Graduate Seminars

The 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; understanding the academic job market; humanities careers; critical and methodological approaches to literary studies; and navigating the university as an institution.

Every manuscript is unique. There is no “history of the book” wholly separate from the history of individual books. This class will train students how to read, look at, and generally make sense of manuscripts produced in Britain and Northern Europe from the earliest writings to the flourishing of print culture. As part of this conversation, we will necessarily consider the role of technology in re-mediating our encounters with manuscripts. The seminar will meet each week in YRL’s Special Collections, working hands-on with UCLA’s remarkable and teaching-focused collection of medieval manuscripts, leaves, and fragments.

 

 

This course may meet the pre-1800 breadth requirement OR the genre/theory/methods breadth requirement. Students may apply the course to only one of the above breadth requirements, and final seminar paper must cover territory within that breadth area.

As far as critical identification goes, Shakespeare is often read as being on our side, that is, as espousing some proximity to a humanistic rendering of us. But when we closely read Shakespeare’s plays, it’s fair to ask whether we’re overlooking the extent to which Shakespeare’s habitus offers us less discursive and performative fields of identification – we are all Hamlet – than matrices of dissociation, ones built around not only characters who pointedly embody/express a contempt for the (humanist) aesthetics and ideologies through which they’re persistently implicated but a Shakespeare himself who, arguably, holds us in contempt. (That’s a very long sentence! … moving on) The core question of our seminar is when thinking about the humanities/humanism, their futures, our futures and various critical schools of thought (e.g., critical race theory, queer theory, political theology, disability studies, environmental studies, postcolonialism) could “contempt” work as at least one useful model for thinking about our Shakespeare (or at least Shakespeare in the second quarter of the 21st century)? What kinds of contemptus mundi (formally and otherwise) do we see at work in Shakespeare? While such questions undergird the raison dêtre of our seminar, I’m offering this course first and foremost as a graduate-level introduction to Shakespeare, in which seminarians, if they are so inspired, should feel free to hold Shakespeare “himself” in contempt. Some of the plays being considered for this seminar are Titus Andronicus, The Merchant of Venice, Much Ado About Nothing, Richard II, Richard III, Julius Caesar, Measure for Measure, Othello, Coriolanus, The Winter’s Tale, and The Tempest. Seminarians will deliver a presentation, may be asked to respond formally to one presentation, and submit a final term paper, 3000– 7000 words, depending on the seminarian’s individual investments. Attending all seminar meetings and being graduate-level prepared for all seminar meetings are absolutely mandatory.

 

This course meets the pre-1800 breadth requirement.

This graduate seminar has three goals. First, students will become acquainted with some of the major texts and interpretive problems of pre-1900 American literature, with emphasis on the colonial era. Second, they will investigate the historical emergence of an early American “science of politics,” an inductive and empiricist alternative to the deductive rationalism of canonical political philosophy that modeled itself on early modern natural science and arose to mediate the challenges of transatlantic colonialism. Third, we will take the rise of this new political science as a case study in interdisciplinary scholarship, using it to explore the methods students in any literary field can use to generate original scholarly projects by putting different disciplines into conversation. In other words, students will conclude the course better equipped to mediate between seemingly discrete discourses that need not include the political and scientific ones explored in the course. Authors may include John Smith, Francis Bacon, John Winthrop, Thomas Hobbes, Richard Ligon, Aphra Behn, John Locke, Tom Paine, and Herman Melville.

 

This course may meet the pre-1800 breadth requirement OR the genre/theory/methods breadth requirement. Students may apply the course to only one of the above breadth requirements, and final seminar paper must cover territory within that breadth area.

In this seminar, we will read works of contemporary Latinx poetry alongside recent monographs in Latinx studies. While the monographs we read are not necessarily about poetry, our focus will be on how poetry does and does not intersect with these scholarly works, as well as how the genre shapes our understanding of Latinx studies. To do so, we will discuss how poets are working with, on, and against recent turns and innovations in the field. Our thinking will also develop from understanding poetry as a self-theorizing genre that challenges and enriches the field while exploring a range of poetic forms and media that gesture to the heterogeneity of Latinx communities.

 

This course may meet the post-1800 breadth requirement OR the genre/theory/methods breadth requirement. Students may apply the course to only one of the above breadth requirements, and final seminar paper must cover territory within that breadth area.

Diversifying the Classics research group meeting, two hours. Limited to graduate students. Collaborative translation of early modern Hispanic plays to English. S/U grading.

 

Please note this course is taken for an S/U grade only and cannot count toward the coursework requirement for the Ph.D.

During the Cold War, American Studies was founded to both challenge and reify reigning ideas regarding American exceptionalism. American Quarterly, launched in 1949 and the premier journal of the field, described it as “studies in the culture of the United States.” The field, emphasizing interdisciplinarity and globalism, focused on scholarship emphasizing American life, the idea of ‘America,’ and its relationship to the world. The social movements of the 1960s, and democratizing of US universities, radically transformed the field, leading to deeper emphases on race, class, gender, and empire. This seminar emulates the outward expansion of the field, in the past decade or so, to embrace cutting-edge work in the inter-disciplines, principally feminist theory, performance studies, queer theory, and aesthetics. As such, this seminar explores recent interdisciplinary work in the humanities utilizing innovative methodologies and creative approaches to the archive that push the field in new directions. As such, this seminar aims to reveal both rigorous and imaginative methods for examining discrete cultural actors, historical paradigms, aesthetic representations, performance tactics, musical and dance cultures, and the texture of everyday life.

 

This course meets the genre/theory/methods breadth requirement. 

Course description coming soon. 

 

Course description coming soon.

 

 

This course meets the genre/theory/methods breadth requirement. 

Course description coming soon.

 

 

This course may meet the post-1800 breadth requirement OR the genre/theory/methods breadth requirement. Students may apply the course to only one of the above breadth requirements, and final seminar paper must cover territory within that breadth area.

This seminar considers the ways that contemporary Indigenous aesthetics and critical theory imagine possible ecologies and relational ethics with the more-than-human world. With an emphasis on the twenty-first century, we will trace the ways that Indigenous artists and critical scholars have responded to past, present, and future colonial apocalypses, extractive violence, genocide, and ecocide. Our readings will move transnationally across Indigenous literatures and visual cultures that enact ecological relations otherwise. In doing so, we will contemplate diverse and expansive conceptualizations of the more-than-human, personhood, and kinship that draw on Indigenous cosmologies, ecological knowledges, and ethics. We will also engage conversations that have taken shape in Indigenous feminisms, gender studies, critical race studies, “animal” studies, queer inhumnisms, and beyond. Content considerations: our course materials will engage gender and sexual violence, genocide, and violence directed at and experienced by more-than-human persons, lands, and waters.

 

 

This course meets the genre/theory/methods breadth requirement. 

Course description coming soon.

 

 

This course meets the genre/theory/methods breadth requirement. 

Diversifying the Classics research group meeting, two hours. Limited to graduate students. Collaborative translation of early modern Hispanic plays to English. S/U grading.

 

Please note this course is taken for an S/U grade only and cannot count toward the coursework requirement for the Ph.D.

From the current post-Brexit moment, we will explore how the early modern English canon takes shape in relation to other languages and literatures. How does the sense of England’s distinctiveness then and now determine the boundaries of what is English? What is the connection between literary imitation and broader forms of cultural imitation or imperial emulation? Focusing on problems of vernacularity, translation, and empire, this course examines early modern English texts in a series of overlapping contexts, and considers how models for literary study beyond the nation (oceanic, archipelagic, transnational) serve the early modern period.

 

This course meets the pre-1800 breadth requirement. 

The genre of the novel has had long associations with narratives of normative personal development and with stories of compulsory heterosexual marriage. This genre history has meant that writers who wanted to queer the novel have had to find innovative ways to break the form and disrupt those normative trajectories. American novels have sometimes been claimed as generally queerer than the novels of other national traditions. This course will study some nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century queer American novels that feature such formal and thematic disruptions. We will likely read Charles Brockden Brown’s Memoirs of Stephen Calvert (1799-1800), Julia Ward Howe’s The Hermaphrodite (c. 1846-47), Margaret J. M. Sweat’s Ethel’s Love-Life (1859), Theodore Winthrop’s Cecil Dreeme (1861), Sarah Orne Jewett’s A Marsh Island (1885), Herman Melville’s Billy Budd (1891/1924), Charles Warren Stoddard’s For the Pleasure of His Company (1904) and Nella Larsen’s Passing (1929), all of them offering unsettling variations on queer novelistic form and content.

 

 

This course may meet the post-1800 breadth requirement OR the genre/theory/methods breadth requirement. Students may apply the course to only one of the above breadth requirements, and final seminar paper must cover territory within that breadth area.

A seminar in the history and practice of writing for an informed public audience, introducing students to different prose styles suited for publication in literary journals, etc., and helping them develop their own voice for use across scholarly and more popular genres. We will begin with Samuel Johnson and read critics including William Hazlitt, Matthew Arnold, T.S. Eliot, Dorothy Parker, James Baldwin, Lester Bangs, Ellen Willis, Susan Sontag, John Berger, Andrea Long Chu, Lauren Michele Jackson, and others. Students will be expected to keep on top of major publications (such as The New Yorker and the London Review of Books, to name a few) during the quarter.

 

This course meets the genre/theory/methods breadth requirement.

Course description coming soon.

 

This course meets the genre/theory/methods breadth requirement. 

Diversifying the Classics research group meeting, two hours. Limited to graduate students. Collaborative translation of early modern Hispanic plays to English. S/U grading.

 

Please note this course is taken for an S/U grade only and cannot count toward the coursework requirement for the Ph.D.