| Course | Title | Instructor | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
| ENGLISH H80 | SANCTUARY:MEDEV&MOD | ALLEN, E. | |
| ENGLISH 8 | INTRODUCTION TO NATIVE AMERICAN LITERATURES | CARROLL, A. | This course explores literatures from Native nations within the United States, including works by Pequot, Dakota, Lakota, Menominee, Kiowa, Ohlone, Laguna Pueblo, Cherokee, and Anishinaabe authors. Since the eighteenth century, Indigenous authors have produced an important body of literature in the English language; additionally, some have transliterated their Indigenous languages into the Roman alphabet, and others have created their own unique Indigenous language writing systems, such as the Cherokee syllabary. This course presents Native literatures within their historical contexts framed by four periods of US-Native relations: massacres and removals, allotment and assimilation, termination and relocation, and the current tribal self-determination era. Students will learn key concepts in Native American and Indigenous studies, including colonialism, nationalism, sovereignty, gender, and Indigenous feminism. Course texts may include autobiographies by William Apess (Pequot) and Zitkala-Sa (Dakota), a tribal memoir by Deborah Miranda (Ohlone), political writings and essays by N. Scott Momaday (Kiowa) and Vine Deloria, Jr. (Lakota), a novel by Louise Erdrich (Anishinaabe), and poetry by Chrystos (Menominee), Leslie Marmon Silko (Laguna Pueblo), and Qwo-Li Driskill (Cherokee). Course requirements include regular participation in the online course discussion board, a midterm exam, and a final exam. |
| ENGLISH 10 | BOREDOM AND LITERATURE | BARTLETT, J. | In this course we will theorize what Theodore Adorno called “free time,” by treating the submissiveness of waiting as a form of production. We will read texts that make their own fun, that spend time writing about time spent, and that dilate on emptiness to a number of ends. The relation between boredom and narrative is both subtle and everywhere, and so we will read widely, pitching into novelists who make extensive literal and metaphorical use of the power of infinite strategy in order to talk about sociability, ethics, and politics, economists who compare their work on monopolies to strategic partnerships in novels, scientists who describe evolution in terms of elaborate games of chess, cognitive theorists who plot the circuitous route we take when we stake ourselves on invention, and readings from psychoanalysis and the philosophy of action and mind that try to describe just what it is that we are laying claim to when a “doing” finally becomes “a thing done.” All the while, we’ll consider such questions as: how does boredom manage or mismanage time? How can we understand boredom as a kind of reading, and a kind of writing? Does boredom have a style? Expect work by Henry James, Samuel Beckett, Virginia Woolf, Iris Murdoch, and Oscar Wilde. Requirements include a midterm, a final, and short response papers. |
| 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 at such stories, 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. This is not a course in world literature, but rather one than that explores worlding in literature; that is, we will not be attempting the impossible task of trying to understand the world as such in all of its multiplicity but rather be concerned with the strategies through which one conceives of the world and how one projects oneself into it. We will read these literary representations along with a few from other media mixed in (namely film and videogames) as part of a broader attempt to make sense of the increasingly complex global circuits of exchange, shifting affiliations, and emergent conflicts that characterize our world today. |
| ENGLISH 15 | SHAKESPEARE AND MAGIC | SILVER, V. | When Shakespeare lived, the world was still enchanted. Fairies, the devil, curses and prophecies, ghosts, witches, spirits and sorcerers populated early modern culture as well as some of Shakespeare’s most popular plays; yet Shakespeare himself was (as far as we can tell) a skeptic. The course will consider to what inventive use the playwright put the realms of magic so familiar to his audience, many of whom were ardent believers, and to what extent magic itself serves as a metaphor for his own art of theatrical illusion. In the process, we will cover the major genres in which Shakespeare wrote: A Midsummer Night’s Dream (a comedy), Richard III (a history play), Macbeth (a tragedy) and The Tempest (a romance). Requirements for the course are inevitably two takehome exams. |
| ENGLISH 15 | ALL ABOUT EVE | LEWIS, J. | The biblical Eve was the first rebel, the first penitent, the first mother, the first genetic experiment, the first person to ask a question, and the first woman to go off her diet. No wonder she has always been an object of literary fascination, a mythic figure endlessly reimagined in response to changing ideas about female desire, curiosity, subjection, and potentiality. In this class, we’ll look at some of the ways that Eve’s multivalent story has been told and retold over time. That means embarking on the genre-sensitive journey through literary history that every English major should take. As we move from Genesis to today’s fembot EveR1, we’ll pay special attention to the ways that women writers have imagined themselves as Eve’s daughters, and to Eve’s ever-complicated role in traditional gender ideologies. Expect to meet the mystical mother embraced by medieval and early modern women poets, the disobedient bride of Milton’s Paradise Lost, the curious ingenue of Frances Burney’s Enlightenment comedy of manners Evelina, the fallen woman demonized in Victorian gothic literature and pre-Raphaelite art, the competitor who stages herself against herself in response to modern feminism (All about Eve, Killing Eve), the African demi-goddess collaboratively imagined by Toni Morrison and Kara Walker, and Angela Carter’s postmodern, transsexual “New Eve.” If you’re a fan of Eve’s ‘other woman,’ Lilith, fear not: She’ll be making more than a guest appearance! Two papers—one comparative—and a handful of short, fun writing exercises. |
| 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 17 | CRAFT OF FICTION | GELERNTER, J. | Saul Bellow tells us that the labor of writing fiction is in its purest form decision-making—the making of thousands of decisions on every page. In this course, we will examine analytical work by Vladimir Nabokov and Mary Ruefle, alongside Madame Bovary, Flaubert’s most famous novel, with the purpose of learning how a writer makes those thousands of decisions on each page. More importantly, we will determine what the dilemmas are that prompt those decisions in the first place. We will discuss prosody, structure, and style, with a fundamentally hedonistic approach, asking ourselves what the pleasures of reading are and how great writers ignite them in us. |
| ENGLISH 100 | INTRODUCTION TO LITERARY THEORY | STEINTRAGER, J. | In this course, we will examine some of the key concepts of literary theory and its historical development. We will begin with Plato’s vexed relationship to poetry and poetic language and Aristotle’s counter-attempt to establish the nature and value of drama in particular, before moving on to consider topics treated by both ancient and modern writers such as: as rhetoric and linguistic decorum, sublimity, and the nature of literary interpretation. |
| ENGLISH 101W | WEIRD TALES | STEINTRAGER, J. | In this course, we will consider the emergence and development of the genre for so-called weird fiction in the late nineteenth and earlier twentieth century: tales of malign spirits, hidden cults, extraterrestrial monsters among us, and alien gods. Through contextual lenses such as rapid technological change, concerns about immigration, and industrialization, we will read a range of authors who specialized in the “weird”: the British supernaturalists Arthur Machen and Algernon Blackwood; the problematic American doyen of weird fiction H.P. Lovecraft and members of his circle such as Clark Ashton Smith, Robert Bloch, and Robert E. Howard; and subsequent practitioners of the genre, including Richard Matheson and T.E.D. Klein. This course meets the upper-division writing requirement and will have a significant writing component. |
| ENGLISH 101W | RACE,MEMORY & REVISION | MONTERO ROMAN, V. | Feminist scholars have long positioned historical revision as a crucial literary strategy. Dominant histories sometimes obscure the contributions of women and people of color, and, as Carmen Maria Machado articulates, the silences that develop in those accounts “illustrate a difficult truth: sometimes stories are destroyed, and sometimes they are never uttered in the first place; but either way something very large is irrevocably missing from our collective histories.” In this course, we will look at some of the ways that Latinx women authors have used their writing to address the gaps and silences of historical and literary records. We will ask what kinds of literary forms they mobilize and consider what narrative tools they deploy. Along the way, we will think critically about revision as a tool: Is narrative revision a means for creating social, political, or structural change? What kind of knowledge is created in acts of written remembrance? How does the revision or retracing of personal or cultural memory alter or impact the construction of racial and ethnic categories? This focus on revision is also a means for considering the importance of those strategies for our own writing practice. Throughout term we will practice rewriting and reconceptualizing arguments for different mediums, genres, and audiences. Assignments will likely include a midterm and final paper. Authors might include: Jovita González, Julia Alvarez, Dahlma Llanos-Figueroa, and Valeria Luiselli. |
| ENGLISH 101W | UTOPIA/DYSTOPIA | ALEXANDER, J. | Dystopia may be one of the most important -- certainly most popular -- genres of the past few decades. But what is a dystopia? How has this genre emerged, and what is its relationship, formally, to utopias? This course looks at theories of dystopia and utopia and reads them through three novel-length works that are dystopic but contain elements of the utopic within them: Margaret Atwood's THE HANDMAID'S TALE, Marge Piercy's WOMAN ON THE EDGE OF TIME, and Octavia Butler's PARABLE OF THE SOWER. Our focus in analyzing these works will be on the relationship between dystopia and utopia and what constitutes them formally as genres. |
| ENGLISH 102A | REVENGE TRAGEDY | SILVER, V. | Hearts on sticks, people backed in pies, some kissing poisoned skulls and others grasping the hands of dead men--this is the happy realm of late sixteenth- and seventeenth-century revenge tragedy, which has come back into academic fashion with (dare I say it?) a vengeance. For those with strong stomachs, the course will cover a selection of these plays, beginning with their literary inspiration and Roman original, Seneca’s Thyestes: with the help of at least one film, we will read Middleton’s The Revenger’s Tragedy; possibly the most appalling of all, Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus; Webster’s Duchess of Malfi; Ford’s ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore, and conclude with Hamlet. Course requirements at this point consist of two takehome exams. Buyer beware. (Not really.) |
| ENGLISH 102B | 18TH CENTURY CULTURE | 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 102B | AGE OF SENSIBILITY | GROSS, D. | Defying chronology, we return to the Age of Sensibility as "emotion studies" accelerate across the disciplines. Like David Hume we should see how emotion is a matter of status (not the status of matter); like William Collins we should find fear in our creepy world (not just in our brains), and like Mary Wollstonecraft we should see how sensibility that appear naturally tied to gender in fact has a sinister history. In this course we will survey key works of 18th-century fiction, poetry, psychology, and social thought to address these issues and others, learning along the way how critical work in the present proceeds by way of literary history. The format for the class includes lecture, collaborative work, peer review, and discussion. There are 6 short 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 102C | VICTORIAN SPACES | TUCKER, I. | The 19th-century British novel has long been notable for the detail and precision with which it presents the physical world its characters inhabit. Because this novel has come to be known as “the realist novel,” our impulse might be to assume that the authors of such novels just thought it obvious that their task should be to present readers with as many of the details of the actual world as they could describe. But, in fact, the notion that people should be defined by the space they inhabit or move about, and that what is most noteworthy about a given space are its particular details, is actually anything but natural and self-evident. In the course, we will read realist novels alongside the texts that helped bring the concepts of Victorian realist space into being. We will examine theories of landed property, accounts of the mid-19th-century invention of photography; theories of 19th-century poetry and the poetry itself; arguments about citizenship, and finally, theories of evolution and their relation to fossil evidence. Some of the authors and texts we will read are the following: Charles Dickens’ Oliver Twist; Wilkie Collins’ The Woman in White; John Stuart Mill’s, On Liberty, ‘What is Poetry?’ and On the Subjection of Women; William Henry Fox Talbot’s, “The Pencil of Nature;” Charles Darwin’s The Origins of Species; Students will be expected to write two 5-7pp over the course of the quarter, along with a number of short writing assignments. |
| ENGLISH 102D | POSTMODERNISM | IZENBERG, O. | Critical, skeptical, ironic, playful: The literary and historical period we call “postmodernism” (starting in the mid-20th century) was supposed to put an end to the idea of “progress” in history, philosophy, and art. All the “master narratives” we use to explain the world broken; all systems of meaning and social faiths subjected to corrosive irony and doubt. Postmodernism promised spectacle, flux, and endless change. How could postmodernism end? And what comes next? In this course we will read important works of postmodern literature and theory in order to understand this important moment in art and thought. Readings may include: Ashbery, Borges, Beckett, DeLillo, Hejinian, Lyotard, Morrison, Pynchon, and Reed. |
| ENGLISH 102D | MULTI-ETHNIC WOMEN | MONTERO ROMAN, V. | This course is a survey of early 20th century multi-ethnic women authors in the United States. It will introduce you to pivotal figures from the period and give you a sense of how they engaged with and intervened in debates about modernity and modernist literary experimentation. As a group, we will consider how modernity and modernism can be defined, and we will trace how the categories of race and gender were developing in the legal, literary, and sociopolitical landscape of the early twentieth century. We will ask questions like: how are conceptualizations of race, ethnicity, and gender reflected in the content and form of literary texts? What are some of the key debates, recurrent themes, and literary tools that manifest in the writing of women authors in this historical moment? How did women writers across racial and ethnic discourse negotiate emergent conceptualizations of gendered modernity like the modern girl and the flapper? Our course will likely involve a midterm and final project. Authors might include: Ella Deloria, Jessie Redmon Fauset, Sui Sin Far, Nella Larsen, Zitkála-Šá, and María Cristina Mena. |
| ENGLISH 105 | AF AM ESSAY | CHANDLER, N. | |
| ENGLISH 105 | ASAM AUTOBIOGRAPHIES | LEE, J. | This course examines how and why Asian Americans write about change and transformation in autobiographical writing, particularly under the rubric of vocation. Vocation derives from the Latin word vocare, or “to call.” Originating in religious contexts, the notion of vocation—as an occupation or profession that one is “called to”—can also be viewed as a more general, social process of discovering oneself. How does the vocational search correspond with or diverge from the process of forming a social identity? Why do some narratives of identity coalesce into a demonstrable career, while others remain resolutely unmeasurable? What special “calling” or vocation do Asian Americans bring to US society and culture? How does the formation of Asian American identity unravel the seeming stability of one’s professional vocation? And to what extent might these narratives of vocation gesture to the impossibility of a “calling?” We will read these works to reveal the constraints and possibilities of representing “oneself,” and in doing so also uncover the significance, illuminations, and pitfalls of narrating vocation as identity, identity as vocation. Finally, we will spend time reflecting on our own vocational autobiographies by exploring the particular ways that politics, economics, culture, and history impact the psychic lives of Asian Americans and of our own stories. |
| ENGLISH 105 | AFTER SLAVERY | MORGAN, C. | This course will survey representations of American slavery in African American literature and culture by examining works that critically engage the legacy of slavery. Our attention will focus on creative traditions of critique, memorialization, poetics and philosophy from the 19th century to the present to highlight the diverse ways that Black artists have aestheticized experiences of bondage and theorized modes of liberation. Students can expect to write two argumentative essays. Our study will include works by Frederick Douglass, W.E.B. Du Bois, Harriet Jacobs, Edward P. Jones, Toni Morrison, and Natasha Trethewey. |
| ENGLISH 106 | JOYCE'S ULYSSES | O'CONNOR, L. | James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), lauded by many as the finest and most influential twentieth-century novel, is a perfect “capstone” text for reading and writing about in the E106 capstone seminar. The novel takes place over the course of a single day, June 16, 1904 (now celebrated as “Bloomsday”) during which we follow the thoughts of Leopold Bloom and Joyce’s avatar, Stephen Dedalus, as they traverse Dublin city before returning ‘home,’ where the soliloquizing Molly Bloom has the final say. We’ll explore Joyce’s innovative techniques for representing consciousness and situate the novel in relation to its structural Homeric parallel and its modernist and Irish contexts. A sociable novel, you’ll discover, I hope, that Ulysses is best read in collaboration with peers in the convivial context of a seminar devoted to it. The E106 is intended to facilitate the writing of a 15-page research paper. Because making a long essay a requirement for everyone isn’t feasible during COVID, students will have the option of writing either a research paper or two essays. Students are also expected to complete assigned weekly writing. To keep us “on the same page,” the 1986 Hans Gabler edition of Ulysses (ISBN 0394743121) is a required text, even if you already have another edition of Ulysses. |
| ENGLISH 106 | SECULARISM | TUCKER, I. | When we think about the idea of secularism, we are likely to notice a tension at its center. One the one hand, secularism would seem to acknowledge some kind of absolute and historically transcendent form of authority. On the other hand, the idea of secularism offers a logic by which that absolute authority might be circumscribed, limited, made something less than universal. The most familiar way of making sense of this paradox has been to understand the secularizing impulse as essentially a narrative of modernization. In this story, people continued – and continue -- to make a place for a god-ordered realm of the world even as they came to acknowledge the possibility of other frameworks of meaning and authority like science or democratic forms of state authority because they were in the habit of believing and were not quite ready to embrace their disenchantment. In tracing the history of secularism from its 17th-origins through to the recent emergence of a discourse of “post-secularism,” this course seeks to complicate this modernization story. We will try to understand the secularism’s authority not simply in relation to the emergence of the state as a political entity, but also in relation to the state’s operation as a structure of economic organization and as a site of affective investment. Does the notion of the separation of church and state produce a kind of equality among different sorts of religious practices by keeping the state from endorsing or advancing one religion over another, or is it possible to understand the very notion of secularism as depending on models of belief that are more relevant to some religious practices than others? Should we understand the idea of secularism to emerge from a specifically Christian understanding of belief, and if so, in what ways is it able, or unable, to accommodate other models of religious practice? We will investigate the ways in which the notion of the secular can be seen to emerge from Western Christianity’s sustained engagement with the organizational logics of other religions, both its effort to distinguish itself from Judaism as its law-centered predecessor and its various colonial encounters with Islam and Hinduism. Readings will include work by John Locke, Moses Mendelssohn, Immanel Kant, J.S. Mill, Thomas Macaulay, Soren Kierkegaard, as well as historians and theorists of secularism including Charles Taylor, Wendy Brown, Talal Asad, Akhil Bilgrami, Saba Mahmood, and Michael Warner. |
| ENGLISH 106 | SOCIAL COMEDY | JEON, J. | A man walks into a bar. A Chicken (in search of adventure) crosses the road. The fundamental condition of comedy as expressed in old jokes seems to be some kind of social interaction. Taking this premise to its logical conclusion, this class will explore a wide range of comedic texts in literature and popular culture in order to consider the social function of comedy. We will ask: How does laughter bind us together or rift us apart? What sort of communities is comedy capable of building? How lasting are these formations? Texts may include works by Lenny Bruce, Oyinkan Braithwaite, Charlie Chaplin, Dave Chappelle, Percival Everett, Alissa Nutting, Ed Park, Maya Rudolph, Oscar Wilde, and Ali Wong. |
| ENGLISH 106 | BLACK SUBJECTS | MORGAN, C. | This seminar considers how African American writers have explored the existential dimensions of Black life from the 19th century until the present day. We will explore how Black writers have variously conceptualized and represented the racialized individual navigating their world. From agents of change, to cogs in machines, to members of communities larger than themselves, the Black subjects of the texts discussed in this course will introduce students to Black writers’ efforts to develop new ways of writing subjectivity. Students can expect to write two argumentative essays. Our study will include works by Frederick Douglass, Charles Chesnutt, Richard Wright, Zora Neale Hurston, Ann Petry, James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, Octavia Butler, and Toni Morrison. |
| ENGLISH 210 | SHAKESPEARE AND WISDOM LITERATURE | LUPTON, J | Course Code: 23800 Thursdays 9:00 – 11:50 am Wisdom literature refers to a diverse body of ancient texts that combine philosophical, pragmatic, poetic, and theological/cosmological aspirations. Examples include Proverbs, Psalms, the Song of Songs, and the Book of Job in the Hebrew Bible; the letters, meditations, and handbooks of the ancient Stoics, including Epictetus, Seneca and Marcus Aurelius; the theogenic nature hymns attributed to Orpheus; and the vegetarian teachings of Pythagoras. Egyptian, Buddhist, and Arabic wisdom literature mixed with Greek and Jewish traditions to contribute to a common thought world taken up by both Christianity and Islam. In the Renaissance, Montaigne and Erasmus elaborated the ecumenical and experimental dimensions of wisdom literature to create the modern essay. This course will look at Shakespeare’s creative exchange with Greco-Roman and Hebrew writings while placing that exchange within the deep congeniality--vertical and horizontal--of this wisdom-seeking thought world, in which sapience functions as a potential solvent among confessional and ethnic divisions. We will read Hamlet, As You Like It, Twelfth Night, Timon of Athens, and selected sonnets, plus prose works by Plato, Seneca, Cato, Cicero, Epictetus, Sextus Empiricus, Erasmus, and Montaigne as well as the sapiential books of the Hebrew Bible considered in their Near Eastern context. We will address the following questions: In what sense does Shakespeare draw on and contribute to wisdom literature? Is wisdom literature inherently dramatic as well as poetic? Where do Shakespeare’s plays and poems turn essayistic? In what ways have his works been received as wisdom, in, for example, the common-placing tradition? How does wisdom literature offer Shakespeare a humanistic framework beyond confessional divisions? Does the feminine and transcultural depiction of Wisdom as a woman who co-exists with God at creation in any way shape Shakespearean drama’s understanding of femininity and culture? Finally, how does Shakespeare draw upon the ecological dimension of wisdom literature in his plays? |
| ENGLISH 210 | THE ATLANTIC WORLD IN THE AGE OF DUAL REVOLUTIONS, 1789-1861 | SZALAY, M. | Course Code: 23806 Wednesdays 2:00 – 4:50 pm (same as 28650 Human 270, Sem A) Eric Hobsbawm famously argued that “dual revolutions” reshaped the Atlantic World during the first half of the 19th century: the French Revolution and the Industrial Revolution. If the first of these signal events was nominally political and the second, nominally economic, taken together, they have been the occasion for ongoing debates, for example, over the origin and nature of capitalism and whether capitalism is best studied at the national or global level. We begin with debates over the dual revolutions between World-System Theory (Immanuel Wallerstein and Giovanni Arrighi) and Political Marxism (Robert Brenner and Ellen Meiksins Wood). We then assess how adequately these competing rubrics account for the slave trade, the rise of sugar and then cotton plantations in the Americas, the relation of slave agriculture to industrial production proper across the Atlantic World, and the Haitian Revolution in particular. In this part of the course, we will read from Stephanie Smallwood, Saltwater Slavery; Saidiya Hartman, Lose Your Mother; Ian Baucom, Specters of the Atlantic; Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery; Robin Blackburn, The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery; Caitlin Rosenthal, Accounting for Slavery; Edward Baptiste, The Half Has Never Been Told; Sven Beckert, The Empire of Cotton; Walter Johnson, River of Dark Dreams; C.L.R. James, Black Jacobins; and Joan Dayan, Haiti, History, and the Gods. In aggregate, we will likely spend more time reading histories and theories of capitalist development than cultural or literary histories or cultural or literary objects themselves. Nevertheless, we will in fact explore some of the key cultural transformations that accompanied the dual revolutions. We will read from Olaudah Equiano’s The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano; James Williams, A Narrative of Events Since the First of August, 1834; Leonora Sansay’s Secret History; or, the Horrors of St. Domingo; Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin; Harriet Jacob’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl; and Charles Dickens’ Hard Times. Finally, aided by critics like Raymond Williams, Marilyn Butler, Simon Gikandi, Catherine Gallagher, Michael McKeon, Peter Brooks, Linda Williams, Lisa Lowe, Christopher Taylor, and Susan Buck-Morss, we will establish rudimentary familiarity with broad rubrics like Romanticism, sensibility, sentimentalism, melodrama, autobiography, the epistolary novel, and even Universal History. |
| ENGLISH 210 | LATINX LITERATURE | LAZO, R. | Course Code: 23808 Tuesdays/Thursdays 5:00 – 6:20 pm We begin with recent debates in LatinX studies -- including the X -- to consider how a variety of texts take up questions of migration and forms of violence (economic, military, legal) on the borderlands. While much of the focus will be on the contemporary political scene and recently published writing, we will also turn to prior historical periods, including LatinX elements in the nineteenth-century Americas. In the last part of the course, we will look at the connection between migration and archive theory to move into new routes of research. |
| ENGLISH 210 | READING JOYCE'S ULYSSES | O'CONNOR, L. | Course Code: 23804 Fridays 9:00 – 11:50 am This seminar is devoted to reading and discussing James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922). Readers of the episodes serialized in The Little Review hailed the novel as a masterpiece even before Joyce had completed it, and the banned book became celebrated contraband. A century later, the popular “bucket list” item sold out during the COVID lockdown. I believe we’ll find that this compendious and convivial novel is better suited to reading in colloquy with others--seminar peers and Joyceans more generally—than in solitude. We’ll explore Joyce’s innovative techniques for representing consciousness and situate the novel in relation to its modernist and Irish contexts—including, on the eve of its centennial, the ‘moment’ of 1922’s annus mirabilis. In the course of addressing reflexive questions about what “reading Ulysses” entails, we’ll interrogate the related categories of “the difficult” and “the everyday.” We’ll keep the diverse perspectives of PhD critic-readers and MFA writer-readers in play as we engage with its near cult-like status in literary criticism and its reputation among writers as a game-changer. To keep us “on the same page,” the 1986 Hans Gabler edition of Ulysses (ISBN 0394743121) is a required text, even if you already have another edition of Ulysses. Class discussion will be stimulated by participants’ weekly response papers and collaborative reports on secondary criticism. In addition, seminar students are expected to write a 15-page research paper on a topic cleared in advance with the instructor, to meet the mid-quarter deadline for submitting a prospectus and annotated bibliography, and to present their research topic to the seminar near the quarter’s end. Pro-seminar students have the option of writing a 8-page conference presentation (2000-2500 words) or a take-home essay. MFA students may propose a relevant creative writing exercise, which, if approved by the instructor, fulfils the pro-seminar requirement. |
| ENGLISH 210 | MODERNIST POETRY | IZENBERG, O. | Course Code: 23802 Tuesdays 11:00 – 1:50 pm We want “poems that kill.” —Amiri Baraka While we often think of poems as objects—describing their forms or structures, grouping them into characteristic kinds—poets, especially modern poets, have been at least as concerned to think about poetry as a kind of action. A poem is a “field of action” (W.C. Williams); it is a species of “purposive behavior” (Charles Olson). William Butler Yeats imagined a poem as an act of unusual scope and power: “I am certainly never certain, when I hear of some war, or of some religious excitement, or of some new manufacture, or of anything else that fills the ear of the world, that it has not all happened because of something that a boy piped in Thessaly.” In his elegy for Yeats, W.H. Auden famously rebuked this fantastic account of poetic efficacy with the equally fantastic claim that poetry “makes nothing happen.” The scope of poetic action most likely falls somewhere between “all” and “nothing.” And yet in this unfantastic zone, poems raise a persistent and challenging question: how should we understand the relation between the clearly purposive actions that go into the making of a poem—“stitching and unstitching” [Yeats]; “decisions and revisions” (Eliot); the poet’s laborious, intense, minute working with sound, pattern, sense—and the large scale actions that ambitious poets intend by means of the poem (conversion, construction, revolution)? How, for that matter, should we understand the relation of either of these action types (“‘intentional,’ Donald Davidson tells us, “under some description,”) to the sorts of actions critics see as “really” accomplished by means of poems? Actions take place in the “first person,” initiated in the intending mind and executed by a composing hand; and yet they matter (if they are to matter at all) in the third person: in the domain of actions beyond those that the poet’s mind (or perhaps any mind) can plausibly be said to intend. In this class, we will consider a number of (mostly) twentieth-century poems (by Hardy, Eliot, Riding-Jackson, Baraka, and others) as beautiful problems in action. Because they are highly reflexive (which is to say, that they are about action as well as being actions themselves), they are also interventions in the theory of action—a central topic for modern philosophy, psychology, and social theory. These poems, and the theoretical texts we will read alongside them, will help us to understand the fundamental puzzle that the category of action posed for modern writers, and continues to pose to contemporary thought. |
| ENGLISH 290 | READING&CONFERENCE | STAFF | |
| ENGLISH 291 | GUIDED READING | STAFF | |
| ENGLISH 299 | DISSERTATION RESEARCH | SZALAY, M | |
| ENGLISH 399 | UNIVERSITY TEACHING | STAFF |