James Horowitz

Before the 18th century was dubbed the Enlightenment, it was widely known as the Age of Criticism—a term that captures the growing cultural influence, not least in the English-speaking world, of largely secular commentary on society, politics, morality, and the arts. Suddenly, everyone was a critic, eager to express their opinions in one of the many sites for conversation and debate that were blossoming across Britain and its colonies. Those sites included institutions with brick-and-mortar locations—coffeehouses, taverns, and private clubs—but also the virtual forums made possible by the increasingly inescapable medium of print; parallels to our own social media-dazed era are easy to draw. With the Age of Criticism came a new kind of celebrity: the public intellectual. No man of letters was more renowned for his powers of criticism, conversation, and what he called “clubbability” than Samuel Johnson (1709-84), the gravitational center of our course. In addition to compiling the first English dictionary of note, Johnson was a gifted and hugely influential literary theorist, poet, political commentator, biographer, and satirist, as well as a legendarily pithy maker of small talk and a master of the English sentence. His overbearing but strangely lovable personality was preserved for posterity by his friend and disciple, James Boswell, who in 1791 published The Life of Johnson, the greatest and most entertaining of all literary biographies, which records, among much else, Johnson’s near-blindness, probable Tourette’s Syndrome, and selfless love of cats. Now, after the tercentenary of his birth, this seminar will reappraise Johnson’s legacy within a broad cultural survey of the British Enlightenment. Along with Johnson, Boswell, and other titans of 18th-century prose, such as Edward Gibbon, David Hume, and Adam Smith, we will consider international writing on race and slavery (Olaudah Equiano, Ottobah Cugoano, and the abolitionist poets), the French and American revolutions (Edmund Burke), and women’s rights (the Bluestocking Circle and Mary Wollstonecraft). We will also sample the period’s fiction (Horace Walpole’s lurid Gothic novel, The Castle of Otranto, and Frances Burney’s coming-of-age saga, Evelina), comic drama (Oliver Goldsmith’s uproarious She Stoops to Conquer), and personal writing (Burney’s diary, Boswell’s shockingly candid London Journal), as well as Celtic literature (James Macpherson), visual art (Joshua Reynolds), and the poetic innovations that laid the groundwork for Romanticism (Thomas Gray). We may also glance at Johnson’s reception and influence over the centuries—for instance, in the work of Virginia Woolf.

This course will explore the literary culture of the British Isles during the lifetime of the great Anglo-Irish satirist Jonathan Swift. In his use of humor, shock, whimsy, and quicksilver irony to convey moral outrage and personal pique, Swift has influenced every major satirist who came after him—from Mark Twain to John Oliver. Swift also lived through remarkable times. Between his birth in 1667 and his death in 1745, Britain grew from a war-torn cultural backwater to a military and colonial powerhouse with a stable, if corrupt, political system, several of the world’s great cities, and a sense of national identity that has remained largely consistent to this day. At the same time, the marketplace of literature and ideas in Britain grew increasingly diverse and fractious, as popular fiction appealed to newly literate readers and as authors from the social and colonial margins—including Ireland, a colony within the British Isles—began to make itself heard in print. Swift exemplified many of these developments in his life and work, at once mocking and immortalizing the crime-ridden squalor of London; attacking the English exploitation of Ireland, even as he formed part of the Anglican establishment in Dublin; and honing a form of ironic invective that enlightened, amused, and offended readers of all backgrounds and orientations. This course will cover each of Swift’s major works, from Gulliver’s Travels—both a classic of science fiction and a devastatingly effective satire—to his outrageous scatological poetry and his scathing writings on Ireland, including the notorious Modest Proposal, as well as introducing students to a host of other distinctive voices from this raucous period in English letters. We will, for example, become acquainted with the undisputed master of the heroic couplet, Swift’s friend Alexander Pope, who made satirical poetry of undying power and beauty out of the most unlikely of subjects—such as landscape design and a purloined lock of hair. Other writers under consideration will include England’s first professional female author, Aphra Behn; the second Earl of Rochester, a wildly transgressive poet of sexual libertinism; satirical playwrights such as William Wycherley; the founders of lifestyle journalism, Joseph Addison and Richard Steele; John Gay, author of The Beggar’s Opera, a musical comedy with a cast of thieves and sex workers; and the visual satirist William Hogarth. We may also consider a few modern landmarks of literary and cinematic satire with an 18th-century heritage by writers and directors such as Kurt Vonnegut, Joan Didion, Stanley Kubrick, and Boots Riley.

Powdered, ruffled, and bewigged, the ghosts of the 17th- and 18th-century playhouse still stalk the stages, screens, and red carpets of the global entertainment industry. After a period of suppression by a puritan government, London theatres came roaring back to life in the 1660s, thanks in part to England’s first professional female actors—by some accounts the original modern celebrities—and the reign of a king, Charles II, who was besotted with drama and the people who made it. Over the coming century, the practice and theory of the theatrical arts would be thoroughly and durably transformed, and a new dramatic canon would be consolidated through both print and repertory enactment. Theatre was not only big business in Enlightenment Europe but also, arguably, the representative art form of the age. Part of the public’s fascination with stagecraft lay in the unsettling questions it raised about the nature of performance itself, not only as a form of artistic practice but also as an element of social and political life: What if, for instance, our putatively God-given identities (king and subject, wife and husband) were merely factitious roles that could be adopted or discarded at will? This yearlong “large seminar” considers how authors and theatrical professionals from the 1660s to the 1790s imagined the potential of performance to transform—or sometimes to reinforce—the status quo, with a look ahead to major films, mostly from classical Hollywood, that inherited and adapted the legacy of Restoration and 18th-century entertainments. Our primary emphasis will be on plays, with a survey of major Enlightenment Era comedies (some of the funniest and most outrageous ever written), parodies, afterpieces, heroic tragedies, imperial pageants, sentimental dramas, and Gothic spectacles by authors such as William Wycherley, George Etherege, John Dryden, Aphra Behn, Susanna Centlivre, John Gay, Henry Fielding, Richard Brinsley Sheridan, and Elizabeth Inchbald. We will also consider nondramatic writing on performance and theatrical culture, including 18th-century acting manuals, racy theatrical memoirs, and a “masquerade novel” by Eliza Haywood, in addition to films by directors such as Frank Capra, Howard Hawks, Ernst Lubitsch, Oscar Micheaux, F. W. Murnau, Lois Weber, and Billy Wilder. Wigs are not required.

From soap operas to sketch comedy, drag shows to musical theatre, Restoration and 18th-century Britain helped to shape the modern conventions of dramatic art and popular entertainment. The period also introduced an early form of celebrity culture, thanks in part to the rise of England’s first professional female actors and the reign of a king, Charles II, who loved theatre and all-too-public extramarital sex. At the same time, the increasing prominence of drama raised unsettling questions about the nature of performance, not only as a form of artistic practice but also as an element of social and political life. What if, for instance, our putatively God-given identities (king and subject, wife and husband) were merely factitious roles that we could adopt or discard at will? This seminar considers how authors and theatrical professionals from the 1660s to the 1820s imagined the potential of performance to transform—or sometimes to reinforce—the status quo, with a look ahead to plays and films that have inherited and adapted the legacy of 18th-century entertainments, as well as backward to the Renaissance drama that paved the way for Restoration stagecraft. Our emphasis will be on plays, with a survey of major Restoration and 18th-century comedies (some of the funniest ever written), parodies, afterpieces, heroic tragedies, imperial pageants, sentimental dramas, and Gothic spectacles by authors such as William Wycherley, George Etherege, John Dryden, Aphra Behn, Susanna Centlivre, John Gay, Henry Fielding, Elizabeth Inchbald, Pierre Beaumarchais, and Georg Büchner. We will also consider nondramatic writing on performance and theatrical culture, including 18th-century acting manuals, racy theatrical memoirs, and a “masquerade novel” by Eliza Haywood, as well as earlier plays by the likes of Shakespeare and Ben Jonson. More contemporary playwrights and filmmakers under consideration may include Bertolt Brecht, Jean Genet, Howard Hawks, Alfred Hitchcock, François Truffaut, Edward Albee, and Jeremy O. Harris. This is a large seminar, with group conferences that include assigned reading.

By the time of her death in 1817, Jane Austen could boast that books by women had “afforded more extensive and unaffected pleasure than those of any other literary corporation in the world.” A mere century and a half earlier, it was still a rarity for a woman to publish under her own name. This course traces the emergence of professional female authorship from the end of the Renaissance to the heyday of Romanticism, along the way introducing students to the most illustrious and intriguing members of Austen’s “literary corporation.” We will divide our time between authors who remain familiar today (Aphra Behn, Mary Wollstonecraft) and those who have been unjustly forgotten (Eliza Haywood, Elizabeth Inchbald). The texts we cover will be as eclectic as the authors themselves, ranging from lyric poems to Gothic novels, sex comedies to political jeremiads, fantasy literature to travel writing, slave narratives to courtship fiction. The centerpiece of the spring semester will be an extended discussion of Austen’s own work, including at least three of her novels and a selection from her outrageous juvenilia. The popular and scholarly reception of 18th-century women’s writing will also be considered.

Our current decade, with its global ambience of claustrophobia and dread, is on its way to becoming the most Hitchcockian on record. More than 40 years after his death, prolific British and American filmmaker Alfred Hitchcock (1899-1980) remains one of the world’s most recognizable, most imitated, most studied, most parodied, and most divisive entertainers in the history of media. Known during his heyday in Hollywood as the “master of suspense,” Hitchcock developed a distinctive visual and narrative style that became synonymous with a set of unnerving affects and experiences (paranoia, guilt, abject terror, mistaken identity, transgressive desire, watching and being watched), as well as with the director’s own personality—made famous through his iconic cameos on film and television, where he appeared as a droll and dapper provocateur. At the same time as Hitchcock became a shaping influence on several generations of filmmakers, including several who repudiated that influence, and the basis for scores of biopics and spinoffs (Bates Motel is one recent example), he has attracted intense interest from a diverse range of scholars—including historians of popular culture and specialists in queer theory, gender studies, narratology, and psychoanalysis—in some cases through work that has defined its disciplinary field and introduced analytic concepts, such as the “male gaze,” into the mainstream. Now, even as well-substantiated accusations of sexual misconduct against Hitchcock by the actor Tippi Hedren have encouraged debates over his legacy, the fascination he exerts over his worldwide audience has seemingly only deepened. Neither a celebration nor an exposé, this large seminar turns a critical eye toward several of Hitchcock’s major works from both his British and American periods, including landmark achievements such as Blackmail, Rope, Rear Window, and The Birds. We will approach these films both as singular cultural artifacts and as parts of the long and still robust tradition of uncanny storytelling that we call the Gothic, which we will trace from its origins in Enlightenment- and Romantic-era Britain (Horace Walpole, Edmund Burke, Ann Radcliffe, Matthew Lewis, Jane Austen) to its later incarnations on both sides of the Atlantic in the work of neo-Gothic masters such as Edgar Allen Poe (a favorite of Hitchcock’s), Robert Louis Stevenson, Henry James, Charles Chesnutt, Daphne Du Maurier, Shirley Jackson, and Toni Morrison, as well as through its elucidation by theorists from Sigmund Freud to Lee Edelman. We will end by considering a few key figures in contemporary cinema—Jordan Peele, Pedro Almódovar, and Bong-Joon Ho are likely choices—who have engaged in complex dialogue with Hitchcock’s films and have helped to guarantee, for better or worse, that his stylistic fingerprints will remain traceable on the cultural history of the coming century.

This section of FYS traces the representation of erotic, romantic, and conjugal relations on the page and stage from 1590 to 1820, a crucial period in the consolidation of modern assumptions about gender, sexuality, and marriage in the West. The emphasis will be on drama and prose fiction; but we will also sample a range of other expressive forms, including lyric and narrative poetry, visual satire, and life-writing. Along the way, students will be introduced to some of the most compelling figures in European literature—all of whom share an interest in the conventions of courtship and the performance of gender: John Milton, the foremost epic poet in the language (we will read Paradise Lost in its entirety); Aphra Behn, England’s first professional female author; bawdy comic playwrights like George Etherege and William Wycherley; the innovative early novelists Eliza Haywood and Samuel Richardson; the masterful verse satirist Alexander Pope; the pioneering periodical writers Joseph Addison and Richard Steele; the cross-dressing memoirist Charlotte Charke; and Mary Wollstonecraft, one of the founders of modern feminism. Bracketing the yearlong course will be extended coverage of the two most influential authors of courtship narratives in English: William Shakespeare and Jane Austen. Additional attention will be paid to earlier writers on sex and marriage, such as Ovid and St. Paul, as well as to contemporary work in queer theory and gender studies. We will also consider select films that reflect the legacy of early modern courtship narratives by directors such as Frank Capra and Hal Ashby.

This FYS course asks how three persistently messy topics—interpersonal desire, conjugal attachment, and gender identity—were articulated and explored in the literary arts across two centuries of cultural upheaval in England: the 1590s to the 1810s, the late Renaissance to the Romantic era. Our chief focus will be on drama, narrative poetry, and prose fiction; but we will also sample a range of other expressive modes, including sonnets, journalism, and life-writing. Along the way, students will be introduced to some of the most compelling figures in literary history: the renegade epic poet John Milton (we will read his masterpiece, Paradise Lost, in its entirety); Aphra Behn, England’s first professional female author; Eliza Haywood and Samuel Richardson, pioneers of the realist novel; the elegantly devastating verse satirist Alexander Pope; the cross-dressing memoirist Charlotte Charke; and Mary Wollstonecraft, one of the founders of modern feminism. Bracketing the yearlong course will be comparatively extended coverage of the two most influential and dazzling authors of courtship narratives in English: William Shakespeare and Jane Austen. Additional attention will be paid to earlier writers on sexuality and marriage, such as Ovid and St. Paul, as well as to contemporary work in queer theory and gender studies and to a handful of early Hollywood films that are in dialogue with the readings. By the end of the year, students will have become measurably stronger at thinking and writing critically about the literature of the past and about cultural artifacts and practices more broadly. Please note that this course will necessarily include candid discussions of sensitive subject matter, including sexual violence. This course will have biweekly conferences alternating with some kind of small group activity at least for the first semester; the alternating small-group activity might be a lab, a workshopping session, an ongoing project, etc.

Our present decade, with its global ambience of claustrophobia and dread, is on its way to becoming the most Hitchcockian on record. More than 40 years after his death, prolific British and American filmmaker Alfred Hitchcock (1899-1980) remains one of the world’s most recognizable, most imitated, most studied, most parodied, and most divisive entertainers in the history of media. Known during his heyday in Hollywood as the “master of suspense,” Hitchcock developed a distinctive visual and narrative style that became synonymous with a set of unnerving affects and experiences (paranoia, guilt, abject terror, mistaken identity, transgressive desire, watching, and being watched), as well as with the director’s own personality—made famous through his iconic cameos on film and television, where he appeared as a droll and dapper provocateur. At the same time as Hitchcock became a shaping influence on several generations of filmmakers, including several who repudiated that influence, and the basis for scores of biopics and spinoffs (Bates Motel is one recent example), he has attracted intense interest from a diverse range of scholars—including historians of popular culture and specialists in queer theory, gender studies, narratology, and psychoanalysis—in some cases through work that has defined its disciplinary field and introduced analytic concepts, such as the “male gaze,” into the mainstream. Now, even as well-substantiated accusations of sexual misconduct against Hitchcock by the actor Tippi Hedren have encouraged debates over his legacy, the fascination he exerts over his worldwide audience has seemingly only deepened. Neither a celebration nor an exposé, this large seminar turns a critical eye toward several of Hitchcock’s major works from both his British and American periods, including landmark achievements such as Blackmail, Rope, Rear Window, and The Birds. We will approach these films both as singular cultural artifacts and as parts of the long and still robust tradition of uncanny storytelling that we call Gothic, which we will trace from its origins in the British Enlightenment to its later incarnations on both sides of the Atlantic in the work of authors such as Edgar Allen Poe (a favorite of Hitchcock’s), Henry James, Daphne Du Maurier, and Shirley Jackson and through its elucidation by theorists from Freud to Toni Morrison. We will end by considering a few key figures in contemporary cinema—such as Jordan Peele, Pedro Almódovar, and Bong-Joon Ho—who have engaged in complex dialogue with Hitchcock’s films and have helped to guarantee, for better or worse, that his stylistic fingerprints will remain evident across the culture of the coming century.

Before the 18th century was dubbed the Enlightenment, it was widely known as the Age of Criticism—a term that captures the growing cultural influence, most conspicuously in the anglophone world, of secular commentary on society, politics, morality, and the arts. Suddenly everyone was a critic, eager to express their opinions in one of the many sites for conversation and debate that were blossoming across Britain and its colonies. Those sites included institutions with brick-and-mortar locations—coffeehouses, taverns, and private clubs—but also the virtual forums created by the increasingly inescapable medium of print. (Parallels to our own social media-crazed era are easy to draw.) With the Age of Criticism came a new kind of celebrity: the public intellectual. No man of letters was more renowned for his powers of criticism, conversation, and what he called “clubbability” than Samuel Johnson (1709-84), the gravitational center of our course. In addition to compiling the first English dictionary of note, Johnson was a gifted and hugely influential literary theorist, poet, political commentator, biographer, and satirist, as well as a legendarily pithy maker of small talk and a master of the English sentence. His overbearing but strangely lovable personality was preserved for posterity by his friend and disciple, James Boswell, who in 1791 published the greatest and most entertaining of all literary biographies, The Life of Johnson, which records, among much else, Johnson’s near-blindness, probable Tourette’s Syndrome, and selfless love of cats. Now, after the tercentenary of his birth, this seminar will reappraise Johnson’s legacy within a broad cultural survey of the British Enlightenment. Along with Johnson, Boswell, and other titans of 18th-century prose—such as Edward Gibbon, David Hume, and Adam Smith—we will consider international writing on race and slavery (Olaudah Equiano, Ottobah Cugoano, the abolitionist poets), the French and American revolutions (Edmund Burke), and women’s rights (the bluestocking circle, Mary Wollstonecraft). We will also sample the period’s fiction (Horace Walpole’s lurid Gothic novel, The Castle of Otranto, and Frances Burney’s coming-of-age saga, Evelina), comic drama (Oliver Goldsmith’s uproarious She Stoops to Conquer), and personal writing (Burney’s diary, Boswell’s shockingly candid London Journal), as well as Celtic literature (James Macpherson), visual art (Joshua Reynolds), and the poetic innovations that laid the groundwork for Romanticism (Thomas Gray). We may also glance at Johnson’s reception and influence over the centuries; for instance in the work of Virginia Woolf.

The 18th century introduced the long, realist prose fictions, printed and marketed to readers on a large scale, that we now call novels. As often with emergent literary forms, the novel arrived with an unsavory reputation; and its early practitioners labored, often unsuccessfully, to distinguish their work from ephemeral printed news, escapist prose romances, and pornography. It was not until the defining achievements of Jane Austen and Walter Scott, at the beginning of the 19th century, that the novel achieved a status as polite and even prestigious entertainment. This yearlong course looks at the difficult growth of the novel, from its miscellaneous origins in the mid-17th century to the envelope-pushing experiments of the early 1700s and the eclectic masterpieces of Daniel Defoe, Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding, Laurence Sterne, Austen, and Scott. Other authors may include Aphra Behn, Eliza Haywood, John Cleland, Tobias Smollett, Matthew Lewis, Frances Burney, Charles Brockden Brown, and Maria Edgeworth. Everything that we read will be arresting and restlessly experimental; much of it will also be bawdy, transgressive, and outrageously funny. Topics of conversation will encompass the rise of female authorship, the emergence of Gothic and courtship fiction, the relationship between the novel and other literary genres or modes (lyric and epic poetry, life-writing, allegory), novelists’ participation in the leading debates of their time (those over slavery, empire, and revolution), the reinvention of the novel in North America, the representation of consciousness, and the meaning of realism. We may also consider films adapted from 18th-century fiction, such as Tony Richardson’s 1963 Tom Jones and Michael Winterbottom’s 2006 Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story.