The English Conference

Fall 2022

ENGL BC3098 The English Conference: The Poetry of Breaking News
—Glyn Maxwell
MW 11-12:50 on October 24, 26, 31 and November 2, 2022.

At a time when the same news story leads everywhere in the world, we shall look at examples of instant or rapid poetic responses to significant events – or, in modern parlance, breaking news. This would range from famous commemorative poems such as Tennyson’s ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’ or Hardy’s ‘The Convergence of the Twain’ (on the sinking of the Titanic), through the poetry of 20th-century wars, all the way to the earliest literary responses to the covid-19 outbreak.

Comedians will often ask ‘too soon?’ about making light of darkness – should time be an issue for poetry? Should poets be taking snapshots or waiting for time’s wider perspective? Can obscurity be in bad taste? Can beauty miss the point? What strengths and what weaknesses does topicality bring to poetry?

Glyn Maxwell’s poetry collections include Pluto, Hide Now, The Nerve and The Breakage, all of which won or were shortlisted for major prizes. His new collection How The Hell Are You will be published in the fall of 2020. His epic poem Time’s Fool (1999) is in development as a feature film with Fox Searchlight.

Maxwell’s plays have been widely performed, and he has written several opera libretti. He has taught at Amherst, Princeton, Columbia and NYU in the USA; Warwick, Essex and Goldsmiths in the UK; he currently teaches on the MA at the Poetry School in London. He has also published On Poetry (Harvard University Press 2012), a popular critical guidebook for the general reader, and its fictional sequel Drinks With Dead Poets (Pegasus 2017). He served as the Poetry Editor of The New Republic from 2001 to 2007.

Spring 2020

ENGL BC3097 The English Conference: Music and Social Movements since 1960
—Dar Williams
TR 11-12:50 on February 11th, 13th, 18th, and 20th, 2020.

The role of music in late 20th century social movements is more exciting and complicated than “Bob Dylan wrote 'The Times They are A-Changin'' and inspired a million people to take to the streets.” Yes, Dylan was an important figure, but so were The Staple Singers, Chris Williamson, Stevie Wonder, Tom Paxton, Bernice Johnson Reagon, and Carlos Santana.

Music provided the street beat, the social space and the emotional grounding that strengthened and sustained many movements. Through songs, memoirs, films, and maybe a little singing ourselves, we will visit the “Woodstock generation” counter-culture movement, the Civil Rights movement, and the women’s movement of the early ’70s and also look at the role that music plays in social movements today.

About Dar Williams

"…I'll just say that her songs are beautiful. Some are like finely crafted short stories. They are, variously, devastatingly moving, tenderly funny, subtle without being in any way inaccessible, and utterly fresh—not a cliché or a clunker in her entire songbook." –Hendrik Hertzberg, The New Yorker

Dar Williams has been writing songs and touring for over twenty years, drawing inspiration from her travels over four continents and from the Hudson Valley where she lives. She has recorded nine studio albums (eight with Razor & Tie Records), clocked in over 2,000 gigs, and has enjoyed teaching at the Rocky Mountain Folks Festival song school, Jorma Kaukonen's Fur Peace Ranch, Steve Earle's Camp Copperhead and in conjunction with concerts at many schools. Teaching an undergraduate course about music movements and democracy at Wesleyan University renewed Dar's faith in the importance of making music and also in the intrinsic, life-affirming value of creating songs, a process she is excited to be sharing in her neck of the woods.

Fall 2019

There was no English Conference in fall 2019.

Spring 2019

There was no English Conference in spring 2019.

Fall 2018

ENGL BC3096 The English Conference: Race and Class in British Literature of the 1950s
—Caryl Phillips
W 12:10-2 on September 26th, October 3rd, 10th, and 17th, 2018

The course will look at the literature which reflects how, in the wake of WW2, Britain began to transition itself into a welfare state which opened up hitherto unimagined opportunities for working class men and women. At the same time Britain was coming to terms with the end of an empire and mass immigration from colonial, and former colonial, territories; the changing role of women; and the beginning of a national discussion which, in the 1960's, resulted in the decriminalization of both abortion and homosexuality. The 1950's marked the beginning of the formation of modern Britain. Four key texts - two plays and two novels - will be discussed.

Look Back in Anger (1956) by John Osborne
A Taste of Honey (1958) by Shelagh Delaney
The Lonely Londoners (1956) by Samuel Selvon
To Sir, With Love (1959) by E.R.Braithwaite

Students will be expected to have read all four texts. In addition, we will look at sections of the film adaptations of three of the texts, and there may be some additional reading material by critics, writers, and other commentators.

Caryl Phillips is the author or numerous works of fiction and non-fiction. Formerly Henry R Luce Professor of Social Migration and Order at Barnard College, he is currently Professor of English at Yale University.

Spring 2018

ENGL BC3095 The English Conference: Migration, Immigration, and the Boundaries of American Literature
—Kristin Sánchez Carter
TR 4:10-6 on February 6th, 8th, 13th, and 15th, 2018

How do we think about immigrant literature if the immigrant was here before the literature? How does it look if the literature “came first”? This class will help students think about American literature through the lens of postcolonial theory and practice, and consider what it means to emigrate through genres, periods, and literary structures as writers, artists, and readers/interpreters. In addition to reading narratives of cultural literacy and migration by writers like Frederick Douglass, Malcolm X, and Julia Alvarez, we’ll examine the ways in which contemporary political discourses on immigration and migration generate surprising returns to what we imagine to be either “pre-colonial” or “post-apocalyptic” foundations, via the work of artists like Lin-Manuel Miranda, Sherman Alexie and Viet Thanh Nguyen.

Kristin Sánchez Carter is a scholar and researcher interested in issues of equity and access in higher education. A graduate of Stanford University, she earned her PhD at UCLA, and she has taught at private colleges (Amherst, Williams, and Vassar), as well as state universities (SUNY New Paltz, Cal State San Marcos). She is currently teaching at San Diego Mesa College and working with the California Acceleration Project to transform remediation and increase completion for students on a path to transfer-level collegiate studies. She is also developing a project that grows out of her interest in media studies, and the theoretical challenges posed by new work in the digital humanities and affect theory; this work examines late twentieth and early twenty-first-century public discourses of sexuality, gender, race and ethnicity, embodiment, cultural and geographic mobility, ability and disability, and even the human and the “post-human.” In the wake of increased media attention paid to police violence in US cities, and sexual violence on American college campuses, she is especially interested in considering the ways in which the remediation of affect itself, in virtual public spaces, has shaped and changed the tenor and effect/affect of political discourse—our frameworks for understanding what does and doesn’t “count” as social and cultural change, and our responses to physical and discursive violence.

Fall 2017

ENGL BC3094 The English Conference: Black Life in Digital: from the Zong to Assassin's Creed
—Marisa Parham
M 4:10-6 on October 16th, 23rd, 30th, and November 13th, 2017

How might a digital humanities approach broaden our understanding of Black Atlantic literature and culture? Similarly, how might attending to Black literature deepen our understanding of contemporary technoculture? By combining close reading practice with a digital studies approach to canonical African American literature, this class will help students historicize important cross-fertilizations between Black expressive traditions and a range of contemporary media and technological texts. In addition to reading narratives by Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs, poetry by Marlene Nourbese Philip, and engaging "let's plays" of two installments of the Assassin's Creed video game series, we will also work with already-existing databases housed at the Schomburg Center in order to produce the final short written assignment.

Marisa Parham is Professor of English at Amherst College, and also directs the Five College Digital Humanities Initiative, which is a Mellon-funded grant initiative serving Amherst, Hampshire, Mt. Holyoke, and Smith Colleges, and the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. Its purpose is to help artists and scholars to integrate technology into humanities scholarship and creative work, and also to bring those disciplines to learn from and critique technological innovation.

Her current teaching and research projects focus on texts and technologies that problematize assumptions about time, space, and bodily materiality. She is particularly interested in how such terms share a history of increasing complexity in texts produced by African Americans, and how they also offer ways of thinking about intersectional approaches to digital humanities and technology studies.

Marisa Parham holds a PhD in English and Comparative Literature from Columbia University, and is the author of Haunting and Displacement in African-American Literature and Culture, The African-American Student’s Guide to College, and is co-editor of Theorizing Glissant: Sites and Citations. She currently serves on the Board of Directors for the Massachusetts Foundation for the Humanities, and formerly served on the founding Board of Directors for the Amherst Cinema Arts Center. Parham also serves as Faculty Diversity and Inclusion for Amherst College.

In 2005 she was a fellow at the W.E.B. Du Bois Research Institute at Harvard University, and in 2014 a Huntington Library fellow.

Spring 2017

ENGL BC3093 The English Conference: Modern Jewish Women's Writing In America
—Anita Norich
M 4:10-6 on February 6th, 13th, 20th, and 27th, 2017

This course considers prose and poetry written by twentieth- and twenty-first-century Jewish women in America. Paying equal attention to each of the terms in the course’s title—Modern, Jewish, Women, Writing, and America—we focus on works written in English as well as some in Yiddish. (NO knowledge of Yiddish is expected; all texts are in English.) Questions about religion, immigration, assimilation and acculturation, the Holocaust, and Israel are often raised in this literature, but so are explorations of class, sexuality, family relations, and political, social, and economic shifts in America. We will consider what writers had to say and how they wrote about such problematic but popular images as the Jewish mother, the “Jewish American Princess,” the radical Jew, and both traditional and modern Jewish women.

Anita Norich is the Tikva Frymer-Kensky Collegiate Professor of English and Judaic Studies at the University of Michigan. A Barnard graduate, she earned her PhD from Columbia University. She is the author of Writing in Tongues: Yiddish Translation in the 20th Century; Discovering Exile: Yiddish and Jewish American Literature in America During the Holocaust; The Homeless Imagination in the Fiction if Israel Joshua Singer, and co-editor of Languages of Modern Jewish Cultures; Jewish Literatures and Cultures: Context and Intertext; Gender and Text in Modern Hebrew and Yiddish Literatures. She teaches, lectures, and publishes on a range of topics concerning Yiddish language and literature, modern Jewish culture, Jewish American literature, and Holocaust literature.

Fall 2016

ENGL BC3092 The English Conference: Jews and Race in Early American Literature
—Laura Leibman
MW 4:10-6 on September 19th, 21st, 26th, and 28th, 2016

This course will explore the fascinating and rich literature by and about Jews in early America. Although never the majority of the population, Jews were disproportionately important to colonial trade and were highly literate. The earliest Jewish American texts are accounts told by “crypto” (hidden) Jews while being tortured by Spanish colonial Inquisitors. These texts were quickly followed by literature written by Jews living openly in the Protestant colonies. Both forms bear the heavy influence of Spanish literature. In this course we look at four key themes from early Jewish American literature: the Inquisition, travel, slavery, and the body politic. Where exactly Jews fit into colonial hierarchies was a subject of debate. Early American censuses reveal Jews’ ever-changing status: sometimes Jews were white, sometimes they stood alone in a quasi-racial category between blacks and whites, and sometimes they were a religious group. Through early literary texts, we will examine the shifting nature of race in early America and attempts by Jews and non-Jews to locate Jews in emergent hierarchies.

Laura Leibman is Professor of English and Humanities at Reed College, Portland, OR. She joined the faculty at Reed College in 1995. Since then she has been a Fulbright scholar at the University of Panama (Panama) and Utrecht University (Netherlands), and she will be a visiting fellow at Oxford in the spring of 2017. She is widely known for her expertise in early American studies and for her work in American literary history. She is the academic director of the multi-media public television series American Passages (2003) and the award-winning author of several scholarly books on early American literature and culture. Her most recent book Messianism, Secrecy and Mysticism: A Reinterpretation of Early American Jewish Life won a National Jewish book award, a Jordan Schnitzer Book Award, and was a Choice Outstanding Academic Title for 2013. Her current book project is entitled The Material of Race: How Emancipation Transformed American Jews.

Spring 2016

ENGL BC3091 The English Conference: Shakespeare and Cinema
—Hilan Warshaw
TR 4:10-6 on February 9th, 11th, 16th, and 18th, 2016

This course focuses on the history of film adaptations of William Shakespeare, the world's most screen-adapted author. Each class session examines excerpts from international films and television productions of one or more of Shakespeare’s plays, from the silent era to recent releases–often juxtaposing different screen treatments of the same scenes. In so doing, the course not only underscores the inexhaustible interpretive richness of Shakespeare’s works, but also sheds light on the role of changing historical and political contexts in influencing each onscreen representation. To take a few examples, Laurence Olivier's Oscar-winning 1948 Hamlet, with its emphasis on individual psychology, presents a striking contrast with Grigori Kozintsev's more overtly political 1964 adaptation from the USSR; Olivier's triumphal World War II-era Henry V (1944) purposefully obscures aspects of the play that are emphasized in Kenneth Branagh's version from 1989. Successive films of Othello, The Merchant of Venice, and The Tempest shed light on the ways in which evolving discourses on race and colonialism have impacted the reception of these works. Viewed together, these films not only provide valuable insights into recent history, but reflect different facets of the dramatist who remains at once history's most canonical and most mercurial author.

Course readings include scenes from Shakespearean plays including A Midsummer Night's Dream, Hamlet, Henry V, Macbeth, The Merchant of Venice, Much Ado About Nothing, Othello, Richard III, and The Tempest. Each class will include screened excerpts from multiple film versions of one or more of these plays.

Other readings include excerpted critical perspectives by authors including James Agee, Michael Anderegg, Curtis Breight, Stanley Kauffman, and J. D. Salinger; filmmaker interviews with Kenneth Branagh, Peter Hall, Grigori Kozintsev, Baz Luhrmann, Joseph Mankiewicz, and Laurence Olivier, among others; and historical source texts by Lancelot Andrewes, Henry Garnet, Thomas Heywood, Thomas Nashe, and Edmund Spenser.

Hilan Warshaw is a filmmaker, writer, and educator. He recently produced, directed, and wrote the documentary Wagner's Jews, broadcast internationally on PBS-WNET, ARTE, WDR, Deutsche Welle and Israel's Channel 8 (upcoming). His research articles on film and the arts have been published in The Wagner Journal and in volumes from Cambridge University Press, McFarland Press, and Königshausen & Neumann. He taught the Barnard English Conference course in fall 2011, and currently teaches film at Western Carolina University.

Fall 2015

ENGL BC3099 The English Conference: Four Talks on Weather and Literature
—Paul Keegan
TR 4:10-6 on November 10th, 12th, 17th and 19th, 2015

In the context of climate fears and fantasies, these talks would examine ways in which weather has informed literary texts, directly and obliquely. Ranging from–or touching upon–Homer’s winds and Ovid’s flood to the prose poems of Francis Ponge; from the pre-Socratics to Victorian theories of the death of the sun, with reference to scientific texts but also reportage and eye-witness (Pliny the Younger on the eruption of Vesuvius, Daniel Defoe on the Great Storm of 1703).

The focus will be on Enlightenment, Romantic and Victorian weather, with particular emphasis on jottings, journals, diaries, letters: texts which report with immediacy on unstable phenomena and are themselves unstable, tenuously anchored in the "literary": the patient everyday entries of Gilbert White, the natural history writings of John Clare and Dorothy Wordsworth, the notebooks of Coleridge and Gerard Manley Hopkins.

We will consider imaginary as well as actual responses to the transitory and transitional (from Tacitus’s mariners believing they could hear the sun sink into the sea, to the "frozen sounds" reported by Mandeville on his arctic travels, to Ruskin’s apocalyptic "storm-cloud," through to J G Ballard’s sci-fi apocalypses). We will consider oral testimony as well: weather rhymes, almanacs and suchlike.

Our discussions will not add anything to our image of nature as a Suffering Solid. Instead they will attend to erratic and transient phenomena and their imaginative notation: patterns and forces, things that are invisible, ephemeral, sudden, catastrophic, seasonal–and endless: weather being the oldest conversation of all.

Paul Keegan was educated at Oxford and at the Sorbonne in Paris, and has taught at the universities of York and UC San Diego. He was Faber poetry editor and previously editor of the Penguin Classics, has edited The Penguin Book of English Verse and the Collected Poems of Ted Hughes.

Spring 2015

ENGL BC3098 The English Conference: Children's Literature and the Idea of the Child
—Elisabeth Rose Gruner
MT 4:10-6 on February 23rd, 24th, March 9th, and 10th, 2015

Children's literature not only entertains and educates children, it helps define them. In this course we will examine classics of children's literature from Alice's Adventures in Wonderland to Harry Potter and beyond, analyzing the ways in which childhood is both depicted and constructed by the only serious literary genre defined by its audience. Topics will include class, race, innocence, nature, and the domestic as categories that both define and exclude children at different times. Authors may include Lewis Carroll, Frances Hodgson Burnett, Maurice Sendak, J. M. Barrie, J. K. Rowling, Mary Hoffman, Walter Dean Myers, and Kiese Laymon.

Dr. Elisabeth Gruner has taught at the University of Richmond since 1993. Her areas of interest are children's and young adult literature and Victorian literature, as well as Creative Nonfiction Writing. Her current research is on young adult literature and the "crisis in reading"; more broadly, she is interested in the relationships between children's and young adult literature and education. Her most recent articles are on religion and children's literature, intertextuality and young adult literature, and education and children's fantasy. She is also an associate dean of Arts & Sciences and Director of the Academic Advising Resources Center, and the former coordinator of the First-Year Seminar Program.

Fall 2014

ENGL BC3097 The English Conference: The City in American Literature
—Nathalie Cochoy
WR 12:10-2 on October 29th, 30th, November 5th, and 6th, 2014

This course will explore the representation of the city (New York, Paris) in the American novel. A first session will be dedicated to a theoretical introduction. With references to some major critics (Barthes, Benjamin, Certeau, Derrida, Sansot...), we will focus on the transformation of the description from a panoramic, omniscient perspective to a mobile, labyrinthine, fragmentary perception. The motif of walking will be evoked as a means of rediscovering the historical, cultural or social evolution of the city, but also of rehabilitating the wonders of the ordinary. We will dwell on some of the ways in which novelists reinvent language in order to translate the ceaseless transformation or the Babel-like multiplicity of urban space. The next sessions will focus on the representation of the city in some specific novels (with a close analysis of some extracts): Stephen Crane's Maggie, Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises, John Dos Passos's Manhattan Transfer, Paul Auster's Moon Palace.

Nathalie Cochoy, a former student of the Ecole Normale Supérieure of Fontenay-Saint Cloud, is Professor of American Literature at the University Toulouse, in France. She is the author of Ralph Ellison, La Musique de l'Invisible (Belin, 1998), and of Passante à New York (PU Bordeaux, 2010). She co-directed The Art of the City (Anglophonia/Caliban, 2009) and directed City Instants (Erea, 2010). She also wrote numerous articles on the representation of urban and natural spaces in American literature. She is the editor of Transatlantica for literature and the arts.

Spring 2014

ENGL BC3096 The English Conference: T.S. Eliot, Poet-Critic
—Christopher Ricks
MT 4:10-6 on March 31st, April 1st, 7th, and 8th, 2014

Eliot and the great tradition of the poet-critic, from Dryden to Geoffrey Hill. Eliot as critic of his own work, both explicitly and within the art of revision. Eliot as critic of others’ work, both explicitly and within the art of allusion. The course will draw upon the full-scale edition of Eliot’s poems, edited by Ricks and McCue, to be completed in the summer of 2014.

Christopher Ricks is Warren Professor of the Humanities and co-director of the Editorial Institute at Boston University. His books include Milton’s Grand Style; Tennyson; The Force of Poetry; T. S. Eliot and Prejudice; Beckett’s Dying Words; Allusion to the Poets; Dylan’s Visions of Sin; and True Friendship: Anthony Hecht, Geoffrey Hill, and Robert Lowell Under the Sign of Eliot and Pound. He is at present preparing a full critical edition of the poems of T. S. Eliot. Ricks was elected professor of poetry at Oxford University in 2004, and was knighted for services to scholarship in the Queen’s Birthday Honors in 2009.

Fall 2013

ENGL BC3095 The English Conference: 'Speak, memory': Women & Time in Later Medieval English Literature
—Felicity Riddy
TR 4:10-6 on October 1st, 3rd, 8th, and 10th, 2013

This course explores some of the ways in which time was experienced and understood in late medieval England by focusing on four fifteenth-century texts in which retrospection is central and gendered.

October 1: Belatedness and nostalgia: the close of Malory’s Le Morte Darthur
We start with cultural memory in the last two books of Thomas Malory’s Le Morte Darthur, which retell the end of the love affair between Guenivere and Lancelot, and Arthur’s final battle against his usurping son Mordred, in which both die. We’ll explore what place is created for women in a narrative of male nostalgia for the past.

October 3: Achronicity and no going back: The Testament of Cresseid
Around the same time, the Scottish poet Robert Henryson, wrote The Testament of Cresseid, a semi-sequel to Chaucer’s great poem Troilus and Criseyde, set in the last days of the Trojan War. This poem focuses on the woman, feminizing nostalgia and loss: Cresseid looks back in agony on what she has done and what she has become. The poem’s anxieties about female sexuality are explicitly those of the poet’s own era. What do we make of this confusion of periods? We’ll read the text in the brilliant translation of Seamus Heaney.

October 8: Contemporaneity and enigma: The Book of Margery Kempe (selections)
The other two texts are by women authors. One is the first autobiography written in English, by townswoman, international pilgrim, roarer in public places and mother of fourteen, Margery Kempe. It raises questions about memory and identity, about how the disconnected sequence of events of the lived life are given shape in autobiography, and about how the individual locates herself in time.

October 10: The end of time: Julian’s Revelation of Love (selections)
Margery’s contemporary, Julian of Norwich, an anchoress in Norwich, is the only one of our four who might be said to have a theory of time. Meditating for decades on a sequence of visions of Jesus she had in her early life, Julian develops an adventurous theology: God is a mother; Eve has no place in the story of original sin; sin is without substance; there is no need for forgiveness because God is never angry; it’s even possible that everyone will be saved.

The class will proceed by lecture and discussion. Texts in translation or modernized spelling will be available on CourseWorks.

Prof. Felicity Riddy specializes in late-medieval literature and culture. In addition to serving as Professor at University of York, was Director of the University’s interdisciplinary Centre for Medieval Studies, rose to Deputy Vice-Chancellor, and has chaired the British Arthurian Society. Riddy's extensive publications concentrate on medieval women’s writing, Arthurian romance, devotional literature and Older Scots poetry. Her interests in urban culture (stimulated by York's Centre for Medieval Studies inter-disciplinary urban Household Research Group) have produced articles on urban courtesy texts, romances, devotional reading and domestic authority.

Spring 2013

ENGL BC3094 The English Conference: Shakespeare and Music
—Helen Wilcox
TR 4:10-6 on February 26th, 28th, March 5th, and 7th, 2013

This course will explore the fascinating and rich relationship between Shakespeare and music of all kinds, from the songs and street music featured in the theatre of his own day, right through to jazz and popular music in our own time.  Each of the four sessions will focus on a particular play - The Tempest, Othello, Twelfth Night, and Romeo and Juliet - as a springboard for a discussion of a variety of musical ideas and interactions.  In the first class, The Tempest will offer examples of music as an ideal, a source of magic, and a vital element in masque and tragicomedy.  The focus on Othello in the second meeting will open up the topic of Shakespeare-inspired opera as well as the musical metaphors and the tradition of folk music crucial to the dramatic effect of the tragedy.  How could a course on Shakespeare and music not examine Twelfth Night, the play to be read for the third session, whose opening speech assumes that music is the food of love, and which proceeds to feature important songs which have inspired composers over many centuries.  Finally, the tragedy of the star-crossed lovers, Romeo and Juliet, will lead us to consider the place of Shakespeare's work in the music of ballet and film as well as the repertoire of modern popular music.  Each session will include live musical performance where possible, and the concluding class will feature jazz bassist Allan Wilcox demonstrating what Shakespeare and jazz have in common.  Students taking this class are not required to have any musical proficiency - just a lively curiosity, an open mind and ear, and an enthusiasm for the poetic dramas of Shakespeare.

Helen Wilcox is Professor of English and Head of School at Bangor University, U.K. After studying at Birmingham and Oxford, she has taught at universities in three countries - England (Liverpool), the Netherlands (Groningen) and now Wales - as well as being a visiting professor in Singapore and Spain. Her research focuses on early modern literature, and among her book publications is the annotated edition of The English Poems of George Herbert (Cambridge, 2007). She has also written extensively on devotional poetry, autobiographical writing, drama, women's writing, and the early modern partnership of literature and music.

Fall 2012

ENGL BC3093 The English Conference: Feasting and Starving in English Literature
—Rachel Trubowitz
R 4:10-6 on October 11th, 18th, 25th, and November 1st, 2012

This course will focus on the function of food, drink, and hunger in a variety of literary texts written or translated into English, from the medieval period to the present day.  We will touch on such issues as vegetarianism, maternal nurture, self-starvation, and the relationship between eating and cultural memory.  Readings will include, the Last Supper in the gospels and 1 Corinthians (KJV), Milton’s Paradise Lost (especially Book 5), Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, and Kafka’s The Hunger Artist.

Prof. Rachel Trubowitz graduated from Barnard in 1976 and received her PhD from Columbia in1985.  She taught from at Barnard from 1984-86 and has been at the University of New Hampshire since fall 1986.   She specializes in Seventeenth-Century English Literature, especially John Milton and Margaret Cavendish.   She author of Nation and Nurture in Seventeenth-Century English Literature (Oxford University Press).  Her essay, "Israel, Asia, and England in Milton's Writings" (Cambridge UP) won the James Holly Hanford Award for Best Essay on Milton in 2008.  She also has essays on Margaret Cavendish and Milton forthcoming in The Oxford Handbook on Literature and the English Revolution, Milton Now, and Two Cultures?: Newton and Milton (Cambridge UP).  She serves as Vice President of the Milton Society of America for 2012-2013.

Spring 2012

ENGL BC3092 The English Conference: Stendhal’s The Red and the Black, read with Freud and Lacan on Love, Passion, and Murder
—Prof. Pierre-Gilles Guéguen
TR 4:10-6 on February 21st, 23rd, 28th, and March 1st, 2012

Stendhal’s The Red and the Black is a novel about love, passion, and murder. The novel, Stendhal’s second, appeared in 1830. It made him famous right away. Nietzsche said that Stendhal was a supreme psychologist, but Stendhal was above all a realist. He said: "A novel is a mirror that strolls along a highway. Now it reflects the blue of the skies, now the mud puddles underfoot." The novel, full of noise and turmoil, was inspired by an article in a local newspaper describing the murder of a bourgeois mother by her former lover, a seminarist, during a Sunday mass.

Madame de Rênal is a married housewife with children. She falls in love with a young man who serves as the children’s teacher. He happens to be an ambitious man, searching for power. He lets her down and falls in love with the daughter of his mentor, a rich and influent Parisian aristocrat. He makes the young woman pregnant. When Madame de Rênal informs against him in an act of revenge, he tries to kill her; he is condemned to death by the guillotine. Mathilde de la Mole manages to retrieve his head so as to bury it near her.

Stendhal describes the awakening of love and the destructive power of passion with great precision. Later he writes an essay entitled «On Love» that traces the birth of love and its crystallization.

Starting with a reading of this exceptional novel, I intend to examine the topics of love, passion, murder and revenge within the perspectives articulated by Freud and Lacan. At the beginning of the XXth century, it was Freud who first drew attention to the different place of love in the lives of men and women. He was the first to underline how love and desire are convergent for women and divergent for men. Later on, in 1973 (Seminar XX p. 61), Lacan came to stress the importance of love for women even while he declared at the same time, enigmatically: «There is no sexual relation».

Readings:

• Stendhal, The Red and the Black, Penguin Classics.
• DVD: The Red & the Black, with Carole Bouquet, Kim Rossi Stuart, Judith Godrèche etc…
• Freud: Feminity, New introductory Lectures Lecture XXIII, Standard edition, vol XXII, p112, Hogarth Press, London
• Lacan: Encore, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XX, Norton 1975 Ch VII ( A Love Letter).

Assignment: A five to ten pages essay on a topic related to the Novel or to Freud and Lacan’s problems of Sexuation and Love will be requested from the students at the end of the Course.

Pierre-Gilles Guéguen is a French Psychoanalyst, member of the World Association of Psychoanalysis and of the Ecole de la Cause Freudienne. He is a past President of the New Lacanian School and a former professor in the Psychoanalysis Department of the University of Paris VIII. (Dr. Guéguen also gave the Conference in spring 2005.)

Fall 2011

ENGL BC3091 The English Conference: Romanticism and Film
—Hilan Warshaw

The literature of the Romantic period left a powerful and enduring imprint on cinema. Popular Romantic genres such as Gothic horror and science fiction have been mainstays of the film industry since its inception, bequeathing to filmmakers a highly recognizable set of motifs, themes, and conventions. The legacy of Romanticism also extends to cinema as a medium: early film pioneers including Sergei Eisenstein and D.W Griffith were inspired by the Romantics' privileging of visual and sensory responses over detached rationalism. This four-lecture course draws on excerpted texts from Romantic literature and theory—such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Anne Radcliffe, Mary Shelley, and Richard Wagner—alongside clips from various films to explore the multifaceted resonance of Romanticism within film.

Hilan Warshaw is a filmmaker and writer living in New York. In addition to directing his own films through his production company, Overtone Films, LLC, his video editing and writing credits include documentaries for PBS and other networks. He is also an experienced film teacher, lecturer and author of articles on film and the arts. He has a B.F.A. and M.F.A. from NYU's Tisch School of the Arts. For more information on Mr. Warshaw, visit his website.

Spring 2011

ENGL BC 3191 The English Conference: Just Letters: Poets in Correspondence
—Hugh Haughton

In a letter of 1971 Elizabeth Bishop said she was preparing a series of seminars at Harvard on "Letters": 'Just letters – as an art form or something. I‘m hoping to select a nicely incongruous assortment of people – Mrs Carlyle, Chekhov, my Aunt Grace, Keats, a letter found in the street, etc. etc.'

This series of lectures will pursue the implications of Bishop's notion of letters as 'an art form' by reflecting on the relationship between poets' letters and the primary 'art form' of poetry in the modern period. Auden said 'The mere fact that a man is famous and dead does not entitle us to read, still less to publish, his private correspondence', but Richard Howard argued that 'a poet's letters constitute a crucial dimension of the poet'. The dialogue between poems and letters takes many different forms, and many poets, including John Keats, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Emily Dickinson and Robert Frost, not only circulated poems in their letters to friends, but sketched out their poetics in letters. Starting with a reflection on 'T.S. Eliot and the Use of Letters', the lectures will look at a number of twentieth-century poets, including Bishop, Lowell, Marianne Moore, Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath, and Philip Larkin, and seek to develop something on the lines of an epistolary poetics. In engaging with the ways modern poets' talk about poetry in their correspondence, the lectures will also pursue the aesthetics of letter-writing, and consider the bearing of letters on lyrics (and vice versa).

Hugh Haughton earned his B.A. from Cambridge University and his M.A. from Oxford University. He is the author of The Poetry of Derek Mahon (Oxford University Press) and the editor of The Chatto Book of Nonsense (Chatto and Windus) and co-editor (with Valerie Eliot) of Volume II of The Letters of T.S. Eliot (Faber and Faber). He teaches English at the University of York.

Fall 2010

ENGL BC3191 The English Conference: Words and Music
—Erik Ryding and Rebecca Pechefsky

The course will focus, on the one hand, on the way composers and songwriters have responded to words and, on the other, on the way authors have tried to describe music in words. We will study the creative method of musicians ranging from John Dowland and Richard Wagner to Bob Dylan and Suzanne Vega. Among the authors discussed will be Thomas Campion, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Eduard Hanslick, George Bernard Shaw, Christopher Ricks, Susan Youens, and Anthony DeCurtis. Special guests will speak and perform. No knowledge of musical notation is needed.

Erik Ryding and Rebecca Pechefsky coauthored the award-winning biography Bruno Walter: A World Elsewhere.  Erik Ryding earned his PhD at Columbia University; a revision of his dissertation was published as In Harmony Framed. He taught English at Barnard College for seven years and was later senior editor of publications at Carnegie Hall. Rebecca Pechefsky earned her BA at Barnard and her MPhil at the CUNY Graduate Center. A freelance harpsichordist, Ms. Pechefsky has made numerous recordings and is a founding member of the trio Brooklyn Baroque. Both Ryding and Pechefsky have written program notes for various musical organizations.

Spring 2010

ENGL BC3191 The English Conference: Torture: A Short Course
—Isabel Fonseca

‘Torture is a barbarity that has no place in a modern democracy.’ True or false?

Abu Ghraib dispelled the restful assumption that torture is the purview of violent sects, rogue police and distant authoritarian regimes. In fact, since human-rights monitoring began in the Seventies (along with specific bans on use of torture), and since the disappearance of many of the world’s dictatorships, the use of torture by governments has continued apace. What is the history and what are the facts? And what, furthermore, do psychologists, historians, and novelists have to tell us about those facts? What is the meaning of torture? Is it always wrong? Does torture ever work?

Over four class periods, we will consider changing attitudes and practice — from maximally gory public spectacle to covert and unmarked interrogation — and try to make sense of the intractable and almost inconceivable violence committed, most often, in the name of security.

Texts will include Kafka's In the Penal Colony, excerpts from Hubert Selby, Jr.'s Last Exit to Brooklyn, and George Orwell's 1984, along with readings from Human Rights Watch's collection: Torture, Does it Make Us Safer?

Isabel Fonseca '84 was a Religion major at Barnard College. She went on to study Philosophy and Politics at Oxford University and was an editor at the Times Literary Supplement in London before she left to write her study of Roma life and culture, Bury Me Standing: The Gypsies and their Journey, which became an international bestseller, published in twenty countries. In 2008, Alfred A Knopf published her novel, Attachment.

Fall 2009

ENGL BC3191 The English Conference: Dante in English
—Massimo Bacigalupo

Dante’s poetry has been widely influential since the fifteenth century and is still much read, translated and imitated in Britain, Ireland and the U.S.A. Using two recent anthologies, Dante in English (Penguin Classics), and The Poets’ Dante: Twentieth-Century Responses (Farrar), this course will include a reading in English translation of some of the best known episodes of The Divine Comedy, a comparison of styles and interpretations, a discussion of the questions of translation and adaptation, and a survey of some of the critical and poetical responses Dante has elicited, from Chaucer and Keats to T. S. Eliot, Samuel Beckett, and Seamus Heaney. We will try to discover why Dante’s vision has spoken to so many writers at different times and what it can tell us today of the culture we live.

Massimo Bacigalupo received his M.A. from the University of Rome and his Ph.D. from Columbia University. His research has centered on American and British Romanticism and Modernism. He is Professor of American Literature and Chair of Department at the University of Genoa, Genoa, Italy. He is a Member of the Ligurian Academy of Sciences and Letters, and the former President of AISNA, the American Studies Association of Italy.

He is the author of The Forméd Trace: The Later Poetry of Ezra Pound (Columbia Univ. Press, 1980), Grotta Byron (2001), and the editor of many scholarly volumes, most recently Ezra Pound, Language and Persona (2008), Ambassadors: American Studies in a Changing World (2006), and America and the Mediterranean (2003). His essays are included in Wallace Stevens Across the Atlantic (Palgrave, 2008), T. S. Eliot and the Concept of Tradition (Cambridge Univ. Press, 2007), Anglo-American Modernity and the Mediterranean (2006), The Oxford Companion to Italian Literature (OUP, 2002), The Cambridge Companion to Ezra Pound (1999), etc. He has contributed to The Yale Review, The Modern Language Review, American Literary Scholarship, Journal of Modern Literature, Paideuma, The Paris Review, The Wallace Stevens Journal, Notes & Queries, etc. In 2003 he was awarded Italy’s National Translation Prize for his translations of Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Wallace Stevens, Emily Dickinson, Herman Melville, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Seamus Heaney, and many others. This is the third time that he is teaching The English Conference at Barnard. In 1992 his course was called "Romantics and Modernists"; in 1995 his subject was "Love & Power in Shakespeare and Hemingway."

Spring 2009

ENGL BC3191 The English Conference: Poets Listening to Poets
—Judith Scherer Herz

Donne and Milton will provide starting points for an exploration of some of the different ways in which poets listening to poets gets played out in literary history. We’ll begin with a scan of a variety of Donne texts watching him think, speak, and perform the self in his writing. Then we’ll explore some 20th and 21st century poets as they discover, appropriate, and speak with and through that voice. We’ll end with Paul Muldoon’s “Sillyhow Stride,” which literally speaks Donne insofar as a good portion of its words are Donne’s. However, that poem is at least in part a pastoral elegy and underlying it is Milton’s “Lycidas.” With “Lycidas” in hand, we’ll glance back at the origins of pastoral elegy in Theocritus and Virgil and then follow, with Orpheus as our guide, the transformations of that mode in modern and contemporary poetry from Auden to Czeslaw Milosz, all the while listening to the poets as they listen.

Judith S. Herz received her B. A. from Barnard College and her M.A. and Ph.D. from University of Rochester. Her current research centers on the ways in which Donne enters the poetic vocabulary, the imagination, the sound system, of contemporary poets. A book chapter on time and narrative instability in Milton’s Paradise Lost is also in progress and she continues to work on Bloomsbury, especially the writing of Forster and Leonard Woolf. Although she started out as a medievalist with a dissertation on Chaucer, she has moved since then into the seventeenth century and the early twentieth. She has been President of the Association of Canadian College and University Teachers of English (ACCUTE) and of the John Donne Society.

Fall 2008

ENGL BC3191 The English Conference: Criminals, Courts and Storytelling
—Dr. Nancy E. Johnson

This English Conference will focus on the relationship between narrative and the law by examining four eighteenth-century trials and the narrative responses to the trials. Readings will include court transcripts from the Old Bailey, such as those of the infamous thief Jack Sheppard, and narrative responses such as John Gay’s Beggar’s Opera and Bertolt Brecht’s Threepenny Opera.

Nancy Johnson is an Associate Professor of English and Deputy Chair at SUNY New Paltz, where she teaches eighteenth-century British literature and literary theory. She has published a book on radical novels of the 1790s, The English Jacobin Novel on Rights, Property and the Law: Critiquing the Contract (Palgrave, 2004), and she is currently working on a scholarly edition of the court journals of Frances Burney for Oxford University Press.

Spring 2008

ENGL BC3191 The English Conference: Science as Literature: How We See the Universe
—Richard Panek

We usually read scientific writings, if we read them at all, to find out what we know about nature. In this series of four lectures we will read excerpts from some of the most influential scientific writings in history to find out how we think about nature. By paying close attention to the literary qualities of the works, we will consider the roles that both the individual and society play in investigating nature, and how and why those roles have changed over the ages. (Bonus: The lectures will also provide a compact survey of the history of Western science.) Readings, which will be supplied, will include excerpts from Aristotle, Copernicus, Galileo, Descartes, Newton, Darwin, Freud, Einstein, Heisenberg, Bohr, Crick and Watson, and other one-name wonders.

Richard Panek is the author of two books about the history and philosophy of science, The Invisible Century: Einstein, Freud, and the Search for Hidden Universes (Viking, 2004) and Seeing and Believing: How the Telescope Opened Our Eyes and Minds to the Heavens (Viking, 1998). He is now researching a third, Let There Be Dark: At the Dawn of the Next Universe (Houghton Mifflin, c. 2010), based on an article he wrote for The New York Times Magazine on dark matter, dark energy, and the frontiers of cosmology. He has written about science and culture for various sections of The New York Times, as well as for Smithsonian, Natural History, Discover, Esquire, Outside, Astronomy, Seed, and many other magazines. He is a 2007 fellow in Nonfiction Literature from the New York Foundation for the Arts. He has also published short fiction, for which he received a PEN Award in 1987. He has no background in science, but he hopes that by combining the exploratory sensibility of journalism with the storytelling techniques of long-form narrative, he can illuminate and humanize science for readers who, like himself before he began writing about the subject ten years ago, would know little or nothing about it. He taught creative writing at Barnard College during the fall 2007 semester, and he is on the permanent faculty of the Goddard College MFA Writing program.

Fall 2007

ENGL BC3191 The English Conference: Lectures on Holocaust Literature: “Forms of Autobiography”
—Jan Zlotnik Schmidt

This series of lectures will focus on the representation of the Holocaust in forms of autobiography including Holocaust testimonies, children’s diaries, journals, and selected memoirs. The course will include discussion of the following works: oral histories from Brana Gurewitsch’s Mothers, Sisters, Resisters and from the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies at Yale University; selected unknown children’s diaries; journal entries from Etty Hillesum’s An Interrupted Life; and excerpts from two memoirs, Charlotte Delbo’s Auschwitz and After and Primo Levi’s Survival in Auschwitz. Selected short stories and poems also will be distributed. Attention will be paid to forms of witnessing and to artistic techniques used by different Holocaust writers to represent their experiences. There also will be several films shown including Night and Fog, the first Holocaust documentary, and excerpts from Shoah and The Last Days.

Dr. Jan Zlotnik Schmidt is a SUNY Distinguished Teaching Professor in the Department of English at SUNY New Paltz where she teaches courses in composition, theories of writing, autobiography, creative writing, women’s literature, and Holocaust studies. An expert in the field of composition studies and writing across the curriculum, she has given presentations and workshops at the local, regional, and national level. Her poetry has been published in many journals including Kansas Quarterly, Cream City Review, Syracuse Scholar, Alaska Quarterly Review, Home Planet News, and Phoebe. She has published two volumes of poetry—We Speak in Tongues (The Edwin Mellen Press, 1991) and She Had This Memory (The Edwin Mellin Press 2000); two collections of autobiographical essays—Women/Writing/Teaching (SUNY Press, 1998) and Wise Women: Reflections of Teachers at Midlife, co-authored with Dr. Phyllis R. Freeman (Routledge 2000); and a multicultural, global literature anthology, Legacies: Fiction, Poetry, Drama, Nonfiction (co-authored with the late Dr. Carley Bogarad and Dr. Lynne Crockett), which is about to go into a fourth edition. She has been teaching both an undergraduate and graduate Holocaust literature course in the Departments of Jewish Studies and English for several years.

Spring 2007

ENGL BC3191 The English Conference: Whitman and After: the First Person Singular
—Patricia Hampl

Four lectures devoted to the first person voice in literature and its special attraction for iconic American authors as well as for contemporary writers. This series of talks will cross genres, with individual sessions on poetry, fiction and forms of nonfiction including memoir and the personal essay. The first lecture will focus on Walt Whitman (with a couple of nods to Emily Dickinson). The second lecture, turning to fiction, will consider The Great Gatsby in depth but will also look at Moby Dick and Huckleberry Finn. The third and fourth lectures discuss forms of nonfiction (literary journalism, the personal essay and other autobiographical forms), perhaps the signature genres of contemporary letters.

Patricia Hampl first won recognition for A Romantic Education, her memoir about her Czech heritage. This book and subsequent works, including Virgin Time (1992) and I Could Tell You Stories (finalist in General Nonfiction in the National Book Critics Circle Awards 2000) established her as an influential figure in the rise of autobiographical writing in the past 25 years. Blue Arabesque: A Search for the Sublime, a meditation on the odalisque figure in Western art, came out from Harcourt in fall 2006. It will be followed next year by another memoir, The Florist’s Daughter. Ms. Hampl is Regents Professor and McKnight Distinguished Professor at the University of Minnesota where she teaches creative writing. She is also on the permanent faculty of The Prague Summer Program.

Fall 2006

ENGL BC3191 The English Conference: John Ruskin
—Rochelle Gurstein

This course will examine selected writings of the great Victorian sage, John Ruskin. We will pay special attention to how Ruskin's thinking about aesthetics—in particular, why the world looks the way it does—forced him to become an unwilling social critic and the consequences of this radical reorientation for Ruskin's writing, for social-reform movements of his day, and for Ruskin personally.

Rochelle Gurstein is the author The Repeal of Reticence:  A History of America's Cultural and Legal Struggles over Free Speech, Obscenity, Sexual Liberation, and Modern Art.

Spring 2006

ENGL BC3191 The English Conference: Stage Comedy
—Anthony Kaufman

We will read four plays: Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Ernest; Alan Ayckbourn’s Absurd Person Singular; Joe Orton’s What the Butler Saw; and Tom Stoppard's The Real Thing. We will have a double focus—the plays themselves and the relevant theories of comedy and how they are illustrated by the plays we’ve read.

Prof. Tony Kaufman received his Ph.D. from Yale and taught for many years at the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana. His courses include Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Drama, and Comedy in Theory and Practice. He has written on early playwrights, Congreve, Behn, Wycherley, John Crowne, Thomas Southerne, and such later writers as Thurber, Salinger, and Barbara Pym.

Fall 2005

ENGL BC3191 The English Conference: Psychoanalysis and Literature: Lacan and Kleist
—Peter Widmer

This course will examine some Kleistian works from a psychoanalytical point of view. Kleist described how major topics of psychoanalysis, such as unconscious, mirror stage, transference, object a, the peculiar position of femininity, Oedipe and others function. Kleist gives us an example how psychoanalysis can borrow insights, sometimes even concepts, from belletristic literature. Of course, this affinity does not exclude a questioning about limits of comparability. This course will confront four psychoanalytic fundamental concepts (mirror-stage; anxiety; transference; femininity) with some Kleistian works, such as Amphitryon, Schroffenstein Family, About The Gradual Formation of Thoughts in Speaking,The Foundling, The Earthquake of Chili, Käthchen von Heilbronn, and Penthesilea.

Peter Widmer is a practicing psychoanalyst in Zurich as well as the founder and publisher of RISS. He has taught at the University of Kyoto and at the University of Zurich.

Spring 2005

ENGL BC3191 The English Conference: Psychoanalysis and Film
—Pierre-Gilles Guéguen

The artist always precedes the psycholanalyst according to the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. This sentence holds true for great film makers and for the characters they invent and insert in the narrative plot. Many pictures teach us about the subject of speech and language, and also about the symptom as a special mode of jouissance which inscribes the subject in a social link, as exemplified through the characters in the texture and the style of the film. We will draw from texts from Lacan to comment some extracts of the following pictures: “A Woman Under the Influence,” “El Habla Con Ella,” “The Hours,” “Fatal Attraction,” “Taxi Driver,” “When Harry Met Sally,” “Catch Me If You Can,” and “In the Bedroom.”

Films discussed:
March 21: An inquiry into passion and madness. Films: Fatal Attraction and Bunuel’s El.
March 23: How bad obsession can be: the narcistic cage. Film: As Good As It Gets.
March 28: Hysteria and unsatisfaction. Film: Reflections in a Golden Eye.
March 30: The war between the sexes. Film: Adam’s Rib.

Readings:
Freud's Dora and The Ratman
Readings in Lacan’s Seminar III: Psychosis (To Be Announced)
Books will be available at Labyrinth Bookstore

Prof. Pierre-Gilles Guéguen, Ph.D., is President of the W.A.P. (World Association of Psychoanalysis), member and former Director of L’École de la Cause Freudienne (E.C.F.), manager and faculty member of the Clinical Section, in France, faculty member of the Department of Psychoanalysts, Paris VIII University, and author of numerous articles on Lacan.

Fall 2004

ENGL BC3191 The English Conference: Writing Madness Psychoanalysis
—Russell Grigg

The conference will provide the framework for exploring the function of writing for psychotics and the relationship of psychotics to writing. Authors discussed will include Schreber and Joyce, Plath and Frame. Aspects of Aimée, treated by Lacan, and the Papin sisters, discussed by Genet, will be examined if time permits.

Pror. Russell Grigg is a member of the École de la Cause Freudienne and the Australian Centre for Psychoanalysis. He has translated Lacan's Seminar III: The Psychoses (Routledge, 1993) and Seminar XVII: The Other Side of Psychoanalysis (Routledge, 2005) and is the author of numerous articles on Lacan and philosophy.

Spring 2004

ENGL BC3191 The English Conference: Boccaccio’s Decameron and Renaissance Fiction
—Lorenzo Bartoli

The Decameron, assembled and probably written by Boccaccio around 1349-1351, but famously set in Florence at the time of the Black Death which swept across Europe from 1347 and savagely hit the city of the florin in 1348, is the narrative work of the widest range in all of Italian Literature. In fact, for the entire western tradition, the Decameron stands as a landmark, as it signals the advent of a new form and a new view of literature, based upon contemporaneity and the bourgeois world, depicted in its multiform reality of characters, geographies, existential horizons, epistemological uncertainties.

Dr. Lorenzo Bartoli teaches at the Autonomous University of Madrid.

Fall 2003

ENGL BC3191 The English Conference: Girls and Balls: Staking Our Claim
—Professor Jane Leavy

For generations, men regarded America’s games, and the written accounts of them, as an entitlement, an inheritance to be passed from father to son. Female interest in competitive athletics either ended at puberty or was viewed as a mechanism for attracting the opposite sex. The passage of Title IX legislation in 1972, requiring equal funding for men’s and women’s collegiate sports, promoted women’s competition as well as their entrance into the competitive world of sports journalism. This course will compare the fictional treatment of America’s pastime by male and female novelists and examine how female reporters, outsiders to the game, bring needed perspective to daily sports journalism.

Bibliography:
Jimmy Breslin, Can’t Anybody Here Play This Game? Excerpts to be handed out in class.
Steve Kluger, Last Days of Summer. Excerpts to be handed out in class.
Jane Leavy, Sandy Koufax: A Lefty's Lagacy.
Jane Leavy, Squeeze Play.

Jane Leavy (Barnard '74) is an award winning former sports writer and feature writer for the Washington Post and the author of Sandy Koufax: a Lefty’s Legacy, and Squeeze Play.

Spring 2003

ENGL BC3191.01 The English Conference: How We Got to Where We Are: Christians, Jews, & Israel in Early Modern England & America
—Achsah Guibbory

This course is a brief introduction to several aspects of the complex topic of Christian/Jewish relations, and of the history of the Christian relation to Israel. By reading excerpts of writings from the period, we will examine the habit of a number of seventeenth-century English people to think of England as a “chosen nation,” as the new Israel; and the parallel tendency among American puritans to think of themselves as Israel and America as the promised land, Canaan. (We see traces of this in the names of many towns in Connecticut.) What were the causes and implications of this kind of thinking? If the English or Americans were Israel, what were the Jews? In the middle of the seventeenth century, at the height of the English identification with Israel, England considered the question of whether to “readmit” the Jews, who had been expelled from England since the end of the thirteenth century. We will look at excerpts of some of the writings surrounding the debate over Jewish readmission.

The readings for this course will be available in a course packet (since most of them are not available in modern editions). Many of the texts are odd, interesting, different. I want to give a wide sampling, though the selections themselves will be short. Readings may include: some brief selections from the Bible, a few poems by George Herbert and Andrew Marvell, excerpts from John Winthrop and another early American writer, from a funeral sermon on James I (as Solomon), from Milton’s Areopagitica, the Amsterdam rabbi Menasseh ben Israel’s account of Jews among the American “Indians” and his petition for Jewish readmission, protests against and defenses of readmission (including Roger Williams), and a pamphlet by the Quaker leader Margaret Fell (wife of George Fox) written to convert the Jews to Christianity.

Learning something about earlier ways in which Christians thought about Israel and Jews might shed light on issues of intense concern today.

The readings, though short, may seem difficult at first, since they are from an earlier period, but you will get used to them. You are expected to have read the selections before class, and to come to class prepared to discuss and engage them, to ask questions.

Prof. Achsah Guibbory is now a member of the Barnard English faculty.

ENGL BC3191.02 The English Conference: Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell: Friendship and Poetic Influence
—Francesco Rognoni

Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell’s thirty-year-long friendship is possibly the most interesting and rewarding American literary connection of the second half of the twentieth century. Though these two great poets developed very different and original poetics, their dialogue was unbroken and their extraordinary outputs can be seen as complimentary. The course will focus both on biographical and critical issues. Poems and prose writings by Lowell and Bishop will be read in the context of their mutual influence and in the larger scenario of their times: questions of genre, gender, cultural history, canon formation, and interpretation will be raised.

Bibliography:
Elizabeth Bishop, The Complete Poems, 1927-79 (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1983). Required.
Robert Lowell, Selected Poems (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1977). Required.
Elizabeth Bishop, One Art: Selected Letters (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1994). Optional.
David Kalstone, Becoming a Poet (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1989). Optional.

Francesco Rognoni is Professor of English Language and Literature at the University of Udine (Friuli, Italy).

Fall 2002

ENGL BC3191.02 The English Conference: English Abroad: The Journey of Language
—Professor Iain Chambers

English—as a language, literature, culture and identity—today travels in the world without an obvious home or owner. The historical, cultural and poetical consequences of this journey will be examined.

Iain Chambers is Professor of Cultural and Postcolonial Studies at the Università degli Studi di Napoli, “l’Orientale,” Italy.

Spring 2002

ENGL BC3191.01 The English Conference: 911: When Narratives Conflict
—Arthur Kopit

Readings include many articles from the aftermath of 9/11, using Robert Stone’s "911: When Narratives Collide" as a starting point. Students should read Yeats’ "The Second Coming" and be familiar with the film A Beautiful Mind and the controversy involving its historical "accuracy." They should be prepared to discuss the questions: "Does historical accuracy matter in a film" and "What is historical accuracy?" They should also be familiar with the recent controversy over charges of plagiarism level Joseph Ellis "invented" a more dramatic past for himself. They should be prepared to talk about the question: "When is plagiarism not plagiarism?"

Arthur Kopit is a playwright, author of "Wings" and "Oh Dad, Poor Dad, Mamma's Hung you in the Closet and I'm Feeling so Sad."

ENGL BC3191.02 The English Conference: England Gone: Warning & Regret in the Poetry of Edward Thomas, W. H. Auden, Louis MacNeice, & Philip Larkin
—Glyn Maxwell

Bibliography:
W. H. Auden, Collected Poems, ed. Edward Mendelson (Vintage International). Required.
Philip Larkin, Collected Poems, ed. Anthony Thwaite (Farrar, Straus, Giroux). Required.
Edward Thomas, Penguin Book of First World War Poetry, ed. Jon Silkin (Penguin). Required.
Louis MacNeice (poems will be distributed as handouts). Required.
Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (Oxford University Press). Highly Recommended.

Glyn Maxwell is Poetry Editor of The New Republic and poet. He is the author of The Tale of the Major’s Son, Out of the Rain, and Rest for the Wicked.

Fall 2001

ENGL BC3191 The English Conference: Postcolonial London
—John McLeod

London has become an important crucible where new forms of national and transnational identity are being created by British-based writers who may trace a connection with countries with a history of colonialism. The legacy and experience of specifically post-war migrations to London, and the hybrid and diverse communities created in their wake, have created new forms of social and cultural activity. The classes will briefly trace the emergence of a variable and exciting body of cultural texts created by these ’new’ Londoners from the 1950s to the present. Though engaging with a variety of literary examples, classes will focus on three in particular: George Lamming, The Emigrants (1954), Hanif Kureishi, The Buddha of Suburbia (1990) and Zadie Smith, White Teeth (2000).

Spring 2001

ENGL BC3191 The English Conference: Caribbean Women's Writing
—Evelyn O’Callaghan

Bibliography:
Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea
Jamaica Kincaid, Annie John
Erna Brodber, Jane and Louisa Will Soon come Home

Prof. Evelyn O'Callaghan is a Senior Lecturer in the Faculty of Arts at the University of Barbados, West Indies. She is Jamaican and Irish by birth, studied at the University in Jamaica, won a scholarship to Oxford, and then, after her graduate studies, returned to the Caribbean. Her specialty is Caribbean Women’s writing, particularly the early colonial phase at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries.

Fall 2000

ENGL BC3191 The English Conference: Four Major New Voices in Contemporary American Literature: Cormac McCarthy, Patricia Eakins, Mark Richard, Richard Powers
—Beatrice Trotingnon

Bibliography:
Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, 1985.
Patricia Eakins, The Marvelous Adventures of Pierre Baptiste, Father & Mother, First & Last, 1999.
(New York University Prize for Fiction)
Mark Richard, Fishboy, 1993.
Richard Stone, The Gold Bug Variations, 1991.

Beatrice Trotingnon teaches at the University of Tours, France.

Spring 2000

The English Conference: Women Writers, Postcolonial Identities.
—Celeste Schenck

Bibliography:
Michelle Cliff, Abeng
Mariama Ba, Such a Long Letter (Heinemann African Writers)
Nawal El Saadawi, Woman at Point Zero
Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Thing
Ruth Ozeki, My Year of Meat

Fall 1999

The English Conference
—Jacqueline Ollier

The English Conference: Love & Power in Shakespeare and Hemingway
—Massimo Bacigalupo

Massimo Bacigalupo received his M.A. from the University of Rome and his Ph.D. from Columbia University. His research has centered on American and British Romanticism and Modernism. He is Professor of American Literature and Chair of Department at the University of Genoa, Genoa, Italy. He is a Member of the Ligurian Academy of Sciences and Letters, and the former President of AISNA, the American Studies Association of Italy.

The English Conference: Romantics and Modernists
—Massimo Bacigalupo

Massimo Bacigalupo received his M.A. from the University of Rome and his Ph.D. from Columbia University. His research has centered on American and British Romanticism and Modernism. He is Professor of American Literature and Chair of Department at the University of Genoa, Genoa, Italy. He is a Member of the Ligurian Academy of Sciences and Letters, and the former President of AISNA, the American Studies Association of Italy.

Fall 1985

The English Conference: History and Stories, Myths and Anti-Myths in Contemporary British Drama.
—Riccardo Duranti

Bibliography:
John Arden, Serjeant Musgrave's Dance (1959).  (In Plays: One.  Grove Press, 1978.)
Caryl Churchill, Light Shining in Buckinghamshire (1976). Pluto Press, 1982.
     or Plays: One. Methuen, '85.
Edward Bond, Early Morning (1968).  (In Edward Bond, Plays: One.  Methuen, 1977.)

Riccardo Duranti teaches at the University of Rome.