| Course | Title | Instructor | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
| ENGLISH 8 | CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN POETRY | JACKSON, V. | If you think that American poetry is still written by old white guys, this class is not for you. Whatever American poetry has been in the past (and it has been many things), the poetry published and performed in the United States in the twenty-first century has not assumed that we all assume what it assumes. American poetry no longer pretends to share a communal impulse. Or does it? What (or really, who) is American poetry about? Does anyone actually read it, anyway? We will pose these questions by reading recent work by Morgan Parker, Analicia Sotela, Ocean Vuong, Terrance Hayes, Mei-mei Berssengrugge, Cathy Park Hong, Jos Charles, Doug Kearney, Ada Limon, Claudia Rankine, Sawako Nakayasu, Melissa Lozada-Oliva, Patricia Lockwood, Vanessa Angelica Villareal, and others. |
| ENGLISH 10 | BIBLE IN LITERATURE | ALLEN, E. | In this course, we will read selections from the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament as centrally important cultural documents and works of literary artistry in various genres. The Bible will be considered as a challenging and fascinating text whose stories and poems are open to many valid interpretations. What are the parts of the Bible? How was the Bible put together, by whom and for whom? What images and themes repeat in the course of its many books? What sort of character is God, and what do these stories have to say about the Hebrew people and, later, about the advent of Christianity? How does the New Testament reinterpret the Hebrew Bible? And along the way, how have readers responded to the Bible—in scholarship, in poetry and song, in parody? Since time will not permit a complete reading, we will spend most of the quarter on the Hebrew Bible, especially those books that display the greatest literary interest or influence: Genesis, Exodus, excerpts from Leviticus and Deuteronomy; the saga of King David; wisdom literature, including Psalms, the Song of Songs, and the Book of Job; First and Second Isaiah and Daniel; the Gospels according to Matthew and John. While the Bible is of course a foundational religious document in many traditions, we will not be looking at it as revelation. With all respect for others’ religious or non-religious orientation, we will be emphasizing the Bible’s literary forms, genres, historical context, and cultural significance for believers and non-believers alike. No previous acquaintance with the Bible is presupposed. |
| ENGLISH 10 | CONTEMPORARY AFRICAN AMERICAN LITERATURE | GRADY, K | We live in a moment that fosters noteworthy examples of racial progress, as well as one that produces striking demonstrations of racial intolerance. It often feels like America is going forward and backward at the same time. Given this ambiguity, how might we describe our current moment’s relationship to issues of race? How can we better understand the ways in which the present rehearses a more equitable future while remaining entangled with a racist past? This course will consider these questions, particularly as they relate to the black experience, by exploring 21st century African American literature. We will think broadly about how such work renders the past, contextualizes the present, and charts the future. We will also consider how and where these issues resonate given today’s increased consumption of black art. Along with reading the work of authors like Paul Beatty and Jesmyn Ward, we will also discuss the work of artists like Janelle Monáe and Donald Glover. Coursework will include short writing assignments, a few quizzes, group work, and a final paper. |
| ENGLISH 10 | ENGLISH WITH AN ACCENT | LEE, J.W. | This course introduces students to the complexities of speaking English, writing in English, and simply studying English in the context of globalization, through which we are able to take stock of the reality that there is no such thing as one English in the first place, and that English, whatever that may be, is readily blended with resources from other languages to take on new forms and achieve a wider range of communicative purposes as it circulates worldwide. |
| ENGLISH 10B | BIBLE AS LITERATURE/COMBO-CREDIT COURSE WITH WR39B | ALLEN, E. | Concurrent Enrollment in English 10B and Writing 39B Click here for more information. In this course, we will read selections from the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament as centrally important cultural documents and works of literary artistry in various genres. The Bible will be considered as a challenging and fascinating text whose stories and poems are open to many valid interpretations. What are the parts of the Bible? How was the Bible put together, by whom and for whom? What images and themes repeat in the course of its many books? What sort of character is God, and what do these stories have to say about the Hebrew people and, later, about the advent of Christianity? How does the New Testament reinterpret the Hebrew Bible? And along the way, how have readers responded to the Bible—in scholarship, in poetry and song, in parody? Since time will not permit a complete reading, we will spend most of the quarter on the Hebrew Bible, especially those books that display the greatest literary interest or influence: Genesis, Exodus, excerpts from Leviticus and Deuteronomy; the saga of King David; wisdom literature, including Psalms, the Song of Songs, and the Book of Job; First and Second Isaiah and Daniel; the Gospels according to Matthew and John. While the Bible is of course a foundational religious document in many traditions, we will not be looking at it as revelation. With all respect for others’ religious or non-religious orientation, we will be emphasizing the Bible’s literary forms, genres, historical context, and cultural significance for believers and non-believers alike. No previous acquaintance with the Bible is presupposed. |
| ENGLISH 15 | NARRATIVE MIDDLES | BARTLETT, J. | |
| ENGLISH 15 | THREE POETS | JACKSON, V. | In this class we will read only three poets. Rather than surveying a lot of different poems by a lot of different poets who wrote at many different times in many different places, we will drop down into the work of three black women. These women--Phillis Wheatley, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, and Gwendolyn Brooks--each wrote poems for a specific place and time that is not our own: Anglo-Boston in the eighteenth century (Wheatley); Baltimore, Ohio, and Pennsylvania before and after the Civil War in the nineteenth century (Harper); Chicago in the middle of the twentieth century (Brooks). This class will teach English majors how to read poetry historically and how to think about American history poetically. |
| ENGLISH 15 | THE WORK OF POETRY | GODDEN, R. | For Richard Sennett, the American sociologist, in his study, The Craftsman (2008), to make is to think. This course will consider poems as a form of making. Sennett argues that craftwork involves leaving a mark on the materials at hand, and in so doing experiencing those materials (whether stone, wood or metal) as both resistant and yet finally compliant to “the intelligent hand”: though compliant, the materials may compel the worker, for a time at least, “to dwell in error.” In poetry, the materials are words: for “hand” read “mind” and “mouth.” Just as craft materials resist and comply, so words, “say without quite saying,” and “talk towards but miss.” The Russian linguist, V.N. Volosinov, usefully proposes that, “the meaning of a word is its position between speakers.” You talk, your friends listen, sort of understanding; as they reply, you do what they did, each offering counter signs to the others’ signs, where signs and counter signs reflect the particular, divergent and specific lexicons and histories of those caught up by talk. As in conversation, so in craftwork, the practice seems largely unthinking or innate, it being much practiced. Poetry slows down the linguistic work, requiring attention to the processes and orders of making, and allowing its readers to become students of the complex materials (the resistant yet compliant words) from which they make sense. Throughout the section we will attend to the forms through which poetry is made: we will consider iambic pentameter, the syllabic line, sonnets, elegies, and more and less dramatic monologues. In so doing, we will address such formal features as vocabulary, syntax, rhythm, metaphor, and the implied speech situation. Understanding making in its more generic sense, we will concentrate on poems that engage thematically with the sheer variety of labor, with work (waged and unwaged); with the assorted making of history, art, sound, gender; with the production of non-sense (or difficulty) and nonsense, and with the work of mourning and melancholia. The course will be examined by way of three papers. |
| ENGLISH 15 | ASIA AND SCIENCE FICTION | FAN, C. | For much of the past half-century, “Asia,” “Asians,” and Asian-ness have been closely associated with Anglophone science fiction: both as objects of the genre, and as producers of it. On one hand, there is the tradition of “techno-orientalist” science fiction (e.g., Blade Runner, The Matrix, Big Hero 6), which updates longstanding tropes about Asian futurity and Oriental threats to the West. On the other hand, there is the burgeoning field of science fiction literature and film by Asian Americans, which exploded onto the cultural scene in the 1990s and has shown no signs of abating. Why is Orientalism such an enduring aesthetic dominant in science fiction? Why are Asian American fiction writers and filmmakers so drawn to the genre? This course makes the case that these two questions refer to two sides of the same coin. They point to two different histories and perspectives on the same phenomenon: Asia’s postwar economic and geopolitical rise (or, depending on whom you ask, its return to prominence). Texts will likely include: novels: Charles Yu’s How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe, Weike Wang’s Chemistry, Ling Ma's Severance; short stories by Ted Chiang and Claire Light; and the following films: Blade Runner, Blade Runner: 2049, and Big Hero 6 (along with an issue or two from the 1998 and 2008 Marvel series). |
| ENGLISH 16 | CRAFT OF POETRY | STAFF | Reading of selected texts to explore the ways in which these modes formulate experience. Students write several short analytic papers. Requires creative writing. |
| ENGLISH 100 | INTRODUCTION TO LITERARY THEORY | HARRIES, M. | Theory begins with distance from what we contemplate. Contemplating a work of art, we may begin with the assumption that it represents something else: a tyrant, a historical period, a wheelbarrow. Some artworks seem to aspire to imitate the world as exactly as possible. Other artworks challenge our assumptions about representation entirely: they don’t seem to refer to something outside themselves or something already in the world. Theory is, among other things, a systematic way of contemplating the difference, or the distance, between the artwork and what we understand it to represent. Criticism puts theory to work in practices of close attention to artworks. Depending upon what theory we begin with, or simply take for granted, we may understand works of art very differently and we may therefore adopt very different critical practices. This course will survey aspects of the long history of theorizing literature and writing about it critically. While we will begin with ancient Greek examples from Plato and Aristotle, emphasis will fall on strands of theoretical thought and criticism that shape theory and criticism today. A few literary works will provide touchstones. The aim of the course is to make participants aware of a range of theoretical modes, alert to the ways these are put into practice in critical writing, and self-conscious about our own theoretical and critical assumptions, aspirations, and critical practices. |
| ENGLISH 101W | MATERIALIST MODES OF READING | GODDEN, R. | We shall beg the question, aphoristically put, “If nature (the materiality) is always human nature (or human materials), how best might that stuff be understood as it reflects and is modified by literary expression?” Literature (here, late twentieth century American short stories) will be explored as produced in relation to a number of interwoven forms of work; that is, by and within political economy, language, historical explanation, and even by and within the forgetting of that on-going and diverse making. Since literary materiality is made from words, and since words are social instruments, we shall depart from materialist accounts of language (Volosinov, Bakhtin). Since literary words frequently take narrative forms, we will address the relation between plot and the real (Benjamin, Greenblatt). Since written stories are made as much from what is forgotten as from what is remembered, we will consider “forgetting”, or the unconscious, as made from that which we have learned to find unthinkable (Abraham and Torok, Freud). These three areas, language, narrative and the structural unconscious, will be read as part of a wider pattern of making, or an economy (Marx, Jameson, Harvey). The purpose of the course is at all times to explore and enable the activity of reading: methodologies are more limited than the complex literary and historical objects which they address, and should neither be neither complete, nor glass machines. Each week the seminar will consider extracts from theoretical writings in relation to a particular short story. The stories chosen will be drawn primarily from a single historical period (U.S., post 1973, variously referred to as “postmodern”, “post industrial”, “flexible Fordist” or “post Fordist”): they and the theoretical readings will be made available via pdf . Course assessment will be based on two essays. |
| ENGLISH 101W | CLOSE READING | ROBERTS, H. | “Close reading” is a term used to describe a wide range of practices that are central to all forms of literary analysis. This course will provide students with opportunities to hone their skills in close reading of poetry, prose and drama with a constant focus on how we convey the insights derived from close reading in our writing. We will think about how writing persuasively often hinges upon reading insightfully, and, crucially, how writing allows us to see things in our reading we would not otherwise have perceived. Students will spend a portion of most classes engaged in writing exercises and will be invited to share examples of their writing in other classes for group workshop exercises. All texts for this class will be provided in photocopy or digital form. |
| ENGLISH 101W | EARLY MODERN ENCOUNTERS | GRADY, K | Before early modern England became a colonial power, it engaged in a period of broad exploration that brought it into contact with places as geographically distant as South East Asia. These encounters could be cooperative, like when England attempted to form an alliance with Morocco, but they could also rehearse some of the most abhorrent practices associated with English colonialism, as when Elizabeth I sanctioned early transatlantic slaving voyages. This course will examine this moment in England’s relationship with the world through dramatic texts and travel narratives from the period. It will consider the conditions that encouraged intercultural collaboration and those that engendered colonial violence, focusing in particular on how England’s shifting approach to peoples and places it considered different were represented on the early modern English stage. Our reading will include plays like Shakespeare’s Tempest and Fletcher’s Island Princess. Along with thinking about early modern history, we will keep in mind how our course topic raises important questions about modern day issues of race and culture. Coursework will include short writing assignments, peer review workshops, and a midterm paper meant to be the basis of a final paper. |
| ENGLISH 102A | EARLY MODERN SELF | SILVER, V. | From the mid-14th century through the 17th century, British literature arguably begins to focus on what it means to be a self as against a soul--that is, body and mind together composing one human organism, one human person. This idea of our embodied being brings with it a new emphasis on subjective experience as both a challenge and a guide to the nature of truth. But that condition is no longer viewed as something that must be escaped or transcended by reason, intellect, conscience or a spiritual "mens angelicus," but instead as something that must be better understood. The course looks at the literature which enfranchises the body and describes what it brings with it--the rich and uncertain complications of subjective experience: "Gawaine and the Green Knight," Chaucer's "Canterbury Tales," Montaigne's "Essays," Shakespeare's sonnets and his play, "Twelfth Night." The requirements are two take home exams. |
| ENGLISH 102B | PARADISE LOST AND THE PROBLEM OF POWER | LEWIS, J. | John Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667/72) is the first modern epic. It’s also the most influential interpretation of the Judeo-Christian Bible in the English language. Milton’s Satan, taking up arms against a tyrannical God, became one of the great anti-heroes in our literature, while Milton’s rendering of Adam and Eve’s “first disobedience” and subsequent fall from grace continues to shape the ways we think about freedom. So why not read the blasted thing? Here’s your chance. People will be impressed! You will be impressed! To make this challenging poem our own, we will be focusing on the problem of power in Milton’s “great argument.” To that end, we’ll do two things: (1) We’ll place in its political, and literary context—the tumultuous times of Restoration England—so as to understand the energies that drive it and the many unresolved power struggles at its heart. (2) We’ll look at how later 18th-century writers reimagined Paradise Lost so as to examine questions of power, voice, and authority: the neoclassical poet Alexander Pope’s The Rape of the Lock, poems by the African slave Phillis Wheatley that used Milton to articulate the slave’s sense of abandonment by God; and the radical ironist William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience. We will also consider Samuel Johnson’s skeptical critique of Paradise Lost (“no one ever wished it longer than it is”), ending with Blake’s Marriage of Heaven and Hell and its famous verdict that Milton “was of the Devil’s party.” Does that make him a Democrat or a Republican? Midterm, final, 7- to 9-page critical essay, several short quizzes. |
| 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 novels by Walpole, Sterne, and Austen, along with dramatic and philosophical texts. Course requirements will include short assignments, a paper, a midterm, and a final exam. |
| ENGLISH 102D | FROM MODERNISM TO POSTMODERNISM | MARTIN, T. | This course will introduce you to two of the most significant and widely discussed modes of literary expression in the twentieth century: modernism and postmodernism. Focusing on novels, artistic manifestos, and political manifestos, we will trace the ways that modernist and postmodernist writers sought to make literature new in response to the rapidly changing conditions of modern life. How, we will ask, did these writers see themselves as radically breaking from the aesthetic and political norms of the past? And how did they justify the need for new, experimental literary forms as responses to the new and disorienting experiences of world warfare, gender inequality, racial oppression, state secrecy, and global capitalism? Taking these questions as our starting point, we will seek to understand modernism and postmodernism as key chapters in the history of how writers have imagined the link between radical aesthetics and radical politics. Authors will include Virginia Woolf, Nella Larsen, Thomas Pynchon, Ishmael Reed, and Joan Didion. |
| ENGLISH 102D | MODERNISM'S OBJECTS | BARTLETT, J. | |
| ENGLISH 105 | TRANSNATIONALISM: RACE, GENDER, SEXUALITY | RADHAKRISHNAN, R. | Is the nation form adequate as a category or as a mode of explanation during times of volatile movement, globalization, migration, diasporic flows, and hybrid configurations of culture, labor, and capital? A long time ago Virginia Woolf proclaimed that a woman knows no country. Race and ethnicity and sexuality too transcend the sovereignty of the nation state. The human condition clearly surpasses the boundedness of nationalism, and yet the dominant grammar of contemporary political organization continues to be nation-centric. Walls are being built to keep the dangerous foreigner out even as the meaning of what it means to be human is parsed within the straitjacket of citizenship. Has the nation then been transcended only in theory, but not in practice? Is there a radical disjunction between political consciousness and cultural and literary and aesthetic awareness? The purpose of this course is to explore the contours of TRANSNATIONALISM by way of texts both theoretical and literary. Race, gender, the diaspora, and sexuality have been powerful forces that have demonstrated the poverty as well as the hypocrisy of nationalism, anchored as it often is on principles of exclusion, discrimination, and racialization. But on the other hand, nationalism has operated as an instrument of decolonization in the so called Third World. Are there then good and bad nationalisms; and correspondingly, are there good and bad examples of TRANSNATIONALISM? Is TRANSNATIONALISM an uneven phenomenon that manifests itself differently in fields such as Economics, Politics, Culture, and Literature? I hope this course will help you all develop a critical perspective on the heterogeneous and contradictory flows and trajectories of what is called TRANSNATIONALISM. Readings from Literature, theories of Gender and Sexuality, Marxist, African-American, Diasporic, Global, Critical Race and Postcolonial theories. Lecture and discussion. I short essay 5 pages and 1 long essay 7 pages. |
| ENGLISH 105 | WRITING RACE IN THE UNITED STATES | TOBAR, H. | This course is a survey of nonfiction writing about race in the United States of America, from the 19th century to the present. We will examine how writers have tackled issues of racial inequality and discrimination, and constructed narratives centered on the lives of people of color in various nonfiction genres, including: newspaper and magazine journalism, investigative reporting, essays, criticism, documentary film, and memoirs. Readings will include works by Ida B. Wells, W.E.B Du Bois, James Baldwin, Luis Alberto Urrea, Ta-Nehisi Coates and others. How do writers construct works that cut through the falsehoods of prejudice and ignorance? How do they work to defend the humanity of those who have been marginalized or oppressed by dominant cultures? How do they express the joy and fortitude unseen or unknown by outsiders? As a final requirement, students will produce their own work of cultural reportage or criticism. Students will work on this project in several stages throughout the quarter, producing a 2,000-word piece by finals’ week. In addition, students will produce four, 300-word “responses” to the readings. |
| ENGLISH 105 | RACE & ART OF WRITING | WILDERSON, F | African American Studies 144, "Race & the Art of Writing,” is a literature and writing class. While being introduced to seminal texts in the Black literary tradition, as well as to narrative theory, students will develop creative writing skills and produce a short piece of fiction of creative nonfiction by the end of the quarter. (same as 20310 AfAm 144, Lec A) |
| ENGLISH 106 | DRAMA AND PSYCHOANALYSIS | HARRIES, M. | Theater is important to Freud’s work. Concepts as fundamental to psychoanalysis as the Oedipus complex have their roots in tragedy, and the frequency with which theatrical examples and terms supply Freud with ways to imagine important components of his thought is remarkable. The theater, that is, at once supplies paradigmatic plots for imagining psychic life and also a vocabulary – sometimes a disarmingly colloquial one – for thinking about how the psyche works. This course will trace these various strands. Given the importance of Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex and Shakespeare’s Hamlet to Freud’s thinking, we will begin by reading these plays and looking at their aftermaths in psychoanalytic thought, closely tracking Freud’s comments about the plays. From these plays we will move on to other plays that engage with psychoanalysis, including plays that Freud thought anticipated his work by his contemporary Arthur Schnitzler. The course will also include texts by other psychoanalytic thinkers, including Otto Fenichel, Jacques Lacan, D. W. Winnicott, and Melanie Klein, as well as plays by Samuel Beckett, Tennessee Williams, and others. |
| ENGLISH 106 | FEMINIST MODERNISM | MARTIN, T. | In this course, we’ll survey the ways that women authors in the first half of the twentieth century used the literary innovations of modernism to grapple with the inequities of gender, sexuality, and race in a rapidly modernizing society. Our aims in the course will be twofold: first, to better understand the complicated and often contested idea of “modernism” as a category of Anglo-American literary history; and second, to take stock of the feminist ambitions, undercurrents, and crosscurrents that were instrumental in shaping the modernist literary project. How, we’ll ask, did modernist writers represent the gendered realities of labor, social life, and private space in the early twentieth century? How did they seek to reimagine conventional categories of gender and sexual identity? How did they understand the intersection between gender and racial oppression? And how, finally, might these questions begin to alter our traditional understanding of what modernist literature was? |
| ENGLISH 106 | VICTORIAN REPRESENTATION | HENDERSON, A. | In this course we will trace the late-nineteenth-century preoccupation with the workings of representation, focusing on poems and novels that are meditations on their own capacity to figure forth the world. We will begin by familiarizing ourselves with Romantic theories of representation--theories that confidently root language in nature or the divine order--so as to be able track the Victorian loss of faith in the artist’s capacity to produce symbols that make reference to anything beyond themselves. Readings will include Dickens’ Our Mutual Friend, Collins’ The Woman in White, and poems by Tennyson, Browning, Swinburne, and Rossetti. Students will also read several critical articles and lead class discussion on one of them. The writing for the course will center on the production of one major essay, for which students will produce an annotated bibliography and an outline to share with the class. |
| ENGLISH 210 | SPECULATIVE FICTION | FAN, C. | [Course Code: 23801] Tuesdays 11:00 – 1:50pm in HIB 341 In this course, students will become acquainted with major theoretical topics in, and instances of, contemporary speculative fiction (mostly 21st century, mostly science fiction). Standard accounts of the history of contemporary speculative fiction will also be covered. Topics might include: posthumanism, posthistoricism, ecology, the anthropocene, gender, sexuality, postcoloniality, dystopia/utopia, migration, identity, political economy. Primary texts might include: Octavia Butler, Kindred; Eugene Lim, Dear Cyborgs; Nnedi Okorafor, Lagoon; Larissa Lai, Salt Fish Girl; Charles Stross, Accelerando; Karen Tei Yamashita, Through the Arc of the Rainforest; Jeff Vandermeer, Annihilation; Ruth Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being; Colson Whitehead, The Intuitionist or Zone One; Ling Ma, Severance; Ex Machina; Children of Men; Big Hero 6; Sorry to Bother You. Possible secondary texts from Aimee Bahng, Anna Tsing, Fredric Jameson, Mark Jerng, Rachel Lee, Roger Luckhurst, Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, Mark McGurl, Lee Edelman, José Munoz, Margaret Ronda, Alexandre Kojève, Georg Lukács. |
| ENGLISH 210 | POETIC RHYTHM | ROBERTS, H. | [Course Code: 23802] Fridays 2:00 - 4:50pm in HIB 341 This course is designed to give students an introduction to practical prosodic analysis and an outline of the history of English prosody from the Renaissance to the present day. It assumes, at best, a very rudimentary knowledge of prosody on the student's part. If you consider yourself already adept at scanning lines of English verse and have no difficulty in distinguishing, say, catalectic trochaic tetrameter from acephalic iambic tetrameter, then this course is not for you. If, on the other hand, you're only "pretty sure" that something is in iambic pentameter if most of the lines seem to have ten syllables and you'd draw a blank if someone asked you to describe the difference between Pope's use of the heroic couplet and Shelley's, or Shakespeare's early and late blank verse, then I hope this course will open up whole new dimensions to you even in works that seem very familiar. Coursework: Students will perform innumerable prosodic exercises; write short essays in prosodic analysis and sit an exam. (NB: it will be difficult to generate a seminar length paper out of this course because its focus is practical rather than theoretical.) Required texts: Derek Attridge, Poetic Rhythm: An Introduction. Cambridge Ferguson et al, Norton Anthology of Poetry: Shorter Fifth Edition. Norton. |
| ENGLISH 210 | INTERSECTIONALITIES | RADHAKRISHNAN, R. | [Course Code: 23806] Tuesdays 2:00 - 4:50pm in HIB 341 (same as 22640 Clt&Thy 289, 22860 Com Lit 210, and 28682 Human 270) The temporal "after" in the title of the course could also be read spatially as "beyond": the time-spaces or the chronotopes beyond INTERSECTIONALITIES. And as for INTERSECTIONALITIES, you all know what I mean. For more than an academic generation now, this term/concept/paradigm has been unfailingly effective in helping us understand, both theoretically and historically-experientially and discursively, the multiple but simultaneous nature of oppression-domination-colonization along lines of race, class, gender, sexuality, colonization, and more. Thanks to intersectional analysis as initiated by Critical Race theory, it became possible to produce sophisticated analyses and interpretations, both aggregated and disaggregated, of different trajectories of the emergence of "subjugated knowledges," their modes of identity and subject formation, their preferences of representational, post-representational, and coalitional practices. Thanks to intersectional awareness, hegemony could be read symptomatically even in its imperceptibly unsutured articulations and complicities. But the time has now come to ask the following questions: has intersectionality itself become hegemonic? Has intersectionality enabled dubious notions of fungibility, facile formulations of post-identitarian, post-representational neoliberal coalitional practices that shore up and perpetuate deep structure imbalances and unevennesses and asymmetries? Has intersectionality been seduced by the political mantra of "winner take all" and thereby turned traitor to its original impulse of incorruptible critical negativity in the name of one and all? In other words, has intersectionality now found a proper, exceptionalist, and sovereign agent-subject-owner, in violation of its originary commitment to non-sovereign ways of living and thinking? This seminar will be an attempt to revisit intersectionality and read its history both with and against the grain, and to speculate what the future may hold after/beyond. After such knowledge, what can "after" and "beyond" mean? Tentative Readings: Readings: Kimberle Crenshaw, Du Bois, Frantz Fanon, Denise de Silvia, Sylvia Wynter, Adrienne Rich, Virginia Woolf, Chantal Mouffe and Ernesto Laclau, Judith Butler, Jared Sexton, Frank Wilderson, Saidia Hartman, Hortense Spillers, Sara Ahmed, Lata Mani, Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Jacqui Alexander, Helene Cixous Donna Haraway Angela Davis, Cherrie Moraga, Gloria Anzaldua. |
| ENGLISH 210 | INTRODUCTION TO CRITICAL METHODS | MCCLANAHAN, A. | [Course Code: 23804] Tuesdays and Thursdays 9:30-10:50am in HIB 341 This course has three aims. First, I aim to provide you with a limited introduction to graduate school and to the UCI Department of English. In a practical sense, that means I am happy to address pragmatic questions about grad school strategies, struggles, goals etc. in class. In a bigger sense, it means that this class will (ideally) help you build a community that is both intellectual and intimate. The second purpose of this course is to offer a very limited overview of the past and the present of literary and cultural criticism. In the first half of the course, we will read excerpts from six thinkers from the canon of critical theory: Immanuel Kant, G.W.F. Hegel, Karl Marx, Franz Fanon, Michel Foucault, and Gayatri Spivak. We will use our focused reading to unpack the foundational concepts they developed, concepts that remain fundamental to contemporary methodological discussions: aesthetic judgment, dialectics, historical materialism, decolonial theory, power, and the critique of representation. In the second half of the course, we will take up five contemporary methods in literary criticism: Queer Theory, New Formalism, Critical Race Theory, Marxism, and Eco-Criticism, reading texts written in the 21st century and specifically engaging questions of literary theoretical method. The third goal is get you thinking about how to use theory to understand literary and cultural texts. To this end, your primary writing project for the quarter will be to take a single literary text and to write three short essays on that text. This course is a requirement for first-year students in the English PhD program and is only open to those students. |
| ENGLISH 290 | READING&CONFERENCE | WILENTZ, A. | |
| ENGLISH 398 | RHET/TCHNG OF COMP | QUEEN, B. |