| Course | Title | Instructor | Description |
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| ENGLISH 8 | AMERICAN LITERATURE | ZIMMERMAN, R. | |
| ENGLISH 28A | POETIC IMAGINATION | STAFF | |
| ENGLISH 28C | REALISM & ROMANCE | STAFF | |
| ENGLISH 28D | CRAFT OF POETRY | STAFF | |
| ENGLISH 102A | PLEASURE & DOCTRINE | ALLEN, E.G. | How can entertainment be useful? How can doctrine be amusing? Doctrine, broadly speaking, means teaching of all kindsnot just spiritual but moral, ethical, and political education. For medieval and renaissance writers and audiences, the interplay between pleasure and teaching was a constant source of concern. In the unstable political climate of the later Middle Ages, the wild adventures of romance knights like Sir Launfal are also quests for social and personal betterment; even the most humorous stories have something serious to say about moral action and political life. Conversely, the most serious and direct poems of political protest engage in the sometimes grim entertainment of satire and allegory. By the time of Spenser, the effort to create a connection between worldly pleasure and moral growth gives rise to the ornate complexity of a lengthy allegorical poem. By studying both satire and romance, we shall explore the ways in which medieval and early modern writers bring together what we modern readers tend to separate: pleasure and seriousness, entertainment and morality, body and spirit. The course will include a short paper, assorted brief assignments and quizzes, a take-home midterm and a final exam. |
| ENGLISH 102C | VCTRN PASTS&FUTURES | FREELAND, N. | Change, progress, development, degeneration? This course explores the shifting concepts of time in the age of Lyell and Darwin, from the fetish of the ruin and historical nostalgia early in the century, to the fin de siècle fad for novels of the future. We will examine how contemporary hopes and anxieties are projected onto the past or future, as well as the use of these alternate time-frames to imagine solutions to nineteenth-century problems. We will consider how contested models of time inflect the representations of science and technology; sex, gender and love; changing places (when time is spatialized); evolution, heredity and race; voluntary and involuntary memory; and the unconscious. We will also analyze how these texts construct the time of reading and how they manage duration, selection and sequence within their own narrative structures. |
| ENGLISH 102D | US POETRY 1950-1990 | TERADA, R. | |
| ENGLISH 103 | AFRICAN LIT | NGUGI, W.T. | The course examines themes in African Writing in English: drama, poetry and fiction. It is both introductory and an in depth look at the issues animating the African imagination. The relationship between aesthetics and literature is a connecting theme. The course also looks at post-apartheid fiction and the politics of language. |
| ENGLISH 103 | AMERICAN DOCUMENTRY | GOBLE, M. | This class surveys a broad range of nonfictional representations of life in the United States, with a particular emphasis on the literary rhetorics and political contexts that shape the very commitment to "fact" that defines the modern documentary. Starting with several landmarks of American nonfiction from the turn of the twentieth century, including Jacob Riis's How the Other Half Lives, W. E. B. Du Bois's The Souls of Black Folk and Henry James's The American Scene, we will examine how a distinct documentary genre emerged from a variety of influences, including sensationalist or "yellow" journalism of the late-nineteenth century, the classic slave narratives of Douglass and others, academic writing in the fields of sociology and anthropology, and elite forms of travel writing and memoir. We will also look closely at the 1930s-in many ways the most important decade of documentary expression in the U. S.-and see how texts like James Agee and Walker Evans's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men attempted to apply modernist techniques for documentary purposes. Central to the course will be questions about the importance of visual representation in the documentary tradition, from the inclusion of Riis's own photographs in How the Other Half Lives to the experimental collaboration of various writers and photographers in the 1930s. We will also be interested in work by documentary filmmakers of both the silent era and later, including Robert Flaherty, Erroll Morris and Frederick Wiseman, and by contemporary writers and visual artists who explore, and at times exploit, the potential for fiction that remains always a part of even the most strenuous attempt to capture reality in word and image. |
| ENGLISH 103 | BLACK SOUTH AFR LIT | MASILELA, N. | |
| ENGLISH 105 | CUBAN AMERICAN LIT | LAZO,J.R. | |
| ENGLISH 106 | MEDIEVAL DRAMA | ALLEN, E.G. | Most medieval drama is religious: the earliest liturgical dramas were acted out in church ritual, and the Corpus Christi plays, or mystery plays, are elaborations on bible stories, including the life and crucifiction of Jesus Christ, performed publicly in cycles that probably lasted for days. Drama was thus an important facet of medieval ceremonial life, integral to a culture in which festival formed community relationships and solidified religious devotion. In this class, we will read a bit of liturgical drama and much Corpus Christi drama, along with a morality play or two (allegories of virtue and vice) and some saints' plays or conversion plays. We will also study some contemporary attitudes toward drama--those who objected to it as idolatry, and those who defended it as worship; and we will explore the drama's actual performance in city festivals. Some of the reading will be in Middle English, but previous experience in Middle English is NOT expected or required. Several informal papers, a short paper, a longer paper, and performance of a scene will be required. |
| ENGLISH 106 | RAKES & HARLOTS | STEINTRAGER, J. | Since ancient Rome at least, the harlot has been considered a particularly apt vehicle for satire. She has seen men’s behavior at its most mean and ridiculous; she has a harshly realistic view of economic motives and a correspondingly jaundiced view of society. Rediscovered in Renaissance Italy, the satirical dialogue of harlots was to spread quickly to France and on to England. The harlot’s counterpart, the rake, enjoyed similar popularity: a hero of libertine excess and the subject of many cautionary tales about the wages of debauchery. In this course, we will track rakes and harlots as literary figures from Rome (Lucian), on to Italy (Aretino), and then concentrate on their place in libertine poetry, the visual arts, and the novel in Restoration and 18th-century England (Rochester, Hogarth, Cleland, et al.). |
| ENGLISH 106 | CHAUCER & LOVE | GEORGIANNA, L.M. | Students in this class will learn to read Chaucer's Middle English poetry as we pursue a single large theme of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, namely Chaucer's treatment of love, both religious and secular, spiritual and sexual, in and out of marriage, love returned, thwarted, lost, praised,parodied and moralized. Translation quizzes, midterm, paper, and final. |
| ENGLISH 210 | LITERATURE, THEORY, AND THE CALL OF THE OTHER | RADHAKRISHNAN, R. | The purpose of this seminar is to submit the theme of Alterity and the binary epistemic regime it exemplifies to rigorous critique. The Self-Other grid as the structuring principle of human self-understanding has a long and problematic "omni-history." Philosophers, theorists, artists, and writers have negotiated this problematic with varying degrees of success and frustration. For a variety of world-historical reasons, this theme has become urgently significant in the last few decades. Alterity has been legitimated as a major theme in a variety of discourses such as psychoanalysis, poststructuralism, ethics, nationalist, diasporan, and transnational studies. I am hoping, with your help, to bring together some of the most exciting debates about the Self-Other problematic in Theory with literary practices that have struggled with the same issue in the name of aesthetic representation, and narrative authority. In this seminar we will be elaborating the Self-Other problematic on a variety of registers: the ethical, the political, and the epistemological. What does it mean to be interpellated by the Other? What is all the fuss over the distinction between the big O and the lower case o? Is the obsession with the Self-Other binary structure the metier of the dominant discourse? What is the relationship between a purely allegorical celebration of Alterity and the historical problems of various "selves" and "others" that are situated coevally in a world structured in dominance? How does the Self-Other theme emerge in the context of Racism, Patriarchy, Colonialism, linguistic representation, Madness, Anthropology? These are some of the questions that will resonate through the course as we dive fearlessly into Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway, Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, Fyodor Dostoevsky's Notes From Underground, Nadine Gordimer's Burger's Daughter, Amitav Ghosh's The Shadow Lines, Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior in active conjunction with readings from Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan, W.E.B. Du Bois, Mikhail Bakhtin, Edward Said, Johannes Fabian, and Martin Heidegger. |
| ENGLISH 210 | BRITISH POETRY OF THE 19TH CENTURY | HENDERSON, A.K. | In this course we will discuss a broad range of nineteenth-century British poetry, paying particular attention to the theories of representation they encode or thematize. Thus we will begin by reading the poems and literary criticism of Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, and Shelley, as well as poems by Dorothy Wordsworth, Mary Robinson, Charlotte Smith, and L.E.L.. We will then move forward to consider writings by Swinburne, Webster, Tennyson, Christina Rossetti, and D. G. Rossetti. Because one of our main concerns will be the status and fate of the notion of symbolism, we will also examine some contemporary paintings and photographs that comment on symbolic representation. Students taking the course as a seminar will write a 20-page seminar paper; students taking the course as a pro-seminar will do a 10-page archival project. |
| ENGLISH 210 | EPISTEMOLOGY AND FANTASY | STEINTRAGER, J. | The most significant trend in eighteenth-century literature is usually taken to be the development of the novel. One of the stylistic hallmarks of the novel-what sets it apart from romance-can be encapsulated in the term "realism." The plot of Richardson's Pamela might strike the reader today as improbable; it certainly struck Fielding as outlandish at the time. Nonetheless, from the prefatory assertion concerning the letters' authenticity to the supposed naturalness of its representations, this work laid claim to reality in order to ground its moral goals. We can make a similar inference in relation to Locke's epistemological program in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding: the proper use of language is to represent reality and accurate representation is itself a moral act. To insist on the novel and realism, however, ignores the generic ferment of the time as well as a trend in favor of fantasy and the fantastic. Likewise, to stress only the empiricist program in Locke and the philosophers that followed his lead downplays the importance within sensationist epistemology of the faculty of imagination and the productive power of mental and linguistic associations.
In this class, we will focus not on the rise of the novel and of realism but rather on the concomitant rise of the fantastic in literature. As the course title suggests, I am particularly interested in exploring the relation of the fantastic in its various guises-the imaginary, fanciful, chimerical, and so forth-to theories of knowledge. We will therefore begin with an examination of the place of fantasy in philosophy, above all in Locke and later empiricist and materialist thinkers. We will then turn to various examples of the fantastic in literature. The first stop will be the poetry of Pope: the hallucinatory visions in the Cave of Spleen in "The Rape of the Lock" and erotic charge of language in "Eloisa to Abelard," to name two important cases. Next, we will consider the move from eroticism to obscene fantasy in Cleland's Fanny Hill. The remainder of the course will be dedicated to three classics of fantastic literature: Walpole's seminal "gothic" Castle of Otranto, Beckford's Oriental tale Vathek, and Hogg's horrific Confessions of a Justified Sinner. The focus throughout the course will be the ways in which fantasy intersects with, disrupts, and extends empiricist theories of knowledge. To the extent that epistemology implies ethical and moral positions, we will also take the latter into consideration. Included in our readings will be various short essays and excerpts-from Freud and Wittgenstein, for example-to catalyze our inquiries.
Those taking the course for seminar credit will write an approximately twenty-page research paper. Those taking the course for pro-seminar credit will write an approximately fifteen-page thesis paper.
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| ENGLISH 210 | 19TH-C. U.S. RELIGION: POLITICAL THEOL., LITERARY&ORATORICAL | MAILLOUX, S.J. | This course will trace some rhetorical paths of thought in American political theology during the mid-nineteenth and early twenty-first centuries. We will begin by examining the Jewish and Greco-Roman rhetoric of St. Paul's speeches and letters and then track their interpretive uses in U.S. antebellum political theologies, for example, in Herman Melville's fiction and Frederick Douglass's speeches. We will spend considerable time studying the relation of these political theologies to current re-readings of Pauline Christianity in the work of Alain Badiou, Giorgio Agamben, Gianni Vattimo, and other thinkers of what some now call the "theological turn" in contemporary theory. Assigned texts will probably include Douglass's Narrative, Melville's The Confidence-Man, and shorter selections from Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Harriet Wilson, and Alexander Crummell. Theoretical readings will include at least Badiou's Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism, Carl Schmitt's Political Theology or The Concept of the Political, and Jacob Taubes's The Political Theology of Paul. This course will be as much a theoretical examination of the concepts and rhetoric of late-20th-century political theology as it will be a critical and historical analysis of mid-19th-century fiction and oratory. Requirements: class presentation and take-home final. Seminar option: class presentation and seminar paper. |
| ENGLISH 210 | ETHNICITY AND LABOR IN FICTION | LAZO, J.R. | This course seeks to situate the representation of ethnically typed labor in U.S. fiction within the context of national and international historical processes that promote the creation of such jobs. We will start by working through a definition of ethnicity that accounts for racial constructions and notions of cultural commonality while considering how certain jobs may influence social conceptions of an ethnic person. We will then read Fae Myenne Ng's novel Bone along with critical work to raise questions about the relationship of fiction to other writings about the lives of ethnic workers, including personal narrative, oral history, and academic studies. That vexed relationship will move us toward the concerns and problems of working-class studies which seek to connect the classroom with workers and movements outside the university. Toward the end of the quarter, we will discuss the importance of considering labor in the work of ethnically typed writers who might otherwise be read exclusively as part of an ethnic canon. While some sessions will focus on a novel, others will be organized around topics such as transnational labor and domestic workers. Our readings will include theory and criticism by Marx, Adorno, Janet Zandy, and Lisa Lowe, among others. Fiction includes Tomás Rivera's And the Earth Did Not Devour Him, Helena María Viramontes's "The Cariboo Café," and Oscar Hijuelos's A Simple Habana Melody.
Pro-seminar students will work in pairs twice during the quarter to lead a discussion of a text or topic and write a 5-6-page response paper. Seminar students will write a seminar paper instead of a response paper. If you would like to get started, please read the Sharp Press 2003 edition of Upton Sinclair's The Jungle, which is based on the original newspaper publication. We will discuss that in the middle of the quarter.
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| ENGLISH 210 | THEORY OF THE NOVEL | TUCKER, I. | This course aims at once to offer a sampling of recent and canonical writing about the novel (and a few novels) and to attempt to discover what the links and discontinuities of these various efforts might reveal about the genre's role in organizing (or dissolving) the contemporary discourse of literary criticism. Some questions we will consider are: What are the relations between formalist conceptions of the novel and those accounts that insist upon the novel's baggy formlessness? How might the novel mediate or bring into conflict materialist accounts of literary production and various methodologies of reading? The novel has long been a favorite object of New Historicist analysis; in what ways might the genre help illuminate the relations among New Historicism as an account of the organization of institutions, as a generalizable analytical methodology, as a set of rhetorical practices?
Readings will include work by Aristotle, Watt, Price, Gallagher, Armstrong, Austen, James, Radway, Collins, Miller, Barthes, Sedgwick, Woloch, Chaoli, Crace.
All students will deliver a class presentation. Students taking the course for seminar credit will produce a 15-20pp. paper; students taking it for pro-seminar credit will be required to write an 8-10pp. paper. |
| ENGLISH 210 | U.S. POETRY AND VISUAL CULTURE | GOBLE, M. | This class combines readings across a broad range of American poetry, from Whitman to the New York School, with close attention to topics related to the visual in all its forms, including painting, photography, and film. In addition to examining the current state of several long-running critical conversations--about theories of ekphrasis, about literary modernism and media aesthetics, about photography and objectivism, about Abstract Expressionism and the postwar avant garde--we will be interested more generally in how a wider network of historical transformations associated with an intensifying visual culture are registered in American poetry. We will also take up various arguments about the status of poems themselves as visual artifacts, with attention to a number of issues related to the particular technology of the book, such as the manuscript and publication history of Leaves of Grass, modernist experiments in typography, and illustration in its many forms. Poets to be discussed include: Whitman, Gertrude Stein, William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, Frank O'Hara, and John Ashbery. Critical texts will include work by Michael Fried, W. J. T. Mitchell, Walter Benn Michaels, and Marjorie Perloff.
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| ENGLISH 215 | PROSPECTUS WORKSHOP | HENDERSON, A.K. | Prospectus Workshop is the two-unit seminar designed for graduate students in English and Comparative Literature who have completed their qualifying examinations and are working on their dissertations. Participants in the seminar will present work-in-progress during the quarter. The goal of the seminar is for each participant to complete his/her prospectus (or an equivalent, such as a chapter) for the Ph.D. dissertation. Graduate students from other Ph.D. programs are welcome to take this seminar, but they should contact the instructor in advance of registration . |
| ENGLISH 299 | DISSERTATION RESEARCH | CHRISTENSEN, J.C. | Variable Units (4-12)
For students who have completed coursework, are preparing for their qualifying exams, or who are ABD.
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| ENGLISH 398 | RHETORIC/TEACHING OF COMPOSITION | JARRATT, S. | Designed for new teachers of writing, this course offers an introduction to theory, research, and scholarship in the field of rhetoric and composition. The course will be organized loosely around the scene of writing instruction as a rhetorical situation, offering readings addressed to the questions such as
o what historical forces within U.S. higher education led to "composition" as we know it: a required course taught to first-year students largely by graduate students?
o how does one construct an ethos for oneself as a teacher? what pedagogical theories are most useful for the teaching of writing? what constitutes an effective style for class presentation/discussion? for written response to student writing?
o who are our students? how do they learn? what do we need to know about their cultural, educational, and language backgrounds?
o how do we define "writing"? what presuppositions ground the lower-division writing curriculum at UCI? where does it fit within the range of current approaches?
o how does research within rhetoric and composition inform contentious public debates about literacy, standard English, "grammar," and plagiarism?
o what are the effects of our teaching? how will students use the first-year writing course as they move through the rest of their undergraduate courses?
Students will write a number of short pieces-responses to the readings, reflections on teaching experiences, reports on observations of other writing teachers, etc. They will also work in small groups to lead class discussion for a portion of each class. The final project will invite students to explore links between composition and their own interests in literature, theory, or rhetoric and will assist them in starting a teaching portfolio.
Text: Villanueva (ed.), Cross-Talk in Comp Theory. A Reader (plus additional xeroxed essays)
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