| Course | Title | Instructor | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
| ENGLISH 10 | BOREDOM AND LITERATURE | BARTLETT, J. | |
| ENGLISH 11 | SOCIETY, LAW & LITERATURE | THOMAS, B. | Three of the most important political debates of today focus on the movement for “black lives matter,” immigration, and birth-right citizenship. This course uses law and literature to provide the historical background needed to understand and participate in those debates. The first half of the course looks at the age in which African Americans were segregated from whites. The second half examines the status of Asian Americans during the period of Chinese exclusion acts. We will also look at the former segregation of Mexican-American children in Orange County schools. Literay authors include Maxine Hong Kingston, Sui Sin Far, W.E.B Du Bois, Charles W. Chesnutt, and Mark Twain. Professor Brook Thomas E11 satisfies either Gen Ed category III (Social Science) or IV (Arts and Humanities). |
| 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 100 | INTRODUCTION TO LITERARY THEORY | LEE, J.W. | Using Plato and Aristotle as points of departure, addresses a range of perspectives and problems in literary theory. To be taken by English majors in the junior year. Requirements include a midterm and a final. |
| ENGLISH 101W | EARLY MODERN METAMORPHOSES | HELFER, R. | This course views Renaissance literature through the lens of metamorphosis. We’ll consider how representations of transformation figure as a means of negotiating the past and the present, imitation and innovation, authority and authorship, gender and genre, and other shifting categories. We will examine the literature of change in works by Ovid, Petrarch, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Spenser, and Milton. |
| ENGLISH 101W | CLOSE READING | ROBERTS, H. | In this class we will explore a variety of approaches to the theory and practice of "close reading," that most fundamental skill for all literary analysis and argument. We will explore some of the critical history of the idea of "close reading" and engage in numerous practical exercises in close reading of poetry, prose and drama with a particular emphasis on the effective use of close reading in critical writing. Weekly writing exercises will be required, as well as a final exam. Texts will be made available online or provided in class. |
| ENGLISH 101W | 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? How do manufactured objects and built environments tell stories, and what genres do they favor (romance, fairy tale, science fiction, satire)? How does architecture support branding and marketing in the experience economy? How have marketing and branding discourses reshaped both authorship and readership? Syllabus includes works by David Foster Wallace, Tao Lin, Nicholson Baker, Mike Davis, and Jennifer Egan, plus films such as Toy Story, Disney shorts, The Dark Knight, and The Avengers. |
| ENGLISH 101W | TRAGEDY | SILVER, V. | The course will address the fundamental concepts of the tragic, considered both as a conceptual mode and a literary genre, in the European tradition. We will begin with tragedy's Greek origins in religion, politics, literature and philosophy: Homer's 'Iliad' and select plays of the Greek tragedians, Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, while taking into account the responses of the Sophists, Plato and Aristotle to the performance and argument of tragedy. After that, we will address medieval conceptions of the tragic, focusing on what is probably the greatest of them, Dante's 'Inferno.' We will then turn to Shakespearean tragedy, and conclude with two of the mode's 20th-c. American incarnations: Eugene O'Neil's "Mourning Becomes Electra" and Tennessee Williams' "A Streetcar Named Desire." We will all be exhausted, depressed but informed. |
| ENGLISH 102A | SHAKESPEARE AND MARLOWE | HELFER, R. | This course explores the poetry and drama of Shakespeare and Marlowe, two of Renaissance England's most important writers. Despite his early death, Marlowe's brief career created a body of work that profoundly influenced Shakespeare's writing throughout his career. We’ll examine the relationship between these writers and their works, comparing Marlowe's Hero and Leander, Jew of Malta, Tamburlaine, and Doctor Faustus with, respectively, Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis, Merchant of Venice, Henry V, and The Tempest. |
| ENGLISH 102A | MEDIEVAL VISIONS | DAVIS, R. | Some say there is nothing in dreams but lies and fables; however, one may have dreams which are not in the least deceitful, but which later become clear. -The Romance of the Rose This course explores the medieval tradition of visionary literature, traces the developing relationship between text and image in medieval manuscripts and other visual arts, and delves into the controversy over the use of images in religious literature. Readings encompass visions both sacred and profane including Chaucer's dream visions, Pearl, Boethius's Consolation of Philosophy, and excerpts from Langland's Piers Plowman, the Romance of the Rose, Dante's Divine Comedy, holy visions by female mystics, a medieval play, and The Cloud of Unknowing. Course requirements include regular attendance, reading quizzes, two 3-5 page essays, a midterm, and a final. |
| ENGLISH 102B | LATE 18TH CENTURY LITERATURE | ROBERTS, H. | This course will examine the vogue for the literature of sensibility in the late eighteenth century and the emergence of early Romanticism out of that literary movement. We will explore late eighteenth century theories of aesthetics and explore the connections between sensibility, gothic literature and the broader philosophical and political issues of the period. Texts will be made available for download on the course website. |
| ENGLISH 102B | RISE OF THE NOVEL | TUCKER, I. | This course attempts to investigate the question. What makes a novel a novel? by going back to the moment, or moments, when the novel came into being. We will examine a variety of forms of writing that retrospectively came to be understood as ancestors of the novel, including Aphra Behn's Oroonoko, Samuel Richardson's Pamela, Henry Fielding's Joseph Andrews, Daniel Defoe's Moll Flanders, Frances Burney's Evelina, and William Godwin's Caleb Williams. We will begin the course by briefly examining some of the poetry and criticism of the period in attempt to figure out what the prose writers of the era thought they were writing, and writing against. Some questions we will consider: When, if ever, did writers of the era understand themselves to be writing something unprecedented? When, if ever, did they understand themselves to be writing novels? Is it okay for people reading after the fact to decide what they are reading are novels if the authors didn't understand themselves to be writing such a thing? Requirements include a midterm, final and two papers. |
| ENGLISH 102C | VICTORIAN CULTURE | HENDERSON, A. | This course will provide a survey of British literature of the nineteenth century. We will begin with a few key readings in Romanticism, looking particularly at Wordsworth and Keats. We will then trace the fate of Romantic aesthetics in Victorian writing, reading work by Tennyson, Bronte, Dickens, Pater, and Rossetti. Throughout, we will pay particular attention to the status of visual representation, looking at Romantic-era painting and Victorian photography alongside our literary works. Course requirements will include short assignments, a midterm, and a final exam. |
| ENGLISH 102D | U.S. LITERATURE: 1920'S | GODDEN, R. | The Twenties will be understood as a long decade in order to approach it through such extended and insistent patterns of determination as shifts in the prevalent forms of production (associated with Taylorism and Fordism); the Great War; the Great Migration; the intensification of advertising attendant upon an enlargement of the consumer network, and the continuing marginalization of the South as a region committed to labor bound by debt rather than to free wage labor. Such economic elements and their cultural consequences (alienation/reification, commodity aesthetics/capitalist realism, the Jazz Age, Harlem, Modernism) will be addressed through a range of literary texts, and under a general rubric of modernization, where the formal processes associated with making it new aesthetically may themselves be glossed (in a phrasing from Marx), as all that is solid melts into air. The course will attempt historically to situate and closely to read a number of the periods key texts: Upton Sinclair, The Jungle (1906); Ernest Hemingway, In Our Time (1925); John Dos Passos, Manhattan Transfer (1925); T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land (1922); F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Diamond as Big as the Ritz (1922) and The Great Gatsby (1925); William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying (1930); Nella Larsen, Passing (192); Jean Toomer, Cane (1925). |
| ENGLISH 103 | SHORT STORIES | TUCKER, I. | This course invites students to learn to read short fiction closely, and to explore the connections between these practices of close-reading and the history of the genre and its institutions. What's the link between how short stories are taught and how (and where) they are written, marketed, sold? We will begin by exploring the form's origins by way of the work of some of its earliest nineteenth-century practitioners, Poe, Melville, Tolstoy, and will make our way through an idiosyncratic history of the form in its twentieth-century forms, turning to writers ranging from Franz Kafka to Flannery O'Connor, Thomas McGuane and Ronit Matalon. We will also read some reflections on the form by both critics and practitioners, and will examine the strange career of Raymond Carver as a way of thinking about the processes and institutions by which stories come to be read and authors come to be celebrated. A 10-15 pp paper will be required. |
| ENGLISH 105 | MIGRANT FICTION | LAZO, R. | |
| ENGLISH 105 | INDIGENOUS LITERATURE | O'CONNOR, L. | This course explores works by contemporary writers from indigenous cultures that have been devastated by colonialism, beginning with Aborigine, Maori and Samoan writers and then turning to Native American writers. We’ll examine the effects of an education designed to “kill the Indian, and save the man” on the psyche, on cultural identity, and on indigenous languages and knowledge. How do these writers narrate the traumatic loss of an ancestral culture they can neither forget nor fully recollect? Can they adapt the narrative conventions of the dominant Anglophone print culture in order to re-create the Native customs and oral tradition supplanted by colonialism? What do these disparate indigenous cultures share in common? We’ll read works by Doris Pilkington Garimara; Patricia Grace; Sia Figiel; Louise Erdrich; Adrian C. Louis and Sherman Alexie, and others. Response postings, midterm, paper, and final. |
| ENGLISH 106 | CONCEPTS OF VIRTUE | SILVER, V. | This is a course in the ethics of interpretation but also in ethical literature from the Judaic scriptures and 'The Mahabharata,' through the Christian gospels, Confucius' 'Analects,' and the 'Dao de Jing,' concluding with Greek tragedy and the 'modern turn' as exemplified by Michel de Montaigne's 'Essais,' Austen's 'Persuasion' and Jack Schafer's 'Shane.' It begins, however, with two ethical problems or predicaments: first, that enacted in David Mamet¹s remake of 'The Winslow Boy,' and second, that posed by Henry James¹ 'Turn of the Screw.' We will consider how various interpretive models might respond to and perhaps even resolve those predicaments. Texts: Henry James, Turn of the Screw Chkravarthi Narasimhan, The Mahabharata Simon Leys, The Analects of Confucius Stephen Mitchell, Tao Te Ching Richmond Lattimore, Euripides V Michel Montaigne, Selected Essays Jane Austen, Emma Jack Shaeffer, Shane Holy Bible: New Revised Standard Version with Apocrypha |
| ENGLISH 106 | HOLLYWOOD EXCEPTIONALISM | CHRISTENSEN, J | Hollywood Exceptionalism will study the history of Hollywood not as a continuously unfolding narrative of industrial innovation and adjustment but as a series of discontinuous episodes--moments of change engineered by the studios in response to or in anticipation of political, economic, social, and legal challenges and opportunities. The course will begin with Hollywood at the end of the silent era and the beginning of the Depression with films by Cecil B. DeMille and King Vidor. In the thirties we will focus on the major studios’ cooperation with the New Deal and their so-called collaboration with Hitler. Congressional legislation and state and federal legal decisions will subsequently guide our advance to the present day. In the postwar period we will be largely concerned with the consequences of the extension of freedom of speech to motion pictures in the 1950s and as manifested in the auteurist movement called “the New Hollywood” in the 1970s. Subsequent topics will include the privileged status of Disney and its global ambitions, the role of motion pictures as the instrument for the extension of full First Amendment rights to profit-making corporations, and the methods by which the studios have attempted to deal with the advent of social media. We will conclude with a study of the eventful films of Warner Bros. auteur Christopher Nolan. We will examine the implications of the Aurora Massacre at the opening of The Dark Knight Rises for a reconsideration of corporate liability as a peril faced by the studios that make motion pictures and the theaters that exhibit them. |
| ENGLISH 106 | FAULKNER AND FITZGERALD | GODDEN, R. | The course will undertake close readings of key modernist works by Fitzgerald and Faulkner, contemporaries who wrote out of entirely divergent economic conditions and systems. Fitzgerald's writing took place in, and explored, a culture which, in his own words, followed money. Faulkner's fiction, preoccupied with racialized work, reflected and refracted an impoverished region, within which bound labor or human capital, rather than monetary capital, was central. As a transition between the two prose writers, we will read T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land (1922). Eliots long poem seeks mythic structures as a rebuke to an urban modernity which Eliot described as the vast panorama of anarchy and futility that is contemporary history. Faulkner, though as much a modernist as Fitzgerald or Eliot, deploys modernist techniques in the pursuit of pre-modern and non-urban historical imperatives, imperatives generated by an archaic regime of accumulation, grounded in debt peonage. Works covered will include, "the Diamond as Big as The Ritz" (1922), The Great Gatsby (1925), Tender Is the Night (1934), The Love of the Last Tycoon (1941), by Fitzgerald; The Waste Land (1922) by T.S.Eliot; The Sound and the Fury (1929), As I lay Dying (1930) and Go Down, Moses, by Faulkner. |
| ENGLISH 210 | THE AMERICAN WAR IN VIETNAM AS DOCUMENTED IN WORDS AND IMAGE | BURKE, C | [Course Code: 23800] Thursdays 2:00 – 4:50pm in HG 2200 (same as 32560 Vis Std 295, Sem B) Carol Burke, English & Cecile Whiting, Art History The Vietnam War was several wars: a war of independence, a civil war, a guerilla war, a proxy war, an insurgency, a war to win “hearts and minds;” and, as it lingered on, many called it “an unwinnable war.” In this seminar we will examine efforts to document this protean war as it unfolded (the print journalism, photojournalism, and television broadcasts from reporters with unprecedented access to the conflict), the reactions of those who protested an unpopular war, and the reflections of writers and artists that emerged after the fall of Saigon in 1975. Texts will include selections from historians Marilyn Young’s The Vietnam Wars and Nick Turse’s Kill Everything that Moves ; literary journalism by Herr, Hersh, Riddenhour, and Laurence; prose by O’Brien, Wolff, Ninh, Hasford,; poetry by Levertov, Duncan, Ginsberg, and Weigl; protest literature like The Huron Statement and The Winter Soldier Hearings; films by Davis, Goodman, Ashby, Kubrick, and Coppola; key photographs of violence that circulated in the press; and, art work by Emory Douglas, Martha Rosler, Peter Saul, Nancy Spero, and others. No story of any war is complete without the accounts of the return of those who were deployed to fight in the name of the state, the memorials in honor of those who fought but did not return, and the accounts of refugees forced to flee their homeland. |
| ENGLISH 210 | MATHEMATICS AND REPRESENTATION IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY | HENDERSON, A. | [Course Code: 23802] Tuesdays and Thursdays 12:30pm-1:50pm HIB 411 In this course we will examine the work of British artists and mathematicians of the nineteenth century, focusing on their accounts of the nature of representation. We will begin with early Romantic poets and geometers, examining the fusion of idea and sign in the Coleridgean symbol and the geometric figure. With the advent of non-Euclidean geometry, this fusion came to seem untenable, 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 study the structure of popular Victorian puzzles—especially puzzles in combinatorics—for new insight into the workings of plotting and characterization in the realist novel. Since we will be focusing on the philosophy and principles of the mathematics we discuss, no prior knowledge of mathematics is necessary. Our texts, for the most part, are not very long, but we will read one long Dickens novel, Our Mutual Friend, and students are encouraged to begin reading it over the break if possible. Seminar students will write a 25-page paper; pro-seminar students will do a 10-page archival project. |