Graduate Seminars

The Graduate Proseminar is an introduction to the profession of literary studies. The course will cover a wide array of topics related to issues in the profession and professionalization, including (but not limited to): the structures and histories of the discipline; writing and publishing for scholarly and general audiences; scholarly organizations and conference presentations; building a CV and a resume; developing professional skills; understanding the academic job market; humanities careers; and critical and methodological approaches to literary studies.

Eighteenth-century moral philosophy held that human nature is governed by the passions; in this course we’ll read novels that dramatize this belief by telling stories about characters overtaken by passion. Readings will include novels by authors including Madame de Lafayette, Eliza Haywood, Laurence Sterne, and Jane Austen, as well as selections from early modern and eighteenth-century philosophy and criticism including works by John Locke, William Hogarth, and David Hume. Alongside these eighteenth-century texts we’ll also read recent work that explores affect’s relationship to literature.

 

Breadth:
Pre-1780 (2019 and earlier cohorts)
Pre-1800 (2020 and later cohorts)

In this seminar we will explore the intellectual challenge posed by the Latinx 19th century.  It radically alters our ideas of space, place, and nation as it forces us to reconsider the Anglocentrism of conventional periodization in C19 literary studies as well as foundational concepts like “America,” “ethnic,” and even the category of the “literary” itself. Readings will be multigeneric and in English, covering topics including: antebellum black-brown solidarities; the role of emerging print technologies in forging migrant, Latinx reading communities; the relationship between modernismo, vanguardismo, and hemispheric vs. transatlantic modernisms; cross-dressing, Confederate, Cuban émigrés and the queering of the Civil War; and the territorial politics of the testimonial vs. the novelistic “self” in the aftermath of the Mexican-American War.  We’ll explore these through contemporary, cutting-edge research and will dialog directly with the scholars currently shaping the field of C19 literary studies.  Seminar time will comprise discussion as well as hands-on, archival experience, and class work will include a mix of papers, flash presentations, and archival assessments designed to give specialists and non-specialists alike skill-building experiences applicable across academic and professional fields. Readings will include: Selected Writings (José Martí); Xicoténcatl (Anonymous); The Squatter and the Don (María Amparo Ruiz de Burton); The Woman in Battle (Loreta Velasquez); Blake (Martin Delaney); Selections from Azul and Profane Prose (Rubén Darío), and more!

 

Breadth:
Post-1780 (2019 and earlier cohorts)
Post-1800 (2020 and later cohorts)

English 257, “Digital/Medieval: Resistant Archives” will focus on the theoretical and practical complexities of contemporary archives, digitization and archival preservation practice, and medieval documents and books.

Working hands-on with UCLA’s collections of medieval manuscripts and early printed books, and also hands-on with some of the interoperable data available from various digital projects from around the world (including but not limited to IIIF, the Digital Mappa project, the Mapping Manuscript Migration project, and others), the seminar will offer students an opportunity to both encounter the practical difficulties of archival and digital work on medieval and renaissance books/texts, and also to situate those difficulties in theoretical discussions about archives, manuscripts, and book history more generally. Visiting speakers will make presentations to the class and.

 

This class is the annual CMRS LAMAR seminar (Late Antique, Medieval, and Renaissance) for 2021-22.

Breadth:
Genre/Methods/Theory (2020 and later cohorts)

This seminar focuses on literary and cultural productions by and about Asian Americans, with particular attention paid to works reflecting on science and technology.  How does the bioecological turn in the humanities (e.g. Hsuan Hsu’s “atmo-orientalism,” Neel Ahuja’s “queer atmospheres”, Tim Choy’s articulation of “wind” as environmental and human bodily actant) affect the practice of Asian Americanist critique?  How does it nuance the earlier biopolitical turn in the field dating to 2014?  What is the relation between intelligence gathering and intervention on the macro-level—e.g., via big data, economic and environmental risk calculations, metrics of toxicological threshold, population statistics, and so forth—and the techniques for relaying perception attuned to the consciousness of the individual organism, associated with the lyric, the confession, the epistle, and the autoethnography (those styles purveying intimacy)?  And what of narratological techniques stressing not the coherence of a singular embodied subject but distributed cognition across semi-autonomous nonhuman actants such as cells or cities?  Primary texts for the class include novels, poetry, and installation art by C.R. Lee, O. Vuong, K. Ishiguro, R. Ozeki, Y. Li, L. Ma, G. Bear, A. Yi, J. Fan, and Arakawa & Gins.  We will discuss these writers and artists in relation to scholarship in cultural studies, environmental studies, and science and technology studies.  Works in the latter category may include those by F. Jameson, A. Woloch, L. Davis, A. Heinrich, A. Ghosh, H. Hsu, T. Choy, N. Ahuja, S. Sze, M. Chen, A. Bahng, H. Landecker & C.

 

Breadth:
Post-1780 (2019 and earlier cohorts)
Post-1800 (2020 and later cohorts)

This seminar explores the works of anti-colonial theorist and activist Franz Fanon in the context of postcolonial discourse. We will read Fanon’s four major works, Black Skin, White Masks (1952), A Dying Colonialism (1959), Toward the African Revolution (1964), and The Wretched of the Earth (1961), along some of the most important critical engagements with and evaluations of these works by postcolonial scholars. Our discussions will be framed by a broad range of questions about the relevance of his theoretical articulations of colonial relations of power, race, and nationalism. As well, we will interrogate the term “postcolonialism” by considering the theoretical and political implications of using such an umbrella term to designate the ensemble of writings by those subjects whose identities and histories have been interpolated by colonial encounter.

 

Breadth:
Genre/Methods/Theory (2020 and later cohorts)

This seminar studies Shakespeare’s relationship to what I’m calling for the purposes of this seminar “theories of accountability,” theories that have articulated investments in social justice, possibly including critical race studies, disability studies, ecocriticism, Marxist criticism, queer studies, postcolonialism, etc. One of the seminar’s overarching questions is what does it mean to think about accountability within both institutional and critical frameworks. What does it mean to hold Shakespeare accountable? To hold us accountable as scholars in the humanities, as teachers etc.? Each week we will read a different Shakespeare play and take on a different theoretical model (via modest theoretical readings) and explore these and other questions. We will also, of course, welcome intersectional work among these and other theoretical models and will do our best to resist obvious pairings of plays and theories. Some possible plays include As You Like It, Merchant of Venice, Othello, Richard III, Romeo and Juliet, The Tempest, Twelfth Night. Expectations for seminarians will include one formal presentation, participation in an end-of-term symposium, and the submission of a final research paper.

 

Breadth:
Pre-1780 (2019 and earlier cohorts)
Pre-1800 (2020 and later cohorts)

This seminar questions the critical purchase of modernism amid conflicting rumors of its obsolescence and whispers of its return. Modernism, after all, has been declared dead before. If it has died (again), are there mourners at its wake or shouts of good riddance? If it is revived, what is at stake in the reanimation of modernism? We will reckon with modernism’s perceived ends and the field’s own obsession with endings, nostalgia, death, and loss. Balancing on the knife’s edge of disaster and renewal, modernism insists on the exchange of old and new, and so we will consider the particular relationship of modernism to contemporary works and contemporary crises. In thinking about the shape of the field, we will look closely at the ways in which formalism as method emerged in the early part of the twentieth century and how it might inform the current conversations about the field.

 

Breadth:
Post-1780 (2019 and earlier cohorts)
Post-1800 (2020 and later cohorts)

How should we understand today the nineteenth-century genre of industrial fiction? What can it teach us? This class will revisit Catherine Gallagher’s classic 1985 literary critical work, The Industrial Reformation of English Fiction, 1832–1867 as well as several of the novels upon which that study focused. We will also read one astonishing novel that it missed. Our aim will be two-fold. First, we will investigate closely this genre, its contemporary history, and its later theorizations. Our goal here will be to open a door into the nineteenth-century novel. Georg Lukács will serve as one of our primary theorists. Our second aim will be to loosen and explore the ideas that the industrial novel presents, experimenting with them across periods and approaches. Papers and student research might thus involve, for instance, issues of race and industrialization; bibliographic matters and the industrialization of printing; questions of manufacturing in relation to eco-criticism and the Anthropocene; the history of science; new views of Marx and other dimensions of contemporary ‘political economy’. A core of industrial fiction concerns gender and sexual expression, which varied greatly with class, and that will form a focus of discussion and possible research. Your instructor will be attending especially to the history of standardization, that is, to the extraordinary infrastructural shift in relations between people and man-made objects spawned by industrialization and grasped partly through re-imagining literary narratives.

 

Breadth:
Post-1780 (2019 and earlier cohorts)
Post-1800 (2020 and later cohorts)

This seminar considers how Indigenous writers use speculation to craft alternative possibilities for Indigenous life in the face of historic and ongoing settler colonial violence in North America. Our readings will trace an expansive definition of speculation that centers nonrealist storytelling practices which resist normative, colonial conceptions of being, embodiment, and space-time. We will also examine how authors draw on and subvert genre conventions, such as those found in horror, fantasy, and science fiction. We will ask, how do Indigenous speculative literatures imagine beyond colonial apocalypses and project Indigenous lives forward in time? How do speculative modes of storytelling enact Indigenous cosmologies, traditional ecological knowledges, and decolonial relations with more-than-human life? How do feminist and queer forms of speculation challenge colonial heteropatriarchy while imagining anti-colonial forms of sociality and relationality? And, how do Indigenous speculative literatures represent vital sites of decolonial, ecological, feminist, and queer theorizing?

 

Breadth:
Post-1780 (2019 and earlier cohorts)
Post-1800 (2020 and later cohorts)

In this seminar, we will read some of the key works by Fredric Jameson on the questions of modernity and postmodernity in relation to selected literary and visual texts addressing modern and postmodern urban space.  The aim will be to develop a two-way dialogue between literature and theory, to read the different kinds of texts with and against one another in order to develop a fuller understanding of the dynamics of modernity and postmodernity both in general and as grounded in one particular site in which these dynamics have worked (and continue to work) themselves out: London.  Texts by Jameson will include parts or all of Postmodernism, Or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism; The Seeds of Time; A Singular Modernity; The Modernist Papers; and The Antinomies of Realism.  Texts engaging London will include work by Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, Iain Sinclair, J. G. Ballard, Alan Moore, Patrick Keiller, Zadie Smith and Laura Ford, among others.

 

Breadth:
Genre/Methods/Theory (2020 and later cohorts)

“One cannot write poems about trees when the forest is full of police.” – Bertolt Brecht.

 

This seminar asks what kind of determinative relation might exist between contemporary poetry and poetics and the modern police state. In other words and in the simplest terms, how does the omnipresence of the police affect what poetry looks like, and is? We will be treating policing not just as a theme within twentieth- and twenty-first century poetry but rather attempting to develop a working theory of the impact of state violence—in both its ordinary and more extraordinary manifestations—on poetic form, language, and concepts. Readings will be many and varied, and will include work by Amiri Baraka, Sean Bonney, Gwendolyn Brooks, Aimé Césaire, Roque Dalton, Diane di Prima, Tongo Eisen-Martin, Mercedes Eng, Jean-Marie Gleize, Bhanu Kapil, Anna Mendelssohn, Justin Rovillos Monson, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Danez Smith, Juliana Spahr, and Wendy Trevino among several others, as well as works of literary and political theory and history.

Breadth:
Post-1780 (2019 and earlier cohorts)
Post-1800 (2020 and later cohorts)

This seminar focuses on the relation between New World encounters and narrative form. It draws on an array of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century texts like exploration and travel narratives, natural histories, novels, captivity narratives, long poems, and medical treatises to consider the formal and narrative choices that authors use to detail their experiences and observations. Rather than tracing specific national or generic conventions, this literary history will seek to understand the relation between those conventions and the evolution of colonialism and modernity. The course will be attentive to the circulation of African, European, and Indigenous knowledge through the Atlantic world and will explore the scholarly and pedagogical practices that teach us how to identify and analyze non-Western narrative forms within Western archives.

 

Breadth:
Pre-1780 (2019 and earlier cohorts)
Pre-1800 (2020 and later cohorts

This will be both a seminar and an opportunity for students to workshop their own creative prose. For our seminar texts, we’ll look at Latinx literary production of the last five years. How would we define the “now” of Latinx literature, and how does that “now” imagine the future, revision the past, reflect and distort the contemporary? On the workshop side, students will have the chance to develop their own research interests in a creative direction, whether that’s thinking about new ways of engaging with the archive; writing fiction, poetry, or essays; or – in the great Anzaldúan tradition – hybridizing poetry and prose, personal narrative and theory, in order to create new forms.

 

Breadth:
Post-1780 (2019 and earlier cohorts)
Post-1800 (2020 and later cohorts)

This seminar examines key developments in contemporary African American literature, tracing lively debates about authenticity, identity, and tradition over the last four decades after the end of the Black Arts Movement. We explore the links between aesthetic and political worlds, the interplay of race, gender, class, sexuality, and region, and the innovative responses of writers to the ongoing contradictions of emerging racial formations, neither reducible to what came before, nor radically in breach from it. In what ways is contemporary African American literature a coherent entity? To what extent does resistance form a central problematic in the field today? How do contemporary writers open up restrictive ideas about racial identity and community and highlight the multiplicity of African American identities, interrogating notions of authenticity and the demands of representation? How do they make sense of the contradictions of historical developments over the last four decades, where advances in racial justice have been haunted by the persistence of pernicious forms of discrimination and dispossession? The writers and artists we study not only reckon with these developments, they shape our understanding of their impact on ordinary lives by chronicling the psychic and social architecture of lived experiences of racism. They also take up the question of how and why contemporary forms of discrimination relate to previous racial regimes, probing whether the new century inaugurated a new racial order or documented the persistence of old forms of injustice and precarity. Major topics include: the literature of protest and dissent; memory, history, and the legacy of slavery; literary experimentation and Afrofuturist speculation; satire, humor, and the search for new forms; the new African diaspora, migration, and displacement.

 

Breadth:
Post-1780 (2019 and earlier cohorts)
Post-1800 (2020 and later cohorts)

This course will serve as a critical introduction to what is customarily called “theory,” or “French theory.”  While recent studies have usefully situated theory—and the questionable idea that it can be readily applied—as an invention of the Anglo-American academy, this course will explore the hypothesis that a wide range of groundbreaking works of “theory” had as their focal point critical considerations of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and especially his work in political theory.  What makes this work, and particularly Rousseau’s concept of origin, such an enabling frame of reference in the twentieth-century?  Thinkers considered include Lévi-Strauss, Starobinski, Derrida, de Man, Althusser, Foucault, Deleuze, Kofman, Lejeune, and Badiou.  We will also consider selections from Rousseau’s vast corpus alongside the critical works in question, and students are encouraged to read as much as they can of Rousseau’s Confessions, Discourse on the Origins of Inequality, The Social Contract, Emile, and Julie, or the New Heloise.

 

Breadth:
Genre/Methods/Theory (2020 and later cohorts)

The workshop is intended for students who would like to draft a scholarly article and submit it to a journal for publication. Over ten weeks we will discuss topics including academic writing and revising; the genre of the scholarly article; the mechanics of academic publishing; how to research and select a journal for your article; and how to use publishing as a way to advance your scholarly work and build your intellectual community. Each class meeting will have some time devoted to writing, and each week we will examine a scholarly article chosen by students, with an eye to understanding how the article presents research, frames an argument, creates a scholarly voice, addresses an audience, and engages with a set of scholarly fields. There will be no formal assignments; however, on the final day of class everyone will, hopefully, submit their article to the journal of their choice.

 

It is not necessary to have an article draft completed prior to the start of the class, nor is it necessary to have prior experience with academic publishing. The course will be graded S/U and will not count towards the 14-course requirement. Therefore, it is primarily intended for students who have completed their regular coursework and/or passed their Part I exam.

 

Please note that the seminar may not be used to fulfill the 14-course requirement for the PhD in English.  S/U grading only.