| 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 | WARMINISKI, 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 | 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, Raymond Carver, Alice Munro and Uwem Akpan. 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. We will end by viewing the 1995 film Daytrippers, attempting to figure out what, besides length, might make a film “short-story-like.”
A 10-15pp paper will be required. |
| ENGLISH 101W | MATERIALIST READING | GODDEN, R. | Departing from a Marxist assumption that materiality is socially produced, under changeable conditions that its producers neither wholly control nor wholly understand, the course seeks to explore elements of those methodologies which may best allow for the reading of literature as part of that wider materiality. We shall beg the question, aphoristically put, “If nature (the materiality) is always human nature (or human materials), how best might that stuff be understood as it reflects and is modified by literary expression?” The materiality of literature will be explored as produced in relation to a number of interwoven forms of work; that is by and within political economy, language, historical explanation, and even by and within the forgetting of that on-going and diverse production.
Since literary materiality is made from words, and since words are social instruments, we shall depart from materialist accounts of language (Volosinov, Bakhtin). Since literary words frequently take narrative forms, we will address historiography as it seeks to apprehend the real (Benjamin, Greenblatt). Since written stories are made as much from what is forgotten as from what is remembered, we will consider “forgetting”, or the unconscious, as made from that which we have learned to find unthinkable (Abraham and Torok, Freud).
These three areas, language, narrative and the structural unconscious, since they are to be read as part of a wider pattern of material making (or an economy), needs must be linked to a specific accumulative regime (Marx, Jameson, Harvey).
The purpose of the course is at all times to explore and enable the processes of reading: methodologies are more limited than the complex literary and historical objects which they address, and should neither be neither complete, nor glass machines. Each week the seminar will consider extracts from theoretical writings in relation to a particular short story. The stories chosen will be drawn primarily from a single historical period ( U.S., post 1973, variously referred to as “postmodern”, “post industrial”, “flexible Fordist” or “post Fordist”): they and the theoretical readings will be made available via pdf . |
| ENGLISH 101W | ELEGIES | O'CONNOR, L. | “Life goes on: it is the lives, the lives, the lives that die.” In this writing-intensive seminar we’ll read some of the finest elegies in English with a view to understanding both the psychological “work” of mourning (in a Freudian sense) and how the elegist uses elements of poetry to register loss, the passage of time, and renewal. Weekly writing assignments and 3 graded essays. Upbeat instructor |
| ENGLISH 101W | WRITNG ABOUT 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 | HEAVEN & HELL | KIENE, J. | It is not surprising that in a society as suffused with religious belief and theological debate as Renaissance England, nightmarish visions of Hell and beatific visions of Heaven often feature in the literature of the period. In this class, we’ll seek to understand why such visions routinely capture the imaginations of readers and audiences, both then and now, by reading examples of prose, narrative poetry, and drama that reveal political, religious, and cultural anxieties through depictions of Heaven, Hell, and related realms (such as underworlds and utopias). What religious, political, and social purposes did literary depictions of Hell and Heaven serve? What do the ways in which a culture constructs and responds to imaginative representations these spiritual realms tell us about the overriding social and existential concerns of the day? Visions of Hell and Heaven could instruct the faithful in conduct and devotion; they could satisfy a desire to see the wicked punished and the righteous redeemed; they could advanced veiled political and social critique, or demonstrate the grandeur as well as the limits of earthly power. The authors of such visions advertise their indebtedness to classical and medieval precursors (some of whom we’ll read), at the same time asserting the newness and quintessential “Englishness” of their work.
Texts may include portions of Homer’s Odyssey and Virgil’s Aeneid, Dante’s Divine Comedy, Norton’s “Induction” to A Mirror for Magistrates, Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus, Spenser’s Faerie Queene, and Milton’s Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained. 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 | HAMLET AND 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 seventeenth-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 "Changeling," Chapman's "Revenge of Bussy D'Amboise," Webster's "Duchess of Malfi," and Ford's "'Tis Pity She's a Whore." Besides bold conspiracies, desperate intrigues 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 kinds of violence (poisoned skulls, hearts on daggers, twigs for lopped-off hands, not to mention people in pies). We will read some of Francis Bacon's 'Essays' and some Hobbes as well. The course will require from the student a strong stomach and the completion of two takehome exams. What could be more fun? |
| ENGLISH 102A | REN VILLAIN&USURPER | KIENE, J. | This course will trace an evolving fascination with problems of evil and illegitimacy in the literature of medieval and early modern England. We’ll focus on prose, narrative poetry, and drama that reveals political, religious, and cultural anxieties through the depiction of characters whose words as well as actions threaten the social order, and we’ll seek to understand why such characters routinely captured the imaginations of readers and audiences. Just how rigidly did medieval and early modern authors define the boundaries between heroism and villainy, between virtue and vice, between legitimate kings and loyal citizens, on the one hand, and tyrants and traitors, on the other? What do the ways in which a society constructs and responds to its literary villains tell us about the overriding social and existential concerns of the day? Possible texts include Beowulf, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Machiavelli’s The Prince, Marlowe’s Jew of Malta, Shakespeare’s Macbeth, and Milton’s Paradise Lost. Requirements will include a series of short (2-3 page) papers, weekly informal responses, a mid-term, and a final exam. |
| ENGLISH 102B | RISE OF THE NOVEL | TUCKER, I. | This course attempts to investigate the question “What makes a novel a novel?” by going back to the moment, or moments, when the novel came into being. We will examine a variety of forms of writing that retrospectively came to be understood as ancestors of the novel, including Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko, Samuel Richardson’s Pamela, Henry Fielding’s Joseph Andrews, Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders, Frances Burney’s Evelina, and William Godwin’s Caleb Williams. We will begin the course by briefly examining some of the poetry and criticism of the period in attempt to figure out what the prose writers of the era thought they were writing, and writing against. Some questions we will consider: When, if ever, did writers of the era understand themselves to be writing something unprecedented? When, if ever, did they understand themselves to be writing novels? Is it okay for people reading after the fact to decide what they are reading are novels if the authors didn’t understand themselves to be writing such a thing?
Requirements include a midterm, final and two papers. |
| ENGLISH 102C | LIT&MANIFEST DESTNY | LAZO, R. | In 1845, the journalist John L. O’Sullivan wrote that it was the United State’s “manifest destiny to overspread the continent,” thus putting a name on an ideological belief that the country had a divine right to expand its territory. Used as a justification for rapid national expansion in the nineteenth century, Manifest Destiny has also come to be associated with the displacement of populations, particularly as a result of Indian removals and the U.S.-Mexico War. In this course we will study how a variety of writers grappled with expansionism and the questions it presented for the nation and the hemisphere. We will consider the relationship between writing and a military/political/economic process that led to the establishment of new states, including California, even as it prompted displacement of people living in the territories acquired. Our readings include newspaper articles and essays by Frederick Douglass, Henry David Thoreau, and Lydia Maria Child as well as Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick and Zitkala-Sa’s American Indian Stories. Requirements include short and long papers, an in-class exam, and attendance/participation. |
| ENGLISH 102C | VICTORIAN INHERITNC | CASTILLO, L. | This class examines the ways in which individual and civil rights interact with the rights of the state. By engaging political philosophy, literature, film, and critical theory, it focuses on issues of natural right, moral obligation, hegemony, terror, and violence to ask if, or in what cases, the rights of the individual supersede the prerogatives of the state, or if the state may rightfully delimit individual liberties. In what cases is violence justified for the assertion of one’s sovereignty? Authors discussed will include, among others: John Locke, William Shakespeare, George Orwell, Hannah Arendt, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Jürgen Habermas, and Salman Rushdie. |
| ENGLISH 102D | FITZGERALD AND FAULKNER | GODDEN, R. | The course will undertake close readings of key modernist works by Fitzgerald and Faulkner, contemporaries who wrote out of entirely divergent economic conditions and systems. Fitzgerald’s writing took place in, and explored, a culture which, in his own words, “followed money.” Faulkner’s fiction, preoccupied with racialized work, reflected and refracted an impoverished region, within which ‘bound labor’ or ‘human capital’, rather than monetary capital, was central. As a transition between the two prose writers, we will read T.S. Eliots’ The Waste Land (1922). Eliots’ long poem seeks mythic structures as a rebuke to an urban modernity which Eliot described as “the vast panorama of anarchy and futility that is contemporary history.” Faulkner, though as much a modernist as Fitzgerald or Eliot, deploys modernist techniques in the pursuit of pre-modern and non-urban historical imperatives, imperatives generated by an archaic regime of accumulation, grounded in debt peonage.
The course (whose subtitle might be, ‘The Literature of Two Economies’) will address how different forms of property and its production yield different narrative forms; where differences involve not simply differences of subject (the flapper rather than the sharecropper), but different structures, perceptions and poetics. Works covered will include, “The Diamond as Big as The Ritz” (1922), The Great Gatsby (1925), Tender Is the Night (1934) by Fitzgerald; The Waste Land (1922) by T. S. Eliot; As I Lay Dying (1930), Absalom, Absalom! (1936), and Go Down, Moses (1942) by Faulkner. |
| ENGLISH 102D | CONTEMP US FICTION | SZALAY, M. | This class will read short stories and novels written since the 1990s about the United States. We will focus on fiction that responds to seismic geopolitical events, like the end of the Cold War and start of the War on Terror, but we will also attend to the manner in which fiction engages popular and business culture--like changes in musical subcultures, and changes in written communication associated with text messaging, PowerPoint presentations, and blogs. Class requirements will include a midterm and final examination, a paper, and regular attendance. |
| ENGLISH 103 | MARKETING FICTIONS | CHRISTENSEN, J. | How do modern marketers use narrative to sell products and create brand communities? How do films and novels incorporate branded products, environments, and experiences into their fictional worlds? How do manufactured objects and built environments tell stories, and what genres do they favor (romance, fairy tale, science fiction, satire)? How are D.I.Y. practitioners of new media forms (indie music, self-publishing, craft-based businesses, grassroots organizations) using mainstream marketing techniques to build their products and profiles, and how are these techniques in turn effecting mainstream marketing? How have marketing and branding discourses reshaped both authorship and readership? Syllabus includes works by Malcolm Gladwell, Nicholson Baker, Mike Davis, and Tao Lin, plus Bonnie and Clyde, the Toy Story movies, and Batman.
Two short assignments culminate in a research paper in which students write about some aspect of the contemporary branded environment. There will also be a midterm and a final exam.
Draft syllabus available on line:
http://www.thinkingwithshakespeare.org/index.php?id=1069 |
| ENGLISH 105 | QUEER CINEMA | ALEXANDER, J. | QUEER CINEMA will focus primarily on major works of queer fiction (or works claimed by the ever-changing and expanding canon of queer fiction) that have been turned into films that, in turn, have contributed to or effected the development of a recognizable queer cinema. So, we will probably start with Wilde's _Picture of Dorian Gray_, and look at different American and European film versions of it, noting how the book and its subsequent adaptations have set the stage for a queer cinema. We'll move from there to works by Virginia Woolf/Sally Potter, Patricia Highsmith/Alfred Hitchcock, Langston Hughes/Isaac Julien, Annie Proulx/Ang Lee, and Sarah Schulman/Jonathan Larson/Chris Columbus, as possibilities. Given the diversity of characters here, we're bound to question what "queer" is; indeed, much of our discussion will probably focus on contact zones and contested spaces, particularly as queer texts (or texts with substantial queer subtexts) are adapted into films, sometimes for mass audiences, with varying effects. What's gained? What's lost? What's transformed? What's queered? What's de-queered? Short papers, longer paper, exam. |
| ENGLISH 105 | INDIGENOUS LIT | O'CONNOR, L. | This course explores works by contemporary writers from cultures that have been devastated by colonialism, beginning with Aborigine, Maori, and Samoan writers and then turning to Native American writers. We’ll examine the dynamics of coercive assimilation and the influence of an education designed to “kill the Indian, save the man” on the psyche, on cultural identity, and on indigenous languages and knowledge. Assimilated into the dominant Anglophone culture that almost destroyed the customs, oral traditions, and languages of their own ethnic cultures, these writers use “the master’s tools” to narrate the traumatic loss of an ancestral culture they can neither forget nor fully reconstruct. Paper, midterm, and final. |
| ENGLISH 105 | T. MORRISON'S WORK | KEIZER, A. | In an interview from the early 1980s, Toni Morrison states that “narrative remains the best way to learn anything . . . so I continue with narrative form.” The aim of this course is to explore, in detail, Morrison's uses of narrative form and figurative language. We will read most of Morrison's novels, examining the development of themes and formal strategies. We will also read Morrison's literary and cultural criticism, paying particular attention to the ways in which issues in the novels are addressed in these non-fiction works. Among the questions we will attempt to answer by reading the novels and criticism together is the question of how narrative might function as a form of theory. Another ongoing concern of the class will be to situate Morrison's work in the African American and American literary traditions. Course requirements: two short essays (2-4 pages), the second of which will be the midterm, and a take-home final exam. |
| ENGLISH 106 | LATE VICTRN LIT | HENDERSON, A. | In this course we will trace the late-nineteenth-century preoccupation with the workings of representation, focusing on poems and novels that are meditations on their own capacity to figure forth the world. We will begin by familiarizing ourselves with Romantic theories of representation--theories that confidently root language in nature or the divine order--so as to be able track the Victorian loss of faith in the artist’s capacity to produce symbols that make reference to anything beyond themselves. Readings will include Dickens’ Old Curiosity Shop, Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass, Wilde’s Picture of Dorian Gray, and poems by Tennyson, Browning, Swinburne, and Rossetti. Students will also read several critical articles and lead class discussion on one of them. The writing for the course will center on the production of one major essay, for which students will produce an annotated bibliography and an outline to share with the class. |
| ENGLISH 106 | AF AM LIT & THEORY | KEIZER, A. | This course juxtaposes works of African American literature with critical/theoretical essays on literature and culture. We’ll examine how Frederick Douglass’s 1845 slave narrative is revised in Ishmael Reed’s postmodernist novel Flight to Canada. We’ll read Toni Morrison’s novel Song of Solomon with the work of Mikhail Bakhtin and Nella Larsen’s Passing alongside critical race theory. Finally, we’ll use feminist theory to analyze several works of short fiction. Requirements include an in-class midterm, a 3-page prospectus for the final paper, and a final paper of 10-12 pages. |
| ENGLISH 106 | WHAT'S ENTERTAINMT | CHRISTENSEN, J. | This course will examine the concept of entertainment that is developed by the Hollywood motion picture industry from the silent picture era to the 1990s. We will analyze motion pictures as devices designed to entertain, as arguments about what entertainment is, and as efforts to comprehend all past and present forms of entertainment: fairs, amusement parks, vaudeville, and burlesque. Motion pictures will likely include Lumiere and Edison shorts, The Jazz Singer (1927), The Crowd (1928), Freaks (1932), Footlight Parade (1933), She Done Him Wrong (1933), Pinocchio (1940), Dumbo (1941), Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942), Sullivan’s Travels (1941), Hollywood Canteen (1944) Meet Me in St. Louis (1944), Nightmare Alley (1947), The Greatest Show on Earth (1952), The Band Wagon (1953), Kiss Me Stupid (1964), Bonnie and Clyde (1967), Westworld (1973), Batman (1989), Jurassic Park (1993) Casino (1995), and Shrek (2001). We will have screen two movies a week. There will also be readings from historical documents and contemporary film theory and criticism. Grades will be based on a mid-term exam, a final paper of 9-12 pages, occasional quizzes, and class discussion. |
| ENGLISH 106 | READING POETRY | RADHAKRISHNAN, R. | Poetry makes nothing happen. W.H. Auden.
Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the universe. Percy Bysshe Shelley.
Poetry, I too dislike it. Marianne Moore.
A poem is like dancing whereas prose is like walking. Paul Valery.
Beauty is Truth and Truth Beauty. John Keats.
A sonnet is a moment’s monument. Dante Gabriel Rossetti.
How do these different diagnoses and definitions add up? Is poetry difficult or easy, elitist or populist, critical-Utopian and transformative or just tamely beautiful, deeply subjective or out in the world? Is it political or apolitical? What is its relationship to language, to society, to the individual? Is it a kind of truth or just a mode of saying? How is it related to thought, to philosophy, and to every day life? Is a poem intellectual, cognitive, emotive, sensuous, or all of the above? Why and how does it please the reader? What forms of joy and pleasure does it offer that are uniquely its own? How much has poetry changed over centuries and why?
Questions, more questions. This course does not pretend to have all the answers, but I certainly hope that we as a passionate and intensely committed collectivity will have these questions in mind as we practice the art of close reading a number of profound and delicious poems in English, drawn from different time periods and schools of composition. Likely suspects: William Shakespeare, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Keats, Adrienne Rich, Sylvia Plath, Wallace Stevens, W.H. Auden, T.S. Eliot, Emily Dickinson, William Butler Yeats, Agha Shahid Ali, and more. Even as we dive deeply and irrevocably into each poem, so irrevocably indeed that we may not know the difference between swimming and drowning, and submit it to word by word and between the words scrutiny and exegesis, we will be aligning and relating the inner world of each poem to its broader worldly context of ideas, philosophies, critical theories and schools of thought, political regimes, socio cultural and political landscapes and horizons. The emphasis will be as much on “reading” as on “poetry,” and it is my hope that the course will help you understand the deep symbiosis as well as complicity between the two terms.
Mode of teaching: A mix of some lecture and introduction combined with individual student presentations and collective dialog and discussion.
Expectations and requirements: Diligent attendance and participation. No required texts: we will just be downloading copies of the required poems from the web. I will be suggesting secondary critical material now and then, as the need arises.
You will very likely be writing two short papers and I long paper.
WELCOME TO READING POETRY IN THE HOPE THAT POETRY WILL READ US IN GENEROUS RECIPROCITY |
| ENGLISH 210 | RACE&EARLY REPUBLIC | LAZO, R. | [Course Code: 24310] Thursdays 10:00-12:50am HIB 411
Enrollment via [SEMINAR REQUEST FORM]
This course takes a comparative approach to racial production in the nineteenth century United States, considering how Native Americans, Mexicans, Asians, and African Americans were portrayed and portrayed themselves in a variety of texts. We will begin with ground- breaking studies published in the last thirty years, including Ronald Takaki’s Iron Cages and Reginald Horsman’s Race and the Manifest Destiny to consider how ideas about race and ethnicity helped shape conceptions of US nationhood. Then we will turn to a series of case studies: the removal of Native Americans, the US-Mexico War, and the abolitionist movement to read closely various descriptions of racialized people and how those descriptions were connected to economic circulation and political transformations. In addition to fiction and poetry, we will analyze newspaper articles, travel writing, and essays. A part of the course will focus on recent research on race in relation to the role of the United States in global and hemispheric contexts. We will read selections from Frederick Douglass, Maria Amparo Ruiz de Burton, Sui-Sin Far, Herman Melville, and Richard Henry Dana, among others. The primary format will be discussion, and you should come prepared to share your readings of the material each week. The seminar will include at least one visit from a scholar at another university. |
| ENGLISH 210 | AGE OF SENSIBILITY | GROSS, D. | [Course Code: 24308] Mondays 4:00-6:50pm HIB 411 Enrollment via [SEMINAR REQUEST FORM]
As "consilience" has become a guiding principle across academic disciplines and national funding agencies, the humanities are usually, but not always, epiphenomenal to the sciences they admire. How do these consilient projects function hegemonically, and what are the alternatives? In this course we will focus on a new consilient challenge called Cognitive Approaches to Literature (CAL) as it is practiced, not coincidentally, by scholars of 18th- century literature including Lisa Zunshine, Alan Richardson, Blakey Vermeule, and Suzanne Keen, and we will consider alternative approaches rooted in the critical traditions of rhetoric and phenomenology. After all, cognition itself is a historical phenomenon, both in terms of its emergence as an explicit problematic in the European 18th-century, and in terms of its substance: any particular cognitive formation is embodied, socially embedded, and in- the- world uncomfortably, and it is this practical discomfort that demands critical theory. We will read Sterne\'s Sentimental Journey, Radcliffe\'s Romance of the Forest, and Austen\'s Sense and Sensibility, paying particular attention to \"extended cognition\" as it complicates British and Continental idealism through Kant (\"What Does It Mean to Orient Oneself in Thought?\"). Then we will explore an alternative to the dominant trend in CAL by way of internally connected readings that help us theorize extended cognition in the novel and beyond, including selections from Martin Heidegger (Being and Time, on rhetoric), Alva Noë (Out of Our Heads: Why You Are Not Your Brain and and Other Lessons from the Biology of Consciousness), Sara Ahmed (Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others) and Gayle Salamon (Assuming a Body: Transgender and Rhetorics of Materiality).
This course satisfies the English Department requirement in literature of the long 18th century. It is crosslisted with the Critical Theory Emphasis. |
| ENGLISH 210 | PROSE POETRY&BIBLE | MILES, J. | [Course Code: 24306] Tuesdays 3:00-5:50am HIB 411 Enrollment via [SEMINAR REQUEST
FORM]
Both as a repertory of subjects and as the echo of a resoundingly distinctive style, the English
Bible is rivaled in its impact on English literature only by Shakespeare. Working from the new
Norton Critical Edition of the Bible in English and from Harold Bloom’s The Shadow of a Great
Rock: A Literary Appreciation of the King James Bible, this seminar will engage the great text
in its prose, its poetry, and some of its progeny. |
| ENGLISH 210 | NATURE & SECOND NATURE | SILVER, V. | [Course Code: 24302] Thursdays 2:00-4:50pm HIB 411 Enrollment via [SEMINAR REQUEST FORM]
Nature and Second Nature: Early Modern Pastoral and the English Civil War.
The subject of this course is largely the English pastoral lyric (as against pastoral prose and drama), because it is in the lyric that we see most clearly and remarkably how political understandings shape, distort, refine poetic traditions, conventions and expressions--of which the pastoral is one of the most prescribed and most sophisticated. In the late 16th and 17th centuries, conceptions of governance in Europe underwent a revolution even as Britain engaged in the great experiment of (thwarted) republicanism--the consequence of parliament's and then Cromwell's victories in the English civil war. But the bookends to both civil war and notional commonwealth or Protectorate were the reigns of Stuart kings, who liked to fashion themselves after French absolutism, arguing the divine right of kings (whose English history can be traced to Richard II).
This ferment and, ultimately, conflict between court and country, loyalist and parliamentarian, royalist and liberal, Tory and Whig factions is echoed in the fields and pastures, groves and streams of the seventeenth-century pastoral, whose past and present traditions associate it not only with political allegory and satire, but also the Caroline or cavalier romance of Merry England, and through the erotic suffering that romance portrays, the topos of the world's mutability. What emerges from these various conceptual tributaries to the pastoral, especially with the rise of philosophical and adventitious scepticism in a world turned upside down by civil war, is a poetics of methodical equivocality--irony, in short--that engenders the most curious pastoral landscapes, populated by the most peculiar nymphs, swains, mowers, shepherds and shepherdesses. Freud would have a field day.
Accordingly, the poetry will include works by Will Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Robert Herrick, Richard Lovelace, Marvell, very likely Milton's "Lycidas," Aphra Behn, Rochester, John Dryden, and a brief extension to Swift and perhaps Pope. Greek (Theophrastus' Idylls) and Roman (Virgil's Eclogues and Georgics) precedents, Montaigne, Shakespeare's 'Tempest' and Hobbes will constitute the historical/ analytical framework, along with Freud himself in the form of his 1914 lecture 'On Narcissism' and 'Totem and Taboo.'
The requirements for the course are as follows:
Attendance and talking. No reports. For seminar credit, a seminar paper. For pro-seminar credit, a takehome exam. |
| ENGLISH 210 | 21ST C AMER NOVEL | SZALAY, M. | [Course Code: 24300] Fridays 02:00pm - 04:50pm HIB 411 Enrollment via [SEMINAR REQUEST FORM]
"The 21st-Century American Novel"
Our primary task will be the reading and evaluation of novels written in the new millennium. But we will also study the institutions and networks that generate, disseminate, and evaluate contemporary fiction. Topics might include how the university writing program and the annual awarding of literary prizes contribute to what James English calls an "economy of prestige"; how superstores and digital distribution systems impact the branding and marketing of particular literary genres and styles; how television book clubs, magazines, and newspapers organize the mainstream reading experience; how alternate forums like McSweeny's organize the alternative reading experience; and how the rise of so-called "quality" television has impacted both the writer's and the reader's understanding of social realism.
Possible novelists might include:
Michael Chabon Junot Diaz Jennifer Egan David Eggers Jonathan Franzen Jonathan Lethem Rick Moody Gary Shteyngart Dana Spiotta Vanessa Veselka Colson Whitehead |
| 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. Students may add or drop the course by obtaining a code from the administrator. |
| ENGLISH 299 | DISSERTATN RESEARCH | STEINTRAGER, J | Course Code 24550 |