The course is intended to provide the student of literature with tools to analyze the structure of narratives. Narrative is not only a literary category. It is indispensable to our understanding of science, history, cinema, journalism, and the electronic media. Narrative is the way we think about the succession of events in time. The course will combine discussion of this broader sense of narrativity with emphasis on narrative fiction. We will discuss theoretical texts analyzing various aspects of narrative, including plot, setting, point of view, and genre. In conjunction with the theoretical material, we will read a number of short stories by Edgar Allan Poe, Arthur Conan Doyle, Jorge Luis Borges, Angela Carter and others

This course provides basic terminology and techniques for understanding and discussing poetry. On the assumption that poetic language is different from the language of prose, and reading poetry demands different tools, we will study subjects such as imagery, meter, speaker, and forms, through a close examination of examples from classical and contemporary English and American poetry. WRITTEN ASSIGNMENTS: 4 quizzes, one final examination.. PRIMARY TEXT: Texts will be provided on Virtual TAU Site

This course is an introduction to William Shakespeare and his world. We shall examine his vast canon by first perusing the Sonnets, and then proceed to consider six plays from a generic perspective. Each genre will be discussed, followed by a close reading of the relevant text, encompassing: tragedy, revenge drama, comedy, tragicomedy, and problem plays. Each text will be contextually considered within the pertinent socio-cultural background, to illustrate the mutual influence of drama and ideology. Relevant critical articles will also be studied to evaluate the changing methodological approaches to the world of Shakespeare.

Texts
Sonnets
Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, Much Ado About Nothing, Measure for Measure, The Tempest
Requirements
One in-class quiz, one take-home assignment, mid and final examinations

An encounter with systematic thinking on language, representation, and literature, from antiquity (Aristotle's Poetics and Rhetoric, Platonic aesthetics) through the Renaissance (Sir Philip Sidney's Arcadia, George Puttenham's The Arte of English Poesie) the eighteenth century (Kant on aesthetic judgment), Victorian aestheticism (Walter Pater and Oscar Wilde) through twentieth century formalism, structuralism, anthropological linguistics (Clause Levi-Strauss), deconstruction, psychoanalysis, and philosophical reflections on language and literature (e.g. Hegel, Heidegger and Wittgenstein).

Requirements: short assignments throughout the semester; mid-term and final exams.

The course traces the development of English literature from the beginnings through the early modern period, emphasizing the distinctive cultural orientation dominant in each period and showing how that orientation conditions the way we under-stand representative works of literature. It provides a skeletal framework for the sequence of “periods” in English literature by focusing on major figures and characteristic genre.

WRITTEN ASSIGNMENTS: Two mid-term examinations and a final ex-amination.

REQUIRED TEXT: The Norton Anthology of English Literature. The Major Authors. 8th (or earlier) edition. New York and London: Norton.

This course will provide an overview of American Culture based on written texts from the Colonial Period to the contemporary scene. Material will be drawn from a variety of genres, among them poetry, slave narrative, captivity narrative, autobiography, novel, romance, essay, and short story.
The text for this course is The Norton Anthology of American Literature, Shorter Sixth edition, which is available at the Dyonon.
In addition, we will be reading three full-length novels: Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter (also available at the Dyonon) Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (the full text included in the Norton anthology), and Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby.

The aim of the proseminar is to prepare you for participation in academic seminars and for the writing of seminar papers. You will be required to develop an extended, researched analysis of a literary work assigned in class. This course is designed to teach and rehearse specific skills, such as close reading and analysis of a literary text; defining purposes and terms; problematizing; planning, positioning yourself in an existing interpretive framework and finding your own perspective, addressing and negotiating critical views, developing a coherent critical thesis of your own, summarizing and abstracting; producing a bibliography, sifting evidence; revising purposes, contents, organization, language; editing, etc. The research paper you produce as a result of this course (about 10 pages, or 2000 words) will be your contribution to the ongoing conversation about the literary work. It is due at the end of the semester, but the first draft is submitted halfway through and then revised and expanded through discussions with the instructor and input from other students.

Text: a different primary text every semester.
A good English-English dictionary, such as the Webster’s, Oxford, Random House

Because this is an intensive writing course, please take into account that you will need to set aside between 6 and 8 hours per week for your reading, writing and library research in addition to the 4 hours of class time.

This course aims to examine the development of American fiction from the establishment of the Republic in the last quarter of the eighteenth century to the aftermath of the Civil War. The course will explore the emergence of a distinct American literary tradition, which reflects aspects of an inherent American ideology, as well as the particular aesthetic discourses of the time.
TEXTS will include works by Brockden Brown, Hawthorne, Jacobs, Beecher Stowe.
WRITTEN ASSIGNMENTS: midterm exam or paper, final exam

This course will focus on the period between the world wars, from 1918 through the decades of the 1920's and 1930's.
The literature of this period was marked both by modernist aesthetics and by dramatic social changes in the social fabric caused by reaction to the mass immigration at the beginning of the century and mass migration of African Americans to the North. It also saw the emergence of new voices in literature in terms of region, race, and ethnicity. We will look at the historical, sociological, and political factors that shaped the cultural production of this rich period, including nativism, blackface minstrelsy, dialect, and urbanism. We will discuss the works in the context of modernism as an artistic movement, including formal experimentation in narrative technique and characterization. Among the issues that will be addressed are plots of cross-cultural encounter, inscriptions of the “Other,” the construction of national identity, symbolic geography (such as the frontier, Europe, the urban underground, the South) and the ideological aspects of the representation of race, ethnicity, and gender.

Primary Works (not final):

Willa Cather, My Antonia (1918)
Anzia Yezierska, Bread Givers (1925)
F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (1925)
Nella Larsen, Passing (1929)
William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury (1929)
Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God (1932)
Henry Roth, Call It Sleep (1934)

Critical Works (not final)

Walter Benn Michaels, "The Vanishing American"
Nina Baym, "Melodramas of Beset Manhood"
Horace Kallen, "Democracy versus the Melting Pot"
Werner Sollors, excerpts from Beyond Ethnicity and Neither Black Nor White Yet
Both
Eric Sundquist, excerpt from To Wake the Nations
Hana Wirth-Nesher, excerpt from Call It English

What is pastoral? Is it portrayal of shepherds? Representation of simplicity that is superior to complexity, nature to artifice, rural life to urban values? Why, though it was considered a low genre, as compared to epic and tragedy, has the pastoral endured into modern times? Can Arcadia, a nostalgic portrayal of a Golden Age, be set in the future? Is there such a thing as Utopian pastoral, or should we, in dreaming up opposition to the present, distinguish between the Arcadian perspective, turned towards the past, and the Utopian one, focused on the future, as W.H. Auden has argued?
These are some of the questions that we shall attempt to answer in this course. We shall start with the classical conventions of pastoral, established by Theocritus and Virgil, and trace their elaborate transformations, which take such diverse generic forms as song, eclogue, epithalamium, epic, prose romance and comedy, in major Renaissance pastoral works: Sidney’s Arcadia (excerpts), Spenser’s Shepheards Calendar and The Faerie Queene, Book VI, and Shakespeare’s As You Like It. We shall look at later Renaissance poetry by Milton and Marvell and examine the pastoral influences in such later poets as Pope and Wordsworth. We shall then redefine the pastoral ethos and concerns and trace their presence in 19th – 20th century prose: George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, Willa Cather, Sarah Orne Jewett, Tom Stoppard, Flannery O’Connor, Philip Roth, Annie Proulx. This is a list from which the final selection is still to be determined; if you are interested, you are welcome to contact me at annakis@post.tau.ac.il, and I shall let you know as soon as I have it. I am also still open to suggestions, if you would like me to include a favorite work you believe belongs on the list.

Requirements: a midterm and a final examination, a term paper, oral report and/or quizzes as required; attendance and participation. In your term paper, you will be able to trace the influences of the pastoral in any literary work of your choice (you may also draw relevant parallels with the fields of music or the fine arts, if you have the necessary background), not necessarily from our syllabus.

The Victorian period is considered the pivotal age of the British novel. By the mid-nineteenth century the novel had become the most popular and dominant form of literary writing, attracting a wide reading public of all social classes. In this course we will read three influential works by Emily Brontכ, Charlotte Brontכ, and Charles Dickens from the late 1840s, and discuss the relation of each work, and of the novel as a literary form, to the socio-political and ideological concerns of the period. We will look at the fictional representations of class differences, gender roles, colonial expansion, capitalism, industrialization and urbanization, and examine their connection to narrative devices, to generic choices, and to the construction of character and setting.

Texts:
Emily Brontכ, Wuthering Heights
Charlotte Brontכ, Jane Eyre
Charles Dickens, David Copperfield

Requirements:
A written report on each novel, one home-written paper, and a final exam.

This course will explore the link between Jazz music and 20th century American literature and culture. Listening to musical examples in the class, and reading theoretical work on the politics of aesthetics, the course will offer an introduction to jazz as a basis for literary analysis. Examining texts such as the blues poetry of Langston Hughes, Toni Morrison’s Jazz, Norman Mailer’s “White Negro”, James Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues”, and Philip Roth’s The Human Stain, the course will explore the wide variety of jazz presences in literature. The different writers use jazz differently – as imagery, content, language, and narrative structure – in order to locate themselves in a particular historical, political, social, and aesthetic moment. · Final exam Marks: Attendance & Participation: 20% Paper/Presentation: 20% Final Exam: 60%

Early Modern treatises on English rhetoric attribute the invention of this art to poets. According to Thomas Wilson, the art of remembrance was first invented by the Greek poet Simonides, who was able to call by name the disfigured carcasses of the dead because he remembered the sitting place of each and every one of them. Hence, trauma, memory, and language as the art of naming the dead are deeply interrelated.
In this course we will explore the interrelations between language and death through Early Modern poetry and theorizations of rhetoric, and Freud's writings on war, trauma, mourning, and melancholy. We will examine these interrelations in contemporary representations of trauma, in cinematic visions of the Holocaust, as is Claude Lanzmann's Shoah.
Reading Material: excerpts from Early Modern treatises on rhetoric, poems by Shakespeare, Sir Philip Sidney, Edmund Spenser, and others. Excerpts from Freud's writings.
Requirements: Attendance, participation, reading the required texts and watch the films (be advised, some of the materials are difficult to watch). Two quizzes in class, and a final paper.

This course will trace the development of the theme of the West in American culture and the development of the Western as a distinctly American genre from the Early National period to the present. It will address attendant issues, such as the marking and crossing of borders (geographical borders, borders of genre, borders of identity), the construction of masculine individualism, inter-racial relations, and forms of hybridity.

Requirements: short writing assignments, final exam. Students who wish to enroll in this course are required to attend film screenings in the second half of the semester.

Texts include fiction by James Fenimore Cooper, Bret Harte, Owen Wister, and films by John Ford, Fred Zinnemann, Clint Eastwood.

Canadian literary production blossomed in the second half of the 20th century, at a time when Canadians where searching for an independent national identity. The course will examine samples of the literary production of this period, in relation to their historical and socio/political contexts.
TEXTS will include work by Margaret Atwood, Mavis Gallant, Margaret Laurence, Michael Ondaatje
WRITTEN ASSIGNMENTS: midterm exam or paper, final exam

TEXTS: (subject to revision)
Margaret Atwood: Surfacing; from Bluebeard’s Egg; from Survival; from Good Bones
Margaret Laurence: A Bird in the House; from The Heart of a Stranger
Mavis Galant: selected Stories
Alice Munro: Lives of Girls and Women; from Selected Stories

African American Literature - Sonia Weiner 4 Hour Course This course will consider the emergence of early African American literature in the nineteenth century and its evolvement in the twentieth century. The course will focus on the African American struggle for freedom – from slavery, prejudice and discrimination, as conveyed through a variety of literary texts (slave narratives, autobiographies, short stories, novels and essays). The course will address the various difficulties black authors faced in their endeavor to create a unique voice within the larger American discourse, and will further examine varying attitudes toward identity, race and gender, as conceived by diverse authors at various junctions in the African American discourse

In this course we will read postmodern works of fiction. These texts challenge totalizing thought, and offer in its stead narratives which destabilize notions of continuity, borders, and hierarchies. Postmodern texts engage with the notion of "master narratives" which shape our culture, and question cherished ideas of a unified, located subject. Central to the postmodern project are the notions of "history" and "myth". The texts challenge and question the roles of historical and mythical tales in contemporary society. We will read texts by Salman Rushdie and Don DeLillo, among others, and try to gauge to what extent their novels participate in the postmodern project and to what extent they diverge from it.

Course Requirements:
Active class participation (in class presentations)
Paper
Final exam

The late eighteenth and early nineteenth century was the age of revolution and romanticism. In this course we will read a variety of texts in different genres, ranging from extracts from the key political texts of Edmund Burke and Thomas Paine, to the novels, poetry and drama that responded to and addressed concerns raised by the French Revolution and its aftermath. These texts exemplify the cultural awareness of this period – one of profound political change – and explore many of its central concerns: the place of the individual, the articulation of social oppression, the retreat to nature and the rise of historical and national consciousness. Among the authors we will read are Charlotte Smith, Matthew Lewis, Mary Shelley and Walter Scott.

Requirements:

mid-term paper
final exam
written responses
attendance and participation

The emphasis in this course is on the contemporary drama produced during the past three decades. The plays have been drawn together with a view to exploring certain interconnections in their themes: territory, property, oppression (political and sexual), the boundaries of the 'normative'. In addition we will examine the historical and cultural in each play as written by the playwright; attention will be paid to the cultural and theatrical milieux from which each play arose, and to the varied presentation methods which the writers choose.

Harold Pinter, Betrayal 1978

Caryl Churchill, Top Girls 1982

David Mamet, Oleanna 1992

Sarah Kane, Blasted 1995 ** will now be : Timerberley Wertenbaker Our Country’s Good 1988

This course will begin to explore the image and the persona of the ‘other’ in American poetry. Beginning with Longfellow’s Hiawatha and Walt Whitman’s catalogues of other in “Song of Myself” and ending in the phenomenon of Slam and Rap Poetry. Although the emphasis is on the phenomenon and not the writers, the poets studied will include Emily Dickinson, Langston Hughes, Sharon Olds, Allen Ginsberg, Naomi Shihab Nye, Muriel Rukeyser, Robert Hass, Joy Harjo, and others.

The readings will be available on the Virtual TAU site.

COURSE REQUIREMENTS

There will be a midterm examination, a short paper on a single work, and a final examination.

This course will explore the idea of the monstrous in the English middle ages (approximately 1100 to 1500) and will look at various ways of representing monsters, hybrids, and the unnatural. We will concentrate on medieval ideas about the body, the line between sacred and profane, and the role of the monstrous in the rise of the English as a nation, a culture, and a language. While our work will center on close readings of key texts (including Beowulf, the Dream of the Rood, the Siege of Jerusalem, the Morte d’Arthur, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, the Canterbury Tales, the grail legends, and Spenser’s Faerie Queene) we will also make room for the study of new media materials (such as graphic novels, animated films and websites devoted to our subject), retellings, modern analogues and theoretical works.

Requirements: Two five-page papers and a final exam.

Rhyme is one of the most persistent, mysterious, and salient features of poetry, and has been part of English poetry for hundreds of years. It has been used in many different ways for many different, even contradictory effects. In this class we will read a wide selection of poetry both old and new, and discover both how rhyme works and why it works. We will also read excerpts from theoretical texts about rhyme to help us think through rhyme’s power and paradoxical attributes. As students’ suggestions for rhymed poems to consider are most welcome, we will also look at examples of rhyme outside of poetry.

This course will compare the cultures, histories and literatures of the African and Jewish diasporas. We will seek to understand how and under what circumstances the notion of diaspora has evolved and changed over time within both the black and Jewish communities. In both cases, we will examine how communal memories of oppression have shaped national identities and cultures, and how the vision of a homeland has been used as a tool of political liberation. We will examine literature, film, and visual arts as expressions of collective consciousness and compare the implications of a diasporic consciousness in the evolution of culture among of Africans and Jews over time.

This course will explore Native American identity as imagined and represented by Native and non Native American authors in the twentieth century. Readings will include texts by D’Arcy McNickle, William Faulkner, D. H. Lawrence, N. Scott Momaday, Leslie Marmon Silko, Louise Erdrich, Sherman Alexie and Forrest Carter, written in a variety of genres (short stories, autobiographies, novels, essays). We will contextualizing Native American culture, raise issues concerning identity and authenticity, discuss the relation between oral storytelling and the written text, address the phenomenon of going native, and explore the relation between anthropology and Native American literature.

Requirements:

A short presentation of a critical reading (to be assigned in class) – 20%
Active participation in class discussion – 10%
Final exam – 70%

Autobiography has been identified by American critics of culture as “the essential American genre, a form of writing closely allied to our national self-consciousness” (Jay Prini, The Norton Book of American Autobiography, 11). The course will focus on the affinities as well as the tension between the personal, the historical, and the national identities that this genre has initiated and continues to sustain today. Bearing in mind the origins of the genre in Puritan captivity narratives and accounts of religious awakening, we will read two full-length autobiographies as well as chapter excerpts from all the major contributors to the genre, starting from Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography and concluding with self-writings by Gertrude Stein, Sylvia Plath, Maxine Hong Kingston, and Philip Roth. Beside the historical emphasis on the development of the genre in America, we will also explore a spectrum of theoretical questions related to textual representations of the self-created life, and the ideological and aesthetic purposes that such texts serve.

Texts:

The Norton Book of American Autobiography, ed. Jay Parini.
The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath
Everyman, Philip Roth

Written requirements: four short response papers and a final exam.

How does sexuality manifest itself through poetic form? What are the conceptual relationships between the character, the letter, and the orifice as components at once of the poetic text and of the sexual reality of the unconscious? How do the gaze and the voice as objects of the drive endemic to the artistic object take a poetic form singular to the poet? What is the relation between the rhetorical and the erotic? The course will address these and related questions through an encounter with Shakespeare's major poetic output – The Sonnets, A Lover's Complaint, The Rape of Lucrece – from a formal, rhetorical-linguistic and psychoanalytical (Freudian and Lacanian) perspective, as a key to Shakespeare's poetics at large. The course may be taken as the Shakespare requirement.

Requirements: short assignments in the course of the semester. midterm and final papers.

This course examines the complexities of Jewish American poetry in its delineation as a distinct, ethnic poetic tradition. While this tradition dates back two centuries, scholars are only beginning to understand its unique thematic and formal features. In tandem with theoretical writings in the fields of Jewish American poetry and literature, we will read works by Jewish American poets including Emma Lazarus, Charles Reznikoff, Muriel Rukeyser, Karl Shapiro, Allen Ginsberg, Adrienne Rich, Jerome Rothenberg, Robert Pinsky, Alicia Ostriker, Jacqueline Osherow, and Marge Piercy, among others. Throughout the course we will keep in mind at least one deceivingly simple question: what is Jewish American poetry?

This course studies selected works of two English Renaissance giants: Sir Philip Sidney and Edmund Spenser. On the surface, Sidney, brilliant knight, promising courtier, aristocratic patron of the arts, a living pattern of the humanistic ideal, for whom writing was a trifling pastime in the period of forced inactivity, and the middle-class Spenser, whose best and only ambition was to be England’s first official professional poet laureate – couldn’t differ more. However, they were the two most defining and characteristic figures of their fascinating age, at the avant-garde of the major European intellectual and artistic discoveries. By studying their works and the intricate tissue of the cultural assumptions underlying them, we will gain an insight into the culture and history of late sixteenth-century England.
Readings will include: Sidney's Arcadia and Spenser's The Faerie Queene; Sidney's Defense of Poetry and the sonnet sequence Astrophil and Stella; Spenser's sonnet sequence Amoretti and a selection from The Shepherd's Calendar. Background and critical readings will be posted on our Virtual TAU site.
Requirements: attendance and participation,
a midterm test which may be replaced by short quizzes or reading responses,
a class report,
a term paper
a final exam.

From its earliest days, the genre of science fiction has explored the limits of humanity and how these may be transcended. This course will focus on the recognisable Americanness of a significant subset of the genre, as American writers from the middle of the twentieth century onwards have created alternate geographies, societies, histories, and humanities, to explore contemporary anxieties, politics, and cultural concerns of American society. Central themes explored will be national ideologies and Cold War politics, the city, the suburb, gender, and language as we consider the American Body and how it is perceived, represented, or critiqued in this literature.

“The real war will never get in the books,” Walt Whitman once wrote. And yet few topics have received as extensive a treatment by American literature as the Civil War. In this course we will analyze 19th and 20th-century literary works on slavery, the Civil War, and Reconstruction in an attempt to address questions about the relationship between the literary and the political. Is literature shaped by political debates, and does it shape them in turn? What literary tools are available to writers who are politically committed, and which of these tools is most ethical or effective? How do writers give shape to a chaotic and traumatic historical event, and to what political purposes? How is the American literary canon itself shaped by political considerations?

Requirements: short writing assignments, final exam. Students who wish to enroll in this course are required to attend film screenings in the second half of the semester.

Texts include: Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom's Cabin; Frederick Douglass, The Heroic Slave; Stephen Crane, The Red Badge of Courage; Margaret Mitchell, Gone with the Wind.

This course will examine New York as a Real and Symbolic 'Locus' in Yiddish American Literature. It will address the main aspects of the Jewish New York experience as reflected in the writings of Yiddish poets and writers of prose fiction, and to trace the various levels of significance the "place" assumed in their works.
The course will have four foci: a) the New York ambience through the eyes of the immigrants (possible texts for discussion: a selection from Morris Rozenfeld's "Sweat-Shop" poetry; a selection from Moyshe Leyb Halpern's "In New York" [both Hebrew and Yiddish translations are available), and the Yoysef Opatoshu's first New York novella: "In New-Yorker Ghetto." If time allows, we will also discuss David Ignatov's short novel :"In Kessl Grub," a unique attempt to refract the Immigrants' experience through the prism of Symbolist prose. b) problems of acculturation. The main text would be Sholem Asch's "East River," in many ways the author's best creation as well as the most intriguing New York "epic", where a social history of the Jewish garment industry in New york, a rivetting family saga and an exploration of the themes of faith, agnosticism, Jewish-Christian interactions and the emergence of a particular kind of an American-New Yorkish Jewish sainthood (as distinguised from the European-Hasidic brand) are dexterously intertwined.c) New York of the Inzikhistn: a small anthology of New York poems by A.G.Leyeles, Y. Glatshteyn, J.L.Teller and B. Alkvit would be discussed. Perhaps also a chapter or two from Glatshteyn's Yash novels. D) "Hard Boiled" Jewish New York of the Great Depression. Main texts: B. Demblin's "West Side" and Berish Vaynshteyn "Brukhvarg."

This seminar explores the period in poetry from 1890 to World War II through the poetic work of William Butler Yeats. Using other poets for orientation, such as T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, we will trace the development of Yeats’ models for poetry and life.

PRIMARY TEXTS:
The readings will be available on the Virtual TAU site.

SEMINAR REQUIREMENTS:
In addition to a referat, students will be expected to present a poem from the schedule in class and discuss it in relation to the general topic of the seminar. This presentation, in outline form, will be submitted in writing to the instructor before the class. The grade will also be composed of active class participation.

Few literary conventions teach us as much about the culture that produced them as the coming-of-age plot. In charting the transition from childhood to adulthood, this plot explores the most basic definitions governing normative identity in a given social setting. For many years, however, discussion of this genre focused on male-authored texts, from Wilhelm Meister and David Copperfield, to Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and The Catcher on the Rye. This seminar will center, instead, on female-authored coming-of-age stories, and will address such questions as: what happens to this genre when it is appropriated by women? How is the "adult woman" defined in different historical moments? Are there common threads (mother-daughter relations, conflict between love and labor, paths of socialization and resistance) that connect older and contemporary writing about female maturation?
Requirements: active participation, preparation of study questions and oral presentation, and a seminar paper.
Texts will include works of fiction by Louisa May Alcott, Carson McCullers, Katherine Anne Porter, Sylvia Plath, and others.

The seminar will focus on the ability of literary texts to pose difficult questions, and to explore possible answers to these questions. We will also consider how to ask questions about literary texts. Our work will focus on themes raised by John Milton and some of his contemporaries in the seventeenth-century, many of which are still relevant to modern culture, such as religious fundamentalism, marriage and divorce, Christian Hebraism, religious violence and the allocation of rights in democratic societies. Readings for this course will be drawn from texts by Milton (including Paradise Lost, Areopagitica, and Samson Agonistes), by other seventeenth-century English writers (including George Herbert, John Donne, Rachel Speght, and John Selden), and from current writing on these subjects (by Robert Alter, Tariq Ali, Hirsan Ali, and others).

This seminar will examine the poetry of the late Victorian period, tracing the development of the spirit of decadence from Rossetti and Swinburne to Oscar Wilde and Yeats. We will examine some of the moral, ethical, romantic and aesthetic problems facing the aesthetic and decadent poetry. In addition to the spirit of the end-of-century weariness, we will examine the continuing development of poetic forms, such as the sonnet sequence and the dramatic monologue, particularly in their relation to the social and moral issues of the period.


PRIMARY TEXTS:
The readings will be available on the Virtual TAU site.

SEMINAR REQUIREMENTS:
In addition to a referat, students will be expected to present a poem from the schedule in class and discuss it in relation to the general topic of the seminar. This presentation, in outline form, will be submitted in writing to the instructor before the class. The grade will also be composed of active class participation.

This seminar examines fiction written by American women writers in the second part of the 20th century. Their fiction reflects the diversity inherent in the contemporary scene of cultural pluralism. We will examine their different racial ethnic and regional affiliation, as well elements they share as American and as Women.
TEXTS will include works Flannery O’Connor, Grace Paley, Alice Walker, Bharati Mukherjee, and Jamaica Kincaid.
REQUIREMENTS: class attendance and participation, short papers, referat or seminar paper.

Freud's "Mourning and Melancholy" is seminal to Freud's conceptualization of melancholy as an affect which is an effect on the ego of the loss of a highly cathected object that becomes identified with the primal lost object. In his return to Freud, Jacques Lacan stressed that the stakes of this affect are real, that is, pertaining to what is beyond the pleasure principle and beyond representation, while also pointing out this affect's ethical dimension: it's being an instance of ethical cowardice. Literature throughout the ages bears traces of melancholic suffering, Lacan himself using the literary example of Hamlet to theorize melancholy at the conclusion of his tenth seminar. In this seminar, we will articulate Freud's theorization of melancholy in "Mourning and Melancholia," in its resonance with the metapsychology of Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Lacan's comments on mourning and melancholy (in seminar 10 and in seminar 6 on Desire and its Interpretation, which includes an extensive reading of Hamlet), together with the Shakespearen texts and other examples from the arts (e.g. the novels of Virginia Woolf, the visual art of Van Gogh) in an effort to learn in what way the melancholy impacts the structure (not content and theme) of the artistic object, i.e. what is a melancholic art object, and in what ways can the aesthetic specifics of art objects enrich the psychoanalytic conceptualization of the structure of melancholy and its relation to the signifier and the real.
Requirements: five responses to the theoretical material, referat or seminar paper

Lacan's late teaching is marked by a transition from linguistics to topology as a conceptual grid for the thinking of the psyche. Since the Saussurean-Jakobsonian dimension of Lacan's teaching accounted both for his own frequent turns to the literary (e.g. in the seminar on Poe's "Purloined Letter") and for the initial interest his teaching aroused in the English-speaking world, it might seem that this transition widens the schism between the already heterogeneous fields of psychoanalysis and literature. However, Lacan's turn to topology is accompanied by his most sustained treatment of literary texts and the question of literature itself, in relation to the art of James Joyce (in "Lituraterre" {Seminar 18] and the 23rd seminar on the sinthome). What is the relevance of psychoanalytical topology to the study of literature? How can Lacan's directives about topology be developed to bear on macrostructural (e.g. narrative) and macrostructural (e.g. style and rhetoric) dimensions of the literary text? In this seminar, we will explore the consequences of Lacan's topological thinking, especially in the Joyce seminar, for the study of literary texts and the reflection on the category of the literary itself. We will explore these and other questions by articulating Lacan's texts together with the literary texts of James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Shakespeare, and others,.

Requirements: five analytical responses to theoretical material; referat or seminar paper.

The topic of "ethnicity" in American Literature has become subsumed in recent years by the discourses of race and culture. We will return to the concept of ethnic literature as central to discussions of American writing and American identity, and will examine ethnicity in relation to language, race, religion, nationality, and immigration. We will discuss ethnicity within the framework of transnational approaches to American literature, as well as its representation through dialect, voice, and modernist experimentation. Readings will span the twentieth century, from Edith Wharton and Gertrude Stein at the beginning of the century, to Willa Cather, Nella Larsen, and D'arcy McNickle in the interwar years, to the contemporary writing of Philip Roth and Achy Obejas.

Primary Readings:

Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth
Gertrude Stein, "Melanctha" (from Three Lives)
Anzia Yezierska, Salome of the Tenements
Nella Larsen, Passing
Willa Cather, The Professor's House
Philip Roth, American Pastoral

Tentatively:
D'Arcy McNickle, The Surrounded
Achy Obejas, Days of Awe

Theoretical and Critical Readings to be announced.

Canada has been defined as a country of multiple borderlines - geographical, sociopolitical and cultural. The course aims to explore these borderlines as contributing to the structuring of Canadian selfhood. We will focus on texts by women writers of the post WWII era, among them Margaret Laurence, Margaret Atwood Joy Kogawa, Carol Shields and Dionne Brand in the attempt to understand the relation between the search for a distinctive Canadian national and cultural self-image and the revisioning of female selfhood.
REQUIREMENTS: Active participation, written critical responses, class presentation, referat.

This seminar will explore the growing field of masculinity studies in the context of American culture and history. The first part of the semester will be devoted to a critical examination of some theories about masculinity originating from men's studies, feminist theory, psychoanalytical thought, and cultural studies. Topics will include: the masculinity/femininity binary, relations between men, the father-son plot, masculinity in relation to emotion and violence, and the male body. In the subsequent parts, we will trace the development of fictions of masculinity in the US, from the Early Republic to the present.
Requirements: active participation, preparation of critical questions, two short reports, a referat paper.

How do works of Jewish American writers serve as sites of cross cultural translation? We will discuss the artistic strategies, cultural dynamics, and the politics of translation as these are exemplified in texts that mediate between cultures in terms of language, religion, and ethnicity. Among the many aspects of cross cultural translation, we will be emphasizing the place of Hebrew in Jewish American writing: as icon, typeface, transliteration, intertext, liturgy, ethnic and religious signifier. Readings will be drawn from Sholem Aleichem, Lamed Shapiro, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Saul Bellow, Cynthia Ozick, Grace Paley, Michael Chabon, Dara Horn, Henry Roth, Gilles Rozier, and others. Theoretical readings will draw on Walter Benjamin, David Damrosch, Naomi Seidman, George Steiner, Geoffrey Hartman, and others