Graduate Seminars

In “Ulysses, Order, and Myth,” T.S. Eliot writes that Ulysses “is a book to which we are all indebted, and from which none of us can escape.” This course interrogates the inescapability of Ulysses, focusing on the novel’s grand experiment with prose style in the context of modernism. We will use Joyce’s novel to think through a series of questions about literary influence; the epistemology of the novel; the relationship between literature, science, and art; the novel’s production of time and space; stylistic difficulty; canonicity; and the purchase of modernist studies. We will consider various ways in which the novel has been taken up critically, each week focusing on a particular theoretical or historical approach to Ulysses and to literary criticism. In addition to Ulysses, we will read Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, selections from Dubliners, and portions of Finnegans Wake. Students may either write two 8-10 page papers or a seminar paper.

This seminar intends to help students engage with Shakespeare’s plays at an advanced level and, secondarily, use that engagement to develop professional perspectives on literary research in various methodologies and ideologies (historicist, feminist, ecocritical, editorial, close and distant reading, performance and adaption, etc.). We will explore between eight and ten plays, and direct analysis of those plays will be our primary emphasis, but we will also consider various scholarly approaches — usually through articles or chapters chosen by members of the seminar — to those plays. The weekly discussions will require students to prepare thoroughly for each meeting, not only studying the assigned material in detailed, alert, and imaginative ways, but also taking initiatives to look further into areas of doubt or interest, and then to be active, informed, and courteous participants during class. We will most likely study Romeo and Juliet, Measure for Measure, and Othello, and will choose our other plays from among Midsummer Night’s Dream, Merchant of Venice, Hamlet, Henry V, As You Like It, King Lear, Macbeth, Coriolanus, The Winter’s Tale, and The Tempest. Students will write brief (1-2 page) position-papers on topics of their own choice for each session of the first half of the Quarter, to be posted on the course website the day before the class meets, and will write a seminar paper (about fifteen pages) at the end of the Quarter

This course will examine representations of the Mediterranean—-that space in between Europe and Africa, Christianity and Islam, East and West—-in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, to explore how English identities are negotiated in relation to Italy, Spain, and Africa. What is the role of the Mediterranean in early modern conceptions of race and gender? How do Mediterranean exchanges complicate our histories of imperialism? How does the literary negotiate and inflect these exchanges? Authors will include Kyd, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Cervantes, Massinger.

This will be a practical course in formal analysis of the novel. Thus we will read some of the important authorities on the topic: Genette, Bakhtin, Chatman, and a number of novels, including Joseph Andrews, Jane Eyre, Emma, Frankenstein, Mrs. Dalloway, and others. Our purpose will be to acquire a command of the basic categories in the analysis of the novel, but also to subject these to some critical pressure. For example, why is the apparently basic distinction between story and discourse so hard to describe and why are the names given to these two so variable? Is it appropriate to divide novelistic narration along the linguistic line between first and third person? What are the limitations to omniscient narration and how does the acknowledgement of limitations undermine the very concept? Is the term “psychological realism” an oxymoron? Requirements include a) two scholarly book reviews, or b) a seminar paper.

This seminar focuses on Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison’s novels Beloved (1987) Jazz (1992) and Paradise (1998), works the author has described as a trilogy. Spanning a century, Beloved represents African American life during and immediately after slavery, Jazz is set during the 1920s Jazz Age, and Paradise during the ambiguous, transitional decade of the 1970s. We also read Morrison’s first novel The Bluest Eye (1970), and her most recent, 2015’s God Help the Child, along with selected critical essays. Note: Vintage International print editions of all books are required for this seminar.

This course centers on realism, or, more exactly, realisms. Realism, as genre or tendency, is premised on a world that comes to itself by staging, and reporting, its own the conditions. Such a world is one recast by the presence of alternatives—and so always in a state of suspense. ”The real world” is thus given to what the novelist David Shields calls “reality hunger.” Realisms present how we live in and with these circular networks, and so how such a world renders its own reality comprehensible to itself—or, at times, the degree to which its reality lacks reality. We will look first at two very recent attempts to take the temperature of such a world: Tom McCarthy’s novel Satin Island (on the drive to write “the great report” on the contemporary) and China Miéville’s novel This Census-Taker (on storifying lives via data-base fictions, in a chalk-lined world). Such an “interdisciplinary” turn may lend itself to seemingly harmless
introductory surveys—at times, to approaches, genres, and theories as nearly one-word arguments (“interdisciplinarity,” for example). There may be no way around these problems. But there are different ways of entering them. For one thing, these concerns are not alien to realism: they are constitutive of it. So we will next look back at canonical, albeit weird, realisms (novels, for example, of William Dean Howells, Sarah Orne Jewett, Theodore Dreiser, Henry James). Then, turn to some recent and experimental realisms (for example, the fiction of Kazuo Ishiguro, Cormac McCarthy, Patricia Highsmith, or Natsuo Kirino). Here official reality, spectral finance, and new ego-technic media (euphemized as social media) lead realism into uncanny valleys. Each week core readings will dock onto recent work in art theory, media studies, social psychology, science studies, among other things. Topics will include the
ontological turn in literary studies (object envy); the allure of systems (cybernetic irony); and current enchantments with neo-animisms and immersive, or actor-network, connections (network love). Course requirements: either two shorter papers–each may take the form of a brief essay or a book review—or a longer term paper.

Literary critics agree that now is a good time to think about how we relate to literature in terms that move beyond the stances—such as “digging down and standing back,” in Rita Felski’s phrase—associated with literary critique, a view that has unsurprisingly brought renewed attention to questions of attachment. I call this interest unsurprising because, where critique operates via detachment and dissection, attachment is about the ties that bind. But how does attachment work, by what objects is it mediated, and what is its relationship to the task of literary criticism? This course will investigate these questions by pairing attachment theory from psychology, sociology, and literary studies, with literary texts, primarily from the eighteenth century, that both thematize and embody different modes of attachment. Literary texts will include works by Samuel Richardson, Laurence Sterne, William Hogarth, James Boswell, and Jane Austen.

This is a seminar in Romantic poetry and also in the idea of poetic difficulty. In other words, it is appropriate for students of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature and of poetics more broadly, in particular those interested in the historical formation of “the” avant-garde. We will consider the emergence of difficulty as a term of praise and disrepute, the relationship between poetry and jargon, difficulty’s politics (e.g., what kinds of audience does difficulty presume and create, what are the ideological claims of demands for plain-speaking, what is the function of specialized languages, from techno-scientism to local dialect, in producing difficulty’s affiliations and alignments), and the consequences of difficulty’s coevolution with global capital. Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century authors will include Wordsworth, Keats, Hazlitt, Burke, Blair, G. Campbell, Hogarth, C. Smith, Shelley, Kant, Cowper, Young, Clare, Hegel, and Marx; later materials from Bernstein, Glissant, Prynne, Apter, Dworkin, Forrest-Thomson, Doyle, and Spivak, among several others.

This course traces out the recent oceanic turn in the humanities, with an emphasis on postcolonial and indigenous methods and approaches. While diaspora and transnational studies have emphasized maritime mobility, most scholars have treated the ocean as a blank space across which travelling human subjects attain their agency. More recently there has been a rise in what has been called a “critical ocean studies” that examines the ocean as embodied space, fluid material, a place for engagement with nonhuman others, and a place of alternative knowledges and ontologies. We will examine postcolonial texts that engage with all of these themes and turn to representations of the ocean (including the frozen poles) as a space of migration as well as an agent of climate change. Given the interdisciplinary range of the “Oceanic Humanities” (or “Blue Humanities”) we will examine a wide range of texts, including literature and the visual arts and host a number of visiting scholars. Students will be required to attend the “Relational Undercurrents: Contemporary Art of the Caribbean Archipelago” exhibit (part of Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA) at the Museum of Latin American Arts, Long Beach. https://www.molaa.org/exhibition/relational-undercurrents/ [Transport will be provided.] Readings may include Epeli Hau`ofa, Derek Walcott, Keri Hulme, Craig Santos Perez, Phil Steinberg, Liza Paravisini-Gebert, Stefan Helmreich, Stacy Alaimo, and Astrida Neimanis.

This seminar will examine the development of the thought and work of Edward Said. We will read most of Said’s major works, often in relation to some of the other major intellectual figures (e.g., Vico, Adorno, Gramsci) in relation to whom Said elaborated his own unique intellectual career. Readings will include Orientalism; The Question of Palestine; The World, the Text and the Critic; Culture and Imperialism; Representations of the Intellectual; and On Late Style, and will involve Said’s approaches to literature, theory, music, aesthetics and politics.

This lecture aims to introduce graduate students in the humanities and social sciences to basic concepts, theories, and methods in research on narrative. We will cover “classical” structuralist narratology; early sociolinguistic approaches to oral narrative; “postclassical” narratology as it emerged from feminist and reader response theory; anthropological field work and narrative; storyworld and virtual reality theories; and recent developments from cognitive science, affect theory, and the digital humanities. The class will explore storytelling situations, plot structure, character construction, fictionality and nonfictionality, cultural story templates, modes of reading/hearing narrative, image-text relations, and cross-media translation (text, film, games, Internet). Assignments will emphasize application of narratological concepts and methods to your own field of research, and to communication of your research to the public sphere. Open to graduate students from the humanities and social sciences; open to advanced undergraduates by instructor’s permission.

If April is the cruelest month, it’s Chaucer’s fault. If Dryden wrote voluminously, he also noted that “[Chaucer] must have been a Man of a most wonderful comprehensive Nature.” And Patience Agbabi wants you to know that “When my April showers me with kisses / I could make her my missus or my mistress / but I’m happily hitched – sorry home girls.”

 

In this class, we’re going to read a lot of Chaucer, a lot of Chaucer criticism, and a lot of Chaucer adaptations, from 15th century Chaucerian apocrypha, to Agbabi’s Telling Tales, to Jean Binta Breeze’s “Wife of Bath in Brixton Market” and various BBC productions. Aimed at medievalists and also non-medievalist graduate students, we’ll interrogate Chaucer’s canonical Canterbury Tales by putting it in dialogue with anything and everything we can bring to the table. Class participation is essential. Students will make two presentations over the course of the quarter, and submit a final 20-page seminar paper.

This seminar introduces students to the early history of U.S. resistance literature. It examines the traditions of protest that developed out of one of the most tumultuous eras of U.S. history—the period between the American Revolution and the Civil War. The early U.S. was a hotbed of political resistance and artistic innovation. Its heated debates about personhood and rights helped fuel the rise of new literary traditions centered on social justice (the slave narrative, abolitionist literature, and protest fiction). Throughout the quarter, students will use the political histories of U.S resistance literature as a way into a range of questions. How have various acts of writing and reading been understand as political at different moments in U.S. history? How might the early traditions of resistance inform ongoing scholarly debates about reading and interpretation? And how might the long history of U.S. protest literature help us to better understand twenty-first century resistance movements? The seminar will address it itself to two primary audiences: 1). students interested in learning more about 19th century U.S. literature and politics; 2). students in other subfields and disciplines, who are interested in the political history of literature. Readings will include select legal documents, literature (by Phillis Wheatley, William Apess, David Walker, Henry David Thoreau, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, Herman Melville, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Susan B. Anthony, and Claudia Rankine), and secondary criticism (by Spivak, Jameson, Butler, Fetterly, and others).

An elite author if there ever was one, Melville clearly began as a “popular” writer of travel and captivity narratives: what happened?  Or, to put the question another way, what can we say about the “long foreground” of  Moby-Dick?   Before the mysteriously tattooed Queequeg, the strangely well-spoken Marnoo, taboo kannaker and sacred wanderer of Typee; before the metaphysical whiteness of the whale, the more explicitly racial whiteness of Yillah, the disappearing maiden of Mardi; before the at-first insistent but then fading personality of Ishmael, a whole range of curiously unstable experiments in first-person adventure narration. And if a foreground, an aftermath or “wake” as well: with the “romance” property of light and dark ladies left over from Mardi, Pierre more furiously pursues the growing skepticism of Moby-Dick, asking if our belief in virtue is any better founded than that in objective knowledge.  The critics were not amused.
So, then, in a sudden, brilliant reduction of mode, from tragedy and romance to irony, there appear the ordinary narrators of the magazine tales who seem, like a landlocked Ishmael, to be trying to make familiar sense out of an exceptional person in an extreme circumstance.  With the added (ethical) problem of whether a well-motivated intervention could possibly help.  Think before you answer, for haunting characters like Bartleby, Merrymusk, Marianna, Benito Cereno (not to mention Babo), the pale maids of “Tartarus,” and the somber family doomed to eat the “poor man’s pudding.”

Finally, when Melville’s stunning accomplishment has long outrun our grubby interest in precedent—and epistemology and politics have just about stultified one another—two alternate endings: as if to show that the Postmodern is not far off from the Victorian, a chance to ask why we have been, all along, so very exercised over the random fantasies of that notorious Confidence Man, the novelist; but then, lest you think it’s all been just so much free-play, the stark (un-)patriotic gore of the Battle Pieces.

 

What?  You insist on adding  Billy Budd?  OK, but only if you’re prepared to demand Clarel, Timoleon, and John Marr as well.

This course focuses on transformations in race and genre in the contemporary novel, exploring the forms of correlation made visible by this conjunction. Much has been made critically of new racial formations in the twenty-first century, including the globalization of racial forms, the provocation of post-racialism, and the pervasive disposability of racialized bodies. Concurrently, some of the most compelling fiction of the last three decades experiments with such received forms as the bildungsroman, the gothic novel, magic realism, fantasy, science fiction, and the slave narrative to devise new forms of speculative and counterfactual thinking, to erase distinctions between popular and literary fiction, and to reorder space and time to imagine new geographies. Drawing on novels by Junot Díaz, Octavia Butler, Colson Whitehead, Karen Tei Yamashita, Percival Everett, Joe Sacco, Teju Cole, and Marjorie Liu, we will explore the range of twenty-first century racial forms on display. Students are welcome to write their final paper on a contemporary novel of their own choice, as long as they engage with the questions discussed in the class. Requirements include weekly discussion questions, a class presentation, and a final seminar paper.

This 2-quarter seminar (comprised of Comparative Literature 290 in winter quarter and English 259 in spring quarter) is offered by the UCLA Program in Experimental Critical Theory. For more information, please visit:

 

http://ect.humnet.ucla.edu/

This seminar will focus on the how Chicanx culture helps formulate notions of Chicanx agency. We’ll focus on certain exemplary texts from the 1960s to 2010 to map out how moments of particular critical concern crystalize around animating cultural figures (the farm worker, the pachuco, the borderlands mestiza, the hemispheric mujerista, the cyborg). The context for our discussion lies amid debates about biopower and bare life, ranging from Giorgio Agamben’s interpretation of Foucault to Sylvia Wynter’s postcolonial critique of homo economicus. We will consider how subjectivity generated from a position of socio-political marginality formulates a sense of collective protection through identity and ultimately agency.

 

The class will trace two main investigative arcs. One will focus on an introduction to key critical figures and concepts in the unfolding of a Chicanx literary heritage. The other will focus on current critical issues relating to discussions of biopower as a manifestation of modernity and considerations of the posthuman. The first arc will serve to familiarize us with the field of Chicanx literary studies while the second will provide the opportunity to explore exciting and challenging theoretical formulations together, Course work, besides active attendance, includes an annotated bibliography and a drafted final research project.

This course will provide an eclectic introduction to the work of Louis Althusser and especially Michel Foucault, by focusing on three common lines of inquiry these otherwise strikingly different thinkers shared.  In both cases, we will consider major works from the 1960s and 1970s alongside more recently collected course lectures and archival materials.  We will also look at some of the now extensive work on Foucault and neoliberalism while trying to frame our inquiry in different terms.

This seminar will serve both as an introduction to the field of cultural memory studies and as an occasion to reflect on the question of historical responsibility. We will begin by reading classic and contemporary texts on individual and collective memory by such scholars as Maurice Halbwachs, Sigmund Freud, Pierre Nora, Jan and Aleida Assmann, Jeffrey Olick, Astrid Erll, and Ann Rigney. We will then focus in more depth on the ethical and political problems that arise from the retrospective confrontation with violent histories. We will explore the dilemmas of justice, reparation, reconciliation, and forgiveness and the status of beneficiaries, heirs, and other latecomers who are “implicated” in traumatic histories without having been direct participants. We will consider a wide range of contemporary literary, cinematic, artistic, and theoretical texts dealing with the aftermaths of Atlantic slavery, the Holocaust, South African apartheid, the Vietnam War, and European colonialism as well as ongoing situations such as contemporary globalization, climate change, and settler colonialism. Among the intellectuals and artists we will likely consider are: Hannah Arendt, Berber Bevernage, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Jacques Derrida, Saidiya Hartman, Marianne Hirsch, Karl Jaspers, William Kentridge, Jamaica Kincaid, Mahmood Mamdani, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Bruce Robbins, and Michel-Rolph Trouillot. Since the course is meant to provide an opportunity to develop new ways of thinking about social and historical relationality, students will be encouraged to draw on their own research interests and explore histories beyond those mentioned here. Prior to the first seminar meeting, please watch Michael Haneke’s 2005 film Caché.