| Course | Title | Instructor | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
| ENGLISH H81 | WHAT IS A PERSON? | IZENBERG, O. | This seminar is devoted to understanding the history and meaning of personhood—a concept that undergirds some of the most urgent debates of our time. The term “person” is the meeting place between fact and value; it connects claims about what human beings are—are we sentient beings? rational beings? relational beings?— to claims about what human beings are worth. To designate a class of beings as persons grants value—perhaps the highest value, in the form of rights, citizenship, or moral standing more generally—on the grounds that they possess some fundamental quality that other beings do not. We will study the emergence of ideas of personhood in ancient philosophy and in early Christian theology. This intellectual history will lay the groundwork for engaging with modern and contemporary arguments about personhood in a number of highly contested domains of law, culture and society. The five case studies at the center of the course are quite distinct and require particularized attention, but in their broadest outlines they present students with two critical questions: How and why have societies denied personhood to human beings? Why or how should societies grant personhood to non-human beings? Along the way, we will encounter not just different arguments about personhood, but a wide range of disciplinary approaches to argument and knowledge. We will study historical documents surrounding the 1781 massacre of African slaves aboard the British ship Zong alongside the cultural sociology of slavery; we will consider empirical information about fetal development alongside philosophical arguments that take up the premise of fetal personhood. We will learn how to track the reasoning that motivates legal decisions about “corporate personhood” and we will discuss how to understand the real-world implications of the science-fictional imaginings about artificial intelligence. |
| ENGLISH 10 | TWENTY POEMS | IZENBERG, O. | Each meeting of this class will focus on a single text, ranging from the oldest love poem we know to a poem that has not yet been written, with many great works of art between. Together, we will read each poem closely to learn how it is made, and to see how acts of poetic making reveal important features of a culture or moment—our own, or another. While we will read some criticism and history, the bulk of our time and attention will be reserved for our twenty poems. In writing, we will analyze, appreciate, argue with, imitate, puzzle over, and pry apart our texts; and in the end, I hope we will develop the skills to discover what some never-before-seen work of art demands of us, and to judge whether that demand is worth answering. |
| ENGLISH 10 | GLOBAL FICTIONS | JEON, J. | This class will examine fictions that understand themselves to be “global” in scope. They may be set in multiple locations around the world, foreground border locations, or focus on international travel. Looking closely as such stories (in novels, movies, and other media), we will call into question the extent to which any national context might be understood as discrete from its adjacenciesand, more broadly, think about what it means to occupy a transnational space. Ultimately, we will attempt to make sense of the increasingly complex circuits of exchange, shifting affiliations, and emergent conflicts that characterize our world today. Text may include Taiye Selasi, Ghana Must Go (2013), David Michell, Cloud Atlas(2004), China Mieville, The City and the City(2009), Nami Mun, Miles from Nowhere(2009), Patricia Highsmith, The Talented Mr. Ripley(1955). Likely assignments: Midterm and Final exam, both of which will have short take-home essay components. |
| ENGLISH 10 | FAMOUS LAST WORDS | LEWIS, J. | The bad news: human beings have a 100% mortality rate. The good news: literature can help us cope with this universal reality. Indeed, it may even have developed for just that purpose! In this course, we will explore some of the ways in which the formal elements of various literary genres—lyric poetry, fiction, drama, essay, memoir—have been used to give shape to the prospect and experience of death, both our own and that of others. Fear of death, longing for death, denial of death, bargaining with death, the sexual and racial politics of death, life after death, the good death, undeath (or at least the undead): all will be on our autopsy table. So will the Grim Reaper as celebrity, last words, last meals, mourning and grief. Besides Tolstoy’s Death of Ivan Ilych, the syllabus will include excerpts from Shakespeare’s Hamlet and the medieval morality play Everyman; literary journalism exploring last words, what to say to dying people, American funeral styles, and death row; philosophical writings by Thomas Nagel, Michel de Montaigne, and Sir Thomas Browne; excerpts from the memoirs of Paul Kalanithi and the goth cremator Caitlin Doughty; short stories by Edgar Allan Poe, Helena Maria Viramontes, Alice Walker, Mary Wilkins Freeman, and Stephen King; poems by John Donne, Emily Dickinson, e.e. cummings, Sharon Olds, Philip Larkin, Langston Hughes, Nikki Giovanni, Li -Young Lee, Lucile Clifton, Sylvia Plath, and Dylan Thomas; and Lulu Wang’s 2019 film The Farewell. We will also be exploring Saved: Objects of the Dead, a multimedia collaboration developed by poet Lorene Delany Ullman and photographer Jody Servon which will exhibited locally this quarter. Students enrolled in this course may take it in one of three ways: 1] in conjunction with W39B (taught by Lorene Delany Ullman), which will focus on the rhetoric of grief and mourning; 2] as a general education lecture course (with discussion section); 3] or as a preparation for the English major (with discussion section). In addition to an in-class midterm and a final, there will be four writing assignments, the first (your own obituary) and last (an elegy for someone you dislike) completed by students in all 3 groups, the second (a short close analysis of a poem) and third (an alternative ending to a ‘death story’) only by students in groups 2 and 3. English majors (Group 3) will write a comparative paper in lieu of the final. |
| ENGLISH 10B | FAMOUS LAST WORDS | LEWIS, J. | The bad news: human beings have a 100% mortality rate. The good news: literature can help us cope with this universal reality. Indeed, it may even have developed for just that purpose! In this course, we will explore some of the ways in which the formal elements of various literary genres—lyric poetry, fiction, drama, essay, memoir—have been used to give shape to the prospect and experience of death, both our own and that of others. Fear of death, longing for death, denial of death, bargaining with death, the sexual and racial politics of death, life after death, the good death, undeath (or at least the undead): all will be on our autopsy table. So will the Grim Reaper as celebrity, last words, last meals, mourning and grief. Besides Tolstoy’s Death of Ivan Ilych, the syllabus will include excerpts from Shakespeare’s Hamlet and the medieval morality play Everyman; literary journalism exploring last words, what to say to dying people, American funeral styles, and death row; philosophical writings by Thomas Nagel, Michel de Montaigne, and Sir Thomas Browne; excerpts from the memoirs of Paul Kalanithi and the goth cremator Caitlin Doughty; short stories by Edgar Allan Poe, Helena Maria Viramontes, Alice Walker, Mary Wilkins Freeman, and Stephen King; poems by John Donne, Emily Dickinson, e.e. cummings, Sharon Olds, Philip Larkin, Langston Hughes, Nikki Giovanni, Li -Young Lee, Lucile Clifton, Sylvia Plath, and Dylan Thomas; and Lulu Wang’s 2019 film The Farewell. We will also be exploring Saved: Objects of the Dead, a multimedia collaboration developed by poet Lorene Delany Ullman and photographer Jody Servon which will exhibited locally this quarter. Students enrolled in this course may take it in one of three ways: 1] in conjunction with W39B (taught by Lorene Delany Ullman), which will focus on the rhetoric of grief and mourning; 2] as a general education lecture course (with discussion section); 3] or as a preparation for the English major (with discussion section). In addition to an in-class midterm and a final, there will be four writing assignments, the first (your own obituary) and last (an elegy for someone you dislike) completed by students in all 3 groups, the second (a short close analysis of a poem) and third (an alternative ending to a ‘death story’) only by students in groups 2 and 3. English majors (Group 3) will write a comparative paper in lieu of the final. |
| ENGLISH 15 | DRAMA & IRISH HISTORY | O'CONNOR, L. | Before the Abbey theater was founded in Dublin at the turn of the twentieth century, Irish playwrights strove for success in London. The cultural nationalist movement associated with the Abbey and the Gaelic Revival turned instead to the legend and song of the peasantry as the basis for creating an authentic Irish national literature and culture. Our first trio of plays by Abbey co-founders W. B. Yeats, Lady Augusta Gregory, and John Millington Synge show these early beginnings and how the meanings of “authentic,” “Irish,” and “national” proved controversial. Next we turn to the theatrical treatment of two historic events in the year 1916, the Easter Rising in Dublin (which was pivotal to the foundation of the Irish Free State) and the devastating battle of the Somme. The plays, composed at other moments of historical crisis and from competing points-of-view, raise fascinating questions about “making history,” and the politics of commemoration, heroism, and sacrifice. In order to allow for flexibility, our approach to the final two plays (perhaps one) will be negotiated around midterm. You don’t need to know any Irish history to take this course, though you’ll learn some en route, because our interest lies in “making history” as subject-matter and as interventionist activism. |
| ENGLISH 15 | SEAMUS HEANEY ET AL | O'CONNOR, L. | This course enables you to practice the art of reading and writing about poetry by way of studying the work of Seamus Heaney. Heaney is usually associated with the Northern Irish sectarian conflict known as “the Troubles” (1968-1998). Finding ways to bear witness to the violence, without compounding or sensationalizing it, is an ongoing challenge. Yet Heaney also relishes the ordinariness of the everyday, whether he is paying homage to friends and family or evoking the rhythms of his rural childhood. One of our focuses will be on the elegy, in part because the genre straddles the public and the intimate spheres of his life. Heaney would be first to acknowledge the importance to him of working among a community of poets--several of whom have international reputations of their own--and while some of them make cameo appearances, our primary focus will be on Seamus Heaney: 100 Poems. |
| ENGLISH 15 | THE STORY OF ROMANCE | SILVER, V. | The course looks at the western literary tradition of romance—one of its earliest genre or literary modes whose subject (as everyone knows) is eros, the erotic, which the Greek considered as much more than mere sex but as the natural motive force of all living things to survive and reproduce themselves. Romance is also the vehicle of the ideal--not of what is but what we desire should be—embodied in the human experience and aspiration to possess the beautiful. We will look at how these concepts and values are expressed in romance’s distinctive narrative form. The readings are Homer’s Odyssey, Xenophon’s sensational Ephesian Tale, a couple of Chretien de Troyes’ Arthurian romances, Shakespeare’s Winter Tale, possibly Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko, Austen’s hilarious Northanger Abbey and Jack Shaeffer’s western, Shane. Writing requirements are two take home exams. |
| ENGLISH 15 | PULP FICTION | MARTIN, T. | In the early twentieth century, American readers did much of their fiction reading in what were called “pulp” magazines—so named for the low-quality pulpwood paper they were printed on. 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, we’ll use the seemingly cheap thrills of pulp fiction as an opportunity to grapple with some more serious questions about aesthetic quality, literary history, and the politics of genre. Indeed, what makes something “literary”? Why do we distinguish between genre fiction and literary fiction? And how did certain popular genres manage to transform themselves from mass-produced commodities into emblems of cultivated taste? To answer these questions, we’ll trace the development of two of the most important genres of the pulp era—detective fiction and science fiction—from their origins in pulp magazines to their influence on major novelists and filmmakers. Along the way, we’ll be thinking a lot about how generic conventions evolve and how standards of literary value change. |
| ENGLISH 15 | SHAKESPEARE AND GENRE | HELFER, R. | What makes a comedy a comedy? Is it the mere fact that “all’s well that ends well”? Is tragedy simply defined by the body count at the end of the play? Do history plays primarily relate and reenact the inevitable facts of the past? Does romance mostly refer to tales of love and desire? The short answer to all of these questions of course is “no,” and in this course on “Shakespeare and Genre,” we’ll explore such questions about how the genre of a play – the form, type, or category to which it presumably belongs and which defines its central conventions – governs an audience’s expectations in Renaissance drama, as it does now (think of Sci-Fi, for example, a recognizable genre that creates and fulfills, as well as subverts, certain expectations about what and how things will happen and why that matters). Despite the generic categories of Comedy, Tragedy, History, and Romance that have been assigned to Shakespeare’s plays, the plays themselves represent complex generic interplay, with comedy, tragedy, history mingling and overlapping, and coming together in new ways in the genre of romance, a hybrid form that incorporates these different genres with supernatural and magical elements. We’ll consider the ways in which Shakespeare actively plays with genre throughout his plays, at once constructing and undermining our expectations – what we think will or should happen and why – in profoundly original and surprising ways. Course requirements include regular attendance, active class participation, quizzes and short writing, an essay and a final. The following editions of Shakespeare will be available at UCI’s bookstore but you can use any scholarly edition: * Twelfth Night, ed. Roger Warren (Oxford World’s Classics) * Measure for Measure, ed. N. W. Bawcutt (Oxford World’s Classics) * Anthony and Cleopatra, ed. Michael Neill (Oxford World’s Classics) * Henry IV, ed. David Bevington (Oxford World’s Classics) * Cymbeline, ed. Roger Warren (Oxford World’s Classics) |
| ENGLISH 15 | MODERN COMEDY | HARRIES, M. | In 2003, Erich Segal declared the death of comedy, and yet we keep laughing. Are we laughing at something other than comedy? What was comedy, then? Or are reports of the death of comedy greatly exaggerated? This course will consider these questions in light of a wide range of comedies, especially but not exclusively ones written for the stage. Beginning with Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest, we will track some of the deaths and afterlives of comedy from the premiere of Wilde’s play in 1895 to comedies and performances from the last decade. |
| ENGLISH 15 | DOCUMENTARY CINEMA | BURKE, C. | Documentary films have evolved from late 19th Century “films of fact,” which in a single take recorded simple human actions, to today’s sophisticated narratives, complete with flashbacks, cross-cuts, music, archival footage and voiceover. They have always shared with print journalism a keen interest in reporting reality. We will examine the ways in which nonfiction filmmakers document the world around them and bring to us their reconstructions of earlier times, their renderings of events in remote locations, and their arguments for reform. Your success in this course will depend on the effort you expend in screening assigned films, completing assigned reading, participating in lively discussion, and producing clear and interesting prose that has profited from revision. |
| ENGLISH 16 | CRAFT OF POETRY | TAN, I | In this class, we will be reading a wide variety of contemporary poems and paying special attention to how poetic craft techniques contribute to meaning. Through careful examination of imagery, sound, and lineation, we will strive to broaden our understanding of what poetry can be, and what poetry can do. We’ll consider questions such as: What kinds of thinking and feeling do poems make possible? How does a poem convey what matters? And how do the choices we make as writers shape what the reader experiences? Since all writing is a gradual process of thinking and discovery, emphasis will be placed on class participation and the progressive development of your ideas through short writing assignments and essays. |
| ENGLISH 100 | INTRODUCTION TO LITERARY THEORY AND CRITICISM | BARTLETT, J. | English 100 has been designed to provide you with a survey of literary theory and criticism from the fifth century B.C.E. to the present day, an ambition that would read like an incredible prank if it were it not so sincerely earned. The University of California, Irvine has a reputation for bleeding-edge approaches to literature and culture that is, frankly, unmatched: ours was the first university in the country to offer a doctoral program in Critical Theory, now an essential component of literary study, and our library houses the most comprehensive Critical Theory Archive in the world, as well as the manuscripts and papers of many of the field’s most significant thinkers. Irvine’s influence on humanistic inquiry is both historic and ongoing, and this course—English 100—represents everything that we are about. Behind every survey lies a logic of selection, and my choices have been guided by a belief in the prominence and centrality of Worry in the history of literary criticism and theory. Rather than offer a strictly chronological review, I have organized works by their motivating concerns. Each week will feature a mixture of old and new texts that address a common issue, so that you can receive a more discrete and compelling genealogy of critical discourse. You are expected to attend and participate in all class meetings, to take one midterm and one final, and to complete two reading quizzes. |
| ENGLISH 101W | PASTORAL | HELFER, R. | What is Pastoral? In the simplest sense, it’s an ancient form of writing dedicated to country life – the idyllic and sometimes not-so-idyllic life of shepherds, who not only tend to their sheep but who also happen to be remarkable poets, singing songs of love and loss that implicitly explore a wide range of that issues which belie their seeming rural simplicity. As we’ll see, pastoral writing from antiquity through the Renaissance (and beyond) indirectly addresses important questions about the relationship between the country and the city, poetry and power, labor and leisure, nature and art, gender and genre, and so on. This course explores the complex mode of pastoral literature, beginning with classical precedents by Hesiod, Theocritus, and Virgil. We’ll then consider how and why 16th and 17th-century English writers – Shakespeare, Sidney, and Spenser, in drama, prose, and poetry – turned to pastoral in order to examine the relationship between the ideal and the real, the past and the present, and to represent the complexities of early modern English culture. Time permitting, we’ll also consider an example or two of pastoral in the present. Course requirements include regular attendance and active participation, two essays, and a final. Many of the texts will be available on the course website but the following texts will be available at the UCI bookstore, though you’re welcome to use any scholarly edition: * Shakespeare, As You Like It, ed. Alan Brissenden (Oxford World’s Classics) * Shakespeare, The Winter’s Tale, ed. Stephen Orgel (Oxford World’s Classics) * Sidney, The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia (The Old Arcadia), ed. Katherine Duncan-Jones (Oxford World’s Classics) |
| ENGLISH 101W | CLI-FI (CLIMATE FICTION) | MARTIN, T. | How do you write about something as large-scale, long-term, and nearly unimaginable as climate change? This is the question at the heart of the twenty-first-century genre that’s come to be known as “cli-fi” (rhymes with “sci-fi”), or climate fiction. In this course, we’ll read several major works of cli-fi and put them in conversation with other modes of writing about the climate crisis, including science writing and poetry. What, we’ll ask, are the different literary strategies writers have used to make the catastrophe of climate change legible to a wide range of readers? And how effective are those strategies—not just in helping us understand the causes and consequences of climate change, but, more importantly, in convincing us to come together to do something about it? |
| ENGLISH 101W | TRAGEDY | SILVER, V. | This is a course in western drama’s Ur-genre, tragedy, whose profound idea of the human condition affects the literature that succeeds its Greek origin in the sixth and fifth centuries BCE, and through Aristotle’s Poetics (which we will read), shapes the assumptions of much literary criticism. The readings include plays by Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides; Dante’s Inferno; Shakespeare’s Macbeth and King Lear, as well as a modern or contemporary American or Irish example. Writing requirements are two take home exams. |
| ENGLISH 102A | RACE AND RELIGION IN EARLY MODERN ENGLAND | GRADY, K | This course will explore how issues of race and religion were rendered in early modern English literature. Before England was a colonial power, it was beset by worries of infiltration by “others” both foreign and domestic. At the same time, it imagined a variety of ways of assimilating those “others.” In this course, we will read poetry and plays written by Thomas Dekker, Christopher Marlowe, George Peele, Philip Sidney, and William Shakespeare, examining how Elizabethan and Jacobean literature became a site for exploring assimilation and conversion, as well as one that fostered racism and religious intolerance. Along with situating their work in relevant historical context, this course will ask broader questions about racism, nationalism, and “multiculturalism” in our own moment. Coursework will include a midterm, a final, and a short paper, along with a few quizzes and reading responses. |
| ENGLISH 102A | RENAISSANCE RHETORIC & POETICS | GROSS, D. | Dismissed as a passive behavior that comes naturally, listening is in fact a complex and learned activity that can be perfected. But while speaking has grounded courses in higher education since classical antiquity, rarely does a course in the literary humanities focused on the rhetoric and poetics of listening. That's what we will do in this course, with the goal of practicing what Michel Foucault called a "genealogy" of contemporary problems. By foregrounding the ear in Renaissance rhetoric and poetics, our sensibilities will be newly tuned to canonic works by Shakespeare, Lanyer, Donne, Cavendish, Milton, and Herbert, as well as certain lesser-known sermons, works of literary criticism, and science. Meanwhile this Renaissance sensibility for the ear will help us reconsider some late-modern problems including the rhetoric of race, our restricted notion of political activism (that ignores the virtues of passivity), and our odd commonplace that women are better listeners than men. The format for the class includes lecture, collaborative work, peer review, and discussion. There are 6 brief writing assignments, and one longer project that goes through a careful drafting and revision process. All materials will be collected via midterm and final Canvas LMS portfolios, which are worth 30% and 60% of your final grade, respectively. The other 10% is participation. |
| ENGLISH 102B | MILTON & HIS MAKERS | COLLINS, R. | “Neither the Renaissance nor the Reformation nor the Scientific Revolution are, in our terms, purely or necessarily progressive. Each has a Janus-face. Each is compounded both of light and of darkness.” Thus writeth the brilliant and polemical historian, Hugh Trevor-Roper. Nowhere does this Janus-face better reveal itself than in the late poems of John Milton where history is the catastrophe that is poetry’s making. By the time Milton wrote Paradise Lost, the experience of defeat was total: the Puritan “good old cause” on behalf of which he had spent the greater part of his life fighting was in ruins, he was completely blind, sick, cold, depressed and afraid. So: when this blind poet invokes his muse, “Shine inward . . . that I may see and tell / Of things invisible to mortal sight,” the request feels pretty damn sincere. And in the context of an increasingly entrenched view of history as “progressive” (even as humanity’s moral and ethical failures compounded), Milton’s poetic grappling with history’s horrors also feels prescient. In this course, we will examine how Milton’s poetry of defeat makes more of history than a series of accumulated sorrows or a reductive narrative of progress: history is made personal, imbued with moral sense and illuminated with poetic vision. In short, history makes Milton, but Milton also remakes history. Along with some contextualizing materials, we will read selections from: Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, and the closet drama Samson Agonistes. Other than a constant diet of reading, you can expect to write in three different contexts: the online public discussion forum, the 1-2 page concisely formulated and stylized summary, and the formal essay. |
| ENGLISH 102C | VICTORIAN SCIENCE | TUCKER, I. | In 1833, the British philosopher William Whewell coined the term “scientist” to name those thinkers who systematically gathered material data in the hopes of organizing their local observations into claims about the laws according to which the natural law operated. Four years later, in 1837, Queen Victoria ascended to the British throne, beginning the longest monarchical reign in English history. In this class, we will investigate the intersecting arcs of these two decisive events. To what extent and in what ways might we understand “the Victorian era” as the age of science? How did the bureaucratic systems that came to be the hallmark of Victoria’s rule benefit from, and help establish, practices of scientific investigation? How does the scientific impulse undergird – or undermine – the detailed world-building associated with the Victorian realist novel? Some topics and texts we will engage include Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White and shifting concepts of the medically legible body; William Whewell and the concept of scientific induction; Charles Darwin, natural selection, fossils and the disappearance of human point of view; Edward Abbot’s Flatland and the narration of geometry. |
| ENGLISH 102D | AMERICAN NATURE WRITING | JENSEN, I. | Perhaps surprisingly, critical and popular interest in nature writing seems inversely proportional to the increasing concern about climate change in the twenty-first century. Indeed, at this admittedly early point, one struggles to name a major twenty-first century nature writer in English, for example, and certainly the critical discourse of what is sometimes called the environmental humanities has largely turned away from nature writing per se. In this course, we will examine some twentieth and twenty-first century nature writing, broadly construed. In doing so, we will examine critical cases for and against nature writing, as well as for the very idea of nature itself–its uses and abuses. At stake will be the relation of human to and with the natural world, the case for conservation of the wild, and the ideologies of literary aesthetics. Primary authors will include Mary Hunter Austin, Robinson Jeffers, Ernest Hemingway, Edward Abbey, Annie Dillard, Linda Hogan, Cormac McCarthy, and Richard Powers. Secondary (theoretical) readings may include Kant on the sublime, Thoreau, Emerson, Wallace Stegner, Lawrence Buell, Timothy Morton, William Cronon, Gary Snyder, Jane Bennet, Carolyn Merchant, and/or Martin Heidegger. Grading will be based on a midterm exam, a final exam, a capstone essay, and class participation. |
| ENGLISH 102D | MODERNISM'S STAGES | HARRIES, M. | Twentieth-century theater ranged from the plays of Henrik Ibsen, which many saw as one of the first blasts of a new movement in literature, to the exhausted landscapes of the plays of Samuel Beckett. New dramatic forms challenged older generic conventions. Plays represented exhilarating, if also frightening, possibilities of emancipation as well as situations where human autonomy seemed an empty remainder of earlier experience. Theater supplies not only examples of twentieth-century literature, however, but also a key concern of modernist writing and artistic production across genres and forms. Even as cinema rose steadily gained larger and larger audiences, the theater continued to fascinate artists. Theatricality provided a way to think about human authenticity in the context of alienated experience. Theatrical genres modeled the larger shape of history: as comedy, or as tragedy, as some mixture. This course will look examine examples of modernist theater as well as twentieth-century works in other forms that engage theater, drama, and theatricality. Readings will include: Henrik Ibsen, A Doll House and Hedda Gabler Virginia Woolf, Between the Acts Gertrude Stein, “Plays” Samuel Beckett, Endgame James Baldwin, Blues for Mister Charlie |
| ENGLISH 105 | CONTEMPORARY QUEER WRITING | ALEXANDER, J. | English 105, CONTEMPORARY QUEER WRITING, will survey a range of prose and poetry, including some nonfiction and televisual work, from contemporary writers who are explicitly writing in a tradition of "queer" or LGBTQ literary production. In analyzing this work, we will be attentive to how writers are engaging and resisting that tradition; how they are addressing issues and ideas both within and without an ever-changing queer community; and how formal choices that writers make (poetry, fiction, memoir, televisual narrative, performance pieces, rants, etc.) are intimately connected to particular queer visions and aesthetic practices. Likely writers to be covered include Eileen Myles, Edmund White, Carmen Machado, Audre Lorde, Chen Chen, Andrea Lawlor, Jack Halberstam, and Ocean Vuong, amongst others. |
| ENGLISH 105 | CONTEMPORARY 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 begin the course by reading and analyzing the cluster of political documents that established and, later, attempted to rollback or reform, the political relations of the region: the Covenant of the League of Nations, Article 22, which established the post-WWI mandate system; the Balfour Declaration, which announced Great Britain’s commitment to establishing a “Jewish homeland” in Mandatory Palestine; the White Paper, in which Great Britain renounced its earlier embrace of the Balfour Declaration; and finally, the Peel Commission, the government group established by the British colonial administration to deal with the political unrest generated by its own political waffling by envisioning the division of the land between the two national groups.. Having studied the relevant political texts concerned, we will turn our attention to the political and cultural realm, considering 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? What are the ways in which the histories and complexities of the literary genres and cultural media function to undo or complicate some of the oppositions of the political realm? Authors whose works we will engage include, but are not limited to: Ghassan Kanafani, David Grossman, Sayeed Kashua, Mahmoud Darwish, Moriel Rothman-Zecher. |
| ENGLISH 105 | NARRATVES OF ILLNES | LEE, J. | Please note that this course is taught by James Kyung-Jin Lee, Asian American department. This course introduces students to the rise of memoir narratives written by Asian American physicians, about their experiences in both medical education and profession, and the transformative capacities that take place when encountering and caring for the ill and dying. At the heart of these narratives lies a central question: what does it mean to engage in the healing arts and in the science of “cure” when illness and death are unavoidable realities to the clinical encounter? What might it mean to confront the limits of medical care as ill bodies exceed the stories that doctors tell of their patients? We will read these works with and against the emerging genre of “auto-somato-pathography,” and theorize the possibilities and limits of reading about ill bodies through the lens of those charged to care for them. We will also discuss the relative paucity of illness stories, and read recent memoirs written by Asian Americans who suffer from cancer and its treatments. (same as 21610 AsianAm 110, Lec A) |
| ENGLISH 105 | DARK FANTASY LITERATURE | MURILLO, J. | The title of this course is informed by two living artifacts: the first is (Old) Kanye’s My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, and the other is a line from Frank Wilderson’s Red, White, and Black that reads “to stay in the hold of the ship, despite my fantasies of flight.” There are several other resonances here, and part of the job of the course will be to unpack those connections between Black people fantasizing—imagining, creating, wondering, dreaming—and Black people being bound to the hold of the slave ship. We will read Black fantasy literature, watch Black fantasy and surrealist music videos, and think together about what’s at stake and what’s possible when we take Black fantasies and Black fantasizing seriously in this antiblack catastrophe of a world. |
| ENGLISH 106 | EMILY DICKINSON | JACKSON, V. | A lot of people seem to love the poetry of Emily Dickinson. When Dickinson's poems were first published as a volume in 1890 (four years after her death), the book instantly became and has remained a best-seller. Why? Dickinson wrote her poems on grocery lists and party invitations, on sheets of stationery sewn together with string or folded around dead bugs. She wrote poetry for women she loved and for men she wanted to cultivate. She published only eleven poems during her lifetime, but now over 1800 poems have been published under her name. In this class, we won't read all 1800 poems, but we will think about what kinds of poems Dickinson wrote and why and how so many different people have found so many different uses for them. |
| ENGLISH 106 | LITERATURE & ECONOMICS: FITZGERALD & FAULKNER | GODDEN, R. | 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, and the commodity form (“capitalist realism”). Faulkner’s fiction, preoccupied with racialized work, reflected and recast an impoverished region, within which ‘bound labor’ or ‘human capital’, rather than monetary capital, appeared 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, The Great Gatsby (1925), Tender Is the Night (1934), and The Love of the Last Tycoon (1941); by Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury (1929), As I Lay Dying (1930) and Go Down, Moses (1942). |
| ENGLISH 106 | READING RACIAL MIXING IN EARLY MODERN LITERATURE | GRADY, K | Racial mixing is often considered a modern phenomenon. It is also commonly thought of as a potential solution for racism. But mixedness features in early modern texts like Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus, in which the birth of a mixed race child only encourages additional anti-blackness. How do we analyze representations of racial mixing in early modern English literature when racial mixing is widely misunderstood today? In order to better engage texts like Titus Andronicus, this course will examine a variety of misconceptions and oversimplifications about mixedness from the past and the present. It will track the pervasiveness of “one drop” thinking and consider a longer history of the term “mulatto.” Coursework will include journaling, short writing assignments, and an annotated bibliography, all meant to be the groundwork for a final research paper. |
| ENGLISH 210 | THE REALIST NOVEL | BARTLETT, J. | [Course Code: 23800] Fridays 9:00 – 11:50am in HIB 341 This course will serve as an introduction to a nineteenth-century literary mode that concerned itself with what George Eliot called “more or less ugly, stupid, inconsistent people,” and Virginia Woolf “this appalling narrative business of the realist: getting on from lunch to dinner.” Often cast as the straw man that authenticates the literary and critical innovations that follow it, realism is simply that which “goes without saying,” and its practitioners—experts rather than visionaries—are often accused of getting things right by flattening out questions of truth and virtue into parables of common sense so naïve and smilingly unselfconscious that they miss how, finally, the catalogue of innumerable material details that undergirds the realist project passes off entrenched gender, class, and racial stereotypes as objective truth. Like most of the people and most of the enterprises that it depicts, realism will always fail in idea and in practice, for any representational undertaking that claims to provide access to a material reality that, while mediated by consciousness and language, is nevertheless independent of it, is ultimately presenting just another theory of what counts as a picture of reality. As our readings in the course of our study will show, this argument is neither untrue, nor is it particularly troublesome for the form of the realist novel, which runs on the inescapable limits of human knowing (evident everywhere in the tensions between plausibility and literary form that can puncture a great realist novel like Middlemarch with sudden and convenient revelations) and is thus on the whole required to obsess about itself. We will see how, in trying to reach beyond words to things as they are—in believing “the truth is out there”—the realist novel funnels its sprawling narratives into inductive sequences of causes and effects; how it develops a collector’s mania for figurations of entrapment and enclosure, and then punishes the wayward and unconventional; and how it shows off its author’s bookish know-how through descriptions that at their worst exist somewhere, for Lyotard, “between academicism and kitsch.” All of this and more will be our focus, but our objective need not be to rescue realism from its adversaries; in sympathy, it will be enough just to talk about it at all. |
| ENGLISH 210 | MATH & REPRESENTATION IN THE 19TH CENTURY | HENDERSON, A. | [Course Code: 23802] Tuesdays & Thursdays 9:30 – 10:50am in HIB 341 (same as 24077 Euro St 201, Sem B) In this course we will examine the work of British writers, artists, and mathematicians of the nineteenth century, tracking their common concern with the attenuation of reference. 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 fin-de-siècle 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. Students will have the option of exploring the relation of mathematical and literary concepts in the historical period of their choice. |
| ENGLISH 210 | LYRIC THEORY | JACKSON, V. | [Course Code: 23804] Tuesdays 2:00 – 4:50pm in HIB 341 In this seminar, we will develop a critical genealogy of lyric as a modern invention with a long history. Rather than assuming that lyric poetry is a transhistorical genre or the product of a unified tradition, we will ask how lyric came to be read as a genre in literary criticism over the last century. We will survey modern genre theorists, several generations of New Critics, Frankfurt School and phenomenological versions of the lyric, the construction and deconstruction of lyric subjectivity, avant-garde anti-lyricism, the new lyric humanism, and the racialization of lyric ideology. We will dwell on this last point, since the anthology of criticism we will use for the class assumes a predominantly white Anglophone perspective. In all our reading, we will be especially interested in the changing senses and various abstractions of “lyric,” the critical conflation of lyric reading with reading lyric, and the identification of all poetry with lyric as such. That reading will include (but not be limited to) Moten, Posmontier, Edwards, Mufti, Adorno, Genette, Culler, De Man, Johnson, Benjamin, Abrams, Richards, Brooks, Bakhtin, Prins, Posmontier, and Damrosch. This class is a class in the history of criticism, in genre theory, and, yes, in poetry and poetics. Yopie Prins (University of Michigan), Sonya Posmontier (NYU), Meredith Martin (Princeton), Meredith McGill (Rutgers), Brent Edwards (Columbia) and Juliana Spahr (Mills College) will all visit the seminar as interlocutors at various points in our discussion of lyric and lyric reading. |
| ENGLISH 230 | FITZGERALD & FAULKNER | GODDEN, R. | [Course Code: 23820] Thursdays 11:00 – 1:50pm in HIB 341 Fitzgerald and Faulkner: A Narrative Poetics for 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, The Sound and the Fury (1929), As I Lay Dying (1930), Absalom, Absalom! (1936), The Hamlet (194) and Go Down, Moses (1942). |
| ENGLISH 230 | SHAKESPEARE | LUPTON, J. | [Course Code: 23822] Mondays 9:00 – 11:50am in HIB 411 Curse / Cure / Care In this seminar, we will read three plays by Shakespeare with an eye to their inquiry into the toxic effects of human language and the forms of repair that people seek in response to tears in the social fabric. King Lear begins with the father’s disowning of his daughter, an act effected in the form of an archaic curse whose destructive resonances ripple across the play, in repeated curses that become more violent as their speaker becomes more impotent. Medical metaphors (cure) and forms of social work (care) organize the efforts at recovery mounted by various actors in the play: the servant who binds Gloucester’s bleeding eyes with flax and egg whites; the field hospital where Cordelia reunites with her father; the trust games that Edgar stages for his blinded father. In later plays such as Pericles and The Winter’s Tale, Shakespeare returns to the dialectic of curse, care, and cure as a means of probing the forms of dependency that bind human beings together and the virtues they draw upon in moments of crisis. Readings will include Cheryl Mattingly, Moral Laboratories, Milton Mayerhoff, On Caring, Joan Tronto, Moral Boundaries: A Political Argument for an Ethics of Care, Björn Quiring, Shakespeare’s Curse, Sarah Beckwith, Shakespeare’s Grammar of Forgiveness, Michel Foucault, Care of the Self, and Martha Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness. Students will have an opportunity to see The Winter’s Tale at A Noise Within, Pasadena (Sunday, February 16). This seminar supports the 2019-2020 Mellon Sawyer Seminar, “Suffer Well,” a medical humanities initiative. |