| Course | Title | Instructor | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
| ENGLISH 8 | MULTICULTURAL AMERICAN LITERATURE | JACKSON, V. | If you think that American poetry is still written by old White guys, this class is not for you. Whatever American poetry has been in the past (and it has been many things), the poetry published and performed in the United States in the twenty-first century has not assumed that we all assume what it assumes. American poetry no longer pretends to share a communal impulse. Or does it? What (or really, who) is American poetry about? Does anyone actually read it, anyway? We will pose these questions by reading recent work by Morgan Parker, Ocean Vuong, Terrance Hayes, Jos Charles Ada Limón, Claudia Rankine, Danez Smith, Jericho Brown, Chen Chen, Natalie Diaz, Diana Khoi Nguyen, and Tommy Pico. |
| ENGLISH 9 | SHAKESPEARE | HELFER, R. | Virtual Remote Course Love and friendship, separation and reunion, rivalry and jealousy, buffoonery and bullying, and race and gender: these are among the themes addressed in this designed-online Shakespeare course. Explore Shakespeare’s poetic gifts, theatrical imagination, and global references and concerns alongside his inquiry into human relationships and the human condition. You will be guided by an experienced team of faculty from UCI’s English department. Professionally-recorded online lectures are illustrated with clips from the plays and voice overs by UCI actors. Texts include Romeo and Juliet, Twelfth Night, and Othello. Students will complete three multi-modal projects as well as lecture and reading quizzes and peer evaluation of creative assignments. |
| ENGLISH 10 | CONTEMP AF AM LIT | GRADY, K. | Broadly, this course will engage contemporary African American literature to consider long-histories specific to the Black experience. We will explore how recent work by Black authors renders the past, contextualizes the present, and charts the future. Along with reading work by authors like Colson Whitehead, we will consider the work of artists like Janelle Monáe. Coursework will include short writing assignments, a group project, and a final paper. |
| ENGLISH 10 | WEIRD TALES | STEINTRAGER, J. | An overview of the genre of “weird tales,” that is, short stories that focus on the macabre, otherworldly, diabolical, and inexplicable. We will start with the roots of the genre in American and British writers such as Ambrose Bierce, Algernon Blackwood, and Arthur Machen, before moving on to concentrate on H.P. Lovecraft and the circle of like-minded writers for the pulp magazine Weird Tales in the 1920s and 30s. We will finish by examining the long and ongoing influence of the Lovecraft circle through stories Ramsey Campbell, Thomas Ligotti, Caitlín R. Kiernan, and others. Related topics to be covered on the way will include: developments in science and technology; historical theories of racial difference; masculinity and the pulp format; and much more. |
| ENGLISH 15 | ESTRANGEMENT | HARRIES, M. | In an essay first published in 1916, the Russian literary theorist Viktor Shklovsky wrote that art “exists to make one feel things, to make the stone stony.” The “technique of art,” Shklovsky argud, “is to make objects ‘unfamiliar,’ to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception.” In the 1920s and 1930s, the German playwright Bertolt Brecht saw potential political implications in theories of estrangement: what if art could defamiliarize and make strange not only things but institutions, social practices, ideologies? Brecht argued that theater should be a force to make the social world strange. This course will track theories of estrangement in essays by Shklovsky, Brecht, and others. It will also consider Brecht’s theoretical writing in the light of a few of his plays. The course will end by considering how the concept of estrangement illuminates three contemporary U.S. American women playwrights, Julia Jarcho, Young Jean Lee, and Suzan-Lori Parks. |
| ENGLISH 16 | CRAFT OF POETRY | SCHULTZ, R. | This is a literature class for poets and for people who want to learn to read and think like poets. To read a good poem should be a physical experience: sometimes pleasurable, sometimes discomfiting, sometimes uncanny. It's an experience of recognition: a good poem feels true, in a way that the reader senses, before they can necessarily articulate what the poem means or is about. In this class, we'll learn how to experience poems this way, and we'll also ask analytical questions about how these good poems get made. Why does a certain image make us shiver, or squirm? Where does that image come from, for the poet? How do craft techniques contribute to an effect on a reader, and then to the 'meaning' that that reader takes away? In addition to reading poetry, we'll read critical works by poets that help us understand how they read, think, and make choices in their work. We'll write essays about our readings, and we'll also craft some poems of our own. |
| ENGLISH 17 | CRAFT OF FICTION | LEWIS, J. | To craft is to plan. To craft is to make. To craft is to deceive. This hands-on class will help you to develop all three of these elements of fiction writing, via the conceit of the thrice-told tale. Meaning what? We will put our faith in the magical power of repetition with difference, working with some classic fairy tales and two retellings of each that turn the original inside out, not only adapting it to new priorities but discovering in it new possibilities and opportunities for understanding how stories are told. Then it will be your turn to do the same thing—and you will also get the opportunity to rewrite at least one of your own stories. In these ways, we’ll experiment with the difference that such elements as genre, point of view, setting, and voice can make to a work of fiction. Three benefits: you’ll get to know your own voice as a writer in a nurturing and respectful environment. You’ll get to know what Vladimir Propp (whose theory we’ll read) called the morphology of the folk tale. And you will get to hone your skills as an ‘inside’ reader—the reader who is also a writer, and who thus comes to terms with literary fiction from the inside out. Some probable fairy tales: Snow White, Jack and the Beanstalk, Hansel and Gretel, and Red Riding Hood. Some likely rewrites: Helen Oyeyemi’s Snow White Bird, Angela Carter’s “The Company of Wolves,” Tony Earley’s “Jack and the Mad Dog.” All readings except Oyeyemi will be short stories and available in PDF format. If you sign up for this class and have a fairy tale you are obsessed with and would love for us to read, email me by 12/1/21! Then we can all live happily ever after. Friday workshop sessions will likely be conducted in small pods via Zoom. |
| ENGLISH 100 | INTRO TO LIT THEORY | MCCLANAHAN, A. | If this thing we call “Theory” is to have not just an afterlife but a life—to continue to be urgent, illuminating, necessary—it will have to be in constant critical conversation with the present. For this class, then, each week we’ll read an excerpt from a “classic” theory text (Adorno, Horkheimer, Benjamin, Marx, Fanon, Judith Butler, Foucault, Jose Munoz, Wendy Brown) alongside a more recent intervention written in a accessible style, from pop culture criticism to personal essays. In your own writing for the course, you’ll learn not just to cite theory but also to write it, and will produce a theoretical essay of your own modeled after one we’ve read. Succeeding in this class will require patience with demanding texts and an abiding curiosity about how to describe and reimagine the world around you. |
| ENGLISH 101W | RACE AND REVISION: LATINX CREATIVES REWRITING HISTORY | MONTERO ROMAN, V. | In this course, we will look at some of the ways that Latinx creatives and authors have used their work to address the gaps and silences of historical and literary records. We will ask what kinds of literary and visual forms they mobilize and consider what narrative methods 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 creative 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. |
| ENGLISH 101W | STOCK CHARACTERS | BARTLETT, J. | This course will introduce you to the complexity of the nineteenth-century realist novel through the analysis of an irregular figure, the stock character. Neither minor nor major, neither flat nor round, too familiar to require much in the way of a personal history and yet unique in their reactions to immediate events, stock characters wander at a rich intersection between character and plot. If, as Forster has it, the difference between flat and round characters is that the round ones are capable of surprising us, we could say that stock characters often surprise us, but rarely themselves. Mr. Brownlow, the grand benefactor of Oliver Twist, is both reliably and literally deep—“his kindness and solicitude knew no bounds”—but at key moments, like Oliver’s rescue from Fagin’s gang, the novel makes a point of withholding the very details that we would anticipate (and probably skim over): Brownlow “forced a supply of tears into his eyes, by some hydraulic process which we are not sufficiently philosophical to be in a condition to explain.” By reverting to an unfathomable type in such moments, stock characters like Brownlow both reveal and aggravate a fundamental contradiction in the form and ethos of the realist novel, pushing the details that are said to conjure its “realism” into uneasy abstractions. My vision for this course will be similarly, blurrily bifocal: we will get a sense of the form of the realist novel itself by reading a few of them alongside a smattering of novel theory influenced by the fields of anthropology, drama, psychoanalysis, literary criticism, and sociology. Requirements include three papers (one revised) and a final project. |
| ENGLISH 101W | REALITY&REPRESENTN | RADHAKRISHNAN, R. | Warm greetings and Welcome One and All. Years ago, I was a participant at a conference co-sponsored by the Departments of English, Princeton University and Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ. To honor the theme of the conversation, we brought out two shirts, one of which read, “Get Real,” and the other proclaimed, “No Reality without Representation.” There you have it: the intense tension and tug of war between powerful antagonists/interlocutors/collaborators: Reality and Representation. Whereas the manifesto “Get Real” sounds impatient and dismissive of “representation” as baggage to be transcended in the name of something authentic and unmediated, the other T-shirt responds, “Hey, not so fast. There can be no Reality without mimesis/reflection/imitation/ representation. Reality is not numinous. It will have to be spoken for.” There you have it. This course will selectively but rigorously unpack the philosophical, the political, the literary, the cultural, and the aesthetic complexities of the Reality-Representation as well as the Form-Content dialectic. We will be working our way through poems, short stories, possibly novels, and a range of theories and methodologies: phenomenology, feminisms, poststructuralism and deconstruction, Marxism, postcoloniality, psychoanalysis, and Critical Race Theory. Each of the texts in the syllabus will address, embody and perform in its own way, the contrapuntal conversation between “Reality” and “Representation.” The texts covered will range from Socrates/Plato down to our own times and places. Since this a W course, we will be focusing carefully and intensively on the envisioning, the conceptualizing, and the drafting of your essays. There will be considerable writing in class. I will be helping you all I can to enable you not just with the mechanics of writing and the close reading of texts, but with your ability to incorporate “theory” into your analysis. Most likely, you will be writing 2 short essays and 1 long essay. |
| ENGLISH 102A | POETRY & PATRIARCHY | SILVER, V. | The end of the sixteenth century saw a sudden increase in the power and sophistication of English lyric poetry, an artistic revolution coinciding with an age of religious and political turmoil in Europe that succeeded the Reformation. That turmoil, in its turn, ignited a new skepticism about received knowledge and authority, troubling the gendered ideology of universal hierarchy that informed it and that we term “patriarchy”: “the rule of the father.” This skeptical movement, both intellectual and practical, engendered experiments in poetic form and poetic argument: if the sonnets of Sidney, Spenser and especially Shakespeare led the way in England, the innovative poetry of Donne, Jonson and Marvell that followed hard upon their heels finally burst the confines of poetic convention, pushing and pulling stanza, line and figure in novel directions, embracing lyric models as yet untried in the language, while newly ironizing the speaker’s utterance. Besides the works of Donne, Jonson and Marvell, we will also read a Shakespearean romance, The Winter’s Tale, to exemplify patriarchy’s assumptions (and Shakespeare’s skepticism), and a few essays of the most famous skeptic of the age, Michel de Montaigne. The requirements for the course are two takehome exams and attendance. |
| ENGLISH 102B | AUGUSTAN 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. Course requirements will include several short writing assignments, a midterm, and a final. |
| ENGLISH 102B | 18C DOMESTIC SPACE | MCCLANAHAN, A. | This class will explore the invention, over the course of the 18th century, of the genre we now call the novel. How, we will ask, did readers come to expect that the stories be “realistic”? How did they come to be willing to imagine themselves in the minds (and in the houses, workplaces, streets, and even beds) of fictional characters? We'll also consider the historical transformations those novels describe, from the rise of the middle class, to the changing role of women, to the abolition of the slave trade. In particular, we’ll think about the relationship between the rise of capitalism and the command over space, land, and property, from colonial adventures to the power dynamics of the household. We’ll also talk a lot about connections between the 18th century and the 21st: our first text will be Daniel Defoe's Journal of a Plague Year, about the bubonic plague; our last text will be a contemporary novel, trans* author Jordy Rosenberg's sexy, speculative historical novel Confessions of the Fox, which updates the 18th-century novel (and 18th-century history) for 21st-century readers. |
| ENGLISH 102C | DECOLONIZING AMERICA | LAZO, R. | We will focus on how writers used literary forms to respond to different colonization processes: settler colonialism, Manifest Destiny (ideology), war, and slavery (and other forms of racial capitalism). We will study work by Black, Indigenous and LatinX writers alongside Anglo-American voices to reconsider decolonial literature that has been de-emphasized in white supremacist literary histories. Some readings will provide context for nineteenth-century historical events. The course will meet in person on Monday and Wednesday and virtually for the third meeting. Requirements include weekly responses, a short midterm paper, and a final paper. |
| ENGLISH 102C | AWKWARDNESS AND OUTCAST | BARTLETT, J. | To cast in my lot with Jekyll was to die to those appetites which I had long secretly indulged and had of late begun to pamper. To cast it in with Hyde was to die to a thousand interests and aspirations, and to become, at a blow and for ever, despised and friendless. Robert Louis Stevenson, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886) One of the most striking absences in this Stevenson epigraph is the identity of its “I,” for as even a casual familiarity with the story tells us, Jekyll and Hyde are the same person. In order to cast in my lot with one or the other I’d have to transcend them both, making the decision as pointless as the novel would be without its drama. The choice of becoming-Jekyll or becoming-Hyde requires costs that are neither compatible nor equivalent, so this course will begin with the assumption that stories about the way we integrate ourselves into our social worlds are driven by a sense of foreclosure, the awkward friction that develops after we already know who and what we are. The literature of the nineteenth century is uniquely attentive to the ethics of personal and social relationships, it is a literature of outcasts, in which identities are often depicted as obligations and vice versa. We may never see a narrative evolving the wholly successful transgression that the illusion of “I” (or its “independence”) promises—indeed, it is debatable that we ever could—but we will be attentive to the ways in which we feel its weight. A closer look at outcasts, their awkward mis-fits and self-foreclosures, as well as the narratives that displace them, will give us a sense of the social and cultural commitments of nineteenth-century literary form, and might give us cause to review the knotty organization of our own assumptions about literary coherence, character development, and the organic unfolding of a realistic plot. Assignments include reading responses, a midterm and a final exam. |
| ENGLISH 102D | LIT OF PARTITION | O'CONNOR, L. | Partition along sectarian lines was a feature of British withdrawal from several colonies during the twentieth century, including the partition of Ireland into North and South (1922) and of the Indian sub-continent into India and Pakistan (1947). We’ll examine how partition ramifies into other “partitions”--of the psyche, of ethnic groups and families, of communities and once undivided locales--across a range of genres, including drama (Sean O’Casey); short stories and literary journalism (Saadat Hasan Manto); novels (Seamus Deane and Bapsi Sidhwa); and recent poetry and murals from Northern Ireland. Our writers call attention to the difficulties of writing partition, difficulties that arise from the complex relationship between memory (collective and personal), trauma, and narrative. Requirements include scheduled postings on the readings, an essay, and final exam. |
| ENGLISH 102D | MODERN DRAMA | HARRIES, M. | In the mid-twentieth century, the critic Joseph Wood Krutch wrote that for a time in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century drama became perhaps the most important species of imaginative writing so far as the dissemination of revolutionary attitudes is concerned. […] For the first time in several generations the intellectually restless began to see, or more often simply to read, dramatic works – not usually because they had any special interest in the theater but because to read them was the surest and simplest way of doing what we call “keeping up with the times.” Ibsen tended to become the key to modernism. In this course we will concentrate on dramatic works that were crucial to this “dissemination of revolutionary attitudes.” How did a form that seemed almost archaic, especially with the growth of mass print and newly emergent mass media, become so central to political debate? Following Krutch’s lead, we will begin with two plays by Henrik Ibsen, A Doll House and Hedda Gabler, that became crucial to the articulation of feminism in the early twentieth century. Other works will include Votes for Women, a play by the actress and radical suffragette Elisabeth Robins; The Dog Beneath the Skin, a verse drama by W. H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood; a few short plays by Samuel Beckett; and Caryl Churchill’s Cloud Nine and Light Shining in Buckinghamshire. We will also read Virginia Woolf’s Between the Acts, a novel about (among other things) the place of drama in the formation of national identity. |
| ENGLISH 105 | EARLY AFAM LIT | CHANDLER, N. | |
| ENGLISH 105 | CONTEMP AFAM LIT | STEINTRAGER, J. | A very partial introduction to recent anglophone literature from Africa with a focus on Nigerian and southern African novels and novelists. Authors and works will include: Tsitsi Dangarembga, This Mournable Body (2018); Akwaeke Emezi, Freshwater; Damon Galgut, The Promise (2020); Chigozie Obioma, The Fisherman; and Tade Thompson, Rosewater. |
| ENGLISH 105 | NARRATVES OF ILLNES | LEE, J. | |
| ENGLISH 106 | FRANTZ FANON | RADHAKRISHNAN, R. | WARM GREETINGS AND WELCOME ONE AND ALL. In this course we will endeavor to plumb the multifarious depths of Frantz Fanon’s thought: Fanon the thinker, philosopher, political revolutionary, psychoanalyst, organizer, critical race theorist, radical de-colonial “new humanist” who exclaims, even as he is looking for answers, “O my body, make of me always a man who questions.” It is only natural that Fanon has had a tectonic influence on Third World Theory and Literature, African American Thought, Critical Theory, Blackness and Diaspora Studies, We will do all we can to do justice to the local as well as trans-local significance of Fanon’s legacy. We will cover the range of Fanon’s agenda both chronologically and thematically, and by way of close readings of most of Fanon’s published texts: A Dying Colonialism; Black Skin, White Masks; Algeria Unveiled, and The Wretched of the Earth. We will be focusing in particular on how carefully Fanon seeks to articulate an “onto-politics” of post-colonial resistance beyond radical negation towards absolute affirmation. Does his thought really return to pre-Colonial Africa, or is he trapped forever in the agony of “double consciousness?” Does Fanon succeed in transcending the regimes of humanism-nationalism? How does Fanon align strategic and political activism with the long haul call of ontological revolt? Is he an Afro-centric thinker, or is he universal in scope and appeal? How does he actualize Africa both as Perspective and Worldview? Does his thinking go beyond the binary stalemate of “The Negro is not. Any more than the white man” and create new truths rather than chronically deconstruct the master’s house with the master’s tools? How persuasive is Fanon as an intersectional thinker, and what is his relationship to Feminism and the politics of gender and sexuality? These are some of the questions that will serve as the founding rationale of our study. You will most likely write two essays, one short, and one long. |
| ENGLISH 106 | STAGING IDENTITY | O'CONNOR, L. | In “Staging Identity” we’ll read a range of plays by Irish dramatists from the long twentieth century, from Oscar Wilde to Samuel Beckett. Playwrights associated with the Abbey Theater--W. B. Yeats, Lady Gregory, John Millington Synge and Sean O’Casey--are overtly concerned with Irish-national identity as they strove to dismantle the “stage Irishman” stereotype and write plays in English that are recognizably “Irish.” Others—Wilde, Beckett, and George Bernard Shaw—explore the performative and existential nature of identity as such. The goal of the course is to provide the background context and collaborative support to help you to select and develop an elective research topic and to write a 12-15 page research paper on it. By way of preparation, students are required to write one graded take-home essay and to do group presentations. |
| ENGLISH 106 | VICTORIAN LITERATURE AND VISION | HENDERSON, A. | In this course we will trace the nineteenth-century preoccupation with seeing and vision, focusing on poems and novels that are meditations on the relation of literature to painting and/or photography. Readings will include De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and Collins’ The Woman in White, along with poems by Tennyson, Browning, Swinburne, and Rossetti. Students will also read several critical articles and lead class discussion on one of them. The writing for the course will center on the production of one major essay, for which students will produce an annotated bibliography and an outline to share with the class. |
| ENGLISH 199 | INDEPENDENT STUDY | STAFF | |
| ENGLISH 210 | SHAKESPEAREAN TRAGEDY | SILVER, V. | Course Code: 23810, Tuesdays 6:00-8:50pm HIB 341 PLEASE NOTE: This seminar is only for Master of English students. We all have a notion in our heads of how a given Shakespeare play means; and if we don’t, there is always the First Folio’s classification of the plays according to genre--comedy, history, tragedy, romance--which are there to tell us what sort of dramatic action to expect. Comedy will end with a marriage; tragedy will trace an arc from fortune to misfortune, ending with suffering and death. If only it were so simple. For Shakespeare is a master of mixed dramatic modes, a technique peculiar to the early modern stage and an inheritance from the medieval one. In a satirical moment, he has Polonius in Hamlet list all the various combinations of dramatic modes notionally popular in the day, which does nothing so much as suggest that early modern drama was a mongrel phenomenon by generic standards. So this is not your usual Shakespeare class: it is experimental, since we will try Shakespeare’s tragedies (Hamlet and King Lear) by history and satire (Richard III) and by comedy and romance (Much Ado About Nothing), the better to understand his dramatic arguments and emphases. You may be surprised at what you find. |
| ENGLISH 210 | KANTIAN AESTHETICS | VAN DEN ABBEEL, G. | Course Code: 23808, Fridays 2:00 - 4:50pm HIB 341 This seminar will propose an in-depth interrogation of Immanuel Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgment (1790) , his so-called “Third” Critique, which aims to bridge the gap between “pure reason” and “practical reason,” the subject matter respectively of his first two “critiques” (1781, 1788). In other words, how can the mental faculty of the understanding be reconciled with that of the will, cognition with moral action, epistemology with ethics? The Third Critique posits judgment, not as another faculty, but as a separate power (Kraft) that can adjudicate the other faculties of the mind. However, it turns out that this power is realized most evidently in the realm of aesthetics, divided in Kant’s thinking between the feeling of the beautiful and that of the sublime. The aim of the seminar, beyond the explication of Kant’s aesthetic categories per se, is to raise the question of why or how the aesthetic sentiment should serve as the condition of philosophical reflection, and in turn, how that philosophical grounding should inflect the subsequent development of art in its myriad forms during the rise of modernity and the so-called avant-garde. To what extent does Kant, in a dramatic departure from the Platonic tradition, legitimize various non-representational concepts of art? What does it mean when he defines aesthetic judgment paradoxically as “subjectively universal”? Or, the aesthetic object, via another paradox, as something exhibiting “purposiveness without a purpose”? And how is it that while the beautiful emerges as the contained and pleasurable “free play” of the imagination with the understanding, the sublime underwrites their explosive dissonance in the “unpleasure” of the incomprehensible or the unimaginable? Finally, what are the philosophical as well as artistic consequences of this critical “power” of judgment? Does Kant enable a conceptualization not only of philosophy but also of art itself as “critique”? Time permitting, we will examine the legacy of Kantian aesthetics in a variety of subsequent thinkers, including Schopenhauer, Hegel, Nietzsche, Cassirer, Husserl, Heidegger, Benjamin, Adorno, Strawson, Allison, Derrida, Guyer, and Lyotard. |
| ENGLISH 210 | C19/C21 BLACK POETICS | JACKSON, V. | Course Code: 23806, Thursdays 11:00am-1:50pm HIB 341 This seminar will survey the Black radical tradition in American poetics by allowing that tradition to change the way we practice literary criticism. The story of American poetics as “the drive toward modernism” (as Roy Harvey Pearce put it in 1961) is a White supremacist narrative consolidated in the twentieth century, and it continues to structure the discipline of Anglophone literary studies. In order to undiscipline that narrative, in this seminar we will skip the twentieth century and focus instead on Black poetics before and after modernism. We will read a range of Black poetic theory (Moten, Mackey, Shockley, Posmentier, Reed, Wilson, Sandler, Z. Jackson, Edwards) and we will think about the relation between poets before 1900 (Wheatley, Horton, Whitfield, Whitman, Plato, Watkins Harper, Dunbar, and others) and poets after 2000 (Shockley, Smith, Smith, Hayes, Morgan, Rankine, Brown, Kearney, Morris, and others). Several events in the poetics|history|theory@uci series will be folded into our seminar, including visits by Evie Shockley, Terrance Hayes, Matt Sandler, Anthony Reed, and Sonya Posmentier. |
| ENGLISH 210 | EARLY MODERN MEMORY | HELFER, R. | Course Code: 23804, Tuesdays 2:00 - 4:50pm HIB 341 This course will explore the central role that memory plays in the poetics and praxis of early modern writing. We’ll study a few key texts (e.g., Hamlet and Shakespeare’s Sonnets) in fairly intensive ways, taking them as opportunities to think about representations of memory from a range of perspectives: historical, psychological, pedagogical, and political, as well as aesthetic and performative. The aim of the course is twofold: to treat these early modern works as ‘memory studies’ in themselves – as works which reflect broadly upon memory as cognition and embodiment, as individual and collective trauma, as personal and political performance, as narrative and temporal construct, as location or site for memorialization and erasure, and so on – and also to consider these texts in the context of the historical and theoretical criticism and concerns of the field of memory studies. The work for the course will consist of some short writing and a presentation or two, as well as a final paper. |
| ENGLISH 210 | FEMNARRATIVE THEORY | MONTERO ROMAN, V. | Course Code: 23802, Thursdays 2:00-4:50pm HIB 341 This course offers an introduction to approaching literary analysis through feminist and cognitive narratology. Feminist narratology, as Robyn Warhol describes it, is a theoretical approach that contends that “texts are always linked to the material circumstances of the history that produces and receives them,” and because of that, “the more we can understand about narrative’s role in the constitution of gender (race, ability, and sexuality), the better positioned we are to change the oppressive ways that [those] norms work in the world.” The overarching goal for this course is to explore narratology as a method for engaging the formal aspects of narrative structures. We will read seminal work in feminist and cognitive narratology, but we will also consider how feminist, queer, and critical race theory outside of narratology might create new horizons for the field. As Susan Lanser says, “narratology may be too important to leave to narratologists.” This course is organized predominantly around thinking about method – about how we approach texts – but we will read early 20th century fiction written by multi-ethnic women to ground these methodological questions. While this course will be of use to students of women’s literature, it should also be helpful for graduate students more broadly interested in narrative form (both its creation and its analysis). Depending on selected seminar format, course requirements might include short written response papers, an annotated bibliography, and a final paper. I look forward to having MFA students in this class, and I encourage projects that combine creative work and critical reflections that describe engagement with narratological concepts and course discussions. |
| ENGLISH 210 | EARLY CONSTRUCTIONS OF RACE | GRADY, K. | Course Code: 23800, Wednesdays 9:00am - 11:50am HIB 341 This course will explore early constructions of race, particularly as they develop in early modern England. We will consider, in part, how pre and early modern notions of difference inform later modes of race-making. To explore the various ways in which notions of embodied difference are formed and forwarded, we will consider relevant religious discourse, proto-scientific texts, travel narratives, and literary works. Our discussions will be informed by a range of recent scholarship in the field. |
| ENGLISH 290 | READING&CONFERENCE | STAFF | |
| ENGLISH 290 | READING&CONFERENCE | STAFF | |
| ENGLISH 290 | READING&CONFERENCE | STAFF | |
| ENGLISH 290 | READING&CONFERENCE | STAFF | |
| ENGLISH 290 | READING&CONFERENCE | STAFF | |
| ENGLISH 290 | READING&CONFERENCE | STAFF | |
| ENGLISH 290 | READING&CONFERENCE | STAFF | |
| ENGLISH 290 | READING&CONFERENCE | STAFF | |
| ENGLISH 290 | READING&CONFERENCE | STAFF | |
| ENGLISH 290 | READING&CONFERENCE | LUPTON, J. | |
| ENGLISH 290 | READING&CONFERENCE | LUPTON, J. | |
| ENGLISH 291 | GUIDED READING | STAFF | |
| ENGLISH 291 | GUIDED READING | GODDEN, R. | |
| ENGLISH 399 | UNIVERSITY TEACHING | DAVIS, R. | |
| ENGLISH 399 | UNIVERSITY TEACHING | LATIOLAIS, P. | |
| ENGLISH 399 | UNIVERSITY TEACHING | SZALAY, M. | |
| ENGLISH 399 | UNIVERSITY TEACHING | HARRIES, M. | |
| ENGLISH 399 | UNIVERSITY TEACHING | HARRIES, M. | |
| ENGLISH 399 | UNIVERSITY TEACHING | HARRIES, M. |