| Course | Title | Instructor | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
| ENGLISH 10 | CONTEMPRY AFAM LIT | GRADY, K. | |
| ENGLISH 15 | PROBL OF DESCRIPTN | STAFF | “. . . And this is the reason why such postcards have to be so overbearingly and over-realistically beautiful; if ever they were to start looking natural, then mankind would have lost something. “So this is what it looks like here,” we say to ourselves and study the card mistrustfully; then we write below: ‘You can’t imagine how lovely it is . . . !’” (Robert Musil, “It’s Lovely Here”) Description, often enough, ends in failure (“The sky was really blue – like really blue”); and we can forgive the desire to forego it altogether (“You can’t imagine how lovely it is!”). At other moments, however, the words of a description may – like the postcard Musil’s mistrustful tourist studies – startle us, seeming not less than but somehow more than what they were supposed to dutifully transcribe: “So this is what it looks like here!” As we’ll see, our intuitions about good and bad descriptions – what makes them work in this or that context? – rake up a set of questions about representations and actions (“narrate or describe?”), habit and perception, the value of precision (or the release from its pressures); about the presence of the describer’s eye (and I), and how persons may or may not, as we say, “answer a description” (Desdemona, in Othello: “Am I that name?”); and about the possibilities of our words to reproduce the world or to produce it anew. In this discussion-based seminar, we will in other words be moving from the prosaic category of our title to the kind of questions which keep literature and literary theory in vital conversation with ethics, philosophy, psychology, and social thought. Together we’ll read (and in some cases look at and listen to) a selection of creative works and critical interventions that put strain on description as a category, testing its limits and coaxing it into new forms; this will include poems (from the seventeenth century to the twenty-first), essays, a film, and likely some audio of your choosing. We will also try our hands at producing descriptions of our own, as a practical engagement with the theoretical issues raised, and as a way to sharpen fundamental writing skills in an experimental and collaborative mode. Reflection on this ongoing and informal practice will also help us draw out the differences between descriptive writing as such and the genres of critical writing practiced in the humanities. Authors will likely include: Emily Dickinson; Virginia Woolf; Nathaniel Mackey; Gertrude Stein; Harryette Mullen; Joy Williams; Jia Zhangke. We’ll also read a selection of criticism and theory, with the aim of introducing you to the way critics reason, write, and work with their materials. Readings will be provided in course-packet, available for purchase at the start of the quarter. |
| ENGLISH 15 | ALL ABOUT EVE | LEWIS, J. | The biblical Eve was the first rebel, the first penitent, the first mother, the first genetic experiment, the first person to ask a question, the first scientist, and the first woman to go off her diet. No wonder she has always been an object of literary fascination—a mythic figure endlessly reimagined in response to changing ideas about female desire, curiosity, subjection, and potentiality. In this class, we’ll explore some of the ways that Eve’s multivalent story has been told and retold over time. That means embarking on the genre- sensitive journey through literary history that every English major should take. It also means thinking about what it means to read Eve from a literary perspective, as opposed to a religious or historical one, and about how different kinds of readers have interpreted her in different ways at different historical moments. As we journey from Genesis to today’s fembot EveR and…wait for it…Greta Gerwig’s Barbie, we’ll pay special attention to the ways that women or female-identified writers have imagined themselves as Eve’s daughters, while also examining Eve’s ever-complicated role in the gender ideologies of every cultural moment. Over the reading quarter, expect to meet the self-seeking bride of Milton’s Paradise Lost, the curious ingenue of Frances Burney’s Enlightenment comedy of manners Evelina, the fallen woman demonized in Victorian gothic literature and pre-Raphaelite art, the ambitious modern woman who steals the limelight in the classic film All about Eve (1950), the African demi-goddess collaboratively imagined by Toni Morrison and Kara Walker, Carmen Maria Machado’s monster bride, and Angela Carter’s gender-bending, fairy tale-inspired new Eve. If you’re a fan of Eve’s ‘other woman,’ Lilith, fear not: She’ll be making more than a guest appearance! PLEASE BE AWARE THAT SOME OF THE READING FOR THIS CLASS IS CHALLENGING!!!!! Course requirements: midterm essay (4 pages), final 6-page ‘biography’ or ‘autobiography’ of Eve; a series of super-short creative exercises/response paragraphs; active participation and periodic leadership in class conversations. |
| ENGLISH 16 | CRAFT OF POETRY | STAFF | |
| ENGLISH 17 | CRAFT OF FICTION | STAFF | |
| ENGLISH 100 | INTRO TO LIT THEORY | MCCALL, S. | |
| ENGLISH 101W | AUSTEN | WAY, J. | Jane Austen is more than a beloved novelist—in the 21st century, she is a full blown industry. Our work in this class will explore what makes Austen so enduringly (relentlessly?) popular, as well as a great artist. How do her craft and humor create meaning and inspiration for modern readers? How does her work channel eighteenth-century influences and contribute to the development of the novel? How does she comment on the world she lived in? As we read selections from Austen’s letters and manuscripts, and her mature novels Mansfield Park and Emma, we’ll discuss in detail what she has to say about class, gender, religion, education, the slave trade, war, empire, human nature, and writing itself. And of course we’ll also watch and discuss some film adaptations (not limited to our course readings). Expect to read ~100 pages week, participate actively in class and collaborate in small groups, write a few short response papers, and complete two major writing projects. |
| ENGLISH 101W | INTRO TO POETRY | HENDERSON, A. | This class will provide a focused introduction to the workings of English poetry; no prior knowledge of poetry is required. We will begin by reviewing the formal qualities of poems, including rhyme, rhythm, and stanza structure. We will then examine some standard poetic forms and topoi from the English tradition, such as the sonnet, the dramatic monologue, and the blazon. Our readings will range chronologically from the Renaissance to the twentieth century. We will focus on developing skills in analysis and writing without the aid of AI. Writing requirements will include several short assignments and papers, in addition to a longer final paper. |
| ENGLISH 101W | LOVE AND ARMS | MATTHEWS, R. | Medieval romance has always been defined by the expression of both love and arms. In this class, we’re going to explore chivalric romances and love poetry by reading some exciting and innovative works of the twelfth century in translation, as well as some Middle English poetry. Because medieval literature is so meta, it can also tell us a lot about the writing process. The class will include two papers (one a creative option), group powerpoint and portfolio. |
| ENGLISH 102A | MEDIEVAL AUTOFICTION | MATTHEWS, R. | Suddenly everyone is talking about autofiction, but this highly reflexive genre mixing autobiography and fiction was a feature of medieval literature. Experimental and funny—the whole comedic genre of authors under duress is invented during this period—“Medieval Autofiction” will explore fun texts that playfully evoke the first-person experiences of authors, who also happen to name themselves, making their fiction real. We’ll read how Chaucer worries about his future fame as a poet; how Thomas Hoccleve, a bureaucrat in the medieval DMV, responds to his depression and anxieties about money; how Charles of Orleans, a French prince who has learned English while being a prisoner in England for 25 years, deals with that imprisonment through the optic of love, and how Guillaume Machaut invents the epistolary novel to describe a love affair between an older poet and his younger “fangirl.” |
| ENGLISH 102B | SEX AND SENSIBILITY | WAY, J. | This is a class about how our embodied and emotional experiences—especially sex and love—shape our ideas of politics and morality. We usually think of the eighteenth century as the “Age of Reason,” but of course, the people living in this period were just as preoccupied with the irrationality of human emotions—what British writers of the time called “sensibility” or “sentiment.” These novelists, poets, and philosophers saw our individual capacity to perceive, think, and judge as rooted in the emotions expressed through sensitive bodies—things like tears, blushes, and even heartbeats. They imagined systems of social regulation based on emotional transactions, that through physical observation of other people’s inner thoughts and feelings, sympathy could be generated and relationships built. As a concept, sensibility offered a powerful way for eighteenth-century writers to interrogate lines between virtue and vice and to make arguments about how society should function. And as we shall see, women’s sexualized, domesticated, consuming/consumable bodies as portrayed in this literature acquired an outsized significance in contemporary debates over governance, commerce, education, marriage, and slavery. We’ll use eighteenth-century perspectives on sensibility (i.e. sentimentalism) to consider and discuss a wide variety of political and ethical questions, such as: How do the sensations of pleasure and pain motivate and subvert our sense of right and wrong? Where do benevolence and malevolence come from? What’s the social value of negative emotions like fear, vanity, and selfishness? How should we distinguish sex and love? What makes a good or bad relationship? How do race and gender problematize our ideas about how emotions work? How do emotions connect to the notion of “rights”? How is the state like a family, and vice versa? What’s the role of emotion in the economic marketplace? What’s the difference between political slavery and chattel slavery, and why does it matter? How is the physical body essential to our sense of self, yet separate from it? And how much feeling is too much? |
| ENGLISH 102C | AWKWARDNS & OUTCAST | BARTLETT, J. | |
| ENGLISH 105 | WRITING RACE | TOBAR, H. | Course is cross-listed as a Lit Jrn 103. This course is a survey of nonfiction writing about race in the United States of America, from the 19th century to the present. We will examine how writers have tackled issues of racial inequality and discrimination, and constructed narratives centered on the lives of people of color in various nonfiction genres, including: newspaper and magazine journalism, investigative reporting, essays, criticism, documentary film, and memoirs. Readings will include works by Ida B. Wells, W.E.B Du Bois, James Baldwin, Carey McWilliams, Ta-Nehisi Coates and others. Part of the aim of this class is what we can learn about the craft of writing as a tool of social engagement and change. How do writers construct works that cut through the falsehoods of prejudice and ignorance? How do they work to defend the humanity of those who have been marginalized or oppressed by dominant cultures? How do they express the joy and fortitude unseen or unknown by outsiders? As a final requirement, students will produce their own work of cultural reportage or criticism. Students will work on this project in several stages throughout the quarter, producing a 2,000-word piece by finals’ week. In addition, students will produce four, 300-word “responses” to the readings |
| ENGLISH 105 | ASAM NONFIC FILM | CHO, J. | Cross-listed with AsianAm 114 in the Fall 2026 quarter. This interdisciplinary course examines documentary film, experimental nonfiction, oral history, community media, archival practice, and podcasting not simply as forms of representation, but as modes of testimony, evidence, memory work, political intervention, and community history. The course also introduces students to documentary modes and points of view, and introductory training for oral history and interviewing. We also study Asian Americans’ active interventions to access and develop institutional infrastructures that continue to support story work, including community media organizations, festivals, and archives. |
| ENGLISH 106 | MILTON | WALTON, A | We will read the verse and prose of one of early modern England’s most committed iconoclasts, John Milton, whose work answers to virtually every concern and topic we might bring to it: gender and sexuality; liberty, hierarchy, and the forms of government; the purpose of education; capitalism; the natural world and our pursuit of scientific knowledge; and the morality of violence (to name a few prominent areas of sustained concern). Sustained engagement with this body of work, including Paradise Lost, will show us a writer whose work is animated, at every turn, by those collective projects that would issue in, and then outlive, the English Revolution of 1640–1660. This class will involve substantial and challenging reading; we will help each other through it. One textbook (in hard copy) will be required for purchase. Assignments will include shorter papers and responses, and an in-person final exam. |
| ENGLISH 106 | LITERATURE AND THE MIND | MONTERO ROMAN, V. | E 106: Literature and the Mind In her well-known work on the fictional representation of consciousness, Dorrit Cohn argues that the “singular power possessed by the novelist” is that the author is a “creator of beings whose inner lives [they] can reveal at will” (4). This course will introduce you to scholars like Cohn, who have studied how and why novelists represent the inner lives of characters. We will read scholarship that analyzes the narrative strategies authors use to represent cognition (like free indirect discourse, stream of consciousness, unreliable narration, and description) and ask questions about the nature of literary imagination, the relationship between fiction and reality, and the uses of fiction. Because the study of the mind has never been objective or neutral, though, we will also think critically about how gender and race have impacted the representation and theorization of fictional minds. Primary sources are likely to include women authors like Jane Austen, Nella Larsen, Virginia Woolf, Maria Cristina Mena, and Jean Rhys. |
| ENGLISH 106 | COMMUN IN AFAM LIT | MORGAN, C. | |
| ENGLISH 107 | ENGLISH IN ACTION | DAVIS, R. | E107 English in Action Wondering what to do with your English major? E107 is a workshop that explores career pathways for English majors through discussion, writing workshops, mentorship, and learning from invited speakers. This course is required for students completing an internship through the Internships for English Majors program but it is also open to all English majors who are interested in career exploration. E107 meets once a week and is graded P/NP. |