| Course | Title | Instructor | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
| ENGLISH 10 | SATIRE | VAN SANT, A. | In this course, which satisfies the Gen Ed Requirement for Arts and Humanities, we will read/view satires very old (e.g., Lysistrata, a Greek play about war and sex, 411 BCE) and very new (Ros Chast’s Can't We Talk about Something More Pleasant? A Memoir, 2014). We will also read Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal for Preventing the Children of Poor People From Being a Burthen to Their Parents or Country, and for Making Them Beneficial to the Public, 1729 and perhaps see Bill Maher’s Religulous, 2008. Just from this list, it’s easy to see that satirists take on some serious topics. We will ask what satire is and whether anything is too important, too precious, or too horrific to be an object of satire. |
| ENGLISH 28B | COMIC&TRAGIC VISION | DAVIS, R. | 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 | DAVIS, R. | 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 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. Topics will include theories of language and semiotics; race; psychoanalysis; and materialism. 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. The course text will be Literary Theory: An Anthology, edited by Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan, 2nd edition (Wiley-Blackwell, 2010). |
| ENGLISH 101W | BETWEEN LITERATURE AND PHILOSOPHY | WARMINSKI, A. | This course will examine philosophy's ambiguous (and ambivalent) relation to literature: that is, the sense in which philosophical logic needs both to banish and to borrow from the rhetoric of the poets. The focus will be on Plato and Nietzsche, but texts by Descartes, Heidegger, and Derrida will also be read. Two papers. |
| ENGLISH 101W | PRACTICE OF CLOSE READING | GODDEN, R. | Readers and literary scholars frequently use terms like ‘realistic’, ‘voice’, ‘irony’, ‘metaphor’ and ‘character’ as though the meaning of those terms were self-evident. The course departs from the assumption that this is not the case, and from the belief that the literary, perceptual and cognitive structures caught up within the supposed commonplaces of textual analysis are both interesting and worthy of detailed analysis. During each of the first five weeks of the course, we will engage with a single literary term (drawn from the list above), approaching it through a piece of theoretical writing and in relation to a twentieth century American short story. The purpose of the course is at all times to explore and enable the process of reading; theoretical vocabularies and models, though interesting, are generally more limited than the complex literary and historical objects which they address, and should be viewed neither as complete nor as glass machines. Consequently, the course will view such vocabularies and models as necessary and yet subordinate to the work of close reading. During the concluding five weeks of the course, having with luck gained a fuller vocabulary through which to address literary texts, we will engage a number of more generic literary problems (or excitements). Again, the weekly format will involve a theoretical essay and a related short story. Possible topics of discussion will include, “Reading through commodity (or “capitalist realism”)”; “Reading for the whispers (the issue of secrets)”; “What to do with ‘difficulty’, or textual opacity?”; “Narrative forms for a catastrophic century (parataxis and breakage)”. The ten stories and ten pieces of theoretical writing will be made available as PDF files. The course will be assessed by way of 3 essays, each of between 4-6 pages (and amounting in total to some 4,000words). The timing of essay submittal will be organized to promote redrafting, and self-editing skills. |
| ENGLISH 101W | ACTION & THE NOVEL | BARTLETT, J. | In this course we will examine the qualities that distinguish an “action” in the novel from any old thing that happens. Assisted by readings in philosophies of practical reason and intentionality, our focus will include analyses of mental events like plans and beliefs, as well as descriptions of action sequences and their causal chains. We will put these theories in dialogue with the Victorian novel, a form that relies on its actions for both its force and its often considerable length. We will also examine the relation between action and serialization. Requirements include regular engagement with course readings, one oral presentation followed by discussion facilitation, and three short papers. |
| ENGLISH 102A | PREMODERN PSYCHOLOGY | DAVIS, R. | Long before modern psychology gave us a vocabulary for analyzing the workings of our minds, medieval writers used personification allegory (a technique revived in the 2015 Pixar film Inside Out) to describe the mental and volitional “faculties” that enable thought, emotion, decision-making, and creativity. To explore how premodern writers constructed theories of the mind, we’ll read a selection of late-classical, medieval, and early modern texts including Augustine’s Confessions, Prudentius’s Psychomachia, Langland’s Piers Plowman, Chaucer’s House of Fame, the Castle of Perseverance, and Shakespeare’s Richard III. In these texts, literary techniques open up philosophical and theological questions about the relationship of body and psyche (from the Greek for “soul”), the existence of free will, and the obligations of conscience. Course requirements include regular attendance and participation; a midterm; a final; and two short papers. |
| ENGLISH 102B | RESTORATION AND REVOLUTION: 1660-1700 | VAN SANT, A. | This course is in part framed by political events. We begin in 1660--with the restoration of the monarchy after civil war, the beheading of a king (Charles I), and several years of Puritan dominance-- and end just after 1700, approximately a decade after what became known as the "Glorious Revolution." We will read aggressive wit comedy, satiric poetry, allegorical fiction, and feminist and political essays. Lectures will also provide material from scientific reports and from contemporary philosophy. Our readings invite us to ask questions about literary form, political and religious dissent, marriage, property, and the status of women. And they invite us to consider fundamental contrasts in a period marked both by restoration and by revolution. Students will write one paper and have a midterm and final. |
| ENGLISH 102C | VICTORIAN LITERATURE | HENDERSON, A. | This course will provide a survey of British literature of the nineteenth century. We will begin with a few key readings in Romanticism, looking particularly at Wordsworth and Keats. We will then trace the fate of Romantic aesthetics in Victorian writing, reading work by Tennyson, Bronte, Dickens, Pater, and Rossetti. Throughout, we will pay particular attention to the status of visual representation, looking at Romantic-era painting and Victorian photography alongside our literary works. Course requirements will include short assignments, a midterm, and a final exam. |
| ENGLISH 102C | ROMANTIC NARRATIVE ART | CHRISTENSEN, J | |
| ENGLISH 102D | AMERICAN POETRY | JACKSON, V. | Did Modernism kill off poetry, or just drive poems into hiding? In this class, we will read a range of twentieth-century American genres (plays and stories, newspaper accounts and novels, long poems and short poems, essays and blogs and websites) in order to answer that question. In a century in which poetry was everywhere, why do we think it became "difficult"? What happens when poems appear in other genres? What happens when other genres appear in poems? When poetry loses its shape in the twentieth century, is it still poetry? What is poetry, anyway? |
| ENGLISH 102D | AFRICAN AMERICAN-CARIBBEAN AUTOBIOGRAPHY | KEIZER, A. | Creating, naming, and claiming the self has been a central preoccupation of African American and Caribbean literatures from their inception to the 21st century. This course will explore several subgenres of autobiographical writing: slave narratives, autobiographical fiction, memoirs, and critical essays that utilize personal histories. We’ll examine the structure and figurative language of these texts, attempting to understand how the story of a life can be rendered as an argument for a cause, a tool for professional advancement, or a model for emulation. Course requirements include a take-home midterm and a take-home final exam (a 7-10-page essay). |
| ENGLISH 103 | POETRY NOW | JACKSON, V. | Do people read poetry now? There seem to be lots of complaints these days that no one reads poetry these days, but is that true? There were more poems published in 2015 than ever before. Spoken Word performance spaces seem to be proliferating rather than diminishing; twitter, Facebook, and various blogs are full of poems and lines of poems. In this class, we will read a range of contemporary poetry and we will talk about the ways in which recent poems do and do not address reading publics. |
| ENGLISH 103 | INTRODUCTION TO POETRY | HENDERSON, A. | This class will provide a survey of English poetry, focusing particularly on revisions and reconceptions of poetic forms over time. We will begin by reviewing the formal qualities of poems, including rhyme, rhythm, and stanza structure. We will then examine some standard poetic forms and topoi from the English tradition, such as the sonnet, the dramatic monologue, and the blazon. Our readings will range chronologically from the Renaissance to the twentieth century. Requirements will include several short assignments and papers in addition to a longer final paper. |
| ENGLISH 105 | LANGUAGE AND PLACE | LEE, J.W. | Through an examination of texts from literary/cultural theory, geography, linguistic anthropology, and sociolinguistics, this course will consider the interrelationships among language, space, and place. We will examine the ways in which the spaces we traverse and the places we occupy shape our understandings of language and our usage of various language resources. In addition, focusing on key issues including globalization, (post)nationalism, and multilingualism, we will simultaneously consider how the usage and circulation of language resources reconfigure and reconstitute the spaces and places themselves. On a more practical level, students will develop a metadiscursive attunement to the different usages of, and meanings associated with, language in various global contexts toward a development of their intercultural communicative competence. |
| ENGLISH 105 | CA IN ASIAN AMERICAN FICTION | LEE, J. | (Same as 21570 AsianAm 110, Lec A) If the worn truism—“as California goes, so goes the nation”—holds water, then what does the fiction written by California’s Asian Americans suggest about the past, present, and future of the United States? What vision does California’s Asian American writers bring to other Asian Americans, to other Americans? And what do these works say about those of us who live in this state, arguably the most diverse in the world? Do we who live in California recognize the California represented in these stories? And is there a California that we’d rather not see? What is the “best” way to write fiction about California? These are some of the critical questions that we will pursue throughout the quarter. Reading both short story and novel, historical and contemporary, immigrant and “longtime Californ,” we will chart the cultural and cognitive map of Asian Americans writing in and about this wondrous geography. Authors include Ronyoung Kim, Hisaye Yamamoto, Brian Ascalon Roley, Fae Ng, Karen Tei Yamashita, and Aimee Phan. |
| ENGLISH 105 | INDIGENOUS LITERATURE | O'CONNOR, L. | This course explores works by contemporary writers from indigenous cultures that have been devastated by colonialism, beginning with Aborigine, Maori and Samoan writers and then turning to Native American writers. We’ll explore how these writers narrate the traumatic loss of an ancestral culture they can neither forget nor fully recollect, and examine the effects of an education designed to “kill the Indian, save the man” on the psyche, on cultural identity, and on indigenous languages and knowledge. Works studied include Follow the Rabbit-proof Fence; Baby No-Eyes; They who do not Grieve; Ten Little Indians; The Round House and selected poetry by Adrian C. Louis. Midterm, paper, final |
| ENGLISH 106 | RENAISSANCE POETRY | HELFER, R. | This course might simply be called “Renaissance Love Poetry,” given that so much of this type of literature revolves around issues of love in various forms -- romantic, amorous, and erotic, as well as philosophical, spiritual, familial, and so on. The rich and protean language of love in Renaissance poetry was motivated by equally varied and complex desires for, among other things, fame, wealth, power, and salvation. We will be examining Renaissance poetry through the lens of love to see how it represents a wide range of artistic, psychological, political, religious, and historical concerns in densely symbolic, even allegorical form. Requirements for this course include short writing and two 5-7 page papers that engage with criticism. The text we’ll be using is The Longman Anthology of British Literature, v. 1B: The Early Modern Period. |
| ENGLISH 106 | MILTON | SILVER, V. | This course addresses the peculiar problem Milton poses himself: how can an iconoclast of a kind write poetry, whose medium is imagery? In pursuing an answer to that question, we will let Milton be Milton, using Milton’s tracts and treatises to help us read his poetry and vice versa, assisted by that repellant fifteenth-century bestseller, the Malleus Malificarum (“Hammer of Witches”), as our source of magical or idolatrous thinking, and by its antidote, the revolutionary theology of Martin Luther. For in that theopathic age, theology was “grand theory,” considered the ultimate human discipline or knowledge by Milton: how one conceived the nature of God and revelation determined in many respects how one conceived the ultimate nature of meaning and truth. The course will accordingly address what Milton conceives to be this fundamental order of things, created by what Luther calls a Deus absconditus, a “hidden God,” whose impossible “similitude” or image is also a Deus absconditus but sub contrario: that is, a deity concealed beneath its contrary. There will be a short paper, out of which a seminar paper will be constructed. |
| ENGLISH 106 | QUALITY TELEVISION | SZALAY, M. | Everybody seems to agree that television has gotten really, really good. This course will survey television of the last 20 years and evaluate the criteria with which it has been judged. Does it make sense to say that "quality" television is in some sense literary--in its elaboration of long story arcs, three-dimensional characters, and complex social relations? Possible shows to include: The X-Files, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Girls, The Sopranos, Breaking Bad, Game of Thrones, Transparent and Mr. Robot. |
| ENGLISH 106 | POET IN THE CITY | BURT, E. | |
| ENGLISH 210 | EARLY MODERN LYRIC | SILVER, V. | [Course Code: 23806] Tuesdays 5:00pm-7:50pm in HIB 411 Enrollment via [click here] This is ultimately a course in the politics of nature and second nature, focusing on what is in early modern studies a convention of great interest, the pastoral, especially in its connection with Hesiod’s myth of a Golden Age, which Charles I in his court masques played as an ideological trump card. We will start with a modern myth of the state of nature and its grounds, Freud’s Totem and Taboo (Freud being a remarkable analyst of western culture), and along the way we will read some familiar Freudian essays (“Instincts and their Vicissitudes,” “On Narcissism,” “Mourning and Melancholia”) as a way into the peculiar motives behind pastoral. We will look briefly at its ancient foundations and then move to its early modern exponents, beginning with a Jacobean masque by Ben Jonson and Shakespeare’s The Tempest, as interpreted by selected essays of that consummate skeptic, Michel de Montaigne. From there, we will address the surprising development of 17th-century pastoral poetry, from Jonson and Herrick, to Lovelace and some Cavaliers, Marvell and Milton, Denham, Dryden, Behn, Rochester and Swift. Requirements: a 15-page takehome exam for those not wishing to write a longer seminar paper. |
| ENGLISH 210 | AMERICAN RELIGIOUS POETRY | MILES, J. | [Course Code: 23804] Thursday 3:00pm-5:50pm in HIB 411 Enrollment via [click here] The earlier meetings of this seminar will track two related stories: the story of religion in America, through Mark A. Noll’s concise The Old Religion in a New World, and the story of religious poetry in America, through selections from Harold Bloom’s Library of America anthology American Religious Poems. The later meetings of the seminar will be devoted to students’ biographical and interpretive presentations on individual American poets as religious and as American. These presentations must include a poem written in imitation of the presented poet. These presentations will then build toward the students’ final papers, which will determine 50% of the grade. Intelligent and creative participation will determine the remaining 50%. |
| ENGLISH 210 | THEORY & AFRICAN AMERICAN LITERATURE | KEIZER, A. | [Course Code: 23802] Thursday 12:00pm-2:50pm in HIB 411 Enrollment via [click here] African American literary and expressive cultures have contributed significantly to the development of literary/critical theory and critical race theory in particular. This course revisits major African American texts to investigate the most important strands of critical race theory and contemporary African Americanist literary criticism. We will examine black literary works as sources and intertexts for theoretical works, as well as using critical/theoretical works to read the literature. We’ll read fiction, poetry, and drama by James Weldon Johnson, Nella Larsen, Richard Wright, Ann Petry, Ralph Ellison, Chester Himes, Toni Morrison and others. This course can be taken as a seminar or pro-seminar. |
| ENGLISH 210 | RECENT U.S. LITERATURE | GODDEN, R. | [Course Code: 23800] Tuesdays 2:00pm-4:50pm in HIB 411 Enrollment via [click here] Our readings will track a range of formal and thematic developments in light of current crisis in U.S. capital accumulation; declining value production during turns to finance; neoliberal transformations in the status of the corporation; the changing structure of brands and finance; and the relation between political theology and political economy. Possible texts might include: William Gaddis, /Carpenter’s Gothic/ Bret Eason Ellis, /Lunar Park/ Jayne Anne Phillips, /Lark and Termite/ David Foster Wallace/, The Pale King/ Colson Whitehead, /Zone One/ HBO, /The/ /Sopranos/ HBO, /Deadwood/ NBCUniversal, /Mr. Robot/ |
| ENGLISH 240 | AFFECT CRITICISM | GROSS, D. | CR240 (Xlist with Hum 270) [Course Code: 23994] Monday 4:00pm-6:50pm in HIB 411 Enrollment via [click here] This course has two interanimating purposes. First is to focus the wide range of recent affect and emotion theory toward affect criticism, which is to name certain kinds of critical work offering at the very least a way to read social, literary, and visual texts. Second is to develop an historical argument about this affective turn tied to interrelated and specific scenes of conflict including for example 1) the denazification of political emotions under the cover of brain science 2) intense social movements of the 1960s and beyond, and 3) late capitalist investment in flattened affect with its consequences for criticism, where new forms of intimacy and detachment demand our attention. Final projects for this course will either exercise affect criticism in a textual domain relevant to the student's home field, or will develop an original, academically grounded thesis about the historical emergence of affect criticism or theory. Readings include selections from the following: Charles Darwin, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872) including the tradition around Lessing's Laocoon as well as the relevant sentimental traditions. WK Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley, "The Affective Fallacy" (1949) including some prehistory in Aristotle and the relevant traditions of poetics. Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (1952) on love and affective disorders under the colonial regimes of race. Raymond Williams, on "structures of feeling" in Introduction to Film (1954) and Marxism and Literature (1977) as well as Marx on the history of the senses. Arlie Hochschild, The Managed Heart: The Commercialization of Human Feelings (1983) and Cheríe L. Moraga, Loving in the War Years (1983). Eve Sedgwick and Adam Frank, "Shame in the Cybernetic Fold" (1995) including the relevant psychological and brain science, and psychoanalysis. Sianne Ngai, Ugly Feelings (2005) including phenomenology of mood, or Stimmung. Lauren Berlant, introduction to Compassion: The Culture and Politics of an Emotion (2004) and "Nearly Utopian, Nearly Normal: Post-Fordist Affect in La Promesse and Rosetta" (2007). |