| Course | Title | Instructor | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
| ENGLISH 8 | MULTICULTURAL AMERICAN LITERATURE | O'CONNOR, L. | In “Writing American Selves,” we’ll use the genre of autobiography to explore what it means to be American and/or a hyphenated American. Selected autobiographies may include, among others, works by Sherman Alexie, Julia Alvarez, Sandra Cisneros, Frederick Douglass, Benjamin Franklin, Maxine Hong Kingston, Yoshido Uchido, and Richard Wright. |
| ENGLISH 10 | DETECTIVE FICTION | MARTIN, T | In this course, we’ll survey the history of detective fiction from its origins in the nineteenth century to its continued cultural presence in the twenty-first. Our study of this 150-year span will be motivated by a simple question: why can’t we stop reading detective stories? Reading widely across the genre—from early tales of deduction (Poe, Doyle) to hard-boiled accounts of urban life (Chandler, Himes) to postmodern critiques of the genre’s treatment of race and gender (Mosley, Paretsky)—we’ll see how detective fiction has long wrestled with some of the defining tensions of modern social life: between order and disorder, reason and unreason, certainty and uncertainty, sociality and violence. With these tensions in mind, we’ll work to understand the history of detective fiction as several histories in one: a history of scientific rationality; a history of civil society; and a history of literary interpretation itself. Ultimately, our aim in this course is to use our skills as critical readers to track the development of detective fiction; and to use detective fiction, in turn, as an opportunity to reflect on the very nature of critical reading. |
| ENGLISH 10 | INTRODUCTION TO SCIENCE FICTION LITERATURE | ALEXANDER, J | Introduction to Science Fiction Studies will boldly go...into one of the most exciting areas of English and literary studies: the rise of science fiction as both a popular and critical form of literary exploration. Our analysis will proceed both (1) historically, as we attempt to understand how and why SF emerged as a genre in the late 19th century, and (2) materially, as we examine SF as a powerful market constellation of texts, films, and fanfiction and web series. You can expect to read widely and frequently in SF literature, discuss numerous short film and video clips, examine SF on the Web, and write scholarly analyses of a variety of different kinds of texts. In general, our goal will be to address the following question: What is science fiction, and why has it emerged over the last 100 years as a powerful genre of storytelling? |
| 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 | INTRODUCTION TO LITERARY THEORY | BARTLETT, J. | Using Plato and Aristotle as points of departure, addresses a range of perspectives and problems in literary theory. To be taken by English majors in the junior year. Requirements include a midterm and a final. |
| 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 101W | THEORY OF CHARACTER | BARTLETT, J. | This course will introduce you to the complexity of the idea and implementation of character in the nineteenth-century realist novel through the analysis of an irregular figure, the stock character. Neither minor nor major, neither flat nor round, too familiar to require much in the way of a personal history and yet unique in their reactions to immediate events, stock characters wander at a rich intersection between character and plot. If, as Forster has it, the difference between flat and round characters is that the round ones are capable of surprising us, we could say that stock characters often surprise us, but rarely themselves. Mr. Brownlow, the grand benefactor of Oliver Twist, is both reliably and literally deep—“his kindness and solicitude knew no bounds”—but at key moments, the novel makes a point of withholding the very details that we would anticipate (and probably skim over): Brownlow “forced a supply of tears into his eyes, by some hydraulic process which we are not sufficiently philosophical to be in a condition to explain.” By reverting to an unfathomable type in such moments, stock characters like Brownlow both reveal and aggravate a fundamental contradiction in the relationship between form and character in the novel, pushing the details that are said to conjure “realism” into uneasy abstractions. My vision for this course will be similarly, blurrily bifocal: we will use the characters of two realist novels and two short stories as points of entry into the form of the realist novel itself, and we will situate that form in a genealogy of the archetype by reading a smattering of secondary material from the fields of anthropology, drama, psychoanalysis, literary criticism, and sociology. Students will be expected to post responses to course readings, to deliver one oral presentation followed by some discussion facilitation, and to write and revise three short papers. |
| ENGLISH 101W | ENGLISH IN THE WORLD | LEE, J.W. | What does it mean to study "literature," particularly "English literature," "literature in English," or even "literature translated into English," at a time when multilingualism is the global norm? In an era of globalization, the study of literature demands an awareness of English as one language among many in the world, along with an awareness that the language itself can take a variety of unexpected forms when encountered in global contexts. To that end, we will read and study various literary and nonfiction works that represent the plurality of Englishes of the world. However, rather than simply identifying, categorizing, or even celebrating various features of "different" Englishes, we will interrogate our very assumptions of what a "different" English is and why we are compelled to categorize it as such . Three short (3-5 page) essays. |
| ENGLISH 102A | THE AGE OF SHAKESPEARE | LUPTON, J | In this course we will read three plays by Shakespeare in the context of the art, poetry, and thought of the period, with supplementary readings in Lyly, Spenser, Sidney, Castiglione, Queen Elizabeth, and Vasari. Plays: Twelfth Night, King Lear, and The Winter’s Tale. Class will include student-centered activities such as dramatic reading and scene work, formal debates, quiz shows, film clips, and visits by theater makers. |
| 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 a series of brief writing assignments and a seven-page final essay that will go through a careful drafting and revision process. |
| ENGLISH 102C | SENTIMENTALISM AND ROMANTICISM | HENDERSON, A. | This course will provide a survey of British literature of the late-eighteenth and early- nineteenth centuries. We will begin by establishing the principles of neoclassicism and then explore the way that sentimentalism, Gothicism, and Romanticism renounced those principles in favor of subjective expressions of emotional life. Our readings will include the poetry of Pope, Wordsworth, and Keats and the novels of Walpole, Sterne, and Shelley, along with dramatic and philosophical texts. Course requirements will include short assignments, a paper, a midterm, and a final exam. |
| ENGLISH 102D | MODERNIST LITERATURE | IZENBERG, O | In this course, we will read a remarkable sequence of novels, poems and stories written in English, from the birth of the last century through the 1950s. The syllabus does not tell the whole story of the Modernist period, or even a single story. Rather, it focuses on idiosyncratic originals who stand in uneasy relation to larger wholes; it pits the relentless pursuit of novelty against the unrefusable burdens of history and memory; it achieves the momentary appearance of completion only to be shattered by its own exclusions. In all of this, our syllabus resembles Europe and the United States in a time of great progress and unprecedented violence. We will study the forms and themes, aesthetics and politics of Anglophone literature in the first half of the 20th century with an appreciative and critical eye, and consider the relationship between important historical events (two World Wars, the Great Depression, the feminist movement and the struggle for racial equality) and works of verbal art. Authors may include: Joseph Conrad, Hart Crane, T.S. Eliot, Ernest Hemingway, Langston Hughes, Marianne Moore, Ezra Pound, Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein, Jean Toomer, W.B. Yeats, among others. |
| ENGLISH 103 | APPROACHES TO SHAKESPEARE | HENDERSON, A. | In this course students will learn a variety of techniques for reading, watching, and discussing Shakespeare’s plays. We will study three major plays—Hamlet, Twelfth Night, and The Tempest—from a wide range of perspectives. We will explore, among other things, Shakespeare’s use of rhetoric, the influence of editors on Shakespeare’s plays, the ways performance functions as interpretation, and the relevance of Renaissance social issues to modern readers and audiences. Coursework will include three papers and weekly exercises. |
| ENGLISH 103 | CONSPIRACY CULTURE | MARTIN, T | In 1964, the historian Richard Hofstadter identified a new “paranoid style”—a sense of “suspiciousness and conspiratorial fantasy”—shaping American politics. Since then, conspiracy has become an increasingly pervasive feature not just of political history, but also of literary history. Conspiracy is in many ways a questionable and discredited concept, yet it is also now a widespread narrative strategy for artists trying to make sense of an increasingly complex, interconnected, and globalized world system. In this course, we’ll consider how the logic of conspiracy—from the Cold War to the internet age—has shaped contemporary literature and film. Through these texts, we’ll trace the rise of a culture defined by surveillance, security, political secrecy, corporate power, and the labyrinthine networks of global capitalism. In the end, the goal of this course is not to make you a conspiracy theorist. Rather, it’s to figure out why conspiracy has come to seem such an indispensable aesthetic response to the conditions of contemporary life. Readings may include Thomas Pynchon, Ishmael Reed, Don DeLillo, Joan Didion, Colson Whitehead, Margaret Atwood, and Dave Eggers. |
| ENGLISH 105 | HISTORY, MEMORY, AND IDENTITY IN CONTEMPORARY AFAM LIT | KEIZER, A. | Twentieth- and twenty-first century African American literature is deeply engaged with the history of blacks in the African Diaspora. One might say that history, especially the history of slavery, haunts contemporary African American expressive culture. This course will examine novels, drama, and some visual artworks published from the 1970s through the present, analyzing the ways in which they address memory (especially the memory of trauma), oral and written history, and the formation of black identity. Issues of gender, sexuality, and “racial” formation will be central to our discussions. Course requirements will include an in-class midterm, an in-class presentation, and a take-home final (an 8-10-page essay). |
| ENGLISH 105 | POLITICS OF AFRICAN AMERICAN LITERATURE | THIONG'O, N | Just about everything about African literature generates heated debates about Africa and the world. Even the language and definition of African writing are highly political: is it literature written in European languages or in African languages? The course is an introduction and an in-depth look at the issues animating the African imagination such as colonialism, language, orality, race, class, gender and ideology. The course explores the relationship between aesthetics, ethics, and power in literature and society, in the process raising important questions of deracination and identity; domination and resistance. Texts for discussion will include drama, poetry and fiction in English or in English |
| ENGLISH 106 | MODERN ELEGY | IZENBERG, O | “Death is the mother of beauty,” wrote the poet Wallace Stevens in “Sunday Morning.” In this course, we will read poems written in response to death—the death of the friend of the beloved, of parents or children, in the natural course of things or cut short by violence or illness—and consider how poets use their art to address and compensate for loss. Though we will read widely in the elegiac tradition, we will pay special attention to the elegy in its modern and contemporary instances: what resources does the poet have to understand or console in an age without social or theological consensus about the place of death in life? Can pain be made beautiful? Should it? |
| 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 210 | CHAUCER | DAVIS, R. | [Course Code: 23802] Mondays 11:00- 1:50p in HIB 411 This course examines Geoffrey Chaucer’s fourteenth-century masterwork The Canterbury Tales. No prior experience with Middle English is expected, but with plenty of practice, you will gain substantial reading ability in Chaucer’s original language, familiarity with its pronunciation, and knowledge of its distinctive vocabulary and syntax. Our study will be framed by considerations of historical context, including Chaucer’s literary historical influences and analogues, and we will pay particular attention to questions of form, broadly speaking, focusing on the design of the poem, its thematic patterns, narrative techniques, negotiations of genre, and philosophical inquiries. Course requirements include participation; weekly response papers; a presentation; and a 10-page (proseminar) or 20-page (seminar) paper. |
| ENGLISH 210 | DELEUZE, CINEMA II | ABBAS, M | [Course Code: 23810] Thursday 2:00- 4:50p in HIB 246 (same as 22858 Com Lit 210, Sem A) This is the second of a 2-part seminar on Deleuze’s groundbreaking cinema books. Each seminar can be taken independently. Fall 2016 will focus on Cinema 2. For Deleuze, philosophers construct concepts, while filmmakers construct images, so much so that filmmakers can be classified in terms of the type of image they create. The cinema books do not give us a ‘philosophy of cinema’, or treat filmmaking as ‘thinking in images’. Rather, ‘thinking’ and ‘image-making’ are seen as independent but related activities; which is why the books on cinema can complement and extend Deleuze’s philosophy in important ways. Taking a hint from Bergson, Deleuze organizes cinematic images into two main types, the Movement-Image (Cinema 1), and the Time-Image (Cinema 2). Like in Cinema 1, Cinema 2 contains many provocative analyses of particular films, including the work of the Italian neo-realists, Godard, Resnais, and Welles. At the same time, the rethinking of the nature of cinema begun in Cinema 1 is taken further when Deleuze broaches topics like ‘ the powers of the false’, ‘thought and cinema’, and ‘cinema and politics’. The seminar will not encumber students with excessive readings. The stress will be on discussing and thinking through the many seminal ideas—in philosophy, in cinema—in Cinema 2. Students are required to keep a journal, and to submit an essay at the end of the quarter. |
| ENGLISH 210 | US LAW AND LITERATURE IN THE 1880S | THOMAS, B. | [Course Code: 23808] Wednesday 4:00- 6:50p in HIB 411 The goal of this course is for students to learn an interdisciplinary method of cross-examining law and literature at a particular moment of history. That method respects the relative autonomy of both fields of study—law is not literature, and literature is not law. But it also recognizes that both inhabit the same cultural field. By “cross-examining” the two while relating both to the various forces at work in that culture, we can come up with an understanding of a particular era we would not get if we focused on only one of the two disciplines. In the process, our understanding of both the law and the literature of that period is altered. We will focus on the 1880s because of its importance for both law and literature. A number of the issues raised at the time are still with us today. In the law there are important issues of race involving African Americans, Native Americans, and Chinese immigrants. Those issues raise questions of federalism as they often test the limits of national versus state jurisdiction. With the invention of the electric chair renewed the debate over a state’s right to sentence people to death for punishment of a crime. The question of the extent of governmental power was also raised with the rise of laissez-faire economics. In turn, the premises of laissez-faire economics and its celebration of individual competition were challenged by the rise of monopolistic corporations. The period saw some of the most important cases granting corporations, which were affirmed as legal persons, some 14th Amendment rights. At the same time that the courts upheld the doctrine of freedom of contract in economics, it confirmed the state’s right to regulate the marriage contact by upholding anti-miscegenation laws and laws against Mormons and polygamy. The decade also saw the birth of a tort right to privacy protecting individuals from having their privacy violated by other private parties, especially the press. In literature the 1880s saw the rise of literary realism. One volume of The Century Magazine serialized publication of Howells’s The Rise of Silas Lapham and James’s The Bostonians, while publishing an excerpt from Twain’s Huckleberry Finn and a debate between author George Washington Cable and journalist Henry Grady over the issue of race in the wake of the Supreme Court declaring the Civil Rights Act of 1875 unconstitutional in 1883. The period also saw publication of the first short stories by the African American author Charles W. Chesnutt responding to Joel Chandler Harris’s extremely popular Uncle Remus stories. But not all the fiction in the period was produced by the realists. We will also read a best-selling account of the racial issues of Reconstruction by Albion W. Tourgée, who would later become Homer Plessy’s lawyer. Finally, we will read two works set in California: Helen Hunt Jackson’s Ramona, considered the Uncle Tom’s Cabin for Native Americans, and Maria Amparo Ruiz de Burton’s The Squatter and the Don, which portrays the status of those of Mexican descent in a state ruled by the corporate monopoly of the Southern Pacific Railroad. We will use these literary works to give insight into the legal issues and the legal issues to give insight into the literary works, while gaining a historical perspective on social, economic, and racial issues that are still with us. |
| ENGLISH 210 | POST-NATIONAL AND POST-HUMAN | RADHAKRISHNAN, R. | [Course Code: 23804] Tuesday 4:00- 6:50p in HIB 411 Why indeed the term post-national when nations are well and alive and show no sign of disappearing, and why post-human when human is all we have been, are, and will be? Does the post- indicate a critical desire that the Age of the Nation State deserves to come to an end, and the hegemony of the human erase itself? The purpose of this week long seminar is to examine post-humanism and post-nationalism with reference to each other; for indeed, the two isms are reciprocal and mutually constitutive. If nationalism marks political sovereignty, humanism defines ontological sovereignty in the name of the human both in relationship to itself and in relationship to Being in general. If political being would seem to reach its plenitude in the template of the national citizen, ontological being or Being with a capital B is held captive to the human hegemon. Both orders are sovereign are exceptionalist in nature. Nationalism reduces by violence the “human” to the national while humanism, underwritten as it is by the deeper rationale of anthropocentrism, reduces, as Martin Heidegger would have it in his critique of Jean-Paul Sartre, the Dasein to the human, and in so doing forgets the “prior question of Being.” Giorgio Agamben would argue, in advocacy of “bare or naked life,” that political being drives a deep wedge between bios and zoes, and thus makes “inclusion by exclusion” and “abjection” the corner stone of political sovereignty and governmentality. When we study humanism and nationalism conjuncturally, what emerges into view is the tenuous space of the “onto-political” that demonstrates that the violence that separates the citizen from the immigrant, the non-citizen (who after all is human) is the same violence that separates “human life,” or what Kalpana Rahita Seshadri terms the “humanimal” from the animal, the plant, the rock, the rest of Life. The Age of the Anthropocene is surely the culmination of this ongoing hubris in the name of the sovereign human Cogito. Both humanism and nationalism function like the pharmakon: they are both the poison and the remedy. Nationalism, for example, accommodates the human being as a normative sovereign citizen but only on the basis of an Us-Them divide: some one else has to be an exile, an immigrant, a stranger, an ethnic other so that the citizen may enjoy the plenitude of his/her political being. In the ongoing crisis the world over of refugees, the rationale of the nation state builds walls, separating the human from the citizen; and political leaders of countries who are responsive to the plight of refugees instantly fall foul of their national citizen subjects who demand protection from “the inhumanity” of the refugee. The calculus of the nation state brainwashes the citizen subject into the ratio that “national life” is the proper currency of the value of human life, and that it is perfectly legitimate to claim exceptional privilege for one’s own nationality. The accommodation of the human being as citizen-subject and the violent creation of the nation state as political home un-homes the human being ontologically with the result that “exile” and “nationalism,” as Edward Said would theorize poignantly, sustain each other in a relationship of chronic pathology. Even though humanism grandstands as a philosophical worldview, it is constrained to instrumentalize itself via nationalism, its politically ally and executive. Humanism in history has an ambivalent history as both a good and a bad “ism.” Eurocentrism, Anthropocentrism, Colonialism, and Racism have all been valid and intended manifestations of humanism; and the challenging question is the following. Is it possible to transform humanism in the name of humanism; or has the time come to reject humanism (and along with it, nationalism) tout court and look for a new imprimatur: in the name of the exile, the refugees, the animal, planetary being, deep ecology? Would a new imprimatur inaugurate its own regime of “othering” and abjection? Or is the only available option an “exilic” praxis of a given hegemonic location: a Derridean double session of a radical ongoing dualistic deconstruction from within? Or, is the “Open” imaginable, along the lines of the great Siddha Tamil poets, as naked under the sky, absolutely non-sovereign, singular as the body and the truth of the body? This seminar should be of interdisciplinary interest, particularly to students and scholars in Literature, Philosophy, Anthropology, Sociology, Political Science, and the Fine Arts. Tentative Readings: Jean-Paul Sartre, Martin Heidegger, Louis Althusser, Rabindranath Tagore, Etienne Balibar, Frantz Fanon, W.E.B. Du Bois, Donna Haraway, Adrienne Rich, Rosi Braidotti, Sylvia Wynter, Edward Said, Partha Chatterjee, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Giorgio Agamben, Jacques Derrida, Cary Wolfe. Expectations and Requirements: Attendance, participation, class presentations, and 2 papers: 1 Short (10 pages) and I Long (20 pages). |
| ENGLISH 398 | RHETORIC/TEACHING OF COMPOSITION | QUEEN, B. | [Course Code: 23977] Mondays 4:00pm-6:50pm in HH 142 Readings, lectures, and intership designed to prepare graduate students to teach composition. Formal instruction in rhetoric and proactical work in teaching methods and grading. |
| ENGLISH 398 | RHETORIC/TEACHING OF COMPOSITION | GROSS, D. | [Course Code: 23979] Mondays 4:00pm-6:50pm in HG 2320 Readings, lectures, and intership designed to prepare graduate students to teach composition. Formal instruction in rhetoric and proactical work in teaching methods and grading. |