| Course | Title | Instructor | Description |
|---|
| 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 | MEDIEVAL OTHERWRLDS | ALLEN, E. | This course studies one of the most enduring traditions of English literature, the story of King Arthur and the knights of the Round Table, who venture into Otherworlds of many varieties. In the romance, young noble protagonists strive to win love and honor in quests replete with marvels and monsters, magic springs and bridges of swords, bold speeches and strange silences. The centerpieces of our study are Chretien de Troyes, who initiates the romance tradition, and Thomas Malory, whose work represents the culmination of the romance in English and the source of most modern versions of the Arthurian tradition. We will also explore at least one Arthurian film. Requirements include regular journal writing, online discussion, and three short formal papers. |
| ENGLISH 101W | 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 Simultaneism to Surrealism). 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. |
| ENGLISH 101W | NABOKOV & MEMORY | HELFER, R. | This course explores one of the most exciting and challenging American authors of the 20th century. We will read Lolita, Pale Fire, and Ada (and maybe Pnin) all difficult works and not for the faint-hearted! This course includes two essays, drafts, in class writing and quizzes, as well as active participation and regular attendance. |
| ENGLISH 101W | EARLY MODERN SCI-FI | KIENE, J. | In this course, we’ll read examples of English fiction impacted by scientific discourses and debates emerging in England and Continental Europe during the 16th and 17th-centuries, as well as early modern poems, plays, and prose works that anticipate many of the motifs, themes, and philosophical concerns characteristic of contemporary science fiction (including space exploration, time-travel, artificial life, utopian/dystopian social engineering, robots, aliens, UFOs, and more). We will define the genre of early modern sci-fi broadly, ranging from works of utopian fiction that present imaginary societies fully invested in the acquisition of scientific knowledge, to a major poem that depicts a popular uprising quelled by a proto-robotic “iron man,” to an English prose text that anticipates the Apollo lunar landings by some 330 years in its portrayal of an inter-planetary voyage to the Moon. We will chart the impact on early science fiction of non-fictional accounts of the discoveries of real uncharted lands and non-European peoples in the Americas. And most importantly, we’ll examine the ways in which all these texts juxtapose “real” and explicitly imaginary or artificial worlds in order to think through problems of religion, politics, national consciousness, sexuality, race, and language, problems with which science-fiction authors are still productively engaging to this day.
Possible texts include Hakluyt’s Voyages and Discoveries, More’s Utopia, Bacon’s New Atlantis, Cavendish’s The Blazing World, John Wilkins’s The Discovery of a World in the Moone, Shakespeare’s The Tempest, Book V of Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, lyric poetry by John Donne, and portions of Milton’s Paradise Lost. We may also incorporate more recent science-fiction, like Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel Frankenstein and the 2003 television mini-series Battlestar Galactica. Course requirements will include short written responses and three 5-page essays for which you will hand in preliminary drafts for peer-group feedback. |
| ENGLISH 102A | SHAKESPEARE&CO | LUPTON, J. | This lecture course studies the development of dramatic and poetic form from Marlowe to Marvell, with Shakespeare as a central reference point. The course opens with Marlowe’s Edward II, an Elizabethan drama that establishes some of the standards for drama and poetic language taken up by Shakespeare. Marlowe’s play will be performed at UCI in the Little Theater from April 15-23, and students are strongly encouraged to attend a performance. Following our reading of Marlowe, we take up three plays by Shakespeare: Richard II, As You Like It, and Macbeth. The course ends with a series of poems by Ben Jonson and Andrew Marvell. Themes will include holiday and hospitality; nature and culture; and kingship and its discontents. Requirements: one 5-7 pp. paper, a midterm, a final, three quizzes, and two very short essays.
Students may not enroll in both English 102A (Shakespeare & Co) and English 106 (Shakespeare) with Professor Julia Lupton in Spring 2011. |
| ENGLISH 102A | RENAIS BANNED BOOKS | KIENE, J. | E102A: Renaissance Banned Books
This course will survey English Renaissance literature by studying examples of early modern literary and non-literary texts that attained “forbidden” or “banned” status during the early modern period. We’ll focus on poems, prose tracts, and plays that tantalize with visions of forbidden knowledge, that peer into hidden strategies of political control (the “mysteries of state”), that give voice to unauthorized or non-normative cultural, racial, gendered, or religious positions or identities, that express anxiety about governmental and other forms of censorship, or that were themselves manipulated, censored, or banned from public circulation or performance during the 16th and 17-centuries in England.
Possible texts include Machiavelli’s The Prince, Shakespeare’s Richard II, Macbeth, and King Lear, Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, Book VI of Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, Jonson’s Sejanus His Fall, and Milton’s Areopagitica and Samson Agonistes. Requirements will include three short (2-3 page) papers, weekly reading quizzes, a mid-term, and a final exam. |
| ENGLISH 102B | 17TH C PASTORAL | SILVER, V. | The course readings address the incongruous impact of seventeenth-century politics (civil war and regicide) on the pastoral literature (shepherds and nymphs)of that age, from Shakespeare, Ben Jonson and Herrick to Marvell, Milton, Aphra Behn, Dryden, Rochester, and Swift. Strange sights will be seen and odd things will occur in the pastoral landscape, all of which will require explanation from your instructor. Oh yes, there will be a film. |
| ENGLISH 102C | VICTRN LIT&SCIENCE | TUCKER, I. | Ever wonder when the idea of “physics for poets” came into being? In 1825, writing in response to the recent discovery of a heretofore unknown manuscript by the poet John Milton, Member of Parliament and sometimes literary critic Thomas Babington Macaulay laid out two fundamental models for human progress -- one literary and the other based on the “experimental sciences.” Writing nearly 35 years later, Charles Darwin described the imperfections in the fossil record as being “written in a changing dialect,” with only a few chapters of a few volumes kept. What are we to make of the fact that, beginning in the 19th century, scientific and literary modes of thinking are repeatedly opposed to one another, even as each is invoked as a metaphor for translating and making legible the other? This course will explore these newly strange relations between Victorian science and literature, investigating not only the writings of Macaulay and Darwin, but also philosopher of science William Whewell’s fascinating defense of scientific induction, which doubles as a defense of literary close-reading. We will also read Edward Abbots’s “Romance of Many Dimensions,” Flatland, a novel about a world populated by two-dimensional shapes, and visit the various poetic and novelistic dreamworlds of mathematician Lewis Carroll. |
| ENGLISH 102D | AF AM LIT AT THE MOVIES | KEIZER, A. | Since the early twentieth century, film technology has had a profound impact on American literature. This course explores the ways in which African American poetry, fiction, drama, and non-fiction prose have engaged the cinematic. Rather than viewing film versions of literary works, we’ll discuss a set of themes taken up by literature and film: the critical notion of “double-consciousness,” the ‘color line’ and the issue of passing, visibility and the gaze, the problem of lynching, sexuality and subjectivity, gender and ‘gender trouble’. Texts will include Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, Toni Morrison’s Sula, poems by Langston Hughes, essays by W.E.B. Du Bois, James Baldwin, bell hooks, and Kimberlé Crenshaw. Films will include “Chameleon Street,” “She’s Gotta Have It,” “Imitation of Life,” “Illusions,” and “Looking for Langston.” Course requirements: 4 quizzes, a group historical-research project (with a written component completed individually), and a final paper/project. There will be room for creative final projects, accompanied by a written analysis. |
| ENGLISH 106 | NOVEL,THEORY&PRACT | TUCKER, I. | At first glance, “The Theory of the Novel” might appear to be an oxymoron: why bother to theorize a genre whose most striking characteristic would seem to its “realness”? This course is designed to explore the ways in which “theory” and “novel” are not, in fact, mutually exclusive – to consider the ways in which the “realist novel” is distant – and different – from “reality,” and why that difference matters. Our exploration will begin with the most influential ancient precursor to modern theories of the novel – Aristotle’s theory of fictional plots, The Poetics – before proceeding to accounts of the novel itself. We will read about the novel’s eighteenth-century rise” as it is understood by critics like Ian Watt, Nancy Armstrong, and Catherine Gallagher, about Georg Lukacs’ understanding of the “historical novel” and its relation to the European revolutions of the 1840s. We will read what Walter Scott had to say about Jane Austen, before turning our attention to the middle of the nineteenth century, to examine the emergence of the mid-nineteenth century Victorian “multi-plot” novel, and a variety of accounts of that development, including Alex Woloch’s theory of minor characters, and Leah Price’s reading of the novel as a kind of “anthology.” We will conclude by reading two provocatively peculiar novels ourselves: Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White and Ian McEwan’s The Comfort of Strangers. |
| ENGLISH 106 | SHAKESPEARE | LUPTON, J. | This seminar opens with a selection of scenes and poems from the works of Christopher Marlowe, Shakespeare’s most immediate predecessor. Marlowe’s Edward II will be performed at UCI in the Little Theater from April 15-23, and students are strongly encouraged to attend a performance. Marlowe leads directly to Shakespeare’s erotic poem, Venus and Adonis, followed by four plays by Shakespeare: Richard II, As You Like It, Macbeth, and King Lear. Themes will include holiday and hospitality; nature and culture; and kingship and its discontents. Requirements: one short paper, one long paper, and a final exam.
Students may not enroll in both English 102A (Shakespeare & Co) and English 106 (Shakespeare) with Professor Julia Lupton in Spring 2011. |
| ENGLISH 106 | LATE VICTORIAN LIT | HENDERSON, A. | In this course we will trace the late-nineteenth-century preoccupation with the workings of representation, focusing on poems and novels that are meditations on their own capacity to figure forth the world. We will begin by familiarizing ourselves with Romantic theories of representation--theories that confidently root language in nature or the divine order--so as to be able track the Victorian loss of faith in the artist’s capacity to produce symbols that make reference to anything beyond themselves. Readings will include Dickens’ Old Curiosity Shop, Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass, Wilde’s Picture of Dorian Gray, and poems by Tennyson, Browning, Swinburne, and Rossetti. Students will also read several critical articles and lead class discussion on one of them. The writing for the course will center on the production of one major essay, for which students will produce an annotated bibliography and an outline to share with the class. |
| ENGLISH 106 | IMAGINATION&DISSENT | DAVIS, R. | This course explores the great flowering of religious literature written in English at the end of the fourteenth century, a development that takes place just as church and secular authorities begin to place limits on the use of English for theological and devotional writing, aiming to suppress what were considered heretical views, to control controversial vernacular translations of the Bible, and to set limits on the new accessibility the use of English afforded lay audiences. This distinctive body of “vernacular theology” features imaginative attempts to re-think doctrinal concepts and to devise new ways of accessing spiritual experiences more directly, troubling the rigid assumptions of clerical/lay, Latin/English, spirit/matter, and even masculine/feminine hierarchies.
Course readings include the “mystical” writings of female authors Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe, the alliterative dream visions Piers Plowman and Pearl, selections from medieval drama, and meditative guidebooks such as The Cloud of Unknowing. Throughout the quarter, we’ll engage with secondary criticism and each student will develop an individual research topic that culminates in the major requirement for the course: a 15-page seminar paper supported by a proposal and annotated bibliography. |
| ENGLISH 210 | MIN WORK MAJ AUTHOR | LATIOLAIS, P. | [Course Code: 24508] Fridays 2:00-4:50pm HIB 341
Enrollment via [SEMINAR REQUEST FORM]
The Small Novel
Scope. What is it? Is this something determined before hand by the writer, or something derived later, or during, or after the discretionary process? Do we care? How many gems fall within this heading, "the small novel," and why? Do they have the precision and suggestive power of a poem, but also the capaciousness of a novel, or at least the sense of the allowance of that greater room? What is in one writer's hands a long short story is in another's a novella, and in another's a small novel; the genres are perhaps as arbitrary as they are individual to the writer. "The only Emperor is the emperor of ice-cream." The greats do what they're going to do and then we follow along and decide what to call it. Our mistake, seemingly, is to think codification is process, or some access to how the work was actually made. Even worse, as an answer to why the work was made. We will try to read as well as the poets, a series of shorter works in prose.
A reading list that will consist of the following, but a longer list to be distributed later that might comprise your summer reading. Please order the below editions so we all have the same pagination.
Required texts:
My Life Anton Chekhov, The Art of the Novella, ISBN: 0974607827
The Return of the Soldier, Rebecca West, Lits, ISBN: 1609421116
My Mortal Enemy, Willa Cather, Vintage, ISBN: 0679731792
The Wild Palms, or If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem, William Faulkner, Vintage, ISBN: 0679741933
Winter in the Blood, James Welch, Penguin, ISBN: 0143105221
Aura, Carlos Fuentes, FSG, ISBN: 0374511713
Nocturnes for the King of Naples, Edmund White, St. Martin's, ISBN: 0312022638
The Reluctant Fundamentalist, Mohsin Hamid, Harcourt, ISBN: 978-0-7394-8826-3
03, Jean-Christophe Valtat, FSG, ISBN: 0374100217 |
| ENGLISH 210 | POSTWAR AMER WRTG | SZALAY, M. | [Course Code: 24506] Thursdays 2:00-4:50pm HIB 411
Enrollment via [SEMINAR REQUEST FORM]
"Listening to Postwar Literature"
This course will read a range of novels--by the likes of Ralph Ellison, Robert Stone, James Baldwin, John Updike, Joan Didion, Ishmael Reed, and Toni Morrison--in light of their representations of and critical engagements with popular music. Situating developments in storytelling alongside contemporaneous developments in jazz, rhythm and blues, and rock, we'll study how and to what effect American novelists turned to music in order to understand their own mission in a rapidly integrating Cold War society. We will begin by studying Ellison's recently-released but never-completed second novel, Three Days Before the Shooting. Students will be given the opportunity to research the music as well as the novels in question.
Open to field specialists and non specialists alike, this course fulfills the department's twentieth-century distribution requirement. |
| ENGLISH 210 | EPIC | HELFER, R. | [Course Code: 24504] Tuesdays 2:00-4:50pm HIB 411
Enrollment via [SEMINAR REQUEST FORM]
"Epic (and its Enemies)" will examine epic and anti-epic narratives from antiquity through the Renaissance, beginning with Homer and concluding with Spenser. Course requirements include a final essay (10-15 pages as a pro-seminar and 20-25 pages as a seminar) and short weekly writing assignments. The following texts are preferred, especially the translations: Homer's Iliad and Odyssey (Fitzgerald / Farrar), Virgil's Aeneid (Fitzgerald / Vintage), Dante's Inferno, Purgatory, Paradise (Musa / Penguin), Spenser's Faerie Queene (Roche / Penguin). Given the ambitious reading list, please try to read the Iliad for the first class. |
| ENGLISH 210 | PRE-MODERNISM | HENDERSON, A. | [Course Code: 24502] Tuesdays, Thursdays 12:00-1:20pm HIB 411
Enrollment via [SEMINAR REQUEST FORM]
In this course we will trace the late-nineteenth-century preoccupation with the workings of representation, focusing on poems and novels that are meditations on their own capacity to figure forth the world. We will begin by familiarizing ourselves with Romantic theories of representation--theories that confidently root language in nature or the divine order--so as to be able track the Victorian loss of faith in the artist’s capacity to produce symbols that make reference to anything beyond themselves. Readings will include Dickens’ Old Curiosity Shop, Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass, Wilde’s Picture of Dorian Gray, and poems by Tennyson, Browning, Swinburne, and Rossetti. While we will not be reading modernist literature, we will read critical accounts of modernism so as to see the extent to which late Victorian conceptions of representation resemble modernist ones.
Each student will lead class discussion on one of our critical articles. Proseminar students will produce an annotated bibliography and seminar students will write a 20-page seminar paper. |
| ENGLISH 210 | ROMANCE | ALLEN, E. | [Course Code: 24500] Thursdays 9:00-11:50pm HIB 411
Enrollment via [SEMINAR REQUEST FORM]
Romance is an enormously elastic genre, know for its endurance from Greek novels through Harlequins, especially visible in the myriad turnings of Arthuriana in modern films and novels. Though genre encompasses a remarkable range of related nonfiction, from historiography to hagiography, at its height in the courts of England and France in the 12th through 15th centuries, romance is by definition fictional. Indeed, romances habitually theorize their own fictive relation to a framing (often Arthurian) king and court. Hence romances provide a testing ground for political ideals such as divine right kingship, political counsel, feminine intercession, masculine social aspiration, and monarchical inheritance.
Initiated by chance and happenstance, the narrative patterns of romance (quest, knightly combat, amorous encounter, familial reconciliation) depend upon conventions of chivalry, honor, nobility, humility, devotion; yet romance action also emphasizes the awkward fit between idiosyncratic character and code of ethics. Nonetheless, ethical codes are not simply imposed from without; instead, gradually through the processes of plot, codes of conduct shape heroes and heroines into ideals both artificed and enlivened by the very processes by which they initially fell short. Moreover, the unmotivated nature of romance events creates meaning retrospectively, so that the process of reading mirrors the quest: both occur in a state of incomplete knowledge about their own significance, and looking back, or reflection, is the essential means of creating patterns of understanding.
The resulting narratives maintain and confirm the value of social order and ritual pattern (kingship; succession; feminine subordination; displacement of the old and unfit; divine authorization of human social order; festival, funeral, marriage rite), but in such a way as to generate value as if through an unplanned process of education, even as romances continually remind us of the artifices involved in any social order they achieve. Thematically, romances foreground young noble protagonists striving to win love and honor. The elaborations of their plots, however, demonstrate relationships between society and imagination (the frame and the story, the court and the journey) that pose a set of challenges to the very societies that they idealize. Perceval cannot understand the language of chilvary, and disobeys all its precepts. Lancelot commits and re-commits near-adultery with a series of mysterious desiring women. Havelok misunderstands the origins of his own immense, unstinting appetite for food. Chivalric failure and monarchical weakness give rise to the bizarre performances of voluble women, bourgeois monks, giants, divine lights. French romances highlight the artifices of courtly social codes, while proposing that such codes are permeable by outsiders including the writers of romance themselves; English alliterative romances suggest provincial, anti-centrist power; rhyming romances register the relatively stable baronial society of England and the new urban gentry alike. Despite the genre’s essential maintenance of order, its fundamental idealism—its fictive world of beauty, leisure, political and moral virtue—suggests criticism of the social world.
The arc of the course spans four centuries of increasingly skeptical and finally tragic romance. We begin by establishing the logic of romance conventions in the earliest canonical romances by Chretien de Troyes (with some reference to earlier influences in Geoffrey of Monmouth, Thomas of Britain, and the troubadours). The course will then move to the short stories (lais) of Marie de France and her avatars in Middle English romance, investigating the formal effects of concision in the genre. In moving to the martial and heroic emphasis of the English romances, then, we will try to tease out both the conventional narrative maneuvers and the changing attitude toward literary, social, and spiritual convention in some native examples of the genre, before moving into the great flowering of late 14th-century English literature with the Gawain-poet, Chaucer, and possibly John Gower. Finally, we will approach Malory—the progenitor of almost all modern versions of feudal romance—with an enriched sense of its multivocality and its tragic end. Time permitting, the course may conclude with consideration of the American Western (despite typical declarations of its death) as our most vigorous present-day instantiation of the old courtly ideals.
There will be texts in glossed, unmodernized Middle English. I do not expect any prior experience with ME and will spend some limited time on reading the language; for the most part, however, the texts on our syllabus are quite accessible to the modern reader.
Seminar: 5 response papers and a seminar paper (20 pp)
Proseminar: 5 response papers and two shorter papers (5 pp) |
| ENGLISH 210 | SHELLEY | ROBERTS, H | [Course Code: 24510] Fridays 9:00-11:50pm HIB 411
Enrollment via [SEMINAR REQUEST FORM]
In this course we will engage in an in-depth study of the work of one of the major British Romantic Poets. Shelley is perhaps the most multi-faceted, at times self-contradictory of the Romantics. Feminist, republican, anarchist, vegetarian, atheist, sceptic, teetotal, he has been read as everything from a neoplatonic idealist to a decontructionist avant la lettre. Both deeply indebted to the "first generation" Romantic poets and fiercely critical of their political apostasy and philosophic idealism, he drew on a surprisingly diverse range of sources in an attempt to reinvent contemporary poetic practice. We will, of course, read a great number of Shelley's own works, including poems, plays and prose essays, with particular attention paid to Queen Mab, Prometheus Unbound, The Cenci, The Triumph of Life, A Philosophical View of Reform, and The Defence of Poetry. In addition, we will read widely in the work of Shelley's contemporaries and earlier influences (such as Milton, Rousseau, Hume, Edmund Burke, William Godwin, Mary Wollstonecraft, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Keats, Byron, Mary Shelley among others) in order to gain a better understanding of the intellectual and political milieu from which Shelley's work springs.
All students will make a class presentation. Students who take the course as a Pro-seminar will write a take-home examination; Seminar students will write an article-length final paper.
Required text: Donald Reiman and Neil Fraistat (eds), Shelley's Poetry and Prose, Norton Critical Edition (2nd Ed), ISBN: 978-0393977523. |
| ENGLISH 290 | READING&CONFERENCE | STAFF | English 290 enrollment requires submission of an approved Independent Study proposal form available [HERE] by the end of the second week of classes (April 8, 2011). Students may add or drop the course by obtaining a code from the administrator. |
| ENGLISH 299 | DISSERTATN RESEARCH | WARMINSKI, A | Course Code 24580 |