| Course | Title | Instructor | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
| ENGLISH 8 | MULTICULTURAL AMERICAN LITERATURE | RADHAKRISHNAN, R. | WHAT IS MINORITY LITERATURE? What indeed is “minority literature?” Was it born “minority” or was it minoritized by history and geopolitical circumstances, and perhaps by a process called democracy? Is “minority” a badge of honor or a stigma? Is minority quality driven or numbers driven? Why is “minority” marked as such while the literature of the majority is not called “majority literature?” What is the nature of the binary relationship between majority and minority? Is it antagonistic, symbiotic, mutually constitutive? Is minority literature content and ideology oriented, or is it a perspective? Is it by definition political, resistant, transformative, revolutionary? We will be tracking and unpacking these questions about the majority-minority nexus by way of critical and political theory, philosophy, and of course literature. Of particular interest in the context of the majority-minority binary grid are the following themes and issues: America, multiculturalism, the nation-state, nationalism, naturalization and immigration, the One and the Many, ethnicity and hyphenation, double consciousness, hybridity, trans-nationalism and the diaspora, race, class, gender, and sexuality. As we analyze the works, theoretical as well as literary, of thinkers and writers such as Du Bois, Ralph Ellison, Deluze and Guattari, Chantal Mouffe, Lani Guinier, Toni Morrison, Cornel West, Gloria Anzaldua, Adrienne Rich Maxine Hong Kingston, Jhumpa Lahiri, James Baldwin, Langston Hughes, and others, I hope we get a rich and complex sense of the legacy, the phenomenology, as well as the universal call of the minority that always speaks in an “other” voice, on an “other” register. Lecture and discussion and open-ended class participation. 1 Short Essay, 1 Long Essay. |
| ENGLISH 10 | LITERATURE OF DISCOVERY | ROBERTS, H. | This course will survey literary (and cinematic) approaches to the idea of “discovery” from 16th century exploration narratives, through Shakespeare’s “The Tempest,” to 20th century Science Fiction movies. We will think about “discovery” in a variety of ways, including the “discovery” of new lands, scientific breakthroughs (Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein,” H. G. Wells’s “The Time Machine”) and, always, the discovery of the self and new self-understandings. We will think about literature itself as a mode of “discovery” and think about the ways different literary forms and modes (fiction, poetry and drama) structure the kinds of discoveries they allow us to make. |
| ENGLISH 10 | TWENTY POEMS | IZENBERG, O. | Each meeting of this class will focus on a single text, ranging from the oldest love poem we know to a poem that has not yet been written, with many great works of art between. Together, we will read each poem closely to learn how it is made, and to see how acts of poetic making reveal important features of a culture or moment—our own, or another. While we will read some criticism and history, the bulk of our time and attention will be reserved for our twenty poems. In writing, we will analyze, appreciate, argue with, imitate, puzzle over, and pry apart our texts; and in the end, I hope we will develop the skills to discover what some never-before-seen work of art demands of us, and to judge whether that demand is worth answering. |
| ENGLISH 11 | SOCIETY, LAW, & LITERATURE | QUEEN, B. | Recent controversies about freedom of the press and fake news have again placed the First Amendment at the center of debates about the authenticity of American democracy. When it first became part of the Constitution in 1791, the First Amendment gave to a new nation freedom from laws that would abridge “. . . the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble . . . .” But it was not until World War I (1914-1918) that such freedoms would assume familiar forms, when the Supreme Court heard several cases that questioned the legalities of speech critical of the war effort. From these cases, historians argue, emerges the contemporary First Amendment, which becomes over the twentieth century one of the Constitution’s highest ideals with its broad protections for political speech. The major themes of this course—among them violent rhetoric and hate speech online, freedom of and access to information on the Internet, free speech on college campuses, and obscenity and pornography—embody salient tensions in recent history. As we consider the history of contested rights to speech and expression, we will question whether such rights are imperiled today and whether such rights can be dangerous to society. Reading and writing assignments will draw from several types of sources: to include Supreme Court cases, literature, legislative histories, philosophical and historical thought, print journalism, film, contemporary art, television shows, political cartoons, and online content. |
| ENGLISH 15 | REVISITING FAIRY TALES: THRICE UPON A TIME | O'CONNOR, L. | Unusually for a college course, participants in a seminar on fairy tales are familiar with the course texts before we begin. The course builds on this core knowledge by reading variants and adaptations of these thrice told tales and by exploring different critical approaches for analyzing them. We’ll read classic versions by Charles Perrault and the brothers Grimm, which are darker than the sanitized versions we heard as children. We’ll read revisionist fairy tales, which deliberately re-work traditional material into stories and verse with metalevel commentary on the originals. And we’ll learn about the critical methodologies used to study fairy tales by structuralist, psychoanalytic, and feminist critics, among others. We’ll also discuss film adaptations, including movies made by Disney and by film-makers whose vision is distinctly un-Disneylike. Fairy tales include “Red Riding Hood,” “Beauty and the Beast,” “The Little Mermaid,” “Mulan,” and “Cinderella.” Students are expected to complete weekly writing exercises, two short papers, and a final essay. |
| ENGLISH 15 | THE WIRE AND ITS CRITICS | SZALAY, M. | TV is no longer the “vast wasteland” that the official guardians of high culture once took it to be. Indeed, for some twenty years, audiences have enjoyed what some consider the “golden age of TV.” The one-hour cable drama in particular has gotten really, really good. But rather than take that claim at face value, this class will evaluate the criteria by which such judgments might conceivably be made. To do so, we turn to the crime procedural that now stands at the center of the “quality TV” canon. Dramas like The Sopranos, Six Feet Under, Deadwood, and Breaking Bad have won countless accolades, and have changed how we think about and evaluate TV in a fundamental way. But no single drama has garnered more critical acclaim than HBO’s The Wire (2002-2008), and no drama has served more consistently as an occasion for considerations of how and in what way TV has become a new kind of art form. Participants in this seminar will watch at least two seasons of The Wire, and will read some of the best criticism yet written on TV. |
| ENGLISH 16 | 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 17 | CRAFT OF FICTION | LATIOLAIS, P. | E17, 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 | WORKING | TUCKER, I. | This course will take up the topic of work from a variety of different angles. We will read the writings of several important theorists of work, including John Locke and Karl Marx. In these readings, we will try to figure out both how Locke and Marx understand work to organize the social relations among people and also what they understand the “opposites” of work to be. We will also read some poetry about work from poets ranging from William Wordsworth to Alfred, Lord Tennyson. The heart of the course centers on our engagement with one of the strangest novels about work ever written, Frank Norris’s McTeague, which tells the story of dentist whose practice and relationship with his wife complicate the process of transforming work into money. We will conclude by viewing the 1982 musical version of Studs Turkel’s classic of literary journalism, Working. |
| ENGLISH 101W | WRITING ABOUT DOCUMENTARY FILMS | BURKE, C. | English 101 W is a writing course, and you will be asked to produce short weekly pieces of writing, one longer polished paper, and some in-class writing assignments. You will be writing about several examples of documentary cinema. Documentary films have evolved from late 19th Century “films of fact,” which in a single take recorded simple human actions, to today’s sophisticated narratives, complete with flashbacks, cross-cuts, music, archival footage and voiceover. They have always shared with print journalism a keen interest in reporting reality. We will examine the ways in which nonfiction filmmakers document the world around them and bring to us their reconstructions of earlier times, their renderings of events in remote locations, and their arguments for reform. Your success of this course will depend on the effort you expend on screening assigned films, completing assigned reading, participating in lively discussion, and producing clear and interesting prose that has profited from revision. |
| ENGLISH 102A | RENAISSANCE AND REFORMATION | HELFER, R. | This course explores English Renaissance literature with a particular focus on the cultural, political, and religious transformations of the 16th and 17th centuries. We will cover a range of genres – drama, prose, and poetry – and a variety of authors, including Shakespeare, Marlowe, More, Cavendish, Spenser, and Milton. Course requirements include a midterm and final, as well reading quizzes. |
| ENGLISH 102B | GLOBAL ENLIGHTENMENT | KAUFMAN, S | “I am a Dane, Swede, or Frenchman at different times; or rather fancy myself like the old philosopher, who upon being asked what countryman he was, replied that he was a citizen of the world” – Addison, The Spectator (1711). This course examines an emerging global consciousness in seventeenth and eighteenth-century literature and culture. A growing global market, the expansion of empire, international exchange, scientific breakthroughs, and travelers’ reports of diverse cultures and religions contributed to a new vision what it meant to be a “citizen of the world.” This course will consider how authors and artists depicted the diversity of their times, from the Americas to Asia, and how a global perspective challenged, enriched, and complicated English culture, conceptions of cosmopolitanism, and responses to xenophobia. Course readings include Cavendish’s Blazing World, Behn’s Oroonoko, Dryden’s poetry and drama, The Arabian Nights (in translation), Montagu’s Turkish Embassy Letters, and Johnson’s Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia. Course requirements include: paper, midterm, and final. |
| ENGLISH 102C | YOUNG ROMANTICS | ROBERTS, H. | In this course we will explore the writings of the "second generation" of English Romantic poets. We will look at the ways in which the redemptive promise of High Romanticism is increasingly called into question by the writers who emerge after the great achievements of Wordsworth and Coleridge. In the tense political context of the collapse of the Napoleonic Empire and the repressive European order which followed in its wake, writers as diverse as Byron, Thomas de Quincey, Percy Bysshe Shelley, John Keats and Felicia Hemans explored extremes of feeling, of estheticism, of political protest, and of ironic detachment which have in common a fascination with incompletion or "failure". |
| ENGLISH 102D | LITERATURE & MEDIA | HARRIES, M. | In 1900, residents of large cities in Europe and North America learned what was happening in the world, and among their friends, through newspapers, letters, the occasional telegram, and talk. Books were printed; theater and music were live. The twentieth century saw the explosion of cinema, the development of broadcast communication including radio and TV, the widespread adoption of the telephone, and the development of the Internet. Nevertheless, novelists, playwrights, and poets continued to write. This course will track the way novels, plays, and poems register the new media surround by representing it, adapting to it, and resisting it. Texts will include: Henry James, The Ambassadors (1903) George Bernard Shaw, Heartbreak House (1919) Virginia Woolf, Between the Acts (1941) Orson Welles and the Mercury Theatre of the Air, The War of the Worlds (October 30, 1938) Renata Adler, Speedboat (1976) Caryl Churchill, Light Shining in Buckinghamshire (1976) and The Skriker (1994) The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry: Vol. II (Contemporary) |
| ENGLISH 102D | FITZGERALD&FAULKNER | GODDEN, R. | The course will undertake close readings of key works by Fitzgerald and Faulkner, contemporaries who wrote out of entirely divergent economic conditions and systems. Fitzgerald’s writing took place in, and explored, a culture which, in his own words, “followed money.” To read a Fitzgerald text necessarily, therefore, involves enquiry into the nature of money, price, and the commodity form (“capitalist realism”). Faulkner’s fiction, preoccupied with racialized work, reflected and refracted an impoverished region, within which ‘bound labor’ or ‘human capital’, rather than monetary capital, appeared central. Faulkner, though as much a modernist as Fitzgerald, deploys modernist techniques in the pursuit of pre-modern and non-urban historical imperatives, imperatives generated by an archaic regime of accumulation, grounded in debt peonage. Nathaniel Hawthorne noted, “It must relate to property; because nothing else survives in this world. Love grows cold and dies; hatred is pacified by annihilation” (The American Claimant). In the spirit of Hawthorne’s insight, the course will address how different forms of property and its production yield different narrative forms; where differences involve not simply differences of subject (the flapper rather than the sharecropper), but different structures, perceptions and narrative poetics. Works covered: by Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (1925), Tender Is the Night (1934), and The Love of the Last Tycoon (1941); by Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury (1929), As I Lay Dying (1930) and Go Down, Moses (1942). |
| ENGLISH 103 | WRITERLY READING | RYAN, M. | 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 generated by our angles of attention on a small group of poems we have not discussed in class will be required. |
| ENGLISH 105 | LATIN AMERICAN LITERATURE IN TRANSLATION | LEGRAS. H | (same as 31590 Spanish 150, Lec A) Latin American Literature in translation focuses on the last 50 years of fiction (mostly novels) written in Latin American by authors from Argentina, Brazil and Mexico. In addition to reading short stories by Borges, Arguedas and Rulfo, we will read Cristina Rivera Garza, No one will see me cry (Mexico), Cesar Aira, Ghosts (Argentina), Clarice Lispector, The Hour of the Star (Brazil) and Horacio Castellanos Moya Senselessness (Honduras-Mexico). The class is structured as a hybrid class, with some classes or assignments taking place on line. The on line portion of the course -called Internet lab- prepare students for the work of the incoming week by guiding them in the necessary research needed to better understand the thematic and problems represented by each particular novel. Additionally, the internet lab will allow students to reflect on recent past readings. Grade will be calculated on the bases of the assignments completed for each academic lab, in class presentations, 2 exams (one focused on interpretation, the second on the contents of the literary works) and attendance. Internet lab requires an average of 3-5pages of writing per week. In most cases, writing assignments will answer to specific prompts and questions distributed through Canvas. There is no final exam. Notice. Please beware that this class cannot be counted towards the Spanish major or minor. |
| ENGLISH 105 | WRITING RACE IN THE U.S. | TOBAR, H | (same as 29932 Lit Jrn 103, Lec B) This course aims to be a survey of nonfiction writing about race in the United States of America, from the 19th century to the present. We will examine how writers have tackled issues of racial inequality and discrimination, and constructed narratives centered on the lives of people of color in various nonfiction genres: journalism, investigative reporting, essays, criticism and memoirs. Readings will include works by W.E.B Du Bois, Ida B. Wells, Octavio Paz, Carey McWilliams, Luis Alberto Urrea, Ta-Nehisi Coates and others. As a final requirement, students will produce their own work of cultural criticism or reportage. |
| ENGLISH 105 | POSTNATIONAL KOREA | LEE, J.W. | Through an examination of various texts, including theory, historiography, ethnography, and literature, this course will explore the possibility of “Korea” as a necessarily postnational imaginary in that it transcends the very paradigm of nationalism, which as a political doctrine aspires to consolidate a people within a predefined territory and ideological matrix. Scholars have used the expression postnational to refer to forms of social belonging that counteract the ideological and geopolitical expectations of the nation-state. Yet, by invoking the notion of postnational to describe the emergence of global Koreanness, this of course is not meant to suggest that the national is no longer relevant, that it has somehow been transcended by the macro-processes of globalization, or that official criterion of state recognition, including documents ranging from passports to birth certificates, have been rendered obsolete. Indeed, the national remains so central to social belonging in many Korean communities, whether in Korea “proper” or in global Koreatowns, such as those in Los Angeles, Beijing, or New York. This course, therefore, considers the ways in which the “national” is inflected in various everyday social practices, but also the ways in which nationness can be said to emerge, in some cases, more prominently than it does in the ostensibly originary point of Korea. |
| ENGLISH 106 | NOVEL, THEORY & PRACTICE | TUCKER, I. | |
| ENGLISH 106 | WRITING THE SOUTH | GODDEN, R. | Departing from the assumption that what makes the South regionally specific is its economy, the course will address the changing regimes of accumulation that typify the region, from ante-bellum slavery, through post-bellum debt peonage, to the onset of ‘free market’ labor (care of the New Deal). Arguably, economic forms and contradictions, in the South particularly those associated with coercive labor systems, generate the narratives and linguistic options through which people order their experience. The course seeks to trace how Southern literature grows from the lived relations of a changing economy. To do so we will concentrate on literary responses to key institutions (‘chattel slavery, ‘the plantation,’ ‘share cropping,’ ‘jim crow’ and ‘the great migration’). Among those studied will be Fredrick Douglass (Narrative of the Life…of an American Slave); Edgar Allan Poe (“Ligeia,” “The Fall of the House of Usher,” “William Wilson,” “The Murders in the Rue Morgue”); Herman Melville “Benito Cereno”; Mark Twin, Huckleberry Finn; Charles W. Chesnutt, The Marrow of Tradition; Kate Chopin, The Awakening; William Faulkner, Go Down, Moses; Nella Larsen, Passing, and Richard Wright, Black Boy. The seminar based course will be assessed by two essays, each of 6-8 pages in length. |
| ENGLISH 106 | LIBERTINISM | STEINTRAGER, J. | In the seventeenth century, libertinism emerged as a philosophical stance, a lifestyle, and a mode of literature that emphasized pleasure to the point of license: drinking to excess and all manner of voluptuous indulgence. The movement also produced some of the best poetry in the English language and at times surprisingly progressive views of gender and sexuality. In this course, we will look at the roots of libertine writing and thought in ancient and Renaissance satire, examine the heyday of courtly libertine poetry in the works of Rochester, consider the figure of the libertine on the Restoration stage, study the transfer and translation of French libertine works into English, and track the development of the English libertine novel in the eighteenth century. Note: The material covered in this class will contain graphic descriptions of sexual behavior, some of which may be triggering. |
| ENGLISH 106 | QUEER INDGENOUS LITERATURE | COX, A. | This course examines Indigenous-centered approaches to gender and sexuality studies. How did colonial European explorers and settlers view American Indian communities whose social systems included three or more genders? How has the structure of settler colonialism imposed Euro-American heteropatriarchy and heteronormativity, with its binary gender/sex system, onto American Indians, and what effect has this intrusion had on Indian peoples and cultures? How has the (mainly white) LGBT movement, with its emphasis on identity politics and civil rights, reinforced US settler colonialism over and against indigenous peoples’ rights to self-determination and sovereignty/self-governance? How have historical and contemporary Two-Spirit/LGBTIQ-identified Native authors represented colonial gender violence and the survival of what Qwo-Li Driskill calls an indigenous sovereign erotic? Course materials include novels, poetry, and multimedia cultural productions by Two-Spirit/queer Native artists and scholars such as Paula Gunn Allen, Billy-Ray Belcourt, Chrystos, Thirza Cuthand, Qwo-Li Driskill, Joy Harjo, Maurice Kenny, Deborah Miranda, Kent Monkman, and Craig Womack. Students will also read critical works at the intersection of Native American studies and queer theory. |
| ENGLISH 210 | FANON, SAID, AND POSTCOLONIAL THEORY | RADHAKRISHNAN, R. | [Course Code: 23805] Thursdays 4:00 – 6:50pm in HIB 411 Frantz Fanon and Edward Said continue to be two of the most influential theorists of the postcolonial human condition. The differences in their two world views, theories, and critical epistemologies are as striking and revealing as their mutual common ground. Deeply symptomatic as they both are of the trauma of Colonialism, they enact and prioritize their symptoms differently even as they envision a new Humanism on behalf of all humanity. The purpose of this seminar is to be explore the critical theoretical terrains of these two formidable and creative thinkers by way of close readings of strategically chosen texts of each author. The objective is not to render full justice or cover exhaustively their two respective agendas, but to examine and interpret the mutual intersections and divergences. Of particular importance are the following themes and conjunctures: Nationalism and Humanism, ontology and politics, identity politics and the politics of representation, history and theory, epistemology and politics, the problem of centrism, diaspora and the nation, postcolonial asymmetry and cosmopolitanism, cultural nationalism and political nationalism, aesthetics and ideology, the indigenous and the worldly, solidarity, oppositionality, and critique, the intellectual and the masses, double consciousness and contrapuntality, binary thinking and possibilities beyond, the predicament of secularism, race, democracy and the problem of the state, violence versus persuasion, revisionism and revolution, history-historiography-meta history. I don't and can't promise we will cover all these horizons and trajectories but I do promise an honest endeavor with your help and good will. Format, requirements etc. You know the routine, the procedure: seminar, pro seminar, anti seminar, disinterested versus partisan seminar. Just kidding. A long paper and a short paper plus participation and/or class presentation. |
| ENGLISH 210 | READING W. B. YEATS | O'CONNOR, L. | [Course Code: 23802] Wednesdays 9:00 – 11:50am in HIB 341 In this seminar, we’ll read Yeats extensively—all of the Collected Poems, some plays and prose, and representative criticism—and intensively, as befits the close reading of poetry. In this light, I’ll finalize the syllabus early in the quarter after I consult with participants about their research interests (and suggest congenial topics) so that the single-author rubric can accommodate diverse preoccupations." Our focus will be on how the “Yeatsian” entity can be said to encode the political, linguistic, and cultural milieux (both Irish and more generally modernist) out of which he wrote as we weave formal analysis and cultural considerations into our discussion of his verse. Yeats’s influential role in the cultural nationalist endeavors that transformed Ireland from a colony into the Free State in which he served as a Senator, and his willingness to pronounce upon world-historical crises, makes the nexus between politics and literature an ongoing topic. Conversely his commitment to “Magic,” from the fairy legend of the Celtic Twilight through the cyclical cosmology of A Vision (1925 / 37), juxtaposes “this pragmatical, preposterous pig of a world” with the otherworld’s antithetical purview. Though radically different writers, Yeats and Joyce both embed an autobiographical writer-persona in a localized Irish setting, peopled with historical and fictional personae. Each envisages his recursive refashionings of the “matter of Ireland” as a decolonizing literary praxis. Literary modernists have accordingly learned all manner of Irish arcana, and are introduced to a field of intertextual and collaborative relationships with an accompanying plethora of potential research topics. In this light, I’ll finalize the syllabus early in the quarter after I consult with participants about their research interests (and suggest congenial topics) so that the single-author rubric can accommodate diverse preoccupations. Participants are required to post weekly response papers on the readings. Seminar participants are expected to meet the deadlines for submitting a research prospectus; an oral presentation of their research-topic, and completing a 15-page research paper. Pro-seminar participants are expected to present on an agreed research topic or assigned secondary criticism, and to submit an 8-page essay. Under the aegis of the SoCal Irish Studies Colloquium (SCISC), participants will have an opportunity to avail of two professionalization opportunities if they are interested. In April, you are invited to visit the Irish archives at the Huntington Library with us; in Fall 2018, there’ll be an opportunity to present your revised 15- or 8- page paper at a SCISC conference panel. |
| ENGLISH 210 | FRANKFURT SCHOOL | HARRIES, M. | [Course Code: 23800] Mondays 2:00 – 4:50pm in HIB 411 This course will focus on theories of the work of art in central texts of the Frankfurt School. We will pay especially close attention to the theoretical problems of allegory and mediation. Allegory seems to offer a solution to the questions raised by the problem of mediation – of how to picture the relationship of the artwork to the social world. But might allegory also at times resolve contradictions too quickly? We will concentrate on the dialogue and debate about these questions between Walter Benjamin and Theodor W. Adorno. Literary texts will include texts for the theater by Bertolt Brecht, Samuel Beckett, and Caryl Churchill. The course will assume some familiarity with Shakespeare’s Hamlet. In his Origin of German Tragic Drama (1928), Benjamin reinvigorated the category of allegory; Benjamin and Adorno alike soon saw the potentiality of that book’s insights for materialist criticism. The course will begin with Benjamin’s book, and then track debates about the aesthetic through various essays and books, ending with selections from Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory. Texts will include: Books: Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minnesota) Samuel Beckett, Endgame (Grove/Atlantic) Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne (Verso) Bertolt Brecht, The Measures Taken and other Lehrstücke (Methuen) Caryl Churchill, The Skriker (Theatre Communications Group) Essays, Etc.: Adorno, “The Idea of Natural History” ---. “Cultural Criticism and Society” ---. “Trying to Understand Endgame” ---. “Commitment” Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of its Mechanical Reproducibility: Second Version” ---. “On the Theory of Knowledge, Theory of Progress” (Convolute N of The Arcades Project) ---. “Theses on the Philosophy of History” |
| ENGLISH 210 | GLOBAL ASIAS | JEON, J | [Course Code: 23804] Fridays 2:00 – 4:50pm in HIB 341 This class will examine the transnational cultures of contemporary Asian globalism. How do we make sense of K-pop’s popularity in Latin America? Or the impact of Chinese infrastructural support in African nations? How do we regard contemporary Hollywood productions at a time when industry practices are increasingly geared toward Asian audiences? To begin to answer such questions, we will read a wide-range of theory and history, while also employing a core set of literary and filmic examples that will function as case studies to anchor our more abstract discussions—likely Karen Tei Yamashita’s novel, Tropic of Orange (1997), Cathy Park Hong’s volume of poems, Engine Empire (2012), and Bong Joon-ho’s film, Okja (2017). In this manner, we will attempt to generate a set of critical tools and practices that help make sense of the present moment of global transition in which U.S. power seems on the decline and a so-called “Asian Century” is said to be emerging. Areas of focus may include emerging global media formations, cultures of Asian crises, environmental transnationalism in the age of planetary catastrophe, and new migration phenomena (including exilic forms driven by classed, racial and gendered precarity). |
| ENGLISH 230 | SHAKESPEARE | LUPTON, J. | [Course Code: 23810] Tuesdays 9:00 – 11:50am in HIB 411 In this course we will read three plays by Shakespeare (Twelfth Night, Measure for Measure, and All’s Well That Ends Well) in the framework of virtue and virtue ethics. We will define virtue broadly, as the actualization of human capacity through arts of performance, attention, and care in ecologies of mutual dependence and exposure. We will pay special attention to the virtues of courage, trust, hope, patience, resilience, and respect as they are practiced and defined in classical ethics, theology, performance theory, humanistic pedagogy, and the environmental and medical humanities. Readings will be drawn from Aristotle, Alisdair MacIntyre, Martha Nussbaum, Bernard Williams, Hannah Arendt, and Pierre Hadot as well as historic and contemporary Shakespeare criticism. Proseminar and seminar options. Text: New Oxford Shakespeare on line and Oxford texts of the three plays. |
| ENGLISH 255 | WORKSHOP IN ACADEMIC PUBLISHING | MARTIN, T | [Course Code: 23820] Thursdays 1:00 – 3:50pm in HIB 341 This course has one primarily goal: to help you prepare and submit an article for publication. In the first half of the quarter, we will discuss what makes a successful journal article; how to decide which journal to submit to; what the review process is like; and what the difference is between an article and other forms of academic writing, like a dissertation chapter. In the second half of the quarter, we will spend our time intensively workshopping your article drafts in class, with the aim of offering each student a clear plan for revision and submission. The final week of the course will be devoted to drafting and discussing materials for the job market. Please note: this course is intended for students in or beyond their third year. |