| Course | Title | Instructor | Description |
|---|
| ENGLISH E106 | AUTHORSHIP IN LITERATURE AND FILM | CHRISTENSEN, J | |
| ENGLISH E160 | CLASSICAL AND NON-CLASSICAL HOLLYWOOD CINEMA | CHRISTENSEN, J | This course studies Hollywood motion pictures from the beginning of the Sound Era in 1927 through the Great Depression and Roosevelt’s New Deal, and it ends with a trio of post World War films that symptomatize a depression of a different kind.
In the broadest sense we will be tracking Hollywood’s artful transformation of depression as a concept that predominantly referred to an economic catastrophe affecting a nation into a notion of a novel psychological state afflicting a certain kind of maladjusted man. Our discussions will involve interpretations of numerous significant motion pictures of the period, informed by readings that contextualize those pictures in the politics and commerce of their day.
We’ll begin in a territory mapped out by musical comedy, melodrama, and the figure of the gangster—motion pictures that, in the early 1930s, transgressed Hollywood censorship rules and the social norms that those rules upheld. The audience for a melodrama, such as the sentimental The Crowd or the sensationalistic Baby Face, was predominantly women. Stardom was its implicit and, in A Star is Born, often explicit topic. The gangster picture--exemplified by Little Caesar--bluntly glorified the unquenchable aggressivity associated with ambitious, socially deviant males. The musical, however, scaled from the romantic couple of New Comedy up to the level of a disciplined collectivity, such as the Busby Berkley chorus line of The Golddiggers of 1933, which organized to accomplish a common purpose. We will track those generic traits as they evolve in Universal’s Frankenstein pictures, in the screwball comedies of Fox and RKO, in the utopian fantasies of MGM in Boys Town and The Wizard of Oz, in John Ford’s Stage Coach, and, finally, as they are radically, irreversibly transformed in Fritz Lang’s Scarlet Street, Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life, and Howard Hawks’s The Big Sleep.
The grade for the course will be based on class participation, regular quizzes, a midterm, a critical essay of 5-7 pages, and a final exam. |
| ENGLISH 28A | POETIC IMAGINATION | LAZO, R. | 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 | LAZO, R. | 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. |
| ENGLISH 101W | PRACT OF CLOSE RDG | GODDEN, R. | Readers and literary scholars frequently use terms like ‘realistic’, ‘voice’, ‘irony’, ‘metaphor’ and ‘character’ as though the meaning of those terms were self-evident. The course departs from the assumption that this is not the case, and from the belief that the literary, perceptual and cognitive structures caught up within the supposed commonplaces of textual analysis are both interesting and worthy of detailed analysis. During each of the first five weeks of the course, we will engage with a single literary term (drawn from the list above), approaching it through a piece of theoretical writing and in relation to a twentieth century American short story. The purpose of the course is at all times to explore and enable the process of reading; theoretical vocabularies and models, though interesting, are generally more limited than the complex literary and historical objects which they address, and should be viewed neither as complete nor as glass machines. Consequently, the course will view such vocabularies and models as necessary and yet subordinate to the work of close reading.
During the concluding five weeks of the course, having with luck gained a fuller vocabulary through which to address literary texts, we will engage a number of more generic literary problems (or excitements). Again, the weekly format will involve a theoretical essay and a related short story. Possible topics of discussion will include, “Reading through commodity (or “capitalist realism”)”; “Reading for the whispers (the issue of secrets)”; “What to do with ‘difficulty’, or textual opacity?”; “Narrative forms for a catastrophic century (parataxis and breakage)”. The ten stories and ten pieces of theoretical writing will be made available as PDF files. The course will be assessed by way of 3 essays, each of between 4-6 pages (and amounting in total to some 4,000words). The timing of essay submittal will be organized to promote redrafting, and self-editing skills. |
| ENGLISH 101W | AMERICAN POETRY AFTER WWII | IZENBERG, O | The poetry of the present comes After. After the great syntheses of the High Moderns. After the devastation of two World Wars. After the total crises of mind in which human rationality could seem compatible with the madness of Auschwitz and human creativity could devise the destruction Hiroshima. “After such knowledge,” as T.S. Eliot asked, decades before the full force of the question would reveal itself, “what forgiveness?”
In this course we will read deeply in the strong work done by American poets after WWII, including poems by Robert Lowell, Allen Ginsberg, Elizabeth Bishop, George Oppen, Sylvia Plath, Frank O’Hara, John Ashbery, Susan Howe and others, all of them in pursuit of answers to two difficult questions: First, Can there be a poetry of the present? How can poetry address the individual and social urgencies of its moment without either refusing the present, taking refuge in the authoritative cultures and solutions of the past, or overleaping the imperfect present for the visionary perfection of an imagined future? And the second: How do poets make sense of the thing that happens only one time, or to only one person? Deprived of the confidence that we are players in a history that progresses toward triumph, or part of a species with a blessed fate and a certain future, how do our poets (and how can we) come to value or grant significance to the singular person: to my life, my family, my turmoil, my perception, my mind? |
| ENGLISH 101W | WRITNG ABOUT POETRY | JACKSON, V. | Why would anyone want to write about poetry? In this class, you will be required to write about poetry, but we will spend the quarter thinking about how and why reading and writing about poetry might (or might not) matter in your life. We will start in the nineteenth century, when various poets (Whitman, Shelley) and critics (Mill, Emerson) made large claims for why everyone should read poetry. We will end at the beginning of the twenty-first century, when national foundations (the NEH, the NEA,
the Poetry Foundation) seem to be afraid that no one reads poetry anymore, and various avant-garde poets (Goldsmith, Moxley) seem to make it hard to do so. What happened? One answer is that there are many ways to read poetry, and in this class we will experiment with some of them: memorization, recitation, interpretation, singing, counting, describing, erasing, telling the difference between iambs and trochees, dactyls and spondees. Requirements will include several short papers, some pop quizzes
and oral presentations. |
| ENGLISH 101W | LAW & LITERATURE | THOMAS, B. | E 101W fulfills the upper division-writing requirement for English majors and introduces them to a particular critical or theoretical approach to literature with practical application. In this section we will explore the intersections between law and literature. There will be three units: (1) The law's impact on literature; for our course, questions of censorship. We will read selections from Plato's Republic, Milton's "Areopagitica," Mill's On Liberty, and a few relevant Supreme Court cases. (2) Literary/rhetorical analysis of legal documents. We will read the case of Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), which ruled that it was constitutional for states to require a "separate but equal" system of racial segregation. Plessy was the law of the land until Brown v. Board of Education (1954). 3) Literary representations of the law. We will read Charles W. Chesnutt's The Marrow of Tradition (1901), a novel about segregation. Students will write three essays. Because this is a writing course, we will spend considerable time on writing both in and out of class. This section counts as a course for the Humanities and Law Minor. Nonetheless, it is a literature course, and students do not need to have any legal background. The goal of the course is to show how the skills we learn as English majors can help us better understand the law and how an understanding of certain legal issues can help us better understand some works of literature. |
| ENGLISH 102A | EPIC TRADITION | KIENE, J. | This course will survey examples of ancient, medieval, and early modern epic and heroic poetry of Europe, focusing on the creative adaptation of epic conventions established in the ancient Greek oral-poetic tradition associated with Homer, to the vastly different cultural contexts of Augustan Rome, medieval Italy, and early modern England. Over the course of the term, we’ll chart a remarkable development in the defining features of the heroic ideal in literary epic, and we’ll note the ways epic poets frame their grand visions as both definitive celebrations of all that is best about a given society, and as penetrating social critiques. We’ll move from the petulant warrior Achilles, whose wrath makes him as deadly to his Greek comrades as he is to his Trojan enemies (Iliad), to the stoic Aeneas, who must endure national catastrophe and personal loss in order to found Rome (Aeneid), to Dante’s pilgrim, who does his fighting with words alone but who, like Aeneas, is divinely elected to descend into a frightening underworld (Inferno). We’ll then read two English critical responses to the epic tradition, Shakespeare’s tragedy Antony and Cleopatra, and John Milton’s Paradise Lost, which rearticulates the heroic ideal in Christian terms of “patience and heroic martyrdom” by attempting nothing less than to “justify the ways of God to men.”
Requirements will include a short paper, weekly informal responses, a mid-term, and a final exam. |
| ENGLISH 102B | LIT OF ENLIGHTNMENT | LEWIS, J. | The period known as the “long eighteenth century,” roughly 1660-1798, knew itself--and has long been known as--"the Enlightenment." Writers of this period often believed they were shining the new "light" of reason, scientific knowledge, and toleration on the old darkness of superstition and political oppression. The result? A radically new understanding of–and interest in–what it means to be human. But was "the Enlightenment" all it claimed to be? What were its limitations, contradictions, and unique possibilities? Most important for our purposes, how did English literature of the Enlightenment both reflect and challenge its values? How can that literature help us to understand our own, present-day quest for deeper understanding of our identity and future as human beings? In this course, we will be exploring a range of 18th-century literary texts, some quite challenging, which worked through the problem of enlightenment and helped to bring our modern world and understanding of the human into being. To this end, we will be traveling across an exceptionally wide range of authors (Locke, Rochester, Pope, Wycherley, Swift, Haywood, Finch, Walpole, and Blake) and genres (philosophy, drama, poetry, satire, fiction, and the periodical essay) in an age uniquely conscious of the boundaries of genre and determined to forge new models of literary authority. Midterm, final, one paper, several short writing assignments. Students who took E102B in spring 2012 should expect some overlap. |
| 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 reading responses and an 8 page essay that will go through a careful drafting and revision process. |
| ENGLISH 102C | ROMANTIC REVOLUTION | ROBERTS, H. | This course provides an introduction to the literature of a complex and fascinating period in British social and literary history. Most of the works we will read were written while Britain was waging a counterrevolutionary war with France in the wake of the French Revolution (which began in 1789). During this period of intense political struggle and debate, a new and profoundly influential literary movement--Romanticism--began to emerge throughout Europe. We will explore both the continuities and the differences between the late Eighteenth Century literature of "sensibility" and the emergent literature of Romanticism. At the same time, we will read a number of contemporary political and philosophical documents which will allow us to relate the changing aims and concerns of the poetry we are reading to the turbulent political events of the period.
Required Reading
The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol. D: The Romantic Period
Occasional handouts and web documents.
Coursework
Students must complete one ten in-class reading tests, a Midterm Examination, a 4-5 page paper, and a final examination. |
| ENGLISH 102C | AMER POETRY TO 1915 | JACKSON, V. | American poetry of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries has gotten a bad rap. In the first decades of the twentieth century, modern poets such as Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot had some mean things to say about earlier American poets, and for the most part modern readers have taken their side. Although a poet like Longfellow had the popularity of a rock star in the nineteenth century and although taxation and temperance battles could be waged in heroic couplets in the eighteenth
century, later poets and readers have been embarrassed by early American poetry's public appeal. In this class, we will read all sorts of American poems written before 1900: hymns, drinking songs, newspaper ads, hexameter epics, odes, elegies, verse histories, spirituals, and jokes. We will think about the many ways that genres worked in public before the twentieth century, both in the work of particular poets (Bradstreet, Freneau, Whitman, Dickinson, Dunbar) and in popular practice. You will be required to memorize two poems and to write two short papers and take two exams. |
| 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 lyric, prose fiction, autobiography, drama, 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, Woolf, Freud, and Lawrence, among others, along with some legal writing in which the definition of “person” is at issue. |
| ENGLISH 103 | LITERARY MANIFESTOS | RADHAKRISHNAN, R. | In this course, we will be examining in depth a number of crucial literary critical statements/manifestos that have shaped the history of Western literary theory. Beginning with Plato and Aristotle, moving into Sir Philip Sidney, and then to Schiller and Goethe and the great English Romantics (Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Shelley), onward then to Matthew Arnold to be followed by T.S. Eliot and the modernists, to be succeeded by Jean-Paul Sartre, Roland Barthes, right down to the Structuralists, the post-Structuralists, Marxists, feminists, and post-colonial critics such as Edward Said, this course will seek to understand the historical and ideological positioning of each text, each theorist. How do these texts define and defend the importance of literature? How do they articulate the relationship between the “word” and the “world?” How does each manifesto construct its polemical agenda as it defines literature relationally with reference to science, philosophy, religion, sociology, politics, history, and economics? Does literature have a goal, a social purpose? What is the relationship between the aesthetics and ideology? How are movements like realism, romanticism, modernism, existentialism, phenomenology, and postmodernism, to name just a few, orientations to the world at large? Does literature make anything/nothing happen? What is the relationship between literature to political movements, revolutions, and populist upheavals? What are the connections, both formal and thematic, among literature, democracy, and the nation state? These are some of the questions that will frame and inform our course of study. I hope that by the end of the quarter, we as a class will have a clear sense of the continuities as well as the discontinuities among texts and authors from different time periods. Just a word of caution: I may not be able to cover all the “isms” and schools of thought I have listed here. The final course description, I expect, would be less ambitious in its coverage and range.
1 short paper and 1 long paper. A combination of lecture and wide ranging classroom discussions. |
| ENGLISH 105 | ASAM AUTOBIOGRAPHIES | LEE, J. | This course examines how and why Asian Americans write about change and transformation in autobiographical writing, particularly under the rubric of vocation. How does the vocational search correspond with or diverge from the process of forming a social identity? How does the formation of Asian American identity unravel the seeming stability of one’s professional vocation? We will read these works to reveal the constraints and possibilities of representing “oneself,” and in doing so also uncover the significance, illuminations, and pitfalls of narrating vocation as identity, identity as vocation. |
| ENGLISH 105 | AFRICAN NOVEL | THIONG'O, N. | 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. |
| ENGLISH 105 | POETRY OF THE AFRICAN DIASPORA | O'CONNOR, L. | In this course we’ll study poetry of the Black Atlantic by African-American, Afro-Caribbean, and Black British poets with special attention to how the poets combine oral-performative and canonical literary traditions in their verse. Throughout history, poetry has been transformed repeatedly by efforts to revitalize the literary vernacular with the spoken language of a given community and era. For poets of the African diaspora, however, the creative blending of spoken and written idioms was made more perilous and yet more imperative by the legacy of slavery. Their historical disenfranchisement widened the high / low divide between the prestigious sphere of print and the circulation of orature (orally-transmitted stories, song, and lore), while at the same time vastly enhancing the inventive, communal, and double-voiced potential of orature. We’ll explore some of the repercussions of the racialized print/orality divide on (mostly) twentieth-century poetry in the following three thematic clusters:
a) “Typecast”: black-and-white profiling on the printed page
b) Soundings: “It don’t mean a thing (if it ain’t got the swing)”: transposing Rhythm, Blues, Jazz, Reggae into verse
c) Lines of kinship: poems of mourning, protest, praise and the collective “we” / lyric “I.”
We’ll read from a wide range of poets, including Dunbar, McKay, Brown, Hughes, Baraka, Bennett, Brathwaite, Nicholls, Jordan, Clifton, Walcott, Komunyakaa, Dove, Mackey, Nichols, Johnson, Kay, and Evaristo, among others. |
| ENGLISH 106 | WRITING THE SOUTH | GODDEN, R. | Departing from the assumption that what makes the South regionally specific is its economy, the course will address the changing regimes of accumulation that typify the region, from ante-bellum slavery, through post-bellum debt peonage, to the onset of ‘free market’ labor (care of the New Deal). Arguably, economic forms and contradictions, in the South particularly those associated with coercive labor systems, generate the narratives and linguistic options through which people order their experience. The course seeks to trace how Southern literature grows from the lived relations of a changing economy. To do so we will concentrate on literary responses to key institutions (‘chattel slavery, ‘the plantation,’ ‘share cropping,’ ‘jim crow and the great migration’). Among those studied will be Fredrick Douglass (Narrative of the Life…of an American Slave); Edgar Allan Poe (“Ligeia,” “The Fall of the House of Usher,” “William Wilson,” “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” “Hop Frog”); Herman Melville “Benito Cereno”; Mark Twin, Huckleberry Finn; Charles W. Chesnutt, The Marrow of Tradition; Kate Chopin, The Awakening; William Faulkner, Go Down, Moses; Nella Larsen, Passing, and Richard Wright, Black Boy. The seminar based course will be assessed by two essays, each of 6-8 pages in length. |
| ENGLISH 106 | GHOSTS STORIES | LEWIS, J. | These will be specifically American ghosts, and in this class we will be looking at how they have helped to tell specifically American stories. From early Puritan times, through 19th-century patriarchy and slavery to the immigration waves of the twentieth century, America has been haunted by the shadows of its own past. This has made the ghost story, in both its long and its short forms, one of the major subgenres in American literature. We’ll be tracing this subgenre from the 18th century to the 21st, through the work of writers as varied as Washington Irving (“The Legend of Sleepy Hollow”), Nathaniel Hawthorne (“The Gray Champion,” Edgar Allan Poe (“Ligeia”), Henry James (The Turn of the Screw), Edith Wharton (“Eyes”), Shirley Jackson (The Haunting of Hill House), Toni Morrison (Beloved), and Nora Okja Keller (Comfort Woman). Some questions we’ll be asking: Why are we so haunted? Are different ethnic groups haunted by different ghosts and do they respond to the experience in different ways? What is a ghost, anyway? How do ghosts bring to the surface issues of guilt, fear, desire, self-knowledge, social and political injustice, sexuality, family and inheritance? How can they be drafted into a coded language of social protest? Do specific climates geographic regions give rise to specific kinds of ghosts? How has the American ghost story changed over time and in response to what? Why are American ghosts so often linked to domestic space? Why do they wear clothes? Are American women haunted in the same ways that American men are? Plotted onto the larger story of US (literary) history, moving from New England to Hawaii with many stops in between, the ghost stories we’ll be reading this quarter 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 objective and the subjective, the individual and the community, the present and the past. Besides in-class activities (both individual and group), course work includes: four sets of reading questions over the quarter; one 5-page interpretive essay and one 12- to 15-page paper using secondary sources. |
| ENGLISH 106 | THE AVANT-GARDE | HARRIES, M | “Avant-garde” is an old military term, and described those in advance of the main body of an army. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the term slowly migrated, first in French, then in other languages, into literary and other artistic contexts to describe radical or advanced art. This course will examine works of avant-garde art in contexts varying from early twentieth-century London to contemporary Los Angeles. Questions will include avant-garde challenges to form; the relationship between the avant-garde and politics; experiments with mixed media; and the relationship between avant-garde experiment and emancipatory movements in the U.S. We will approach these large questions through close attention to particular works, including Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons (1914), |
| ENGLISH 106 | DICKENS | BARTLETT, J. | |
| ENGLISH 210 | LIT &PHILOS OF MIND | STAFF | [Course Code: 24312] Mondays 1:00 -3:50pm HIB 411
Enrollment via [click here]
Taught by Professor Oren Izenberg
What is to be learned when the artifacts conceived and made by an impassioned mind are considered alongside our most carefully argued accounts of the nature and structure of mental life? In this course, we will consider some of literature’s sophisticated thinking about “ordinary” mental actions—believing, desiring, perceiving, remembering, and intending—alongside important related work in analytic philosophy. Our inquiry is premised (though not unquestioningly) on the idea that technical philosophical inquiry has hermeneutic value for art, allowing us to see unfamiliar aspects of familiar literary works and to recast perennial literary concerns in compelling new ways. Just as importantly, we will explore the possibility that literature’s (principally poetry’s) distinctive modes of address to conceptual problems (generic, rhetorical, formal, tuneful) might contribute something rigorous and substantive to the project of philosophical thinking. Topics of literary and philosophical interest will include: the continuity of persons across time, qualia and privacy, the nature of irrational commitments, the ethical significance of fictional events, and much more. |
| ENGLISH 210 | CASUISTRY &CLARISSA | VAN SANT, A. | [Course Code: 24300] Tuesdays 9:00am -11:50am HIB 411
Enrollment via [click here]
Casuistry, dependent on a complex understanding of conscience, is a case-based method of solving particular moral problems in light of known moral principles. The problem to be solved is known as a “case of conscience,” and can range from whether to take an oath (when the stakes were very high), to whether it’s ok to buy something you think may be stolen, to whether a father can command a child to marry. Although there are some well-known casuistic texts (see, to the left, Sanderson’s 9 cases [posthumously published1685] which as we will see can seem like fictional pre-texts, casuistry itself produces not a text but a process and thus a “habit of mind” and potentially a route into the mind. Like casuistry guides and compilations, conduct books such William Fleetwood’s The relative duties of parents and children, husbands and wives, masters and servants, consider’d in sixteen sermons: with three more upon the case of self-murther (1705), were guides to appropriate conduct and were akin to an ancient literature of duties, principally Cicero’s De Officiis. Conduct books set out to mold behavior, but they are only steps away from misbehavior. There is a huge bibliography on the relation between novels and conduct books, but we will move our questions back to an examination of the mind making decisions. Clarissa’s “life” is constructed of one case of conscience after another.
SPOILER ALERT: No one imagines that Clarissa is a plot-based novel, but if you have never read it, don’t let anyone tell you what happens. And paste a piece of paper over the back cover of the Penguin edition. If you have read it, please be courteous and let others read themselves into “what happens.” Eighteenth-century readers heard rumors (and one wrote to Richardson begging him to change his mind about the plot), but all had to wait 6 months between each of the 3 parts to find out “what happened”).
We will read selected casuistry materials, materials from the literature of duties and conduct, and Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa. All students will write annotated bibliographies. Seminar students will write seminar papers. Pro-seminar students will write shorter papers. The course will have a website, and students will write on the message board and do reports in class. Students should have read Richardson’s Pamela before the course begins. |
| ENGLISH 210 | REALISM | BARTLETT, J. | [Course Code: 24310] Wednesday, 9:00-11:50am HIB 411
Enrollment via [click here]
This course will serve as an introduction to a nineteenth-century literary mode that concerned itself with what George Eliot called “more or less ugly, stupid, inconsistent people,” and Virginia Woolf “this appalling narrative business of the realist: getting on from lunch to dinner.” Often cast as the straw man that authenticates the literary and critical innovations that follow it, realism is simply that which “goes without saying,” and its practitioners—experts rather than visionaries—are often accused of getting things right by flattening out questions of truth and virtue into parables of common sense so naïve and smilingly unselfconscious that they miss how, finally, the catalogue of innumerable material details that undergirds the realist project passes off entrenched gender, class, and racial stereotypes as objective truth. Like most of the people and most of the enterprises that it depicts, realism will always fail in idea and in practice, for any representational undertaking that claims to provide access to a material reality that, while mediated by consciousness and language, is nevertheless independent of it, is ultimately presenting just another theory of what counts as a picture of reality. As our readings in the course of our study will show, this argument is neither untrue, nor is it particularly troublesome for the form of the realist novel, which runs on the inescapable limits of human knowing (evident everywhere in the tensions between plausibility and literary form that can puncture a great realist novel like Middlemarch with sudden and convenient revelations) and is thus on the whole required to obsess about itself. We will see how, in trying to reach beyond words to things as they are—in believing “the truth is out there”—the realist novel funnels its sprawling narratives into inductive sequences of causes and effects; how it develops a collector’s mania for figurations of entrapment and enclosure, and then punishes the wayward and unconventional; and how it shows off its author’s bookish know-how through descriptions that at their worst exist somewhere, for Lyotard, “between academicism and kitsch.” All of this and more will be our focus, but our objective need not be to rescue realism from its adversaries; in sympathy, it will be enough just to talk about it at all.
Readings will include selections by writers from Fielding to Zola and novels by Thackeray, Eliot, Hardy, and Gissing, along with relevant novel theory. Students will be expected to write brief responses to course readings, to give one oral presentation followed by some discussion facilitation, and to submit written work for seminar or pro-seminar credit. |
| ENGLISH 210 | KEATS | ROBERTS, H. | [Course Code: 24308] Fridays 2:00 -4:50pm HIB 411
Enrollment via [click here]
Keats is a poet of extremes ("O for a life of Sensation rather than of Thoughts!"), who has always provoked extreme reactions: from Byron's de haut en bas dismissal of 'Johnny Keats's piss-a-bed poetry' to F. Scott
Fitzgerald's reverential: 'For a while after you quit Keats all other poetry seems to be only whistling or humming.' His famous letters have been declared the most important works of literary criticism by a great writer, but also described as derivative and contradictory. In this course you will read most of Keats's writings in verse and prose, and be introduced to some of the major critical approaches to his work. You can decide whether to risk having all other poetry be reduced to "whistling or humming."
Required texts:
John Keats, Complete Poems (Jack Stillinger, ed.) Harvard UP, 1982.
John Keats, Selected Letters (Robert Gittings, ed.) Oxford UP, 2002. (paperback, Oxford World's Classics edition) ISBN: 0-19-284053-3
Students taking the Seminar option will write an article length paper; Proseminar students will write a final exam. All students will deliver a class presentation. |
| ENGLISH 210 | SAID | RADHAKRISHNAN, R. | [Course Code: 24306] Tuesdays 4:00 -6:50pm
Enrollment via [click here]
This seminar is intended as a comprehensive and intensive critical appreciation of the legacy of Edward Said and his particular brand of secular, oppositional, and contrapuntal humanism. Starting with his early work on Conrad, and Beginnings, the text that announced his arrival as a star in the field of Theory, moving on then to Orientalism that made him a controversial celebrity and international public international intellectual overnight, and finally, proceeding towards his prolific work after Orientalism (The Question of Palestine; The World, the Text, the Critic; Covering Islam; Culture and Imperialism; Representations of Exile; the posthumously published Humanism and Democratic Criticism; and Late Style, to name a few), we will submit Said’s entire body of work both to macro-political (in terms of the large themes, causes, and concerns that animated and informed Said’s critical vision) and micro-political (with reference to Said’s chosen methodologies, theoretical and critical leanings and predispositions, perspectives, and modes of reading) analysis and appreciation. Here are a few questions that will resonate through the entire seminar. What kind of critic was Said: theoretical, philosophical, political, pragmatic? Is it possible to categorize him under a specific rubric or school of thought? What was his relationship to contemporary theories and theorists? How, why, and in response to what sorts of challenges and imperatives did Said’s mode of thinking evolve? How and why do the following themes occupy center stage in Said’s theater of thought: “representation,” “the intellectual,” “critical oppositional consciousness,” “humanism,” and “secularism?” How did Said create a niche for himself in the context of the many ongoing skirmishes and contestations among a variety of isms, and theoretical schools of thoughts? What was the nature of his disagreement with high Theory? What are the choices that he makes to align the world, the text, and the critic in the name of what he terms “worldliness?’’ How does he open up a contrapuntal space where Culture and Imperialism may be studied in reciprocal reference to each other? How does his work perform between East and West, between Culture and System both in the spirit of ambassadorial negotiation and with the intensity of political partisanship and advocacy? What makes Said persuasive both as a cultural and literary specialist and as a public intellectual dedicated to the democratic task of critiquing and breaking down “professionalism?’’ Finally, in being richly and candidly symptomatic of the many contradictions that constitute our complex, uneven, and non-synchronous contemporaneity, how does Said’s generous and inclusive vision on behalf of all humanity transcend the ugly binary divide between the politics of guilt and the politics of blame? |
| ENGLISH 210 | THEATER AFTER FILM | STAFF | [Course Code: 24304] Tuesdays and Thursdays 12:00 -1:50pm HIB 411
Enrollment via [click here]
Taught by Professor Martin Harries
Histories often narrate a movement from theater to film: Stage to Screen and Theatre to Cinema are titles of two important studies that treat aspects of this topic. But what if we turn these titles around, and think about a process from screen to stage, from cinema to theater? What did film do to theater?
To think this way runs contrary to some standard narratives, but not against history: no form had a more powerful impact on the development of theater in the twentieth century than film. Just as art historians have traced a dialectic between photography and painting – a dialectic involving problems of technological change, of formal constraints, and of shifting media and audiences – so histories of modern theater need to acknowledge the centrality of film in the development of theater. This seminar will trace what such an acknowledgment might look like. Examples will span the twentieth century. We will, however, pay especially close attention to the decades after World War Two, when film and mass culture, as example and antagonist, were vital to the development of innovative theater.
Central to the course will be a number of weeks on work of Samuel Beckett. The course will trace the historical and aesthetic problem of the relationship between theater and film by looking closely at plays and other theater works that respond to the new forms of cinematic entertainment that became dominant in the first part of the twentieth century. This investigation should, however, also be relevant to those students whose primary interest is in literary forms other than theater: the larger question of the relationship of literary modernism to mass culture will be a constant concern. |
| ENGLISH 290 | READING&CONFERENCE | STAFF | English 290 enrollment requires submission of an approved Independent Study proposal form available [click here] by the end of the second week of classes. Students may add or drop the course by obtaining a code from the administrator. |
| ENGLISH 299 | DISSERTATION RESEARCH | STEINTRAGER, J | Course code: 24400 |
| ENGLISH 398 | RHET/TCHNG OF COMP | GROSS, D. | Course code 24500
Every Monday, 4-6:50pm. Registration details to come. |
| ENGLISH 398 | RHET/TCHNG OF COMP | ALEXANDER, J. | Course Code 24502
Every Monday, 4-6:50pm. Registration details to come. |