| Course | Title | Instructor | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
| ENGLISH 8 | MULTICULT AMER LIT | MONTERO ROMAN, V. | This course is an introduction to Multicultural American Literature through a focus on women’s literature. In particular, we will analyze the work of women authors in relation to ideas of race and gender emerging in eugenics discourse and immigration and citizenship policies. |
| ENGLISH 10 | BOREDOM AND LIT | BARTLETT, J. | |
| ENGLISH 15 | 19TH-21ST DEVIANTS | TRIGOS, M. | This course offers students a framework to explore how literature, film, and other cultural production have represented different notions of “deviance” as a systemic means of control as well as a potential site of resistance. It engages how concepts such as foreignness (e.g. encounters with foreign creatures, lands, nations, and individuals), gender, ethnicity, class, and race have been connected to representations of “deviants.” We will analyze how certain figures—for example, Dracula or Frankenstein—travel to different contexts and through different media, how main concerns of literary texts—novellas, novels, and plays—are translated into other media adaptations, and how context influences constructions of gender, race, and foreignness, even sometimes at repositories such as digital archives and museums. |
| ENGLISH 15 | YOUNG GIFTED &BLACK | MORGAN, C. | |
| ENGLISH 16 | CRAFT OF POETRY | HANSON, D. | Poetry of Surprise and Wonder This class is a survey of contemporary American poetry and poetry translated into English. We will read and listen to a variety of poets covering a wide range of topic, identity, and form, focusing on how poetry uses surprise, disturbance, and delight to affect the reader. We’ll use these readings as a basis to discuss what poetry is and how it achieves a connection with the reader and communication of a story or subject. We will write a few poems in response to writing exercises, and write one short analytical paper. No previous writing or literature experience required. |
| ENGLISH 100 | INTRO TO LIT THEORY | MCCALL, S. | The assigned readings for this course shall probe questions such as: What is the relationship between art and reality? Is there such a thing as objective judgment regarding what is beautiful, or is all artistic appreciation a matter of subjective taste? Are some art forms better or more important than others? How has technology affected our relationship to art? How does our interaction with the world through our bodies, senses and feelings differ from our interaction by means of cognition and concepts? What counts as art at all? We shall proceed chronologically from discussions of ancient mimetic theory, to the birth of modern aesthetics in the 18th and 19th centuries and then turn to 20th century Aesthetic Theory and the “Black Aesthetic” as defined by the Black Arts Movement. |
| ENGLISH 101W | THE UNCANNY | LEWIS, J. | What do ghosts, doppelgängers, alter egos, déjà vu, split personalities, bats, identical twins, androids, and Barbie dolls have in common? All are examples of ‘the’ uncanny. Not quite a noun--but not entirely an adjective either—the uncanny is the strangely familiar and the familiarly strange that haunts the borders of human life. Literature, built on the verbal art of ambiguity, has long been the perfect place to explore the psychology, aesthetics, and ethics of the uncanny; there’s a reason Freud based his influential theory of the uncanny on a not-so-short story by ETA Hoffmann, and why the meaning of the word itself, for him, had an uncanny quality. Later, Freud’s successor Jacques Lacan would write that the uncanny places us "in the field where we do not know how to distinguish bad and good, pleasure from displeasure.” What does it mean to find ourselves on that borderline, stranded in the so-called “uncanny valley” with only our not-selves for company? Though AI is beginning to answer that question for us, our focus will be on the literary uncanny. We’ll explore several classic works of fiction that can help us understand this defining (and undoing) aspect of human experience and identity. Besides Freud’s classic essay, texts include stories by Hoffmann, Poe, Oates, Highsmith and Machado as well as two novels, Wells’s The island of Dr Moreau and Moreno-Garcia’s The Daughter of Dr Moreau. Since this is an upper-division writing course, requirements include short weekly writing assignments along with two long critical essays (one revised) and a Week 10 presentation. |
| ENGLISH 101W | READING POETRY | RADHAKRISHNAN, R. | Poetry makes nothing happen. W.H. Auden. Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the universe. Percy Bysshe Shelley. Poetry, I too dislike it. Marianne Moore. A poem is like dancing whereas prose is like walking. Paul Valery. Beauty is Truth and Truth Beauty. John Keats. A sonnet is a moment’s monument. Dante Gabriel Rossetti. How do these different diagnoses and definitions add up? Is poetry difficult or easy, elitist or populist, critical-Utopian and transformative or just tamely beautiful, deeply subjective, or out in the world? Is it political or apolitical? What is its relationship to language, to society, to the individual? Is it a kind of truth or just a mode of saying? How is it related to thought, to philosophy, and to everyday life? Is a poem intellectual, cognitive, emotive, sensuous, or all of the above? Why and how does it please the reader? What forms of joy and pleasure does it offer that are uniquely its own? How much has poetry changed over centuries and why? Questions, more questions. This course does not pretend to have all the answers, but I certainly hope that we as a passionate and intensely committed collectivity will have these questions in mind as we practice the art of close reading a number of profound and delicious poems in English, drawn from different time periods and schools of composition, and a few translated poems. Likely suspects: William Shakespeare, William Wordsworth, Langston Hughes, Mahmoud Darwish, John Keats, Adrienne Rich, Sylvia Plath, Wallace Stevens, W.H. Auden, T.S. Eliot, Emily Dickinson, Archibald MacLeish, William Butler Yeats, Agha Shahid Ali, and more. Even as we dive deeply and irrevocably into each poem, we will be aligning and relating the inner world of each poem to its broader worldly context of ideas, philosophies, critical theories and schools of thought, political regimes, socio cultural and political landscapes, and horizons. The emphasis will be as much on “reading” as on “poetry,” and as much on reading as on writing. Sensitive reading leads to effective writing. Mode of teaching: A mix of some lecture and introduction combined with individual student presentations and collective dialog and discussion. Expectations and requirements: Diligent attendance and participation. No required texts: we will just be downloading copies of the required poems from the web. I will be suggesting secondary critical material now and then, as the need arises. You will very likely be writing two short papers and I long paper. Since this a W course, there will be a quite a bit of emphasis on writing in class. |
| ENGLISH 101W | W. B. YEATS | OCONNOR, L. | The twofold purpose of this course is to offer a) immersion in the work of William Butler Yeats, regarded by many as the outstanding poet of the twentieth century, and b) opportunities to improve your skills in close reading and critical writing expected in E101Ws. You’ll become adept at reading the traditional verse forms favored by Yeats. A co-founder of the Abbey Theater, Yeats strove to create an Irish-national literary tradition in English. He was deeply interested in the occult, from the fairy legend of early poems to the gyring antitheses of A Vision (1925). His unrequited love for Maud Gonne is one of his recurrent themes. A key player in the cultural nationalist movement that shaped modern Ireland, his work tracks how revolution transformed the former colony into an independent state. Weekly writing assignments and two papers. |
| ENGLISH 102A | EARLY MODERN SELF | SILVER, V. | This is a course about the uses of irony, that skeptical order of meaning that controverts appearances, undercuts cherished assumptions, and moves us reflexively to focus on the sources of error in ourselves. For irony is about the failure to know oneself: its literary subject is frequently a character, a fictional self, that ignores or denies its disabilities and limitations, and at its moment of greatest self-confidence proves awash in self-delusion. As old as Homer, irony can thus be an adversary of the Ideal, since it circumscribes where it does not wholly subvert humanity’s pretensions to perfectability—to be ut Deus, ‘as God.’ Such skepticism about the species began to afflict western culture sometime in the 14th c., which once again began to doubt received knowledge. Where reason was trusted to vet appearances, distinguishing the true from the false, that faculty itself now seemed the font of misconception, little different from the senses or the passions blamed for human error since the advent of original sin in the Garden of Eden. As a result, the known world threatened to become the world merely imagined; reality began to unravel, disperse, and dissolve into mere words, which irony anatomizes in the literature of the age—poetry, prose and drama. Readings include Gawain and the Green Knight, Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, Montaigne’s Essays, Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night and his sonnets. Requirements are two exams. |
| ENGLISH 102B | A SELF IN THE WORLD | STAFF | |
| ENGLISH 102C | RACE, GENDER & EMPIRE | SPEER, M. | This course will examine 19th-Century fears through the lens of scary stories. Ghosts, monsters, and evil doppelgangers proliferated in Transatlantic literature in a period when the violence of slavery, settler colonialism, and imperialism informed every Anglophone cultural production. Anxieties about gender roles, racial purity, and deviant sexualities caused an explosion of horror and gothic we will explore in poetry, short stories, and novels. Writing for this course will include short exercises, a midterm exam, and a final essay. |
| ENGLISH 102D | RADIO | HARRIES, M. | Radio was the first electronic broadcast medium. Introduced in the United States in 1916 and in Britain in 1922, radio became increasingly important over the 1920s and 1930s. How did radio become a medium for literature? How did literature respond to its increasing importance as a source for news and information and its saturation of social space? How did some writing define itself against radio? This course will pursue these questions by looking at radio as a medium for narrative and drama, while also considering the ways that the radio leaves its traces on work in other media. We will consider works in a variety of media, from works created for the radio, including serial dramas and radio plays; novels; and poems. Course materials will include texts and listening assignments, among them: The Shadow (radio program, various episodes, 1937-1954) Orson Welles and the Mercury Theatre of the Air, The War of the Worlds (CBS Radio Network broadcast, US, October 30, 1938) John Cheever, “The Enormous Radio” (short story, US, 1947) Samuel Beckett, radio plays (BBC radio, UK, 1960s) Amiri Baraka, from The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones (autobiography, US, 1997) LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka, Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note (poetry, US, 1961) Penelope Fitzgerald, Human Voices (novel, UK, 1980) |
| ENGLISH 103 | RACE&SX 20C FLM&FCT | TRIGOS, M. | This course will introduce students to various critical approaches to race and sexuality in order to examine their relationship in fictional representations across the twentieth century. How are representations of race sexualized and how are representations of sex and sexuality racialized? How does genre affect this process? What is the “work” that these representations do on the page and on the screen? One of the course’s aims is to challenge the ways in which both race and sexuality—which we now refer to as identity categories—are conceptualized as legitimate areas of study. Thus, the class juxtaposes notions of race as biology, ethnicity, affect, property, or citizenship, for example, and it combines visual texts (images, films, trailers, music videos) and literary works of different genres (plays, novels, short stories) in order to question the dependence on visual cues for reading racial and sexual paradigms. How are fictional representations informed and contested by these theoretical approaches? How do these notions of race shift when we center their connections to sex and sexuality? |
| ENGLISH 105 | NARRATVES OF ILLNES | LEE, J. | This course introduces students to narratives written by Asian Americans about the experience of ill embodiment. These stories include both those written by those tasked to care for ill and disabled bodyminds—physicians—and by those who themselves are, in some sense, sick. In either case, in related but differential ways, all of these memoirs highlight the transformative capacities that take place when encountering and caring for the ill and dying. At the heart of these narratives lie central questions: 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? What happens to ableist ideologies such as the “model minority” if we make central the Asian American ill bodymind? |
| ENGLISH 105 | INDIGENOUS LITERATURE: PACIFIC RIM | OCONNOR, L. | This course explores the historical trauma of genocidal and ethnocidal settler colonialism by reading literature by contemporary Aborigine, Maori, and Native American writers. The master trope of indigenous literature, according to Gloria Bird, “is the interconnectedness of all things—of people to land, of stories to people, of people to people.” We’ll examine how several writers, including Doris Pilkington, Patricia Grace, Tommy Orange, Sherman Alexie, Layli Long Soldier, and Natalie Diaz, address the legacy of forced assimilation on the psyche, on cultural identity, and on indigenous languages and knowledge. A paper and two in-class exams. |
| ENGLISH 105 | NATIVE AMER AUTOBIO | CARROLL, A. | This course examines autobiographies by Native American people to learn about the histories of Indigenous individuals and communities from their own perspectives. Students will engage with historical and political contexts, including US attempts to abolish Indigenous Peoples’ sovereignty and treaty rights; Indian Removal and the reservation system; colonial migration and settlement; federal Indian assimilation policy; and Indigenous Peoples’ continuing presence and resistance to ongoing US settler colonialism. Students will gain an introduction to uniquely Native American autobiographical forms, including as-told-to narratives; mixed genre works; visual texts; and storytelling methods that blend oral traditions, mythography, and cosmology with personal experience. Course materials include autobiography, memoir, mixed genre works, and academic essays by artists and scholars from the Dakota, Kiowa, Kumeyaay, Laguna Pueblo, Lenape, Osage, and Pequot nations. |
| ENGLISH 106 | ERLMOD MIXEDNESS | GRADY, K. | |
| ENGLISH 106 | POSTCOLONIALITY | RADHAKRISHNAN, R. | In this course, we will be taking a selective but deep look into some of the powerful and often revolutionary literature as well as theory produced in the formerly colonized areas of Asia and Africa. Here is a tentative list of works and authors to be studied: Things Fall Apart (Achebe, Nigeria), A Grain of Wheat (our own wonderful Ngugi wa Thiong’ O, Kenya), Shadow Lines (Amitav Ghosh, India), Burger’s Daughter (Nadine Gordimer, South Africa), Nervous Conditions (Tsi-tsi Dangarembga, Zimbabwe). We will be analyzing and interpreting the fiction within the larger macro-political context of Colonialism and its aftermath. The themes that will animate and inform the course are: Tradition and modernity; Eurocentrism and Afrocentrism; the politics of Gender and Sexuality between the West and the non-West; Nationalism and Feminism; Nationalism in the post-colonial context; Enlightenment Reason and the politics of decolonization; Postcolonial double-consciousness; Secularism and the Nation state; Nationalism, Populism, and the politics of representation; Race, Sovereignty, and the Nation State; Self and Other and the Colonial Divide; Subjectivity and Collectivity in the postcolonial condition; People and the Intellectual in the post-colony; and the Cultural politics of the “post-“ after Colonialism. Even as we pursue these themes by way of a careful close reading of the literary texts, we will also be taking an equal look at a number of influential theoretical essays by political thinkers and philosophers such as, Frantz Fanon, Ernst Renan, Benedict Anderson, Homi Bhabha, Partha Chatterjee, Chinua Achebe, Ngugi wa Thiong’O, Edward Said, to name a few, to frame and contextualize our discussion. Format: Lecture and discussion. Requirements and Expectations: Regular attendance and participation. Possibly 1 short paper (5 pages) and 1Long Paper (7 to 10 pages). |
| ENGLISH 106 | COLONIAL & REVLTN LIT | MCCALL, S. | In this course we will read early Anglophone Atlantic literatures of colonization and political protest. We shall attend specifically to the ways in which the production, distribution and consumption of books, pamphlets and print ephemera shaped the Atlantic World public sphere during the long eighteenth century (1688-1815). |
| ENGLISH 198 | SPECIAL TOPICS | STAFF | |
| ENGLISH 198 | SPECIAL TOPICS | STAFF | |
| ENGLISH 198 | SPECIAL TOPICS | STAFF | |
| ENGLISH 199 | INDEPENDENT STUDY | STAFF | |
| ENGLISH 199 | INDEPENDENT STUDY | LATIOLAIS, P. | |
| ENGLISH 199 | INDEPENDENT STUDY | DAVIS, R. | |
| ENGLISH 199 | INDEPENDENT STUDY | MCCALL, S. | |
| ENGLISH 199 | INDEPENDENT STUDY | STAFF | |
| ENGLISH 199 | INDEPENDENT STUDY | STAFF | |
| ENGLISH 205 | MODERNISM | SZALAY, M. | This course will introduce students to some of the major texts and debates of Anglo-American literary modernism. Possible authors to include Joseph Conrad, T. S. Eliot, Claude McKay, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and Nella Larsen. |
| ENGLISH 205 | HAMLET & REVENGE | 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 offer a selection of these plays, beginning with their literary inspiration and Roman original, Seneca’s Thyestes: we will read Middleton’s The Revenger’s Tragedy; possibly the most appalling of all (with the best film), Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus; Webster’s Duchess of Malfi; Ford’s ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore, and conclude with Hamlet. We will be guided on this excursion through inner and outer darkness by Seneca’s essay, De Ira [‘Of Anger’], Aristotle’s Rhetoric, Francis Bacon’s Essays and more besides. Course requirements at this point consist of two exams. Buyer beware. (Not really.) |
| ENGLISH 206 | RESEARCH & WRITING | IZENBERG, O. | |
| ENGLISH 207 | THESIS PRACTICUM | STAFF | |
| ENGLISH 210 | LATINA LITERATURE | MONTERO ROMAN, V. | Course code: 23846 Tuesdays 11:00am – 1:50pm HIB 341 In this course we will read literature and theoretical texts that explore the intersection of discussions of race, gender, and Latinidad. The goal for the course will be to consider some of the ways women and womxn authors have conceptualized and critiqued Latinidad, and to identify key theories, concepts, and debates that emerge in discussions of their work. This will include discussions of the overlap between Latine theory and disability studies, environmental studies, queer theory, and other areas of critical race studies. Reading primary texts from the 19th century to today, this course will provide graduate students with an introduction to a genealogy of U.S. based Latina authors, and it will also offer them the opportunity to be exposed to theories and methodologies that emerge in conversation with this tradition. Theorists might include: Chela Sandoval, Cherríe Moraga, Gloria Anzaldúa, Juliet Hooker, Miriam Jiménez Román, Maylei Blackwell, Julie Minich, Linda Martín Alcoff, Emma Pérez, etc. Authors might include María Amparo Ruiz de Burton, María Cristina Mena, Jovita González, Julia de Burgos, Helena Maria Viramontes, Julia Alvarez, etc. |
| ENGLISH 210 | RISE CONTEMP NOVEL | TUCKER, I. | Course code: 23844 Thursdays 11:00am – 1:50pm HIB 341 One of the foundational challenges of tracing histories of the novel is finding a way around our tendency to read history teleologically. Our impulse is to identify those elements of early narratives that make their way into what we come to think of as “the 18th-century novel” as the defining qualities of those early narratives without fully acknowledging the ways in which our identification of such defining “essentialness” rests upon an outcome that may well have been otherwise. Our project in this course is to envision alternative accounts of the novel by thinking beyond such teleological histories, pairing (or tripling) examples of what have come to be seen as iconic forms of the early novel with examples of contemporary, 21st-century fictional narratives that take up and transform elements of the earlier forms in ways that would not have been envisionable in the immediate aftermath of those early forms. By juxtaposing these early novels with novels that postdate them by two or three centuries, our is not to dismiss the formative power of the 18th and 19th-century historical contexts out of which the original versions emerged so much as to throw into relief the constitutive power of historical or formal elements that only become discernible with the passage of time. While we will engage with some critical histories and theories of the novel as well, our central project will be developing new histories of the novel from the bottom-up, by way of close readings of these unconventional juxtapositions. We will end the course with a short story collection that announces itself as a dissolution of the novel form. Provisional syllabus: The Epistolary Novel: Fanny Burney, Evelina, Or the History of a Young Lady’s Entrance into the World (1778) Claire Fuller, Swimming Lessons (2017) Julia Whelan, Thank You for Listening (2022) (To be engaged first as audiobook) The Marriage Plot (or Not): Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility (1811) Sally Rooney, Normal People (2018) The Sensation Novel: Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White (1859) Sarah Bonner, Her Perfect Twin (2022) The End of the Novel: Tananarive Due, The Wishing Pool and Other Stories (2023) |
| ENGLISH 210 | MIGRATION & MEDIATION | JEON, J. | Course code: 23840 Wednesdays 9 – 11:50am HIB 341 This class begins with an irony: we live at a time characterized, on the one hand, by a global migration crisis, in which the movement of bodies across borders has slowed to a trickle, and on the other hand, by a radical proliferation of mediation technologies, which has made possible the global flow of information, commodities, and capital occurring now at previously unimaginable scales and speeds. Beginning with the work of Walter Benjamin, a theorist who thought deeply about both modern phenomena, this class will read and think through theory and criticism that help us understand not only their histories and conceptual implications but also their interrelation. |
| ENGLISH 210 | UTOPIA AND MORE | VAN DEN ABBEEL, G. | The genre of utopia is as denigrated as it is celebrated. On the one hand, it is discounted as a dangerous distraction and escapist fantasy, and on the other hand, praised as a powerful vehicle of social critique and visionary change. What is a stake in the imaginative invention of other worlds and alternative realities? Beginning with a close analysis of Thomas More’s eponymous Utopia (1516), we will consider the modes, possibilities and limitations of utopian (and dystopian) writing, including subsequent early modern examples from Bacon, Montaigne, Hakluyt, de Bergerac, Godwin, Cavendish and Swift. Theoretical readings by Bloch, Marin, Jameson, Davis, and others. Students will be encouraged to research utopian/dystopian works related to their own research projects. |
| ENGLISH 291 | GUIDED READING | STAFF | |
| ENGLISH 299 | DISSERTATN RESEARCH | ALLEN, E. | |
| ENGLISH 399 | UNIVERSITY TEACHING | LATIOLAIS, P. | |
| ENGLISH 399 | UNIVERSITY TEACHING | LEE, J.W. | |
| ENGLISH 399 | UNIVERSITY TEACHING | ALLEN, E. |