| English 140A | Fools for Love: Chaucer's Canterbury Tales Chaucer: Canterbury Tales |
Prof. Kat Lecky |
| This course looks at a common theme found all too often in everyday life, as well as in Geoffrey Chaucer's writing: the disappointments of love. Throughout The Canterbury Tales, the consistent message emerges that love in all its forms (eros, philia, storge, and agape) will mislead and ultimately destroy the unwary. In some of Chaucer's tales, the consequences are laughable; in others, they are heart-wrenching or downright spine-chilling; some denounce the perfidy of women, while others delve into men's propensity to stray; but always, they contain cogent messages for his readers that still speak to us today. During the term, we analyze a number of his works grounded in this theme of the folly of love in order to understand why we still study—and enjoy—this archaic medieval work. We tackle these tales in the original Middle English in which Chaucer wrote. We will proceed slowly at first, and incorporate many instances of in-class close reading in both small groups and as a class. |
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| English 141 |
Early Medieval Literature | Prof. Eric Jager |
| Major prose and poetry of Anglo-Saxon England (600 to 1100), including epic, romance, history, saints’ lives, and travel literature. Texts and topics include Beowulf, Vikings, poems by/about women, Bede, and King Alfred. |
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| English 144 |
The Politics of Later Medieval English Poetry
Medieval Romance and Literatures of the Court |
Prof. Matthew Fisher |
| This course will explore the extraordinary development of Middle English literature written during the reigns of Richard II and Henry IV (c. 1377 – 1413). We will read the works of Chaucer, Gower, Lydgate, and Hoccleve (amongst others) against the dramatic political backdrop of the period: the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, the rise of Lollardy, the deposition of Richard, and the consolidation of the Lancastrian dynasty. In addition to Middle English poetry connected to or depicting the royal court, we will also consider primary and secondary accounts of the history of the English court, its political intrigues, and its discontents. The majority of the readings for the course will be in Middle English, and there will be extensive supplementary readings in Modern English translation. |
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| English 145 |
Orthodoxy, Heterodoxy, and Heresy in Middle English Literature Medieval Literatures of Devotion and Dissent |
Prof. Matthew Fisher |
| Orthodoxy, heterodoxy, and heresy are not fixed terms. This course will explore the ways in which medieval English literature navigated and debated the troubling (and sometimes nearly fatal) lines between them, and attempted to make sense of the self as embedded in competing political and religious discourses. Texts will include selections from the South English Legendary, Pearl, Saint Erkenwald, Piers Plowman, Lollard and Wycliffite texts and dialogues, Julian of Norwich’s Revelations of Divine Love, and The Book of Margery Kempe. Readings for the course will be in Middle English. |
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| English 150A |
Shakespeare: Poems and Early Plays |
Prof. Karen Cunningham |
| Today, an invocation of Shakespeare brings with it considerable literary, academic, cultural, and political power and conflict. In order to understand some of the roots of this long-standing and current significance, this course emphasizes the relationships among the author's Elizabethan writings and significant intellectual, cultural, and political developments of the era. Who is this apprentice playwright? What models does he find compelling in his early career? What literary path does he carve out from his early Romanesque comedies to the revenge-filled dream of Hamlet? This course will examine a selection of Shakespeare's early plays and poems from multiple perspectives in order to develop a sense of the many ways in which these works have become meaningful as artifacts of English Renaissance culture, as examples of brilliant literary work, and as prompts for thought in a variety of fields. As we discuss conceptions of character, broad themes, conventions of verse and genre, and conditions of staging, we will necessarily glance at such issues as gender, economics, and law in the society in which the playwright lived. Probable texts: The Comedy of Errors, Romeo and Juliet, The Merchant of Venice, 1 Henry IV, Hamlet; selected sonnets; The Rape of Lucrece. |
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| English 150B |
Shakespeare: Later Plays |
Prof. Stephen Dickey |
| Intensive study of representative problem plays, major tragedies, Roman plays, and romances. |
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| English 150C |
Shakespeare’s Tragedies
Topics in Shakespeare
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Prof. Arthur Little |
| This course introduces students to or advances students’ study of Shakespeare by focusing exclusively on Shakespeare’s tragedies. Along the way students will be asked to think about various ways we may think about what tragedy performs aesthetically, philosophically, historically, politically, etc. Among the possible plays for discussion are Titus Andronicus, Julius Caesar, Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth, and Coriolanus. Students may be asked to supplement their thinking about tragedy (with professor’s guidance of course) by familiarizing themselves with some of the following writers and theater practitioners: Aristotle, Sidney, Nietzsche, Brecht, Miller, Artaud, Grotowski, and Boal. |
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| English 151 |
Milton | Prof. Jonathan Post |
| This class will focus on Milton's poetry and politics, politics including not just urgent matters of censorship, divorce, and tyranny, but also the vexed relationship between God and Satan, and perfect woman and perfect man, as figured in the greatest long poem in English, Paradise Lost. Most of the course will be devoted to reading closely this gorgeously exhilarating epic. Some attention will also be paid to visualizing the biblical traditions on which the poem is based—paintings by Michelangelo, for instance—and those it inspired, such as William Blake's illustrations. Among topics to be considered: beauty, sex, violence, the origins of evil (Satan), revenge, goodness, and poetry. Since Paradise Lost is largely concerned with the relationship between the first man (Adam) and the first woman (Eve), a gender difference stemming from Genesis and inculcated through much of Western literature and thought, the class will also, inevitably, concentrate on matters involving the origin and representation of gender difference. |
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| English 155 |
Gender and Renaissance Drama Renaissance Subjects |
Prof. Karen Cunningham |
| How did the early modern English theater stage the culture's complex, unstable notions of gender? What's at stake for this generation of English playwrights in representing gender identities—femaleness and maleness and ambiguous roles in between—in the ways that they do and in circulating those representations in the wider popular culture? This course will focus on a range of plays by dramatists of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries (including but not focused on Shakespeare) to develop ideas about the Renaissance investment in constructing gender according to particular political, social, domestic, and intellectual goals. What does the association of domesticity, business, or violence with femininity or masculinity tell us about early modern notions of selfhood and sexuality in general and about the theatre in particular? What might be the significance for the theatre of such writings as the anonymous pamphlets "Hic Mulier; or the Man-woman" and "Haec Vir; or the Womanish man," both of which contended that a woman or man who dressed as her or his sexual opposite (in life or on stage) risked becoming what she or he wore? What do the theatre's developing ideas of performance and performativity contribute to the culture's developing ideas of the elusive nature of gender identifies and selfhood? Including works by such playwrights as Christopher Marlowe, Elizabeth Cary, John Webster, Shakespeare, and others, this course tangles with the ways Renaissance English plays construct perceptions of maleness and femaleness, and asks what the aesthetic, social, and ideological implications of these perceptions might be in their own day and in the centuries that follow. |
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| English 157 |
The Ancient Foundations of Modernity: Renaissance Translations from the Classics Translation and Innovation in the English Renaissance/Early Modern Period |
Prof. Debora Shuger |
| Until the late 19th century (and to some extent into the mid-20th), Greco-Roman texts written between 750 BC and ca 200 AD dominated the curriculum from grade school through college in both England and America. These are works of extraordinary importance (e.g., the checks-and-balances structure of the American constitution comes from the 1st century BC Greek historian, Polybius), and also of extraordinary beauty, variety, and intelligence. The course focuses on English Renaissance translations of the classics because the Renaissance was the rebirth (the re-naissance) of classical learning and literature, and one of the topics will be the translation of ancient texts into early modern cultural contexts, but the class also provides a general introduction to the classical underpinnings of English literature. Readings include selections from Homer, Ovid, Cicero, Pliny, Plutarch, Hesiod, Xenophon on topics as far-flung as love, duty, sex, science, and empire. |
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| English 166A |
Colonial Beginnings of American Literature |
Prof. Michael Colacurcio |
| After a brief look at the literature of discovery and exploration, a close encounter with the writings of the English colonists of North America, including their encounter with the native population, who speak in their tests but do not produce a full-fledged literature in response to the invasion of Europeans. For reasons that will appear, the heavy emphasis falls on the literature of Puritan New England: Bradford, Shepard, Winthrop, Bradstreet, Taylor, Edwards. But the distinct voice of Quaker Pennsylvania is well heard at the end: Ashbridge, Woolman, Franklin, Crevecoeur. Some emphasis on early American writing as predictive of later literary interests; but more on the colonial product itself—as history, journal, autobiography, and meditative poetry record (invent?) the origins of a derivative culture seeking originality. |
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LITERATURES IN ENGLISH 1700-1850
| English 161C |
The Rise of the Novel The Novel in English to 1850 |
Prof. Sarah Kareem |
| What defines the novel as a genre, and how does it relate to literary categories such as realism, fiction, and romance? In pursuing this question, students will become familiar with various forms of the novel including the epistolary, sentimental, and gothic novel, and the novel of manners. We will also investigate the history of the novel’s development, specifically, the genre’s rise to prominence in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Special attention will be paid to debates in the period over the pleasures and dangers of novel reading. Topics for discussion will include the role of the individual within the novel, the relationship between the probable and the marvelous, and the nature of readers’ identification with novelistic characters. |
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| English 163A |
Romanticism and Revolution |
Prof. Saree Makdisi |
| The decade following the French Revolution was one of the most turbulent in English cultural and political history. New formulations of the rights of man (and of woman), various anticipations of a new cultural and political order, and altogether new understandings (and enactments) of being and desire—all of which were developed as England itself seemed poised on the brink of a revolution—were elaborated in a series of exciting developments in art, poetry, and literary as well as political discourse. Drawing on a range of materials, from experimental ballads to visionary paintings, and from seditious songs to revolutionary pamphlets, this course will explore the contours of the emergent cultural politics of a new age.
REQUIREMENTS: • Students are expected to attend every lecture REQUIRED TEXTS: William Blake, Songs of Innocence and of Experience |
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| English 166A |
Colonial Beginnings of American Literature
|
Prof. Michael Colacurcio |
| After a brief look at the literature of discovery and exploration, a close encounter with the writings of the English colonists of North America, including their encounter with the native population, who speak in their tests but do not produce a full-fledged literature in response to the invasion of Europeans. For reasons that will appear, the heavy emphasis falls on the literature of Puritan New England: Bradford, Shepard, Winthrop, Bradstreet, Taylor, Edwards. But the distinct voice of Quaker Pennsylvania is well heard at the end: Ashbridge, Woolman, Franklin, Crevecoeur. Some emphasis on early American writing as predictive of later literary interests; but more on the colonial product itself—as history, journal, autobiography, and meditative poetry record (invent?) the origins of a derivative culture seeking originality. |
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| English 167A |
American Poetry to 1900 |
Prof. Michael Cohen |
| Poetry is the undiscovered country of American literature. In the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, poetry mattered in ways now difficult to believe. Poems were part of public culture, they commented on all aspects of the times, and participated intimately in the lives of ordinary readers. Our course will study the “serious” poetry that became part of American Literature, and also the forgotten verse that sold cheaply and circulated widely as part of daily life in early America This course will survey the history of American poetry from the Puritan era to the turn of the twentieth century. We will read the poetry of major authors like Anne Bradstreet, Edward Taylor, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Herman Melville, Edgar Allan Poe and others; we will also read the poetry of major events and movements, like the poetry of antislavery and the poetry of the Civil War. Finally, we will survey the “popular” poetry of the era, looking at execution elegies, popular ballads, slave spirituals, political songs and satires, and sentimental verse. |
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| English 168 |
Major American Writers | Prof. Chris Looby |
| A survey of representative American writers across several centuries, this course is designed to give a concise account of the broad narrative of American literary development, from its origins through the 19th century. It includes mainly works that have traditionally been identified as American classics, including such early works as William Bradford's Of Plymouth Plantation (1620-47), Jonathan Edwards' fiery sermons, Phillis Wheatley's poetry, and Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography (1771-90), along with later works such as Ralph Waldo Emerson's Nature (1836), Frederick Douglass's Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave (1845), Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter (1850), Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852), Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass (1855), Herman Melville's Benito Cereno (1855), the poetry of Emily Dickinson, and Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885). Among the questions to be asked: What is distinctive about American literature? What are some of the major traditions, genres, and preoccupations of American literature? Critics have argued, at various times, that what distinguishes American literature is its messianic vision (American as "redeemer nation"), or the thematic centrality of individual selfhood, or the encounter with pristine nature, or the fundamental American contradiction between the promise of social equality and the historical reality of racialized slavery. Others have argued for stylistic features as definitive of American literature: a "plain style" of narration, for example, or a "vernacular" voice. This course will survey and assess such large critical claims and test them against some foundational literary texts. |
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| English 176 |
American Literature and the Global South Hemispheric American Literature |
Prof. Juan Sanchez |
| In an age in which cultures and societies find themselves inescapably integrated into complex global networks of communication and trade, literary critics have been increasingly invested in thinking about the influence of global forces on aesthetic production. Resituating the study of literature of the United States within a wider Hemispheric context, American studies in particular has actively sought out new critical paradigms that not only challenge notions of North American exceptionalism, but also integrate U.S. literature with writings from other parts of America, including Canada, Mexico, Central America, and South America. This course will critically evaluate the benefits and liabilities of this new critical paradigm, often referred to as Hemispheric American Studies, and provide a broad survey of both literary and theoretical texts from and about America from 1776 to the present. While key critical works will help us establish the important debates of Hemispheric American Studies, primary texts will provide useful case studies for thinking through these issues. |
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LITERATURES IN ENGLISH 1850-PRESENT
| English M101B |
Pre-Stonewall LGBT/Queer Literature since 1855 Queer Literatures and Cultures, 1850-1970 |
Prof. Arthur Little |
| Our course surveys LGBT/Queer literature before Stonewall, a historical and mythic moment in LGBT culture, which refers to the riots at the Stonewall Inn (largely a drag bar for people of color) in New York at the end of June in 1969. This moment was taken as the beginning of the modern LGBT/Queer movement. In short, our course will focus on LGBT literature and culture before that culture may be said to have “outed” itself. Our course will grapple with a range of issues concerned with some of the relationships among gender, sex, and, and sexuality—and race. We will think, too, about issues of identity politics, then and now. Also, we will think about the use of various genres, narrative styles, and terminologies. |
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| English M102A |
Historical Survey of Asian American Literature |
Prof. King-Kok Cheung |
| This course is a survey of Asian American literature produced or reflecting the pre-1980 period. Issues to be explored include immigration, diaspora, generational conflict, cultural traditions, race and gender, interethnic and interracial dynamics. Authors studied include the Eaton sisters, Younghill Kang, Ruthanne Lum McCunn, John Okada, Bienvenido Santos, and Hisaye Yamamoto. |
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| English M104B |
African American Literature from Harlem Renaissance to 1960s
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Prof. Caroline Streeter |
| This course surveys African American literature from 1900 to 1960 using the framework of the Migration Narrative. As Henry Louis Gates explains, the Great Migration was "the movement of people of African descent from the rural South to the urban North between 1900 and 1930...the largest movement of black bodies since slavery. The Great Migration created a cross-pollinated black culture, one northern and urban yet thoroughly southern in its roots." The course materials map the radical transition of newly emancipated African Americans from the atavistic culture of the South to modernity in the Northern cities. Key periods examined include the Harlem Renaissance, a flowering of creative work among African American writers, painters, sculptors and intellectuals living and working in New York City during the 1920s. Subsequent decades are represented by important figures in African American letters such as Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, Ann Petry and Lorraine Hansberry. The course ends at the cusp of the Civil Rights movement. |
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| English M104D |
Contemporary African American Literature |
Prof. Uri McMillan |
| In her Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, novelist Toni Morrison dissected the “Africanist” presence haunting American literature, particularly the latter’s dependence on protean polarities of black and white. In this course, we will take Morrison’s lectures as a starting-point to trace how select contemporary black writers, mainly American, have utilized the literary as an aesthetic form and mode of cultural production to meditate on “race” and other topics. In particular, the writers for this course occasionally share motley concerns such as: flâneurs, cities, and imaginaries; the legacy of slavery; technologies and modernity; and an attention to specific spatial-temporal zones such as 1920s and present-day Harlem, seventeenth-century “America,” and 1980s Berlin. Writers studied in this course will include Paul Beatty, Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts, Colson Whitehead, and Suzan Lori-Parks, among others. |
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| English M105C |
Gender, Ethnicity and Conflicts of Imperial Aztlan Chicana/Chicano Literature since el movimiento (1970s-Present) |
Prof. Rafael Perez-Torres |
| This course will cover Chicana/o literatures that examine relational identities and the legacy of imperialism in Chicana/o culture. We will consider the ways race, ethnicity, gender and sexuality are constituted in contemporary Chicana/o literary texts within the context of European and U.S. imperialism and modern transnational circulation. Texts may include The Rain God by Arturo Islas, What You See in the Dark by Manuel Muñoz, So Far From God by Ana Castillo, Loving Pedro Infante by Denise Chavez, Peeping Tom Tom Girls by Marisela Norte, Their Dogs Came With Them by Helena María Viramontes, and The Flowers by Dagoberto Gilb. |
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| English 131 |
Roots and Routes: Mapping Pacific Literatures and Cultures Studies in Postcolonial Literatures |
Prof. Erin Suzuki |
| The readings in this class will focus on the role of travel in and around the Pacific Islands, a region of the world that has been long misunderstood or misrepresented as a group of pristine, isolated islands where one can “get away from it all.” In actuality, the Pacific is one of the most heavily trafficked areas of the world. Not only does the Pacific see the comings and goings of hundreds of thousands of tourists from all around the world; it is also marked by the constant movements and deployments of the U.S. military, as well as the travels taken by Asians and Pacific Islanders living in the diaspora. In this class, we will explore the role that this constant travel plays in the cultural construction of the Pacific: looking beyond white sandy beaches, hula maidens and swaying palm trees, we will reconsider the Pacific as a space constantly recreating itself through the processes of cultural conflict, cooperation, and change. |
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| English 167A |
American Poetry to 1900 |
Prof. Lejla Kucukalic |
| Poetry is the undiscovered country of American literature. In the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, poetry mattered in ways now difficult to believe. Poems were part of public culture, they commented on all aspects of the times, and participated intimately in the lives of ordinary readers. Our course will study the “serious” poetry that became part of American Literature, and also the forgotten verse that sold cheaply and circulated widely as part of daily life in early America This course will survey the history of American poetry from the Puritan era to the turn of the twentieth century. We will read the poetry of major authors like Anne Bradstreet, Edward Taylor, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Herman Melville, Edgar Allan Poe and others; we will also read the poetry of major events and movements, like the poetry of antislavery and the poetry of the Civil War. Finally, we will survey the “popular” poetry of the era, looking at execution elegies, popular ballads, slave spirituals, political songs and satires, and sentimental verse. |
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| English 168 |
Major American Writers |
Prof. Chris Looby |
| A survey of representative American writers across several centuries, this course is designed to give a concise account of the broad narrative of American literary development, from its origins through the 19th century. It includes mainly works that have traditionally been identified as American classics, including such early works as William Bradford's Of Plymouth Plantation (1620-47), Jonathan Edwards' fiery sermons, Phillis Wheatley's poetry, and Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography (1771-90), along with later works such as Ralph Waldo Emerson's Nature (1836), Frederick Douglass's Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave (1845), Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter (1850), Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852), Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass (1855), Herman Melville's Benito Cereno (1855), the poetry of Emily Dickinson, and Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885). Among the questions to be asked: What is distinctive about American literature? What are some of the major traditions, genres, and preoccupations of American literature? Critics have argued, at various times, that what distinguishes American literature is its messianic vision (American as "redeemer nation"), or the thematic centrality of individual selfhood, or the encounter with pristine nature, or the fundamental American contradiction between the promise of social equality and the historical reality of racialized slavery. Others have argued for stylistic features as definitive of American literature: a "plain style" of narration, for example, or a "vernacular" voice. This course will survey and assess such large critical claims and test them against some foundational literary texts. |
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| English 170A |
American Literature, 1865-1900
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Prof. Joseph Dimuro |
| This course fulfills the historical requirement for the English major as well as one of the five required courses in American literature for the American Literature and Culture major. The course focuses primarily upon narrative fiction of various kinds, including the short story, novella, and the novel written in the volatile years between the Era of Reconstruction and the onset of modern urban civilization at the turn of the twentieth century. Literary works to be considered include the tales of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, and Henry James. We will read a short novel by Stephen Crane, as well as Charles W. Chesnutt's historical novel, The Marrow of Tradition. Our course will also include important works of fiction written by women such as Constance Fenimore Woolson, Fanny Fern, Kate Chopin, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman. We conclude the course with Theodore Dreiser's 1900 novel of Chicago, Sister Carrie. Topics of discussion include narrative techniques, the question of race and gender, the relationship between historical and fictional narrative, the economic dimension of human value, and the continuities and irruptions of literary history. Requirements include two or three papers and a comprehensive final examination. |
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| English 170B |
American Literature, 1900-1945 |
Prof. Lejla Kucukalic |
| This course will offer a selective survey of major American authors from the first half of the twentieth century, including millennial, socialist, and regionalist writers, American modernists, expatriates, imagist poets, and playwrights. We will investigate cultural forces and ideas that formed the literature of the period: immigration, World Wars, trauma, imperialism, modern corporations and market forces, mass culture, social reform, race, gender, and new technologies and media. Ultimately, we will focus on the connection between representation and construction of American life during this volatile period, tracing the relationships between art, culture, history, and self-definition. Grading will be based on: reading quizzes, take-home midterm, research proposal and a final research paper. Representative writers: Sui Sin Far, Zitkala Sa, Edith Wharton, Theodore Dreiser, Djuna Barnes, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Jean Toomer, H.D., Eugene O’Neill. |
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| English 171A |
Later 19th-Century Poetry |
Prof. Joseph Bristow |
| This class focuses on nineteenth-century English poetry published after 1850 and before literary Modernism began around the time of World War One. The writers whose works we will explore include Algernon Charles Swinburne, Christina Rossetti, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Rosamund Marriott Watson, Oscar Wilde, “Michael Field” (Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper), Rudyard Kipling, Thomas Hardy, Ernest Dowson, and W.B. Yeats. Students will learn about the development of poetry in light of aestheticism, decadence, and imperialism. The instructor will place special emphasis on prosody. |
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| English 173B |
American Poetry since 1945 |
Prof. Harryette Mullen |
| Study of American poetry since end of World War II. |
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| English 173C |
The Ludic Turn Contemporary American Poetry |
Prof. Brian Stefans |
| Ludology is the study of play and games, and is becoming increasingly important as a discourse in contemporary aesthetics, especially as computer technology has brought the play of algorithm – chains of mathematical computer functions – deep into our cultural and linguistic life. Mainstream filmmakers such as Christopher Nolan, Michel Gondry and the The Wachowski brothers, novelists such as Karen Tei Yamashita, Jonathan Safran Foer and Shelley Jackson, and the creators of video games such as Grand Theft Auto, Heavy Rain and Mass Effect (among countless others), have all injected elements of the “ludic” in their telling of stories. A similar phenomenon is occurring in American poetry: poets are gravitating toward a more “formal” style of writing poetry – forsaking some of the freedoms that the Modernists and New American poetics purportedly granted (free verse, the page as “open field,” collage, concrete poetics, oral poetries, etc.) – and opting instead for highly rhetorical, procedural, decidedly _unnatural_ mode, characterized by the uses of arbitrary constraints, word lists, syllabics and exhaustive re-workings of precedent texts. The first seven weeks of this course will be devoted to books consisting of shorter lyrical works – some authors include Matthea Harvey, Harryette Mullen, Susan Wheeler, Christian Bok (a Canadian, but highly influential on poetry in the States), Ben Lerner and K. Silem Mohammed – while the final weeks will be devoted to reading two longer works, the first part of James Merrill’s epic ouija board narrative The Changing Light at Sandover, titled “The Book of Ephraim,” published in 1976, and Mark Z. Danielewski’s most recent “novel,” Only Revolutions (his follow-up to the widely-acclaimed House of Leaves), published in 2006. Supplementary readings will include theories of the ludic (Huizinga, Caillois, Suits, Manovich, etc.) as well as passing glances at predecessor texts such as Browning’s Ring and the Book, Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, poems by Marianne Moore, and some works by the French writing group The Oulipo. |
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| English 174B |
American Fiction since 1945 |
Prof. Mitchum Huehls |
| This course provides a historical survey of U.S. fiction written since 1945. Readings will include work by Ralph Ellison, Phillip Roth, Sylvia Plath, Thomas Pynchon, John Barth, and Norman Mailer, among others. There will be weekly quizzes, at least two papers, and exams. |
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| English 176 |
American Literature and the Global South
Hemispheric American Literature |
Prof. Juan Sanchez |
| In an age in which cultures and societies find themselves inescapably integrated into complex global networks of communication and trade, literary critics have been increasingly invested in thinking about the influence of global forces on aesthetic production. Resituating the study of literature of the United States within a wider Hemispheric context, American studies in particular has actively sought out new critical paradigms that not only challenge notions of North American exceptionalism, but also integrate U.S. literature with writings from other parts of America, including Canada, Mexico, Central America, and South America. This course will critically evaluate the benefits and liabilities of this new critical paradigm, often referred to as Hemispheric American Studies, and provide a broad survey of both literary and theoretical texts from and about America from 1776 to the present. While key critical works will help us establish the important debates of Hemispheric American Studies, primary texts will provide useful case studies for thinking through these issues. |
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RACE AND ETHNICITY, GENDER AND SEXUALITY STUDIES
| English M101B |
Pre-Stonewall LGBT/Queer Literature since 1855 Queer Literatures and Cultures, 1850-1970 |
Prof. Arthur Little |
| Our course surveys LGBT/Queer literature before Stonewall, a historical and mythic moment in LGBT culture, which refers to the riots at the Stonewall Inn (largely a drag bar for people of color) in New York at the end of June in 1969. This moment was taken as the beginning of the modern LGBT/Queer movement. In short, our course will focus on LGBT literature and culture before that culture may be said to have “outed” itself. Our course will grapple with a range of issues concerned with some of the relationships among gender, sex, and, and sexuality—and race. We will think, too, about issues of identity politics, then and now. Also, we will think about the use of various genres, narrative styles, and terminologies. |
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| English M102A |
Historical Survey of Asian American Literature |
Prof. King-Kok Cheung |
| This course is a survey of Asian American literature produced or reflecting the pre-1980 period. Issues to be explored include immigration, diaspora, generational conflict, cultural traditions, race and gender, interethnic and interracial dynamics. Authors studied include the Eaton sisters, Younghill Kang, Ruthanne Lum McCunn, John Okada, Bienvenido Santos, and Hisaye Yamamoto. |
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| English M104B |
African American Literature from Harlem Renaissance to 1960s
|
Prof. Caroline Streeter |
| This course surveys African American literature from 1900 to 1960 using the framework of the Migration Narrative. As Henry Louis Gates explains, the Great Migration was "the movement of people of African descent from the rural South to the urban North between 1900 and 1930...the largest movement of black bodies since slavery. The Great Migration created a cross-pollinated black culture, one northern and urban yet thoroughly southern in its roots." The course materials map the radical transition of newly emancipated African Americans from the atavistic culture of the South to modernity in the Northern cities. Key periods examined include the Harlem Renaissance, a flowering of creative work among African American writers, painters, sculptors and intellectuals living and working in New York City during the 1920s. Subsequent decades are represented by important figures in African American letters such as Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, Ann Petry and Lorraine Hansberry. The course ends at the cusp of the Civil Rights movement. |
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| English M104D |
Contemporary African American Literature |
Prof. Uri McMillan |
| In her Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, novelist Toni Morrison dissected the “Africanist” presence haunting American literature, particularly the latter’s dependence on protean polarities of black and white. In this course, we will take Morrison’s lectures as a starting-point to trace how select contemporary black writers, mainly American, have utilized the literary as an aesthetic form and mode of cultural production to meditate on “race” and other topics. In particular, the writers for this course occasionally share motley concerns such as: flâneurs, cities, and imaginaries; the legacy of slavery; technologies and modernity; and an attention to specific spatial-temporal zones such as 1920s and present-day Harlem, seventeenth-century “America,” and 1980s Berlin. Writers studied in this course will include Paul Beatty, Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts, Colson Whitehead, and Suzan Lori-Parks, among others. |
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| English M105C |
Gender, Ethnicity and Conflicts of Imperial Aztlan Chicana/Chicano Literature since el movimiento (1970s-Present) |
Prof. Rafael Perez-Torres |
| This course will cover Chicana/o literatures that examine relational identities and the legacy of imperialism in Chicana/o culture. We will consider the ways race, ethnicity, gender and sexuality are constituted in contemporary Chicana/o literary texts within the context of European and U.S. imperialism and modern transnational circulation. Texts may include The Rain God by Arturo Islas, What You See in the Dark by Manuel Muñoz, So Far From God by Ana Castillo, Loving Pedro Infante by Denise Chavez, Peeping Tom Tom Girls by Marisela Norte, Their Dogs Came With Them by Helena María Viramontes, and The Flowers by Dagoberto Gilb. |
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| English M107A |
Transatlantic Women Writers Studies in Women's Writing |
Prof. Juan Sanchez |
| This course examines the role women in the transatlantic literary cultures of Britain and the Americas in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Taking as its starting point the rise of the rights of women debate, we will focus on the complex ways in which women generated and expanded transatlantic conversations about such monumental issues as slavery and the slave trade, revolution, empire, cosmopolitanism, science, and theology, all of which emerged as integral features of transatlantic political cultures. In addition to British and US American authors, we will consider the writings of writers living in Mexico, Central and South America, and the Caribbean (e.g., Flora Tristan, Maria Graham, and Frances Calderon de la Barca). In doing so, we will develop a better understanding of the international relationships and intercultural contacts between women in Britain and all of the Americas that helped establish a transatlantic literary culture that was able to cross national borders, languages, and ethnic groups. |
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| English 151 |
Milton | Prof. Jonathan Post |
| This class will focus on Milton's poetry and politics, politics including not just urgent matters of censorship, divorce, and tyranny, but also the vexed relationship between God and Satan, and perfect woman and perfect man, as figured in the greatest long poem in English, Paradise Lost. Most of the course will be devoted to reading closely this gorgeously exhilarating epic. Some attention will also be paid to visualizing the biblical traditions on which the poem is based—paintings by Michelangelo, for instance—and those it inspired, such as William Blake's illustrations. Among topics to be considered: beauty, sex, violence, the origins of evil (Satan), revenge, goodness, and poetry. Since Paradise Lost is largely concerned with the relationship between the first man (Adam) and the first woman (Eve), a gender difference stemming from Genesis and inculcated through much of Western literature and thought, the class will also, inevitably, concentrate on matters involving the origin and representation of gender difference. |
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| English 155 |
Gender and Renaissance Drama Renaissance Subjects |
Prof. Karen Cunningham |
| How did the early modern English theater stage the culture's complex, unstable notions of gender? What's at stake for this generation of English playwrights in representing gender identities—femaleness and maleness and ambiguous roles in between—in the ways that they do and in circulating those representations in the wider popular culture? This course will focus on a range of plays by dramatists of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries (including but not focused on Shakespeare) to develop ideas about the Renaissance investment in constructing gender according to particular political, social, domestic, and intellectual goals. What does the association of domesticity, business, or violence with femininity or masculinity tell us about early modern notions of selfhood and sexuality in general and about the theatre in particular? What might be the significance for the theatre of such writings as the anonymous pamphlets "Hic Mulier; or the Man-woman" and "Haec Vir; or the Womanish man," both of which contended that a woman or man who dressed as her or his sexual opposite (in life or on stage) risked becoming what she or he wore? What do the theatre's developing ideas of performance and performativity contribute to the culture's developing ideas of the elusive nature of gender identifies and selfhood? Including works by such playwrights as Christopher Marlowe, Elizabeth Cary, John Webster, Shakespeare, and others, this course tangles with the ways Renaissance English plays construct perceptions of maleness and femaleness, and asks what the aesthetic, social, and ideological implications of these perceptions might be in their own day and in the centuries that follow. |
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IMPERIAL, TRANSNATIONAL, AND POSTCOLONIAL STUDIES
| English M105C |
Gender, Ethnicity and Conflicts of Imperial Aztlan Chicana/Chicano Literature since el movimiento (1970s-Present) |
Prof. Rafael Perez-Torres |
| This course will cover Chicana/o literatures that examine relational identities and the legacy of imperialism in Chicana/o culture. We will consider the ways race, ethnicity, gender and sexuality are constituted in contemporary Chicana/o literary texts within the context of European and U.S. imperialism and modern transnational circulation. Texts may include The Rain God by Arturo Islas, What You See in the Dark by Manuel Muñoz, So Far From God by Ana Castillo, Loving Pedro Infante by Denise Chavez, Peeping Tom Tom Girls by Marisela Norte, Their Dogs Came With Them by Helena María Viramontes, and The Flowers by Dagoberto Gilb. |
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| English M107A |
Transatlantic Women Writers Studies in Women's Writing |
Prof. Juan Sanchez |
| This course examines the role women in the transatlantic literary cultures of Britain and the Americas in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Taking as its starting point the rise of the rights of women debate, we will focus on the complex ways in which women generated and expanded transatlantic conversations about such monumental issues as slavery and the slave trade, revolution, empire, cosmopolitanism, science, and theology, all of which emerged as integral features of transatlantic political cultures. In addition to British and US American authors, we will consider the writings of writers living in Mexico, Central and South America, and the Caribbean (e.g., Flora Tristan, Maria Graham, and Frances Calderon de la Barca). In doing so, we will develop a better understanding of the international relationships and intercultural contacts between women in Britain and all of the Americas that helped establish a transatlantic literary culture that was able to cross national borders, languages, and ethnic groups. |
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| English 131 |
Roots and Routes: Mapping Pacific Literatures and Cultures Studies in Postcolonial Literatures |
Prof. Erin Suzuki |
| The readings in this class will focus on the role of travel in and around the Pacific Islands, a region of the world that has been long misunderstood or misrepresented as a group of pristine, isolated islands where one can “get away from it all.” In actuality, the Pacific is one of the most heavily trafficked areas of the world. Not only does the Pacific see the comings and goings of hundreds of thousands of tourists from all around the world; it is also marked by the constant movements and deployments of the U.S. military, as well as the travels taken by Asians and Pacific Islanders living in the diaspora. In this class, we will explore the role that this constant travel plays in the cultural construction of the Pacific: looking beyond white sandy beaches, hula maidens and swaying palm trees, we will reconsider the Pacific as a space constantly recreating itself through the processes of cultural conflict, cooperation, and change. |
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| English 157 |
The Ancient Foundations of Modernity: Renaissance Translations from the Classics Translation and Innovation in the English Renaissance/Early Modern Period |
Prof. Debora Shuger |
| Until the late 19th century (and to some extent into the mid-20th), Greco-Roman texts written between 750 BC and ca 200 AD dominated the curriculum from grade school through college in both England and America. These are works of extraordinary importance (e.g., the checks-and-balances structure of the American constitution comes from the 1st century BC Greek historian, Polybius), and also of extraordinary beauty, variety, and intelligence. The course focuses on English Renaissance translations of the classics because the Renaissance was the rebirth (the re-naissance) of classical learning and literature, and one of the topics will be the translation of ancient texts into early modern cultural contexts, but the class also provides a general introduction to the classical underpinnings of English literature. Readings include selections from Homer, Ovid, Cicero, Pliny, Plutarch, Hesiod, Xenophon on topics as far-flung as love, duty, sex, science, and empire. |
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| English 166A |
Colonial Beginnings of American Literature |
Prof. Michael Colacurcio |
| After a brief look at the literature of discovery and exploration, a close encounter with the writings of the English colonists of North America, including their encounter with the native population, who speak in their tests but do not produce a full-fledged literature in response to the invasion of Europeans. For reasons that will appear, the heavy emphasis falls on the literature of Puritan New England: Bradford, Shepard, Winthrop, Bradstreet, Taylor, Edwards. But the distinct voice of Quaker Pennsylvania is well heard at the end: Ashbridge, Woolman, Franklin, Crevecoeur. Some emphasis on early American writing as predictive of later literary interests; but more on the colonial product itself—as history, journal, autobiography, and meditative poetry record (invent?) the origins of a derivative culture seeking originality. |
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| English 176 |
American Literature and the Global South Hemispheric American Literature |
Prof. Juan Sanchez |
| In an age in which cultures and societies find themselves inescapably integrated into complex global networks of communication and trade, literary critics have been increasingly invested in thinking about the influence of global forces on aesthetic production. Resituating the study of literature of the United States within a wider Hemispheric context, American studies in particular has actively sought out new critical paradigms that not only challenge notions of North American exceptionalism, but also integrate U.S. literature with writings from other parts of America, including Canada, Mexico, Central America, and South America. This course will critically evaluate the benefits and liabilities of this new critical paradigm, often referred to as Hemispheric American Studies, and provide a broad survey of both literary and theoretical texts from and about America from 1776 to the present. While key critical works will help us establish the important debates of Hemispheric American Studies, primary texts will provide useful case studies for thinking through these issues. |
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GENRE STUDIES, INTERDISCIPLINARY STUDIES, CRITICAL THEORY
| English 115D |
Detective Fiction | Prof. Blake Allmendinger |
| In this course we will study the evolution of the detective genre and various related subgenres. We will begin by analyzing the British mystery tradition, exemplified by Arthur Conan Doyle and Agatha Christie. We will contrast the British tradition with the hard-boiled American detective tradition (noir), reading works by Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, and Walter Mosley. We will also consider how suspense and horror writing relates to the mystery-detection genre, examining writers such as Patricia Highsmith, Truman Capote, Edgar Allan Poe, Thomas Harris, and one local writer (to be chosen later) who will come speak to the class. |
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| English 117 |
Literature of California and American West | Prof. Blake Allmendinger |
| In this course we will study the literature of California. Beginning in the nineteenth century, we will study the Mission period, the Gold Rush, and the Mexican-American War. In the twentieth century, we will cover the rise of the entertainment industry in Hollywood, the cultural revolution of the 1960s, the 1992 Los Angeles riots, and contemporary political events in California as they have been represented in literature. Authors include Helen Hunt Jackson, the Native American writer Yellow Bird, Nathanael West, Raymond Chandler, Joan Didion, T.C. Boyle, and the African American performance artist Anna Deveare Smith. |
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| English 120 |
History of Aesthetics and Critical Theory | Prof. Mitchum Huehls |
| This course provides a historical survey of philosophical and theoretical thinking about aesthetics in general and literature in particular. Readings will include selections from Plato, Aristotle, St. Augustine, Sir Philip Sidney, Kant, Hegel, and the British Romantics. Students will be primarily evaluated through exams. |
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| English 122 |
Keywords Keywords in Theory: Culture |
Prof. Joseph Dimuro |
| Raymond Williams has noted that the concept of "culture" has both a long etymological history of varied meanings across several European languages, and is one of the most complex words in the English language to define. This course takes up the challenge of defining the meaning of this essential "keyword" in the lexicon of literary study and contemporary theoretical discourse by carefully considering the anthropological, sociological, ideological, and literary dimensions of culture within the context of modernity. Topics to be considered include the formation of subcultures, the difference between mass and popular culture, the concept of the "cultural work" literary texts perform, the advent of multiculturalism, the relationship between culture and politics, and the idea of culture as a regulatory system of collective constraint and social mobility. To pursue these topics in some depth, we will read the Matthew Arnold's influential Culture and Anarchy, the literary criticism of T.S. Eliot, Thorstein Veblen's Theory of the Leisure Class, Pierre Bourdieu's Distinction, the anthropological essays of Clifford Geertz, Marx and Engels' The German Ideology, essays by Stephen Greenblatt, Theodor Adorno, Stuart Hall and others. We will consider literary works by Henry James, Edith Wharton, and Willa Cather. The point of the course is to track the evolution of the meanings and uses of the concept of culture in the human sciences, as well as to develop a new critical framework to interpret literary texts in ways that significantly amplifies formalist analysis or "close reading". Requirements include frequent short essays, one longer paper, and a comprehensive final examination. This course may be used to fulfill the breadth requirement for the English major, as well as to fulfill one of the two required English electives. |
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| English 144 |
The Politics of Later Medieval English Poetry
Medieval Romance and Literatures of the Court |
Prof. Matthew Fisher |
| This course will explore the extraordinary development of Middle English literature written during the reigns of Richard II and Henry IV (c. 1377 – 1413). We will read the works of Chaucer, Gower, Lydgate, and Hoccleve (amongst others) against the dramatic political backdrop of the period: the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, the rise of Lollardy, the deposition of Richard, and the consolidation of the Lancastrian dynasty. In addition to Middle English poetry connected to or depicting the royal court, we will also consider primary and secondary accounts of the history of the English court, its political intrigues, and its discontents. The majority of the readings for the course will be in Middle English, and there will be extensive supplementary readings in Modern English translation. |
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| English 145 |
Orthodoxy, Heterodoxy, and Heresy in Middle English Literature Medieval Literatures of Devotion and Dissent |
Prof. Matthew Fisher |
| Orthodoxy, heterodoxy, and heresy are not fixed terms. This course will explore the ways in which medieval English literature navigated and debated the troubling (and sometimes nearly fatal) lines between them, and attempted to make sense of the self as embedded in competing political and religious discourses. Texts will include selections from the South English Legendary, Pearl, Saint Erkenwald, Piers Plowman, Lollard and Wycliffite texts and dialogues, Julian of Norwich’s Revelations of Divine Love, and The Book of Margery Kempe. Readings for the course will be in Middle English. |
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| English 150C |
Shakespeare’s Tragedies
Topics in Shakespeare
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Prof. Arthur Little |
| This course introduces students to or advances students’ study of Shakespeare by focusing exclusively on Shakespeare’s tragedies. Along the way students will be asked to think about various ways we may think about what tragedy performs aesthetically, philosophically, historically, politically, etc. Among the possible plays for discussion are Titus Andronicus, Julius Caesar, Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth, and Coriolanus. Students may be asked to supplement their thinking about tragedy (with professor’s guidance of course) by familiarizing themselves with some of the following writers and theater practitioners: Aristotle, Sidney, Nietzsche, Brecht, Miller, Artaud, Grotowski, and Boal. |
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| English 151 |
Milton | Prof. Jonathan Post |
| This class will focus on Milton's poetry and politics, politics including not just urgent matters of censorship, divorce, and tyranny, but also the vexed relationship between God and Satan, and perfect woman and perfect man, as figured in the greatest long poem in English, Paradise Lost. Most of the course will be devoted to reading closely this gorgeously exhilarating epic. Some attention will also be paid to visualizing the biblical traditions on which the poem is based—paintings by Michelangelo, for instance—and those it inspired, such as William Blake's illustrations. Among topics to be considered: beauty, sex, violence, the origins of evil (Satan), revenge, goodness, and poetry. Since Paradise Lost is largely concerned with the relationship between the first man (Adam) and the first woman (Eve), a gender difference stemming from Genesis and inculcated through much of Western literature and thought, the class will also, inevitably, concentrate on matters involving the origin and representation of gender difference. |
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| English 161C |
The Rise of the Novel The Novel in English to 1850 |
Prof. Sarah Kareem |
| What defines the novel as a genre, and how does it relate to literary categories such as realism, fiction, and romance? In pursuing this question, students will become familiar with various forms of the novel including the epistolary, sentimental, and gothic novel, and the novel of manners. We will also investigate the history of the novel’s development, specifically, the genre’s rise to prominence in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Special attention will be paid to debates in the period over the pleasures and dangers of novel reading. Topics for discussion will include the role of the individual within the novel, the relationship between the probable and the marvelous, and the nature of readers’ identification with novelistic characters. |
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| English 163A |
Romanticism and Revolution |
Prof. Saree Makdisi |
| The decade following the French Revolution was one of the most turbulent in English cultural and political history. New formulations of the rights of man (and of woman), various anticipations of a new cultural and political order, and altogether new understandings (and enactments) of being and desire—all of which were developed as England itself seemed poised on the brink of a revolution—were elaborated in a series of exciting developments in art, poetry, and literary as well as political discourse. Drawing on a range of materials, from experimental ballads to visionary paintings, and from seditious songs to revolutionary pamphlets, this course will explore the contours of the emergent cultural politics of a new age.
REQUIREMENTS: • Students are expected to attend every lecture REQUIRED TEXTS: William Blake, Songs of Innocence and of Experience |
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| English 167A |
American Poetry to 1900 |
Prof. Michael Cohen |
| Poetry is the undiscovered country of American literature. In the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, poetry mattered in ways now difficult to believe. Poems were part of public culture, they commented on all aspects of the times, and participated intimately in the lives of ordinary readers. Our course will study the “serious” poetry that became part of American Literature, and also the forgotten verse that sold cheaply and circulated widely as part of daily life in early America This course will survey the history of American poetry from the Puritan era to the turn of the twentieth century. We will read the poetry of major authors like Anne Bradstreet, Edward Taylor, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Herman Melville, Edgar Allan Poe and others; we will also read the poetry of major events and movements, like the poetry of antislavery and the poetry of the Civil War. Finally, we will survey the “popular” poetry of the era, looking at execution elegies, popular ballads, slave spirituals, political songs and satires, and sentimental verse. |
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| English 171A |
Later 19th-Century Poetry |
Prof. Joseph Bristow |
| This class focuses on nineteenth-century English poetry published after 1850 and before literary Modernism began around the time of World War One. The writers whose works we will explore include Algernon Charles Swinburne, Christina Rossetti, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Rosamund Marriott Watson, Oscar Wilde, “Michael Field” (Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper), Rudyard Kipling, Thomas Hardy, Ernest Dowson, and W.B. Yeats. Students will learn about the development of poetry in light of aestheticism, decadence, and imperialism. The instructor will place special emphasis on prosody. |
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| English 173B |
American Poetry since 1945 |
Prof. Harryette Mullen |
| Study of American poetry since end of World War II. |
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| English 173C |
The Ludic Turn Contemporary American Poetry |
Prof. Brian Stefans |
| Ludology is the study of play and games, and is becoming increasingly important as a discourse in contemporary aesthetics, especially as computer technology has brought the play of algorithm – chains of mathematical computer functions – deep into our cultural and linguistic life. Mainstream filmmakers such as Christopher Nolan, Michel Gondry and the The Wachowski brothers, novelists such as Karen Tei Yamashita, Jonathan Safran Foer and Shelley Jackson, and the creators of video games such as Grand Theft Auto, Heavy Rain and Mass Effect (among countless others), have all injected elements of the “ludic” in their telling of stories. A similar phenomenon is occurring in American poetry: poets are gravitating toward a more “formal” style of writing poetry – forsaking some of the freedoms that the Modernists and New American poetics purportedly granted (free verse, the page as “open field,” collage, concrete poetics, oral poetries, etc.) – and opting instead for highly rhetorical, procedural, decidedly _unnatural_ mode, characterized by the uses of arbitrary constraints, word lists, syllabics and exhaustive re-workings of precedent texts. The first seven weeks of this course will be devoted to books consisting of shorter lyrical works – some authors include Matthea Harvey, Harryette Mullen, Susan Wheeler, Christian Bok (a Canadian, but highly influential on poetry in the States), Ben Lerner and K. Silem Mohammed – while the final weeks will be devoted to reading two longer works, the first part of James Merrill’s epic ouija board narrative The Changing Light at Sandover, titled “The Book of Ephraim,” published in 1976, and Mark Z. Danielewski’s most recent “novel,” Only Revolutions (his follow-up to the widely-acclaimed House of Leaves), published in 2006. Supplementary readings will include theories of the ludic (Huizinga, Caillois, Suits, Manovich, etc.) as well as passing glances at predecessor texts such as Browning’s Ring and the Book, Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, poems by Marianne Moore, and some works by the French writing group The Oulipo. |
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| English 174B |
American Fiction since 1945 |
Prof. Mitchum Huehls |
| This course provides a historical survey of U.S. fiction written since 1945. Readings will include work by Ralph Ellison, Phillip Roth, Sylvia Plath, Thomas Pynchon, John Barth, and Norman Mailer, among others. There will be weekly quizzes, at least two papers, and exams. |
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| English 176 |
American Literature and the Global South
Hemispheric American Literature |
Prof. Juan Sanchez |
| In an age in which cultures and societies find themselves inescapably integrated into complex global networks of communication and trade, literary critics have been increasingly invested in thinking about the influence of global forces on aesthetic production. Resituating the study of literature of the United States within a wider Hemispheric context, American studies in particular has actively sought out new critical paradigms that not only challenge notions of North American exceptionalism, but also integrate U.S. literature with writings from other parts of America, including Canada, Mexico, Central America, and South America. This course will critically evaluate the benefits and liabilities of this new critical paradigm, often referred to as Hemispheric American Studies, and provide a broad survey of both literary and theoretical texts from and about America from 1776 to the present. While key critical works will help us establish the important debates of Hemispheric American Studies, primary texts will provide useful case studies for thinking through these issues. |
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CREATIVE WRITING
| English 136.1 |
Creative Writing: Poetry Creative Writing Workshop |
Prof. Harryette Mullen |
| In this creative writing workshop, students must write original poetry and submit multiple copies of their drafts for class discussion. Each student is also required to contribute constructive written and oral feedback to fellow writers, and to make an oral presentation on the work of a published poet. Criteria for grading include regular and punctual attendance and completion of assignments, participation in discussion with respectful critique of fellow writers, as well as a final portfolio of revised poems. Enrollment is by instructor consent. To Apply: Please submit five poems, along with a brief statement about your interest in reading and writing poetry and your previous experience in literature and creative writing courses. Please include your student identification number and e-mail address. Please deliver a print copy to the English Department Office and also send an electronic version to me at mullen@humnet.ucla.edu. Deadline: 4pm on September 15, 2011. Notification: The class list will be posted in the main English office before the first class meeting this Fall. Those who miss the first class will forfeit their spots. |
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| English 136.2 |
Creative Writing: Poetry Creative Writing Workshop |
Prof. Reed Wilson |
| English 136 is open, by application, to any student who writes poems. Each week we'll discuss the work of students in the course, as well as the work of other poets. To apply, please pick up an application sheet in the English Department main office, Humanities 149. Prerequisites: the desire to read and write poems and to do both of those things in better ways.
This course will be limited to fifteen students. To Apply: Please fill out the flyer in the English Department main office (Humanities 149) and submit it with three to five of your best poems. Applications may be submitted to the English Department main office or emailed to me (rwilson@college.ucla.edu) as an attachment. Deadline: 4pm Friday, September 9, 2011. Notification: All applicants will be notified by email no later than Thursday, Sept. 22, 2011. Those who miss the first class will forfeit their spots. |
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| English 137.1 |
Creative Writing: Short Story Creative Writing Workshop |
Prof. Mona Simpson |
| Writing students will read short stories every week, will complete weekly exercises and two stories, one short and one longer, over the course of the quarter.
To Apply: Please EMAIL (to mona.s@ix.netcom.com.) a sample of your fiction writing (no more than ten pages long, please) and a cover letter introducing yourself, explaining how long you've been writing, what you consider to be your strengths and weaknesses and what books you've read over the summer. Deadline: I will be traveling this summer and will not be accepting submissions until September 1st. Please submit your materials after September 1st, but no later than September 10th, 2011. Notification: The class list will be posted in the main English office before the first class meeting this Fall. Those who miss the first class will forfeit their spots. |
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| English 137.2 |
Creative Writing: Short Story Creative Writing Workshop |
Prof. Michelle Huneven |
| In this course, we approach writing fiction through craft talks, writing exercises, reading assignments, and critiques of student writing.
To Apply: Please EMAIL a writing sample to huneven@gmail.com. Please tell me your class rank (such as junior, senior, etc.) and provide a list of other fiction writing classes you've taken. If you are submitting to any other workshop please indicate which workshop is your first choice. Also, please include a short list of several books and writers that are important to your writing with brief explanations why. Deadline: September 10th, 2011. Notification: The class lists will be posted in the main English office before the first class meeting this Fall. Those who miss the first class will forfeit their spots. Class meets Mondays, 11:00 a.m. to 1:50 p.m. in Humanities 222B |
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| English 138 |
Creative Writing: Screenplay Creative Writing Workshop |
Prof. Brian Stefans |
| This class involves some readings in theory of genre the screenplay. Students gain ability to isolate critical moments in screenplays that illuminate structure of the narrative; gain ability to identify plot points, use of objects/props and mise-en-scene, and other narrative vehicles in film; have grounded sense of literary genre; and have basic mastery of format of screenplay writing. Grading will be based on evaluation of students' participation in class, writing assignments, revisions, and a portfolio of work at quarter's end. Most sessions will be classic writing workshops, for which the student is expected to bring in pieces of writing he or she would like to submit to peer evaluation. Some sessions will be devoted to creative assignments that respond to the material in the required reading.
For the final grade, students will have to submit a well-developed 5-page treatment of a film with clearly articulated plot points and the first five pages of the screenplay itself. To Apply: Please email to me (stefans@humnet.ucla.edu) a screenplay writing sample of 5-10 pages. The sample MUST BE IN SCREENPLAY FORMAT. The sample must be in 12-point Courier, have slug lines, and nothing should be center justified. Use the free program, available online, called Celtx or another screenplay writing program to help you. There are several "screenplay format" sites to refer to, as well as many sites where you can download famous screenplays. I won't consider submissions that are not properly formatted. Also include your name, student ID#, a list of filmmakers and films that inspire you, screenplays you have read, and whatever else you want to mention that tells me about your relationship to film. Deadline: September 9th, 2011. Notification: The class lists will be posted in the main English office before the first class meeting this Fall. Those who miss the first class will forfeit their spots. |
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SENIOR SEMINARS
| English 181A.1 |
Authoring Addiction: Confessions, Diaries, and Memoirs |
Prof. Allan Borst |
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Addiction has been many things during the last couple of centuries—a moral failing, a deficiency of willpower, a disease, a genetic defect, a neurochemical disorder—but in that time it has always been a story. While myriad theories and beliefs about addiction have come and gone, addiction narratives have remained remarkably consistent in their form and function. This seminar will consider how and why first-person “experience-based” accounts of addiction have become so archetypical. We’ll examine how such addiction narratives draw upon other literary genres like the bildungsroman, the confession, the picaresque, and the cautionary tale. In doing so, we’ll think about how addiction narratives create expectations and even promise to supply their readers with inspiration, moral lessons, vicarious thrills, or access to other worlds/states of mind. Finally, we’ll consider how anti-drug reform, self-help, and therapeutic culture have contributed to the genre’s prominence. |
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| English 181A.2 |
Learning from Chekhov Topics in Genre Studies |
Prof. Mona Simpson |
| Designed as supplement for students who write their own fiction, but serious readers also welcome. Discipleship is dangerous. Faulkner, Nabokov, Hemingway, Woolf, O'Connor, Garcia Marquez, and Beckett are notoriously perilous to imitate. Anton Chekhov (1860-1904), grandson of freed serfs, became physician who donated his medical services to poor and wrote over 600 stories. His "style without style" has been seminal legacy for contemporary short-story writers, from William Trevor and Alice Munro to Jhumpa Lahiri and Yiyun Li. His impartial humanity, his healer's overview, his rare ability to see beauty and pain at once, and his gift for creating characters of every social class make him mentor for writers of many backgrounds and temperaments. Weekly reading of Chekhov stories, to learn from them how to write and how to live. |
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| English 181A.3 |
Crime Stories Topics in Genre Studies |
Prof. Mark Seltzer |
| This seminar will look at a series of novels, and some films, in examining the strange attraction between violence and spectacle, crime and the media. Crime and violence are popular and compulsive topics of the modern media, and the forms of crime and violence that show this lurid popularity can tell us a good deal about how we experience intimate and public life--and the games people play--today. Readings include novels by Patricia Highsmith, Bram Stoker, Agatha Christie, and Cormac McCarthy, among others, and related films. Course requirements: two 7-page papers, one due middle of the term and one end of term, attendance and participation in discussions. |
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| English 181C |
Tactility Topics in Critical Theory |
Prof. Rachel Lee |
| Right now you are touching something, and not only skin surface meeting chair, hand/arm on table, or face against the ambient air, but through the haptic senses of your stomach muscles gripped or relaxed--but this touching has become absent to you. This course is about the contemplation rather than the distractedness of touch. But it is not a course that, these opening statements aside, wishes to make you aware of every contact point on your body. This course reviews thinkers who’ve contemplated touch primarily in relation to vision, who’ve focused on degrees of awareness in our habitual modes of operating and interacting in the world, and have made tactility a metaphor—or have studied tactility as the sense that speaks when something has an “impact,” or is “forcefully felt”, delivers an “electric shock,” or is sentimentally “touching.” Through the examination of visual culture paired with novels, poetry, and theories of embodiment, this seminar inquires into the possibilites and limits of the literary arts to engage tactility as a topic, in light of new media interfaces (e.g., touchscreens, vibrotactile belts, etc.) that both capitalize upon and intentionally disorient the relationship of the user/audience to the artistic or consumer object. We will also explore the gendered and racialized dimensions of tactility. How do we narrate and metaphorically summon tactility? Conversely, how does tactility deliver information and does it (can it) fabricate in the way poetry has been said to make worlds? Students are to come prepared to the first class having read Michael Taussig's essay, "Tactility and Distraction," Cultural Anthropology 6.2 (May 1991), pp. 147-53. |
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| English 182A |
Going Native: Naturalized Citizenship in Late Medieval and Early Modern British Literature Topics in Medieval Literature |
Prof. Kat Lecky |
| Legend recounts how the medieval English knight Gilbert Becket met and married a Saracen princess while on crusade. She moved to her new husband's homeland, and their union produced one of the most famous men in British history: Thomas Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury. The myth of this cross-cultural alliance reveals the importance of naturalized citizenship to national growth. In a transnational world, the ability of a native body politic to accommodate foreign cultures marks true progress.
The myth of Becket's origins emerged when medieval England flourished as an imperial power and a center of international trade, and persisted as the nation continued to expand after the Reformation. As the national body politic grew, the questions of naturalized citizenship--of who belonged, and who was an "other"—occupied the thoughts of many. This course looks at this strain of thought in some British literature of this period, and contextualizes it with postcolonial theory, as well as with historical and literary criticism on Britain as an archipelagic association of cultures stretching across the Atlantic and beyond the Mediterranean. We will focus on the ways that civic acts by the excluded construct a de facto form of citizenship, one that may undermine hegemonic definitions of belonging. |
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| English 182B |
Humanism: Shakespeare, Michelangelo and a little Leonardo Topics in Renaissance and Early Modern Literature |
Prof. Michael Allen |
| This capstone seminar will begin by looking at some of the themes in S’s and M’s sonnets (M is an important poet too!). Then we will turn to other themes, and notably humanist ones, by delving into such works as Hamlet and the David, Lear and the Last Judgment, the Tempest and the Sistine Chapel, Antony & Cleopatra and the Medici Chapel. En route we will explore some of the problems associated with stylistic categories, including mannerism, and with describing M, L and S in stylistic terms as classical or Renaissance or mannerist artists. Key questions: How can one go back and forth between very different art forms? In what way is a painting dramatic or a drama pictorial or sculptural? Can one transfer terms? Can one talk, and how, about the “spirit” or style or “ism” of an age? Requirements: eager classroom participation including a PRESENTATION; a paper (probably based on your presentation); an informal written journal on the class. The seminarians, not the prof, do absolutely all the work. |
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| English 182D |
British Romantic Women Writers Topics in Romantic Literature |
Prof. Anne Mellor |
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This seminar will attempt to define a distinctively "romantic" period in the British female literary tradition. Using approaches garnered from the new historicism, feminist and race theory, we will study the emergence of a new social construction of gender (of femininity and masculinity) in women's writing in England between 1790 and 1830, focusing on the relationship between gender, genre, history, and political ideology. We will analyze the ways in which a spectrum of women writers widely differing in class, race and political orientation dealt with such social issues as the rights of woman, marriage and motherhood, female sexuality, religion, revolution and social change, the slave-trade and the abolitionist movement. What political positions and literary practices do these women share? In what ways do they differ from and contradict each other? Required TextsBritish Literature, 1780-1830, ed. Mellor / Matlak |
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| English 183C |
Literature of the Beat Generation Topics in 20th and 21st-Century American Literature |
Prof. Stephen Dickey |
| This course will explore the Beat phenomenon in its historical and cultural moment and will locate Beat literature in the tradition of American Romantic writing. We will concentrate on works by William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, and Jack Kerouac, paying some attention to other figures like Neal Cassady, Gregory Corso, and Lawrence Ferlinghetti, whose lives and works in some way confront and contest the pedestrian values of 50's America (and after). We will also investigate the aesthetic principles which the Beats appropriated from diverse sources--Surrealism, Abstract Expressionism, and Bebop--in order to ratify their own contrivances of spontaneity. And finally, we will consider predecessors (e.g., James Fenimore Cooper, Walt Whitman, Henry Miller) and inheritors (e.g., Ken Kesey, Sam Shepard, Hunter S. Thompson) whose works illuminate the achievement, or fried shoes, of the Beats. |
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| English M191A |
Toni Morrison's Trilogy Topics in African American Literature |
Prof. Caroline Streeter |
| Toni Morrison has indicated in interviews that the three novels she wrote between 1982 and 1997—Beloved (1987), Jazz, (1992) and Paradise (1999) -- formed a trilogy, and that this 15-year labor focused on the theme of excessive love. This advanced seminar focuses on Morrison's trilogy in addition to her two most recent novels Love (2003) and A Mercy (2008). The course shall include critical essays on Morrison along with selected footage of interviews and of Morrison in conversation with other writers. |
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| English M191B |
Chicana/Chicano Literature and its Cultural Influences Topics in Chicana/Chicano and/or Latina/Latino Literature |
Prof. Rafael Perez-Torres |
| This seminar will consider how some contemporary Chicana/o literary texts are influenced by a wide variety of poems, film, music and television programs. We will consider the issue of intertextuality across cultural borders and the inherently multicultural nature of Chicana/o literature. Some texts may include The Rain God by Arturo Islas, Pedro Paramo by Juan Rulfo, The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway, the film Psycho, What You See in the Dark by Manuel Muñoz, "The Wasteland" by T.S. Eliot, Loving Pedro Infante by Denise Chavez, Angelitos Negros with Pedro Infante, Peeping Tom Tom Girls by Marisela Norte, So Far From God by Ana Castillo, some telenovelas and perhaps an old Oprah episode or two. All texts will be in English. A final research paper or project will be required. |
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| English M191E |
Modernism, Gender, Sexuality Topics in Gender and Sexuality |
Prof. Louise Hornby |
| The modernist period (from around the end of the nineteenth century to World War II) witnessed the coincidence of radically new understandings of gender and sexuality alongside innovations in form and representation. In this course, we will explore modernism’s experiments with form and its resistance of the normative alongside its interrogation of gender and sexuality. We will examine the pairing of sexual and literary experimentation in the work of Oscar Wilde, Henry James, Radclyff Hall, E.M. Forster and Virginia Woolf. The final section of the course will engage in an extended analysis of the role of women in early film, paying particular attention to the construction of the female star, the politics of masquerade and cross-dressing, and the production of sexual identity on screen. |
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