| Course | Title | Instructor | Description |
|---|
| ENGLISH E105 | COL & MOD AF LIT | THIONG\'O, N. | Colonialism and the colonial experience have profoundly affected intellectual production in the world. With the theme of colonialism as the unifying principle, the course explores the work of a number of African writers. Though based on the African literary production, the issues raised are relevant to all post-colonial societies. |
| ENGLISH 12 | YOUNG ADULT FICTION | ALEXANDER, J. | Young Adult (YA) fiction is amongst the most lucrative genres in the publishing industry. Stories of teen angst, dystopic visions of the future, magic-laced fantasies, tales of adolescent love, and paranormal romances have all proliferated in the past century, especially in the last 20 years--from Harry Potter to The Hunger Games. Millions of young people read YA fiction, educators increasingly use it in their curricula, the culture industry develops mass media out of it, and literary critics and literacy theorists trace the appeal (and controversies) of this publishing phenomenon. This course will track the history of YA fiction, with particular attention to the development of YA fiction as an economic phenomenon. Short essays, a midterm, and a final will sort you into either Gryffindor or Slytherin. |
| ENGLISH 28A | POETIC IMAGINATION | ALLEN, E. | 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 | ALLEN, E. | 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 100 | HISTORY OF THEORY & CRITICISM | SILVER, V. | This course will focus on the critical problem of "mimesis" (the literary 'imitation,' representation or exemplification of experience), and the ancient charge of its falsity or deceptiveness. The first half of the course will address the concept in its Greek (and Roman) expression, from Aeschylus' tragedy "Agamemnon," the first Sophists, Plato, Aristotle and Longinus; the second half will look at its Judeo Christian formulation, with selections from Genesis, Exodus, Isaiah, Matthew and Paul, as well as Augustine, Aquinas, Dante and the "Inferno." Erich Auerbach's "Mimesis" will serve as a model of literary analysis as well as our contact with literature as such. In between, we will reflect on the status of literary study in the current political-economic climate, and what it means to be an English major. |
| ENGLISH 101W | WORKING | TUCKER, I | This course will take up the topic of work from a variety of different angles. We will read the writings of several important theorists of work, including John Locke and Karl Marx. In these readings, we will try to figure out both how Locke and Marx understand work to organize the social relations among people and also what they understand the “opposites” of work to be. We will also read some poetry about work from poets ranging from William Wordsworth to Alfred, Lord Tennyson. The heart of the course centers on our engagement with one of the strangest novels about work ever written, Frank Norris’s McTeague, which tells the story of dentist whose practice and relationship with his wife complicate the process of transforming work into money. We will conclude by viewing the 1982 musical version of Studs Turkel’s classic of literary journalism, Working. |
| ENGLISH 101W | READING POETRY | RADHAKRISHNAN, R. | Poetry makes nothing happen. W.H. Auden.
Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the universe. Percy Bysshe Shelley.
Poetry, I too dislike it. Marianne Moore.
A poem is like dancing whereas prose is like walking. Paul Valery.
Beauty is Truth and Truth Beauty. John Keats.
A sonnet is a moment’s monument. Dante Gabriel Rossetti.
How do these different diagnoses and definitions add up? Is poetry difficult or easy, elitist or populist, critical-Utopian and transformative or just tamely beautiful, deeply subjective or out in the world? Is it political or apolitical? What is its relationship to language, to society, to the individual? Is it a kind of truth or just a mode of saying? How is it related to thought, to philosophy, and to every day life? Is a poem intellectual, cognitive, emotive, sensuous, or all of the above? Why and how does it please the reader? What forms of joy and pleasure does it offer that are uniquely its own? How much has poetry changed over centuries and why?
Questions, more questions. This course does not pretend to have all the answers, but I certainly hope that we as a passionate and intensely committed collectivity will have these questions in mind as we practice the art of close reading a number of profound and delicious poems in English, drawn from different time periods and schools of composition. Likely suspects: William Shakespeare, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Keats, Adrienne Rich, Sylvia Plath, Wallace Stevens, W.H. Auden, T.S. Eliot, Emily Dickinson, William Butler Yeats, Agha Shahid Ali, and more. Even as we dive deeply and irrevocably into each poem, so irrevocably indeed that we may not know the difference between swimming and drowning, and submit it to word by word and between the words scrutiny and exegesis, we will be aligning and relating the inner world of each poem to its broader worldly context of ideas, philosophies, critical theories and schools of thought, political regimes, socio cultural and political landscapes and horizons. The emphasis will be as much on “reading” as on “poetry,” and it is my hope that the course will help you understand the deep symbiosis as well as complicity between the two terms.
Mode of teaching: A mix of some lecture and introduction combined with individual student presentations and collective dialog and discussion.
Expectations and requirements: Diligent attendance and participation. No required texts: we will just be downloading copies of the required poems from the web. I will be suggesting secondary critical material now and then, as the need arises.
You will very likely be writing two short papers and I long paper.
WELCOME TO READING POETRY IN THE HOPE THAT POETRY WILL READ US IN GENEROUS RECIPROCITY |
| ENGLISH 102A | INDIVIDUAL &SOCIETY | ALLEN, E. | This course surveys the emergence and development of English literature from Anglo-Saxon riddles to Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales to mystery plays. Thematically, we will explore how medieval literature portrayed the individual’s place within the social structure. What place do books have in a society where it takes several hundred sheep to make a manuscript? How do women contribute to ideals of chivalry? How do kings bolster their own power by ceding authority? How does religious vision compete with or shore up kingship? Questions such as these will occupy us in this course. We will explore various medieval social frameworks and see how social ideals guide individual action, what makes individuals fit ideals or chafe against conventions, how societies judge persons, and when social structures contain the seeds of their own destruction |
| ENGLISH 102B | RISE OF THE NOVEL | TUCKER, I | This course attempts to investigate the question “What makes a novel a novel?” by going back to the moment, or moments, when the novel came into being. We will examine a variety of forms of writing that retrospectively came to be understood as ancestors of the novel, including Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko, Samuel Richardson’s Pamela, Henry Fielding’s Joseph Andrews, Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders, Frances Burney’s Evelina, and William Godwin’s Caleb Williams. We will begin the course by briefly examining some of the poetry and criticism of the period in attempt to figure out what the prose writers of the era thought they were writing, and writing against. Some questions we will consider: When, if ever, did writers of the era understand themselves to be writing something unprecedented? When, if ever, did they understand themselves to be writing novels? Is it okay for people reading after the fact to decide what they are reading are novels if the authors didn’t understand themselves to be writing such a thing?
Requirements include a midterm, final and two papers. |
| ENGLISH 102C | ART AND NATURE IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY | HENDERSON, A. | This course will provide a broad survey of Romantic and Victorian art, ranging from poems by Wordsworth to novels by Oscar Wilde. We will pay particular attention to the changing status of an ideal of "nature" over the course of the nineteenth century, and its impact on notions of "realism" and "beauty." Our authors will include Keats, Shelley, Burke, Pater, Carroll, and Tennyson. Course requirements include a paper, a midterm, and a final. |
| 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 102D | AMERICAN LITERATURE OF THE 1920'S | GODDEN, R | The Twenties will be understood as a long decade in order to approach it through such extended and insistent patterns of determination as shifts in the prevalent forms of production (associated with Taylorism and Fordism); the Great War; the Great Migration; the intensification of advertising attendant upon an enlargement of the consumer network, and the continuing marginalization of the South as a region committed to labor bound by debt rather than to free wage labor. Such economic elements and their cultural consequences (alienation/reification, commodity aesthetics/capitalist realism, the Jazz Age, Harlem, Modernism…) will be addressed through a range of literary texts, and under a general rubric of modernization, where the formal processes associated with “making it new” aesthetically may themselves be glossed (in a phrasing from Marx), as “all that is solid melts into air”. The course will attempt historically to situate and closely to read a number of the period’s key texts: Upton Sinclair, The Jungle (1906); Ernest Hemingway, In Our Time (1925); John Dos Passos, Manhattan Transfer (1925); T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land (1922); F. Scott Fitzgerald, “The Diamond as Big as the Ritz” (1922) and The Great Gatsby (1925); William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying (1930); Nella Larsen, Passing (192); Jean Toomer, Cane (1925). |
| ENGLISH 102D | MODERNIST WOMEN WRITERS | O'CONNOR, L. | |
| ENGLISH 103 | PSYCHOANALYSIS AND CULTURE | TERADA, R. | |
| ENGLISH 103 | SCIENCE & ART IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY | HENDERSON, A. | In this course we will examine the mutual influence of science and art in nineteenth-century British culture, beginning with Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and ending with Oscar Wilde's Picture of Dorian Gray. We will not only discuss the representation of scientific concepts in literature, but will track the importance of formal abstraction--especially in the mathematics and logic of the age--to the impulse towards formalism in poetry and painting. We will read writings by mathematicians and physicists alongside aesthetic treatises and poems. Course requirements will include a paper, a midterm, and a final. |
| ENGLISH 103 | FILMS OF THE 60'S | CHRISTENSEN, J. | |
| ENGLISH 105 | TONI MORRISON AND DEREK WALCOTT: AMERICAN MASTERS | KEIZER, A. | In an interview from the early 1980s, Nobel-Prize-winning novelist Toni Morrison states that “narrative remains the best way to learn anything ... so I continue with narrative form.” The Nobel-Prize-winning poet and playwright Derek Walcott has said, “I have a belief that a poet is instinctively closer to the theatre than a novelist or fiction writer because, structurally, the feel of the poem is the feel of a play[;] ... they both have the same kind of chording.” The aim of this course is to explore, in detail, Morrison's and Walcott’s uses of poetic and narrative form and figurative language in a range of genres: lyric and epic poetry, novels, short fiction, and drama. We will also read Morrison's and Walcott’s literary and cultural criticism, paying particular attention to the ways in which issues in the novels, poems, and plays are addressed in these non-fiction works. Among the questions we will attempt to answer by reading the literature and criticism together is the question of how literary works might function as forms of theory. Another ongoing concern of the class will be to situate Morrison's and Walcott’s work in the African American, Caribbean, and hemispheric American literary traditions. Students will complete a book review, an in-class midterm, and a take-home final. |
| ENGLISH 105 | TRANSNATIONALISM | RADHAKRISHNAN, R. | |
| 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.
Required Text: William Wordsworth, _The Major Works_, edited by Stephen Gill. Oxford World's Classics. |
| ENGLISH 106 | JOYCE'S ULYSSES | O'CONNOR, L. | The E106 is the capstone course for English majors. And what can cap spending a quarter immersed in what many regard as finest and most influential novel of the twentieth-century, James Joyce’s Ulysses, working on a 12-15 page research-paper in the stimulating company of a supportive seminar? Superlatives can be intimidating, of course, but the novel’s relish for the ordinary quickly banishes solemnity as readers become absorbed in the often very funny thoughts of the main characters as they go about their daily business in Dublin on June 16, 1904. My goal is to make Ulysses (1922) accessible and endlessly intriguing, so that you’ll enjoy revisiting the novel at various times throughout your life. Every imaginable critical and theoretical approach has been used to interpret Ulysses, and the novel has in turn influenced the theorists (the late philosopher and former UCI professor, Jacques Derrida, said that “deconstruction would not have been possible without Joyce,” for example). We’ll begin by situating the novel in relation to its structural Homeric parallel and its Irish and modernist contexts. The 1984 Hans Gabler edition of Ulysses (ISBN 0394743121) is required, even if you already have another edition of Ulysses, because it is essential for the success of the seminar for everyone to be “on the same page.” Our ten-week itinerary will cover about 2 Homeric episodes each week and some supplementary reading, though most reading in secondary criticism will be conducted independently as part of your research project. Discussion will be stimulated by participants’ weekly response papers on the upcoming assigned episodes (circulated on the class messageboard), and by pre-circulated reading questions. Students are required to submit a prospectus and annotated bibliography by the mid-quarter deadline, to engage in a peer-reviewing process with the instructor of their final drafts near the end of the quarter, and to meet the final submission deadline the revised capstone essay. There will be no exams, though you’ll have take-home writing to do around weeks 4-6, and of course a 12-15 page paper to finish by the quarter’s end. The final paper is worth 60% of the grade, and the remaining 40% covers supplementary writing exercises (response papers, prospectus, presentation on secondary criticism etc), all of which feed into the research paper. |
| ENGLISH 106 | WHAT IS ENTERTAINMENT? | CHRISTENSEN, J. | This course will examine the concept of entertainment that is developed by the Hollywood motion picture industry from the silent picture era to the 1990s. We will analyze motion pictures as devices designed to entertain, as arguments about what entertainment is, and as efforts to comprehend all past and present forms of entertainment: fairs, amusement parks, vaudeville, and burlesque. Motion pictures will likely include Lumiere and Edison shorts, The Jazz Singer (1927), The Crowd (1928), Freaks (1932), Footlight Parade (1933), She Done Him Wrong (1933), Pinocchio (1940), Dumbo (1941), Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942), Sullivan’s Travels (1941), Hollywood Canteen (1944) Meet Me in St. Louis (1944), Nightmare Alley (1947), The Greatest Show on Earth (1952), The Band Wagon (1953), Kiss Me Stupid (1964), Bonnie and Clyde (1967), Westworld (1973), Batman (1989), Jurassic Park (1993) Casino (1995), and Shrek (2001). We will have screen two movies a week. There will also be readings from historical documents and contemporary film theory and criticism. Grades will be based on a mid-term exam, a final paper of 9-12 pages, occasional quizzes, and class discussion. |
| ENGLISH 210 | TIME TRVEL: MED-REN | ALLEN, E. & LUPTON, J. | [Course Code: 23800] Thursdays 2:00pm-4:50pm in HIB 411
Enrollment via [click here]
Time Travel: Medieval to Renaissance
This course is designed to consider ways in which literary texts of the medieval and early modern periods meditate on time. We begin with the combination or collision between linear time as experienced by human creatures and eternal time as imagined from a divine perspective, what M. D. Chenu calls “horizontal” and “vertical” temporality. Horizontal time is associated with earthly growth and decay, with social change, with clock time, with mercantile transaction; vertical time is associated with what does not change: with social ideals like chivalry and saintliness, with devotion and ritual, with access to divinity. But medieval and early modern literature everywhere displays temporalities that complicate these axes: seasonal cycles in the natural world reflect God’s care for his creation; historical time hearkens forward in prophecy and backward in exemplarity; literary allusions reach ‘back in time’ to revise events of the storied past; saintly miracles and flights to sanctuary submit earthly emergencies to the aegis of divinity. This course will explore two narrative threads that create what Carolyn Dinshaw calls “temporal asynchrony”: readings on Ephesus, Apollonius, and Jonah that coalesce in Shakespeare’sPericles, and readings from Ovid, Chaucer, and medieval lyric that weave through A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Our explorations in renaissance and medieval time will enable us to reflect, in turn, upon our own experiences and portrayals of the time-travel so essential to the reading of literature in any period. |
| ENGLISH 210 | EVDNCE&TEST AUTOBIO | BURT, E. | [Course Code: 23801] Tuesdays 2:00pm-4:50pm in HIB 411
Enrollment via [click here]
Evidence and Testimony in Autobiography
We will investigate evidence and testimony in autobiographical writing, basing the discussion on texts from Rousseau, De Quincey and Newman, all of which present not just examples but theories of what it is to testify for and give evidence of self. The critics of the Geneva School were interested in this problem of self-evidence in Rousseau, to which—following Descartes—they gave the name of the cogito. As a related, and more difficult question, we will consider the contribution of autobiographical writing to modeling and/or tampering with legal notions of evidence and testimony, given the claim of autobiographical writers to incomparability and the category of the unique.
Theoretical texts also to be selected from works on autobiography and witnessing: Starobinski de Man, Felman, Agamben, Lejeune, Ricoeur, Levinas, Derrida. (Although not essential, knowledge of French will be helpful, as some of our work will draw on Derrida’s still unpublished seminar on testimony, to be found in the Special Collections at the library.) |
| ENGLISH 210 | MDLE MOD MELANCHOLIES | LEWIS, J. | [Course Code: 23802] Mondays 1:00pm-3:50pm in HIB 411
Enrollment via [click here]
The premise of this seminar—and hence its title—is that modernity produces what John F. Sena calls a “plurality of melancholies.” What we’ll explore through a selection of 18th-century literary, philosophical and medical works is the disconcerting variety of forms that an ancient condition assumed at a moment of self-conscious modernization. Not by accident, this moment coincides with the consolidation of Anglophone linguistic identity: it is no accident that English’s most ambitious lexicographer, Samuel Johnson, was also the most famous depressive of the 18th century. We’ll be reading Johnson, as we will some of his sidekick Boswell’s Hypochondriack essays (1777-83), whose title tells us just how many cognates melancholy found at this extraordinarily fertile juncture in the history of the mind-body relationship. Besides “hypochondria,” we have “vapors,” “spleen,” “dolor” and “inveterate dejection,” each with its own vector toward some of core conflicts and transformations of the long 18th century: the sometimes competing and sometimes convergent interests of Christian and classical (stoic), moral and spiritual therapies; demonology’s disappearance as a context for understanding melancholy delirium and delusion; the decline of Galenic medicine with its highly individuated accounts of mental and physical illness and the rise of the normative, medicalized body which today is treated within the actuarial logic of pharmaceutical drugs. Approaching these developments primarily through the study of literature and language will allow us to appreciate melancholy’s intimate relationship to problems of form, embodiment, and imaginative genius as well as its role in the construction of a national imaginary, a role epitomized in the title of George Cheyne’s 1733 treatise on melancholy, The English Malady (also on our reading list). We’ll also ask what specific role literature played in the diagnosis, production, and management of modern melancholies: How did the novel help make melancholy fashionable, a marker of taste, of disposable time and wealth? How did satire, bedeviled by deep affinities between melancholy and wit, turn around and condemn melancholy—with its symptoms of groundless thought, delusion and distorted value—as a disease of affluence and a symptom of dissolute modernity? Just when did the task of poetry become—as we see with the romantic poets—that of making people sick at heart instead of curing them? To the extent that melancholy involves interminable experiment with fantastic forms, how might this have supported obsession with generic form? Philosophically speaking, how could the obdurate fact of melancholy be reconciled with the enlightenment ideal of happiness? How did dejection’s trend toward isolation accord with 18th-century ideals and practices of sociability? How did melancholy’s performative aspect complicate emergent discourses of authenticity that it was called upon to support? How did such figures as “gloom,” “vapors” and “could” articulate some kinds of melancholy with bad air—air bad because it is mixed with the human element? How does enlightenment philosophy—empirical, skeptical—find a perverse mirror in the 1730 complaint of Bernard Mandeville’s depressive Misomedon that “unaccountably I am afflicted by mere thoughts, and sometimes worked upon by non entia” (non-existent things)? How was melancholy (“Mother of Musings”) gendered—rendered heroic and a marker of genius in figures like Johnson, but also identified with female bodiliness, excessive delicacy, and triviality? And what of the new affliction of colonial melancholy as registered in Boswell’s description of the plantation proprietor who is “sick and sick again […] and is tempted with wild wishes to hang himself”? Perhaps he has something in common with Aphra Behn’s “royal slave” Oroonoko, who “laid himself down and sullenly resolved upon dying” when taken into captivity. We’ll see.
Besides Cheyne, Mandeville, and Boswell, authors include Swift, Pope, Finch, Sterne, Young, Mackenzie, Hume, Charlotte Smith, Cowper, and Coleridge. (Don’t worry, the works are short—melancholy, mercifully, does not lend itself to length.) Seminar participants: one 15- to 20-page research paper and two presentations. Proseminar participants: two presentations, with one expanded to a six-page comparative essay or creative piece. |
| ENGLISH 210 | CULTURE INDUSTRY | SZALAY, M. | [Course Code: 23803] Fridays 2:00pm-4:50pm in HIB 411
Enrollment via [click here]
“The Culture Industry, Reconsidered”
This course will evaluate classic Marxist accounts of the relation between culture and capital, in light of contemporary television production. We will begin with Marx’s Capital, Volume One, and then consider Lukacs on the novel, Benjamin on cinema and allegory, and Horkheimer and Adorno on the Culture Industry. We'll move next to influential accounts of ideology (offered by Gramsci, Althusser, and Jameson), and to post-Operaismo or Autonomist accounts of immaterial and affective labor. During the second half of the course we will turn to recent television production--by Time Warner on the one hand and News Corp/21st Century Fox on the other. We will likely read Pierre Bourdieu’s On Television during these weeks, and evaluate its relevance to recent TV production, as compared to the Marxist writings assigned earlier in the course. |
| ENGLISH 255 | WRKSHOP IN ACAD PUB | STAFF | |
| ENGLISH 290 | READING&CONFERENCE | STAFF | |
| ENGLISH 290 | READING&CONFERENCE | STAFF | |
| ENGLISH 290 | READING&CONFERENCE | STAFF | |
| ENGLISH 290 | READING&CONFERENCE | STAFF | |
| ENGLISH 290 | READING&CONFERENCE | STAFF | |
| ENGLISH 290 | READING&CONFERENCE | STAFF | |
| ENGLISH 290 | READING&CONFERENCE | STAFF | |
| ENGLISH 290 | READING&CONFERENCE | STAFF | |
| ENGLISH 290 | READING&CONFERENCE | STAFF | |
| ENGLISH 290 | READING&CONFERENCE | STAFF | |
| ENGLISH 290 | READING&CONFERENCE | STAFF | |
| ENGLISH 299 | DISSERTATN RESEARCH | HARRIES, M. | Course Code: 23970 |
| ENGLISH 398 | RHET/TCHNG OF COMP | GROSS, D. | |
| ENGLISH 398 | RHET/TCHNG OF COMP | QUEEN, B. | |
| ENGLISH 398 | RHET/TCHNG OF COMP | STAFF | |