| Course | Title | Instructor | Description |
|---|
| ENGLISH 28B | COMIC&TRAGIC VISION | LAZO, R. | |
| ENGLISH 28C | REALISM & ROMANCE | LAZO, R. | |
| ENGLISH 28D | CRAFT OF POETRY | LATIOLAIS, P. | |
| ENGLISH 28E | CRAFT OF FICTION | LATIOLAIS, P. | |
| ENGLISH 100 | HIST THEORY & CRIT | WARMINSKI, A. | Literary theory from Plato on. Focus on the way that the question of "the literary"--once posed correctly--frustrates any and all attempts to theorize it. Texts by Plato, Aristotle, Longinus and their "modern" inheritors. Two exams. |
| ENGLISH 101W | WORKING | TUCKER, I. | This course will take up the topic of work from a variety of different angles. We will read the writings of several important theorists of work, including John Locke and Karl Marx. In these readings, we will try to figure out both how Locke and Marx understand work to organize the social relations among people and also what they understand the “opposites” of work to be. We will also read some poetry about work from poets ranging from William Wordsworth to Alfred, Lord Tennyson. The heart of the course centers on our engagement with one of the strangest novels about work ever written, Frank Norris’s McTeague, which tells the story of dentist whose practice and relationship with his wife complicate the process of transforming work into money. We will conclude by viewing the 1982 musical version of Studs Turkel’s classic of literary journalism, Working. |
| ENGLISH 101W | WAR & REMEMBRANCE | KIENE, J. | This course will examine representations of warfare, both as individual experience and as collective cultural crisis, in literature ranging across several historical periods and literary genres. While we won’t limit ourselves to narrow conceptions of “pro-war” or “anti-war” discourses, we will consider texts that valorize warfare as virtuous, life-affirming, or heroic, and texts that undermine such conceptions by refusing to mask war’s inherent cruelty, suffering, and dehumanization. We will focus particularly on the ways in which communities, through both literature and visual arts, seek to make sense of and find solace for the trauma of war in acts of commemoration and myth-construction (i.e., remembrance). Possible texts for the course range from ancient epics like Homer’s Iliad and Virgil’s Aeneid, to early modern English works like Shakespeare’s Henry V, to the poetry of First World War veterans Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon, to novels like Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, and Ian McEwan’s Atonement.
Course requirements will include regular participation in class discussion, weekly written responses, a short close-reading essay, and a research essay for which you will hand in preliminary drafts. |
| ENGLISH 102A | INDIVIDUAL &SOCIETY | ALLEN, E. | This course will explore ideas of the individual and society in medieval narratives from Beowulf to King Arthur. For the Middle Ages—and even for us today—individual action makes sense only within a social framework. What makes an individual part of a society—what makes him ‘fit in’ or ‘stand out’? What social roles are available to individuals, under what conditions? What are the limits of the available roles, and how do individual actors struggle against those limits? Every society has its own values—particular notions of honor, courtesy, love, valor, integrity, purity—and its own expectations for each person’s adherence to such values. How do societies judge individual action? When do social structures contain the seeds of their own destruction regardless of the best individual intentions? Such questions are of urgent importance in medieval literature, where the heroes and kings who maintain order may carry out the most savage violence, where apparently passive women may weave the most lasting peace, and where the intimacy of divine love may create radical social alienation. We will be particularly concerned to explore the foundations of medieval communities—family structures, feudal hierarchies, catholic religion—during the years when social forms like courtly love and affective piety solidify. Requirements: 2 papers, final exam, assorted shorter assignments. |
| ENGLISH 102B | THE PROBLEM OF THE NEW | VAN SANT, A | After a civil war, the execution of a king, and eleven years of Parliamentary rule, a cultural desire to achieve stability seemed to depend on restoring the forms and customs lost or threatened by the political and religious turbulence of the immediate past. Innovation was a negative concept. And yet, this period was highly inventive. A famous scientific society was established, women first acted on the stage, the new literary form of the novel emerged, and a new philosophy developed. Of course there were also brilliant forms of resistance to cultural change, much of it in satire. We will take as our central theme “the problem of the NEW.” We will read scientific material, feminist essays and poems, satires, periodical essays, biography, and novels in order to discover the tension between the conservation of tradition and the creation of a modern culture. And we will ask whether restoration is ever possible. |
| ENGLISH 102C | VICTORIAN 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 102C | THE DECADENCE | BURT, E. | This course will explore some representative poetic and prose works from the Decadent period in the latter part of the 19th century. The works to be read are self-conscious about occupying a transitional period of “decay” and “exhaustion” that implicates political, social and artistic movements, and even representative individual types. Decadent works take their inspiration partly in the formal renewals of art for art’s sake movements, and partly in a modernist critical reaction to inherited Romantic and Victorian motifs judged tired or cloying. In these texts we will find evidence of “new sciences” examining modernity for myriad signs of decline: sociologists turn to study criminal types; psychologists focus on sexuality, often deviant (vampirism, fetishism, sado-masochism); self-conscious theorists of the aesthetic look for art to emerge not from a strong native imagination but from critique and the parasitical borrowing from previous models (irony, translation). After an initial period examining texts from Nordau, Ellis, Baudelaire and Huysmans, as well as representative paintings, the course will read closely the following works: Pater’s Studies in the History of the Renaissance; Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde; Stoker’s Dracula; Wilde’s The Decay of Lying and Salomé; Machen’s The White People; Sacher-Masoch’s Venus in Furs; Freud’s Wolfman; selected poems from Decadent poets, selections from the trial of Oscar Wilde. |
| ENGLISH 102D | AMERICAN LIT: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 formal processes associated with “making it new” aesthetically 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 a number of the period’s key texts: Upton Sinclair, The Jungle (1906); Ernest Hemingway, In Our Time (1925); John Dos Passos, Manhattan Transfer (1925); T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land (1922); F. Scott Fitzgerald, “The Diamond as Big as the Ritz” (1922) and The Great Gatsby (1925); William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying (1930); Nella Larsen, Passing (192); Jean Toomer, Cane (1925). |
| ENGLISH 103 | DOCUMENTING WAR | BURKE, C. | Photographers, filmmakers, videographers, journalists, and more recently bloggers document the wars we fight and the conflicts we avoid. They send their dispatches from “the front” in the heat of conflict. They record the losses that come with any war and the atrocities suffered by those caught in harm’s way. They distill for those of us on the home front the complications and chaos of war into narratives of heroism and sacrifice, efficiency and excess, liberation and injustice. They bring us the assessments of war from leaders, both military and civilian, whose task it is to manage conflict, if not to win it. They produce the iconic images that sear a war in our memory.
In this course, we will look closely, but not exclusively, at the work of documentary filmmakers and print journalists. We will consider the arguments they make, the scenes they depict, and the stories they tell in their efforts to write the first draft of history or to bring to light a previously hidden truth about a specific war. Students will be required to screen the films out of class. Most of these films will be available either on Netflix or Amazon. Contact Prof. Burke at cburke@uci.edu for an authorization code for this course. |
| ENGLISH 103 | POETIC RHYTHM | ROBERTS, H. | This course will provide students with a comprehensive introduction to the study of prosody--the critical analysis of poetic meter and poetic rhythm. The course will be taught principally via web-based modules that students will work through each week at their own pace. There will be weekly class meetings at which students can raise questions and be tested on their progress. The final grade will be based upon a final examination and a variety of shorter written assignments.
Texts: Derek Attridge, Poetic Rhythm: An Introduction and Margaret Ferguson et al. (eds.) The Norton Anthology of Poetry (Shorter Fifth Edition). |
| ENGLISH 103 | NEW TESTAMENT | MILES, J. | The Bible is the foundational classic of Western literature. Within it, the New Testament stands as its epilogue and, for Christians, its culmination. Within the New Testament, certain passages qualify as classics within the classic. In this course, after a brief historical introduction, we will consider about two dozen of these passages, reading them in the seventeenth-century King James Version, still irreplaceable for its influence on English prose, but in an edition of the KJV that includes annotations from contemporary historical scholarship. Typically, a passage will be read in conjunction with an Old Testament passage that it quotes or alludes to. Occasionally, a passage will also be read in conjunction with a later Western work of literature, art, or music that it inspired. |
| ENGLISH 103 | FOUCAULT | RADHAKRISHNAN, R. | This course is precisely what the title says it will be: an introduction to the profound and revolutionary critical-theoretical world of Michel Foucault, the great French philosopher-historian-public intellectual and activist whose dynamic contributions to contemporary thought resist and transcend traditional disciplinary boundaries and categories. My objective in this course is to make you see how relevant Foucault is to our understanding of our troubled and contradictory contemporaneity. A word of caution even as I invite you all, with considerable passion and excitement, to the course: this is a single author course and the author in this case is a complex thinker whose work straddles different disciplines and discourses. So, please be prepared to wrestle and negotiate with tough texts saturated with theory and philosophical thought. I promise to do my all by way of lucid explanation and clear presentation. I also assume that you are taking this course because of an intrinsic interest in Foucault, however vague or undefined. Together, with some real dedication and rigorous commitment, we can make this course sing and dance. Beginning with Foucault’s early work on “madness and civilization,” Reason and its Other, we will thread our way through The Birth of the Clinic, The Order of Things, and The Archeology of Knowledge: texts that deal with the relationship between language and reality, truth and discourse, epistemology and ontology, the human and its doubles, reality as phenomenological and knowledge as discursive expertise. We then move to the essays in Language, Counter-memory, Practice and the Power-Knowledge lectures to explore the relationship between memory and counter-memory, power and knowledge, theory and praxis, genealogy and archeology, representation and the critique of representation, the intellectual and people’s movements, and scientific discourse and “subjugated knowledges.” The final movement of the course will deal with Discipline and Punish and Foucault’s late work on ethics and sexuality. This section will include the following themes: the body and the disciplining of the body, governmentality, technologies of the self, the ethical in the broadest sense of the term and its relationship to thought, politics, and social change. In addition to covering in some selective manner the most crucial aspects of Foucault’s mercurial thinking, I will also be attempting to map Foucault’s significance in relation to a number of major thinkers and philosophers such as Karl Marx, Antonio Gramsci, Friedrich Nietzsche, Frantz Fanon, Jacques Derrida, Louis Althusser, Jacques Lacan, Gilles Deleuze, and Edward Said and to schools of thought such as Phenomenology, Structuralism, Poststructuralism, Postcoloniality, Marxism, and Critical Race Theory.
This is a lot to cover and I do not promise that we will get to it all. I will be guided by what transpires in the classroom and we will make changes accordingly. The teaching methodology will be a mix of lecture and classroom participation and discussion. Very likely, I will be expecting 2 papers: one short (7 pages or so) and one long paper (about 10 pages), and class presentations. |
| ENGLISH 105 | TONI MORRISON | KEIZER, A. | 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. 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. Course requirements include a book review, a midterm, and a final paper (in the form of a take-home exam). |
| ENGLISH 105 | ASNAM LIT/FLM ADAPT | SHROFF, B. | |
| ENGLISH 106 | RENAISSANCE SONNET | HELFER, R. | |
| ENGLISH 106 | 1590 FAERIE QUEENE | KIENE, J. | This course offers an in-depth study of the life and work of Edmund Spenser, the preeminent poet of sixteenth-century England, by focusing specifically on the three books that make up the original, 1590 edition of his great poem, The Faerie Queene. Spenser’s poem is an allegorical epic, celebrating the exploits of larger-than-life heroes and staking a claim to be the quintessential poem of English nationalism and Protestantism. But as it celebrates England and its Protestant queen Elizabeth I, it also participates in that quintessentially English genre, Arthurian Romance. Book I’s “Legend of Holiness” follows the Red Cross Knight’s quest to destroy the fearsome dragon who is terrorizing the land of the knight’s beloved lady, Una. Book II’s “Legend of Temperance” depicts Sir Guyon’s mission to capture the temptress Acrasia, who makes her home in the Bower of Bliss. And Book III’s “Legend of Chastity” charts the adventures of the cross-dressing, misogyny-crushing female knight Britomart, who is searching for a man she loves but has seen only in Merlin’s magic mirror. Spenser’s broad artistic vision encompasses almost all available literary genres (pastoral, lyric, blazon, court masque, love poetry, revenge tragedy, military epic), but the poem’s epic sweep is matched not only by the frankness of its depictions of politics, sexuality, and violence, but also by the intricate beauty of its construction and the playfulness of Spenser’s distinctive poetic voice.
Course requirements will include regular, active participation in class discussion, weekly written responses, writing a Spenserian stanza, a formal presentation on Spenser criticism, and a seminar paper for which you will hand in preliminary drafts and conduct library research. |
| ENGLISH 106 | KEATS | ROBERTS, H. | This course offers an in-depth study of the poems and letters of John Keats (1795-1821), one of the greatest lyric poets in the English language. In addition to detailed study of his major works, we will explore his (all too brief) life, and the social, political, and literary contexts that shaped his writing.
Texts:
• John Keats, Complete Poems (Jack Stillinger, ed.) Harvard UP, 1982.
• John Keats, Letters of John Keats: A Selection (Robert Gittings, ed. Revised by John Mee) Oxford UP, 2002. |
| ENGLISH 106 | THEORIES OF LIBERATION | KEIZER, A. | The theme and project of liberation has been a driving force 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, sexual, and political freedom for individuals and groups. We will use classic theories on the attainment of freedom as frameworks for reading these narratives. Beginning with the Book of Exodus and traveling through African American slave narratives, Latin American testimonios, novels, literary essays, and contemporary films, we will explore the ways in which a wide range of writers and filmmakers have conceptualized the goal and process of liberation in their literary works. Course requirements include a midterm and a final research paper. |
| ENGLISH 210 | THE RENAISSANCE SONNETT | HELFER, R. | [Course Code: 23802] Mondays 1:00pm -3:50pm HIB 411
Enrollment via [click here]
Love is a many-splendored thing in Renaissance sonnet sequences, and this course will pursue both how and why. Beginning with the premise that, as Shakespeare writes, “love is not love” (or not just love, at any rate), this class will explore how the sonnet’s discourse of desire depicts the relation between the self and the world, the secular and the divine, the past and the present. To explore how the sonnet's labile language of love speaks to issues of authorship and authority, gender and sexuality, history and memory, power and nationhood, and so on, we first will consider the influential Italian sonnet sequence by Petrarch and then move on to important English sonnet sequences by Sidney, Spenser, Daniel, Drayton, Shakespeare, and Wroth. Critical approaches to this remarkably influential form will run the gamut and help to demonstrate how early modern sonnets are rich mines of literary and cultural interpretation. |
| ENGLISH 210 | MELVILLE | LAZO, R. | [Course Code: 23802] Tuesdays 10:00am -12:50pm HIB 411
Enrollment via [click here]
In the introduction to his classic Mariners, Renegades, and Castaways, CLR James writes, “A great part of this book was written on Ellis Island while I was being detained by the Department of Immigration. The Island, like Melville’s Pequod, is a miniature of all the nations of the world and all sections of society.” Let us take that phrase for the full title of this seminar, “Melville and the Nations of the World.” With his references to immigration and state detention, James prods us to raise questions not only about Melville but also via Melville about how his fictions invoke various people and social contexts outside of the United States. As we consider how Melville’s writing engages with territories in Latin America, the Caribbean, Europe, and Asia, we will also explore various critical approaches: hemispheric studies, globalization, comparative narratives of slavery, among others. One goal of the seminar is to enter, albeit briefly, various critical conversations in nineteenth-century studies. To that end, Professor Hester Blum from Penn State will visit us for a lecture on Melville and oceanic studies. Our readings will include “The Encantadas, or Enchanted Isles,” Benito Cereno, “The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids,” “Bartleby,” Typee, Israel Potter, and Clarel. Please read Moby-Dick over spring break. In addition, we will read a few other nineteenth-century texts, including Frederick Douglass’s “The Heroic Slave,” Martin Delany’s Blake, and Fanny Fern’s “The Working Girls of New York.” Active participation required of all. Pro-seminar option: 6-8 page final paper. Seminar option: research paper. |
| ENGLISH 210 | GHOSTS OF ENLIGHTEN | LEWIS, J. | [Course Code: 23804] Fridays 2:00pm -4:50pm HIB 411
Enrollment via [click here]
What haunted the Enlightenment? If you decide to take this seminar, you will find out. Or not: the question of ghosts, like most matters (or, in this case, non-matters) in that most dialectical of junctures in the history of the human being, turns out to be an open one. At least since Immanuel Kant defined it in 1784, the very concept of “enlightenment” has historically implied the exorcism not just of ghosts but of the modes of seeing, believing, and communicating required to perceive them. Forward momentum, individual freedom from collective superstition, the privileging of the ordinary senses as conditions of right understanding and right representation, personal autonomy and voluntary association: these are all familiar imprints of a period that inherited Christian concepts of the itinerant or at least persistent spirit and traded them for the romantic unconscious and its specters. Though our framing texts will be Cotton Mather’s Wonders of the Invisible World (1693) and Coleridge’s “Frost at Midnight” (1798) we naturally will challenge this linear description of events, and we will do so by exploring the literature of the supernatural produced in both England and America over the so-called long 18th century. Equally self-conscious about formal mediation, about its status as the visible trace of the airborne, and about the nature of the imagination, poetry and fiction of the period found themselves singularly equipped to inculcate, investigate, renovate, and perpetuate the experience of insensible sensation previously associated with ghosts. They thus invite us to consider the phenomenology of reading as it took its modern form. In response, we will approach the occult strain in both insular and colonial writing of the period as a place where that phenomenology was both bred and theorized. Canonical literary texts include Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year, Walpole’s Castle of Otranto, Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho (a two-week enterprise), Lewis’s The Monk, Brockden Brown’s Wieland, some English poems of the “Graveyard School” and their American counterparts. Three specific focal points will be: ‘enlightened’ paradigms of the senses, of the self, and of the socioeconomic as these generated their own spectral others. The moral of the fable? Time will tell. But in a seldom-noticed coda on ghosts at the end of their classic Dialectic of Enlightenment:, Horkheimer and Adorno intriguingly summarized the relationship to those others that we moderns appear to have inherited: “We like them, are the victims of the same condition and the same disappointed hope.”
Seminar participants will write one article-length paper and make at least one oral presentation. Proseminar participants will submit a written version of said presentation which references at least one other work on the syllabus. |
| ENGLISH 210 | FICTITIOUS CAPITAL | GODDEN, R. | [Course Code: 23808] Tuesdays 3:00pm -5:50pm HIB 411
Enrollment via [click here]
I had thought to title this course, “Three Very Long Late Twentieth/Early Twenty First Century Novels that Few Read (Because of their Length), Read from a Materialist Perspective,” but I feared that, despite its accuracy, such a title might attract no one. Nonetheless, the course will focus on three ‘great’ books (four, if one includes Marx’s Capital Volume1, deployed as a methodological shadow and prompt throughout the course). William Gaddis’ J R (1975) will be read over a three week period in an effort to establish how the generative contradictions of finance (or of “fictitious capital”), as an emergent cultural dominant, might be understood as conditioning the narrative poetics both of the economy of a Neoliberal phase, and of its key literary texts. The three-week format will then be applied either to William Gass’ The Tunnel (1995) or to Don Dello’s Underworld (1997); the third text will be David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King (2011). Readings will be accompanied by essays and extracts, drawn predominantly from materialist theory and Marxist economics, through which the evasive substance of finance, its instruments, language, spaces and temporalities may be engaged, in order that a mode of reading apt to what has been called variously ‘the financial turn’ or ‘a sign of autumn’ may be discerned. |
| 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 | LUPTON, J | Course Code 23970 |