| Course | Title | Instructor | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
| ENGLISH 8 | POST-1965 ASIAN AMERICAN FICTION | FAN, C. | Two of the most familiar stereotypes of Asian Americans are 1) that their parents disapprove of careers in the arts; and 2) that they are preternaturally talented in math and science. These stereotypes are so frequently confirmed by anecdotal experience, especially among Asian American academics, that they seem unworthy of serious analysis (at best) and cringe-worthy (at worst). But what if these stereotypes were the keys to understanding important features of contemporary Asian America and Asian American cultural production, insofar as they bring our attention to the policy-driven occupational concentration of Asian Americans into scientific and technical fields? This course examines key works of Asian American fiction that bring into focus the relationship between economic subjectivity and racial identity after the passage of the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, which shifted US immigration policy away from principles of exclusion to principles of selection. Texts will include: novels: Maxine Hong Kingston’s Woman Warrior, Chang-Rae Lee’s Native Speaker, Hari Kunzru’s Transmission, Charles Yu’s How to Live Safely in a Scientific Universe; short stories by Ted Chiang and Nam Le; films: Greg Pak’s Robot Stories and Jennifer Phang’s Advantageous; and Thi Bui’s graphic novel The Best We Could Do. |
| ENGLISH 10 | EARLY AMERICAN LITERATURE | LAZO, R. | Our topic will be “Anthologizing Early America,” which will take us into conversations about how one puts together an anthology of writings from the 16th-18th centuries, when the term “America” referred to the hemisphere rather than a specific nation. In this case the problem of how to organize an anthology cannot be divorced from the question of how one conceptualizes the early American period. What regions do we consider? How do writing genres differ in that historical period? How do we include native American literature and the different languages they introduce? How do we account for the Spanish background of American literature? What types of conflicts emerge when people from different cultures come into contact? How is power represented in this period? We will begin the course with Toni Morrison’s novel A Mercy so that we can review techniques of literary analysis and discuss questions of human interaction before the emergence of more recent notions of nationhood and racial division. We will draw readings from and mount arguments against The Norton Anthology of American Literature. |
| ENGLISH 11 | THE RHETORIC OF FREE SPEECH & EXPRESSION | QUEEN, B. | The First Amendment of the United States’ Constitution has long embodied utopian possibilities. To speak and express oneself freely, to assume an unrestrained press and media, to assemble peaceably to dissent and to advocate, all free from government control and coercion. These are among the Constitution’s most majestic guarantees. They release imaginative possibilities for what society and each person might choose to become. They enable autonomy, liberty, equality, and a vibrant public discourse that together form the foundation for democratic deliberation. Recent controversies about freedom of the media and fake news and about public discourse corrupted by misinformation have called into question the authenticity of American democracy and the values articulated by the First Amendment. The major themes of this course—among them threatening rhetoric and hate speech, freedom of and access to reliable information on the Internet and across media, violence in video games and other media, and debates about obscenity—embody salient tensions in recent history. As we examine literary works that place before us utopian possibilities and dystopian warnings, we will study the contemporary history of the First Amendment. This synthesis of law and literature questions the authoritarian tendencies of governments and laws, whether free markets serve freedom and equality and individual autonomy, and whether freedom of speech and expression are absolute rights. Reading and writing assignments will draw from several types of sources: to include Supreme Court cases, novels, legislation, legal and historical thought, print journalism, film, contemporary art, advertisements, television shows, political cartoons, and online content. |
| ENGLISH 11C | THE RHETORIC OF FREE SPEECH & EXPRESSION | QUEEN, B. | The First Amendment of the United States’ Constitution has long embodied utopian possibilities. To speak and express oneself freely, to assume an unrestrained press and media, to assemble peaceably to dissent and to advocate, all free from government control and coercion. These are among the Constitution’s most majestic guarantees. They release imaginative possibilities for what society and each person might choose to become. They enable autonomy, liberty, equality, and a vibrant public discourse that together form the foundation for democratic deliberation. Recent controversies about freedom of the media and fake news and about public discourse corrupted by misinformation have called into question the authenticity of American democracy and the values articulated by the First Amendment. The major themes of this course—among them threatening rhetoric and hate speech, freedom of and access to reliable information on the Internet and across media, violence in video games and other media, and debates about obscenity—embody salient tensions in recent history. As we examine literary works that place before us utopian possibilities and dystopian warnings, we will study the contemporary history of the First Amendment. This synthesis of law and literature questions the authoritarian tendencies of governments and laws, whether free markets serve freedom and equality and individual autonomy, and whether freedom of speech and expression are absolute rights. Reading and writing assignments will draw from several types of sources: to include Supreme Court cases, novels, legislation, legal and historical thought, print journalism, film, contemporary art, advertisements, television shows, political cartoons, and online content. |
| ENGLISH 15 | 21ST CENTURY EXPERIMENTAL FICTION | MCCLANAHAN, A. | Have you ever loved a book that other people thought was really…weird? If so, then this is the class for you! In this class, we’ll read five novels written in this century that might be classified as “experimental.” They’ll range from a work of speculative historical fiction about a queer thief, to a fairytale novel about the monstrous ways people treat each other, to a fictional account of the world’s most boring job. Along the way we’ll do some “experiments” ourselves, using these novels to inspire creative, challenging, unusual and downright weird critical writing. |
| ENGLISH 15 | POETRY IN RUINS | HELFER, R. | This course explores a fascination with ruins in (and as) poetry that spans from the classical to the contemporary. Together we’ll consider how poetry about ruins takes up the relationship between past and present, self and society, nostalgia and novelty, as well as broad issues about memory and history, politics and culture. We’ll also think about how ruins poetry frequently functions as a kind of literary theory-in-practice: that is, the ways in which the fragmentary form that poetry takes so often mirrors its representation of a fragmented or decaying world. Requirements for this course include regular attendance, active class participation, short writing assignments, and two essays. |
| ENGLISH 15 | ASIA AND SCIENCE FICTION | FAN, C. | For much of the past half-century, “Asia,” “Asians,” and Asian-ness have been closely associated with Anglophone science fiction: both as objects of the genre, and as producers of it. On one hand, there is the tradition of “techno-orientalist” science fiction (e.g., Blade Runner, The Matrix, Big Hero 6), which updates longstanding tropes about Asian futurity and Oriental threats to the West. On the other hand, there is the burgeoning field of science fiction literature and film by Asian Americans, which exploded onto the cultural scene in the 1990s and has shown no signs of abating. Why is Orientalism such an enduring aesthetic dominant in science fiction? Why are Asian American fiction writers and filmmakers so drawn to the genre? This course makes the case that these two questions refer to two sides of the same coin. They point to two different histories and perspectives on the same phenomenon: Asia’s postwar economic and geopolitical rise (or, depending on whom you ask, its return to prominence). Texts will likely include: novels: Chang-rae Lee’s Native Speaker, Bharati Mukherjee’s Holder of the World, Charles Yu’s How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe, and Weike Wang’s Chemistry; short stories by Ted Chiang and Claire Light; and the Disney film Big Hero 6, along with an issue or two from the 1998 and 2008 Marvel series. |
| ENGLISH 100 | INTRODUCTION TO LITERARY THEORY | RADHAKRISHNAN, R. | This course will be a broad but strategic and selective chronological survey of what constitutes Western Literary Theory, all the way from Socrates-Plato-Aristotle right down to this very moment of our problematic, conjunctural, and intersectional contemporaneity. We will begin with the Socratic move to professionalize the role of the critic, and then move on to issues of mimesis, Plato’s quarrel with Poetry, and the nature of academic and literary freedom within the jurisdiction of the State. Here are a few stops on our journey: some stops will be longer than others: Sir Philip Sidney (On Poetry, Philosophy, Poetry; the role of poesy in both educating and delighting the reader, its role in the body politic); Immanuel Kant on Subjectivity and Aesthetic Judgment; the English Romantics with particular emphasis on William Wordsworth and Percy Bysshe Shelley (Poetry, Prose, the Common Man, Nature and Society, Imagination, Society and Revolution); T.S. Eliot’s profoundly anti-Romantic Modernism, (Sense of Tradition and the Poetry of “impersonality”); Ferdinand de Saussure and ‘the linguistic turn”: Voloshinov and the Marxist theory of language: Freud, psychoanalysis and the interpretation of Dreams; Marxist concepts of base-superstructure-ideology-mediation and critique by way of Antonio Gramsci and Raymond Williams; Structuralism and Post-Structuralism (Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and Jacques Lacan, deconstruction, the “death of the author,”); Feminisms and feminist theories of subjectivity, representation, and revolution; W.E.B. Du Bois, “the color line,” ‘the veil,” “double-consciousness,” critical Race Theory; postcolonial theory by way of Frantz Fanon and Edward W. Said; the queering of Theory. We may not be able to make all the stops, or tarry meaningfully at each juncture. This is the overall map. We will travel and cover what we can. My objective is to find the right balance between coverage and depth. With your help, I will make sure that we take on no more than what we can digest and relish. Wherever possible, I will align theory with a literary text to make a point, prove a thesis. After all, literature and theory are friends, not antagonists; and theory can be literary, and literature theoretical. Lecture combined with open-ended discussions, questions, and answers. 1 Short and 1 Long Paper. |
| ENGLISH 100 | INTRODUCTION TO LITERARY THEORY | MCCLANAHAN, A. | This class will ask some of the big questions: What makes good art? How do gender and race define us? What is capitalism? Why do we care about narrative? What is a university and why are we here? To answer these questions, we’ll read widely across the history of literary and critical theory, including thinkers like Mikhail Bakhtin, Walter Benjamin, Judith Butler, WEB Du Bois, Frantz Fanon, Sigmund Freud, Silvia Federici, Immanuel Kant, Karl Marx, Nina Power, and Raymond Williams. We’ll also read a number of recent texts in the genre of “vernacular theory”: popular critics using theory to make widely readable arguments about everything from video games and contemporary TV to student debt and police violence. Students will write their own theoretical essays using these texts as models. |
| ENGLISH 101W | NINETEENTH-CENTURY AMERICAN LITERATURE | BERLINER, J. | In this course, we will focus on five nineteenth-century American authors—Edgar Allan Poe, Emily Dickinson, Herman Melville, Mark Twain, and Charles Chesnutt. These writers span what is usually considered to be two historical periods, first, the American Renaissance, often associated with Romanticism, and, second, a period of realism after the Civil War. We will consider how these authors dramatize a relationship between the individual and society. In working through this analysis, we will pay close attention to artistic techniques of narration, characterization, setting, imagery, metaphor, and literary language with the goal of understanding the subtle play of the imagination over the course of these two historical periods. Students should expect frequent writing assignments in multiple forms, including response papers and three formal essays. |
| ENGLISH 101W | SHORT STORIES | TUCKER, I. | This course invites students to learn to read short fiction closely, and to explore the connections between these practices of close-reading and the history of the genre and its institutions. What’s the link between how short stories are taught and how (and where) they are written, marketed, sold? We will begin by exploring the form’s origins by way of the work of some of its earliest nineteenth-century practitioners – Poe, Melville, Tolstoy – and will make our way through an idiosyncratic history of the form in its twentieth-century forms, turning to writers ranging from Franz Kafka to Flannery O’Connor, Raymond Carver, Alice Munro and Uwem Akpan. We will also read some reflections on the form by both critics and practitioners, and will examine the strange career of Raymond Carver as a way of thinking about the processes and institutions by which stories come to be read and authors come to be celebrated. We will end by viewing the 1995 film Daytrippers, attempting to figure out what, besides length, might make a film “short-story-like.” A 10-15pp paper will be required. |
| ENGLISH 101W | TRANSCENDENTALISM | JACKSON, V. | In the decades before the American Civil War, a group of writers in and around Boston developed what Wikipedia now calls “a philosophical movement. . .as a protest against the general state of culture and society” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcendentalism). In this class, we will read some of those writers, and we will think about what it might mean to “protest against” current social relations by generating ideas. Can ideas really change how we live? Could ideas end slavery? Was racism an idea or a practice? Could ideas create women’s rights? Could ideas shift the incoming tide of industrial capitalism? How and why did these writers believe that ideas could make such a difference? Did the idea that an idea could change the world die when the Civil War began? If so, why? If not, why not? |
| ENGLISH 102A | RENAISSANCE AND REFORMATION | WOODS, D | The dark experiment at the heart of Shakespeare’s King Lear centers on this question: What becomes of humankind and human meaning in the face of a displaced absolute? The initial displacement of Lear results in the division of his family, his kingdom, even his mind from itself in a remarkably swift series of events until the old king is left exposed on the heath, nearly insensate, asking the gods for their intervention. What happens, Shakespeare seems to ask, when the metaphysical becomes illegible in the wake of a church divided against itself, in the face of a skeptical crisis spurred by internecine war; what happens when the foundations of human cognition, language and access to deity seem to be crumbling beneath our feet? What happens, in other words, when our experience mutters darkly with Gloucester, “As flies to wanton boys are we to th’ gods. They kill us for their sport.” Can we know anything certain of God or of ourselves in a world without sure foundations? Can meaning itself be secured if our experience and our expressions are so variable and contingent? This course will take up these and related questions by exploring the impact of the Renaissance and Reformation on English literary expression. We will begin our journey in the enchanted late medieval forests of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. From there we will travel to the dark castles of Spenser's Faerie Queene, eventually emerging on the blasted, wind-swept heath of Shakespeare's King Lear. Finally, we will survey and attempt to summit the grand peak itself, Milton's Paradise Lost. We will be exhausted when we are done, no doubt, but hopefully also illumined. |
| ENGLISH 102B | RACE & ENLIGHTNMNT | TUCKER, I. | This course is structured as an effort to answer a fundamental puzzle about the Enlightenment. How do we make sense of the fact that the same historical moment known for establishing the universal equality of all people (or at least all men) as a foundational political principle was also the moment the race came to be seen not as a fleeting and changeable quality but an essential and unchanging aspect of who they were? We will begin our efforts to answer this question by looking at theories of race that saw “human variety” as the changeable effects of individuals’ climates, works by the medieval physician Galen and the physician-anthropologist Georg Forster. What about the 17th- and 18th- century European colonialist enterprise made these early models of human variety increasingly difficult to believe? We will move on to examine the writings of philosopher Immanuel Kant. While Kant is most famous now for his theorizing of the universal laws that allow people to know the world and themselves, he was renowned in the 18th century for his account of race, a model that helped solve problems within the logic of the Enlightenment as well as to make sense of the various skin colors people were increasingly likely to encounter. We will also read the racial theories of Johann Friedrich Blumenbach and James Prichard, paying special attention their engagement with the connection between physical difference and linguistic differences. We will also spend some time looking at some related fictional narratives of the era, most notably Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko and Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels. |
| ENGLISH 102C | TRANSATLANTIC ROMANTICISM | JACKSON, V. | In this class we will read British and American literature of the nineteenth century. The novels, poems, plays, essays, and manifestos we will read all fall into the general category of "Romanticism," though the definition of Romanticism will be part of the subject of this class. Did Romanticism emphasize individual expression? Yes, but that emphasis depended on what kind of individual you were (man? woman? Chippewa? African? straight? queer? rich? poor?). Did romanticism emphasize the beauty of Nature? Yes, but that emphasis depended on emerging industrial threats to the natural world, particularly in the Americas. Did Romanticism emphasize ideas of liberal democracy and personal freedom? Yes, but can political aims be achieved on the basis of ideas expressed in poems and stories? Readings will include work by Phillis Wheatley, William Blake, Olano Equiano, William Wordsworth, William Cullen Bryant, Felicia Hemans, Lydia Sigourney, John Keats, Jane Austen, James Fenimore Cooper, Catherine Maria Sedgwick, Mary Shelley, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Frederick Douglass, Dion Boucicault, and Paul Laurence Dunbar. |
| ENGLISH 102D | FROM MODERNISM TO POSTMODERNISM | MARTIN, T. | This course will introduce you to two of the most significant and widely discussed modes of literary expression in the twentieth century: modernism and postmodernism. Focusing on novels, artistic manifestos, and political manifestos, we will trace the ways that modernist and postmodernist writers sought to make literature new in response to the rapidly changing conditions of modern life. How, we will ask, did these writers see themselves as radically breaking from the aesthetic and political norms of the past? And how did they justify the need for new, experimental literary forms as responses to the new and disorienting experiences of world warfare, racial oppression, gender inequality, state secrecy, and global capitalism? Taking these questions as our starting point, we will seek to understand modernism and postmodernism as key chapters in the history of how writers have imagined the link between radical aesthetics and radical politics. Readings will likely include Virginia Woolf, Nella Larsen, Thomas Pynchon, Ishmael Reed, and Joan Didion. Course requirements will involve one or two essays, weekly reading quizzes, and a final exam. |
| ENGLISH 102D | ALIENATION | RADHAKRISHNAN, R. | Wow! How profoundly rich, allegorically vital and sovereign, literarily rejuvenating and affirmative it is to be alienated, whereas literal and empirical alienation is nothing short of devastation, disempowerment, marginalization, and annihilation. There you have it: the double template of alienation, and our collective endeavor this quarter is to plumb the abject depths of alienation, as existential symptom and aesthetic performance. The fact of the matter is that “alienation” has been, in the West, from the late 19th century onwards, a powerful and abiding theme and motor of so much literary and cultural creativity: alienation of the individual from herself, from society, the alienation of the I from the We, from the nation, from God, from Nature. The alienation of Labor by Capital (Marxism), existential and metaphysical alienation (Fyodor Dostoevsky, Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus), alienation by way of War (Virginia Woolf), death of God and religion and cultural alienation (T.S. Eliot), psychological alienation and the alienation of Self from Other (psychoanalysis), alienation by Racism and Slavery (Du Bois, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin), alienation by Colonialism (Fanon, Tsitsi Dangarembga), alienation via Patriarchy and Sexism (Virginia Woolf, Adrienne Rich, and bell hooks). As we make our way through a range of poignant and powerful texts (poems, fiction, theory), we will seek to identify and recognize the many faces and profiles of alienation. How does alienation, as a context of crisis, become the basis for a deep, systemic and “critical’ understanding of what ails the human condition? How does literary/aesthetic form cope with the shattering negativity of alienation, and give it meaningful shape? What does “meaning” mean during times of crisis? Is language alienated from meaning, and if yes, how does literature deal with the “waste land” of Existence? What are the geopolitical parameters of alienation and how is one form of alienation to be parsed relationally with reference to another and different form of alienation? Is alienation Eurocentric, colonial, global, universal? How does alienation bridge or aggravate the gaps between Ethics, Politics, Economics, Ontology, and Philosophy? Is alienation primarily economic, political, or philosophical? Commodification/reification/objectification/alienation: what are the connections, the interlinks? Are there two kinds of alienation: one with a lower case “a,” that has a political cure and an economic answer, and the other, with a capital A that is inevitably and necessarily chronic? Just a few straightforward questions, that is all. And we will be raising these not alone, but in solidarity. Format: Lectures, discussions, and plenty of dialog, questions and answers. I Short essay and 1Long essay. |
| ENGLISH 105 | HOLLYWOOD VS. HALLYUWOOD | KIM, S | As a culture is reflected in the literary works it generates, there can be little argument about the fact that literature is the best medium for understanding a foreign culture. Whenever we want to be informed about a culture other than our own, therefore, we turn to its literature to explore the unknown realm as if we were going on an intellectual adventure. Films, too, can be an excellent medium through which we can learn about other cultures and societies. Hollywood movies, for example, reflect the main concerns of the American people: their hopes and fears, dreams and nightmares, and so on. By watching American movies, therefore, we can understand how Americans think, live, and act. The same goes for Korean movies: By watching Korean movies, we can learn about Korean culture, society, and psychology quite well. Indeed, films are excellent cultural texts and important social documents. Our objectives in this course will be to delve into various multicultural issues of American and Korean society with reference to contemporary literary movements such as postmodernism, postcolonialism, cultural studies, media studies, multiculturalism, feminism, transhumanism and transnationalism, while reading American literature and Korean literature, and discussing Hollywood (American) and Hallyuwood (Korean) movies. Hallyu, which means the Korean Wave, refers to the recent enormous popularity of Korean pop culture all around the world such as K-pop, K-literature and K-film. American movies provide indispensable reference materials for the students of American literature and culture and so do Korean movies for those who study Korean Literature and culture. By reading major literary works and film texts of both countries closely in a comparative perspective, we can have a better understanding of the two nations and learn to build a cultural bridge between the East and the West. |
| ENGLISH 105 | COMING OF AGE ASAM | LEE, J. | (same as 21570 AsianAm 110, Lec A; and 25170 Gen&Sex 189, Lec A) What is it like to grow up Asian American in the United States? What kinds of expectations, pressures, obstacles, stereotypes, and exclusions do young Asian Americans face and how do they respond? This course examines those questions in contemporary Asian American culture: film, narrative fiction, graphic novels, and essays. Our focus will be on understanding the unique demands placed on Asian American subjects as they emerge from childhood and adolescence into adulthood. We will start by thinking about the broad genre of the bildungsroman and how its conventions are used, adapted, revised, or rejected by Asian American writers. We will examine how the experience of racial alterity affects the development of Asian American identities as well as the role that ethnicity, class, gender, and sexuality play in these coming of age stories. Graduate students enrolled in this course will also become familiar with critical conversations pertaining to Asian American literary and cultural theory. |
| ENGLISH 105 | PUBLIC HEALTH NARRATIVES | HAYASAKI, E. | In this class, we will read deeply reported and researched public health narratives around science, psychology, social issues and medicine written by journalists. Although these nonfiction stories will often draw from scientific and medical studies or complicated diagnoses, they will mostly be stories about people first: patients, families, nurses, physicians, scientists, mental health workers, and sometimes also the journalists behind these stories. We will discuss how writers untangle complex medical subjects to present them as compelling narratives. How does a journalist interview for details that capture the humanity of a public health story? How does a journalist report for pivotal moments that evoke empathy? How does a medical question become a narrative mystery? How do writers preserve the narrative voice when translating medical terminology? What ethical complications arise when writing about the ill, the dying, the disenfranchised or the hospitalized? In this class, we will explore public health topics in longform magazine articles, podcasts and books, examining issues like cross-cultural health care and crises, trauma, immigration, motherhood, capital punishment, prison reform, body issues, violence, mental health, DNA testing, and the psychology and neuroscience of racism and prejudice. There will be a series of shorter writing assignments and one final writing project, all drawing from lessons in listening, interviewing, research and writing. |
| ENGLISH 106 | ENVIRONMENTL RACISM | COX, A. | Institutionalized racism in government and corporate policies such as redlining and zoning lead to environmental racism in policy and practice. Due to factors such as low income and lack of political representation and mobility, communities of color experience environmental injustices, including: exposure to hazardous waste, vulnerability to flooding, lack of access to potable water, and discriminatory waste management programs. Since the 1970s and ‘80s, environmental justice social movements in the US have worked to bring attention to these issues. Concurrently, in literary studies, ecocriticism evolved as a field that examines how literature treats environmental concerns and the subject ofnature. This course examines environmental racism specifically as it effects Indigenous peoples, communities, and territories in the continental United States. One of the earliest examples of environmental racism in the US is the Indian Removal Act of 1830 which forcibly removed southeastern tribes to western lands that were dry, barren, or otherwise incapable of sustaining Native people’s lives. Since World War II, the US military has located its most dangerous military facilities near Indian reservations, and Native people suffer from the fallout of nuclear weapons testing. Extractive resource economies such as oil drilling, coal and uranium mining, and hydroelectric damming disproportionately affect Native peoples whose water and air become polluted and lands become flooded. The US and multinational corporations dispose and illegally dump nuclear, toxic, medical, and otherwise hazardous waste materials on Indian reservations, threatening the safety, health, and lives of Indigenous people and non-human life forms. Students in this course will examine film, literature, criticism, and theories of environmental racism in Native American communities. Course materials may include documentaries like Broken Rainbow (1985) and The Return of Navajo Boy (2000), novels by Linda Hogan (Chickasaw) and Thomas King (Cherokee), Indigenous feminist critique by Mishuana Goeman (Tonawanda Band of Seneca) and Winona LaDuke (White Earth Ojibwe), and works of Indigenous philosophy and theory by Gregory Cajete (Tewa) and Vine Deloria, Jr. (Standing Rock Sioux). According to the requirements of this capstone course for English majors, students will produce a substantive research paper. |
| ENGLISH 106 | HOPE & HOPELESSNESS | LEE, J.W. | This course is about the language of hope and hopelessness. More specifically, it examines how people use linguistic, semiotic, and literary resources to articulate, re-represent, and produce “hope,” especially in the context of the hopelessness of globalization. We will analyze literary artifacts, film, and other social phenomena in tandem with secondary material from a range of academic disciplines, including critical theory, cultural studies, and anthropology. In so doing, we will aim to theorize and understand hope in relation to and across time and geographic space. |
| ENGLISH 106 | ARCHIVES OF PERFORMANCE | HARRIES, M. | It is now a commonplace that performance vanishes: the embodied moment of theatrical co-presence leaves no trace. Nevertheless, few plays leave no trace at all. Focusing on a relatively narrow swath of the 1960s, this course will focus on archives that surround plays and other forms of performance. What can we learn from reviews, letters, photos, drafts, multiple editions? What other traces may performances leave? The course will begin with Tennessee Williams’ Orpheus Descending (1957). This play from the late 1950s will introduce issues relevant to the course’s focus on theater and performance in New York City in the 1960s. The course will include plays, performance texts, and accounts of performances across a range of genres. We will read texts by and about James Baldwin, Amiri Baraka, Samuel Beckett, Adrienne Kennedy, Frank O’Hara, Yoko Ono, and others, and we will consider such companies as the Living Theater and the Judson Dance Group. Readings will include scholarship by theater and performance theorists who have thought about the relationship between the ephemerality of performance and the material traces they leave behind. We will make substantial use of electronic archives: where and when possible, we will also consult traditional archival materials. The course will culminate in final projects in which students prepare final research papers built around the archive of a particular play or performance. |
| ENGLISH 210 | MODERN POETRY, OR THE NAMING OF PARTS | IZENBERG, O. | [Course Code: 23820] Tuesdays 11:00 – 1:50pm in HIB 341 This course seminar pursures two related inquiries. We will consider a selection from the diverse and sometimes internally contradictory archive of poetic practices that have been labelled “modern” or even “Modernist” – terms that are somehow supposed to accomodate compression and fragmentation, and the development of elaborate sequences and structures; impersonality and the cultivation of highly identifiable signatures; intense philsosphical skepticism and idealist abstraction, aesthetic withdrawal and political engagement. At the same time, we will pose a set of theoretical questions relevant to modern (American) poetry (and in some cases, emerging historically alongside it). These will focus on a few notionally basic aspects or qualities of poems that we tend to invoke pretheoretically, or that remain standing despite the crushing weight of prior theoretization. These include: tone, image, form, metaphor, and a few others. We will ask: What is a “tone,” and where in a poem is it located? What is a “form” and does it have an alternative? Can there be a theory (or politics) of metaphor? Posed locally, these questions will help us to explore the history and theory of modern poetry; posed more generally, they will help us to think through the profound problems, and equally profound interest, of interpreting— and even describing— poems. Authors might include: Eliot, Hughes, Moore, Stein, Stevens, Williams. |
| ENGLISH 210 | GENRE & TELEVISION | SZALAY, M. | [Course Code: 23815] Tuesdays 2:00 – 4:50pm in HIB 341 Separate Spheres and other Family Dramas This course uses recent TV about family life--heteronormative and otherwise--as an occasion to ask how cultural forms mediate the relation between gender and capitalism. First, we will examine changes in the division of labor within and beyond the traditional family over the last two centuries. Our point of departure will be the breakdown of the Fordist nuclear family in the early 1970s. Looking back to the formation of separate sphere ideologies in early 19th-century Britain, at the start of industrialization, from the perspective of deindustrialization and the breakdown of state Fordism toward the end of the 20th century, we will ask how successive capitalist crises have redefined gender over time. We will pay particular attention to the enmeshment of gender and race in this long dynamic and to political responses to the crisis of the Fordist family during the 1980s and 1990s, especially as they eventuated in the fateful alliance between neoliberals and new social conservatives that led to the 1996 welfare reforms. We will take up the broad terms and long histories just adumbrated as they are immanent in a particular cultural form: a genre of quality TV that followed The Sopranos. That genre is the “family drama,” and this class will explore the genre’s permutations and its continued centrality to quality TV as a whole, while studying how our profession reads cultural objects symptomatically, in relation to their animating contradictions. Representatives of the genre taken up in class to include: The Sopranos, Weeds, Big Love, Breaking Bad, Orange is the New Black, Atlanta, Transparent, Queen Sugar, and The Handmaid’s Tale. |
| ENGLISH 210 | PUBLICS AND THEATERS | HARRIES, M. | [Course Code: 23810] Thursdays 12:30 – 3:20pm in HIB 341 This course will explore the place of the “public” in theories of literature and art. It will proceed from the assumption that we do not know in advance how an artwork has a public or how artworks belong to the “public sphere.” Debates about this term, the standard English translation of Jürgen Habermas’ Öffentlichkeit, will provide our starting point. Does the public sphere contain embodied publics, or is it always marked by an abstraction from the bodies of readers or spectators? Habermas seems to imply that, while theater may have an audience, it is not part of the public sphere: co-presence is not where the public sphere does its discursive work. Does a gathered audience, then, have no “public” force? Beginning with Habermas and ending with one version of the present, we will trace the dialectic of discourses concerning the formation of the public and discourses about the aesthetic, paying special attention to theater and performance. Alongside Habermas, we will read Rousseau’s Letter to d’Alembert for its influential picture of an alternative form of anti-theatrical public performance. The course will, however, focus on twentieth-century and contemporary examples from Samuel Beckett to Julian Rosefeldt and Cate Blanchett’s Manifesto. We will track the relationship between embodied publics and various forms of broadcast and other mass media. Might historically distinct forms of publics for theater and other forms of performance form themselves precisely in relation to mass culture’s patterns of interpellation and address? What are these counterpublics that gather in negative relation to the mass-mediated public sphere? Critical readings for the course will include texts by Christopher Balme, Lauren Berlant, Elizabeth Dillon, Nancy Fraser, Habermas, Miriam Hansen, Julia Jarcho, Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge, Peggy Phelan, Nicholas Ridout, and Michael Warner. |
| ENGLISH 210 | THE WAYS OF DEATH | ALLEN, E. | Course Code: 23805] Fridays 2:00 – 4:50pm in HIB 341 This course will explore literature of crossing from life to death and back, centering on medieval texts but reaching earlier and later to seek cross-period resonances. The ultimate transition between life and death evokes other transits, linguistic, temporal, and erotic. From privileged visits to the underworld in Homer and Virgil to King Arthur, once and future king; from the medieval Orpheus who brings his dead wife home to George Saunders's Abraham Lincoln, gripped by grief, this course will explore the permeable membrane between the living and the dead, and the crafts that arise from and carry us between these realms. Western attitudes toward death have shifted over time, and literature registers this history; yet literature also resists customary and habitual frameworks, rendering death mobile, sensory, live; not just an impasse but a spatial and bodily experience of mutability. In fact, arguably, the living always travel in transition, in the world of the dead, with bodies buried beneath our feet and cultures buried beneath our architecture. This fact of liminal existence produces profound grief and its mitigations: melancholias, architectural wonders, arts of dying, purgatorial imaginings, the founding of empires. The fact of death haunts the living, enhancing the perception of life and the value of the created world and of human creativity within it. Texts may include selections from Homer’sOdyssey, Virgil’sAeneid, Boethius’Consolation of Philosophy, Dante’sDivine Comedy, Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, Malory’s Morte Darthur, the anonymous Sir Orfeo, the anonymous Digby play of Mary Magdalene, Shakespeare’s Winter’s Tale, Tennyson’s Idylls of the King, Saunders’s Lincoln at the Bardo,and Harding’s Tinkers. The course aims to gather insight from both historical and philosophical accounts, including works such as Philippe Ariès's The Hour of Our Death, Jacques Derrida's Aporias, and Robert Pogue Harrison’s The Dominion of the Dead. |
| ENGLISH 210 | EARLY MODERN POETICS | HELFER, R. | [Course Code: 23800] Mondays 2:00 – 4:50pm in HIB 341 This course explores early modern English literary theory-in-practice, with a particular focus on how issues and strategies related to memory helped to shape a poetics of recollection central to Renaissance writing. Throughout the course, we’ll pursue the complex and fundamentally interdisciplinary nature of the history of poetics, which blurs the boundaries between fiction and non-fiction, and which emerges from and engages with a wide range of fields, including philosophy, psychology, pedagogy, rhetoric, theology, history, and in most contexts, with issues of politics and power. In many respects the aim of this course is to appreciate how such interdisciplinarity, or multidisciplinarity, fundamentally challenges any notion of early modern poetics as narrowly literary or rhetorical, and instead as fundamentally expressive of long-held debates about the social role of stories and their place in both individual and collective memory. Starting with Philip Sidney’s seminal defense of poetry, his 16th-century Apology for Poetry, we’ll consider fundamental principles of Renaissance poetics – imitation and innovation or invention, and the role of image-making and imagination therein – as well as the broader interdisciplinary dialogue and debate about poetics that informs Sidney’s writing and, indeed, early modern poetics. From here, we’ll look back to key classical works and then forward to consider their reception and transformation in the early modern period, engaging with important Italian works by Dante, Petrarch, and Castiglione, as well as exemplary English texts that include Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella, Spenser’s Faerie Queene, and Shakespeare’s Sonnets and Hamlet. |
| ENGLISH 255 | WORKSHOP IN ACADEMIC PUBLISHING | MARTIN, T. | 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 workshop is reserved for PhD students who have advanced to candidacy. |