| Course | Title | Instructor | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
| ENGLISH H83 | WHAT'S A UNIVERSITY? | MCCLANAHAN, A. | As you walk around campus, go to class, or grab a bite to eat in the dining hall, do you ever wonder about the history of this institution we call a university—or even just the history of UCI? This course will lead you to ask (and answer) questions like: How did the US university system get built? What purpose (and what people) was it originally built to serve? How does pop culture both reflect and produce changes in the institution? What does “student life” mean and how has its meaning changed? What are the economics of public universities and how do they relate to problems of racial justice and class mobility? How can understanding these histories, contexts, and representations help you understand your own experience as a member of a university community? Along the way, we’ll look at a range of different types of universities—from public universities, to Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs), to the so-called Ivy League. We’ll focus especially on the student experience, from parties to protests, and we’ll view films about universities, from the 1929 film The Wild Party (an early “talkie” about a women’s college) to Bama Rush (2023), which we’ll use to explore gender, college, and social media. We’ll look at primary sources from ancient philosophy to Tik-Tok and secondary scholarship by historians, sociologists, education scholars, economists, cultural theorists, critical race theorists, and more. And you’ll end the class by researching and writing about UCI itself, using the library special collections--and your own experience here so far-- as your archive. |
| ENGLISH 8 | MULTICULT AMER LITERATURE | MONTERO ROMAN, V. | Full Title: 20th Century Multicultural American Women’s Literature This course is an introduction to Multicultural American women’s literature. Surveying multi-ethnic modernist women authors in the United States, our readings 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. As a group, we will trace how the categories of race and gender developed in the legal, scientific, and political landscape of the early twentieth century, and we will consider how that history impacted the literature we read. We will focus our time on literature from the early twentieth century, but at the end of quarter we will consider how to read these earlier authors in conversation with at least one contemporary author. Assignments will likely include participation activities, a research based midterm, and a final group project that is a literary playlist. |
| ENGLISH 9 | SHAKESPEARE | HELFER, R. | 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 15 | THE LANGUAGE OF AMERICAN DRAMA | HARRIES, M. | How do people talk? How do people on stage talk? A common assumption among the playwrights and audiences of American drama has been that people on stage should talk as people do talk in their everyday lives. Producing authentic dialogue meant mirroring how Americans talk. Plays by American playwrights such as Thornton Wilder, Arthur Miller, and Tennessee Williams, for instance, were valued for their closeness to everyday speech. In the last few decades, some of the most interesting American drama has challenged this ideal. Adventurous playwrights have refused the belief that there is some typical norm of American speech. Their plays suggest that, even if there were such a norm, that it is not the job of playwrights to reproduce it. The languages of these plays are plural: very often the dialogue doesn’t sound like the way anyone speaks. In this course, we will read a few “classic” plays—to set the stage, so to speak. The heart of the course will involve the reading and analysis of contemporary American plays by Mac Wellman, Suzan-Lori Parks, Annie Baker, Julia Jarcho, Young Jean Lee, and others. |
| ENGLISH 15 | SCIENCE FICTION | FAN, C. | This course explores science fiction as a genre that reflects and critiques social and physical reality, from the relationship between humanity, nature, and technology, to linguistic determinism and political visions for the future. We will delve into themes such as utopias and dystopias, artificial intelligence, climate change, feminism, and post-apocalyptic futures. Each week introduces a new theme, pairing classic and contemporary readings with visual media to showcase diverse perspectives. Assigned texts might include fiction by Ursula K. Le Guin, Octavia Butler, William Gibson, Ted Chiang, Ken Liu, Sir Thomas More, Francis Bacon, and Paolo Bacigalupi, and films by Ridley Scott, Jennifer Phang, and Makoto Shinkai. |
| ENGLISH 16 | CRAFT OF POETRY | HANSON, D. | This class is a survey of contemporary American poetry. We will read and listen to a variety of poets, covering a wide range of topic, identity, and form. 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 on contemporary American poetry. |
| ENGLISH 100 | INTRO TO LIT THEORY | MCCLANAHAN, A. | This class will ask some of the big questions: What does the word “critical,” so often invoked in theory, really mean? What is culture—where does it come from and what does it do? What is identity and how do processes of racialization and gendering construct it? What is power, whether the power of the state or the power of money itself? And, finally, what is a university and why are we here? To answer these questions, we’ll read widely across the history of literary and critical theory, including canonical thinkers like Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Judith Butler, Frantz Fanon, Michel Foucault, Sigmund Freud, Immanuel Kant, Laura Mulvey, Jose Munoz, and Karl Marx. But I also want to persuade you that the project of “theory” isn’t just about abstract ideas written down by dead philosophers. It’s also about understanding the world around you—including your own experiences—in new ways. In this sense, the project of theory is never finished, but always urgent and ongoing. Thus we’ll also read a number of recent texts in the genre of “vernacular theory”: popular critics using theory to make widely readable arguments about everything from contemporary TV to sex and gender; from student debt to incarceration. These texts are also meant to provide models and inspiration for your own writing. If the project of theory is ongoing, its future is in your hands! |
| ENGLISH 101W | TRAGEDY | SILVER, V. | A course in western drama’s Ur-genre, tragedy, whose profound idea of the human condition affects the literature that succeeds its Greek origins in the sixth and fifth centuries BCE, and that, through Aristotle’s Poetics, shapes the assumptions of centuries of literary criticism. Tragedy makes use of a culture’s mythology to confront the existential discrepancy between an individual’s or community’s expectations and the different actualities it must confront—between our understanding of justice and right, reason and truth, and what experience teaches instead. To that extent, it explores humanity’s blindness—our incorrigible egotism—but also the species’ determination to carve out an identity in the face of an apparently senseless, implacable cosmos. The readings include plays by Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides; Dante’s Inferno; Shakespeare’s Macbeth and King Lear, as well as a contemporary Irish example by Marina Carr, The Bog of Cats. Writing requirements are two exams. |
| ENGLISH 101W | THE INTERPRETATION OF DREAMS | LEWIS,J. | Sigmund Freud famously described the creative writer as a “dreamer in broad daylight.” In this class, we’ll explore the intimate connections that have always existed between literary art and dreams, with special attention to the ways dreams are represented in literary texts. This opens all kinds of fascinating questions: What is a dream? Why do we dream? Where do dreams come from? How do they change over time and across cultures? How do they remain the same? Can they be trusted? And what, oh what, do they mean? Assuming that literary artists have special insight into these mysteries, we’ll look at various kinds and manifestations of dream life as they recur in literature: prophetic dreams; mystic visions; the gendering of dreams; shared dreams; ‘bad’ dreams and nightmares; lucid dreams; daydreams;; the dream as imagined future; the dream as political vision; the dream as repressed or forbidden material (Freud’s “royal road to the unconscious”); the dream as compensation for an inadequate reality; the dream as reality itself. Texts may include: Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (abridged!); The Book of Daniel; Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love (excerpts); Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream; Dickens, A Christmas Carol; Le Fanu, Carmilla; Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (excerpts); Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream Speech”; poems by Langston Hughes and Ocean Vuong; LeGuin, The Lathe of Heaven; Walker, The Dreamers. Requirements: two 5- to 7-page critical essays, the first revised; a dream journal; three short (and fun!) writing exercises; Week 10 presentation. |
| ENGLISH 101W | RACE AND REVISION | MONTERO ROMAN, V. | Full Title: Race and Revision: Latinx Creatives Rewriting History 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. In our class discussions, 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? In order to answer these questions, we might analyze texts as varied as: short stories by Maria Cristina Mena, fiction and nonfiction by Valeria Luiselli, the play and film version of Real Women Have Curves, and the web series and show Gentefied. Our course 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 participation activities, peer review activities, a personal narrative, a literary analysis, and an adaptation analysis. |
| ENGLISH 102A | RACE AND RELIGION IN EARLY MODERN ENGLAND | GRADY, K. | This course will explore how issues of race and religion were rendered in early modern English literature. Before England was a colonial power, it was beset by worries of infiltration by “others” both foreign and domestic. At the same time, it imagined a variety of ways of assimilating those “others.” In this course, we will read poetry and plays written by Thomas Dekker, Christopher Marlowe, George Peele, Philip Sidney, and William Shakespeare, examining how Elizabethan and Jacobean literature became a site for exploring assimilation and conversion, as well as one that fostered racism and religious intolerance. Along with situating their work in relevant historical context, this course will ask broader questions about racism, nationalism, and “multiculturalism” in our own moment. Coursework will likely include quizzes, reading responses, a final paper, and an exam. |
| ENGLISH 102B | EARLY BLACK ATLANTIC LITERATURES | MCCALL, S. | This course will examine slavery and abolition in eighteenth-century Anglophone Atlantic literatures. Throughout this course, we will study how early literatures of the Black Atlantic challenge our understanding of the Age of Reason. Our discussions will also explore how racial slavery influenced Atlantic World conceptualizations of revolution, consciousness, alterity, and self-determination. |
| ENGLISH 102C | VICTORIAN FIGURES OF TRANSGENDER | SPEER, M. | This course will examine how Victorian writers imagined gender and used gender-crossing aesthetically for various purposes. This course does not argue that this or that author or character was necessarily transgender, but rather that "trans" was a useful set of figures for literature of a period when men's and women's roles were very strictly delineated. We will also discuss 19th-Century histories of sexuality through medical and legal lenses as background to our literary study. |
| ENGLISH 102D | MODERNISMS STAGES | HARRIES, M. | Twentieth-century theater ranged from the plays of Henrik Ibsen, which many saw as one of the first blasts of a new movement in literature, to the exhausted landscapes of the plays of Samuel Beckett. New dramatic forms challenged older generic conventions. Plays represented exhilarating, if also frightening, possibilities of emancipation as well as situations where human autonomy seemed an empty remainder of earlier experience. Theater and theatricality supply not only examples of twentieth-century literature, however, but also a key concern of modernist writing and artistic production across genres and forms. Even as cinema rose steadily gained larger and larger audiences, the theater continued to fascinate artists. Theatricality provided a way to think about human authenticity in the context of alienated experience. Theatrical genres modeled the larger shape of history: as comedy, or as tragedy, as some mixture. This course will look examine examples of modernist theater as well as twentieth-century works in other forms that engage theater, drama, and theatricality. Readings will include: Henrik Ibsen, A Doll House and Hedda Gabler (two plays) Virginia Woolf, Between the Acts (a novel) Gertrude Stein, “Plays” (an essay about theater) Samuel Beckett, Endgame (a play) James Baldwin, Blues for Mister Charlie (a play) |
| ENGLISH 105 | SLAVE NARRATIVES AND THEIR AFTERLIVES | MCCALL, S. | This course will examine both the political and aesthetic dimensions of the slave narrative and its positioning within nineteenth-century print economics. We will also discuss the literary and cultural afterlives of slavery: the neo-slave narrative, films and documentaries depicting slavery, and writings by enslaved writers that have been recovered and authenticated over the last century and a half. |
| ENGLISH 105 | ASIAN AMERICAN DISABILITY STUDIES | LEE, J. | This course is cross-listed as ASIANAM 110. This course explores what happens when disabled bodyminds are centered and assumed as normative, especially within Asian American contexts. How does disability and its critical appraisal of normative assumptions challenge the hyperableism that undergird model minority formations in contemporary Asian American communities? This class refuses a medicalized, pathologized understanding of diversity in bodymind and instead insists that what are disabling are structures that demand ablebodied and ableminded performance. We will examine how a disability justice model offers new forms of storytelling, life making, and future imagining. |
| ENGLISH 105 | DEMOCRATIC & MINORITY DISCOURSE | RADHAKRISHNAN, R. | Is democracy the best game in town? Why and why not? Is it both the symptom and cure of our times? What is the relationship between popular sovereignty and democracy, between citizen rights and democracy? How are liberalism, the rule of the law, and democracy triangulated? Is democracy thinkable without the normativity of the nation state? What can we say about the linkages between democracy and identity politics, between democracy and the politics of representation, between democracy and multiculturalism, between democracy and the politics of recognition? How does democracy mediate between the need for distributive justice and the clamor for difference and heterogeneity? What are the different traditions of democracy and how do they mark and define “the political?” How is democratic hegemony different from other forms of control and organization? How do modernity and the democratic form of government constitute each other? How does democracy govern the relationship between East and West, between the so-called “First and Third” worlds; and how does it bear the symptomatic burden of a world that is structured in dominance? How does democracy name the human being as citizen and unpack her in terms of race, class, gender, and sexuality? Is democracy an ideology or is it a pure and neutral procedure? How do capitalism and democracy constitute each other? Most significantly, is democracy possible without an Us-Them divide, or a majority-minority divide? What is the tacit relationship among democracy, violence, and terror? These are a few of the questions (a few, I can hear the throaty agonized sigh) that we will be raising in this course by way of readings in political theory, philosophy, literature, sociology, critical race theory, postcoloniality, African-American Theory, Feminist theories and theories of gender and sexuality. Readings will be made available as pdfs in your Canvas files. Expectations and requirements: Regular attendance, and democratic participation. The class, depending on the size, will be a combination of lecture and freewheeling discussion. Likely assignments: 1short and 1long paper. LOOKING FORWARD TO SOME TOUGH COLLECTIVE THINKING. |
| ENGLISH 106 | RESTORATION LITERATURE & CULTURE | STEINTRAGER, J. | In 1660, Charles II returned to England as king after many years of exile. Puritanism was out; play going, partying, and philandering were in. We will look at the Restoration era (1680-1689) from several literary angles: witty and often obscene satirical poems by John Dryden and John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester; bawdy comedies such as Wycherley’s The Country Wife; novels depicting the sexual underworld of the nation’s capital such as The London Jilt; and diary entries from John Evelyn and Samuel Pepys, who chronicled epochal events such as the Great Fire of London in 1666 as well as everyday life of in a burgeoning global trade hub and market-driven cosmopolis. Seminar-style discussion with some informal lecturing to set the scene and to provide key background; grades mainly based on quizzes, short essays, active participation, and a final research paper. |
| ENGLISH 106 | RHETORICAL THEORY | GROSS, D. | This seminar is for students interested in the "rhetoric" side of English departments: its origin, its relationship to literary criticism and theory, and its viability for English majors after graduation. Readings move sequentially through these themes: Rhetorical Theory c. 1900 (Friedrich Nietzsche & Gertrude Buck); Roots of (African-American) Rhetorical Theory; Subjunctive Moods and Alternative Realities after Saidiya Hartman; Science Fiction Realism. The major theme of the seminar will be how rhetorical theory decenters human agency – what one critic calls the "anthroperiphery" – posing thereby a challenge to rhetoric as it is taught in schools, where human voice and agency are essential to writing instruction. All quarter students will work on a project that can be oriented toward literary studies per se, or toward rhetoric and writing studies. For students looking at graduate school, the goal may be something that can be used as an application writing sample. |
| ENGLISH 106 | TECHNO-ORIENTALISM | FAN, C. | Since the 1980s, Orientalism—stereotypical depictions of Asia and Asians—has been a preeminent aesthetic in science fiction. Ridley Scott’s 1982 film Blade Runner and William Gibson’s 1984 novel Neuromancer—both of which we will encounter in this course—are often identified as originators of this trend; but we’ll push back against that story. In this course, we’ll ask how this trend came about, and how Orientalism and science fiction have shifted in relation to each other. We’ll be especially interested in how these shifts have taken place along the lines of race, gender, sexuality, and work; and in what these shifts tell us about our relations to each of these topics. At no point will we lose sight of the historical contexts in which these developments have taken place: from the “Japan panic” of the 1970–1980s and the “China threat” discourse of the 1990s and today, to post-9/11 obsessions with Oriental terrorism and US-China interdependency and rivalry. Our questions will include: What are the different kinds of Orientalism that science fiction brings into relief? How have developments in geopolitics and political economy influenced Orientalist thinking and aesthetics, and vice-versa? Which Orientalist tropes have proven useful to culture producers and in public discourse at various historical moments, and why? |
| ENGLISH 205 | SHAKESPEARE | LUPTON, J. | ENROLLMENT IS RESTRICTED, FOR MASTER OF ENGLISH STUDENTS ONLY COURSE CODE: 23802, Tuesdays 6:00-8:50pm at HIB 341 In this course, we will read three plays by Shakespeare: Measure for Measure, All’s Well That Ends Well, and Antony and Cleopatra. Themes will include sex and gender; power and purpose; and the state and civil society. Our approaches will include mythology and iconography; dramaturgy and theater; and medical humanities. Students will write one shorter and one longer paper; lead class discussion once; and make a final presentation. |
| ENGLISH 205 | MOVEMENT AND STASIS: AMERICAN FICTION 1915 TO 1940 | DANNER, K. | ENROLLMENT IS RESTRICTED, FOR MASTER OF ENGLISH STUDENTS ONLY COURSE CODE: 23801 , Thursdays 6:00-8:50pm at HIB 341 Full Title: Movement & Stasis: American Fiction 1915 to 1940 Into the chaos of human desires, social upheaval, and the permanent fact of mortality, we shape stories. Narratives of motion – journeys, quests, picaresque adventures, and road trips— are common across cultures and find their place in American literary tradition. The first half of the 20th century is full of varieties of motion and upheaval: two World Wars, the Great Depression, the Great Migration, the development of Fordism, and the European descent into fascism. We will investigate how writers imagine both motion and stasis given these contexts. In the fiction we will read together, some characters move, but seemingly without purpose. Others migrate but remain fixed in a single psychological orbit. Still others ambit a limited geography but develop psychologically. Some leave the country; others never leave the house. What familial, social, or psychological drives shape these scenes of motion and stasis? How do these narratives imagine the benefits of movement, achieve goals, or evade ends? Eudora Welty, Jean Toomer, William Faulkner, Zora Neale Hurston, Djuna Barnes, Carson McCullers Weekly reading journal, 1 Presentation, and a Final Paper |
| ENGLISH 210 | GREATER MEXICAN FEM | TRIGOS, M. | COURSE CODE: 23840, Tuesdays 11:00-1:50pm at HIB 411 This course examines the overlap between the discourse of archival recovery in Latinx studies, Mexican and Chicanx feminisms, and theories of race and ethnicity. It considers several conceptualizations of Greater México in border and hemispheric contexts (perhaps Texas, California, New York, Cuba, and beyond) taking into account colonial and racial histories of the Americas. Focusing mostly on late 19th and 20th century texts, it doubles as an introduction to core concerns for the field of Latinx studies and an in-depth seminar for students with cemented interests in feminisms, archives, and racialization practices. |
| ENGLISH 210 | SEX SUBCUL & 18TH C | STEINTRAGER, J. | COURSE CODE: 23842, Wednesdays 9:00-11:50am at HIB 311 With the return of the monarchy in 1660 and an unabashedly lusty king as example, England and particularly London became the production site for an explosion of highly sexualized literature: comedies, poetry, and early novels. At the same time, the capital was home to a flourishing and multifaceted sex trade. In this seminar, we will consider: the importation of libertine literature from France and its adaptation to English political and social contexts. We will track the development of the sex trade in the capital through primarily literary examples, starting with the Restoration and ending roughly at the middle of the 18 th century. Along with a variety of anonymous erotic dialogues and the like, our readings will include Rochester’s poetry, Pepys’s diary, Wycherley’s comedy The Country Wife, Hogarth’s prints, and Cleland’s Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure and related works. |
| ENGLISH 210 | RACIAL MIXING/DEMO | GRADY, K. | COURSE CODE:23845, Mondays 2:00-4:50pm at HIB 341 This seminar examines mixed race identity as it is engaged in early modern English literature and culture, including in a number of Shakespeare’s plays. We will focus in particular on mixedness involving Afro-descent, but a range of different identity formations will also be part of our discussion. These representations offer a launch point to explore early modern racial constructs as well as their enduring colonial cognates, especially as they are deployed in the US. As such, we will read literary and historical analysis examining race in both historical and more contemporary terms. Some of our key areas of investigation will include: interstitial identity and its relationship to settler colonial racial categories and hierarchies; racemaking and settler colonial demographics; and the development of heritage based slavery and racial inheritance broadly. |
| ENGLISH 210 | RADICAL PEDAGOGY | ALEXANDER, J. | COURSE CODE:23846, Thursdays 2:00-4:50pm at HIB 411 Radical Pedagogy seems like a contradiction, especially if we understand “pedagogy” as the formation of subjects to adapt to particular and prescribed courses of study and “radical” as a far-reaching calling into question of prescription, especially modalities of adaptation to normative or existing structures. Fortunately, both “pedagogy” and “radical” are flexible and mobile terms, allowing us to think them generatively together. And when we do think them together, we can approach a variety of pressing questions: What are the limits of education and pedagogy for exploring issues of vital human concern? How does a “radical” approach to pedagogy allow us to critique and reimagine what humanistic education might be? At a time of chaos and uncertainty, how can humanistic pedagogies approach the limits of the thinkable, of what is possible for the human – and then try to go beyond those limits? This course takes seriously the history of thinking pedagogy and radicality together within the humanities, from John Dewey’s thoughts on the intertwining of democracy and education to the countercultural challenges to education in the 1960s to ongoing (and intensifying) culture wars today. To probe these histories and understand the roles – and possibilities – of humanistic education, we will read, discuss, and debate work by Michel Foucault, Aldous Huxley, Jacques Rancière, Pierre Bourdieu, Paulo Freire, Augusto Boal, M. Jacqui Alexander, bell hooks, Mimi Khúc, Fred Moten, amongst others. |