| Course | Title | Instructor | Description |
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| ENGLISH E210 | CORPORATION, ICONIC TURN, & BRAND MGMT IN POSTWAR HOLLYWOOD | CHRISTENSEN, J | [Course Code: 24305] Thursdays 10:00am - 12:50pm HIB 411
Enrollment via [SEMINAR REQUEST FORM].
This seminar will integrate readings in management theory, corporate theory, and cultural theory (broadly conceived) with the examination of individual Hollywood studio products: theme parks, action figures, stars, and, of course, motion pictures. Topics will include: \"the concept of the corporation and the sense of history\"; \"the New Criticism and the construction of the brand icon\"; \"corporation as star, star as corporation\"; \"agents and independents\"; \"corporate authorship and criminal liability\"; \"corporate takeovers and body snatching\"; and \"product cycles, genres, and the culture of the spectacle.\"
Motion pictures will likely include: The Big Sleep (Warners, 1968), Red River (Charles K. Feldman Group, Monterrey Productions, 1948), The Fountainhead (MGM, 1949), Donovan\'s Brain (Dowling Productions, 1953); Singin\' in the Rain ( MGM, 1952); The Band Wagon (1953); Executive Suite (MGM, 1954); Bonnie and Clyde (1967), The Horse in the Gray Flannel Suit (Disney, 1968), Easy Rider (Columbia,1969); The Godfather, Invasion of the Body Snatchers (United Artists, 1978), Batman (Warner Communications, 1989 The Santa Clause (Disney, 1994), The Truman Show (1998); Toy Story 2, (Disney, 1999) Shrek (Dreamworks, 2001); Minority Report, (Dreamworks, 2002)
Requirements: one seminar presentation and a final paper. There will be a minimum of two movies per week.
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| ENGLISH 28A | POETIC IMAGINATION | STAFF | Reading of selected texts to explore the ways in which this mode formulates experience. Students write several short analytic papers. Prerequisite: satisfaction of the lower-division writing requirement. |
| 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. Required prerequisite: satisfactory completion of lower-division writing requirement. |
| ENGLISH 100 | HIST THEORY & CRIT | WARMINSKI, A. | Literary theory from Plato on. Focus on the way that the question of "the literary"--once posed correctly--frustrates any and all attempts to theorize it. Texts by Plato, Aristotle, Longinus and their "modern" inheritors. Two exams. |
| ENGLISH 101W | CNTEMP IRISH POETRY | O'CONNOR, L. | In this seminar we’ll explore how a range of contemporary Irish poets adapt poetic form to respond to several contentious issues, including “the Troubles” of Northern Ireland, the changing role of women, and the contested status of Ireland’s two languages, Irish and English. As an E101W course, the emphasis will be on improving writing and close-reading skills. Students are required to write three graded essays and to complete regular writing assignments and response papers. The poets we’ll read include Eavan Boland, Ciaran Carson, Rita Ann Higgins, Seamus Heaney, Michael Longley, Derek Mahon, John Montague, Paul Muldoon, Gearóid MacLochlainn, Medbh McGuckian, Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin and Cathal Ó Searcaigh, with flexibility for focusing on those poets in whom participants develop most interest.
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| ENGLISH 101W | BETWEEN LIT & PHIL | WARMINSKI, A. | This course will examine philosophy's ambiguous (and ambivalent) relation to literature: that is, the sense in which philosophical logic needs both to banish and to borrow from the rhetoric of the poets. The focus will be on Plato and Nietzsche, but texts by Descartes, Heidegger, and Derrida will also be read. Two papers.
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| ENGLISH 101W | METAMORPHOSES | HELFER, R. | This course will explore Renaissance literature and culture through the important thematic of metamorphosis, considering how transformation figures as a means of negotiating past and present, imitation and innovation, authority and authorship, gender and genre, and other shifting categories. We will examine both the aesthetics and politics of change in works by Shakespeare, Marlowe, Spenser, Nashe, Burton, and Wroth, as well as selections of classical and medieval works by Lucretius, Ovid, Dante, and Petrarch. The course requirements will include regular attendance, active class participation, one essay of 3-4 pages, and two essays of 9-10 pages each. |
| ENGLISH 101W | SHORT STORIES | TUCKER, I. | This course invites students to learn to read short fiction closely, and to explore the connections between these practices of close-reading and the history of the genre and its institutions. What’s the link between how short stories are taught and how (and where) they are written, marketed, sold? We will begin by exploring the form’s origins by way of the work of some of its earliest nineteenth-century practitioners – Poe, Melville, Tolstoy – and will make our way through an idiosyncratic history of the form in its twentieth-century forms, turning to writers ranging from Franz Kafka to Flannery O’Connor, Thomas McGuane and Ronit Matalon. We will also read some reflections on the form by both critics and practitioners, and will examine the strange career of Raymond Carver as a way of thinking about the processes and institutions by which stories come to be read and authors come to be celebrated. A 10-15 pp paper will be required. |
| ENGLISH 101W | ANIMALS IN NARRATIV | DAVIS, R. | The medieval theologian Thomas Chobham describes animals as symbolic creatures created not only for the sustenance of men, but for their instruction. Indeed, the vast body of children’s literature and films featuring animals is a testament to the educative uses of animal stories. But what makes animals such appealing vehicles of instruction, and what exactly do animals have to teach us? Does the use of animals to teach practical and moral lessons often through the literary technique of anthropomorphism distort our ability to understand real animals? What ethical obligations do we have to the real-life counterparts of the animal figures we are so eager to encounter in story? In this course, we’ll consider these and other questions about the relationship between humans and animals in narrative, exploring how the category of the animal functions to construct what it means to be human, and how the stories we tell about animals both facilitate and constrain animal-human relationships.
Beginning with animal lore from medieval bestiaries and beast fables, this course pairs medieval and modern texts to explore how animals bear meaning in the past and in our own culture. Texts may include: Chaucer’s Parliament of Fowls and The Nun’s Priest’s Tale; the tales of Reynard the Fox; selections from Ovid’s Metamorphoses; T.H. White’s Book of Beasts and The Sword in the Stone; Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis; Art Spiegelman’s Maus; Yann Martel’s The Life of Pi; J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace; and films including Grizzly Man and March of the Penguins. Course assignments focus on close reading and written response to both primary and secondary texts. In fulfillment of the University’s upper-division writing requirement, students will submit short responses to course texts and write and revise three 5-7 page essays. |
| ENGLISH 102A | SACRED AND SECULAR | ALLEN, E. | How do visions of salvation square with dreams of love and society? In a world where fictions could be thought of simply as lies, medieval writers often re-imagined the world in dreams visions of alternate realities, experiments with social reform, wishes for heavenly ideals, fears of hellish punishment. Such dreams reach a particular height in the work of the anonymous Gawain-poet and Chaucer, in poems that imagine religious visions through the lens of courtly love, and imagine consolation for worldly loss through the lens of poetry devoted to the Virgin Mary. These poems find roots in the bible and religious literature, and they also hearken back to classical and late antique philosophy. Their goals are varied: they express human loss, seek answers to the dilemmas of love, and imagine spiritual transcendence. They take many forms: although they tend to be characterized by allegorical palaces and personages, their settings are also in natural times and places. Ultimately we will find that, over and over, Middle English poems break down the contrast between secular and sacred, physical and philosophical, showing that medieval literature is characterized, not by simple religious orthodoxy, but by restless searches for worldly meaning and spiritual fulfillment.
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, including required e-mail contributions.
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| ENGLISH 102A | REN HUMANISM | HELFER, R. | This course offers a broad survey of Renaissance humanism, from its classical and medieval origins to its reception in Europe from the 14th to 17th century. A notoriously difficult term to define, “humanism” has been understood as a fascination with antiquity, a desire to reform religious institutions, and an educational program related to what we now call “the humanities”. We will explore wide varieties of humanism by focusing on one of its consistent central tenets, imitation and innovation, the early modern corollary to “originality.” More broadly, we will consider humanism as a dialogue / debate about a range of issues – learning, society, authority, and belief – in (mostly selections of) works by Plato, Cicero, Augustine, Petrarch, Castiglione, Machiavelli, Erasmus, Montaigne, Sidney, and Shakespeare. Requirements for this course will include regular attendance, two essays of 4-5 pages each, and a take home final of 9-10 pages.
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| ENGLISH 102B | AM LIT EXPLOR&EMPIR | CLARK, M. | This course will introduce students to some of the most influential texts, authors, and literary movements in American literature from 1492 to 1820, the age of exploration and empire. We will focus on the role of literature in the creation of America as a new national identity from what began as colonial settlements in the international space of the New World. The course will explore European origins of American writing, primarily through works by English authors but with some attention to Spanish and French writers in the Americas. We will also study a few of the written transcriptions of oral legends and histories from some indigenous nations in contact with the Europeans in North America, and some writing and speeches by Native Americans from later in the period. Principal readings will include early narratives of exploration and discovery; the poetry, histories, and sermons of Puritan New England; religious and philosophical works from the Great Awakening and the American Enlightenment; and poetry, prose, and drama of the early national period following the Revolutionary War.
By the end of the course, students should be able to recognize and understand the wide range of literary genres, styles, and topics characteristic of early American literature. They will be able to identify and to distinguish among the historical and cultural contexts from which literary works emerged during this period, and to trace the influence of those contexts on what authors wrote. Because much of the course will emphasize close reading, students should also improve their ability to describe and analyze the formal properties of poetry and prose common to most British as well as American literature of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, including lyric and epic poetry and the early novel.
Course requirements consist of a mid-term examination, a short paper, and a final examination. Attendance is required and will include occasional quizzes and brief in-class writing assignments graded on a pass-fail basis.
Required Texts:
Nina Baym, General Editor. Wayne Franklin, Philip F. Gura, and Arnold Krupat, Editors. The Norton Anthology of American Literature, Volume A: Literature to 1820. Seventh Edition. W.W. Norton.
Aphra Behn. Oroonoko. Penguin Classic.
Washington Irving. The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and Other Stories from the Sketch Book. Penguin Group.
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| ENGLISH 102C | 19TH C MELODRAMA | BARTLETT, J. | Writing in 1814, the editor of The New English Theatre (“Original Dramas, Not Yet Acted”) levels this critique at The Prophetess: A Tragedy, an extravagant verse drama about the sack of Troy: “It is properly a Melo-drama, and ought not to have been called a Tragedy. In tragedy and comedy the final event is the effect of the moral operations of different characters, but in the melo-drama the catastrophe is the physical result of mechanical strategem.” In this course, we will work from this definition of melodrama as a big con, a clockwork trick unconcerned with the passions of its characters (who are ineffectual) or the catastrophes of its plots (which are providentially fixed). For us, the “physical result” of melodrama’s representational excess is a sleight of hand, which is to say, it is explicitly nonlinguistic: it is sustained by exaggerated gestures, bodily attitudes, and facial expressions; visual cues like costumes, sets, and props; actions that are recognizably motivated, even if imaginary or historical; and, of course, musical accompaniment that sets the mood, and tracks characters with leitmotifs that cue them on- and offstage. The network of nonlinguistic representations that are said to make melodrama go have not before been isolated as a “mechanical strategem,” a focus that would present us with opportunities for examining structural relationships between facial expressions and objects, between musical repetition and habitual bodily attitudes, and examine the ways we interpret gestures and signal motives. Since the nineteenth century, criticism of melodrama has threaded its aesthetic objectives, like the production of somatic sensation, the enforcement of rigid moral distinctions, and the subordination of character development to plot, into a study of melodrama’s contribution to the escapism, philistinism, and political sympathies of the lower middle class. My hope is that our return to a nonlinguistic understanding of melodramatic excess will allow us some distance from this instrumentalization of melodrama as an expression of social and cultural movements, and will reveal its moving parts instead. Readings will include George DuMaurier’s Trilby and Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret, Arthur Pinero’s The Second Mrs. Tanqueray and W. S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan’s The Mikado, and short stories by Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Henry James. Requirements include a midterm, a final paper of 5-7 pages, and a final exam.
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| ENGLISH 102D | ASPECTS OF MODERNSM | FARBMAN, H. | The first half of the twentieth century was a time of convulsions in the relationships among the arts, among genres, between the genders, between art and life, and indeed between life and death. Though we may be “postmodern” now (and what André Breton called “convulsive beauty” may no longer be the aesthetic order of the day) we are hardly safely beyond all this. This course will look at what modernism is and isn’t in some still highly contagious cases of it: those of Yeats, Joyce, Lawrence, Pound, Eliot, Woolf, Stein, William Carlos Williams, Wyndham Lewis, H.D., and Mina Loy, among others. Though the course will focus on developments in the art of writing, we will keep an eye (and an ear) on concurrent developments in the visual arts, music, and dance. Along the way, we’ll encounter manifestos, diatribes, and other announcements of some notable early twentieth-century “-isms”: feminism, futurism, imagism, simultaneism, and surrealism. |
| 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 explore 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 AFFLICTION | LEWIS, J. | In her 1926 essay “On Being Ill” (which we’ll be reading), Virginia Woolf found it “strange indeed that illness has not taken its place with love and battle and jealousy among the prime themes of literature.” But since Woolf’s day “pathography” (writing on illness) has grown into a perversely healthy subgenre, with both illness memoirs and physicians’ narratives staples of literary journalism today. In this course, we’ll explore the literary strategies, both fictional and nonfictional, that writers have used to make sense of their own and others’ physical and sometimes mental suffering. Contra Woolf, we’ll start off looking at some classic literature of affliction: the Book of Job, Tolstoy’s “The Death of Ivan Ilyich,” and Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper.” Then we’ll turn to several recent works of creative nonfiction that draw on this literary tradition. These works investigate some fundamental questions: Where and how do we draw the line between sickness and health? How can figurative language help us to (re)shape the experience of suffering? What does ‘normal’ really mean? How do social perceptions shape the diseases people ‘have’? Why do we speak of ourselves as ‘having’ and ‘getting’ the illnesses we ‘have’ and ‘get’? How does illness destroy individuality and how can it be used to confirm it? Can the mind or spirit truly be separated from the body? How does the work of doctors overlap with art and interpretation? Texts and authors devoted to these problems include Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor; Oliver Sacks, An Anthropologist on Mars; Sherwin Nuland, How We Die; and Katherine Butler Hathaway, The Little Locksmith. Along with a comprehensive final examination, two 5-7 page papers are required. To the second of these, students may add an illness narrative of their own. |
| ENGLISH 105 | ASNAM LIT/FLM ADAPT | SHROFF, B. | Same as Asian Am 114, ArtH 101, Comp Lit 143. This course analyzes the historical context within which Asian American texts have been adapted into films. There is a vast body of Asian American Literature but very few texts have been adapted to cinema since issues of audience and market are primary considerations. A historical context demonstrates how representations of Asian Americans have changed from the stereotypical images in the 1920s to self-representations by Asian American writers and filmmakers in contemporary times. We analyze different literary genres such as novels and dramas and short stories, for example Jhumpa Lahiri's novel, The Namesake, Le Ly Hayslip's memoir When Heaven and Earth Changed Places, David Henry Hwang's drama, M. Butterfly and Philip Kan Gotanda's drama, The Wash. Cinematic adaptations/versions of literary texts sometimes retitle and reconstruct texts as suitable for a mass audience such as Heaven and Earth directed by Oliver Stone, and others such as Hot Summer Winds directed by Emiko Omori based on two Hisaye Yamamoto short stories, Seventeen Syllables and Yoneko's Earthquake. We employ literary and film theory in reading the novels and plays to analyze language, structure, characterization and historical representation. We also discuss how the literary form translates into a visual medium, and the modifications of story/plot and characterization for the screen--for instance, how dramas lend themselves to screen adaptation more easily than do novels. We interrogate the strengths of each medium such as the scope of the fictional framework, and the spatial-temporal capabilities of the cinematic medium. |
| ENGLISH 105 | ASIAN AMER FICTION | LEE, J. | Same as AsianAm 110. The worn truism—“as California goes, so goes the nation”—holds water, then what does the fiction written by California’s Asian Americans suggest about the past, present, and future of the United States? What vision does California’s Asian American writers bring to other Asian Americans, to other Americans? And what do these works say about those of us who live in this state, arguably the most diverse in the world? Do we who live in California recognize the California represented in these stories? And is there a California that we’d rather not see? What is the “best” way to write fiction about California? These are some of the critical questions that we will pursue throughout the quarter. Reading both short story and novel, historical and contemporary, immigrant and “longtime Californ,” we will chart the cultural and cognitive map of Asian Americans writing in and about this wondrous geography. Readings will include novels and stories by Hisaye Yamamoto, Ronyoung Kim, Brian Ascalon Roley, Fae Myenne Ng, Karen Tei Yamashita, and Aimee Phan.
Alongside readings and class participation, students will be expected to post weekly blog entries, write one short paper (1200 words) and one longer paper (2100 words). |
| ENGLISH 105 | LIT AGE OF SEGREGAT | THOMAS, B. | We will read a variety of literary works written in the era of segregation. We will also work with some of the important legal cases decided in the period, such as the Civil Rights Cases, Plessy v. Ferguson. and US v. Wong Kim Ark. The focus will be on the late 19th century with some attention to the early years of the 20th century. Traditionally, the Age of Segregation has been understood as a black/white divide. But it is important to remember that the law upheld in Plessy distinguished between “whites” and “coloreds.” We will, therefore, look at literary works and the legal status of African Americans in the period, but also at works and the legal status of Asian Americans. Assigned works will include poems, fiction, and essays by Hay (Lincoln’s secretary and then Secretary of State during the Spanish-American War) , Tourgée, (Plessy’s attorney), Lanier, Douglass, Grady, Cable, B.T. Washington, W..E. B Du Bois, and Sui Sin Far. We will also read Howells’s An Imperative Duty, Twain’s Pudd’nhead Wilson, Chesnutt’s The Colonel’s Dream, Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, and Faulkner's Go Down, Moses. Requirements: regular class attendance, a midterm, a 5-7 page essay, and a final. This course should count for students taking the "Humanities and Law" minor.
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| 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. We’ll explore how these writers narrate the traumatic loss of an ancestral culture they can neither forget nor fully recollect, and examine the effects of an education designed to “kill the Indian, save the man” on the psyche, on cultural identity, and on indigenous languages and knowledge. Works studied include Follow the Rabbit-proof Fence; Baby No-Eyes; They who do not Grieve; Black Elk Speaks; Ten Little Indians and selected poetry by contemporary Native American poets. Midterm, paper, final. |
| ENGLISH 106 | HAMLET & REVENGE | SILVER, V. | This is a course in Revenge Tragedy (as it is termed in the English tradition), a peculiar brand of drama that swept the boards in late sixteenth- and early eventeenth-century Europe and England. It is exemplified here by three of Shakespeare's plays ("Titus Andronicus," "Richard III" and "Hamlet") as well as Middleton's "Revenger's Tragedy" and "The Changeling," Webster's "Duchess of Malfi," and Ford's "'Tis Pity She's a Whore." Besides fabulously intricate revenge plots and maniacal revengers, this species of drama features ghosts, the hand of fate or (what is different) providence, inconceivably corrupt courts and vile courtiers, erotic mayhem (adultery, incest, sexual addiction, rape) as well as artistic violence (poisoned skulls, hearts on daggers, twigs for lopped-off hands, not to mention people in pies). It will require from the student a strong stomach and hard writing. |
| ENGLISH 106 | APPROACH TO SHKSPRE | HENDERSON, A. | In this course, Approaches to Shakespeare, 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 106 | TV&CORP CULTURE | SZALAY, M. | "It's not TV; It's HBO": this class will examine the rise to prominence of pay television by focusing on the one-hour drama. The bulk of our time will be spent closely reading the first season of three of the following four shows, each of which was originally conceived to appear on HBO: /Six Feet Under/, /The Sopranos/, /Deadwood/, and /Mad Men/. Students will collectively decide which of these shows to study. Our analysis and requirements will be rigorous: students will be asked at the end of the course to hand in a portfolio that includes detailed formal analysis of how individual episodes and entire seasons generate plot, narrative arc, characterization, etc. Students not present at the first day of class will not be allowed to enroll. |
| ENGLISH 106 | LATINO LIT HISTORY | LAZO, R. | This course will consider theoretical and historical debates surrounding the formation of literary history by focusing on the development of Latino literature. What are the critical goals and assumptions behind national, ethnic, or generic literary histories? How does historical specificity complicate retroactive reading of textual production? What is the role of print culture? And do certain histories call for a reconsideration of what counts as "literature"? Throughout the quarter we will develop these questions generally while attending to specific conditions. We begin by reading The House on Mango Street and several other short texts written by Latinos and Latinas in the contemporary period, then move to case studies from the nineteenth century. Other readings include María Amparo Ruiz de Burton's novel Who Would Have Thought It? and essays by José Martí. Requirements include short responses, participation in discussions, and a 10-page seminar paper. |
| ENGLISH 210 | PIERS PLOWMAN | DAVIS, R. | [Course Code: 24310] Tuesdays 10:00am - 12:50pm HIB 411
Enrollment via [SEMINAR REQUEST FORM].
E210 Piers Plowman and the Fourteenth Century
William Langland’s epic dream vision offers a meditation on the social and religious upheavals of its era, from the Black Death and its aftermath, to the rise of the vernacular language and the Lollard heresy. Delving into the poem and its contexts offers a point of entry into the central issues of fourteenth-century England. But Piers Plowman is also an imaginatively daring poem that rewards close reading with the aesthetic pleasures of its inventive poetics. In this course, we’ll work our way through the entire poem in the original Middle English language (no prior experience required), taking time to consider how Langland’s historical and literary contexts enrich our understanding of the poem’s concerns and techniques, as well as exploring the major lines of critical inquiry that inform Piers Plowman studies. An imperative for medievalists, this course will also appeal to specialists in other fields with interests in allegory, satire, nature, ethics, class, and religion.
All participants are expected to take part in discussion and submit weekly response papers. Pro-seminar students will write two take-home essay exams (totaling 10 pages) or a conference paper on a topic of your choice. Students taking the course for seminar credit are required to write a 25-page research paper, for which you will submit a proposal in advance, and give an oral presentation on a topic of your choice.
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| ENGLISH 210 | 40 STORIES&ONE POEM | CARLSON, R. | [Course Code: 24308] Mondays 02:00pm - 04:50pm HIB 341
Enrollment via [SEMINAR REQUEST FORM].
This class for writers will closely examine the narrative strategies in selected short stories, three or four each week. Our object will be to see how the art was made, and we will be looking at the application of all the elements of craft, especially how time features in each story. The writers range from Hawthorne to Aimee Bender though the major portion, I see, are contemporary. Writing will be responses to stories, discussions of salient strategies, exercises as assigned, short emulations, and one longer story. In addition, each student will be assigned an author to examine further. |
| ENGLISH 210 | AMER RELIG POETRY | MILES, J. | [Course Code: 24306] Thursdays 03:00pm - 05:50pm HIB 341
Enrollment via [SEMINAR REQUEST FORM].
The three elements in this course are American religious history, American religious poetry tracked across the history, and selected criticism engaging the questions of how a religious statement qualifies as poetry, how a poem qualifies as religious, and how a religious poem qualifies as American. |
| ENGLISH 210 | MILTON | SILVER, V. | [Course Code: 24300] Wednesdays 05:00pm - 07:50pm HIB 341
Enrollment via [SEMINAR REQUEST FORM].
The course will serve to introduce most of Milton's writings, but it will also make a particular argument about them. That argument will explore the tradition of opprobrium that has followed Milton from almost the first moment he burst into print, to his becoming Samuel Johnson's Great Satan and T.S. Eliot's baleful influence, to more recent discussions which have cast him as the ultimate Dead White Male in British studies. It will attempt to explain how Milton responds, and more importantly, anticipates this vilifying in his concepts of justice, injustice, and justification, and thus to suggest the peculiar manner in which the issue of his reputation and, by extension, his iconoclasm are incorporated into his poetry as a species of irony. In pursuit of these connections, there will be a decided emphasis on Milton's tracts, in the context of 17th-century royalism, as well as some assiduous talk about the Protestant God by Martin Luther. There will also be an initial bout with the magical mentality and anti-feminism, in the form of the Malleus Maleficarum or "witches hammer," so as to evoke contrastively the distinctive character and idiom of Milton's thought.
If the course is taken as a seminar, it will entail two take-home exams, one roughly midterm, which will cover Milton's early poetry and whatever prose we've managed to cover-certainly, the 1640's tracts up to Areopagitica. The midterm is a strange one, since it requires you to bring Milton's iconoclastic arguments to bear on cinematic images. The second exam will address Paradise Lost and possibly the anti-royalist writing of the 1650's, and will be an extension of your argument in the midterm. Pro-seminar credit requires that you do the midterm exam, which will at least give you coverage in literature before 1789. |
| ENGLISH 210 | CASUISTRY & CLARISSA | VAN SANT, A. | [Course Code: 24303] Wednesdays 09:00am - 11:50am HIB 411
Enrollment via [SEMINAR REQUEST FORM].
Casuistry, dependent on a complex understanding of conscience, is a case-based method of solving particular moral problems in light of known moral principles. The problem to be solved is known as a “case of conscience,” and can range from whether to take an oath (when the stakes were very high), to whether it’s ok to buy something you think may be stolen, to whether a father can command a child to marry. Although there are some well-known casuistic texts (see, to the left, Sanderson’s 9 cases [posthumously published1685] which as we will see can seem like fictional pre-texts, casuistry itself produces not a text but a process and thus a “habit of mind” and potentially a route into the mind. Like casuistry guides and compilations, conduct books such William Fleetwood’s The relative duties of parents and children, husbands and wives, masters and servants, consider’d in sixteen sermons: with three more upon the case of self-murther (1705), were guides to appropriate conduct and were akin to an ancient literature of duties, principally Cicero’s De Officiis. Conduct books set out to mold behavior, but they are only steps away from misbehavior. There is a huge bibliography on the relation between novels and conduct books, but we will move our questions back to an examination of the mind making a decisions. Clarissa’s “life” is constructed of one case of conscience after another.
**SPOILER ALERT**
No one imagines that Clarissa is a plot-based novel, but if you have never read it, don’t let anyone tell you what happens. And paste a piece of paper over the back cover of the Penguin edition. If you have read it, please be courteous and let others read themselves into “what happens.” Eighteenth-century readers heard rumors (and one wrote to Richardson begging him to change his mind about the plot, but all had to wait 6 months between each of the 3 parts to find out “what happened”).
We will read selected casuistry materials, materials from the literature of duties and conduct, and Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa. All students will write annotated bibliographies. Seminar students will write seminar papers. Pro-seminar students will write shorter papers. The course will have a website, and students will write on the message board and do reports in class. Students should have read Richardson’s Pamela before the course begins.
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| ENGLISH 290 | READING&CONFERENCE | STAFF | English 290 enrollment requires submission of an approved Independent Study proposal form available [HERE] by the end of the second week of classes (January 15, 2010). Students may add or drop the course by obtaining a code from the administrator. |
| ENGLISH 299 | DISSERTATN RESEARCH | STEINTRAGER, J | [Course Code: 24550] |