| Course | Title | Instructor | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
| ENGLISH 8 | MIGRATIONS | DANNER, K. | It is difficult to get the news from poems yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there. -William Carlos Williams Fiction is the genre of English 8, though we will work together to “get the news,” as Williams says of poetry. Our readings will be formal and linguistic – examining how our writers have gone about conveying their meanings – but also, necessarily, contextual and political – examining the forces shaping our writers and their texts. We will begin by reading a set of African-American works connected to the period following WW I in which over a million and a half blacks left the South. These migration narratives will prompt our discussion of representations of race, flight, and rural and urban identities. The second half of the course will focus on Chinese-American writers. Here, immigration stories form the backdrop for generational conflict and identities formed in the crucible of the traditional and the American. What are the lenses that help us with our readings? Is there overlap at all between the two traditions, some notion of “American-ness” that aids our understanding? Can we read with a racial lens? A human one? Or does each text make its own particular readerly demands? Jean Toomer (Cane), Nella Larsen (Quicksand), Richard Wright (“Big Boy Leaves Home”), William Attaway (Blood on the Forge), David Henry Hwang (“The Railroad and the Dancer”), Maxine Hong Kingston (Woman Warrior), Frank Chin (Donald Duk), Gish Jen (Who’s Irish?), Chieh Chieng (A Long Stay in a Distant Land). 2 short papers, final exam. Reading questions/quizzes. |
| ENGLISH 28A | POETIC IMAGINATION | DAVIS, 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 | DAVIS, 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 100 | INTRO TO LIT THEORY | 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 | SHAKESPEARE | HELFER, R. | We know that comedies have happy endings – but how these endings are achieved, and at what cost, are questions that Shakespeare poses throughout his investigation of this complex literary form. In this course, we will explore five of Shakespeare’s comedies: Comedy of Errors, Much Ado About Nothing, Merchant of Venice, Measure for Measure, and All’s Well That Ends Well. We will consider genre fluidity, taking into account the comic, tragic, historical, and romance elements of these plays, while tackling issues about the relationship of self and society, gender / sexuality and identity, as well as power and politics. Course requirements include two essays (and one essay draft), a final, and occasional in-class writing and quizzes. |
| ENGLISH 101W | W.B. YEATS | O'CONNOR, L. | This course offers immersion in the work of William Butler Yeats, regarded by many as the outstanding poet of the twentieth century, and an opportunity to improve your skills in close reading and critical writing. Appropriate for the E101W project of revising and improving writing, Yeats was an inveterate reviser of his verse and his poetics. “Those that have it I do wrong, / Whenever I remake a song / Should know what issue is at stake: / It is myself that I remake,” declares an epigraph to a projected early “Collected Works,” and the principle of continual change through self-revision is a unifying theme for the quarter. A self-avowed traditionalist, Yeats wrote in inherited verse forms and was committed to creating an Irish-national literary tradition in English and to reconnecting with occult philosophy and Magic. His unrequited love for Maud Gonne is one of his recurrent themes. A key player in the cultural nationalist movement that shaped modern Ireland, his fifty-year career coincided with the revolutionary change in Ireland as the former colony became an independent state. Requirements: regular ungraded assignments and three graded essays. |
| ENGLISH 101W | PRACTICE OF CLOSE READING | 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 | FAERIE: MEDIEVAL TO RENAISSANCE | ALLEN, E. | From Homer to Shakespeare, magic opens a door to another world, where men can be transformed into beasts or kings can pull swords out of stones. The world of ‘faerie’ however does not just consist of intrigue and magic for its own sake. Instead, fantastic Otherworlds enhance reality. When men turn to beasts, they show their real nature as creatures of unbridled desire; when kings achieve miracles, they demonstrate the basis of their political power in personal charisma. Magic creates an image of reality—an allegory—that exposes social and political problems. Often in the hands of women, ‘faerie’ power can pit private desire against the public good, female against male. Thus magic can bend and even destroy the status quo. Yet in the fairy-tale world of romance, the status quo will often emerge victorious: the exile will return, the conflict resolve, the knight win back his shining lady. This course will concern ‘faerie’ in a range of texts that may include Homer; Ovid; anonymous medieval romances; Chaucer; Shakespeare; fairy tales; and C. S. Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. Requirements: 2 papers, assorted informal writing. |
| ENGLISH 102A | LOVE IN MEDIEVAL LITERATURE | ALLEN, E. | Love can be a supremely disruptive force. But it can also be a source of powerful social norms and even quasi-religious devotion. Tristan and Isolde flee her husband Mark to live in the forest of Broceliande; Lancelot breaks into a foreign king’s prison and sleeps with Guinevere. Yet when the hero Erec finally accepts the loving advice of his wife Enide, the two achieve the ultimate Joy of the Court. In the Middle Ages, within marriage, a woman was assumed to be under the control of her husband, and was ideally obedient to him. Yet women exercised agency in numerous ways—sometimes precisely by upholding social conventions better than their husbands. Moreover, marriage was not the only model of gender relations. Central to the idea of “courtly love” was the unmarried lover’s humble service to his lady, in the hope that she might reward his loyalty with pity. Equally central was the lady’s social superiority: usually she was married to a lord, and the lover was an aspiring knight in the lord’s service. The knight’s adulterous desire might challenge the lord’s place, and yet his loyal service to both lady and lord confirmed their power. This course will explore Arthurian and non-Arthurian romances of the Middle Ages, focusing on the complexity of relations between the sexes and the attendant ideas of social hierarchy and order depicted in the works of Chrétien de Troyes, Chaucer, and other medieval writers. Weekly short papers, one longer paper, exam. |
| ENGLISH 102B | AGE OF SENSIBILITY | GROSS, D. | Defying chronology, we return to the Age of Sensibility as "emotion studies" accelerate across the disciplines. Like Ann Radcliffe we should find terror part of our creepy world (not just a brain state), like Shaftesbury we should consider most basic our social emotions such as panic and sympathy (not personal feelings), and maybe we would actually do better if, like Adam Ferguson, we understood our social institutions such as the marketplace in terms of fear and vanity (not reason). In this course we will survey key works of 18th-century fiction, psychology, and social thought to address these questions and others, learning along the way how critical work in the present proceeds by way of literary history. Grades will be based primarily on reading responses and a final essay that will go through a careful drafting and revision |
| ENGLISH 102C | WILDE TIMES | BURT, E. | How can the same decade of the 1890’s have given us Wilde’s painterly Decadent texts, Shaw’s socially-concerned, realist comedies, James’s finely-tuned psychological tales, Wells’s ferocious science-fiction novellas and Conrad’s modernist meditations on English honor and the Empire in dissolution? As the Victorian age reaches an end, on the cusp of modernism, there are noticeable signs in the texts of these writers of a struggle to liberate men and women from the confines of Victorian notions of virtue and domestic life. There is evidence as well of anxiety, as socio-political institutions come under fire for their corruption or inadequacy at accommodating modern needs. Corrupting influences are shown inhabiting the family or tearing apart Victorian assumptions as to the glorious Empire and the fairness of old England itself. Along with the social upheaval, we see our novelists and dramatists experimenting with styles and forms that indicate on the one side an increasing formalism, and on the other, a reforming spirit struggling to find literary language adequate to the new age. Works to be read include: The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890), Lady Windermere’s Fan (1893), Mrs. Warren’s Profession (1893), The Spoils of Poynton (1896), The Invisible Man (1897), Lord Jim (1899). |
| ENGLISH 102C | YOUNG ROMANTICS | ROBERTS, H. | In this course we will explore the writings of the "second generation" of English Romantic poets. We will look at the ways in which the redemptive promise of High Romanticism is increasingly called into question by the writers who emerge after the great achievements of Wordsworth and Coleridge. In the tense political context of the collapse of the Napoleonic Empire and the repressive European order which followed in its wake, writers as diverse as Byron, Thomas de Quincey, Percy Bysshe Shelley, John Keats and Felicia Hemans explored extremes of feeling, of estheticism, of political protest, and of ironic detachment which have in common a fascination with incompletion or "failure". |
| ENGLISH 103 | POETIC RYTHYM | ROBERTS, H. | This course will provide students with a comprehensive introduction to the study of prosody--the critical analysis of poetic meter and poetic rhythm. The course will be taught principally via web-based modules that students will work through each week at their own pace. There will be weekly class meetings at which students can raise questions and be tested on their progress. The final grade will be based upon a final examination and a variety of shorter written assignments. Texts: Derek Attridge, Poetic Rhythm: An Introduction and Margaret Ferguson et al. (eds.) The Norton Anthology of Poetry (Shorter Fifth Edition). |
| ENGLISH 103 | SHORT FICTION | O'CONNOR, L. | Renowned writer and UCI faculty member Ron Carlson recommends the aspiring short-story writer to “begin near the end, finish before you are done, and leave everything out.” It is a paradox of short-story criticism and theory that the genre is often characterized in terms of what it lacks (it falls short of the novel) and defended on “less is more” grounds. The question of what a short story does will preoccupy us from several vantages--as literary critics, narrative theorists and would-be practitioners of the genre. We’ll read a range of classic and lesser known stories, from Edgar Allen Poe to contemporary writers, to gain insight into the historic development of the genre. Students are required to take a midterm and to write a critical essay, and will have a choice of submitting a portfolio of writing or taking a final exam. |
| ENGLISH 105 | WHAT'S MINORITY LIT | RADHAKRISHNAN, R. | What indeed is “minority literature?” Was it born “minority” or was it minoritized by history and geopolitical circumstances, and perhaps by a process called democracy? Is “minority” a badge of honor or a stigma? Is minority quality driven or numbers driven? Why is “minority” marked as such while the literature of the majority is not called “majority literature?” What is the nature of the binary relationship between majority and minority? Is it antagonistic, symbiotic, mutually constitutive? Is minority literature content and ideology oriented, or is it a perspective? Is it by definition political, resistant, transformative, revolutionary? We will be tracking and unpacking these questions about the majority-minority nexus by way of political theory, philosophy, epistemology, and of course literature. Of particular interest in the context of the majority-minority binary grid are the following themes and issues: America, the nation-state, nationalism, Colonialism, naturalization and immigration, various forms of centrism such as Eurocentrism, the One and the Many, ethnicity and hyphenation, double consciousness, hybridity, trans-nationalism and the diaspora, race, class, gender, and sexuality. As we analyze the works, theoretical as well as literary, of thinkers and writers such as Du Bois, Ralph Ellison, Deluze and Guattari, Chantal Mouffe, Lani Guinier, Toni Morrison, Cornel West, Toni Morrison, James Baldwin, Langston Hughes, and others, I hope we get a rich and complex sense of the legacy, the phenomenology, as well as the universal call of the minority that always speaks in an “other” voice, on an “other” register. Lecture and discussion and open-ended class participation. 2 Short Essays and 1 Long Essay. |
| ENGLISH 105 | LATINO LITERATURE | LAZO, R. | Anthology and Community. Those will be two of our concerns as we use the 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, 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 105 | ASNAM LITERATURE / FILM ADAPTATION | SHROFF, B. | This course analyzes the historical context within which Asian American literary texts have been adapted into filmic texts. There is a vast body of Asian American Literature but very few texts have been adapted to cinema since issues of audience and market are primary considerations. A historical context demonstrates how representations of Asian Americans have changed from the stereotypical images in the 1920s to self-representations by Asian American writers and filmmakers in contemporary times. We analyze different literary genres such as novels, dramas and short stories, for example Jhumpa Lahiri's novel, The Namesake, Le Ly Hayslip's memoir When Heaven and Earth Changed Places and David Henry Hwang's drama, M. Butterfly. Cinematic adaptations/versions of literary texts sometimes re-title and reconstruct texts as suitable for a mass audience such as Heaven and Earth directed by Oliver Stone, and others such as Hot Summer Winds directed by Emiko Omori which is based on two Hisaye Yamamoto short stories, Seventeen Syllables and Yoneko's Earthquake. We employ literary and film theory in reading the novels and plays to analyze language, structure, characterization and historical representation. We also discuss how the literary form translates into a visual medium, and the modifications of story/plot and characterization for the screen. We interrogate the strengths of each medium and the spatial and temporal capabilities of the cinematic medium. |
| 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 | SECULARISM | TUCKER, I. | Spirit, World, State: Secularism and its Limits In this course, we will examine the historical processes by which various religious communities came to understand the connections and distinctions among their spiritual, ritual and worldly lives. How did the emergence of modern ideas of the state in the 17th and 18th centuries change the way people thought about the nature of God’s authority? Does the relation of God’s power to the power of the government change when the government is elected instead of led by a monarch? How do different monotheistic religious communities – Judaism, Christianity, Islam – conceive of the relations between the authority of their creed and the authority of the states they inhabit? Does the most common understanding of secularism – the concept of a “separation of church and state” – rest upon a set of assumptions borrowed from one model of religion and not others, or is such an understanding equally applicable to all three versions of monotheism? We will begin by reading some of the 17th-, 18th-, and 19th-century texts that were foundational in theorizing and establishing the relations of state and religious authority, including work by Filmer, Locke, Mendelssohn, Mill and Kierkegaard. In the second half of the course, we will turn our attention to the work of contemporary theorists who analyze and critique many of the accepted models of secularism including Judith Butler, Wendy Brown, Charles Taylor, Talal Asad, Akhil Bilgrami, and Saba Mahmood. Rel Std Category: 1,3 |
| ENGLISH 210 | LATINO AMERICAS | LAZO, R. | [Course Code: 23802] Mondays and Wednesdays 10:00am-11:20am in HH 142 Enrollment via [click here] Latino Lit and the Americas Latino Literature, a US economic creation and late twentieth-century academic formation, begins with another America south of the border, sometimes called by a country, a town or even a lover left behind. Check out Rafael Campo, the best doctor-poet since WCW, in the opening track of his most recent collection: "Does anyone know the capital of Cuba? / Every bone in my body ached with an answer, /the one place in the world I most wanted to visit, / the one place in the world whose name / was always impossible for me to remember." Which begs the question of whether you can remember a non-experience. Has the second generation (Rafael's from Jersey) soaked up exilic pain to the point of having an answer without a memory? And what about those who actually carry those aches and places in their (our?) bones? Migrants, for example. The point here being that another place in the Americas is always part of Latino culture in the United States. In addition to poetry by Campo, we will read Francisco Goldman's The Ordinary Seaman and fiction by Helena Viramontes, both of which point us toward economic conditions beyond the nation-state and a consideration of critical approaches such as transnationalism, world-systems theory, and hemispheric conceptions. We will spend a bit of time with a couple of recent anthologies to consider other historical periods. One part of the course will be devoted to historical conceptions of Latino literature with particular attention to the role of archives and the types of questions they present. How do nineteenth-century intellectuals in the United States produce materials that differ from the fiction, novels, and essays of contemporary Latino literature? This will be a discussion-based course. |
| ENGLISH 210 | AMERICAN RELIGIOUS POETRY | MILES, J. | [Course Code: 23803] Tuesdays 2:00pm-4:50pm in HIB 411 Enrollment via [click here] American Religious Poetry Religion is a subject that has engaged American poets of every period since the colonial. In this course, we will first review the history of religion in America, then turn to leading examples of American religious poetry from successive periods. Students will write a research paper engaging all three subjects—religion, America, and poetry—as enacted in the work of a poet of their selection. A part of the paper will be an imitation exercise: a poem written in the style of the target poet. |
| ENGLISH 210 | FOUCAULT: A SEMINAR | RADHAKRISHNAN, R. | [Course Code: 23806] Wednesdays 4:00pm-6:50pm in HH 100 Enrollment via [click here] Michel Foucault: Genealogy, Counter-Memory, Critique. This seminar is a selective and strategic engagement with certain aspects of that immensely profound and complex discourse known as Michel Foucault. I am hoping that the terms “genealogy,” “counter-memory” and “critique” will help to delimit and focus the terrain to be covered. Here are a few framing questions and concerns. What is the relationship between Foucault the epistemologist and Foucault the political activist? How is the perennial sacrifice of the subject of knowledge to processes of knowing aligned to the programmatic needs of political revolution? Does Foucault resolve the tension between archeology as a rigorously descriptive and professional methodology, and genealogy as an opportunistic, discontinuous, maverick, and interventionary procedure of surgical cutting and doing in the name of “the history of the present?” What is the nature of the alignment between “the history of the present” and “subjugated knowledges?” What is the connection between Foucault’s “return to Life” and the imperative of “subjugated knowledges?” Is counter-memory synonymous with radical revisionism? Starting with his initial groundbreaking work on Reason and Madness, what is a reliable way to map the significance of Foucault’s theoretical intervention? Is he a radical thinker deconstructive of dominance and hegemony, or a thinker of radical affirmation on behalf of the abject, the subaltern? How successful is Foucault in initiating the politics of post-representation? To what extent is Foucault’s thinking disabled by Eurocentrism? What is Foucault’s relationship to Phenomenology, Humanism, Structuralism, Poststructuralism, Postcoloniality, Postmodernism, Gender and Sexuality Studies, Marxism, and Psychoanalysis? How is Foucault to be understood in relation to other thinkers such as Derrida, Marx, Nietzsche, Sartre, Gramsci, Fanon, Du Bois, Merleau-Ponty, Deleuze, Edward Said, to name a few? Is Foucault a rebel with or without a cause? How does Foucault’s “subject position” perform between a determining “given-ness” and the potential for transgressive openings and possibilities? Given his ongoing interest in the Power-Knowledge nexus, how does Foucault envision a new transformative liaison between the macropolitics of sovereignty and micropolitics as proceduralism? What is Foucault’s contribution to theories of “intellectuality?” Is the specific intellectual reconcilable with the organic intellectual? How is Foucault’s notion of “critique” different from Marxist ideology critique, or deconstruction? And finally, how is “speaking Truth to Power,” for Foucault, simultaneously ethical, political, and epistemological? Most likely, a course package, a few pdfs. Selections from “Discourse on Language,” Madness and Civilization; The Order of Things, Language-Countermemory, Practice; Discipline and Punish, Power/Knowledge; History of Sexuality, and a range of posthumously published volumes of essays and interviews. Combination of some lecturing, plenty of discussion and student presentations. Here, I must confess to my constitutive weakness. We will be reading Foucault in English: my French is way too minimal for Foucault in French. If you are French fluent, I envy you and I promise to learn from you during our quarter together. 1 Short and 1 Long essay. WELCOME TO OUR HISTORY OF THE PRESENT. |
| ENGLISH 210 | SPENSER | HELFER, R. | [Course Code: 23810] Thursdays 2:00pm to 4:50pm HIB 411 Enrollment via [click here] Dubbed the "new Poete" in his debutante work, *The Shepheardes Calender,* Edmund Spenser self-consciously fashioned himself as Elizabethan England's poet laureate throughout his career. But rather than taking this assertion at face value, our course will consider precisely what this role means. What does writing England entail? How do fictions and histories of nationhood and empire dovetail in this ambition? Can, and should, we attempt to square Spenser's poetics with his politics? This and more will be asked of Spenser's *Faerie Queene* and other works. |