CoursesSenior Seminars

The division and contention between the country and the city is the source of one of the greatest political chasms of our moment.  What might the history of fiction set in the countryside have to tell us about this conflict, and the way in which rural life has portrayed and understood in our increasingly urbanized world? Agriculture is where nature meets culture: what is the result for fiction? What makes a novel (or a life) rural as opposed to urban or suburban?  Does it have to be about farming? Why is rural fiction so often penned by city dwellers, and how does that matter? Why is the contemporary rural novel so frequently a study of poverty rather than an idyllic pastoral life?   Why do so many universities have departments of urban studies, and so few of rural studies? Questions such as these will motivate our reading, which will primarily be concerned with the American fiction of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.  Authors to be studied may include Cather, Steinbeck, Kingsolver, Wilson, Ward, among others. Long distance readers only need apply.

 

Reserved for American Literature & Culture seniors only on first pass. Open to English seniors on second pass.

The Basques were the first people to settle central Europe.  They have a unique language and the rarest blood type in the world.  This course examines the culture and history of the Basques and their immigration to the American West.  In this seminar, we will read a broad sampling of Basque American literature, including memoirs, novels and poetry, cookbooks, travel guides, children’s books, language instruction manuals, and detective fiction, as well as Basque literature in English translation—all of which documents the unusual and mysterious nature of this immigrant group.

 

Reserved for American Literature & Culture seniors only on first pass. Open to English seniors on second pass.

Variable specialized studies course in African American literature. Topics may include Harlem Renaissance, African American literature in Nadir, black women’s writing, contemporary African American fiction, African American poetry.

 

Reserved for American Literature & Culture seniors only on first pass. Open to English seniors on second pass.

This seminar considers the enmeshments of queerness, trans*ness, and Indigeneity in the contemporary Indigenous expressive cultures of North America. Reading fiction, poetry, visual media works, performance, and critical theory, we will trace the ways that artists and theorists craft decolonial conceptions of gender, sexuality, embodiment, sensation, kinship, and movement. Focusing on works published since 2012, we will follow the shifting contours of queer and gender-expansive Indigenous art and theory in the 21st century. We will also highlight the ways that writers imagine queer and trans* intimacies with the more-than-human world amidst world-ending structures and events. Our course materials engage trauma, colonial history, and sexuality in the Indigenous arts.

 

Reserved for American Literature & Culture seniors only on first pass. Open to English seniors on second pass.

In this seminar we try to answer two basic questions that should interest all students of literature: what is a novel, and why does it matter? We will approach these questions from two related areas of study. These include (1) the novel’s historical emergence as a cultural phenomenon over hundreds of years of development, and (2) the novel as a distinct literary genre with its own narrative conventions, techniques, and conceptions of human character. Both areas have been the subject of intense literary criticism and theoretical speculation for the last hundred years or so. Students will read the most provocative and engaging statements about the novel from these important secondary sources, and will use their insights from them to read two or three novels from different time periods. Requirements include regular oral reports, engaged class discussion, short papers, and a longer paper.

The division and contention between the country and the city is the source of one of the greatest political chasms of our moment.  What might the history of fiction set in the countryside have to tell us about this conflict, and the way in which rural life has portrayed and understood in our increasingly urbanized world? Agriculture is where nature meets culture: what is the result for fiction? What makes a novel (or a life) rural as opposed to urban or suburban?  Does it have to be about farming? Why is rural fiction so often penned by city dwellers, and how does that matter? Why is the contemporary rural novel so frequently a study of poverty rather than an idyllic pastoral life?   Why do so many universities have departments of urban studies, and so few of rural studies? Questions such as these will motivate our reading, which will primarily be concerned with the American fiction of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.  Authors to be studied may include Cather, Steinbeck, Kingsolver, Wilson, Ward, among others. Long distance readers only need apply.

 

Reserved for American Literature & Culture seniors only on first pass. Open to English seniors on second pass.

In this course, we’ll take a deep dive into a text that is one of the longest novels written the English language: Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa, first published in 1748. Though we’ll be focusing on a single text, the reading for this course will be substantial – the Penguin edition we’ll be using comes to 1499 pages, and they are large pages.

The course will toggle between formalist and political analysis – since Richardson’s novel is remarkable, not least, as an expansive account of threats to bodily and sexual autonomy. (The novel remains all too apt in our present moment). We’ll find together that Richardson’s vast novel opens up a variety of topics for research and discussion, including gender and sexuality, media theory, the rise of the novel, the history of capitalism, and the relationship between literature and philosophy. Our encounters with the novel will be enriched by visits to the Clark Library, where students will work with archival materials that will help us flesh out the world of the text.

Students who complete the seminar successfully are awarded a $1000 scholarship. Subsidies for use of Lyft are provided for student transportation to and from the Clark Library.

This class is limited in size. To apply, please fill out the form at https://bit.ly/4g7xNBk by Friday, February 7.

This course is the annual Ahmanson seminar, and will be held in part at the Clark Library. An application is required (see details above.)

In this seminar we will study together the work of one of the great novelists of the nineteenth century in Britain, George Eliot. Eliot, whose real name was Marianne Evans,  wrote fiction that was able to distil and explore major ideas in philosophy, ethics, science, history, aesthetics and politics. The central questions of her work include how people live meaningful and creative lives, and how people ought to treat one another. In examining these questions, we will focus in particular on Eliot’s masterpiece Middlemarch (1871-3), which manages to be both the story of ordinary life in a small town, and an inquiry into some major historical and philosophical ideas. (It’s also very funny). We will also look at some of the major artistic and philosophical sources that were important to Eliot. The aim of the seminar will be to study Eliot’s writings slowly and carefully, and in the process to learn a lot about the culture of the nineteenth century, as well as the vast range of Eliot’s ideas that are still relevant to our lives today.

The Basques were the first people to settle central Europe.  They have a unique language and the rarest blood type in the world.  This course examines the culture and history of the Basques and their immigration to the American West.  In this seminar, we will read a broad sampling of Basque American literature, including memoirs, novels and poetry, cookbooks, travel guides, children’s books, language instruction manuals, and detective fiction, as well as Basque literature in English translation—all of which documents the unusual and mysterious nature of this immigrant group.

 

Reserved for American Literature & Culture seniors only on first pass. Open to English seniors on second pass.

The unlikely story of the three Brontë sisters, Charlotte, Emily, and Anne, has fascinated scholars and general readers alike—how could it be that not one or two but three authors whose works would live on after their untimely deaths could emerge from a single family in an isolated Yorkshire village? Indeed, the legend of the Brontës is always in danger of eclipsing the works themselves. In this capstone seminar, we will read Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847), Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847), and Anne Brontë’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848). We will consider these novels in their social, historical, and artistic contexts, examining each through a variety of critical lenses, and will discuss how the mystique of the Brontë family story and its r/Romantic backdrop has shaped our expectations as 21^st-century readers of these novels.

Variable specialized studies course in African American literature. Topics may include Harlem Renaissance, African American literature in Nadir, black women’s writing, contemporary African American fiction, African American poetry.

 

Reserved for American Literature & Culture seniors only on first pass. Open to English seniors on second pass.

This seminar considers the enmeshments of queerness, trans*ness, and Indigeneity in the contemporary Indigenous expressive cultures of North America. Reading fiction, poetry, visual media works, performance, and critical theory, we will trace the ways that artists and theorists craft decolonial conceptions of gender, sexuality, embodiment, sensation, kinship, and movement. Focusing on works published since 2012, we will follow the shifting contours of queer and gender-expansive Indigenous art and theory in the 21st century. We will also highlight the ways that writers imagine queer and trans* intimacies with the more-than-human world amidst world-ending structures and events. Our course materials engage trauma, colonial history, and sexuality in the Indigenous arts.

 

Reserved for American Literature & Culture seniors only on first pass. Open to English seniors on second pass.