| Course | Title | Instructor | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
| ENGLISH 10 | GLOBAL FICTIONS | JEON, J. | This class will examine fictions that understand themselves to be “global” in scope. They may be set in multiple locations around the world, foreground border locations, or focus on international travel. Looking closely as such stories (in novels, movies, and other media), we will call into question the extent to which any national context might be understood as discrete from its adjacencies and, more broadly, think about what it means to occupy a transnational space. Ultimately, we will attempt to make sense of the increasingly complex circuits of exchange, shifting affiliations, and emergent conflicts that characterize our world today. Text may include Taiye Selasi, Ghana Must Go (2013), David Michell, Cloud Atlas (2004), China Mieville, The City and the City (2009), Nami Mun, Miles from Nowhere (2009), Patricia Highsmith, The Talented Mr. Ripley (1955). Likely assignments: Midterm and Final exam, both of which will have short take-home essay components. |
| ENGLISH 10 | REVISITING FAIRY TALES: THRICE UPON A TIME | O'CONNOR, L. | Unusually for a college course, participants in a seminar on fairy tales are familiar with the course texts before we begin. The course builds on this core knowledge by reading variants and adaptations of these thrice told tales and by exploring different critical approaches for analyzing them. We’ll read classic versions by Charles Perrault and the brothers Grimm, which are darker than the sanitized versions we heard as children. We’ll read revisionist fairy tales, which deliberately re-work traditional material into stories and verse with metalevel commentary on the originals. And we’ll learn about the critical methodologies used to study fairy tales by structuralist, psychoanalytic, and feminist critics, among others. We’ll also discuss film adaptations, including movies made by Disney and by film-makers whose vision is distinctly un-Disneylike. Fairy tales include “Red Riding Hood,” “Beauty and the Beast,” “The Little Mermaid,” “Mulan,” and “Cinderella.” Students are expected to complete weekly writing exercises, two short papers, and a final essay. |
| 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 the genre YA fiction that take into account YA as a cultural and economic phenomenon. |
| ENGLISH 15 | CREATIVE NONFICTION: EVERYDAY LIFE | BURKE, C. | Some people spend their weekends reenacting Civil War battles; others celebrate the new lives they have fashioned in America after fleeing a civil war abroad. Some people develop a personal style of graffiti they emblazon on urban walls; others lace up their skates and block and jam at the local roller derby track. Some speak in tongues at a weekly religious service; others seek calm in their daily Yoga practice. This is a course in creative nonfiction in which you will read about and write about the extraordinary detail, the compelling drama, and the profound meaning that structure the lives of ordinary people. |
| ENGLISH 15 | 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, 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 will have these questions in mind as we practice the art of close reading a number of profound and challenging 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, Darwish, and more. Even as we dive into each poem and do a close reading, we will be also 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. 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. |
| ENGLISH 15 | INTRODUCTION TO 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 17 | CRAFT OF FICTION | STAFF | E17, The Craft of Fiction, should be taken before embarking on the Creative Writing Emphasis. The concentration of the course is the study of writing by writers about the process of writing. How have writers viewed their craft; how have they developed their processes; what have their influences been, and at what point did they shed them? Contrary to popular notions of muses, of inspiration, most writers are very hard working. This course studies the thoughtfulness most writers have about the work of writing. Required prerequisite: satisfactory completion of the lower-division writing requirement. |
| ENGLISH 100 | INTRODUCTION TO LITERARY THEORY | BARTLETT, J. | English 100 has been designed to provide you with a survey of literary theory and criticism from the fifth century B.C.E. to the present day, an ambition that would read like an incredible prank if it were it not so sincerely earned. The University of California, Irvine has a reputation for bleeding-edge approaches to literature and culture that is, frankly, unmatched: ours was the first university in the country to offer a doctoral program in Critical Theory, now an essential component of literary study, and our library houses the most comprehensive Critical Theory Archive in the world, as well as the manuscripts and papers of many of the field’s most significant thinkers. Irvine’s influence on humanistic inquiry is both historic and ongoing, and this course—English 100—represents everything that we are about. Behind every survey lies a logic of selection, and my choices have been guided by a belief in the prominence and centrality of Worry in the history of literary criticism and theory. Rather than offer a strictly chronological review, I have organized works by their motivating concerns. Each week will feature a mixture of old and new texts that address a common issue, so that you can receive a more discrete and compelling genealogy of critical discourse. Requirements include a midterm exam, a final exam, and two reading quizzes. |
| ENGLISH 101W | LITERARY MANIFESTOS | RADHAKRISHNAN, R. | The objective of this course is to study, appreciate, and critique a few carefully chosen theoretical statements/manifestos that have shaped the history of Western literary theory. Beginning with Plato and Aristotle, moving into Sir Philip Sidney, and the great English Romantics, onward then to the modernists, to be succeeded by the Structuralists, the post-Structuralists, Marxists, feminists, African-American and post-colonial critics, this course will seek to understand the historical and ideological positioning of each text, each theorist. How do these texts define and defend the importance of literature? How do they articulate the relationship between the “word” and the “world?” How does each manifesto construct its polemical agenda as it defines literature relationally with reference to science, philosophy, religion, sociology, politics, history, and economics? Does literature have a goal, a social purpose? What is the relationship between aesthetics and ideology? What is the relationship of literature to political movements, revolutions, and populist upheavals? What are the connections, both formal and thematic, among literature, democracy, and the nation state? These are some of the questions that will frame and inform our course of study. I hope that by the end of the quarter, we as a class will have a clear sense of the continuities as well as the discontinuities among texts and authors from different time periods. Just a word of caution: I may not be able to cover all the “isms” and schools of thought I have listed here. The final course description, I expect, would be less ambitious in its coverage and range. This being a Writing oriented course, you will be producing rough drafts of all your essays (2 short and 1 long), and there will be regular sessions of in-class writing as well. |
| ENGLISH 101W | SEMIOTICS, SPACE, AND PLACE | LEE, J.W. | A social semiotic approach to language foregrounds the wide range of resources people draw on to achieve a variety of communicative goals in a globalizing society. This course, in particular, will explore how people draw on semiotic resources, including and in addition to "writing," to make use of, make sense of, and indeed simply make, their social worlds. After introducing students to a wide range of semiotic principles, including semiotic resources, change, rules, and functions, along with the various dimensions of semiotic analysis, including discourse, genre, style, and modality, students will be invited to write social semiotic analyses of their own. Students will be graded based on daily written assignments, one midterm exam, and one final paper. |
| ENGLISH 102A | EARLY MODERN LYRIC | SILVER, V. | The readings for this course encompass the subversive erotics, both sensual and spiritual, of John Donne; Ben Jonson’s slippery theater of vice and virtue; George Herbert’s intimate colloquies which make his God; and Andrew Marvell’s weird and wonderful pastoral landscapes—all of which happen to be some of the greatest poetry in the English language. They have been called “metaphysical” or “cavalier” poets, but the more apt description is “experimental”: they are innovators in poetic form but also poetic argument, exploding the magical thinking of their age with subtle yet surprising irony. For they are skeptics all. The course requirements are two takehome exams and regular attendance. A willingness to talk when Silver asks questions will be much appreciated. |
| ENGLISH 102B | 18C BRITISH CULTURE | HENDERSON, A. | |
| ENGLISH 102C | THE 1890S | BARTLETT, J. | In this course we will read a number of works associated with Aestheticism and the Decadence, a period marked by great social, literary, and philosophical ambivalences, including the paradox of the cosmopolitan subject, the circulation of criticism and the exclusivity of the coterie, the aestheticization of the object and the relation between the useful and the beautiful. We will read philosophies of art and culture by John Ruskin, Walter Pater, Vernon Lee, anthropology by W. T. Stead, sociology by Max Nordau, sexology by Havelock Ellis, and psychical research by William James. Our literary texts will include prose and poetry by Aubrey Beardsley, Max Beerbohm, George Egerton, Henry James, Arthur Machen, H. G. Wells, and Oscar Wilde. Requirements include a midterm, a final paper of 5-7 pages, and a final exam. |
| ENGLISH 102D | AMERICAN LITERARY MODERNISM | BERLINER, J | In the half century between 1890 and 1940, the United States went through a period of rapid economic, political, and social change. The population of the country doubled and became increasingly urban. In this course, we will work through a range of canonical and less well-known authors from this period, situating literary works within both the larger historical context of modernity and international developments in literature, visual art, architecture, and music. Readings will include works by Henry James, T.S. Eliot, William Carlos Williams, William Faulkner, Zora Neale Hurston, and Nathaniel West. |
| ENGLISH 105 | CONTEMPORARY AFRICAN LITERATURE | THIONG'O, N | The course examines themes in African Writing in English and translations into English: drama, poetry and fiction. It is both an introduction to the field and an in-depth look at the issues animating the African imagination. The relationship between language, literature, aesthetics, ethics, and power in society is the connecting thread. The course introduces some key literary movements, such as negritude, as well as writers of the new generation and looks at new trends such as crime fiction. |
| ENGLISH 105 | INDIGENOUS LITERATURE | O'CONNOR, L. | This course explores works by contemporary writers from indigenous cultures that have been devastated by colonialism, beginning with Aborigine, Maori and Samoan writers and then turning to Native American writers. We’ll examine the trauma of ethnocide and the effects of an education designed to “kill the [native], and save the person” on the psyche, on cultural identity, and on indigenous languages and knowledge. How do these writers narrate the traumatic loss of an ancestral culture they can neither forget nor fully recollect? How are Native customs and oral traditions represented through the narrative conventions of the dominant Anglophone print culture? And in what ways do the needs of indigenous communities influence the forms that such narration takes? Paper, final, and short assignments |
| ENGLISH 106 | THE BOUNDARY CROSSER IN FILM, LITERATURE, AND FOLKLORE | BURKE, C. | In this course we will examine the figure of the boundary crosser as it appears in folklore, literature, and film. Boundary crossers can terrify, but they can also beguile. They can subvert the conventional order and in so doing, generate new possibilities. Whether the traditional trickster, the devil who refuses to stay forever sealed in an underworld, or the invading alien, the boundary crosser threatens to merge with the human in a horrifying hybridity. We will look at this figure from the perspectives of literary convention, religion, psychology, and the fantastic. The latter, according to Todorov is “ that hesitation experienced by a person who knows only the laws of nature, confronting an apparent supernatural event.” Texts will include Native American tales, European fairytales, Milton’s Paradise Lost, Enders Game, and several contemporary films |
| ENGLISH 210 | MARTIN HEIDEGGER | GROSS, D. | [Course Code: 23806] Tuesdays 4:00 – 6:50pm in HIB 411 (same as 28686 Human 270, Sem F) This graduate seminar explores how Martin Heidegger's work has become a kind of crucible for major considerations of the 20th and 21st century, including the critique of metaphysics, affect theory, environmentalism, and political crisis. Procedurally the seminar will focus on Heidegger's 1927 masterwork translated as Being and Time, where most major considerations can be studied either in their fully developed or in their nascent forms. As fodder and foil we will also review key related texts ranging from the brilliant 1920s Marburg lectures on topics including rhetoric and religion, through the recently published Black Notebooks which reveal Heidegger's disastrous political philosophy. Given the institutional context for this graduate seminar, we will also pursue some specific questions about Heidegger's vexed relationship with critical theory per se, and the role of his work in the humanities writ large. |
| ENGLISH 210 | INTRODUCTION TO CRITICAL METHODS | MCCLANAHAN, A. | [Course Code: 23804] Wednesdays & Fridays 2:00 – 3:20pm in PSCB 220 This course, designed with first year Ph.D. students in mind, will look at both the past and the present of literary and cultural criticism. The first half of the course will introduce students to five thinkers from the canon of critical theory: Immanuel Kant, G.W.F. Hegel, Karl Marx, Frantz Fanon, and Gayatri Spivak. Although we will be unable to read more than short excerpts from all these thinkers, we will use our focused reading to unpack the foundational concepts they developed: aesthetic judgment, dialectics, historical materialism, phenomenology, and the critique of representation. In the second half of the course, we will take up five contemporary methods in literary criticism: (Neo)formalism, Marxist Historicism, Critical Race Theory, Queer Theory, and Eco Criticism, reading texts written in the 21st century and specifically engaging questions of literary theoretical method. Along the way, students will select a primary literary text of their own and write a series of short essays on that text, deploying and exploring a range of methods from reception and circulation history to formal or theoretical approaches. |
| ENGLISH 210 | SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY PASTORAL AND THE ENGLISH CIVIL WAR | SILVER, V. | [Course Code: 23802] Wednesdays 9:00 – 11:50am in HIB 341 This is ultimately a course in the politics of nature and second nature, focusing on what is in early modern studies a convention of great interest, the pastoral, especially in its connection with Hesiod’s myth of a Golden Age, which Charles I in his court masques played as an ideological trump card. We will start with a modern myth of the state of nature and its grounds, Freud’s Totem and Taboo (Freud being a remarkable analyst of western culture), and along the way we will read some familiar Freudian essays (“Instincts and their Vicissitudes,” “On Narcissism,” “Mourning and Melancholia”) as a way into the peculiar motives behind English pastoral in this period. We will look briefly at pastoral’s Virgilian foundations and Ben Jonson’s politic use of them in his masque, The Golden Age Restor’d. We will then turn to James I, Robert Filmer and Thomas Hobbes on the natural state of humankind and Shakespeare’s The Tempest, with the latter framed by selected essays of that consummate skeptic, Michel de Montaigne (whom Shakespeare quotes). From there, we will address the development of 17th-century pastoral poetry and its inflection by the political events leading up to and away from the English civil war, reading Jonson and Herrick, Lovelace and Marvell, possibly Milton, possibly Denham, Dryden, Behn, Rochester and Swift. Requirements: a 15-page takehome exam for those not wishing to write a longer seminar paper. |
| ENGLISH 210 | ROMANTIC IRONY | ROBERTS, H. | [Course Code: 23808] Thursdays 2:00 – 4:50pm in HIB 411 Romantic Irony is one of the more controversial terms in literary theory and history. Critics disagree about where it is found, how it should be defined, and what its significance is. Friedrich Schlegel defined it, most famously, as “the clear consciousness of eternal agility, of an infinitely teeming chaos” but, perhaps unsurprisingly, that hasn’t settled the matter. Some critics see it as no more significant than common-or-garden rhetorical irony, while others have argued that it calls into question the very possibility of language as a signifying practice and marks a watershed in literary and intellectual history. In this class we will read a number of texts which can be suspected of perpetrating Romantic Irony, including, but not limited to, Diderot’s Jacques le Fataliste et son Maitre, Stern’s Tristram Shandy, and major works by the English Romantic poets. We will also explore some of the philosophical writings (e.g. by Kant and the post-Kantians) that provided the theoretical underpinnings of Romantic Irony, examine competing critical accounts of the significance of Romantic Irony as a practice, and consider some of the social and historical conditions to which it may have been a response. |
| ENGLISH 398 | RHETORIC/TEACHING OF COMPOSITION | QUEEN, B. | [Course Code: 23975] Mondays 4:00pm-6:50pm in ALP 2100 Readings, lectures, and internship designed to prepare graduate students to teach composition. Formal instruction in rhetoric and practical work in teaching methods and grading. |