| Course | Title | Instructor | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
| ENGLISH 10 | BOREDOM &LITERATURE | BARTLETT, J. | In this course we will theorize what Theodore Adorno called 'free time,' by treating the submissiveness of waiting as a form of production. We will read texts that make their own fun, that spend time writing about time spent, and that dilate on emptiness to a number of ends. The relation between boredom and narrative is both subtle and everywhere, and so we will read widely, pitching into novelists who make extensive literal and metaphorical use of the power of infinite strategy in order to talk about sociability, ethics, and politics, economists who compare their work on monopolies to strategic partnerships in novels, scientists who describe evolution in terms of elaborate games of chess, cognitive theorists who plot the circuitous route we take when we stake ourselves on invention, and readings from psychoanalysis and the philosophy of action and mind that try to describe just what it is that we are laying claim to when a 'doing' finally becomes 'a thing done.' All the while, we'll consider such questions as: how does boredom manage or mismanage time? How can we understand boredom as a kind of reading, and a kind of writing? Does boredom have a style? Expect work by Henry James, Samuel Beckett, Virginia Woolf, Iris Murdoch, and Oscar Wilde. Requirements include quizzes and short papers. |
| ENGLISH 10 | NERDS | FAN, C | Nerds are ambiguous figures. Fiction and film depict them as socially abject yet professionally privileged; as hyper-intelligent outcasts who find their revenge in mobilizing arcane knowledge for monetary gain and revenge; and, more recently, as social nightmares who have the power to make our dreams come true. As knowledge work has increased in social and economic significance, depictions of nerds and their social value have become more complicated. For instance, it’s now cool to confess one’s nerdiness; this certainly wasn’t the case even twenty years ago. NBA players sport thick, plastic-framed glasses, backpacks, and pocket protectors. Janelle Monae has elevated nerd style to high fashion. Silicon Valley and celebrity culture have overlapped—trend mavens covet the latest Apple device as intensely as the latest runway silhouette. Depictions of nerds can tell us a lot about what our society is anxious about at any given moment, as well as what it values. This course will track the nerd figure—which we’ll loosely define as white-collar knowledge workers—in select works of cultural production from about the mid-20th century to the present. We’ll be particularly attentive to nerd’s historical variability and origins in the professional classes that began emerging in the first half of the 20th century. The ambitious question organizing our course will be this: What do shifts in cultural depictions of nerds tell us about our relationship to work and the economy, race, gender, sexuality, and political feeling (and lack of feeling)? Our answers will be routed through readings of fiction, graphic novels, drama, and film, including: Steve Zacharias and Jeff Buhai’s Revenge of the Nerds, Gene Leung Yang’s American Born Chinese, Maxine Hong Kingston’s Woman Warrior, Douglas Coupland’s Microserfs, John Hughes’ Sixteen Candles, Joel Schumacher’s film Falling Down, Junot Diaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, and short stories by Charles Yu. |
| ENGLISH 10 | 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 12 | YOUNG ADULT FICTION | ALEXANDER, J. | Young Adult (YA) fiction is amongst the most lucrative genres in the publishing industry. 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. Like any mass produced literary genre, YA has a history—one intimately tied to the development of literacy and the mass marketing of fiction over the last 100 years. This course will trace that history, with particular attention to the development of pedagogical approaches to YA fiction that take into account YA fiction as a cultural and economic phenomenon. |
| ENGLISH 15 | THEMES AND TECHNIQUES IN POETRY | HENDERSON, A. | This class will provide a focused examination of the workings of English poetry. We will begin by reviewing the formal qualities of poems, including rhyme, rhythm, and stanza structure. We will then examine some standard poetic forms and topoi from the English tradition, such as the sonnet, the dramatic monologue, and the blazon. Our readings will range chronologically from the Renaissance to the twentieth century. Requirements will include several short assignments and papers, in addition to a longer final paper. |
| ENGLISH 15 | ARTHURIAN LITERATURE | ALLEN, E. | This course traces King Arthur from his beginnings as a hero conquering the Giant of Mont-St-Michel to his demise as the tragic betrayed King of Camelot; and extending to Victorian poems and Monty Python. King Arthur’s court depicts a wide range of political and social relationships—between men and women, kings and lords, knights and peasants. It provides an arena for exploring the basis of political authority and the ethics of erotic love; for understanding how personal needs create political stability, but also undermine it; for recognizing how women are excluded from rule, but still play crucial roles in society. In the world of magic so often encountered by Arthur and his court, giants and dwarves and fairies suggest social forces, and adventures help knights confront and solve social problems. And the Arthurian court endures: when King Arthur is struck down in battle and taken to Avalon, he is called “the once and future king.” We will explore his continuing life in literature and his relevance to politics and social life even today. Texts will include Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain, the romances of Chrétien de Troyes, Lais of Marie de France, Chaucer’s “Wife of Bath’s Tale,” Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur, Tennyson’s Idylls of the King. Requirements will include regular informal writing, oral presentation, final short paper. |
| ENGLISH 100 | INTRODUCTION TO LITERARY THEORY | JACKSON, V. | Why should we bother to think about the way we read? If you are considering taking this class, you already know the answer to that question. For one thing, you can't read without thinking. The goal of this class is to encourage you to stop taking how you think about reading for granted. As it turns out, people have been thinking about how to bring our reading habits into focus for a long time. We will begin in ancient Greece and we will end in 2017. We will consider arguments for the dangers of reading, for the benefits of reading, for the difficulty of reading, for the difference between reading books and looking at screens, for queer reading, for straight reading, for young reading, for old reading, for raced reading, for universal reading, for materialist reading, for idealist reading, for close reading, for distant reading, for surface reading, for deep reading, and for not reading at all. Requirements will include two short papers, a midterm and a final. |
| ENGLISH 101W | THNKNG ABOUT POETRY | JACKSON, V. | Why would anyone want to write about poetry? In this class, we will spend the quarter thinking about how and why reading and writing about poetry might (or might not) matter in your life. We will start in antiquity, when a writer now known to us as “Longinus” thought about how poetry makes us feel, and then we will move to the nineteenth century, when philosophers (notably Hegel) thought about how poetry should make us feel. Why did critics in the nineteenth century (Mill, Shelley Emerson, Whitman) make such large claims for why everyone should read poetry? Why did another philosopher-critic (Adorno) in the twentieth century think that poetry should be hard to read? What happened? One answer is that there are many ways to read poetry, and in this class we will experiment with some of them: memorization, recitation, interpretation, singing, counting, describing, erasing, telling the difference between iambs and trochees, dactyls and spondees. At the end of the course, we will read two contemporary books of poems that are also books about how to think about poetry. Requirements will include two short papers, revisions of those papers, a take-home midterm exercise, memorization and recitation of fourteen lines, and a take-home final in which you will think and write about poetry. |
| ENGLISH 101W | WOMEN AND AUTHORITY IN MEDIEVAL LITERATURE | DAVIS, R. | This course explores the history of writing by and for women during the medieval period, with a particular emphasis on the role female writers and audiences played in the development of English literature. We’ll encounter holy visionaries, aristocratic women with influence at court, a wealthy widow, a virgin who wrestles a dragon, a cross-dressing maiden-knight, a wife who betrays her husband (because he’s a werewolf), a shape-shifting hag, and a self-supporting writer who dreams of a female utopia--just to name a few highlights. In fulfillment of the University’s upper-division writing requirement, course assignments focus on close reading and written response to both primary and secondary texts. You will write and revise two essays, compose short responses to your reading, and prepare informal presentations to facilitate discussion throughout the term. |
| ENGLISH 101W | POET IN THE CITY | BURT, E. | In the early part of the 19th-century, Romantic poetry tended to treat rural subjects in forms and language felt to be natural. What happens to reverse the trend and make the city a prime poetic destination in the latter part of the 19th century? What forces increasingly lead writers of poems, with their eyes fixed on modernity, to address apostrophes to London fogs, the London social season, or the view from Saint Paul’s? Why do they adapt modes like the ode, the elegy, or the idyll to celebrating the city? We can look at the poems as reflecting socio-political changes in the 19th-century world. According to urban theorists, for instance, the rapidly expanding cities of the 19th century placed new demands on the senses and favored new varieties of mental life, especially of memory. Conversely, we can see forces internal to poetry that force its modern development along this path, as if, having exhausted the poetic resources inherited from Romanticism, it had to look for new locations, motifs, and figures. We will examine some representative texts from Romanticism about the city and investigate the changing ideas of experience, mental life, and the function of poetry to be found in urban poems from the latter part of the century. Along with texts by the sociologist Georg Simmel and the philosopher-critic Walter Benjamin, we will read texts by Romantic and late Victorian authors from among the following: Blake, Wordsworth, De Quincey, Shelley, Keats, Dickens, Hood, Arnold, Hardy, Wilde, and Symons. 4000 words of finished work required. Two papers out of three will go through drafts. |
| ENGLISH 101W | OUTSIDERS | MARTIN, T | In this course, we will survey the twentieth-century English-language novel in order to understand its abiding interest in the figure of the outsider: that figure situated at the edges or on the margins of society, sometimes by choice and sometimes by force. What does it mean to live outside the norms and conventions of society? Is it an act of heroic non-conformity or a consequence of systematized abandonment? Through the work of authors who understood themselves to be, in different ways, socially marginalized, we’ll study both lived and literary figures of the outsider as they stage the often violent confrontation between self-determination and social belonging that plays out across the twentieth century. Moving from European colonialism to Jim Crow America to the sexism and homophobia of the Cold War, we will trace how the literary form of the novel develops in response to a changing sense of both the horror and—possibly—the appeal of not belonging to society. Readings will include novels by Joseph Conrad, Ralph Ellison, Patricia Highsmith, William S. Burroughs, and Joan Didion. Students will be expected to write and revise several critical essays, lead one class discussion, and participate liberally in seminar. |
| ENGLISH 102A | HAMLET AND REVENGE | SILVER, V. | This is a course in Revenge Tragedy (as it is termed in the English tradition), a peculiar brand of drama that swept the boards in late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century Europe and England. It is exemplified here by three of Shakespeare's plays("Titus Andronicus," "Richard III" and "Hamlet") as well as Middleton's "Revenger's Tragedy" and "Changeling," Chapman's "Revenge of Bussy D'Amboise," Webster's "Duchess of Malfi," and Ford's "'Tis Pity She's a Whore." Besides bold conspiracies, desperate intrigues and maniacal revengers, this species of drama features ghosts, the hand of fate or (what is different) providence, inconceivably corrupt courts and vile courtiers, erotic mayhem (adultery, incest, sexual addiction, rape) as well as artistic kinds of violence (poisoned skulls, hearts on daggers, twigs for lopped-off hands, not to mention people in pies). We will read some of Francis Bacon's 'Essays' and some Hobbes as well. The course will require from the student a strong stomach and the completion of two takehome exams. What could be more fun? |
| ENGLISH 102A | RENAISSANCE RHETORIC AND POETICS | GROSS, D. | Dismissed as a passive behavior that comes naturally, listening is in fact a complex and learned activity that can be perfected. But while speaking has grounded courses in higher education since classical antiquity, rarely has a course in the literary humanities focused on the rhetoric and poetics of listening. That's what we will do in this course, with the goal of practicing what Michel Foucault called a "genealogy" of contemporary problems. By foregrounding the ear in Renaissance rhetoric and poetics, our sensibilities will be newly tuned to canonic works by Shakespeare, Milton, Herbert, and Donne, as well as certain lesser-known sermons, works of literary criticism, and science. Meanwhile this Renaissance sensibility for the ear will help us reconsider some late-modern problems including our restricted notion of political activism (which ignores the virtues of passivity), and our odd commonplace that women are better listeners than men. The format for the class includes lecture, collaborative work, peer review, and discussion. There are shorter assignments, some of which are creative, and one 7-page project that goes through a careful drafting and revision process. All materials will be collected via midterm and final Canvas LMS portfolios, which are worth 30% and 60% of your final grade, respectively. |
| ENGLISH 102B | LITERATURE AND REVOLUTION | COLLINS, R | This course will examine the effects of philosophical empiricism and political revolution on the poetry and drama of mid to late seventeenth century Britain, particularly as these concepts and realities are expressed in the literature about, by and on behalf of women. Along with shorter works, we will read longer works that include Milton’s Paradise Lost, Margaret Cavendish’s Blazing World and Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko. Students will write a take-home midterm of medium length and a longer final essay that will go through a careful drafting and revision process. |
| ENGLISH 102C | ROMANTIC NARRATIVE | CHRISTENSEN, J | |
| ENGLISH 102D | WHAT WAS POSTMODERNISM? | IZENBERG, O. | Critical, skeptical, ironic, playful: The literary and historical period we call “postmodernism” (starting in the mid-20th century) was supposed to put an end to the idea of “progress” in history, philosophy, and art. All the “master narratives” we use to explain the world broken; all systems of meaning and social faiths subjected to corrosive irony and doubt. Postmodernism promised spectacle, flux, and change. How could postmodernism end? And what comes next? In this course we will read important works of postmodern literature and theory in order to understand this important moment in art and thought. Readings may include: Acker, Ashbery, Barth, Barthelme, Beckett, Davis, Delay, DeLillo, Howe, Pynchon and others. |
| ENGLISH 105 | W. E. B. DU BOIS | CHANDLER, N. | This course provides a deep introduction to one of the most important American thinkers of the 20th century, W. E. B. Du Bois. Taking a grounding in several essential early essays by Du Bois, the course places his classic text The Souls of Black Folk: Essays and Sketches (1903) as the pivotal reference of the term. Key concepts by Du Bois, such as “double-consciousness” and the “problem of the color line” are spelled out and studied. This account of Du Bois’s practice, also shows how both literary production and critical journalism were central aspects of his practice across more than a half century. The course thus provides a careful guide through some key early works of an essential thinker in African American and American literature, art, philosophy and the human sciences of the 19th and 20th centuries. Work for the course includes a bi-weekly journal, two sort essays (3-5 pages), and a final essay. |
| ENGLISH 105 | COLONIZER AND THE COLONIZED | THIONG'O, N | The course examines the dialectics of the colonizer and the Colonized in the making of Europhone African literature. The two linked social forces have impacted the ethics, aesthetics and politics of contemporary African literature including choice of themes, language and even publishing options. Though the course is based on individual texts and writers from the colonial to the post-colonial period, the connecting link is the struggle between the two forces, whose consequences underly the anxieties globalization today. |
| ENGLISH 106 | CANTERBURY TALES | DAVIS, R. | This course examines Geoffrey Chaucer’s fourteenth-century masterpiece The Canterbury Tales, a collection of stories voiced by a motley band of pilgrims on their way to St. Thomas’s shrine. 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. We’ll study a bit of historical context and read the poem’s General Prologue and several of the individual tales in great detail, focusing on the design of the poem, its thematic patterns, narrative techniques, modes of characterization, and philosophical inquiries. Additionally, we’ll read excerpts from some of Chaucer’s probable sources and consider how he shaped existing stories and traditions to give them new meaning. Course requirements include participation; weekly response papers; and a 10-12 page research paper. |
| ENGLISH 106 | HOLLYWOOD AND THE FIRST AMENDMENT | CHRISTENSEN, J | |
| ENGLISH 210 | SANCTUARY: MEDIEVAL TO MODERN | ALLEN, E. | [Course Code: 23802] Fridays 2:00 – 4:50pm in HH 100 This course is designed to explore the narrative logic of sanctuary seeking, anchored in medieval English chronicles, saints’ lives, and other narratives, and extending in the last few weeks of the class to narratives of churches in the American Civil Rights Movement and immigrant Sanctuary Movements. Though our discussions may be informed by a handful of anthropological texts on hospitality, sacrifice, and sacred space, the course principally investigates the fundamentally historicist question of the relationship between sanctuary law and literary texts. In medieval England, sanctuary was central to the common law and crucial to the practices of lordship and kingship. Sanctuary seeking was a legal practice: a felon could flee to the nearest church and delay or avoid prosecution. Usually he could stay up to 40 days, but would then have to confess his crime to the coroner, give up his belongings, and abjure the realm (i.e., go into exile, usually in France). Five hundred people a year took sanctuary in the long thirteenth century, many of them poor. Sanctuary saved them from execution and provided new stories of their lives, albeit as destitute survivors. But the practice of sanctuary opened up a wider repertoire of socio-political possibilities for those who could put them to work: a thief sought sanctuary in the person of the Bishop of Lincoln, not in a holy space; an argument arose over whether a sanctuary man could come out of the building to piss; a fallen aristocrat repeatedly sought the church until he became quasi-sanctified even outside it; a king breached sanctuary but his bishops forced him to return the sanctuary man to the church or risk his own regality. Such narratives suggest that, far from simply providing a safe “home base,” sanctuary’s boundaries are open: jurisdictional disputes and violations abound, and sanctity itself can be made ‘portable’. In miracles, sacredness can spread through cities, regions, and the world. Sanctuary suspends the hectic events of the status quo, providing space and time for negotiation, re-casting social relationships, and enabling socio-political change. But the practice also evokes the vocabularies of Christian martyrdom and sacrifice, sometimes drawing violence as much as warding it off. These possibilities remain alive in the practices of sanctuary that persist in activist movements to this day, when sanctuary calls upon a legal system to be more just, marking the fundamental human need for safety in a profoundly unsafe world. Law enforcement has long remained reluctant to breach modern sanctuary spaces, even without the legal mitigation of an official practice of sanctuary under the law. Assignments will include weekly 3-5 page papers that include limited independent research; and for seminar participants, a final paper. Historical background will be useful, but no prior knowledge of medieval English history or law is expected. Many texts will be in translation; some texts may be in Middle English, but no prior knowledge of Middle English is expected. Texts may include Bracton’s Laws and Customs of England, excerpted saints’ lives, chronicle histories, Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, a play of Cain and Abel, Shakespeare’s Henry VI, John Ford’s Perkin Warbeck, freedom songs, legal documents, Kathleen Collins’s Whatever Happened to Interracial Love?; Barbara Kingsolver’s The Bean Trees. |
| ENGLISH 210 | NINETEENTH-CENTURY AMERICAN POETRY | JACKSON, V | [Course Code: 23804] Wednesdays 2:00 – 4:50pm in HIB 220 What is the history of American poetry? For much cf the twentieth century, the story of American poetry was understood as "the drive toward Modernism." With the exception of Whitman and Dickinson (who were considered proto-modern), nineteenth-century American poets were cast as conventional, sentimental, or just plain boring. Until recently, it was not unusual for American critics to trace a history of poetics from (British) Romanticism to Wallace Stevens, skipping over the American nineteenth century entirely. Now all that has changed. In the last twenty years, the study of the history of American poetry has emerged as a transatlantic field . Now, the poets that modern American criticism left behind (Holmes and Whittier, Bryant and Longfellow, Lowell and Sigourney, the Poetess and the dialect poet) seem to have a lot to tell us about slavery, about gender, about world literature, about affect theory, about the history of sexuality, about media history, about ecocriticism, about prosody, about whiteness, about genocide, about abstraction, about race, and about poetics. And yes, about Modernism. In this seminar, we will read a range of poets from the long nineteenth century (Wheatley, Hammon, Bryant, Drake, Halleck, Sigourney, Whittier, Whitfield, Plato, Poe, Schoolcraft, Oakes Smith, Longfellow, Lowell, Whitman, Harper, Jackson, Dickinson, Dunbar, and others) and a range of the criticism that is changing the way the history of American poetry is told (Cavitch, Warner, Richards, Cohen, McGill, Wilson, Loeffelholz, Nurhussein, Lootens, Kappeler, Martin, Rudy, and others). |
| ENGLISH 225 | RACE AND THE PMC | FAN, C | [Course Code: 23811] Tuesdays 1:00 – 3:50pm in HIB 411 This course will explore the mutual determination of race and class through theories of the professional managerial and knowledge worker class, with particular (though not exclusive) attention to Asian American racial form and formation. Our protagonist will be the figure of the Asian American math and science nerd, who we will track from its origins in the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, through its subsequent articulation in a “model minority” discourse, and finally to its ascendancy alongside network and finance capitalism—especially in regard to the sector that often goes by the name “Silicon Valley.” At no point will we neglect a metacritical analysis of literary and cultural criticism as preeminent institutions of PMC culture. Primary texts will range across fiction and film, and might include: Revenge of the Nerds (1984), Gung Ho: Working Class Man (1986), Chang-Rae Lee’s Native Speaker (1995), Douglas Coupland’s Microserfs (1995), How Stella Got Her Groove Back (1996), Charles Yu’s How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe (2010), Mike Judge’s Silicon Valley (2014–present), Tony Tulathimutte’s Private Citizens, and Tao Lin’s Taipei. Secondary texts will include work from Edna Bonacich, Barbara Ehrenreich, Richard Florida, Andrew Hoberek, Madeleine Hsu, Alan Liu, Colleen Lye, Walter Benn Michaels, Michael Omi and Howard Winant, David Palumbo-Liu, AnnaLee Saxenian, C. P. Snow, Michael Szalay, Ken Warren, the UCLA Asian American Studies Center’s Roots reader, and others. |
| ENGLISH 225 | REALIST NOVEL | BARTLETT, J. | [Course Code: 23812] Thursdays 2:00 – 4:50pm in HIB 411 This course will serve as an introduction to a nineteenth-century literary mode that concerned itself with what George Eliot called “more or less ugly, stupid, inconsistent people,” and Virginia Woolf “this appalling narrative business of the realist: getting on from lunch to dinner.” Often cast as the straw man that authenticates the literary and critical innovations that follow it, realism is simply that which “goes without saying,” and its practitioners—experts rather than visionaries— are often accused of getting things right by flattening out questions of truth and virtue into parables of common sense so naïve and smilingly unselfconscious that they miss how, finally, the catalogue of innumerable material details that undergirds the realist project passes off entrenched gender, class, and racial stereotypes as objective truth. Like most of the people and most of the enterprises that it depicts, realism will always fail in idea and in practice, for any representational undertaking that claims to provide access to a material reality that, while mediated by consciousness and language, is nevertheless independent of it, is ultimately presenting just another theory of what counts as a picture of reality. As our readings in the course of our study will show, this argument is neither untrue, nor is it particularly troublesome for the form of the realist novel, which runs on the inescapable limits of human knowing (evident everywhere in the tensions between plausibility and literary form that can puncture a great realist novel like Middlemarch with sudden and convenient revelations) and is thus on the whole required to obsess about itself. We will see how, in trying to reach beyond words to things as they are—in believing “the truth is out there”—the realist novel funnels its sprawling narratives into inductive sequences of causes and effects; how it develops a collector’s mania for figurations of entrapment and enclosure, and then punishes the wayward and unconventional; and how it shows off its author’s bookish know-how through descriptions that at their worst exist somewhere, for Lyotard, “between academicism and kitsch.” All of this and more will be our focus, but our objective need not be to rescue realism from its adversaries; in sympathy, it will be enough just to talk about it at all. |
| ENGLISH 398 | RHETORIC/TEACHING OF COMPOSITION | GROSS, D. | [Course Code: 23975] Mondays 4:00pm-6:50pm in HG 2320 Readings, lectures, and internship designed to prepare graduate students to teach composition. Formal instruction in rhetoric and practical work in teaching methods and grading. |
| ENGLISH 398 | RHETORIC/TEACHING OF COMPOSITION | QUEEN, B. | [Course Code: 23977] Mondays 4:00pm-6:50pm in HH 100 Readings, lectures, and internship designed to prepare graduate students to teach composition. Formal instruction in rhetoric and practical work in teaching methods and grading. |