| Course | Title | Instructor | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
| ENGLISH 10 | ALTERNATIVE REALITIES | CASTILLO, L. | This class is a survey of contemporary speculative fiction. We will read novels and short stories that imagine alternative realities as a way of navigating human social and ecological relationships. Readings will include works by authors such as Octavia Butler, George Orwell, and Ted Chiang. We will ask questions about the nature of power, about our relationship to change and emergence, and about the role of narrative in the creation of new realities. Students will have the choice of writing three short analytical papers or two short analytical papers and a speculative fiction of their own. |
| ENGLISH 10 | EATING IN LITERATURE | SPEER, M. | How many different ideas can food represent? From the “body of Christ” to indicators of class and wealth tied to gender, what and how we eat means deeply in every culture. Rather than focusing on a single century’s writing or even on a single argument about the meaning of food in literature, this course will focus on wide-ranging texts with a concentration on depictions of eating, cooking, enjoying, starving. Each week will be a mini-unit all its own focused on a single text. Students will write responses to readings and answer exam questions. |
| ENGLISH 15 | HISTORY,MEMORY,LOSS | MORGAN, C. | |
| ENGLISH 15 | LITERARY/CRITICAL MANIFESTOS | RADHAKRISHNAN, R. | This course will take the form of a selective historical-chronological appreciation of African-American thought, starting from Frederick Douglass all the way to the present moment. How does African American thought evolve, and in response to what crises, challenges, and predicaments? What have been the movements, the ideologies, and the different schools of theory and practice that have contributed to the process? What is the relationship of African American Thought to Critical Race Theory, Postcoloniality, PanAfricanism, Marxism-Communism, Negritude, anti-Black Humanism, Diasporic Thought, and theories of Intersectionality? Is African-American thought nation centric, hemispheric, global, universal, or all of the above? From the point of view of the African-American subject, how much has changed from the days of slavery to the times of Black Lives Matter and AfroPessimism? How unique and non-fungible is African-American thought and theory with respect to revolutions and resistances based on Class, Gender, and Sexuality? How does African American thought envision the relationship between the human and the citizen, between past and present, between Ontology and Politics? These are the questions that will animate our course as we make our way from Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs to Booker T. Washington, W.E.B. Du Bois and Ida Wells, to the Harlem Renaissance (Langston Hughes, Alain Locke, Claude McKay, Countee Cullen, Zora Neale Hurston), Marcus Garvey, Black nationalism and the Negritude movement, fiction and essays by Ralph Ellison, Richard Wright and James Baldwin, African feminisms by way of June Jordan and Audre Lorde (the politics of difference), Toni Morrison, all the way to Black Lives Matter, Orlando Patterson, Critical Race Theory, and Afro-Pessimism. Most likely, you will be writing 1 Short Essay, 5 to 7 pages, 1 Long Essay, 7 to 10 pages, and a Take Home Examination. |
| ENGLISH 16 | CRAFT OF POETRY | HANSON, D. | This class is a survey of contemporary American poetry. We will read and listen to a variety of poets, covering a wide range of topic, identity, and form. 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 on contemporary American poetry. |
| ENGLISH 17 | CRAFT OF FICTION | BURKE, T. | In E17, “The Art and the Craft of Fiction,” we’ll explore in depth the intricacies of the process by which writers represent the world on the page. We shall focus on the writerly “style,” the mechanics of the prose, from its grammar to its lyricism to its use of metaphorical devices, as it manifests in the work of Jane Austen, Henry James, Virginia Woolf, Ralph Ellison, and more. In particular we’ll be reading for the representation of consciousness in fiction. All classes have an ethos, a set of working theories/ principles, and among ours we number the following: there is a formal case to be made that the ultimate artistic expression of consciousness is in writing, for language is a model of consciousness, and texts themselves are made real only in the conscious mind of the reader. Therefore literature can model consciousness using consciousness, in doing so achieving a perfect harmony of form, content, and medium. As an instructor I do not demand that you agree with this principle, but I do ask that you engage with it. In addition to excerpts from novels and short stories by some of the writers listed above, we’ll be reading works on craft: How Fiction Works by James Wood, The Faith of a Writer by Joyce Carol Oates, On Reading (translated by Damion Searls) and excerpts from Contre Sainte-Beuve by Marcel Proust, and “The Art of Fiction” by Henry James. These works all prioritize fiction as an art and an end unto itself, not a tool for some other purpose, certainly not for instruction. The primary aim of this class is to cultivate our taste for literary fiction, to develop in us the particular exquisite pleasure that reading can inspire. Over the course of this class you will be responsible for writing short reading responses to each reading, in-class and take-home writing exercises both fictional and argumentative, and a final paper. The focus in the writing will be on close reading and analysis of course materials. Class time will be devoted to reading discussion, so it is vial that you complete each reading with care and come to class prepared to participate. |
| 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. |
| ENGLISH 101W | TIME MACHINES | MARTIN, T. | In this course, we’ll study works of twentieth- and twenty-first-century literature that involve time travel (sometimes through a literal machine, sometimes not). Why is time travel such a perennially interesting topic to fiction writers? What social problems and political tensions does time travel allow writers to confront? What formal innovations and aesthetic experiments does the time travel narrative seem to inspire, if not require? We’ll use these questions to hone our skills as both critical readers and scholarly writers. Along the way, we may also find ourselves wondering: isn't literature itself a kind of time machine, giving us the opportunity to travel back into the past and the space to meditate on what time actually is? |
| ENGLISH 101W | THE POLITICS OF ROMANCE | MATTHEWS, R. | The course looks at a continuing strain of the western literary tradition of romance—one of its earliest genre or literary modes whose subject (as everyone knows) is eros, the erotic, which the Greeks considered as much more than mere sex but as the instinctual force driving all living things to survive and reproduce themselves. Romance is also the vehicle of the ideal—not of what is but what we desire should be—embodied in the experience and aspiration to “possess the beautiful” in the ancient phrase. We will look at how these concepts and values are expressed in romance’s narrative and dramatic forms, from Homer’s Odyssey, Xenophon’s weird and sensational Ephesian Tale, and a couple of Chretien de Troyes’ Arthurian romances, to Shakespeare’s Winter Tale, Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko, Austen’s Northanger Abbey and Jack Schaefer’s classic western, Shane. |
| ENGLISH 101W | WRITING ABOUT SHORT FICTION | MCCALL, 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. |
| ENGLISH 102A | ARTHURIAN ROMANCE | MATTHEWS, R. | Before Star Wars and Game of Thrones, there was King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table. World building at its finest, Arthurian literature is the original fan fiction. Beginning as an obscure chieftain or king fighting against either witches or Saxon invaders, Arthur became a literary phenomenon with writers of all sorts adding and creating new episodes and stories. This course will explore Arthurian literature from its beginnings as a small paragraph in a Latin history of Britain to the development of an entire imaginary world with glittering lovers like Lancelot and Tristan, adulterous queens, a supernatural grail and a kingdom’s inevitable fall. |
| ENGLISH 102B | SEX AND SENSIBILITY | WAY, J. | This is a class about how our embodied and emotional experiences—especially sex and love—shape our ideas of politics and morality. We usually think of the eighteenth century as the “Age of Reason,” but of course, the people living in this period were just as preoccupied with the irrationality of human emotions—what British writers of the time called “sensibility.” These novelists, poets, and philosophers saw our individual capacity to perceive, think, and judge as rooted in the emotions expressed through sensitive bodies—things like tears, blushes, and even heartbeats. They imagined systems of social regulation based on emotional transactions, that through physical observation of other people’s inner thoughts and feelings, sympathy could be generated and relationships built. As a concept, sensibility offered a powerful way for eighteenth-century writers to interrogate lines between virtue and vice and to make arguments about how society should operate. And as we shall see, women’s sexualized, domesticated, consuming (and consumable) bodies as portrayed in this literature acquired an outsized significance in contemporary debates over governance, commerce, education, marriage, and slavery. Readings include excerpts by philosophers Mary Astell, David Hume, Adam Smith, and Mary Wollstonecraft; poetry by Aphra Behn, the Earl of Rochester, Bernard Mandeville, and Alexander Pope; a few Spectator essays and letters; and several novels: Eliza Haywood’s Love in Excess, John Cleland’s Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, and The Woman of Colour. |
| ENGLISH 102C | AWKWARDNESS&OUTCAST | BARTLETT, J. | To cast in my lot with Jekyll was to die to those appetites which I had long secretly indulged and had of late begun to pamper. To cast it in with Hyde was to die to a thousand interests and aspirations, and to become, at a blow and for ever, despised and friendless. Robert Louis Stevenson, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886) One of the most striking absences in this Stevenson epigraph is the identity of its “I,” for as even a casual familiarity with the story tells us, Jekyll and Hyde are the same person. In order to cast in my lot with one or the other I’d have to transcend them both, making the decision as pointless as the novel would be without its drama. The choice of becoming-Jekyll or becoming-Hyde requires costs that are neither compatible nor equivalent, so this course will begin with the assumption that stories about the way we integrate ourselves into our social worlds are driven by a sense of foreclosure, the awkward friction that develops after we already know who and what we are. The literature of the nineteenth century is uniquely attentive to the ethics of personal and social relationships, it is a literature of outcasts, in which identities are often depicted as obligations and vice versa. We may never see a narrative evolving the wholly successful transgression that the illusion of “I” (or its “independence”) promises—indeed, it is debatable that we ever could—but we will be attentive to the ways in which we feel its weight. A closer look at outcasts, their awkward mis-fits and self-foreclosures, as well as the narratives that displace them, will give us a sense of the social and cultural commitments of nineteenth-century literary form, and might give us cause to review the knotty organization of our own assumptions about literary coherence, character development, and the organic unfolding of a realistic plot. Assignments include reading responses, a midterm and a final exam. |
| ENGLISH 102D | IRISH MODERNISM | OCONNOR, L. | This course introduces students to some classics of twentieth-century drama, fiction, and poetry by Irish writers. These include W. B. Yeats’s poetry, several plays associated with the Abbey Theater, and short fiction by James Joyce and Elizabeth Bowen. Though often classified as “British Literature,” we’ll be reading these works as literature which is engaged with shaping modern Ireland as the former colony gains independence. We’ll pay special attention to questions of language and genre as we examine how these writers, working in conjunction with those who strove to restore Irish (Gaelic) as a spoken language, undertook to create an other-than-English literature in English. We’ll also explore the theme of ambivalent identity that recurs throughout these works. |
| ENGLISH 105 | ASAM SHORT STORIES | LEE, J. | Cross-listed with AsianAm 110. Understudied and undertaught, the short story has arguably tracked Asian American 20th and 21st century social life more comprehensively than other genres. We will take advantage of the form’s brevity by reading widely. Students will come away from this class with an encyclopedic knowledge of the Asian America’s literary practitioners. |
| ENGLISH 105 | LATINX SIGNIFIER | TRIGOS, M. | This course introduces students to some of the main texts and genres within Latinx literatures and cultures focusing on cities, imaginaries, and important figures as concentrations of knowledge production (for example: “el barrio,” Selena, highways, la ciguapa, la malinche, diaspora, pachucos, lotería, and low riders). Some authors may include: ire'ne lara silva, Omaris Zamora, Luis Valdes, and Cristina García. |
| ENGLISH 105 | WRITING RACE | TOBAR, H. | Course is cross-listed as a Lit Jrn 103. 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, Carey McWilliams, Ta-Nehisi Coates and others. Part of the aim of this class is what we can learn about the craft of writing as a tool of social engagement and change. 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 106 | EMILY DICKINSON | JACKSON, V. | A lot of people seem to love the poetry of Emily Dickinson. When Dickinson's poems were first published as a volume in 1890 (four years after her death), the book instantly became and has remained a best-seller. Why? Dickinson wrote her poems on grocery lists and party invitations, on sheets of stationery sewn together with string or folded around dead bugs. She wrote poetry for women she loved and for men she wanted to cultivate. She published only eleven poems during her lifetime, but now over 1800 poems have been published under her name. In this class, we won't read all 1800 poems, but we will think about what kinds of poems Dickinson wrote and why and how so many different people have found so many different uses for them. |
| ENGLISH 106 | LITERATURE & CLIMATE CHANGE | MARTIN, T. | How do you tell a story about something as large-scale, long-term, and globally inescapable as climate change? In this course, we’ll study the ways that contemporary writers have responded to the unique representational challenges of the climate crisis. We’ll read a variety of genres—from realist fiction to science fiction to journalism—in order to assess the different literary strategies writers have used to make the catastrophe of climate change legible to readers. Surveying the literary genres that have emerged in the wake of climate change, we’ll ask ourselves and each other what it means to read and write in the face of ecological calamity. Like all English 106s, this course will culminate in an extensive research paper. |
| ENGLISH 106 | EUGENIC FEMINISMS | TRIGOS, M. | This course analyzes eugenics and feminism as twin investments in nation-building projects during the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It traces genealogies of eugenic feminisms, emphasizing the imagined and material role of reproduction in these ideologies. While the syllabus focuses mainly on cultural production discussing the United States and Mexico, it attempts to construct a broader and more comprehensive picture of the prevalence, influence, and legacy of eugenic ideologies in feminist thinking by including the Canadian, English, and Indian contexts. It thus emphasizes the role of imperial projects in perpetuating eugenic ideologies as well as how they traveled transnationally. Some authors and critics may include Eduardo Urzaiz, Octavia Butler, Frances E.W. Harper, Charlotte Perkins Gillman, Cecily Devereux, and Asha Nadkarni |
| ENGLISH 205 | MILTON | SILVER, V. | The seminar addresses the problem arguably posed by Milton, namely, how can an iconoclast be a poet. To that extent, it is a course in how best to read Paradise Lost without succumbing to the undeniable allure of the Icthyian fallacy (Stanley Fish’s How Milton Works). In order to tackle this question, the seminar supplies an interpretive framework, beginning with the fifteenth- century bestseller, the Malleus Maleficarum (“The Hammer of Witches”), which serves as an introduction to what is currently called “magical thinking” but Milton terms “idolatry.” The antidote to a magical or idolatrous hermeneutics comes first, in the form of Martin Luther’s theology--especially the work arguably most read in England, his 1535 Commentary on Galatians, but also The Bondage of the Will, his reply to Erasmus on that subject. The second antidote is Milton’s own theology, as argued in his polemical prose and Christian Doctrine, and of course his poetry from the time of his earliest sonnet, “How soon hath time” through Paradise Lost. Wittgenstein’s later philosophy will make an appearance, as will Adorno’s concept of dialectic, the better to dispel some misconceptions about how meaning works in Milton’s “great argument.” |
| ENGLISH 205 | FEMALE GOTHIC | LEWIS, J. | When the feminist critic Ellen Moers coined it back in 1977, she blithely assumed that “the term female gothic is easily defined.” It meant for her, simply “the work that women writers have done in the literature that, since the eighteenth century, we have called the gothic.” Over the last six decades, however, this term has been endlessly challenged and redefined, as indeed have the words “female” and “gothic” themselves. 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. More recently, however, tropes developed in female gothic’s haunted house have been reinterpreted as modes of empowerment and guides to a transformed future, even as their political resonance has expanded beyond the patriarchal household, especially in the hands of women of color. After considering pioneering work by Ann Radcliffe and Charlotte Brontë, this seminar will track these generic transformations and shifting stakes largely through fiction written by American women: Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Edith Wharton, Carmen Machado, Shirley Jackson, Silvia Moreno- Garcia, and Octavia Butler. Critics include Ellis, Kristeva, Haraway, Castle, Kahane, Gilbert, and Gubar. Weekly reading responses, one long seminar paper with a presentation on your topic during the last class meeting. |
| ENGLISH 206 | RESEARCH & WRITING | STAFF | |
| ENGLISH 208 | THESIS WORKSHOP | STAFF | |
| ENGLISH 210 | DE-STRUKTION & DECONSTRUCTION | RADHAKRISHNAN, R. | I apologize for the prolixity of this course description, but I do feel like sharing some personal/autobiographical (not narcissistic) information with you: the subject-positional and locational politics of where I am coming from. There is some nostalgia here, not touchy feely, but fraught and real. It was the Fall of 1978 when I moved from India and entered the doctoral program at SUNY-Binghamton. I took a course, “De-struktive Hermeneutics,” with the one and only William V. Spanos (please look him up if you don’t know of him already), and I knew I had found my theme and my mentor. The burning issue for me/us then was the necessity of “the epistemological break” and the need to attempt an ex-nhilo (Frantz Fanon) articulation of the “after of the before” with the before having been put to rest for ever. Should the break be initially theoretical and then historical, or historical first and only then theoretical? Two imperatives were challenging and inspiring each other: Always Historicize, and Always Theorize, the imperfect continuous tense of history and the “always already” future perfect of theory. It was all about the epistemic as well as ontological location of “post-ality,” to be later differentiated as the post in post-colonial, the post in post modernism, and the post in post- structural, the post-human, the post-racial, the post-patriarchal, and so on. There were questions to do with autonomy and heteronomy (Marx), the content preceding the phrase or the other way around (Marx again), remembering, forgetting, and the counter-memory (Nietzsche, Foucault), having to choose between Foucault and Derrida in the context of their polemic over Descartes and the relationship of madness to reason. I side with Foucault here. To top it all as an overarching horizon, both ontological and epistemological, the question of Language and of Being, of the language of Being and the being of Language: first, the controversial Martin Heidegger with his manifesto of hermeneutically de-strukting the entire western onto-theological logocentric tradition, and then Jacques Derrida, following Heidegger’s path differentially, the project of unhinging logocentrism internally by turning its pages deconstructively via the performance of grammatology and “the dangerous supplement.” From a postcolonial “double-conscious” perspective (it is quite revealing how many postcolonial and subaltern scholars have been indebted to Heidegger and Derrida), Heidegger and Derrida qualify as allies in the task of interrogating, provincializing and reading the Eurocentric Cogito against the grain: a project that is of vital importance to the postcolonial subject (Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Homi Bhabha, among others). We will be close reading a few strategically chosen texts by Heidegger (Introduction to Being and Time, “Letter on Humanism,” “The Origin of a Work of Art,” “Building, Dwelling, Thinking,” “What is Metaphysics?” “On the Essence of Truth,” and a few other selections from the Basic Writings of Heidegger) and Derrida (from Of Grammatology, Dissemination, Margins of Philosophy, Writing and Difference) with the following questions in mind. Which critique is more radical, more abyssal: de-struktion or deconstruction? What does “radical” mean in any way in the context of the relationship of being to knowing, of Ontology to Epistemology? What about the “nothing” and its coordinates? Is there a beyond to humanism and anthropocentrism? What is hors-texte? What is voice and what is ecriture? What is bias and what is knowledge? What is truth and what is method? Does the more radical critique affirm or negate, say aye or nay? Does it shore up its truth and back it up in the name of an imprimatur, or does it disseminate beyond recuperation, without the comfort of naming and of authority? Does it need the blessing of authenticity and the proper, or does it remain a trace, the prosthesis as origin? Does thought seek a home or does it roam as differance/ deferral? What is the nature of the conflict between the Epistemological Turn and the Ontological Turn? What is the relationship of Ontology to History and politics? Does philosophy have anything to offer at all by way of wisdom/knowledge? How important is ontological thinking? Is it no more than the honorable detritus of a fast-fading philosophical Cogito? Are both de-struktion and deconstruction self- indulgent rebels without a cause; or do they have a bearing at all on historical changes and revolution? Most important, we will be implicating both Heidegger and Derrida in the current debates about Humanism: post humanism, critical humanism, non- humanist humanism, anti-black humanism, epistemological humanism, methodological humanism, political and ontological humanism. Where and what and how and when is the “human” in the Age of the Anthropocene and where should it be? In the context of the environment and the planetary scheme of things, is the human the problem or the potential agent of change? Is the human in the way? Is the human in a double bind and should it perform as the pharmakon (Derrida), should it in the act of producing knowledge not just interpret but transform reality (Marx), or should it practice the openness of the four-fold, implement Gelassenheit (“letting be,” a la Heidegger)? All of this or none of this, in the name of what? We will contextualize these discussions with reference to contemporary Black Philosophical Thought and its convergences and divergences with poststructuralism. Too much gravitas, so dear friends, a WARM WELCOME with a loony limerick. Is De-struktion really lame? And Deconstruction quite tame? Shouldn’t there be a cause And normative laws? Language has got to be more than a game. |
| ENGLISH 210 | AMER LABOR HISTORY | MCCALL, S. | In this seminar we shall read literary and theoretical texts that study early American labor systems. Topics shall include slavery and indentured servitude, the rise of factory manufacturing, the sexual division of labor, postbellum racial stratification of the labor force and the history of labor unionism. This is also equally a survey of American Labor Studies itself, and we shall consider the evolution of the field from the Wisconsin School to New Labor History. |
| ENGLISH 210 | METHODS | LEWIS, J. | In his classic 1919 essay of that title, Freud (ambivalently) defined “the uncanny” not only as “that species of the frightening that goes back to what was once well-known and had long been familiar” but also as “that which should remain hidden which has now come to light.” The hypothesis of this seminar is that the uncanny, particularly as Freud conceptualized it for modernity, resurfaces today as the dominant critical hermeneutic of our time. This is true whether we see ‘the’ uncanny as a compulsively repeated explanatory concept or as a methodology that underlies virtually every currently salient critical approach to literature. And indeed identifying a shared idiom of the uncanny can even bring to light subterranean affinities between the writing of literary criticism and the writing of literature ‘itself.’ In a required course that uncannily ‘doubles’ as an introduction to research methods, we’ll thus explore three interconnected domains: (1) the uncanny ‘itself’ as a critical construct developed and debated by six theorists (Freud, Lacan, Kristeva, Mori, Fisher, Royle); (2) the uncanny as the defamiliarizing subtext of several essays exemplifying a range of seemingly ‘canny’ critical perspectives (Marxist, ecocritical, critical race, historicist, feminist, queer, deconstructionist); and (3) the uncanny as a condition of modern fiction’s legibility and reproducibility (Frankenstein + practical criticism/source study/transmedial and transcultural replications of the novel). In observance of the instructor’s obvious compulsion to repeat the number three, you will be writing three five-page papers over the course of the quarter, one anchored in each of our three domains. Final meeting: a brief informal presentation in which you share how you’d apply our collective findings to your own specific research interest. |
| ENGLISH 210 | BALLAD, SONNET, LYRIC, LINE: THE STORIES OF POETIC FORMS | JACKSON, V. | What happens to forms across time? Moving beyond the juxtaposition of history and theory, this graduate seminar will explore theories of poetic forms in several historical periods and compare these to 20th - and 21st -century ideas. Using the ballad, the sonnet, the lyric, and the line as grounding forms and concepts, we will collect, read, and critique both criticism and poetry. When and how does an example of a poetic form take the place of a story of a poetic form, and how might we detect and collect these examples? Do our methodologies of reading poetry now and in the past rely on a shared understanding of what a form might mean? When does a concept become a form? How are concepts, genres, and forms related? How, and when, do poetic forms become abstractions of genres and how, and when, do they not? The practical applications of these questions will concern source materials (where do we find them? how do we gather and organize them?) and methods (how are ideas and stories about poetry transmitted and circulated? can computational methods help us figure that out?). Students will learn how to organize research materials, to generate shared resources and to practice distant-, middle-distance and close readings of critical texts and of poetry. We’ll be working toward and thinking through critical methodology – its pasts, limits, possibilities, and futures – as much as literary history, theory, and poetry. |
| ENGLISH 255 | WRKSHOP IN ACAD PUB | FAN, C | Reading and critique of student-authored essays with the goal of producing a publishable essay. Instructor leads discussion, meets with students individually, and provides an introduction to appropriate venues for publication and the process of submission, peer review, and revision. (Does not require a seminar request from. Please contact Brianna Brown |
| ENGLISH 290 | READING&CONFERENCE | STAFF | |
| ENGLISH 290 | READING&CONFERENCE | STAFF | |
| ENGLISH 290 | READING&CONFERENCE | STAFF | |
| ENGLISH 290 | READING&CONFERENCE | STAFF | |
| ENGLISH 290 | READING&CONFERENCE | STAFF | |
| ENGLISH 290 | READING&CONFERENCE | STAFF | |
| ENGLISH 290 | READING&CONFERENCE | STAFF | |
| ENGLISH 290 | READING&CONFERENCE | STAFF | |
| ENGLISH 290 | READING&CONFERENCE | STAFF | |
| ENGLISH 290 | READING&CONFERENCE | STAFF | |
| ENGLISH 290 | READING&CONFERENCE | STAFF | |
| ENGLISH 291 | GUIDED READING | STAFF | |
| ENGLISH 291 | GUIDED READING | STAFF | |
| ENGLISH 291 | GUIDED READING | STAFF | |
| ENGLISH 291 | GUIDED READING | STAFF | |
| ENGLISH 291 | GUIDED READING | STAFF | |
| ENGLISH 299 | DISSERTATN RESEARCH | STAFF | |
| ENGLISH 398 | RHET/TCHNG OF COMP | QUEEN, B. | |
| ENGLISH 399 | UNIVERSITY TEACHING | STAFF | |
| ENGLISH 399 | UNIVERSITY TEACHING | STAFF | |
| ENGLISH 399 | UNIVERSITY TEACHING | STAFF |