| 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. |
| ENGLISH 101W | READING PARADISE LOST | JENKINS, J. | We will read Milton’s Paradise Lost, first for the joy of it, and second for ways the poem engages with problems of time and succession. The political ramifications of these engagements, including their relations to the poem’s religious themes, will also be explored. This is a writing intensive course; assignments include 300-500 word reading responses due before each class session, a midterm essay (both draft and final), and a final essay.
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| ENGLISH 101W | AESTHETIC THEORY | RADHAKRISHNAN, R. | What is the aesthetic? How are the norms of “the true and the beautiful” determined in Nature, and in Art? How does art/literature speak and to whom? Why do we need a theory for understanding Art and Literature? How do form and content blend in the structure known as the art/literary work? Is there an ideology behind aesthetics? How are politics and aesthetics related to each other: through the individual, society, the nation, the State, class, gender, sexuality, Capital, the commodity form? What is “experience” and how does art/literature frame it? How is the world figured in artistic expression, and how does “worldliness” constrain the freedom of Art? Why are there are fierce controversies about Art and its truth claims about the World? Is it possible to make objective evaluations about such rampantly subjective phenomena as taste, sensibility, pleasure etc? Does literature/art have a purpose, or is it “purposelessly purposive,” as the great philosopher Immanuel Kant would have it? How does aesthetic judgment differ from political or moral evaluation? Can there be a universal aesthetic, or is the aesthetic subject to the vagaries and contingencies of history and circumstance? When and how does the aesthetic function as a critique (utopian or immanent) of reality, and when how does it become complicit with the world as it is? How does the aesthetic experience reconcile matter with spirit, objectivity with subjectivity? What is its mode of appeal: rational or irrational, affective or cognitive, sensuous or intellectual? W.H.Auden said, “Poetry makes nothing happen,” whereas the romantic-revolutionary Shelley anointed poets as “the unacknowledged legislators” of the universe, while his contemporary Keats maintained that “Beauty was Truth and Truth Beauty.” Who was right? Is there even right and wrong in such matters? These are some of the questions that we will be raising in this seminar as we study a number of literary texts, primarily poems, and theoretical texts that deal with the fraught and contradictory relationship of the aesthetic text to the world at large.
Tentative list of authors to be studied: Adrienne Rich, John Keats, William Wordsworth, Wallace Stevens, James Joyce, William Butler Yeats, W.H. Auden, Martin Heidegger, Immanuel Kant, Herbert Marcuse, Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, Jean-Paul Sartre.
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| ENGLISH 101W | FIC OF INTERCONNECT | FARBMAN, H. | Everything is increasingly interconnected, or at least so we are increasingly told. From all sides—from politicians left and right, network theorists, environmentalists, globalization scholars and prophets, and from a number of recent ensemble films—we find ourselves called to recognize new or overlooked forms of interconnection. Through looking at how the discovery of surprising connections has been plotted in texts from Oedipus Rex to Amores Perros and from the Bible to The Wire, this course will reflect upon the mythic frameworks and narrative schemes within which such calls are inevitably placed. Sharpened reception will be our aim. Reading and viewing will include works of Sophocles, Plato, Marx, Freud, Yeats, Woolf, Bishop, Altman, Resnais, and Pynchon, among others. |
| ENGLISH 101W | LATE VICT POETICS | KROLL, A. | "Later Victorian Poetry and Poetics"
This course will focus on English poetry after 1850. We will pay particular attention to formal aspects of the texts we study. We will also, though, consider to the symbiotic relationship between poetry and painting in the latter half of the nineteenth century, beginning with the Pre-Raphaelites, a group which included poets, artists, and poet-artists. We will also consider how both the poetry and painting of the period engage mythical and legendary narratives to address questions of spirit and matter, soul and body, sacred and profane. Critical response papers, two longer papers, plus brief, in-class presentation.
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| ENGLISH 101W | PRACT OF CLOSE RDG | GODDEN, R. | Readers and literary scholars frequently use terms like ‘plot’, ‘voice’, ‘irony’, ‘metaphor’ and ‘character’ as though the meaning of those terms were self-evident. The course departs from the assumption that this is not the case, and from the belief that the literary, perceptual and cognitive structures caught up within the supposed commonplaces of textual analysis are both interesting and worthy of detailed analysis. During each of the first five weeks of the course, we will engage with a single literary term (drawn from the list above), approaching it through a piece of theoretical writing and in relation to a twentieth century American short story. The purpose of the course is at all times to explore and enable the process of reading; theoretical vocabularies and models, though interesting, are generally more limited than the complex literary and historical objects which they address, and should be viewed neither complete nor as glass machines. Consequently, the course will view such vocabularies and models as necessary and yet subordinate to the work of close reading.
My reason for drawing the literary examples from one period (albeit an extended one) stems from the course’s materialist emphasis; that is to say, from a conviction that language, whether literary or everyday, takes form from (reflects and refracts) the social and economic structures which it expresses, and upon which it acts. To record the “practical consciousness” (Marx) of poetic devices with any accuracy requires that our discussion of those devices relate to a traceable period (hence America in the twentieth century).
During the concluding five weeks of the course, having with luck gained a fuller vocabulary through which to address literary texts, we will engage a number of more generic literary problems (or excitements). Again, the weekly format will involve a theoretical essay and a related short story. Possible topics of discussion will include, “Reading through commodity (or “capitalist realism”)”; “Reading for the whispers (the issue of secrets)”; “What to do with ‘difficulty’, or textual opacity?”; “Narrative forms for a catastrophic century (parataxis and breakage)”. The ten stories and ten pieces of theoretical writing will be made available as PDF files.
Upper division writing courses require a total of 4,000 or more words of finished work. This work will consist of three essays of between 4-6 pages each, to be submitted at the first seminar of weeks 3, 6 and 10. Prior to submittal the second and third essay will be subject to small group editorial work.
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| ENGLISH 102A | INDIVIDUAL&SOCIETY | ALLEN, E. | This course will explore ideas of community and the self in medieval narratives from Beowulf to King Arthur. The Middle Ages, often defined as the “time between” the Classics and the rebirth of the Renaissance, actually covers an enormously varied and lively range of literature, which weaves together ideals of heroic martial prowess, courtly refinement, and spiritual devotion sometimes into peculiarly evocative rough cloths, sometimes into brilliant tapestries. The age is defined by precarious communities in which social continuity and peace can easily tilt into utter destruction. We will be particularly concerned to explore the basic terms of such communities their familial forms, their ethical values, their political orders—as social forms like courtly love and mercantilism solidify. We will tease out what makes individuals exceptional, outcast, or heroic in such communities, from the tension between Beowulf and his resentful enemy Grendel to the incestuous link between King Arthur and Mordred. The individual self can typify and lead the community, or else destroy it; in a context of social upheaval, what causes one or the other is not always so clear. Kings and monsters, gods and heroes, mystics and their demons—all evoke the remarkable proximity between social cohesion and isolation. The course book will be the Norton Anthology (Volume A). Requirements include one paper, a midterm and final exam (both essays), assorted smaller assignments including unannounced quizzes, and the usual attendance and participation. |
| ENGLISH 102B | DILLEMMA:POLI/SPIRTL | VAN SANT, A. | This course is about political, spiritual, and moral problems and the methods used to solve them by men and women in the 17th & 18th-centuries. We will start with political philosophy (reading selections of Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan) and ask about the source of political authority and the method of creating political stability. The readings will then include a long satiric poem (John Dryden’s Absalom & Achitophel) that was supposed to have an influence on an immediate political crisis. The same crisis accounts for our next work (John Locke’s Two Treatises), which was written for the opposing side. Then we will read John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress, a spiritual allegory in which a Christian soul has to turn his back on the corruption of the world and follow a solitary path to salvation. In a different mode and from a very different point of view, Mary Astell wrote Reflections on Marriage, which is both a feminist essay and a political pamphlet. The last work will be Daniel Defoe’s novel Roxana, about an energetic and clever woman whose strategies for survival often include methods that she recognizes as immoral. All these writers give us a sense of the struggle involved in dealing with the dilemmas of their period. |
| ENGLISH 102C | YOUNG ROMANTICS | ROBERTS, H. | In this course we will explore the writings of the "second generation" of English Romantic poets. We will look at the ways in which the redemptive promise of High Romanticism is increasingly called into question by the writers who emerge after the great achievements of Wordsworth and Coleridge. In the tense political context of the collapse of the Napoleonic Empire and the repressive European order which followed in its wake, writers as diverse as Byron, Thomas de Quincey, Percy Bysshe Shelley, John Keats and Felicia Hemans explored extremes of feeling, of estheticism, of political protest, and of ironic detachment which have in common a fascination with incompletion or "failure".
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| ENGLISH 102C | 19C US HUMOR AND SATIRE | STAFF | The United States was unique, according to an 1846 essay in Yankee Doodle magazine, because all of its inhabitants - "rich and poor, famous and obscure, young and old" - enjoyed "the inestimable blessings of a constant intercourse with a laughter-loving, mirth-provoking deity." Laughter was indeed a characteristic feature of U.S. culture during the 19th century, but it was certainly not an unmixed "blessing" for every American. It was, rather, an indicator of power and an instrument for acquiring it. In this course, we will use works of humor and satire to map the social, economic, and political contours of this period, with a particular focus on "mirth-provoking" representations of race, class, and gender that emerged at moments of cultural crisis. Readings will include Royall Tyler's play The Contrast, a selection of tall tales by Old Southwestern writers like Augustus Longstreet and T.B.Thorpe, and two novels: María Ruiz de Burton's Who Would Have Thought It? and Mark Twain's Puddn'Head Wilson. We will also move in the opposite direction, using the historical context of the 19th-century United States as a lens for examining the evolution of U.S. humor and satire in literature, oratory, and visual art. Hence we will also read political essays, slave narratives, cartoons, poetry, and court cases by familiar names like Alexander Hamilton, George Washington, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Frederick Douglass, Walt Whitman, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Thomas Nast. Students will post regularly to the class blog, give one group presentation, write one essay, and complete an in-class midterm and take-home final.
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| ENGLISH 102D | AMERICAN 1920'S | GODDEN, R. | The Twenties will be understood as a long decade in order to approach it through such extended and insistent patterns of determination as shifts in the prevalent forms of production (associated with Taylorism and Fordism); the Great War; the Great Migration; the intensification of advertising attendant upon an enlargement of the consumer network, and the continuing marginalization of the South as a region committed to labor bound by debt rather than to free wage labor. Such economic elements and their cultural consequences (alienation/reification, commodity aesthetics/capitalist realism, the Jazz Age, Harlem, Modernism…) will be addressed through a range of literary texts, and under a general rubric of modernization, where the processes associated with “making it new” may themselves be glossed, in a phrasing from Marx, as “all that is solid melts into air”. The course will attempt historically to situate and closely to read texts including The Jungle (Upton Sinclair [1907]), In Our Time (Hemingway [1925]), The Waste Land (T.S. Eliot [1922]), The Great Gatsby and A Diamond as Big as the Ritz(F. Scott Fitzgerald [1925],[1922]), The Sound and the Fury (William Faulkner [1929]), Cane (Jean Toomer [1923]), Passing (Nella Larsen [1929]), and Manhattan Transfer (John Dos Passos [1915]). Requirements include an essay, a midterm, a final and regular class attendance. |
| ENGLISH 103 | GOD: LITERARY INTRO | MILES, J. | The Bible, the foundational classic of Western literature, exists in two main editions: the Jewish and the Christian. This course includes: 1) a concise historical introduction to the Bible in both its editions; 2) a more extended literary introduction to the Jewish edition of the Bible, the Tanakh, more usually called the Old Testament, centered on God as its protagonist; 3) a sampling of other-than-literary kinds of contemporary Tanakh interpretation: archaeological, political, theological, feminist, etc., and 4) a sampling of the visual, literary, and musical art that has been inspired by the Tanakh. |
| ENGLISH 103 | INTRO SCI FI STDIES | ALEXANDER, J. | Introduction to Science Fiction Studies will boldly go...into a field often ignored in English and literary studies: the rise of science fiction as both a popular and critical form of literary exploration. Our analysis will proceed both (1) historically, as we attempt to understand how and why SF emerged as a genre in the late 19th century, and (2) materially, as we examine SF as a powerful market constellation of texts, films, and Web entities. Students can expect to read widely and frequently in SF literature, discuss numerous short film and video clips, examine SF on the Web, and write scholarly analyses of a variety of different kinds of texts. |
| ENGLISH 105 | AFRICAN WOMEN WRITERS | KATRAK, K | This course undertakes a study of women writers in the English language from different nations on the African continent. We discuss the naming of this field as "postcolonial" or "third world" given the history of British colonization in parts of Africa such as Nigeria, Ghana, among others. Although our focus is on texts by African women writers, we analyze similarities and differences among women writers from other parts of the colonized world such as the Caribbean--for instance, commonalities and differences in British colonial practices; the impact of colonial(ist) educational systems on oral traditions and modern written forms. We explore "feminisms" appropriate to the "third world". African women writers give imaginative expression to the multiple layers of oppression facing their protagonists such as patriarchy and colonialism, the traps of "tradition", female sexuality and socialization, "tradition" and "westernization." We study the dynamics of race, class, gender, ethnicity as these have evolved through the impact of colonialism and into postcolonial times. We study literary texts by Ama Ata Aidoo, Tsitsi Dangarembga, Bessie Head, among others. |
| ENGLISH 105 | T. MORRISON'S WORK | KEIZER, A. | Toni Morrison as Novelist and Critic
In an interview from the early 1980s, Toni Morrison states that “narrative remains the best way to learn anything . . . so I continue with narrative form.” The aim of this course is to explore, in detail, Morrison's uses of narrative form and figurative language. We will read most of Morrison's novels, examining the development of themes and formal strategies. We will also read Morrison's literary and cultural criticism, paying particular attention to the ways in which issues in the novels are addressed in these non-fiction works and to the different ways in which Morrison’s fiction and her criticism have been received. Among the questions we will attempt to answer by reading the novels and criticism together is the question of how narrative might function as a form of theory. Another ongoing concern of the class will be to situate Morrison's work in the African American and American literary traditions. |
| ENGLISH 106 | U.S. POSTMODERNIST FICTION | ZIMMERMAN, R. | This course will introduce students to some post-WWII U.S. fiction that exemplifies techniques and preoccupations associated with literary postmodernism. Specifically, we will read works by Kurt Vonnegut, Charles Johnson, Maxine Hong Kingston, Sherman Alexie, and Ana Castillo. 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, skepticism about metanarratives, and cultural hybridity. 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 psychoanalysis. Grades will be based on two essays, as well as a number of two-page homework responses and a 10-15 minute in-class presentation. |
| ENGLISH 106 | WHAT'S ENTERTAINMT | CHRISTENSEN, J. | This course will examine the concept of entertainment that is developed by the Hollywood motion picture industry from the silent picture era to the 1990s. We will analyze motion pictures as devices designed to entertain, as arguments about what entertainment is, and as efforts to comprehend all past and present forms of entertainment: fairs, amusement parks, circles, Motion pictures will likely include Lumiere and Edison shorts, The Jazz Singer (1927), The Crowd (1928), Freaks (1932), Footlight Parade (1933), She Done Him Wrong (1933), Pinocchio (1940), Dumbo (1941), Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942), Sullivan’s Travels (1941), Hollywood Canteen (1944) Meet Me in St. Louis (1944), Nightmare Alley (1947), The Greatest Show on Earth (1952), The Band Wagon (1953), Kiss Me Stupid (1964), Bonnie and Clyde (1967), Westworld (1973), Batman (1989), Jurassic Park (1993) Casino (1995), and Shrek (2001). We will have screenings of two movies a week. There will also be readings from historical documents and contemporary film theory and criticism. Grades will be based on a mid-term exam, a final research paper of 12-15 pages, completion of assignments on the class message board, occasional quizzes, and class discussion. |
| ENGLISH 106 | JOYCE'S ULYSSES | NORRIS, M. | This course is unusual because it will focus only on a single novel but one of the greatest novels ever written: James Joyce’s 1922 Ulysses. Ulysses is extraordinary not only because of the rich human story it tells about three major characters on a single day in Dublin, Ireland (June 16, 1904), but because if offers a dizzying array of narrative experiments that become more complex and provocative as it proceeds. It also functions as an exemplary text for modernist literature because of its classical parallel to Homer’s epic, the Odyssey. In this seminar we will work our way systematically through the text’s episodes, keeping our eye not only on what happens in the story, but also on how that story is told and complicated by the intellectual richness of its allusions and references.
The chief assignment for this course will be a formal research paper of 15-18 pages, produced with the help of a prospectus, an annotated bibliography, and revisions after a polished draft has been submitted. Because the seminar activity of lecture and discussion is crucial for tracking the text, class attendance will be mandatory.
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| ENGLISH 106 | SHKSPRE LAW&THEOLGY | 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 | HISTORY OF GRAPHIC NOVEL | SZALAY, M. | This course will look at the most significant graphic novels of the last 30 years, tracing the genre from its emergence from comic books, zines, and other mass-produced pulp forms to its current standing as a serious art.
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| ENGLISH 106 | WOOLF & MODERNISM | FARBMAN, H. | This course will interweave readings in the novels, stories, essays, and diaries of Virginia Woolf with readings of documents from a wide range of modernist movements in literature and across the arts (from futurism to imagism and from dada to simultaneism). Following Woolf’s permutations of some major tropes and motifs of modernist discourse, we will ask not what modernism was in general but what it is and isn’t—what it promises and doesn’t—in her particular case of it.
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| ENGLISH 210 | HLYWD&MODERN CORP | CHRISTENSEN, J. | |
| ENGLISH 210 | AMER WRITNG:1945-75 | SZALAY, M. | |
| ENGLISH 210 | STUDIES OF AMERICAS | LAZO, R. | |
| ENGLISH 210 | ROMANTCSM & HISTORY | ROBERTS, H. | |
| ENGLISH 210 | SPENSER AND MEMORY | HELFER, R. | |
| 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 299 | DISSERTATN RESEARCH | THOMAS, B. | |