| Course | Title | Instructor | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
| ENGLISH 10 | SHAKESPEARE | LUPTON, J. | In this course, we will immerse ourselves in three plays by Shakespeare: Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth, and As You Like It. We will address the plays as works of dramatic poetry, as texts for performance, and as cultural movers that continue to reverberate in English-speaking and global contexts today. Demonstrating the thesis that Shakespeare can be both serious and fun, the class will supplement image-rich lectures with experiential and student-centered activities, including debates, quiz shows, film clips, and guest lectures and demonstrations by actors and other theater makers. Requirements: 1 short paper (1-2 pp.), 1 longer paper (3-5 pp.), midterm, final, plus 5 reading quizzes and participation. |
| ENGLISH 11 | SOCIETY, LAW & LITERATURE | THOMAS, B. | This course satisfies Gen Ed Requirements for either Category III (Social and Behavioral Sciences) or Category IV (Arts and Humanities), but not both for any individual. It also fulfills a requirement for the Humanities and Law Minor. Law occupies a central role in American society. Given the law’s importance, it has frequently been the topic of literature, as writers provide their own image of justice and measure whether the law has lived up to it. This course will consist of two units dealing with law and literature in the United States. The first explores how, after the abolition of slavery, the United States lapsed into a racially segregated society justified with the ruling of Plessy v. Ferguson (1896). We will read some important literary responses by Plessy’s lawyer, Albion W. Tourgeé, and African Americans, Booker T. Washington, W.E.B. DuBois, and Charles Chesnutt. We will also look at the case of Mendez v. Westminster (1947) involving the segregation of Mexican-American children in Orange County schools, before examining how the country abandoned legally supported segregation with Brown v. Board of Education (1954). The second unit explores the status of Asian Americans during the same period. It will look at the Chinese Exclusion Acts and how Chinese overcame the attempt to deny them access to American society by wielding battles in both the courts and in literature. We will examine cases like U.S. v. Wong Kim Ark (1898), still hotly contested today because it granted citizenship to all people born in the United States, no matter what race, and China Men by Maxine Hong Kingston. Requirements: a midterm, a take-home essay, a final, and regular attendance. |
| ENGLISH 28A | POETIC IMAGINATION | DAVIS, 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 | DAVIS, 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 101W | WRITING ABOUT COMICS | SZALAY, M. | What are comics, and how do we read and write about them? This course begins by laying out some of the constitutive formal features of this story-telling form. We will evaluate critical efforts to define comics as a medium, and also consider the historical origins of this popular art in different national contexts. The bulk of the class, however, will be taken up with closely reading and writing about comics. We will read one significant comic a week, and each student will share with the class their writing on these texts every two weeks. Discussions of student writing will take up a large portion of our time. Readings will include Understanding Comics (Scott McCloud), Watchmen (Alan Moore and David Gibbons), V is for Vendetta (Alan Moore and David Lloyd), Masks of Anarchy (Michael Demson), Persepolis (Marjane Satrapi), Fun Home (Alison Bechdel), and Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind (Hayao Miyazaki). |
| ENGLISH 101W | WEIRD TALES | STEINTRAGER, J. | In the 1920s and 30s, the pulp magazine Weird Tales put out all manner of odd, gruesome, supernatural, horrific, and fantastic stories. The most famous author associated with the magazine also served as its editor: H.P. Lovecraft. In this course, we will read not only works from Lovecraft, but also those by writers who inspired him, such as Arthur Machen and Algernon Blackwood, and those in his circle, such as the decadent fantasist Clark Ashton Smith and Conan’s inventor Robert E. Howard. The course is discussion-centered, writing intensive, and will culminate in a research paper. |
| ENGLISH 101W | UNCRITICAL READING | JACKSON, V. | This course won't teach you how to read or write, since you already know how to do both of those things. You read all the time: you have to read to surf the internet, you read signs and packages and fan fiction and newspapers and blogs and comments and Facebook posts and emails and poems and texts and novels and tweets and course descriptions like this one. You also write all the time: you write back to those emails and texts and tweets and comments and posts, you write school papers and exams, you fill out forms, you write Google docs, you write notes to yourselves. Some of you also write poems and plays and stories and journalism. In this course, we will compare the variety of reading and writing you are usually asked to do in literature classes (often called "critical reading") to the other kinds of reading and writing you do outside classes like this one. What are the differences between everyday uncritical reading and writing practices and the academic "critical" versions of those practices you go to school to learn? Why do you enjoy some of these practices more than you enjoy others? What is your relation to (and feeling about) the readers you address when you write and the text that addresses you when you read? In this class, you will be asked to read and write several different critical and uncritical genres and we will think as a group about what those ways of reading and writing share, since most of us share them all. |
| ENGLISH 102A | ANGLO-SAXON ENGLAND | DAVIS, R. | Canst þu sprecan on eald Englisc? Want to learn? This course introduces students to the language, literature, and culture of Anglo-Saxon England. No prior knowledge of Old English or Anglo-Saxon history is required. In the first few weeks of the quarter, you’ll learn the basics of Old English, which is the precursor to Middle and modern English. With this knowledge, you’ll be able to read short poems and excerpts of longer works in their original language, including the epic Beowulf. Other course readings will be given in modern translations. As we delve into the wonderfully strange worlds of Anglo-Saxon literature, we’ll meet seafarers and exiles; saints and kings; teachers and poets; female warriors, questing heroes, and villains of every sort, including a dragon or two. By the end of the quarter you’ll have a grasp on the basics of Old English, knowledge of the early history of the English language, and experience reading key literary works of the Anglo-Saxon period. Coursework includes translation assignments, quizzes, a midterm, a final, and a short paper. |
| ENGLISH 102A | RENAISSANCE | 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. We'll be using the Longman Anthology of British Literature, Volume 1B: The Early Modern Period. |
| ENGLISH 102B | VIRTUES & VICES | LEWIS, J. | “Thus ev’ry Part was full of Vice,/Yet the whole Mass a Paradise.” So wrote the English satirist Bernard Mandeville in a 1705 fable whose subtitle, Private Vices, Public Benefits, captured the moral contradictions that ruled his 18th-century English society. And it’s true: in no other culture do we find more of an obsession with gambling, drinking, debauchery, and crime . . . or more of a fascination with honor, integrity, and, simply, ‘being good.’ The literature we will read in this course (all of it written between 1660 and 1745) explores these moral extremes; it was written at a time when human virtue and human vices were no longer understood in terms of sin and piety but rather looked like aspects of personal character interacting with social habits and conventions. We’ll meet whores and determined virgins, liars and truthtellers, thieves and preachers, rakes and chaste wives. The big picture? A rambunctious human scene full of idealism, hedonism, and hypocrisy where literature’s ambivalent power both to correct and to seduce, to moralize and to make mischief, gives it an important role to play. The reading list mixes Rochester’s naughty libertine lyrics with the austerities of Bunyan’s Pilgrim’ Progress; Wycherley’s raunchy comedy The Country Wife with Behn’s heroic Oroonoko; and Gay’s ironic exposé of the London underworld, The Beggar’s Opera, with Pamela, Richardson’s controversial novel of “virtue rewarded.” We’ll end with Hogarth’s satiric images of “The Harlot’s Progress.” Course requirements include: one in-class midterm, one final, one substantial critical essay, and several short assignments, including some unannounced quizzes, and the usual attendance and participation. The good, the bad, and those with a little of both in them all are welcome! |
| ENGLISH 102B | THE THINKING SELF | VAN SANT, A. | What does “self” mean? This question is central both to philosophy and literary works. Is the “self“ a “permanent subject of successive and varying states of consciousness”? Or does it change to fit circumstances? What do we mean when we say “my former self” or "I feel like my old self,” as if the self varies from one time to another. In this course we will read 2 novels that centralize the representation of a self. To help us think about the concept of the “self” as developed in western philosophy, we read some philosophical treatments of the self by Augustine, Rene Descartes, Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and David Hume. Students will write a very short paper early in the course and another longer paper (with draft). The course will have a final but no mid-term. Students will also write informally (sometimes in class, sometimes on the course message board) to discover their own thinking. Three books are ordered for the course: Augustine’s Confessions (Penguin, ISBN-10 014044114X); Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (Broadview Press, ISBN: 9781551119359 / 1551119358); and Samuel Richardson’s Pamela (Oxford, ISBN-019953649X/978 or 0192829603). Please get these specific editions.. The other materials are available online. |
| ENGLISH 102C | THE 1890S | BARTLETT, J. | |
| ENGLISH 102C | VICTORIAN SPACES | TUCKER, I. | This course will explore the relations among different conception of space that are created or come into prominence during the Victorian era: national space, Continental space, colonial space, the interiors and surfaces of bodies, domestic space, architectural space, geological space. We will read work by authors including Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Robert Browning, Charles Darwin, John Stuart Mill. |
| ENGLISH 102D | AMERICAN POETRY & POETICS | IZENBERG, O. | |
| ENGLISH 102D | LITERATURE OF PARTION | O'CONNOR, L. | |
| ENGLISH 103 | FILMS OF THE 60S | CHRISTENSEN, J. | This course will study major and minor Hollywood motion pictures of the 1960s chronologically in the context of the various movements that emerged or were transformed in that decade in response to decolonization, the distortion of American politics by Cold War paranoia, the Viet Nam War, the burgeoning growth of youth culture, demands for equal treatment under the law by African Americans and women, and, last but not least, the fragmentation of the film industry. |
| ENGLISH 103 | INTRODUCTION TO SHAKESPEARE | HENDERSON, A. | In this course students will learn a variety of techniques for reading, watching, and discussing Shakespeare’s plays. We will study three major plays—Hamlet, Twelfth Night, and The Tempest—from a wide range of perspectives. We will explore, among other things, Shakespeare’s use of rhetoric, the influence of editors on Shakespeare’s plays, the ways performance functions as interpretation, and the relevance of Renaissance social issues to modern readers and audiences. Coursework will include three papers and weekly exercises. |
| ENGLISH 103 | GENDER AND SEXUALITY IN AFRICAN AMERICAN LITERATURE | KEIZER, A. | Since the era of American slavery, African American writers have grappled with the difficulties of representing love and sexuality in the context of coercion and the negative stereotypes that have dominated representations of black people in the Americas. In the late-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, African American fiction emphasized black morality, respectability, and “uplift” in order to counter widespread denigration. While critical for US race politics, such a stance became a constraint as nineteenth-century literary cultures gave way to Modernism and subsequent experimental movements. In the wake of the Civil Rights, Black Power, and feminist movements, new possibilities for representing gender and sexuality became available to African American writers. This course will examine fiction, poetry, drama, and film by twentieth- and twenty-first-century African American writers, with particular attention to the influence of nineteenth-century concerns upon more recent works. Through our close readings, we will trace thematic and stylistic continuities and discontinuities between the texts under study, and we will consider the socio-economic and political factors that established the parameters of African American creative expression, including the legacies of slavery, stereotypes of black men and women, sexual violence, and movements for social, political, and sexual liberation. We will use critical essays to enhance our analyses of primary texts. Course requirements will include a midterm exam, a 5-page essay, and a take-home final exam. |
| ENGLISH 105 | LITERATURE OF ISRAEL AND PALESTINE | TUCKER, I. | In this course, we will read, watch and analyze contemporary novels, memoirs, poetry,films and television shows produced by writers living both inside and outside Israel and Palestine. We will consider ways in which different literary genres and media function to make the worlds they represent seem self-evident, or to trouble the givenness of those worlds. How do these forms represent the relations between the spaces they represent and the inhabitants of those spaces? What are the links or disconnections between narrative authority and political authority? Between narrative authority and military authority? What are the relations between the conventions of various genres and the language, or languages, in which they are written? (Although we will read works in English translation or with English subtitles, the works we will engage were originally written in Hebrew, Arabic, English or in some combination of those languages, and the modes of combination and interaction will be central to our examination.) What are the different sorts of testimonial claims linked to fictional characters and the subjects of memoirs? How do these different modes represent their own relations to the larger institutional structures – publishing houses, television studios, newspapers -- that produce and authorize them? Authors whose works we will engage include, but are not limited to: Shani Boianjiu, David Grossman, Sayeed Kashua, Mahmoud Darwish, Orly Castel-Bloom, Ghassan Kanafani. |
| ENGLISH 105 | AFRICAN AMERICAN NOVEL | KEIZER, A. | The African American novelist Ralph Ellison wrote “I believe that true novels, even when most pessimistic and bitter, arise out of an impulse to celebrate human life and therefore are ritualistic and ceremonial at their core. Thus they would preserve as they destroy, affirm as they reject.” This course explores the African American novel from the late nineteenth century to the present, investigating how these works “preserve as they destroy, affirm as they reject” aspects of the genre and its sub-categories (e. g., the Bildungsroman, the postmodernist novel). As we examine the formal and thematic elements of the novels, we will pay particular attention to the representation of black folk culture, music, religious practices, and popular culture. We will also analyze the ways in which African American novelists respond to socio-economic and political realities, including the legacies of slavery, dominant-culture stereotypes of black men and women, black migration to northern and western cities, and the Civil Rights and feminist movements. Course requirements include midterm and final exams and an 8-10-page essay. |
| ENGLISH 105 | AFRICAN AMERICAN DRAMA | HARRIES, M. | |
| ENGLISH 105 | CONTEMPORARY ASIAN AMERICAN NOVEL | LEE, J. | |
| ENGLISH 106 | WOMEN & SATIRE | VAN SANT, A. | Satire is both radically disruptive and deeply conservative, and it often produces results that satirize the satirist as much as the explicit object of criticism. Satires against women have at various times been a significant sub-genre. Juvenal’s great 2nd century tirade against women provided a pattern imitated for centuries by satirists who assumed a male normative and a male dominated culture. Juvenal's satire excoriates women but at the same time creates an image of women as strangely powerful. Women have also talked back, sometimes by satirizing male satirists, sometimes by defending women. The Vagina Monologues, the last work we will read (and if possible see), removes the satiric ground from satirists by allowing women to have their say from the point of view of their vaginas. In this course we will read satires against women, satires in which women provide a vehicle for social critique, satires by women against men, and satires that assume or can imagine a female normative culture. We will also read criticism that deals both with questions of literary form and with historical issues brought into view by the satires. E106 is the advanced seminar for English majors and has as prerequisites E01W (or its equivalent) and 2 other upper-division courses in the major. Students will write a significant course paper, with drafts and peer critiques, and will also write informally in class and on the message board. Participation (and of course attendance) will be important elements of the course. Course materials will be available in the bookstore and on the web. |
| ENGLISH 106 | VICTORIAN SCIENCE & LITERATURE | HENDERSON, A. | In this course we will examine the mutual influence of science and art in nineteenth-century British culture, beginning with Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and ending with Oscar Wilde's Picture of Dorian Gray. We will not only discuss the representation of scientific concepts in literature, but will track the importance of formal abstraction--especially in the mathematics and logic of the age--to the impulse towards formalism in poetry and painting. We will read writings by mathematicians and physicists alongside aesthetic treatises and poems. Writing for the course will be geared toward the production of a major research paper. |
| ENGLISH 106 | 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. Students will be judged on two papers 6-8 pages in length. Both will involve drafts and at least one will be presented orally to the class. The second paper will require the use of secondary sources. |
| ENGLISH 210 | QUEER MEMOIRS | ALEXANDER, J. | [Course Code: 23800] Monday/Wednesday 9:30am to 10:50am HIB 411 QUEER MEMOIR offers an exploration of the art and theory of figuring queer lives in prose, graphic books, and digital media. Beginning with sexological case studies at the end of the 19th century, we will trace the emergence throughout the 20th and early 21st centuries of multiple representational approaches to queer subjectivities in diverse works of nonfiction. Particular attention to will be given to genre as a complex engagement with--and complication of---concepts of resistance, agency, and intersectionality, Likely subjects: Foucault, Genet, Lorde, Baldwin, Eribon, Bornstein, Bechdel, Clare, Delaney, González, Cvetkovich, among others. |
| ENGLISH 210 | CHAUCER T&C | ALLEN, E. | [Course Code: 23802] Thursdays 11:00am to 1:50pm HIB 411 Chaucer’s great tragic romance Troilus and Criseyde takes as its subject a love affair conducted amid the war and ruin of Troy—a love affair between the warp and woof of past texts, but one that aspires to change the pattern of the weaving. Chaucer creates a lover, Troilus, who is courtly to the point of inept passivity. He brings alive the intentions of a female character, Criseyde, radically dismissed by his antifeminist forebears. He invents a clerkly go-between, Pandarus, whose vicarious involvement in the love affair throws new light on the vicarity of the reader. Criseyde in particular focuses the reader’s attention on questions that have preoccupied Virgil, Ovid, Boethius, Dante, and Chaucer’s never-mentioned, nearest source, Boccaccio. Thematically, Criseyde meditates on Helen and Dido; ethically, she becomes a lightning rod for antifeminist critique; formally, she figures the possibility of representing the self in poetry; philosophically, she represents the problem of maintaining faith in a world of contingency. Troilus and Criseyde synthesizes romance and tragedy in a vision that reduces to neither. In a poem thoroughly infused with Boethian concern for human choice in a Providential world, Chaucer examines the possibilities for action through the lens of pagan characters. In a poem resolutely charged with a love of the earthly world and human chance, he refutes the hubris of Dantean comedy. In a poem that purports to be a romance—one that ends with detached laughter at human foibles—Chaucer nonetheless writes a tragedy whose ineluctable end destabilizes the role of go-between, narrator, and reader alike. This course will read Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde in light of its predecessors, putting theories of imitation, allusion, and intertextuality into action. The reading list will thus include three sorts of reading to contextualize the Troilus: criticism, sources, and theories of imitation and intertextuality. The balance will tip toward sources and our own practice of putting them to good use. Seminar: response papers and a 20-page final paper Proseminar: response papers and a 10-page final paper or two 5-page papers |
| ENGLISH 210 | LITERARY DESCRPTION | IZENBERG, O. | [Course Code: 23804] Tuesdays, 1:00pm to 3:50pm HIB 411 The success of a project of interpretation or evaluation depends in part on its ability to produce in its readers the sense that it has accounted for its object as a whole. Or in its most salient parts. Or through the finest stylistic filaments that bind a work of art to a determining context. But how do we know when we have described enough of the whole? How do we determine which are the salient parts? What do we do about the great excess of the object left 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 readers and writers. |
| ENGLISH 210 | WHITMAN IN THEORY | JACKSON, V. | [Course Code: 23806] Thursdays 4:00pm to 6:50pm HIB 411 This seminar will use the seven editions of Whitman’s Leaves of Grass to think through several theoretical trajectories at once. Part of the focus of this course will be explicitly historical: we will read the 1855, 1856, 1860, 1867, 1871, 1881, and 1892 editions of LoG, attending to the shifts in historical poetics those editions entail. From the early utopian, explicitly Fourierist book that Whitman printed by hand in the back of a sex-radical, phrenological bookshop in Flatbush, Brooklyn to the “Deathbed” edition assembled by the circle of Whitmaniacs around Whitman in his last years, LoG traced a history of poetic theory as well as a history of social theory and, of course, social events. Whitman’s work as a nurse during the Civil War will also form part of our study, though that experience is not explicitly recorded in the poems (since, as Whitman wrote, “the real war will not get in the books”). The literary and social historical focus of our reading of the editions of LoG will open into various theoretical trajectories that issue from them, since, like Benjamin’s Arcades project, the aim of LoG was to shift the frame of intellectual history into a new key. Queer theory, Ecopoetics (especially in Whitman’s beautiful pastoral elegy for Lincoln and in his understanding of the commercialization of antebellum New York), affect theory, media theory, race theory, the theorization of intimate publics, theories of the nation state—all of these current theoretical conversations intersect in Whitman. Whitman wrote as if the LoG could make America into a queer utopia with resources available to all; as if the stranger intimacy solicited by mass print could bind readers together in a public constituted by elective affinities rather than by law or race or wealth. In order to evaluate that “as if,” we will read the Fourier and Fanny Wright and Hegel that Whitman read, and we will also read Emerson, Warner, Berlant, Ngai, Cavitch, Douglass, Taylor, Gitelman, Coviello, Breitweiser, Stansell, Grossman, Nersessian, and Mongrel Coaltion Against Gringpo. |