ENGLISH Course Descriptions for 2004-2005

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Spring Course Descriptions
CourseTitleInstructorDescription
ENGLISH 28BCOMIC&TRAGIC VISIONSTAFFIn these sections of the E28 series described above, we will focus on drama and its conventions - especially on the primary forms of tragedy and comedy. Course work will entail three papers, including one revision, and a final.
ENGLISH 28BCOMIC&TRAGIC VISIONSTAFF
ENGLISH 28BCOMIC&TRAGIC VISIONSTAFF
ENGLISH 28CREALISM & ROMANCESTAFF
ENGLISH 28CREALISM & ROMANCESTAFF
ENGLISH 28CREALISM & ROMANCESTAFF
ENGLISH 28CREALISM & ROMANCESTAFF
ENGLISH 28CREALISM & ROMANCESTAFF
ENGLISH 28CREALISM & ROMANCESTAFF
ENGLISH 28CREALISM & ROMANCESTAFF
ENGLISH 28CREALISM & ROMANCESTAFFIn these sections of the E28 series described above, we will focus perdominantly but not exclusively on the narrative use of "realsim" and "romance", understood in a dialectical relation to each other. Course work will entail three papers, including one revision, and a final.
ENGLISH 28ECRAFT OF FICTIONSTAFF
ENGLISH 102AEARLY MODERN SELFSILVER, V.A.The course will address how a shift in conceptions of selfhood (in relation to community and cosmos) alters the possibilities and refashions the forms of literate expression from the 14th through the 16th centuries. The course will probably include a late medieval romance, one of Chaucer's two major works, some sonnets from Wyatt to Donne, a play or two of Shakespear's, and a reasonably dreadful revenge tragedy. There will be two take-home exams and atleast one movie.
ENGLISH 102BPARADISE LOST&AFTERLEWIS, J.M.John Milton''s _Paradise Lost_ (final edition, 1674) is not only the single most influential work of literature in the English literary canon; it was also a text of central importance to English writers of the so-called 'long eighteenth century," who reworked its central themes and poetics, famously trembled in its shadow and, eventually, rebelled against what they saw as Milton's God of reason and cast their lot with his great enemy, Satan. In this course, we will explore Milton's this "great epic" in detail, considering it both in relation to its unique historical moment and as an epic theodicy which permanently revised the way human life could be understood. Then we'll look at a number of works written in Milton's immediate shadow--the poetry of Anne Finch, Alexander Pope and William Blake, along with Mary Shelley's _Frankenstein_--to understand the scope and substance of imaginative response to his challenging vision. Please note that we will spend approximately half the quarter on _Paradise Lost_--an extremely challenging work. Written assignments include a midterm, a final examination, and two 6-page papers.
ENGLISH 102CC19TH US LITTAMARKIN, E.This course traces the literary and cultural response to the institution of slavery in the U.S. in the years before Emancipation. We will consider a series of texts and images from the first half of the nineteenth century depicting the dramas of displacement and subjection that mark the experience of the "middle passage," the slave trade, and life on the plantations. We will also look at the articulations and strategies of the antislavery movement and its efforts to variously appeal on political, religious and social grounds. In the process, this class will ask questions about the difficult relationship of race to national identity and of politics to both ethics and aesthetic forms. Readings will include works by Phillis Wheatley, Frederick Douglass, William Wells Brown, David Walker, Herman Melville, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Louisa May Alcott and others. The course is designed to compliment two other courses offered Spring Quarter: Professor Brook Thomas's E105, "US Literature in the Age of Segregation" and Professor Mark Goble's E102D, "Modernism and Ethnicity." Students who want to have greater exposure to the cultural history of race and ethnicity in the US are invited, but by no means required, to enroll in either or both of these classes in addition to this one.
ENGLISH 102DUS MODERNISM AND ETHNICITYGOBLE, M.A.This course examines a range of literary and cinematic works that explore the historical contours of ethnic experience in 20th-century America. After starting with W. E. B. DuBois’s The Souls of Black Folk and Henry James’s The American Scene, we will be especially concerned with the intersections between racial representation and formal experimentation that patterned American modernism in the first half of the century, with readings of such major figures as T. S. Eliot, William Faulkner, Langston Hughes, Nella Larsen, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, and William Carlos Williams. The course will also consider several films—including D. W. Griffith’s Broken Blossoms, Frank Capra’s The Bitter Tea of General Yen, and Douglas Sirk’s Imitation of Life—that help to situate the literature of this period within various contexts crucial to understanding the role played by race and ethnicity in US culture of the period. Other readings will include Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, a text which tests the very limits of literary modernism while also signaling larger social and political transformations associated with the rise of the Civil Rights Movement. The materials for this course have been selected to compliment the readings of two other English department offerings this Spring: Professor Elisa Tamarkin’s E102C “US Literature in the Age of Slavery” and Professor Brook Thomas’s E105 “US Literature in the Age of Segregation.” Students interested in gaining a broader perspective on the history of race and ethnicity in US literature are invited to sign up for either or both of these courses along with this one, but this is not a requirement for enrollment in this course.
ENGLISH 103FARAWAY PLACES: THE LITERATURE OF TRAVELHOLLOWELL, J.W.With travel insights from Clifford's "ethnography" and some sections of Levi-Strauss's Tristes Tropiques, we will begin to explore the exotic--the other--the difference between here and there, between some narrating “I” and some faraway place or persons. The books are chosen with care for their writing style and narrative construction, matters of some interest to writers of excellent nonfiction prose and literary journalists. These books and places include: Jonathan Raban's Passage to Juneau, Paul Theroux's Dark Star Safari, Isabella Bird's Among the Tibetans, William Least Heat Moon's Blue Highways, David Quammen's Wild Thoughts from Wild Places, Robert Byron's Road to Oxiana, George Orwell's Down and Out in London and Paris, and Joan Didion's Where I Was From. We will track down the construction and variety of travel narratives as well as techniques for incorporating "research" and "background" without detracting from narrative force. I envision two short explorations (read "papers") of 5-6 pages and a final exam covering both the individual works and the theoretical material at the outset.
ENGLISH 103WOMEN & RELIGIONGEORGIANNA, L.M.Beginning with 2nd century virgin-martyr tales and running through the fifteenth century works of Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe, this course will focus on the ways in which various ideals of virginity operate in both literature and in t he lived experiences of medieval women. Works to be read include the Life of St. Perpetua , the Acts of Paul and Thecla, the early 13th century Ancrene Wisse (Guide for Anchoresses), Chaucer's Wife of Bath's Prologue, Julian of Norwich's Revelations, and the Book of Margery Kempe. Students will write several short essays, take a midterm and final.
ENGLISH 103JOYCE'S SHORT FICTNMCMICHAEL, J.L.
ENGLISH 105LITERATURE OF THE SOUTH ASIAN DIASPORASHROFF, B.In this class we analyze the work of writers who are of South Asian ancestry living in North America and Britain. A central concern is how through literary and cinematic representations, spaces of ìhomeî and ìbelongingî are negotiated through narratives of disjunctures and displacements. How do the literary and cinematic texts represent multiple and contradictorily organized spaces where new identities must be negotiated? How do writers and filmmakers construct and negotiate their identities in their own specific cultural context and also in the larger diasporic context? We analyze texts such as Meena Alexanderís "Fault Lines", Jhumpa Lahiriís short stories "The Interpreter of Maladies", Hanif Kureishiís screenplay "My Beautiful Launderette" and Agha Shahid Ali's poems "The Half Inch Himalayas" among others.
ENGLISH 105ASIAN AMERICAN WOMEN PLAYWRIGHTS: HISTORY ON STAGEKATRAK, KETU H.This course explores the theatrical representation of Asian American history by women playwrights. Our study includes both literary analyses of drama-as-text, and the dramaturgical elements that render a written text into a stage performance. Women playwrights Genny Lim, Wakako Yamauchi, Velina Hasu Houston among others demonstrate the importance of self-representation, and the depiction of Asian American history that is usually marginal on the mainstream stage. We study a variety of dramatic styles from the realistic to the surrealistic and fantastical. We explore how drama reveals ideological currents at different historical times and changing perceptions of race and racialized identities of minority populations in the U.S. Requirements include: in-class writing, oral presentation, short essay and final exam.
ENGLISH 105US LITERATURE IN THE AGE OF SEGREGATIONTHOMAS, B.We will read selected works of US literature written during the age of legally mandated segregation in the US. Most works will deal with the status of African Americans, but we will also read some that touch on the condition of those of Chinese descent as well as the condition of peoples living in the territories acquired by the US in the Spanish-American War of 1898. Authors will include Twain, Cable, Chesnutt, B.T. Washington, Du Bois, Tourgee, Sui Sin Far, Hurston, and Faulkner. In addition, we will cover the case of PLESSY V. FERGUSON that from 1896 to 1954 gave Constitutional sanction to legally mandated segregation in the US. Requirements: regular attendance, midterm, essay, final. The readings for this course have been designed to coordinate with those of two other classes offered Spring Quarter: Professor Elisa Tamarkin's E 102C, "US Literature in the Age of Slavery" and Professor Mark Goble's E 102D, "US Modernism and Ethnicity." Students who want to have in depth exposure to the history of race and ethnicity in US literature are invited to sign up for either or both of these courses in addition to this one. Doing so is, however, by no means necessary. Each course is a self-contained unit in itself. Nonetheless, those who enroll in two or more of these coordinated classes might benefit from the different reading materials and perspectives. This course also counts toward the Humanities and Law minor.
ENGLISH 106RISE OF ROMANCE ON MEDIEVAL ENGLAND AND FRANCEGEORGIANNA, L.M.In this course, we will explore the rise of romance as a new genre as it develops following the Norman Conquest in England and France. Relations between history and romance will be a major focus; thus we will begin Geoffrey of Monmouth's romancing of history in History of the Kings of Britain, a largely fictional history that was immensely influential for the next 500 years, and where King Arthur's story is told for the first time in literature). We will then read a variety of works ranging from the earliest vernacular version of Virgil's Aeneid (the Eneas), the earliest surviving fictions written by a woman the Lais of Marie De France, the earliest full blown Arthurian romances, by Chretien de Troyes, and several different early versions of the Tristan and Isolde story. Students will be expected to contribute to class discussions and write several papers, including a final research paper or a comprehensive final examination.
ENGLISH 106AUSTENVAN SANT, A.J.E 106 is an advanced seminar required of majors. It allows students to read and write intensively on a single topic. In this seminar on Austen, students will read for class discussion 4 of Austen’s 6 completed novels in the order of their publication (Pride and Prejudice [1813]; Mansfield Park [1814]; Northanger Abbey [1818]; and Persuasion [1818]); biographical material on Austen; historical material on the period; and numerous critical works. In the main paper required for the course, students may choose to work as well on Sense and Sensibility (1811) and Emma (1816). In describing her own method as a novelist, Austen wrote that she worked on a “little bit (two inches wide) of ivory . . . with so fine a brush as produces little effect after much labour.” Sir Walter Scott commented in his diary that although he could do “the big Bow-Wow strain” of novels very well, Austen had an “exquisite touch which renders ordinary common-place things and characters interesting.” Modern critics have written variously of her “regulated hatred,” her conservative propaganda, and her view of social conventions as fictions. We will consider many, often conflicting, views of her work and ask questions both about her novelistic practice (e.g., her narrative style, her use of irony) and about the social problems that her novels engage. We will also be interested in why Austen and her novels continue to draw such a devoted following, as indicated by college courses, the Jane Austen Society, and recent films.
ENGLISH 106POETRY THEMES/TECHHENDERSON, A.K.This class will provide an advanced introduction to the workings of English poetry. We will focus first on the formal qualities of poems, including rhyme, rhythm, and stanza structure. We will then examine some standard poetic forms and topoi from the English tradition, such as the sonnet, the dramatic monologue, and the blazon. Our readings will range chronologically from the Renaissance to the twentieth century. Course requirements will include several short assignments and papers, a group presentation, and a final.
ENGLISH 106HENRY JAMES AND EDITH WHARTONGOBLE, M.This course considers major texts by Henry James and Edith Wharton in light of their shared fascination with marriage, manners, and extravagant wealth. Our readings will survey the shape of each author’s career, beginning with some of James’s earlier texts (Washington Square, The Portrait of a Lady) and moving on to later works (The Spoils of Poynton) that demonstrate his stylistic and thematic development. The second half of the course will focus on Wharton. We will read several of her best-known novels (The Custom of the Country, The Age of Innocence), as well as some lesser-known works (Summer, The Reef). We will be especially interested in the ways each author explores the world of manners, courtship, and sophisticated sociability in order to understand better the violence, sexuality, and brutality this world tries desperately to contain.
ENGLISH 106HUGHES & SCHUYLERBARRETT, L.W.This course will examine two figures from the Harlem Renaissance, who propose divergent characterizations of African American culture. Langston Hughes is the most esteem poet of the Harlem Renaissance, as well as an essayist and novelist. George Schuyler is the leading African American journalist figure of the period, as well as satirist and novelist. The essay “The Negro-Art Hokum” by George Schuyler and Langston Hughes’s response, “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain,” provide the blueprint of their opposed cultural visions. The course will trace these divergent positions in selected essays, autobiographical writings, and works of fiction, including The Ways of White Folk, Not Without Laugher, Black No More, and “The Ehtiopian Murder Mystery.” Course requirements include two papers and an oral report.
ENGLISH 210POLYPHONY AND LYRIC FORMO'CONNOR, L.B.Please note: In order to enroll in this seminar, students must submit a seminar request form by Tuesday, March 8. Please contact Nancy Benay for more information. This seminar explores lyric persona in post-Romantic poetry. T. S. Eliot's working-title for The Waste Land, "He do the police in different voices," (citing, not coincidentally, popular novelist Charles Dickens), exemplifies modern poets' attempts to pluralize the lyric speaker in response both to changing notions of subjectivity and to the marginalization of poetry with the ascendancy of the novel, cinema, and popular mass culture. In order to accommodate the disparate needs of students intending to specialize in poetry and those seeking a broad introductory survey, the course is designed around a core focus on dramatic monologues with latitude for participants to branch off into contiguous areas of interest. The generic focus allows us to read an eclectic range of modern poetry, beginning with Robert Browning and concentrating on twentieth-century verse, with an emphasis on Anglo-American modernism. We'll explore questions of lyric subjectivity; the High / Low cultural divide; the "novelization" of lyric form; voice and social code-switching; irony; and intertextuality. Pro-seminar participants: weekly response papers, and a portfolio based on a syllabus and annotated anthology in an elective field of modern poetry. Seminar participants: response papers; a class presentation, and a research paper on an elective topic.
ENGLISH 210HEMISPHERIC AMERICAN CULTURESLAZO, J.R.Please note: In order to enroll in this seminar, students must submit a seminar request form by Tuesday, March 8. Please contact Nancy Benay for more information. Questioning the equation of "America" with the United States, we will analyze a variety of writings that bring forth tensions between hemispheric (north-south) conceptions of America and the specifics of nation-formation in various countries. We begin by looking at the work of literary critics and historians who have debated the question of commonality in the Americas and then move into a study of novels, essays, travel pieces and other forms in the context of social, political, and literary movements at particular moments. Much of our attention will be on the nineteenth century and the way cultures (not only ethnic but also of print) emerged and were represented, particularly in relation to the rise of the U.S. empire and battles for territorial control in the hemisphere. For example, we will look at Philadelphia in the 1820s as a site where Latin American exiles published widely as they deployed tropes of hemispheric American exceptionalism to call for independence from Europe. We will also look at some work from the contemporary period. The readings will be in English, but knowledge of Spanish and/or French could help in writing a research paper. Readings will be selected from the following: José Martí, selections (1880s); María Amparo Ruiz de Burton, Who Would Have Thought It? (1872); Xicotencatl: An Anonymous Historical Novel (1826); Martin Delany, Blake; or, the Huts of America (1859); Herman Melville, The Encantadas (1854); Cirilo Villaverde, Cecilia Valdés (1882); Julia Alvarez, The Other Side/El Otro Lado (1994); Ana Castillo, ed., Goddess of the Americas (1996). We will also read critical pieces by Doris Sommer, José David Saldívar, Nicolás Kanellos, Angel Rama, Anna Brickhouse, and Edmundo O'Gorman, among others.
ENGLISH 210THE GREAT PRETENDERS: IMPOSTERS AND IMPERSONATORSBURKE, C.M.Please note: In order to enroll in this seminar, students must submit a seminar request form by Tuesday, March 8. Please contact Nancy Benay for more information. "If life were fair, Elvis would be alive and all the impersonators would be dead." Johnny Carson "The secret of life is honesty and fair dealing. If you can fake that, you've got it made." Groucho Marx This course will examine the shifting identity of the figure who appears to be one thing but turns out to be something else. We'll look first at the extensive body of folklore inhabited by changelings, tricksters, and shape shifters, by fairies who resemble humans but are really hollow, and by humans who turn out to be ghosts. We'll read about historical impostors like Martin Guerre, Princess Caraboo, and the Fox Sisters, look at a cluster of recent pretenders (Black Like Me, I Led Three Lives, I Married a Martian, I Married a Dead Man, The Talented Mr. Ripley, and The Duke of Deception), consider performances featuring 21st Century Elvises and male and female impersonators, and conclude with a postmodern turn to cyberspace where anonymity licenses the free play of identity. With the help of Erving Goffman, Wendy Doniger, Marjorie Garber, and Terry Castle we'll consider the vexed relationship between the copy and the original, the masquerade and the reality it cloaks, and the virtual and the real. Although the course is transhistorical, students who wish to define a research topic squarely located in a particular period may do so. Those wishing to pursue projects that require fieldwork are welcome.
ENGLISH 210"EXTREME" LITERATURE: TRAGEDY AND UNTRAGEDYSILVER, V.A.Please note: In order to enroll in this seminar, students must submit a seminar request form by Tuesday, March 8. Please contact Nancy Benay for more information. I should perhaps begin by stressing that this is not a survey course-a version of Criticism 220-nor is it the sublime Warminskian account of nineteenth-century speculative or philosophical tragedy. It is rather an inquiry into the ancient problematic of Attic tragedy in order to understand a peculiar phenomenon of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century European drama: in its Tudor and Stuart manifestation, "revenge tragedy" (from which arguably arise other such "extreme" literatures as sentimental and gothic fiction, not to mention melodrama and tabloid novels). To that end, the course includes the religious or mythological codifications of Homer (Iliad) and Hesiod (Theogony); not exactly your mother's selection of Greek tragedy; and the writing of the pre-Socratics and Sophists (Heraclitus, Parmenides, Gorgias, Protagoras), all of which in varying ways respond to the predicament of "causeless" human suffering or pathemata analyzed by tragedy. Yet, for reasons that might even become clear (especially if one knows speculative tragedy), it is actually a deviation or innovation on that predicament, performed by the incorrigible Euripides, which appears to be Aristotle's preferred species of "tragedy." This deviation has been called any number of things-tragicomedy, romance, melodrama, mixed mode, problem play-and has distinct affinities with a subsequent species of "extreme" literature, Hellenistic prose fiction, of which we will read as much as we can bear in preparation for Seneca, who himself knows a thing or two about the hyperbolic. At some point, we might even read proper "revenge tragedy," and in doing so, meditate with Benjamin (The German Tragic Drama) on the aesthetic ideologies of allegory and symbol. No doubt we will be exhausted. Before embarking on this course, it would not hurt to take up The Odyssey, an easy if not an obvious read. Students taking the course for seminar credit will produce a 15-20 page paper on a suitable subject; those taking it as a pro-seminar will have a take-home exam.
ENGLISH 210THE FIFTIESCHRISTENSEN, J.C.This graduate seminar is a continuation of the one offered this past winter quarter. Our goal is to facilitate substantial research papers on a salient aspect of cultural and intellectual life in the United States during the 1950s. Attending to an array of novels, films, and critical writing, we will read the cultural production of this moment as a function, expression, and symptom of the changing character and disposition of institutions. Specific topics of analysis will include: method acting and the death of the Hollywood studio system; hip culture and the end of segregation; the interpenetration of management theory and political science; the death of the salesman and the rise of the organization man; the ascendance of New Criticism, the creative writing department and the social sciences in the "new" university; the commercialization of modernism and the market segmentation of mass consumption; the emergence of television and a white-collar information economy; the prosecution of the Cold War and the creation of a permanent war economy. Possible texts to include: Robert Penn Warren, All the King's Men (1946) or Brother to Dragons (1953) Ralph Ellison, Juneteenth Flannery O'Connor, A Good Man is Hard to Find (1955) Bill Lee Brammer, The Gay Place (1961) Richard Condon, The Manchurian Candidate (1959) William S. Burroughs, Naked Lunch (1959) Robert Lowell, Selections Selected essays by Max Weber, David Riesman, Talcott Parsons, C. Wright Mills, C.L.R. James, William H. Whyte Jr., Arthur Schlesinger Jr., Lionel Trilling, Irving Howe, Norman Mailer, and Hannah Arendt; also Pierre Bourdieu, Alan Liu, John Guillory, et al. Warner Bros.: The Fountainhead (1949), Rebel Without a Cause (1955), East of Eden (1955), Giant (1956) Fox: Gentleman's Agreement (1947), The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (1956), Woman's World (1954) MGM: Executive Suite (1954), It's Always Fair Weather (1955), The Band Wagon (1953), Singin' in the Rain (1952) Columbia: Death of a Salesman (1951) United Artists: Patterns, The Apartment (1960) Paramount: The Ten Commandments (1956), Stalag 17 (1953) Shamley/Hitchcock: Psycho (1960) UI: The Glenn Miller Story (1954)
ENGLISH 210ANTEBELLUM CULTURESTAMARKIN, E.C.Please note: In order to enroll in this seminar, students must submit a seminar request form by Tuesday, March 8. Please contact Nancy Benay for more information. This course is designed as an introduction to the range of literary cultures in the antebellum U.S. Our goal will be to read as widely as we can well, and to engage with the heterogeneity of print in a period that was also invested in promoting the idea of a unified literary tradition. Our readings will look at the relationship between genteel society and mass culture, taste and consumerism, class politics and public intellectualism, while exploring the way that social status in the U.S. has been historically accommodated to democratic practice. We will examine the literary distinctions that emerge in a market-based culture, and chart the forms and genres that become both increasingly elite and recognizably popular before mid-century, with special attention to the way that images of taste speak to questions of political status. Our readings will take us from early nineteenth-century debates over institutions of culture through later representations of style, intellectual practice and cultural dissent, and will be discussed alongside both contemporary paintings and visual materials from the popular press. At the same time, we will address the ethics and epistemology of African American literary culture in this period as it responded to and participated in a variety of aesthetic forms. The course will work across literary modes-essays, autobiography, poetry, urban gothic, adventure stories, plantation novels, travel narratives-while asking questions about the formats in which these genres appeared, their readership, their manner of circulation, and their changing function across the decades that would come to be known as the "American Renaissance." Readings by Emerson, Poe, Hawthorne, Douglass, Melville and Longfellow will be read alongside others by E.D.E.N. Southworth, Mary Seacole, Henry Box Brown, T.S. Arthur and George Thompson. All students will be responsible for leading discussion on one of the texts. Seminar students will write a 20-page research paper; pro-seminar students will write a 10-12 page paper on a text from the course.
ENGLISH 230KEATSROBERTS, H.Please note: In order to enroll in this seminar, students must submit a seminar request form by Tuesday, March 8. Please contact Nancy Benay for more information. Keats is a poet of extremes ("O for a life of Sensation rather than of Thoughts!"), who has always provoked extreme reactions: from Byron's de haut-en-bas dismissal of "Johnny Keats's piss-a-bed poetry" to F. Scott Fitzgerald's reverential: "For a while after you quit Keats all other poetry seems to be only whistling or humming." His famous letters have been declared the most important works of literary criticism by a great writer, but also described as derivative and contradictory. In this course you will read most of Keats's writings in verse and prose, and be introduced to some of the major critical approaches to his work. You can decide whether to risk having all other poetry be reduced to "whistling or humming." Required texts: John Keats, Complete Poems (Jack Stillinger, ed.) Harvard UP, 1982. John Keats, Selected Letters (Robert Gittings, ed.) Oxford UP, 2002. (paperback, Oxford World's Classics edition) ISBN: 0-19-284053-3 Students taking the Seminar option will write an article-length paper; pro-seminar students will write an 8-10 page paper. All students will deliver a class presentation. This course qualifies for the "major author exemption" if there is anyone out there still working under the rules of the ancien regime.