| 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. Required prerequisite: satisfactory completion of lower-division writing requirement. |
| ENGLISH 28C | REALISM & ROMANCE | STAFF | Reading of selected texts to explore the ways in which this mode formulates experience. Students write several short analytic papers. Prerequisite: satisfaction of the lower-division writing requirement. |
| 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. Required prerequisite: satisfactory completion of the lower-division writing requirement.
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| ENGLISH 101W | ILLNESS & DIFFERENC | TERADA, R. | This course inquires into how the idea of physical illness influences thinking about normality, difference, and deviance in the 19th and 20th centuries. Probable topics include: illness, hypochondria, and femininity in 19th century literature; different roles of particular illnesses such as tuberculosis, cerebral palsy, and AIDS; the intersection between thinking about pathological bodies and thinking about queer sexuality. Texts will include narratives, philosophy and/or history of science, and films. This small seminar emphasizes student-driven participation and exploration. Requirements include weekly electronic comments, short papers and a final. Required prerequisite: Criticism 100A or English 100. |
| 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. Required prerequisite: Criticism 100A or English 100. |
| ENGLISH 101W | REALISM & NATURALIS | GOBLE, M. | In this course we will sample a range of texts American that seek to describe the emerging contours of "modern life" at the turn of the twentieth century. Focusing on Henry James, Charles Chesnutt, Stephen Crane, Frank Norris and Edith Wharton, we will ask a series of questions about the ways in which realism and naturalism-defined broadly as both literary movements and cultural responses-allow writers to examine a range of social, political, and historical concerns in a period spanning roughly from the end of the Civil War to the start of World War I. Among the topics we will discuss: the politics of race relations, the experience of technology, urban psychology and the rise of mass society, class and the commodification of art, and, finally, the crucial place of women at the center of all these concerns. Our texts includes shorter works by James ("The Turn of the Screw" and several other stories), Chesnutt's The House Behind the Cedars, Crane's "The Monster", Norris's McTeague, and Wharton's The Age of Innocence. These readings will be supplemented by a broad range of visual materials and historical documents from the period. Required prerequisite: Criticism 100A or English 100. |
| ENGLISH 101W | DEATH IN VERSE | ROBERTS, H. | This course will explore the English elegy--poems about loss, death and mourning. We will consider these poems both in terms of their historical development and in from the point of view of their thematic variety (poems mourning the death of other poets, poems asserting a victory over death, poems mourning the poet's own future death and suchlike). We will also explore some critical and theoretical writing on the elegy and upon cultural attitudes to death and the work of mourning. The required text for this class is Inventions of Farewell: A Book of Elegies, edited by Sandra M Gilbert. Required prerequisite: Criticism 100A or English 100.
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| ENGLISH 101W | BETWEEN LIT & PHIL | 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, and Derrida will also be read. Two papers. Required prerequisite: Criticism 100A or English 100. |
| ENGLISH 102A | REN HUMANISM | HELFER, R. | Humanism, a notoriously difficult term to define, has been understood variously as a
fascination with antiquity, a desire to reform religious institutions, and a renewed love of learning—an educational program that has led to what we now call ‘the humanities’. This course will explore varieties of humanism in the European Renaissance by focusing on one of its central tenets: imitation, and its early modern corollary, innovation. We will begin with a play by Shakespeare and work our way back to Plato, Cicero, and Augustine before advancing to Petrarch, the ‘father of humanism’, and continental figures such as Castiglione, Erasmus, Montaigne, as well as English humanists such as Sidney and More. In the broadest terms, this course will consider humanism as an ongoing dialogue or debate about culture, authority, and belief.
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| 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.
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| ENGLISH 102C | VICTORIAN SPACES | TUCKER, I. | This course will explore the relations among different conception fo space that are created or come into prominence during the Victorian era: national space, Continental space, colonial space, the interiors and surfaces of bodies, domestic space, architectural space, geological space. We will read work by authors including Charles Dickens, Charlotte Bronte, Wilkie Collins, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Robert Browning, Christina Rossetti, Matthew Arnold, John Ruskin, Charles Darwin, John Stuart Mill.
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| ENGLISH 102D | NAT & LIT: IRELAND | O'CONNOR, L. | This course introduces students to some classics of twentieth-century drama, fiction, and poetry by Irish writers, including works by Yeats, Joyce, Beckett, and others. Students are required to attend scheduled discussion groups four times in the quarter (more if you like!), to do midterm and final exams, and to write a paper. |
| ENGLISH 102D | POST WWII BRIT. MIN | ZIMMERMAN, R. | This course will introduce students to some poetry, drama and fiction by post-World War Two British minority authors. Specifically, we will read works by Jackie Kay, Linton Kwesi Johnson, Hanif Kureishi, Buchi Emecheta, Kazuo Ishiguro, and Timothy Mo. We will explore the literary conventions these texts deploy, and their preoccupations with issues such as race, xenophobia, cultural hybridity, transnational identities, diaspora, postcoloniality, historical trauma, and changing concepts of Britishness. The course will also serve as an introduction to theories of postcolonialism and transnationalism and the ways in which such theories intersect with feminism, Marxism, postmodernism, and post-structuralism. We will read texts by theorists such as Franz Fanon, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Gayatri Spivak, Hazel Carby, Paul Gilroy, Salman Rushdie, and Caryl Phillips, and consider ways in which their work can enrich our readings of the literary texts we’ll study. Grades will be based on two essays, some 1-2 page homework responses, and occasional quizzes. |
| ENGLISH 103 | SCI FI & URBAN DYSTOPIA | LIU, C. | This course will examine science fiction narratives and their projection of the geography of utopias and dystopias. Students are expected to have experience with film and literary theory and will be asked to consider the role of science fiction as cultural criticism and urban geography. Beginning with Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward that dates from the turn of the last century, we will focus on the work of science fiction writer Phillip K. Dick and examine his preoccupations with and visions of a nightmarish future for California. Critics we will be reading include Fredric Jameson, Mike Davis and David Harvey.
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| ENGLISH 103 | THE BINDING OF ISAAC | MILES, J | No chapter in the Hebrew Bible has provoked a greater outpouring of religious commentary, philosophical reflection, and artistic creativity than Genesis 22, the story of the akedah, or binding, of Isaac in preparation for the parricidal sacrifice that his father Abraham never performs. Reflection on the akedah begins in the Hebrew Bible itself, quite possibly in the Book of Job. Proto-Christian reflection on the Roman crucifixion of Jesus in the light of the akedah transformed a devastating defeat into a redemptive victory. Rabbinic reflection on the Roman destruction of the Jerusalem Temple in the light of the same chapter, shifting the focus from Abraham’s faith to Isaac’s, had a similarly redemptive or transformative effect. Recent research suggests that from a very early date, Jews and Christians were aware of and influenced by each other’s readings of this pivotal chapter. Its centrality in their imaginations surely had something to do with the place that Abraham’s paradigmatic submission to the will of God would come to occupy in the Qur’an.
But these are just the beginning. Thinkers from Augustine to Maimonides to Kant to Kierkegaard have made this chapter foundational for their thinking about the nature of morality, rationality, and faith. Poets from the anonymous author of the 14th-century Passion play The Brome to Wilfred Owen to Leonard Cohen have made it a vehicle for pathos, rage, and grief both personal and collective. Artists from Rembrandt to George Segal have painted or sculpted it. Its afterlife, since the Nazi shoah of European Jewry, has only grown more poignantly intense.
In the first weeks of the seminar, we shall engage the interpretation history of Genesis 22 through Jon Douglas Levenson’s seminal The Death and Transformation of the Beloved Son and Omri Boehm’s daring The Binding of Isaac: A Religious Model of Disobedience. In the latter weeks, seminar participants will make presentations and lead discussions on selected sources that these two recent commentators (and perhaps one or two others, such as Edward Kessler) build upon. A paper on a cognate topic of the student’s choosing will determine the final grade.
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| ENGLISH 103 | AMERICN DOCUMENTARY | GOBLE, M. | This class surveys a broad range of non-fictional representations of life in the United States, with a particular emphasis on the literary rhetorics and political contexts that shape the commitment to "fact" that defines the modern documentary. Starting with several landmarks of American nonfiction from the turn of the twentieth century, including Jacob Riis's How the Other Half Lives, W. E. B. Du Bois's The Souls of Black Folk and Henry James's The American Scene, we will examine how a distinct documentary genre emerged from a variety of influences, including sensationalist or "yellow" journalism of the late-nineteenth century, academic writing in the fields of sociology and anthropology, and elite forms of travel writing and memoir. We will also look closely at the 1930s-in many ways the most important decade of documentary expression in the U. S.-and see how texts like James Agee and Walker Evans's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men attempted to apply modernist techniques for documentary purposes. Central to the course will be questions about the importance of visual representation in the documentary tradition, from the inclusion of Riis's own photographs in How the Other Half Lives to the experimental collaboration of various writers and photographers in the 1930s. We will examine work by documentary film makers of both the silent era and later, including Robert Flaherty, Alain Resnais, Frederick Wiseman and by contemporary writers and visual artists who explore, and at times exploit, the potential for fiction that remains always a part of even the most strenuous attempt to capture reality in word and image.
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| ENGLISH 103 | CNTRY & CTY IN LIT HISTORY | GELLEY, A. | This course will explore the significance of the city as a \"memory theater\" in the sense that Frances Yates analyzed for an earlier period, that is, as a repertoire of cultural sites situated in historical cities and at the same time deployed in an intertextual network linking geographical and social data with fictive constructs. We will trace how the new forms of city-space that became prominent around the turn of the 18th to the 19th centuries became available as cultural narratives during the 19th and 20th.
The course will begin with a consideration of the pre-Romantic and Romantic concept of landscape, especially as a touchstone of aesthetic experience and judgment in the period. In the wake of the aesthetization of landscape in Romanticism, there emerged a consciousness where \"cityscape\" served as both a reaction and an alternative to landscape. The flight from the city articulated in Wordsworth\'s \"Residence in London\" (The Prelude, Bk. 7) leads to a differentiated yet pervasive theme of anti-nature in Baudelaire. In the writings of Poe, and then in the fiction of the mid-century (Dickens), the aura of landscape as a sheltering precinct, a site still touched by traces of a divine providence, came to be replaced by the phenomenon of the metropolis as site of new forms of human agglomeration and cultural commerce.
Our course will study this development in literature dealing with three metropolitan centers-London, Paris, and New York, with works by Wordsworth, Baudelaire, Poe, Dickens, and Bellow. Critics and theorists will include Georg Simmel, Walter Benjamin, Michel Foucault, Raymond Williams, and T.J.Clark.
Texts:
Raymond Williams, The Country and the City, Oxford U.P.
Baudelaire, Baudelaire in English, Penguin
W. Benjamin, Reflections, Schocken
Saul Bellow, Mr. Sammler’s Planet, Penguin
T. J. Clark, The Painting of Modern Life, Princeton U.P.
Dickens, Bleak House, Penguin
E. A. Poe, Selected Tales, ed. D. Van Leer, Oxford World Classics
Wordsworth, The Prelude Bk. 7 (Electronic Reserve)
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| ENGLISH 105 | ASAM WRITERS GENDER | KATRAK, K. | This course explores the intersection of gender and generation in Asian American Cultural Expression. The importance of gender (first, second, third, and beyond) is a significant theme along with male and female parameters of gender identity in the representation of Asian American lives. Our study includes the portrayals of different generations within one family as well as cultural politics of tradition and innovations in South Asian American dance and music, and responses from youth and elders within the community. Selection of literary texts include Maxine Hong Kingston, Joy Kogawa, Denise Uyehara's performance writings that include personal memory, family history and political realities in post 9-11 times. We read selection of Vietnamese- American writers and expressive art (dance) by second-generation South Asian Americans. Requirements include class presentation, in-class writing, midterm and final exam.
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| ENGLISH 105 | ASNAM LIT MULTIRACE | PAN, A. | This course situates Asian American literature and culture in the broader framework of racial formations in the United States, addressing a range of themes fundamental to the study of the topic: interracial and cross-cultural contact, immigration and transnationalism, identity politics and stereotyping. We will not only study the work of Asian American writers, but also the ways Asian Americans have been portrayed in the U.S. cultural imaginary from the beginning of the twentieth century to the present. Rather than understanding Asian Americans as belonging to a discrete, self-defined racial category, the class offers a comparative approach that examines the political, legal, and economic structures that shape the social experiences of Asian Americans in relation to other racial groups. We will explore how cultural production by and about Asian Americans has been crucial to the constitution of American national identity for over a century. The objective of this course is for students to think critically about the relationship between race and culture in comparative, multiracial contexts.
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| ENGLISH 105 | LIT AGE OF SEGREGAT | THOMAS, B. | We will read a variety of literary works written in the era of segregation. We will also work with some of the important legal cases decided in the period, such as the Civil Rights Cases, Plessy v. Ferguson, US v. Wong Kim Ark, and Downes v. Bidwell. The focus will be on the late 19th century with some attention to the early years of the 20th century. Traditionally, the Age of Segregation has been understood as a black/white divide. But it is important to remember that the law upheld in Plessy distinguished between “whites” and “coloreds.” We will, therefore, look at literary works and the legal status of African Americans in the period, but also at works and the legal status of Asian Americans as well as the status of the people living in the “Insular Territories” acquired by the US in the Spanish-American War. Assigned works will include poems, fiction, and essays by Hay (Lincoln’s secretary and then Secretary of State during the Spanish-American War) , Tourgée, (Plessy’s attorney), Lanier, Douglass, Grady, Cable, B.T. Washington, W..E. B Du Bois, Kipling, and Sui Sin Far. We will also read Howells’s An Imperative Duty, Twain’s Pudd’nhead Wilson, Chesnutt’s The Colonel’s Dream, Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, and Faulkner's Go Down, Moses. Requirements: regular class attendance, a midterm, a 5-7 page essay, and a final. This course should count for students taking the "Humanities and Law" minor. |
| ENGLISH 105 | AFRICAN AMER NOVEL | KEIZER, A. | The African American novelist Ralph Ellison wrote “I believe that true novels, even when most pessimistic and bitter, arise out of an impulse to celebrate human life and therefore are ritualistic and ceremonial at their core. Thus they would preserve as they destroy, affirm as they reject.” This course explores African American novels from the late-nineteenth century to the present, investigating how these works “preserve as they destroy, affirm as they reject” aspects of the genre and its sub-categories (e. g., the Bildungsroman, the postmodernist novel). As we examine the formal and thematic elements of the novels, we will pay particular attention to the representation of black folk culture, music, religious practices, and popular culture. We will also analyze the ways in which African American novelists respond to socio-economic and political realities, including the legacies of slavery, dominant-culture stereotypes of black men and women, black migration to northern cities, and the Civil Rights and feminist movements. Novels include Sutton Griggs’ Imperium in Imperio, Nella Larsen’s Passing, Toni Morrison’s Sula, Danzy Senna’s Caucasia, and Paul Beatty’s The White-Boy Shuffle. Requirements include a mid- term, a final, an 8-10 page paper, and regular attendance and participation. |
| ENGLISH 105 | CARIBBEAN LIT | CULBERT, J. | The reading for this course will range widely from the 16th to the 20th centuries and includes European and Caribbean texts of English, French, Spanish and African heritage. With its diverse cultural influences and languages, the Caribbean provides a rich context in which to explore questions of race, cultural identity, colonial heritage and literary production. We will pay particular attention to the ways in which Europe has viewed and imagined the Caribbean region and how Caribbean writers have responded to these ideas, whether contesting, rewriting or reinventing them. Examples of the type of questions we will be posing are: How does Caribbean writing reflect the legacy of colonialism and the slave trade? How are cultural and literary identity fashioned in a context of racial, cultural and linguistic mixing? What are the strategies by which Caribbean writers challenge Euro-American cultural domination? How does literature contribute to the work of history and cross-cultural dialogue? Authors include Shakespeare, Montaigne, C.L.R James, Aime Cesaire, and Jamaica Kincaid.
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| ENGLISH 106 | VICTORIAN POETRY | ROBERTS, H. | In this course we will survey a range of poets from the Victorian period, including Matthew Arnold, Robert Browning, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Christina Rossetti, A.C. Swinburne and Alfred Tennyson.
The required text for this class is The Norton Anthology of English Literature (8th Ed): Volume E: The Victorian Age edited by Christ and Robson.
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| ENGLISH 106 | GRAPHIC NOVEL HIST | ALEXANDER, J. | This course will examine the development of the graphic novel, from its early formation in serialized comic books of the 1940s and 50s to the avant-garde work of R. Crumb in the 1960s and 70s, and to more recent experimental works by novelists such as Art Spiegelman (Maus I and II) and Alan Moore (The Watchmen). Some attention will be paid to the contributions made to the genre by Japanese authors, such as Osama Tezuka, whose influence on American graphic novel writing has been immense. We will also examine the transformation of some graphic novels into film (e.g., Frank Miller's 300). Methodologically, this course will attempt to understand the development of the graphic novel as a form blending both popular culture elements and highbrow aesthetics. We will also attempt to situate these works in the socio-cultural and political climates surrounding their publication. Most significantly, we may understand some of these works as "cultural work"; that is, as intentional (and often ideological) interventions in helping mass audiences understand complex social and political phenomena (e.g, Persepolis and its depiction of modern day Iran or Pedro and Me and its exploration of AIDS among youth).
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| ENGLISH 106 | MEDIEVAL MAGIC | KROLL, A. | In this course, we will read a number of medieval literary and historical works that center on magic, witchcraft, and folklore (e.g., the Old English Leechbook, the Lais of Marie de France, Geoffrey of Monmouth's History of the Kings of Britain, The Mabinogion, Malory's Morte Darthur, the Malleus Maleficarum, selections from the Zohar, treatises on alchemy, selections from Agrippa's Occult Philosophy). While we explore the basic structure and argument of each text, we will also consider the nature of magic, magical practitioners, and the cultures which foster or revile them. We will also inquire into the changing fortunes of magic and magical lore from the early to later medieval periods, particularly in relation to social, political, and economic conditions. Readings will be accompanied by relevant art and film. Brief presentation, a few short response papers, and one longer term paper. |
| ENGLISH 106 | SHKSPRE LAW & THEOL | 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 106 | RHETORIC & RACE | MAILLOUX, S. | This course will explore the rhetorical construction of racial identity in several literary and non-literary texts by or about African Americans. Readings will include Douglass's Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Du Bois's The Souls of Black Folk, Nella Larsen’s Passing, and Ellison’s Invisible Man,. Requirements include class participation, midterm and final exams, and final term paper. |
| ENGLISH 160 | GOLDEN AGE HOLLYWD | CHRISTENSEN, J. | Hollywood Classical Cinema: 1928-1939. We will study Hollywood motion pictures from the introduction of sound until the end of the 1930s. The lectures will analyze individual films from the perspectives of their genre (gangster, musical, horror, comedy, social realism) and their engagement with American society and culture.
Students are responsible for screening two pictures a week. Most assigned readings will be from The Grand Design: Hollywood as a Modern Business Enterprise by Tino Balio. Among the motion pictures on the syllabus are: The Jazz Singer, Public Enemy, Little Caesar, Frankenstein, Bringing Up Baby, The Wizard of Oz, The Grapes of Wrath, and Citizen Kane. Students will be responsible for two 4-5 page critical papers and a final exam. There will be occasional pop quizzes. |
| ENGLISH 160 | MELODRAMA | TERADA, R. | In this course we look into the philosophy of melodrama, inquiring how to think about emotions that seem extravagant, excessive and sometimes even false, and investigating the place outsize emotions occupy in aesthetic genres, especially drama and film. Philosophical reflection on inauthentic emotions produces normative models of self, concepts, and feeling. Melodrama is therefore also a social issue: often, depiction of a world of people who can\'t seem to produce the right emotions seems to suggest criticism of the society that demands certain emotions and yet has produced these people. Philosophers that may help us toward a theory of melodrama include Plato, Walter Benjamin, and Stanley Cavell. We\'ll watch several films from the period of classic Hollywood melodrama or reflecting back on it, probably including Douglas Sirk, All That Heaven Allows (1955) and There\'s Always Tomorrow (1956), Michael Curtiz, Mildred Pierce (1945), Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Veronika Voss (1982), and Todd Haynes, Far from Heaven (2004).
The class format will be student-driven discussion; requirements include regular postings on a website, two 5-pp. papers, a midterm, and a final.
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| ENGLISH 210 | ASNAM POSTCOL DRAMA | KATRAK, K. | |
| ENGLISH 210 | SHAKESPEARE | LUPTON, J. | |
| ENGLISH 210 | 19C REPRESENTATION | HENDERSON, A. | |
| ENGLISH 210 | PSYCHOAN&AF AM LIT | KEIZER, A. | |
| ENGLISH 210 | AM RELIGIOUS POETRY | MILES, J. | |
| ENGLISH 210 | RADICAL & CORP LIB | SZALAY, M. | |
| ENGLISH 210 | GOTHIC ENLIGHTMENT | LEWIS, J. | |