| Course | Title | Instructor | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
| ENGLISH 8 | MULTICULTURAL AMERICAN LITERATURE | RADHAKRISHNAN, R. | What indeed is “minority literature?” Was it born “minority” or was it minoritized by history and geopolitical circumstances, and perhaps by a process called democracy? Is “minority” a badge of honor or a stigma? Is minority quality driven or numbers driven? Why is “minority” marked as such while the literature of the majority is not called “majority literature?” What is the nature of the binary relationship between majority and minority? Is it antagonistic, symbiotic, mutually constitutive? Is minority literature content and ideology oriented, or is it a perspective? Is it by definition political, resistant, transformative, revolutionary? We will be tracking and unpacking these questions about the majority-minority nexus by way of critical and political theory, philosophy, and of course literature. Of particular interest in the context of the majority-minority binary grid are the following themes and issues: America, multiculturalism, the nation-state, nationalism, naturalization and immigration, the One and the Many, ethnicity and hyphenation, double consciousness, hybridity, trans-nationalism and the diaspora, race, class, gender, and sexuality. As we analyze the works, theoretical as well as literary, of thinkers and writers such as Du Bois, Ralph Ellison, Deluze and Guattari, Chantal Mouffe, Lani Guinier, Toni Morrison, Cornel West, Gloria Anzaldua, Adrienne Rich Maxine Hong Kingston, Jhumpa Lahiri, James Baldwin, Langston Hughes, and others, I hope we get a rich and complex sense of the legacy, the phenomenology, as well as the universal call of the minority that always speaks in an “other” voice, on an “other” register. Lecture and discussion and open-ended class participation. 1 Short Essay, 1 Long Essay. |
| ENGLISH 10 | STAR TREK | ALEXANDER, J. | English 10 -- Star Trek and Science Fiction -- boldly goes where so many have gone before, examining the persistence, attraction, and influence of the ever-developing Star Trek narrative. As one of the longest-running, continuous narrative arcs in our culture, the Star Trek mega-story encompasses multiple television shows, movies, novels, web series, fan productions, and video/computer games. This course will introduce students to the critical study of popular culture by focusing on selected highlights of the last fifty years of the unfolding Star Trek narrative arc -- in TV, film, text, and fan media. We will focus on representations of race, gender/sexuality, and class, with a particular emphasis on how the Star Trek universe imagines future economies and the hope for utopian society. Grades will be based on short writing assignments throughout the term and a final project. |
| ENGLISH 10B | STAR TREK | ALEXANDER, J. | English 10 -- Star Trek and Science Fiction -- boldly goes where so many have gone before, examining the persistence, attraction, and influence of the ever-developing Star Trek narrative. As one of the longest-running, continuous narrative arcs in our culture, the Star Trek mega-story encompasses multiple television shows, movies, novels, web series, fan productions, and video/computer games. This course will introduce students to the critical study of popular culture by focusing on selected highlights of the last fifty years of the unfolding Star Trek narrative arc -- in TV, film, text, and fan media. We will focus on representations of race, gender/sexuality, and class, with a particular emphasis on how the Star Trek universe imagines future economies and the hope for utopian society. Grades will be based on short writing assignments throughout the term and a final project. |
| ENGLISH 15 | YOUNG GIFTED & BLACK | MORGAN, C | In this course, we will read a series of texts that foreground the experience of childhood and adolescence, to consider how African American writers and artists have engaged questions of identity, memory, and experience in their work. How might we take seriously representations of joy, sorrow, pride, shame, love, loss, and maturity? How do these affective qualities manifest in works of literature, poetry, and film? What sorts of conceptual and analytic frames do these texts offer us for thinking through intersectional issues of race, gender, sexuality, and class? What, really, does it mean to grow up? We will work through these questions as we read and watch texts by authors working across an array of different media, including James Baldwin, Gwendolyn Brooks, Octavia Butler, Barry Jenkins, Audre Lorde, Paule Marshall, Toni Morrison, Claudia Rankine, Dee Rees, and Richard Wright. |
| ENGLISH 15 | ARTIFICIAL MEMORY | HELFER, R. | What does memory mean in a world in which we have outsourced much of it to our devices and to clouds with seemingly infinite storage? Given this, what constitutes memory, natural or artificial? Or the boundaries between human and non-human memory? Between our authentic selves and our android avatars? How can we understand art, especially literature, as both a product and representation of artificial memory, at once individual and social, psychological and political? We’ll explore these and other questions in this course, beginning with classical and early modern examples of aids-to-memory, before turning to contemporary representations of art-as-artificial memory and literature as ‘machine learning’. Possible texts include Simon Critchley’s Memory Theater, Richard Power’s Galatea 2.2, Louisa Hall’s Speak, Liz Moore’s The Unseen World, and stories from Ted Chang’s Exhalation. Course requirements most likely will consist of occasional quizzes, short writing, and an essay |
| ENGLISH 16 | CRAFT OF POETRY | TAN, I. | In this class, we will be reading a wide variety of contemporary poems and paying special attention to how craft and technique contribute to meaning. Through careful examination of imagery, sound, and lineation, we’ll consider questions such as: What kinds of thinking and feeling do poems make possible? How does a poem convey what matters? And how do the choices we make as writers shape what the reader experiences? Through class discussions and written work, we will strive to broaden our understanding of what poetry can be, and what poetry can do. Since all writing is a gradual process of thinking and discovery, emphasis will be placed on class participation and the progressive development of your ideas. Expect to spend several hours in and out of class reading, writing, and thinking about poetry, as well as how you can contribute to the community of writing that exists today. Materials will include The Art of Description by Mark Doty, A Lesser Love by E. J. Koh, and a course packet. |
| 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. You will be expected to attend and participate in all class meetings, to take one midterm and one final, and to complete two reading quizzes. |
| ENGLISH 101W | NARRATING GIRLHOOD | MONTERO, V | In this class we will analyze the historical construction (and strategic political deployment) of terms like ‘youth,’ ‘adolescence,’ and ‘teenager,’ and we will do so while reading novels, short stories, and poems that explore what it means to be a young woman of color in the United States. We will ask questions like, since the 1900s what has been the boundary between childhood and adulthood and who has decided what it means to be ‘grown up’? What are the stakes of historically specific ideas about youth and maturation? And, what can we learn from women of color authors who “grew up” writing alongside these political and scientific ideas about girlhood? Authors might include: Frances Harper, Zitkála Šá, Edith Eaton, Jovita González, Toni Morrison, Maxine Hong Kingston, Sandra Cisneros, bell hooks, Ntozake Shange, Angie Cruz, Jenny Han, or Elizabeth Acevedo. |
| ENGLISH 101W | FEMALE / GOTHIC | LEWIS, J. | With its oppressive domestic enclosures, predatory patriarchs, missing or monstrous mothers, and anxious, melancholy, isolated, and often powerless female (or simply feminized) protagonists, the gothic genre evolved in part as a way to explore the dark side of women’s experience in nature, in culture, and in the emergent spaces between the two (think Siri…). Though the term, coined by the literary critic Ellen Moers way back in the day, is contested, in this class we will read some classic examples of female gothic literature. Ghosts, vampires, madwomen, demon lovers, and other uncanny beings turn out to have be powerful fantasy tools for exploring the realities of women’s social, political, psychological, and artistic selves. Texts—not all female-authored—may include (Freud) Dora: An Analysis of a Case of Hysteria; stories by Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Edith Wharton; (LeFanu) Carmilla; (Jackson) The Haunting of Hill House; (Okja Keller) Comfort Woman; and (Butler) Fledgling. We’ll end with a consideration of the female cyborg: epitome of the gothic heroine or a solution to her problems? Three 5- to 7-page papers—one revised, one working directly with literary criticism; one comparative—and several short writing assignments, as well as a final group project |
| ENGLISH 101W | WRITING ABOUT SHORT FICTION | BASU, S | The modern short story emerged in the long nineteenth century as a popular literary form geared toward mass consumption. In this course we will address questions of form, genre, and production in American short stories from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Edgar Allan Poe astutely, if not ominously, points out that “In the brief tale…. the soul of the reader is at the writer's control.” Taking cue from this we will ask how the brevity and narrative density of the American short story mediate its portrayals of race, gender, and the early nation. We will compare the modern short story to its predecessors, the parable and the anecdote, and contemporary literary forms such as the novella and the vignette and learn about the tools needed to understand the short story’s narrative structure. Some of the writers included in this course are Charles Brockden Brown, Washington Irving, Edgar Allan Poe, William Wells Brown, Lydia Maria Child, Pauline Hopkins, Charles Chesnutt, and Kate Chopin. All required reading for this course will be made available as PDFs. Assignments will include two short close reading papers and one longer comparative paper. |
| ENGLISH 101W | PRACTICE OF CLOSE READING | GODDEN, R. | Readers and literary scholars frequently use terms like ‘realistic’, ‘voice’, ‘irony’, ‘metaphor’ and ‘character’ as though the meaning of those terms were self-evident. The course departs from the assumption that this is not the case, and from the belief that the literary, perceptual and cognitive structures caught up within the supposed commonplaces of textual analysis are both interesting and worthy of detailed analysis. During each of the first five weeks of the course, we will engage with a single literary term (drawn from the list above), approaching it through a piece of theoretical writing and in relation to a twentieth century American short story. The purpose of the course is at all times to explore and enable the process of reading; theoretical vocabularies and models, though interesting, are generally more limited than the complex literary and historical objects which they address, and should be viewed neither as complete nor as glass machines. Consequently, the course will view such vocabularies and models as necessary and yet subordinate to the work of close reading. During the concluding five weeks of the course, having with luck gained a fuller vocabulary through which to address literary texts, we will engage a number of more generic literary problems (or excitements). Again, the weekly format will involve a theoretical essay and a related short story. Possible topics of discussion will include, “Reading through commodity (or “capitalist realism”)”; “Reading for the whispers (the issue of secrets)”; “What to do with ‘difficulty’, or textual opacity?”; “Narrative forms for a catastrophic century (parataxis and breakage)”. The ten stories and ten pieces of theoretical writing will be made available as PDF files. The course will be assessed by way of 3 essays, each of between 4-6 pages (and amounting in total to some 4,000words). The timing of essay submittal will be organized to promote redrafting, and self-editing skills. |
| ENGLISH 102A | POETRY & PATRIARCHY | SILVER, V. | The end of the sixteenth century saw a sudden increase in the power and sophistication of English lyric poetry, an artistic revolution coinciding with an age of religious and political turmoil in Europe. That turmoil, in its turn, ignited a new skepticism about received authority, troubling the gendered ideology of universal hierarchy that informed it and that we term “patriarchy”: “the rule of the father.” This skeptical movement, both intellectual and practical, found expression in poetic form and poetic argument: if the sonnets of Sidney, Spenser and especially Shakespeare led the way in England, the experimental poetry of Donne, Jonson and Marvell that followed hard upon their heels finally burst the confines of the sonnet structure, pushing and pulling stanza, line and figure in novel directions, embracing lyric conventions as yet untried in the language, while obtruding into lyric utterance a pervasive irony. Besides the works of Donne, Jonson and Marvell, we will also read a Shakespearean romance, The Winter’s Tale, to exemplify patriarchy’s assumptions (and Shakespeare’s skepticism), and some essays of the most famous skeptic of the age, Michel de Montaigne. The requirements for the course are two takehome exams. |
| ENGLISH 102A | RACE & RELIGION IN EARLY MODERN LITERATURE | GRADY, K. | This course will explore how issues of race and religion were rendered in early modern English literature. Before England was a colonial power, it was beset by worries of infiltration by “others” both foreign and domestic. At the same time, it imagined a variety of ways of assimilating those “others.” In this course, we will read poetry and plays written by Thomas Dekker, Christopher Marlowe, and William Shakespeare, examining how Elizabethan and Jacobean literature became a site for exploring assimilation and conversion, as well as one that fostered racism and religious intolerance. Along with situating their work in relevant historical context, this course will ask broader questions about racism, nationalism, and “multiculturalism” in our own moment. Coursework will include reading responses, quizzes, a short paper, and a final exam. |
| ENGLISH 102B | 18TH C. LITERATURE AND ECONOMY | MCCLANAHAN, A | The first concern of this class will be to explore the invention, over the course of the 18th century, of the genre we now call the novel. How, we will ask, did readers come to expect that the stories be “realistic”? How did they come to be willing to imagine themselves in the minds (and in the houses, workplaces, streets, and even beds) of fictional characters? Our second concern will be with the economic transformations those novels represented, from new understandings of property and the rise of the middle class, to revolutionary changes in relationships between the classes and the abolition of the slave trade. We’ll ask: do literary works like novels simply reflect the economic circumstances in which they were written or might they offer some new ways of thinking, seeing, and describing the economic and social world around them? Along the way to answering these questions, we’ll read short excerpts from political, economic, and legal texts written during this period—John Locke, Adam Smith, Mary Wollestonecraft and others—and, of course, we’ll read a lot of marvelous novels! We’ll explore treatments of land and settlement in Robinson Crusoe; servants, poverty, and sexuality in Pamela; commerce, mercantilism, and the slave trade in The Interesting Narrative; and domestic property and land enclosure in Northanger Abbey. |
| ENGLISH 102B | VIRTUES AND VICES | LEWIS, J. | “Thus ev’ry Part was full of Vice,/Yet the whole Mass a Paradise.” So wrote the English satirist Bernard Mandeville in a 1705 fable whose subtitle, Private Vices, Public Benefits, captured the moral contradictions that ruled his 18th-century English society. And it’s true: in no other culture do we find more of an obsession with gambling, drinking, debauchery, and crime . . . or more of a fascination with honor, integrity, and, simply, ‘being good.’ The literature we will read in this course (all of it written between 1660 and 1745) explores these moral extremes; it was written at a time when human virtue and human vices were no longer understood in terms of sin and piety but rather looked like aspects of personal character interacting with social habits and conventions. We’ll meet whores and determined virgins, liars and truthtellers, thieves and preachers, rakes and chaste wives. The big picture? A rambunctious human scene full of idealism, hedonism, and hypocrisy where literature’s ambivalent power both to correct and to seduce, to moralize and to make mischief, gives it an important role to play. The reading list mixes Rochester’s naughty libertine lyrics with the austerities of Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress; Wycherley’s raunchy comedy The Country Wife with Behn’s heroic Oroonoko; and Gay’s ironic exposé of the London underworld, The Beggar’s Opera, with Pamela, Richardson’s controversial novel of “virtue rewarded.” We’ll end with Hogarth’s satiric images of “A Harlot’s Progress.” Midterm, final, 7-page paper plus quizzes and participation. |
| 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 plays, prose, and poetry by Aubrey Beardsley, Max Beerbohm, George Egerton, Henry James, Arthur Machen, Vernon Lee, and Oscar Wilde. You will be expected to attend and participate in all class meetings, to take one midterm and one final, and to complete two reading quizzes. |
| ENGLISH 102C | TRANSATLANTIC ROMANTICISM | BASU, S | This course will centralize the history, literature, and culture of slavery and abolition in transatlantic Romantic literature. We will think of how racial slavery informed the ways in which British and American Romantic writers conceptualized revolution, consciousness, alterity, and selfness. Relatedly, we will explore how the early literatures of the Black Atlantic challenge the way in which we historicize and understand this literary period and its zeitgeist. Our endeavor would be to probe whether the Romantic emphases on artistic inspiration and subjectivity are inherently racialized, or whether Romanticism was indeed decolonized from within by Black Atlantic literatures. \r\nAssignments will include quizzes, three short reflection papers, and a final research paper.Required Reading: CLR James, The Black Jacobins John Gabriel Stedman, Narrative of a Five Years Expedition Against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam Phillis Wheatley, “On Recollection,” “Thoughts on the Works of Providence,” and “On Imagination” Leonora Sansay, Secret History, or The Horrors of St. Domingo Mary Prince, The History of Mary Prince, A West Indian Slave, Related by Herself Mary Shelley, Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” William Wordsworth, “To Toussaint L’Ouverture” and “The Mad Mother” Frederick Douglass, The Heroic Slave |
| ENGLISH 102D | AMERICAN LITERATURE IN THE 1920S | GODDEN, R. | The Twenties will be understood as a long decade in order to approach it through such extended and insistent patterns of determination as shifts in the prevalent forms of production (associated with Taylorism and Fordism); the Great War; the Great Migration; the intensification of advertising attendant upon an enlargement of the consumer network, and the continuing marginalization of the South as a region committed to labor bound by debt, rather than to free wage labor. Such economic elements and their cultural consequences (alienation/reification, commodity aesthetics/capitalist realism, the Jazz Age, Harlem, Modernism) will be addressed through a range of literary texts. The course operates under a general rubric of modernization, where the formal processes associated with ‘making it new’ aesthetically may themselves be understood (in a phrasing from Marx), as one register of the sense that ‘all that is solid melts into air.’ The course will attempt historically to situate and closely to read a number of the periods key texts: Upton Sinclair, The Jungle (1906); Ernest Hemingway, In Our Time (1925); John Dos Passos, Manhattan Transfer (1925); T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land (1922); F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Diamond as Big as the Ritz (1922) and The Great Gatsby (1925); William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying (1930); Nella Larsen, Passing (192); Jean Toomer, Cane (1925). |
| ENGLISH 102D | 20TH CENTURY AFRICAN AMERICAN LITERATURE | MORGAN, C | This course will survey major movements and minor themes characteristic of the 20th century African American literary canon. As we study the works and influences of well-known writers, we will also think critically about the stakes of canonization itself by incorporating works by less familiar authors into our reading schedule. Throughout the course, we will consider how our view of the African American literary tradition changes as we try to gather the sheer diversity of Black writers’ experiments with form, medium, and technique beneath one overarching rubric. How do our understandings of Blackness, history, identity, racialization, etc. shift as we rethink the scope and configuration of African American literary history. Our reading will likely include works by W.E.B. Du Bois, Jean Toomer, Nella Larsen, Gwendolyn Brooks, James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, Toni Morrison, Charles Johnson, Octavia Butler, Randall Kenan, and Colson Whitehead. |
| ENGLISH 105 | CULTURAL NARRATIVES - NARRATIVES OF RACE AND RACISM | HAYASAKI, E. | (same as 29865 Lit Jrn 103, Lec B) This class will discuss journalism and essays on race and racism throughout the history of the U.S. and today. We will delve into how narratives have contributed to, and also combatted, racial oppression. The focus of this class will be on literary journalism in books, magazines and digital media. We will examine the evolution of writings on race and racism in the American media, and we will also focus heavily on the evolution of craft. Students will study subject matter, as well as a writer’s voice, reporting and interviewing techniques, and literary style. Students will be expected to do some interviewing and journalistic writing as well. Students will come away from this course with a deeper understanding of different genres of literary journalism—from profile writing, to investigative reporting, reported essays, in-depth narrative features and podcasts—and will discover how their voices and experiences fit into a shifting media landscape that is not yet reflective of the nation’s multitude of stories and experiences. |
| ENGLISH 105 | BLACK TV & CHILL | MURILLO, J. | From The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, A Different World, Martin, and Chappelle’s Show to Dear White People, Atlanta, Blackish, and Insecure, the cultural singularities of Black television shows are inescapable, creative phenomena. In profound ways, they entertain us, tether us to one another, and facilitate critical conversations about Black existence in an antiblack world. In this course, we will sit, chill, and dialogue with these shows in order to consider how and why they work in these ways. We will work alongside creative, critical, theoretical texts, academic and literary meditations on Blackness in order to think especially critically about the nature of our enjoyment of Black TV shows and its relation to their critical potential to shape our everyday discourse. |
| ENGLISH 105 | SI SE PUEDE: LATINX FEMINISM IN LITERATURE AND MEDIA | MONTERO, V | In this course we will trace the development of a United States Latinx feminist tradition in literature, film, and television from the early twentieth century to today. Our course, for example, might analyze the performance of early Hollywood starlet Lupe Vélez in Mexican Spitfire alongside the 2017 documentary about activist Dolores Huerta or episodes from shows like One Day at a Time or Pose. We will read early twentieth century authors like María Cristina Mena, seminal Chicana theorists like Gloria Anzaldúa, and contemporary writers like Jeanine Capó Crucet and Gabby Rivera. Some of the guiding questions for this course will be: • What are the stakes of representation? How does equitable representation make us feel and does it actually create or reflect sociopolitical change? What does Latinx feminist history teach us about Afro-Latinidad, LGBTQIA Latinx communities, and economic justice for Latinx people? • What are some of the central debates that have shaped current understandings of the Latinx community? Why Latinx and not Chicana/o, Hispanic, or Latina/o? • What kinds of histories do stories provide? What do we learn by retracing the stories and (her)stories of the Latinx feministas who have come before us and who write for us now? |
| ENGLISH 106 | RAKES, BAWDS, AND BULLIES—URBAN UNDERGROUNDS OF RESTORATION | STEINTRAGER, J. | |
| ENGLISH 106 | CONCEPTS OF VIRTUE | SILVER, V. | This course explores the concept of virtue in a diverse range of materials—religious, philosophical, literary and cinematic—in which virtue and vice turn upon a matter of interpretation, namely, an interpretation of the fundamental order of things, of ‘reality.’ It addresses not so much Plato’s question, ‘what is the nature of the good,’ or Aristotle’s ‘how best to live,’ but instead the problem that precedes them and gives these questions their motive and urgency: why does the good not obtain in the (human) world? There will be ghosts and gods, heroes and villains, although you won’t be able easily to tell them apart. The course begins with David Mamet’s film “The Winslow Boy” and Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw, and continues with the great Hindu epic The Mahabharata and Genesis from the Hebrew bible; the gospel of Matthew from the Christian bible and two classics of Chinese thought, the Analects of Confucius and the Dao de Jing; and if we get that far, a Greek tragedy or a Shakespeare play (tba). The requirements for the course are two papers, ultimately combined into one. |
| ENGLISH 106 | SHAKESPEARE'S MEMORY THEATER | HELFER, R. | The theater has long been understood as a space of memory and, in this course, we’ll explore how and why this is true of Shakespeare’s plays, many of which turn upon memory: memory at once personal and collective, grounded in the past while also shaping the present, constituted by both aesthetic and social imperatives. We’ll consider the haunting and recursive force of memory in Hamlet and Macbeth, before turning to the complex political and psychological representations of memory in The Tempest and The Winter’s Tale. Course requirements include active participation, occasional quizzes and short writing, and two essays, with the option of instead producing one longer research paper. |
| ENGLISH 210 | RACE & EARLY MODERN LIT | GRADY, K. | [Course Code: 23800] Wednesdays 9:00 – 11:50 am in HIB 411] In this seminar, we will explore the topic of race in early modern English literature, focusing especially on Elizabethan and Jacobean drama. We will read key texts like Shakespeare’s Othello and consider lesser-known histories, including England’s initial engagement with transatlantic slavery as well as Elizabeth I’s attempts to deport black people from England. Our discussions will be informed by an expanding range of recent scholarship, which will acquaint us with a variety of new directions in the field and allow to think through questions of methodology. As we pursue our investigations, we will also keep in mind the various ways in which discussions of race in early modern studies were discouraged or impeded in the recent past. In doing so, this seminar will also consider the challenges of pursuing work on race in more “traditional” venues. |
| ENGLISH 210 | INTRO TO CRITICAL METHODS | HENDERSON, A. | [Course Code: 23804] Tuesdays and Thursdays 9:30 – 10:50 am in HIB 411] This course, an introduction to graduate studies in English, has two aims. First, we will discuss practical and professional issues, from how to submit a conference abstract to developing skills in archival research. Second, we will consider how to strike a balance between bringing questions to a literary text and finding questions that could be said to be immanent in the text itself. To this end, we will examine literary texts ranging from Hamlet to poems by Langston Hughes, considering as we do the kinds of criticism they might elicit. The goal will be to help students become more self-conscious regarding their assumptions as readers, more flexible in their use of secondary or “theoretical” paradigms, and more confident in their capacity to generate not just original readings but also original frames for reading. |
| ENGLISH 210 | EXISTENTIAL REALISM | NEWMAN, J. | [Course Code: 23806] Mondays 3:00 – 5:50pm in HIB 246] (same as 22860 Com Lit 210, Sem A; and 28682 Human 270, Sem D) In his 1954 “Epilegomena to Mimesis,” the German-Jewish Romanist and Comparatist, Erich Auerbach (1895-1957), wrote that he could have just as easily described the project of his soon-to-be famous book as “existential realism.” The apparent ease with which he yokes together what might appear to be quite different ways of “interpreting human events” and representing the human “situation” in the world asks us to consider the relation between Existentialism and the analysis of representation in the early to mid-twentieth century, a moment whose social and political turmoil quite resembles our own. Can this relation justifiably be reanimated today as a way of addressing what role the techniques of representation in any medium play in the shaping of our upended material-social and psychic-affective lives? In this course, we will begin with several overviews of both the Realism debates and the contest between theological and ‘atheistic’ Existentialism in the early 20th century, and then consider some of the foundational texts in both canons – Heidegger with Lukacs, for example – in dialogue with one another. We will then read a series of paired sets of texts from both well- and lesser-known corners of the Existentialist and ‘realist’ worlds – among them, Kierkegaard and Auerbach on Abraham and the sacrifice of Isaac; Heidegger, Arendt, and Auerbach on Saint Augustine; Hugo Friedrich and Auerbach on Montaigne. Finally: We will examine the possibility that Existentialism had a poetics (Fredric Jameson’s Ph.D. dissertation on Sartre’s style will be our guide here) and how close reading might be understood as a philosophical and theoretical – and perhaps also political – act. Weekly discussion board posts, annotated bibliography or research paper options for final work. ENROLLMENT in E210 course limited to seven students. Please fill out a seminar request form. |
| ENGLISH 210 | VIOLENCE | RADHAKRISHNAN, R. | [Course Code: 23808] Mondays 2:00 – 4:50pm in HIB 341] My seminar on VIOLENCE will endeavor to critically map the meaning and the significance of Violence as a phenomenon, its becoming and being, its rationale and modalities on multiple terrains: Politics, Phenomenology Ontology, and Epistemology. Here are a few questions that will animate our work together. Is Violence Originary? Is Violence constitutive of the Human? Is there Violence in Nature? Is Nature amoral? What is the relationship among Violence, Humanism, and Anthropocentrism? Under what conditions is Violence defensible? How is the Violence of the freedom fighter different from the organized violence of the State? Why is one person's terrorist someone else's beloved freedom fighter? What is the relationship of Violence to agonism, antagonism, the dialectic? The seminar will connect the phenomenology of Violence to the historical particularities of specific struggles and themes: Colonialism, Racism, Heterosexual normativity, Patriarchy, Settler Colonialism, Capitalism. Keeping in mind the productive tension between the two maxims, “Always historicize,” and “Always theorize,” I hope to cover a broad range of texts whose importance is both symptomatic of their historical location and yet not reducible to their provenance. Here is a tentative list of theorists who will figure in the syllabus: Karl Marx, Georges Sorel, Walter Benjamin, Hannah Arendt, Judith Butler, Adrienne Rich, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Talal Asad, Gil Andjar, Frantz Fanon, Gandhi, Freud, Malcolm X, Afro-Pessimism, the Palestinian INTIFADAH and Zionism. Wherever possible, our readings in theory will be meaningfully interrupted by readings in literature and other texts. |
| ENGLISH 210 | LIBERTINISM & LONG 18C | STEINTRAGER, J. | [Course Code: 23802] Tuesdays 11:00 – 1:50pm in HIB 411] In this course, we will read libertine writings from the Restoration era until the end of the eighteenth century, including the poetry of John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, the novels of John Cleland and the Marquis de Sade, and numerous anonymous works of erotic, radical, and scurrilous fiction. Libertinism is complex historical phenomenon that intersects with numerous other discourses: political, medical, and economic, to name a few. We will pay particular attention to its evolving intersections with materialist philosophy and epistemology. |
| ENGLISH 398 | RHET/TCHNG OF COMP | QUEEN, B. | [Course Code: 23975] Mondays 2:00 – 4:50pm in ALP 2600] Readings, lectures, and internship designed to prepare graduate students to teach composition. Formal instruction in rhetoric and practical work in teaching methods and grading. |