| Course | Title | Instructor | Description |
|---|
| ENGLISH 8 | MIGRATIONS | DANNER, K. | It is difficult
to get the news from poems
yet men die miserably every day
for lack
of what is found there.
-William Carlos Williams
Fiction is the genre of English 8, though we will work together to “get the news,” as Williams says of poetry. Our readings will be formal and linguistic – examining how our writers have gone about conveying their meanings – but also, necessarily, contextual and political – examining the forces shaping our writers and their texts.
We will begin by reading a set of African-American works connected to the period following WW I in which over a million and a half blacks left the South. These migration narratives will prompt our discussion of representations of race, flight, and rural and urban identities. The second half of the course will focus on Chinese-American writers. Here, immigration stories form the backdrop for generational conflict and identities formed in the crucible of the traditional and the American.
What are the lenses that help us with our readings? Is there overlap at all between the two traditions, some notion of “American-ness” that aids our understanding? Can we read with a racial lens? A human one? Or does each text make its own particular readerly demands?
Jean Toomer (Cane), Nella Larsen (Quicksand), Richard Wright (“Big Boy Leaves Home”), William Attaway (Blood on the Forge), David Henry Hwang (“The Railroad and the Dancer”), Maxine Hong Kingston (Woman Warrior), Frank Chin (Donald Duk), Gish Jen (Who’s Irish?), Chieh Chieng (A Long Stay in a Distant Land).
2 short papers, final exam. Reading questions/quizzes. |
| ENGLISH 10 | SHAKESPEARE | HELFER, R. | Why can’t (or won’t) Hamlet forget his father’s death? What really happens to the four young lovers one crazy midsummer night in the woods? Who determines the official memory of the island in The Tempest, Prospero or Caliban? How does recovering what has been lost, but never forgotten, frame the family romance in The Winter’s Tale? These are some of the questions we will explore in this course, considering some of Shakespeare’s greatest plays through the lens of memory. We’ll study four plays (Hamlet, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Tempest, and The Winter’s Tale), a handful of sonnets, and a film. Course requirements include short writing assignments, a midterm, and a final exam. |
| 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 101W | MELANCHOLIA | LEWIS, J. | “Why is it,” asked Aristotle back in the second century BCE, “that all men who have become outstanding in philosophy, statesmanship, poetry or the arts are melancholic?” While Aristotle may have been overstating the case—and while over time melancholy has come to be more often associated with women than with men, and with the powerless rather than the empowered—the melancholy figure is a standard fixture in much English and American literature. He or she suffers, as the sixteenth-century scholar (and melancholic) Robert Burton put it, from “fear and sadness without cause” and often uses literary language to shape or assuage this condition—sometimes even to cultivate its unexpected pleasures! A forerunner to what we call depression today, melancholy has a rich literary and iconographic history, one that helps us to think about how the mind is related to the body, creativity to sorrow, the sense of helplessness, loneliness, or senselessness to social norms and conventions. In this class, though, we’ll be focusing specifically on the melancholy person as a literary protagonist: the subject of the lyric poem (Milton, Smith, Keats, Berryman), the moral essayist (Johnson), the tragic protagonist (Hamlet), the narrator of the gothic short story (Poe, Gilman), the heroine of the feminist satire (Plath), the author of the illness memoir (Styron), and (as we’ll see during our last week together) the black blues musician (Billie Holiday, Louis Armstrong). Don’t worry: except for Hamlet, all of these pieces are very short! And all of them will help us to ask questions like these: Why does western culture tend to romanticize melancholy? How does women’s melancholy differ from that of men? How do melancholy’s social causes interact with physical ones? What difference does race make to the experience of melancholy? How is melancholy different from depression or mourning? This course fulfills the upper-division writing requirement for the English major: fear and sadness with cause!! The assignments are 3 critical papers (4 to 6 pages, depending on the assignment) spaced at 3-week intervals, one revised, and several ‘flash’ writing exercises. Attendance at a midterm in-class writing clinic centered on peer editing is mandatory. |
| ENGLISH 101W | SHAKESPEARE | HELFER, R. | In this course, we’ll explore four of Shakespeare’s plays – Hamlet, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Tempest, and The Winter’s Tale – through the lens of memory. Working from a variety of perspectives - psychological, social, historical, artistic, and pedagogical – we’ll examine how memory relates to love, language, gender, identity, power, and performance. Course requirements include short writing assignments, two essays, and a final exam. |
| ENGLISH 101W | THE DRAMTIC MONOLOG | BARTLETT, J. | In this course we will examine the hybrid genre of the “dramatic monologue,” a short piece, often a poem, expressing the speech of a character who is participating in an ongoing action. While generally considered a nineteenth-century genre, the psychological immediacy and power of the dramatic monologue has made it attractive to playwrights and novelists modern and contemporary. Located at the site where drama meets poetry and fiction meets drama, where the speaker is not the author and the reader is a character, the dramatic monologue is the ideal genre for the study of character and the technics of embedded speech. Students will be expected to write brief responses to course readings, to give one oral presentation followed by some discussion facilitation, and to write and revise three short papers. |
| ENGLISH 102A | RENAISSANCE LITERATURES OF CRISIS | STEWART, R. | During the 16th and 17th centuries, England experienced unprecedented political, religious, and social change that indelibly shaped the form and content of its literature. In terms of religion, the Protestant
Reformation cast long established beliefs and traditions into doubt; the discovery of the Americas and the emergence of empirical skepticism engendered a new appreciation for the contingency of cultural values and knowledge; and European-wide, the rediscovery and dissemination of classical learning through the printing press offered a wealth of literary tropes and conventions that helped establish vernacular English as a language capable of expressing the full spectrum of modern human experience, including new conceptions of the self, society, and the cosmos. In this course, we will be looking at the historical conditions that caused these various crises and the literatures that responded to them during the reigns of four successive monarchs (Henry VIII, Elizabeth I, James I, Charles I) and the English Civil War. For each reign, we will read significant works of drama (Bale, Shakespeare, Jonson, Massinger), poetry (Sidney, Wyatt, Surrey, Spenser, Shakespeare and Jonson again, Donne, Marvell, Milton), and prose (More, Nashe, Bacon, Hobbes). The assignments for the course consists of a midterm, a final, two short papers, and online discussion forums. |
| ENGLISH 102A | EARLY MODERN SELF | SILVER, V. | From the mid-fourteenth century or thereabouts, literature arguably begins to focus on what it means to be a self as against a soul--that is, body and mind together composing one human organism, one human person. Embodiment is no longer a condition that must be escaped or transcended, but understood. This course looks at the literature which enfranchises the body and what it brings with it--the rich and uncertain complications of experience: "Gawaine and the Green Knight," Chaucer's "Canterbury Tales," Montaigne's "Essays," Shakespeare's sonnets and his play "Troilus and Cressida." The requirements are two takehome exams. |
| ENGLISH 102B | URBANITY, COMMERCE, AND VICE | STEINTRAGER, J. | From aristocrats at their gaming tables to merchants in coffeehouse conversation and down to gin soaked slums, the city was not only one of the main settings but also one of the great topics and characters of Restoration and eighteenth-century literature. We will examine satirical takes on urban life by John Dryden, the Earl of Rochester, Jonathan Swift, and Samuel Johnson; consider topics such as substance abuse and sexual commerce in the libertine writing of John Cleland and the engravings of William Hogarth; and compare the troubles of the elite in Alexander Pope with the aspirations of the emergent urban middle classes in the journalism of Addison and Steele. Grading will be based on a midterm examination, a final, and a short paper. |
| ENGLISH 102C | THE DECADENCE | BURT, E. | This course will explore some representative poetic and prose works from the Decadent period in the latter part of the 19th century. The works to be read are self-conscious about occupying a transitional period of “decay” and “exhaustion” that implicates political, social and artistic movements, and even representative individual types. Decadent works take their inspiration partly in the formal renewals of art for art’s sake movements, and partly in a modernist critical reaction to inherited Romantic and Victorian motifs judged tired or cloying. In these texts we will find evidence of “new sciences” examining modernity for myriad signs of decline: sociologists turn to study criminal types; psychologists focus on sexuality, often deviant (vampirism, fetishism, sado-masochism); self-conscious theorists of the aesthetic look for art to emerge not from a strong native imagination but from critique and the parasitical borrowing from previous models (irony, translation). After an initial period examining texts from Nordau, Ellis, Baudelaire and Huysmans, as well as representative paintings, the course will read closely the following works: Pater’s Studies in the History of the Renaissance; Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde; Stoker’s Dracula; Wilde’s The Decay of Lying and Salomé; Machen’s The White People; Sacher Masoch’s Venus in Furs; Freud’s Wolfman; selected poems from Decadent poets, selections from the trial of Oscar Wilde. |
| ENGLISH 102C | VICTORIAN VICE | BARTLETT, J. | In this course we will read a number of literary works that explore the “dark side” of nineteenth-century culture, when the widening gulf between rich and poor and correlated fears of social, moral, and physical decay were sensationalized in stories of transgression and punishment. We will find this trend in the “best” and “worst” places—poems in coterie magazines, newspaper coverage of crimes and criminals, detective fiction, social criticism, slum memoirs, and government documents—while interrogating our own critical assumptions about the vocabularies of the literary, the judgment of taste, and narratives of sociocultural identity. Requirements include a midterm, a final paper of 5-7 pages, and a final exam. |
| ENGLISH 102D | MODERNIST SUBJECTIVITIES | BEAUCHAMP, T | The continued allure of modernist experimental literature may lie in its depiction of a burgeoning milieu of cosmopolitan artists, a group of people that may be regarded as the progenitors of today’s so-called creative class. Likewise, the formal difficulty of navigating modernist avant-gardism might be seen to reify the continued existence of a clever and inquisitive readership in an increasingly anti-intellectual climate. This modernist survey takes up the question of self-fashioning in literary practice—that is, constructing one’s identity or public persona through literary forms—by examining novels, expository non-fiction, short stories, an epic poem, manifestoes, and a clinical memoir. The texts we will examine often tread uneasily in the genre of semi-autobiography or roman à clef, as they ask what it means to be an aesthetic practitioner negotiating with the modern. These authors question bourgeois ideals of rationality, progress, and self-presence, while also poking fun at the pretensions of self-defined bohemian class. At the same time, they foreground how gender performance, racial or national identity, and sexuality are ciphered through that dynamic. While this course will provide an overview of modernist representation, our readings will focus on how formal experimentation relates to the deployment of aesthetic subjectivity. Readings will include D.H. Lawrence’s St. Mawr; Wyndham Lewis’s Tarr; Virginia Woolf’s Orlando; Mina Loy’s manifestos, “Anglo-Mongrels and the Rose,” and Insel; H.D.’s Tribute to Freud; Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood; Jane Bowles’s Two Serious Ladies; as well as psychoanalytic theory contemporary to these works. Course requirements include lively class participation, a research paper, and a midterm and final exam. |
| ENGLISH 103 | PARADISE LOST | LEWIS, J. | “Of man’s first disobedience, and the fruit/Of that forbidden tree, whose mortal taste/Brought death into the world.” Paradise Lost 1:1-3.
What do you know about John Milton’s epic poem Paradise Lost (1667/74)? Do you dare to know more?As it happens, this is a poem about knowledge, including the “forbidden tree” thereof. It was composed at a time—the dawn of the scientific revolution—when the question of what counts as knowledge was up for grabs and when once seemingly forbidden knowledge was suddenly within reach—bringing, to the minds of many, more death into the world. That’s the perspective we’ll bring to bear on Milton’s poem as we spend the quarter tackling it, along the way considering some of the ways in which later writers and critics came to know it. This will be a small and intimate class and it might be the one for you if: (1) You’re an English major—a courageous one—who wants to go deep into a single, if challenging, work of literature that has shaped virtually everything written after it. (2) You love the great epics of the ancient world and want to know how someone reworked them. (3) You are interested in the Jewish and Christian Scriptures—especially their shared story of humanity’s fall from innocence into knowledge. (4) You ever made a mistake and want to know how to live with it. (5) You love the English language and want to know what can be done with it. (6) You, like Milton’s Eve, just want to know! Midterm with a take home essay component, one 6-page paper, a final, and several short in-class exercises. |
| ENGLISH 103 | STAGING IDENTITY: CLASSIC IRISH PLAYS | O'CONNOR, L. | In “Staging Identity” we’ll read a range of plays from the long twentieth century (the 1890s to the present) by Irish dramatists, from Oscar Wilde to contemporary playwrights Marina Carr and Conor McPherson. Though several of these playwrights, including the Abbey playwrights W. B. Yeats, Lady Gregory, John Millington Synge and Sean O’Casey, are overtly concerned with “Irish” identity, others—notably Wilde and Samuel Beckett—explore the performative and existential nature of identity as such. We’ll discuss a range of topics, including the relationship between language and identity; dismantling the stereotypical “stage Irishman”; Ireland as theme and setting; myth and the supernatural; and the reception of the plays. Midterm, final, paper. |
| ENGLISH 105 | CMNG OF AGE IN ASAM | LEE, J. | This course examines narratives of identity formation—also known as the bildungsroman—in contemporary Asian American literature. Our focus will be on understanding the unique demands placed on Asian American subjects as they emerge from childhood and adolescence into adulthood. How does the experience of racial alterity affect the development of Asian American individuals and the kinds of stories of self they tell? What role do issues surrounding ethnicity, class, gender, and sexuality play in these kinds of narratives?
Class meetings will be a combination of lecture, discussion, and group work. Texts may include Eddie Huang’s Fresh Off the Boat, Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake, Patti Kim’s A Cab Called Reliable, Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior, Bich Nguyen’s Stealing Buddha’s Dinner, Lois Ann Yamanaka’s Blu’s Hanging, and Kenji Yoshino’s Covering. |
| ENGLISH 105 | ASNAM LIT/FLM ADAPT | SHROFF, B. | This course analyzes the historical context within which Asian American literary texts have been adapted into filmic texts. There is a vast body of Asian American Literature but very few texts have been adapted to cinema since issues of audience and market are primary considerations. A historical context demonstrates how representations of Asian Americans have changed from the stereotypical images in the 1920s to self representations by Asian American writers and filmmakers in contemporary times. We analyze different literary genres such as novels, dramas and short stories, for example Jhumpa Lahiri's novel, The Namesake, Le Ly Hayslip's memoir When Heaven and Earth Changed Places and David Henry Hwang's drama, M. Butterfly. Cinematic adaptations/versions of literary texts sometimes re-title and reconstruct texts as suitable for a mass audience such as Heaven and Earth directed by Oliver Stone, and others such as Hot Summer Winds directed by Emiko Omori which is based on two Hisaye Yamamoto short stories, Seventeen Syllables and Yoneko's Earthquake. We employ literary and film theory in reading the novels and plays to analyze language, structure, characterization and historical representation. We also discuss how the literary form translates into a visual medium, and the modifications of story/plot and characterization for the screen. We interrogate the strengths of each medium and the spatial and temporal capabilities of the cinematic medium. |
| ENGLISH 105 | POETRY OF THE AFRICAN DIASPORA | O'CONNOR, L. | In this course we’ll study poetry of the Black Atlantic by African-American, Afro-Caribbean, and Black British poets with special attention to how the poets combine oral-performative and canonical literary traditions in their verse. Throughout history, poetry has been transformed repeatedly by efforts to revitalize the literary vernacular with the spoken language of a given community and era. For poets of the African diaspora, however, the creative blending of spoken and written idioms was made more perilous and yet more imperative by the legacy of slavery. Their historical disenfranchisement widened the divide between the prestigious sphere of print and the circulation of orature (orally-transmitted stories, song, and lore), and at the same time vastly enhanced the inventive, communal, and double-voiced potential of orature.
We’ll explore some of the repercussions of the racialized print/orality divide on (mostly) twentieth-century poetry in the following three thematic clusters:
a) Soundings: “It don’t mean a thing (if it ain’t got the swing)”: transposing Rhythm, Blues, Jazz,
Reggae into verse
b) “Typecast”: black-and-white profiling and the printed page
c) Lines of kinship: poems of mourning, protest, praise, and lyric“I” / “we”
We’ll read from a wide range of poets, including Amiri Baraka, Louise Bennett, E. Kamau Brathwaite, Gwendolyn Brooks, Sterling Brown, Lucille Clifton, Paul Lawrence Dunbar, Langston Hughes, James Weldon Johnson, Yusuf Komunyakaa, Claude McKay, Harryette Mullen, Grace Nicholls, Sonia Sanchez, Natasha Trethewey, and Derek Walcott. |
| ENGLISH 106 | CAVES & CATHEDRALS | ALLEN, E. | From the mysterious caves where hermits dwell to the soaring cathedrals of the High Middle Ages, this course will explore the significance of safe and sacred spaces in medieval literature. From saints to knights, this course finds people making all sorts of journeys, held temporarily in spaces of rest or spiritual relief, often having to move on. Arthurian knights are known for their journeying—but where do they find hospitality, safety, rest, or sacred space? St. Cuthbert lived in a lowly hermitage on the outer island of Farne in the North Sea. After he died, monks carried his coffin across northern England, fleeing Viking invasions. Finally they settled with the body, enshrined it at Durham, and built a magnificent cathedral on a hill, still standing to this day. How does a hermit’s cave work to give the saint meaning. How does the cathedral create a new sense of his significance? Geoffrey Chaucer, meanwhile, imagines a pilgrimage to Canterbury cathedral, site of another opulent cathedral and the shrine of the medieval martyr Thomas Becket. Along the way, the pilgrims tell tales—of saintly suffering, hidden gold, forest wanderings—and never finally reach their goal. How does this restless journey create safe spaces, sacred spaces, and places of worship along the way? Seeking answers to questions like these, we will read some of the central texts of the medieval period, tracing the path from sainthood to romance. Two papers (5-6 and 8-10 pages), assorted writing exercises. |
| ENGLISH 106 | VICTORIAN REPRSNTAT | 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 210 | SONIC MEDIATIONS | STEINTRAGER, J. | [Course Code: 23994] Wednesdays 9:00am-11:50am in HIB 411
Enrollment via [click here]
This course would focus on three or so important themes in sound studies and media studies, engaging students both with historical context and recent theoretical perspectives on our areas of concentration. Themes would include: the resurrection of Pythagoras’s pedagogical notion of acousmatic listening (listening without the sound source being visible) with the theorization of the radiophonic listening experience in the 1950s up to recent works in cinema theory and aesthetic philosophy; the viability and politics of the concept of noise, from Futurist manifestos and the invention of intonarumori, that is, noise machines for avant-garde music, in the 1930s to the equation of noise with political disruption in the 1960s and 70s and more contemporary lionizations and critiques of noise music; and silence as a cultural construct and mediated category.
Readings would include selections from Benjamin on radio, Adorno on jazz and dissonance, Pierre Schaeffer on musique concrète and the sound object, John Cage on silence, Michel Chion on the acousmatic listening, Henri Atlan on order out of noise, along with more historical accounts by Luciano Chessa on futurism, Douglas Kahn on sound art and the avant-garde, Joanna Demmers on noise music, etc. Each class would also include a listening module which would include not only listening to recorded pieces (Schaeffer’s “Étude aux chemins de fer [Railroad Study,” Schwitters’ Ursonate and Russolo’s intonarumori concerti, Merzbow’s so-called Japanoise, examples of New London Silence and Berlin Reductionism, etc.) but also visiting an anechoic chamber, making field recordings, and other experiential exercises.
Note: I taught an H270 on “Sound Studies” a couple of years ago. The proposed course represents a continuation of my current research on the topic and draws heavily on what I learned during that seminar about pedagogical possibilities. In terms of texts, however, there will be little, if any, overlap. |
| ENGLISH 210 | SECULARISM | TUCKER, I. | [Course Code: 23810] Thursdays 11:00am-1:50pm in HIB 411
Enrollment via [click here]
Secularism
In its most skeletal and generic form, we might understand the concept of secularism to be animated by a paradox, at once acknowledging some kind of absolute and historically transcendent form of authority and seeking to theorize the logic by which that absolute authority might be circumscribed, made something less than absolute or universal. The most familiar way of making sense of this paradox has been to understand the secularizing impulse as essentially a narrative of modernization: people continued – and continue -- to make a place for a god-ordered realm of the world even as they came to acknowledge the possibility of other frameworks of meaning and authority like science or democratic forms of state authority because they were in the habit of believing and were not quite ready to embrace their disenchantment. In tracing the history of secularism from its 17th-origins through to the recent emergence of a discourse of “post-secularism,” this course seeks both to complicate this modernization story. We will try to understand the secularism’s authority not simply in relation to the emergence of the state as a political entity, but also in relation to the state’s operation as a structure of economic organization and as a site of affective investment. We will also investigate the ways in which the notion of the secular can be seen to emerge from Western Christianity’s sustained engagement with the organizational logics of other religions, both its effort to distinguish itself from Judaism as its law-centered predecessor and its various colonial encounters with Islam and Hinduism.
Readings will include work by Locke, Mendelssohn, Hume, Kant, J.S. Mill, Macaulay, TH Huxley, JH Newman, as well as historians and theorists of secularism including Charles Taylor, Talal Asad, Akhil Bilgrami, Saba Mahmood, Alistair MacIntyre and Michael Warner. |
| ENGLISH 210 | JOYCE BECKT LIT FLM | SCHLOSSMAN, B. | [Course Code: 23808] Wednesdays 2:00pm-4:50pm in HIB 246
Enrollment via [click here]
James Joyce and Samuel Beckett: Irish Literature in Context, in Exile, and on Film
This seminar will explore some major works of modern Irish literature and theater. We will focus on influential early works of fiction (story sequences) and drama by Joyce and Beckett. Readings will include Joyce’s Dubliners and Exiles, and Beckett’s More Pricks than Kicks and his important play, Waiting for Godot. Film versions of several works will be used to study interpretation and cultural contexts.
Student participation includes informal discussion and a brief presentation of a research paper topic. |
| ENGLISH 210 | LGIC SYMBLSM 19CENT | HENDERSON, A. | [Course Code: 23806] Tuesdays, Thursdays 9:30am-10:50am in HIB 411
Enrollment via [click here]
The Logic of Symbolism in the Nineteenth Century
In this course we will examine the work of British artists and mathematicians of the nineteenth century, focusing on their interest in and anxieties regarding the act of representation. We will begin with early Romantic poets and geometers, examining the fusion of idea and representation in the Coleridgean symbol and the geometric figure. The untenability of this fusion became more apparent with the advent of non-Euclidean geometry, and we will explore the construction of alternative models of symbolism in its wake, reading George Boole and William Kingdon Clifford alongside Abbott’s Flatland and Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass. Finally, we will look at the ways mathematical physicists and aesthetes transformed representation by reconceiving matter itself.
Seminar students will write a 25-page paper; pro-seminar students will do a 10-page archival project. |
| ENGLISH 210 | FAULKNER&FITZGERALD | GODDEN, R. | [Course Code: 23804] Tuesdays 11:00am-1:50pm in HIB 411
Enrollment via [click here]
Fitzgerald and Faulkner: Narratives from two Economies
The course will undertake close readings of key 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.” To read a Fitzgerald text necessarily, therefore, involves enquiry into the nature of money, price, the commodity form, and their effective constitution of what has been described as “capitalist realism.” 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. Faulkner, though as much a modernist as Fitzgerald, 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.
Nathaniel Hawthorne noted, “It must relate to property; because nothing else survives in this world. Love grows cold and dies; hatred is pacified by annihilation” (The American Claimant). In the spirit of Hawthorne’s insight, the course 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 narrative poetics. Works covered by Fitzgerald will include, “The Diamond as Big as the Ritz” (1922), The Great Gatsby (1925), Tender Is the Night (1934), and The Love of the Last Tycoon (1941) (with The Day of the Locust [1939]). Works covered by Faulkner will include, As I Lay Dying (1930), The Sound and the Fury (1929), Absalom, Absalom! (1936), and Go Down, Moses (1942). |
| ENGLISH 210 | SCENE & STORY | CARLSON, R. | [Course Code: 23800] Fridays 2:00pm-4:50pm in HIB 411
Enrollment via [click here]
Scene & Story
In this class we will read as writers looking primarily at how various writers have measured and created scenes, but we will also look at all of the narrative strategies in four to eight stories every week -- one week a novel. Our object will be to see how this fiction is made, and we will be examining all the elements of craft, especially how time features in each piece.
Papers will be responses to stories, discussions of salient strategies, emulations, and exercises as assigned. |
| ENGLISH 210 | MEDIEVAL NATURES | DAVIS, R. | [Course Code: 23802] Thursdays 2:00pm-4:50pm in HIB 411
Enrollment via [click here]
Medieval Natures
This seminar examines the representation of nature and the non-human in Middle English literature. We will pay close attention to recent ecocritical trends in the field and consider the value of ecological and posthumanist readings of medieval texts.
We begin with representations of Eden on the medieval stage and end with the paradise depicted in the alliterative dream vision Pearl, places otherworldly yet bound in complex ways to the temporal world medieval authors called Middle Earth. Most of our readings set their focus on that terrestrial place, its busy inhabitants, its cycles of birth and death, its pleasures and its agonies. We will consider broadly how these texts construct ideas of nature and frequently envision the world itself as a text to be interpreted. In addition, we will pursue more focused questions these texts pose about the relationship of nature and culture; the immanence of the creator in creation; the capacities of human nature; the proper use and distribution of nature’s goods; nature as a source of aesthetic pleasure but also of menace; and, frequently, the intertwined lives of human and non-human animals.
Seminar readings include the York Corpus Christi plays; the Castle of Perseverance; excerpts from Langland’s Piers Plowman; Wynnere and Wastour; Patience and Pearl; medieval lyrics; and a selection of beast fables. We will read texts in the original Middle English, but no prior experience is necessary. |
| 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 398 | RHET/TCHNG OF COMP | GROSS, D. | |
| ENGLISH 398 | RHET/TCHNG OF COMP | STAFF | |
| ENGLISH 398 | RHET/TCHNG OF COMP | STAFF | |