To take the Film/literature senior seminar (ENGL BC3993), you must meet the following requirements in Student Planning:

1. Your major is listed as Film Studies or English with a Film Studies concentration.
2. Your expected graduation date is listed as any month within the year 2025 or February 2026.

To take an English senior seminar (any section of ENGL BC3998), you must meet the following requirements in Student Planning:

1. Your major is listed as English (you may have any or no concentration).
2. Your expected graduation date is listed as any month within the year 2025 or February 2026.

To take the senior project in creative writing (ENGL BC3992), you must meet the following requirements in Student Planning:

1. Your major is English with a creative writing concentration.
2. Your expected graduation date is listed as any month within the year 2025 or February 2026.

If you do not meet these requirements, the computer system will not allow you to sign-up for these courses. It is therefore extremely important that you check that your major, concentration, and graduation year are correct in Student Planning BEFORE registration opens.

If your anticipated graduation date is incorrect, please contact Julissa Acosta ASAP to let her know that you are a senior and should be allowed to take a senior seminar. Please note that if you wait until after registration opens to contact Julissa, this will delay your ability to register for senior seminars.

If you are not a senior but have extenuating circumstances that require you to take a senior seminar, please see the following question.

Before registration opens up, please email Julissa Acosta a short explanation of why you need to take your senior seminar early and cc your major adviser.

First, check to see if your major and expected graduation date is correct in Student Planning for the seminar you are trying to register for. If they are and you still cannot register, please email Julissa Acosta with a description (and, if possible, a screenshot) of your issue.

Please join the electronic wait list for the seminar(s) that works for your schedule. Then email Julissa Acosta a short explanation of your scheduling conflict and cc your major adviser. Julissa will work with you and your adviser to resolve the problem.

Please join the electronic wait list for the seminar(s) that works for your schedule. Then email Julissa Acosta to let her know about your issue and cc your major adviser. Julissa will work with you and your adviser to place you in a senior seminar.

Spring 2025

Senior Seminars:

ENGL BC3998.01 Senior Seminar: Words and Pictures. 4 points. 
Enrollment limited to Barnard senior English majors. Please see the FAQ below for the exact expected graduation dates for which the registration system considers students to be seniors--if your graduation date does not match, you will not be able to automatically register.
In this class we will explore literary texts that focus on visual experience, especially on painting, sculpture, and photography. What kinds of questions do these texts raise about the nature of aesthetic experience? How does what we mean by aesthetic experience change through time? What is the distinction, if any, between aesthetic experience and other ‘evidential’ uses of visual experience (documentary photography, for example)? Our readings will range from ancient to modern, from poetry to philosophy: Homer, Plato, Virgil, Ovid, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Dickinson, Woolf, Proust, Benjamin, Barthes, and Hayes, among others. 
— Rachel Eisendrath

ENGL BC3998.02 Senior Seminar: Write to Vote. 4 points.
Enrollment limited to Barnard senior English majors. Please see the FAQ below for the exact expected graduation dates for which the registration system considers students to be seniors--if your graduation date does not match, you will not be able to automatically register.
This seminar investigates the literary antecedents and cultural aftermath of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, with special attention to gendered and racial narratives of the ballot. Authors include Robert Munford, Walt Whitman, Paul Lawrence Dunbar, Thomas Dixon, Jr., William Faulkner, Zora Neale Hurston and Fannie Lou Hamer. Note: this course fulfills the senior seminar in American literature requirement for the American literature concentration.
— Jennie Kassanoff

ENGL BC3998.03 Senior Seminar: City Girls: Fiction and Film by and about Urban Womxn. 4 points.
Enrollment limited to Barnard senior English majors. Please see FAQ linked below for the exact expected graduation dates for which the registration system considers students to be seniors--if your graduation date does not match, you will not be able to automatically register.
The primary objectives of this course are to explore the assigned material with joy and rigor, and to inspire, cultivate and nurture your senior theses. The syllabus ranges broadly into different periods, genres and languages. My hope is that there will be something here for each of you. (Note: as I get a sense of you and your knowledge bases, orientations, interests, individually and collectively, we may want to make some changes to the assigned films as we go.).
— Maura Spiegel

ENGL BC3998.04 ENGL BC3998 Senior Seminar: Victorian Literature and Science. 4 points.
Enrollment limited to Barnard senior English majors. Please see FAQ linked above (and also reproduced below) for the exact expected graduation dates for which the registration system considers students to be seniors--if your graduation date does not match, you will not be able to automatically register.
This course explores the relationship between literature and scientific inquiry. Focusing on the literature of the Victorian era, a period that saw unprecedented scientific and technological innovation, we will ask how fiction and poetry engages, critiques, participates, and intervenes in scientific thought and technological development. How did new scientific theories lead novelists and poets to reimagine the relationships between human and animal, self and other, space and time, body and mind? How did literature explore the ethical, social, political, and ecological implications of science in ways that scientific writers may not have envisioned? How did Victorian biological discourse imagine gender, race, and sexuality as scientific categories, and how did literature reflect or trouble such thinking? How did scientific thought reshape religious belief, and how did literature address tensions between science and religion? We will consider major developments in the history of science, such as the emergence of Darwinian evolutionary thought in biology, as well as more eccentric, “pseudoscientific” areas of Victorian inquiry, including mesmerism, occultism, telepathy, phrenology, and degeneration. We will also think broadly about the value of science and technology in relation to the arts and to literature. What does scientific thinking offer to literature, and what kinds of questions can literature answer that science cannot? Authors to be studied may include Charles Darwin, Mary Shelley, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, Edwin Abbott, Charles Kingsley, H.G. Wells, Robert Louis Stevenson, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Alfred Tennyson, Marie Corelli, and others.
— Jayne Hildebrand

ENGL BC3992 Senior Project in Creative Writing. 4 points.
Enrollment limited to Barnard senior English majors with a concentration in creative writing, focusing on prose.
This creative writing workshop represents an opportunity for creative writing concentrators to work on one large project that will serve as a capstone senior project. As in a typical writing workshop, much of the focus will be on sharing and critiquing student work. Unlike other workshops, in this class students will focus on building out a longer project—such as a more ambitious full-length story for fiction and creative nonfiction writers, or a collection of stories or essays. Students should be aware of two important notes: (1) This class is limited to senior English majors who have already been approved to be creative writing concentrators; and (2) this course fulfills the requirement for concentrators to finish a senior project, but not the academic senior seminar requirement. This class is about your own writing and that of your classmates. This class will be what you make of it!
— Hisham Matar

Fall 2024

Senior Seminars:

ENGL BC3997.01 Senior Seminar: Histories of the Body
Enrollment limited to Barnard senior English majors. Please see FAQ below for the exact expected graduation dates for which the registration system considers students to be seniors--if your graduation date does not match, you will not be able to automatically register.
How to imagine a history of the body, across time, across culture?   Body is transhistorical (even as it may be disappearing now into simulation) while interpretations of bodies shift across time, space, class, and belief. How has the body served as a site for social, political, anxieties and desires?   Through engaging literature across time and place, this seminar will enact a series of interventions, less to create a synthetic history that demonstrates the diverse significations of the body, of “our” bodies.    
Among the topics we will explore:  paleolithic bodies and their afterlife in trans-species metamorphosis, nudity as an aesthetic, beauty as an aesthetic,  the “disappearance” of the body in Judaism and Islam, sacrifice and suffering in medieval Christianity, and the correlation between the body and the carnivalesque, dissection and mechanism in early modernity, the ideology of the “king’s two bodies” and the body politic, the orientalist body and colonialist pathologies, gendered, racialized and sexualized bodies, the diseased body (syphilis, AIDS and Covid)  necropolitics and the right to maim, transgenderism and virtual bodies. Although the primary site of investigation will be Europe and the Americas, we will also consider the absence of the nude as an aesthetic object in Feudal China, while Japanese aesthetics that find erotica in objects rather than the body.
— Ross Hamilton

ENGL BC3997.02 Senior Seminar: Victorian and Modern Drama 
Enrollment limited to Barnard senior English majors. Please see FAQ below for the exact expected graduation dates for which the registration system considers students to be seniors--if your graduation date does not match, you will not be able to automatically register.
Drama in a period of rapid transition involving changing social structures and evolving modes of performance. Protest plays, problem plays, and experimental plays vie for attention and authority. Our seminar will explore fluid relationships between realism and theatricalism, historicism and modernism, convention and invention, adaptation and interpretation. We will read plays, view streamed productions, films and stage adaptations, and attend a NYC production.  Works include Dion Boucicault, The Octoroon; Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, An Octoroon; Arthur W. Pinero, Trelawny of the ‘Wells’; Elizabeth Robins, Votes for Women, Evelyn Glover, Miss Appleyard’s Awakening; Githa Sowerby, Rutherford and Son; Georgia Douglas Johnson, Plumes; Oscar Wilde, An Ideal Husband; Bernard Shaw, Candida; Henrik Ibsen, A Doll’s House; Anton Chekhov, The Seagull; Caryl Churchill, Top Girls; Dominique Morisseau, Pipeline
— Patricia Denison

ENGL BC3997.03 Senior Seminar: Black Lives in the Enlightenment 
Enrollment limited to Barnard senior English majors. Please see FAQ below for the exact expected graduation dates for which the registration system considers students to be seniors--if your graduation date does not match, you will not be able to automatically register.
Focusing both on representations of Black lives in canonical literature and on newly recovered texts by forgotten Black writers, this seminar will examine the varieties of experience and accomplishment of people of African descent in the English-speaking world from the 1650s to the 1850s. Authors to include canonical writers from Behn and Pope to Wordsworth and Douglass, as well as large numbers of neglected Black writers such as Wheatley, Haynes, Banneker, Hammon, Belinda Sutton, Olaudah Equiano, Venture Smith, Boston King, Richard Allen, and James Forten, among others.
— James Basker

ENGL BC3997.04 Senior Seminar: "a d—d mob of scribbling women": Nineteenth-century American Women Writers
Enrollment limited to Barnard senior English majors. Please see FAQ below for the exact expected graduation dates for which the registration system considers students to be seniors--if your graduation date does not match, you will not be able to automatically register.
In 1855, Nathaniel Hawthorne complained that American publishing was "wholly given over to a d--d mob of scribbling women," and that he could not hope to compete with women writers for popularity or sales. Yet Hawthorne's texts were canonized as American classics, while texts by nineteenth-century women writers were largely ignored by the academy until late in the twentieth century. This course considers a variety of texts by nineteenth-century American women, including novels, short fiction, poetry, and journalism. We'll consider women's writing and women's reading through a variety of lenses, including domesticity and women's sphere, political action and suffrage, slavery and abolition, the economics of writing and publishing, sentimentality and anger, and canon formation and literary merit. Authors include Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Susan Warner, Fanny Fern, Harriet Jacobs, Elizabeth Drew Stoddard, Louisa May Alcott, Emily Dickinson, Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins, Nellie Bly, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Edith Maude Eaton/Sui Sin Far, and Mary E. Wilkins Freeman.
— Lisa Gordis

ENGL BC3992 Senior Project in Creative Writing
Enrollment limited to Barnard senior English majors with a creative writing concentration. Join the waitlist to be let into the course.
This creative writing workshop represents an opportunity for creative writing concentrators to focus on one large project that will serve as a capstone senior project. As in a typical writing workshop, much of the focus will be on sharing and critiquing student work. Unlike other workshops, in this class students will focus on building out a longer project—such as a more ambitious full-length story for fiction and creative nonfiction writers and a chapbook for poets. This means students will discuss work by writers who may not share their own genre. We will focus on generating new work, developing your writing process, and creating new possibilities and momentum for your piece, as well as trying to create a sense of community among the concentrators. We will also conduct in-class writing exercises in response to short reading assignments and class lectures. Students should be aware of two important notes: (1) This class is limited to senior English majors who have already been approved to be creative writing concentrators; and (2) this course fulfills the requirement for concentrators to finish a senior project, but not the academic senior seminar requirement. This class is about your own writing and that of your classmates. This class will be what you make of it!
—Jennifer F. Boylan

Spring 2024

Senior Seminars:

ENGL BC3993 Senior Seminar: The Family in Fiction & Film: The Poetics of Growing Up
Enrollment limited to Barnard senior English majors with a Film Studies concentration and Barnard senior Film Studies majors. Please see the FAQ below for the exact expected graduation dates for which the registration system considers students to be seniors--if your graduation date does not match, you will not be able to automatically register.
We will look closely at 20th- and 21st-century stories of family life in novels, memoirs, a few children’s books, and movies in many genres, from melodramas to sitcoms. Authors include Gaston Bachelard (The Poetics of Space), D.W. Winnicott (On Playing and Reality), Jessica Benjamin, Maggie Nelson, Toni Morrison, Alison Bechdel, Astrid Lindgren and Vivian Gornick.  Films by Sean Baker, Ingmar Bergman, Jennifer Kent, Barry Jenkins, Tamara Jenkins, Hirokazu Kore-eda, Elia Kazan, Lance Hammer, Mike Mills, King Vidor, Andrei Zvyagintsev, and others.
—Maura Spiegel

ENGL BC3998.05 Senior Seminar: Romance
Enrollment limited to Barnard senior English majors. Please see the FAQ below for the exact expected graduation dates for which the registration system considers students to be seniors--if your graduation date does not match, you will not be able to automatically register.
The literary mode we call “romance” has been enormously popular and influential from its origins in Hellenistic antiquity to current science fiction, and at all levels of textual ambition from popular culture to canonical literature. Within this mass of material, one constant element is romance’s encounter with boundaries, prompted by forms of desire. This course will explore such boundary moments and narratives of desire in texts from the 5th to the 20th centuries: boundaries of time (the reimagining of antiquity), of national foundation, of geography (crusader texts), of gender, and of class, indeed the boundary of the human and the monstrous. For their senior projects in the seminar, students will be welcome to use texts from beyond the syllabus, approaching them with the optic of romance.
—Christopher Baswell

ENGL BC3998.06 Senior Seminar: Late Victorian and Modern Drama
Enrollment limited to Barnard senior English majors. Please see the FAQ below for the exact expected graduation dates for which the registration system considers students to be seniors--if your graduation date does not match, you will not be able to automatically register.
Drama in a period of rapid transition involving changing social structures and evolving modes of performance. Protest plays, problem plays, and experimental plays vie for attention and authority. Our seminar will explore fluid relationships between realism and theatricalism, historicism and modernism, convention and invention, adaptation and interpretation. We will read plays, view streamed productions, films and stage adaptations, and attend a NYC production.  Works include Dion Boucicault, The Octoroon; Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, An Octoroon; Arthur W. Pinero, Trelawny of the ‘Wells’; Elizabeth Robins, Votes for Women, Evelyn Glover, Miss Appleyard’s Awakening; Githa Sowerby, Rutherford and Son; Georgia Douglas Johnson, Plumes; Oscar Wilde, An Ideal Husband; Bernard Shaw, Candida; Henrik Ibsen, A Doll’s House; Anton Chekhov, The Seagull; Caryl Churchill, Top Girls; Dominique Morisseau, Pipeline. Note: this course fulfills the senior project in theatre requirement for the theatre concentration.
—Patricia Denison

ENGL BC3998.07 Senior Seminar: The Novel and Economic Justice
Enrollment limited to Barnard senior English majors. Please see the FAQ below for the exact expected graduation dates for which the registration system considers students to be seniors--if your graduation date does not match, you will not be able to automatically register.
Global capitalism inspired novelists to explore the ways in which money, or the lack of it, forms or deforms our characters. It also inspired the writings of Karl Marx, the great theorist of economic justice. In this seminar we will read four early novels – Behn’s Orinooko, Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, Godwin’s Caleb Williams, Austen’s Persuasion alongside Marxist theory. For the remaining two thirds of the seminar, we will move, temporally and geographically, to a cluster of contemporary global novels in English to explore both the aftereffects of colonialism and the continued power of the capitalist system. Novels will include Sembene Ousmane, God’s Bits of Wood, Arhundati Roy, God of Small Things, K. Sello Duiker, Thirteen Cents, Aravind, Adiga, The White Tiger, Deepak Unnikrishnan, Temporary People. Theorists may include Georg Lukács, Mikhail Bakhtin, Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Walter Benjamin, C.L.R. James, Frantz Fanon, Amílcar Cabral, Edward Said, Antonio Gramsci, Raymond Williams, Stuart Hall, Louis Althusser, Guy Debord, Gayatri Spivak, Vivek Chibber, Achille Mbebe, Kohei Saito, Giovanni Arrighi, Pascale Casanova, Slavov Zizek, and Melinda Cooper.
—Ross Hamilton

ENGL BC3998.08 ENGL BC3998 Senior Seminar: Write to Vote
Enrollment limited to Barnard senior English majors. Please see the FAQ below for the exact expected graduation dates for which the registration system considers students to be seniors--if your graduation date does not match, you will not be able to automatically register.
This seminar investigates the literary antecedents and cultural aftermath of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, with special attention to gendered and racial narratives of the ballot. Authors include Robert Munford, Walt Whitman, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Thomas Dixon, Jr., William Faulkner, Zora Neale Hurston and Fannie Lou Hamer. Note: this course fulfills the senior seminar in American literature requirement for the American literature concentration.
—Jennie Kassanoff

Senior Project in Creative Writing:

ENGL BC3992 Senior Project in Creative Writing
Enrollment limited to Barnard senior English majors with a creative writing concentration. Join the waitlist to be let into the course.
This creative writing workshop represents an opportunity for creative writing concentrators to work on one large project that will serve as a capstone senior project. As in a typical writing workshop, much of the focus will be on sharing and critiquing student work. Unlike other workshops, in this class students will focus on building out a longer project—such as a more ambitious full-length story for fiction and creative nonfiction writers, or a collection of stories or essays. Students should be aware of two important notes: (1) This class is limited to senior English majors who have already been approved to be creative writing concentrators; and (2) this course fulfills the requirement for concentrators to finish a senior project, but not the academic senior seminar requirement. This class is about your own writing and that of your classmates. This class will be what you make of it!
—Jennifer F. Boylan

Fall 2023

Senior Seminars:

ENGL BC3997 Senior Seminar: The Making and Unmaking of the Poetic Canon
Enrollment limited to Barnard senior English majors.
This seminar reviews the emergence of poetry anthologies from the 18th century to the present, while sampling a wide variety of lyric poetry (Renaissance and Romantic to Modernist and Contemporary) and re-examining such issues as what it is we value in poetry and how we might reinvent the "canon" we have inherited. Students will create their own anthologies and have the option to do editorial or critical projects for their final submissions.
—James Basker

ENGL BC3997 Senior Seminar: John Donne, the Metaphysicals, and His Legacy
Enrollment limited to Barnard senior English majors.
John Donne, though writing in the early 17th century, is one of the greatest lyric poets, and one of the most influential, still influential, picked up by modernist poets and continuing on until the present, though his prose Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions has been similarly influential. Donne is smart, interesting, often blasphemous, clever and witty, always thinking and analyzing whether he is writing women or God, about love (sexual or spiritual) and desire, disappointment and disgust, faith (in love? Or God?) or doubt. Soul and body are intertwined (can you separate physical and spiritual experience?) and death too close. His sense of mortality is as keen as his desire for embodied love. Donne’s poetry always pushing and breaking boundaries, not just technically. Samuel Johnson (and then later T.S. Eliot) labeled his poetry “Metaphysical.” But what does that mean? We begin with close (I prefer “attentive”) reading of Donne’s texts, then poems by other “metaphysical poets” (George Herbert, Katherine Philips, and Andrew Marvell) sometimes paired with later 20th-century poets. We will probably read Thomas Browne’s Hydriotaphyia (Urn Buriall)—it’s not in Latin, particularly the fifth book about mortality, longing for immortality, continuing human connections, and legacies. We will be exploring how later poets’ writing was/is in conversation with these early poets, and will read select poems by Dylan Thomas, Yeats, Elizabeth Bishop, Anthony Hecht, Adrienne Rich, Mary Oliver, Jericho Brown, etc. This is an experimental course, open. The writers you might wish to explore need not be from England, Ireland, or America. Range broadly, find new writers. The syllabus will be flexible. The reading will not be overwhelming after the first (probably) four or five weeks, giving you time to explore and share, and to be working on your own senior essay, discovering what you want to write and think about.
—Achsah Guibbory

ENGL BC3997 Senior Seminar: "a d—d mob of scribbling women": Nineteenth-century American Women Writers
Enrollment limited to Barnard senior English majors.
In 1855, Nathaniel Hawthorne complained that American publishing was "wholly given over to a d--d mob of scribbling women," and that he could not hope to compete with women writers for popularity or sales. Yet Hawthorne's texts were canonized as American classics, while texts by nineteenth-century women writers were largely ignored by the academy until late in the twentieth century. This course considers a variety of texts by nineteenth-century American women, including novels, short fiction, poetry, and journalism. We'll consider women's writing and women's reading through a variety of lenses, including domesticity and women's sphere, political action and suffrage, slavery and abolition, the economics of writing and publishing, sentimentality and anger, and canon formation and literary merit. Authors include Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Susan Warner, Fanny Fern, Harriet Jacobs, Elizabeth Drew Stoddard, Louisa May Alcott, Emily Dickinson, Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins, Nellie Bly, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Edith Maude Eaton/Sui Sin Far, and Mary E. Wilkins Freeman.
—Lisa Gordis

ENGL BC3997 Senior Seminar: Charles Dickens
Enrollment limited to Barnard senior English majors.
Charles Dickens: the life, the works, the legend, in as much detail as we can manage in one semester. Reading will be selected by the class, and may include Pickwick Papers, A Christmas Carol, David Copperfield, Bleak House, and selections from his friend John Forster's Life of Charles Dickens. Special emphasis will be given to the question of what "Dickensian" means, in the context of Dickens's literary style, his genius for characterization, his love of conviviality, and Victorian extremes of wealth and poverty. Students will be expected to share in creating the syllabus, presenting new material, and leading class discussion.
—William Sharpe

Senior Project in Creative Writing:

ENGL BC3992 Senior Project in Creative Writing
Enrollment limited to Barnard senior English majors who are creative writing concentrators.
This creative writing workshop represents an opportunity for creative writing concentrators to focus on one large project that will serve as a capstone senior project. As in a typical writing workshop, much of the focus will be on sharing and critiquing student work. Unlike other workshops, in this class students will focus on building out a longer project—such as a more ambitious full-length story for fiction and creative nonfiction writers and a chapbook for poets. This means students will discuss work by writers who may not share their own genre. We will focus on generating new work, developing your writing process, and creating new possibilities and momentum for your piece, as well as trying to create a sense of community among the concentrators. We will also conduct in-class writing exercises in response to short reading assignments and class lectures. Students should be aware of two important notes: (1) This class is limited to senior English majors who have already been approved to be creative writing concentrators; and (2) this course fulfills the requirement for concentrators to finish a senior project, but not the academic senior seminar requirement. This class is about your own writing and that of your classmates. This class will be what you make of it!

Fall 2022

ENGL BC3997.01 Senior Seminar: Shakespeare's Tragedies
Enrollment limited to Barnard senior English majors.
In this course, we will read four Shakespearean tragedies (Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth, and King Lear), focusing on nuances of the language and on the astonishingly varied intellectual traditions that underlie this language. We will also work our way through selected parts of the modern critical tradition, focusing on how these plays can help us think in complex ways about our world then and now. Note: this course fulfills the senior project in theatre requirement for the theatre concentration.
—Rachel Eisendrath

ENGL BC3997.02 Senior Seminar: Late Victorian and Modern Drama
Enrollment limited to Barnard senior English majors.
Drama in a period of rapid transition involving changing social structures and evolving modes of performance. Protest plays, problem plays, and experimental plays vie for attention and authority. Our seminar will explore fluid relationships between realism and theatricalism, historicism and modernism, convention and invention, adaptation and interpretation. We will read plays, view streamed productions, films and stage adaptations, and attend a NYC production.  Works include Dion Boucicault, The Octoroon; Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, An Octoroon; Arthur W. Pinero, Trelawny of the‘Wells’; Elizabeth Robins, Votes for Women, Evelyn Glover, Miss Appleyard’s Awakening; Githa Sowerby, Rutherford and Son; Georgia Douglas Johnson, Plumes; Oscar Wilde, An Ideal Husband; Bernard Shaw, Candida; Henrik Ibsen, A Doll’s House; Anton Chekhov, The Seagull; Caryl Churchill, Top Girls; Dominique Morisseau, Pipeline. Note: this course fulfills the senior project in theatre requirement for the theatre concentration.
—Patricia Denison

ENGL BC3997.03 Senior Seminar: "a d—d mob of scribbling women": Nineteenth-century American Women Writers
Enrollment limited to Barnard senior English majors.
In 1855, Nathaniel Hawthorne complained that American publishing was "wholly given over to a d--d mob of scribbling women," and that he could not hope to compete with women writers for popularity or sales.  Yet Hawthorne's texts were canonized as American classics, while texts by nineteenth-century women writers were largely ignored by the academy until late in the twentieth century.  This course considers a variety of texts by nineteenth-century American women, including novels, short fiction, poetry, and journalism. We'll consider women's writing and women's reading through a variety of lenses, including domesticity and women's sphere, political action and suffrage, slavery and abolition, the economics of writing and publishing, sentimentality and anger, and canon formation and literary merit.  Authors include Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Susan Warner, Fanny Fern, Harriet Jacobs, Elizabeth Drew Stoddard, Louisa May Alcott, Emily Dickinson, Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins, Nellie Bly, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Edith Maude Eaton/Sui Sin Far, and Mary E. Wilkins Freeman.
—Lisa Gordis

ENGL BC3997.04 Senior Seminar: The Novel and Economic Justice
Enrollment limited to Barnard senior English majors.
The industrial revolution inspired novelists to explore the ways in which money, or the lack of it, forms or deforms our characters. It also inspired the writings of Karl Marx, the great theorist of economic justice. In this seminar we will read five of the greatest nineteenth-century novels – Godwin’s Caleb Williams, Austen’s Persuasion, Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, Eliot’s Middlemarch and Hardy’s Jude the Obscure – alongside Marx’s most influential writings. We will pay special attention to Marxist notions of materialism; alienation and human flourishing; capital and labour; classes; and ideology. Special emphasis will also be given to the Marxist approach in the study of culture, the role of intellectuals (such as ourselves) and the relationship between capitalism and culture – through theorists like Gramsci, the Frankfurt School, and Raymond Williams.
—Ross Hamilton

ENGL BC3997.05 Senior Seminar in Creative Writing
Enrollment limited to Barnard senior English majors who are creative writing concentrators.
This creative writing workshop represents an opportunity for creative writing concentrators to focus on one large project that will serve as a capstone senior project. As in a typical writing workshop, much of the focus will be on sharing and critiquing student work. Unlike other workshops, in this class students will focus on building out a longer project--such as a more ambitious full-length story for fiction and creative nonfiction writers and a chapbook for poets--and also discuss work by writers who may not share their own genre. Much of the emphasis will be on generating new work, developing your writing process, and creating new possibilities and momentum for your piece, as well as trying to create a sense of community among the concentrators. Depending on course enrollment, we will also conduct in-class writing exercises in response to short reading assignments. Note: This course fulfills the senior writing project requirement for the creative writing concentration, but not the requirement for the Senior Seminar. 
—Ken Chen

Spring 2023

ENGL BC3993 Senior Seminar: The Family in Fiction & Film: The Poetics of Growing Up
[NOTE: this Film/literature senior seminar has a new number; it is BC3993, not BC3998 like the other senior seminars.]
Enrollment limited to Barnard senior English majors with a Film Studies concentration and Barnard senior Film Studies majors. Please see the FAQ below for the exact expected graduation dates for which the registration system considers students to be seniors--if your graduation date does not match, you will not be able to automatically register.
We will look closely at 20th and 21st-Century stories of family life in novels, memoirs, a few children’s books, and movies in many genres, from melodramas to sitcoms. Authors include Gaston Bachelard (The Poetics of Space), D.W. Winnicott (On Playing and Reality), Jessica Benjamin, Maggie Nelson, Toni Morrison, Alison Bechdel, Astrid Lindgren and Vivian Gornick.  Films by Sean Baker, Ingmar Bergman, Jennifer Kent, Barry Jenkins, Tamara Jenkins, Hirokazu Kore-eda, Elia Kazan, Lance Hammer, Mike Mills, King Vidor, Andrei Zvyagintsev, and others.
—Maura Spiegel

ENGL BC3998 Senior Seminar: Migration, Immigration, and the Borders of American Literature
Enrollment limited to Barnard senior English majors. Please see the FAQ below for the exact expected graduation dates for which the registration system considers students to be seniors--if your graduation date does not match, you will not be able to automatically register.
This course will explore representations of voluntary and forced migration as a path toward understanding the formation of literary traditions and histories in the US and the Americas. How do we think about immigrant literature if the immigrant was here before the literature? Where does American literature begin and end when a mobile subject carries her words and experiences across borders and genres? In addition to reading fictional and non-fictional narratives of cultural literacy and migration by writers like Frederick Douglass, Julia Alvarez, and Valeria Luiselli, we’ll examine the ways in which contemporary discourses of relocation generate surprising returns to what we might recognize as the proto-exceptionalist and/or post-apocalyptic foundations of American literature and culture.
—Kristin Carter

ENGL BC3998 Senior Seminar: Words and Pictures: The Intersection of Literary and Visual Art
Enrollment limited to Barnard senior English majors. Please see the FAQ below for the exact expected graduation dates for which the registration system considers students to be seniors--if your graduation date does not match, you will not be able to automatically register.
In this class we will explore literary texts that focus on visual experience, especially painting, sculpture, and photography. What kinds of questions do these texts raise about the nature of aesthetic experience? How does what we mean by aesthetic experience change through time? What is the distinction, if any, between aesthetic experience and other ‘evidential’ uses of visual experience (documentary photography, for example)? How do writers explore the distinction between the things of art and the things of the world? Our readings will range from ancient to modern and may include Plato, Homer, Virgil, Ovid, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Dickinson, Hayes, Woolf, Benjamin, Barthes, and Ishiguro, among others. We will also read widely in the history of aesthetic philosophy and critical theory.
—Rachel Eisendrath

ENGL BC3998 Senior Seminar: Write to Vote
Enrollment limited to Barnard senior English majors. Please see the FAQ below for the exact expected graduation dates for which the registration system considers students to be seniors--if your graduation date does not match, you will not be able to automatically register.
This seminar investigates the literary antecedents and cultural aftermath of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, with special attention to gendered and racial narratives of the ballot. Authors include Robert Munford, Walt Whitman, Paul Lawrence Dunbar, Thomas Dixon, Jr., William Faulkner, Zora Neale Hurston and Fannie Lou Hamer.
—Jennie Kassanoff

Fall 2021

ENGL BC3997.01 Senior Seminar: Exploring the Eighteenth Century
Enrollment limited to Barnard senior English majors.
This seminar will explore selected topics in the 18th century, including the transformation in print culture and development of new genres such as the novel, biography, and popular journalism; the emergence of women writers; the interplay between canonical authors and newcomers such as working class and Black writers; the literature of slavery and abolition; poetic experimentation; and the turn to Romanticism. Writers include Behn, Defoe, Pope, Johnson, Richardson, Sterne, Wheatley, Blake, Cowper, Equiano, Boswell, Wollstonecraft, Wordsworth, and Austen. Students will be invited to propose additional writers for our weekly discussions and to include in their projects writers beyond the syllabus.
—James Basker

ENGL BC3997.02 Senior Seminar: Late Victorian and Modern Drama
Enrollment limited to Barnard senior English majors.
Drama in a period of rapid transition involving changing social structures and evolving modes of performance.  Protest plays, problem plays, and experimental plays vie for attention and authority.  Our seminar will explore fluid relationships between realism and theatricalism, historicism and modernism, convention and invention, adaptation and interpretation.  We will read plays, view streamed productions, films and stage adaptations, and if possible, attend a NYC production.  Works include Dion Boucicault, The Octoroon; Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, An Octoroon; Elizabeth Robins, Votes for Women, Evelyn Glover, Miss Appleyard’s Awakening; Oscar Wilde, An Ideal Husband; George Bernard Shaw, Mrs. Warren’s Profession; Henrik Ibsen, A Doll’s House and Ghosts; Anton Chekhov, The Seagull; Hazel Ellis, Women Without Men; Caryl Churchill, Top Girls; Noel Coward, Still Life; and Emma Rice, Brief Encounter.
—Patricia Denison

ENGL BC3997.03 Senior Seminar: "a d—d mob of scribbling women": Nineteenth-century American Women Writers
Enrollment limited to Barnard senior English majors.
In 1855, Nathaniel Hawthorne complained that American publishing was "wholly given over to a d--d mob of scribbling women," and that he could not hope to compete with women writers for popularity or sales.  Yet Hawthorne's texts were canonized as American classics, while texts by nineteenth-century women writers were largely ignored by the academy until late in the twentieth century.  This course considers a variety of texts by nineteenth-century American women, including novels, short fiction, poetry, and journalism. We'll consider women's writing and women's reading through a variety of lenses, including domesticity and women's sphere, political action and suffrage, slavery and abolition, the economics of writing and publishing, sentimentality and anger, and canon formation and literary merit.  Authors include Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Susan Warner, Fanny Fern, Harriet Jacobs, Elizabeth Drew Stoddard, Louisa May Alcott, Emily Dickinson, Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins, Nellie Bly, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, and Mary E. Wilkins Freeman.
—Lisa Gordis

ENGL BC3997.04 Senior Seminar: The Novel and Economic Justice
Enrollment limited to Barnard senior English majors.
The industrial revolution inspired novelists to explore the ways in which money, or the lack of it, forms or deforms our characters. It also inspired the writings of Karl Marx, the great theorist of economic justice. In this seminar we will read five of the greatest nineteenth-century novels – Godwin’s Caleb Williams, Austen’s Persuasion, Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, Eliot’s Middlemarch and Hardy’s Jude the Obscure – alongside Marx’s most influential writings. We will pay special attention to Marxist notions of materialism; alienation and human flourishing; capital and labour; classes; and ideology. Special emphasis will also be given to the Marxist approach in the study of culture, the role of intellectuals (such as ourselves) and the relationship between capitalism and culture – through theorists like Gramsci, the Frankfurt School, and Raymond Williams.
—Ross Hamilton

Spring 2022

ENGL BC3998.01 Senior Seminar: City Girls: Fiction and Film by and about Urban Womxn
Enrollment limited to Barnard senior English majors with a Film Studies concentration and Barnard senior Film Studies majors. Please see the FAQ below for the exact expected graduation dates for which the registration system considers students to be seniors--if your graduation date does not match, you will not be able to automatically register.
From Lorelei Lee to Issa Dee, from Josephine Baker to Audre Lorde and Patti Smith, urban, non-binary, queer womxn, those who identify or are identified as [women], fictional and real, continue to redefine boundaries, femininity and identity, and give us great stories. With bell hooks’ All About Love, De Certeau’s The Practice of Everyday Life and Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space, we will look closely at storytelling strategies, including assemblage, fracturing, simultaneity, mapping, networks, traces, palimpsests, and at modes of inhabiting.  Themes include what Virginia Woolf called “street haunting,” at yearning, ephemerality, affectation and authenticity.  Through close reading of novels, memoirs, graphic narrative, short stories and films, we will study the changing interface of [women] and the city. Assigned texts likely to include works by Chantal Ackerman, Andrea Arnold, Sean Baker, Shirley Clarke, Joan Didion, Elena Ferrante, Vivian Gornick, Christopher Isherwood, Tamara Jenkins, Wong Kar-Wei, Irmgard Keun, Helen Levitt, Jennie Livingston, Anita Loos, Audre Lorde, Mike Leigh, Maggie Nelson, Alan J. Pakula, Ann Petry, Dee Rees, Patti Smith, Agnes Varda, and more.
—Maura Spiegel

ENGL BC3998.02 Senior Seminar: Write to Vote
Enrollment limited to Barnard senior English majors. Please see the FAQ below for the exact expected graduation dates for which the registration system considers students to be seniors--if your graduation date does not match, you will not be able to automatically register.
This seminar investigates the literary antecedents and cultural aftermath of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, with special attention to gendered and racial narratives of the ballot. Authors include Robert Munford, Walt Whitman, Paul Lawrence Dunbar, Thomas Dixon, Jr., William Faulkner, Zora Neale Hurston and Fannie Lou Hamer.
—Jennie Kassanoff

ENGL BC3998.03 Senior Seminar: Charles Dickens
Enrollment limited to Barnard senior English majors. Please see the FAQ below for the exact expected graduation dates for which the registration system considers students to be seniors--if your graduation date does not match, you will not be able to automatically register.
Charles Dickens: the life, the works, the legend, in as much detail as we can manage in one semester. Reading will be selected by the class, and may include Pickwick Papers, A Christmas Carol, David Copperfield, Bleak House, and selections from his friend John Forster's Life of Charles Dickens. Special emphasis will be given to the question of what "Dickensian" means, in the context of Dickens's literary style, his genius for characterization, his love of conviviality, and Victorian extremes of wealth and poverty. . Students will be expected to share in creating the syllabus, presenting new material, and leading class discussion.
—William Sharpe

ENGL BC3998.04 Senior Seminar: The Paragon of Animals
Enrollment limited to Barnard senior English majors. Please see the FAQ below for the exact expected graduation dates for which the registration system considers students to be seniors--if your graduation date does not match, you will not be able to automatically register.
However unwittingly, Hamlet’s “[w]hat a piece of work is a man” speech divulges the cause and effects of humanity’s love affair with itself.  Writers featured in this seminar resist, if not unravel, the tragic trajectory set in motion by the self-appointed “paragon of animals.”  Novels by Barnes, Coetzee, Malouf, Saer, and Silko.  Poetry by Bishop, Dickinson, Seshadri, Shelley, Stevens, Walcott, and Yeats.
—Margaret Vandenburg

FALL 2020

ENGL BC3904 Senior Seminar: Charles Dickens
Enrollment limited to Barnard senior English majors.
Charles Dickens: the life, the works, the legend, in as much detail as we can manage in one semester. Reading will be selected by the class, and may include Pickwick Papers, A Christmas Carol, David Copperfield, Bleak House, and selections from his friend John Forster's Life of Charles Dickens. Special emphasis will be given to the question of what Dickensian means, in the context of Dickens's literary style, his genius for characterization, his love of conviviality, and Victorian extremes of wealth and poverty. Students will be expected to share in creating the syllabus, presenting new material, and leading class discussion.
—William Sharpe

ENGL BC3920 Senior Seminar: Migration, Immigration, and the Borders of American Literature
Enrollment limited to Barnard senior English majors.
This course will explore representations of voluntary and forced migration as a path toward understanding the formation of literary traditions and histories in the US and the Americas. How do we think about immigrant literature if the immigrant was here before the literature? Where does American literature begin and end if a mobile subject carries her words across borders and genres? In addition to reading fictional and non-fictional narratives of cultural literacy and migration by writers like Frederick Douglass, Julia Alvarez, and Valeria Luiselli, we’ll examine the ways in which contemporary discourses of relocation generate surprising returns to what we might recognize as the proto-exceptionalist and/or post-apocalyptic foundations of American literature and culture.
—Kristin Carter

ENGL BC3927 Senior Seminar: "a d—d mob of scribbling women": Nineteenth-century American Women Writers
Enrollment limited to Barnard senior English majors.
In 1855, Nathaniel Hawthorne complained that American publishing was "wholly given over to a d--d mob of scribbling women," and that he could not hope to compete with women writers for popularity or sales.  Yet Hawthorne's texts were canonized as American classics, while texts by nineteenth-century women writers were largely ignored by the academy until late in the twentieth century.  This course considers a variety of texts by nineteenth-century American women, including novels, short fiction, poetry, and journalism. We'll consider women's writing and women's reading through a variety of lenses, including domesticity and women's sphere, political action and suffrage, slavery and abolition, the economics of writing and publishing, sentimentality and anger, and canon formation and literary merit.  Authors include Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Susan Warner, Fanny Fern, Harriet Jacobs, Elizabeth Drew Stoddard, Louisa May Alcott, Emily Dickinson, Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins, Nellie Bly, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, and Mary E. Wilkins Freeman.
—Lisa Gordis

ENGL BC3936 Senior Seminar: The Novel and Economic Justice
Enrollment limited to Barnard senior English majors.
The industrial revolution inspired novelists to explore the ways in which money, or the lack of it, forms or deforms our characters. It also inspired the writings of Karl Marx, the great theorist of economic justice. In this seminar we will read five of the greatest nineteenth-century novels – Godwin’s Caleb Williams, Austen’s Persuasion, Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, Eliot’s Middlemarch and Hardy’s Jude the Obscure – alongside Marx’s most influential writings. We will pay special attention to Marxist notions of materialism; alienation and human flourishing; capital and labour; classes; and ideology. Special emphasis will also be given to the Marxist approach in the study of culture, the role of intellectuals (such as ourselves) and the relationship between capitalism and culture – through theorists like Gramsci, the Frankfurt School, and Raymond Williams.
—Ross Hamilton

SPRING 2021

ENGL BC3902 Senior Seminar: New Millennial American Fiction
Enrollment limited to Barnard senior English majors.
Remember Y2K, the fear that the internet would implode at the stroke of midnight on January 1, 2000? Conspiracy theories notwithstanding, have 9/11, COVID-19, and virtual reality derailed the American experiment? Apocalyptic dread inspired by the new millennium may be a self-fulfilling prophecy, exacerbating the impact of increasingly virulent culture wars. Have the form and content of American fiction been irrevocably transformed by such cultural cataclysms? Novels by Don DeLillo, Emily Fridlund, Edward P. Jones, Chang-rae Lee, Ben Lerner, Valeria Luiselli, Jenny Offill, Kevin Powers, and Ocean Vuong.
—Margaret Vandenburg

ENGL BC3909 Senior Seminar: The Family in Fiction & Film: The Poetics of Growing Up
Enrollment limited to Barnard senior English majors with a Film Studies concentration and Barnard senior Film Studies majors.
Enrollment limited to Barnard senior Film Studies majors and Barnard senior English majors concentrating in Film Studies. We will look closely at 20th and 21st-Century stories of family life in novels, memoirs, a few children’s books, and movies in many genres, from melodramas to sitcoms.  Authors include Gaston Bachelard (The Poetics of Space), D.W. Winnicott (On Playing and Reality), Ta-Nehisi Coates, Maggie Nelson, Toni Morrison, Alison Bechdel, Jonathan Franzen, J.D. Salinger, Astrid Lindgren and Vivian Gornick.  Films by Sean Baker, Ingmar Bergman, Wes Anderson, Jennifer Kent, Barry Jenkins, Tamara Jenkins, Hirokazu Kore-eda, Elia Kazan, Richard Linklater, Lance Hammer, Mike Mills, King Vidor, Andrei Zvyagintsev, and others.
—Maura Spiegel

ENGL BC3912 Senior Seminar: Intolerance, Tolerance, And Stories Of Resilience
Enrollment limited to Barnard senior English majors.
Intolerance seems worse than ever these days, not just in the world but in America, which is more polarized than ever. It comes in so many forms, ever morphing into new forms, though it has a history, one we keep struggling to revise, to make our world and our society inclusive and embracing of difference. This course is an effort to explore the issue of intolerance from a historical and literary emphasis, taking a transhistorical and transnational scope. We begin in seventeenth century England (very brief readings from Donne, Milton, Locke) when the concept and word "toleration" emerged. It initially concerned religion and freedom of "conscience," but later expanded to the issues of women's equality, race, and eventually sexuality (though religion is often never far from these issues). Though we begin with brief selections from the seventeenth century, we quickly move to various texts about resistance, resilience, and attempts to assess the damages and look towards change. We start with Mary Wolstonecraft on The Rights of Women, and then move to the twentieth and twenty-first century, considering a variety of genres, mainly (but not exclusively) writings by women. We will read a very brief selection from anthropologist Mary Douglas and then Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste (at least the first three sections, culminating in the "eight pillars of caste"). Wilkerson is particularly important as she triangulates caste in India, anti-Semitism, and racism/slavery in America. Texts: W.G. Sebold’s The Emigrants (on the effects of the holocaust); Deborah Feldman’s Unorthodox (a woman’s resistance of Ultra Orthodox Judaism; there’s also a wonderful Netflix series based on this book and a second one); Toni Morrison’s Others; Tayari Jones, An American Marriage (complex intersection of racism, injustice, and the complexity of love and marriage); Jeanette Winterson, Oranges are not the Only Fruit (religion, homosexuality, and love between women); (optional) Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things; pehaps Stephanie Land, Maid (poverty); ending with Tara Westhover’s bestseller, Educated. I know this is too much. I’ve listed Land and Roy as books to consider. One theme of the course is that religion is never far from the issues of intolerance and racism. This is not to attack religion, but to suggest how often religion and the Bible have been (mis)used to bolster or legitimize intolerance. We will not have time for all of these books. Some are simply recommended, depending on your individual interest. Students in the class are encouraged to suggest other books. Each student will create a topic for their senior essay that allows them to explore their own interests.
—Achsah Guibbory

ENGL BC3919 Senior Seminar: Black EcoLiterature
Enrollment limited to Barnard senior English majors.
Questions of sustainability, ecology, and environmental justice have begun to garner much attention within the field of contemporary Black literary studies. This course investigates the various ways that notions of blackness and ecology converge. Throughout the semester we will become familiar with various textual representations of ecology and Blackness from across the African diaspora. We will explore the ways in which categories such as race, gender, nature, place, and technology cohere and become complicated within a contemporary catalog of texts that we might call Black ecoliterature. Central questions guiding the course include "How do our notions of blackness and gender inform our ideas of ecology?" and "In what ways does centering blackness and/or black subjects shift our extant understandings of environmentalism writ large?" Guiding authors will include Octavia Butler, Wangari Maathai, Nnedi Okorafor, Julie Dash, Wangari Maathai, Zora Neale Hurston, and Alice Walker among others.
—Chelsea Frazier

SUMMER 2021

ENGL BC3913 Senior Seminar: Bad Romance
Romance: the quest for the one true love. This seminar will read romances that go wrong, that end catastrophically, that damage lovers or leave victims along the way. Reading bad romances will illuminate the consuming fantasy of the romance genre, as well as a range of emotions – rage and revenge, narcissism and self-protection, obsession and oblivion – that surface in their wake. We will also look at shifting interpretations of these powerful emotions, from Plato, to the Galenic theory of the humors, to the sociology of court-culture, to Freudian and finally contemporary neurobiological explanations of feelings. Students are welcome to propose texts of their own interests to open this course to the widest range of interests.  Weekly individual tutorials with Professor Hamilton on weekends are offered but optional.

Readings:  
Euripides, Medea and Sophocles, Antigone
Malory, Sir Tristram de Lyonesse  and Shakespeare, Othello
Mme de Lafayette, The Princesse de Cleves
Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights
Miranda July, The First Bad Man and Curtis Sittenfield, Prep
Finally we will view Lina Wertmuller, Swept Away by an Unusual Destiny in the Blue Sea of August, Wong Kar Wai, In the Mood for Love, and Derek Cianfrance, Blue Valentine
—Ross Hamilton

Fall 2019

ENGL BC3918 Senior Seminar: Late Victorian and Modern Drama
Enrollment limited to Barnard senior English majors.
Drama in a period of rapid transition.  The interaction of changing social structures and performative traditions. Protest plays, problem plays, and plays pursuing new social and aesthetic possibilities vie for attention and authority. Our seminar will explore fluid relationships between realism and theatricalism, historicism and modernism, convention and invention, adaptation and interpretation.  We will read texts, view films and stage adaptations, and attend NYC productions.  Playwrights may include Dion Boucicault, Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, Colin Hazelwood/ Mary Bratton, Arthur Wing Pinero, Patrick Marber, Elizabeth Robins, Evelyn Glover, Lillian Hellman, Oscar Wilde, Theresa Rebeck, George Bernard Shaw, Henrik Ibsen, Anton Chekhov, Caryl Churchill, Noel Coward, and Emma Rice.
—P. Denison, W 11-12:50

ENGL BC3919 Senior Seminar: Virginia Woolf
Enrollment limited to Barnard senior English majors.
We will read all eight novels of Virginia Woolf, as well as A Room of One's Own and Three Guineas and selections from her diaries and criticism.
—M. Gordon, T 2:10-4

ENGL BC3920 Senior Seminar: Migration, Immigration, and the Borders of American Literature
Enrollment limited to Barnard senior English majors.
This course will explore representations of voluntary and forced migration as a path toward understanding the formation of literary traditions and histories in the US and the Americas. How do we think about immigrant literature if the immigrant was here before the literature? Where does American literature begin and end if a mobile subject carries her words across borders and genres?  In addition to reading fictional and non-fictional narratives of cultural literacy and migration by writers like Frederick Douglass, Julia Alvarez, and Valeria Luiselli, we’ll examine the ways in which contemporary discourses of relocation generate surprising returns to what we might recognize as the proto-exceptionalist and/or post-apocalyptic foundations of American literature and culture.
—K. Carter, T 10:10-12

ENGL BC3926 Senior Seminar: Tradition and Nonconformity: Marlowe, Shakespeare, Woolf, Borges, and Baldwin
Enrollment limited to Barnard senior English majors.
How does a literary lineage develop by challenging its own perceived norms? How can tradition itself be, in other words, unconventional? Focusing on the work of Christopher Marlowe, William Shakespeare, Virginia Woolf, Jorge Luis Borges, and James Baldwin, we will study texts that suggest the complexity of each author's engagement with his or her literary inheritances.
—R. Eisendrath, R 4:10-6

ENGL BC3927 Senior Seminar: "a d—d mob of scribbling women": Nineteenth-century American Women Writers
Enrollment limited to Barnard senior English majors.
In 1855, Nathaniel Hawthorne complained that American publishing was "wholly given over to a d--d mob of scribbling women," and that he could not hope to compete with women writers for popularity or sales.  Yet Hawthorne's texts were canonized as American classics, while texts by nineteenth-century women writers were largely ignored by the academy until late in the twentieth century.  This course considers a variety of texts by nineteenth-century American women, including novels, short fiction, poetry, and journalism. We'll consider women's writing and women's reading through a variety of lenses, including domesticity and women's sphere, political action and suffrage, slavery and abolition, the economics of writing and publishing, sentimentality and anger, and canon formation and literary merit.  Authors include Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Susan Warner, Fanny Fern, Harriet Jacobs, Elizabeth Drew Stoddard, Louisa May Alcott, Emily Dickinson, Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins, Nellie Bly, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, and Mary E. Wilkins Freeman.
—L. Gordis, R 2:10-4

ENGL BC3936 Senior Seminar: The Novel and Economic Justice
Enrollment limited to Barnard senior English majors.
The industrial revolution inspired novelists to explore the ways in which money, or the lack of it, forms or deforms our characters. It also inspired the writings of Karl Marx, the great theorist of economic justice. In this seminar we will read five of the greatest nineteenth-century novels – Godwin’s Caleb Williams, Austen’s Persuasion, Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, Eliot’s Middlemarch and Hardy’s Jude the Obscure – alongside Marx’s most influential writings. We will pay special attention to Marxist notions of materialism; alienation and human flourishing; capital and labour; classes; and ideology. Special emphasis will also be given to the Marxist approach in the study of culture, the role of intellectuals (such as ourselves) and the relationship between capitalism and culture – through theorists like Gramsci, the Frankfurt School, and Raymond Williams.
—R. Hamilton, R 11-12:50

Spring 2020

ENGL BC3901 Senior Seminar: Women of Color in the US Public and Private Cultures. 4 points.
Enrollment limited to Barnard senior English majors.
This course will explore cultural production and consumption by "women of color" in the U.S., with a focus on the way various groups have negotiated the presumed gap between private experience and public or political form.  Historical, social, and cultural connections and disjunctions between African-American, Arab-American, Asian-American, Native American, Latina, and other women will be examined, especially in the context of feminism, cultural nationalism, and the scholarly discipline and practice of critical legal feminism and critical race studies.  We will explore the varied ways in which family, labor, and leisure practices can place women of color in social positions which blur the distinction between private and public culture, and which call for a reconsideration of the notion of "experience," itself. Authors and critics to be considered may include Louise Erdrich, Cherríe Moraga, Valeria Luiselli, Chela Sandoval, Maxine Hong Kingston, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Cathy Hong Park, Mohja Kahf, and Chandra Mohanty.
—Kristin Carter, R 4:10-6

ENGL BC3907 Senior Seminar: The Brontës. 4 points.
Enrollment limited to Barnard senior English majors.
In this course, we will closely study the works of the three Brontë sisters, Charlotte, Emily, and Anne. Although the Brontës are famous for their secluded lives on the moors of Yorkshire, their novels brilliantly engage many of the most urgent cultural concerns of the Victorian era, including poverty and social alienation; colonialism and empire; psychology, desire, and repression; religious belief and spirituality; the role of art and the imagination; and, especially, the social, economic, and political condition of women in the nineteenth century. We’ll explore these topics and others through readings of the Brontës’ major novels (Jane Eyre, Villette, Wuthering Heights, and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall), as well as some of their less well-known works, including their poetry and their astonishing juvenile literary experiments. We’ll also consider the enduring influence of the Brontës' novels in film and literature; additional texts may thus include recent film adaptations of the novels, as well as works such as Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea and Daphne Du Maurier’s Rebecca.
—Jayne Hildebrand, R 10:10-12

ENGL BC3909 Sr. Sem: The Family in Fiction & Film: The Poetics of Growing Up. 4 points.
Enrollment limited to Barnard senior Film Studies majors and Barnard senior English majors concentrating in Film Studies.
We will look closely at 20th and 21st-Century stories of family life in novels, memoirs, a few children’s books, and movies in many genres, from melodramas to sitcoms.  Authors include Gaston Bachelard (The Poetics of Space), D.W. Winnicott (On Playing and Reality), Ta-Nehisi Coates, Maggie Nelson, Toni Morrison, Alison Bechdel, Jonathan Franzen, J.D. Salinger, Astrid Lindgren and Vivian Gornick.  Films by Sean Baker, Ingmar Bergman, Wes Anderson, Jennifer Kent, Barry Jenkins, Tamara Jenkins, Hirokazu Kore-eda, Elia Kazan, Richard Linklater, Lance Hammer, Mike Mills, King Vidor, Andrei Zvyagintsev, and others.  
—Maura Spiegel, M 4:10-6

ENGL BC3912 Senior Seminar: Intolerance, Tolerance, and Stories of Resistance. 4 points.
Enrollment limited to Barnard senior English majors.
Intolerance seems worse than ever these days, and comes in so many forms. This course is an effort to explore the issues from a historical and literary emphasis, taking a transhistorical and transnational scope. We begin in seventeenth century England (Donne, Milton, Locke) when the concept of and word "toleration" emerged. It initially concerned religious toleration and freedom of "conscience," but later expanded to the issues of women's equality, race, and eventually sexuality (though religion is often never far from these issues). Though we begin with brief selections from the seventeenth century, we quickly move to Mary Wolstonecraft’s Rights of Women, Hawthorne's Scarlet Letter (religion, sexuality, women), and then to the twentieth and twenty-first century, considering a variety of genres, mainly (but not exclusively) writings by women. Writers and texts may include: W.G. Sebold’s The Emigrants; Deborah Feldman’s Unorthodox; Toni Morrison’s Others and Ta-Nahisi Coates’ Between the World and Me; Tayari Jones, An American Marriage; Jeanette Winterson, Oranges are not the Only Fruit, Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things; Stephanie Land, Maid; and Tara Westhover, Educated.
—Achsah Guibbory, M 2:10-4

ENGL BC3917 Senior Seminar: Words and Pictures: The Intersection of Literary and Visual Art. 4 points.
Enrollment limited to Barnard senior English majors.
In this class we will explore literary texts that focus on visual experience, especially painting and sculpture. What kinds of questions do these texts raise about the nature of aesthetic experience? How does what we mean by aesthetic experience change through time? Our readings will range from ancient to modern: Homer, Ovid, Chaucer, Spenser, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Herder, Barthes, Woolf, Ishiguro, Dove, Howe, Sebald, among others. We will also read widely in the history of aesthetic philosophy and critical theory.
—Rachel Eisendrath, W 4:10-6

ENGL BC3924 Senior Seminar: Common Languages. 4 points.
Enrollment limited to Barnard senior English majors.
Are humans, alone among the species, caught in the clutches of a death drive?  This course revives “the dream of a common language,”* ways to elude the tragic trajectory of alienation.  Writers include Paul Auster, J. M. Coetzee, Mohsin Hamid, David Malouf, Claudia Rankine, *Adrienne Rich, Juan José Saer, and Virginia Woolf.
—Margaret Vandenburg, W 11-12:50

Fall 2018

ENGL BC3901: Senior Seminar: The Field of the Emotions in 19th- and 20th-Century Poetry and Prose
Enrollment limited to senior Barnard English majors.
(Formerly ENGL BC3997; this course has been renumbered but has not changed in content.) An interdisciplinary examination of human feelings, emotions, and passions in selected literary texts of the 19th and 20th century, in coordination with a few selected texts from more scientific approaches to these phenomena in philosophy, psychoanalysis and affective neuroscience.
—M. Jaanus, T 12:10-2

ENGL BC3904x: Senior Seminar: Charles Dickens
Enrollment limited to senior Barnard English majors.
(Formerly ENGL BC3997; this course has been renumbered but has not changed in content.) Charles Dickens: the life, the works, the legend, in as much detail as we can manage in one semester. Reading will be selected by the class, and may include Pickwick Papers, A Christmas Carol, David Copperfield, Bleak House, and selections from his friend John Forster's Life of Charles Dickens.. Special emphasis will be given to the question of what "Dickensian" means, in the context of Dickens's literary style, his genius for characterization, his love of conviviality, and Victorian extremes of wealth and poverty. . Students will be expected to share in creating the syllabus, presenting new material, and leading class discussion.
—W. Sharpe, W 10:10-12

ENGL BC3911x: Senior Seminar: Write to Vote
Enrollment limited to Barnard senior English majors.
This seminar investigates the literary antecedents and cultural aftermath of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, with special attention to gendered and racial narratives of the ballot. Authors include Walt Whitman, Paul Lawrence Dunbar, Thomas Dixon, Jr., William Faulkner, Zora Neale Hurston, Fannie Lou Hamer and Alice Walker.
—J. Kassanoff, T 10:10-12

ENGL BC3918x: Senior Seminar: Late Victorian and Modern Drama
Enrollment limited to Barnard senior English majors.
(Formerly ENGL BC3997; this course has been renumbered but has not changed in content.) Drama in a period of rapid transition. The interaction of changing social structures and performative traditions. Protest plays, problem plays, and plays pursuing new social and aesthetic possibilities vie for attention and authority. Our seminar will explore fluid relationships between realism and theatricalism, historicism and modernism, convention and invention, adaptation and interpretation. We will read texts, view films and stage adaptations, and attend NYC productions. Playwrights may include Dion Boucicault, Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, Colin Hazelwood/ Mary Bratton, Arthur Wing Pinero, Patrick Marber, Elizabeth Robins, Evelyn Glover, Lillian Hellman, Oscar Wilde, Theresa Rebeck, George Bernard Shaw, Henrik Ibsen, Anton Chekhov, Caryl Churchill, Noel Coward, and Emma Rice.
—P. Denison, R 11-12:50

ENGL BC3919x: Senior Seminar: Virginia Woolf
Enrollment limited to Barnard senior English majors.
We will read all eight novels of Virginia Woolf, as well as A Room of One's Own and Three Guineas and selections from her diaries and criticism.
—M. Gordon, R 2:10-4

ENGL BC3920x: Senior Seminar: Migration, Immigration, and the Borders of American Literature
Enrollment limited to Barnard senior English majors. 
This course will explore representations of voluntary and forced migration as a path toward understanding the formation of literary traditions and histories in the US and the Americas. How do we think about immigrant literature if the immigrant was here before the literature? Where does American literature begin and end if a mobile subject carries her words across borders and genres? In addition to reading fictional and non-fictional narratives of cultural literacy and migration by writers like Frederick Douglass, Julia Alvarez, and Valeria Luiselli, we’ll examine the ways in which contemporary discourses of relocation generate surprising returns to what we might recognize as the proto-exceptionalist and/or post-apocalyptic foundations of American literature and culture. Authors and artists studied may include Octavia Butler, Louise Erdrich, Lin-Manuel Miranda, Claudia Rankine, and Viet Thanh Nguyen.
—K. Carter, M 6:10-8

 

Spring 2019

ENGL BC3909y Senior Seminar: The Family in Fiction & Film: The Poetics of Growing Up
Enrollment limited to Barnard senior Film majors/concentrators. 
(Formerly ENGL BC3998; this course has been renumbered but has not changed in content.) Looking closely at late Twentieth and Twenty-First Century stories, novels, memoir and films that center on the logic, dysfunction, romance, system, morphing, divorcing and curious maturation of the family. From Alison Bechdel's graphic novel, Fun Home, to the Korean film, The Host, we will explore fresh and a few classic cinematic takes on this theme. We will explore renderings of "family cultures," family feeling, family values, the family as a narrative configuration, and home as a utopian space, a nightmarish landscape, a memory palace and more. Authors and directors will include: Wes Anderson, Gaston Bachelard, Mira Bartok, Alison Bechdel, Joon-ho Bong, Jonathan Franzen, Vivien Gornick, Lasse Hallstrom, Tamara Jenkins, Ang Lee, Mike Leigh, Jim, Sheridan, Todd Solondz, Francois Truffaut, Tennessee Williams, D. W. Winnicott, Andrei Zvyagintsev.
—M. Spiegel, R 4:10-6
4 points

ENGL BC3921y: Senior Seminar: Aphra Behn to Jane Austen: 18th Century Women Writers
Enrollment limited to Barnard senior English majors.
From Aphra Behn and Anne Bradstreet at the end of the 17th century to Jane Austen in the early 19th, women writers had a widespread, prolific, and influential presence in the history of English literature. This seminar will examine some of the major women writers, along with lesser known figures, with attention to texts in many genres, from drama and poetry to the novel and prose nonfiction, and to the literary culture of the larger Atlantic world. Students can devise their seminar projects either as anthologies with critical apparatus or as long critical essays, focused on individual writers, selected texts, or thematic and critical ideas that span the era.
—J. Basker, M 2:10-4
4 points

ENGL BC3922y: Senior Seminar: Latinx Feminisms
Enrollment limited to Barnard senior English majors. Also fulfills the American Lit concentration senior seminar.
This course approaches Latinx feminist practice as a highly contested and still-evolving site of cultural production. Among the issues to be explored: Latinx participation in feminist coalition-building across linguistic, racial, ethnic, gender, class, and national borders; Latinx writers' negotiation and critique of cultural theory and practice; and the relationship of Latinx feminist activism to other political movements and practices in the Americas, including religion and spirituality, queer latinidad, and nationalist, anti-colonial and anti-capitalist movements. Authors studied may include Cherríe Moraga, Gloria Anzaldúa, Cristina García, Norma Alarcón, María Pilar Aquino, Achy Obejas, Julia Álvarez.
—K. Carter, F 10:10-12
4 points

ENGL BC3923y: Senior Seminar: Shakespeare, Race, and Appropriation
Enrollment limited to Barnard senior English majors.
This course reads “Shakespeare” in relationship to concepts of cultural capital and racial "property" drawn from performance studies and critical race theory. We will use the rich afterlife of Shakespeare’s plays to examine connections between literary appropriation, social power and constructions of race, gender and sexuality. Class readings focus primarily on revisions of two Shakespeare plays, but also consider more evanescent citations and evocations of Shakespeare, his plays, and his characters.
—K. Hall, T 2:10-4
4 points

ENGL BC3924y: Senior Seminar: Common Languages
Enrollment limited to Barnard senior English majors.
Are humans, alone among the species, caught in the clutches of a death drive? This course revives “the dream of a common language,”* ways to elude the tragic trajectory of alienation. Writers include Paul Auster, J. M. Coetzee, Mohsin Hamid, David Malouf, Claudia Rankine, *Adrienne Rich, Juan José Saer, and Virginia Woolf.
—M. Vandenburg, W 11-12:50
4 points

ENGL BC3926y: Senior Seminar: Tradition and Nonconformity: Marlowe, Shakespeare, Woolf, Borges, and Baldwin
Enrollment limited to Barnard senior English majors.
How does a literary lineage develop by challenging its own perceived norms? How can tradition itself be, in other words, unconventional? Focusing on the work of Christopher Marlowe, William Shakespeare, Virginia Woolf, Jorge Luis Borges, and James Baldwin, we will focus on texts that suggest the complexity of each author's engagement with his or her literary inheritances.
—R. Eisendrath, W 4:10-6
4 points

Fall 2017

ENGL BC3901x The Field of the Emotions in Romantic Literature and the Arts, Psychoanalysis, Affective Neuroscience, and Philosophy

Enrollment limited to Barnard senior English majors. 

An interdisciplinary examination of human feelings, emotions, and passions, with a focus on the romantic era (the poetry of Keats & Shelley, Beethoven's 9th symphony, Turner's paintings), in coordination with more scientific approaches to these phenomena in affective neuroscience (Jaak Panksepp), psychoanalysis (selected Lacan, references to Freud) and philosophy (excerpts and references to Aristotle, Hume, Hegel, & Schiller). A feeling, an emotion, an affect is something that comes into existence or happens or that shows itself (Greek Phainein=to show) without our knowing exactly what it is, what caused it, or what it is "showing" or "saying." How have these phenomena and their function been interpreted? What do we at this point know, how does this compare to earlier speculations, and what should or can we try to do with our emotions and passions?
—M. Jaanus, M 2:10-4

ENGL BC3903x Poets in Correspondence

Enrollment limited to Barnard senior English majors.  
(Formerly ENGL BC3997; this course has been renumbered but has not changed in content.) How do poets' letters inform our understanding of their poetry?  From the eighteenth to the twentieth century, poets have used their intimate correspondence to "baffle absence," as Coleridge remarked.  This course will examine the ways several masters of the letter (including Cowper, Keats, Dickinson, Eliot, Bishop, and Lowell, among others) shaped their prose to convey spontaneity in paradoxically artful ways, illuminating their major work as poets and making the private letter a literary form in its own right.

—S. Hamilton, T 11-12:50

ENGL BC3904x Dickens 
Enrollment limited to Barnard senior English majors.  
(Formerly ENGL BC3997; this course has been renumbered but has not changed in content.) Charles Dickens: the life, the works, the legend, in as much detail as we can manage in one semester. Reading will be selected by the class, and may include Pickwick Papers, A Christmas Carol, David Copperfield, Bleak House, and selections from his friend John Forster's Life of Charles Dickens.. Special emphasis will be given to the question of what "Dickensian" means, in the context of Dickens's literary style, his genius for characterization, his love of conviviality, and Victorian extremes of wealth and poverty. . Students will be expected to share in creating the syllabus, presenting new material, and leading class discussion.
—W. Sharpe, T 2:10-4

ENGL BC3911x Write to Vote
Enrollment limited to Barnard senior English majors.  
This seminar investigates the literary antecedents and cultural aftermath of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, with special attention to gendered and racial narratives of the ballot. Authors include Walt Whitman, Paul Lawrence Dunbar, Thomas Dixon, Jr., William Faulkner, Zora Neale Hurston, Fannie Lou Hamer and Alice Walker.

—J. Kassanoff, W 10:10-12

ENGL BC3914x Sr. Sem:  Exploring the 18th Century

Enrollment limited to Barnard senior English majors. 
This seminar will explore selected topics in the 18th century, including the transformation in print culture and development of new genres such as the novel, biography, and popular journalism; the emergence of women writers; the interplay between canonical authors and newcomers such as working class and Black writers; the literature of slavery and abolition; poetic experimentation; and the turn to Romanticism. Writers include Behn, Defoe, Pope, Johnson, Richardson, Sterne, Wheatley, Blake, Cowper, Equiano, Boswell, Wollstonecraft, Wordsworth, and Austen. Students will be invited to propose additional writers for our weekly discussions and to include in their projects writers beyond the syllabus.

—J. Basker, M 10:10-12

Spring 2018

ENGL BC3907y Sr. Sem.: Short Fiction by American Women
Enrollment limited to Barnard senior English majors. 
(Formerly ENGL BC3997; this course has been renumbered but has not changed in content.) We will explore the rich variety of fiction in shorter forms—short stories and novellas—written by American women. Writers to be studied will include Porter, Stafford, Welty, O'Connor, Olsen, Paley.
—M. Gordon, M 6:10-8
 

ENGL BC3915 Sr. Sem: Late Shakespeare: Visions and Revisions 
Enrollment limited to Barnard senior English majors.  
Othello, King Lear, Antony and Cleopatra, The Winter’s Tale, and The Tempest.
—P. Platt, W 12:10-2’s>

ENGL BC3908y Sr. Sem.: The American Sublime
Enrollment limited to Barnard senior English majors.
(Formerly ENGL BC3998; this course has been renumbered but has not changed in content.) "The empty spirit / In vacant space": gothicism, transcendentalism, and postmodern rapture. Traces of the sublime in the American literary landscape, featuring Poe, Melville, Emerson, Whitman, Dickinson, Stevens, Bishop, Didion, and Robinson.
—M. Vandenburg, W 11-12:50

ENGL BC3909y Sr. Sem.: The Family in Fiction & Film: The Poetics of Growing Up
Enrollment limited to Barnard senior Film majors/concentrators. 
(Formerly ENGL BC3998; this course has been renumbered but has not changed in content.) Looking closely at late Twentieth and Twenty-First Century stories, novels, memoir and films that center on the logic, dysfunction, romance, system, morphing, divorcing and curious maturation of the family. From Alison Bechdel's graphic novel, Fun Home, to the Korean film, The Host, we will explore fresh and a few classic cinematic takes on this theme. We will explore renderings of "family cultures," family feeling, family values, the family as a narrative configuration, and home as a utopian space, a nightmarish landscape, a memory palace and more. Authors and directors will include: Wes Anderson, Gaston Bachelard, Mira Bartok, Alison Bechdel, Joon-ho Bong, Jonathan Franzen, Vivien Gornick, Lasse Hallstrom, Tamara Jenkins, Ang Lee, Mike Leigh, Jim, Sheridan, Todd Solondz, Francois Truffaut, Tennessee Williams, D. W. Winnicott, Andrei Zvyagintsev.
—M. Spiegel, R 4:10-6

ENGL BC3912y Sr. Sem.: Utopias and Dystopias
Enrollment limited to Barnard senior English majors.
(Formerly ENGL BC3998; this course has been renumbered but has not changed in content.) A look first at Thomas More’s Utopia and then at the dreams or nightmares it inspired, whether hopeful, ironic, serious, parodic, speculative, nightmarish, or simply interrogatory. Authors include More, Rabelais, Bacon, Margaret Cavendish, William Morris, Bellamy, H.G. Wells, George Orwell, Ursula LeGuin and, if there is time, R.A. Lafferty’s scifi novel starring More and also a young adult novel by Lois Lowry.
—A. Prescott, T 2:10-4

ENGL BC3916y: Sr. Sem.: Gender, Sexuality and the American Stage: Performing the Body Politic
Enrollment limited to Barnard senior English majors.
This seminar investigates how American theatre/performance, as read through the lens of gender and sexuality, operates as a cultural force. Simply put, the U.S. is obsessed with sex; theatre/performance has proven a fertile medium for America’s expression of this obsession. Exploring texts from the seventeenth through the twenty-first centuries, we will consider how performance intersects with the nation state’s desire to regulate how we “practice” gender both publicly and behind closed doors. How is performance, which always includes gendered/raced/classed/sexualized bodies, situated in relationship to ideas of a national body politic? How does the American nation state hinge on how gender and sexuality are performed both on-stage and off? Authors include John Winthrop, Dion Boucicualt, Lillian Hellman, Tennessee Williams, David Henry Hwang, Michel Foucault, Jose Muñoz, Jill Dolan, Suzan-Lori Parks, Holly Hughes, Tony Kushner, Lisa Kron, Margaret Cho and performance groups Split Britches, Five Lesbian Brothers, Pomo Afro Homos.
—P. Cobrin, W 2:10-4

ENGL BC3917y: Sr. Sem.: Words & Pictures: The Intersection of Literary and Visual Art
Enrollment limited to Barnard senior English majors.
In this class we will explore literary texts that focus on visual experience, especially painting and sculpture. What kinds of questions do these texts raise about the nature of aesthetic experience? How does what we mean by aesthetic experience change through time? Our readings will range from ancient to modern: Homer, Ovid, Catullus, Chaucer, Spenser, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Diderot, Balzac, Zola, Woolf, Sebald, among others. We will also read widely in the history of aesthetic philosophy and critical theory.
—R. Eisendrath, T 4:10-6

Fall 2016

ENGL BC3901x The Field of the Emotions in Romantic Literature and the Arts, Psychoanalysis, Affective Neuroscience, and Philosophy
Enrollment limited to Barnard senior English majors. 

An interdisciplinary examination of human feelings, emotions, and passions, with a focus on the romantic era (the poetry of Keats & Shelley, Beethoven's 9th symphony, Turner's paintings), in coordination with more scientific approaches to these phenomena in affective neuroscience (Jaak Panksepp), psychoanalysis (selected Lacan, references to Freud) and philosophy (excerpts and references to Aristotle, Hume, Hegel, & Schiller). A feeling, an emotion, an affect is something that comes into existence or happens or that shows itself (Greek Phainein=to show) without our knowing exactly what it is, what caused it, or what it is "showing" or "saying." How have these phenomena and their function been interpreted? What do we at this point know, how does this compare to earlier speculations, and what should or can we try to do with our emotions and passions?
—M. Jaanus, T 2:10-4

ENGL BC3902x Adultery: Realism and Desire in Fiction and Film
Enrollment limited to Barnard senior film majors and Barnard senior English majors with a film concentration.

“Rising from the most basic human needs, marriage is essential to our most profound hopes and aspirations.” So writes the United States Supreme Court in Obergefell v. Hodges (2015), finding in marriage the "keystone of our social order" - the means by which individual desire is stably fixed within the family unit and, thereby, linked to civility and law. This course studies a rich counter-tradition of film and literature interested in adultery. These works suggest ways in which human desire and identity exceed social bounds; they also examine ways in which private desire is not only limited but formed by social forces. Works may include: fiction by Flaubert, Goethe, James, Laclos, Proust, Tolstoy; films by Frears, Kieslowski, Renoir, Resnais, Wilder, Wong; criticism and philosophy by Barthes, Beauvoir, Cavell, Cott, Freud, Hegel, Marx.
—A. Lynn, R 4:10-6
 

ENGL BC3903x Poets in Correspondence
Enrollment limited to Barnard senior English majors.  
(Formerly ENGL BC3997; this course has been renumbered but has not changed in content.) How do poets' letters inform our understanding of their poetry?  From the eighteenth to the twentieth century, poets have used their intimate correspondence to "baffle absence," as Coleridge remarked.  This course will examine the ways several masters of the letter (including Cowper, Keats, Dickinson, Eliot, Bishop, and Lowell, among others) shaped their prose to convey spontaneity in paradoxically artful ways, illuminating their major work as poets and making the private letter a literary form in its own right.
—S. Hamilton, T 10:10-12

ENGL BC3904x Dickens 
Enrollment limited to Barnard senior English majors.  
(Formerly ENGL BC3997; this course has been renumbered but has not changed in content.) Charles Dickens: the life, the works, the legend, in as much detail as we can manage in one semester. Reading will include Pickwick Papers, A Christmas Carol, David Copperfield, Bleak House, and selections from his friend John Forster's Life of Charles Dickens, as well as other works to be chosen by the class. Special emphasis will be given to Dickens's literary style and genius for characterization, in the context of Victorian concerns about money, class, gender, and the role of art in an industrializing society. Students will be expected to share in creating the syllabus, presenting new material, and leading class discussion. Be prepared to do a LOT of reading—all of it great!—plus weekly writing on CourseWorks.
—W. Sharpe, T 4:10-6

ENGL BC3905x Amazing Grace: English and American Antislavery Literature
Enrollment limited to Barnard senior English majors. 
  Drawing on poems, plays, slave narratives, fiction and other genres, by both famous and non-canonical writers from 1660 to 1865, this seminar explores the ways that writers helped end slavery. Authors include Defoe, Johnson, Wheatley, Equiano, Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Longfellow, Alcott, Stowe, Douglass, Melville, and Harriet Jacobs, among others. Final projects may take the form of extended critical essays or original anthologies.
—J. Basker, M 11-12:50
 

ENGL BC3906x Black Literature Now

Enrollment limited to Barnard senior English majors. 
(Formerly ENGL BC3997; this course has been renumbered but has not changed in content.) Examines contemporary African American literature, in particular the ways in which recent authors are reconceiving literary notions of blackness. Beginning in the 1980s with the emergence of "post-soul" literature, this class explores the ways in which authors one or two generations after the Civil Rights Movement reconfigure their sense of racial "belonging" and notions of how to write "blackness" into a text. Authors may include Ellis, Pinckney, Whitehead, Everett, Senna, Beatty, Evans, Ward, Lavalle.
—M. Miller, M 10:10-12
 

ENGL BC3907x Short Fiction by American Women
Enrollment limited to Barnard senior English majors. 
We will explore the rich variety of fiction in shorter forms--short stories and novellas--written by American women. Writers to be studied will include Porter, Stafford, Welty, O'Connor, Olsen, Paley.
—M. Gordon, W 6:10-8

Spring 2017

ENGL BC3908y The American Sublime
Enrollment limited to Barnard senior English majors. 
(Formerly ENGL BC3998; this course has been renumbered but has not changed in content.) "The empty spirit / In vacant space": gothicism, transcendentalism, and postmodern rapture. Traces of the sublime in the American literary landscape, featuring Poe, Melville, Emerson, Whitman, Dickinson, Stevens, Bishop, Didion, and Robinson.
—M. Vandenburg, W 11-12:50

ENGL BC3909y The Family in Fiction & Film: The Poetics of Growing Up
Enrollment limited to Barnard senior film majors and Barnard senior English majors with a film concentration.
(Formerly ENGL BC3998; this course has been renumbered but has not changed in content.) Looking closely at late Twentieth and Twenty-First Century stories, novels, memoir and films that center on the logic, dysfunction, romance, system, morphing, divorcing and curious maturation of the family. From Alison Bechdel's graphic novel, Fun Home, to the Korean film, The Host, we will explore fresh and a few classic cinematic takes on this theme. We will explore renderings of "family cultures," family feeling, family values, the family as a narrative configuration, and home as a utopian space, a nightmarish landscape, a memory palace and more. Authors and directors will include: Wes Anderson, Gaston Bachelard, Mira Bartok, Alison Bechdel, Joon-ho Bong, Jonathan Franzen, Vivien Gornick, Lasse Hallstrom, Tamara Jenkins, Ang Lee, Mike Leigh, Jim, Sheridan, Todd Solondz, Francois Truffaut, Tennessee Williams, D. W. Winnicott, Andrei Zvyagintsev.
—M. Spiegel, M 2:10-4
 

ENGL BC3910y Sexuality, Sin, and Spirituality
Enrollment limited to Barnard senior English majors.  
(Formerly ENGL BC3997; this course has been renumbered but has not changed in content.) The first half of the course is grounded in readings from the Bible, Augustine, Petrarch and Donne, but the second half will move to later texts including Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, and Flannery O'Connor stories. We will discuss as a class other texts we might want to add. For their senior essays, students will come up with their own topics and may explore the relation and intersection between sexuality, sin, and spirituality up into the present, and cross-culturally.
—A. Guibbory, T 12-1:50

ENGL BC3912y Utopias and Dystopias
Enrollment limited to Barnard senior English majors. 
(Formerly ENGL BC3998; this course has been renumbered but has not changed in content.) A look first at Thomas More’s Utopia and then at the dreams or nightmares it inspired, whether hopeful, ironic, serious, parodic, speculative, nightmarish, or simply interrogatory. Authors include More, Rabelais, Bacon, Margaret Cavendish, William Morris, Bellamy, H.G. Wells, George Orwell, Ursula LeGuin and, if there is time, R.A. Lafferty’s scifi novel starring More and also a young adult novel by Lois Lowry.
—A. Prescott, T 2:10-4
 

ENGL BC3913y Human and Other Animal Identities
Enrollment limited to Barnard senior English majors. 
(Formerly ENGL BC3998; this course has been renumbered but has not changed in content.) In this seminar, we will engage in an interdisciplinary study of intersections of human and non-human animal identities in selected literary, philosophical and theoretical texts. We will examine how constructions and representations of non-human animal identities confirm understandings and experiences of human ones, including racialized and gendered identities and study the ways in which non-human identities challenge claims to human exceptionalism. Some of the topics along which the readings will be arranged include liminality, (mis)-recognition, metamorphoses, suffering, as well as love. Readings include Aristotle, Euripides, Ovid, Montaigne, Descartes, Shakespeare, Kafka, Woolf, Morrison, Coetzee, Szymborska, Hughes, Haraway, and Derrida and essays by contemporary scholars such as Kim Hall and Karl Steel. Some class time will be devoted to the process of writing the thesis at all significant critical junctures.
—T. Szell, W 4:10-6

Fall 2015

ENGL BC3997x: Senior Seminars

Section 1: A Phenomenology of the Passions
Prerequisites: Sign up is accomplished through the "SR Seminar" section of myBarnard. Enrollment limited to Barnard senior English majors. 
An examination of the human emotional field in literature, music, and art, with accent on the Romantic era (Wordsworth, Keats, Shelley, Kleist, Beethoven, Caspar David Friedrich) -- in coordination with the more scientific approaches to these phenomena in philosophy, psychoanalysis, and neuroscience. A feeling, an emotion, an affect is something that comes into existence or happens, or that shows (Greek Phainein=to show) itself without our knowing exactly what it is, what caused it, or what it is “showing” or “saying.” How are we to interpret it? What is its function? What should we do with it? How is it different from an idea or an action?
—M. Jaanus, M 12-1:50

Section 2: Film/Literature Senior Seminar: City Girls: Fiction and Film by and about Urban Women
Prerequisites: Sign up is accomplished through the "SR Seminar" section of myBarnard. Enrollment limited to Barnard senior English majors or Barnard senior Film majors. Priority given to Barnard Film majors and English majors with a Film concentration.
From Holly Golightly to Hannah Horvath, from Lorelei Lee to Audra Lorde, urban women, fictional and real, re-define gender identity, test boundaries and give us great stories. We will look closely at storytelling strategies, including assemblage, fracturing, simultaneity, mapping, networks, traces, palimpsests. Drawing on De Certeau's The Practice of Everyday Life and Soja's models of flexicity, expolis, metropolarities, simcity,etc., we will explore urban geographies and "spatial practices." Themes include what Virginia Woolf called "street haunting," yearning, ephemerality, and performance. Close reading of novels, memoirs, graphic narrative, short stories and films by Chantal Ackerman, Andrea Arnold, Toni Cade Bambara, Busby Berkeley, Michael Cho, Shirley Clarke, Sofia Coppola, Joan Didion, Elena Ferrante, Christopher Isherwood, Tamara Jenkins, Wong Kar-Wei, Helen Levitt, Anita Loos, Audra Lorde, Mike Leigh, Alan J. Pakula, Dee Rees, Patti Smith, Agnes Varda, and Billy Wilder.
—M. Spiegel, R 2:10-4

Section 3: Poets in Correspondence
Prerequisites: Sign up is accomplished through the "SR Seminar" section of myBarnard. Enrollment limited to Barnard senior English majors.
How do poets' letters inform our understanding of their poetry? From the eighteenth to the twentieth century, poets have used their intimate correspondence to "baffle absence," as Coleridge remarked. This course will examine the ways several masters of the letter (including Cowper, Keats, Dickinson, Eliot, Bishop, and Lowell, among others) shaped their prose to convey spontaneity in paradoxically artful ways, illuminating their major work as poets and making the private letter a literary form in its own right.
—S. Hamilton, W 9-10:50

Section 4: Charles Dickens 
Prerequisites: Sign up is accomplished through the "SR Seminar" section of myBarnard. Enrollment limited to Barnard senior English majors. 
Charles Dickens: the life, the works, the legend, in as much detail as we can manage in one semester. Reading will include Pickwick Papers, A Christmas Carol, David Copperfield, Bleak House, and selections from his friend John Forster's Life of Charles Dickens, as well as other works to be chosen by the class. Special emphasis will be given to Dickens's literary style and genius for characterization, in the context of Victorian concerns about money, class, gender, and the role of art in an industrializing society. Students will be expected to share in creating the syllabus, presenting new material, and leading class discussion. Be prepared to do a LOT of reading--all of it great!—plus weekly writing on CourseWorks.
—W. Sharpe, T 2:10-4

Section 5: Sexuality, Sin, and Spirituality
Prerequisites: Sign up is accomplished through the "SR Seminar" section of myBarnard. Enrollment limited to Barnard senior English majors.
The topic is huge, but the readings will offer a range of texts giving a historical (and to some extent theoretical) perspective on how sexuality (particularly women's sexuality) and religion have intertwined-how it was been (and continues to be) constructed in relation to sin and/or spirituality in the Western traditions ever since the Bible. Beginning with passages from both the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament and the New Testament; we move on to Augustine's Confessions; Petrarch's sonnet sequence about Laura; a selection of John Donne's poetry; Books 4 and 9 of Milton's Paradise Lost (Adam and Eve in the garden; the temptation/seduction). The syllabus is a work in process, but further readings might include some of the following: Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, Tolstoy's The Kreutzer Sonata, Willa Cather, My Mortal Enemy,Marguerite Duras' The Lover, and Mary Gordon's Spending. I welcome students suggesting other books (especially contemporary novels). We will make reference to contemporary issues, and there is plenty of material in our own times that can be fruitfully examined. You will have considerable freedom to determine your own topic for your senior essay, using the course as simply the starting point.
—A. Guibbory, R 11-12:50

Section 6: Black Literature Now
Prerequisites: Sign up is accomplished through the "SR Seminar" section of myBarnard. Enrollment limited to Barnard senior English majors.
This class examines contemporary African American literature, in particular the ways in which recent authors are re-conceiving literary notions of blackness. Beginning in the 1980s with the emergence of "post-soul" literature, this class explores the ways in which authors one or two generations after the Civil Rights Movement reconfigure their sense of racial "belonging" and notions of how to write "blackness" into a text. Along with contemporary African American novels, we will also read key works of contemporary literary and racial theory. Authors may include Trey Ellis, Danzy Senna, Paul Beatty, Colson Whitehead, Percival Everett, ZZ Packer, Martha Southgate, Danielle Evans, Michael Thomas, Ayana Mathis, Victor Lavalle, among others.
—M. Miller, M 2:10-4

Section 7: Senior Seminar for Writing Concentrators
Prerequisites: Open only to senior English majors concentrating in creative writing. Permission required; email Prof. Szell.
A special section of Senor Seminar for writing concentrators specializing in prose. This will lead to the completion of a senior thesis of approximately 50 pages of prose, fiction or non-fiction. The course will meet every second Tuesday with individual meetings with the instructor on alternate weeks.
—M. Gordon, T 6:10-8

Spring 2016

ENGL BC3998y: Senior Seminars

Section 1: The American Sublime
Prerequisites: Sign up is accomplished through the "SR Seminar" section of myBarnard. Enrollment limited to Barnard senior English majors. 
"The empty spirit / In vacant space": gothicism, transcendentalism, and postmodern rapture. Traces of the sublime in the American literary landscape, featuring Poe, Melville, Emerson, Whitman, Dickinson, Stevens, Bishop, Pynchon, and Robinson.
—M. Vandenburg, W 11:00-12:50

Section 2: The Making and Unmaking of the Poetic Canon
Prerequisites: Sign up is accomplished through the "SR Seminar" section of myBarnard. Enrollment limited to Barnard senior English majors. This seminar reviews the emergence of poetry anthologies from the 18th century to the present, while sampling a wide variety of lyric poetry (Renaissance and Romantic to Modernist and Contemporary) and re-examining such issues as what it is we value in poetry and how we might reinvent the "canon" we have inherited. Students will create their own anthologies and have the option to do editorial or critical projects for their final submissions. —J. Basker, M 2:10-4:00

Section 3: Gender, Sexuality and the American Stage
Prerequisites: Sign up is accomplished through the "SR Seminar" section of myBarnard. Enrollment limited to Barnard senior English majors.
This seminar investigates how American theatre/performance, as read through the lens of gender and sexuality, operates as a cultural force. Simply put, the U.S. is obsessed with sex; theatre/performance has proven a fertile medium for America's expression of this obsession. Exploring texts from the seventeenth through the twenty-first centuries, we will consider how performance intersects with the nation state's desire to regulate how we "practice" gender both publicly and behind closed doors. How is performance, which always includes gendered/raced/classed/sexualized bodies, situated in relationship to ideas of a national body politic? How does the American nation state hinge on how gender and sexuality are performed both on-stage and off? Authors include John Winthrop, Dion Boucicualt, Lillian Hellman, Tennessee Williams, David Henry Hwang, Michel Foucault, Jose Munoz, Jill Dolan, Suzan-Lori Parks, Holly Hughes, Tony Kushner, Lisa Kron, Margaret Cho, Kip Yan, Brandon Jacobs-Jenkins, Jennifer Miller and performance groups Five Lesbian Brothers, Circus Amoc, Split Britches.
—P. Cobrin, R 11:00-12:50

Section 4: Short Fiction by American Women 
Prerequisites: Sign up is accomplished through the "SR Seminar" section of myBarnard. Enrollment limited to Barnard senior English majors. 
We will explore the rich variety of fiction in shorter forms--short stories and novellas--written by American women. Writers to be studied will include Porter, Stafford, Welty, O'Connor, Olsen, Paley.
—M. Gordon, 6:10-8:00

Section 5: Utopias and Dystopias

Prerequisites: Sign up is accomplished through the "SR Seminar" section of myBarnard. Enrollment limited to Barnard senior English majors.
A look first at Thomas More’s Utopia and then at the dreams or nightmares it inspired, whether hopeful, ironic, serious, parodic, speculative, nightmarish, or simply interrogatory. Authors include More, Campanella, Rabelais, Bacon, Margaret Cavendish, William Morris, Bellamy, H.G. Wells, George Orwell, Ursula LeGuin and, if there is time, R.A. Lafferty’s scifi novel starring More and also a young adult novel by Lois Lowry.
—A. Prescott, T 4:10-6:00

Section 6: Human and Other Animal Identities
Prerequisites: Sign up is accomplished through the "SR Seminar" section of myBarnard. Enrollment limited to Barnard senior English majors.
In this seminar, we will engage in an interdisciplinary study of intersections of human and non-human animal identities in selected literary, philosophical and theoretical texts.  We will examine how constructions and representations of non-human animal identities inform understandings and experiences of human ones, including even and specifically racialized and gendered identities.  We will also study the ways in which non-human identities inform and buttress what it means to be human or, conversely, challenge claims to human exceptionalism. Some of the topics along which the readings will be arranged include liminality, (mis)-recognition, metapmorphoses, suffering, as well as love.  Readings include, among others, Aristotle, Euripides, Ovid, Montaigne, Descartes, Shakespeare, Kafka, Woolf, Morrison, Coetzee, Szymborska, Hughes, Haraway, and Derrida and essays by contemporary scholars such as Kim Hall and Karl Steel. Some class time will be regularly devoted to the process of writing the thesis at all significant critical junctures.
—T. Szell, 4:10-6:00