The League of David

School's Out: Second Level of Hell: Cornell

Here's another issue of School's Out.  It's the League's ongoing series exploring the "excellence" of our elite English Departments.  There was a time when the study of liberal arts meant a deep and broad knowledge of the greatest fruits of civilization. 

Not any more.

Here are  a few course offerings from one of our "second tier" elite schools:  Cornell.

WARNING:  This school offers so many insipid, PC-laden, post-structuralist-inspired triviality that I just can't add them all here.  Follow the links to get a good idea of how bad it really is at our "elite" schools.

Cornell University, Undergraduate

276 Desire

Sexual desire may be seen as a series of scripted performances, a set of stories we tell ourselves about ourselves. Through a critical discussion of "these pleasures which we lightly call physical," to borrow a phrase from the French novelist Colette, we might discover a deeper appreciation for the strange narrative of someone else's desire, and perhaps even the strange narrative of our own. We will begin with the theory that desire has a history, even a literary history, and we will examine classic texts in some of its most influential modes: Platonic, Christian, romantic, decadent, psychoanalytic, feminist, and queer. This course is an introductory survey of European dramatic texts from Plato and Aristophanes to Jean Genet and Caryl Churchill; and it is also a survey of the most influential trends in modern sexual theory and sexual politics, including the work of Freud, Foucault, Barthes, and various feminists and queer theorists. Topics for discussion will include Greek pederasty, sublimation, hysteria, sadomasochism, homosexuality, pornography, cybersex, feminism, and other literary and performative pleasures, and the focus will always be on expanding our critical vocabulary for considering sex and sexual desire as a field of intellectual inquiry. Letter grade only.

263 Studies in Film Analysis: Monsters and Misfits: Hollywood's Misogynist Myths of Women

Exploring a series of (mostly) Hollywood films, we will consider the cultural, political, sexual and psychological implications of conservative myths which demonize women in film. Mainstream misfits and monstrous mothers, love-lorn ladies and sermonizing suffragettes, language-lacking loners and marriage-mangling marauders, vampires and aliens: All film genres make room to exclude misfits, co-opt them back into the circle, or define community norms in opposition to them. We will view, discuss, and read about such films as The Piano Teacher, The Hand that Rocks the Cradle, Psycho,The Manchurian Candidate (two versions), Safe, The Piano, Far From Heaven, The Searchers, Alien, Gilda, Fatal Attraction,The Stepford Wives (two versions), The Haunting, Carrie, Boys Don't Cry, and The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant.

342 Themes in African/Diasporic Writing: The Afro-Europeans: Black Diaspora in Europe

Beyond the borders of North America, other long-established Black communities are articulating their own social, cultural, and political forms of Black Diaspora identity and consciousness. What are the histories and shared experiences of Blacks in Europe--in this course, specifically Britain, France, Germany, and the Netherlands--with those in Canada, the Caribbean and the U.S.? How do realities of those Afro-European populations shape their definitions of Black Diaspora? Readings in the course will consist of literary texts as well as autobiographies.

374 Slavery in 20th Century American Film and Fiction

This course explores twentieth century preoccupations and reconstructions of slavery, examining the ways slavery continues to define and impact sexuality, racial identities and their popular representations, our sense of public and private spaces, legal discourse, and our national identity.   What does it mean to be a black or white man or woman in America? Whom does law, history, and society concede as legitimate witness? How should we craft our histories?   Who is a subject of, and who is subjected to law?   How are privacy interests diffused against social interests: what are a (black) woman's reproductive rights (in the age of contraceptive options and abortion)? How do desires materialize and how are they materially denied?   Our readings will place in close proximity not only historical writings on slavery (slave history and slave narratives) and these 20th century revisionist slave stories, but slave law and contemporary immigration, property, reproduction, criminal, and privacy legislation.

Cornell University, Graduate

654 Queer Theory

The only thing better than having sex is theorizing about it. In an effort to provide us with a more sophisticated language with which to analyze sexuality in literature and culture, this course will offer an introduction to the most influential theoretical trends in the field of queer theory, the radical deconstruction of sexual rhetoric. We will consider various foundational texts of queer theory from the late 80's and 90's, but we will also explore new directions that the theorization of sexuality has taken in the past few years. In the final few weeks, we will discuss recent debates about sexual politics with reference to critical race theory, the transgender movement, marriage, pornography, pedagogy, and child-abuse scandals. Among those theorists discussed will be Sigmund Freud, Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, Gayle Rubin, Leo Bersani, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Judith Butler, James Kincaid, Jane Gallop, Douglas Crimp, and Michael Warner.

657 Modernism and Feminism

This class begins from two sources of first-wave feminist theory and narrative in Great Britain: the suffrage movement and the notorious "problem plays" of Henrik Ibsen. Beginning from readings of A Doll's House and Hedda Gabler, along with commentaries on the London productions, we will explore Bernard Shaw's appropriations of Ibsen, the development of the suffrage narrative in novels by Elizabeth Robins and short stories by Evelyn Sharpe, and other "problem" novels by Mona Caird , H.G. Wells and May Sinclair. When we move to a second and in some respects "postfeminist" group of modernist writers—especially Virginia Woolf, Dorothy Richardson and H.D.—we will consider in particular how the legacy of feminist writing might provide insight into their particular modernisms. The last readings will be Joanna Russ's 1970s classic How to Suppress Women's Writing and a late twentieth-century "problem play" by Wendy Wasserstein.

672 Islands of Globalization

This interdisciplinary course examines theories of globalization and modernity in relation to the cultural production of the Caribbean and Pacific Islands. By drawing upon diverse fields such as cultural, environmental, literary, and postcolonial studies, we will explore why particular spaces are associated with the production of history and examine how even the smallest islands have contributed to world modernity. We will draw from studies in environmental imperialism to complicate the myth of the isolated tropical isle and place this in a dialogue with contemporary island tourism. By engaging what Kamau Brathwaite calls the constant "tidalectic" between land and sea, we'll consider how the history and geography of island spaces help deepen our understanding of home, nation, and transoceanic migration. Derek Walcott's suggestion that "the sea is history" will be considered in relation to indigenous, creole, and diaspora island literatures. This course will be taught in collaboration with the Islands of Globalization project hosted at the University of Hawai'i. Depending on interest, we might organize a visit to their campus during spring break.

 

School's Out: "Excellence" at Our Ivy League Schools

I haven't been following the Harriet Miers fiasco because I've been busy with life, and Miers doesn't really matter.  Honest.  It might seem like it, but she's not that important.  However, since gloomy Rod Dreher announced the coming of the Great Will Column that intended, in his words, to silence the opposition to the opposition to Ms. Miers, I've been waiting with bated breath for Mr. Will's staggering crie de coeur, his column to end all columns. 

Well, All Things Beautiful has an excellent response to Mr. Will's Column To End all Columns.  Carol Platt Liebau does, as well.  As for George Will, let me tell you a secret:  I've seen this bespeckled, pot-marked jerk up close and personal, and I wasn't impressed.  Unlike Hugh Hewitt, I'm not willing to give him the credit he doesn't deserve.  He's a pompous bore.  He eats French food and writes with the sort of dramatic, "insightful" voice that makes people yawn after a few sentences.  He gets all the Sunday column space, because the liberal elites like him.  He's one of them, with a bow-tie.

However, since Mr. Will and his supporters in the opposition adorn their elitism as a defense of excellence, I thought I'd continue my exploration of what is being taught at our nation's "elite" schools, where grade inflation and "legacy" students (read: nepotism) are standard practice.    I began the other day at Harvard, now I'm turning my attention to the English Departments at Princeton and Yale.

NOTE:  Readers get extra points for counting the number of times quotation marks are used senselessly.

 

From the English Department at Princeton:

ENG 383/AFS 383
Topics in Literature and Nationality: Writing Race and Nation: The South African Example
Description/Objectives:
What is a nation? We will examine the ways in which the nation is imagined, debated, and deconstructed in literary form. We will focus on the example of South Africa where questions of race and nation are historically and culturally entangled and have, for that reason, generated a literary culture that has produced winners of major literary prizes, including the Nobel and Booker Prizes. We will also examine how the national imaginary and literature are connected across time and space and how the process of political change transforms literary culture.

The Victorians: Sociability and Its Discontents
Description/Objectives:
In this course we will survey a range of more or less familiar literature, criticism and theory. Our broadest aim will be to find out what the nineteenth century novel has to teach us about how people are drawn into modern society and how they draw away from it. Our list of writers will include Austen, Dickens, Eliot, Thackeray, Wilde, Trilling, Foucault, Marx, Durkheim, Simmel and Goffman.

ENG 563
Poetics: Poetry, Metaphysics and the Environment
Description/Objectives:
This theoretical course will approach poetry in general and in relation to environmental fact. It will consider changing metaphysical assumptions and, following Vico's New Science, will treat the question of "poetic wisdom." We ask, regarding individual authorship and ideological constraints, "Is eco-criticism via viable?" Our texts will include earlier authors such as Tennyson, Hopkins, Dickinson and Whiteman, along with more recent poets.

ENG 572/COM 572
Selected Topics in Criticism and Theory: Derrida: Ethics, History, Politics
Description/Objectives:
This course aims to introduce students to the ethical, historical, and political dimensions of Jacques Derrida's thought and writings. Engaging contemporary critical debates over the politics and ethics of deconstruction, it will seek to understand the ways in which Derrida's meditations on language and literature open onto questions of ethics, history, and politics. We will be reading several of Derrida's most well-known books as well as his essays on the university, law, religion, democracy, nationalism, psychoanalysis, and the war on terror.

TheLeague notes:  Good God! The Philosopher Frog lives!

From the English Department at Yale

ENGL 285a, U.S. LITERATURE IN THE ELECTRIC AGE
Nineteenth and twentieth century U.S. literature and the history of technology, with an interest in how innovations like the telegraph and the electric chair, the automobile and the radio have transformed the literary imagination..."I sing the body electric"--Walt Whitman's famous line uses modern technology to imagine the power of modern poetry. This course reads Whitman and several other well-known U.S. writers with an eye toward the technological transformations that have generated the imaginative world of modernity. How do the telegraph and the electric chair, the automobile and the radio inform the American scene as writers have conceived it? Can the experimental literary forms of "modernism" be understood as technologies designed to transform social life? How does literature, a relatively old-fashioned medium, adjust to the explosion of new, hi-tech media in the twentieth century? The course has two mascots: Thomas Edison, whose electric innovations promised Americans new, sometimes shocking, forms of contact with each other; and Harry Houdini, whose escape stunts explored the dynamism, the mobility, of a modern society where old geographical and social divides appeared to be losing their hold. Attending to history, however, doesn't mean forgetting about the details of literary texts--only close and careful reading will reveal the subtleties at the contact point of literature and technology.

ENGL 328a, FICTION WITHOUT BORDERS
"The dream of the great American novel is past," Maxine Hong Kingston declared in 1989. "We need to write the Global novel." But what does it mean to write a global novel? Examining contemporary fiction from the United States, South Asia, South Africa, China, and Britain, we will explore the changing relationships between literature and globalization.

In particular, this course will focus on three sets of questions. First, how do these novels address the social, political, and economic changes that we associate with contemporary globalization? We will ask how phenomena such as migration, travel, social reform, transnational communication, consumerism, and expanding capital markets influence our ideas about what it means to be global. We will discuss not only how novels portray the nuances of increasingly transnational lives, but also how these novels themselves shape transnational experiences for their readers.

Second, how do novels attempt to represent worlds that are often quite different from the cultural locations of their authors? Writing about other people and places has often been seen as a way of asserting power over them, and thus the idea of "fiction without borders" can be considered a project fraught with ethical difficulty. We will explore literary and philosophical defenses of the need to imagine others, asking if novels with global aspirations can adequately evade the common charge of imperialist, Orientalist, or primitivist representations.

Third, what is the relationship between a novel's literary form and its portrait of globalization? This course will examine different aesthetic approaches to the problem of global fiction, ranging from realist novels to multilingual texts to works that play with the boundaries of fiction. We will discuss the consequences of particular stylistic and formal choices, and we will question how those choices might imply or invent specific global readerships.

ENGL 345a, ORIENTALISM
This course introduces students to English and American representations of the East, the Orient, or Islam, often referred to as "Orientalism." The emphasis will be placed on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literary works that imagine the Orient as a holy site of Christian pilgrimage, an allegory of unrestrained sensuality and fantasy, and a discursive mirror against which English and American traditions measure their own distinction and progress. Reading poems, plays, novels, and travel narratives inspired by the translation of The Arabian Nights, we will examine the ways in which this epic shaped several Anglo-American genres and forms. A comparison between British and American authors will allow us to demonstrate how the latter drew on Eastern cultural traditions (e.g., mysticism and soufism) to liberate their writing from European cultural hegemony on the one hand, and counter the rigid precepts of Puritanism, on the other. Theoretical works by major critics of Orientalism will be discussed throughout the course to help students understand how literature is both critical of and complicit with the discourses of power such as imperialism and capitalism. One of the main objectives of the course is to expose students to the problems of "interpretation" in cross-cultural contexts: the representation of unfamiliar cultures and geographies; the patterns of exoticist and stereotypical thinking; the textual construction of identity and difference; East-West interactions; and the possibilities of dialogue across diverse literary and cultural traditions.

ENGL 347a, CONTEMPORARY SOUTH ASIAN FICTION
Contemporary fiction by writers of South Asian birth or descent. Issues of identity, modernity, empire, and history as well as of narrative and linguistic experimentation. Authors include V.S. Naipaul, Salman Rushdie, Amitav Ghosh, Hanif Kureishi, Rohinton Mistry, Arundhati Roy, Bapsi Sidwa, and Jhumpa Lahiri.

ENGL 354a, LITERATURE OF FRIENDSHIP
One of modernity's great untold stories is the rise of friendship to a preeminent position in social imagination and practice. As the anthropologist Robert Brain has written, "We are friends with everyone" now: parents, co-workers, teachers, etc. Whereas friendship was once a relatively unimportant relationship, clearly subordinate to family, feudal, and other more formal, stable, and hierarchical ties, over the past two centuries it has become the relationship in terms of which all others are understood, against which they are all measured, into which they have all dissolved. It has become, in other words, the characteristically modern form of relationship. New types of friendship have emerged, and new ways of thinking about old types: with feminism, the emergence of equal friendships between men and women, as well as friendships between married couples; with the rise of a visible gay culture, changes in the way non-sexual friendships between men are lived and understood: with the emergence of youth culture, a new emphasis on group friendships.

This course will explore some of these changes through their expression in British and American literature. The main emphasis will be on fiction, with some attention to poetry, essays, and film. The syllabus will include some or all of the following: poems by Wordsworth, Jane Austen's Emma, essays by Emerson and Thoreau, Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure, D.H. Lawrence's Women in Love, E.M. Forster's Passage to India, Virginia Woolf's The Waves, Mary McCarthy's The Group, Michael Cunningham's A Home at the End of the World, and John Sayles's The Return of the Secaucus 7.

I haven't even reached the graduate courses yet.   Here are a few:

ENGL 925a, AMERICAN LITERATURE AND WORLD RELIGIONS
Beginning with Cabeza de Vaca and Olaudah Equiano as instances of Christianity in the Atlantic world, this course studies the extension, migration, and transformation of world religions-Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, and their folk variants-within the context of American literature, challenging the standard account of an exclusively Puritan heritage. Readings range from Emerson and Thoreau to Henry Adams, Willa Cather, Malcolm X, Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, Amy Tan, and Bharati Mukherjee. Also AMST 925a, CPLT 529a.

ENGL 801a, VICTORIAN PROSE: THE CONDITIONS OF ENGLAND
In Past and Present (1843), Thomas Carlyle announced, "The Condition of England…is justly regarded as one of the most ominous, and withal one of the strangest, ever seen in the world." Although there was no more a single "Condition of England" in the nineteenth century than there was one unified Victorian period, Carlyle's statement does epitomize the conflicts and excesses both of Victorian culture and of the prose that charted its contradictions. Starting with Carlyle's Sartor Resartus and ending with Morris's News from Nowhere, this course will examine the art and rhetoric of Victorian nonfictional prose by focusing on two of its characteristic tensions-between social criticism and personal experience and between fact and fiction. Readings will include canonical texts-Carlyle's Past and Present, Mill's On Liberty and Autobiography, Newman's Apologia pro Vita Sua, Arnold's Culture and Anarchy, and selections of Ruskin's works from Modern Painters to Praeterita-as well as periodical essays by such women writers as Cobbe and Linton and working-class contributions to the debates on the "factory question" by Brown and Dodd. As an example of the fictional techniques often mined by these writers as they explored the various conditions of England, two monthly numbers of Dickens's Bleak House will also be assigned during each of the ten central weeks of the semester. (Students are encouraged to read Bleak House in its entirety before the beginning of the course so that the weekly assignments of the novel may offer them the pleasures and advantages of rereading.)

The last part is the best.  "Students are encouraged" to read Bleak House in its entirety.  How about...they read Bleak House and study Dickens in a class on Dickens,.

Excellence at work, foks.  Excellence at work.

Next week, I'll descend into the second level of "elite" school status...the dreaded Tier Two Ivy League schools.

School's Out: Harvard

This is the first in a series on the neo-Marxist, froggy-philosophizing, politically correct mish-mash that supposedly passes as English studies at today's universities.

I'll start this series with the English department at our top-ranked university, Harvard.  According to the common-volk at National Review online, it's important to have credentials from this university in order to be a Supreme Court justice. 

Let's see what our future Supreme Court justices will be reading.   Keep on scrolling, they grow more absurd the further down you go.

Art of Dying
English 90ad
How is dying an art? And how is it learned in advance? Handbooks, poems and plays from before 1600 speak, solemnly or cheerfully, of contemplating death, dying, and the dead as vital to individual and communal living. We'll examine the imagination of death in pre-modern literary culture: death as performance or aesthetics; grave humor; death in language, politics, and fashioning identity.

Money and Literature
English 90ml
Money and language as means of representation, exchange, and production. Principal literary texts include works by Shakespeare, Melville, Poe, Thoreau, Ruskin, Joyce, and Martineau as well as attention to novels where a coin is the narrator and to coins inscribed with poetic epigrams. Special consideration of the economics of literature from Aristotle to Heidegger, the relationship between monetary and aesthetic form in visual arts and cinema, and various theories of money as social fiction.

Sex and Sensibility in the Enlightenment
English 146
How Enlightenment theories of moral sensibility and physical susceptibility shaped categories of sex and gender. Topics include theories of sexual difference and sexual identity; the rise of the conjugal couple; libertine writings and the “invention of pornography.” Readings range from the scandalous Eliza Haywood to the respectable Samuel Richardson, from Cleland’s Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure to Austen’s Sense and Sensibility, including conduct books, medical treatises and trial records.

Imperialism and Victorian Literature
English 156x
By 1830 a quarter of the world population lived within British territories. For some Victorians, colonial expansion constituted a moral imperative, a mission to "civilize" the world. Others were ambivalent about the empire that Britain had created. This course explores how Victorian writers viewed the world beyond their shores: how they perceived colonial possessions, how they justified or confronted imperialist violence, how they viewed competing and emergent imperial powers.

The Postcolonial Classic
English 166x
This lecture course will explore the idea of a classic work in the postcolonial, global era. It surveys literary, cultural, and political works that illustrate the relationship between aesthetic values and questions of cultural citizenship. Works read may include Gandhi, Fanon, Sartre, Mandela, Rudyard Kipling, Joseph Conrad, James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, Nadine Gordimer, Salman Rushdie, V.S. Naipaul, John Coetzee.

Postcolonial Narratives
English 167p
An investigation of the major concerns, paradigms, and quarrels within postcolonial literary studies. While reading authors such as Achebe, Conrad, Dabydeen, Dangarembga, Ghosh, Phillips, Rushdie, and Salih, we shall pay close attention to the continuities and the discontinuities of the postcolonial experience as represented in literary texts from Africa, the Caribbean, and South Asia.

Literature of Migration and Ethnicity: The Case of the United States
English 196
How have migration and ethnic diversity affected the American literary landscape? Is the stress on ethnic diversity a form of resistance to, or a feature of modernity? Such questions, complemented by ethnic theory, inform discussions of books ranging from The Life Stories of Undistinguished Americans to Mary Antin’s The Promised Land and of authors from Richard Rodriguez and Jamaica Kincaid to Gish Jen and Sherman Alexie.

Literary Ecosystems
English 198x
From the extermination of the dodo to the search for the birthplace of the eel, writers have been writing about the relationship between human beings and the natural world for centuries. This lecture-workshop offers an immersion in environmental writing, in fiction and non-fiction, from the 18th century onwards. Participants will be expected to develop writing projects of their own, centered on environmental themes, and in forms of their choosing.

Culture and Its Wars
"Freshman Seminar"
The term "culture," referring to the distinctive values, products, and practices of a group, is only a little more than two hundred years old, and almost as soon as it appeared, it became a fighting term. Folk culture versus elite culture, high culture versus mass culture, "Culture and Anarchy," "Culture and Ideology," "Culture and Society," cultural pluralism, multiculturalism, the culture wars: these are some of the terms of dispute. The stakes in these arguments have seemed enormous. But what is a culture? Can you point to it, measure it, evaluate it? How do you interpret it? Are there "bad" and "good" cultures, healthy cultures and deformed cultures? Do people's cultural tastes and preferences matter to the quality of their lives or the condition of the polity? The seminar will begin by looking at the emergence of the term and at some of the uses to which it was put in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Then, we will discuss the anthropological literature on culture, specifically the work of Claude Levi-Strauss, Clifford Geertz, Marshall Sahlins, and James Clifford. We will examine the public debates over mass culture and popular culture, in the nineteen fifties and nineteen sixties, and over cultural pluralism and multiculturalism, in the nineteen seventies and nineteen eighties. We will end by considering, through a look at the political science literature, the usefulness of the notion of a red-state/blue- state "culture war" in explaining the behavior of the American electorate today. Student projects will involve an analysis of a contemporaneous public debate in cultural terms

American Protest Literature from Tom Paine to Tupac
Lit & Arts, A-86
This interdisciplinary course examines the rich tradition of protest literature in the US from the American Revolution to the rise of Hip Hop and globalization. Using a broad definition of "protest literature," it focuses on the production and consumption of dissent as a site of progressive social critique, using a wide variety of print, visual, and oral forms. We examine the historical links between modes of protest and meanings of literature, and explore how various expressions of dissent function as aesthetic, performative, rhetorical, and ideological texts within specific cultural contexts. "Readings" range from novels to photographs and music.

Literary Theory in the Life of Literature: Graduate Seminar
English 298
Interactions between concepts central to literary theory-genre and `textuality', writing and `difference', ethics and interpretation, narrative and cultural translation-and literature embodying such concerns. Barthes, Habermas, Derrida, Lacan, Carey, Forster, Ghosh, Morrison, Rushdie, others.

School's Out

Independent Women's Forum has yet another example of why academics are dangerous fools, trivializing once-honored humanities disciplines for no other reason than that it feeds their bottomless need for attention:

Two professors who claim to be teaching the humanities at well-repected universities, Olga Gershenson of the University of Massachusetts-Amherst and Barbara Penner of University College-London are calling for papers for a book they’re editing titled "Toilet Papers: The Gendered Construction of Public Toilets."

More here.