Plus: George Saunders's Pastoralia, Tom McCarthy's Remainder, W.G. Sebald's The Rings of Saturn, JG Ballard's The Atrocity Exhibition, readings from Orwell, and Richard Yates's Eleven Kinds of Loneliness.

Course Description:

What does 'having a sensibility', literary or otherwise, mean? Is it something one acquires, something innate, or something else again? We're going to read a selection of very good 20th century novels (and one book of poems) concentrating on whatever is most particular to them, in the hope that this might help us understand whatever is most particular to us. The reading list is long* and heterogeneous in the hope of encouraging sympathy for a broad range of literary sensibilities regardless of what our own natural inclinations may be. Students will give short presentations, and at the end of the course will write a piece of fiction, or a piece of literary criticism, of at least five pages.

The course will be punctuated by secondary readings of literary criticism and philosophy.

* Most of the novels are short.

W. H. Auden's syllabus for English 135 at the University of Michigan during the 1941-42 academic year [via Alan Jacobs]:

Susan Howe's syllabus for Poetics: Sexuality and Space in 17th - 19th Century American Literature, 1996 [via SUNY at Buffalo]

SYLLABUS English 3 9 : Professor Susan Howe. Spring 1996. Thursdays 3:30-6:30 pm.

Though we wander about,

find no honey of flowers in this waste,

is our task the less sweet-

who recall the old splendour,

await the new beauty of cities?

The city is peopled

with spirits, not ghosts, O my love:

Though they crowded between

and usurped the kiss of my mouth

their breath was your gift,

their beauty, your life.

H.D. from "Cities" (Sea Gardens)

Who knows the curious mystery of the eyesight? The other senses corroborate themselves, but this is removed from any proof but its own and foreruns the identities of the spiritual world. A single glance of it mocks all the investigations of man and all the instruments and books of the earth and all reasoning.

The great poet forms the consistence of what is to be from what has been and is. He drags the dead out of their coffins and stands them again on their feet. . . . he says to the past, Rise and walk before me that I may realize you. He learns the lesson. . . . he places himself where the future becomes present.

Walt Whitman-from Preface to Leaves of Grass

We will begin by examining the literature of Puritan New England. During the 17th century, women, figured as converts, heretics, captives, goodwives, and witches.; indeed Puritan women and young girls were simultaneously represented as embodiments of exemplary virtue and deplorable deviance. We will explore a variety of genres-conversion narratives, captivity narratives, heresiographies, trial transcripts, diaries.