| Course | Title | Instructor | Description |
|---|
| 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 | RENAIS REBELS&SPIES | KIENE, J. | SPIES AND STRANGERS IN EARLY MODERN LITERATURE
In this class, we will read a selection of plays, poems, and prose works that reveal ways in which early modern English writers and readers conceived of English national and cultural identity in relation to national, religious, and racial “others.” In particular, we will explore how sixteenth and seventeenth-century English literature shapes a sense of “Englishness” by catering to a popular fascination with the exotic and the foreign (the English referred to foreigners in their midst as “strangers”). In comparison with the periods of civil war that came before and after, the reigns of Elizabeth and James I seem peaceful; yet at the time, anxieties about Catholic plots, foreign invasion, and rebellion ran at a fever pitch. The political intrigue and popular xenophobia of this early modern “cold war” period (complete with espionage rings and terrorist plots) is evident in many of the texts we’ll consider, often as they seek to test and even blur boundaries between “self” and “other,” “culture” and “barbarism,” “citizen” and “stranger.”
Possible texts include Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice, Othello, and The Tempest; Jonson’s Volpone; Marlowe’s Jew of Malta; Spenser’s Faerie Queene; Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi, Bacon’s New Atlantis, and Behn’s Oroonoko. Course requirements will include regular participation in class discussion, weekly written responses, and three 5-7 page essays for which you will hand in preliminary drafts. |
| ENGLISH 101W | YEATS | O'CONNOR, L. | This course offers immersion in the work of William Butler Yeats, regarded by many as the outstanding poet of the twentieth century, and an opportunity to improve your skills in close reading and critical writing. Since this is a E101W seminar you are expected to write a lot: ungraded weekly response papers and skills-related writing exercises, in-class writing, and three graded essays. By way of compensation there is no midterm or final. An over-arching theme is Yeats’s evolving use of image and symbol, but we’ll explore many facets of his life and oeuvre, including his work in the Abbey theater; interest in traditional subject-matter and poetic forms; involvements in nationalism, occultism, and political controversies; the love poems; and all the other topics that emerge as we read through most of his poems and some prose and plays. |
| ENGLISH 101W | INTRO TO POETRY | HENDERSON, A. | THEMES AND TECHNIQUES IN POETRY
This class will provide a focused examination of the workings of English poetry, particularly as viewed from a feminist critical perspective. We will begin by reviewing the formal qualities of poems, including rhyme, rhythm, and stanza structure. We will then examine some standard poetic forms and topoi from the English tradition, such as the sonnet, the dramatic monologue, and the blazon. Our readings will range chronologically from the Renaissance to the twentieth century. Since this is a writing course, requirements will include several short assignments and papers, in addition to a longer final paper. |
| ENGLISH 101W | CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE | KIENE, J. | This course will serve as an introduction to the life and works of Christopher Marlowe. Like Shakespeare, his contemporary, Marlowe rose from humble origins to recognition as a leading poet and dramatist of the Elizabethan age. Unlike Shakespeare, he was university-trained, traveled on the Continent, served as a spy in Elizabeth’s secret service, and was jailed for his part in a deadly London street brawl. Admired by fellow playwrights, but libeled as an atheist and traitor in other circles, he penned eight extraordinarily popular plays prior to his murder in a Deptford tavern at the age of 29. We will read a selection of Marlowe’s plays and poems representing the key genres in which he worked. Texts may include the narrative poem Hero and Leander and the plays 1 &2 Tamburlaine, The Jew of Malta, Edward II, and Doctor Faustus.
Course requirements will include regular participation in class discussion, weekly written responses, and three 5-7 page essays for which you will hand in preliminary drafts. |
| ENGLISH 102A | MEDIEVAL ROADTRIPS | DAVIS, R. | This course surveys the emergence and development of English literature from the Anglo-Saxon elegies to Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and Thomas Malory’s Morte Darthur. Thematically, we’ll investigate narratives of place, movement across boundaries, encounters with the unfamiliar, and quests for sanctuary, community, and meaning. Course assignments include three short essays, a midterm, and a final. |
| ENGLISH 102A | PAGE AND STAGE | HELFER, R. | "Page and Stage" explores the poetry and drama of Shakespeare and Marlowe, two of Renaissance England's most important writers. Marlowe's early death and brief career nevertheless created a body of work that influenced Shakespeare's writing in profound ways. This class examines the relationship between these writers and their works, comparing Marlowe's Hero and Leander, Jew of Malta, Tamburlaine, and Doctor Faustus with, respectively, Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis, Merchant of Venice, Henry V, and Hamlet. The course requirements include a midterm, final, a 5-7 page essay, occasional quizzes, and participation. We will be using Oxford World Classics editions of all these texts. |
| ENGLISH 102B | LIT OF ENLIGHTNMENT | LEWIS, J. | The period covered in this course, 1660-1798, knew itself--and has long been known as--"the Enlightenment.” Among other things, it prided itself on the shining of the new "light" of reason, scientific knowledge, and toleration on the old darkness of superstition and political oppression to yield a radically new understanding of–and interest in–what it means to be human. But was "the Enlightenment" all it claimed to be? What were its limitations, contradictions, and unique possibilities? Most important for our purposes, how did English literature of the Enlightenment both reflect and challenge its values? How can that literature help us to understand our own, present-day quest for deeper understanding of our identity and future as human beings? In this course, we will be exploring a range of literary texts, some quite challenging, which worked through the problem of enlightenment and helped to bring our modern world and understanding of the human into being. Along the way, we’ll come to understand the role that imaginative literature can play in the establishment of human rights and human identity. But we’ll also see how literature could critique those same advances in human understanding. And we will appreciate the role that genre-consciousness played in both the process and the critique of enlightenment: the syllabus incorporates plays, poems, early examples of the novel, satire and science writing. Authors include Thomas Hobbes, the naughty Earl of Rochester, Aphra Behn, William Wycherley, Isaac Newton, Alexander Pope, Anne Finch, Jonathan Swift, Horace Walpole, Mary Wollstonecraft, and (time permitting) William Wordsworth. If you took E102B in Spring 2010, you may not enroll in this course. Required work: One midterm with a take-home essay component; one final; one 7- to 9-page paper; two unannounced quizzes; being there. |
| ENGLISH 102C | ROMANTIC REVOLUTION | ROBERTS, H. | This course provides an introduction to the literature of a complex and fascinating period in British social and literary history. Most of the works we will read were written while Britain was waging a counterrevolutionary war with France in the wake of the French Revolution (which began in 1789). During this period of intense political struggle and debate, a new and profoundly influential literary movement--Romanticism--began to emerge throughout Europe. We will explore both the continuities and the differences between the late Eighteenth Century literature of "sensibility" and the emergent literature of Romanticism. At the same time, we will read a number of contemporary political and philosophical documents which will allow us to relate the changing aims and concerns of the poetry we are reading to the turbulent political events of the period.
Required Reading
The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol. D: The Romantic Period
Occasional handouts and web documents.
Coursework
Students must complete one ten in-class reading tests, a Midterm Examination, a 4-5 page paper, and a final examination. |
| ENGLISH 102D | IRISH MODERNISM | O'CONNOR, L. | This course introduces students to some classics of twentieth-century drama, fiction, and poetry by Irish writers. The authors of these works were directly involved in shaping--or resisting--the cultural nationalist movements that came to define modern Ireland. We’ll explore the theme of ambivalent identity, with special attention to questions of language and genre as we examine how these writers, working alongside those who strove to restore Irish (Gaelic) as a spoken language, undertook to create an other-than-English literature in English. Midterm, final, paper, and pop quizzes. |
| ENGLISH 102D | AGE OF RALPH ELLISON | SZALAY, M. | We will begin with extensive study of Ralph Ellison, before moving to other postwar writers preoccupied with questions that animate Ellison's work. In addition to reading many of Ellison's essays on literature and music, we will spend substantial time on /Invisible Man/ and /Three Days Before the Shooting/. Our time after Ellison will be divided between the fiction and nonfiction of James Baldwin and Joan Didion, each of whom extends inquiries central to Ellison's work (the relation between "style" and "democracy" most centrally) into new registers. Throughout, we will study developments in postwar American history and culture that are pertinent to our authors: the emergence of bebop, the Civil Rights movement, the War in Vietnam, and the protest movements of the sixties. |
| ENGLISH 103 | WRITING SEX | ALEXANDER, J. | (Cross-listed with Lit Jrn 103)
WRITING SEX examines the variety of ways in which sex and sexuality have been represented and constructed as subjects for public discourse in major Anglo-American nonfiction and journalistic writing of the last 120 years. We begin with the late 19th-century sexologists and their popularizers, consider the impact of Kinsey's studies and his followers, think about the flowering of "sex writing" in the 60s and 70s, ponder the emergence of "sex advice" columnists in the 80s and 90s, and wonder about the proliferation of "sex talk" on the Internet. Throughout, our focus will be on tracing the dominant discourses that shape public articulation and understanding of sex/uality, as well as considering significant resistances and alternative discourses that push dominant ideological boundaries. Basically, we will ask: what does the proliferation of discourses about sex/uality in the public sphere suggest, both about sex/uality itself and its relationship to notions of citizenship, agency, and the supposed split between the private and the public. |
| ENGLISH 105 | DEMOCRACY AND MINORITY DISCOURSE | RADHAKRISHNAN, R. | Is democracy the best game in town? Why and why not? Is it both the symptom and cure of our times? What is the relationship between popular sovereignty and democracy; between citizen rights and democracy? How are liberalism, the rule of the law, and democracy triangulated? Is democracy thinkable without the normativity of the nation state? What can we say about the linkages between democracy and identity politics, between democracy and the politics of representation, between democracy and multiculturalism, between democracy and the politics of recognition? How does democracy mediate between the need for distributive justice and the clamor for difference and heterogeneity? What are the different traditions of democracy and how do they mark and define “the political?” How is democratic hegemony different from other forms of control and organization? How do modernity and the democratic form of government constitute each other? How does democracy govern the relationship between East and West, between the so-called “First and Third” worlds; and how does it bear the symptomatic burden of a world that is structured in dominance? How does democracy name the human being as citizen and unpack her in terms of race, class, gender, and sexuality? Is democracy an ideology or is it a pure and neutral procedure? How do capitalism and democracy constitute each other? Most significantly, is democracy possible without an Us-Them divide, or a majority- minority divide? What is the tacit relationship among democracy, violence, and terror? These are a few of the questions that we will be raising in this course by way of readings in political theory philosophy, literature, sociology, critical theory, feminist theories and theories of gender and sexuality. |
| ENGLISH 106 | BOREDOM&NARRATIVE | 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 about characters that make their own fun, and texts that spend time writing about time spent and 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 power of infinite strategy 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, as well as 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? Expect work by Henry James, Elizabeth Gaskell, Lewis Carroll, Virginia Woolf, Iris Murdoch, and Harold Pinter. Requirements include written responses to course readings, one presentation followed by some discussion facilitation, one shorter paper of 5-7 pages, and one paper of research length, 8-10 pages. |
| ENGLISH 106 | ROMANTIC PTRY&FICT | CHRISTENSEN, J. | The Romantic period has always been identified with the concision, force, and beauty of the lyric poetry produced by its major and minor poets. Numerous experiments in narrative fiction, non-fiction, and poetry were also undertaken, however. Those innovations contributed to produce a distinctive set of works across a variety of genres, including gothic novels and poems, sentimental fiction, the historical novel, the psychological thriller, and autobiographical poetry. This course will be concerned with analysis of the particular genres of the period and with conceptualizing the way those genres combine to define the period both as a literary territory and a literary history. Readings will include: Sterne, A Sentimental Journey across France and Italy; Monk Lewis, The Monk; Clara Reeve, “The Progress of Romance”; Walter Scott, Waverley; William Godwin, Caleb Williams, Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, William Wordsworth, “Adventures on Salisbury Plain” and The Two-Part Prelude, Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights. |
| ENGLISH 106 | SEEING RACE | TUCKER, I. | This course aims to disrupt many of our current understandings of race by asking some fundamental questions: What is it that we are doing when we notice someone's race? Perceiving something about the body? Translating a code? Learning a history? Making a political statement? How does it matter that certain body parts and not others are involved in our processes of recognition? In what ways are the judgments we make about race connected to other sorts of ways we know and judge?
This course is divided into three parts. We will begin with a brief survey of the ways race has been understood in Europe and the Americas from the early Greeks through the nineteenth century, focusing on thinkers including Galen, Blumenbach, Foster, Kant and Darwin. In the second part of the course, our focus will be on the twentieth century, moving from early century thinkers like WEB Dubois and Booker T. Washington, through mid-century theorist colonial theorist Franz Fanon, through contemporary cultural theorists like Henry Louis Gates, Anthony Appiah, Paul Gilroy and Hortense Spillers. Finally, we will end by seeing the ways in which the various paradigms we have investigated help us understand two important fictional narratives concerned with race: Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye and the HBO television series The Wire. (Students will be responsible for watching two seasons of The Wire outside of class.) |
| ENGLISH 106 | MILTON | SILVER, V. | This is a course whose purpose is to teach you an effective and (I hope) illuminating way to read John Milton's works, although we won't read all the poetry that Milton ever wrote but focus on learning how and why he composed 'Paradise Lost' as he did. To begin with, we will look at a number of texts he didn't write--that fifteenth-century bestseller, the 'Malleus Maleficarum' or 'Hammer of Witches,' whose vision of the world Milton wrote against, and a selection of Luther's works from whose theology Milton learned a great deal. We will also read his early poetry and his most significant polemical tracts, since Milton participated in the pamphlet war over the disposition of church and state that coincided with the English civil war, whose arguments go a long way towards elucidating his poetic method. There may even be a movie to start things off. |
| ENGLISH 210 | WRITERLY READING | RYAN, M. | [Course Code: 24310] Fridays 2:00-4:50pm HIB 341
Enrollment via [SEMINAR REQUEST FORM]
When asked how he studied other poets’ work, Phillip Larkin responded, “Oh, for Christ’s sake, one doesn’t study poets. You read them, and think, That’s marvelous, how is it done, could I do it? and that’s how you learn.” In this seminar, we’ll look at the marvelous to see how it’s done. Writerly reading is reading for usage: carnivorously, closely and slowly, through prescribed lenses of attention. A different lens makes a different picture. If you can see it you have a better chance of being able to do it yourself. We’ll look at how poems situate the act of “speech” by the speaker, through a story being told and/or an argument being made. We’ll trace the angles and turns and intersections of the stories and arguments, and see how they’re transfigured by syntax and rhythm. An essay or story or group of poems generated by our study will be required. MFA prosers and vagabond PhD’s who are willing to participate in poets’ shoptalk are welcome.
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| ENGLISH 210 | A GENEALOGY OF RACE | TUCKER, I. | [Course Code: 24308] Thursdays 1:00-3:50pm HIB 411
Enrollment via [SEMINAR REQUEST FORM]
This course aims to accomplish two goals simultaneously (or at least in alternating weeks): 1) to visit – or revisit – some of the touchstones of literary-theoretical writing on race from the 1960s onward in the hope of developing an historiography of the discipline; 2) to analyze this historiography of relatively contemporary writing on race within a longer trajectory of writing on the subject, one that begins with the perplexing Enlightenment invention of modern race and traces its developments and permutations across the nineteenth century. Some questions that will guide our historiography: What is it that the writers we engage think is happening when people notice someone's race? Perceiving something about the body? Translating a code? Learning a history? Making a political statement? Does it matter to these writers that certain body parts and not others are involved in the processes of recognition? In what ways do these writers understand judgments about race to be connected to other sorts of ways we know and judge? Does race work differently as different technological media become culturally dominant?
We will begin with a survey of the ways race has been understood in Europe and the Americas from the early Greeks through the nineteenth century, focusing on thinkers including Galen, Blumenbach, Forster, Kant and Darwin. Our contemporary readings will move from mid-century theorist colonial theorist Franz Fanon, through contemporary cultural theorists like Henry Louis Gates, Kwame Anthony Appiah, Paul Gilroy and Hortense Spillers. Finally, we will end the course by analyzing two "moment-defining" fictional narratives: Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye and the HBO television series The Wire. (Students will be responsible for watching three seasons of The Wire outside of class.)
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| ENGLISH 210 | AMERICAN LITERARY REALISM | THOMAS, B. | [Course Code: 24306] Tuesdays & Fridays 10:30-11:50am HIB 411
Enrollment via [SEMINAR REQUEST FORM]
This is a survey course that counts for 19th-century coverage. We will
read a number of realist works of literature written in the United States
from the Civil War to the first years of the 20th century. In the first
week we will explore different definitions of realism through a reading of
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. For general notions of realism we will
read criticism by Lukacs, Auerbach, Watt, and Blumenberg. To define
realism in the American context, we will read criticism by Howells,
Trilling, Chase, and Kaplan. We will then have brief units on (1)
realistic representations of the Civil War (2) realism and Reconstruction
and its aftermath (3) realism and the question of privacy and the press
(4) realism and the divide between rich and poor (5) realism and the “new
woman (6) realism and naturalism (7) realism and imperialism. To cover a
wider range of writers we will read a number of short stories. Longer
works, in addition to Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, will include Crane’s
The Red badge of Courage, Tourgée’s A Fool's Errand, Chesnutt’s The
Marrow of Tradition, James’s The Aspern Papers and The Reverberator, and
Howells’s A Hazard of New Fortunes. All students will be responsible for
leading part of a class discussion and for taking a short final oral
examination as practice for the oral component of the qualifying
examination. Pro-seminar students will write a ten-page essay analyzing a
passage or incident from an assigned work or reviewing the criticism of
one of the assigned works. Seminar students will write a 20-25 page
research paper.
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| ENGLISH 210 | RDG POSTCOL THEORY | RADHAKRISHNAN, R. | [Course Code: 24304] Wednesdays 4:00-6:50pm HIB 341
Enrollment via [SEMINAR REQUEST FORM]
Postcolonial Theory is a vast and fraught field informed and constituted by a whole range of fierce and rigorous debates: ethical, political, epistemological, and discursive. This seminar does not pretend to be an omniscient or all-inclusive coverage of postcolonial theory. It is an interested and perspectival introduction to a few salient themes and dilemmas that lie at the heart of postcolonial socio-political and cultural formation. Here then are a few conjunctures that we will be exploring together within the pathetic finitude that we call the 10 week long academic quarter: Nationalism and postcoloniality, postcolonial secularism, postcolonial subject and agency formation political and psychoanalytic, postcoloniality-Reason (Enlightenment or otherwise) and Universalism, temporality and historicity in the name of the postcolonial, nationalisms and diasporas, postcolonial hybridity and double-consciousness, the postcolonial intellectual and the regime of representation, postcoloniality-gender-sexuality, the “post-al” articulation between postcoloniality and poststructuralism, subalternity-Marxism-postcoloniality, to name a few, did I say few?
The cast of characters, the dramatis personae, in our theater of thought will be:
Benedict Anderson, Edward Said, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Partha Chatterjee, Homi Bhabha, Frantz Fanon, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Achille Mbembe, R. Radhakrishnan, Talal Asad, David Scott, Nhugi Wa Thiong’O, Chinua Achebe, Amitav Ghosh, Salman Rushdie, Nadine Gordimer, Coetzee, Robert Young, Pheng Cheah, Ella Shohat, and Arjun Appadurai.
There will be a course package, or a list of a few books, or a combination thereof: my pedagogical concern here will be your wallets, and I promise to go with the most economical option. Though the focus will be on theoretical readings, postcolonial literary texts are certainly on the agenda and can be invoked meaningfully in a variety of ways. I am hoping for a free flowing and judicious combination of lecture, discussion, and student presentations: one short and one long paper will probably be the requirements, and of course every ounce of your passionate being and participation.
I hope the excitement is reciprocal: WELCOME ABOARD AND ASHORE IN A DOUBLE AMPHIBIOUS GESTURE |
| ENGLISH 210 | COLERIDGE&WORDSWRTH | CHRISTENSEN, J. | [Course Code: 24302] Thursdays 10:00-12:50pm HIB 411
Enrollment via [SEMINAR REQUEST FORM]
This seminar will take as its basic text Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria. We will proceed through the chapters sequentially, taking up the challenges--critical, philosophical, even moral—as we go. Considerable attention will be given to Wordsworth’s poetry, the great inspiration of Coleridge’s life and the great unsolved problem of his career. We will also read in David Hartley, Edmund Burke, William Hazlitt, and Thomas DeQuincey.
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| ENGLISH 210 | VICTORIAN NOVEL | BARTLETT, J. | [Course Code: 24300] Tuesdays 2:00-4:50pm HIB 411
Enrollment via [SEMINAR REQUEST FORM]
There were over 7,000 novels published in England during the Victorian period; we’ll read the top three. Some of you will be familiar with Great Expectations, Jane Eyre, and Middlemarch, so we are going to break them up in a different way. Assisted by readings in philosophies of practical reason and intentionality, we will examine the qualities that distinguish an “action” in the Victorian novel from any old thing that happens. In order to avoid taking action as an unexplained primitive, we will motivate it through its grounds—we will think of the action itself as expressive of its reasons for being an action. Understanding actions as the clearest guide to the calculative use they express means subordinating mental events like plans, intentions, and beliefs—in short, the bedrock psychology of novel characterization—to the actions that characters (and novelists) perform. We will learn how the desirability of any particular action can be found embedded in the descriptions possible of that action, and how to locate the spectrum of intentional actions that a novel is considering in the emergence of actions and their logical strings. Methodologically, we will learn how to imbricate traditional theories of the novel with philosophies of practical reasoning, instrumentalism, and rational choice, whose interest in the minutiae of everyday language and practices has much to say to the structure of nineteenth-century realist fiction. I will assume no prior familiarity with philosophy, or theories of action and character in the novel, and encourage all students interested in the period or narrative theory to enroll. Students will be expected to write brief responses to course readings, to give one presentation followed by some discussion facilitation, and to submit written work for seminar or pro-seminar credit. |
| 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 (Jan 14, 2011). Students may add or drop the course by obtaining a code from the administrator. |
| ENGLISH 299 | DISSERTATN RESEARCH | WARMINSKI, A | Course Code 24550 |