| 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 a variety of poems by a wide range of poets. The focus will be on poetry "by the line and sentence" with the idea that such attention will improve the quality of the lines and sentences in students' poems. Poems will not be workshopped. Weekly submissions will take up: the substance of subject matter; clarity, concision and grammar in sentences; unity; cohesiveness; and language use and quality of thought that is representative of the sensibility of the writer. 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.
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| ENGLISH 100 | HIST THEORY & CRIT | CLARK, M. | This course introduces students to some of the most important concepts and texts that inform the ways we read, write, and discuss literature today. We will approach the readings chronologically, starting with Plato and Aristotle and ending with some contemporary theorists, but the course is not intended to be a comprehensive survey. Instead, we will identify a few key ideas about literature and study their emergence and evolution under the pressure of intellectual debate and historical change. Requirements will include two examinations during the quarter and a final examination. Attendance at lecture is required, and there will be several in-class writing assignments throughout the quarter. The text for the course is The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism (W.W. Norton, 2001). |
| ENGLISH 101W | HEAVEN AND HELL IN EARLY MODERN LITERATURE | KIENE, J. | Perhaps it’s not surprising that in a society as suffused with religious belief and theological debate as Renaissance England, nightmarish visions of Hell and beatific visions of Heaven often feature in the literature of the period. Yet as early modern English writers imagined these otherworldly spaces, they had increasingly to negotiate prohibitions on “Catholic” forms of representation likely to strike Protestant authorities as idolatrous. In this class, we’ll seek to understand why such visions routinely capture the imaginations of readers and audiences, both then and now, by reading examples of prose, narrative poetry, and drama that reveal political, religious, and cultural anxieties through depictions of Heaven, Hell, and related realms (such as underworlds and utopias). What religious, political, and social purposes did literary depictions of Hell and Heaven serve? What do the ways in which a culture constructs and responds to imaginative representations these spiritual realms tell us about the overriding social and existential concerns of the day? Visions of Hell and Heaven could instruct the faithful in conduct and devotion; they could satisfy a desire to see the wicked punished and the righteous redeemed; they could advanced veiled political and social critique, or demonstrate the grandeur as well as the limits of earthly power. The authors of such visions advertise their indebtedness to classical and medieval precursors (some of whom we’ll read), at the same time asserting the newness and quintessential “Englishness” of their work.
Possible texts include Virgil’s Aeneid, Dante’s Inferno and Paradiso, poems from the Pearl manuscript, Foxe’s Acts and Monuments, A Mirror for Magistrates, Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus, Spenser’s Faerie Queene, and Milton’s Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained. Course requirements will include regular participation in class discussion, weekly written responses, and three 5-7 page essays for which you will hand in preliminary drafts.
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| ENGLISH 101W | VICTORIAN GAME THEORY | BARTLETT, J. | In this course we will examine the Victorians’ fascination with games in literature and science. Roughly speaking, games are decision-making puzzles in situations of conflict, and in that they tend to involve those traits we consider most “Victorian”— competitiveness, rules, probity, determination, and judgment. But the thematic and stylistic implications of games are far more complicated and far-reaching. We will find novelists who make extensive literal and metaphorical use of games to talk about diplomacy, class, ethics, and sociability, economists who compare their work on monopolies to strategic partnerships in novels, scientists who compare evolution to elaborate games of chess, and Lewis Carroll, of course, who in addition to his descriptions of flamingo-hedgehog croquet, also creates a mathematical puzzle “Natural Selection.” We will sample some of these texts, including novels or stories by Thomas Hardy, Henry James, Wilkie Collins and George Eliot. Requirements include a midterm, a paper of 5-7 pages and a final exam. Although this is a course inspired by some light game theory, the subject of these readings is fun: we will make no use of math. |
| ENGLISH 101W | THE LYRIC | 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.
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| ENGLISH 101W | ARTHURIAN TRADITION | DAVIS, R. | This course investigates the major traditions of Arthurian literature from the Middle Ages to Monty Python. Our focus will be on the historical development of the myth of Arthur in Celtic, Latin, and French texts (all read in translation), as well as in Middle English literature including Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Malory’s Morte Darthur, and medieval romance. In the second half of the course, we will examine the adaptability of the Arthurian legend to the changing values of different eras by analyzing Victorian and modern versions of the tales such as Tennyson’s Idylls of the King, T.H. White’s The Once and Future King, and several films including Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975), Excalibur (1981), and King Arthur (2004).
Course assignments focus on close reading and written response to both primary and secondary texts. In fulfillment of the University’s upper-division writing requirement, students will submit short responses to course texts and write and revise three 5-7 page essays.
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| ENGLISH 101W | LITERATURE OF WAR AND REMEMBRANCE | KIENE, J. | This course will examine representations of warfare, both as individual experience and as collective cultural crisis, in literature ranging across several historical periods and literary genres. While we won’t limit ourselves to narrow conceptions of “pro-war” or “anti-war” discourses, we will consider texts that valorize warfare as virtuous, life-affirming, or heroic, and texts that undermine such conceptions by refusing to mask war’s inherent cruelty, suffering, and dehumanization. We will focus particularly on the ways in which communities, through both literature and visual arts, seek to make sense of and find solace for the trauma of war in acts of commemoration and myth-construction. Possible texts for the course range from ancient epics like Homer’s Iliad and Virgil’s Aeneid, to early modern English works like Shakespeare’s Henry V, to the poetry of First World War veterans Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon, to novels like Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, and Ian McEwan’s Atonement.
Course requirements will include regular participation in class discussion, weekly written responses, and three 5-7 page essays for which you will hand in preliminary drafts. |
| ENGLISH 101W | SHAKESPEARE | HELFER, R. | This course explores the varied forms of Shakespeare's plays – comedy, tragedy, history, and romance – in the literary, social, and political contexts of 16th- and 17th-century England. Course requirements include quizzes and short writing assignments, two essays, and active participation. |
| ENGLISH 102A | INDIVIDUAL&SOCIETY | ALLEN, E. | This course will explore ideas of community and the self in medieval narratives from Beowulf to King Arthur. The Middle Ages, often defined as the “time between” the Classics and the rebirth of the Renaissance, actually covers an enormously varied and lively range of literature, which weaves together ideals of heroic martial prowess, courtly refinement, and spiritual devotion sometimes into peculiarly evocative rough cloths, sometimes into brilliant tapestries. The age is defined by precarious communities in which social continuity and peace can easily tilt into utter destruction. We will be particularly concerned to explore the basic terms of such communities their familial forms, their ethical values, their political orders—as social forms like courtly love and mercantilism solidify. We will tease out what makes individuals exceptional, outcast, or heroic in such communities, from the tension between Beowulf and his resentful enemy Grendel to the incestuous link between King Arthur and Mordred. The individual self can typify and lead the community, or else destroy it; in a context of social upheaval, what causes one or the other is not always so clear. Kings and monsters, gods and heroes, mystics and their demons—all evoke the remarkable proximity between social cohesion and isolation. The course book will be the Norton Anthology (Volume A). Requirements include one paper, a midterm and final exam (both essays), assorted smaller assignments including unannounced quizzes, and the usual attendance and participation. |
| ENGLISH 102B | AGE OF SENSIBILITY | GROSS, D. | Defying chronology, we return to the Age of Sensibility as "emotion studies" accelerate across the disciplines. Like Ann Radcliffe we should find terror part of our creepy world (not just a brain state), like Shaftesbury we should consider most basic our social emotions such as panic and sympathy (not personal feelings), and maybe we would actually do better if, like Adam Ferguson, we understood our social institutions such as the marketplace in terms of fear and vanity (not reason). In this course we will survey key works of 18th-century fiction, psychology, and social thought to address these questions and others, learning along the way how critical work in the present proceeds by way of literary history. Grades will be based primarily on twice- weekly reading responses and a 7-page final essay that will go through a careful drafting and revision process.
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| ENGLISH 102C | THE BRITISH 1890S | BARTLETT, J. | In this course we will read a number of works associated with Aestheticism and the Decadence, a period marked by great social, literary, and philosophical ambivalences, including the paradox of the cosmopolitan subject, the circulation of criticism and the exclusivity of the coterie, the aestheticization of the object and the relation between the useful and the beautiful. We will read philosophies of art and culture by John Ruskin, anthropology by W. K. Clifford, sociology by Georg Simmel, sexology by Havelock Ellis, and psychical research by William James. Our literary texts will include prose and poetry by Oscar Wilde, Max Beerbohm, and Aubrey Beardsley. We will end the course with Arthur Machen’s bizarre scientific-gothic novel The Great God Pan, because, frankly, we can’t do better. Students 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 102C | REPORTING AND REALISM | THOMAS, B. | This section is cross-listed as both E102C and LJ103. Sections of E102C cover different topics in 19th-century literature written in English. Sections of LJ103 cover different topics in literary journalism. Our topic will be the relation between the rise of the mode of realism in American literature after the Civil War and developments in journalism during the same period. We should end with a better understanding of what constitutes both literary realism and literary journalism.
The course will have three units:
(1) Works of literary realism by writers trained as journalists, such as Twain, Crane, Bierce, Frederic, and Garland. We will read a number of short stories reporting the Civil War as well as THE RED BADGE OF COURAGE.
(2) Works of literary realism that portray the role of the press. We will read Chesnutt's THE MARROW OF TRADITION, Howells's A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES, and James's THE REVERBERATORS.
(3) Works of investigative journalism that have been granted the status of literature. We will read Riis's HOW THE OTHER HALF LIVES, Ida B. Wells's exposure of the practice of lynching, and some of the first examples of "muckraking."
Requirements: Regular attendance, a mid-term, an essay of 5-7 pages, and a final.
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| ENGLISH 102D | STATES OF DAMAGE: 21C US WRITING & CULTURE | SHAPIRO, S. | We will survey recent cultural dispatches from the United States in their attempt to make sense of a world in chaos — a world where political and environmental chaos appears to surpass even the routinized chaos of global capitalism. The spectacular terror of September 11, 2001 seemed to many Americans to announce a new world disorder unimaginable before that date. Since 2001, however, the source of much of the new global chaos is increasingly being traced to well established patterns within the U.S. itself; hence the texts and cultural documents we’ll be examining take on the character of self-diagnoses.The module presents different modes of contemporary American writing by focusing on a variety of themes: the individual in a mediatized and information-saturated global market; the perception and experience of terror; the ‘Fourth Great Awakening’ of faith evangelism; the return to more explicit forms of military imperialism; the family as receptacle for global changes and site for social reproduction of class relations/struggle; and the culture of personal trauma, nostalgia, and alternative of counter- actual histories as a means collective memory (re)-formation. A key category of the works included will be ‘pre-post-9/11’ writing: anticipatory expressions of the structures of feeling associated with the aftermath of disaster.
Texts will include: Jonathan Franzen, The Corrections; David Foster Wallace, Oblivion ; George Saunders, Pastoralia (2000); Jehane Noujaim, The Control Room ; Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism; Jonathan Lethem, The Fortress of Solitude ; Richard Sennet Respect in an Philip Roth, The Plot Against America ; Michael Chabon, The Yiddish Policeman's Union. Two essays.
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| ENGLISH 102D | MODERNIST PERSONAE | FARBMAN, H. | An introduction to literary modernism, focusing on one of its central preoccupations: the writer’s relationship to his or her masks, or personae. Reading in (and in between) the genres of dramatic theater, lyric, prose fiction, autobiography, and law, we will look at how modernist presentations of literary personae profoundly unsettle the question of what a “person” is. The syllabus will include key works of Yeats, Pound, Eliot, Joyce, Freud, and Lawrence, among others, along with some early twentieth-century legal writing in which the definition of “person” is at issue. |
| ENGLISH 103 | 19C REALIST NOVEL | GELLEY, A. | E103 cross-listed with CL121
Nineteenth Century Realism offers an astonishing variety of approaches -- conceptual and technical -- to the human condition. What George Eliot wrote, "I have gone through again and again the severe effort of trying to make certain ideas thoroughly incarnate, as if they had revealed themselves to me first in the flesh and not in the spirit," could also apply to Flaubert or to Henry James, though each writer employed radically different narrative techniques. This course will study three novels -- George Eliot's Adam Bede, Flaubert's Sentimental Education, and Henry James's Portrait of a Lady -- in the light of a variety of conceptions of "realism." We will draw on criticism by Erich Auerbach, Mikel Bakhtin, Harry Levin, Roland Barthes, and others. Student requirements: two oral reports (one on a work of criticism, one on a section of a novel), one of which is to be expanded to an essay. |
| ENGLISH 103 | DESIGN WRITING | LUPTON, J. | This course is cross-listed with LJ103. In this course, we will read a variety of writings about design, especially graphic design, architecture and built environments, and product design. Although we will read a few writings by designers, the course will emphasize the view from *outside design,* as mounted by cultural observers who are tracking trends, evaluating objects and environments, addressing the social context and implications of design, or reflecting on objects and places from philosophical or personal points of view. We will pay attention to the different genres and styles that writers employ when addressing design, including biography, review, interview, essay, humor, and reflection. Writing assignments will ask students to observe and comment on the designed world using tools and models developed in class. We will also talk about the role of design in contemporary publishing (and self-publishing).
Click here for draft syllabus.
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| ENGLISH 105 | AFRICAN LIT | NGUGI, W. | COLONIALISM AND THE RISE OF MODERN AFRICAN LITERATURE
E105 cross-listed with CL100A
Colonialism was simultaneously a practice of power, production of knowledge and social engineering. The colonial system and 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 from the different parts of the continent to cover Anglophone, Francophone, and Lusaphone traditions. Though based on the African literary production, the issues raised are relevant to all post-colonial societies and indeed modernity.
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| ENGLISH 105 | COMPARATIVE MULTICULTURALISM | SCHLICHTER, A. | E105 cross-listed with CL105
The class will look at discourses of multiculturalism through German and US literature and culture. We will explore the historical conditions of two different multicultural societies (such as histories of nation building, citizenship, immigration) and engage in a critical discussion of cultural identities and differences (ethnicity, gender, sexuality etc.) in contemporary US and German culture. The materials will include different genres and media, such as fictional, autobiographical, and theoretical writings, films and popular music.
Requirements: regular attendance, midterm and final, short writing assignments (4-5 pp.)
A website will be available at the beginning of the quarter.
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| ENGLISH 105 | MIGRANT FICTIONS | LAZO, R. | This course focuses on the stories that people tell about migration and immigration and how those relate to conceptions of the U.S. nation-state. "Stories" here refers to both novels and short stories but also how certain accounts of migration permeate society and political discourse. Starting with recent public discussions about fences and how to curtail immigration (and also a notorious state law), we then go back to the founding of the United States and consider the historical depth of anxiety about immigration. We will analyze the ways in which literary texts respond to such debates and represent experiences at different points in U.S. history. We conclude by reading fiction about migration outside of the North American context in order to bring a comparative dimension to the course. Requirements include in-class exams, papers, and attendance. |
| 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.
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| ENGLISH 106 | JOYCE | NORRIS, M. | This course is unusual because it will focus only on a single novel but one of the greatest novels ever written: James Joyce’s 1922 Ulysses. Ulysses is extraordinary not only because of the rich human story it tells about three major characters on a single day in Dublin, Ireland (June 16, 1904), but because if offers a dizzying array of narrative experiments that become more complex and provocative as it proceeds. It also functions as an exemplary text for modernist literature because of its classical parallel to Homer’s epic, the Odyssey. In this seminar we will work our way systematically through the text’s episodes, keeping our eye not only on what happens in the story, but also on how that story is told and complicated by the intellectual richness of its allusions and references.
The chief assignment for this course will be a formal research paper of 15-18 pages, produced with the help of a prospectus, an annotated bibliography, and revisions after a polished draft has been submitted. Because the seminar activity of lecture and discussion is crucial for tracking the text, class attendance will be mandatory. |
| ENGLISH 106 | TRAGEDY | SILVER, V. | The course will address the fundamental concepts of the tragic, considered both as a conceptual mode and a literary genre, in the European tradition. We will begin with tragedy's Greek origins in religion, politics, literature and philosophy (the 'Iliad' and select plays of the Greek tragedians, taking into account the responses of the Sophists, Plato and Aristotle to the performance and argument of tragedy), and then consider one or more of Seneca's Roman tragedies on Greek models. After that, we will address medieval conceptions of the tragic, beginning with a brief look at 1 and 2 Samuel in the Judaic scriptures and Boethius' 'Consolation of Philosophy,' and then Dante's 'Inferno' or the Arthurian cycle (the French and English narratives of Arthur's death). Finally, we will address early modern revenge tragedy in English and of course Shakespearean tragedy, concluding with Ben Jonson's or Racine's neoclassical drama. If there is space and time (which I doubt), we will look at tragedy's 20th-c. American incarnation: Eugene O'Neil, Tennessee Williams, Thorton Wilder, or August Wilson. We will all be exhausted but informed.
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| ENGLISH 210 | SOCIABILITY IN 18C | LEWIS, J. | [Course Code: 24300] Tuesdays12:00-2:50pm HIB 411
Enrollment via [SEMINAR REQUEST FORM]
Fictions of Association, 1660-1794 [formerly Sociability in the Long 18th Century]
“Of all animals of prey, man is the only sociable one” remarks Lockit, the jail keep in John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera (1728). “Every one of us preys upon his neighbor, and yet we herd together.” This seminar will be devoted to parsing Lockit’s well-wrought aperçu in the interlocking contexts of 18th-century British literature and society; indeed, the tensions that animate that aperçu —between everyone and “every one,” aggression and aggregation, even philosophical generalization and factitious instance—epitomize the contemporary project of updating the ancient definition of man as the social animal to fit what seemed to be specifically modern realities: early capitalism, commodity culture, colonial opportunism, class mobility, and mass media, among others. How did the ideal of a centripetal social sphere contend with the centrifugal energies of self- and special interest? And what role did the aesthetic play in negotiating the new forms of sociability that attempted to resolve this contention? Jurgen Habermas famously claimed that the 18th century saw the transformation of feudal society, committed to hierarchical forms of organization centered in the institutions of church and court, into a secular public sphere grounded in the principle of voluntary association and perpetuated through new forms of social interaction between both individuals and groups. We’ll consider not just the part that literature (and specifically literary fiction) played in this process but also the ways that it might complicate or even refute Habermas’s well-known paradigm. How did literary fiction generate new forms of the social—manners, play, conversation, friendship, correspondence, credit, interest—but how did it also confirm old ones rooted in deference, honor, and intimidation? How did it work to reveal new social habits as a system of pretenses yet also inspire belief in them? If sociability (even, as Samuel Johnson pointed out, sociability in Hell) depends on trust, how does a conspicuous lie—how does fiction—engage what Steven Shapin calls “the trust dependency of social order”? We’ll look at the problem of dissimulation; at what the sociologist Georg Simmel called the conception of modern life as a credit economy; and at the factitiousness of moral sentiments as these, in Durkheim’s view, nonetheless made possible the organic solidarity of modern society. Our 18th-century readings will come spiced with brief excerpts from Shapin, Simmel, Weber, Durkheim, DeLanda, Habermas, Elias, and others. Of special interest will be the following intersections between allegedly novel forms of social life and the theory and practice of fiction: (1) the Restoration laboratory and theater (Boyle’s New Experiments, Etherege’s The Man of Mode); (2) London clubs, coffeehouses, and coteries (Addison’s Spectator papers; Gay’s Beggar’s Opera; parts of Boswell’s Life of Johnson and London Journal ) (3) sentimental community at mid-century (Richardson’s Pamela, Mackenzie’s The Man of Feeling and part of Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments); (4) ingénue fictions of female socialization (Burney’s Evelina); (5) gothic social iterations in the wake of the French Revolution (Godwin’s Caleb Williams; parts of Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France). Seminar participants will lead two discussions based on passage analysis and write one 15- to 20-page critical paper. Proseminar participants will lead two discussions and expand one of them into a 6- to 7-page paper that also references at least one secondary work. |
| ENGLISH 210 | VERNACULAR THEOLOGY | DAVIS, R. | [Course Code: 24302] Thursdays 11:00am-1:50pm HIB 411
Enrollment via [SEMINAR REQUEST FORM]
In the trilingual culture of medieval England, writing in English was not the likeliest choice. Conscious that it lacked the prestige of French and Latin, authors who wrote in English made apologies for the vernacular that expressed real concern over the limitations of the language, but also signaled daring assertions of vernacular authority and experimentation. The vernacular language, as the common or mother tongue, was once associated with crudeness and instability, but it came to symbolize inclusiveness, natural expression, and emergent social identities. This course examines the politics of Middle English writing, focusing especially on fourteenth-century debates about language and religion in works of what Nicholas Watson has called vernacular theology. Likely course texts include portions of secular texts that theorize the use of the vernacular as a literary language, as well as an array of religious writing including Richard Rolle's Form of Living, Julian of Norwich's Revelation; The Book of Margery Kempe; John Trevisa's Dialogue Between the Lord and the Clerk on Translation; The Cloud of Unknowing; Nicholas Love's Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ; Lollard sermons; and excerpts from Wyclif's English Bible.
All participants are expected to take part in discussion and submit weekly response papers. Pro-seminar students will write two take-home essay exams (totaling 10 pages) or a conference paper on a topic of your choice. Students taking the course for seminar credit are required to write a 25-page research paper, for which you will submit a proposal in advance, and give an oral presentation on a topic of your choice.
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| ENGLISH 210 | WORLD LIT & SYSTEMS | SHAPIRO, S | [Course Code: 24304] Wednesdays 11:00am-1:50pm HIB 411
Enrollment via [SEMINAR REQUEST FORM]
The familiar models of organizing literary studies by language groups, period, genre, nationality, and traits of aesthetic genius are in a perhaps terminal crisis of obsolescence. Thomas Kuhn argued that a discipline's paradigms of theoretical knowledge production broke apart when their conceptual frameworks could no longer coherently explain its evidence. Literary studies in the twenty-first century now face such a bifurcation, partly as a result of three interlinking trends. The legacy of post-war British cultural studies and "history from the bottom up" has dramatically expanded the social context and comparative evidentiary matter of literary studies beyond a highly selective tradition of canonical works, an event that undermines aesthetic-value based categories and refuses to differentiate between the "literary" and sub- or para-literary. Digitalization has furthered this trend as the readily available archive has exponentially expanded far beyond the human capacity of individual researchers; information overload has hit the humanities. Finally, "postcolonialism" has critiqued the parameters of Anglophone and Comparative literary studies as complicit with Euro-American domination that implicitly rests on racializing distinctions. The traditional model of comparative literary studies involving classical and European languages is also suffering, on the one hand, from the increasing hegemony of English as a world language, due to the erosion of foreign language knowledge among contemporary students, and, on the other, questions about the exclusion of other tongues such as Arabic, Cantonese Chinese, Hindi, and Swahili, to name but a few.
This module's working thesis is that the dominant models of post-war literary studies are no longer tenable and that the "linguistic turn" of high Theory during the last quarter of the twentieth century was a compensatory gesture that delayed, but could not remove, the intrinsic crisis in (comparative) literary studies. An ensuing corollary is that we need to explore new models for literary studies, and this module will introduce one such attempt - the question of conceptualizing texts in a global frame (the world literature debate) and a turn to world-systems perspectives. As critics have moved away from the linguistic nation as a classificatory device for cultural production, there has been a desire to consider global relations and area studies (like "Atlanticism") as a better model. Yet this turn still operates mainly at the rhetorical level as it lacks a methodology and logic of ordering material. One solution is the world-systems approach that sees the rise of historical capitalism as a network of competing players trying to gain power through the control of international and domestic factions. Because this perspective originates from a loose collective of economic historians, political scientists, and large-structure sociologists, the exact relations between (literary) culture and the history of global formations has been under-theorized. This seminar aims to familiarize you with the terminology, claims, and points of difference in the debate surrounding world-systems to empower your entry into the ongoing debate about "world literature" as a new paradigm for twentieth-first century literary studies.Texts will include, but are not limited to: Franco Moretti, Graphs, Maps, Trees; Marx, Capital; Braudel, Perspective of the World; Wallerstein, World-Systems Analysis; Raymond Williams, The English Novel from Dickens to Lawrence; and Linebaugh and Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra.
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| ENGLISH 210 | SHAKESPEARE | LUPTON, J | [Course Code: 24306] Fridays 12:00-2:50pm HIB 411
Enrollment via [SEMINAR REQUEST FORM]
This seminar on the plays of Shakespeare takes hospitality as its theme. Hospitality concerns both the conditions and the themes of Shakespearean theater. This course will address the hospitable frame of Shakespeare from perspectives grounded in philosophy and theory; history and culture; and architecture and design. We will address hospitality as an interface between politics and life, and hence as a species of biopower; as ritualized behavior that involves implicit or explicit theological dimensions, and hence as a variant of political theology; and as a set of cultural practices involving space, time, food, and entertainment, and hence as an art of living. We will read Romeo and Juliet, Merchant of Venice, Macbeth, Othello, Timon of Athens, and The Winter’s Tale. Supplementary readings are drawn from Hannah Arendt, Hannah Woolley, Jacques Derrida, St. Paul and the Hebrew Bible, Homer, Virgil, Freud, and contemporary Shakespeare criticism.
Draft syllabus available at http://www.thinkingwithshakespeare.org/index.php?id=684.
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| ENGLISH 210 | AMERICAN ARCHIVES | LAZO, R | [Course Code: 24308] Tuesdays 3:00-5:50pm HIB 411
Enrollment via [SEMINAR REQUEST FORM]
This course delves into recent debates in nineteenth-century American literature through a focus on the concept of "archive," sometimes used primarily in reference to physical repositories of documents but currently circulating in various fields of inquiry to raise questions about how information is organized, stored, and accessed. The proliferation of "archives" on Internet sites as well as the growing availability of archival documents on the web increasingly allows scholars to stake a subjective claim on information and the ability to build "my own archive." But what kind of pressure does that exert on an academic field, which is usually created with the understanding of a shared set of texts, keywords, and approaches? For American literary studies, the archive in question is the nation-based frame of study, represented through the buildings of the National Archives and Records Administration or perhaps the building blocks of canonical anthologies. Can or should we retain national literary study in the face of increasing calls for critical approaches that are global, transnational, and hemispheric? We will read texts by Frederick Douglass, Herman Melville, María Amparo Ruiz de Burton, Francisco Manzano, Julia Ward Howe, Mary Seacole, and José Martí, among others, as well twentieth-century critical approaches to the nineteenth century. Throughout the course of our readings we will integrate theoretical debates about archives and the nation, including Derrida's Archive Fever and Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities to raise additional questions about the meanings and implications of America. The course will also include a workshop on how to work with and in archives (both real and virtual) in our research.
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| ENGLISH 215 | PROSPECTUS WORKSHOP | RADHAKRISHNAN, R. | [Course Code: 24320] Tuesdays 4:00-6:50pm HIB 311
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| ENGLISH 290 | READING&CONFERENCE | STAFF | English 290 enrollment requires submission of an approved Independent Study proposal form available [HERE] by the end of the second week of classes (Oct 1, 2010). Students may add or drop the course by obtaining a code from the administrator. |
| ENGLISH 398 | RHET/TCHNG OF COMP | ALEXANDER, J. | [Course Code: 24502] Mondays 4:00-6:50pm HH108 |
| ENGLISH 398 | RHET/TCHNG OF COMP | GROSS, D. | [Course Code: 24500] Mondays 4:00-6:50pm HH100 |