| Course | Title | Instructor | Description |
|---|
| ENGLISH 28A | POETIC IMAGINATION | ALLEN, E. | |
| ENGLISH 28B | COMIC&TRAGIC VISION | ALLEN, E. | |
| 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 | FEMALE GOTHIC | LEWIS, J. | A woman trapped in a dark place. An English major trapped in an upper-division writing requirement. Is this the E101W for you? “Female gothic” was a term coined by the eminist critic Ellen Moers; in this writing-intensive course we'll use it to understand gothic heroines from Snow White to Korean “comfort women” of World War II and the women who have invented many of them for the pleasure of the female readers who, having appeared on the scene in the 18th century, have yet to turn their backs on gothic romance. Our reading will include short novels by Jane Austen (Northanger Abbey), Mary Shelley (Frankenstein), Shirley Jackson (The Haunting of Hill House) and Nora Okja Keller (Comfort Woman), along with classic short stories by Edith Wharton and Charlotte Perkins Gilman, autobiography by Harriet Jacobs, and poems by Christina Rossetti, Emily Dickinson, and Sylvia Plath. Through these works (and with the help of a couple of critics) we will survey the tropes and traditions embedded in the gothic subgenre with special attention to their significance for women across centuries, social classes, ethnicities, and literary genres. How have women writers used gothic tropes as social protest, critiques of science, and ecological warning? As coded explorations of sexuality and sexual politics, of social and racial inequality, of anxieties about reproduction, and of economic powerlessness? Why and how do so many gothic scenarios (captivity, isolation, the haunted house, the forbidden text, the lover who wants to kill you, the dead first wife/mother/child, the madwoman in the attic) resonate with female experience in the industrialized west? How does gothic writing double as a source of creativity, a means of expanding female power and community? How has it helped women writers find a place within dominant literary traditions? How has the gothic heroine changed over time? Three papers--all revised, one working with criticism, and one expanded--plus several shorter writing assignments. |
| ENGLISH 101W | LITERATURE & HISTORY | THOMAS, B. | E 101w is a seminar focusing on a particular literary or critical problem. It also fulfills an English major's upper-division writing requirement. Because the writing skills achieved in this course are helpful for all other English courses, students should try to take E 101w as soon as possible their junior year. In this section we will explore the complicated relationship between literature and history. One of the works we will read is ADVENTURES OF HUCKLEBERRY FINN (1885). Does Twain's novel primarily give us a representation of the era of slavery that it depicts or does it primarily respond to issues at the time it was written after emancipation? We will also consider its effect on us today and how current issues affect how we read the book. We will ask similar questions about other works we will read. They include E.E. Hale's "The Man Without a Country," Thomas Dixon's A MAN OF THE PEOPLE (a play about Lincoln), and Herman Melville's BILLY BUDD. Our topic requires that we also read some selections of historical source material as well as some literary criticism. We will spend class time on improving writing skills. REQUIREMENTS: three essays, no midterm or final. |
| ENGLISH 101W | POLITICS OF ROMANCE | SILVER, V. | The course looks at the western literary tradition of romance--one of its earliest genre or literary modes whose subject (as everyone knows) is eros, the erotic, which the Greek considered as much more than mere sex but as the natural motive force of all living things to survive and reproduce themselves. Romance is also the vehicle of the ideal--not of what is but what we desire should be--embodied in the human experience and aspiration to possess the beautiful. We will look at how these concepts and values are expressed in romance’s distinctive narrative form. The readings are Homer’s Odyssey, Xenophon’s weird and sensational Ephesian Tale, a couple of Chretien de Troyes’ Arthurian romances, Shakespeare’s Winter Tale, Aphra Behn’s curious Oroonoko, Austen’s hilarious Northanger Abbey and Jack Shaeffer’s western, Shane. |
| ENGLISH 102A | POLITICAL SHAKESPEARE | TBA | Queen Elizabeth famously lamented, “We princes are set on stages, in the sight and view of all the world duly observed,” before reluctantly executing her cousin Mary Queen of Scots for treason. Not long after, Shakespeare ‘s theater would seek to capture and explore the glamor, brutality, and sense of paranoid spectacle inherent in Elizabeth’s metaphorical linking of statecraft with stagecraft. Even in our contemporary world of photo-ops and Washington spin-doctors, we have the sense that politics is largely an art of performance that overshadows the business of practical governance. At the same time, we turn to drama, in the form of film and television, to help us imagine the world of arcana imperii, the behind-the-scenes power brokering and maneuvering that we assume are the real activates that determine our collective fate. In this course we will read some of Shakespeare’s best plays for reflecting upon the nature of politics, power, and community – analyzing them within their own historical contexts (i.e. the ideology and political realities of Elizabethan and Jacobean England) and how they continue to resonate in our own contemporary political and cultural landscape. In addition to selections of Shakespeare’s poetry, we will consider the dark, allure of Machiavellian manipulation in Richard III, the demystification of kingship in Richard II, the tension between military power and democracy in Coriolanus, the use and abuse of the law in Measure for Measure, and the question of citizenship and civil society in Merchant of Venice. The course requirements will include class participation, reading quizzes, two exams (a mid-term and a final), and one essay. |
| ENGLISH 102A | RENEWAL & REFORM | HELFER, R. | This course explores the vibrant and varied literature of the Renaissance with a particular focus on the cultural, political, and religious transformations of 16th- and 17th-century England. We will cover a range of genres – drama, poetry, and prose, both fiction and non-fiction – and authors, which include Marlowe, More, Sidney, Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, and Wroth. Course requirements are regular attendance, reading quizzes, a midterm, a final, and one essay. |
| ENGLISH 102B | RESTORATION AND REVOLUTION: 1660-1700 | VAN SANT, A. | This course is in part framed by political events. We begin in 1660--with the restoration of the monarchy after civil war, the beheading of a king (Charles I), and several years of Puritan dominance-- and end just after 1700, approximately a decade after what became known as the "Glorious Revolution." We will read aggressive wit comedy, satiric poetry, allegorical fiction, and feminist and political essays. Our readings invite us to ask questions about literary form, political and religious dissent, marriage, property, and the status of women. And they invite us to consider fundamental contrasts in a period marked both by restoration and by revolution. |
| ENGLISH 102C | AMER POETRY TO 1915 | JACKSON, V. | This is a course on the history of American poetry, with emphasis on poems of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Was all American poetry bad (or boring) before Whitman, Dickinson, and the American Modernists? No. We will read Puritan elegies, legal verse tracts, crime ballads, folk songs, verse sermons, advertisements, dedications to public monuments, war songs, prayers, verse letters, narrative verse, and sex radical lectures in verse. We will measure the distance between the miscellany of American public poetry in the past and what we do (or don't) think poetry is today. |
| ENGLISH 102D | LITERARY MODERNISM | IZENBERG, O. | In this course, we will read the remarkable work of poets writing from the birth of the last century through the 1950s. The syllabus does not tell the whole story, or even a single story. It contains idiosyncratic originals that stand in uneasy relation to larger wholes; it pits the relentless pursuit of novelty against the unrefusable burdens of history and memory; it achieves the momentary appearance of completion only to be shattered by its own exclusions. In all of this, our reading resembles the world itself in a time of great progress and unprecedented violence. We will study the forms and themes, aesthetics and politics of Anglophone poetics in the first half of the 20th century with an appreciative and critical eye, and consider the relationship between important historical events (two World Wars, the Great Depression, struggles for liberation and equality) and works of verbal art. Writers may include: Yeats, Eliot, Pound, Stein, Stevens, Moore, Williams and others. |
| ENGLISH 103 | POET IN THE CITY | BURT, E. | In the early part of the 19th-century, Romantic poetry tended to treat rural subjects in forms and language felt to be natural. What happens to reverse the trend and make the city a prime poetic destination in the latter part of the 19th century? What forces increasingly lead writers of poems, with their eyes fixed on modernity, to address apostrophes to London fogs, the London social season, or the view from Saint Paul’s? Why do they adapt modes like the ode, the elegy, or the idyll to celebrating the city? We can look at the poems as reflecting socio-political changes in the 19th-century world. According to urban theorists, for instance, the rapidly expanding cities of the 19th century placed new demands on the senses and favored new varieties of mental life, especially of memory. Conversely, we can see forces internal to poetry that force its modern development along this path, as if, having exhausted the poetic resources inherited from Romanticism, it had to look for new locations, motifs, and figures. We will examine some representative texts from Romanticism about the city and investigate the changing ideas of experience, mental life, and the function of poetry to be found in urban poems from the latter part of the century.
Along with texts by the sociologist Georg Simmel and the philosopher-critic Walter Benjamin, we will read texts by Romantic and late Victorian authors from among the following: Blake, Wordsworth, De Quincey, Shelley, Keats, Dickens, Hood, Arnold, Hardy, Wilde, and Symons. 1 presentation, 2 papers, 1 exam. |
| ENGLISH 103 | THE TRANSCENDENTALISTS | JACKSON, V. | In this course we will read Emerson's essays, the writings of Margaret Fuller, Thoreau's Walden, Whitman's 1855 Leaves of Grass, and Louisa May Alcott's Little Women. These mid-nineteenth-century American writers were all associated with Transcendentalism, a big word for a lot of big ideas about politics, ethics, and what it meant to be human in modernity. |
| ENGLISH 105 | LATINA/O LITERATURE AND RELIGION | MORALES, J. | This course explores different moments in Latina/o literature’s representation of religion and spirituality. Of primary concern will be race-based definitions of religiosity, religion/spirituality as a form of decolonial thinking, and the question of a religious heritage. Texts will include selections from the social movements of the 1960s, Chicana/Latina feminist thought, and the Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage
project, among others. |
| ENGLISH 106 | CLARISSA AND CRITICISM | VAN SANT, A | Like other E106 courses, “Clarissa and Criticism” is a capstone course. Unlike most such courses, this one requires that you read only one literary work—although a very long one. Clarissa, or the History of a Young Lady is written in letters, mostly between two young women friends and two young men friends. As you might imagine, there’s a question of seduction involved. And there are questions of parental authority, issues of self-definition and independence, problems about money, and a lot of tension about sex. It’s not an action novel (though it begins with a report about a duel), but it is a novel in which conflict lies just at the surface of every encounter, every sentence. Because the novel is a set of letters, there is no narrator to explain or interpret things; you are reading the letters of characters as they write under pressure. The author, Samuel Richardson, knew that he was writing a new kind of fiction, and he called his style “writing to the moment.”
**SPOILER ALERT** Clarissa is not a plot-based novel, but if you have never read it, don’t let anyone tell you what happens. And don't read the editors' introduction, until we are well-advanced into the novel. Eighteenth-century readers heard rumors (and one wrote to Richardson begging him to change his mind about the plot), but all had to wait 6 months between each of the 3 parts to find out “what happened.”
There have been many critical debates about this novel, and we will enter them. The main assignment will be to write a long paper for the course. You will write smaller pieces that help you think about the novel and its criticism. |
| ENGLISH 106 | RENAISS ENG POETRY | HELFER, R. | This course explores the remarkable poetry of 16th- and 17th-century England. Reading a wide variety of early modern writers, as well as some contemporary literary criticism, we will consider the relationship between poetry and politics, self and society, renewal and reformation. Course requirements include active participation, quizzes and short writing, and a final research paper. |
| ENGLISH 106 | CHAUCER CANT TALES | ALLEN, E. | Late fourteenth-century England saw great social turmoil. The Plague wiped out a third of the population; peasants and artisans rose against the aristocracy; the King struggled to retain authority and was eventually deposed; the Church was divided against itself. Out of this social unrest comes Chaucer's Canterbury Tales—a new kind of poetry for a rapidly changing audience. Thirty pilgrims tell stories to pass the time on their route to Canterbury Cathedral, and along the way they encounter all the problems raised when people try to form a socially various community. The work creates a lively microcosm of the turbulent late medieval world, complete with a cook so drunk he falls off his horse and a parson so virtuous he won't tell a story.
We will read many of the Canterbury Tales, from the Knight’s Tale to the Retraction at the end. We will concentrate on problems of status, gender, and authority raised in these texts: How does the Canterbury pilgrimage highlight medieval status identities? To what extent do the pilgrims reaffirm gender norms? To what extent can narrative poetry call for social or political change? Questions such as these call attention to issues of social justice. But the poem will continually turn our attention to problems of narration and poetic form as well, placing social questions within complex and problematic frames. Which pilgrims tell which sorts of tales? How does the poem call into being a new audience? To what extent does form echo content—and when does narrative complexity make the search for social justice difficult?
Readings are in Middle English, but no prior experience of the language is expected or required. Two papers, one shorter and one longer, with assorted shorter assignments. |
| ENGLISH 210 | ROMANTC CORPORATISM | CHRISTENSEN, J. | [Course Code: 23802] Wednesdays 3:00pm-5:50pm in HIB 341
Enrollment via [click here]
Coleridge and Wordsworth
We will study Coleridge and Wordsworth’s poetry and prose by way of the former’s Biographia Literaria. Major topics include: the eighteenth-century background in philosophy and literature for STC’s own philosophical criticism and poetic innovations; STC’s deduction and application of the secondary imagination; the importance of theories of imagination to the sedition trials of the 1790s; Coleridge’s journalism; the genesis and conduct of the collaboration between the two poets from their first acquaintance through the 1800 Lyrical Ballads; and Coleridge’s lengthy critique of Wordsworth poetic and practice in the second volume of the Biographia. |
| ENGLISH 210 | AMER RELIG POETRY | MILES, J. | [Course Code: 23806] Tuesdays 3:00pm-5:50pm in HIB 411
Enrollment via [click here]
The earlier meetings of this seminar will track two related stories: the story of religion in America, through Mark A. Noll’s concise The Old Religion in a New World, and the story of religious poetry in America, through selections from Harold Bloom’s Library of America anthology American Religious Poems. The later meetings of the seminar will be devoted to students’ biographical and interpretive presentations on individual American poets as religious and as American. These presentations must include a poem written in imitation of the presented poet. These presentations will then build toward the students’ final papers, which will determine 50% of the grade. Intelligent and creative participation will determine the remaining 50%. |
| ENGLISH 210 | THRY&PRACT LIT DESC | IZENBERG, O. | [Course Code: 23804] Thursdays 1:00pm-3:50pm in HIB 411
Enrollment via [click here]
The success of a project of interpretation or evaluation depends in part on its ability to produce in its readers the feeling that it has _accounted_ for its object as a whole. Or in its most salient aspects. Or through the finest stylistic filaments that bind a work of art to a context. But how do we know when we have described enough of the whole? How do we determine which are the salient features? What do we do about the great excess of the object left so unanchored? Our inquiry into these questions will be historical, theoretical, and methodological: we will think through important moments in 20th century formalism; consider them alongside more recent projects of description (surface reading, mapping, and macroanalysis); and consider that role that description has, should, and might play in our work as literary critics. |
| ENGLISH 210 | THRY CONCPT LIT CRT | BARTLETT, J. | [Course Code: 23800] Thursdays 10:00am-12:50pm in HIB 411
Enrollment via [click here]
This course will serve as an introduction to the narrative conventions of the novel and the field of analytic philosophy, and will explore some connections between them. When we ask how a sentence in use expresses the thought that attaches to it, or how descriptions of relations conjure the fictional world that in turn depends upon them, what we are actually revealing are the conditions that must obtain if the sentence or the relations are to count as meaningful. Each referring term in a novel carries its truth conditions with it—-a speaker’s propositional attitudes or background, her intention, the conventions within which she and the novel operates, the criteria under which readers can verify, use, translate, or name the object of her sentence—-and as these conditions shift, characters and plots emerge and develop. Recently, these conditions have emerged as available for literary study. New philosophically inflected criticism on reference and literary objects by Elaine Scarry, Barbara Johnson, Myra Jehlen and others has appeared alongside issues of philosophical journals devoted to intersections between analytic philosophy and narrative. Conferences on literary criticism and ordinary language philosophy, reference and sensation, and the philosophy of actants and objects are proliferating. And analytic philosophy is furthering its application to the questions of metaphysics, hermeneutics, and motor-intentional embodiment that have engaged literary critics for decades. This course reflects this critical return to the philosophy of language, arguing that intersections between analytic philosophy and the novel prove vital to our understanding of how language and narratives work. Some of our subjects may include (but are not limited to) theories of reference, speech acts, intentionality, metaphor, translation, demonstratives, fictionality, propositional attitudes, pragmatics, meaning and use.
Required Texts:
Dickens, Charles. Bleak House. Ed. Stephen Gill. New York: Oxford, 2008.
Wittgenstein, Ludwig. The Blue and Brown Books. New York: Harper Perennial, 1965.
Secondary readings posted to the course website.
Assignments:
Students are expected to write brief responses to course readings, to give one oral presentation followed by some discussion facilitation, and to submit written work for seminar or pro-seminar credit. |
| ENGLISH 290 | READING&CONFERENCE | STAFF | |
| ENGLISH 290 | READING&CONFERENCE | STAFF | |
| ENGLISH 290 | READING&CONFERENCE | STAFF | |
| ENGLISH 290 | READING&CONFERENCE | STAFF | |
| ENGLISH 290 | READING&CONFERENCE | STAFF | |
| ENGLISH 290 | READING&CONFERENCE | STAFF | |
| ENGLISH 290 | READING&CONFERENCE | STAFF | |
| ENGLISH 290 | READING&CONFERENCE | STAFF | |
| ENGLISH 290 | READING&CONFERENCE | STAFF | |
| ENGLISH 290 | READING&CONFERENCE | STAFF | |
| ENGLISH 290 | READING&CONFERENCE | STAFF | |
| ENGLISH 290 | READING&CONFERENCE | STAFF | |
| ENGLISH 290 | READING&CONFERENCE | LEWIS, J. | Course Code: 23900 |