| Course | Title | Instructor | Description |
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| ENGLISH 28A | POETIC IMAGINATION | STAFF | Reading of selected texts to explore the ways in which this mode formulates experience. Students write several short analytic papers. Prerequisite: satisfaction of the lower-division writing requirement. |
| ENGLISH 28C | REALISM & ROMANCE | STAFF | Reading of selected texts to explore the ways in which this mode formulates experience. Students write several short analytic papers. Prerequisite: satisfaction of the lower-division writing requirement. |
| ENGLISH 28D | CRAFT OF POETRY | DAVIS, S. | Craft of Poetry closely examines mechanical aspects of individual poems by poets of many descriptions. Students master at least one poem by presenting it to the class with peer(s). Course strategies are designed to develop an independent writing discipline. The course is one of four classes required for the Creative Writing Emphasis in Poetry. |
| ENGLISH 100 | HIST THEORY & CRIT | STEINTRAGER, J. | This course provides an introduction to and a historical overview of theoretical thought about drama, poetry, oratory, and similarly “literary” instances of language. We begin roughly with Plato and end with some of the major statements of twentieth-century literary theory. Along the way, we will address such topics as: the variety and import of various media, the relations between literary language and ethics, and what sorts of explanations of literary objects are most appropriate (historical, biographical, formal, and so forth). |
| ENGLISH 101W | TROY STORY | ALLEN, E. | The Aeneid is a story of mourning and celebration: Aeneas leaves behind his burning city to found a new Troy in Rome. Diverted to Carthage, he falls in love with its queen, Dido, but must abandon her for the sake of his duty to his fatherland. The Trojan War provides a foundational narrative for western literary culture, in which the conflict between love and war is played out in myriad variations, in countless genres, through many cultural and temporal divides. Every new version regards the old story as the grounds for both continuity and change. Dido reappears as everything from powerful African queen to plaintive domestic suicide; her role mutates into other figures, like Helen and, especially important in this course, the Trojan lady Criseyde, beloved of Troilus. In Chaucer’s tragic love story, Troilus and Criseyde provide a counter-narrative to the celebratory tale of Aeneas’s martial glory, reveling instead in the social and even cosmic harmony of a great love doomed to failure. Dido’s permutations unfold historical explorations of gender, race, and social status, as well as an ongoing and painful consciousness of human vulnerability in the face of time and circumstance.
The course will focus on three texts: Virgil’s Aeneid, Boccaccio’s Il Filostrato, and Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde. Readings will be selective in Virgil and Boccaccio, and will also include assorted short readings from texts including Ovid's Heroides, Dante's Divine Comedy, and modern poetry. In order to investigate the ways in which one single text makes use of its literary foundations, we will read all of Chaucer’s text, primarily in Middle English, with a translation also available. Upper division writing courses require a total of 4,000 or more words of finished work. This work will consist of three essays of 4-6 pages each, to be submitted in approximately weeks 3, 6 and 10. Two of the three essays will involve small group editorial work.
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| ENGLISH 101W | MEDIEVAL WOMEN'S WRITING | DAVIS, R. | But God forbid that you should say or take it that I am a teacher, for I mean not so, and I meant never so; for I am a woman, unlearned, feeble, and frail . . . But because I am a woman should I therefore believe that I should not tell you the goodness of God, since I saw at the same time that it is his will that it be known?
Julian of Norwich, 14th-century anchoress
This course explores the history of writing for and by women during the medieval period, with a particular emphasis on the role female writers and audiences played in the development of English vernacular literature. Delving into issues such as literacy, language change, religious devotion, education, and gender identities, we will examine barriers to women’s opportunities for writing during this era, but also consider the circumstances in which some women did emerge as authors and otherwise influence literary production. Course readings range from anonymous Anglo-Saxon poetry, to the short romances of Marie de France, the testimonies of ystics and holy women such as Margery Kempe and Julian of Norwich, the allegorical visions of hristine de Pizan, and letters written by the noble women of the Paston family.
While the majority of our readings focus on female writers, restricting ourselves to texts that are unambiguously authored by women would not give a complete picture of women’s involvement in the earliest development of English literature. Our course readings will therefore encompass works written by male authors for female audiences and patrons, including saints’ lives and spiritual guidebooks, anonymous works, and texts that were the result of collaborations between women and men.
This course fulfills the University’s upper-division writing requirement. Course assignments focus on close reading, location and analysis of critical resources, and written response to both primary and secondary texts. Students will write and revise three 5-7 page essays and submit a final writing portfolio at the end of the term.
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| ENGLISH 101W | RDG RENAISS UTOPIAS | KIENE, J. | Sir Thomas More’s Utopia was a “communist manifesto” long before Karl Marx made communism a coherent political theory. It expresses a deep moral concern for the well-being of humanity, and depicts an imaginary world without private property. But it is also a guidebook for social control, the suppression of individuality, and militant imperial domination. It presents itself as a serious piece of travel literature and philosophical investigation, but constantly undermines this presentation, winking at its readers and sometimes coming off as a sly joke that we may or may not be in on. This course will study utopian fiction, a highly elastic genre More did not invent but for which he coined a durable name (utopia is Greek for “no place”), as it develops across the 16th and 17th centuries in England. We’ll focus particularly on the cross-fertilization between literature that describes idealized, perfect, imaginary worlds, and non-fiction accounts of the discoveries of real uncharted lands and encounters with non-European peoples of the “New World.”
We will define the genre broadly, ranging from works such Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis, which constructs an imaginary locale with an eye toward offering political commentary closer to home, to poems like Spenser’s Faerie Queene and plays like Shakespeare’s The Tempest, both set in magical realms that blend elements of the “Old” and “New” worlds. Each of the prose works, poems, and plays we’ll study juxtaposes “real” and explicitly imaginary or artificial worlds in order to think through problems of religion, politics, national consciousness, sexuality, race, and language. Each transports its readers to an imagined world in which the impossible becomes possible, in which the boundaries between self and other are magically redrawn or dissolved, and in which cultural attitudes and assumptions are expressed, challenged, and changed.
Course requirements will include short written responses, two 5-7 page essays, a mid-term and a take-home final exam.
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| ENGLISH 101W | CHARACTER TYPES | BARTLETT, J. | This course will introduce you to the complexity of the nineteenth-century realist novel through the analysis of an irregular figure, the stock character. Neither minor nor major, neither flat nor round, too familiar to require much in the way of a personal history and yet unique in their reactions to immediate events, stock characters wander at a rich intersection between character and plot. If, as Forster has it, the difference between flat and round characters is that the round ones are capable of surprising us, we could say that stock characters often surprise us, but rarely themselves. Mr. Brownlow, the grand benefactor of Oliver Twist, is both reliably and literally deep—“his kindness and solicitude knew no bounds”—but at key moments, like Oliver’s rescue from Fagin’s gang, the novel makes a point of withholding the very details that we would anticipate (and probably skim over): Brownlow “forced a supply of tears into his eyes, by some hydraulic process which we are not sufficiently philosophical to be in a condition to explain.” By reverting to an unfathomable type in such moments, stock characters like Brownlow both reveal and aggravate a fundamental contradiction in the form and ethos of the realist novel, pushing the details that are said to conjure its “realism” into uneasy abstractions. My vision for this course will be similarly, blurrily bifocal: we will get a sense of the form of the realist novel itself by reading a few of them alongside some novel theory, and we will situate that form in a broader genealogy of the archetype by reading a smattering of secondary material from the fields of anthropology, drama, psychoanalysis, literary criticism, and sociology. Our writers will probably include Gaskell, Dickens, and Eliot, as well as Greimas, Foucault, Jung, Frazer, and Frye. You will be expected to write a few brief responses to course readings, to give one presentation followed by some discussion facilitation, and to write and revise three short papers of 5-7 pages. |
| ENGLISH 101W | READING PARADISE LOST | LEWIS, J. | Everyone in John Milton’s Paradise Lost is a reader; most of the major writers in English have engaged its authoritative story; and many of the most influential readers in the history of literary criticism have written about it. These are three good reasons for us to focus on it as well, and see what it can do to help today’s English major learn about himself or herself as a critical reader and writer. Paradise Lost is one of the west’s great epics; it is also a “great argument” designed “to justify the ways of God to men.” The power and brilliance with which this poem of 1667/74 fulfills both of these ambitions made it a foundation and crucial point of reference for much later literature in English; any student who has read Paradise Lost will become a better reader of that literature, often by internalizing Milton’s own very human practice of disobedience. This writing-centered course will focus on problems of critical reading in relation to Paradise Lost. We will consider Milton as a quarrelsome reader of both the epic tradition and the Book of Genesis; we will foreground the problems of interpretation that are staged in his poem; and along the way we will look at some critical readings of that poem by figures ranging from William Blake to William Empson, from Samuel Johnson to Stanley Fish. Students will produce and revise three 5-page papers on aspects of Paradise Lost; a fourth and final paper, due during Finals Week, will engage an influential literary critic’s reading of the poem. |
| ENGLISH 101W | MELVILLE/DOUGLASS | LAZO, R. | Frederick Douglass (1818-1895) and Herman Melville (1819-1891) were contemporaries who addressed many of the nineteenth century’s most important social and political concerns, including conceptions of race, the Civil War, and notions of freedom. This course will situate these very different writers in the historical context in which they worked while raising theoretical questions about the nature of comparative study and historical analysis. In addition, we will consider how the topic of this course relates to recent debates in the study of U.S. literature. We will read Douglass’ My Bondage and My Freedom and study his work as a newspaper editor and orator. Other readings include Melville’s Benito Cereno, The Encantadas, and Battle Pieces as well as selected chapters from Moby-Dick. As an E101W, this course will require five two-page responses and two longer papers. Attendance and discussion are required, and one writing assignment will be due the first week. |
| ENGLISH 101W | AF/AM AUTOBIO WRTNG | KEIZER, A. | Creating, naming, and claiming the self has been a central preoccupation of African American literature from the 1800s to the 21st century. This course will explore several subgenres of autobiographical writing: slave narratives, autobiographical fiction, memoirs, and critical essays that utilize personal histories. Writers whose works we’ll analyze include Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, James Weldon Johnson, Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright, James Baldwin, Audre Lorde, John Edgar Wideman, Bell Hooks, and Patricia Williams. The writing component of the course will allow students to do some autobiographical writing, if they so choose. |
| ENGLISH 102A | EARLY MODERN SELF | SILVER, V. | The course will address how a shift in conceptions of selfhood (in relation to community and cosmos) alters the possibilities and refashions the forms of literate expression from the 14th through the 16th centuries. The course will probably include a late medieval romance, one of Chaucer's two major works, and some Shakespeare sonnets as well as a couple of his plays. There will be two take-home exams and at least one movie. |
| ENGLISH 102A | EARLY MODERN VILLAINS AND USURPERS | KIENE, J. | This course will trace an evolving fascination with problems of evil and illegitimacy in the literature of medieval and early modern England. We’ll focus on prose, narrative poetry, and drama that reveals political, religious, and cultural anxieties through the depiction of characters whose words as well as actions threaten the social order, and we’ll seek to understand why such characters routinely captured the imaginations of readers and audiences. Just how rigidly did medieval and early modern authors define the boundaries between heroism and villainy, between virtue and vice, between legitimate kings and loyal citizens, on the one hand, and tyrants and traitors, on the other? What do the ways in which a society constructs and responds to its literary villains tell us about the overriding social and existential concerns of the day? Possible texts include Beowulf, Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, Machiavelli’s The Prince, Shakespeare’s Richard III, Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus, and Milton’s Paradise Lost. |
| ENGLISH 102B | CRISIS OF EXPER 18C | GROSS, D. | From the talk-show testimonial to the tell-all memoir, eye-witness news to auto-ethnography, first-person experience provokes our endless fascination. Indeed authenticity and truth itself often seem grounded in the rhetoric of first-person experience despite the scientific demand for detached objectivity. How did this tension emerge between the two cultures of science and literature, broadly conceived? Why our fascination with experience and what does this mean for questions of personal identity, including race and gender? What is the relationship between our self and a distinctly modern form of experience? Should we trust our senses? In this course we will critically engage genres of eighteenth-century literature where the crisis of experience emerged in its modern form, including the novel (Laurence Sterne), autobiography (Charlotte Charke, Olaudah Equiano), philosophy (David Hume, Immanuel Kant), and poetry (Charlotte Smith, William Blake, William Wordsworth). Grades will be based primarily on twice-weekly reading responses and an 8 page essay that will go through a careful drafting and revision process.
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| ENGLISH 102C | VICTORIAN SPACES | TUCKER, I. | This course will explore the relations among different conception fo space that are created or come into prominence during the Victorian era: national space, Continental space, colonial space, the interiors and surfaces of bodies, domestic space, architectural space, geological space. We will read work by authors including Charles Dickens, Charlotte Bronte, Wilkie Collins, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Robert Browning, Christina Rossetti, Matthew Arnold, John Ruskin, Charles Darwin, John Stuart Mill. |
| ENGLISH 102C | CULTURE OF ROMANTSM | HENDERSON, A. | This course will provide a survey of early-nineteenth-century British literature and culture. Our focus will be on poetry--the writings of Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, and Byron--but we will also read major novels of the period. As we proceed, we will set these literary texts against the background of contemporary writings in aesthetics, landscaping, and painting. Requirements will include a midterm, final, long essay, and a couple of shorter essays. |
| ENGLISH 102D | AF/AMER WOMEN WRTRS | KEIZER, A. | The explosion of African American women's literature that began in the early 1970s came as a surprise to many. Yet the ground for this contemporary work had been prepared by a tradition of black women's literary production extending back into the eighteenth century. This course will examine fiction, poetry, and drama by twentieth-century black women writers, with particular attention to the influence of nineteenth-century concerns upon more recent works. Through our close readings, we will trace thematic and stylistic continuities and discontinuities between the texts under study, and we will consider the socio-economic and political factors that established the parameters of African American women's creative expression, including the legacies of slavery, stereotypes of black women, sexual violence, and the Civil Rights and feminist movements. We will use critical essays to enhance our analyses of primary texts. Assignments for the course include response papers, a midterm exam, and a final paper. |
| ENGLISH 102D | LIT OF PARTITION | O'CONNOR, L. | Partition along sectarian lines was a feature of British withdrawal from several colonies during the twentieth century, including the partition of Ireland into North and South (1922) and of the Indian sub-continent into India and Pakistan (1947). The partition of countries ramifies into other “partitions”--of the psyche, of ethnic groups and families, of communities and once undivided locales. Because the cherished independence of the new nation-states was predicated upon the violence of partition, their dominant cultural narratives tend to variously demonize, misrepresent, disavow or shun the “others” on the far side of the divide. Paradoxically, therefore, partition is often surrounded by silence and discursive invisibility even as it is widely acknowledged as a watershed event. Our writers call attention to the difficulties of writing partition, difficulties that arise from the complex relationship between memory (collective and personal), trauma, and narrative. The contrastive potential of different genres, a central concern in E102 and Lit.J. courses, is of abiding interest to these writers, and accordingly we’ll read across a wide range of genres. We’ll read murals and contemporary Irish poetry; literary journalism, memoir and oral testimony (Urvashi Butalia); short stories (Saadat Hasan Manto); and novels (Seamus Deane and Bapsi Sidhwa). Requirements include an essay, midterm and final along with full participation, which will be monitored by unannounced quizzes. |
| ENGLISH 103 | CNTRY&CTY IN LIT HI | GELLEY, A. | City, Memory, Intertext
This course will explore the significance of the city as a "memory theater," that is, as a repertoire of cultural sites situated in historical cities and at the same time deployed in an intertextual network in literary works. We will trace how the new forms of city-space that became prominent around the turn of the 18th to the 19th centuries became available as cultural narratives during the 19th and 20th.
The course will begin with a consideration of the pre-Romantic and Romantic concept of landscape, especially as a touchstone of aesthetic experience and judgment in the period. The flight from the city articulated in Wordsworth's "Residence in London" (The Prelude, Bk. 7) led to a differentiated theme of anti-nature in Baudelaire. In the writings of Poe, and then in the fiction of the mid-century (Dickens), the aura of landscape as a sheltering precinct came to be replaced by the phenomenon of the metropolis as site of new forms of human agglomeration and cultural commerce. Our course will study this development in literature dealing with three metropolitan centers: London, Paris, and New York, with works by Wordsworth, Baudelaire, Poe, Dickens, and Bellow. Critics and theorists will include Georg Simmel, Walter Benjamin, Michel Foucault, Raymond Williams, and T.J.Clark.
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| ENGLISH 103 | SHAKESPEARE | LUPTON, J. | Explore the landscapes, dreamscapes, and image banks of Shakespearean drama. Plays covered will include Taming of the Shrew, Hamlet, and The Tempest. Requirements: midterm, final, one paper, plus short assignments, including participation in recitation and performance.
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| ENGLISH 105 | TRNSNTL RACE/GENDR | RADHAKRISHNAN, R. | The purpose of this theory driven seminar is to lay bare the semantics of the prefix, “trans.” How is transnationalism different from multi-nationalism and inter-nationalism? Are there elite transnationalisms and subaltern transnationalisms? Is nationalism transcended or naturalized through transnationalism? What are the relationships among transnationalism, globalization, cosmopolitanism and diasporas? Who are the peoples of transnationalism and who are its heads of state? How is cultural transnationalism related to political and economic transnationalisms? How does transnationalism rearticulate the relationship between people and place, space and place, place and location, living and telling, knowing and acting, being and thinking? How are race, gender, and sexuality re-territorialized by the discourse of transnationalism? We will be paying particular attention to the concept of “scattered hegemonies” as developed by postmodern feminists in their complex endeavors to conceptualize transnationalism in conjunction with the emancipatory performances of gender and sexuality. We will also be focusing on the powerful contributions made by ethnic and critical race theorists to our understanding of the formation of contemporary subjectivity. Theories of space-articulations of location and subject-positionality, “post-ality”: how do these discourses function conjuncturally in the production of the “transnational being?” Is transnationalism an ideology; and if so, what sorts of political practices does it enable? Who are its subjects and agents? Who are the “we” under transnationalism?
These are the questions that constitute our agenda as we traverse a wide range of interdisciplinary readings drawn from feminist theories, theories of gender and sexuality, postmodernism-poststructuralism-postmarxism-and-postcoloniality, cultural studies, political theory, literature, and psychoanalysis. |
| ENGLISH 106 | TROLLOPE&THACKERAY | BARTLETT, J. | In this course we will read The Eustace Diamonds and Vanity Fair, along with selections from the travelogues, journalism, and short fiction of two of the most prolific writers of the nineteenth century. The form and history of serial publication looms large in both of their careers—Trollope and Thackeray began their great friendship writing for Thackeray’s literary magazine, the Cornhill—and so we will be paying special attention to those traces of seriality (interruptions, in particular) that mark their work. We will conclude with Trollope’s only sustained piece of literary criticism, his evaluation of Thackeray’s life and oeuvre. Requirements include written responses to course readings, one presentation followed by some discussion facilitation, one shorter paper of 5-7 pages, and one paper of research length, 8-10 pages. |
| ENGLISH 106 | FITZGERALD | GODDEN, R. | F. Scott Fitzgerald: Manners and Capital
In his study, The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899), the American sociologist, Thorstein Veblen argues that “taste is coercion”: manners, as networks of implied rules and systematically organized tastes, exist for Veblen to coerce…but on behalf of whom? Given that rules in part function to mark those who break them, we should perhaps assume that the rules of leisure operate as passwords or points of admission to the leisure class. In which case, manners may be understood as a displaced form of those accumulations of wealth which they exist to protect. Consequently, the course will explore how money makes manners, and will argue that as the pattern of money-making changes, over the first third of the twentieth century, so the nature of manners and the narratives they imply shifts. The work of F. Scott Fitzgerald will be taken as an index of crucial changes within the leisured and owning classes as the economy associated with Fordism establishes itself after the First World War, only to falter with the onset of the Depression.
Fordism, or the organization not simply of production but of distribution and consumption (in order to maximize output and to avoid over-production), ensures that commodities are available to an expanded American middle class. An understanding of the novel of manners necessarily, therefore, involves an engagement with the nature of commodities and consumerism, even as those entities and activities are deployed by the leisured as a measure of their class authority. Since, again in Veblen’s words, the leisured “live by [by means of] but not in” the laboring class; and since the saleability of commodities depends on the purchaser’s capacity to ‘forget’ the conditions under which those commodities were produced, an exploration of mannered interiors must engage with the ways in which those interiors and their representations disregard the facts of labor.
Since the course is premised on ideas concerning the changeable nature of manners themselves, it is comparative in purpose. Fitzgerald’s work will therefore be read in relation to the history of advertising, of Taylorism and of Fordist flow production. At the literary level, comparisons will be made between his key novels (The Great Gatsby [1925], Tender Is the Night [1934] and The Last Tycoon [1941]) and works by Jack London (Martin Eden [1908]), Edith Wharton (The Age of Innocence [1920]), Willa Cather (The Professor’s House [1925]), and Nathanael West (The Day of the Locust [1939]).
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| ENGLISH 210 | JOYCE'S ULYSSES | NORRIS, M. | Joyce’s Ulysses has long been explored for its narrative challenges, and this course will follow in that critical tradition by bringing the perspectives of contemporary narratology to the novel. I will begin this exploration with Possible Worlds theory whose focus is less on the strategies and characteristics of story-telling than on what theorist Ruth Ronan calls “the fictionality of fiction.” We will therefore pay particular attention to the fictional domains that intersect in the imaginary world of Ulysses, as well as on the relationship between its textual actual world and the historical world of 1904 Dublin to which the novel is believed to bear an almost documentary relationship. One of my hopes is to show that although Possible Worlds theory comes from a philosophical tradition that has been relatively uncongenial to literary criticism (analytic philosophy and philosophy of logic), its concepts and formulations may actually enrich our understanding of the text’s social and ideological contexts and conflicts. Students will also be encouraged to pursue other avenues of recent narratological theory, including such topics as tellability, paralipsis, and implicature.
The course may be taken for Seminar credit through completion of a formal research paper. Proseminar credit will require the completion of two take-home examinations.
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| ENGLISH 210 | CONTMP IRISH POETRY | O'CONNOR, L. | Contemporary Irish poetry has generated international critical acclaim and considerable popular interest. Today’s poets came of age in the late sixties, fifty years after the formation (and/or partitioning) of the Irish Free State and Northern Ireland and at a time when campaigns for minority and women’s rights began to dominate the Western political agenda. In Northern Ireland, state suppression of civil rights marches by the Catholic minority ignited “the Troubles”; feminist campaigns for job equity and reproductive control contested the definition, enshrined in the Republic’s 1937 Constitution, of woman-as-Family-caregiver; and Irish-speakers organized against the second-class treatment of the nation-state’s “first because national” language. The minority politics of the late sixties and seventies replaced Ireland’s isolationism with a transnational outlook, but they were also embroiled, in one way or another, in debates about nationality and the internal exclusions of the postcolonial nation-state. Bearing in mind how the sectarian partitions that accompanied British withdrawal from several colonies are often paradoxically surrounded by disavowal and discursive invisibility, we’ll examine the poets’ formal and thematic strategies for representing the trauma of partition. We’ll explore the contrastive ways in which women poets attempt to redress gendered notions of lyric subjectivity and the masculinist biases of their literary traditions. We’ll also discuss how changing practices of literary translation have altered perceptions of Ireland’s bilingual heritage. And we’ll seek signs of another reversal, the ongoing economic meltdown of the so-called Celtic Tiger. Reading these poets in relationship to one another enables us to explore their diverse responses to their political and social milieux and to examine the signs of collaborative and rivalrous exchange among them. Participants are encouraged to read lesser-known and emergent poets along with their better-known contemporaries. The poets we’ll discuss include, but are not limited to, Eavan Boland, Ciaran Carson, Rita Ann Higgins, Seamus Heaney, Michael Longley, Derek Mahon, John Montague, Paul Muldoon, Medbh McGuckian, Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin and Cathal Ó Searcaigh.
All participants are expected to write weekly response papers (c. 500wds). In addition, pro-seminar participants will write a take-home exam-essay or a conference paper. Seminar participants are required to write a 15-20 page research-paper, supported by a prospectus and an oral presentation of their research-topic, and to meet schedule deadlines.
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| ENGLISH 210 | FAULKNER | GODDEN, R. | What is often first remarked on concerning Faulkner’s work is its difficulty; the course will contend that the difficulty diminishes, and textual opacity achieves motivation, once it is understood that the difficulty (though undoubted and intriguing) functions as an expression of contradictions within the plantation South (a region understood as a specific and pre-modern regime of accumulation). Our purpose will be to establish the poetics of a southern economy prior to and during the New Deal. In order to do as much, we will read six of Faulkner’s experimental and canonical novels (The Sound and the Fury [1929], As I Lay Dying [1930] Absalom, Absalom! [1936], The Wild Palms (If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem [1939], The Hamlet [1940] and Go Down, Moses [1942]). Each week, primary reading will also involve specified historical and theoretical essays.
By contextualizing Faulkner’s writing in the complex labor history of the South, the course seeks to establish that his works attend to a major shift in the history of labor relations (from bondage to wages), a shift that determines not only the thematic concerns of the novels, but also their essential stylistic and narrative strategies. The course’s emphasis on the textually generative nature of labor contradictions will, hopefully, broach the issue of materialist models of language, in their relation to narrative poetics.
Arguably, the region, as Faulkner saw it, engaged in a prolonged displacement or denial of the bondage systems (slavery and debt peonage) from which it grew, and which it struggled to keep intact. From such denial emerged a mode of thought (among the planter class) that Faulkner translates into the difficult narrative structures and prose style of the texts with which we will engage. The course will explore the contention that Faulkner’s famous difficulty stems from his need to portray the mind of the southern owning class wrestling with a labor system it regards as at once necessary and untenable, neither to be borne nor to be given up. With luck, as the course proceeds, difficulty will recede towards pleasure.
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| ENGLISH 210 | 19TH CENTURY POETRY | HENDERSON, A. | In this course we will examine the work of British poets of the nineteenth century, focusing on their conception of the act of representation itself. We will begin by reading canonical Romantic writers alongside non-canonical ones in order to familiarize ourselves with Romantic protocols of representation. We will then turn to Tennyson and Browning, mid-century poets, tracing their skepticism regarding the viability of Romantic symbolism, and their efforts to compensate for the non-referential character of their work by an increasing investment in poetic form. Finally, we will explore Pre-Raphaelite techniques for rendering the object world: pictorialism, detailism, and new versions of symbolism that do not rely on objective reference. Seminar students will write a 25-page paper; pro-seminar students will do a 10-page archival project.
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| ENGLISH 210 | CHAUCER | ALLEN, E. | Chaucer has long been the avatar of medieval canonicity. His work in an enormous variety of genres, stylistic experimentation, oblique tone, unreliable narrative persona, and creation of layered narratives have encouraged readers to assign his works a certain timeless or universal value. Recent work in the field has delineated some of the ways in which Chaucer’s very evasiveness with respect to political and social reference has contributed to his universality. Scholars have sought increasingly to locate Chaucer within the social and ideological context of his time. Such work does more than historicize Chaucer’s authorial investments. It suggests ways in which the capacity of Chaucer’s poems to “travel” outside the Middle Ages may arise from a particular summons to literary audience.
In this course, we will investigate ways in which Chaucer situates himself in literary and (to a degree) social histories in order to call into being an audience. This task will be understood as experimental and in-process, governed by the explorations of various literary pasts which, in turn, suggest new literary futures for English poetry. Chaucer likely began writing in French, and his first English poems draw on the popular court tradition of French love debates. When he encountered Dante, his ambitions shifted dramatically, and the conceptual dream vision The House of Fame reimagines the way in which literary history arises from, and recreates, experience. Chaucer develops a thoroughgoing argument against Dante (and, in another way, against Boccaccio) in his most ambitious and coherent work, Troilus and Criseyde, a tragedy of grand proportions and a meditation on readerly involvement. In its aftermath, Chaucer imagines himself subject to a highly constrained imagined audience: the God of Love, as punishment for his having criticized Criseyde, assigns him to write the peculiarly abbreviated Ovidian Legends of Good Women. Finally, the Canterbury Tales embrace a poetics of happenstance, where the links among authors, tales, and audiences have more play than in any of his other works, and where therefore the possibilities for readerly sympathy and moral judgment proliferate.
Through a relatively wide investigation of Chaucer’s own literary histories¬not just through the Canterbury Tales, of which we will read only three or four¬this course will reflect upon literary history as an impetus for and product of poetic making. The premise of the course, and its occasional argument, has to do with the validation of literary texts as themselves constituting history. This does not mean that we jettison social and cultural history, but that we register the historicity¬the changeability, the causal force, and the sometimes incoherent development in time–of Chaucer’s classical and international pasts, the literary world into which he seeks to claim his place.
Readings will be in Middle English. No prior experience is required. Some translation quizzes will be given.
Texts: Relevant criticism on each week’s reading will be assigned. Chaucer, Book of the Duchess; House of Fame; Troilus and Criseyde; some Legends of Good Women; Canterbury Tales (Knight, Miller, Wife of Bath, perhaps others). Selections from Machaut, Judgment of the King of Bohemia; Dante, Divine Comedy; Ovid, Metamorphoses and Heroides; Boethius, Consolation of Philosophy; Statius, Thebiad; Boccaccio, Il Filostrato.
Proseminar: weekly response papers; annotated bibliography
Seminar: oral presentation, seminar paper
NB: For medievalists and early modernists, I will be teaching concurrently a Canterbury Tales course for upper-level undergraduates. You are welcome to attend that course, though participation in class discussion must be limited. An additional meeting time per week can be arranged for graduate auditors of the Canterbury Tales.
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| ENGLISH 215 | PROSPECTUS WORKSHOP | RADHAKRISHNAN, R. | 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 290 | READING&CONFERENCE | STAFF | |
| ENGLISH 290 | READING&CONFERENCE | STAFF | |
| ENGLISH 290 | READING&CONFERENCE | STAFF | |
| ENGLISH 290 | READING&CONFERENCE | STAFF | |
| ENGLISH 290 | READING&CONFERENCE | STAFF | |
| ENGLISH 290 | READING&CONFERENCE | STAFF | |
| ENGLISH 290 | READING&CONFERENCE | STAFF | |
| ENGLISH 290 | READING&CONFERENCE | STAFF | |
| ENGLISH 290 | READING&CONFERENCE | STAFF | |
| ENGLISH 290 | READING&CONFERENCE | STAFF | |
| ENGLISH 290 | READING&CONFERENCE | STAFF | |
| ENGLISH 299 | DISSERTATN RESEARCH | THOMAS, B. | |
| ENGLISH 398 | RHET/TCHNG OF COMP | ALEXANDER, J. | |
| ENGLISH 398 | RHET/TCHNG OF COMP | STAFF | |
| ENGLISH 398 | RHET/TCHNG OF COMP | GROSS, D. | |