| Course | Title | Instructor | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
| ENGLISH H83 | WHAT'S A UNIVERSITY | MCCLANAHAN, A. | |
| ENGLISH 8 | MULTICULT AMER LIT | MONTERO ROMAN, V. | 20th Ct. Multicultural American Women’s Lit 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. Here are a couple of our driving course questions: • 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? Class assignments will likely include participation/attendance, quizzes, a midterm, and a final. |
| ENGLISH 10 | ASIAN AMERICAN LIT | FAN, C. | This course examines key works in Asian American literature, film, and political critique, as well as key moments in Asian American history. |
| ENGLISH 10 | LIT IN THE LAB | STREITFELD, S. | English 10 – Literature in the Lab Scottie Alexander Streitfeld, Ph.D. This course examines approximately four centuries of interactions between literature and science, with a particular focus on experimentation in controlled settings. Defined in spatial and procedural terms, the laboratory describes a diverse set of observational practices, technologies, social relations, and other ways of demarcating humans’ relationship to nature, cultures, and ecologies. We will read texts by poets, novelists, and scientists (in some cases, these jobs will be held by the same individuals). Throughout our class we will ask, what kinds of experiments can be done on literature, and what does it mean to think of a text as experimental? Our first unit considers experimentation as a set of methods in science and literature. In our second unit, we’ll consider the work of literary realists and naturalists whose efforts to document their world by sorting it into categories and types. As we move into the Twentieth Century, we’ll examine the shift toward technological, industrial, and nationalist expansions of science into large-scale projects, particularly in the U.S. context. For our final unit, we’ll examine a selection of texts interested in interactions between writing and technology, including amanuensis, automatic writing, and experiments with computer-generated writing prior to our current post-AI moment. Alongside these texts, we’ll consider recent debates and contexts in the digital humanities, and consider emerging scholarship on generative AI in relation to the texts that predicted and analyzed the implications of these technologies. Grade Structure Midterm: 40% Final: 45% Labs: 15% Lab Days: In addition to a midterm and final, we will hold two “lab days.” Completion of these activities will be part of your overall course grade, along with your midterm and final exam. All lab days will require three components to receive full credit: a completed lab preparation activity, attendance on the date of the lab activity, and a completed lab report or reflection. Lab activities will be held in class (at the location, date, and time of our normal class) on the dates scheduled. All lab prep and report activities will be assigned on Canvas, and will be marked on a rubric available prior to assessment. Required Texts: Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, Norton Critical Edition (ISBN-13: 978-0393644029) Henry James, Tales of Henry James, Norton Critical Edition (ISBN-13: 978-0393977103) H.G. Wells, The Island of Dr. Moreau, Norton Critical Edition (ISBN-13: 978-0393920154) Leonard Nimoy, dir. Star Trek IV: The Journey Home (Rent or view on a streaming platform of your choice) Schedule of Readings, Labs, and Exams Unit 1: Experiment – Weeks 1-3 Primary: • Shelley, Frankenstein (1818) Secondary: • Galileo, Siderius Nuncius (1610) (very short selection) • Bacon, New Atlantis (1626) (short selections) • Arnold, “Literature and Science” (1882) (selection) (2 pg.) • Shapin, from the Introduction to The Scientific Revolution (2-3pg) Week 3 Lab: Narrative Structure: Diagramming Frankenstein Unit 2: Taxonomy – Weeks 4-5 Primary • Melville, “Cetology” from Moby Dick (1848) (10 pgs. in the Norton ed.) • Wells, The Island of Dr. Moreau (1887) • Crane, “The Open Boat” (1897) Secondary: • Darwin, selection from On the Origin of Species (in Wells, Norton edition) • James, “The Art of Fiction” (1884) • Zola, “The Experimental Novel” (1897) • Ellis, selections from Studies in the Psychology of Sex, vol 2, (1897) • Wilde, “The Decay of Lying” (1891) Midterm Unit 3: Enterprise – Weeks 6-7 Primary: • Whitman, “I Sing the Body Electric” (1855) (5 pgs.) • James, “In The Cage” (1899) (80 pgs.) • Forster, “The Machine Stops” (1909) (30 pgs.) • Nimoy, Star Trek IV: The Journey Home (1986) Secondary: • Fredrick Winslow Taylor, “Principles of Scientific Management” (1911) • Daston and Gallison, “Mechanical Objectivity” (short selection) from Objectivity (2009) • Kuhn, “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions” (short selection) Week 7 Lab: Docuscope Analysis of Student-Generated Corpus Unit 4: Automation – Weeks 8-10 Primary: • Melville, “Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street” (1853) • Stein, short selections from multiple texts • Borges, “The Garden of Forking Paths” (1941) • Lem, “The First Sally (A), or Trurl’s Electronic Bard” (trans. Michael Kandel, 1973) • Balestrini, “Tape Mark 1” (1961) Secondary: • Gitelman, “A Short History of _________” from Paper Knowledge: Toward a Media History of Documents (2014) • Slater, “Post-Automation Poetics: ; or, How Cold-War Computers Discovered Poetry,” American Literature (2024) |
| ENGLISH 10 | NOVEL AS SOC THEORY | MCCLANAHAN, A. | |
| ENGLISH 15 | SATIRE | STEINTRAGER, J. | |
| ENGLISH 15 | FEMINIST NARRATIVE | MONTERO ROMAN, V. | Feminist Narrative Theory This course offers an introduction to feminist 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 main goal for this course is to explore narratology (the study of narrative and narrative structures) as a method for literary analysis, but our primary sources for the class will be texts written by early 20th century U.S. women authors like Maria Cristina Mena, Jean Rhys, Nella Larsen, Edith Eaton, and Gwendolyn Bennett. Class assignments will likely include participation/attendance, a midterm, and a final. |
| ENGLISH 16 | CRAFT OF POETRY | YOUN, M. | |
| ENGLISH 17 | CRAFT OF FICTION | KMETZ-CUTRONE, J. | |
| ENGLISH 100 | INTRO TO LIT THEORY | MCCALL, S. | |
| ENGLISH 101W | POLITICS OF ROMANCE | MATTHEWS, R. | Medieval romance has always been defined by the expression of both love and arms, but it can also be defined by its relation to politics, that is, where love and its understanding of the world and its hierarchies become associated with the polis, that is, the city or court. In this writing course, we’re going to explore the politics of chivalric romances by reading some exciting and innovative romances of the twelfth century and fifteenth century, as well as a series of love poems that were suddenly politicized when they reappear in little narratives on the life of poets. They also tell us a lot about the writing process. The class will include two papers (one a creative option), group power point and portfolio. |
| ENGLISH 101W | ERLY MOD ENCOUNTERS | GRADY, K. | E101W: Early Modern Encounters Before early modern England became a colonial power, it engaged in a period of broad exploration that brought it into contact with places as geographically distant as South East Asia. These encounters could be cooperative, like when England attempted to form an alliance with Morocco, but they could also rehearse some of the most abhorrent practices associated with English colonialism, as when Elizabeth I sanctioned early transatlantic slaving voyages. This course will examine this moment in England’s relationship with the world through dramatic texts and travel narratives from the period. It will consider the conditions that encouraged intercultural collaboration and those that engendered colonial violence, focusing in particular on how England’s shifting approach to peoples and places it considered different were represented on the early modern English stage. |
| ENGLISH 101W | SHORT STORIES | TUCKER, I. | Short Stories – This course invites students to learn to read short fiction closely, and to explore the connections between these practices of close-reading and the history of the genre and its institutions. We will also use this exploration of the evolution of the short story as an opportunity to develop from the ground up your own practices of critical and analytical writing, moving from thesis-writing to outlining to drafting and revising. We will begin by exploring the form’s origins by way of the work of some of its earliest nineteenth-century practitioners – Poe, Melville, Tolstoy – and will make our way through an idiosyncratic history of the form in its twentieth-century forms, turning to writers ranging from Franz Kafka to Flannery O’Connor, Raymond Carver, Alice Munro and short-short story writers like Aimee Bender and Etgar Keret. We will also read some reflections on the form by both critics and practitioners, and think through a range of practices of analytical contextualizing. What do we notice when we read two short stories in relation to one another? When we take an author’s personal biography into account? We will end by viewing the 1995 film Daytrippers, attempting to figure out what, besides length, might make a film “short-story-like.” |
| ENGLISH 102A | JUSTICE&MERCYMEDL | ALLEN, E. | E102A Justice and Mercy in Middle English Literature Medieval England was not a society of quiet hierarchies – it experienced outbreaks of plague, religious dispute, factional conflict, and political protest. Medieval people suffered the effects of social injustice, and they thought searchingly about how to find refuge in a world of crisis, asking crucial questions about the nature of justice and mercy. What was justice in the medieval world? Who deserved just rewards – and just punishments? Was justice found in the law? What if laws themselves were unjust – and what if mercy or mitigation was called for? What kind of justice was to be found in the workings of Christian divinity? How did justice mesh with divine mercy, or grace? We will explore satires about the greed of the rich, the laziness of the poor, and the self-interest of church authorities – a kind of protest literature. We will also read devotional poems imagining spiritual error can be met with faith in generous divine grace. Finally, we will explore romance fantasies of magical bonds that bring stability and satisfaction to worldly existence. Each of these traditions has its own patterns for seeking to right political wrongs, call out corruption, or resolve economic injustice; each tradition tries, in its own way, to imagine human and divine mercy. Assignments may include a hand-written journal, short close readings and responses, one longer paper, and an in-class exam. |
| ENGLISH 102B | VIRTUES & VICES | LEWIS, J. | “Ev’ry Part was full of Vice/Yet the whole Mass a Paradise,” wrote the English satirist Bernard Mandeville in 1705. Sound familiar? Mandeville’s subtitle, Private Vices, Public Benefits, captured the moral contradictions that ruled his 18th-century English society—contradictions we find in today’s US, many of whose moral and political roots lie in the 18th century. In no other culture do we find more of an obsession with gambling, drinking, debauchery, and crime . . . or more of a fascination with honor, integrity, and, simply, ‘being good.’ The literature we will read in this course (all of it written between 1660 and 1776, the start point of the American Revolution) explores these moral extremes; it was written at a time when human virtue and human vices were no longer understood in terms of sin and piety but rather looked like aspects of personal character interacting with social habits and conventions, all increasingly dictated by capitalism and its new definitions of what counts as virtue. In this class, you’ll meet saintly sex workers and determined virgins, liars and truthtellers, thieves and preachers, rakes and pilgrims, ruling-class coquettes and one so-called “royal slave.” The big picture? A rambunctious human scene brimming with hedonism and hypocrisy where literature’s ambivalent power both to correct and to seduce, to moralize and to make mischief, gives it an important role to play. The reading list mixes Rochester’s naughty libertine lyrics with the austerities of Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress; Wycherley’s raunchy comedy The Country Wife with Behn’s heroic Oroonoko; and Pope’s witty, wicked take on female vanity in The Rape of the Lock with Pamela, Richardson’s controversial novel of “virtue rewarded.” Requirements: a quarter-long “commonplace book” (a journal of your responses to the reading); 5-page ‘companion piece’ essay pairing two works; memorization and recitation of at least one literary passage; several unannounced in-class quizzes. |
| ENGLISH 102C | SLAVERY&AGE OF REVO | MCCALL, S. | In this course we will study the Age of Revolution (1770-1850) from below. We will explore the ways in which transatlantic antislavery and anticolonial thinking both invigorated and challenged the political and intellectual energies of the American and French Revolutions. |
| ENGLISH 102D | MIGRATION IN AF AM | MORGAN, C. | |
| ENGLISH 103 | UTOPIA EARLY SCI FI | VAN DEN ABBEEL, G. | English 103: Utopia and Early Science Fiction The genre of utopia as the predecessor genre to science fiction 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 as they emerge in the early modern imagination as it seeks to conjugate fiction with science. Subsequent readings to include Bacon, Montaigne, de Bergerac, Godwin, Cavendish and Swift. In addition to the readings and active class discussion, students will be expected to write two papers, keep a journal of ideas, and give an oral presentation on material related to the course. |
| ENGLISH 105 | MIXED RACE AFAM LIT | GRADY, K. | E105: Mixed Race Lit in the African American Tradition This course will explore how mixed race identity is represented in literature, politics, and popular culture in the context of the United States. It will focus in particular on mixedness as it relates to African American identity. We will examine a range of texts and historical periods, from the 16th century into the contemporary moment. Throughout, we will try to reconcile popular fantasies about racial mixing with its diurnal and historical realities. |
| ENGLISH 105 | BORDERLANDS LIT | TRIGOS, M. | Borderlands literatures: This course is a multi-racial approach to borderlands literatures since the 1900s. We will consider theories of the border, and although we will primarily read literature from the U.S. Mexico Borderlands, we will also consider borderlands of a different nature (the nation as a borderland, oceanic borderlands, etc). Potential authors include Lorgia García Peña, Ana Castillo, Gloria Anzaldúa, and Javier Zamora. We will center close reading methodologies during class and for assignments. |
| ENGLISH 106 | MODERN ELEGY | IZENBERG, O. | Does grief have a form? Can mourning be done well, or badly, or even beautifully? In this course, we’ll study the strange meeting place of loss and art, the poetic Elegy. We’ll begin with some ancient examples of the attempt to give voice to the unavoidable reality of mortality, and trace the way that a formless fact becomes a genre, one that can take in any or all of the many things we can mourn: a beloved individual, an abstract idea, or even a people. The second half of the course will be devoted to modern elegies—to the ways poets close to us in history, or even our contemporaries, have wrestled with the expression of grief. Authors might include: Virgil, John Milton, Walt Whitman, Thomas Hardy, W.B. Yeats, Patricia Smith, Anne Carson, Susan Howe. |
| ENGLISH 106 | HEMISPHERIC DESIRES | TRIGOS, M. | Hemispheric Desires This course analyzes theories and representations of desire across literatures of the Americas. Authors we read might include Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Jovita González, Samuel Delaney, Toni Morrison, Clarice Lispector, and Pablo Neruda. Students will have the opportunity to nuance their approach to close reading (to both primary and secondary texts) through in-class assignments. We will approach research-paper writing as a series of discrete steps throughout the quarter. |
| ENGLISH 106 | END TIMES? | HELFER, R. | Is this The End? We’ll take a past-to-present journey through writing that explores this perennial question, considering the relationship between art and apocalypse from a wide range of perspectives: historical, social, political, rhetorical, psychological, religious, ecological, as well as aesthetic. Our course will take us from the Gospel of St. John to St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven, from classical to contemporary writing about how the ever-‘present moment’ speaks to both the future and the past: how the sense of an ending shapes these writers’ views of time – both the ‘here and now’ and the ‘hereafter’, as broadly conceived – and how such endings inspire them to imagine beginning again in a new world, as well as the role of art in this renewal. |
| ENGLISH 106 | CANTERBURY TALES | ALLEN, E. | E106 Chaucer Canterbury Tales Late fourteenth-century England saw great social turmoil. Plague wiped out a third of the population; peasants and artisans rose against aristocracy; the King struggled to retain authority and was eventually deposed; the Church was divided against itself. Out of this social unrest came Chaucer's Canterbury Tales—a new kind of poetry for a rapidly changing audience. Thirty pilgrims tell stories to pass the time en route to Canterbury Cathedral, and along the way they encounter the problems raised and satisfactions achieved in forming a socially various community. The work creates a lively microcosm of the turbulent late medieval world, complete with a cook so drunk he falls off his horse and a parson so virtuous he won’t tell a story. In this context of crisis, the General Prologue depicts storytelling as a way of constituting a community. How does the Canterbury pilgrimage highlight medieval status identities? To what extent do the pilgrims and their tales reaffirm gender norms? To what extent do they confirm or question the power of those who rule? We will read many of the Canterbury Tales, from the Knight’s Tale to the Retraction. As we read the Tales, we will also ask about the tellers and the settings they choose. Which pilgrims tell which sorts of tales? To what extent do tales ‘match’ their tellers? How do the storyteller, the genre, and the setting of a tale affect what the tale can say about status, gender, rule, or other social issues? Assignments may include a hand-written journal, language exercises, informal writing exercises, two short papers and one long paper. |
| ENGLISH 198 | SPECIAL TOPICS | STAFF | |
| ENGLISH 198 | SPECIAL TOPICS | STAFF | |
| ENGLISH 198 | SPECIAL TOPICS | STAFF | |
| ENGLISH 199 | INDEPENDENT STUDY | STAFF | |
| ENGLISH 199 | INDEPENDENT STUDY | STAFF | |
| ENGLISH 199 | INDEPENDENT STUDY | STAFF | |
| ENGLISH 199 | INDEPENDENT STUDY | STAFF | |
| ENGLISH 199 | INDEPENDENT STUDY | STAFF | |
| ENGLISH 199 | INDEPENDENT STUDY | ALLEN, E. | |
| ENGLISH 205 | YOUNG ADULT FICTION | ALEXANDER, J. | Open to MA of English students only. Young Adult Fiction provides an historical survey of the development of fiction for "young people," beginning with the late-18th/early 19th-century emergence of the bildungsroman, through the creation at the end of the 19th century of the concept of adolescence, and into the increasing spread of "youth" as a marketable category throughout the 20th/early 21st centuries. Throughout, we will track how conceptualizations of youth have historically shaped literary forms of writing for young people — and how those forms have in turn shaped social and political consciousness about young adults and their needs, desires, interests, and possibilities. |
| ENGLISH 205 | 20TH CENT AFAM LIT | MORGAN, C. | Only open to students in the MA of English program. Alienation: Wow! How profoundly rich, allegorically vital and sovereign, literarily rejuvenating and affirmative it is to be alienated, whereas literal and empirical alienation is nothing short of devastation, disempowerment, marginalization, and annihilation. There you have it: the double template of alienation, and our collective endeavor this quarter is to plumb the abject depths of alienation, as existential symptom and aesthetic performance. The fact of the matter is that “alienation” has been, in the West, from the late 19th century onwards, a powerful and abiding theme and motor of so much literary and cultural creativity: alienation of the individual from herself, from society, the alienation of the I from the We, from the nation, from God, from Nature. The alienation of Labor by Capital (Marxism), existential and metaphysical alienation (Fyodor Dostoevsky, Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus), alienation by way of War (Virginia Woolf), death of God and religion and cultural alienation (T.S. Eliot), psychological alienation and the alienation of Self from Other (psychoanalysis), alienation by Racism and Slavery (Du Bois, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin), alienation by Colonialism (Fanon, Tsitsi Dangarembga), alienation via Patriarchy and Sexism (Virginia Woolf, Adrienne Rich, and bell hooks). As we make our way through a range of poignant and powerful texts (poems, fiction, theory), we will seek to identify and recognize the many faces and profiles of alienation. How does alienation, as a context of crisis, become the basis for a deep, systemic and “critical’ understanding of what ails the human condition? How does literary/aesthetic form cope with the shattering negativity of alienation, and give it meaningful shape? What does “meaning” mean during times of crisis? Is language alienated from meaning, and if yes, how does literature deal with the “waste land” of Existence? What are the geopolitical parameters of alienation and how is one form of alienation to be parsed relationally with reference to another and different form of alienation? Is alienation Eurocentric, colonial, global, universal? How does alienation bridge or aggravate the gaps between Ethics, Politics, Economics, Ontology, and Philosophy? Is alienation primarily economic, political, or philosophical? Commodification/reification/objectification/alienation: what are the connections, the interlinks? Are there two kinds of alienation: one with a lower case “a,” that has a political cure and an economic answer, and the other, with a capital A that is inevitably and necessarily chronic? Just a few straightforward questions, that is all. And we will be raising these not alone, but in solidarity. |
| ENGLISH 206 | RESEARCH & WRITING | SZALAY, M. | |
| ENGLISH 210 | REALISM CORE/PERIPH | FAN, C. | |
| ENGLISH 210 | POSTMODERNISM | MARTIN, T. | This course will offer a survey of American postmodernism—an aesthetic concept that remains notoriously tricky to define even as it has become a standard way of describing the literary history of the late twentieth century. Specifically, we’ll track the rise and fall of the postmodern novel from the early 1960s to the late 1990s, contextualizing its modes of formal experimentation (pastiche, hybridity, metafiction, and more) in relation to the era’s cultural, political, and economic developments. While offering you an essential introduction to a major literary period, this course will double as a reflection on the uses of periodization as a critical practice. The key figure who brings these two course aims together is, of course, the late Fredric Jameson, whose work we’ll read as both a foundational effort to define postmodernism and a career-long demonstration of the indispensability of periodization. Our primary novelists will include most (if not all) of the following: Thomas Pynchon, Ishmael Reed, Toni Morrison, Theresa Cha, Don DeLillo, Charles Johnson, Karen Tei Yamashita, and Colson Whitehead. |
| ENGLISH 210 | EARLY MODERN POETRY | HELFER, R. | Love is a many-splendored thing in Renaissance sonnet sequences, and this course will explore the complex uses of the language of love in these 14 line poems. Beginning with the premise that, as Shakespeare writes, “love is not love” (or not just love, at any rate), this class will examine how the sonnet’s discourse of desire depicts the relation between the self and the world, the secular and the divine, the past and the present. We’ll explore how the sonnet's labile language of love speaks to issues of authorship and authority, gender and sexuality, history and memory, power and nationhood, considering continental sonneteers (Petrarch and more) and their influence on English sonnet sequences.. |
| ENGLISH 210 | MODERNISM& THE ARTS | MILLER, T. | Modernism and the Arts The seminar focuses on the parallel development of modernist literature, visual arts, and art criticism / aesthetics in the period from the latter half of the 19th century to the early 20th century in Great Britain. Topics include the role of periodicals and presses such as the pre-Raphaelite The Germ, the aestheticist Yellow Book, the vorticist Blast and The Tyro, the early cinema journal Close-Up and the Hogarth and Seizin Presses as institutions of avant-garde groupings and intermedial exchange; the interactions of visual and literary arts in inspiring new modernist forms; modernist critical and aesthetic theoretical discourses from aesthetic impressionism to post-impressionist formalism to avant-garde aesthetics; and the emergence of experimental film theory and practice within the British avant-garde. Figures discussed include the pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, John Ruskin, Augustus Pugin, Walter Pater, Roger Fry, Virginia Woolf, Vanessa Bell, Wyndham Lewis, Ezra Pound, Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, Laura Riding, Len Lye, H.D., and Bryher. |
| ENGLISH 210 | MODERNIST POETRY | IZENBERG, O. | The Modernist Poem As Action While we often regard poems as objects—describing their form or shape or structure—poets, especially modern poets, have been at least as concerned to think about poesis—making— as an action. A poem is a “field of action” (W.C. Williams); making one is a feat 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 implausible claim that poetry “makes nothing happen.” The scope of poetic action most likely falls somewhere between “all" and “nothing.” But the question remains: How will we understand the relation between the purposive action that goes into the making of a poem—“decisions and revisions,” the poet’s laborious, intense, minute working with sound, pattern, sense—and the large scale actions that are supposed take place by means of a poem: persuasion, conversion, resistance, revolution? As Amiri Baraka puts in in “Black Art”—“We want “poems that kill.”” In this class, we will consider a number of (mostly) twentieth-century poems as presenting paradigmatic problems of 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; itself absolutely central to modern thought. These poems, and the theory we will read alongside them, are occasions for thinking about a striking and fundamental problem in modern and contemporary life: Actions take the “first person.” They are initiated in the intending mind and executed by a composing hand. And yet they matter (if they matter) in the third person—in the domain of effects beyond those that any mind can plausibly be said to contain. Or, as T.S. Eliot puts it, in “The Hollow Men” Between the conception And the creation Between the emotion And the response Falls the Shadow |
| 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 | STAFF | |
| ENGLISH 290 | READING&CONFERENCE | STAFF | |
| ENGLISH 291 | GUIDED READING | STAFF | |
| ENGLISH 291 | GUIDED READING | STAFF | |
| ENGLISH 291 | GUIDED READING | STAFF | |
| ENGLISH 299 | DISSERTATN RESEARCH | STAFF | |
| ENGLISH 399 | UNIVERSITY TEACHING | STAFF | |
| ENGLISH 399 | UNIVERSITY TEACHING | STAFF | |
| ENGLISH 399 | UNIVERSITY TEACHING | STAFF | |
| ENGLISH 399 | UNIVERSITY TEACHING | STAFF | |
| ENGLISH 399 | UNIVERSITY TEACHING | STAFF | |
| ENGLISH 399 | UNIVERSITY TEACHING | STAFF |