| Course | Title | Instructor | Description |
|---|
| ENGLISH 10 | BOREDOM &LITERATURE | BARTLETT, J. | In this course we will theorize what Theodore Adorno called “free time,” by treating the submissiveness of waiting as a form of production. We will read texts that make their own fun, that spend time writing about time spent, and that dilate on emptiness to a number of ends. The relation between boredom and narrative is both subtle and everywhere, and so we will read widely, pitching into novelists who make extensive literal and metaphorical use of the power of infinite strategy in order to talk about sociability, ethics, and politics, economists who compare their work on monopolies to strategic partnerships in novels, scientists who describe evolution in terms of elaborate games of chess, cognitive theorists who plot the circuitous route we take when we stake ourselves on invention, and readings from psychoanalysis and the philosophy of action and mind that try to describe just what it is that we are laying claim to when a “doing” finally becomes “a thing done.” All the while, we’ll consider such questions as: how does boredom manage or mismanage time? How can we understand boredom as a kind of reading, and a kind of writing? Does boredom have a style? Expect work by Henry James, Samuel Beckett, Virginia Woolf, Iris Murdoch, and Oscar Wilde. Requirements include quizzes and short papers. |
| ENGLISH 28B | COMIC&TRAGIC VISION | ALLEN, E. | 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 | ALLEN, E. | 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 | LATIOLAIS, P. | 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 | ART AND LIT IN US MODERNISM | CONNELL, C | This course examines the relationship between gender and avant garde compositional practices in literature from 1901-1945. Modernist experimental compositional practices will be contextualized in part by American writers' convergence with avant garde art. Readings will include Gertrude Stein
and Djuna Barnes, among others. Of particular interest to this course are the ways in which discussions of gender work hand-in-hand with modernizing the novel. In the second half of the course, we will read against so-called canonical representations of the modern. |
| ENGLISH 101W | FAITH&FIC CULTURES | MILES, J | This writing class combines an engagement with the techniques of the short story as a literary form with religion as a subject. Each of the stories considered in the course will engage a different religion. In addition, we shall consider a sampling of prominent 20th-century nonfiction statements about religion. |
| ENGLISH 101W | MEDIEVAL WOMEN WRTG | 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 mystics and holy women such as Margery Kempe and Julian of Norwich, the allegorical visions of Christine 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 be expected to attend and participate in all seminar meetings, write and revise three 5-7 page essays, and submit a final writing portfolio at the end of the term. |
| 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, Boethius's Consolation of Philosophy, and excerpts from Langland's Piers Plowman, the Romance of the Rose, Dante’s Divine Comedy, holy visions by female mystics, a medieval play, and The Cloud of Unknowing.
Course requirements include regular attendance, reading quizzes, two 3-5 page essays, a midterm, and a final. |
| ENGLISH 102A | MONSTERS AND MONSTROSITY IN THE MIDDLE AGES AND RENAISSANCE | BERGHOF, A | |
| ENGLISH 102B | ANATOMIES OF POWER | LEWIS, J. | Anatomies of Power: Neoclassical and Baroque
“I put for a general inclination of all mankind, a perpetual and restless desire of power after power, that ceaseth only in death.” These words, from Thomas Hobbes’s artful philosophical treatise, Leviathan (1651), haunted English literature from the end of the seventeenth century to the beginning of the nineteenth. In this period, dramatic social and political change forced a re-examination of traditional assumptions about what power is, where it is located (in inherited and communal forms or in individual desire?), and how it is most effectively exerted (through coercion or seduction?). Imaginative literature–poems, novels, and plays alike–played a crucial role in ‘anatomizing’ these assumptions: in breaking them down, analyzing their dynamics, and exploring their implications for real human bodies. Crucial to this process were two major artistic styles: the baroque, which dominated in the 17th century, and the neoclassical, which began to mix with the baroque, eventually replacing it until it itself gave way to what we call the romantic style. We’ll examine works as various as Dryden’s Absalom and Achitophel (alongside All for Love, his rewrite of Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra), Wycherley’s The Country Wife, Rochester’s libertine poetry, and Behn’s romance of the slave trade, Oroonoko. These baroque texts all responded to contemporary reformulations of social, political, and intellectual authority. In the second half of the course, we’ll turn to neoclassical attempts to stabilize and regulate power relations, especially as these were seen (and critiqued) through the eyes of Finch, Pope, Swift and Johnson. Our survey will end with a quick look (via Blake) at the emergence of new conceptions of power—both artistic and political—in the wake of the French Revolution. |
| ENGLISH 102C | WILDE TIMES | BURT, E. | How can the same decade of the 1890’s have given us Wilde’s painterly Decadent texts, Shaw’s socially-concerned, realist comedies, James’s finely-tuned psychological tales, Wells’s ferocious science-fiction novellas and Conrad’s modernist meditations on English honor and the Empire in dissolution? As the Victorian age reaches an end, on the cusp of modernism, there are noticeable signs in the texts of these writers of a struggle to liberate men and women from the confines of Victorian notions of virtue and domestic life. There is evidence as well of anxiety, as socio-political institutions come under fire for their corruption or inadequacy at accommodating modern needs. Corrupting influences are shown inhabiting the family or tearing apart Victorian assumptions as to the glorious Empire and the fairness of old England itself. Along with the social upheaval, we see our novelists and dramatists experimenting with styles and forms that indicate on the one side an increasing formalism, and on the other, a reforming spirit struggling to find literary language adequate to the new age. Works to be read include: The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890), Lady Windermere’s Fan (1893), Mrs. Warren’s Profession (1893), The Spoils of Poynton (1896), The Invisible Man (1897), Lord Jim (1899). |
| ENGLISH 102D | PERCEPTION IN TWENTIETH-CENTURY LITERATURE | MCNELLIS, E | This course provides broad exposure in American literature from the late nineteenth century to the present while investigating the ways that the literary innovators of this period responded to changing ideas about perception and consciousness that were entering the popular imagination from the fields of biology, psychology, and philosophy. We begin in the nineteenth century with Emerson’s concept of the “transparent eyeball,” and investigate its two provisions (“I am nothing, I see all”) in the work of Whitman and Dickinson. We will trace this tension between self-expansion and self-erasure through a variety of works, genres, and styles throughout the twentieth century: the crowded, cacophonous consciousness of Eliot and Faulkner; the layered expectations of racial consciousness and the layers of meaning in Hughes and Morrison; the spare, crystalline vision of the Imagists and their inheritors; and the playful postmodern experiments of Stein, Ashbery, and the Language poets. In all these readings, we will investigate the ways in which literary representations of the human sensorium can test the limits of thought and language, and reveal deep truths about what it means to be human. |
| ENGLISH 102D | LITERATURE OF PARTITION | O'CONNOR, L. | Partition along sectarian lines was a feature of British withdrawal from several colonies during the twentieth century, including the partition of Ireland into Northern Ireland and the Free State in 1922 and of the Indian sub-continent into India and Pakistan in 1947. The partition of these countries ramifies into other “partitions”--of the psyche, of ethnic groups and families, of communities and once undivided locales. Our writers call attention to the difficulties of writing partition that derive from the complex relationship between memory (collective and personal), trauma, and narrative. We’ll read across a wide array of genres, including a play, short stories, novels, poetry, and murals. How does the writer use the resources of a particular genre to represent partition? Are there “lines” in the text demarcating “the divide” between us and them, then and now, event and rumor? Is the experience and narration of partition gendered? What effect has partition on the regulation of sexuality? How do writers at a generational remove from the event of partition come to terms with a history that has shaped them but that they did not experience themselves? Take-home midterm, term paper, final exam. |
| ENGLISH 103 | FASHION & CELEBRITY | WILENTZ, A. | Where does fashion come from and how does it get covered in the media? How does a celebrity become a celebrity, and what do journalists have to do with this process? Does any of it matter? (Answer: YES!!!)
Every person in the developed world is bombarded every day with images from the fashion world and from the realm of celebrities. Often we just accept this about our lives, the way earlier cultures accepted the image of the king and the wardrobe of his court. We know that Jennifer Lawrence is engaged to be married the way earlier peoples knew that Queen Elizabeth I was being courted by a knight or an explorer in her entourage. We know what Lawrence’s Oscar dress (2013) looked like and who made it, much as subjects of the queen might have known that Elizabeth wore a ruff collar made by royal Flemish lacemakers. But, all things considered, Elizabeth was, after all, the queen and the law and the locus of all political power in her country in her day, whereas Lawrence is a commodity, or at best, an image that sells a commodity (see this September’s Vogue cover; ok, she’s also a good
actress…).
What, then, is the significance of our “celebrity addiction,” as some have called it, for our lives and our future? And what is the role of the media in broadcasting and burnishing the image of celebrities and the importance of fashion?
What are the tropes of celebrity journalism; what are the rules? (Hint: there are strict rules.) Are journalists ever honest brokers in this game or have they become part of a culture of corruption in which the bottom line (not the hemline!) is the most important thing for the makers of fashion and the manipulators of celebrity.
Does Angelina really care about hungry kids in Africa? Does Madonna really want to spend her money and time making sure girls in Malawi get a good education? What is Oprah’s role as an arbiter of culture?
And why is Jennifer Aniston on the cover of every supermarket magazine, week in and week out? Does anyone really care who she’s dating? What is the story line we are following in all this coverage of babes, boyfriends, and \"bumps\"?
We’ll read books by journalists and fiction writers about celebrity and fashion and the business of the two related industries. We’ll read about the Michael Jackson phenomenon, how it happened, what it meant. We’ll read about fame junkies and the importance of being famous. We’ll also be reading from fashion magazines like Vogue, Bazaar, WWD, In Style and Lucky. We’ll look at advertising spreads for fashion, we’ll page through Vanity Fair and The New Yorker, and we’ll go to a bunch of websites including Fashionista, Michelle Phan, the Business of Fashion (UK), Styleite, Advanced Style, and The Sartorialist, as well as to Perez Hilton, Gawker, Defamer, and TMZ, in order to see how the cultures of fashion and celebrity have invaded the country’s cultural spaces and how the Internet is making them
fresh and lively, if not meaningful and important.
We’ll also watch two prize-winning fashion documentaries: \"The September Issue\" and \"Bill Cunningham’s New York.\" |
| ENGLISH 103 | NARR IN 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. |
| ENGLISH 103 | AMERICAN WOMEN POETS | JACKSON, V | "I am obnoxious to each carping tongue,/Who sayes, my hand a needle better fits," wrote
Anne Bradstreet in The Prologue to _The Tenth Muse, Lately Sprung up in America" (1650).
Really? Bradstreet, a highly literate British woman who immigrated to Massachusetts
aboard the Arabella in 1630, actually enjoyed great success after her book was published in
London. For the 364 years since Bradstreet's declaration, women poets have continued to
publish poems about being women poets. Often, these poets have called attention to why
they should or shouldn't write poems; sometimes, men have written poems in which they
pretend to be women. Writing as a woman poet who shouldn't write seems to have been a
strategy for poetic success for almost four centuries. In this class, we will read several
such poets, and we will think about the various ways in which each circulated as a woman
poet--in many cases as a Poetess, or as a lesbian, or as a good wife, or as a bad wife, or
as a female slave, or as anon., or as a spinster, or as a recluse, or as an invalid, or as a
subversive, or as a reactionary, or as a man, or as a psychotic, or as avant-garde, or as a
poet who should have been a seamstress. Our reading will include Bradstreet, Lucy Terry,
Phillis Wheatley, Lydia Sigourney, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Jane Schoolcraft, Emily
Dickinson, Elizabeth Oakes Smith, Helen Hunt Jackson, Amy Lowell, Gwendolyn Brooks,
Edna St Vincent Millay, Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath, Elizabeth Bishop, Lucie Brock-Broido,
Jennifer Moxley, and Evie Shockley. |
| ENGLISH 105 | ART OR PROPAGANDA | DANNER, K. | Art or Propaganda: U.S. Literature in the Aftermath of the Great Depression
The stock market crash of 1929 – and the economic collapse that followed – deeply marked U.S. and world political, economic, and cultural events. In Germany, it contributed to the rise of the National Socialist Party. In Russia, it fed the consolidation of Stalin’s power. In the United States, it led large numbers of working class people to join unions and far left wing organizations like the Communist Party USA.
The Communist Party and its cultural organs, in turn, had deep and longstanding effects on the United States, leading to what one critic has called the “laboring of American culture.” Knowledge of these effects has been largely erased by the Cold War, and part of our task will be recovery of that cultural memory. At the same time, we may (or may not) find crude New Masses editor Mike Gold’s 1930 formulation that “every poem, every novel and drama, must have a social theme, or it is merely confectionery.” (1930)
As the writers we read are either African-American (Richard Wright, Zora Neale Hurston, William Attaway) or Jewish (Mike Gold, Nathanael West, Clifford Odets), we will necessarily consider the key question of Art or Propaganda through other interpretive lenses and contexts. Hurston’s strident anti-Communist views will also receive a full hearing.
2 papers, required drafts, a midterm and final. |
| ENGLISH 105 | NEW ZEALAND LITERATURE | 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. |
| ENGLISH 106 | WOMEN & SATIRE | 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 106 | VICTORIAN POETRY | ROBERTS, H. | This course will explore some of the major figures in British poetry of the later 19th century, including Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Robert Browning, Alfred Tennyson, Matthew Arnold, Christina Rossetti and Gerard Manley Hopkins.
Text: the required text for this course is the Norton Anthology of English Literature (9th edition), Volume E: The Victorian Age.
Coursework: Students will produce a short exercise in critical writing
before every class and will submit a major essay late in the quarter.
There will also be a final exam. |
| ENGLISH 106 | MELODRAMA | BARTLETT, J. | Writing in 1814, the editor of The New English Theatre (“Original Dramas, Not Yet Acted”) levels this critique at The Prophetess: A Tragedy, an extravagant verse drama about the sack of Troy: “It is properly a Melo-drama, and ought not to have been called a Tragedy. In tragedy and comedy the final event is the effect of the moral operations of different characters, but in the melo-drama the catastrophe is the physical result of mechanical strategem.” In this course, we will work from this definition of melodrama as a big con, a clockwork trick unconcerned with the passions of its characters (who are ineffectual) or the catastrophes of its plots (which are providentially fixed). For us, the “physical result” of melodrama’s representational excess is a sleight of hand, which is to say, it is explicitly nonlinguistic: it is sustained by exaggerated gestures, bodily attitudes, and facial expressions; visual cues like costumes, sets, and props; actions that are recognizably motivated, even if imaginary or historical; and, of course, musical accompaniment that sets the mood, and tracks characters with leitmotifs that cue them on- and offstage. The network of nonlinguistic representations that are said to make melodrama go have not before been isolated as a “mechanical strategem,” a focus that would present us with opportunities for examining structural relationships between facial expressions and objects, between musical repetition and habitual bodily attitudes, and examine the ways we interpret gestures and signal motives. Since the nineteenth century, criticism of melodrama has threaded its aesthetic objectives, like the production of somatic sensation, the enforcement of rigid moral distinctions, and the subordination of character development to plot, into a study of melodrama’s contribution to the escapism, philistinism, and political sympathies of the lower middle class. My hope is that our return to a nonlinguistic understanding of melodramatic excess will allow us some distance from this instrumentalization of melodrama as an expression of social and cultural movements, and will reveal its moving parts instead. Students will be expected to write a few brief responses to course readings, to give one presentation followed by some discussion facilitation, and to write and revise three short papers of 5-7 pages. |
| ENGLISH 210 | LIT OF PARTITION | O'CONNOR, L. | [Course Code: 23804] Tuesdays 12:00am-2:50pm in HIB 411
Enrollment via [click here]
Drawing on postcolonial and trauma theory, the seminar will explore how the partition of Ireland into North and South (1922) and of the Indian sub-continent into India and Pakistan (1947) is represented in ethnography, poetry, novels and other genres. Partition along sectarian lines was a feature of British withdrawal from several colonies, and offers plenty of scope for examining literature in historicized contexts. The Manichean logic and binaries of colonialism, which polarize settler and native, resurface in the partitioned post-colony when the impasse between ethno-religious groups reifies into a sectarian faultline dividing a new “us” from “them.” Brought into focus through comparative analysis, this peculiar state-formation raises many intriguing theoretical issues. The partition of countries ramifies into further “partitions”--of ethnic groups; local communities; cities; families; and cultural, literary, and historical genealogies.
Partition bifurcates along territorial, epochal and psychocultural axes, and we’ll track the figurative and narrative “lines” in our texts demarcating the divide between us and them, then and now, and event and rumor, among others. We’ll explore how the experience and narration of partition is gendered, and the effects of partition on the regulation of sexuality. How do post-partition maps and related political symbols alter the political, geographical, and spatial imaginary of the newly reconstituted peoples? How do writers at a generational (and perhaps geographical) remove from the event of partition come to terms with a history that has shaped them but that they did not themselves experience firsthand?
Though routinely acknowledged as a historical watershed, the event of partition is paradoxically occluded as an object of inquiry and surrounded by silence and discursive invisibility. The new states in the partitioned post-colony repress how their cherished independence is predicated upon cataclysmic violence, though their disavowals are evident in how their dominant cultural narratives demonize and shun the “others” on the far side of the divide. Our writers call attention to the difficulties of writing partition, difficulties that arise from the complex relationship between memory (collective and personal), trauma, and narrative.
The course is of obvious relevance for students of postcolonial, Indian sub-continent or Irish literature, as well as for those interested in other partition histories like those of Israel / Palestine or the Cold-War partitions of Berlin or Korea. The emphasis on figurations of partition has pertinence for other borderland / frontier contexts. Political issues of historiography and secular vs ethno-religious state-formation, and representations of collective trauma, are also applicable elsewhere. Course readings include the short fiction of Saadat Hasan Manto; poetry by Seamus Heaney, Ciaran Carson, and other Northern poets; ethnographers Allen Feldman and and Veena Das’s Formations of Violence and Life and Words: Violence and the Descent into the Ordinary; and Bapsi Sidhwa and Seamus Deane’s novels, Cracking India and Reading in the Dark.
Seminar students are required to write a 15-20 page research paper, pro-seminar students to complete a take-home exam, and all participants are expected to circulate weekly response papers. |
| ENGLISH 210 | WRITERLY READING | RYAN, M. | [Course Code: 23808] Fridays 2:00pm-4:50pm in HIB 341
Enrollment via [click here]
When asked how he studied other poets’ work, Phillip Larkin responded, “Oh, for Christ’s sake, one doesn’t study poets. You read them, and think, That’s marvelous, how is it done, could I do it? and that’s how you learn.” In this seminar, we’ll look at the marvelous to see how it’s done. Writerly reading is reading for usage: carnivorously, closely and slowly, through prescribed lenses of attention. A different lens makes a different picture. If you can see it you have a better chance of being able to do it yourself. We’ll look at how poems situate the act of “speech” by the speaker, through a story being told and/or an argument being made. We’ll trace the angles and turns and intersections of the stories and arguments, and see how they’re transfigured by syntax and rhythm. An essay or story or group of poems generated by our study will be required. MFA prosers and vagabond PhD’s who are willing to participate in poets’ shoptalk are welcome. |
| ENGLISH 210 | MODERNISM DEBATE | HARRIES, M. | [Course Code: 23800] Wednesdays 2:00pm-4:50pm HG 2121
Enrollment via [click here]
“Modernism” remains a contested term. Very often, it is unclear whether it is a period term or a formal one: Does it describe aesthetic production in the overdeveloped world from, say, 1890 to 1940, or a set of stylistic developments limited to certain works in that period, or a set of formal experiments not bound by period or geography at all? This course will survey the development of the term, paying particular attention to the vexed relationship between modernism as period term and modernism as a term describing a set of formal features. The larger questions of the course, however, will not be terminological ones but aesthetic and historical. Can modernism’s privileged position as a name for the art that responds to modernization be sustained?
The course will begin with accounts of the relationship between modernity, modernization, and modernism. The central text for this section will be Walter Benjamin’s The Writer of Modern Life. This collection’s claims about Baudelaire’s response to modernity open up an argument about base and superstructure that will be a preoccupation of the course. Its salutary disruption of Anglo-American assumptions about periodization will also be useful in establishing the course’s goal of unsettling commonplaces about modernism. We will also consider some of Marx and Engels’ writings on art, and Raymond Williams’ discussions of base and superstructure. The course will proceed to consider examples of historical accounts of modernism that see its cultural importance as a matter of its resistance to modernization (e.g., Lears) and accounts that argue for the avant-garde’s commitment to undoing modernity’s crucial division of the zones of the aesthetic and of the “praxis of life” (e.g., Bürger). We will also consider texts from various disciplines that established influential accounts of modernism by Theodor Adorno, Clement Greenberg, Harry Levin, and others.
The course will conclude by considering more recent crucial challenges to entrenched versions of “modernism” in works by Dipesh Chakrabarty, Paul Gilroy, Rita Felski, Geeta Kapur, T. J. Clark, and others. These texts will return us to a question which, implicitly and explicitly, will have driven the discussion all along: Should “modernism” survive as a critical term?
Selected Readings:
Walter Benjamin, The Writer of Modern Life
Peter Bürger, The Theory of the Avant-Garde
Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference
T. J. Clark, Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism
Rita Felski, The Gender of Modernity
Geeta Kapur, When Was Modernism?: Essays on Contemporary Cultural Practice in India
Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double-Consciousness
Andreas Huyssen, After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism
Fredric Jameson, A Singular Modernity: Essay on the Ontology of the Present
T. J. Jackson Lears, No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880-1920
Harry Levin, “What Was Modernism?”
Raymond Williams, “When Was Modernism?” |
| ENGLISH 210 | HISTORICAL POETICS | JACKSON, V. | [Course Code: 23802] Mondays 2:00pm-4:50pm in HIB 411
Enrollment via [click here]
"Historical poetics" is a phrase that has emerged recently among scholars in several fields at once. What does it mean? For some, it means the study of prosodic discourses that have been obscured by the abstractions of modern critical reading (is the iamb a cultural imaginary?); for some, it means the cultural histories that surround and determine the transmission of poems (memorization or graffiti, for example); for some, it means the ideas of poetry assumed by readers and poets (ideas as large as the progress of civilization or as small as verbal melody); for some, it means the theories of history that poems took up or on which they depended (Universal History, for example, with its national and racial implications); for medievalists it might mean a range of now unread genres; for African-Americanists it might mean all these things and more. Increasingly, "historical poetics" has also become a way of describing the formal discourses in prose (especially in the study of the novel, in law, and in anthropology).
In this course, we will read a range of eighteenth-, nineteenth-, twentieth- and twenty-first-century poems and treatises on poetics in several languages, and we will read several theorists who influence (or resist) recent work in historical poetics, including Benjamin, Adorno, Heidegger, Agamben, de Man, Jarvis, Moten, Prins, Damrosch, Mufti, and Berlant. |
| ENGLISH 210 | MILTON | SILVER, V. | [Course Code: 23806] Thursdays 2:00pm-4:50pm in HIB 411
Enrollment via [click here]
The seminar addresses the problem arguably posed by Milton, namely, how can an iconoclast be a poet; and to that extent, it is a course in how best to read Paradise Lost without succumbing to the undeniable allure of the Icthyian fallacy (Stanley Fish’s How Milton Works). In order to tackle that question, the seminar supplies an interpretive frame, beginning with the fifteenth-century bestseller, the Malleus Maleficarum (“The Hammer of Witches”), which serves as an introduction to what is currently called “magical thinking.” The antidote to magic comes first, in the form of Martin Luther’s theology--especially the work most read in England, his 1535 Commentary on Galatians, but also The Bondage of the Will, his reply to Erasmus’ Diatribe on that subject. The second antidote is Milton’s own theology, as argued in his controversial prose and Christian Doctrine, as well as the poetry from his earliest sonnet, “How soon hath time.” Wittgenstein’s later philosophy will make an appearance, as will Adorno’s concept of dialectic, the better to dispel some misconceptions and clarify Milton’s enterprise in his “great argument.” |
| ENGLISH 255 | WRKSHOP IN ACAD PUB | JACKSON, V. | [Course Code: 23850] Mondays 6:00pm-8:30pm in HIB 411
Professional Proseminar: For Advanced PhD students, at the end of the dissertation process
This seminar is for students who plan to be on the job market next year or the next. We will do practical work on job materials and on the interview and submission process. We will also do practical work on the preparation of articles and conference papers for submission, on the transition from dissertation to book, and on applying for post-docs and grants. In addition to these practical concerns, we will read and discuss essays on the current state of the Humanities, on the state of the profession, on academic publishing, and on nonacademic careers for English PhDs. All advanced PhD students are encouraged to attend this seminar. |
| ENGLISH 290 | READING&CONFERENCE | STAFF | |
| ENGLISH 290 | READING&CONFERENCE | STAFF | |
| ENGLISH 290 | READING&CONFERENCE | STAFF | |
| ENGLISH 290 | READING&CONFERENCE | STAFF | |
| ENGLISH 290 | READING&CONFERENCE | STAFF | |
| ENGLISH 290 | READING&CONFERENCE | STAFF | |
| ENGLISH 290 | READING&CONFERENCE | STAFF | |
| ENGLISH 290 | READING&CONFERENCE | STAFF | |
| ENGLISH 290 | READING&CONFERENCE | STAFF | |
| ENGLISH 290 | READING&CONFERENCE | STAFF | |
| ENGLISH 290 | READING&CONFERENCE | STAFF | |
| ENGLISH 290 | READING&CONFERENCE | STAFF | |
| ENGLISH 290 | READING&CONFERENCE | STAFF | |