| Course | Title | Instructor | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
| ENGLISH 10 | FAIRY TALES REVISITED | O'CONNOR, L. | “Fairy Tales Revisited” entails re-reading tales you probably encountered in childhood. The course builds on and enriches this common knowledge by reading versions and adaptations of the traditional tales. Our class anthology, Maria Tatar's Norton Classic Fairy Tales, includes classic versions by the Grimm brothers, among others, along with less familiar international variants and adaptations of them. We’ll approach the tales comparatively, and examine how the tales change as they migrate across cultures and adapt to changing times, social contexts, audiences, and media technologies. What attitudes toward gender roles, sexuality, childhood, family, virtue, and beauty are conveyed, and arguably conditioned, by themtales? How are fairy tales variously interpreted, and why do diverse schools of criticism, such as structuralism, psychoanalyis, and feminism, find them so revealing? Why have fairy tales such staying power? Regular writing assignments, midterm and final. |
| ENGLISH 10 | BOREDOM &LITERATURE | BARTLETT, J. | In this course we will theorize what Theodore Adorno called “free time” by treating the submissiveness of waiting as a form of production. We will read texts that make their own fun, that spend time writing about time spent, and that dilate on emptiness to a number of ends. The relation between boredom and narrative is both subtle and everywhere, and so we will read widely, pitching into novelists who make extensive literal and metaphorical use of the power of infinite strategy in order to talk about sociability, ethics, and politics, economists who compare their work on monopolies to strategic partnerships in novels, scientists who describe evolution in terms of elaborate games of chess, cognitive theorists who plot the circuitous route we take when we stake ourselves on invention, and readings from psychoanalysis and the philosophy of action and mind that try to describe just what it is that we are laying claim to when a doing finally becomes a thing done. All the while, we’ll consider such questions as: How does boredom manage or mismanage time? How can we understand boredom as a kind of reading, and a kind of writing? Does boredom have a style? |
| ENGLISH 10 | TWENTY POEMS | IZENBERG, O. | Each meeting of this class will focus on a single text, ranging from the oldest love poem we know to a poem that has not yet been written, with many great works of art between. Together, we will read each poem closely to learn how it is made, and to see how acts of poetic making reveal important features of a culture or moment—our own, or another. While we will read some criticism (because reading is attention shared with other readers) and some history (because poems are made by persons located in place and time), the bulk of our attention and time will be reserved for our twenty poems. In writing, we will analyze, appreciate, argue with, imitate, puzzle over, and pry apart our texts: we will learn to count and inventory their parts; to categorize and group them into kinds; and hear them remembering and speaking to each other. In the end, I hope you will develop the skills to discover what some never-before-seen work of art demands of us, and to judge for yourselves whether that demand is worth answering. |
| ENGLISH 12 | YOUNG ADULT FICTION | ALEXANDER, J. | Many people who read young adult fiction do so because, as they claim, they find the characters and situations "relatable." But what does that mean? Can you really "relate" to the plight of a boy wizard battling an older, evil wizard? Or can you "relate" to a young woman fighting to the death in annual hunger games? This course on young adult fiction takes up the question of "relatability" by looking at a number of texts written both for and about young people. Together, we will attempt to "thicken" out what readers might mean by relatability. How do such fictions generate situations that seem relatable? What other terms or concepts might we use to understand "relatability" -- terms and concepts that can expand and make more sophisticated our understanding of how we interact with fictional narratives about young people? We will read five novels and look at five works of media (films and television), and students will write responses, analyses, and interpretations of the works we consider. |
| ENGLISH 15 | POLITICS OF ROMANCE | SILVER, V. | The course looks at a continuing strain of the western literary tradition of romance—one of its earliest genre or literary modes whose subject (as everyone knows) is eros, the erotic, which the Greeks considered as much more than mere sex but as the instinctual force driving all living things to survive and reproduce themselves. Romance is also the vehicle of the ideal—not of what is but what we desire should be—embodied in the experience and aspiration to “possess the beautiful” in the ancient phrase. We will look at how these concepts and values are expressed in romance’s narrative and dramatic forms, from Homer’s Odyssey, Xenophon’s weird and sensational Ephesian Tale, and a couple of Chretien de Troyes’ Arthurian romances, to Shakespeare’s Winter Tale, Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko, Austen’s Northanger Abbey and Jack Schaefer’s classic western, Shane. |
| ENGLISH 15 | W.E.B. DU BOIS | CHANDLER, N. | |
| ENGLISH 15 | RDNG AROUND THE WEB | CRANO, R. | This course will introduce basic concepts of semiotics (the science of signs and sign systems) to analyze, interpret, and evaluate some of the common signs, styles of signification, and modes of meaning-making unique to the digital age. The course is divided into three main units, oriented, respectively, around emoji, memes, and GIFs. Each unit will integrate classic works of literary theory and criticism with contemporary analyses of digital cultural forms. We will look at how these new types of signs are used in diverse contexts, ranging from everyday interpersonal communication to corporate advertising to activist organizing to art. We will additionally explore the readerly implications of social media forms and formatting, how theories of gamification apply to reading signs and making sense online, and how techniques of network amplification and algorithmic distribution influence the spread and success of messages. Most class sessions will be discussion based. Besides regular participation and weekly response posts, students will conduct case studies of each type of sign, present one case study to the class, and write a final paper. |
| ENGLISH 16 | CRAFT OF POETRY | SHAPERO, N. | This course will focus on the fundamentals of how to read and write poetry, looking at how poets transform kernels of observations and analyses into fully-realized works of literature, with an emphasis on sound structures, visual organization, and argument. Each week, we will investigate a different facet of how a poem is made – that is, how do poets negotiate sonic architecture, visual composition, intellectual through line, and imaginative locus at the level of the line? At the level of the stanza? The poem? The sequence? Assignments may include both critical and creative writing. |
| ENGLISH 17 | CRAFT OF FICTION | LOVE, M. | What makes a good story? In the words of Flannery O’Connor, “You tell a story because a statement would be inadequate. When anybody asks what a story is about, the only proper thing is to tell him to read the story.” Taking our cue from Eudora Welty’s On Writing and James Wood’s How Fiction Works, we will discuss how writers deploy elements such as character, plot, dialogue, point of view, and structure to produce affecting stories that stay with the reader. Our primary lens will be place. As Eudora Welty notes in On Writing, “Location is the crossroads of circumstance, the proving ground of ‘What happened? Who’s here? Who’s coming?’—and that is the heart’s field.” Additional course texts include Dorothy B. Hughes's novel In a Lonely Place and The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty, as well as various contemporary short stories. Assignments include: Weekly reading responses; 2 critical essays (3-4 pages long); a final paper (6-8 pages long) with a creative option |
| ENGLISH 100 | INTRODUCTION TO LITERARY THEORY AND CRITICISM | BASU, S. | This course aims to familiarize students with a broad corpus of literary theory and criticism starting from the 5th century BCE to contemporary times. The unifying thread in our discussions shall be the question of Aesthetics. The assigned readings for our course shall probe questions such as: What is the relationship between art and reality? Is there such a thing as objective judgment regarding what is beautiful, or is all artistic appreciation a matter of subjective taste? Are some art forms better or more important than others? How has technology affected our relationship to art? How does our interaction with the world through our bodies, senses and feelings differ from our interaction by means of cognition and concepts? What counts as art at all? We shall proceed chronologically from discussions of ancient mimetic theory, to the birth of modern aesthetics in the 18th and 19th centuries and then turn to 20th century Aesthetic Theory and the “Black Aesthetic” as defined by the Black Arts Movement. Attendance is mandatory. We shall have biweekly quizzes, a midterm, and a final exam. |
| ENGLISH 101W | MEDIEVAL WOMEN WRTG | DAVIS, R. | This course explores the history of writing by and for women during the medieval period, with a particular emphasis on the role female writers and audiences played in the development of English literature. Delving into issues such as gender identity, sexuality, literacy, and religious devotion, we will examine barriers to women’s opportunities for writing during this era but also consider the circumstances in which some women did emerge as authors and influence literary production in other important ways. In our readings we’ll encounter holy visionaries, female healers, aristocratic women with influence at court, a wealthy widow, a virgin who wrestles a dragon, a wife who betrays her husband (because he’s a werewolf), a genderqueer maiden-knight, and a self-supporting writer who dreams of a female utopia. Formal assignments include three short papers aimed at honing upper-division writing skills including close reading, argumentation, and secondary source analysis; students are encouraged to take creative and/or collaborative approaches to informal assignments. |
| ENGLISH 101W | ART OF MEMORY | HELFER, R. | What does memory mean in our world, with its seemingly limitless capacity for storing and retrieving information in hand-held digital devices (looking at you iPhone!), a world which requires us to remember almost nothing, not even our own phone numbers? One answer to this anxious question is to say that it’s not really a new one, and that we’ve always relied on artificial forms of memory to supplement and, in effect, to extend our own natural memory. Once upon a time, the so-called “art of memory” – a term of art for an ancient mnemonic method of constructing places for memory, usually metaphoric books or buildings, filled with memorable images – was one such form of artificial memory that worked to extend our capacity to remember and, with this, our cognitive powers. This ancient method is also modern (what the TV-Sherlock Holmes calls his “mind palace”), and as we’ll see, one used not only for memory but also discovery and, indeed, creativity. In this course we’ll explore the relationship between the art of memory and art: how these spatial / locational / placed-based memory systems and strategies have profoundly shaped literary theory and practice. Our reading will take us from past to present (some texts will be available on Canvas and others for purchase at UCI’s The Hill), and include non-fiction writing as well as some quality TV. Assignments will consist of weekly short writing, two essays, and a final. |
| ENGLISH 101W | APPROACHES TO SHAKESPEARE | HENDERSON, A. | In this course students will learn a variety of techniques for reading, watching, and discussing Shakespeare’s plays. We will study three major plays—Hamlet, Twelfth Night, and The Tempest—from a wide range of perspectives. We will explore, among other things, Shakespeare’s use of rhetoric, the influence of editors on Shakespeare’s plays, the ways performance functions as interpretation, and the relevance of Renaissance social issues to modern readers and audiences. Coursework will include three papers and weekly exercises. |
| 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 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, the causes of dreams, the workings of memory, and the demands of conscience. Course requirements include regular attendance and participation; a midterm; a final; and two short papers. |
| ENGLISH 102A | MEDIEVAL WONDER | KING, L. | Wonder is a powerful emotion. Encounters with the wondrous can leave one shocked, awestruck, exhilarated, and filled with profound curiosity. In this course, we will be exploring how people in the Middle Ages wrote about, thought about, and experienced wonder. Our focus will be primarily on the literature of the wondrous: travel narratives exploring the edges of the world, encyclopedias and bestiaries cataloguing natural wonders, stories of miracles bringing the divine closer to home, and romances giving free play to the wondering imagination. Over the course of this class, we will read a diverse range of medieval texts, including The Travels of Sir John Mandeville (fantastical journeys), Chaucer’s “Squire’s Tale” (technological marvels) and selected Lais of Marie de France (werewolves, bird-men, and romance). Through texts such as these, we’ll examine how medieval thinkers worked to make sense of their worlds, and how their understanding of what was possible influenced the kinds of stories they told. Assignments will include a midterm and a final with take-home essay components. |
| ENGLISH 102B | LATE 18TH C LIT | ROBERTS, H. | This course explores the literature, philosophy and politics of the culture of “sensibility” in England during the late eighteenth century. We will read a range of poems, novels, political essays and philosophical works which emerge from a contemporary fascination with our capacity for feeling the pain (and pleasure) of others. All texts will be made available as pdfs on the class Canvas site. |
| ENGLISH 102C | DECADENCE & DECAY | WELLS, E. | This course provides an introduction to a fascinating period of transition in French literature and culture. "Decadence" was levied as an accusation of a culture in decline after the prosperity and progress of the Belle Époque, but the writers who came to be known as Decadents celebrated the fall. Our readings, in English, will examine themes of disease and decay, corporeal and gender transgression, and the era's perceived dichotomy between human creativity and logic. Course requirements include attendance and participation, short writing assignments, and two papers. Required reading: The Decadent Reader: Fiction, Fantasy, and Perversion from Fin-de-Siecle France by Asti Histvedt, Les Fleurs du Mal by Charles Baudelaire, and occasional provided readings. |
| 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 102D | MONDERNISM RUINS | BARTLETT, J. | In this course we will read a number of literary works that explore the concept of ruin as it influenced the distinctive thematic and stylistic qualities of English literature in the twentieth century. The battle cry of literary modernism as expressed by poet and critic Ezra Pound—“Make it new!”—not only implies that the remains of the old—whatever they are—remain, but that they are the raw stuff of innovation. T.S. Eliot elaborated on Pound’s claim in his essay “Tradition and the Practice of Poetry”: “The perpetual task of poetry is to make all things new. Not necessarily to make new things. … It is always partly a revolution, or a reaction, from the work of the previous generation.” There was much to react to: rising education rates, political liberalism, scientific advances in technology, and the development of mass production had weakened the certainty of ongoing social, religious, and cultural stability at the end of the nineteenth century, and no one figure had the authority to compel it—the idea that the writer had a moral obligation to uplift and educate the masses seemed as irresponsible and ironic as the idea that a complacent, exploitative, and rapidly expanding empire would do the same for the rest of the world—so the tradition, habit, and certitude of the Victorian period and its literatures gave way to the relentless change, loss, and destabilization of modernism. All of the writers we will read this quarter considered themselves to be confronting the ruins of a culture of conviction and optimism, and to be remaking old, resistant materials, and we will trace their conceptualization of the “ruin”—as a noun and a verb—through novels, manifestos, poems, and essays that reimagine human identity in these terms. “The center cannot hold,” wrote William Butler Yeats, “Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,” and indeed, the matter of our analysis will be anarchic, for alongside the rapid pace of social and technological change, the mass dislocation of populations by war, empire, and economic migration, and the mixing of cultures and classes in rapidly expanding cities, the force of modernity disrupted the old order, upended ethical and social codes, and cast into doubt previously stable assumptions about self, community, the world, and the divine. The literature of the period took on a variety of stylistic imperatives in response: it was by design and intention aggressively difficult—for Eliot, a writer “must become more and more comprehensive, more allusive, more indirect, in order to force, to dislocate if necessary, language into his meaning”—and its resistance to interpretation was not only unapologetic, but the point: in foregrounding the device of literary style, twentieth-century writers were not only searching for new modes of expression to convey new insights, they were revealing that style itself is never innocent but always already ruined by the historical conditions that produce it. |
| ENGLISH 102D | HOME, WORLD, NATION | RADHAKRISHNAN, R. | Home, Nation, World: how do these three categories line up? Or, do they? Are they synonymous, cognate, consanguineous, coeval, concentric? Is each of them an “imagined community?’ Is imagination natural or the result of a conscious and intentional fabulation? Who or what is behind each of these formulations: God, State, Spirit, Being, Ontology, Politics, Religion, Father, Mother? What is the relationship between filial belonging and belonging by virtue of affiliation? Are Home, Nation, and World simultaneous? Is any one to be derived from the other? What is the temporality that governs each of these terms? Is there a law of precedence, all the way from history to something anterior and primordial? Phylogeny, ontogeny, socio-geny; Being, familial being, social being, political being: in this continuum (perhaps it is not a continuum), how and where and why do home, nation, and world belong? Where is the common ground among the three, and where are the ruptures? Would this equilibrium be differently experienced if you were male, female, gay, lesbian, transgender, white, black, brown, colored, master, slave, colonizer, colonized, ex-colonizer, ex-colonized? Is Nation a kind of Home? Is the Nation a microcosm for the World? Is it possible to be at home in the world without being a citizen of the nation state? Is the World a Cosmo-polis? What is the relationship between human being and citizen being? Why and how do the figures of the Exile, the Immigrant, the Diaspora and the Refugee haunt Home, Nation, and World? These are some of the questions that will resonate through the course as we educate ourselves in the histories of Settler Colonialism, Imperialism, Racism, Orientalism, Patriarchy, and the resistances offered to these forces by movements of decolonization all over the world. Readings will include Theory (Postcolonial, Feminist, PanAfrican, African-American, Feminist), Postcolonial fiction and poetry from Africa and Asia. Here are a few authors who will figure in the course: Rabindranath Tagore, Mohandas Gandhi, Jacques Derrida, Martin Heidegger, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Virginia Woolf, Stuart Hall, Paul Gilroy, Arjun Appadurai, Benedict Anderson, Ernst Renan, Frantz Fanon, Frederick Douglass, Edward Said, Amitav Ghosh, Mahmoud Darwish, Tsi-tsi Dangarembga, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Salman Rushdie Requirements: 1 Short Essay (5 to 7 pages) and 1 Long Essay (7 to 10 pages), and possibly, a Take-Home Examination. |
| ENGLISH 103 | CANADIAN LITERATURE | VAN DEN ABBEEL, G. | Canada is often perceived by “Americans” (i.e. US residents who claim the entire continent as their homeland) as our gentle, Northern neighbor, not really a “foreign” country but a more polite and tolerant version of ourselves. Whereas the US thinks of itself as a vast, assimilative “melting pot,” Canadians refer to their country as a “patchwork quilt,” allowing physical and cultural space for many different constituencies. But just as the American ideology of the melting pot belittles the reality of racist and ethnic exclusions, so too does the patchwork quilt metaphor sweep under the rug the deep strife between communities fiercely divided by language, race, religion and ethnicity, all the while scattered over an immense landmass (constituting the second largest nation in the world in terms of area) that also leaves all Canadians equally at the mercy of an exquisitely unforgiving climate. Critics often refer to the “garrison mentality” of Canadian culture and literature in terms of the persistent concern with taking shelter against a threatening outside, whether harsh weather or suspicious others (Americans, in particular). Interior spaces loom large in Canadian literature but often themselves hide their own secretive horrors, a thematics widely reflected within the vibrant current of Canadian literature written by women and sexual minorities (from Roy and Hébert to Atwood, Campbell, and Tremblay). Alternatively, the risk and danger of outdoor excursions can also be the opportunity for unexpected liberations, such as in the influential Canadian genre of the road trip (Kerouac, Poulin). Curiously, Canada is also technically a colony whose official head of state is still, remarkably, the queen of England. At the same time, it is itself a colonial power wielding the world’s 9th largest economy and dominating a vast realm that is home to an impressive diversity of indigenous cultures referred to as the “First Nations” in acknowledgement however minimal of their prior claim to the land later settled by the “second” nations of European immigrants. We will engage in a critical reading of a range of texts from the last 500 years to analyze and understand how the underpinnings of what we may or may not be willing to call Canadian “identity” overlap with and diverge from its US counterpart. We will read a variety of texts by French-Canadian, Anglo-Canadian, First Nations, Métis, Inuit, Afro Canadian, and Asian Canadian authors, including Jacques Cartier, Gabrielle Roy, Ringuet, Anne Hébert, Jack Kerouac, Alice Munro, Michel Tremblay, Margaret Atwood, Michael Ondaatje, Jacques Poulin, Dany Laferrière, Maria Campbell, Tanya Tagaq, and Ying Chen. All in all, this course enables a comparative analysis of differing social paradigms and literary fashionings as they address both diversity and environmental concerns. In addition to the readings and active class discussion, students will be expected to write two papers, keep a journal of ideas, and give an oral presentation on material related to the course. Prerequisite: Satisfactory completion of the Lower-Division Writing requirement. Repeatability: Unlimited as topics vary. Restriction: Recommended: Upper-division students only. |
| ENGLISH 105 | TRAVEL LITERARY JRN | WILENTZ, A. | |
| ENGLISH 105 | INDIGENOUS LIT | O'CONNOR, L. | This course explores works by contemporary writers from indigenous cultures that have been devastated by colonialism, beginning with Aborigine, Maori and Samoan writers and then turning to Native American writers. The master trope of indigenous literature, according to Gloria Bird, “is the interconnectedness of all things—of people to land, of stories to people, of people to people.” We’ll examine the trauma of ethnocide and the effects of an education designed to “kill the Indian, and save the person” on the psyche, on cultural identity, and on indigenous languages and knowledge. How do these writers narrate the traumatic loss of an ancestral culture they can neither forget nor fully recollect? How do the needs of indigenous communities influence the forms that such narration takes? Midterm, paper, final |
| ENGLISH 105 | AFRICN AMRN THOUGHT | RADHAKRISHNAN, R. | This course will take the form of a selective historical-chronological appreciation of African-American thought, starting from Frederick Douglass all the way to the present moment. How does African American thought evolve, and in response to what crises, challenges, and predicaments? What have been the movements, the ideologies, and the different schools of theory and practice that have contributed to the process? What is the relationship of African American Thought to Critical Race Theory, Postcoloniality, PanAfricanism, Marxism-Communism, Negritude, anti-Black Humanism, Diasporic Thought, and theories of Intersectionality? Is African-American thought nation centric, hemispheric, global, universal, or all of the above? From the point of view of the African-American subject, how much has changed from the days of slavery to the times of Black Lives Matter and AfroPessimism? How unique and non-fungible is African-American thought and theory with respect to revolutions and resistances based on Class, Gender, and Sexuality? How does African American thought envision the relationship between the human and the citizen, between past and present, between Ontology and Politics? These are the questions that will animate our course as we make our way from Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs to Booker T. Washington, W.E.B. Du Bois and Ida Wells, to the Harlem Renaissance (Langston Hughes, Alain Locke, Claude McKay, Countee Cullen, Zora Neale Hurston), Marcus Garvey, Black nationalism and the Negritude movement, fiction and essays by Ralph Ellison, Richard Wright and James Baldwin, African feminisms by way of June Jordan and Audre Lorde (the politics of difference), Toni Morrison, all the way to Black Lives Matter, Orlando Patterson, Critical Race Theory, and Afro-Pessimism. Most likely, you will be writing 1 Short Essay, 5 to 7 pages, 1 Long Essay, 7 to 10 pages, and a Take Home Examination. |
| ENGLISH 105 | LATINX POETRY | LAZO, R. | Let’s start with the X as a crossing, in this case a crossing of languages. How do poets conceive LatinX experiences while engaging the move from one language to another, Spanish to English and vice versa? Academic forms and community languages? Can a poem in English capture an experience that took place in Spanish? How does poetry capture cultural experiences for people often considering scenes (memories, political conditions, people) in other countries in the Americas? We begin with the poet José María Heredia (1803-1839) and some nineteenth-century antecedents before moving into contemporary poets. The writer Sandra Cisneros, who will be doing a virtual visit to UCI, is scheduled to be part of one of our sessions. We may have one or two other writers visit. Meetings will be in person unless the university goes virtual again. Please do not sign up for this course if you cannot come to campus, as attendance in person is mandatory. Requirements include attendance in person (an intentional repetition), in-class responses, short papers, and a final project. |
| ENGLISH 106 | MAKING MELANCHOLY | LEWIS, J. | Feeling blue? You’re not alone, and it may not be because of the pandemic: it could be related to your English major! “Why is it,” asked Aristotle after all, “that all men who have become outstanding in poetry or the arts are melancholic?” The melancholy person suffers, as the sixteenth-century scholar (and melancholic) Robert Burton put it, from “fear and sadness without cause” and often uses literary language and aesthetic form (visual art, music) to give this condition a shape and a name—sometimes even to cultivate its perverse pleasures. A cousin of what we call depression today, melancholy has a rich literary and iconographic history, one that helps us to think about how the mind is related to the body, creativity to sorrow, the sense of helplessness, loneliness, or senselessness to social norms and conventions, the experience of loss to political conditions of dislocation and injustice. Using the tools of critical theory and insights from the history of medicine and psychiatry, we’ll explore melancholy’s role in secretly shaping the genres of lyric (Milton, Keats, Berryman, Sexton, the blues singer Billie Holiday) and satire (Finch, Plath’s The Bell Jar), fictionalized memoir (again Plath, Vuong) and tragedy (Hamlet), gothic fiction (Poe and Gilman) and visual allegory (the artists Albrecht Dürer and Frida Kahlo). Critics exploring such phenomena as mourning and melancholia, perfection’s therapy, sad girl theory, humors theory, and the melancholy of migration include Freud, Ahmed, Showalter, Cheng, and Kristeva. Writing: weekly posts, an ongoing reading journal and annotated bibliography building to a 12- to 15-page research paper. |
| ENGLISH 106 | DESIRE, DECEPTION, DEVOTION | HELFER, R. | Desire, Deception, Devotion – a few of our favorite things! – add up to the triple focus for our examination of early modern poetry, primarily sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English lyric verse. We will explore these interconnected subjects at the heart of most early modern poetry, and the ways in which The Three D’s (along with the inevitable addition of other D’s such as Delight, Determination, Desperation, Despair, and Destruction) taken together represent a symbolic ‘language of love’ with which poets expressed complex themes and issues ranging from the personal to the political, and encompassing matters both secular and sacred. We’ll study a range of authors from the ‘Age of Shakespeare’, whose writing will be made available to you on Canvas, as well as some scholarship about it. Assignments will consist of weekly short writing and a final research paper of approximately 12-15 pages. |
| ENGLISH 106 | RHETORICAL THEORY | GROSS, D. | This seminar is for students interested in the "rhetoric" side of English departments: its origin, its relationship to literary criticism and theory, and its viability for English majors after graduation. Readings will survey the history of rhetorical theory which is in fact a modern invention, including Friedrich Nietzsche on "Truth and Lies," Judith Butler on performativity, Thomas Rickert on Ambient Rhetoric, and D'Angelo Bridges on the "Roots of (African American) Rhetorical Theory in Frederick Douglass’s My Bondage and My Freedom." The major theme of the seminar will be how rhetorical theory decenters human agency – what one critic calls the "anthroperiphery" – posing thereby a challenge to rhetoric as it is taught in schools, where human voice and agency are essential to writing instruction. All quarter students will work on a project that can be oriented toward literary studies per se, or toward rhetoric and writing studies. For students looking at graduate school, the goal may be something that can be used as an application writing sample. |
| ENGLISH 199 | INDEPENDENT STUDY | STAFF | |
| ENGLISH 210 | THE WAYS OF DEATH | ALLEN, E. | Course Code: 23800, Thursdays 11:00am-1:50pm This course explores 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, generic, temporal, erotic. From privileged visits to the underworld in 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 focus on narratives—especially but not exclusively romances—that 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 and the genres that express them have shifted over time; though literature registers historical specificity and change, it 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, ghosts and purgatorial imaginings, the founding of empires. The fact of death haunts and romances the living, enhancing the perception of life and the value of the created world and of human creativity within it. Seminar: several short papers and a 20-page final paper; proseminar: several short papers and a 10-page final paper. |
| ENGLISH 210 | POETIC RHYTHM | ROBERTS, H. | Course Code: 23802, Fridays 2:00pm - 4:50pm This course is designed to give students an introduction to practical prosodic analysis and an outline of the history of English prosody from the Renaissance to the present day. It assumes, at best, a very rudimentary knowledge of prosody on the student's part. If you consider yourself already adept at scanning lines of English verse and have no difficulty in distinguishing, say, catalectic trochaic tetrameter from acephalic iambic tetrameter, then this course is not for you. If, on the other hand, you're only "pretty sure" that something is in iambic pentameter if most of the lines seem to have ten syllables and you'd draw a blank if someone asked you to describe the difference between Pope's use of the heroic couplet and Shelley's, or Shakespeare's early and late blank verse, then I hope this course will open up whole new dimensions to you even in works that seem very familiar. Coursework: Students will perform innumerable prosodic exercises; write short essays in prosodic analysis and sit an exam. (NB: it will be difficult to generate a seminar length paper out of this course because its focus is practical rather than theoretical.) Required texts: Derek Attridge, Poetic Rhythm: An Introduction. Cambridge Ferguson et al, Norton Anthology of Poetry: Shorter Fifth Edition. Norton. |
| ENGLISH 210 | SLAVERY&LEGALGOTHIC | BASU, S. | Course Code: 23804, Wednesdays 9:00am - 11:50am The year 1764 saw the publishing of two foundational works: Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto and Cesare Beccaria’s On Crimes and Punishments. While the former was the first English gothic novel and the latter was a formative treatise on jurisprudence, their overlapping was far more than a coincidence, it indicated deep-rooted, shared epistemologies between modern law and the gothic. Nowhere is this relationship between law and the gothic more explicit than it is in the case of New World slavery. In this course we will read gallows speeches, court documents, and slave narratives by enslaved and formerly enslaved writers who articulate their authorial personae as haunted property. Additionally, we will read selected novels from the long nineteenth century English Atlantic in an attempt to evaluate the gothic as a repudiation of civil law. Representative authors will include Uriah Derick D'Arcy, Joseph Mountain, Hannah Crafts, Harriet Jacobs, William Godwin, Mary Shelley, Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte, Edgar Allan Poe, Charlotte Dacre, and Florence Marryat. |
| ENGLISH 210 | RACE&PHILOSOPHY | TUCKER, I. | Course Code: 23806, Thursdays 2:00pm - 4:50pm This course begins by examining the foundational paradox at the heart of both Western racial discourse and Western philosophical thought: the same Enlightenment moment in which philosophers began to make the case for understanding universal rationality as the defining feature of personhood was the moment in which race came to be defined not as an ephemeral effect of climate and location but rather as an essential and immutable quality of a self. Here are some questions we will take up in the context of this paradox: To what degree does this philosophical embrace of rationality depend upon envisioning subjects as essentially minds that are only accidentally or contingently housed in bodies? If the subjects envisioned by Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment philosophy are essentially minds, then what is the place for embodiment within philosophy? For embodiment that organizes people according to groups? If recognition of the historical and cultural force of racial classification is understood to be essential to understanding subjectivity, what, if any, place does such a recognition leave for a philosophical approach to peoplehood? What would a racially attentive philosophy look like? We will dive headlong into this paradox by beginning with the work of Immanuel Kant, whose philosophical method was guided by his commitment to theorizing the relationship between subjects’ empirical experience of the world and the essential qualities of the world itself. We will attempt to square the universalism that is at the heart of Kant’s critical method in his Critique of Pure Reason with the surprising turn his work takes in the final decades of his life, where he takes up the question of embodiment in more deliberate ways, examining the place of aging in medical knowledge, and the role of race in making bodies legible. We will then take up 18th-century work that explicitly understands race to be its subject, including the writing of Friedrich Blumenbach and Arthur de Gobineau. We will then consider the late work of Charles Darwin, in which the famed naturalist belatedly takes up human change as his object of analysis, and generates an entirely innovative theory of knowing with the category of race at its core in the service of this new object. The second half of the course will be devoted to theorists who embrace racial systems as their objects of critical analysis. We will begin with famed political sociologist WEB DuBois’ The Conservation of the Races, before turning toward the questions of philosophical, political and psychoanalytic subjecthood in a colonial context with Franz Fanon’s Black Skins, White Masks. We will conclude the course by jumping forward to contemporary writing about racial legibility and justice, equity and authorship, examining Anthony Appiah and Amy Guttman’s Color Conscious: The Political Morality of Race; Christina Sharp’s In the Wake: On Blackness and Being, and Kenneth Warren’s What Was African-American Literature? |
| ENGLISH 210 | POETIC OCCASIONS | IZENBERG, O. | Course Code: 23808, Mondays 6:00 - 8:50 pm Enrollment Restriction: Enrollment for Master of English students An “occasional poem” is written as a public response to or commentary on a particular event: battle or inauguration; birth or death. Historically, critics have condescended to occasional art, discounting its value as art precisely because of its historical particularity (as though a poem was bound to its occasion, and could live only as long as that moment lived). Recent criticism has reversed this judgment, valuing even the most “timeless” art precisely (and even only) to the degree that it can be show to belong to some occasion—to be fundamentally responsive to the pressures of history, responsible to the world even in its most imaginative flights. The “Poetic Occasion,” then, names a problem: how should we think about the relation between the transformative powers of art and the insistent determinations of fact? On what grounds should a poem that is made for a day endure? How can a poem that aims for eternity satisfactorily address any particular present? We will read a series of major poems (by Homer, Edmund Spenser, John Milton, William Wordsworth, Emily Dickinson, William Butler Yeats, Marianne Moore, Claude McKay, Amiri Baraka, Allen Ginsberg and others) and reconstruct for each an archive, thinking practically about the multiple histories out of which art emerges (the individual life of the poet; the history of a genre; the upheavals of war and nation formation; the traditions of a people or race) and theoretically about the multiple values to which art is answerable. |
| ENGLISH 255 | WRKSHOP IN ACAD PUB | IZENBERG, O. | Course Code: 23820, Tuesdays 11:00am - 1:50pm In this workshop, we will practice the professional genres that you will use throughout your career as an academic. Our ultimate goal is to move toward a finished piece of writing: a dissertation chapter or publishable essay. A portion of any meeting will be spent thinking concretely about particular features and challenges of academic prose: how an essay begins or ends; how to write about texts that your reader may not know; how to navigate between moments of textual attention and historical and theoretical generalization, and in doing so we will no doubt spend some time contemplating published work as models, whether positive or negative. But the central requirements for this seminar are your own materials, and the majority of our time together will be spent discussing your work and that of your colleagues, and helping each other to understand and develop the stakes of our own projects. Think of it as an unusually sympathetic and rigorous writing group— in which you do what you would already be doing, only more deliberately and with more input. As time and interest permits, we may also have the opportunity think about and practice other genres: applications for grants and fellowships; conference papers (both written and delivered); even the academic cv. And as we approach the end of the quarter, our focus may expand to include to the preparation of materials for the job market: the dissertation abstract, job letter, and teaching statement. Students not yet contemplating the job market may function here as audience and sounding board—there is much to be learned in this role as well. Finally, this is a class that aims to function as a community of collaboration and support as we pursue the often solitary work of research and writing. (Does not require a seminar request form. Please contact Kassandra Ceja cejak@uci.edu if you are interested in enrolling) |
| ENGLISH 299 | DISSERTATN RESEARCH | ALLEN, E. | |
| ENGLISH 398 | RHET/TCHNG OF COMP | QUEEN, B. | Course Code: 23975, Mondays 2:00pm - 4:50pm Readings, lectures, and internship designed to prepare graduate students to teach composition. Formal instruction in rhetoric and practical work in teaching methods and grading. |
| ENGLISH 399 | UNIVERSITY TEACHING | ALLEN, E |