| Course | Title | Instructor | Description |
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| ENGLISH 7 | LIT ENGL 18 TO 20C | JENKINS, J. | The course will focus on romantic poetry, considered in its engagement with religious traditions and with revolutionary political ideas. The two engagements are joined in the theme of redemption—of universes, political communities, and single souls. Ideas of time and narrative structure are also involved. Readings of romantics, their forebears, and followers, always in search of ruptures as well as continuities, will include (with many in small doses): Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, Keats, Carlyle, Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley, the Books of Isaiah and Daniel and the Revelation of John, Paul of Tarsus, Augustine of Hippo, Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, Pope, and Yeats. |
| ENGLISH 28A | POETIC IMAGINATION | STAFF | Discussion, three hours. Reading of selected texts to explore the ways in which these modes formulate experience. Students write several short analytic papers in each course. |
| ENGLISH 28B | COMIC&TRAGIC VISION | STAFF | Discussion, three hours. Reading of selected texts to explore the ways in which these modes formulate experience. Students write several short analytic papers in each course. |
| ENGLISH 100 | HIST THEORY & CRIT | PFEIFFER, D. | This section of E100 is an introduction to the western traditions of writing about literature. Reading chronologically, we examine one or two major works per week, beginning with the ancient Greek Sophist Gorgias and ending with the American New Critics. Authors include Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Horace, Augustine, Sidney, Dryden, Pope, Kant, Wordworth, Coleridge, Arnold, and Eliot.
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| ENGLISH 101W | DIABOLICAL FICTIONS | STEINTRAGER, J | The devil, in his various guises, has often played a starring role in literature, and, thanks to the tale of a certain serpent, has frequently been portrayed as offering access to hidden knowledge. In this class, we will examine how a handful of playwrights, poets, and novels from the Elizabethan age to the Romantic era invoke the diabolical as a way to examine the limits of human understanding, the temptation of the arcane, and the power of fiction. We will begin with Marlowe's play Doctor Faustus and Milton's epic poem Paradise Lost, before taking a philosophical pause with Descartes. We will then descend to Goethe's Mephistophelian Faust, Jacques Cazotte's seductive The Devil in Love, William Blake's illuminating The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, and, lastly, James Hogg's horrific and comic The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner.
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| ENGLISH 101W | FREE SPEECH | JENKINS, J. | This course is centered on U.S. Supreme Court cases of the 1960s and 1970s that tailored many of today’s notions of constitutionally protected free speech. Study of the language of those cases (along with law-school case-book explications) is paired with readings of contemporary novels, journalism, and feature films that deal with similar issues in varying idioms. The course begins with a history book, written in 1960 by Leonard Levy, that challenged received wisdom on the “Founding Fathers’” views on freedom of speech. We conclude with readings of some 2005 “young adults” fiction: these recent best-sellers re-raise in new ways many of the issues encountered in this course (“product placement” as commercial speech, representations of sex acts by minors, what counts as “political,” “misleading,” etc.). The instructor, who is both a California attorney and a doctor of comparative literature, will provide students with all background necessary to understand the Supreme Court cases assigned. The course is of general interest and especially recommended for students considering a career in law. |
| ENGLISH 101W | ANXIETIES INFLUENCE | FREELAND, N. | We usually think of art as the product of an artist's originality, and we have an entire vocabulary of pejoratives to describe art that isn't original: banal, derivative, clichéd, even plagiarized. But alongside this model of art as the uniquely inspired vision of a single creator there has always been a counter-tradition imagining artistic production as a more collective or collaborative venture, whose call-and-response stretches across and beyond generational and cultural boundaries. As blogs, wikis and other web-based compositions eclipse more traditional media, this second paradigm of art as a conversation among many voices has become increasingly important. This class closely examines some key moments in the history and theory of artistic influence. We'll look closely at poems that respond to other poems, art as illustration, song covers, film adaptations, gender reversals, cultural translations and modernizations. |
| ENGLISH 101W | RHETORIC & RELIGION | MAILLOUX, S. | This course is as much about rhetoric and critical theory as it is about literature and religion. We will begin with a brief introduction to classical Greek rhetoric and examine the relation of rhetoric as persuasion to the Christian notion of faith. We will study the text and context of St. Paul’s Epistles and then look at some literary, philosophical, and political receptions of Pauline Christianity and its variants. Among the texts to be read are Augustine’s Confessions, James’s Pragmatism, Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Badiou’s St. Paul and Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran. The writing assignments will be designed to help students engage the course perspective and to develop a topic for a final seminar paper. |
| ENGLISH 101W | LIT & TECHNOLOGY | GOBLE, M. | This course considers a range of literary works, critical texts, and films that explore the cultural implications of technology. More specifically, we will be examining these various texts to understand better the place of literary practice within a world increasingly shaped by media and machines. Though not by any means a comprehensive treatment of this topic, the course will proceed by way of case studies that will allow us to orient ourselves alongside several critical and literary traditions that have taken up questions concerning technology from the middle of the nineteenth century to the present. We will read texts by Henry James, Bram Stoker, Thomas Pynchon, and William Gibson; we will also screen a range of films, including Sherlock, Jr., Man with a Movie Camera, The Girl Can't Help It, Pillow Talk, Citizens Band, and Blade Runner.
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| ENGLISH 102A | CHAUCER/GAWAIN POET | ALLEN, E. | In a time of tremendous social and political upheaval, medieval writers imagined worlds through romances and dreams—visions of alternate realities, experiments with social reform, wishes for heavenly ideals, fears of hellish punishments. These visions reach a particular height in the early poems of Chaucer (before the Canterbury Tales) and in the poems of the so-called Gawain-poet or Pearl-poet, an anonymous northern writer. In this course we will explore the poems of both writers, which are both typical of the period and exceptional in their condensation of medieval English religious and social anxieties. Although neither poet appears to have know the other, both were working at about the same time and in different places. We will explore in depth the interconnected literary environment that these poets create, and the hopes and dreams to which they give voice. You will be doing some reading in Middle English, but no previous experience is expected or required. There will be a midterm, a final, a paper, and assorted smaller assignments. |
| ENGLISH 102B | PARADISE LOST&AFTER | LEWIS, J. | In his “great epic,” Paradise Lost, John Milton famously set out to “justify the ways of God to men,” blending classical myth and Christian theodicy to create one of the most complex and influential poems in English. In this course, we will devote ourselves first to Paradise Lost’s complexity, understanding it partly in its historical context as a response to the political and cultural crises of the late seventeenth century. We’ll then turn to its influence on several literary works published in the decades following. Ranging from Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko to Alexander Pope’s The Rape of the Lock and Essay on Man, and from the Earl of Rochester’s Satyr against Reason and Mankind to the poems of Anne Finch, these works will be seen not just as responses to Milton’s intimidating epic precedent but as critiques, revisions, and ‘workings-with’ the form and content of his achievement. We’ll pay special attention to what Milton’s Eve bequeathed to later women writers, as well as to the implications of his intricate and demanding conception of what it means to be human. Fans of the devil won’t be disappointed either. Course Requirements: one 3-page paper; one 6-page paper, midterm and final. |
| ENGLISH 102C | ROMANTIC LITERATURE | HENDERSON, A. | In this course we will examine some key topics in eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century art: sentimentalism, gothicism, and Romanticism. We will discuss not only various literary genres--poetry, the novel, the essay--but also other arts, particularly painting and architecture. Our goal will be to understand how social issues of the day, especially the French Revolutionary ideology of "liberty, equality, fraternity," influenced both the subject matter and the form of English art in this period. Readings will include A Sentimental Journey, Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, Frankenstein, and poems by Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, Shelley, and Byron. |
| ENGLISH 102D | ANGLO-AMER MODERNSM | NORRIS, M. | This course is designed to explore the major canonical works of Modernism by British and American writers whose works encompass the period from just before the turn of the century to the outbreak of World War II. Encompassing a moment between two world wars, the period from 1900-1940 was one of great upheaval that had significant repercussions for culture and the arts on both sides of the Atlantic. The lectures in this course will focus on the historical conditions of each author, and the formal experiments and innovations that were the poetic responses of writers to those conditions. We will read Joseph Conrad's The Heart of Darkness, T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, D. H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover, several stories from James Joyce's Dubliners, Gertrude Stein's The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, Djuna Barnes's Nightwood, Nella Larsen’s Quicksand, as well as some poetry from the Harlem Renaissance. There will be two examinations--a mid-term and a final--and possibly a short paper. The examinations will be half objective, half essay.
Book List:
Joseph Conrad, The Heart of Darkness
T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land
D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley’s Lover
James Joyce, Dubliners
Gertrude Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas
Djuna Barnes, Nightwood
Nella Larsen, Quicksand |
| ENGLISH 103 | POLITICS & MEDIA | SZALAY, M. | This course will focus on how literary journalists have covered crucial political events in recent American history, from the Civil Rights and Youth Movements of the the 1950s and 1960s through the acrimonious Presidential campaigns of the 1990s. |
| ENGLISH 103 | LIT OF DISASTER | TUCKER, I. | This course will examine a variety of different writings about disasters recent and not-so-recent. We will explore what exactly we and other people mean when we label something a disaster. Is disaster a measure of intensity? A moral valuation? A relation to knowing (or not knowing)? Something that is beyond our control, or the consequence of our wills? Something that demands memorialization or makes remembering impossible? We will the relations between these different notions of disaster and the different genres used to represent and analyze them: popular journalism; scientific treatises; poetry; novels; big budget Hollywood films; documentaries; cultural criticism. Readings will be selected from Daniel Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year; Thomas Malthus’s On the Principle of Population; Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species; Tennyson’s “Charge of the Light Brigade;” Richard Jeffries' After London; Irwin Allen’s The Towering Inferno; Douglas Brinkley’s The Great Deluge: Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans and the Mississippi Gulf Coast; Spike Lee’s When the Levees Broke; Jim Crace’s Being Dead; David Simpson’s 9/11. |
| ENGLISH 103 | LIT OF ADDICTION | BURT, E. | Discussions of 19th-century fictions and autobiographical literature centering on the drug experience. Among the questions to be considered: how drugs are defined; the drug motif as representation of the place of imaginative literature in everyday life; the drug traffic as a traffic with Orientalism and the Orient; hashish and opium as stimulants of the creative imagination and of memory; addiction as subjection of the will and loss of creative power. Works to be read: De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, Hawthorne’s “Rappaccini’s Daughter,” Poe’s “Ligeia,” “Berenice,” “The Fall of the House of Usher,” “A Tale of the Ragged Mountains,” Gautier’s “The Hashish Club,” Baudelaire’s Artificial Paradises, Collins’s The Moonstone, Conan Doyle’s The Sign of the Four, Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray. |
| ENGLISH 103 | AMERICN LIT TO 1800 | TAMARKIN, E. | This course provides a survey of English-language American literature to 1800. We will explore a wide range of texts beginning with narratives of discovery and exploration and extending past the literature of the American Revolution to the formations of an early national culture. Topics to be discussed include the role of Puritanism in American society, ethnic difference and the experience of the frontier, the social makings of the new republic, the rise of the novel in America, and the literary expressions of women and slaves. Readings will also look at the American Revolution within a varied cultural landscape that staged encounters between rational thinking and sentimental experience, between neoclassical models and romantic sensibilities, and between the language of independence and the respect for history. Authors include William Bradford, Mary Rowlandson, Jonathan Edwards, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Paine, Thomas Jefferson, Olaudah Equiano, Hannah Foster, Charles Brockden Brown and Washington Irving. |
| ENGLISH 105 | HARLM REN SOPHIATWN | MASILELA, N. | Same as AfAm 130. One of the extraordinary events of the twentieth century has been the emergence of black modernities across the oceanic divide. These modernities took on particular historical forms as well as singular cultural configurations. Invariably, in their formation, realization, and actualization, whether on African or in the African Diaspora, they constituted themselves as historical discourse, usually across the Atlantic, about cultural identities, historical survivals, invention of traditions and the formation of new nationalities. At the center of these reciprocal exchanges and interactions in the black world has bee the New Negro modernity in the United States. It was largely the New Negro modernity which orchestrated the deeper strains of cultural splay of black historical avant-gardes globally. The course will investigate and analyze some of these seminal United States cultural and literary influences on south Africa. On the cultural plane, of essential importance will be an understanding of how the concepts of the New Negro and New African were formulated and came into being, as well as the ‘construction’ of the literary periods of the Harlem Renaissance and the Sophiatown Renaissance. Within each literary period, the complexly different intersection and combination of literary modernity and literary modernism will be theorized. Each literary period had a peculiarly differential structure of generic forms. Despite this, several parallels between writers will be discussed: say, between Zora Neale Hurston and Bessie Head, W.E.B. Du Bois and H.I.E. Dhlomo, Langston Hughes and Rive Rive and Ezekiel Mphahlele, Rudolph Fisher and Arthur Maimane, George Schuyler and Casey Motsisi, and etc. Of the six assigned books, five are anthologies. Fredric Jameson has recently observed: “The eclipse of avant-gardes (including political ones) has often been taken to be more than accidental characteristic of the postmodern turn; less often remarked is the concomitant substitution---for the great avant-garde manifestos and indeed for the very conception of the great individual master text or statement---of the anthology, the collective symposium, as the generic expression of the emergence of new concerns and new fields or objects of study.” Clearly, the relation between United States and South African concerning modernity and modernism is an emergent new concern of intellectual endeavor. |
| ENGLISH 105 | LIT SOUTH ASIAN DIASPORA | SHROFF, B. | Same as AsianAm 110. In this class we analyze the work of writers who are of South Asian ancestry living in North America and Britain. A central concern is how through literary and cinematic representations, spaces of “home” and “belonging” are negotiated through narratives of disjunctures and displacements. How do the literary and cinematic texts represent multiple and contradictorily organized spaces where new identities must be negotiated? How do writers and filmmakers construct and negotiate their identities in their own specific cultural context and also in the larger diasporic context? We analyze texts such as Meena Alexander’s “Fault Lines”, Jhumpa Lahiri’s short stories “The Interpreter of Maladies”, Hanif Kureishi’s screenplay “My Beautiful Laundrette”, and Agha Shahid Ali’s poems “The Half Inch Himalayas”, among others. |
| ENGLISH 105 | CHICANO LITERATURE | LAZO, J. | The course provides an introduction to novels, poems, and essays that emerge in conjunction with and in response to Chicano movements from the 1960s to the 1990s. We will pay particular attention to the relationship of literature's role in promoting community formation (and complicating notions of community) and raising consciousness about various forms of oppression in society. Two of our main readings, Tomás Rivera's And the Earth Did Not Devour Him and Helena Viramontes' Under the Feet of Jesus, will lead us to questions about labor and literature. We will coordinate some class material with visits to campus by Chicano writers. Requirements include three papers, quizzes, and a final portfolio.
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| ENGLISH 105 | AUTOBIOG FICTIONS | KATRAK, K. | Same as AsianAm 110. This course explores the multi-dimensional facets of autobiography as literary form, and the literary expressions of this form by Asian American writers. We analyze the interstices between telling the truth of one’s life as conveyed in memoir, and in autobiographical novels. Personal stories are contextualized within their authors’ cultural and political histories. Just as there is no one way of representing and recreating history, so there are many ways, points of views, and perspectives in recounting a life. We discuss the interplay of autobiography with memory, and how new diasporic locations for immigrants influence looking back on the past. Such memories inspire the literary production of autobiographical stories along with the assertion/erasure of ethnic identities. Selection of literary texts includes a memoir by Meena Alexander, and Maxine Hong Kingston, as well as innovative recreations of autobiographical fictions in Joy Kogawa’s novel, Obasan, and multi-genre autobiographies in Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s, Dictee, and Denise Uyehara’s Maps of City and Body. Our study also includes representations of family and personal history on videos about the Japanese-American internment, and about the struggles of recent immigrants in making a home in the U.S. Course Requirements: Attendance and participation, Class presentation, in-class Midterm, and Final Essay. |
| ENGLISH 105 | INDIGENOUS LIT | O'CONNOR, L. | “Indigenous Literature” explores works by contemporary writers from cultures that have been devastated by colonialism, including native American, Maori, Aborigine, and Samoan writers. We’ll examine their literary responses to the trauma of ethnocide and their efforts to reconnect with an ancestral culture they can neither forget nor fully recollect. Midterm, paper and final will be required.
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| ENGLISH 106 | BRIT LIT OCCULT | KROLL, A. | In this course, we will read a number of nineteenth and early twentieth-century poems, plays, and novels which revolve around occult matters from Shelley's St. Irvyne, A Rosicrucian Tale, to Aleister Crowley's Moonchild. As we read classic "Gothic" texts such as Byron's Manfred, Stoker's Dracula and the ghost stories of M.R. James alongside the works of practicing occultists like Edward Bulwer Lytton, Arthur Machen, and Crowley, we will consider the differences between these two kinds of writers, the Gothic and the occult, and 'high' and 'low' magic. We will also explore a number of non-fiction works which describe various forms of actual post-Romantic occult practice, from London astrologers to rural cunning-folk, to provide context for our literary readings. Some questions we might ask over the course of the term are, to what extent is the occult impulse always present in modern British culture? Does the fashionable "Gothic" label for a number of 19thC texts belie their authors' occult interests? Does magic and/or the occult come to substitute for more conventional spiritual practices in the era of the so-called Victorian crisis of faith? Short, in-class presentations and option of two short papers or one long paper. |
| ENGLISH 106 | SHORT FICTION | O'CONNOR, L. | In addition to reading a variety of compelling short stories, this seminar will examine the distinctive characteristics of this underrated genre. Course requirements include short papers, midterm and term paper. |
| ENGLISH 106 | RISE OF NOVEL | TUCKER, I. | We will examine a variety of early passes at what subsequently came to be called the “novel” – a remarkably heterogeneous set of writings – in an effort to figure out what sorts of worlds authors understood themselves to inhabit and what sorts of problems they thought they were solving when they wrote what they wrote. Readings will include Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko; Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders; Samuel Richardson’s Pamela; Henry Fielding’s Joseph Andrews; Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels; Eliza Haywood’s The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless. |
| ENGLISH 106 | REN. LOVE POETRY | HELFER, R. | *Renaissance Love Poetry* will explore varieties of amorous poetry in 16th and 17th-century England, ranging from seduction to friendship, secular to divine love, and including writers such as Christopher Marlowe, William Shakespeare, Edmund Spenser, John Donne, Mary Wroth, Mary Sidney, and Queen Elizabeth. Texts and assignments will be announced on the first day of class, though I anticipate that the course requirements will be two essays, a final exam, as well as short writing assignments (in and out of class) that count as quizzes, and, of course, class participation.
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| ENGLISH 106 | KEATS | ROBERTS, H. | This course offers an in-depth study of the poems and letters of John Keats (1795-1821), one of the greatest lyric poets in the English language. In addition to detailed study of his major works, we will explore his (all too brief) life, and the social, political, and literary contexts that shaped his writing. Texts: John Keats, Complete Poems (Jack Stillinger, ed.) Harvard UP, 1982. John Keats, Letters of John Keats: A Selection (Robert Gittings, ed. Revised by John Mee) Oxford UP, 2002. |
| ENGLISH 106 | 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 one-hour class meetings at which students can raise questions and be tested on their progress. The final grade will be based upon a final examination and a variety of shorter written assignments. Texts: Derek Attridge, Poetic Rhythm: An Introduction and Margaret Ferguson et al. (eds.) The Norton Anthology of Poetry (Shorter Fifth Edition). |
| ENGLISH 210 | SPENSER | HELFER, R. | |
| ENGLISH 210 | RENAISSNCE HUMANISM | PFEIFFER, D. | |
| ENGLISH 210 | NOVEL THRY OF ORIGN | VAN SANT, A. | |
| ENGLISH 210 | DICKENS & VIC CITY | FREELAND, N. | |
| ENGLISH 210 | AMERICAN CIVIL WAR | TAMARKIN, E. | |
| ENGLISH 210 | JOYCE & NARRATION | MCMICHAEL, J. | |
| ENGLISH 290 | READING&CONFERENCE | STAFF | |
| ENGLISH 290 | READING&CONFERENCE | STAFF | |
| ENGLISH 290 | READING&CONFERENCE | STAFF | |
| ENGLISH 290 | READING&CONFERENCE | STAFF | |
| ENGLISH 290 | READING&CONFERENCE | STAFF | |
| ENGLISH 290 | READING&CONFERENCE | STAFF | |
| ENGLISH 290 | READING&CONFERENCE | STAFF | |
| ENGLISH 290 | READING&CONFERENCE | STAFF | |
| ENGLISH 290 | READING&CONFERENCE | STAFF | |
| ENGLISH 290 | READING&CONFERENCE | STAFF | |
| ENGLISH 290 | READING&CONFERENCE | STAFF | |
| ENGLISH 290 | READING&CONFERENCE | STAFF | |
| ENGLISH 290 | READING&CONFERENCE | STAFF | |