| Course | Title | Instructor | Description |
|---|
| ENGLISH 6 | MAGICAL BRITAIN FROM MALORY TO SHAKESPEARE | KROLL, A. | In this course, we will read a selection of early modern texts (including Malory's Morte D'Arthur; Marlowe's Dr Faustus; Spenser's Faerie Queene; Shakespeare's Macbeth, A Midsummer Night's Dream, and The Tempest) that deal with magic, enchantment, sorcery, and witchcraft. Some of the key questions we will consider are, what did the occult have to offer those who studied it? How did Christian occultists, of which there were many, square their magical studies with their faith? What fears or anxieties did magic, witchcraft, and the occult present to those who sought to suppress them? Paper, paper revision, and take-home final. |
| ENGLISH 28A | POETIC IMAGINATION | STAFF | |
| ENGLISH 28C | REALISM & ROMANCE | STAFF | |
| ENGLISH 28D | CRAFT OF POETRY | DAVIS, S.E. | Craft of Poetry closely examines mechanical aspects of individual poems by poets of many descriptions. Students master at least one poem by team-teaching it to the class. Course strategies are designed to develop an independent writing discipline. The course is 1 of 4 classes required for the Creative Writing Emphasis in Poetry. |
| ENGLISH 100 | HISTORY OF LITERARY THEORY & CRITICISM | KROLL, R. | This course is designed to introduce the tradition of discussing literary texts and their role in society which goes back to the Greeks. We begin with Plato and Aristotle and end with the contemporary critic Harold Bloom. On average, we read two fairly dense, abstract texts a week, with discussion and lecture on Tuesday and Thursday. Apart from some required books, we have a course package which costs about $25. In the past I have required two 3-5-page essays in the course of the term; a take-home final; and spot quizzes roughly every week in the summer, but we might experiment with a slightly different formula.. Grades are heavily dependent on your writing; but they also reflect your attendence at lecture and your performance in the quizzes. |
| ENGLISH 101W | SEMINAR IN LIT CRIT | STAFF | |
| ENGLISH 101W | PROSE BEFORE NOVEL | PFEIFFER, D. | This writing-intensive seminar introduces students to some of the chief forms of Continental and British narrative fiction before the novel, including the novella, the romance, the travel narrative, and the Menippean satire. Using a critical vocabulary drawn from both Renaissance and twentieth-century literary theory, we will examine the ways that early modern storytellers used and abused these narrative forms to communicate their various ethical, political, and artistic programs. Our primary reading will consist of selections from the following books: Boccaccio’s Decameron, Cervantes’ Don Quixote, Thomas More’s Utopia, Thomas Nashe’s The Unfortunate Traveller, Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia, Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene, and Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko. |
| ENGLISH 101W | LYRIC POETRY | ROBERTS, H. | A study of lyric poetry in English from the Middle Ages to the present day. This course will introduce students to a wide variety of lyric forms in English poetry and explore the history of critical and theoretical responses to the challenge of the lyric. |
| ENGLISH 102A | EPIC & ROMANCE | GEORGIANNA, L. | This course will introduce students to the English Middle Ages by focusing on the interrelationship between two important medieval literary genres, epic and romance. We will study works ranging from Beowulf to Sir Gawain and the Green Knight to Malory's Morte D'Arthur some in translation, others in Middle English. Students can expect to read some strange and wonderful books, develop a good historical understanding of the period and these closely inter-related genres, and develop stronger skills in close reading, textual analysis, and critical writing. Midterm, paper and final exam plus reading quizzes as necessary. |
| ENGLISH 102B | NOVEL DISTINCTIONS | VAN SANT, A.J. | The English novel, people often say, began in the 18th century. That claim is reliable, but we should modify it. In the late 17th- and early 18th- centuries, the category of the “novel” did not exist. Instead, many fictional experiments emerged. In this course, we will read 4 of them:
•John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress (a lastingly popular allegory of a soul’s journey, frequently translated);
•Eliza Haywood’s Love in Excess (a fiction about sexual desire and ambition—with one of the best sales records in the early 18th c.)
•Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (a political, moral, and intellectual satire, also one of the 3 most popular fictions in the early 18th c., according to sales records); and
•Daniel Defoe’s Roxana (Defoe’s last novel fiction, darker and more complex than his criminal biography of Moll Flanders).
In addition to considering questions about fictional form, we will ask questions about political and social history and about gender as they are figured in these fictions.
Course requirements: Attendance, participation, mid-term, course paper, and final. The course will have a website. |
| ENGLISH 102C | COUNTRY & CITY | FREELAND, N. | |
| ENGLISH 102C | US REALSM&NATURALSM | THOMAS, B. | Within the English major, the 102 series is designed to give students a sense of literary history in relation to other historical forces, political, social, economic, or cultural. The period after the American Civil War is often called the Age of Realism. It saw the rise, first, of literary realism and, then, literary naturalism. This course will look at some of the best works of realism and naturalism with the goal of (1) learning how to define works of realism and naturalism (2) speculating on why realism and naturalism developed at this time and (3) relating the works we read to the history of their times. We will read short stories, novels, and poetry. Authors will include James, Howells, Twain, Chopin, Jewett, Gilman, Sui Sin Far, Markham, Dunbar, Chesnutt, Crane, and London. There will be a midterm, final, and one essay. Slack attendance and a failure to read the works on time will result in a failing grade. |
| ENGLISH 102D | LIT&DECOLONIZATION | O'CONNOR, L. | |
| ENGLISH 103 | ROMANTIC PROSE | TERADA, R. | In this course we focus not on Romantic novelists such as Mary Shelley and Jane Austen, but on other varied, often bizarrely brilliant, and almost genreless Romantic nonfiction prose--prose that has more in common with poems or letters than with narratives. Texts like Thomas de Quincey's hallucinatory fantasia Suspiria de Profundis, the serial reflective essays of Charles Lamb, the journals of Dorothy Wordsworth, and the notebooks of S.T. Coleridge use the formless, the fragmentary, and the casual to explore the boundaries of the sayable in public and private modes. Regardless of its size, the course will include discussion, along with two papers, a midterm, a final, and postings on EEE's electronic Noteboard. |
| ENGLISH 103 | TOPICS VARY | STAFF | |
| ENGLISH 103 | BLOOMSBURY | KROLL, A. | This course will survey major prose writers in Britain from 1918-1939. Not only were writers such as Keynes, Woolf, Strachey, Forster, Orwell, and Graves all members of a generation that endured two catastrophic world conflicts, they also witnessed the beginning of the end of the British Empire. Our readings will focus on these global events with particular emphasis on the developing reformulation of British/English identity in the midst of them. Two papers and take-home final. |
| ENGLISH 103 | MUCKRAKING | LAZO, J.R. | “Muckrakers,” Teddy Roosevelt called these writers, because they could look no way but down toward the “muck” of society to expose political and economic corruption. We begin our class by reading one of the better-known attempts to bring about social change, Upton Sinclair’s tale of immigrant exploitation in the meatpacking industry, "The Jungle," then delve into work by some of Sinclair’s contemporaries, including Lincoln Steffens and Ida Tarbell. We will consider the historical conditions at the previous turn of the century that inspired stories about crooked politicians, greedy oil magnates, and violations of labor laws. In the last part of the course, we fast-forward to the contemporary moment and consider Eric Schlosser’s "Fast Food Nation" and the documentary "Bowling for Columbine" to see how efforts to rake (and write) the muck have changed over a century. Course requirements include an in-class midterm and final exam. |
| ENGLISH 103 | WOMN&RELGIN MED ENG | GEORGIANNA, L. | Beginning with 2nd century virgin-martyr tales and running through the late medieval Book of Margery Kempe, this course will focus on the ways in which various ideals of virginity, and more generally female sexuality, operate in both literature and in the lived religious experiences of medieval women. Works to be read include the Life of St. Perpetua , the Acts of Paul and Thecla, the early 13th century Ancrene Wisse (Guide for Anchoresses), Julian of Norwich's Revelations, and the Book of Margery Kempe. Paper, midterm and final. |
| ENGLISH 105 | ASIANAM/AFAM NOVELS | RADHAKRISHNAN, R. | This course will be an attempt to understand and appreciate the common and the different ways in which concepts such as “race,” “ethnicity,” “hyphenation,” “assimilation,” “minority,” “citizenship,” “color,” “gender,” “sexuality,” “visibility,” “nationality,” “citizenship,” “language and silence,” “America,” “history,” “remembering,” “forgetting,” and “double-consciousness” play themselves out in the context of the African-American novel and the Asian-American novel. With an even balance on fictional and theoretical texts, I hope to focus, with your help of course, on issues such as narrative and subject formation, subjectivity as both aesthetic and political, identity as both individual and collective, the relationship between literature and politics, theory and practice, and the politics of representation and signification. Against the backdrop of history and theoretical thought about these themes, we will analyze a few selected novels and examine how they construct themselves both as literary and as political texts. Some of the questions that we will be exploring are: What is the relationship between literary movements and political movements? What is the role of the intellectual and the artist in political struggle? How do “minority” artists and writers create their own traditions? As “double-conscious” works, how do the novels of African-America and Asian-America intervene between Africa and America, between Asia and America? How is “America” signified into existence in these works? What articulations are possible between nationalisms and diasporas? What is the relationship of these novels to movements such as Realism, Modernism, Postmodernism, Multiculturalism, Postcoloniality, and theories of Gender and Sexuality? |
| ENGLISH 105 | CLONIALSM&AFRCN LIT | NGUGI, W.T. | Colonialism and the colonial experience have profoundly affected intellectual production in the world. With the theme of colonialism as the unifying principle, the course explores the work of a number of African writers. Through based on the African literary production, the issues raised are relevant to all post-colonial societies. |
| ENGLISH 106 | SHAKESPEARE | HENDERSON, A. | In this course students will learn a variety of techniques for reading, watching, and discussing Shakespeare’s plays. We will study three major plays—Hamlet, Twelfth Night, and The Tempest—from a wide range of perspectives. We will explore, among other things, Shakespeare’s use of rhetoric, the influence of editors on Shakespeare’s plays, the ways performance functions as interpretation, and the relevance of Renaissance social issues to modern readers and audiences. Coursework will include three papers and weekly exercises. |
| ENGLISH 106 | WORDSWORTH | ROBERTS, H. | An introduction to and survey of the work of one of the most important poets in the English tradition. This course will provide students the opportunity to explore Wordsworth's life and works in their contemporary historical context. In particular, we will read the whole of Wordsworth's long autobiographical poem, The Prelude. |
| ENGLISH 106 | MOD UTOPIA&DISTOPIA | AMIRAN, E. | |
| ENGLISH 106 | HUMANIST TEXTS | PFEIFFER, D. | This seminar will examine the work of some of the most important Renaissance humanists from Petrarch to Montaigne. We will pay special attention to the complex ways these authors used traditional kinds of writing (oration, historiography, political treatise, familiar letter, story, techne, and conduct manual) to reinterpret such fundamental literary concerns as the ethics of reading and writing, the social roles of truth and fiction, the psychology of education, the value of the past to the present, and the contest between the academic “disciplines.” We will focus on the formal and conceptual continuities between these various texts, including their shared indebtedness to the classical rhetorical tradition. Authors include Pico, Valla, Alberti, Castiglione, Erasmus, More, and Sidney. |
| ENGLISH 106 | GHOST STORIES | LEWIS, J. | What is a ghost? Why do so many of them--from Hamlet’s father to Wuthering Heights’s Catherine Earnshaw--haunt the passages of literature written in English? For that matter, what does it mean for someone (a person) or something (a house, a book) to be haunted? In this seminar, we’ll be raising all these questions, and many more. Are ghosts merely the shape we give to our anxieties? How have those shapes changed over time, or have they? How are folkloric, oral ghost traditions different from their literary counterparts? Are women haunted by different ghosts from the ones that haunt men? Why are guilt and justice so central to the idea and experience of ghosts? Why does belief in them seem to have declined, or has it? What’s the difference between an English ghost and an American (or Irish or Japanese or Mexican) one? How are literary works, and even the English language itself, shaped by a past they cannot shake off? Why do ghosts wear clothes? Some sorrowful, some spine-tingling, all uncanny, the ghost stories we’ll be reading in this seminar will yield new insight not just into the literature and lore of the supernatural but also into the uncertainty of the lines we draw between the real and the unreal, the inside and the outside, the individual and the community, the present and the past. After a short foray into some of Emily Dickinson’s ghost poems, we’ll start with one of the first ghost stories printed in English (Daniel Defoe’s The Apparition of Mrs. Veal) and end with recent cinema (The Others), in between encountering a wide array of haunted pages composed in both the English and the American literary traditions. Texts include: The Turn of the Screw, The Haunting of Hill House, Beloved, Comfort Woman, and classic stories by J.S. LeFanu, Bram Stoker, and Edith Wharton. A great many of these works are written by women, or centered on them, and an explicit focus in our course will be the question of why ghost stories seem to appeal to female and ethnic American writers. Participants will be working both individually and in groups: A midterm and a final paper (each 5 to 7 pages) on a text of your choice will be required, as well as the contribution of one question about the day’s reading to each class meeting. On the collective level, we’ll be writing a group ghost story for the last class meeting, and dividing into groups responsible for one presentation each over the course of the quarter. We will of course be meeting on Halloween! |
| ENGLISH 210 | TOP IN 20C AMER LIT | SZALAY, M. | |
| ENGLISH 210 | CONTMP IRISH POETRY | O'CONNOR, L. | |
| ENGLISH 210 | US REALISM | THOMAS, B. | |
| ENGLISH 210 | LATE 17TH C WOMEN | KROLL, R. | This class is aimed, methodologically, at the marginalization of these figures by (paradoxically) the prevailing strain of modern feminist criticism, which sees them as either colluding with the patriarchy or as internally conflicted, the logic being that to appeal to the wider culture they had to engage in a certain act of bad faith. My main contention is that, understood properly, all three reveal themselves as fully informed about the central issues of the day, and as remarkably coherent, intelligent, and principled political figures. Their attachment to due process (Hutchinson) and their royalism (Cavendish, Behn) is governed by a Hobbesian reaction to the state of nature, a circumstance more likely to endanger women than men. We have to engage in several adjustments of our assumptions: personality in the seventeenth century—inasmuch as it was conceived of as a stable entity—was largely imagined theologically, so at odds with the prevailing secularism of much modern feminist theory, and political liberties were imagined not via a kind of antiestablishment assertion of autonomy but in group terms: as plural rather than singular. All three writers show themselves deeply immersed in the cosmological issues that pervaded the seventeenth century—Hutchinson was the first person known to have translated all of Lucretius into English (barring the naughty bits), Cavendish became an ardent convert to atomism then developed her own cosmology, and Behn translated Fontenelle as well as being an admirer of Lucretians like Dryden, Rochester, and Thomas Creech, the first to publish a complete translation of De Rerum Natura. This is a crucial fact for two reasons: your cosmology is likely to determine your politics, not the other way around; and assumptions about literacy in the seventeenth century were still humanist, so that modern anthologies dividing these writers’ ‘literary’ productions off from their other effusions prevent us from seeing how in many cases the interest in ‘science’ might be a key to interpreting the ‘literature.’ In their own minds—I think it demonstrable—they saw all their writings as being of a piece, whether cosmology, biography, drama, epic, or prose narrative. Finally, we will also consider how the culture of the French salons, in which women played a crucial role—especially in the fiction of the femme forte—affected forms of self-stylization. |
| ENGLISH 210 | DVRSIONS OF PASTORL | LEWIS, J. | Oh, please don’t yawn! The pastoral mode is a notoriously indolent one, and with its signature evocations of innocence and withdrawal, of natural impulse implausibly integrated with aesthetic form, of timelessness, simplicity, and erotic ideality, it has been with us since Genesis (not to mention Theocritus). But for just about as long, pastoral has been subject to the very encroachments and transformations that it structurally, thematically, and (by many accounts) ideologically resists. And never more so than during the British enlightenment, when new structures of political, anthropological, topographical, and scientific knowledge conspired with new anxieties about sexual, social, and generic hierarchy to infiltrate and divert pastoral’s traditional attitudes and assumptions, including those about the innocence of diversion itself. Drawing inspiration from William Empson’s influential (if quirky) Some Versions of Pastoral, participants in this seminar will explore some self-consciously modern diversions in the theory and practice of pastoral, even as we use this ultimately resilient and reflexive convention as a frame for organizing a picture of emergent modernity itself. The dates bounding our inquiry are important, since they mark the founding of the Royal Society on one end and Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads on the other: two radically different approaches, both symbolic and epistemological, to the natural world that pastoral typically posits. In between we find Milton’s Paradise (PL IV only); the empire-building landscapes of Pope’s Windsor Forest and Thomson’s The Seasons; the ironic mappings of pastoral onto female anatomy and subjectivity in the poetry of Anne Finch; the social protest of both John Gay’s “Newgate pastoral,” The Beggar’s Opera, and Goldsmith’s The Deserted Village; the libertine fantasia of Cleland’s Fanny Hill; the stylization of the North American continent (and specifically Virginia) as a new arcadia in some of Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on Virginia and related writings; and the inexorable descent of gothic mist of Radcliffe’s Sicilian Romance . . . and that, mixed with a little landscape painting and some classic critical works on pastoral, will be our syllabus. This seminar may appeal not only to students with an interest in eighteenth-century literature in English but to those curious about transatlantic connections in the period, as well as to those generally interested in the ideological and historical underpinnings of particular symbolic modes. (This one happens to have special relevance to reconceptions of the female body, so feminist theory emphasists take note!) Requirements, besides the preparation of several reading passages for group discussion, include writing a 15-page paper for seminar credit or, for pro-seminar credit, a 5-page summary and brief application of one theory of pastoral which can also be presented informally to the group. Oh, and not yawning. |
| ENGLISH 210 | LATINO LIT&ARCHIVE | LAZO, J. | |
| ENGLISH 210 | CHAUCER | ALLEN, E.G. | |
| ENGLISH 215 | PROSPECTUS WORKSHOP | HENDERSON, A. | 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 398 | RHET/TCHNG OF COMP | STAFF | |