| Course | Title | Instructor | Description |
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| ENGLISH 28B | COMIC&TRAGIC VISION | STAFF | Discussion, three hours. Reading of selected texts to explore the ways in which these modes formulate experience. Students write several short analytic papers in each course. |
| ENGLISH 28C | REALISM & ROMANCE | STAFF | Discussion, three hours. Reading of selected texts to explore the ways in which these modes formulate experience. Students write several short analytic papers in each course.
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| ENGLISH 28E | CRAFT OF FICTION | STAFF | E28E, The Craft of Fiction, should be taken before embarking on the Creative Writing Emphasis. The concentration of the course is the study of writing by writers about the process of writing. How have writers viewed their craft; how have they developed their processes; what have their influences been, and at what point did they shed them?
Contrary to popular notions of muses, of inspiration, most writers are very hard working. This course studies the thoughtfulness most writers have about the work of writing. |
| ENGLISH 101W | BETWEEN LIT&PHILOS | WARMINSKI, A. | This course will examine philosophy's ambiguous (and ambivalent) relation to literature: that is, the sense in which philosophical logic needs both to banish and to borrow from the rhetoric of the poets. The focus will be on Plato and Nietzsche, but texts by Descartes, Heidegger, Derrida, and de Man will also be read. Two papers. |
| ENGLISH 101W | LIT OF REVERIE | TERADA, R. | In reverie--a state of free association, loose meditation, or daydreaming--perception and imagination mingle. The objects of reverie may be fleeting optical experiences or trains of thought that run wild. This course will explore how reverie became valuable as a mental state and element of creative process during and after the romantic period, and its connection to such topics as psychedelia and recreational drug use. Considering verbal and visual reverie in poetic prose, poetry, philosophy, and film, the course will emphasize student discussion and student-generated ideas. Works to be studied include texts by S.T. Coleridge, Thomas de Quincey, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Walter Benjamin.
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| ENGLISH 101W | LIT & SCIENCE | TUCKER, I. | This course investigates the ways in which Darwin’s theories of natural and sexual selection, racial diversity and human expression came to affect the ways in which nineteenth century laypeople understood their relations to the world and to one another. How did Darwin’s theories transform or consolidate the authority of “science” more broadly construed? How did they affect people’s understandings of the origins, mechanisms or possibility of human creativity? How did these theories transform notions of history? Of the reach and limits of human knowledge?
We will begin the course by examining the writings of Darwin’s predecessors – Lyell, Malthus, Lamarck, Herschel, Whewell and Mill – in order to figure out what exactly was new, or understood to be revolutionary, about Darwin’s ideas. We will then spend some weeks reading and discussing selections from Darwin’s central works – The Origin of Species, Descent of Man, and The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals. Finally, we will turn to a series of literary engagements with Darwin’s ideas – novels by Wilkie Collins, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, HG Wells, Jim Crace – to see the ways in which Darwin’s concepts were popularized and transformed by their translation into literary narratives. We will also examine the way in which these authors’ understandings of their own authority and of the nature and significance of fictional evidence is altered by the emergence of Darwinian ideas.
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| ENGLISH 101W | LAW & LITERATURE | THOMAS, B. | This course will look at different ways in which the disciplines of law and literature relate to one another. It consists of four units. The first examines one way in which the law affects literature: censorship. We will read some important works addressing the question of censorship, such as Plato's "Republic," Milton's "Areopagitica," and Mill's ON LIBERTY. We will also read selections from some famous Supreme Court cases involving freedom of speech as well as the judicial decision lifting the ban on James Joyce's ULYSSES. The second unit will look at a debate about law by two men of letters as well as one example of law represented in literature. In this unit we will read selections from Burke's REFLECTIONS ON THE REVOLUTION IN FRANCE and Paine's THE RIGHTS OF MAN, as well as Melville's BILLY BUDD, SAILOR, which alludes to the Burke/Paine debate. In the third unit we will apply literary techniques of close reading to legal documents or documents affecting the law. Our reading will consist of some famous works by Abraham Lincoln, as well as his justification for his crackdown on civil liberties during the Civil War. The fourth and final unit will be on a literary response to a legal controversy. We will read Hale's "A Man Without a Country," which was written in response to the most famous dispute involving Lincoln's suspension of civil liberties.
This course counts for those wishing to complete the "Humanities and Law" minor. It also fulfills English majors' upper division writing requirement. To that end we will take class time to work on writing skills. Three essays of 5 to 6 pages will be required.
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| ENGLISH 101W | FREUD AND LACAN | JENKINS, J. | This course is designed as a three-hour weekly seminar that acclimates students to the kinds of participation expected in graduate humanities seminars. In the first five weeks, we will read some of Freud’s more important post-WWI works: Group Psychology and Analysis of the Ego, The Ego and the Id, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Civilization and its
Discontents, and Moses and Monotheism. The remainder of the sessions is an introduction to the work of Jacques Lacan, through the reading of his Seminar Seven: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis.
The course’s intensive preparation in Freud, with plenty of explanatory help from the instructor, will allow students an introduction to Lacan through the reading of Lacan himself, rather than readings about Lacan. |
| ENGLISH 102A | IDEAS OF RENAISANCE | HELFER, R. | “The Renaissance Stage” explores the fascinating drama produced in Renaissance England by authors other than Shakespeare. We will read seven plays by a variety of writers such as Johnson, Marlowe, and Webster (to name a few) and, in the process, we will examine historical and social contexts of the Renaissance stage. The assignments for this class will include weekly reading quizzes, an essay, and a final exam. The texts for this class are Renaissance Drama (Blackwell, ed. Kinney) and A Companion to Renaissance Drama (Blackwell, ed. Kinney). |
| ENGLISH 102B | POPE AND SWIFT | KROLL, R. | In this course we will read much of the best of the poetry of Alexander Pope (1688-1744), and much of the best of Jonathan Swift (1667-1745). Pope is undoubtedly the greatest English poet of the eighteenth century; and Swift, a close personal friend, one of the great ironists and political writers in the European tradition. We begin briefly by looking at John Dryden, their great immediate predecessor to whom Swift was distantly related (though he hated him), partly to see how powerful the scatological imagination is in all three writers (look up ‘scatology’ in your dictionary), and partly to see how Pope’s mastery of the heroic couplet follows from Dryden’s. Pope was politically disabled, coming from a Catholic family, in an age in which Catholics had very limited rights, and he was also ill throughout his life: crippled by Pott’s disease as a child (a form of spinal tuberculosis), he never grew higher than 4’6”. Though Swift was born in Ireland, and is today considered something of an Irish national hero, as a professional clergyman in the Church of England, he considered being banished to Dublin from London a form of cultural death. Consequently, both writers sympathize with the lot of minorities, most especially women, with whom both had interesting and complicated relationships, and about whom they write with astonishing sympathy and intelligence. |
| ENGLISH 102C | CLASS&TASTE 19C US | TAMARKIN, E. | This course investigates the aesthetics, ethics and epistemology of high culture in the American nineteenth century. Our readings will look at the relationship between taste and consumerism, genteel society and mass culture, class politics and public intellectualism, while exploring the way that social status in America has been historically accommodated to democratic practice. We will examine the distinctions between high and popular culture, and chart the forms and genres that become increasingly "elite" over the course of the century, with particular attention to the way 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 and decorum and will be discussed alongside both contemporary paintings and visual materials from the popular press. Authors include Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Herman Melville, Emily Dickinson, Louisa May Alcott, Rebecca Harding Davis, Edith Wharton and William Dean Howells. The course ends with new articulations of and responses to a specifically African American high culture in the writings of W. E. B. Du Bois and Stephen Crane. |
| ENGLISH 102C | WRITING THE VICTORIAN CITY | FREELAND, N. | In the nineteenth century, Britain became the world's first predominantly urban society. Nineteenth-century literature reflects this major demographic upheaval not only in its content, but also in the new literary forms it developed to convey the urban experience. While the emerging social sciences tried to make order out of the overwhelming magnitude of city life with maps and statistics, the novel developed new models of omniscience and overview. While police and health inspectors sought to regulate the city by tracking down the sources of deviance or disease, new types of fantasy and science fiction writing promised to explain the genesis of the abnormal or the supernatural. Both real-world and fictional experiments strove to solve the problems of the modern city by imagining utopian futures, ranging from the pastoral to the ultra-urban. This course examines a range of these literary strategies, considering both how our image of the city reflects its literary representations, and how literature itself was shaped by this encounter with the urban experience.
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| ENGLISH 102D | LIT IN AGE OF FILM | GOBLE, M. | In this course, we will examine intersections between literature and visual media in the twentieth century, with a particular focus on texts that are concerned with film and its cultural effects. We will read novels, short stories, poetry, and essays which not only help us better understand the social implications of media technologies, but also show how literature itself tries to understand its new place as one particularly historical medium among many. The class will consider such topics as the status of reading in a culture of looking, the politics of the extremely popular, celebrity as a way of life, and the commercial origins of the modern work of art. Of particular interest will be texts that address directly the mythology of Hollywood, as well as writers who borrow liberally from film technique as an aesthetic resource. That said, this is not so much a class about film, as about the world that film has made, and so we will also devote a great deal of attention to works in which visual media figure only-but nevertheless crucially-in the background. Texts by Theodore Dreiser, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, James Weldon Johnson, Nathanael West, Frank O'Hara, and William Gibson. We will also screen several films, including Buster Keaton's Sherlock, Jr., George Cukor's It Should Happen to You, and Billy Wilder's Sunset Boulevard.
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| ENGLISH 102D | BRIT POSTMODERNISM | ZIMMERMAN, R. | This course will introduce students to some post-WWII British drama and fiction that exemplifies techniques and preoccupations associated with literary postmodernism. Specifically, we will read works by Tom Stoppard, Caryl Churchill, Angela Carter, Salman Rushdie, and Caryl Phillips. We will explore the postmodernist literary conventions these texts deploy (such as temporal disorder, metafictionality, intertextuality, and magical realism), and their preoccupations with issues such as fragmented subjectivity, cultural hybridity, and skepticism about metanarratives. The course will also serve as an introduction to theories of the postmodern and the ways in which such theories intersect with feminism, Marxism, and postcolonialism. Grades will be based on two essays, as well as a number of quizzes and homework responses. |
| ENGLISH 103 | MADNESS IN REN LIT | STAFF | |
| ENGLISH 103 | LIT OF AFFLICTION | LEWIS, J. | In her essay “On Being Ill” (which we’ll be reading), Virginia Woolf found it “strange indeed that illness has not taken its place with love and battle and jealousy among the prime themes of literature.” But since Woolf’s day “pathography” (writing on illness) has grown into a perversely healthy subgenre, with both illness memoirs and physicians’ narratives as staples of literary journalism today. In this course, we’ll explore the literary strategies, both fictional and nonfictional, that writers have used to make sense of their own and others’ physical and sometimes mental suffering. Contra Woolf, we’ll start off looking at some classic literature of affliction: the Book of Job, Tolstoy’s “The Death of Ivan Ilyich,” and Gide’s The Immoralist, intermixed with some of John Donne’s Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, excerpts from Daniel Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year, and the tubercular Robert Louis Stevenson’s autobiographical essay “Called South.” Then we’ll turn to several recent works of creative nonfiction that draw on this literary tradition. These works investigate some fundamental questions: Where and how do we draw the line between sickness and health? How can figurative language help us to (re)shape the experience of suffering? What does ‘normal’ really mean? How do social perceptions shape the diseases people ‘have’? Why do we speak of ourselves as ‘having’ and ‘getting’ the illnesses we ‘have’ and ‘get’? How does illness destroy individuality and how can it be used to confirm it? Can the mind or spirit truly be separated from the body? Texts and authors devoted to these problems include Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor; Oliver Sacks, An Anthropologist on Mars; Katherine Butler Hathaway, The Little Locksmith; and Amy Wilensky, Passing for Normal. We’ll also read some short pieces of literary journalism by Alice Stewart Trillin, Peggy Phelan, Sherwin Nuland, Tracy Thompson, and Andrew Sullivan. Along with several short writing exercises, two 6- to 8-page papers are required. One of them may be an illness narrative of your own.
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| ENGLISH 103 | SHAKESPEARE&THEOLOG | JENKINS, J. | This is a class on the ways that law and language move through time. We will be exploring relations between the legal state of exception, theological grace, and our receptions of legal and cultural traditions. Shakespeare offers us dramatic situations in which many of these issues come into play. Readings include, in addition to Shakespeare, Walter Benjamin, Giorgio Agamben, Samuel Weber, Erich Auerbach, and Paul of Tarsus. |
| ENGLISH 105 | WMN WAKE OF REVOLTN | KROLL, R. | This course examines the extent to which women engage with the politics of two rather different periods in English, and in European, history. First, we look, in the mid- to late-seventeenth century, at the effects of the English Civil Wars (1642-49), the execution of Charles I (1649), the English Republic under Oliver Cromwell (1649-1660), and the return or “restoration” of Charles II, initiating a period in which both English science and English theatre flourished (1660-1700). Writing in this context are Lucy Hutchinson, a Puritan with a superb mind who penned one of the first great English biographies (of her husband, a member of the republican regime); Margaret Cavendish, a royalist who became enamored of the new science and wrote a form of science fiction; and Aphra Behn, the first woman to make her living by writing, and an outstanding dramatist as well as a kind of early novelist. We then turn to the period of political ferment initiated by the French Revolution (1789), looking at direct responses to that event in the guise of Edmund Burke’s attack, and Mary Wollstonecraft’s truly ‘feminist’ tract, A Vindication of the Rights of Women, then novels by Ann Radcliffe and Jane Austen. We take a brief pit-stop part way into the eighteenth century to read Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s letters from Constantinople, which have little to do with the other parts of the course but are too enjoyable to miss.
We will have fortnightly quizzes, two 3-5 page papers, and a take-home final.
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| ENGLISH 105 | NEW ZEALAND LIT | ROBERTS, H. | This course will provide an introduction to New Zealand literature in English. Through poems and short stories, we will explore a number of perennial New Zealand concerns including how to forge of a "national identity" distinct from the "Mother Country," and the place of Maori culture and identity in a postcolonial New Zealand.
Required texts: Michael Morrissey, The Flamingo Anthology of New Zealand Short Stories (Harper Collins, 2004 edition); Jenny Bornholdt et al., An Anthology of New Zealand Poetry in English (Oxford UP).
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| ENGLISH 106 | CULTURES & SUBCULTR | SZALAY, M. | This class will look at the status of the "hipster" in various U.S. subcultures during the 1950s and 1960s. Tracing this figure's evolution during these decades, we will examine the broader function of "cool culture" within a changing postwar US economy: especially with respect to new styles of popular music, advertising, technology and politics.
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| ENGLISH 106 | EPIC | HELFER, R. | In “Epic!” we will examine the two major epics of the English Renaissance, Spenser’s Faerie Queene and Milton’s Paradise Lost, asking how these narrative poems engage in the project of ‘writing’ England – its past, present, and future. We will consider how Spenser’s and Milton’s epics speak to each other but also to classical and medieval expressions of the genre: in addition to reading Virgil’s Aeneid, we will nod to Homer, Dante, and Chaucer by reading excerpts of their work. The assignments for this class include weekly reading quizzes and two essays.
The texts for this class include Virgil’s Aeneid (Vintage, ed. Fitzgerald), Spenser’s Faerie Queene (Penguin, ed. Roche), Milton’s Paradise Lost (Penguin, ed. Leonard), and a course reader. |
| ENGLISH 106 | HAWTHORNE & POE | TAMARKIN, E. | Close critical reading of works by Nathaniel Hawthorne and Edgar Allan Poe, considering questions of literary form, literary history, and historical context. The course examines both representative texts and lesser-known pieces (Hawthorne's travel writings and stories for children, Poe's literary journalism) in hopes of better understanding the full range of each author's attempts to represent, and make sense of, nineteenth-century America. Topics for discussion include: changing definitions of the author and the intellectual; new mass-market genres of entertainment; the literary culture of democracy; the language of sectionalism and slavery; and the relationship between "romance" and history. |
| ENGLISH 106 | COURTING FICTIONS | FREELAND, N. | Boy meets girl. At first they don't seem to get along. Or their parents object. Or there's another boy, or another girl, and jealousy and misunderstandings ensue. Then— at the last minute— everything gets cleared up, he proposes, she accepts and we're assured they'll live happily ever after. Is this the stuff of great literature?
In this course, we'll seek to understand how, over the course of the nineteenth century, the courtship plot became the default model for the English novel. Choosing a spouse was a tricky business, especially for women: a woman's social position and economic prospects were completely dependent on her husband's wealth, status and occupation, yet marriage was increasingly idealized as a sublime meeting of souls rather than a smart business venture. Beginning with Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, we'll explore how the novel both investigates and obscures this contradiction, and how it repeatedly reinvents its familiar story. We'll pay particular attention to the ways that courtship intersects with the other possible plot-lines of the realist novel, by reading a quasi-gothic Bildungsroman (Jane Eyre), a social problem novel (North and South), a religious satire (Barchester Towers) and a mystery novel (The Moonstone)— all of which turn out to be, at some level or other, courtship novels after all.
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| ENGLISH 106 | VICTRN MYTHOGRAPHY | KROLL, A. | This course will explore the development of Victorian mythography from its earliest expressions in folklore collections like Keightley's Fairy Mythology to ethnographical studies of world myth in E.B. Tylor's Primitive Culture, Andrew Lang's Myth, Ritual and Religion, and J.G. Frazer's The Golden Bough. As we read texts which deal with various aspects of myth, we will also consider a number of literary and artistic works which center on mythical subjects, including Tennyson's Arthurian poetry, the art of the Pre-Raphaelites, Swinburne's neoclassical drama and poetry, and Hardy's novels. Brief in-class presentation and option of two short (ca. 5pp.) or one longer (ca. 10pp.) paper.
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| ENGLISH 210 | CHAUCER | ALLEN, E. | |
| ENGLISH 210 | MODERNISM & FILM | GOBLE, M. | |
| ENGLISH 210 | SHAKESPEARE | SILVER, V. | |
| ENGLISH 210 | US REALISM | THOMAS, B. | |
| ENGLISH 210 | EVIDENCE | TUCKER, I. | |
| 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 | |