| Course | Title | Instructor | Description |
|---|
| ENGLISH 10 | MOBY DICK | LAZO, R. | “I want to see what whaling is. I want to see the world,” says Ishmael early in the narrative of Moby-Dick. Before long, it becomes clear that Melville’s tale of the search for the while whale is about both, whaling and the world, and why those two are inextricable. Published in 1851, Moby-Dick was ignored for the most part when it first appeared but went on to become a classic as a result of readers in other centuries interested in learning more about the whaling industry (and the world we live in). We will spend the quarter reading the novel carefully and with profound attention to Ishmael’s narrative voice and the way it approaches questions about religion and belief, race and difference, and global economics, among other topics. We will also consider his ruminations about the “watery part of the world” and how the novel might speak to our current ecological concerns. This course is intended for students of any major – including cetology – who are interested in “all the horrors of the half-known life” (and how funny those can be). Requirements include short quizzes and short papers. |
| ENGLISH 28A | POETIC IMAGINATION | ALLEN, E. | |
| ENGLISH 28C | REALISM & ROMANCE | LATIOLAIS, P. | |
| ENGLISH 100 | HIST THEORY & CRIT | SILVER, V. | This course will discuss "mimesis" (the literary 'imitation,' representation or exemplification of experience) and the charge of its falsity or deceptiveness, starting with the problem as posed and answered by ancient theorists and critics, and then by its modern exponents. There will be two takehome exams, and an in-class final. |
| ENGLISH 101W | SHAKESPEARE'S MEMORY THEATER | HELFER, R. | In this course we will explore the variety of genres in which Shakespeare wrote – comedy, tragedy, history, and romance – and ask how these different modes of writing relate to each other as well as to the complex political, cultural, and religious milieu of 16th- and 17th-century England. Course requirements include active participation, short writing assignments, two essays, and a final exam. |
| ENGLISH 101W | THE UNCANNY | LEWIS, J. | Why do we like literature that makes our spines tingle and our blood chill? What is the nature of the experience of the uncanny and how can literature help us to understand it? Why have so many writers honed their skills by writing ghost stories? This writing-intensive course will look at some of those questions, taking as its point of departure Sigmund Freud’s classic (and very literary) 1919 essay on “the uncanny,” and the “double” who stalks us, turning the familiar into the unfamiliar We’ll use Freud’s theory to explore a number of classic ghost stories in the 19th- and early 20th-century Anglo-American literary tradition—stories which (usually) aim less at horror than at that creepy, crawly feeling that comes from the experience of unresolvable ambiguity: Washington Irving’s “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” Sheridan LeFanu’s “Green Tea,” Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Black Cat,” Charles Dickens’s “A Christmas Carol” (you’ll be surprised), Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper,” Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw, and Edith Wharton’s ghost stories will surely be on the syllabus. Four papers of increasing length and frequent reading quizzes. |
| 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. |
| ENGLISH 101W | WRITING TELEVISION | SZALAY, M. | We will read major critical statements on television and television production of the last 15 years. We'll pay particular attention to the industrial and legal relations that now organize television production, and we'll spent a significant amount of time watching and commenting on one of two television series that the class will pick out on our first day. This class will also be writing intensive: students will write at least two in-class essays, which the class as a whole will discuss and seek to improve; these essays will be revised and handed in at the end of the term. |
| ENGLISH 102A | LOVE IN THE MIDDLE AGES | MATTHEWS, R. | When we fall in love, a strange feeling comes over us. We can’t stop thinking about the person we love, we lose sleep and only feel right when they are in our arms. This experience is medieval in origins. In this class, we will explore how medieval writers invented and played with this new idea of love – the singular sexual focus on one lady, the resulting suffering, feminine resistance, masculine subordination and finally, the idealization of adultery -- in a variety of genres: lyric poetry, dream visions and romances. This course will survey the emergence of this particular conception of love in the south of France during the 12th Century Renaissance, across Northern France and into England where it came into contact with other ideas revolving around the institution of marriage, the education of young men and the debasement of women. We will look first at the troubadours, Marie de France and Chretien de Troyes and then move onto important English works by Geoffrey Chaucer, the Gawain poet, Sir Richard Roos, King James I of Scotland, Charles of Orleans and Sir Thomas Malory. We will end the course with a brief survey of the sonnet during the Renaissance and see how the lady became idealized and divine. |
| ENGLISH 102B | RESTOR/ENLIGHT | STEINTRAGER, J. | |
| ENGLISH 102B | LATE C18 LITERATURE | ROBERTS, H | This course will examine the vogue for the literature of sensibility in the late eighteenth century and the emergence of early Romanticism out of that literary movement. We will explore late eighteenth century theories of aesthetics and explore the connections between sensibility, gothic literature and the broader philosophical and political issues of the period.
Texts will be made available for download on the course website. |
| ENGLISH 102C | AMER LITRARY REALIS | THOMAS, B. | In the United States, the period after the Civil War to the turn of the century is known as the Age of Realism. We will read a variety of poems, short stories, and novels written at this time. In addition to reading each work closely, we will try to determine what makes each one a work of realism. We will start by looking at some portrayals of the Civil War, followed by units on the "race question," "the woman question," and immigration. The novels we read will be by Crane, Howells, Twain, James, and Chesnutt. There will be a midterm, a paper, and a final. Attendance and reading done on time are required. |
| ENGLISH 102C | ROMANTIC NARRATIVE ART | CHRISTENSEN, J | Although the literary movement of Romanticism in the United Kingdom at the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth centuries has long been identified as a shift from mimetic to expressive forms and from the public genres of the epic and the tragic to the more private and domestic genres of the lyric and the pastoral, much of the innovative work in poetry and prose that most strongly appealed to readers at the time and that has endured until today is innovative narrative. In this course we will study the revolutionary breakthroughs in narrative poetry, autobiography, and prose fiction accomplished by William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Blake, Walter Scott, Jane Austen, Emily Bronte, Mary Shelley, and Thomas De Quincey with an eye to both their commonality of means and the individuality of their objectives.
The course will include a mid-term, a final, occasional quizzes, and a critical essay of 7 to 10 pages. |
| ENGLISH 102D | POSTCOLONIAL LITERATURE & THEORY | RADHAKRISHNAN, R. | In this course, we will be taking a selective but deep look into some of the powerful and often revolutionary fiction produced in the formerly colonized areas of Asia and Africa. Here is a tentative list of works and authors to be studied: Things Fall Apart (Achebe, Nigeria), A Grain of Wheat (our own wonderful Ngugi wa Thiong’ O, Kenya), Shadow Lines (Amitav Ghosh, India), Burger’s Daughter (Nadine Gordimer, South Africa), Nervous Conditions (Tsi-tsi Dangarembga, Zimbabwe), Waiting for the Barbarians (J.M. Coetzee, South Africa), God’s Bits of Wood (Ousmane Sembene, Senegal). We will be analyzing and interpreting the fiction within the larger macro-political context of Colonialism and its aftermath. The themes that will animate and inform the course are: Tradition and modernity; Eurocentrism and Afrocentrism; the politics of Gender and Sexuality between the West and the non-West; Nationalism and Feminism; Nationalism in the post-colonial context; Enlightenment Reason and the politics of decolonization; Postcolonial double-consciousness; Secularism and the Nation state; Nationalism, Populism, and the politics of representation; Race, Sovereignty, and the Nation State; Self and Other and the Colonial Divide; Subjectivity and Collectivity in the postcolonial condition; People and the Intellectual in the post-colony; and the Cultural politics of the “post-“ after Colonialism. Even as we pursue these themes by way of a careful close reading of the texts, we will also be looking at a few influential theoretical essays by postcolonial critics and theorists (Frantz Fanon, Chinua Achebe, Ngugi wa Thiong’O, Edward Said) to frame and contextualize our discussion.
Format: Lecture and discussion.
Requirements and Expectations: Regular attendance and participation. Possibly 1 short paper (5 pages) and 1Long Paper (7 to 10 pages). |
| ENGLISH 103 | HUMANISM | HELFER, R. | This course offers a broad survey of Renaissance humanism, from its classical and medieval origins to its reception in Europe from the 14th to 17th centuries. Difficult to define, “humanism” has been understood as a fascination with antiquity, a desire to reform religious institutions, and an educational program related to what we now call “the humanities”. We will explore varieties of humanism by focusing on one of its consistent central tenets, imitation and innovation, the early modern corollary to “originality.” More broadly, we will consider humanism as a dialogue and debate about a range of issues – learning, society, authority, belief, and so on – in works by Plato, Cicero, Augustine, Petrarch, Castiglione, Machiavelli, Erasmus, More, Sidney, and Shakespeare. Course requirements include regular attendance, reading quizzes, two essays, and a final exam. |
| ENGLISH 103 | LIT OF TRUE CRIME | CORWIN, M. | True crime, at its best, it not just about cops and killers, but can tell us much about the world in which we live. While the crimes may animate the narratives – which make for gripping reading – the best books transcend the genre by giving readers a strong sense of place, an insight into the criminal mind, a window into the cops’ world, a feel for the agony of the victims, and the impact on the community. Every crime contains three major players that provide the cornerstone for compelling character studies: a perpetrator, a victim, and an investigator. In this class we will discuss the ethnical challenges true crime writers encounter, the difficulties they face during the reporting, and the decisions they make during the writing. We will explore the psychology of criminals; the effect their behavior has on society, the legal world and the criminal justice system; and the social implications of their crimes. Homicide detectives, former prison inmates, and true crime writers will visit the class, give presentations and answer questions. Some writers whose works we will read include David Grann, Norman Mailer, and John Berendt. |
| ENGLISH 103 | SICK IMAGINATION | LEWIS, J. | Warning: This class will not be nearly as twisted as its title implies! Believe it or not, illness and literature have a long and intimate relationship: think of Oedipus and the plague, Keats’s tuberculosis, Sylvia Plath’s mythic year in the “bell jar.” Together we’ll be exploring the acts of imagination and interpretation–the quest for wholeness and coherence–that sickness perversely inspires. We’ll also be looking at illness in relation to issues of social conformity: at how it can be used to establish a satiric perspective on society and used to reflect and critique social norms. Our focus will be mainly, but not exclusively, English and American literature. In her essay “On Being Ill” (which we’ll be reading), one of the leading figures in the Anglo-American tradition, Virginia Woolf found it “strange indeed that illness has not taken its place with love and battle and jealousy among the prime themes of literature.” But Woolf may have protested too much: beginning with the ancient Book of Job and working our way up through Woolf to the present, we’ll examine the many literary strategies, both fictional and nonfictional, that writers have used to make sense of their own and others’ physical and sometimes mental suffering. Though they span centuries (even millennia) and cultures, the works we’ll read investigate some fundamental questions: Where and how do we draw the line between sickness and health? How can narrative and figurative language help us to (re)shape the experience of suffering? What does ‘normal’ really mean? How do social perceptions shape the illnesses people are said to ‘have’? Why do we speak of ourselves as ‘having’ and ‘getting’ the illnesses we ‘have’ and ‘get’? How does illness destroy individuality and how can it be used to confirm it? Can the mind or spirit truly be separated from the body? Above all: Why do we suffer? Besides works by Plath and Keats, texts include The Book of Job; Charlotte Perkins Gilman, “The Yellow Wallpaper”; Philip Roth, Nemesis; Leo Tolstoy, The Death of Ivan Ilych; essays by Susan Sontag, Erving Goffman, and Oliver Sacks; memoirs by Katherine Butler Hathaway and Miriam Engelberg. One midterm with take-home essay component, one final, one 7- to 8-page paper, assorted in-class writing assignments. |
| ENGLISH 103 | COLD WAR, HOT MELODRAMAS, AND WILD WESTERNS | CHRISTENSEN, J | In this course we will study Hollywood motion pictures of the post World War II era with the ambition to understand the interdependence of the imperative to preserve national security in the face of perceived or imagined threats from foreign enemies and the felt need to fabricate a domestic tranquility that merits protection. A provisional list of the motion pictures we will study in the contexts that mold their forms and charge them with significances includes: The Wild One (1953), On the Waterfront (1954), , Kiss Me Deadly (1955), Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), Rebel without a Cause (1955), Mildred Pierce (1945), The Bad Seed (1956), The Three Faces of Eve (1957), Imitation of Life (1959), , Red River (1946), She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949), The Searchers (1956), No Highway in the Sky (1951), The Bend in the River (1952), Vertigo (1957), and Dr. Strangelove: Or How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love the Bomb (1964). We will review approximately two motion pictures a week, accompanied by readings in pertinent documents of the period and contemporary criticism.
The course will include a mid-term, a final, occasional quizzes, and a critical essay of 7 to 10 pages.
|
| ENGLISH 105 | ASAM AUTOBIOGRAPHIE | LEE, J. | |
| ENGLISH 105 | WHAT’S LOVE GOT TO DO WITH IT? GENDER, POWER, AND SEXUALITY | KEIZER, A. | Since the era of American slavery, African American writers have grappled with the difficulties of representing love and sexuality in the context of coercion and the negative stereotypes that have dominated representations of black people in the Americas. In the late-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, African American fiction emphasized black morality, respectability, and “uplift” in order to counter widespread denigration. While critical for US race politics, such a stance became a constraint as nineteenth-century literary cultures gave way to Modernism and subsequent
experimental movements.
In the wake of the Civil Rights, Black Power, and feminist movements, new possibilities for representing gender and sexuality became available to African American writers. This course will examine fiction, poetry, drama, and film by twentieth- and twenty-first-century African American 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 creative expression, including the legacies of slavery, stereotypes of black men and women, sexual violence (including lynching), and movements for social, political, and sexual liberation. We will use critical essays to enhance our analyses of primary texts. |
| ENGLISH 105 | LATINO LITERATURE | LAZO, R. | Anthology and Community. Those will be two of our concerns as we use the new Norton Anthology of Latino Literature to delve into debates about the various strands of Latino literature. Of primary concern will be the tension between literature’s role in the critical position of Latino community formation (its challenge to a hegemonic Anglo-inflected national imaginings) and the more formal operation of establishing a literary field of study. In other words, where does the practice of literature (writing, circulating, evaluating) meet and diverge from political concerns about marginalization, racism, economic inequality, and language discrimination, among other topics. Or to put that another way, how can literature speak to and about socio-political concerns, including current debates about immigration? How does an anthology frame and contain notions of identity and textual production? We will consider how gender, nationality and sexuality factor into these debates and then turn to the anthology’s attempt to delve into the past, its efforts to fashion something that looks like a literary history. Attendance required. Requirements include short papers and a final project. |
| ENGLISH 106 | IMAGINATN & DISSENT | DAVIS, R. | This course explores the great flowering of religious literature written in English at the end of the fourteenth century, a development that takes place just as church and secular authorities began to restrict the use of English for theological and devotional writing, aiming to suppress what were considered heretical views and to control controversial vernacular translations of the Bible. This distinctive body of “vernacular theology” features imaginative attempts to re-think doctrinal concepts and to devise new ways of accessing spiritual experiences more directly, troubling the rigid assumptions of clerical/lay, Latin/English, spirit/matter, and even masculine/feminine hierarchies.
Course readings include the “mystical” writings of female authors Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe, the alliterative dream visions Piers Plowman and Pearl, selections from medieval drama, and meditative guidebooks such as The Cloud of Unknowing. Throughout the quarter, we’ll engage with secondary criticism and each student will develop an individual research topic that culminates in the major requirement for the course: a 15-page seminar paper supported by a proposal and annotated bibliography. All students will give short research presentations during the last week of the quarter. |
| ENGLISH 106 | FAULKNER'S SOUTH | GODDEN, R. | What is often first observed, concerning Faulkner’s work, is that it is difficult. 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 four of Faulkner’s experimental and canonical novels (The Sound and the Fury [1929], As I Lay Dying [1930], Absalom, Absalom! [1936] and Go Down, Moses [1942]), prevalently allowing two weeks for each text. We will also read the key short stories, “A Rose for Emily,” “Barn Burning,” and “Red Leaves.”
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. Arguably, the region, as Faulkner saw it, engaged in a prolonged displacement or denial of the bondage systems (ante-bellum slavery and post-bellum 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 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 untenable and yet essential to its nature, neither to be borne nor to be given up. With luck, as the course proceeds, difficulty will recede towards pleasure. |
| ENGLISH 106 | W.B. YEATS | IZENBERG, O. | |
| ENGLISH 210 | CASUISTRY &CLARISSA | VAN SANT, A | [Course Code 23808] Tuesdays 2:00-4:50pm in HIB 411
Enrollment via [click here]
This course, which meets the “coverage requirement” for the 18th century, begins in the 17th with a consideration of casuistry, a case-based method of solving particular moral problems in light of known principles. The process generated by casuistry leads into the mind, revealing it and exposing its subterfuges. “Cases of conscience” involved life and death issues in the mid-17thc. (with unprecedented loyalty oaths, loss of property, and legal status at stake), but they could also concern family issues (e.g, whether a father could command a child to marry). These cases offer a glimpse into a problem-centered way of thinking. We will be interested in the historical development of casuistry and in the ubiquity of case-based thinking during this period. And we will use that interest in order to examine “cases” as fictions in the making. Clarissa’s “experience,” like that of Moll Flanders, Roxana, and Pamela, is constructed of one case of conscience after another. Casuistry is, in other words, one of the means through which Richardson produces the material of the novel, with its psychological and ideological force. And finally, we will move from the historical importance of casuistry in shaping fictions to questions about the theoretical implications of case-based thinking.
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 historical materials, Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa, Albert Jonsen & Stephen Toulmin’s modern analysis of thinking in cases, and various theoretical and critical articles. Seminar students will write seminar papers. Pro-seminar students will write shorter papers. All students will write annotated bibliographies. It would be useful but not necessary for students to read Richardson’s Pamela before the course begins. |
| ENGLISH 210 | AFAM LIT & CRTHEORY | KEIZER, A. | [Course Code: 23804] Tuesdays 9:00am-11:50am in HIB 411
Enrollment via [click here]
E210/cross-listed with the Critical Theory Emphasis
African American Literature and Critical Methodologies
[AFAM LIT & CRTHEORY]
This course surveys 20th- and 21st-century African American literature and the critical theories and methods that have been employed to analyze it. Pairing novels, plays, and literary non-fiction with postmodernist, Marxist, psychoanalytic, feminist, postcolonial, and critical race theories (as well as other theories derived from African American intellectual and cultural traditions), it offers a comprehensive introduction to a major strand of American literature.
Seminar or
pro-seminar credit. |
| ENGLISH 210 | RECENT U.S. LIT | GODDEN, R. & SZALAY, M. | [Course Code: 23801] Wednesdays 9:00am -11:50am HIB 411
Enrollment via [click here]
Recent U.S. Fiction, Richard Godden and Michael Szalay
Our course will survey trends in very recent U.S. fiction. We will examine the rise of so-called
post-postmodern fiction, and especially the novel’s relation to new forms of generic confusion.
Our readings will track a range of formal developments in light of the transformation of
corporate and neoliberal imperatives; the changing structure of brands, money and finance;
and an evolving media ecology. Possible texts might include:
Karen Tei Yamashita, Tropic of Orange
William Gaddis, Carpenter’s Gothic
Bret Eason Ellis, Lunar Park
Don DeLillo, The Body Artist
Jonathan Lethem, The Fortress of Solitude
William Gibson, Pattern Recognition
Jayne Anne Phillips, Lark and Termite
Jennifer Egan, A Visit from the Goon Squad
Dana Spiotta, Stone Arabia
Colson Whitehead, Zone One |
| ENGLISH 210 | VERNACULAR THEOLOGY | DAVIS, R. | [Course Code 23800] Thursdays 2:00pm-4:50pm in HIB 411
Enrollment via [click here]
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 for some 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 that the medieval scholar Nicholas Watson has called "vernacular theology." This distinctive body of writing features imaginative attempts to re-think doctrinal concepts and to devise new ways of accessing spiritual experiences more directly, troubling the rigid assumptions of clerical/lay, Latin/English, spirit/matter, and even masculine/feminine hierarchies.
Seminar readings include portions of secular texts that theorize the use of the vernacular as a literary language, as well as an array of religious works including the hermit-poet Richard Rolle's Form of Living, the anchoress Julian of Norwich's Showings; Margery Kempe's contested spiritual autobiography; John Trevisa's Dialogue Between the Lord and the Clerk on Translation; excerpts from William Langland's great dream vision, Piers Plowman; a handbook of negative theology known as the The Cloud of Unknowing; Nicholas Love's imaginative Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ; some 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. All students will give an oral presentation on a secondary reading of your choice. No prior experience with Middle English language required. |
| 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 | DISSERTATN RESEARCH | HARRIES, M. | Course Code 23970 |
| ENGLISH 398 | RHET/TCHNG OF COMP | QUEEN, B. | Course Code 23975
Every Monday, 4-6:50pm. Registration details to come. |
| ENGLISH 398 | RHET/TCHNG OF COMP | ALEXANDER, J. | Course Code 23977
Every Monday, 4-6:50pm. Registration details to come. |