| Course | Title | Instructor | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
| ENGLISH 8 | MULTICULTURAL AMERICAN LITERATURE | RADHAKRISHNAN, R. | What does the term “multicultural” mean in general, as well as in relationship to the nation state known as the USA? What is the relationship of the Many to the One? How do the nation state and the discourse of nationalism contain and assimilate the diverse and heterogeneous flows of multicultural imaginings? Where indeed does culture come from, and what is its relationship to Politics, Economics, Sociology, Law, Citizenship, Immigration and Naturalization, Citizen-Being, Human-Being and Being at large? Is Culture a common ground, or the arena of contestation among the many demographic constituencies that constitute the American body politic? Is culture ethnic, gendered, sexual, class specific, regional, local, global, nation centric, trans-national, diasporic, cosmopolitan? Is “multicultural” a euphemistic way of not talking about Racism, Sexism, Homophobia, and a whole range of phobias and biases, implicit as well as explicit? Does multiculturalism result in coalition formations that transcend identity politics as well as the politics of representation? We will explore these fraught questions, with specific reference to the history of the United States, by way of literature, philosophy, critical theory, critical race theory, feminisms, theories of gender and sexuality, African-American Thought, “minority” and hyphenated formations, political science, and sociology. Here are a few potential authors: Ralph Ellison, Richard Wright, Du Bois, Langston Hughes, Toni Morrison, Maxine Hong Kingston, Jhumpa Lahiri, Gloria Anzaldua, Adrienne Rich, Sandra Cisneros, Carlos Bulosan, John Okada, Chang Rae-Lee, and others. Texts will be made available as PDFs in your Canvas files. Expectations and Requirements: Regular attendance and participation. I Short and 1 Long Essay LOOKING FORWARD TO OUR WORK TOGETHER. |
| ENGLISH 10 | GLOBAL FICTIONS | JEON, J. | |
| ENGLISH 15 | NARRATIVE MIDDLES | BARTLETT, J. | In this course, we will consider an oft-neglected aspect of narrative structure: the middle. Literary critics are frequently drawn to beginnings and endings, in part because their content and form is so inextricably linked. For example: the Bible begins, “In the beginning was the Word,” a sentence that demonstrates its premise: “In” we go, but once we get to the “the beginning,” we find it is already behind us—it already “was”—and (in case we missed the fact) it was made up of the words we had just read. Likewise, the end of the Bible describes the end of the world: once those words have gone, there is nothing left. The mythic power of beginnings and endings draws Odysseus home, solves mysteries, reunites lovers, and gives villains their comeuppance. Beginnings and endings satisfy our hunger for punishment and reward, but while their drama is inescapable, their ontological status isn’t: we know that stories begin and end wherever we want them to, and our desire to make them true and foundational often deprives us of the pleasures of uncertainty, play, flexibility, open-mindedness, and curiosity that make for the best adventures, and the widest and most inclusive understanding of our life story, with all the characters and influences that shape it. In short, middles never get the attention they deserve: they are aligned with the ordinary, the unheroic, the bewildering, messy, repetitive, and the pointless when they should be seen as the liberating, literally central node of development, transition, rupture, intersection, digression, error, rupture, crossing, wandering, and deviation that makes all narrative go. These qualities and their effects are the subject of this course. |
| ENGLISH 15 | PULP FICTION | MARTIN, T. | In the early twentieth century, American readers did much of their fiction reading in what were called “pulp” magazines—so named for the low-quality pulpwood paper they were printed on. Today, the phrase “pulp fiction” continues to be used to describe works of literature and film presumed to be nothing more than cheap entertainment. In this course, we’ll use the seemingly cheap thrills of pulp fiction as an opportunity to grapple with some more serious questions about aesthetic quality, literary history, and the politics of genre. What makes something “literary”? How do we distinguish between genre fiction and literary fiction? And how did certain popular genres manage to transform themselves from mass-produced commodities into emblems of cultivated taste? To answer these questions, we’ll trace the development of two of the most important genres of the pulp era—detective fiction and science fiction—from their origins in pulp magazines to their influence on major novelists. Along the way, we’ll think a fair bit about how generic conventions evolve and how standards of literary value change. |
| ENGLISH 16 | CRAFT OF POETRY | STAFF | |
| ENGLISH 17 | CRAFT OF FICTION | WATKINS, C. | |
| 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. |
| ENGLISH 101W | WOMEN'S WORLD | KING, L | |
| ENGLISH 101W | MCHINE LRNG STORIES | HELFER, R. | What does memory mean in a world in which we've outsourced so 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 extensions? 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 in the context of contemporary representations of art-as-artificial memory and literature as ‘machine learning’: Richard Power’s Galatea 2.2, Louisa Hall’s Speak, Liz Moore’s The Unseen World, and Ishiguro's Klara and the Sun. Course requirements include quizzes and short writing, two essays and one revision. |
| ENGLISH 101W | WHAT IS A PERSON? | IZENBERG, O. | This course is devoted to understanding the history and meaning of personhood—a concept that undergirds some of the most urgent debates of our time. The term “person” is the meeting place between fact and value; it connects claims about what human beings are—are we sentient beings? rational beings? relational beings?— to claims about what human beings are worth. To designate a class of beings as persons grants value to the members of that class—perhaps the highest value, in the form of rights, citizenship, or moral standing more generally—on the grounds that they possess some fundamental quality that other beings do not. We will study the emergence of ideas of personhood in philosophy, law, and literature. This intellectual history of the term will also lay the groundwork for engaging with modern and contemporary arguments about personhood in a number of highly contested domains of law, culture and society. The texts at the center of the course present students with two critical questions: How and why have societies denied personhood to human beings? Why or how should societies grant personhood to other kinds of beings? Along the way, we will encounter not just different arguments about personhood, but a wide range of disciplinary approaches to argument and knowledge. We will study historical documents surrounding the 1781 massacre of African slaves aboard the British ship Zong alongside the recasting of that event in M. NourbeSe Philip’s book-length poem Zong ; we will consider empirical information about animal minds alongside the fictional philosophical lectures of J.M.. Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello; we will learn how to track the reasoning that motivates legal decisions about “corporate personhood” and discuss how to understand the real-world implications of the science-fictional imaginings about artificial intelligence in relation to the fiction of Richard Powers. |
| ENGLISH 102A | MEDIEVAL RACE & GENDER | WAY, J | Studies of works representative of Medieval and Renaissance literature in English, with attention to literary history, treating at a minimum more than one author and more than one genre. |
| ENGLISH 102B | AGE OF SENSIBILITY | GROSS, D. | Defying chronology, we return to the Age of Sensibility as "emotion studies" accelerate across the disciplines. Like David Hume, we see how emotion is a matter of status (not the status of matter); like William Collins, we find fear in our creepy world (not just in our brains), and like Mary Wollstonecraft, we discover how sensibility that appear naturally tied to gender in fact has a sinister history. Finally, with Belinda Royall Sutton on what we now call "the case for reparations," we confront the terrors and the aspirations of slavery that still shape our world today. In this course we survey key works of 18th-century fiction, poetry, psychology, law, and social thought, to address these issues and others, learning along the way how critical work in the present proceeds by way of literary history. The format for the class includes lecture, collaborative work, peer review, and discussion. There are 5 short writing assignments, and one longer project – either argumentative or creative – that goes through a careful drafting and revision process. All materials will be collected via midterm and final Canvas LMS portfolios, which are worth 30% and 60% of your final grade, respectively. The other 10% is participation. |
| ENGLISH 102c | AGE OF REVOLUTION | STAFF | |
| ENGLISH 102C | CULTURE OF RMNTCSM | HENDERSON, A. | This class will focus on early-nineteenth-century British literature, particularly the poetry of Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Keats, but we will also read some novels (Sense and Sensibility, Frankenstein, and Wuthering Heights) and aesthetic treatises (Wordsworth on poetry and Burke on the sublime). Throughout, we will consider how all the arts of the period reflect an investment in individuality, emotional life, and a new conception of nature. |
| ENGLISH 102D | FICTION BETWEEN MEDIA | SZALAY, M. | This course will examine 20th-century Anglo-American fiction as it evolved alongside film and, to a lesser extent, the graphic novel. We will read and watch film adaptations of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, Nella Larsen's Passing, Virginia Woolf's Orlando, and Jean Rhys' The Wide Sargasso Sea. These case studies will help us see what novels and films have learned from each other over the last 100 or so years and how individual films and novels have explored the abilities and limits of their respective mediums. We will also take up looser adaptations and longer inter-textual conversations--like those between Allison Bechdel's graphic novel Fun Home on the one hand and James Joyce's Ulysses and Homer's Odyssey, from which we will read sections, on the other. |
| ENGLISH 103 | 20TH CENTURY LITERATURE & RACE | CHANDLER, N. | |
| ENGLISH 105 | SLAVE NARRATIVES | BASU, S. | In this course we shall consider both the political and aesthetic dimensions of the genre of the slave narrative as well as theorize its position within long nineteenth century print economics. We shall think of the ways in which the slave narrative responds to its allied genres, the autobiography, the sentimental novel, and the gothic novel. Additionally, we shall explore the literary and cultural afterlives of the slave narrative: the neo-slave narrative, films and documentaries representing slavery, and the writings of enslaved writers recovered and authenticated in the 20th and 21st centuries. We will read works by Hannah Crafts, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, Octavia Butler, Sherley Williams, and Colson Whitehead and screen parts of A Son of Africa: The Slave Narrative of Olaudah Equiano (2004), Amistad(1997), and The African Americans: Many Rivers To Cross (2013). |
| ENGLISH 105 | LATINX EXPERIENCE | TOBAR, H. | A survey of writing about the Latino experience, as tackled by authors based in the United States of America, from the mid twentieth century to the present. We will consider how these writers have examined issues of ethnic identity, discrimination, resistance, and creative expression in Latinx communities, making use of Spanish, Spanglish, barrio slang, and, of course, English. Students will produce their own work of cultural reportage or criticism, and will submit this work as a final project. They will work on this project in several stages throughout the quarter, producing a 2,000-word piece by finals’ week. |
| ENGLISH 105 | DEMOCRACY & MINORITY LITERATURE | RADHAKRISHNAN, R. | Is democracy the best game in town? Why and why not? Is it both the symptom and cure of our times? What is the relationship between popular sovereignty and democracy, between citizen rights and democracy? How are liberalism, the rule of the law, and democracy triangulated? Is democracy thinkable without the normativity of the nation state? What can we say about the linkages between democracy and identity politics, between democracy and the politics of representation, between democracy and multiculturalism, between democracy and the politics of recognition? How does democracy mediate between the need for distributive justice and the clamor for difference and heterogeneity? What are the different traditions of democracy and how do they mark and define “the political?” How is democratic hegemony different from other forms of control and organization? How do modernity and the democratic form of government constitute each other? How does democracy govern the relationship between East and West, between the so-called “First and Third” worlds; and how does it bear the symptomatic burden of a world that is structured in dominance? How does democracy name the human being as citizen and unpack her in terms of race, class, gender, and sexuality? Is democracy an ideology or is it a pure and neutral procedure? How do capitalism and democracy constitute each other? Most significantly, is democracy possible without an Us-Them divide, or a majority-minority divide? What is the tacit relationship among democracy, violence, and terror? These are a few of the questions (a few, I can hear the throaty agonized sigh) that we will be raising in this course by way of readings in political theory, philosophy, literature, sociology, critical race theory, postcoloniality, African-American Theory, Feminist theories and theories of gender and sexuality. Readings will be made available as pdfs in your Canvas files. Expectations and requirements: Regular attendance, and democratic participation. The class, depending on the size, will be a combination of lecture and freewheeling discussion. Likely assignments: 1short and 1long paper. LOOKING FORWARD TO SOME TOUGH COLLECTIVE THINKING. |
| ENGLISH 105 | INDIGENOUS LIT | LAZO, R. | |
| ENGLISH 106 | ARCHIVE&REMEMBRANCE | MONTERO ROMAN, V. | In her memoir, In the Dreamhouse, Carmen Maria Machado places her work in conversation with scholarship on archival erasure. She says, “what is placed in or left out of the archive is a political act, dictated by the archivist and the political context in which she lives.” Archival silences, she explains, illustrate the difficult truth that “sometimes stories are destroyed, and sometimes they are never uttered in the first place; either way something very large is irrevocably missing from our collective histories.” In this senior seminar we will read women authors whose work, like Machado’s, considers the role of narrative in the creation of national and personal history. In particular, the authors we read will explore the impact that acts of historical remembrance and erasure have on conceptualizations of Latinidad in the United States. In class, our conversations might consider whether intellectual or imaginative labor can address archival erasure. Alternatively, we might analyze how Latinas use literature to revise conceptualizations of gendered nationalism, of mestizaje, and of Afro-Latinidad. These discussions will help us reflect on whether we think acts of personal or cultural remembrance can alter the construction of racial and ethnic categories. We are likely to read scholarship by Maylei Blackwell, Emma Pérez, and Yomaira Figueroa and literature by authors like María Cristina Mena, Valeria Luiselli, and Ariana Brown. Our thematic focus on archives and memory will correspond to our course assignments. Throughout class you will develop your writing skills, but you will also begin to learn how to do archival or historical research of your own. |
| ENGLISH 106 | LOVE STORIES? | HELFER, R. | When are love stories not exactly love stories? Or, put another way, when are love stories about more than they seem to be? That’s the question we’ll be asking in this course as we read tales of love and marriage, friendship and family, human and divine devotion, that challenge, invert, and even up-end our sense of what constitutes a love story. These narratives, romantic and platonic, rewrite the language of love in order to explore a range of subjects and issues – literary, social, cultural, historical, political – in symbolic and even allegorical terms. Our reading will take us from the distant past to the present day, from Plato’s Symposium to Shteyngart’s Super Sad True Love Story. Course requirements include quizzes and short writing, a research paper, and a final exam. |
| ENGLISH 106 | TONI MORRISON | MORGAN, C. | This seminar offers a close look at Toni Morrison’s oeuvre to study the function of language in her work. In both her fiction and nonfiction writing, Morrison reflected extensively on the limits and possibilities of language. With a keen eye for the ways that language shapes and is shaped by individual and collective experience, students in this seminar will work to form a cohesive theory of language from Morrison’s comprehensive body of work. Longer readings will include two to three novels, and be interspersed with shorter texts drawn from Morrison’s essays, interviews, and writing by her contemporaries. Students can expect to complete weekly reflection-oriented assignments, a non-essay-based mid-term assignment, and a longer, traditional, argumentative essay for their final assignment. |
| ENGLISH 199 | INDEPENDENT STUDY | STAFF | To be taken only when the materials to be studied lie outside the normal run of departmental offerings, and when the student will have no formal chance to pursue the subject. Research paper required. |
| ENGLISH 205 | ARTHURIAN ROMANCE | ALLEN, E | (FOR MASTER OF ENGLISH STUDENTS ONLY) Course Code: 23799, Mondays 6:00pm-8:50pm Arthurian literature has exerted an enduring fascination for audiences and readers for nearly 1500 years. This course traces King Arthur from his beginnings as a Welsh folk hero to his demise as the tragic betrayed King of Camelot; and extending to Victorian poems, the recent novel The Buried Giant, and Monty Python. King Arthur’s court depicts a wide range of political and social relationships—between men and women, kings and lords, knights and peasants. It provides an arena for exploring the basis of political authority and the ethics of erotic love; for understanding how personal needs create political stability, but also undermine it; for recognizing how women are excluded from rule, but still play crucial roles in society. In the world of magic so often encountered by Arthur and his court, giants and dwarves and fairies suggest social forces, and adventures help knights confront and solve social problems. And the Arthurian court endures: when King Arthur is struck down in battle and taken to Avalon, he is called “the once and future king.” We will explore his continuing life in literature and his relevance to politics and social life even today. We will compare and discuss changes in the cultural ideals represented by shared characters who reappear, to different effect, across many works for many kinds of readers. |
| ENGLISH 205 | THE AMERICAN GOTHIC | BASU, S. | (FOR MASTER OF ENGLISH STUDENTS ONLY) Course Code: 23802, Wednesdays 6:00pm-8:50pm This course will explore American Gothic literatures from the revolutionary era to the postbellum decade. We will think of the ways in which the New World modifies and broadens the gothic’s sociohistorical framings and attend specifically to the gothic’s relationship with race, empire, and the law. Besides reading works of fiction, we shall also examine how gothic conceits permeated political and economic thought in the long nineteenth century. Readings shall include works by Charles Brockden Brown, Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, Harriet Jacobs, and Pauline Hopkins among others. |
| ENGLISH 210 | VICTORIAN VISION | HENDERSON, A. | Course Code: 23810, Tuesdays and Thursdays 9:30am-10:50am In this course we will trace the nineteenth-century preoccupation with seeing and vision, focusing on poems and novels that are meditations on the relation of literature to painting and/or photography. Readings will include De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass, and Collins’ The Woman in White, along with poems by Tennyson, Browning, Swinburne, and Rossetti. |
| ENGLISH 210 | MEDIATING BLACKNESS | MORGAN, C. | Course Code: 23812, Thursdays 11:00am-1:50pm This course considers how African American writers have variously represented the self as a subject in mediation. Following protagonists as they react to, rebuke, and otherwise navigate the world around them, students will explore how Blackness has been theorized throughout the African American literary tradition as a site of relationality. Among our guiding questions will be those that ask: what kinds of analytic frames do African American texts offer us for thinking through intersectional matters of race, gender, sexuality, and class? What does it mean to pursue existential truths through aesthetic experiences? How do different media limit or make possible new articulations of selfhood? |
| ENGLISH 210 | INTRO TO METHODS | SZALAY, M. | (FOR FIRST YEAR PH.D. STUDENTS ONLY) Course Code: 23804, Tuesdays 2:00pm-4:50pm This course, exclusively for and required of all first-year Ph.D. students, will touch upon a number of interpretive traditions within literary criticism with the aim of helping students become more self-conscious regarding their own critical methods. It will also discuss practical and professional matters, such as course selection and application to conferences. |
| ENGLISH 210 | LIT&CLIMATE CHANGE | MARTIN, T. | Course Code: 23806, Fridays 9:00am-11:50am In this course, we’ll study how both literature and literary criticism have responded to the crisis of anthropogenic climate change. As many scholars have pointed out, climate change poses significant representational challenges to the novel form. How do you tell a story about something as large-scale, long-term, and slow-moving as the climate crisis? We’ll read a series of recent novels to see how fiction writers have tried to answer that question. At the same time, we will consider the ways that climate change has spurred literary critics to try to reimagine what it is that literary analysis does. Introducing you to the varieties of the contemporary climate novel as well as to new scholarly work in the fields of ecocriticism, the environmental humanities, and the energy humanities, this course will ultimately be an opportunity to think about the relation between literary form, lived experience, capitalism, and climate. Surveying the genres of fiction and the genres of scholarship that have emerged in the wake of the climate crisis, we will ask ourselves and each other what it means to read and to write in the face of ecological calamity. |
| ENGLISH 299 | DISSERTATN RESEARCH | ALLEN, E. | |
| ENGLISH 398 | RHET/TCHNG OF COMP | COLLINS, R. | |
| ENGLISH 399 | UNIVERSITY TEACHING | STAFF | Course Code: 23984 |