| Course | Title | Instructor | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
| ENGLISH 9 | SHAKESPEARE | HELFER, R. | Love and friendship, separation and reunion, rivalry and jealousy, buffoonery and bullying, and race and gender: these are among the themes addressed in this designed-online Shakespeare course. Explore Shakespeare’s poetic gifts, theatrical imagination, and global references and concerns alongside his inquiry into human relationships and the human condition. You will be guided by an experienced team of faculty from UCI’s English department. Professionally-recorded online lectures are illustrated with clips from the plays and voice overs by UCI actors. Texts include Romeo and Juliet, Twelfth Night, and Othello. Students will complete three multi-modal projects as well as lecture and reading quizzes and peer evaluation of creative assignments. |
| ENGLISH 10 | DETECTIVE FICTION | MARTIN, T. | In this course, we’ll survey the history of detective fiction from its origins in the nineteenth century to its continued cultural presence in the twenty-first. Our study of this 150-year timespan will be motivated by a deceptively simple question: why has detective fiction been so popular for so long? Reading widely across the genre—from early tales of deduction to hardboiled novels of urban life to more recent reassessments of the genre’s relation to gender and race—we’ll trace how detective fiction has evolved alongside changing conceptions of law and order, policing and punishment, and justice and equality. The course has two main learning objectives. First, you will learn the basic history of the literary character of the detective. Second, you’ll learn to see detective stories not just as stories about catching criminals, but as stories about how our very ideas of crime and criminality get constructed in the first place. |
| 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 Peters, 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 Peters); Baltimore, Ohio, and Pennsylvania before and after the Civil War in the nineteenth century (Watkins 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 16 | CRAFT OF POETRY | HANSON, D. | This class is a survey of contemporary American poetry and poetry translated into English. We will read and listen to a variety of poets covering a wide range of topic, identity, and form, focusing on how poetry uses surprise, disturbance, and delight to affect the reader. We’ll use these readings as a basis to discuss what poetry is and how it achieves a connection with the reader and communication of a story or subject. We will write a few poems in response to writing exercises, and write one short analytical paper. No previous writing or literature experience required. |
| ENGLISH 17 | CRAFT OF FICTION | WATKINS, C. | A course on the reading and writing of literary fiction, with an emphasis on short stories. Creative writing required. |
| ENGLISH 100 | INTRO TO LIT 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. ASSIGNMENTS: You are expected to attend and participate in all class meetings, to take one midterm and one final, and to complete two reading quizzes. |
| ENGLISH 100 | INTRO TO LIT THEORY | HARRIES, M. | This iteration of E100 will focus on theories of the autonomy of art – that is, the argument that art, including literature, forms a separate sphere, apart from the spheres of ethics, politics, economics, etc. The idea of the separateness of art has a distinct history, and we will trace important moments in this history, beginning with the German philosopher Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Judgment, first published in 1790. We will trace arguments in this tradition to the present, with particular attention to materialist and Marxist arguments against, and also in (modified) support of, the idea of aesthetic autonomy. Questions will include: why did the idea of a separate aesthetic sphere arise when it did? Is the separating out of the aesthetic sphere a maneuver of bourgeois ideology? What is the relationship between the artwork and the commodity? What happens to art with the development of technologically mediated forms of mass culture? Other readings will include (sometimes in selections): Friedrich Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man (1794) Karl Marx, from The German Ideology (1846) Viktor Shklovsky, “Art as Technique” (1917) Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Mechanical Reproducibility: Second Version” (1935-36) Herbert Marcuse, “The Affirmative Character of Culture” (1937) Clement Greenberg, “Avant-Garde and Kitsch” (1939) Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception,” from Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944) Fred Moten, “Knowledge of Freedom” (2004) Rei Terada, from Looking Awry (2009) Sianne Ngai, from Theory of the Gimmick (2020) Written work will include weekly online postings, in-class writing, and two essays. There may be a midterm and/or final exam. A reminder: English majors may take E100 more than once for credit. |
| ENGLISH 101W | POETRY 1945-1989 | IZENBERG, O. | |
| ENGLISH 101W | HISTRY, MEMRY, LOSS | MORGAN, C. | |
| ENGLISH 101W | TRANSCENDENTALISM | JACKSON, V. | In the middle of the nineteenth century (almost two hundred years ago), some American writers became Transcendentalists. Wikipedia says that Transcendentalists were idealists who "shared a core belief in the goodness of people and nature." That's not exactly true. Transcendentalism emerged from Margaret Fuller's feminist reaction to Romantic philosophy and it took many different forms. In this class, we will study some of those forms: Fuller's original ideas about transcendental "electricity," Frederick Douglass's ideas about the unjust relationship between power and knowledge, Walt Whitman's queer idea of a utopian collective united by a single embodied idea, Henry David Thoreau's experiment in living off the social grid, and Ralph Waldo Emerson's idea that "the currents of the universe circulate through me." These writers may seem strange to us now, but together they established the foundation of American literature. |
| ENGLISH 102A | ERLYMOD RACE&RELIGN | 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, George Peele, Philip Sidney, 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 quizzes, reading responses, a short paper, and a final exam. |
| 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 Mandeville’s 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 1776) 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, all increasingly dictated by capitalism and its new definitions of what counts as virtue. We’ll meet saintly sex workers and determined virgins, liars and truthtellers, thieves and preachers, rakes and pilgrims, ruling-class coquettes and one so-called “royal slave.” The big picture? A rambunctious human scene brimming with 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 Pope’s witty, wicked take on female vanity in The Rape of the Lock with Pamela, Richardson’s controversial novel of “virtue rewarded.” Requirements: Midterm/essay; 5-page final essay; quarter-long writing project; participation in art and drama activities. |
| ENGLISH 102C | VICTORIAN VISION | HENDERSON, A. | 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, and Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, along with poems by Tennyson, Browning, Swinburne, and Rossetti. The writing for the course will include a midterm, a final, and several short exercises. |
| ENGLISH 102D | MODERNISM | SZALAY, M. | This course will examine early 20th-century Anglo-American fiction alongside poetry, painting, and film from the same period. We will focus on how this generation of “modernist” writers experimented with and pushed the boundaries of inherited literary forms while responding to tumultuous social changes, from Jim Crow and the First World War to the Great Depression. Our readings will likely include some combination of: Henry James, “The Beast in the Jungle”; short stories by Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, and Richard Wright; Jean Toomer’s Cane; Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway; Nella Larsen's Passing; and Nathanael West’s The Day of the Locust. |
| ENGLISH 105 | AFRICAN AMERICN LIT | CHANDLER, N. | |
| ENGLISH 105 | ASIAN AMERICAN LITERATURE AND FILM | JEON, J. | A survey of key issues and debates in Asian/American studies using literary and filmic texts as sites for discursive exploration. This course considers Asian/America in an expansive transnational sense, encompassing not just immigrant subjectivities in a US framework but also broader sites of entanglement of and engagement between the Asias and the Americas. |
| ENGLISH 105 | LATINX RACIAL NATIONS | TRIGOS, M. | This course will look at different materials from the 20th century to the present in order to explore what the concept of nation (broadly conceived) does in and for Latinx literatures and cultures. We will study how Latinx authors have imagined nations—politically established ones like the U.S. and Guatemala, for example, as well as proposed ones, like Aztlán, and diasporic, community-based ones, like Nuyorico. We will also consider how the concept of the modern nation itself is embedded in violent processes (colonialism, imperialism, racialization, etc.) that structure what we come to understand as “national identities.” Writers may include Jovita González, Salomón de la Selva, Ginetta Candelario, Maya Chinchilla, Silvia Moreno-García, and Veronica Chambers. |
| ENGLISH 105 | MIXED RACE LIT | GRADY, K. | |
| ENGLISH 106 | END TIMES? | HELFER, R. | Is this The End? In this course, we’ll take a past-to-present journey through writing that explores this perennial question, considering the relationship between art and apocalypse from a wide range of perspectives: historical, social, political, rhetorical, psychological, religious, ecological, as well as aesthetic. Our course will take us from St. John to St. John Mandel, from classical to contemporary writing about how the ever-‘present moment’ speaks to both the future and the past: how the sense of an ending shapes these writers’ views of time – both the ‘here and now’ and the ‘hereafter’, as broadly conceived – and how such endings inspire them to imagine beginning again in a new world and new ways of being in it, as well as the role of art in this renewal. Course requirements include regular attendance and active class participation, weekly reading quizzes, frequent short writing assignments, and a final research paper of approximately 12-15 pages. |
| ENGLISH 106 | BLDWN,MORISN,WIDEMN | MORGAN, C. | |
| ENGLISH 106 | THE VICTORIAN NOVEL | BARTLETT, J. | There were over 7,000 novels published in England during the Victorian period; we’ll read the top three. Some of you will be familiar with Great Expectations, Jane Eyre, and Middlemarch, so we are going to break them up in a different way. Assisted by readings in philosophies of practical reason and intentionality, we will examine the qualities that distinguish an “action” in the Victorian novel from any old thing that happens. In order to avoid taking action as an unexplained primitive, we will motivate it through its grounds—we will think of the action itself as expressive of its reasons for being an action. Understanding actions as the clearest guide to the calculative use they express means subordinating mental events like plans, intentions, and beliefs—in short, the bedrock psychology of novel characterization—to the actions that characters (and novelists) perform. We will learn how the desirability of any particular action can be found embedded in the descriptions possible of that action, and how to locate the spectrum of intentional actions that a novel is considering in the emergence of actions and their logical strings. Methodologically, we will learn how to imbricate traditional theories of the novel with philosophies of practical reasoning, instrumentalism, and rational choice, whose interest in the minutiae of everyday language and practices has much to say to the structure of nineteenth-century realist fiction. I will assume no prior familiarity with philosophy, or theories of action and character in the novel, and encourage all students interested in the period or narrative theory to enroll. Assignments: Students are expected to write brief responses to course readings, to give one oral presentation followed by some discussion facilitation, and to submit written work for seminar or pro-seminar credit. |
| ENGLISH 205 | GOTHIC THEOLOGY | LEWIS, J. | ENROLLMENT IS RESTRICTED, FOR MASTER OF ENGLISH STUDENTS ONLY COURSE CODE: 23800, Mondays 6:00-8:50pm at HIB 341 Gothic fiction is (in)famous for chills and thrills, for claustrophobia and camp. This seminar will take a different tack. The idea we’ll explore is that this notoriously irreverent form grew out of the theological conflicts and crises of the 18th-century Enlightenment to become one of the most important—or at least interesting—things that happened to religious experience in secular modernity. Think about it: gothic fiction usually unfolds in evacuated or ruined sacred spaces (monasteries, convents, chapels). It’s populated by monks, nuns, demons, and saints, and draws on the inverted imageries and rituals of Christian sacrament, copying its semiotic structure from the most lurid books of the Judeo-Christian Bible, and its generic name from an architectural form associated with the Roman Catholic cathedrals of medieval times. The hypothesis here is that the gothic novel rose out of a time of religious crisis and became a valuable way of both confronting, displacing, and potentially resolving that crisis. We’ll begin to test that hypothesis with some 17th-century writing about witchcraft, moving from there to three eighteenth-century pioneers of gothic literary form—Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto, Matthew Lewis’s The Monk, and Ann Radcliffe’s The Italian. Then we’ll consider two 19th-century vampire narratives that held up distorted mirrors to Anglican piety: Sheridan LeFanu’s Carmilla and Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Our 20th-century texts will be Toni Morrison’s Beloved (the Black church ) and Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House (New Age spirituality). A recurrent focal point will be the figure of the female medium as a focus of religious ambivalence. |
| ENGLISH 205 | CHAUCER | ALLEN, E. | ENROLLMENT IS RESTRICTED, FOR MASTER OF ENGLISH STUDENTS ONLY COURSE CODE: 23802, Tuesdays 6:00-8:50pm at HIB 341 Late fourteenth-century England saw great social turmoil. Plague wiped out a third of the population; peasants and artisans rose against aristocracy; the King struggled to retain authority and was eventually deposed; the Church was divided against itself. Out of this social unrest comes Chaucer's Canterbury Tales—a new kind of poetry for a rapidly changing audience. Thirty pilgrims tell stories to pass the time en route to Canterbury Cathedral, and along the way they encounter the problems raised and satisfactions achieved in forming a socially various community. The work creates a lively microcosm of the turbulent late medieval world, complete with a cook so drunk he falls off his horse and a parson so virtuous he won't tell a story. We will read many of the Canterbury Tales, from the Knight’s Tale to the Retraction. We will concentrate on the way in which individuals play out and challenge social stereotypes based on status, gender, and authority: How does the Canterbury pilgrimage highlight medieval status identities? To what extent do the pilgrims reaffirm gender norms? To what extent can narrative poetry call for social or political change? The poem will turn our attention to problems of narration and poetic form as well, placing social questions within complex and problematic frames. Which pilgrims tell which types of tale? To what extent does poetic form echo or revise social expectations? How do pilgrims’ perspectives inform or deform their storytelling methods? When does narrative complexity express the search for social justice—or obstruct it? Readings are in Middle English, but no prior experience of the language is expected or required. All students will do brief translation and language exercises, and will write a close-reading paper (3-4 pp.), a critical analysis paper (3-5 pp.) and a longer, lightly researched essay (7-10 pp). |
| ENGLISH 206 | RESEARCH & WRITING | IZENBERG, O. | ENROLLMENT IS RESTRICTED, FOR MASTER OF ENGLISH STUDENTS ONLY TIME & PLACE: TBA |
| ENGLISH 210 | MATH&REPRESENTATION | HENDERSON, A. | COURSE CODE:23842, Tuesdays 11:00-1:50pm at HIB 341 In this course we will examine the work of British writers, artists, and mathematicians of the nineteenth century, tracking their common concern with the attenuation of reference. We will begin with early Romantic poets and geometers, examining the fusion of idea and representation in the Coleridgean symbol and the geometric figure. The untenability of this fusion became more apparent with the advent of non-Euclidean geometry, and we will explore the construction of alternative models of symbolism in its wake, reading George Boole and William Kingdon Clifford alongside Abbott’s Flatland and Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass. Finally, we will look at the ways mathematical physicists and fin-de-siècle aesthetes transformed representation by reconceiving matter itself. Seminar students will write a 25-page paper; pro-seminar students will do a 10-page archival project. Students will have the option of exploring the relation of mathematical and literary concepts in the historical period of their choice. |
| ENGLISH 210 | INTRO TO METHODS | SZALAY, M. | (FOR FIRST YEAR PH.D. STUDENTS ONLY) COURSE CODE: 23840, Thursdays 2:00- 4:50pm at HIB 341 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 | PASTORL&CIVIL WAR | SILVER, V. | COURSE CODE:23844, Fridays 9:00-11:50am at HIB 341 This is ultimately a course in the politics of nature and second nature, focusing on what is in early modern studies a convention of great interest, the pastoral, especially in its connection with Hesiod’s myth of a Golden Age, which Charles I in his court masques played as an ideological trump card. We will start with a modern myth of the state of nature and its grounds, Freud’s Totem and Taboo (Freud being a remarkable analyst of western culture), and along the way we will read some familiar Freudian essays (“Instincts and their Vicissitudes,” “On Narcissism,” “Mourning and Melancholia”) as a way into the peculiar motives behind English pastoral in this period. We will look briefly at pastoral’s Virgilian foundations and Ben Jonson’s politic use of them in his masque, The Golden Age Restor’d. We will then turn to James I, Robert Filmer and Thomas Hobbes on the natural state of humankind and Shakespeare’s The Tempest, with the latter framed by selected essays of that consummate skeptic, Michel de Montaigne (whom Shakespeare quotes). From there, we will address the development of 17th-century pastoral poetry and its inflection by the political events leading up to and away from the English civil war, reading Jonson and Herrick, Lovelace and Marvell, possibly Milton, possibly Denham, Dryden, Behn, Rochester and Swift. Requirements: a 15-page takehome exam for those not wishing to write a longer seminar paper. |
| ENGLISH 210 | NOVEL,PRISON,POLICE | MARTIN, T. | COURSE CODE:23846, Fridays 2:00-4:50pm at HIB 341 This course will investigate how the American novel grappled with the changing politics of policing and imprisonment in the postwar U.S. We’ll start with the question of why the novel form itself might have a unique relation to social processes of surveillance, discipline, and control. From there, we’ll pursue a series of more historically specific questions about criminalization, racialization, policing, and fiction. How has literature reckoned with the racialized, gendered, and classed meanings of crime? How did novels respond to the “tough-on-crime” policies of the postwar era? And what did novelists imagine they were doing when they chose to write about cops and criminals during a period of unprecedented carceral expansion? Putting important works of fiction in conversation with interdisciplinary scholarship on police and prisons, we will work to chart how American literature slowly and unevenly awakened to the crisis of mass incarceration that reshaped American society in the second half of the twentieth century. Authors studied will include Richard Wright, Chester Himes, Dorothy Hughes, Toni Cade Bambara, Rachel Kushner, and others. |
| ENGLISH 299 | DISSERTATN RESEARCH | ALLEN, E. | |
| ENGLISH 398 | RHET/TCHNG OF COMP | QUEEN, B. | COURSE CODE: 23975, Mondays 2:00-4:50pm at ALP 2100 |
| ENGLISH 399 | UNIVERSITY TEACHING | LEE, J.W. | |
| ENGLISH 399 | UNIVERSITY TEACHING | ALLEN, E. |