Courses

Introduction to Scholarly Writing (graduate seminar)

Semester: 

Spring

Offered: 

2017

Through a careful reading of the most influential recent scholarship, students will explore a range of argumentative modes and evidentiary practices; through workshops of their own writing, they will experiment with rhetoric, voice, and style. Students will leave the course with an article ready for submission.

The American Renaissance and the Irish Revival (undergrad seminar)

Semester: 

Fall

Offered: 

2016

Even after the United States became an independent nation, American culture continued to be dominated by Britain. Most American writers struggled, until well into the nineteenth century, with a sense of cultural inferiority and belatedness. Then suddenly, in the 1850s, on the eve of the Civil War, a new generation of American authors began to innovate in a number of genres: Dickinson in the lyric; Whitman in the epic; Hawthorne and Melville in the...

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The Contemporary Novel (grad seminar)

Semester: 

N/A

Offered: 

2015

This course is a hybrid. Half of the weeks will proceed as an ordinary graduate seminar, in which we will read recent novels and discuss current critical questions, among them contemporary literary movements, the institutions of the contemporary novel, the transnational and the national, and the surprising return of the comic book. The other weeks will function as a writing workshop, in which you will plan, research, draft, and revise a long review essay on a subject of your own choosing

The Bildungsroman (grad seminar)

Semester: 

Spring

Offered: 

2015

An introduction to the most important genre of the novel. We will begin by reading the canonical examples of the Bildungsroman (Wilhelm Meister, The Red and the Black, and Sentimental Education), as well as the canonical critical accounts (Hegel and Schiller, Lukacs and Bakhtin, Moretti and Redfield).  We will then turn to recent revisionist scholarship: Fraiman on Mill on the Floss, Robbins on Great Expectations, Slaughter on Nervous Conditions, and Esty on Story of an African Farm. In the final third of the...

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The Civil War from Nat Turner to Birth of a Nation (undergrad lecture)

Semester: 

Spring

Offered: 

2013

This interdisciplinary course examines the American Civil War from Nat Turner’s slave rebellion in 1831 to the legendary history film, Birth of a Nation, in 1915, which coincided with the Jubilee of Appomattox.  We reframe traditional understandings of the conflict by suggesting that civil war in the United States lasted much longer than the four years from 1861-65:  it began with guerrilla war between masters and slaves, and between Northerners and Southerners in various states and in the U.S. Congress; it evolved into a military war after Fort Sumter; and it became a...

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The Historical Novel and the Novel in History (grad seminar)

Semester: 

Fall

Offered: 

2012
The historical novel emerged at the beginning of the nineteenth century, in the wake of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars. Its emergence reflected, as Lukacs famously argued, a new conviction that human experience is not static--and that persons are shaped by their particular moment in history. This conviction is one that we continue to hold today, and it influences, among other things, the way we do literary scholarship. In this seminar, we will explore what it means to bring together literature and history. We will do so in part by reading pairs of historical novels that capture... Read more about The Historical Novel and the Novel in History (grad seminar)

The Contemporary Novel and the Art of the Book Review (undergrad seminar)

Semester: 

Fall

Offered: 

2012

An introduction to the contemporary Anglophone novel, with particular attention to book reviews. As we read pairs of novels that represent the possibilities for the contemporary novel, we will also read the reviews that have set the terms by which these novels are read and understood. Students will write reviews of one book assigned for the course, as well as a longer review essay on a topic, author or genre of their own choosing. Novels to include Hollinghurst's Line of Beauty, Mitchell's Cloud Atlas, Adiga's White Tiger, Ghosh's Sea of Poppies, Franzen...

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The Bildungsroman Around the World (undergrad common ground course)

Semester: 

Fall

Offered: 

2011

Established by Goethe at the end of the eighteenth century, the genre of the Bildungsroman (or novel of education) has since travelled around the world. This course will explore its appearance in Victorian Britain, in the mid-twentieth-century United States, and in post-independence Africa, focusing on the new forms that the genre takes as it enters new cultures and interacts with their existing literary traditions. The course will conclude with a look at the Bildungsroman of the present day.

Novels to include: Adichie's Half of a Yellow Son, Brontë's ...

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Realism (grad seminar)

Semester: 

Fall

Offered: 

2011

A study of the novel’s most important mode. We will read the novelists who defined realism for three national traditions: Balzac, for the French; Eliot, for the British; Howells, for the US. Alongside these novels, we will read an array of theoretical works on realism, which will consider the techniques and subject matter of realism; the epistemology of realism; the politics of realism; and the relation between realism and the literary marketplace. Finally, we will turn to the earliest theorizing of realism, the works of the so-called naturalists (Zola, Gissing, Dreiser), who subjected the...

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George Eliot and William Dean Howells (undergrad seminar)

Semester: 

Spring

Offered: 

2011

In addition to being the most successful novelists of their day, Eliot and Howells were also the most influential critics. This course focuses on the role each played in the nineteenth-century literary world: their championing of literary realism and their experiments in narration and novelistic form, as well as their respective involvements in suffrage campaigns and the Haymarket Affair. Novels to include Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda; A Modern Instance, The Rise of Silas Lapham, and A Hazard of New Fortunes.

Nineteenth-Century American Novel (undergrad lecture)

Semester: 

Fall

Offered: 

2010

The rise of the nineteenth-century American novel from its origins (Irving, Cooper), through the American Renaissance (Hawthorne, Stowe, Melville), to realism (James, Howells, Twain) and naturalism (Dreiser, Wharton). This course will attend to the historical and cultural contexts in which these novels were written, but it will focus equally on novelistic form.

Novels to include The Pioneers, The Scarlet Letter, Uncle Tom's Cabin, Benito Cereno, Washington Square, The Rise of Silas Lapham, A Connectituct Yankee in King Arthur'...

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