Unless otherwise noted, all courses are offered by the English Departments of their respective institutions.
Columbia University
Please note, Columbia's first day of instruction is Tuesday, September 2. [Fall 2014 Academic Calendar]
Women, Politics and the Novel, 1790-1818
Jenny Davidson
Monday 4:10-6pm
Location TBA
In the wake of the French Revolution, writers of both sexes and all political complexions turned to the novel to work out arguments about political and domestic virtue, female education and the rights and obligations of women, metropolitan centers and colonial peripheries, the benefits and costs of strong government (both national and parental), the powers and limits of reason and sentiment. We will read a sequence of novels in their historical and cultural contexts; we will also consider questions of genre and canonicity, considering why so few of these novels are taken into account by important histories of the novel (Watt, McKeon, Armstrong) and how these books can clarify and complicate our own understanding of the relationships between fiction and politics.
Texts (available at Book Culture):
Austen, Jane. Sense and Sensibility (Oxford World’s Classics)
Edgeworth, Maria. Belinda (Oxford World’s Classics)
Godwin, William. Caleb Williams (Penguin)
Godwin, William. Memoirs of the Author of the Vindication (Broadview)
Hamilton, Elizabeth. Memoirs of Modern Philosophers (Broadview)
Hays, Mary. Memoirs of Emma Courtney (Broadview)
Inchbald, Elizabeth. A Simple Story (Penguin)
Opie, Amelia. Adeline Mowbray (Broadview)
Scott, Sir Walter. Heart of Midlothian (Penguin)
Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein (Broadview)
Smith, Charlotte. Desmond (Broadview)
Wollstonecraft, Mary. Mary, A Fiction and The Wrongs of Woman: or, Maria (Broadview)
For additional information, check English dept course listings on Columbia's website, or contact the instructor.
CUNY Graduate Center
Please note, CUNY's first day of instruction is Thursday, August 28. [Fall 2014 Academic Calendar]
Character and Caricature
Rachel Brownstein
Thursday 11:45am-1:45pm
CRN 25030
Literary theorists, literary journalists, and novelists themselves have been talking recently about character in fiction, and the author-character-reader nexus generally. Do you have to like the characters to admire a novel? What about the author? Do the muscles and habits of sympathy get strengthened when a reader identifies with a fictional character? What happens when we respond to eccentrics and types, flat and minor characters—and the voice (or the sense) of the narrator? The full humanity of some characters in fiction is frequently contrasted with “mere caricatures,” and sympathy is usually opposed to satire: are these binaries valid? In this seminar, we will look again at styles of characterization, mostly in novels by Jane Austen but also in graphic satires by her near contemporary, the caricaturist James Gillray.
Enlightenment Utopias
Carrie Hintz
Thursday 11:45am-1:45pm
CRN 25050
Our seminar will center on utopian literature and thought in the late seventeenth century and eighteenth century in the light of contemporary utopian theory. Topics covered will include utopia as social critique, utopian satire and lampoon, gendered spaces in utopia, rationality and nonsense, the literature of colonization and exploration, and the ways in which the rhetorical construction of ideal selfhoods in these works serves to exclude—or even eliminate—individuals and populations outside Enlightenment norms. The last seven weeks of the seminar will be devoted to fostering student research and writing, and to crafting seminar papers with a view to publication or dissertation work.
For additional information, check English dept course listings on CUNY's website or contact individual instructors.
Fordham University
Please note: Fordham's first day of instruction is Wednesday, September 3. [Fall 2014 Academic Calendar]
The Joseph Johnson Circle
John Bugg
Thursday 5:30-8pm
Location TBA
This survey course takes shape around the British bookseller and publisher Joseph Johnson, whose five-decade career stretched from the Seven Years’ War to the dawn of the Regency. Johnson published over four thousand titles during this time, in fields ranging from reform politics to children’s literature, from zoology to Baptist dissent, and from lyric poetry to visionary manifestos. His authors included Mary Wollstonecraft, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Sydney Owenson, William Cowper, Maria Edgeworth, Erasmus Darwin, Joseph Priestley, William Hazlitt, Charlotte Smith, and hundreds more. Attending to what has been referred to as the “Johnson Circle,” we will trace broad orbits in British writing across the late-eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, with topics including aesthetics, religious debate, the American and French Revolutions, women’s rights, war, slavery, popular societies, science, and education. In this regard, this course will function as a broad survey of British writing from 1760 to 1820. Along the way, in studying the radiating influence of the imprint “J. Johnson, London,” we will also pay attention to the field of Book History and how it has energized and expanded eighteenth-century and Romantic-era studies.
For additional information, view all English dept course listings on Fordham's website or contact individual instructors.
New York University
Please note: NYU's first day of instruction is Tuesday, September 2. [Fall 2014 Academic Calendar]
Cultural Institutions in Restoration England
Bill Blake
Thursday 6:20-8:20pm
244 Greene Street, Room 306
This course will look at British literature of the late-seventeenth and early-eighteenth centuries alongside a range of new cultural agendas—from the banding together of a small group of libertine radicals to the formation of an evangelical culture of moral reform; from the invention of "high" culture to the rise of literary professionalism, even as the arts themselves were changing under the impetus of democratization and liberal values. With a special focus on drama and theatre, primary texts will include plays and critical writings by John Milton, William Davenant, Margaret Cavendish, John Dryden, William Wycherley, Aphra Behn, Thomas Otway, William Congreve, Susanna Centlivre, Joseph Addison, and John Dennis. Our supplemental reading will build on various theoretical formulations—systems theory, discourse analysis, cultural sociology, the history of concepts—to explore how new institutions, new policies, new cultural producers, and new audiences transformed both the forms and practices of public art during this period.
For additional information, check English dept course listings on NYU's website or contact individual instructors.
Princeton University
Please note: Princeton's first day of instruction is Wednesday, September 17. [Fall 2014 Academic Calendar]
Pornography, Gender and the Rise of the Novel in Europe
April Alliston (Comparative Literature)
Wednesday 7:30-10:20pm
46 McCosh Hall
Open to all graduate and undergraduate students interested in understanding the origins of the modern novel, this seminar examines the profound historical, theoretical and formal connections between the development of pornography as a distinct category of representation and the development of the novel as a distinct literary genre during the Enlightenment. We will also explore the continuing resonances of those connections today, especially in connection with the development of modern ideas of identity, gender difference, individualism, privacy, and subjectivity. Readings in current criticism, history and theory of the novel and pornography will accompany primary readings, which will be drawn primarily from the core of the tradition in French and English literatures, with reference to early modern Italian precursors and modern German examples.
As of last update, Princeton's English department doesn't appear to have any graduate courses in the eighteenth century for Fall 2014. This is subject to change, however; for the most current information, view all English dept course listings on Princeton's website -- scroll down for graduate.
Rutgers University
Please note: Rutgers' first day of instruction is Tuesday, September 2. [Fall 2014 Academic Calendar]
Eighteenth-Century Fictions of the Human
Lynn Festa
Wednesday 4:30-7:30pm
MU 207
The course offers a survey of the eighteenth-century literature with special attention to the elaboration of concepts of the “human” in the age of Enlightenment. Taking eighteenth-century literature and philosophy as our primary texts, we will also examine a range of theories that have shaped the recent critical fascination with things and with animals in order to investigate the relation between thing theory and animal studies, on the one hand, and the complexities involved in conjoining theoretical models to specific literary texts and historical periods, on the other. Among the questions to be raised: to what degree is the relation between persons and things, humans and animals, specific to one historical period and how does it change from one historical moment to another? What relationship can or should broader cultural theories and histories of material culture and of the animal take to literary texts? How is human identity elaborated in and around animality? How do literary forms— the techniques and technologies of representation used in different genres— delimit human communities or construct visions of human being? Topics may include slavery and the discourse of human rights; natural history and biopolitics; animal studies; eighteenth-century theories of the machine and fictions of “artificial life.” Texts may include works by Hobbes, Behn, Cavendish, Defoe, Pope, Gay, Swift, Fielding, Johnson, Equiano, Sterne, Wollstonecraft, Godwin, with critical and theoretical texts drawn from Marx, Freud, Lukács, Bakhtin, Derrida, Rancière, Serres, Latour, Agamben, Johnson, Lamb, among others. Requirements: regular class participation including weekly posts to class list-serve; one oral presentation; short paper of 5-7 pages; final seminar paper.
Milton and the Long Restoration
Ann Coiro
Monday 4:30-7:30pm
MU 207
This course reads Milton’s poetry within the immediate context of the Restoration (when his late masterpieces were completed and published) and the reception of his work in the decades following (the Long Restoration broadly considered, from 1660 up through the mid-18th century).
Oddly, Milton’s work has rarely been read in the context of the Restoration. There is a deeply entrenched tradition that considers Milton as a “Renaissance” writer, his political views anathema to the Restoration, much less to the 18th century. Yet the achievement of any Restoration poet, regardless of his or her political allegiance, is unthinkable without the trauma and exhilaration of civil war, regicide, and the republican experiment. The further case for extending the Restoration beyond its more usual terminal points in 1688 or 1700 depends on multiple considerations, including literary considerations. Milton was, for example, one of the central pre-occupations of textual editors and literary critics in the early eighteenth century. And his influence on English poetry was powerful long before Romanticism, the literary moment traditionally connected with Milton. One of our goals will be to consider the origins and conceptual power of different historical periods in literary-historical studies (particularly Renaissance, Early Modern, Restoration, Enlightenment, and long eighteenth century, but the question is applicable across the profession). What is to be gained intellectually by redefining a period? What are the institutional risks of doing so?
We will read Milton’s key poetic texts closely and then in conjunction with important Long Restoration imitations of and critical commentaries on Milton’s work.
After working with Milton’s minor poems (including the Nativity Ode, the companion poems, the psalms and Lycidas), for example, we will consider poetry significantly shaped by (and subsequently shaping) Milton’s influence: poetry by Isaac Watts, Elizabeth Singer Rowe, Anne Finch and William Collins, selections from Edward Young’s Night-Thoughts and James Thomson’s The Seasons, and Thomas Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard.” We will put Milton’s A Maske Presented at Ludlow Castle in dialogue with its long-running 18th-c theatrical adaptation, Comus.
Paradise Lost has challenged readers since its publication. Our own close reading of the poem will be augmented and complicated by Long Restoration editors and critics. Paradise Lost’s first editors are still hugely influential. Jacob Tonson’s 1688 Folio edition first conjured a “Whig Milton.” We will also consider Richard Bentley’s notorious 1732 edition, the Richardsons’ Explanatory Notes on Paradise Lost (1734), and the first variorum edition of Paradise Lost (1749), published by Thomas Newton. Critical debates about Paradise Lost recur throughout this period, including criticism by Andrew Marvell, John Dryden, John Dennis, and Joseph Addison.
An entire course could be dedicated to imitations inspired by Paradise Lost. We will look at two: Dryden’s operatic adaptation, The State of Innocence (1674) and Pope’s The Rape of the Lock (1717)
Paradise Regained is a fascinating exception to Milton’s presence in the Long Restoration. A poem self-consciously reacting to the Restoration, it is also the work that seems to have had the least impact then. Finally, we will pair Samson Agonistes with Dryden’s Essay of Dramatic Poesy (and, if we have time, Aphra Behn’s 1688 Oroonoko).
Writing assignments will include three brief and exploratory essays (8 pages long). Also crucially important will be lively engagement with class discussion.
For additional information, view all English dept course listings on Rutgers' website or contact individual instructors.
Stony Brook University
Please note: Stony Brook's first day of instruction is Monday, August 25. [Fall 2014 Academic Calendar]
As of last update, Stony Brook's English department doesn't appear to have any graduate courses in the eighteenth century for Fall 2014. This is subject to change, however; for the most current information, check English dept course listings on Stony Brook's website.
