FALL 2001
UNDERGRADUATE COURSES
ENGLISH 1A: BEGINNING COMPOSITION. Prerequisite: fulfillment of the Subject A requirement. This course will introduce students to the strategies of personal writing in a multicultural context.
ENGLISH 1B: INTERMEDIATE COMPOSITION. Prerequisite: English 1A. This course will emphasize the transition from personal writing in a multicultural context.
ENGLISH 1C: APPLIED INTERMEDIATE COMPOSITION. Prerequisite: English 1B. This course will address the function of writing in a range of contemporary situations, including that of the academy, from a critical and theoretical perspective.
ENGLISH 12A: INTRODUCTION TO POETRY. A general introduction to the enjoyment and understanding of poetry in English, intended primarily for non-majors. We will range broadly through British and American poetry, from the Renaissance to the present day, with particular attention to the varieties of poetic structure, figurative language, and the relationships between form and meaning, feeling and thought. Class text: The Norton Anthology of Poetry , 4 th edition. Mid-term exam, short paper, final exam.
Mr. Essick. MWF 8:10-9:00.
ENGLISH 15: MODERN LITERATURE. An introductory course designed primarily for non-English majors. Focuses on an important theme or technique in modern and contemporary literature. This course is available for qualifier students to fulfill Subject A requirements.
Ms. Kay. MWF 12:10-1:00.
ENGLISH 23A: ENGLISH LITERARY TRADITION. THROUGH EARLY 17 TH CENTURY. This course will survey the major texts and dominant motifs of English literature roughly from Chaucer to Shakespeare. Students will be expected to sit a midterm and an exam, and to produce three papers of varying lengths.
Mr. Bredbeck. MWF 12:10-1:00.
ENGLISH 102: INTRODUCTION TO CRITICAL METHODS. An introduction to criticism - reading it, and writing it. Although we will touch on classical approaches to literature, much of this course is devoted to critical models produced within the past fifty years - Marxism, feminism, anti-racist criticism, postmodern and more.
Ms. Doyle. MW 5:10-6:30.
ENGLISH 122: LITERATURES AND SEXUALITIES . NEW QUEER BRIT LIT. In this class we will read and discuss recent Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual literature from England. In addition to novels by, Neil Bartlett, Christine Crow, Alan Hollinghurst, Hanif Kuresihi, and Jeanette Winterson, we will read the poetry of Thom Gunn and watch the films of Isaac Julien ( Young Soul Rebel ), Stephen Frears ( My Beautiful Laundrette ), Simon Shore ( Get Real ), and Jeanettte Winterson ( Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit ), as well as the original Queer as Folk TV series and BBC's Portrait of a Marriage , the story of Vita Sackville West and Violet Trefusis. Requirements include two papers and a final exam.
Texts:
- Bartlett, Neil, The House on Brooke Street Plume; ISBN: 0452277817
- Crow, Christine, Miss X , Women's Pr Ltd; ISBN: 0704342596
- Gunn, Thom, Boss Cupid , Farrar Straus & Giroux (Paper); ISBN: 0374527717
- Hollinghurst, The Swimming-Pool Library Vintage Books; ISBN: 0679722564
- Kureishi, Hanif, The Buddha of Suburbia Penguin USA (Paper); ISBN: 014013168X
- Jeanette Winterson, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit Grove Press; ISBN: 0802135161
Mr. Haggerty. MWF 9:10-10:00.
ENGLISH 126A: THE AMERICAN NOVEL. THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. When Thomas Jefferson claimed "all men are created equal," he provided a model for representing the American people as a unified body. We can and have critiqued Jefferson's model along gender, class and race lines. This class will continue to examine the model through a critical discussion of sentimental and domestic fictions. Beginning with Susannah Rowson's Charlotte Temple and ending with Herman Melville's Pierre, we will explore a set of texts which confront the notions of "equality" in the United States.
Other authors will include James Fenimore Cooper; Catharine Maria Sedgewick; Harriet Beecher Stowe; Nathaniel Hawthorne; Susan Warner; William Wells Brown.
Requirements:
- 1 3-5 pages essay;
- 1 10-15 page essay and a final.
Mr. Cohen. MWF 2:10-3:00.
ENGLISH 128G: MAJOR AUTHORS. MILTON.
"Of Man's First Disobedience, and the Fruit/ Of that Forbidden Tree ..."
Intensive discussion of Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, Samson Agonistes, Comus, and selections from the minor poems (including "Lycidas" and some of Milton's school exercises) as well as some of the famous prose tracts, including treatises on education, divorce, self-government, and freedom of publication. Students will write several essays and exams, and deliver one or two brief oral reports. If Shakespeare is the Mozart of English Renaissance literature, Milton is its Beethoven.
Mr. Briggs. MWF 10:10-11:00.
ENGLISH 128K: MAJOR AUTHORS. WORDSWORTH. A close study of major works by William Wordsworth (1770-1850), arguably the greatest Romantic poet in the English language. We will investigate several different critical perspectives with particular attention to issues of romantic epistemology, gender, and the minute particulars of poetic language. Wordsworth's fascinating relationships with his sister Dorothy and with his great friend (and first critic) S. T. Coleridge will add a personal, biographical dimension to our studies. The course will conclude with a reading of Wordsworth's epic of self-fashioning, The Prelude . Class text: William Wordsworth: The Major Works , ed. S. Gill. Mid-term exam, term paper, final exam.
Mr. Essick. MWF 11:10-12:00.
ENGLISH 131: AMERICAN LITERATURE 1830-CIVIL WAR . TRANSCENDENTALISM AND ITS MALCONTENTS. Ralph Waldo Emerson's Nature was the unofficial manifesto of the Transcendental Club. Its optimistic declarations defined an era which still influences the United States' sense of self. The plan is to investigate Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Margaret Fuller in light of their conceptions of writing, nature and the United States. Together they struggle with the economic and social needs of a growing nation. We will also examine "malcontents," writers who may or may not share the same sense of optimism: Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs and Herman Melville. Requirements will be a short paper; a long paper; a midterm and a final. Mr. Cohen. MWF 4:10-5:00.
ENGLISH 140MM: STUDIES IN LITERARY GENRES . CALIFORNIA LITERATURE AND CULTURE . TO LIVE AND DIE IN LA: WRITING LOS ANGELES .
"They say this place is evil, but that's not why I stay."- Warren Zevon
This course is designed to explore Los Angeles-- the idea, the history, the myth, the legend, the reality-- through its writing. We will begin by discussing issues of mapping, community, and place as they relate to the central themes in Los Angeles literary and cultural history: Mike Davis' sunshine vs. noir paradigm, the myth industry of Hollywood, LA as a 'fragmented metropolis', LA as capital of postmodern geography, LA as urban apocalypse zone. The course will then focus on fiction (poems, short stories,
novels) produced throughout the twentieth century but with an emphasis on work produced after 1945 by African-American and Chicano/a writers. Where appropriate, we will examine these texts in relation to films and popular music, particularly LA hip hop. We will pay particular attention to the relationship between transformative social and political events--immigration from the U.S. South and Mexico, the Watts Riots, the Chicano Moratorium, the Rodney King verdict-- and the production of minority narratives. Texts covered may include: Nathaniel West's Day of the Locust , Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep , Walter Mosley's Devil in a Blue Dress , Chester Himes' If He Hollers Let Him Go, Anna Deveare Smith's Twilight, Oscar Zeta Acosta's Revolt of the Cockroach People, Sesshu Foster's City Terrace Field Manual, Bret Easton Ellis's Less Than Zero, and the poetry and stories of Wanda Coleman, Gil Cuadros, and Marisela Norte.
Mr. Kun. TR 12:40-2:00.
ENGLISH 143F: GENDER, SEXUALITY & VISUAL CULTURE . QUEER VISUAL CULTURE. A survey of how a range of visual artists - Manet, Warhol, Weems, Piper, Emin and more - interrogate the relationship between art and the body. The emphasis in this class is on the place of sexual difference and sexual pleasure in visual, but many of the artists we will examine take up the link between sexuality and race. In other words, we will be looking at contemporary work by artists of color, and at the place of racial difference in other work as well. We will study paintings, drawings, photography, as well as some video and performance art.
Ms. Doyle. LEC: MW 6:40-8:00. SCR: W 2:10-5:00.
ENGLISH 151T: STUDIES IN MEDIEVAL LITERATURE.
Comedy, Parody and Play 1075-1225 . The Twelfth Century was a period of new schools and universities, a new dialectical philosophy, and an easy-going cultural internationalism. This heady atmosphere produced some of the most playful discourses in the Western Tradition. We will concentrate on texts known to have been read in England, and we will read from a range of genres: comic drama; short comic narratives, fables and fabliaux; beast epic; goliardic lyrics, parodies and satires. Texts will be read in modern English translation, with parallel originals where possible. Expect lectures, music and slides from the period, whole class and small-group discussions, take-home study guides, in-class writing, student presentations. The class will be challenging, but should be great fun for those who want something completely different; it should not be attempted by the narrow-minded.
Ms. Elder. TR 9:40-11:00.
ENGLISH 152: RENAISSANCE REVOLUTIONS. This course will investigate the new forms of knowledge production, governance, verbal and visual culture, and gender construction that the term "Renaissance" was later coined to describe. We will investigate the interconnections among these different facets of "Renaissance" European culture, focusing on England, but taking note of Italian and French contexts. Readings will include Marlowe's Dr. Faustus , Shakespeare's The Tempest and Richard III , Machiavelli's The Prince , Castiglione's The Book of the Courtier , Rabelais's Gargantua and Pantagruel , poetry by Surrey, Louise Labe, Veronica Franco, and articles on exploration on conquest, science, painting, history writing, and humanism's troubled relationship to the figure of woman.
Ms. Waller. TR 11:10-12:30.
ENGLISH 176B: 20 TH CENTURY BRITISH & AMERICAN LITERATURE. Focusing on literature written between 1920 and 1940, this course will examine a range of "high modernist" concerns: the reevaluation and decentering of human identity; the representation of the self in relationship to language and others; the functions of innovations in narrative, verbal, and pictorial forms. Students should be aware of the fact that the majority of the literature for this course is experimental; they must be willing to engage unconventional--and often difficult--textual styles. Readings will include Lawrence's St. Mawr , Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury , Woolf's The Waves , Waugh's A Handful of Dust , Ernst's surrealist collage novel Une Semaine du Bonte , and several chapters of Joyce's Finnegans Wake .
Ms. Devlin. MWF 1:10-2:00.
GRADUATE COURSES
ENGLISH 262: RENAISSANCE LITERATURE. "RARE BEN JONSON": LITERARY CONTEXTS OF CITY, COURT AND COUNTRY. Of all literary figures active during the reigns of Elizabeth, James, and Charles, Ben Jonson is the most central. He wrote in virtually all of the extant forms of the time, excelling in poetry, criticism, and writing for the stage. He was also at the center of some of the major religious and political struggles of the time. And yet he was a productive author for a longer period of time (from the 1590's until his death in 1637) than any other Renaissance English author.
This seminar will be given over to study of Ben Jonson's works, their historical and literary contexts, and their impact on English literary tradition. Students will select a work or a problem in criticism, connected with Jonson or "The School of Ben," and present the seminar with an analysis of the current state of criticism with respect to that selected text or problem, suggesting how, if at all, critical understanding might be advanced.
For easy reference, the standard edition of Hereford and Simpson will be placed on reserve. Class discussion will focus on the assigned texts: the Norton Critical Edition of Ben Jonson and the Cavalier Poets, edited by Hugh Maclean (Norton 1974) and the new Cambridge Companion to Ben Jonson , edited by Richard Harp and Stanley Stewart (CUP 2000).
Mr. Stewart. W 2:10-5:00.
ENGLISH 270: SEMINAR IN TWENTIETH CENTURY AMERICAN LITERATURE. In this class we will consider the complex relationship between the narrative boundaries of the novel and the borders of the nation in the twentieth century, from the fresh green breast of the New World in The Great Gatsby to the prophecies of indigenous revival in The Almanac of the Dead . In the last twenty years the paradigms of American Studies, which have traditionally insisted on the nationalist significance of American literature, have undergone an often contentious revision. We'll consider many of these questions, from the idea of American innocence to paradigms of American imperialism, as well as the tremendous diversity of writing and readings, readers and writers that form the field today. Critical essays will also be assigned. A preliminary syllabus will be available soon.
Novels: William Dean Howells, The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885); Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin (2000); F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (1925); Willa Cather, The Professor's House (1925); Carlos Fuentes, The Old Gringo (1985) ; Cormac McCarthy, The Crossing (1994); John Reed, from Insurgent Mexico (1919); William Faulkner, Absalom, Absolom! (1936); James Baldwin, Another Country (1963); John Dos Passos, The Big Money (1936); Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow (1973); Joan Didion, Democracy (1984); Leslie Marmon Silko, Almanac of the Dead (1991).
Ms. Kinney. R 5:10-8:00.
ENGLISH 278-001: SEMINAR IN MINORITY DISCOURSE.
Autobiography and Memoir: The Arc of Narrative, the Shape of the Subject. Some of the most groundbreaking theoretical work of late has been produced through the autobiographical mode, a form that has been employed variously to consolidate a socially recognized self, to construct a written self whose writing subject is marginalized by the dominant culture, or to articulate the terms of the fragmented subject of hegemonic discourse. While autobiography theory has ranged from assumptions of a normalizing paradigmatic citizen/subject who merely renders his/her rise to exemplary status, to asserting that subject and narrative are mutually and simultaneously created, there is agreement on at least one point: that the relationship between writing and written selves is more crucial than in perhaps any other genre.
We will read a range of autobiographies and memoirs, as well as a wide selection of autobiography theory that addresses issues of race, gender, class, sexuality, and nation. Primary sources will include autobiographical texts that focus on issues of racialization, trauma, whiteness, illness, and intersectional identification ( possible texts: Mark Doty, Firebird: A Memoir ; Dave Eggers, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius ; Marya Hornbacher, Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia ; David Mura, Where the Body Meets Memory: An Odyssey of Race, Sexuality, and Identity ; Dalton Conley, Honkey ; Annie Rogers, A Shining Affliction: A Story of Harm and Healing in Psychotherapy ; Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Colored People ).
Because this course is focused on a form in which writing itself is as important as the story told, there will be a great deal of emphasis on the writing component for the seminar: this course will be writing intensive and papers should be written with deliberation, care, creativity, and style. Seminar participants will be required to write, among other items, a brief autobiographically-based narrative focused around the rubric of formal education (a paper that should be written with public consumption in mind), a comparative and critical book review, a summary review of 3 theoretical articles, and a final conference-length paper (10-12 pages). In addition, you will be giving a brief oral presentation on an autobiography not on the seminar reading list.
Those signing up for this seminar should email me with their own email address or (much less preferable, but acceptable) snail mail address (where, presumably, you can be reached prior to the beginning of the fall term). This course is still under construction and students should expect a final version of requirements and required texts approximately a month before the first seminar meeting. (I will, however, be email-ing titles as I definitively decide on them.) Also, the final syllabus will include the reading assignment for the first seminar meeting.
Ms. Yamamoto. F 2:10-5:00.
ENGLISH 278-002: MINORITY DISCOURSE. NATIVE AMERICAN LITERARY STUDIES. Intensive research in Native American literary studies. This course examines theoretical discourse surrounding Native American literary practices produced within the last twenty years. Topics covered will include: notions of sovereignty, visual culture, passing and mimicry, sexuality, identity formation, globalization, literacy, and authenticity. Films may include Navajo Talking Picture, It Starts with a Whisper, Harold of Orange, Real Indian, Picking Tribes, and High Horse. Readings may include Jace Weaver's That the People Might Live: Native American Literatures and Native American, Craig Womack's Red on Red: Native American Literary Separatism, M. Annette Jaime's The State of Native America, Robert Allen Warrior's Tribal Secrets: Recovering American Indian Intellectual Traditions, Gerald Vizenor's Manifest Manners: Postindian Warriors of Survivance, Elizabeth Cook-Lynn's Why I Can't Read Wallace Stegner and Other Essays: A Tribal Voice, Arnold Krupat's Ethnocriticism: Ethnography, History, Literature, and Joshua David Bellin's The Demon of the Continent: Indians and the Shaping of American Literature.
Ms. Hermann Raheja. T 2:10-5:00.
ENGLISH 279: RHETORICAL STUDIES. This seminar will serve as an introduction to the increasingly vital field of composition theory, research, and pedagogy. We will begin by looking at how Comp/Rhet has defined itself as a field of inquiry, examining the ways commentators like Lester Faigley, Patricia Bizzell, and James Berlin have mapped the various theoretical camps and their approaches to the teaching of composition. We will consider how such mapping efforts can give us a useful overview of the field, but also how they may tend to be reductionist. To gain a deeper, more complex understanding of the discipline as it continues to evolve, we will focus on topics such as process theory, genre theory, the reading/writing connection, metacognition, multiculturalism and the contact zone, critical pedagogy, feminism, and the politics of writing instruction. Class responsibilities will include active participation, two oral reports, and a term paper.
Ms. Axelrod. T 5:10-8:00.
ENGLISH 281: SEMINAR IN COMPARATIVE STUDIES. LITERATURE OF THE AMERICAS. In order to explore points of contact among the literary histories of the entire Americas, we will study the ways in which American self-definition has evolved in its various contexts. Readings will be from Colonial period to the mid-Twentieth Century, with an emphasis on narrative. We will scrutinize claims of distinction and particularity made by and about key texts from several periods, whenever possible pairing readings from North and South sharing historical, thematic and formal aspects. The following will be some of the topics for discussion: presaging America; chronicling the conquest and inventing empires; American picaresques; taming the wilderness; race and bourgeois virtue in the nineteenth century; family romances - Faulkner and his Latin American progeny.
Class discussion will be in English; English translations of the Spanish and Portuguese readings will be on reserve when they exist, but a reading knowledge of the original languages is strongly advised. Mr. Ochoa
ENGLISH 289: LITERARY GENRE. This seminar will focus on the poetics and narratology of the cold war. We will meditate on the relationship between the politics of 1945-65 and the poetry, fiction, and other literary and cultural manifestations of the time. We will consider the discourse of containment, atomic weapons, domesticity, suburbia, race, gender, and sexuality. We will read such poetic texts as Gwendolyn Brooks' Annie Allen (1949); Elizabeth Bishop's A Cold Spring (1955); Allen Ginsberg's Howl (1956); Robert Lowell's Life Studies (1959); Randall Jarrell's The Lost World (1965); Bob Kaufman's Solitudes Crowded with Loneliness (1965); and Sylvia Plath's Ariel (1966). We will read such fictional texts as Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man (1951); Gwendolyn Brooks' Maud Martha (1953); Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar (1963); and Hisaye Yamamoto's Seventeen Syllables and Other Stories (1988). We will also look for guidance and inspiration in such cultural histories as Elaine Tyler May's Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War (1988) and Alan Nadel's Containment Culture: American Narratives, Postmodernism, and the Atomic Age (1995). Finally, we will consider such critical studies as Thomas Schaub's American Fiction in the Cold War (1991) and Thomas Travisano's Midcentury Quartet: Bishop, Lowell, Jarrell, Berryman and the Making of a Postmodern Aesthetic (1999). Class responsibilities will include engaged participation, two oral reports, and a term paper.
"It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs. . . . It had nothing to do with me, but I couldn't help wondering what it would be like, being burned alive all along your nerves." -Plath, The Bell Jar
Mr. Axelrod. M 5:10-8:00.