| Course | Title | Instructor | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
| ENGLISH 9 | SHAKESPEARE | LUPTON, J. | E9 Shakespeare [ONLINE] This course uses three plays by William Shakespeare to explore the playwright’s poetic gifts, his theatrical imagination, his global references and concerns, and his inquiry into human relationships and the human condition. We will read A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Twelfth Night, and Othello. Topics will include love and friendship; gender and race; holiday and festival; sojourn and homecoming; masks and metamorphosis; and music and movement. Students will complete three multi-modal assignments as well as quizzes, comprehension questions, and peer evaluation of creative assignments. |
| ENGLISH 9 | SHAKESPEARE | LUPTON, J. | E9 Shakespeare [M W F 10:00-11:00am] This course uses three plays by William Shakespeare to explore the playwright’s poetic gifts, his theatrical imagination, his global references and concerns, and his inquiry into human relationships and the human condition. We will read Romeo and Juliet, Twelfth Night, and Othello. Topics will include love and friendship; gender and race; holiday and festival; sojourn and homecoming; and music and movement. Students will complete three multi-modal assignments as well as reading quizzes and peer responses. |
| ENGLISH 11 | SOCIETY, LAW, & LIT | QUEEN, B. | The Rhetoric of Free Speech & Expression 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. Near the end of the spring quarter in 2020, this course will offer students the opportunity to participate in a one-day conference to take place here at UCI. “Free Speech Now!: Intersections and Tensions” is sponsored and funded by the U.C. National Center for Free Speech and Civic Engagement and will bring together a community of students, scholars, legal practitioners, and gaming industry experts to discuss issues and questions around the First Amendment of relevance to us all. |
| ENGLISH 11C | SOCIETY, LAW, & LIT | QUEEN, B. | Click here for more information regarding E11C. The Rhetoric of Free Speech & Expression 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. Near the end of the spring quarter in 2020, this course will offer students the opportunity to participate in a one-day conference to take place here at UCI. “Free Speech Now!: Intersections and Tensions” is sponsored and funded by the U.C. National Center for Free Speech and Civic Engagement and will bring together a community of students, scholars, legal practitioners, and gaming industry experts to discuss issues and questions around the First Amendment of relevance to us all. |
| ENGLISH 15 | SHAKESPEARE AND LOVE | HELFER, R. | “If music be the food of love, play on,” Shakespeare writes in Twelfth Night, with a romanticism that belies the dizzying varieties of love that his plays dramatize. In this course, we’ll explore the wide range of ways that Shakespeare represents love: from romantic and erotic desire, to familial love and friendship, from youthful idealism to mature realism, and everything in between. Along the way, we’ll consider a complex matrix of issues – psychological, social, historical, and political – that Shakespeare gives voice to through the language of love. You’ll read four plays – Romeo and Juliet, Twelfth Night, Othello, and King Lear – do short writing assignments, one longer essay, and a final. |
| ENGLISH 17 | CRAFT OF FICTION | SEFIC, D. | 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. Coursework includes two short critical essays, a longer final essay, and a fiction practicum, as well as weekly reading responses. |
| ENGLISH 100 | INTRODUCTION TO LITERARY THEORY AND CRITICISM | 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 101W | SHAKESPEARE AND LOVE | HELFER, R. | When are love stories not exactly love stories? Or, put another way, when are love stories about much more than they seem to be? That’s the question we’ll be asking in this course as we read tales of love and marriage, friendship and family, human and divine devotion, that challenge, invert, and even up-end our sense of what constitutes a love story. These narratives, erotic and platonic, rewrite the language of love in order to explore a range of subjects and issues – literary, social, cultural, historical, political – in symbolic and even allegorical terms. Our reading will take us from the distant past to the present day, from Plato’s Symposium to Shteyngart’s Super Sad True Love Story. Course requirements include short writing assignments and two longer essays. |
| ENGLISH 101W | WORKING | TUCKER, I. | This course will investigate the shifting history of the concept of work. Some questions we will ask: When and in what context did work come to be understood as an essential practice of self-expression? What are the different ways in which the work of multiple people is understood to link or divide them? How does the existence of compulsory work – slavery – affect our conceptions of work as free expression? Is literary production to be understood as a kind of work, or something to be distinguished from work? Does the relation between work and literary writing change depending whether the “work” in question is poetry or prose? We will read the writings of several important theorists of work, including John Locke and Karl Marx before moving to poetry about work from 19th-century poets including William Wordsworth, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Anna Leticia Barbauld and Frances Harper, followed by more contemporary poets including Robert Pinsky, Philip Levine, Muriel Ruykeser, John Ashbery and Mary Oliver. We will conclude with a sustained engagement with two narratives that dramatize the peril and precariousness of work: 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, and the Belgian film Two Days, One Night, the real-time narrative of a woman who must petition her coworkers in order to get her job back. |
| ENGLISH 101W | GOTHIC REVAMPED | LEWIS, J. | How many vampires does it take to change an avid reader into an accomplished critical writer? Exactly as many as you will meet in this upper-division writing seminar, which will track the charismatic figure of the vampire from its arrival in early nineteenth-century fiction (the physician John Polidori’s 1816 short story The Vampyre) to its most recent dusting into a staple of young adult romantic fantasy (Twilight). Vampires can’t see their own reflections. But over the last two centuries, their place on the uncertain border between life and death has made them a mirror for a number of uniquely modern fears and anxieties: about contagion, immigration, female empowerment, collective action, queer and transsexuality, racial mixing, social change, and religious crisis. Meanwhile, the male vampire’s charismatic melancholy suits him perfectly to the artistic role of the tragic hero, while female vampires band together to drain authority from myths of feminine propriety. But why is the vampire’s story so incessantly revamped? How does that story change to reflect the fears and fantasies specific to unique historical moments? What critical approaches can we drive into the vampire’s undead heart? Our central text will of course be Bram Stoker’s Dracula, but others include Sheridan LeFanu’s Carmilla, Octavia Butler’s Fledgling, and some select short stories starring the vampire. Three papers, one growing out of a Week 10 collaborative project based on a film or TV representation of the vampire. |
| ENGLISH 102A | PREMODERN PSYCH | DAVIS, R. | Long before modern psychology gave us a vocabulary for analyzing the workings of our minds, medieval writers used personification allegory (a technique revived in the 2015 Pixar film Inside Out) to describe the mental and volitional “faculties” that enable thought, emotion, decision-making, and creativity. To explore how premodern writers constructed theories of the mind, we’ll read a selection of late-classical, medieval, and early modern texts including Augustine’s Confessions, Prudentius’s Psychomachia, Langland’s Piers Plowman, Chaucer’s House of Fame, the Castle of Perseverance, and Shakespeare’s Richard III. In these texts, literary techniques open up philosophical and theological questions about the relationship of body and psyche (from the Greek for “soul”), the existence of free will, and the demands of conscience. Course requirements include regular attendance and participation; a midterm; a final; and two short papers. |
| ENGLISH 102B | LATE 18TH C LIT | ROBERTS, H. | This course explores the literature, philosophy and politics of the literature of sensibility in England during the late eighteenth century. Required Reading All texts will be made available as pdfs on the class Canvas site. |
| ENGLISH 102B | ENLIGHTNMNT & REVOL | VAN DEN ABBEEL, G. | The Eighteenth Century is often called the Age of Enlightenment for the widespread diffusion of philosophical ideas that promoted the critical use of reason against various forms of ignorance, superstition, authoritarianism, and prejudice. Kant’s credo, “dare to know,” was meant to encourage the liberation of human beings from oppression, physical and ideological, by means of their self-empowerment through education. To this egalitarian end, it was, in Montesquieu’s words, “essential that the people be enlightened.” But Enlightenment thinkers did not see education as based solely in books but also more generally as a function of practical experience, including travel and the meaningful encounter with foreign peoples and cultures. It was foreseeable that an “enlightened” populace would no longer accept the strictures of traditional monarchy and would demand the institution of democratic societies, be that at the cost of extreme violence and insurrection. The Age of Enlightenment would thus culminate in both the American and French revolutions. We will explore the philosophical and literary expressions of Enlightenment thinking along with a reflection on the relationship of that thinking to the previously unimagined possibility of revolution, as famously inscribed in the American Declaration of Independence (1776) and the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen (1789). In addition to a critical reading of these two founding documents, we will read from works by Immanuel Kant, “What is Enlightenment?”; David Hume, An Enquiry on Human Understanding; Alexander Pope, “Essay on Man”; Bernard Mandeville, “Fable of the Bees”; Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe; Baron Montesquieu, Persian Letters; Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Turkish Letters; Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels; Voltaire, Candide; Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discourse on the Origin of Inequality; the Marquis de Sade, Philosophy in the Bedroom; Thomas Paine, The Rights of Man; and Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France. In addition to the readings and active class discussion, students will be expected to write two formal essays, keep a journal of ideas, and give an oral presentation on material related to the course. |
| 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. By reading the works of lesser known poets of the period (such as Anna Letitia Barbauld, Mary Robinson, Charlotte Smith etc.) alongside such familiar figures as Blake, Coleridge, and Wordsworth we will be able to 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 aesthetic prose 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: Jack Stillinger and Deidre Lynch (eds). The Norton Anthology of English Literature: The Romantic Period (Vol D) Ninth or Tenth Edition; Norton, 2006; occasional handouts and web documents. |
| ENGLISH 102C | TRANSCENDENTALISM | JENSEN, I. | Understood as an extension of and reply to English and German Romanticism as well as a self-conscious attempt to build a “national literature,” American Transcendentalism is one of the singular achievements of American literature in the antebellum period. While Transcendentalism has a well-enough earned reputation as having its head in the clouds, so to speak, it was also a political literature grounded firmly in notions of freedom and liberty that spoke out for abolition and women’s rights. In this class, we will read Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau fairly widely, while also examining the work of Transcendentalist critic and intellectual Margaret Fuller and the poet (William) Ellery Channing. We’ll also get a contemporary perspective on the movement in Hawthorne’s novel The Blithedale Romance. We will focus on understanding both the literary practices and thought of the Transcendentalists we read. Graded assignments will include an in-class midterm, an in-class final, and an essay. |
| ENGLISH 102D | MODERNST LITERATURE | IZENBERG, O. | In this course, we will read a remarkable sequence of novels, poems and stories written in English, from the birth of the last century through the 1950s. The syllabus does not tell the whole story of the Modernist period, or even a single story. Rather, it focuses on idiosyncratic originals who stand in uneasy relation to larger wholes; it pits the relentless pursuit of novelty against the unrefusable burdens of history and memory; it achieves the momentary appearance of completion only to be shattered by its own exclusions. In all of this, our syllabus resembles Europe and the United States in a time of great progress and unprecedented violence. We will study the forms and themes, aesthetics and politics of Anglophone literature in the first half of the 20th century with an appreciative and critical eye, and consider the relationship between important historical events (two World Wars, the Great Depression, the feminist movement and the struggle for racial equality) and works of verbal art. Authors may include: T.S. Eliot, Langston Hughes, Marianne Moore, Ezra Pound, Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein, Jean Toomer, W.B. Yeats, among others. |
| ENGLISH 102D | POSTCOLONIAL LITERATURE AND THEORY | RADHAKRISHNAN, R. | In this course, we will be taking a selective but deep look into some of the powerful and often revolutionary fiction produced in the formerly colonized areas of Asia and Africa. Here is a tentative list of works and authors to be studied: Things Fall Apart (Achebe, Nigeria), A Grain of Wheat (our own wonderful Ngugi wa Thiong’ O, Kenya), Shadow Lines (Amitav Ghosh, India), Burger’s Daughter (Nadine Gordimer, South Africa), Nervous Conditions (Tsi-tsi Dangarembga, Zimbabwe), Waiting for the Barbarians (J.M. Coetzee, South Africa), God’s Bits of Wood (Ousmane Sembene, Senegal). We will be analyzing and interpreting the fiction within the larger macro-political context of Colonialism and its aftermath. The themes that will animate and inform the course are: Tradition and modernity; Eurocentrism and Afrocentrism; the politics of Gender and Sexuality between the West and the non-West; Nationalism and Feminism; Nationalism in the post-colonial context; Enlightenment Reason and the politics of decolonization; Postcolonial double-consciousness; Secularism and the Nation state; Nationalism, Populism, and the politics of representation; Race, Sovereignty, and the Nation State; Self and Other and the Colonial Divide; Subjectivity and Collectivity in the postcolonial condition; People and the Intellectual in the post-colony; and the Cultural politics of the “post-“ after Colonialism. Even as we pursue these themes by way of a careful close reading of the texts, we will also be looking at a few influential theoretical essays by postcolonial critics and theorists (Frantz Fanon, Chinua Achebe, Ngugi wa Thiong’O, Edward Said) to frame and contextualize our discussion. Format: Lecture and discussion. Requirements and Expectations: Regular attendance and participation. Possibly 1 short paper (5 pages) and 1Long Paper (7 to 10 pages). |
| ENGLISH 105 | AMERICAN INDIAN AUTOBIOGRAPHIES | COX, A. | In “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” Walter Benjamin famously “asks with whom the adherents of historicism actually empathize” and argues that “The answer is inevitable: with the victor.” Certainly, popular histories of the United States marginalize the experiences and viewpoints of Indigenous Peoples and portray the vanquishing of Native nations as inevitable or justified for the sake of spreading Western civilization. This course explores how American Indian people have authored autobiographies as a way of telling the histories of Indian-settler relations from their perspectives. Students will consider questions of genre and style by examining the unique structural pattern that Indian autobiographers establish through blending personal experience with tribal mythography and oral traditions and incorporating artwork and photography into their narratives. Examining course texts with a focus on their cultural critique and political significance in the context of ongoing US settler colonialism, students will gain a transnational Indigenous perspective as course texts include autobiographies by Native people from the Hopi, Pequot, Eastern Dakota, Kumeyaay, Laguna Pueblo, Lenape, Kiowa, and Osage nations. Course requirements include: regular attendance and participation, one take-home midterm exam, and one final research paper. |
| ENGLISH 105 | BLACK INTERNATIONALISM | NOLAND, C. | English 105/French 170/ELS 200C: The term “Black Internationalism” refers to a movement of African and African diasporic peoples to unite across national and ethnic boundaries. In dialogue with the Socialist tradition (often identified with the rise of the industrial worker in the late 18th century) and Communism (a movement established by Marx and Engels in 1848), Black Internationalism developed into a race- and culture-based critique of these allied European movements. The first Pan-African Conference was held in London in 1900, giving birth to many subsequent activities that joined together the cultural elites of the Black world and advancing what is arguably the greatest challenge to—and extension of—Enlightenment thought. In this course, we will study the literature of Black writers involved in the political and cultural agitation of the 20th century. Readings will include writings by W. E. B. Dubois, Marcus Garvey, Claude McKay, Langston Hughes, Paulette Nardal, Aimé Césaire, Frantz Fanon, C. L. R. James, Richard Wright, James Baldwin, Edouard Glissant, Paul Gilroy, and Brent Hayes Edwards. |
| ENGLISH 105 | KOREAN CINEMA | JEON, J. | ENGL 105 Korean Cinema. Co-taught with Kyung Hyun Kim (East Asian Studies) Same as 24280 Flm&Mda 160, Lec B This course examines the South Korean cinema today, and seeks to understand how it is shaped by re-interpretation of history and genre bending. The course will explore the Korean film history, aesthetics, and commercial industry, and also analyze several key texts that are critical to their understanding. This class, I insist, is on learning how to watch, think about, and write about film; in the same vein that we need to learn how to think about literature or other topics in humanities. Please be advised that some of the films featured in this class may contain scenes of explicit sexual or violent nature. All films will be screened with English subtitles. Weekly screenings, lectures, and discussions. |
| ENGLISH 106 | LOVE STORIES? | HELFER, R. | When are love stories not exactly love stories? Or, put another way, when are love stories about much more than they seem to be? That’s the question we’ll be asking in this course as we read tales of love and marriage, friendship and family, human and divine devotion, that challenge, invert, and even up-end our sense of what constitutes a love story. These narratives, erotic and platonic, rewrite the language of love in order to explore a range of subjects and issues – literary, social, cultural, historical, political – in symbolic and even allegorical terms. Our reading will take us from the distant past to the present day, from Plato’s Symposium to Shteyngart’s Super Sad True Love Story. Course requirements include short writing assignments and two longer essays. |
| ENGLISH 106 | JOYCE'S ULYSSES | O'CONNOR, L. | This capstone seminar for English majors is designed to make James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) accessible and enjoyable as you immerse yourself in reading the novel and writing a research paper on a Ulysses topic of your own devising. Ulysses features on bucket lists because it is lauded as the finest and most influential twentieth-century novel, and yet many readers are daunted by its reputation as “difficult.” It can be arduous at times, but the novel’s relish for the ordinary soon banishes undue solemnity as one becomes absorbed in the often very funny thoughts of the main characters as they go about their daily activities. A sociable novel, it lends itself to reading in concert with others in the convivial context of a seminar devoted to it. Our itinerary will cover 2 or 3 episodes each week as we follow the thoughts of Stephen Dedalus and Leopold and Molly Bloom and other Dubliners over the course of a single day, June 16th 1904. Students are required to submit a prospectus and annotated bibliography by the mid-quarter deadline, to engage in the peer-reviewing process, and to submit a 12-15 page term paper on June 4th. The 1984 Hans Gabler edition of Ulysses (ISBN 0394743121) is required, even if you already have another edition of Ulysses, because it is essential for the success of the seminar for everyone to be “on the same page.” |
| ENGLISH 106 | CHAUCER CANTERBURY TALES | ALLEN, E. | Late fourteenth-century England saw great social turmoil. Plague wiped out a third of the population; peasants and artisans rose against aristocracy; the King struggled to retain authority and was eventually deposed; the Church was divided against itself. Out of this social unrest comes Chaucer's Canterbury Tales—a new kind of poetry for a rapidly changing audience. Thirty pilgrims tell stories to pass the time en route to Canterbury Cathedral, and along the way they encounter the problems raised and satisfactions achieved in forming a socially various community. The work creates a lively microcosm of the turbulent late medieval world, complete with a cook so drunk he falls off his horse and a parson so virtuous he won't tell a story. We will read many of the Canterbury Tales, from the Knight’s Tale to the Retraction. We will begin by exploring the General Prologue’s depiction of storytelling as a way of constituting a community. How does the Canterbury pilgrimage highlight medieval status identities? To what extent do the pilgrims reaffirm gender norms? To what extent do the Talesconfirm or question the power of those who rule? As we read the Tales themselves, we will focus increasingly on the tellers and the settings they choose. Which pilgrims tell which sorts of tales? To what extent do tales ‘match’ their tellers? What do the landscapes and spaces they choose—taverns, stadiums, houses, haunted woods, and the cathedral sanctuary that the pilgrims never reach—allow the pilgrims to say or prevent them from saying? And, circling back to social questions: how do the storyteller, the genre, and the setting of a tale affect what the tale can say about status, gender, rule, or other social issues? Readings are in Middle English, but no prior experience of the language is expected or required. We will experiment with translation and language exercises, and you will occasionally respond to informal questions in writing; you will also write a close-reading paper (4-5 pp.), a critical analysis paper (4-5 pp.) and a longer essay (7-10 pp.). |
| ENGLISH 106 | CRITICAL TV STUDIES | SZALAY, M. | TV and The F***** Up Family This course will examine TV’s longstanding romance with middle-class family life, and why that love affair now seems all but over (at least on cable and web TV). Broadcast TV like The Ozzie and Harriet Show, The Brady Bunch, and The Waltons depicted family life as appealing and supportive, no matter the family quirks in question. But in programs like All in the Family, The Jeffersons, Dynasty, Dallas, Twin Peaks and The Sopranos, we see the emergence of the dysfunction, hostility, and hardship that now often characterizes family life on cable and web TV. This course is part sociology of the family and part economic history, insofar as we will read widely in how and why the middle class family changed beyond TV. But ultimately, we will ask why we love watching f***** up families, and why they came to define our era of Peak TV, in programs like Weeds, Breaking Bad, Atlanta, The Handmaid’s Tale, Empire, Transparent, Jane the Virgin, Queen Sugar, and many others. Students will be expected to attend class regularly and complete all readings. By our halfway point, students will have identified the TV program that will be the subject of their final research paper. In addition to that paper, students will produce shorter papers and some in-class writing exercises. |
| ENGLISH 210 | SCREEN, CULTURE & MEDIA | JEON, J. | [Course Code: 23810] Tuesdays 11:00 – 1:50pm in HIB 341 This course will focus on recent film and media theory and criticism. We will think particularly about the way in which newer media forms (digital art, videogames, etc.), emerging out of contemporary technological developments, interact with their older counterparts (Film and TV). We will also consider how these aesthetic practices map onto the industrial, economic, and political changes that have characterized recent history. Readings may include works by Wendy Chun, Alexander Galloway, Jonathan Crary, JD Connor, Tung Hui-Hu, and others. |
| ENGLISH 210 | MEDIEVAL MINDS | DAVIS, R. | [Course Code: 23805] Fridays 2:00 – 4:50pm in HIB 411 Long before modern psychology and cutting-edge discoveries in neuroscience gave us a vocabulary for analyzing the workings of our minds, medieval writers used personification allegory to describe the mental and volitional “faculties” that enable thought, emotion, memory, decision-making, and creativity. To explore how premodern writers constructed theories of the mind, we’ll read a selection of late-classical, medieval, and early modern texts including Aristotle’s De anima, Prudentius’s Psychomachia, Langland’s Piers Plowman, Chaucer’s House of Fame, the Castle of Perseverance, and Shakespeare’s Richard III. In these texts, literary techniques open up philosophical and theological questions about the relationship of body and psyche (from the Greek for “soul”), the existence of free will, and the demands of conscience. Along with primary texts, we will investigate questions posed by cognitive theory and studies in the philosophy of mind, phenomenological approaches, and theories of form and embodiment. How do medieval texts represent a theory of consciousness? What does it mean—what does it feel like?—to have a mind in medieval texts? Where do medieval writers set the boundaries between what’s outside and what’s inside, and to what extent do those boundaries in fact prove to be porous and shifting, more interface than rigid barrier? Seminar requirements include attendance and participation; a presentation; and a 20-page seminar paper; students taking the course as a proseminar may write a 10-page conference paper in lieu of the longer seminar paper. |
| ENGLISH 210 | DEATH AND UNDEATH IN THE ENLIGHTENMENT | LEWIS, J. | [Course Code: 23800] Tuesdays 5:00 – 7:50pm in HIB 411 “The fatalism by which incomprehensible death was sanctioned in primeval times has now passed over into utterly comprehensible life.” So proposed Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer in their epochal Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944). Michel Foucault subsequently maintained that life became comprehensible in the 18th century—thus subject to new forms of power—when it was corporealized and objectified via modernizing scientific medicine. But if Enlightenment science birthed a world in which embodied persons, like doornails , are matter alone—and in which death, definitively split from life, no longer serves as a portal to another one—why then are there so many ghosts, elegies that extend life beyond death, walking corpses, and self-narrating dead persons in the literature of this period? In this seminar, we will question some of these undead suspects about their relationship to the enlightened modernity that presumably put an end to them. Can it be that death simply gained a new lease on life, taking on new forms, wearing new faces, provoking new anxieties, and offering new consolations to the living and dying alike? Just how did transatlantic cultural actors, caught between the optimism of scientifically expanded life spans and the specter of the total stoppage of a (presumably) now known entity, conceive of death in—and after—the Enlightenment? From a literary perspective (ours), how were their conceptions linked to generic transformation (elegy), crisis (the life writing of socially dead persons), and innovation (gothic romance)? How did the social, political, and legal forms emergent in the period actually consign certain persons to undeath? How did social death interact symbolically with bodily death in the contexts of slavery and the subjugation of women? Early gothic literature looms large on our syllabus (The Monk, Frankenstein), but we will also disinter a number of classic elegies by and / or about Phillis Wheatley, Charlotte Smith, Jonathan Swift, and Thomas Gray; come to grips with the so-called Graveyard School of mid-century British poetry; bust the ghost of Hamlet’s Yorick as it haunts mid-century sentimental fiction; and consider the emergence of actuarial and demographic conceptions of death via two plague narratives—Defoe’s proto-gothic Journal of the Plague Year and Mary Shelley’s post-gothic The Last Man—and the legal case of the slaveship Zong. Excerpts from Jefferson, Irving, and Freneau will help us think about the role that mourning, encryption, and genocide played in the birth of the early American republic and about the possibility of what Max Cavitch calls “constitutional elegy”: is America itself by definition undead? Is rational enlightenment itself a form of undeath? What isn’t? How grim could the reaper really get in a period that prided itself on its ever-expanding horizons? Appearances—and some difficult topics—notwithstanding, you will need a sense of humor for this seminar. How else can we go on? |
| ENGLISH 255 | GRADUATE WORKSHOP IN ACADEMIC PUBLISHING | IZENBERG, O. | [Course Code: 23830] Wednesdays 9:00 – 11:50am in HIB 311 Reading and critique of student-authored essays with the goal of producing a publishable essay. Instructor leads discussion, meets with students individually, and provides an introduction to appropriate venues for publication and the process of submission, peer review, and revision. |
| ENGLISH 398 | RHETORIC/TEACHING OF COMPOSITION | QUEEN, B | [Course Code: 23975] Mondays 2:00 - 4:50pm in ALP 2200] Readings, lectures, and internship designed to prepare graduate students to teach composition. Formal instruction in rhetoric and practical work in teaching methods and grading. |