COURSES

Selected Graduate Seminars

English 583: Virginia Woolf and the Making of Modernism

This seminar explores Virginia Woolf’s multiple contributions to twentieth-century modernism. We will study the development of Woolf’s own novelistic technique in Jacob’s Room, Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, Orlando, The Waves, and Between the Acts. Students will also come to understand Woolf’s role as an influential publisher of modern literature, a prolific critic, a committed feminist, a member of the fabled ‘Bloomsbury Group,’ and an active patron of the arts. We will examine the rise of the Hogarth Press, the production of decorative arts in Roger Fry’s Omega Workshops, the politics of war, and the ongoing controversies surrounding Woolf’s madness, sexuality, and suicide. We will also read a selection of Woolf’s critical, biographical, and political writings, as well as literature by her modernist contemporaries such as T. S. Eliot, Katherine Mansfield, and E. M. Forster. Finally, we will consider the legacy of Woolfian modernism in contemporary British fiction by Jeannette Winterson and Ian McEwan. Secondary readings will address modernist cultural history, feminist theory, the history of the English novel, and theories of biography.

English 583: Modernism and the 20th-Century English Novel

Anglo-American literary modernism in the early twentieth century revolutionized the form of the English novel. This course will explore both how and why modern authors challenged 19^th-century aesthetic conventions as they devised new approaches to narrative fiction. It will also examine modernism’s legacy in late 20^th-century and early 21^st-century novels. How do contemporary novelists assimilate, imitate, or reject modernism’s artistic commitments? How does an understanding of modernism help us to read postcolonial fiction, postmodern fiction, the contemporary bildungsroman, historical novels, mystery fiction? We will answer these questions by reading novels by authors such as Hardy, Joyce, Woolf, Greene, Winterson, McEwan, and Coetzee. Secondary readings will introduce students to narrative theory, histories of the novel, postcolonial studies, and studies of transatlantic literature. Course requirements: weekly responses, one in-class presentation, and a seminar paper.

English 670: Modernism and Modernity

“Modernity,” writes Robert Pippin, “is characterized by the view that human life after the political and intellectual revolutions of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is fundamentally better than before, and most likely will, thanks to such revolutions, be better still.” This course begins with the idea of revolutions – social as well as artistic – and investigates the post-Enlightenment view of modernity as an epoch of progress. We will anchor our understanding of experimental modernism within and against a culture marked by the ascendance of scientific rationalism and industrial capitalism, the valuation of individual autonomy, and the uneven developments of imperialism. Through our readings of modernist literature (fiction, poetry, manifestoes), we will map out the dynamic artistic revolutions that unfolded in tandem with ongoing social revolutions. Required texts are Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness, Ford Madox Ford, The Good Soldier, Wyndham Lewis, BLAST, Katherine Mansfield, Stories, Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway, D. H. Lawrence, The Virgin and the Gypsy, and Jean Rhys, Voyage in the Dark. We will also read Rita Felski’s The Gender of Modernity and Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment. By the semester’s end, students should understand how modernism’s eclectic aesthetic innovations variously engaged, challenged, and retreated from the modern era’s promises and contradictions.

English 670: J. M. Coetzee

Over the course of four decades, the South African Nobel laureate J. M. Coetzee has produced an astonishing range of novels, philosophical writings, and literary criticism. To study his oeuvre is to consider nothing less than the history of the English novel from Daniel Defoe to Salman Rushdie, the story of South Africa, the vexations of modern political philosophy, the ties binding humans to animals, the workings of censorship, and the role of violence in human civilization. This seminar will introduce students to the breadth and depth of Coetzee’s writings and will attempt to answer some of the most absorbing questions about his art. How do aesthetics and ethics intertwine in Coetzee’s spare, merciless novels? Is Coetzee a modernist, a postmodernist, a realist? What do his literary and critical works teach us about the writing of history and the condition of modern humanity? Our readings will include novels about literary authorship (Foe, The Master of Petersburg, and Elizabeth Costello), novels about empire and apartheid (The Life and Times of Michael K, Waiting for the Barbarians, and Disgrace), and Coetzee’s trilogy of fictional memoirs (Boyhood, Youth, and Summertime). We will also study Coetzee’s European literary predecessors (Joseph Conrad, Franz Kafka, James Joyce, and Samuel Beckett) and his South African peers (Nadine Gordimer and Hilda Bernstein). Our primary readings will be supplemented by Coetzee’s own essays, interviews, and literary criticism; we will also read diverse theories and criticism of Coetzee’s oeuvre by contemporary scholars. Finally, we will watch documentaries about apartheid, cinematic and musical adaptations of Coetzee’s work, and lectures by and about Coetzee.

English 690: Modernism and Feminism

“What is a woman?” demanded Virginia Woolf in 1931. “I assure you, I do not know. I do not believe that you know. I do not believe that anybody can know until she has expressed herself in all the arts and professions open to human skill.” As Woolf’s remarks suggest, women’s lives during the opening decades of the twentieth century underwent dramatic changes and inspired contentious debates. In this seminar, we will study the intersections between wide-ranging discourses about women and the rise of Anglo-American literary modernism. Our primary authors include Djuna Barnes, Ford Madox Ford, Radclyffe Hall, Cicely Hamilton, Storm Jameson, Nella Larsen, Mina Loy, Katherine Mansfield, Jean Rhys, Bram Stoker, and Winifred Watson, and Virginia Woolf. We will study shifting conceptions of gender and sexuality in relation to the campaign for women’s suffrage, the First World War, the faltering British Empire, and burgeoning metropolitan avant-gardes. Our primary readings will be supplemented by diverse theories of feminism by scholars such as Susan Stanford Friedman, Rita Felski, Bonnie Kime Scott, Janet Lyon, Lucy DeLap, and Ewa Ziarek.

Selected Undergraduate Courses

Chancellor’s Honors Program 258: What is Duty? (Supported by an NEH Enduring Questions Grant)

What is duty? This course explores the intricate, often tangled paths of duty set forth by Eastern and Western philosophies, religions, and literatures. Focusing on

ancient, classical, and modern texts, we will investigate how duty – an obligation based on moral belief – determines the motives and consequences of our actions. The goals for the course are to understand conceptions of duty across multiple contexts, and, in the process, to debate the value of duty as a force in our lives. We will ask to whom human beings owe duty (individuals? collectives? God? the earth?); and we will also explore how religious principles, legal bodies, and social institutions compel us to behave dutifully. What are the promises inherent in upholding duty, or the consequences of challenging or abandoning it? How do duties differ from rights, and what happens when these concepts clash? When can duty enrich or endanger ambitions, cause or alleviate suffering? Why do we reward some dutiful people but criticize or punish others? Our literary readings will include the Jataka Tales, the Ramayana, Sophocles’s Antigone, Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Margaret Edson’s W;t, and Salman Rushdie’s Haroun and the Sea of Stories. Religious and philosophical texts will be drawn from Confucian, Hindu, Buddhist, and Judeo-Christian traditions as well as from modern Western political philosophy. Together, these readings illustrate the possibilities and limitations of duty as a life-defining principle. They drive us to ask: is the dutiful life ever attainable?

English 253: Introduction to Fiction

Why do we read stories? What does literary fiction teach us about history, humanity, and art? As you encounter fiction from different time periods and countries in this course, you will find a number of answers to these questions. We will begin by reading several short stories to acquaint ourselves with the formal elements of fiction: plot, conflict, narrative voice, and metaphor. We will then read a sequence of novels and novellas written between the early 19^th century and the early 21^st century. Each work opens a different world to its readers, and you will learn to interpret and discuss these worlds in a range of influential texts that includes Mary Shelley’s classic thriller Frankenstein, Toni Morrison’s tragedy The Bluest Eye, and Kazuo Ishiguro’s haunting The Remains of the Day. We will also read two experimental modernist novels: Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis and Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway. Along the way, we’ll study short stories by Ernest Hemingway, Raymond Carver, Jhumpa Lahiri, and Dorothy Parker. To add to your growing knowledge about the development of literary fiction, we will supplement our reading with film adaptations, author interviews, and essays about the creation of literature. Finally, this course will strengthen your writing skills. The written assignments will provide various opportunities to develop critical arguments and generate original interpretations of literary works. By the end of the semester, you should have a new understanding of literary history, the social and political impact of literature, and the importance of reading stories.

English 421: Modern British Novel

This course will introduce students to the radical, controversial, and beautiful fiction that came out of the modernist movement in Great Britain. Focusing on modernist representations of time, space, and consciousness, we will examine the relationships between social change and artistic experimentation in the early twentieth century. We’ll also explore various cultural discourses circulating in Britain between the turn of the century and the 1930s: aesthetics, psychology, industrialization, mass culture, the decline of the British Empire, debates about gender, and, perhaps most crucially, the trauma of the Great War. We’ll investigate the modern era’s promises and anxieties not only through experimental novels and short stories by Stoker, Conrad, Ford, Forster, Lawrence, Mansfield, Woolf, Rhys, Bowen, and Greene but also through artwork from the women’s suffrage campaign, manifestoes by Imagists, Vorticists, and Futurists, contemporary film adaptations of literary texts, and documentaries about art and history. By the end of the semester, students should be familiar with the complex fields of meaning – aesthetic, social, political – that accrued around the word “modern” in twentieth-century Britain’s dynamic artistic circles.

English 422: Virginia Woolf and Modern Fiction

“What a lark! What a plunge!” thinks Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway on a June morning in London. This course takes students on a lark and a plunge through the extraordinary accomplishments of Virginia Woolf (1882-1941), author, publisher, critic, diarist, arts patron, and center of modernist culture. We will study Woolf’s reinventions of the English novel in Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, Orlando, and The Waves. We will read her influential feminist manifesto A Room of One’s Own, as well as selected short stories and critical essays; we will end with her radical memoir, A Sketch of the Past. Along the way, we’ll meet socially and artistically daring members of the Bloomsbury Group, confront the devastation of World War I, and trace diverse developments in global modernism. The course includes literature by Woolf’s contemporaries T. S. Eliot, Katherine Mansfield, Rebecca West, E. M. Forster, and Mollie Panter-Downes, as well as 21^st-century interpretations of Woolf’s work in film, dance, theater, fashion, and photography. Finally, this course will explore how Woolf’s literary genius not only influences 21^st-century fiction but makes its mark on film, dance, theater, opera, fashion, and photography. (Cross-listed with Women’s Studies)

English 422: Women Writers in Britain: Rewriting Empire

What does imperialism mean for women? In this class, students will read a wide variety of texts authored by women to explore the complex conditions of British colonial and postcolonial culture. Our texts will be drawn from the 19^th, 20^th, and 21^st centuries, starting with Charlotte Bronte’s classic novel Jane Eyre and ending with Jhumpa Lahiri’s Pulitzer Prize-winning story collection, Interpreter of Maladies. We’ll consider Englishwomen’s radical revisions of Empire by looking at Jean Rhys’s novel Wide Sargasso Sea and Caryl Churchill’s play Cloud Nine. We’ll also read contemporary literature by women authors hailing from formerly colonized nations as diverse as Egypt, the West Indies, India, and Zimbabwe. Along the way, we’ll familiarize ourselves with feminist theory and post-colonial theory by drawing on the writings of critics like Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak, and Nadine Gordimer. Finally, we’ll watch films directed by minority women living in England: Gurinder Chadha’s Bhaji on the Beach and Mira Nair’s Mississippi Masala. Students will develop a deeper understanding of how the machinery of British imperialism has shaped the political, sexual, linguistic, and artistic identities of colonizing and colonized women alike. (Cross-listed with Women’s Studies)

English 423: Worlds of Empire

At the dawn of the twentieth century, the British Empire ruled over vast portions of the globe. This course investigates the multiple, irreconcilable consequences of British imperialism by studying literature, film, and other art-forms inspired by a century of colonization, decolonization, and globalization. We will begin with that ur-text of twentieth-century colonialism, Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, and end with contemporary fiction about a lightning-fast, interconnected planet. How did Great Britain justify its hold over non-Western peoples? How do formerly colonized nations negotiate the legacies of imperial rule? And how does literature shed light on our contemporary global moment? We’ll develop answers to these questions by reading an international range of stylistically diverse novels by Joseph Conrad, Chinua Achebe, Jamaica Kincaid, J. M. Coetzee, Arundhati Roy, and Salman Rushdie. We’ll watch feature films such as Claire Denis’s Chocolat and Mira Nair’s Mississippi Masala, and we will also watch documentaries about the Belgian Congo, the development of postcolonial literatures, and the different faces of global cinema. (Cross-listed with Global Studies)

English 454: Twentieth-Century International Novel

What is an “international novel”? In this course, we will read a wide variety of fiction about national, international, and transnational borders. Our readings will span 20^th– and 21^st -century novels, novellas, and short stories from Czechoslovakia, England, South Africa, the United States, Egypt, India, Canada, and Italy. We will investigate how literary forms respond to political history; we will study how globalization inspires aesthetic innovations; and we will also consider the complex relationship between the arts and the state. Documentaries will provide historical and biographical contexts for our readings; and we will watch feature films by world-renowned directors such as Pedro Almodóvar and Julian Schnabel. To deepen our understanding of literature and cinema, we will read interviews, essays, and literary criticism by and about our primary authors: Franz Kafka, Nella Larsen, Nawal el Saadawi, J. M. Coetzee, Salman Rushdie, Alice Munro, Yiyun Li, and Jhumpa Lahiri. (Cross-listed with Global Studies)

English 456: Contemporary and Postmodern Literature

How do contemporary writers create stories for today’s world? This course will explore a wide range of recent fiction and film from around the globe. We’ll begin with works that illuminate the elemental promise of storytelling and warn against the dangers of limiting the stories we tell: Salman Rushdie’s Haroun and the Sea of Stories and a trio of short stories by Maxine Hong Kingston, Chimamanda Ngoze Adichie, and Rebecca Lee. Then we’ll study fiction about individual growth, history, and love: Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day, Annie Proulx’s “Brokeback Mountain,” and Jhumpa Lahiri’s Unaccustomed Earth. Films will include the award-winning adaptation of Ishiguro’s novel as well as Proulx’s short story. We will end with Pedro Almodóvar’s film All About My Mother and its three source texts: Tennessee Williams’s play A Streetcar Named Desire, Joseph Mankiewicz’s film All About Eve, and Federico García Lorca’s play Blood Wedding. Over the course of the semester, we will watch documentaries and read essays by and about contemporary writers including Jeanette Winterson, Junot Díaz, Jonathan Lethem, and J.M. Coetzee.

English 398: Junior-Senior Honors Seminars

Life/Writing: Modern Memoirs

“My god, how does one write a biography? And what is a life?” exclaimed Virginia Woolf in 1938. Taking a deep dive into how writers around the world answer these questions, this seminar examines diverse conventions of life-writing in order to understand the constitution of the autobiographical “I.” We will study memoirs, biographies, autobiographies, diaries, letters, graphic novels, poetry, and auto-fiction ranging from the early 20^th century to our contemporary moment; we will also explore life-stories conveyed through feature films, documentaries, photography, and music. From traditional coming-of-age narratives to memoirs devoted to food, art, civil rights, revolution, disability, love, grief, fame, and medicine, Life/Writing: Modern Memoir explores a question essential for the study of language and literature: what are the stakes of telling one’s story? Our primary authors are Jacques Pépin, Virginia Woolf, Malcolm X, Toni Morrison, Nawal el Saadawi, Jean-Dominique Bauby, Elizabeth Alexander, Sarah Manguso, and Paul Kalanithi; secondary readings include theories and histories of life-writing by contemporary scholars such as Hermione Lee, G. Thomas Couser, Carolyn Heilbrun, Saidiya Hartmann, Alex Zwerdling, and others.

Modern Experiments

Modernism shattered boundaries. An eyeball slashed with a razor-blade in Luis Buñuel’s film Un Chien Andalou. James Joyce’s Ulysses on trial for obscenity. Josephine Baker dancing in Paris wearing a skirt made of bananas. Igor Stravinsky’s riot-inducing ballet The Rite of Spring. This Junior-Senior Honors Seminar examines immerses students in the often-shocking, always innovative art-forms of international experimental modernism. We will study modernism’s transnational networks and cosmopolitan aesthetics through literature, music, dance, and film from London, Paris, Dublin, New York City, Barcelona, and St. Petersburg. We will devote sustained attention to four literary masterworks: Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922), Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway (1925), and Nella Larsen’s Passing (1929). As we read these influential works, we’ll also study their genesis, publication histories, and reception. Students will encounter avant-garde magazines, photography, and cinema; and our seminar also includes documentaries about the Ballets Russes, World War I, modern fashion, and the birth of jazz. We will conclude the semester by reflecting on how 21^st-century artists remake, critique, or pay tribute to the creative ferment of metropolitan modernism.

International Women’s Voices

In her 1929 feminist manifesto A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf declared, “A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.” Art, money, and freedom: this honors seminar will take up Woolf’s claim to explore how women authors have expressed themselves across the 20^th and 21^st centuries. Our principal texts hail from multiple countries and include not only fiction, but also criticism, history, and film. We will study realist works that document women’s everyday lives (Alifa Rifaat’s A Distant View from a Minaret and Fumiko Enchi’s The Waiting Years); an experimental fiction that reinvents the intersection of racial and sexual identity (Nella Larsen’s Passing); a coming-of-age novel about crossing local and international boundaries (Jamaica Kincaid’s Lucy); and stories about marriage and family (Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things and Elena Ferrante’s Days of Abandonment). Films include Agnès Varda’s Cléo from 5-7 and Julie Taymor’s Frida. Students will give a final research presentation on a contemporary woman artist of their own choosing. Our study of international women’s voices will be enriched by critical and theoretical readings by Woolf, Simone de Beauvoir, Adrienne Rich, Audre Lorde, Toni Morrison, Luce Irigaray, Laura Mulvey, Susan Sontag, Joy Harjo, Judith Halberstam, and Sarah Ahmed. We will end with Saidiya Hartmann’s arresting opus Wayward Lives, Beautiful Strangers (2019), which weaves together the semester’s tropes and questions and sheds new light on the relationship between women’s lives and women’s arts.

Masterpieces of Modernism: Heart of Darkness, Ulysses, The Waves

Students in this honors seminar will read three astonishing modernist novels: Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899), James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), and Virginia Woolf’s The Waves (1931). Each of these fictions – Conrad’s meditation on human corruption in imperial Africa, Joyce’s epic daylong odyssey through Dublin, and Woolf’s multivoiced tale of the journey from childhood to adulthood – dared to enlarge the horizons of narrative possibility. This seminar will allow students to learn about experimental modernism’s artistic commitments, the lives and careers of the three principal authors, and the history of imperial Britain in the tumultuous first decades of the twentieth century. As we concentrate on reading the semester’s principal texts, we will also watch documentaries on the Belgian Congo and on Ireland; we will read excerpts from Homer’s Odyssey; we will listen to readings of the texts and read biographical and autobiographical writings by and about Conrad, Woolf, and Joyce; and we will read important theories and histories of modernist texts. As this is an Honors seminar, the reading will be demanding and the standards for student work will be very high: please prepare yourselves for an intense semester and plan accordingly.