Course Listings

7907 Chaucer/Mr. Fyler
This course offers a study of the major poetry of Geoffrey Chaucer. We will spend roughly two-thirds of our time on the Canterbury Tales and the other third on Chaucer’s most extraordinary poem, Troilus and Criseyde. Chaucer is primarily a narrative rather than a lyric poet: though the analogy is an imperfect one, the Canterbury Tales is like a collection of short stories, and Troilus, like a novel in verse. We will talk about Chaucer’s literary sources and contexts, the interpretation of his poetry, and his treatment of a number of issues, especially gender issues, that are of perennial interest.

Texts: The Riverside Chaucer, ed. L.D. Benson (Houghton Mifflin or Oxford Paperback [readily available less expensively in the U.K.]); Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy, trans. Richard Green (Macmillan); Woman Defamed and Woman Defended, ed. Alcuin Blamires (Oxford).

7911 English Renaissance Lyric Poetry, 1580-1650/Mr. West
The period 1580-1650 witnessed the rebirth of English lyric poetry and with it an explosion of views about the proper forms, styles and occasions of writing. This course focuses on the achievements of some key innovators and exponents: Sir Philip Sidney, Edmund Spenser, Ben Jonson, John Donne, George Herbert, and Andrew Marvell. Close reading of individual poems will go hand-in-hand with discussion of such key aesthetic and historical contexts as: the rise of English as a literary language; the emergence of different views of the poet's function (prophet, courtier, wit, priest); the social uses of poetry in patronage relationships and coteries; print and manuscript culture; the development of devotional poetry and poetics; and the importance of song and oral performance. Several sessions will revolve around comparisons with early modern music, art, and architecture.

Texts: Sir Philip Sidney: The Major Works, ed. Katherine Duncan-Jones (Oxford World's Classics); Edmund Spenser: The Shorter Poems, ed. Richard McCabe (Penguin); Seventeenth-Century British Poetry 1603-1660, ed. John P. Rumrich and Gregory Chaplin (Norton).

7920 Shakespeare: On the Page and on the Stage/Ms. Gilbert
A play text exists on the page; a performance text exists on the stage. These two versions of Shakespeare’s texts (to which we may add performances on film and video) will form the center of our work as we read and discuss play texts, and then see ten productions, some by the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford-upon-Avon, and some in London (at the restored Globe, at Regent’s Park, and at the Old Vic). Some classes will take place in Stratford, and it is hoped that these will include meetings with members of the RSC, who will discuss their work in the productions. Given the traveling required for each production, the number of pre- and post-show discussions, as well as the extra sessions with stage professionals, the course needs to meet at least three days a week and requires energetic participation and stamina. Writing for the course includes preparing questions for discussion, and probably four short papers dealing with issues of text and performance. Plays already booked in Stratford are: As You Like It, Julius Caesar, and The Winter’s Tale; plays booked so far in London are The Winter’s Tale (different production) and Hamlet; more information on the plays to be seen will be circulated to those enrolling in the course as soon as it is available. Students must expect additional charges for tickets and transportation of $750.

Texts: Plays of the repertory in reliable editions (either a Complete Works or individual paperbacks, particularly from Arden, Oxford, New Cambridge, or New Penguin). A list of selected readings on Shakespeare in the theater and the final list of productions will be sent to students prior to the start of the session. Students should expect to read all plays ahead of time, and then again during the course.

7931 Early Modern Tragedy/Ms. Smith
Why did tragedy give the Elizabethans and Jacobeans such pleasure? What was it about Thomas Kyd’s play The Spanish Tragedy that made it so indispensable to early modern culture—a reference point as iconic as the shower scene in Psycho? In reading a range of tragedies from the period 1590–1620, we will think about genre, history, and theatrical pleasure; about tragedy’s intersections with politics, with religion, and with dramatic action; and about the perverse attractions of violent entertainment. Early modern tragedy’s obsessions with death, with subjectivity, and with sexuality, make it at once historically specific and uncannily modern: using a range of interpretive lenses we’ll try to get to grips with this interplay. Reading Shakespearean texts alongside the plays of his influences, contemporaries, and rivals resituates some familiar material in a different context. One of the players in Tom Stoppard’s sharp and witty Hamlet play, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, identifies "blood, sex and rhetoric" as the crucial components of Renaissance theatrical popularity: an interest in at least two of these is the only prerequisite of this course.

Texts: William Shakespeare, Titus Andronicus; Thomas Kyd, The Spanish Tragedy; Christopher Marlowe, Dr. Faustus; Anonymous, Arden of Faversham; Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra; Thomas Middleton, The Revenger’s Tragedy; John Webster, The White Devil; John Ford, ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore. Any edition will do; many of these plays are in English Renaissance Drama: A Norton Anthology, ed. David Bevington et al., or in Renaissance Drama: An Anthology of Plays and Entertainments, ed. Arthur Kinney (Blackwell). Other reading will be provided during the course.

7935 Literature and the Arts in Restoration and Eighteenth-Century England/Mr. McCullough
This course will set the major literary achievements of Restoration and eighteenth-century England in the wider context of the other arts that flourished after the return of monarchy in 1660. We will consider major published poets and dramatists, as well as manuscript culture, diaries, and the emergent periodical essay. An emphasis will be placed on parallel features and influences in architecture, garden design, urban development, painting, and music. Themes will include georgic, pastoral, and the English landscape; the representation of London after the Great Fire of 1666; theater and court in the emergence of London's "West End"; the contested relationship between the so-called "sister arts"; and the importance of "taste" to the expanding middle class. The course will take advantage (through field trips, for which students should allow a small budget of up to £100 for travel) of the architectural, landscape, and fine art legacies in Oxfordshire and London. (This course carries one unit of Group II credit and one unit of Group III credit.)

Texts: John Milton, Paradise Lost (either Oxford World's Classics or Penguin); Restoration Literature: An Anthology, ed. Paul Hammond (Oxford World's Classics); Eighteenth-Century Poetry, An Annotated Anthology, ed. David Fairer and Christine Gerrard (Blackwell). Plays: Sir George Etherege, The Man of Mode; Nathaniel Lee, Lucius Junius Brutus; Thomas Otway, Venice Preserv'd (these are all found in Restoration Drama, An Anthology, ed. David Womersley, Blackwell, in paperback, but you are welcome to use any other editions you might find; the Lee will be difficult to find outside this anthology or libraries).

Group III (English Literature since the Seventeenth Century)

7935 Literature and the Arts in Restoration and Eighteenth-Century England/Mr. McCullough
(See the description under Group II offerings. This course carries one unit of Group II credit and one unit of Group III credit.)

7941 Early Romanticism/Ms. Gerrard
This course will chart the evolution of romanticism by locating its origins in earlier eighteenth-century writing and by examining a number of key texts from the “first generation” of romantic writers of the 1790s and early 1800s. The course will explore early romanticism from a variety of perspectives—political, social, literary, aesthetic. We will focus in particular on the following topics: sensibility and sentiment, the sublime, landscapes of the mind, rudeness and primitivism, the role of women. The list of texts below is not comprehensive. Students will be encouraged to pursue individual lines of enquiry and to read widely for their written papers.

Texts: Anne Finch, "A Nocturnal Reverie" (1713); Alexander Pope, "Eloisa to Abelard" (1717); Thomas Parnell, "A Night-Piece on Death" (1721); James Thomson, "Spring" (1730); Thomas Gray, Elegy Written in a Country Church Yard (1751); Oliver Goldsmith, The Deserted Village (1770); Anna Laetitia Barbauld, A Summer Evening’s Meditation (1773); William Cowper, The Task (1785). All of the preceding poems are anthologized in Eighteenth-Century Poetry: An Annotated Anthology, 2nd ed., ed. D. Fairer and C. Gerrard (Blackwell). William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lyrical Ballads (1798); Wordsworth, the two-part Prelude (1799); Coleridge, “This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison,” “Frost at Midnight,” “Kubla Khan”; William Blake, Songs of Innocence and Experience (1789-93). The most convenient source for Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Blake is Romanticism: An Anthology, ed. Duncan Wu (Blackwell). Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility (1811); Mary Shelley, Frankenstein (1817), both Oxford World’s Classics.

7950 Atlantic Crossings: Anglo-American Literary Relations, 1798–1900/Ms. Gerrard
This course aims to explore the cross-currents between British and American literary cultures of the nineteenth century. By looking at key texts across a wide variety of genres and modes, including romance, the gothic, realism, and naturalism, we will examine the sometimes tense and competitive relationship between American authors and British cultural models. We will explore a variety of themes such as American innocence and European "sophistication"; landscape and nature; history; self-reliance and community; sin, guilt and the "double self." We will conduct seminars around key pairings or groupings of pivotal British and American texts, supplemented by other contemporary materials. (This course carries one unit of Group III credit and one unit of Group IV credit.)

Texts: Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Ryme of the Ancient Mariner (1798); Herman Melville, Moby Dick (1851); William Wordsworth, The Prelude (1799); Henry David Thoreau, Walden; Walt Whitman, "Song of Myself " from Leaves of Grass (1850); Mary Shelley, Frankenstein (1818); Charles Brockden Brown, Edgar Huntly (1799); Edgar Allan Poe, Selected Tales (1837), especially "William Wilson" and "The Fall of the House of Usher"; William Wordsworth, "The Thorn"; Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter; George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss (1860); Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth (1905). Most of these texts are readily available in Oxford World’s Classics editions. There is an Easy Read edition of Edgar Huntly, ed. Philip Barnard (2007).

7970 Pre-Raphaelitism to Decadence: Literature and Vision/Mr. Evangelista
The Victorian art critic John Ruskin once thundered that "Hundreds of people can talk for one who can think, but thousands can think for one who can see. To see clearly is poetry, prophecy, and religion—all in one." This course explores the intersections, borrowings, and clashes of verbal and visual cultures in Victorian Britain, from the birth of the Pre-Raphaelite movement in the mid-century to the Decadence of the 1890s. We will discuss issues such as the place and value of art in the second half of the nineteenth century, pre-Raphaelite poetry and painting, aestheticism, art for art’s sake, ekphrasis, ghostly visions, sexuality, Symbolism, Decadent writing. Our focus in class will be primarily on literary texts, but there will be opportunities for integrating visual material and for exploring Oxford’s superb late-Victorian heritage. A course pack with additional reading will be given out at the beginning of the course.

Texts: John Ruskin, Selected Writings (Oxford World’s Classics); D.G. Rossetti, Collected Poetry and Prose, ed. Jerome McGann (Yale); Walter Pater, The Renaissance (Oxford World’s Classics); A.C. Swinburne, Poems and Ballads and Atalanta in Calydon, ed. Kenneth Haynes (Penguin); Henry James, Roderick Hudson (any edition) and The Aspern Papers and Other Stories (Oxford World’s Classics); Vernon Lee, Hauntings and Other Fantastic Tales (Broadview); Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray and Salomé (any editions).

7974 Ghost Stories/Ms. Smith
If, as W.H. Auden suggested, art is "the means by which we break bread with the dead," literature is intrinsically ghostly. Like a ghost, literature makes connections between the living and the dead; it too can haunt us with an image or a feeling; both question the mundane and material reality in which we think we live; neither is susceptible to real explication. The literary and the ghostly both unsettle us, and it’s the aim of this course to preserve that spookiness while trying to understand it with a tough but rewarding range of critical reading. Using a range of literary texts which could be called ghost stories, we will investigate the hold of this particular genre across the imaginations of centuries of readers, but in considering ghost stories we will also be approaching some difficult questions about literature itself. A willingness to work to theorise, as well as to experience, the uncanny is required.

Texts: William Shakespeare, Hamlet (any edition); Henry James, The Turn of the Screw (Oxford World’s Classics); M.R. James, Casting the Runes and Other Ghost Stories (Oxford World’s Classics); Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights (any edition); Susan Hill, The Woman in Black (U.S. edition: David Godine; U.K. edition: Viking); Toni Morrison, Beloved (Plume); The Oxford Book of English Ghost Stories, ed. Michael Cox and R.A. Gilbert (Oxford); Ali Smith, Hotel World (Anchor). Other reading will be provided during the course.

7975 James Joyce/Ms. Johnson
Students will engage in intensive study of Ulysses in its Hiberno-European, modernist, and Joycean contexts. We will begin by reading both Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (and Joyce's poetry, critical essays, Stephen Hero, Exiles, Giacomo Joyce, and Finnegans Wake will all be incorporated into discussions), but the course will be primarily devoted to the reading and study of Ulysses. This work's centrality to, yet deviation from, the aesthetic and political preoccupations of modernism will be explored.

Primary Texts: James Joyce, Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and Ulysses (preferably the H.W. Gabler ed.). Supplementary Texts: Stephen Hero, Exiles, Giacomo Joyce, Finnegans Wake, and Poems and Shorter Writings, ed. Richard Ellmann, A. Walton Litz, and John Whittier-Ferguson (Faber). (Students are not expected to buy the supplementary texts.)


7980 The Modern(ist) Novel/Ms. Johnson
T.S. Eliot, reviewing Ulysses, hesitated to describe the book as a "novel": "If it is not a novel, that is simply because the novel is a form which will no longer serve; it is because the novel, instead of being a form, was simply the expression of an age which had not sufficiently lost all form to feel the need of something stricter." Victorian society had itself a "form" and so could make use of that "loose baggy monster," the novel. Modernity, being itself formless, needed something more. Taking issue with Eliot’s diagnosis of the novel’s unfitness for modern purposes, the premise of this course will be that in the hands of the modernists the novel flourished. Ironically, the very unfitness of the Victorian novel for the expression of what Hardy called "the ache of modernism" stimulated the modernists to experiment, adapt, innovate. The result is one of the richest periods in the history of narrative fiction. We begin with Hardy’s "ache" and end with the "—" of which its author wrote, "I have an idea that I will invent a new name for my books to supplant 'novel.' A new — by Virginia Woolf. But what? Elegy?"

Primary Texts: Thomas Hardy, Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891; Norton Critical Ed.); Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891; Norton Critical Ed.); Henry James, The Ambassadors (1900; Norton Critical Ed.); Joseph Conrad, The Secret Agent (1907; any ed.); Ford Madox Ford, The Good Soldier (1915; Norton Critical Ed.); James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, ed. Hans Walter Gabler (1916; Vintage); D.H. Lawrence, Women in Love (1920; any ed.); Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse (1927; any ed.). Everyone will be expected to read, independently, at least two other novels from a longer list available in Oxford. Secondary Text: The Narrative Reader, ed. Martin McQuillan (Routledge).
 

Group IV (American Literature)

7950 Atlantic Crossings: Anglo-American Literary Relations, 1798–1900
(This cross-listed course will carry one unit of Group III and one unit of Group IV credit.)

Group V (World Literature)

7992 The European Nineteenth-Century Novel: Journeys of the Mind/Mr. Evangelista
This course will explore a number of nineteenth-century novels from various European traditions: German, French, Russian, and, of course, English. Travelling across literary conventions and national boundaries, we will be asking both what brings all these very different texts together under the umbrella term "novel," and what makes each one of them resist a fixed generic definition. Many of the works we will be reading treat the themes of place, travel, dislocation, cultural exchange, modernity, nationalism and internationalism—reflecting within their pages the larger intellectual concerns that gave the novel form its vital energy throughout the century. Our journey through nineteenth-century Europe starts from the Romantic sensation of Goethe’s Werther and, by way of realism and naturalism, terminates in the decadent Venice of Thomas Mann’s novella. But can we trace such a straight history of evolution? And can we really talk of a common European tradition? The knowledge of a foreign language is not required for this course: all texts will be read in English.