| Course | Title | Instructor | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
| ENGLISH 8 | MULTICULTURAL AMERICAN LITERATURE: WRITING AMERICAN SELVES | O'CONNOR, L. | As the course-title suggests, “Writing American Selves” is centrally engaged with autobiographical writing. Autobiography raises fascinating issues about the nature of memory, truth, fiction, identity, self-representation and self-fashioning. Who, after all, is better equipped to portray the significance of a life than the person who lived it? Yet is the person writing the autobiography “the same” as the person s/he writes about? Is it possible to write autobiographically without some element of self-fashioning, and does such writing partly produce the person one purports oneself to be? Arguably more than other literary modes, autobiography exemplifies the perennial tension between unique selfhood and the communal forms of socialization through which selfhood is achieved. UCI’s Multicultural Studies course requirement is intended to “develop students’ awareness and appreciation of the cultural differences and inequities of one or more underrepresented groups in California and the United States.” Several of our authors were disheartened by how rarely they encountered people like them in the literature they read. Conscious of the links between how their minority group is marginalized in society and how they are mis- or under- represented in literature, they may feel caught in a double-bind. They cannot write an authentic autobiography without disclosing their minority background. Yet being branded as a minority writer may subject them to unwelcome profiling or spokesperson obligations in ways that perpetuate minority / mainstream inequities. The reading list, not finalized and hence subject to change, includes: Harriet Jacobs, W. E. B. DuBois, Sherman Alexie, Richard Rodriguez, Nam Le, and Alison Bechdel. Regular writing assignments and exam. |
| ENGLISH 10 | BIBLE AS LITERATURE | ALLEN, E. | In this course, we will read selections from the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament as centrally important cultural documents and works of literary artistry in various genres. We will consider such questions as the variety of literary genres and strategies in the Bible; the historical and rhetorical situation of its various writers; the representation of God as a literary character; recurrent images and themes; the Bible as a Hebrew national epic; the New Testament as a radical reinterpretation of the “Old Testament” (or Hebrew Bible); and the overall narrative as a plot with beginning, middle, and end. Since time will not permit a complete reading, we will concentrate on those books that display the greatest literary interest or influence, possibly including Genesis, Exodus, and parts of Deuteronomy; from the Prophets, Second Isaiah and Daniel; excerpts from the books of Judges, Ruth, Psalms, and the Song of Songs, along with the saga of King David and portions of the Wisdom literature. In the New Testament, we will read from the Gospels according to Matthew, Luke, and John. While the Bible is of course a foundational religious document in many traditions, we will not be looking at it as theology or revelation; respect for others’ religious or non-religious orientation is important, but we will be emphasizing the Bible’s literary aspects, its rhetoric, and its cultural significance for believers and non-believers alike. No previous acquaintance with the Bible is presupposed. Requirements: short response papers, essay, final exam. |
| ENGLISH 10 | THEATER/FILM/MEDIA | HARRIES, M. | Some media, such as theater, have been around for a long time. Other media, such as film, have relatively short histories. What happens to older media when new ones arrive? What happens to art forms in the wake of newer media? What happened to theater after film? While theater forms the center of this course, we will also think about film and media studies. This course will take a historical approach to these questions. Such an approach will allow us to distance ourselves from the idea that either media or art forms are static. The particular example of theater’s relationship to film poses a set of questions: • How did film change theater? • What happened to theater when film became the dominant form of entertainment using human performers? • What did film owe to theater? How did film reflect on theatrical performance traditions? • Is theater “live”? What is “live” performance? • What happened to melodrama? • What is the relationship between “medium” and “media”? We will pursue these questions by reading plays, watching films, and reading historical and theoretical work about theater, film, and media. Examples will include important plays from the twentieth century to the present by authors including Bertolt Brecht and Samuel Beckett; short films, including slapstick comedies by Buster Keaton, and a feature film; and readings by a range of critics, including writers who were thinking about the relationship between media in the early twentieth century. Written work will include two papers, a midterm, and a final exam, as well as the occasional pop quiz. |
| ENGLISH 10 | ROMANTIC FICTION AND NON-FICTION | CHRISTENSEN, J. | |
| ENGLISH 15 | COMEDY | BARTLETT, J. | |
| ENGLISH 15 | PULP FICTION | MARTIN, T. | In the first decades of the twentieth century, American readers did much of their fiction reading in so-called “pulp” magazines (named for the low-quality, pulpwood paper they were made of). Today, the phrase “pulp fiction” continues to be used to describe works of literature and film presumed to be nothing more than cheap entertainment. In this course, however, we’ll use the ostensibly cheap thrills of pulp fiction as an opportunity to grapple with some more serious questions in literary study: What is a genre? What is literary history? What makes something “literary”? And how did certain popular genres manage to transform themselves from mass-market entertainments to objects of academic study and symbols of cultivated taste? To answer these questions, we’ll trace the evolution of three pulp genres—detective fiction, apocalyptic fiction, and westerns—from the early twentieth century to the early twenty-first. In doing so, we’ll work to cultivate a historical understanding of genre: an account of how and why generic forms change over time. Through that historical lens, we’ll learn to see popular or “pulp” genre fiction as an important source of both aesthetic innovation and social critique in American culture. Authors studied will likely include Raymond Chandler, Patricia Highsmith, Octavia Butler, and Colson Whitehead, among others. |
| ENGLISH 15 | AMERICAN SHORT STORY | GODDEN, R. | The class will consider a range of American short stories from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with the purpose of addressing, first, how we read, and second, the nature of literary knowledge (how it might differ, for example, from historical or sociological knowledge). To do as much, we will think about issues such as voice, metaphor, tone, difficulty, and narrative. Stories will be drawn from among the following authors: Washington Irving, Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Charles Chesnutt, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, Zora Neal Hurston, Richard Wright, Flannery O’Connor and Eudora Welty. Requirements will include several short assignments and papers, in addition to a longer final paper. |
| ENGLISH 100 | INTRODUCTION TO LITERARY THEORY | BARTLETT, J. | |
| ENGLISH 101W | POETRY AND THE SENSES | COLLINS, R. | “The work of poetry,” argues Susan Stewart, “is to counter the oblivion of darkness.” Our course will consider this work through a focused examination of poetry that resists oblivion through the loss, recovery and transformation of sensory experience. Among other things, we will ask what sort of sight emerges from poetry about the failure to see? What is a poetry of tears? Of tantrums? Of sex and stench? What do we hear in a poetry of silence? What do we taste in a poetry of hunger? What does poetry make of movement? What when limbs are bound? Our readings will draw from the Renaissance and Romantic periods of English poetry, but we will also range further afield, too, including, among others, a journey to Greece with Euripides’ Bacchae and a stay at home with some contemporary American poets. Coursework will include weekly assignments, two short papers and a final essay that will go through a careful drafting and revision process. |
| ENGLISH 101W | OCTAVIA BUTLER AND MARGARET ATWOOD | CHANDLER, N. | This seminar considers the problem of how to understand the time of our own lives historically according to our senses of the future. It does so by way of an engagement with speculative fiction – the work of which is conceived as a critical archaeology of the future. For the winter term of 2017, this course is devoted to Octavia Butler’s Parable series, 1993-1998 (Parable of the Sower, 1993 and Parable of the Talents, 1998, of which a third volume remained incomplete upon her passing) and Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy from 2003-2013 (Oryx and Crake, 2003, The Year of the Flood, 2009, and MaddAddam, 2013). The 2015-2017 made-for-television Netflix series – led by Lana Wachowski – Sense8, along with the series long adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s 1985 novel The Handmaid’s Tale, presented by Hulu will serve as counterpoint genre and technique for our novels. The classic study They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45 (1954), by Milton Sanford Mayer, will be referenced. If possible, the seminar members will visit the Octavia Butler’s papers and archives at the Huntington Library in Pasadena/San Marino. This is an upper division writing intensive seminar, fulfilling such criteria. In practical terms, this means that a student who takes this course should be prepared for both substantial reading and substantial writing |
| ENGLISH 101W | WHAT IS AN AUTHOR | CHRISTENSEN, J. | |
| ENGLISH 102A | GLOBAL RENAISSANCE | KAUFMAN, S | “the English for the most part do not travel much, but prefer to learn foreign matters and take their pleasures at home” -Thomas Platter, Swiss traveler in London, 1599 This course examines an emerging global consciousness in Renaissance literature and culture. A growing global market, international exchange, and traveler’s reports of diverse cultures and religions contributed to a dynamic conception of “the globe” in early modern European literature and a new vision of “home” and its place in the world. Authors such as Michel de Montaigne, Christopher Marlowe, and William Shakespeare produced works on the risks and rewards of cross-cultural exchange, inter-religious dialogue, and interfaith marriage. This course will consider how early modern authors and artists depicted the diversity of their times, from the Americas to the Middle East, and how a global perspective challenged, enriched, and complicated European culture, conceptions of cosmopolitanism, and responses to xenophobia. Course readings will include Thomas More’s Utopia, Marlowe’s Tamburlaine, Shakespeare’s Othello and The Tempest, Montaigne’s Essays, The Travels of the Three English Brothers, travel writings from ambassadors to Persia and India, and maps and atlases from the period. Course requirements include: paper, midterm, and final. |
| ENGLISH 102B | 17TH C PASTORAL | SILVER, V. | The course readings address the thoroughly peculiar impact of seventeenth-century politics (civil war and the killing of a king) on the pastoral literature (shepherds and nymphs)of that age, from Shakespeare and Jonson, Herrick and Lovelace, to Marvell, Aphra Behn, Dryden, Rochester, and Swift. Strange sights will be seen and odd things will occur in these pastoral landscapes, all of which will require weird explanations from your instructor. There may even be a movie to teach you how to see what might not immediately strike the eye. |
| ENGLISH 102B | AUGUSTAN TO GOTHIC | HENDERSON, A. | This course will provide an introduction to eighteenth-century literature, with a special emphasis on the relationship between that literature and other arts of the period, from opera to architecture. We will pay close attention to the way neoclassical aesthetics shaped both the subject matter and the forms of eighteenth-century art, whether in the painting of Alexander Pope or the portraiture of Joshua Reynolds. During the latter half of the term we will track the various movements that would undermine classicism toward the end of the century, including Gothicism and sentimentalism. Course requirements will include several short writing assignments, a midterm, and a final. |
| 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 102C | WILDE TIMES | BURT, E. | How can the same decade of the 1890’s have given us Wilde’s painterly Decadent texts, Shaw’s socially-concerned, realist comedies, James’s finely-tuned psychological tales, Wells’s ferocious science-fiction novellas and Conrad’s modernist meditations on English honor and the Empire in dissolution? As the Victorian age reaches an end, on the cusp of modernism, there are noticeable signs in the texts of these writers of a struggle to liberate men and women from the confines of Victorian notions of virtue and domestic life. There is evidence as well of anxiety, as socio-political institutions come under fire for their corruption or inadequacy at accommodating modern needs. Corrupting influences are shown inhabiting the family or tearing apart Victorian assumptions as to the glorious Empire and the fairness of old England itself. Along with the social upheaval, we see our novelists and dramatists experimenting with styles and forms that indicate on the one side an increasing formalism, and on the other, a reforming spirit struggling to find literary language adequate to the new age. Works to be read include: The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890), Lady Windermere’s Fan (1893), Mrs. Warren’s Profession (1893), The Spoils of Poynton (1896), The Invisible Man (1897), Lord Jim (1899). |
| ENGLISH 102D | AMERICAN NATURALISM: NATURE AND ALLEGORY | JENSEN, I | This course focuses on U.S. naturalism with a particular in interest in allegory, the natural world, and their relation(s). Beginning around the turn of the twentieth century and extending by influence into the twenty-first, Naturalism—a deterministic, grim, and often lurid school—has left an indelible mark on American culture. Sometimes considered a successor to or offshoot of U.S. Realism, American Naturalism differs from its arguably more famous French counterpart in that it often breaks from the urban setting to focus on the natural world, even as it maintains its cousin’s investiture in allegory. In this class then, our guiding questions will be: What is Naturalism? What is allegory, and how does it work? What does it mean to allegorize the natural world? We will have recourse to three theoretical approaches: theories of Naturalism, ecocritical theory, and the theory of allegory. We can expect to read essays or excerpts by Walter Benn Michaels, Donald Pizer, Walter Benjamin, Paul de Man, and Timothy Morton, as well as some historical context from others such as Darwin and Marx. Texts will include London’s The Call of the Wild, Frank Norris’ McTeague, Wharton’s Ethan Fromme, Dreiser’s Sister Carrie, Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage, McNickel’s The Surrounded, Wright’s Native Son, and McCarthy’s Blood Meridian. Course requirements include: paper, midterm, and final. |
| ENGLISH 105 | WHITE SUPREMACY | JACKSON, V. | The history of American literature is a racist history. That is not surprising, since the history of the U.S. is a racist history--yet we often read American literature as if this is not the case, or as if we can separate the violence of American history from the canon of American literature. In this class, we will read some of the most often read (and misread) novels, plays, and poems of the last four centuries of American literature in order to raise questions about racism that allows whiteness to emerge and occupy a position of privilege in the American literary canon. Our reading will include Wigglesworth, Rowlandson, Franklin, Wheatley, Equiano, Barlow, Brown, Sedgwick, Child, Hawthorne, Stowe, Whitman, Melville, Harper, Dunbar, Boucicault, Eliot, Hemingway, Faulkner, Johnson, Ellison, Morrison, and Rankine. |
| ENGLISH 105 | EARLY AFRICAN AMERICAN LITERATURE | CHANDLER, N. | This course will introduce students to the history of the African American intellectual and literary construction of the American experience, focusing on the 18th and 19th centuries – highlighting its early emergence, intensity and breadth – the colonial period through the advent of the Twentieth century. The will focus will be on Phillis Wheatley, Oluadah Equiano, Ottobah Cugoano, David Walker, Maria Stewart, and Frederick Douglass. W. E. B. Du Bois’s reflections on African American intellectual traditions will be of basic reference. In addition to established and recognized literary and intellectual texts, the readings and lectures also include, or consider, inscribed oral texts such as orations and public addresses, sermons, testimonials, songs, especially spirituals, and folklore. Other readings referenced or discussed in the class include published poetry, essays, petitions, legal appeals and declarations, editorials, slave narratives and other autobiographical narratives, fiction, and histories. The student who completes this course will have an understanding of the African American intellectual and literary construction of the American experience and thus the emergence of a modern literature and intellectual tradition, noting its early announcement within the history of the United States and a profound sense of its intensity and breadth. |
| ENGLISH 105 | TRAVEL LITERARY JOURNALISM | WILENTZ, A. | |
| ENGLISH 106 | NEW BLACK POETS | JACKSON, V. | The first two decades of the twenty-first century have seen the emergence of a new phase of black poetics. The extraordinary work of these contemporary poets is and is not post-modern, avant-garde, lyric, or anti-lyric. In fact, the energy of much of this poetry comes from its challenge to norms of genre and period categorization. As Fred Moten has written, "To think poetry in the name of (its) blackness is, crucially, to consider the work’s generative incompletion along with that of the one who is supposed to have made it." So this is a course about that ongoing incompletion. In it we will read poetry by Philip, Hayes, Rankine, Young, Shockley, Kearney, Smith, Jess, Jones, Moten, Mullen, Parker, Alexander, and others. |
| ENGLISH 106 | HUMANISM-NATIONALSM | RADHAKRISHNAN, R. | This course will focus rigorously on the hyphenated category of the "onto-political" by way of nationalism and humanism. What is the relationship between ontology (theory of general Being) and politics (theory of specifically situated, socio-historical beings)? Are the two symbiotic, mutually constitutive? Is the relationship hierarchic? Is ontology the deep structure and politics the symptom? Is ontology temporal and politics historical: and if so, what is the relationship between temporality and historicity? Is ontology sublimated politics, and is politics ontology handed down? Crucial to all these questions is the constitution of the human as simultaneously being and citizen, non-sovereign and sovereign. Is humanism complicit with nationalism; or, can nationalism be "post-ed," i.e., transcended critically in the name of humanism? Is the post in the post-national the same as the post- on the post-human? How is the imprimatur of the human different from or ideologically identical with the imprimatur of the national? Are refugee non-citizens human, sub-human, human manqué? Is nationalism racist? Is humanism racist? Is the human animal, hum-animal? Is sovereignty anchored in the human, the national, or both differentially? In the move towards a new and transformative, deep ecological post-colonial humanism, should nationalism be discredited, deconstructed, transcended transgressively? Are there good and bad nationalisms, just as there are useable and culpable humanisms? Or, should the nationalism-humanism paradigm be abandoned tout court? What about the possibilities of a politically grounded exilic humanism? These are the questions that I hope to explore symptomatically in this seminar, in conjunction with other isms such as colonialism, transnationalism, feminism, anthropocentrism as well as the politics of race, the body, gender, and sexuality. Please fear not, if some of this sounds intimidating. This is an advanced seminar rich in theory and you will have all the opportunity to bring in literature (poetry, fiction, short fiction) and contemporary events, AND I will do all I can and more to facilitate you into all, and particularly, the more dense readings. Believe me, the times we are living on are more complex than the readings which are after all but a commentary on lived collective experience. Tentative Readings: Jean-Paul Sartre, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Martin Heidegger, Edward Said, Karl Marx, Frantz Fanon, Adrienne Rich, Virginia Woolf, W.E.B. Du Bois, Giorgio Agamben, Etienne Balibar, Rabindranath Tagore, Mohandas Gandhi, Ernst Renan, Partha Chatterjee, Benedict Anderson, Antonio Gramsci. I will prioritize these readings as we go along. We may not be able to cover all, and that is just fine. No texts: just pdfs, and most of the texts are accessible on the web. Expectations: Rigorous class participation, and most likely 2 term papers, 1 short (7-10 pages) and 1 long (10-15 pages). The seminar will be a combination of lecture, presentations, close readings of texts, and freewheeling discussion and dialogue. |
| ENGLISH 106 | FREEWAYS PROJECT | HARRIES, M. | In the 1930s, while in exile in Paris, the German scholar Walter Benjamin compiled materials towards understanding nineteenth-century Paris, a city he took to be paradigmatic of modernity. These probably fragmentary materials were published as a book, The Arcades Project, which collects quotations under categories Benjamin devised, including the category of the arcade itself. Benjamin argued that the arcade, a predecessor to today’s mall, was the paradigmatic building type of Paris in this era. Paradigmatic structure of a paradigmatic city, the arcade, Benjamin thought, could tell us a lot about modern life. We will use Benjamin’s work as a model for thinking about southern California. We will begin by reading pieces of The Arcades Project and discussing the book’s design, its arguments, and its archival choices. This reading will ground our collective “Freeways Project.” Each participant in the course will produce the equivalent of one of the sections – or so-called convolutes – of Benjamin’s book. Benjamin’s many categories include “Fashion,” “The Collector,” “Photography,” and “Idleness.” Our categories may overlap with his; they may be entirely different. We will be thinking about how to understand southern California by pursuing archival research into its histories, literatures, and cultures, and we will organize that research along the lines of his project. (It is possible, if not probable, that by the end of the term we will agree that this course should have a different name, but we may disagree about what that name should be.) Outside of class, much of the work for this course will happen in collections, in libraries or elsewhere, which participants will identify. We will work in those archives and other collections relevant to our interests, keeping track of our research through by gathering quotations and writing. Students will assign readings drawn from their archives to the entire class, so the syllabus will not be complete at the start of term. Following Benjamin’s example, the main format for our writing will be the paragraph. |
| ENGLISH 210 | CHARACTERIZING PERSONS IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY | HENDERSON, A. | [Course Code: 23800] Thursdays 12:00 – 2:50pm in HIB 411 In this course we will examine protocols for describing personhood in nineteenth-century British art, tracking changes in those protocols across three domains: poetry, the novel, and visual arts. We will begin by discussing Romantic-era techniques for conjuring subjects in relation to objects in poetry, and major characters in relation to minor ones in the novel. As we move forward to the Victorians, we will discuss the range of techniques poets and novelists used to distinguish persons, from Collins’ tendency to vitalize his characters by giving them internally contradictory features, to Dickens’ conception of characters as nodes in a network, to Swinburne’s vision of characters as merely virtual on the one hand or nothing but flesh on the other. Along the way we will discuss the ways painters and photographers used the peculiarities of their own media—the relation of positive to negative, the use of perspective, and so on—to create their own distinct accounts of personhood. |
| ENGLISH 210 | ON LYING, TRUTH-TELLING AND ALT-FACTS | TUCKER, I. | [Course Code: 23802] Thursdays 4:00 – 6:50pm in HIB 411 This course will examine the shifting status of lying in politics, law, journalism, behavioral economics and psychology, literature, and film. What are the roles of institutional norms in establishing what counts as truth and lying in various realms? Does the operation of such norms undermine the notion of truth-telling? What’s the role of a speaker’s intention in differentiating lying from other sorts of falsehoods? Can performative understandings of lying be made continuous with evidence-based practices associated with journalism and literary analysis like quotation and close-reading, or are new forms of reading and analysis necessary? What are the differences among fictions, lies, and confabulations? How does the medium of documentation affect what we think we can know or not know about a given account of a situation, witness or set of facts? We will read the work of political and legal philosophers including Immanuel Kant, Hannah Arendt, Harry Frankfurt, Martin Jay and Guy Debord; behavioral economists and theorists of collective knowledge including Dan Ariely and Bella Depaulo, and Cass Sunstein; memoirist Lauren Slater, as well as fiction by Ford Madox Ford, Nella Larsen and Patricia Highsmith. We will also engage analyses of journalistic practice by Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel, Seth Mnookin, and Janet Malcolm. We will conclude with Yorgos Lanthimos’ 2015 film, “The Lobster.” |
| ENGLISH 210 | MATERIALIST READING | GODDEN, R. | [Course Code: 23806] Mondays 2:00 – 4:50pm in HIB 411 [Cross listed: CTE, HUMAN 270] Departing from a Marxist assumption that materiality is socially produced, under changeable conditions that its producers neither wholly control nor wholly understand, the course seeks to explore elements of those methodologies which may best allow for the reading of literature as part of that wider materiality. Since literary materiality is made from words, and since words are social instruments, semanticized through particular relations, we shall engage early with materialist accounts of language (Volosinov, Bakhtin,Williams). Since literary words frequently take narrative forms, we will address historiography as it seeks to grasp the real (Benjamin, Greenblatt, White). Since written stories are made as much from what is forgotten as from what is remembered, we will consider the unconscious, as made from that which we have learned to find unthinkable (Freud, Abraham and Torok, Ricoeur). Since these three areas are to be read as part of a wider pattern of material making (or an economy understood both as a mask worn by social relations, and as the ‘last instance’ determinant of cultural forms), they needs must be linked to a specific accumulative regime by way of Marx, and responses to him (most particularly those of Jameson and Harvey). The aim of the course is at all times to explore and enable the processes of reading. To that end, each week the seminar will consider extracts from theoretical writings in relation to a particular short story or stories. The stories will be drawn predominantly from a single historical period (U.S. 1970-2017). |
| ENGLISH 225 | CRIMES OF THE CENTURY: CRIMINALITY AND THE AMERICAN NOVEL | MARTIN, T. | [Course Code: 23810] Fridays 12:00 – 2:50pm in HIB 411 The sociologist Emile Durkheim has suggested that crime is the lens through which society sees itself. So what kind of society do American writers see when they write—as they so frequently do—about crime? In this course, we will work to historicize the twentieth-century American novel through its changing depictions of crime and criminality. At the same time, we will develop and test the theoretical hypothesis that crime offers a unique site for grasping the dynamics of literature’s social mediation—insofar as conceptions of crime inevitably involve a formal articulation of the abstraction we call “society.” Ultimately, our aim in the course will be to explore the different ways that the American novel has used crime to grapple with the question of what it means to belong—and not belong—to society in the twentieth century. Why, we’ll wonder, has criminality been such a consistent theme in American fiction (not just within the narrowly defined genre of “crime fiction” but across a range of novelistic genres)? And how has this fiction understood itself as responding to historically specific concerns and debates about the nature of social belonging in times of intense social antagonism? By tracing how ideas of crime and criminality have shaped a century’s worth of major American novels, we will consider the fate of the novel form in the century of Jim Crow and Civil Rights; of communism and cold war; of liberal commitments to law and increasingly tenuous fantasies of order. Primary readings will include works by James M. Cain, Richard Wright, Patricia Highsmith, Jim Thompson, Chester Himes, Richard Price, and Maggie Nelson. Secondary readings will range from sociology to political history to critical theory. |
| ENGLISH 230 | MILTON | SILVER, V. | [Course Code: 23820] Tuesdays 12:00 – 2:50pm in HIB 411 The seminar addresses the problem arguably posed by Milton, namely, how can an iconoclast be a poet. To that extent, it is a course in how best to read Paradise Lost without succumbing to the undeniable allure of the Icthyian fallacy (Stanley Fish's How Milton Works). In order to tackle this question, the seminar supplies an interpretive framework, beginning with the fifteenth-century bestseller, the Malleus Maleficarum (The Hammer of Witches), which serves as an introduction to what is currently called “magical thinking” but Milton terms “idolatry.” The antidote to a magical or idolatrous hermeneutics comes first, in the form of Martin Luther's theology--especially the work arguably most read in England, his 1535 Commentary on Galatians, but also The Bondage of the Will, his reply to Erasmus' Diatribe on that subject. The second antidote is Milton's own theology, as argued in his polemical prose and Christian Doctrine (owing to its heterodoxy only unearthed in the 19th century), as well as the poetry from his earliest sonnet, "How soon hath time.” Wittgenstein's later philosophy will make an appearance, as will Adorno's concept of dialectic, the better to dispel some misconceptions about how meaning works in Milton and clarify the enterprise of Paradise Lost in its “great argument.” |