| Course | Title | Instructor | Description |
|---|
| ENGLISH 10 | INTRO SCIFI STUDIES | ALEXANDER, J. | "Histories of the Future: An Introduction to Science Fiction Studies" will examine, chronologically, the development over the past 100 years of the science fiction short story. Beginning with the "scientific romances" of H. G. Wells, we will consider how various writers used the emerging genre to address the intersection of scientific and technological developments with socio-political issues. We will see how scientific fetishism gives way to a consideration of what Isaac Asimov calls "social science fiction," which develops into feminist SF, ecologically- oriented SF, the "New Wave" of the 70s, cyberpunk of the 80s, and the "New Weird" of the 90s, including "slipstream" fiction, a hybrid species of fiction blending SF and literary fiction. |
| ENGLISH 28A | POETIC IMAGINATION | LAZO, R. | 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 | LAZO, R. | 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 | SILVER, V. | The course will address the development of the 'literary,' both as a practice and a category of writing, beginning with the Greeks and ending somewhere in the early 20th century, probably with Freud but perhaps with Derrida. In between, we will consider the religious, moral, political, philosophical and artistic uses of what we now call 'literature,' and the reasons why that category has come (at least popularly) to describe so-called 'fictional' writings exclusively. In doing so, we will be bound to contemplate what it means to be a student of literature, i.e. an English major. The texts will be the "Norton Anthology of Criticism and Theory" and Erich Auerbach's "Mimesis," with the latter serving as a model of literary analysis as well as our continuing means of contact with literature as such. Attendance is mandatory, both in lecture and section; there will be a take-home exam for each of three historical units; and quizzes could happen if attendance lags, or class discussion ceases to have its wonted vigor. |
| ENGLISH 101W | TRAGEDY | HARRIES, M. | A familiar way to narrate the history of tragedy is to claim that it was born in ancient Greece and flourished again in the Renaissance, only then to die in modernity. But what is it? Is the thing we call tragedy when we read the Greek tragedians -- Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides -- the same thing that we encounter when we read the tragedies of Shakespeare? Is tragedy a consistent genre that spans millennia, or a name given to a diverse and contradictory group of texts in very different periods?
This reading will provoke a series of questions. First, we will discuss the problem of literary genre itself. What kind of work does the category of “genre” do? How does genre guide how we read? What commonalities between texts does genre make visible? What singularities might genre obscure? Tragedy also raises larger questions about the representation of suffering. Why stare at the suffering of others? Further: how does tragic conflict embody larger social conflicts? What conflicts can tragedy not embody? Has history reached a point where the embodied suffering of tragic protagonists can no longer stand for anything outside itself?
We will explore these questions by reading ancient and very new plays by Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Shakespeare, Caryl Churchill, Sarah Kane and others. Alongside these texts we will read critical and philosophical statements on tragedy and genre by Plato, Aristotle, Hegel, George Steiner, Raymond Williams, Jacques Derrida, and others.
Texts will include:
Aeschylus, The Oresteia, trans. Robert Fagles
Sophocles, Antigone, trans. Robert Fagles
Euripides, The Bacchae, in The Complete Greek Tragedies, vol. 5 (Chicago)
Shakespeare, The History of King Lear (Oxford Classics)
George Lillo, The London Merchant
Caryl Churchill, Plays 3
Sarah Kane, Complete Plays |
| ENGLISH 101W | PERSONAL ESSAY | LAZO, R. | |
| ENGLISH 101W | ENCHANTED | DAVIS, R. | Enchanted Objects in Medieval Literature
Medieval literature is filled with supernatural objects: magic rings, protective cloaks, bleeding lances, self-propelled ships. But even in mundane circumstances, inanimate objects exert influence on the human beings who observe and interact with them, blurring the lines between human agency and inanimate force. In this course, we’ll consider the status and function of objects in a range of medieval texts, from the gift-giving society of the Anglo-Saxon tradition to narratives of romance heroes and saintly relics to encyclopedic descriptions of rocks and their properties. We’ll read essays on thing theory, object studies, and the “new” materialism to frame our discussions, asking questions such as the following: what accounts for the enchanting pull of the material? what roles do objects play within human social and symbolic economies, including literary texts? is it possible to imagine objects as independent agents, and, if so, what does that mean for our relationship to the non-human elements of our world? how do objects that seem to transcend the limitations of matter ask us to rethink our assumptions about the categories of matter and spirit? Enchantment, in short, is a two-way street: human beings are constantly negotiating their relationship to the physical world, to natural objects as well as ones of human fashioning. In this course, we’ll use contemporary theory to consider questions about matter and materiality that lie at the heart of medieval literary culture.
Course requirements include attendance at all scheduled meetings; regular contribution to class discussion; a presentation; a 3-5 page analysis paper; an annotated bibliography; a 8-10 page research paper, and participation in peer review. |
| ENGLISH 101W | CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE | KIENE, J. | This course will serve as an introduction to the conventions of writing and research in the discipline of literary scholarship through study of 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 will include the narrative poem Hero and Leander and the plays Dido, Queen of Carthage, 1 Tamburlaine, The Jew of Malta, Doctor Faustus, and Edward II.
Course requirements will include regular participation in class discussion, weekly written responses, and short (5-page) close analysis essay, and a longer (15 page) research essay for which you will hand in preliminary drafts for workshopping in peer groups. |
| ENGLISH 101W | READG PARADISE LOST | LEWIS, J. | If you are an English major, you should read Paradise Lost!!!! John Milton’s poetic reimagination of “Man’s first disobedience” (1667/1674) is one of the west’s great epics; it is also, in Milton’s own words, a “great argument” intended “to justify the ways of God to men.” The power and brilliance with which Milton fulfills both of these ambitions made his “Master work” a foundation and crucial point of reference for much later literature in English; having read Paradise Lost, you are bound to become a better reader of that literature. But what IS reading? This is a question Milton wrestled with throughout his life, and it underwrites Paradise Lost. Indeed, the poem is itself a reading (many would say a misreading) of the Judeo-Christian Bible, and its major characters are all defined in terms of how they decipher and interpret the world that they are in, thereby creating (thus metaphorially ‘writing’) that world and their place in it. Our own writing-centered course will focus on problems of critical reading in relation to Paradise Lost. We will approach Milton as a quarrelsome reader of both the epic tradition and the Book of Genesis; we will foreground the problems of interpretation that are staged in his poem; and along the way we will look at some famous critical readings of that poem by such figures as C.S. Lewis, Stanley Fish, and Harold Bloom. Our practical goal, however, is to make you a more accomplished critical writer, and to that end you will be producing three papers of, respectively, 4, 6, and 8 pages in length. These will be subject to peer-editing ( = critical reading!) as well as to professorial comment and, in at least one case, revision. |
| ENGLISH 102A | RENAIS BANNED BOOKS | KIENE, J. | This course will survey English Renaissance literature by studying examples of early modern literary and non-literary texts that attained “forbidden” or “banned” status during the early modern period. We’ll focus on poems, prose tracts, and plays that tantalize with visions of forbidden knowledge, that peer into hidden strategies of political control (the “mysteries of state”), that give voice to unauthorized or non-normative cultural, racial, gendered, or religious positions or identities, that express anxiety about governmental and other forms of censorship, or that were themselves manipulated, censored, or banned from public circulation or performance during the 16th and 17-centuries in England.
Possible texts include Machiavelli’s The Prince, Shakespeare’s Richard II, Macbeth, or King Lear, Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, portions of Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, Ben Jonson’s Sejanus His Fall, and Milton’s Areopagitica. Requirements will include a formal essay, regular reading quizzes, weekly informal writing, a mid-term, and a final exam. |
| ENGLISH 102A | ARTHURIAN TRADITION | DAVIS, R. | This course investigates the major traditions of Arthurian literature from the Middle Ages to Monty Python. Our focus will be on the medieval development of the myth of Arthur in Celtic, Latin, and French texts (all read in translation), as well as in Middle English literature including Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Malory’s Morte Darthur, and medieval romance. In the second half of the course, we’ll examine the adaptability of the Arthurian legend to the changing values of different eras by analyzing Victorian and modern versions of the tales in Tennyson’s Idylls of the King and T.H. White’s The Once and Future King. As time permits, we will also consider the Arthurian legend in several films including Excalibur, Monty Python and the Holy Grail, and a recent addition, King Arthur.
Course requirements include attendance at all lectures; weekly reading quizzes; two 3-5 page essays; a midterm and a final. |
| ENGLISH 102B | THINKING ABOUT SELF | VAN SANT, A. | What is the self? A simple yet very difficult question. The "self" can be defined as "a permanent subject of successive and varying states of consciousness." On the other hand, we speak of "a former self" or say we feel like "our old selves" again. In this course we will read 3 fictions that centralize the representation of a self - John Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress, 1678 (a spiritual allegory), Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, 1719 (a fictional travel account), and Samuel Richardson's Pamela, 1741 (a novel written in letters). We will also examine illustrations of these fictions to ask what kinds of self is delineated in them. In addition, we will consider some philosophical treatments of our question by Rene Descartes, Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and David Hume (selections from the web).
Students will write a very short paper and a longer paper and take a final. Students will also write informally to discover their own thinking. |
| ENGLISH 102C | HEMISPHERIC AMERICA | LAZO, R. | This course begins with the proposition that America is not another word for the United States but a spatial concept that cuts across various territories in the hemisphere. In the nineteenth century, as the map of the hemisphere was redrawn and new nations were established, writers and intellectuals took up socio-political debates that affected numerous countries. For example, slavery and abolition were important not only for the United States but also for Cuba, Haiti, and other territories. We begin with Edmundo O'Gorman's "The Invention of America" to work through the conceptual challenges and limitations of thinking hemispherically, then read a variety of texts, including Melville뭩 "Benito Cereno," Ruiz de Burton's novel "Who Would Have Thought It?," travel writing by Julia Ward Howe and Richard Henry Dana, and essays by Jose Marti. We will be particularly attentive to the development of Manifest Destiny and US expansionism in relation to other countries. Requirements will include midterm and final exams, two short papers, and a project. |
| ENGLISH 102C | THE 1890'S | BARTLETT, J. | In this course we will read a number of works associated with Aestheticism and the Decadence, a period marked by great social, literary, and philosophical ambivalences, including the paradox of the cosmopolitan subject, the circulation of criticism and the exclusivity of the coterie, the aestheticization of the object and the relation between the useful and the beautiful. We will read philosophies of art and culture by John Ruskin, Walter Pater, Vernon Lee, anthropology by W. T. Stead, sociology by Max Nordau, sexology by Havelock Ellis, and psychical research by William James. Our literary texts will include prose and poetry by Aubrey Beardsley, Max Beerbohm, George Egerton, Henry James, Arthur Machen, H. G. Wells, and Oscar Wilde. Requirements include a midterm, a final paper of 5-7 pages, and a final exam. |
| ENGLISH 102D | MODERISM'S STAGES | HARRIES, M. | Modernist theater ranged from the plays of Henrik Ibsen, which many saw as one of the first blasts of a new movement in literature, to the exhausted landscapes of the plays of Samuel Beckett. New dramatic forms challenged older generic conventions. Plays represented exhilarating, if also frightening, possibilities of emancipation as well as situations where human autonomy seemed an empty remainder of earlier experience.
Theater supplies not only examples of modernist literature, however, but also a key concern of modernist writing and artistic production across genres and forms. Even as cinema rose steadily gained larger and larger audiences, the theater continued to fascinate artists. Theatricality provided a way to think about human authenticity in the context of alienated experience. Theatrical genres modeled the larger shape of history: as comedy, or as tragedy, as some mixture. Drama offered some of the key examples for imagining psychology: Freud’s adaptation of Oedipus is probably the most familiar example.
This course will look examine examples of modernist theater as well as modernist works in other forms that engage theater, drama, and theatricality.
Readings will include:
Henrik Ibsen, A Doll House and Hedda Gabler
Sigmund Freud, “Psychopathic Characters on the Stage”
Virginia Woolf, Between the Acts
Joan Riviere, “Womanliness as a Masquerade”
Gertrude Stein, “Plays”
Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot |
| ENGLISH 103 | MARKETING FICTIONS | CHRISTENSEN, J. | How do modern marketers use narrative to sell products, build corporate identities, and create brand communities? How do films and novels incorporate branded products, environments, and experiences into their fictional worlds in order to reflect on their own means of production and dissemination? How do manufactured objects and built environments tell stories, and what genres do they favor (romance, fairy tale, science fiction, satire)? How does architecture become event in the experience economy? 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 affecting mainstream marketing? How have marketing and branding discourses reshaped both authorship and readership? Syllabus includes print works by David Foster Wallace, Nicholson Baker, Mike Davis and Geoff Manaugh, plus films such as Executive Suite, The Descendants, Toy Story 2, and Disney shorts.
A sequence of short assignments culminates in a research paper in which students write about some aspect of the contemporary branded environment. There will also be a midterm, a final exam, and quizzes. |
| ENGLISH 105 | LIT AND NATIONALISM | RADHAKRISHNAN, R. | In this course, we will explore and question the thematic, ideological, and aesthetic connections between literature and nationalism. Why and how did nationalism become the normative threshold of collectivity and of populism? What are the mechanisms that create the subjectivity of cultural and literary nationalism? What are the links between modernity and the formation of national sensibility? Is nationalism Eurocentric and western in its modularity? What happens when nationalism travels to Asia and Africa? If nationalism is anchored in the cultural and literary politics of colonial modernity, how do we differentiate non-western nationalisms from western nationalisms? What role does “the state” play in determining who the people are and how they should organize themselves ideologically? How does “national literature” deal with issues such as, gender, class, sexuality, self and other, insiders and outsiders, sovereign citizens and immigrants, war and peace, reason and madness? These are some of the questions that we will be pursuing as we make our way through the following novels that embody symptomatically the many contradictory claims and valences of nationalism: Virginia Woolf’s MRS. DALLOWAY, E.M. Forster’s A PASSAGE TO INDIA, Kazuo Ishiguro’s REMAINS OF THE DAY, Amitav Ghosh’s THE SHADOW LINES, Ngugi wa ThiongO’s A GRAIN OF WHEAT, and Tsitsi Dangarembga’s NERVOUS CONDITIONS.
Requirements and Expectations: Regular attendance and committed participation. 1 Short paper (5 pages), 1 Take-home exam, and 1 Long paper (7-10 pages). |
| ENGLISH 106 | MILITARY CULTURE | BURKE, C. | No detail of military life—the style of haircut, the pitch of a sailor’s white cap, or the chants sung in basic training—is without significance, whether its meaning is imposed from above or smuggled into the barracks or onto the parade ground by ordinary recruits, common sailors or Marines. Like any occupational folk group, members of the military distinguish themselves not only by the jobs they do but by the rituals they share, the jokes and legends they exchange, even the slang that flavors their everyday conversations. They pass on these traditions from one generation of recruits to another, inculcating attitudes towards the missions they train for, the rigid hierarchy they confirm or chafe against, and the values they espouse. In this course we will look at military culture as represented in literature, film and folklore. |
| ENGLISH 106 | CULTURE INDUSTRY | SZALAY, M. | The Culture Industry Reconsidered
This course will assess the contemporary media conglomerate and evaluate the forms of cultural production that now fall within its purview. We'll ask, for example, what distinguishes one conglomerate from another, and what distinguishes a Time Warner film or television series, for example, from one produced by a different conglomerate. We'll study the theory and practice of branding and recent empirical studies of Time Warner, Bertelsmann, and News Corp. in particular. Along the way, we'll study literary fiction and television about branding and we'll examine "transmedia franchises" that move between fiction and TV.
Requirements to include on in-class presentation and one supervised research project into a work of fiction or television of the student's choosing. |
| ENGLISH 106 | VISITING FOREIGNERS | BURT, E. | “Come right in. Make yourself at home.” A frequent experience that the mid-century Victorian novels had to draw upon in their project of realist representation is that of a transformed and anxious hospitality at the national level. The long and short works by Dickens, Brontë, Eliot, Trollope, Thackeray and Collins that we will read seize upon the new anxiety. They portray the accommodations being found to receive and/or resent foreign guests at home in England, and generally to manage the fear of collapsed internal boundaries and misunderstanding that the foreigner “acting like” she is at home figures. We will also look at stories of hospitality to individual British travelers abroad. Such stories seem to give the novelist a chance to criticize Empire–building by showing frank fantasies in which an individual is welcomed by foreign hosts as a heroic figure of virtue or even a semi-divine savior, fantasies that turn nightmarish as the individual is then forced to confront the limits of her values and her capacity to understand what she sees. We will ask: who is visited, whom do they visit, and what are the rites and rules of--and the places open or closed to--visiting? How do the English characters locate, identify and deal with the foreign? What are the anxieties they are managing and the ideals they are representing through hospitality?
A second question arises: might the foreign visitors also threaten the firm conventions regulating the realist novel? The foreign visitors often appear as rigid stereotypes, borrowed rather from allegory or tragedy than from 19th-century experience, so that among the anxieties the novels confront appears that of the novelist. What does it mean to be a realist novelist if your novel keeps having to make room for figures from non-realist traditions? What happens to the realist author’s mastery over characterization and language? Does Victorian realism include a self-critique when it makes hospitality a topic? We will investigate the topic in close readings and class discussion; students will pursue them in a class presentation and two mid-length papers. |
| ENGLISH 106 | THE VICTORIAN NOVEL | BARTLETT, J. | 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. You will be expected to write four brief responses to course readings, to give one oral presentation followed by some discussion facilitation, and to write and revise two papers. |
| ENGLISH 106 | JOYCE'S ULYSSES | O'CONNOR, L. | The E106 is the capstone course for English majors. And what can cap spending a quarter immersed in what many regard as finest and most influential novel of the twentieth-century, James Joyce’s Ulysses, working on a 12-15 page research-paper in the stimulating company of a supportive seminar? Superlatives can be intimidating, of course, but the novel’s relish for the ordinary quickly banishes solemnity as readers become absorbed in the often very funny thoughts of the main characters as they go about their daily business in Dublin on June 16, 1904. My goal is to make Ulysses (1922) accessible and endlessly intriguing, so that you’ll enjoy revisiting the novel at various times throughout your life. Indeed I recommend undertaking a solo reading odyssey over winter break so that you can begin those revisitations on Jan 8th! Every imaginable critical and theoretical approach has been used to interpret Ulysses, and the novel has in turn influenced the theorists (the late philosopher and former UCI professor, Jacques Derrida, said that “deconstruction would not have been possible without Joyce,” for example). We’ll begin by situating the novel in relation to its structural Homeric parallel and its Irish and modernist contexts. The 1984 Hans Gabler edition of Ulysses (ISBN 0394743121) is required, even if you already have another edition of Ulysses, because it is essential for the success of the seminar for everyone to be “on the same page.” Our ten-week itinerary will cover about 2 Homeric episodes each week and some supplementary reading, though most reading in secondary criticism will be conducted independently as part of your research project. Discussion will be stimulated by participants’ weekly response papers on the upcoming assigned episodes (circulated on the class messageboard), and by pre-circulated reading questions. Students are required to submit a prospectus and annotated bibliography by the mid-quarter deadline, to engage in a peer-reviewing process with the instructor of their final drafts near the end of the quarter, and to meet the final submission deadline the revised capstone essay. There will be no exams, though you’ll have take-home writing to do around weeks 4-6, and of course a 12-15 page paper to finish by the quarter’s end. The final paper is worth 60% of the grade, and the remaining 40% covers supplementary writing exercises (response papers, prospectus, presentation on secondary criticism etc), all of which feed into the research paper. |
| ENGLISH 106 | WHITMAN | JACKSON, V. | Whitman for Whitmaniacs
Warning: Take this class only if you like to read Whitman, since that is all we will read. Walt Whitman wrote the same book seven times between the 1850s and the 1880s--or, he wrote seven different books of poetry that all have the same title. We will read each edition of Leaves of Grass in succession, and we will also read much of Whitman's prose and a few volumes of poetry not included in Leaves. In this class, you will learn a lot about Whitman--and you will also learn a lot about American poetry in the nineteenth cen |
| ENGLISH 210 | JOYCE'S ULYSSES | O'CONNOR, L. | [Course Code: 23802] Fridays 2:00pm -4:50pm HIB 411
Enrollment via [click here]
James Joyce’s Ulysses
In this seminar we will read and discuss one work—James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922)—a compendious and sociable novel that is ideal for reading in colloquy with other readers. Joyce’s contemporaries explicated the novel as it emerged in serial form in Chicago’s The Little Review, and it has stimulated theoretical speculation and diverse critical interpretations ever since. Ulysses was quickly recognized as a game-changer by writers, who adapted its representations of consciousness, innovations in narrative technique, and stylistic virtuosity to their own ends. (In addition to Joyce’s influence on the “novel,” I am interested personally in Joyce’s influence on poets and “phonotexts” or acoustic writing). Because the seminar is designed for PhD and MFA students, our discussion will switch between two speculative tracks--How do you interpret x, and how would that interpretation need adjustment if read in the light of y passage or theme or critical approach? Why does Joyce delay communicating x information about y until this point in the narrative, and how does he accomplish z? Our ten-week itinerary will cover about 2 episodes each week and situate Ulysses in relation to modernist and avant-garde aesthetics; its Odyssean intertext; its Irish cultural and political context; and a selective sampling of salient critical contributions. (Most secondary reading will be conducted independently by seminar participants, however). I like to think of our class-schedule as combining a steady Odyssean itinerary for timely arrival at the “Yes” terminal with frequent moorings in the spirit of Immrama (early medieval Gaelic voyage-tales, literally “rowings around”) as we pause to focus our collective attention on short passages, suggestive details, and narrative lacunae. The 1984 Hans Gabler edition of Ulysses (ISBN 0394743121) is required, even if you already have another edition of Ulysses, because it is essential for the success of the seminar for everyone to be “on the same page.” Discussion will be stimulated by participants’ weekly response papers on the upcoming assigned episodes (circulated electronically every Wednesday), and pre-circulated reading questions will also help to ground our common discursive framework. Ulysses is made for re-reading, so feel free to take a reading odyssey over winter break to make the quarter’s reading ahead a pleasurable revisitation.
Seminar students are expected to write a 15-page research paper on a topic cleared in advance with the instructor, to meet the mid-quarter deadline for submitting a prospectus and annotated bibliography, and to present their research topic to the seminar near the quarter’s end. Pro-seminar students can opt for a take-home exam, or negotiate an equivalent exercise with the instructor. MFA students may propose a relevant creative writing exercise, which, if approved by the instructor, can fulfil the pro-seminar requirement. |
| ENGLISH 210 | ROMANTIC AUTHORSHIP | CHRISTENSEN, J. | [Course Code: 23804] Thursdays 4:00pm -6:50pm HIB 411
Enrollment via [click here]
E 210: Romantic Authorship in Theory, Literature, and Film
We will study the changing conceptions of authorship from the emergence of authorial copyright in the 18th century through the Romantic period and then, pivoting on Mary Shelley’s Frakenstein, on to the present. We will consult the theorizations of authorship by Edward Young, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Wordsworth, Percy Bysshe Shelley, W. K. Wimsatt, Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, Andre Bazin, Andrew Sarris, Pauline Kael, Peter Wollen, et. al., We will attempt to apply those theories to works of poetry, fiction, and cinema from the 19th -21st century. Attention will be given to the question of authorial liability for their products. We will examine the theory of corporate authorship as a mediatory approach between individual and collective theories of authorship, which is especially helpful when attempting to understand the strategic significance of Hollywood motion pictures in the studio era but which has undergone considerable stress and in the contemporary post-classical environment of derivatives, mega-mergers and multi-platformed entertainment conglomerates. Film texts will likely be drawn from the following list: Frankenstein, (Universal 1931), Bride of Frankenstein, (Universal, 1936), Donovan’s Brain, (Dowling Productions, 1953), The Glenn Miller Story, (Universal,1954), Invasion of the Body Snatchers (United Artists, 1978), Pinocchio (Disney, 1940), Toy Story 3 (Pixar, 1999), The Avengers (Marvel Studios, 2012), Inception (Warners, 2010) , Contagion (Warners 2011), and The Dark Knight Rises (Warners, 2012), |
| ENGLISH 210 | THE CULT. INDUSTRY | SZALAY, M. | [Course Code: 23806] Wednesdays 3:00pm -5:50pm HIB 341
Enrollment via [click
here]
“The Culture Industry Reconsidered”
This course will assess the political economy of the contemporary media conglomerate and
evaluate the forms of cultural production that now fall within its purview. Our 10-week study of
value creation and capital accumulation we will begin with Marx’s Capital, Volume One. We’ll
then read responses to this work, including Louis Althusser’s “The Object of Capital” and
Fredric Jameson’s Representing Capital. Next up will be Max Horkheimer and Theodor
Adorno’s “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception,” and Adorno’s multiple
reconsiderations of that essay (collected in The Culture Industry). During the second half of the
course, we’ll read about the theory and practice of branding, in light of Antonio Negri and
Michael Hardt’s considerations of “affective labor,” on the one hand, and recent empirical
studies of Time Warner, Bertelsmann, and News Corp, on the other. We’ll pay particular
attention to “transmedia franchises” that move between literary fiction and “quality” TV; in this
capacity, we’ll read selections of Pierre Bourdieu’s On Television and The Rules of Art:
Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field. |
| ENGLISH 210 | LYRIC THEORY | JACKSON, V. | [Course Code: 23800] Tuesdays 2:00pm -4:50pm HIB 411
Enrollment via [click here]
LYRIC THEORY
In this graduate seminar, we will develop a critical genealogy of lyric as a modern invention with a long history. Rather than assuming that lyric poetry is a transhistorical genre, a normative concept, or the product of a unified lyric tradition, we will ask how lyric came to be read as a genre in literary criticism over the last century. Our emphasis will fall on modern genre theorists, on various New Critics, on Marxist versions of the lyric, on the construction and deconstruction of lyric subjectivity, on avant-garde anti-lyricism, and on the new lyric humanism. We will be especially interested in the changing senses and abstractions of “lyric,” the critical conflation of lyric reading with reading lyric, and the identification of all poetry with lyric as such. While the seminar will focus on academic, mostly Anglo-American literary critics, students with an interest in comparative poetics or creative writing are welcome to develop a paper topic on poetry in other languages or to propose a creative final project. |
| ENGLISH 290 | READING&CONFERENCE | STAFF | English 290 enrollment requires submission of an approved Independent Study proposal form
available [click
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 | DISSERTATION RESEARCH | LUPTON, J | Course Code 23970 |