| Course | Title | Instructor | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
| ENGLISH 8 | MULTICULTURAL AMERICAN LITERATURE | SWEENEY, E | “I, Too, Sing America”: Language and Identity in Multicultural American Literature This course takes its title and some of its central concerns from the first line of Langston Hughes’s 1945 poem “I, Too.” Examining a wide range of ethnicities and genres, this course will explore the role of race and culture in the American experience. We will use the four words that constitute Hughes’s first sentence as a lens through which to examine each author’s and text’s relationship to questions of nation and identity. From what perspective of race, gender, and class does the “I” speak? With what other communities and identities is the text in conversation, "too?" To “sing” its truth, which generic conventions does a text uphold, and which does it stretch/perturb/break? What version(s) of “America” does the text portray, and with what aims and implications? We will pay particular attention to whether language and writing allow American writers of different cultures to construct a self that resists discrimination. We will be sensitive both to how these authors manipulate language, but also to how they may seek an alternative language to reconcile their own cultural values and needs with the dominant society. Course assignments include two short papers, a midterm, and a final exam; course authors include Frederick Douglass, Sui Sin Far, Zitkála-Šá, Toni Morrison, Junot Diaz, and more. |
| 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 | REALIIM & 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 28D | CRAFT OF POETRY | DAVIS, S. | Craft of Poetry closely examines mechanical aspects of a variety of poems by a wide range of poets. The focus will be on poetry "by the line and sentence" with the idea that such attention will improve the quality of the lines and sentences in students' poems. Poems will not be workshopped. Weekly submissions will take up: the substance of subject matter; clarity, concision and grammar in sentences; unity; cohesiveness; and language use and quality of thought that is representative of the sensibility of the writer. Students master at least one poem by presenting it to the class with peer(s). Course strategies are designed to develop an independent writing discipline. The course is one of four classes required for the Creative Writing Emphasis in Poetry. |
| 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 | 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 | MATERIALIST MODES OF READING | GODDEN, R. | We shall beg the question, aphoristically put, “If nature (the materiality) is always human nature (or human materials), how best might that stuff be understood as it reflects and is modified by literary expression?” Literature (here, late twentieth century American short stories) will be explored as produced in relation to a number of interwoven forms of work; that is, by and within political economy, language, historical explanation, and even by and within the forgetting of that on-going and diverse making. Since literary materiality is made from words, and since words are social instruments, we shall depart from materialist accounts of language (Volosinov, Bakhtin). Since literary words frequently take narrative forms, we will address the relation between plot and the real (Benjamin, Greenblatt). Since written stories are made as much from what is forgotten as from what is remembered, we will consider “forgetting”, or the unconscious, as made from that which we have learned to find unthinkable (Abraham and Torok, Freud). These three areas, language, narrative and the structural unconscious, will be read as part of a wider pattern of making, or an economy (Marx, Jameson, Harvey). The purpose of the course is at all times to explore and enable the activity of reading: methodologies are more limited than the complex literary and historical objects which they address, and should neither be neither complete, nor glass machines. Each week the seminar will consider extracts from theoretical writings in relation to a particular short story. The stories chosen will be drawn primarily from a single historical period (U.S., post 1973, variously referred to as “postmodern”, “post industrial”, “flexible Fordist” or “post Fordist”): they and the theoretical readings will be made available via pdf . Course assessment will be based on two essays. |
| ENGLISH 101W | CLOSE READING | ROBERTS, H. | "Close reading" is a general term for a range of interpretive strategies and practices that lie at the heart of critical analysis and argument in literary scholarship. Mastery of these practices and techniques will help you in almost all the writing you do as an English major. There is no set text for this course. Our classes will focus on writing exercises in response to texts that will be provided on the class website. There will also be some short pieces of critical writing provided to you as models of excellent "close reading" which we will discuss and analyze in class. As well as frequent short writing exercises in class, you will write one 2000 word essay which will go through several stages of revision, and a final exam. The final grade will be 30% based on class participation (including in-class writing exercises), 40% on the major essay and 30% on the final exam. |
| ENGLISH 101W | OBJECTS IN AMERICAN LITERATURE | SWEENEY, E | Gadgets, Garments, Heirlooms, and Trash: Objects in American Literature and Culture This course will explore how objects and shifting patterns of use mediate ideas of race, class, gender, and nation in multiethnic American literature. Objects in literature take many forms. They might be things we purchase, create or acquire; things we wear, drive, or eat; things with which we play, worship, or work; places we live in, visit, or pass through; things we treasure, throw away, or never notice. We spend our days in, on, and around objects, and as such, they can tell us a lot about ourselves. An object can suggest social and class status; the power relations in which we engage; and the places, times, and peoples that interacted with it. In this course, we will pair U.S. fiction with selections from interdisciplinary scholarship on material culture to examine how our relationships with objects reinforce, propagate, and resist cultural hierarchies. Course authors will include Edgar Allen Poe, Herman Melville, Harriet Jacobs, Charles Chesnutt, Kate Chopin, and Sui Sin Far, among others. Course requirements include regular contribution to class discussion; weekly reading responses; and writing, revising, and workshopping an analysis paper and a research paper. |
| ENGLISH 102A | MEDIEVAL ARTHURIAN ROMANCE | MATTHEWS, R | Before Star Wars and Game of Throne, there was King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table. World building at its finest, Arthurian literature is the original fan fiction. Beginning as an obscure chieftain or king fighting against Saxon invaders, Arthur became a literary phenomenon with writers of all sorts adding and creating new episodes and stories. This course will explore Arthurian literature from its beginnings as a small paragraph in a Latin history of Britain to the development of an entire imaginary world with glittering lovers like Lancelot and Tristan, adulterous queens, a supernatural grail and the kingdom’s inevitable fall. Readings will include Geoffrey of Monmouth, Chretien de Troye, Sir Thomas Malory and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. We’ll also look at some modern manifestations of all things Arthuriana like Tennyson, Jack Spicer’s Californian serial poem Holy Grail and Ishiguru’s latest novel, The Buried Giant. Course requirements will include two 3-6 page essays and a final. |
| ENGLISH 102B | 18TH CENTURY LITERATURE AND POLITICAL ECONOMY | MCCLANAHAN, A. | This course tracks the nearly-simultaneous rise of two arguably brand-new kinds of thought in the 18th century: “political economy,” the study of the economies of states, and the realist novel, a literary genre that remains dominant even today. In this course we’ll ask: what does literature have to do with economics, both its study and its lived realities? Do literary works like novels simply reflect the economic circumstances in which they were written or might they offer some new ways of thinking, seeing, and describing the economic and social world around them? And what about the fact that novels themselves are economic objects, sold and circulated like other goods, and that writers themselves are professionals, interested in making money from their creative output? Along the way to answering these questions, we’ll read short works in classical political economy from the period—John Locke, Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus—and, of course, we’ll read a lot of marvelous novels! We’ll explore the idea of property in the spooky gothic tale The Mysteries of Udolpho; treatments of land and settlement in Defoe’s classic Robinson Crusoe; servants and poverty in the comic novel Tom Jones; domestic economy and personal debt in the sentimental satire Evelina; and finance and national debt in the satirical essays of Jonathan Swift. |
| ENGLISH 102C | ROMANTIC REVOLUTION | ROBERTS, H. | This course provides an introduction to the literature of a complex and fascinating period in British social and literary history. Most of the works we will read were written while Britain was waging a counterrevolutionary war with France in the wake of the French Revolution (which began in 1789). During this period of intense political struggle and debate, a new and profoundly influential literary movement--Romanticism--began to emerge throughout Europe. We will explore both the continuities and the differences between the late Eighteenth Century literature of "sensibility" and the emergent literature of Romanticism. At the same time, we will read a number of contemporary political and philosophical documents which will allow us to relate the changing aims and concerns of the poetry we are reading to the turbulent political events of the period. Required Reading The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol. D: The Romantic Period Occasional handouts and web documents. Coursework Students must complete one ten in-class reading tests, a Midterm Examination, a 4-5 page paper, and a final examination. |
| 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 Salome; 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 | EVERYDAY LIFE | HARRIES, M. | The everyday is a problem. The French philosopher Henri Lefebvre observes: there is a certain obscurity in the very concept of everyday life. Where is it to be found? In work or in leisure? In family life and in moments ‘lived’ outside of culture? The questions multiply: who lives this everyday life? Who represents it? Which everyday life is taken as everyday life “itself,” and at what historical moment? This course will examine a range of representations of the everyday in twentieth-century plays, novels, poems, and visual culture. Questions will include problems of literary genre in the representation of everyday life; realism and the critique of realism; crisis and the everyday; and the relationship between history and lived experience. Readings will include prose fiction by Willa Cather, James Joyce, and Virginia Woolf; plays by Samuel Beckett and others; a range of poems; and at least one film. |
| ENGLISH 102D | IRISH MODERNISM | O'CONNOR, L. | “Irish Modernism” introduces students to some classics of twentieth-century drama, fiction, and poetry by Irish writers. The authors of these works were directly involved in shaping--or resisting--the cultural nationalist movements that came to define modern Ireland. We’ll read works by Yeats, Joyce, Beckett, and others in an Irish context with special attention to questions of language and genre as we examine how these writers, working in conjunction with those who strove to restore Irish (Gaelic) as a spoken language, undertook to create an other-than-English literature in English. We’ll also explore the theme of ambivalent identity that recurs throughout these works. |
| ENGLISH 103 | THE NOVEL, THEORY AND PRACTICE | TUCKER, I. | At first glance, “The Theory of the Novel” might appear to be an oxymoron: why bother to theorize a genre whose most striking characteristic would seem to its “realness”? This course is designed to explore the ways in which “theory” and “novel” are not, in fact, mutually exclusive – to consider the ways in which the “realist novel” is distant – and different – from “reality,” and why that difference matters. Our exploration will begin with the most influential ancient precursor to modern theories of the novel – Aristotle’s theory of fictional plots, The Poetics – before proceeding to accounts of the novel itself. We will read various historical accounts of the novel’s “rise” – how do we trace the rise of a genre that does not yet quite exist? – and then move to a series of “narratological” accounts that attempt to characterize the genre less in terms of its history than in terms of its formal character, specifically its use of the narrative technique of “free indirect discourse.” We will examine an example of a “history of the book” – accounts that seek to make sense of the novel by investigating the publishing practices that grew up around it, before concluding by examining some peculiar, and telling examples of the novel form. We will read and engage the work of Aristotle, Ian Watt, Lennard Davis, Nancy Armstrong, Catherine Gallagher, Ann Banfield, Casey Finch and Peter Bowen, Leah Price, Wilkie Collins, and Ian McEwan. |
| ENGLISH 105 | STAGING IDENTITY: CLASSIC IRISH PLAYS | O'CONNOR, L. | In “Staging Identity: Classic Irish Plays” we’ll read a range of plays from the long twentieth century (the 1890s to the present) by Irish dramatists, from Oscar Wilde to contemporary playwright Marina Carr. Though several of these playwrights, including the Abbey playwrights W. B. Yeats, Lady Gregory, John Millington Synge and Sean O’Casey, are overtly concerned with “Irish” identity, others—notably Wilde and Samuel Beckett—explore the performative and existential nature of identity as such. |
| ENGLISH 105 | THE FRANKFURT SCHOOL | HARRIES, M. | “The Frankfurt School” describes an institution: the Institute of Social Research, which began in Germany in 1924, moved into exile to New York City during the Nazi period, and was reestablished in Frankfurt after World War II. During World War II, some of its leading figures, then in exile, came to southern California. “The Frankfurt School” also describes the collective project of the members of this School: Critical Theory, which combines philosophy, sociology, Marxism, and psychoanalysis in order to analyze crucial problems in modern culture, from anti-Semitism to the “authoritarian personality” to the administration of erotic life. While none of the Frankfurt School’s projects are separate from its sociological engagements, this course will focus on analyses of the place of art in modernity. Looking closely at work by a number of central figures associated with the Frankfurt School, including Theodor W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Max Horkheimer, and Herbert Marcuse, we will discuss questions concerning the place of art in modern culture. What is the history of the category of the “aesthetic”? How does mass culture change the traditional work of art? What is “modernism”? How can we think about the historical content of an abstract work of art? We will focus on the exemplary status of art in works by figures in the Frankfurt School. We will also inevitably consider broader issues, including the development of the Marxist concept of reification in Critical Theory, the rise of fascism and Critical Theory’s attempts to explain this set of events, and questions of freedom and emancipation. We will conclude by considering the massively different positions of Adorno and Marcuse in relation to the student movements of the 1960s, when Adorno was marginalized while Marcuse’s Eros and Civilization (which we will read) became influential. “Introduction to Literary Theory” or other familiarity with the history of theory will be a useful preparation for this course, but is not required. |
| ENGLISH 105 | LANGUAGE AND THE CITY | LEE, J.W. | This course will consider the dynamic interrelationships between language and the urban spaces in which they are used. 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. Developing Michel de Certeau’s notion of “walking in the city” as a means of spatial production, we will simultaneously consider how the usage and circulation of language resources reconfigure and reconstitute the spaces and places themselves. In other words, we will investigate not only how language is used “in” the city but how language produces the city. |
| ENGLISH 106 | THE WESTERN | SZALAY, M. | This course investigates the Western as that genre has taken shape in novels, films, and television shows. We will ask what kinds of characters and narratives have come to define this most American of genres, and how over time different media have given new life and purpose to it. We will read at least one novel and watch at least two films, but above all, we will concentrate on two HBO dramas: Deadwood and the first season of Westworld. Students will write two essays, one of medium length and due week five, and one longer, and due week 10. |
| ENGLISH 106 | ON LYING, TRUTH-TELLING AND ALTERNATIVE FACTS | TUCKER, I. | This course will examine the shifting status of lying in politics, law, journalism, behavioral economics and psychology, literature, and film. What are the roles of institutional norms in establishing what counts as truth and lying in various realms? Does the operation of such norms undermine the notion of truth-telling? What’s the role of a speaker’s intention in differentiating lying from other sorts of falsehoods? What’s are differences among fictions, lies, and confabulations? How does the medium of documentation affect what we think we can know or not know about a given account of a situation, witness or set of facts? We will read the work of political and legal philosophers including Immanuel Kant, Hannah Arendt, Harry Frankfurt, and Martin Jay; behavioral psychologists including Dan Ariely and Bella Depaulo, as well as fiction by Herman Melville, Oscar Wilde, Ford Madox Ford, Nella Larsen and Patricia Highsmith, and analyses of journalism by Seth Mnookin and Janet Malcolm. We will also discuss the documentary film “A Film Unfinished” as well as the recently released fictional film “The Lobster.” |
| ENGLISH 106 | POETRY & NEW MEDIA | JACKSON, V. | This year's award of the Nobel Prize in Literature to Bob Dylan has sparked a debate about whether poetry needs to be in print, but really that debate has been going on for a long time. Are songs poems? Are Twitter poems really poems? Is it true that no one reads poetry these days, except on the Internet? Are slams and Spoken Word performance new or old media? Is the medium always the message when it comes to poetry? This class will consider some of these questions in contemporary poetry (Ward, Moten, Rankine, Hayes, Goldsmith, Dworkin, Hayes, Lockwood, Amram--oh, and of course Dylan) and in newly mediated old media (http://sonnetaday.com, http://www.edickinson.org, http://whitmanarchive.org, etc.). |
| ENGLISH 210 | HYBRID LITERATURE | GERSTLER, A. | [Course Code: 23804] Mondays 2:00pm-4:50pm HIB 411 Charles Baudelaire wrote in Paris Spleen, “Which one of us, in his moments of ambition, has not dreamed of the miracle of a poetic prose, musical, without rhythm and without rhyme, supple enough and rugged enough to adapt itself to the lyrical impulses of the soul, the undulations of reverie, the jibes of conscience?” This class will explore literary works that combine strategies, techniques, and gestures of prose and poetry, and/or other literary and “extra-literary” forms and genres. We’ll talk about prose poetry, “Flash Fiction,”epistolary literature, works that make use of diary formats, the “lyric essay” and other texts that are difficult to pin down or label in terms of a single genre or form. Students will try their hand at inventing and/or writing in hybrid forms, and/or writing about hybrid forms from an analytic/critical point of view. Writers from all genres are welcome, as what we will be studying, discussing and writing will be fruitful collisions of literary genres. There will be no exams for this class but there will be a final writing project which can be ‘creative,’ ‘analytic,’ or a hybrid of both these modes and possibly, others. |
| ENGLISH 210 | WILLIAM FAULKNER | GODDEN, R. | [Course Code: 23802] Thursdays 2:00pm-4:50pm HIB 411 What is often first remarked on concerning Faulkner’s work is its difficulty; the course will contend that the difficulty diminishes, and textual opacity achieves motivation, once it is understood that the difficulty (though undoubted and intriguing) functions as an expression of contradictions within the plantation South (a region understood as a specific and pre-modern regime of accumulation). Our purpose will be to establish the poetics of a southern economy prior to and during the New Deal. In order to do as much, we will read six of Faulkner’s experimental and canonical novels (The Sound and the Fury [1929], As I Lay Dying [1930] Absalom, Absalom! [1936], The Wild Palms (If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem [1939], The Hamlet [1940] and Go Down, Moses [1942]). Each week, primary reading will also involve specified historical and theoretical essays. By contextualizing Faulkner’s writing in the complex labor history of the South, the course seeks to establish that his works attend to a major shift in the history of labor relations (from bondage to wages), a shift that determines not only the thematic concerns of the novels, but also their essential stylistic and narrative strategies. The course’s emphasis on the textually generative nature of labor contradictions will, hopefully, broach the issue of materialist models of language, in their relation to narrative poetics. Arguably, the region, as Faulkner saw it, engaged in a prolonged displacement or denial of the bondage systems (slavery and debt peonage) from which it grew, and which it struggled to keep intact. From such denial emerged a mode of thought (among the planter class) that Faulkner translates into the difficult narrative structures and prose style of the texts with which we will engage. The course will explore the contention that Faulkner’s famous difficulty stems from his need to portray the mind of the southern owning class wrestling with a labor system it regards as at once necessary and untenable, neither to be borne nor to be given up. With luck, as the course proceeds, difficulty will recede towards pleasure. |
| ENGLISH 210 | AFTER MODERNISM | JACKSON, V. | [Course Code: 23800] Thursdays 5:00pm-7:50pm HIB 341 This seminar has a trick title. Since no one agrees on the definition of "modernism," its afterlife seems inconsequential. In this class, we will think about that inconsequence in contemporary American poetics. Since so much contemporary poetry takes its own unimportance as its subject, we will read a range of contemporary poets (Vuong, Carson, Hayes, Robertson, Ward, Phillip, Moten, Nelson, Lockwood, Goldsmith, Rankine, Spahr) next to theorists of contemporary inconsequence (Clark, Jameson, Gitelman, Certeau, Edwards, Berlant, Easthope, Ngai, Lerner). Our working thesis will be that some of this affective unimportance is a reaction against twentieth-century arguments for the importance of poetry as well as a downsizing of post-Hegelian/post-Marxist aspirations toward a teleologically consequential poetry of the future, so our seminar will also include background readings on what came before whatever it is that contemporary American poetics comes after. |
| ENGLISH 210 | MULTLINGUALISM OTHERWISE | LEE, J.W. | [Course Code: 23806] Tuesdays 4:00pm-6:50pm HIB 411 (cross-listed with 28695 Human 270, Sem C) The concept of “language” is an invention of European philology that facilitated the establishment and proliferation of the political doctrine of nationalism and the maintenance of the nation-state ideal. Today, the inventedness of language shapes both academic and “folk” linguistic notions of what constitutes a language (e.g., “English,” or “Chinese,” or “Arabic”), along with derivate prescriptivist discourses of how a language should be used. These discourses privilege and idealize language in an ostensibly pure, hygienic form, as if by an educated monolingual native speaker within a homogeneous speech community, or what Mary Louise Pratt has termed the “linguistic utopia.” In reality, the communicative practices of everyday users helps to deontologize, or to use Sinfree Makoni & Alastair Pennycook’s term, “disinvent,” the very notion of language and thus the categories that precipitate the subsequent metaphors of monolingualism or multilingualism. Thus Monica Heller insists that the persistent expectation that a competent multilingual is one who is able to seamlessly shuttle between and negotiate different language repertoires is not “multilingualism” but rather “parallel monolingualism.” Scholars have recently introduced new terms for emergent language practices that counteract traditional notions of language and language boundaries, such as translanguaging, polylingual languaging, and codemeshing. Indeed, even alternative conceptual paradigms, such as translingualism, metrolingualism, and fragmented multilingualism, have been offered to account for language practice in today’s globalizing linguistic ecology. There is an ongoing attempt, in other words, to imagine multilingualism otherwise. Yet questions remain. What are the epistemological consequences, and even affordances, of the sociohistorical inventedness of language? Is there a distinction to be made between language as such and the political and epistemic use of language that facilitates categorization and thus control? Can discourses of multilingualism ever attend simultaneously to the complexities of the global along with the particularities of the local? In a world structured around dominance, with a fraught and inconsistent relation to plurality, including the plurality of languages, how has multilingualism come to be simultaneously pathologized and valorized? And, perhaps most broadly, but also most relevantly, in what ways can critical theory intervene in contemporary discourses of multilingualism? And, perhaps most urgently, is such an intervention “critical,” and if so, who decides on the terms and outcomes of such an intervention? In short, why, how, and for whom, is multilingualism to be imagined otherwise? Readings by A. Aneesh, Emily Apter, Jan Blommaert, Deborah Cameron, Suresh Canagarajah, Rey Chow, Jacques Derrida, David Gramling, Michael Holquist, Aamir Mufti, NgÅ©gÄ© wa Thiong’o, Alastair Pennycook, Mary Louise Pratt, R. Radhakrishnan, Yasemin Yildiz, among others. |
| ENGLISH 255 | WORKSHOP IN ACADEMIC PUBLISHING | IZENBERG, O | [Course Code: 23810] Tuesday 1:00pm-3:50pm HIB 341 |