| Course | Title | Instructor | Description |
|---|
| ENGLISH E106 | MOBY-DICK | LAZO, R | We start with two short pieces by Melville, the cruelly hilarious “Bartleby” and the inscrutable “The Encantadas, or Enchanted Isles” to begin thinking about the role of narrative perspective in Melville. Then we spend several weeks on _Moby-Dick_, delving into secondary criticism about the novel, including analyses of empire, class, race, and religion in the text. We will conclude by reading one additional text by Melville, perhaps _Benito Cereno_ or _Pierre_. One of the goals of this sustained study of Melville’s work is preparation for writing a seminar paper. In addition to that 10-page seminar paper, requirements include short responses and participation. |
| 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 | HEROIC WOMEN IN EARLY MODERN LITERATURE | KIENE, J. | This course examines the representation of women in literature in Renaissance literature, focusing especially on female characters who occupy what contemporary audiences would have considered “masculine” roles—that is, on female warriors, rulers, law-givers, scholars, scientists, and authors. We will examine a range of texts that explore women’s evolving perspectives and roles in late-medieval and early modern society, including texts by both female and male authors who sought to refute misogynistic stereotypes voiced in a vast body of anti-feminist writing spanning several intellectual and artistic disciplines. Exploring issues such as literacy, access to education, political agency, gender identity, cross-dressing, and sexual violence, we will seek to understand why active, heroic female characters were just as popular in the early modern period as they are now.
Possible texts include the Christine de Pizan’s Book of the City of Ladies, the writings of Queen Elizabeth I of England, Book III of Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, Shakespeare’s As You Like It, and Margaret Cavendish’s The Blazing World. Requirements will include regular participation in class discussion, short written responses, a textual analysis essay, and a research paper for which you will hand in preliminary drafts. |
| ENGLISH 101W | RENAISSANCE COURTSHIP LITERATURE | KIENE, J. | This course will study 16th- and 17th-century English rhetorical culture through the literature of courtship, defined for our purposes as literature that seeks to entice, persuade, or win the favor of a lover, a ruler, or God. We’ll begin by examining the conventions of love lyric, reading a selection of poems in which speakers address beloved ladies. We’ll then look at ways in which poets of the Elizabethan age and after adapted the conventions of love lyric to curry favor at royal courts or to gain the financial support and protection of wealthy patrons and even Queen Elizabeth herself. We’ll conclude by tracing these conventions into devotional poetry written to court divine favor. As part of our investigation of “courtship,” we’ll also read works that reveal the complex dynamics of life “at court” during the Renaissance.
Reading may include works by Castiglione, Sidney, Shakespeare, Lanyer, Wroth, Donne, and Herbert. Requirements will include regular participation in class discussion, short written responses, a textual analysis essay, and a research paper for which you will hand in preliminary drafts. |
| ENGLISH 101W | MEDIEVAL WOMEN'S WRITING | DAVIS, R. | But God forbid that you should say or take it that I am a teacher, for I mean not so, and I meant never so; for I am a woman, unlearned, feeble, and frail . . . But because I am a woman should I therefore believe that I should not tell you the goodness of God, since I saw at the same time that it is his will that it be known?
Julian of Norwich, 14th-century anchoress
This course explores the history of writing for and by women during the medieval period, with a particular emphasis on the role female writers and audiences played in the development of English vernacular literature. Delving into issues such as literacy, language change, religious devotion, education, and gender identities, we will examine barriers to women’s opportunities for writing during this era, but also consider the circumstances in which some women did emerge as authors and otherwise influence literary production. Course readings range from anonymous Anglo-Saxon poetry, to the short romances of Marie de France, the testimonies of ystics and holy women such as Margery Kempe and Julian of Norwich, the allegorical visions of hristine de Pizan, and letters written by the noble women of the Paston family.
While the majority of our readings focus on female writers, restricting ourselves to texts that are unambiguously authored by women would not give a complete picture of women’s involvement in the earliest development of English literature. Our course readings will therefore encompass works written by male authors for female audiences and patrons, including saints’ lives and spiritual guidebooks, anonymous works, and texts that were the result of collaborations between women and men.
This course fulfills the University’s upper-division writing requirement. Course assignments focus on close reading, location and analysis of critical resources, and written response to both primary and secondary texts. Students will write and revise three 5-7 page essays and submit a final writing portfolio at the end of the term. |
| ENGLISH 101W | POWER & VIOLENCE | CASTILLO, L. | This class engages political philosophy, critical theory, and three literary works (King Lear, 1984, and Shalimar the Clown) to examine the status of sovereignty. It focuses especially on issues of natural right, moral obligation, hegemony, and terror to ask in what cases the rights of the individual supercede the prerogatives of the state and in what cases the state may rightfully delimit individual liberties. |
| ENGLISH 102A | MEDIEVAL VISIONS | DAVIS, R. | “Some say there is nothing in dreams but lies and fables; however, one may have dreams which are not in the least deceitful, but which later become clear.” -The Romance of the Rose
This course explores the medieval tradition of visionary literature, traces the developing relationship between text and image in medieval manuscripts and other visual arts, and delves into the controversy over the use of images in religious literature. Readings encompass visions both sacred and profane including Chaucer’s dream visions, Pearl, Langland's Piers Plowman, excerpts from the Romance of the Rose, Dante’s Divine Comedy, holy visions by female mystics, a medieval play, and The Cloud of Unknowing. |
| ENGLISH 102B | VIRTUES & VICES | LEWIS, J. | “Thus ev’ry Part was full of Vice,/Yet the whole Mass a Paradise,” wrote the early 18th-century English satirist Bernard Mandeville. He was describing the extreme contrasts and dizzying contradictions that characterized his own society. And it’s true: in no other culture do we find more of an obsession with gambling, drinking, debauchery, and crime. . .or more of a fascination with honor, integrity, and the possibility of human goodness. The literature we will read in this course (all of it written between 1660 and 1745) will explore these two extremes of human behavior during a period of both obsessive reform and extreme indulgence in depravity–a socially-conscious era when human ‘goodness’ and ‘badness’ were no longer interpreted in terms of sin and beatitude, nor yet in terms of psychological illness and health, but rather in terms of personal character interacting with social habits and traditions. We’ll meet whores and determined virgins, compulsive liars and fatally honest truthtellers, thieves and self-appointed enemies of human depravity, libertines and patterns of charity. The big picture? A rambunctious and completely human scene whose mix of idealism, hedonism, and hypocrisy can tell us a great deal about literature’s role in defining humanity, and about our humanity itself. The reading list mixes Rochester’s and Behn’s libertine poems with Dryden’s adulatory ode “To the Pious Memory of Anne Killigrew”; Wycherley’s raunchy play The Country Wife with Pope’s admiring poetic essay “To a Lady”; John Gay’s ironic exposé of the London underworld, The Beggar’s Opera, with Pamela, Samuel Richardson’s controversial novel of “virtue rewarded.” We’ll end with Hogarth’s satiric images of “The Harlot’s Progress.” Course requirements include: one midterm, one final, one substantial critical essay, and several short assignments, including some unannounced quizzes, and the usual attendance and participation. The good, the bad, and those with a little of both in them all are welcome! |
| 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". |
| ENGLISH 102D | VICTORIAN SPACES | TUCKER, I. | This course will explore the relations among different conception of 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, Wilkie Collins, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Robert Browning, Charles Darwin, John Stuart Mill. |
| ENGLISH 102D | NARRATIVES OF LIBERATION | KEIZER, A. | The theme of human liberation has appeared in literary works from around the world and across centuries. This course will examine a variety of narratives that foreground the attainment of physical, spiritual, and political freedom for individuals and groups. Beginning with the Book of Exodus and traveling through African American slave narratives, British proto-feminist novels, Latin American testimonios, and contemporary autobiographies and films, we will examine how a wide range of writers and filmmakers have conceptualized the goal and the process of liberation in their works. Requirements for the course will include two short papers/projects and a take-home final exam. |
| ENGLISH 103 | STAGING IDENTITY: CLASSIC IRISH PLAYS | O'CONNOR, L | In “Staging Identity” we’ll read a range of plays from the long twentieth century (the 1890s to the present) by Irish dramatists, from Oscar Wilde to contemporary playwrights Marina Carr and Conor McPherson. Though several of these playwrights, including the Abbey playwrights W. B. Yeats, Lady Gregory, John Millington Synge and Sean O’Casey, are overtly concerned with “Irish” identity, others—notably Wilde and Samuel Beckett—explore the performative and existential nature of identity as such. We’ll discuss a range of topics, including the relationship between language and identity; dismantling the stereotypical “stage Irishman”; Ireland as theme and setting; myth and the supernatural; and the reception of the plays. Midterm, final, paper. |
| ENGLISH 103 | NARRATIVES IN A DIGITAL AGE | HAYASAKI, E. | Who says long-form journalism is dying? It is evolving. In this class, we will explore and debate the future of books, magazines, newspapers, writers, and publishers in a digital age. Students will read first-rate pieces from journalists who have published digitally or are incorporating new media, videos, blogs, e-readers and podcasts into reading experiences. This class will be heavily focused on reading and discussions, and students will be expected to think about how traditional storytelling might change as reading formats evolve. We will discuss questions like: Will the book go the way of the CD or record? Will articles soon solely be distributed through models akin to the “I-Tunes of Literature?” Is that a financially viable model? Is there a bad guy in the war between Amazon and Barnes & Noble? What roles do organizations like Instapaper, Longreads, Goodreads, and ReaditLater play in this evolving era? How can writers make money through new long-form journalism platforms like The Atavist, Byliner, and Kindle Singles — and above all how can the quality and integrity of such writing continue to be preserved as it is produced, sold, and read? This class will meet twice weekly and reading assignments will be distributed through the new Literary Journalism Program LJ Digital blog on Tumblr. Students will not only dissect digital stories for each class, analyzing them for narrative arc, scenes, voice, characters, theme, and reporting, but they will also be expected to come up with their own proposals on how to make reading experiences stronger and more successful in this digital age. Same as LitJrn 103. |
| ENGLISH 103 | AMERICAN DOCUMENTARY | BURKE, C. | Documentary film has evolved from late 19th Century “films of fact,” films that in a single take recorded simple human actions, to today’s sophisticated narratives, complete with flashbacks, cross-cuts, music, archival footage and voiceover. The documentary film has always shared with print journalism a keen interest in reporting reality. This course will examine the ways in which nonfiction filmmakers and writers document the world around them and bring to us their reconstructions of earlier times and their renderings of events in remote locations. We will consider soldiers from boot camp to battlefield, murderers from crime to prison, and exploited workers from a turn-of-the century garment factory in New York City to the dangerous coalmines of Harlan Co, Kentucky. We will look at individuals driven by their passion for reform and others preoccupied with their unique obsessions. Weekly assignments will consist of screenings of two films and related literary journalism. Same as LitJrn 103. |
| ENGLISH 105 | ASNAM LIT/FLM ADAPT | SHROFF, B. | Same as Asian American Studies 114. This course analyzes the historical context within which Asian American texts have been adapted into films. There is a vast body of Asian American Literature but very few texts have been adapted to cinema since issues of audience and market are primary considerations. A historical context demonstrates how representations of Asian Americans have changed from the stereotypical images in the 1920s to self-representations by Asian American writers and filmmakers in contemporary times. We analyze different literary genres such as novels and dramas and short stories, for example Jhumpa Lahiri's novel, The Namesake, Le Ly Hayslip's memoir When Heaven and Earth Changed Places, David Henry Hwang's drama, M. Butterfly and Philip Kan Gotanda's drama, The Wash. Cinematic adaptations/versions of literary texts sometimes retitle and reconstruct texts as suitable for a mass audience such as Heaven and Earth directed by Oliver Stone, and others such as Hot Summer Winds directed by Emiko Omori based on two Hisaye Yamamoto short stories, Seventeen Syllables and Yoneko's Earthquake. We employ literary and film theory in reading the novels and plays to analyze language, structure, characterization and historical representation. We also discuss how the literary form translates into a visual medium, and the modifications of story/plot and characterization for the screen--for instance, how dramas lend themselves to screen adaptation more easily than do novels. We interrogate the strengths of each medium such as the scope of the fictional framework, and the spatial and temporal capabilities of the cinematic medium. |
| ENGLISH 105 | BORDERLANDS | LAZO, R. | A borderland is a vague and undetermined place created by the emotional residue of an unnatural boundary,” writes Gloria Anzaldúa. We start with several readings about “borderlands,” a concept that points not only to spatial configurations but also to language, gender, genre, race, and sexuality. A unit on US-Mexico borderlands will give us a particular context in which to consider conflicts, power imbalances, and different ways of interpreting space. We will read novels, stories and poems by
African American, Latino, and Asian American writers and conclude with an urban borderland in a science fiction novel. Requirements include short response papers, participation and two exams. |
| ENGLISH 105 | DOUBLE CONSCIOUS | RADHAKRISHNAN, R. | Beginning with a careful study of W.E.B. Dubois’s classic formulation of black double consciousness, this course will explore the significance of doubleness in the context of subject formation. Here are a few of the questions that will resonate throughout the course. Is double consciousness a problem that is specific only to certain identities, or is it a generalizable human condition? Is double consciousness the same as ethnic hyphenation? In the context of American subject formation, to what extent does the Du Boisian formulation that is based on the virulence of the black-white color/racial line anticipate others forms of difference and heterogeneity: brown folks, Asian-Americans, Latino and Chicano formations? How radical is the threat of double consciousness to the sovereignty of the imagined community of the nation state? What is the relationship of double consciousness to the emerging discourses of globalization, transnationalism, and neoliberal multiculturalism?
The texts we will be studying will be a mix of literary texts and theoretical essays. Here is a tentative sampling of the course material: Ellison’s Invisible Man, Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior, Gloria Anzaldua’s Borderlands; and essays by Cornel West, bell hooks, Toni Morrison, James Baldwin, Anthony Appiah, Hortense Spillers, Vijay Prashad, Paul Gilroy, and others. I will be preparing a course package for the essays.
Depending on the size of the class, the teaching will be a combination of lectures and class discussion and participation. Requirements: 1 short and 1 long paper. |
| ENGLISH 105 | NEW ZEALAND POETRY | 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.
There are no required textbooks for this class. |
| ENGLISH 106 | FAULKNER'S SOUTH | GODDEN, R. | What is often first remarked on concerning Faulkner’s work is its difficulty; the course will contend that the difficulty diminishes, and textual opacity achieves motivation, once it is understood that the difficulty (though undoubted and intriguing) functions as an expression of contradictions within the plantation South (a region understood as a specific and pre-modern regime of accumulation). Our purpose will be to establish the poetics of a southern economy prior to and during the New Deal. In order to do as much, we will read four of Faulkner’s experimental and canonical novels (The Sound and the Fury [1929], As I Lay Dying [1930], Absalom, Absalom! [1936] and Go Down, Moses [1942]), prevalently allowing two weeks for each text. We will also read the key short stories, “Barn Burning” and “Red Leaves.”
By contextualizing Faulkner’s writing in the complex labor history of the south, the course seeks to establish that his works attend to a major shift in the history of labor relations (from bondage to wages), a shift that determines not only the thematic concerns of the novels, but also their essential stylistic and narrative strategies. Arguably, the region, as Faulkner saw it, engaged in a prolonged displacement or denial of the bondage systems (ante-bellum slavery and post-bellum debt peonage) from which it grew, and which it struggled to keep intact. From such denial emerged a mode of thought (among the planter class) that Faulkner translates into the narrative structures and prose style of the texts with which we will engage. The course will explore the contention that Faulkner’s famous difficulty stems from his need to portray the mind of the southern owning class wrestling with a labor system it regards as at once untenable and yet essential to its nature, neither to be borne nor to be given up. With luck, as the course proceeds, difficulty will recede towards pleasure. |
| ENGLISH 106 | SEEING RACE | TUCKER, I. | This course aims to disrupt many of our current understandings of race by asking some fundamental questions: What is it that we are doing when we notice someone's race? Perceiving something about the body? Translating a code? Learning a history? Making a political statement? How does it matter that certain body parts and not others are involved in our processes of recognition? In what ways are the judgments we make about race connected to other sorts of ways we know and judge?
This course is divided into three parts. We will begin with a brief survey of the ways race has been understood in Europe and the Americas from the early Greeks through the nineteenth century, focusing on thinkers including Galen, Blumenbach, Foster, Kant and Darwin. In the second part of the course, our focus will be on the twentieth century, moving from early century thinkers like WEB Dubois and Booker T. Washington, through mid-century theorist colonial theorist Franz Fanon,
through contemporary cultural theorists like Henry Louis Gates, Anthony Appiah, Paul Gilroy and Hortense Spillers. Finally, we will end by seeing the ways in which the various paradigms we have investigated help us understand two important fictional narratives concerned with race: Toni Morrison's /The Bluest Eye/ and the HBO television series /The Wire/. (Students will be responsible for watching three seasons of /The Wire/ outside of class.) |
| ENGLISH 106 | WOMEN AND SATIRE – FROM JUVENAL TO THE VAGINA MONOLOGUES. | VAN SANT, A. | Satire is both radically disruptive and deeply conservative, and it often produces results that satirize the satirist as much as the explicit object of criticism. Satires against women have at various times been a significant sub-genre. Juvenal’s great 2nd century tirade against women provided a pattern imitated for centuries by satirists who assumed a male normative and a male dominated culture. Juvenal's satire excoriates women but at the same time creates an image of women as strangely powerful. Women have also talked back, sometimes by satirizing male satirists, sometimes by defending women. The Vagina Monologues, the last work we will read (and if possible see), removes the satiric ground from satirists by allowing women to have their say from the point of view of their vaginas. In this course we will read satires against women, satires in which women provide a vehicle for social critique, satires by women against men, and satires that assume or can imagine a female normative culture. We will also read criticism that deals both with questions of literary form and with historical issues brought into view by the satires. E106 is the advanced seminar for English majors and has as prerequisites E01W (or its equivalent) and 2 other upper-division courses in the major. Students will write a significant course paper, with drafts and peer critiques, and will also write informally for class and message board discussion. Participation will be an important element of the course. |
| ENGLISH 210 | TBA | TUCKER, I | [Course Code: 24504] Wednesdays 1:00 -3:50pm HH 142
Enrollment via [click here]
A Philosophical Genealogy of Race
This course seeks to offer a genealogy of modern conceptions of race, one that departs from most familiar histories in several important ways. First, the course does not presume an American, or even an Anglo-American cultural context. The course begins by reading the Greek physician Galen’s medical and philosophical works in relation to one another, and while one goal of the course will be to trace the way in which pre-modern, humoral conceptions of the human body and of “human variety” come to be replaced by more familiar modern conceptions of race and medicine, the syllabus also seeks to excavate the relationship between modern notions of race and the early modern discourse of religious toleration. Secondly, we will scrutinize what has come to be the most familiar form of racial analysis in contemporary culture: the notion that race is “constructed,” that it operates by aligning visible marks of difference with a shifting – and hence contingent – series of meanings and associations. The course is premised on the notion the very concept of an arbitrary, constructed racial sign might itself have a history, and that it is a history worth tracing, not simply so that we can come to know that the material forms racial signs take are as arbitrary and contingent as their contents, but rather so that we might discover what such arbitrariness – of the racial sign, of the model of racial identity made apparent by the sign – accomplishes. In this spirit, we will trace history of epistemology in place of racial constructionism’s multiple histories of representation.
Readings will include, though are not limited to, John Locke’s “Letter on Toleration,” and Moses Mendelssohn’s Enlightenment-era response, Jerusalem, Or On Religious Power and Judaism; Mendelssohn and Kant’s famous exchange, “What is Enlightenment?”; Kant’s late writings on race, medicine and philosophy, including The Conflict of the Faculties; Georg Forster’s Voyage to the South Seas; Thomas Malthus’s Essay on the Principle of Population; selections from Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, The Descent of Man, and The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals.
We will read several relevant literary texts: Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White and Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, and will close the quarter with an extended engagement with the HBO television series The Wire. |
| ENGLISH 210 | CRIT RACE THEORY | KEIZER, A. | [Course Code: 24510] Tuesdays 10:00 -12:50pm HIB 411
Enrollment via [click here]
Critical Race Theory and Multi-Ethnic American Literature
African American, Asian American, and Chican@/Latin@ literary and expressive cultures have
contributed significantly to the development of critical race theory. This course revisits major
and minor American literary texts to investigate important strands of critical race theory and
contemporary literary criticism. We will examine literary works as sources and intertexts for
theoretical works, as well as using critical/theoretical works to read the literature. Literary
works will include Johnson’s Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, Fitzgerald’s The Great
Gatsby, Larsen’s Passing, Baldwin’s “Notes of a Native Son,” Hwang’s M. Butterfly, Morrison’s
Beloved, and Cha’s Dictée, Valdez’s I Don’t Need to Show You No Stinking Badges. and
Anna Deavere Smith’s Twilight: Los Angeles. Each week, we’ll discuss a critical/theoretical
work in conjunction with a novel/ play. Students will be expected to draft a brief prospectus for
the paper, as well as presenting the material one week and writing a substantial final essay.
This course fulfills coverage requirements in American literature and 20th-century literature
and is cross-listed with the Critical Theory Emphasis. |
| ENGLISH 210 | DEEP ECOL/ANTHROCNT | RADHAKRISHNAN, R. | [Course Code: 24508] Tuesdays 4:00-6:50pm HIB 411
Enrollment via [click here]
Deep Ecology and the End of Anthropocentrism?
Ecocriticism has come into its own in the last two or three decades. This development has been both general and local, universal and regional. The reasons are not far to seek. Even though the relationship and the Gestalt of humanity to Nature is as old as human existence, in recent decades this relationship has been subjected to a series of tectonic shocks and crises. Earthquakes, tsunamis, the rapidly diminishing ozone layer, vast climatic changes, global warming, the tragedy of endangered species, the hapless plight of animals and birds in the context of predatory human development, habitation, and expansion, and a range of other elemental transformations have compelled the human hegemon as well as the human cogito to be more intensely aware of the human-non-human, human-pre-human nexus. The human story, in all its protean narratological shapes and sizes, needs to be seen now not in the context of the human alone, or even of Being, but in light of something far deeper and more “real” than expedient and opportunistic fictions based on anthropocentric hubris, sustainability, and self interest. A different story, a different narrative on a different scale, with a different cast of dramatis personae and a different understanding of “being” and “becoming” is what is required to re-situate the human ethically within a stage that precedes the human by millions of years. It is no wonder that literature and literary studies, with their emphasis on an imaginative and meaningful story telling of the human condition, have begun to play an important role in the paradigm shift from the anthropocentric to something beyond: Nature, Deep Ecology, or some such provisional/contingent name or category.
When and where and how does anthropocentrism “end,” and where does deep ecology begin: and why, deep ecology? Is there a shallow or compromised ecology that is happy with its complicity with anthropocentrism? Does anthropocentrism have to “end” as an absolute precondition for the genuine emergence of deep ecology? But how will anthropocentrism terminate itself except by way of anthropocentric auto critique and anthropocentric self-reflexivity? Is it possible for the human, all too human Cogito to make room for the “open” where deep ecology may appear gratuitously in the form of Nature or some ineffable open-ness? Can the human get out of the way, ontologically, epistemologically, ethically and politically to re-find itself “namelessly,” i.e., in the name of the nameless? And who says that deep ecology is about “nature,” that already contaminated and sedimented concept? If a nameless, post-representational ontological thinking is the way to go, a way of thinking that is interpellated by the “big O,” how should such a thinking address intra-human problems such as androcentrism, gynocentrism, Eurocentrism, Afrocentrism, etc? What about the sovereignty of nation states and the relationship between weak and strong nations in an uneven and asymmetrical world? Can a post-phenomenological phenomenology enable a critical-symbiotic articulation between two concurrent but discontinuous dialogues: historical human selves and others, the Human Self and the Alterity of Being/Nature?
These are some of the questions that will inform and structure this course as we wade amphibiously through the following readings: Adrienne Rich's poem, “Diving into the Wreck,” Amitav Ghosh's novel, The Hungry Tide, Martin Heidegger’s “Letter on Humanism,” Maurice Merleau-Ponty on Self and Others and Self and Nature from The Phenomenology of Perception, selections from Timothy Morton, Ecology without Nature, and The Ecological Thought, Deleuze on “Immanence,” and selections from David Harvey, Murray Bookchin, Elizabeth Grosz, Vandana Shiva, Lawrence Buell, and others. There will be a course package. |
| ENGLISH 210 | COMPOSG VIRTUALITY | ALEXANDER, J. | [Course Code: 24506] Mondays 2:00 -4:50pm HIB 411
Enrollment via [click here]
This seminar will offer a broad introduction to the study of new media,
including a consideration of the problem of defining new media and the
methods that are appropriate for an analysis of new media. As "case
study," our particular focus throughout will be on immersive virtualities,
both as technological problem and aesthetic possibility. We will proceed
chronologically, starting in the late 19th century and working our way
forward, considering works by J.-K. Huysmans, J. L. Borges, I. Calvino,
Philip K. Dick, Michael Joyce, Neal Stephenson, James Cameron, computer
game designers, and installation artists. Theoretically, we will work
with theorists and historians of new media (Hayles, Manovich, and others),
as well as theorists of the intersection of new media and narrative
(Marie-Laure Ryan, in particular). Short presentations and a long paper
required. |
| ENGLISH 210 | SHAKESPEARE | LUPTON, J. | [Course Code: 24504] Wednesdays 9:00 -11:50am HIB 411
Enrollment via [click here]
This course will examine the late plays of Shakespeare in relation to themes and modes of dwelling, including the places of habitation and transit imagined by the plays (from courts and palaces to caves and desert islands); the spaces of playing occupied by Shakespearean drama (public theaters, private theaters, court theaters, and post-Shakespearean scenography); and the diverse environments that surround and saturate formal edifices (urban streets, ports, and plazas; forests, fields, and pastureland; oceans and waterways; air, atmosphere and weather; sound and light; media networks). Our readings of Shakespeare will engage various strands in contemporary criticism, including ecocriticsm, design and architecture studies, object-oriented ontology, actor-network theory, and contemporary scenography.
We will read Lear, The Tempest, The Winter’s Tale, Pericles, and Cymbeline. Additional readings will be drawn from in contemporary place-making, affordance theory, and landscape architecture by James Gibson, Bruno Latour, Geoff Manaugh, Charlie Hailey, Diana Balmori, and Ann Klingmann; and literary criticism by Julian Yates, Russ McDonald, Charles Frey, and others. This course is addressed both to students with a strong field interest in Shakespeare and Renaissance Studies and to students working in drama, critical theory, and contemporary designed environments.
The seminar coincides with the Group for the Study of Early Culture’s Graduate Conference, “Commons: Shared Resources and Collective Activity in Classical, Medieval and Renaissance Studies,” April 20-21, 2012:
http://www.humanities.uci.edu/SOH/bin/display_event_detail.php?recid=3330&dept_code_val=993&css_path=earlycultures&bkgd=e7d9ac&file_name=events
as well as Wellek Lectures by Bruno Latour, May 14-20, 2012
http://www.humanities.uci.edu/critical/ |
| ENGLISH 210 | HD, YEATS, MOD | O'CONNOR, L. | [Course Code: 24502] Fridays 2:00 -4:50pm HIB 411
Enrollment via [click here]
This course is designed to be capacious, inviting students of modernism; poetry &
poetics; H.D. & modernist women’s writing; and Yeats & his Irish milieu to join
in a comparative study of the archaic “it” the two poets attempt to mediate through
their “make it new” verse. “Mediate” has archaic and avant-garde connotations here,
because H.D. and Yeats alike envisioned themselves as visionary seers and mediums
of ancient occultism and were also at the vanguard of experimental theater (Yeats) and
film (H.D.). We’ll examine the status of the fragment in their respective refashionings
of Victorian Celticism and Hellenism through Yeats’s use of Irish folklore and H.D.’s of
Sappho. We’ll also discuss the gender and queer politics surrounding their inheritance of
European Symbolism and fin-de-siècle Decadence evident in the alleged “effeminacy” of
Celtic Twilightism and in the masculinist rhetoric of “hard” Imagism, Blast Vorticism,
and androgynous branding of “H.D. Imagiste.” They both thought deeply about the
hold of archetypes on the individual and collective (and their own) psyche—Yeats in
Neoplatonist and H.D. in psychoanalytic terms—and we’ll compare the representations
of Helen in Yeats’s love poetry and in H.D.’s Helen of Egypt. Allied to this will be
our study of how their common philosophical interest in cyclical outbreaks of violence
intersected with the actual trauma of war as we examine Yeats’s poetry about the
foundation of the Irish state and H.D.’s war Trilogy.
Pro-seminar requirement: weekly response papers, short annotated bibliography, and
take-home 8 page essay.
Seminar requirement: weekly response papers, and 15 page research paper, supported by
the timely completion of a prospectus and short annotated bibliography. |
| ENGLISH 210 | FIC OF FICT CAPITAL | GODDEN, R. | [Course Code: 24500] Thursdays 9:00 -11:50am HIB 411
Enrollment via [click here]
Fitzgerald and Faulkner: Narratives from two Economies
The course will undertake close readings of key works by Fitzgerald and Faulkner, contemporaries who wrote out of entirely divergent economic conditions and systems. Fitzgerald’s writing took place in, and explored, a culture which, in his own words, “followed money.” To read a Fitzgerald text necessarily, therefore, involves enquiry into the nature of money, price, the commodity form, and their effective constitution of what has been described as “capitalist realism.” Faulkner’s fiction, preoccupied with racialized work, reflected and refracted an impoverished region, within which ‘bound labor’ or ‘human capital’, rather than monetary capital, was central. Faulkner, though as much a modernist as Fitzgerald, deploys modernist techniques in the pursuit of pre-modern and non-urban historical imperatives, imperatives generated by an archaic regime of accumulation, grounded in debt peonage.
Nathaniel Hawthorne noted, “It must relate to property; because nothing else survives in this world. Love grows cold and dies; hatred is pacified by annihilation” (The American Claimant). In the spirit of Hawthorne’s insight, the course will address how different forms of property and its production yield different narrative forms; where differences involve not simply differences of subject (the flapper rather than the sharecropper), but different structures, perceptions and poetics. Works covered by Fitzgerald will include, “The Diamond as Big as the Ritz” (1922), The Great Gatsby (1925), Tender Is the Night (1934), and The Love of the Last Tycoon (1941) (with The Day of the Locust [1939]). Works covered by Faulkner will include, As I Lay Dying (1930), The Sound and the Fury (1929), Absalom, Absalom! (1936), and Go Down, Moses (1942). |
| ENGLISH 290 | READING&CONFERENCE | STAFF | English 290 enrollment requires submission of an approved Independent Study proposal form available [click here] by the end of the second week of classes. Students may add or drop the course by obtaining a code from the administrator. |
| ENGLISH 299 | DISSERTATION RESEARCH | STEINTRAGER, J | Course Code 24580 |