| Course | Title | Instructor | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
| ENGLISH 11 | SOCIETY, LAW & LITERATURE | THOMAS, B. | This course satisfies Category III (Social and Behavioral Sciences) or Category IV (Arts and Humanities) Gen Ed Requirements. Law occupies a central role in American society. As the preamble to the Constitution states, it strives to create a more perfect union by establishing justice, insuring domestic tranquility, providing for the common defense, promoting the general welfare, and securing liberty for each generation of citizens. Given the law’s importance, it has frequently been the topic of literature, as writers provide their own image of justice and measure whether the law has served its purpose or not. This course will consist of two units dealing with law and literature in the United States. The first explores how, after the abolition of slavery, the United States lapsed into a racially segregated society justified with the ruling of Plessy v. Ferguson (1896). We will read some important literary responses by Plessy’s lawyer, Albion W. Tourgeé, and African Americans, Booker T. Washington, W.E.B. DuBois, and Charles Chesnutt. We will also examine how the country abandoned legally supported segregation with Brown v. Board of Education (1954). The second unit explores the status of Asian Americans during the same period. It will look at the Chinese Exclusion Acts and how Chinese overcame the attempt to deny them access to American society by wielding battles in both the courts and in literature. We will look at cases like U.S. v. Wong Kim Ark (1898) that granted citizenship to all people born in the United States, no matter what race, and China Men by Maxine Hong Kingston. Requirements: a midterm, a take-home essay, a final, and regular attendance. |
| ENGLISH 11 | HOLLYWOOD EXCEPTIONALISM | CHRISTENSEN, J. | |
| 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 100 | INTRODUCTION TO LITERARY THEORY | HARRIES, M. | Theory begins with distance from what we contemplate. Contemplating a work of art, we may begin with the assumption that it represents something else: a tyrant, a historical period, a wheelbarrow. Some artworks seem to aspire to imitate the world as exactly as possible. Other artworks challenge our assumptions about representation entirely: they don’t seem to refer to something outside themselves or to something already in the world. Theory is, among other things, a systematic way of contemplating the difference, or the distance, between the artwork and what we understand it to represent. Criticism puts theory to work in practices of close attention to artworks. Depending upon what theory we begin with, or simply take for granted, we may understand works of art very differently and we may therefore adopt very different critical practices. This course will survey aspects of the long history of theorizing literature and writing about it critically. While we will begin with ancient Greek examples from Plato and Aristotle, emphasis will fall theory and criticism today. A few short literary works will provide touchstones. The aim of the course is to make participants aware of a range of theoretical modes, alert to the ways these are put into practice in critical writing, and self-conscious about our own assumptions, aspirations, and critical practices. |
| ENGLISH 101W | JANE AUSTEN | VAN SANT, A. | In describing her own method as a novelist, Austen wrote that she worked on a “little bit (two inches wide) of ivory . . . with so fine a brush as produces little effect after much labour.” Sir Walter Scott commented that although he could do “the big Bow-Wow strain” of novels very well, Austen had an “exquisite touch which renders ordinary common-place things and characters interesting.” Modern critics have written variously of her “regulated hatred,” her conservatism, and her view of social conventions as fictions. In this E101w, we will read three of Austen’s six completed novels in the order of their publication, biographical material on Austen; historical material on the period; and numerous critical works. We will consider many, often conflicting, views of her work and ask questions both about her novelistic practice and about the social problems that her novels engage. E101w is a writing-intensive seminar that emphasizes criticism as well as literary works. Please get the Broadview Press editions of Sense and Sensibility, Mansfield Park, and Persuasion. Broadview has a special offer on all 3 of the novels as “Jane Austen Package A.” Check with the bookstore or visit the Broadview site: https://www.broadviewpress.com/product.php?productid=1490. You will write a lot--informally on the message board as well as in class, and 2 very short papers on the way to writing a long paper. Be prepared to write drafts, read other students’ drafts, and have your own work read. Requirements: attendance, participation, keeping up with the website, turning all written work in on time, and being a responsible reader of other students’ work. |
| ENGLISH 101W | ANIMALS & ALLEGORY | DAVIS, R. | “For the whole world is full of different creatures, like a book written with various words and full of sentences in which we can read what we should imitate and avoid.” The thirteenth-century theologian Thomas of Chobham summarizes the medieval view of the symbolic value of animal life: beyond their use as a source of physical sustenance, animals also provided human beings with moral and spiritual instruction. This conviction—that animals have something to teach us about being human—has left its mark on literature throughout the centuries. Indeed, from Charlotte’s Web, to Animal Farm, to Twilight, the popularity of animal and animal human hybrids as protagonists in fiction and film—especially those aimed young audiences—are a testament to the enduring appeal and didactic value of animal stories.But what makes animals such appealing vehicles of instruction, and what exactly do animals have to teach humans? Why does the very existence of non-human animals seem not only to invite but almost even to demand storytelling? Does the use of animals to teach practical and moral lessons, often through the literary technique of anthropomorphism, distort our ability to understand real animals, our relationship to them, and even our own identities as human animals? What ethical obligations do humans have to the flesh-and blood counterparts of the animal figures we are so eager to encounter in story? Do stories that feature talking animals enable us to understand them better, or, conversely, reveal our fundamental alienation from animal life? Beginning with animal lore from medieval bestiaries and beast fables, this course pairs medieval and modern texts to explore how animals bear meaning in the past and in our own culture. Texts include: Chaucer’s Parliament of Fowls and The Nun’s Priest’s Tale; selections from Ovid’s Metamorphoses; a medieval werewolf narrative; T.H. White’s Book of Beasts and The Sword in the Stone; Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis; Yann Martel’s The Life of Pi; and J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace. Course assignments focus on close reading and written response to both primary and secondary texts. In fulfillment of the University’s upper-division writing requirement, students will submit short responses to course texts and write and revise three 5-7 page essays. |
| ENGLISH 102A | MEDIEVAL ROAD TRIPS | DAVIS, R. | This course surveys the emergence and development of English literature from the Anglo-Saxon elegies to Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and Thomas Malory’s Morte Darthur. Thematically, we’ll investigate narratives of place, movement across boundaries, encounters with the unfamiliar, and quests for sanctuary, community, and meaning. Course assignments include two short essays, a midterm, and a final. |
| ENGLISH 102A | EARLY MODERN MEMORY | HELFER, R. | What does memory mean in a world without seemingly infinite storage capacity and instantaneous retrieval? We will explore this question, considering the vital role of natural and artificial memory in Renaissance literature and culture. Starting with key works from antiquity and the middle ages, we will examine how memory shapes ideas about fiction and the place of literature in early modern society. Our authors will include Castiglione, Sidney, Spenser, Shakespeare, Nashe, Donne, and Cavendish. |
| ENGLISH 102B | LITERATURE OF (THE) ENLIGHTENMENT | LEWIS, J. | The period known as the “long eighteenth century,” roughly 1660-1798, knew itself--and has long been known as--"the Enlightenment." Writers of this period often believed they were shining the new "light" of reason, scientific knowledge, and toleration on the old darkness of superstition and political oppression. The result? A radically new understanding of–and interest in–what it means to be human. But was "the Enlightenment" all it claimed to be? What were its limitations, contradictions, and unique possibilities. Most important for our purposes, how did English literature of the Enlightenment both reflect and challenge its values? How can that literature help us to understand our own, present-day quest for deeper understanding of our identity and future as human beings? In this course, we will be exploring a range of 18th-century literary texts, some quite challenging, which worked through the problem of enlightenment and helped to bring our modern world and understanding of the human into being. To this end, we will be traveling across an exceptionally wide range of authors (Locke, Rochester, Pope, Wycherley, Swift, Haywood, Finch, Walpole, and Blake) and genres (philosophy, drama, poetry, satire, and fiction). And here’s our big question: How on earth did gothic literature rise out of the so-called Age of Reason? Midterm with a take-home essay component, final, one paper, several quizzes. Students who took E102B in spring 2014 should expect some overlap, but a wildly different perspective! |
| ENGLISH 102B | WHAT'S THE PROBLEM? | VAN SANT, A. | We will read 2 novels (a new form of fiction in this period), a play, a feminist essay, mock heroic poetry, and other selected poetry, works that invite us to ask questions about literary form, love, aggression, marriage, women’s status, wit, authority, etc. We will focus attention on the questions that the works seem to ask us to ask and on questions we ask in order to challenge the work’s assumptions. Do different genres seem to ask different kinds of questions? Do any forms of literature seem to outline problems and then offer solutions? What kinds of questions do we as modern readers ask that readers may not have asked when the works were published? What does it mean to read “with” a work? What would it mean to read “against” it? Our reading list will be William Wycherley, The Country Wife (1675); Mary Astell, A Serious Proposal to the Ladies (1694); Alexander Pope, The Rape of the Lock (1712); Daniel Defoe, Roxana (1724); Robert Burns’s poetry (1785-6); and Elizabeth Inchbald, A Simple Story (1791). Course requirements: attendance, participation, staying current with the website, paper, midterm, and final. If you want to get started reading before the quarter begins, check with the bookstore for the appropriate editions or email me. We will read The Rape of the Lock and the Burns poetry from online sites. E102B is one of the historical courses required for English majors. |
| ENGLISH 102C | AMERICAN ROMANTICISM | JACKSON, V. | America is a Romantic idea. This is to say that in many ways the idea we still have about what America is or was or will be was created in the nineteenth century in what we now think of as literature. Many of these texts idealized democratic promise, but many were highly critical of the ways in which the new nation state pursued its promise through chattel slavery, native genocide, Christian nationalism, family values, and colonization. Texts will include works by Cooper, Sedgwick, Emerson, Thoreau, Fuller, Whitman, Hawthorne, Melville, Douglass and Child. |
| ENGLISH 102D | BLACK LITERATURE & FREEDOM | KEIZER, A. | The dream of liberation has always been at the center of African American literary production. This course traces the ways in which black writers in the US have used literature as a practice of freedom. We will read texts beginning with the slave narrative and ending with contemporary fiction and poetry, examining the literary means by which African American writers have kept this yearning for liberty alive. Through the essays assigned for this course (two 5-page papers, and a longer take-home exam), students will be able to analyze the formal strategies of established writers and explore what writing as a practice of freedom might mean in the present. |
| ENGLISH 102D | THE NOVEL&ITS OTHER | IZENBERG, O. | |
| ENGLISH 102D | THE MODERN IN RUINS | BARTLETT, J. | |
| ENGLISH 103 | WHITMAN | JACKSON, V. | Whitman for Whitmaniacs Warning: Take this class only if you like to read Whitman, since that is all we will read. Walt Whitman wrote the same book seven times between the 1850s and the 1880s--or, he wrote seven different books of poetry that all have the same title. We will read each edition of Leaves of Grass in succession, and we will also read much of Whitman's prose and a few volumes of poetry not included in Leaves. In this class, you will learn a lot about Whitman--and you will also learn a lot about American poetry in the nineteenth century. |
| ENGLISH 103 | SHAKESPRIAN TRAGEDY | SILVER, V. | When Shakespeare's plays are entitled tragedies or comedies, are they? Everyone knows that Shakespeare's Hamlet is a heroic tyrant-killer; that Lear is "more sinned against than sinning," Cordelia a saint, and his two elder daughters, like Gloucester's bastard son, evil as the day is long; that Richard III's deformity and lack of mother-love account for his being a wicked, wicked man; and that marriage in the romantic comedies resolves all problems at home and in the state, leaving every deserving soul to live happily ever after. This course will test these dramatic expectations against the experience of the plays as text and film, while considering how this ingenious playwright uses genre to turn the world of playgoer and play upside down. Two takehome exams for course credit. Rel Std Category: 1,3 |
| ENGLISH 105 | BLACK WOMEN WRITERS | KEIZER, A. | The explosion of African American and Afro-Caribbean women's literature that began in the early 1970s came as a surprise to many. Yet the ground for this contemporary work had been prepared by a tradition of black women's literary production extending back into the eighteenth century. This course will examine fiction, poetry, drama and film by twentieth-century black women writers, with particular attention to the influence of nineteenth-century concerns upon more recent works. Through our close readings, we will trace thematic and stylistic continuities and discontinuities between the texts under study, and we will consider the socio-economic and political factors that established the parameters of African American and Afro-Caribbean women's creative expression, including the legacies of slavery, stereotypes of black women, sexual violence, and the Civil Rights, anti-colonial, and feminist movements. We will use critical essays to enhance our analyses of primary texts. Assignments will include a midterm exam, a take-home final essay (8-10 pages), and occasional in-class writing projects. |
| ENGLISH 105 | GLOBAL ENGLISHES | LEE, J. | Through an examination of texts from literary/cultural theory and linguistic anthropology/sociolinguistics, along with analyses of poetical works, this course will consider the ideological, sociopolitical, and linguacultural implications of the emergence and precariousness of English as a global language. We will consider contemporary power relations, epistemic economies, and forms of cultural dis/identification that result from the dynamic, hybrid, and translingual ways English is used outside, but also within, what is traditionally identified as the “English-speaking world.” On a more practical level, students will develop a metadiscursive attunement to the different ways people use English in a variety of global contexts toward a development of their intercultural communicative competence. Tentative list of course texts: Rey Chow’s Not Like a Native Speaker, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o’s Globalectics, Rani Rubdy & Lubna Alsagoff edited collection, The Global-Local Interface and Hybridity, Cathy Park Hong’s Dance Dance Revolution, along with a series of short articles/chapters. In-class midterm exam, in-class final exam, final paper. |
| ENGLISH 105 | WORLD LITERATURE AND GLOBALIZATION | STEINTRAGER, J. | In this course we will read novels from writers born in Nigeria, Malaysia, India, Pakistan, Ireland, and the Dominican Republic, although their works all cross borders and complicate notions of nationality, ethnicity, class, culture, and other forms of belonging in a globalized world. We will consider how these novelists depict colonization and its aftermath, diaspora, integration, linguistic communities, and networks of financial and human capital. Our writers are Amitav Ghosh, Aravind Adiga, Junot Díaz, Colum McCann, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Tash Aw, and Hamid Mohshin. The earliest works we will read were published in 2008; the latest in 2014. In short, this course is intended to make us think about the present state of world literature and about literature’s engagement with the world today. |
| ENGLISH 106 | FICTIONS OF FAITH | MILES, J. | This class combines an engagement with the techniques of the short story as a literary form with religion as a subject and an issue in contemporary culture. Each of the stories considered in the course will engage a different religion or religion related issue. In addition, we shall consider a sampling of prominent 20th-century nonfiction statements about religion in its varying contexts. |
| ENGLISH 106 | WHAT IS AN AUTHOR | CHRISTENSEN, J | |
| ENGLISH 106 | W.B YEATS | IZENBERG, O. | |
| ENGLISH 106 | REALISM | BARTLETT, J. | |
| ENGLISH 210 | ARTS OF MEMORY | HELFER, R. | [Course Code: 23802] Thursdays 1:00pm-3:50pm in HIB 411 Enrollment via [click here] Arts of Memory This course explores the significant role that memory plays in early modern literature. Specifically, this course examines the importance of the art of memory – a term of art for what is variously called mnemonics, artificial memory, locational or spatial memory, the “method of places,” and so on – to early modern literary theory and practice. We’ll start with important classical and medieval treatments of memory (Aristotle, etc.) before turning to early modern authors, including Castiglione, Sidney, Spenser, Shakespeare, Nashe, Donne, Bacon, Burton, Milton, and Cavendish. Along the way, we’ll engage with a variety of scholarship on memory, from important historical work by Frances Yates, Walter Ong, and Mary Carruthers, to more recent critical engagements with the subject of memory from literary, social, cognitive, and ecological perspectives. |
| ENGLISH 210 | HOLLYWOOD EXCEPTIONALISM | CHRISTENSEN, J. | [Course Code: 23800] Wednesdays 3:00pm-5:50pm in HH 231 Enrollment via [click here] Hollywood Exceptionalism Hollywood Exceptionalism will study the history of Hollywood not as a continuously unfolding narrative of industrial innovation and adjustment framed by a variable but determinant classical script but as a series of discontinuous moments of change, engineered by the studios in response to or in anticipation of political, economic, social, and legal challenges and opportunities. We will develop an evolutionary narrative, then, but evolution conceptualized as a series of decisive moments of punctuated equilibrium. By studying those moments when the very features of post-classical cinema that distinguish it from the classical, such as self-reflexivity, knowingness, and a prescriptive marketing ethos, are already operative in the classical cinema we shall attempt to account for Hollywood’s emergence and persistence as a privileged, vanguard industry within corporate America. The course will begin with Hollywood in the thirties, focusing on the studios’ cooperation with the New Deal and their so-called collaboration with Hitler. Congressional legislation and state and federal legal decisions will subsequently guide our advance to the present day. We will pivot into the post-war on the implications of the Paramount Decision for industrial re-organization and for exposing the ironies of anti-trust prosecutions. From the fifties onward we will be largely concerned with the consequences of the extension of freedom of speech to motion pictures, particularly as manifested in the emergence and consolidation of auteurism. Subsequent topics will include the privileged status of Disney and its global ambitions, the role of motion pictures as the instrument for the extension of full First Amendment rights to profit-making corporations. We will conclude with a study of the eventful films of Warners Bros. auteur, Christopher Nolan, and examine the implications of the Aurora Massacre for a reconsideration of corporate liability as a peril faced by the studios that make motion pictures and the theaters that exhibit them. |
| ENGLISH 210 | LAW/LIT&HIST RECONS | THOMAS, B. | [Course Code: 23806] Tuesdays 4:00pm-6:50pm in HIB 411 Enrollment via [click here] Law, Literature, and History of Reconstruction According to Eric Foner, Reconstruction is America’s “unfinished revolution,” because the nation has still not lived up to its promise to create racial equality. No one can understand how race is intricately related to crucial aspects of American social, economic, and political life without understanding Reconstruction. Reconstruction added three amendments to the Constitution that, in an effort to overcome the heritage of slavery, gave increased power to the national government over the states. Reconstruction sparked debates about the role of the national government’s role in education and welfare centered on the ill-fated Freedman’s Bureau. It generated the first anti-terrorist legislation in an effort to control the Ku Klux Klan. The need materially to reconstruct the nation after the devastation of war led to over-speculation in railroads, which caused a massive economic depression that undercut governmental support of programs for the freedmen and generated debates about businesses too big to fail. Despite the importance of Reconstruction, however, the amount of literary criticism devoted to it pales in comparison to the amount of historiography and legal analysis. In this seminar we will read crucial works—short and long—depicting Reconstruction, including ones opposed to its goals and ones supportive of them. Authors will include African Americans (Harper, Washington, Chesnutt, and Du Bois); white Southerners (Lanier, Cable, Grady, Page, and Dixon); white Northerners (Whittier, Tourgée, Howells, and Woolson); and a few historians of the time. To understand those works we will pay careful attention to historical and legal issues while exploring how works of literature affected both. As a result, our understanding of this neglected period in American literary history will be supplemented by methodological considerations of how to relate literature to history and the law. Those methodological concerns should benefit students of all historical periods. (Note: I strongly argue against a model in which literature is said to “reflect” history and the law. If all literature does is reflect them, we may as well go directly to history and the law.) All students will be responsible for leading 20-minutes of class discussion on a short work or a particular aspect of a longer one. All students will take a 20-minute oral final as preparation for oral examinations that loom in the future. Seminar students will write a 25-page research paper. Pro-seminar students will write a shorter essay focused on a close reading of a particular passage from a work. |
| ENGLISH 210 | SHELLEY | ROBERTS, H. | [Course Code: 23804] Fridays 1:00pm-4:00pm in HIB 411 Enrollment via [click here] Percy Bysshe Shelley In this course we will engage in an in-depth study of the work of one of the major British Romantic Poets. Shelley is perhaps the most multi-faceted, at times self-contradictory of the Romantics. Feminist, republican, anarchist, vegetarian, atheist, sceptic, teetotal, he has been read as everything from a neoplatonic idealist to a decontructionist avant la lettre. Both deeply indebted to the "first generation" Romantic poets and fiercely critical of their political apostasy and philosophic idealism, he drew on a surprisingly diverse range of sources in an attempt to reinvent contemporary poetic practice. We will, of course, read a great number of Shelley's own works, including poems, plays and prose essays, with particular attention paid to Queen Mab, Prometheus Unbound, The Cenci, The Triumph of Life, A Philosophical View of Reform, and The Defence of Poetry. In addition, we will read widely in the work of Shelley's contemporaries and earlier influences (such as Milton, Rousseau, Hume, Edmund Burke, William Godwin, Mary Wollstonecraft, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Keats, Byron, Mary Shelley among others) in order to gain a better understanding of the intellectual and political milieu from which Shelley's work springs. All students will make a class presentation. Students who take the course as a Pro-seminar will write a take-home examination; Seminar students will write an article-length final paper. Required text: Donald Reiman and Neil Fraistat (eds), Shelley's Poetry and Prose, Norton Critical Edition (2nd Ed), ISBN: 978-0393977523. |
| ENGLISH 255 | WRKSHOP IN ACAD PUB | JACKSON, V. | [Course Code: 23850] Mondays 5:00pm-7:50pm in HIB 411 Enrollment via [click here] PhD Professionalization Seminar This course will cover various aspects of preparation for your career as an academic. In the first half of the quarter, we will discuss the revision of essays or chapters into articles, the process of submitting those articles to academic journals, the ways in which conference papers are proposed and delivered, and the application process for academic fellowships, including post-doctoral fellowships. The second half of the seminar will be devoted to the preparation of materials for the job market: the cv, abstract, letter, and teaching statement. This seminar is open to PhD students at any stage of the program. |
| 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 |