| Course | Title | Instructor | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
| ENGLISH 9 | SHAKESPEARE | LUPTON, J. | This designed-for-online class features three plays by Shakespeare and professionally-produced lectures by Julia Lupton plus faculty guests, including Rebeca Helfer, Andrea Henderson, Kyle Grady, and Sheiba Kaufman. Interactive lectures and multimodal projects encourage students to think like directors and actors as they enter the exciting play worlds of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Twelfth Night, and Othello. The course will also feature optional Watch Parties and special events celebrating the power of Shakespeare. Check out some sample “Selfie Soliloquies” made by UCI students for this course! |
| ENGLISH 10 | GLOBAL SHORTSTORIES | LEE, J.W. | Edgar Allan Poe claimed that short stories were a superior literary form to novels because, unlike novels, short stories can be read in one sitting. Since a novel cannot be read in one sitting, Poe argued, it was inevitable that “external or extrinsic influences,” or “[w]orldly interests intervening during the pauses of perusal” would shape or disrupt the reader’s experience with the text. In the experience of reading a short story, on the other hand, “the soul of the reader is at the writer’s control” because there are no distractions from the real world, so to speak. In this class, we will read and closely study “global” short stories, written by authors from the US (of course a handful by Poe) and around the world. In so doing, we will examine what it means to read or try to read in a way that is not interrupted by “worldly interests.” In short, we will approach the act of reading and studying literature not only with the goal of becoming immersed in the text in order to forget about the “world” (we all need a break from reality here and there) but as a way of helping us make sense of the “world.” Assignments for the course will include short weekly assignments, a midterm, and a final paper. |
| ENGLISH 10 | LITERATURES OF EARLY AMERICA, 1600-1865 | BASU, S. | This course surveys English-language American literature from the colonial era to the revolutionary, early national, and antebellum periods. We shall read captivity narratives, slave narratives, ballads, autobiographies, gallows sermons, novels and more to think of the ways in which competing models of colonialism, nationalist discourse, and early modern ideas surrounding race evolved in the English Atlantic world. Representative writers would include John Winthrop, Anne Bradstreet, Thomas Morton, Patience Boston, Leonora Sansay, Phillis Wheatley, Charles Brockden Brown, and William Wells Brown. We shall also read some writings on the New World by English authors such as Daniel Defoe, John Milton, Alexander Pope, and Jonathan Swift. |
| 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 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 and violent rhetoric in politics and in various media, freedom of access to information on the Internet and the changing nature of public forums, and debates about the role of government in regulating online speech environments—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 takes up questions about 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. This year, English 11/11C offers students the opportunity to participate in a one-day symposium that will take place late in the spring quarter. “Free Speech Now!: Intersections and Tensions” is sponsored by the U.C. National Center for Free Speech and Civic Engagement and by the UCI Humanities Center and will bring together students, scholars, legal practitioners, and others within the virtual setting of a major public university to discuss questions emanating from the First Amendment of relevance to us all. |
| 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 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 and violent rhetoric in politics and in various media, freedom of access to information on the Internet and the changing nature of public forums, and debates about the role of government in regulating online speech environments—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 takes up questions about 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. This year, English 11/11C offers students the opportunity to participate in a one-day symposium that will take place late in the spring quarter. “Free Speech Now!: Intersections and Tensions” is sponsored by the U.C. National Center for Free Speech and Civic Engagement and by the UCI Humanities Center and will bring together students, scholars, legal practitioners, and others within the virtual setting of a major public university to discuss questions emanating from the First Amendment of relevance to us all. |
| ENGLISH 15 | AFRICAN AMERICAN LITERATURE | CHANDLER, N | |
| ENGLISH 15 | SEAMUS HEANEY | O'CONNOR, L | This course introduces you to the art of reading and writing about poetry by way of Northern Irish poet and Nobel laureate, Seamus Heaney. A public poet, Heaney seeks ways to address the sectarian strife in Northern Ireland known as “the Troubles” (1968-1998) without “hitching a ride on the headlines.” Yet he also relishes the ordinary, and some of his best loved poems evoke the rhythms of rural life. We’ll focus on the elegy as a significant genre in his “poetry of redress,” not least because it straddles the public and the intimate spheres of his life. Two essays and weekly writing. |
| ENGLISH 17 | CRAFT OF FICTION | GODDEN, R. | Readers, writers and literary scholars frequently use words like, ‘realistic,’ ‘voice,’ ‘irony,’ ‘metaphor,’ ‘character’ as though the meaning of those terms were self-evident. Holding that this may not be the case, the seminar-based course will address these and other terms by way of a mix of short stories and theoretical writings. The purpose of the course is, at all times, to explore and enable the process of close reading, understood as inseparable from the activity of writing well. Response papers and new writing will form the basis of assessment. |
| ENGLISH 100 | INTRODUCTION TO LITERARY THEORY | MCCLANAHAN, A. | If this thing we call “Theory” is to have not just an afterlife but a life—to continue to be urgent, illuminating, necessary—it will have to be in constant critical conversation with the present. For this class, then, each week we’ll read an excerpt from a “classic” theory text (Kant, Adorno, Benjamin, Marx, Fanon, Butler, Foucault) alongside a more recent intervention written in a accessible style (what I term “vernacular theory”), from pop culture criticism to personal essays and “auto-theory.” In your own writing for the course, you’ll learn not just to cite theory but also to write it, and will produce a theoretical essay of your own modeled after one we’ve read. Succeeding in this class will require patience with demanding texts and an abiding curiosity about how to describe and reimagine the world around you. |
| ENGLISH 101W | THE UNCANNY | LEWIS, J. | What do ghosts, doppelgangers, alter egos, déjà vu, split personalities, bats, identical twins, androids, and Pinocchio have in common? All are examples of ‘the’ uncanny. Not quite a noun--but not entirely an adjective either—the uncanny is the strangely familiar and the familiarly strange that haunts the borders of human life. Literature, built on the verbal art of ambiguity, has long been the perfect place to explore the psychology, aesthetics, and ethics of the uncanny; there’s a reason Freud based his influential theory (which you will read) on a short story by ETA Hoffmann, and why the meaning of the word itself, for him, had an uncanny quality. Later, Freud’s successor Jacques Lacan would write that the uncanny places us "in the field where we do not know how to distinguish bad and good, pleasure from displeasure.” What does it mean to find ourselves on that borderline, stranded in the so-called “uncanny valley” with only our not-selves for company? As a team, working in the uncanny space of the remote classroom, we’ll explore several classic works of fiction that can help us understand this defining (and undoing) aspect of human experience and identity: a fairy tale or two; The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, and short stories by writers ranging from Edgar Allan Poe and Sheridan LeFanu to Joyce Carol Oates and Carmen Maria Machado. This is also a writing-intensive course so three critical papers (one revised) and several short writing exercises are part of the deal. |
| ENGLISH 101W | CLIMATE FICTION | MARTIN, T. | How do you write about something as large scale, long term, and nearly unimaginable as climate change? This is the question at the heart of the twenty-first-century genre that’s come to be known as “cli-fi” (rhymes with “sci-fi”), or climate fiction. In this course, we’ll read several major works of cli-fi and put them in conversation with other modes of writing about the climate crisis, including science writing and poetry. What, we’ll ask, are the different literary strategies writers have used to make the catastrophe of climate change legible to readers? And how effective are those strategies—not just in helping us understand the causes and consequences of climate change, but more importantly, in convincing us to come together to do something about it? |
| ENGLISH 102A | EARLY MODERN SELF | SILVER, V. | This is a course about irony in early modern literature and specifically the literary ironizing of a self that does not recognize its own disabilities and limitations. Sometime around the 14th century, western culture once again began to doubt the powers of the human mind and its artifacts to recognize and represent the true and the good. In a Christian era, this incapacity of human perception, reason, language and knowledge was attributed to the condition of original sin, whose congenital corruption of the soul not only rendered humanity disposed to evil but blind to its (self-) deceptions and prey to its passions and the violence they foment. Nonetheless, the good were still thought able to overcome their sinful debility in the ardent and strenuous pursuit of the ideal, by which they might transcend their own sinful nature, achieving right knowledge of and communion with its divine creator, the source of all good and all truth. But the world of symbolic appearances that had instructed humanity in the ideal began to unravel, disperse, dissolve into ambiguity and uncertainty. As the magical world of resemblances was disenchanted, so attention turned to the inventor of that world—the human mind and its perverse capacity not only to devise but succumb to its own illusions. Readings include Gawain and the Green Knight, Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, Montaigne’s Essays, Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night and his sonnets. Requirements are two takehome exam |
| ENGLISH 102B | MAKE ENGLAND GREAT AGAIN | COLLINS, R. | On December 19, 2020, President Trump tweeted the following: “Big protest in D.C. on January 6th. Be there, will be wild!” And wild it was. Protestors stormed the Capitol building where the legislative branch of the federal government was in session to count the electoral votes that would officially determine the winner of the 2020 presidential election. At the heart of this insurrection, as it has come to be called, was a President who used an old narrative about American exceptionalism to undermine its government. In this narrative, Americans are courageous rebels against oppressive and elitist governments. They demand freedom from tyranny. They act according to conscience. They won’t be taxed unfairly on their tea. The MAGA crowd on January 6th who repeatedly chanted “stop the steal!” believed itself to be acting on behalf of this narrative, a story often told through the lens of powerful white men. For the majority of Americans, neither Donald Trump nor his supporters speak on the nation’s behalf. But what the insurrection exposes is a nation in the process of reinvention, a nation that has yet to forge a new narrative. In 1649, England was undergoing its own process of reinvention. After nearly a century of government by monarchy and less than ten years of civil war, it beheaded its King and demanded a new government forged through “liberty of conscience.” The poet and polemicist John Milton believed in this new government and in his nation’s capacity for reinvention, but he also believed that a nation seeking to reinvent itself must be committed to the truth; otherwise, its stories could only reflect its capacity for self-deception. Milton wrote passionately about the difficulties of reinvention, warning the nation’s new leaders not to compromise its principles of liberty. But in 1660, after eleven years of embattled government, England called back from exile the beheaded King Charles I’s son, who reinstated the monarchy, and ushered in the period that came to be called The Restoration. For Milton, The Restoration was the story of a nation’s self-deception. This course will examine that story as told through some of Milton’s prose tracts, sections of his late epic Paradise Lost, and his closet drama Samson Agonistes. We will also consider how Milton invites us to reflect on the reinvention of our own nation and what sort of story will emerge. Other than a constant diet of reading, you can expect to write in three different contexts: the online public discussion forum, the 1-2 page concisely formulated and stylized summary, and the formal essay. |
| ENGLISH 102B | FANTASY OF MONARCHY | FUNK, J | The literature of the Restoration and early eighteenth century is characterized by satirical energy and political reaction, sexual frankness and formal decorum, skepticism of and adherence to authority. This course will examine the major poems and plays of the period, often with reference to the political events and intellectual movements to which they respond. Major authors will include Dryden, Rochester, Behn, Pope, and Swift. |
| ENGLISH 102C | ROMANTICISM | WARMINSKI, A. | Close reading of Wordsworth’s Prelude and some other major romantic poems (Coleridge, Keats), as well as an excerpt from Hegel. The course will focus on the self-consciousness and self-reflexivity proper to the romantics and the vision of history that this self-reflection engenders. One hypothesis of the course is that (both older and more recent) attempts to “historicize” the romantics need to overlook the “negativity” peculiar to the language of romantic poetry in its truly historical and material specificity. Two papers. |
| 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, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley and Letitia Landon explored extremes of feeling, of aestheticism, of political protest, and of ironic detachment which have in common a fascination with incompletion or "failure." |
| ENGLISH 102D | IRISH MODERNISM | O'CONNOR, L. | This course introduces students to some modernist classics by Irish writers, including Abbey Theater plays, W. B. Yeats’s poetry, and James Joyce’s Dubliners. We’ll pay special attention to questions of language as we examine how these writers, working in conjunction with those who strove to restore Irish (Gaelic) as a spoken language, undertook to create an other-than-English literature in English. We’ll also explore the theme of ambivalent identity that recurs throughout these works. Weekly written assignments and term paper. |
| ENGLISH 102D | AMERICAN LITERATURE SINCE 1900 | JEON, J. | This course covers the major movements and thematics in American Literature after 1900. We will focus on a selection texts, primarily fiction and poetry, that track the major issues and conflicts through a period that was characterized by great innovation on one hand and horrific violence on the other. Readings may include works by: Norris, DuBois, Eliot, Frost, Larsen, Faulkner, Hurston, Chandler, Morrison. |
| ENGLISH 103 | POETIC RHYTHM | ROBERTS, H. | This course will provide students with a comprehensive introduction to the study of prosody--the critical analysis of poetic meter and poetic rhythm. The course will be taught principally via web-based modules that students will work through each week at their own pace. There will be weekly class meetings at which students can raise questions, do further exercises and be tested on their progress. The final grade will be based upon a final examination and a variety of shorter written assignments. |
| ENGLISH 105 | NATIVE AMERICAN AUTOBIOGRAPHY | CARROLL, A. | In “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” Walter Benjamin famously “asks with whom the adherents of historicism actually empathize” and argues that “[t]he answer is inevitable: with the victor.” Certainly, canonical 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 Native American 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 Choctaw-Cherokee, Pequot, Eastern Dakota, Kumeyaay, Laguna Pueblo, Lenape, Kiowa, and Osage nations. |
| ENGLISH 105 | SLAVE NARRATIVES AND THEIR LITERARY AFTERLIVES | BASU, S. | In this course we shall consider both the political and aesthetic dimensions of the genre of the slave narrative as well as theorize its position within long nineteenth century print economics. We shall think of the ways in which the slave narrative responds to its allied genres, the autobiography, the sentimental novel, and the gothic novel. Additionally, we shall explore the literary and cultural afterlives of the slave narrative: the neo-slave narrative, films and documentaries representing slavery, and the writings of enslaved writers recovered and authenticated in the 20th and 21st centuries. We will read works by Olaudah Equiano, Hannah Crafts, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, Toni Morrison, Gayl Jones, Octavia Butler, Sherley Williams, and Colson Whitehead and screen parts of A Son of Africa: The Slave Narrative of Olaudah Equiano (2004), Amistad (1997), and The African Americans: Many Rivers To Cross (2013). |
| ENGLISH 105 | LATINX LIT | LAZO, R. | This course will approach the emergence of the X in LatinX through a series of literary historical considerations. How have writers searched for language and literary forms to navigate the transnational and trans-American dimensions of experiences in a country that privileges assimilation and monolingualism? How do literary texts engage with questions of identity, racialization, and gender expectations for LatinX populations? Readings will include some classics such as The House on Mango Street and selections from Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera as well as more recent books. Please note that we will read Myriam Gurba’s Mean, which includes scenes of sexual violence. MW meetings will be synchronic, but Friday will be asynchronic and you can do that meeting on your own schedule. Requirements include attendance at the MW synchronic meetings, two short papers, and writing exercises on Friday. |
| ENGLISH 105 | CARING FOR BLK LIFE | MURILLO, J. | |
| ENGLISH 106 | GENERATION CULTURE | MCCLANAHAN, A. | What does it mean to be a part of a “generation”? How do ideas about generational belonging and generational change shape the way we understand the history, politics, and culture of a moment? How do multiple generations relate to one another: what is the connection between narratives of generational anger or disappointment and narratives of generational solidarity and sympathy? Who is typically included in the idea of a generational “we” and who tends to be excluded? This course will take up all these ideas by looking at the representation and self-representation of three recent “generations.” We’ll begin with Gen X, thinking about the way this cohort was shaped by discourses around co-optation and complicity (“selling out”) as well as by changes in work-life. (Texts will include films like Reality Bites and Friday as well as Eugene Lim’s novel Dear Cyborgs.) We’ll then move to millennials, a generation that sought to radically re-define both individual and collective identity while also expressing their anger at “Boomers” for failing to act on issues like student debt and climate change. We’ll read Raven Leilani’s novel Luster and Justin Torres’ We the Animals, and watch episodes of the HBO show I May Destroy You. Finally, we’ll look at your generation, whose official name still seems TBD! Here, we’ll consider the collective impact of texts like The Hunger Games but will mostly focus on what texts you think are important: all quarter you’ll build a portfolio of writing and research toward a final project on a text you think is crucial to understanding your own place in world history. |
| ENGLISH 106 | MOBY-DICK | LAZO, R. | We will tackle 2-5 chapters from Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick each class meeting, paying close attention to the language. As we make our way through the book, a variety of questions will emerge in relation to different critical and theoretical approaches: postcolonial, ecocritical, author-centered, historicist, working-class, queer, feminist, and others. We will also read some other shorter pieces from Melville to situate M-D in relation to his larger body of work. This is a seminar, and you should come prepared to offer interpretations. MW meetings will be synchronic, but Friday will be asynchronic and you can do that meeting on your own schedule. Requirements: a couple of short responses, posing questions for a class discussion, attendance at the synchronic meetings, and a research paper. The latter will be developed throughout the quarter. |
| ENGLISH 106 | THE ASIAN CENTURY IN AMERICAN CULTURE | FAN, C. | In 1941, Henry Luce declared the “American Century,” and long before its calendrical end, Americans have been imagining what comes after. As we enter the third decade of the 21st century, it has come to feel almost natural to us that, yes, of course, what comes next will be the Chinese century. The news confirms this for us constantly, with its unflinching focus on the vicissitudes of the US-China relationship. At the same time, especially here in California, our everyday lives furnish us with evidence that it’s not just China that’s on the rise in the US, but other Asian national contexts as well. South Korean pop culture is preeminent. Varieties of Asian cuisine, ever more finely grained and “authentic,” are proliferating as rapidly as their prestige increases. With the onset of COVID lockdown orders, Silicon Valley tech workers are flocking to Taiwan for a semblance of normalcy. Meanwhile, Asian international students have been an increasingly visible presence on US college campuses. What we find ourselves in the midst of, in other words, is an “Asian Century.” In this course, we’ll explore various historical accounts of the shift from the American Century to the Asian Century, as well as examples of how this shift has been registered in cultural production. Our cultural examples will include techno-orientalist science fiction, essays and poetry about South Korean diasporic identity, hip-hop music and dance, novels and short stories by “Afropolitan” and Asian American authors, videos and television shows about food culture, and films about China’s industrialization and Taiwan’s conquering of the COVID-19 outbreak. We will also discuss methodological approaches to studying Asia’s presence in American culture. This is a capstone course, so students will be working towards a substantive research paper. By the quarter’s mid-point, students will have chosen a topic in consultation with me. Other writing assignments will include a short diagnostic paper and in-class exercises. |
| ENGLISH 160 | ENDS OF THE WORLD | FAN, C. | For many of us, 2020 felt like the world would never stop ending, and like nothing could possibly end it, not even New Year’s Day 2021. The virus, the fires, the protests, the politics—none of it ended, and none of it’s over. Indeed, for many people who long ago survived the loss of their worlds, the world has never not been ending. The endless ending of the world, as it turns out, is just one of many possible ends for the world. But what are we really talking about when we talk about the end of the world? What does it mean for something to “end?” What is the “world?” What linguistic and imaginative tools do we have to imagine this thing that is, technically, unimaginable? As dreary as this line of thinking is, might the ends of the world also possibly contain within them the beginnings of a new world—a better world? This course is about contemporary cultural representations—in film, television, novels, and short fiction—of ends and beginnings. We’ll encounter Utopia, dystopia, climate catastrophe, political upheaval, resilient mushrooms, and extraterrestrial kinship formations, as well as the poetic challenge of bringing something to an artful end. Importantly, we’ll collectively refuse to allow these ends to triumph in their endings. Instead, we’ll focus our energies on finding the beginnings in them, or at least reconfiguring ends so that they’re more beginning-like. Assignments will include exams and short papers. |
| ENGLISH 210 | LANGUAGE FROM BELOW | LEE, J.W. | Course Code: 23800 Thursdays 2:00 – 4:50 pm This course aims to explore the phenomenon and practice that we understand as “language” beyond a strictly disciplinary sense, for instance from the perspective of “linguistics” or “literature,” but instead from the vantage point of “from below.” The perspective of “from below” can be understood in a few senses. It can refer to the examination of language irrespective of inherited categories of languages as countable, transposable entities (e.g., English, Chinese, Spanish), which are themselves entailments of European philology, structural linguistics, and the global translation industry, reflective of an epoch David Gramling has called the linguacene. “From below” can also refer to inquiry into language as an inherently bottom-up, everyday phenomenon that occurs concurrently with and indeed irrespective of named languages as transposable entities. The course will be guided by a series of questions, including the following: What are the epistemological consequences, and even affordances, of the sociohistorical top-down inventedness of language? Relatedly, is there a distinction to be made between language as such and the political and epistemic use of language that facilitates categorization and thus control? Can the very metadiscourse of language, if approached “from below,” attend simultaneously to the complexities of the global along with the particularities of the local? In a world structured around dominance, what, if anything, might be achieved by looking at language from below? Readings will include texts from many of the “usual suspects,” such as Arjun Appadurai, Mikhail Bakhtin, Walter Benjamin, Partha Chatterjee, Rey Chow, Jacques Derrida, and Gayatri Spivak, along with texts from a diverse range of disciplinary contexts including critical theory, literature, sociolinguistics, and linguistic anthropology. NOTE: though I generally reserve a portion of the instructional time in any graduate seminar I teach to professionalization matters in addition to the course content itself, given the added challenges PhD graduates will likely face on the academic job market in the upcoming years due to inevitable COVID-19 related budgetary impacts, for this course I plan to allocate a larger portion of class meeting time to professionalization-oriented conversations while also committing to be available outside of class meetings to offer additional support as needed. |
| ENGLISH 210 | SANCTUARY:MEDEV&MOD | ALLEN, E. | Course Code: 23810 Tuesdays 11:00 – 1:50 pm This course is designed to explore the narrative, political, and religious logic of sanctuary seeking, anchored in medieval English texts and looking forward into modernity. Though our discussions may be informed by a handful of texts on hospitality, sacrifice, and sacred space, the course primarily investigates 1) the historicist question of how to link sanctuary law and literary texts, and 2) the methodological question of how to join medieval and post-medieval materials, opening valves in both directions. The course will be structured around pairs of medieval / post-medieval Anglo-American texts: for example, saints’ lives, the 1939 film The Hunchback of Notre Dame,and accounts of the 2019 fire in Notre Dame cathedral; chronicles, fugitive slave laws, and The Underground Railroad; Becket, Chaucer, refugee tales, and materials from the Sanctuary Movements of the 1980s and today. We may also consider some examples of scholarship that links medieval to post-medieval literatures. In medieval England, sanctuary was central to common and canon law and crucial to the practices of lordship and kingship. The legal procedure was common and relatively routine for several hundred years. But there were always arguments over legal conditions and instances that exceeded the law: a thief sought sanctuary in the person of the Bishop of Lincoln, not in a church’s spatial jurisdiction; an argument arose over whether a sanctuary man could come out of a church to piss; a fallen aristocrat repeatedly sought the church until he became quasi-sanctified even outside it; a king breached sanctuary but his bishops forced him to return the sanctuary man to the church or put at risk his royal authority. Such narratives raise many questions, for example about the definition of sacred space and its violation, the conditions or rules of sanctuary, the jurisdiction within the space, the role of government in granting or upholding sanctuary, and the role of fugitives and ‘hosts’ in negotiating or demanding protection. These questions remain available in film, literature, and the practices of sanctuary that persist in activist movements to this day. America was arguably established as a sanctuary from religious persecution; yet within it, enslaved people sought sanctuary in churches from the Underground Railroad to the church-based Civil Rights Movement. Law enforcement has long remained reluctant to breach modern sanctuary spaces, even without the support of articulated privileges of sanctuary. From outside the articulations of law, sanctuary today ranges from local bureaucratic resistance to Federal law enforcement to an act of civil disobedience, calling upon a legal system to be more just, and marking the fundamental human need for safety in a profoundly unsafe world. Texts may include saints’ lives, chronicle histories, Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, St. Erkenwald, Thomas More’s Richard III, John Ford’s Perkin Warbeck, The Hunchback of Notre Dame(1939), freedom songs, James Baldwin's The Fire Next Time, Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad, and other legal or historical documents to contextualize our explorations. Requirements: several short writing assignments and a final project (short for proseminar, long for seminar). |
| ENGLISH 210 | MILTON | SILVER, V. | Course Code: 23805 Mondays 2:00 – 4:50 pm The seminar addresses the problem arguably posed by Milton, namely, how can an iconoclast be a poet. To that extent, it is a course in how best to read Paradise Lost without succumbing to the undeniable allure of the Icthyian fallacy (Stanley Fish’s How Milton Works). In order to tackle this question, the seminar supplies an interpretive framework, beginning with the fifteenth-century bestseller, the Malleus Maleficarum (“The Hammer of Witches”), which serves as an introduction to what is currently called “magical thinking” but Milton terms “idolatry.” The antidote to a magical or idolatrous hermeneutics comes first, in the form of Martin Luther’s theology--especially the work arguably most read in England, his 1535 Commentary on Galatians, but also The Bondage of the Will, his reply to Erasmus on that subject. The second antidote is Milton’s own theology, as argued in his polemical prose and Christian Doctrine, and of course his poetry from the time of his earliest sonnet, “How soon hath time” through Paradise Lost. Wittgenstein’s later philosophy will make an appearance, as will Adorno’s concept of dialectic, the better to dispel some misconceptions about how meaning works in Milton’s “great argument.” |
| ENGLISH 225 | CRIME & AMERICAN NOVEL | MARTIN, T. | Course Code: 23820 Fridays 9:00 – 11:50 am (same as 22630 Clt&Thy 289, Sem A) The sociologist Emile Durkheim once suggested that crime is the lens through which society sees itself. So what kind of society have American writers seen when they’ve written—as they so frequently have—about crime? In this course, we will work to historicize the postwar American novel in relation to changing forms of criminalization and changing ideologies of criminality. Broadly speaking, we will explore the different ways that novelists have used crime as a means of theorizing social totality and social antagonism. More specifically, we will ask: how did the longstanding literary preoccupation with crime adapt to one of the most consequential and destructive developments of the postwar era—the rise of mass incarceration? Reading literature alongside works of history, sociology, and critical theory, we’ll investigate how major writers of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have grappled with the racial, gendered, and economic dimensions of police power and the carceral state. As we do so, we will have occasion to think more generally about what happens to the novel form’s much-heralded capacity to map social belonging in an era defined by the antisocial imperatives of racial criminalization and state-sanctioned violence. Writers will include Patricia Highsmith, Dorothy B. Hughes, Richard Wright, Chester Himes, John A. Williams, Maggie Nelson, Rachel Kushner, and Saidiya Hartman. |
| ENGLISH 255 | WRKSHOP IN ACAD PUB | IZENBERG, O. | Course Code: 23830 Wednesdays 9:00 – 11:50 am 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. (Does not require a seminar request from. Please contact Kassandra Ceja cejak@uci.edu if you are interested in enrolling) |
| ENGLISH 398 | 398 RHETORIC/TEACHING OF COMPOSITION | QUEEN, B | Course Code: 23975 Tuesdays 2:00 - 4:50pm English 398, Rhetoric and the Teaching of Composition, is a graduate seminar required of all Teaching Assistants instructing in the English Department’s Rhetoric & Composition Program for the first time. This course engages current topics and tensions within the field of writing studies while giving students the opportunity to design and plan their Composition courses. E398 provides a multifaceted approach through which pedagogical theory and applied pedagogies come together. Over the course of the quarter, we will talk about delivering writing instruction and sequences of assignments along long and short arcs, lesson plan and assignment design, the rhetoricity of our roles as teachers, assessing student work and managing workloads, communication and classroom management strategies, and about inclusion and fairness as foundational pedagogical principles. Course Objectives: Study & comprehend several major theories & problems in the field of writing studies. Learn how to negotiate theoretical and applied pedagogies through the design of a specific course. Learn how to design a sequence of assignments, writing process scaffolding assignments, and lesson plans for class meetings. Learn how to reflect critically on one’s teaching. Think productively about key distinctions between teaching in one’s home discipline and teaching in a rhetoric/composition context. |