Oxford Campus, 2012 Courses
Group II (British Literature through the Seventeenth Century)
7900 Reading the Anglo-Saxons, Now and Then/N. Perkins
This course combines an introduction to the earliest surviving literature in English, with an investigation into how Anglo-Saxon writing has been reshaped in modern culture. The Anglo-Saxons left a remarkably rich literary legacy, from mythic narrative (for example, Beowulf) to male- and female-voiced lyrics (The Wanderer, The Wife’s Lament) to philosophical and scurrilous riddles (The Exeter Book Riddles). No special aptitude in studying Old English language is required, and you are welcome to use translations for your preparatory work, although during the course we shall get as close to the texts in their original form as we can. We’ll also ask what constitutes an "original" text and see how more recent writers and artists have reacted to the brilliance and strangeness of Anglo-Saxon culture: in particular, we’ll read work by Tennyson, Ezra Pound, W. H. Auden, Geoffrey Hill, John Gardner, and Seamus Heaney, while keeping an eye out for Ray Winstone and Angelina Jolie strutting their stuff when Beowulf went to Hollywood. (This course carries one unit of Group II credit and one unit of Group III credit.)
Texts: Extracts from Beowulf, The Dream of the Rood, The Wanderer, The Wife’s Lament, and Bede’s account of the poet Caedmon (find at www.english.ox.ac.uk/oecoursepack/); Beowulf, trans. Seamus Heaney, ed. D. Donoghue (Norton), plus surrounding materials: another verse trans. of Beowulf (optional), e.g., by Edwin Morgan (Carcanet) or Michael Alexander (Penguin); John Gardner, Grendel (Vintage); The Saga of Grettir the Strong, trans. B. Scudder (Penguin); The Seafarer (text and trans. at www.anglo-saxons.net); The Exeter Book Riddles, trans. K. Crossley-Holland (Enitharmon); W. H. Auden, "Control of the passes," "Doom is dark," "Oxford," "Prologue at Sixty," "In Praise of Limestone" in Selected Poems, ed. E. Mendelson (Vintage); David Jones, In Parenthesis (NYRB); Geoffrey Hill, Mercian Hymns in Selected Poems (Yale); Seamus Heaney, North (Faber; out of print in U.S., but available from online sellers). The following are useful critical and linguistic guides (recommended, but not required): D. Donoghue, Old English Literature: A Short Introduction (Blackwell); C. Jones, Strange Likeness: The Use of Old English in Twentieth-Century Poetry (Oxford). Introduction to OE Language: http://faculty.virginia.edu/OldEnglish/.
7908 The Margins of Medieval Literature/N. Perkins
This course explores the figures who lurk at the edges of medieval stories and manuscripts, often threatening to destabilize the chivalric or religious narratives from which they have been excluded. Monstrous knights, ghosts, those maddened by love or violence, unbelievers, revolting peasants and dangerous women all give a vital yet unsettling perspective on medieval texts, both familiar and less well known. As part of understanding their power over medieval and later imaginations, we shall also consider the way in which the Middle Ages itself has been reimagined, especially by the Victorians, as a period on the edge of reason and history.
Texts: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, ed. J. J. Anderson (Everyman; out of print in U.S., but easily available used from online sites); you could also read translations by J.R.R. Tolkien, Simon Armitage, or Bernard O’Donoghue; The Awntyrs off Arthur (available at http://www.lib.rochester.edu/camelot/teams/awnfrm.htm); Geoffrey Chaucer, The Book of the Duchess and, from The Canterbury Tales, the tales of the Knight, Miller, Reeve, Cook, Wife of Bath, and Prioress in The Riverside Chaucer, ed. L. D. Benson (Houghton Mifflin or Oxford); Sir Orfeo (available at http://www.lib.rochester.edu/camelot/teams/orfeofrm.htm); The York Plays, ed. R. Beadle and P. King (Oxford); Folie Tristan in The Birth of Romance, trans. Judy Weiss (Everyman: in-print hardcover is expensive; try to buy used paperback); Thomas Malory, Balin and, from The Book of Sir Tristram, “Isode the Fair,” “Tristram’s Madness and Exile,” and “Launcelot and Elaine” all in Malory: Works, ed. E. Vinaver (Oxford); alternative ed. by H. Cooper (Oxford); Alfred Tennyson, The Lady of Shalott, Morte d’Arthur; The Idylls of the King (especially “Balin and Balan,” “Lancelot and Elaine,” and “The Passing of Arthur”) in any edition available to you.
7917 Shakespeare’s Comedies/E. Smith
Reality or dreamworld? Heteronormative mating rituals or queer bacchanalia? The return of spring, or of the repressed, or of rain it raineth every day? Comedy preoccupied Shakespeare’s career from beginning to end, but it’s been a range that critics have found hard to encompass without recourse to additional qualifiers—romance, golden, problem, romantic, dark. We’ll aim to cover all the plays denoted "comedies" in the 1623 Folio, as well as identifying generic overlaps elsewhere in the canon, in a course that emphasizes and encourages critical and formal heterodoxy. Taking comedy seriously means deploying historical analysis and insights from psychoanalysis, anthropology, performance, and post-structuralism: the course involves the formal analysis of Shakespeare’s comedies and their relation to humor, to society, and to sexuality. If life is, as Horace Walpole suggested, "a tragedy for those who feel but a comedy for those who think," then thinkers should come this way.
Texts: William Shakespeare, The Comedy of Errors, The Merchant of Venice, The Taming of the Shrew, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Much Ado about Nothing, Twelfth Night, Measure for Measure, The Winter’s Tale, The Tempest. Any edition will do; if you are buying one, the Norton Shakespeare is recommended.
7920 Shakespeare: On the Page and on the Stage/M. Gilbert
A play text exists on the page; a performance text exists on 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 eight to ten productions, some in Stratford-upon-Avon, some in London. Several classes will take place in Stratford, and these will include meetings with members of the Royal Shakespeare Company, 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. The pace of reading, viewing, and writing is fast, so previous experience with Shakespeare is useful but not required. Plays booked in Stratford are: Julius Caesar, Richard III, Twelfth Night, The Comedy of Errors, The Tempest, and Much Ado about Nothing; we'll also see Henry V and Richard III at the Globe in London. Further information on the plays to be seen will be circulated 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.
7932 Tragedy/E. Smith
“An imitation of an action that is serious, complete, and of a certain magnitude”: Aristotle’s definition of tragedy in his Poetics is the foundational text of the discipline of literary studies. In taking this course you engage with both a body of fiction and a critical field. We range widely from ancient Greek plays—in translation—to modern versions by Heaney and Hughes, from Elizabethan revenge tragedy to nineteenth-century fiction, from the gospels to Star Wars, from King Lear to King Kong. We read the texts that have inspired Freud, Nietzsche, and Hegel, combining an understanding of the aesthetics and ethics of the genre with readings from ancient to modern times. Tragedy engages with literary history, with philosophy, with suffering, and with life itself: prepare for an intense, and rewarding, summer. (This course carries one unit of Group II credit and one unit of Group V credit.)
Texts: Greek Tragedies, vols. 1 and 2, both ed. David Grene and Richmond Lattimore (Chicago); William Shakespeare, Titus Andronicus and King Lear; Thomas Kyd, The Spanish Tragedy; John Webster, The Duchess of Malfi; Thomas Hardy, The Mayor of Casterbridge; Herman Melville, Moby Dick; Arther Miller, The Crucible (any edition of these texts will do). Other readings will be assigned during the course.
7935 Literature and Place, 1640–1740/P. McCullough
This course will set major literary achievements of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries in the context of artists' increasing engagement with both the built and the natural environment. We will consider the works of major and minor poets and dramatists, as well as diaries, and the emergent periodical essay. An emphasis will be placed on parallel features and influences in architecture, garden design, and urban development, as well as changing views of the English countryside. Themes will include the inherited classical traditions of georgic and pastoral; the English landscape; colonial expansionism and nationalism; the representation of London before and after the Great Fire of 1666; the emergence of London's fashionable "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 $165 for travel) of the architectural, landscape, and fine art legacies in Oxfordshire and London. Authors will include Marvell, Milton, Pepys, Rochester, Dryden, Pope, Swift, Addison and Steele, and Thomson, though students will be encouraged to range beyond this canonical core in written work and class presentations. (This course carries one unit of Group II credit and one unit of Group III credit.)
Texts: Andrew Marvell, The Poems of Andrew Marvell, ed. N. Smith (Longman); John Milton, Paradise Lost (either Penguin or Oxford); Restoration Literature: An Anthology, ed. Paul Hammond (Oxford); Eighteenth-Century Poetry, An Annotated Anthology, ed. David Fairer and Christine Gerrard (Blackwell); read these plays: Sir George Etherege, The Man of Mode; William Wycherley, The Country Wife in Restoration Drama, An Anthology, ed. David Womersley (Blackwell).
Group III (British Literature since the Seventeenth Century)
7900 Reading the Anglo-Saxons, Now and Then/N. Perkins
See the description under Group II offerings. This course carries one unit of Group II credit and one unit of Group III credit.
7935 Literature and Place, 1640–1740/P. 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/C. 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 inquiry 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) and Mary Shelley (1817), Frankenstein (both Oxford).
7950 Atlantic Crossings: Anglo-American Literary Relations, 1798–1900/C. 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) and "Westminster Bridge" (1802); Henry David Thoreau, Walden; Walt Whitman, "Song of Myself " from Leaves of Grass (1850), "As I ebb'd with the Ocean of Life," and "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry"; 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"; 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 or a Hackett edition of Edgar Huntly, ed. Philip Barnard.
7969 The Aesthetic Life: Art and Literature in the Nineteenth Century/S. Evangelista
When Oscar Wilde wrote that "All art is quite useless," he tried to provoke his contemporaries into seeing beyond didactic and ethical concerns in art and literature. Wilde’s aphorism belongs within a wide-ranging debate on the meaning and value of art in the nineteenth century. This course explores the idea of the aesthetic life in Victorian Britain, from the birth of the Pre-Raphaelite movement to the decadence of the 1890s. We will study a mixture of literary texts and art objects, paying particular attention to the intersections, borrowings, and clashes of verbal and visual cultures in this period. How did the Victorians talk about, enjoy, and collect art? How did artists and writers push the horizons of expectation of their contemporaries? We will try to answer these questions by discussing issues that include Victorian museum culture, aestheticism, art for art’s sake, the supernatural, gender and sexuality, symbolism, and decadence. Apart from regular seminars, the course will comprise some museum visits in Oxford and London. Participants should budget around $100 for travel and tickets. Additional materials will be able available at Bread Loaf.
Texts: D. G. Rossetti, Collected Poetry and Prose, ed. Jerome McGann (Yale); John Ruskin, Selected Writings (Oxford); Walter Pater, Studies in the History of the Renaissance (Oxford); A. S. Byatt, The Children’s Book (any edition); Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Marble Faun (any edition); Henry James, Roderick Hudson (any edition); Vernon Lee, Hauntings and Other Fantastic Tales (Broadview); Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray and essays "The Decay of Lying" and "The Critic as Artist" (any edition).
7975 James Joyce/J. 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/J. 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); Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891; Norton Critical); Henry James, The Ambassadors (1900; Norton Critical); Joseph Conrad, The Secret Agent (1907; any ed.); Ford Madox Ford, The Good Soldier (1915; Norton Critical); 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/C. Gerrard
See the description under Group III offerings. This course carries one unit of Group III credit and one unit of Group IV credit.
Group V (World Literature)
7932 Tragedy/E. Smith
See the description under Group II offerings. This course carries one unit of Group II credit and one unit of Group V credit.
7992 The European Nineteenth-Century Novel: Journeys of the Mind/S. 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.
Texts: J. W. Geothe, The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774); Mikhail Lermontov, A Hero of Our Time (1839); Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary (1856); George Eliot, Daniel Deronda (1876); Lev Tolstoy, Anna Karenina (1873-38); Émile Zola, Nana (1880); J.K. Huysmans, Against Nature (sometimes also translated as Against the Grain, 1884); Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890), Henry James, Portrait of a Lady (1881), Thomas Mann, Death in Venice (1912). All these texts are widely available and can be read in any edition for the purposes of this course. Penguin, Oxford World’s Classics, or other editions with a critical introduction and reference material are by far the best.
