Graduate Courses
Spring 2006
Graduate students from other departments and exceptionally well-prepared undergraduates are welcome in English graduate courses (except for English 200) insofar as limitations of class size allow. Courses numbered 203 are usually limited to 20 students; courses numbered 250 are usually limited to 15. From time to time, instructors of other graduate courses may find it necessary to limit enrollment.
When demand for a graduate course exceeds the maximum enrollment limit, the instructor will determine priorities for enrollment and inform students of his/her decisions at the second class meeting. Tele-BEARS enrollment does not guarantee a place in a graduate course that turns out to be oversubscribed on the first day of class; in fact, a few students could be required to drop the course, starting with people who are not English Department graduate students -- though, fortunately, this situation does not arise very often.
202
History of Literary Criticsm
Kahn, Victoria
M 3-6
Note New Room: 225 Dwinelle
Book List and Course Description:
History of Literary Theory
This course offers a historical survey of important texts of literary theory, with particular focus on texts that are important for English graduate students. We will devote particular attention to the concept of the sublime and the emergence of the idea of aesthetics. Texts include: Plato, _Republic_; Aristotle, _Poetics_; Longinus, _On the sublime_; Sidney, _Defense of Poetry_; Addison, _Spectator Papers_; Burke, _Philosophical Inquiry into . . . the Sublime and the Beautiful_ ; Hume, _Essays_; Kant, _Critique of Judgment_; Arendt, _Lectures on Kant_; Lyotard, _The Differend_; Derrida, "The Pharmacie of Plato"; Jameson, _Postmodernism_, and selected critical essays. Students in other departments are welcome and may work on critical texts in foreign languages.
203/1
Graduate Readings: Poetry and the “Science of the Feelings”
Goodman, Kevis
M 3-6
103 Wheeler
Book List (tentative): Burke, E.: A Philosophical Enquiry . . . Sublime and the Beautiful; Coleridge, S.T.: Major Works (Oxford Authors); Hume, D.: A Treatise of Human Nature; Keats, J.: Complete Poems; Smith, A.: Theory of Moral Sentiments; Smith, C.: Poems of Charlotte Smith; Williams, R.: Keywords; Wordsworth and Coleridge: Lyrical Ballads 1798 and 1800; Wordsworth, W.: The Prelude 1799, 1805, 1850; plus two Course Readers for the first and second halves of the semester, respectively
Course Description: William Wordsworth’s often-quoted statement that poetry is the “science of the feelings” is double-edged, as such genitive constructions always are. It evokes both the contemporary sciences that took the feelings as their object of study (e.g., the physiological and other human sciences of the eighteenth century) and the modes of knowledge that the feelings may peculiarly yield—the domain that would, during the Romantic period, gradually come to be known as aesthetics, the “science of sensuous cognition.” This class will read the poetry of the later eighteenth century and Romantic periods in tandem with selections from the period’s human and natural sciences in order to consider the ways that “poetry”—and literature more generally—was construed not only in opposition but also in apposition to “science”—even as an extension of scientific practice. As those guarded quotation marks might indicate, a central part of our task will be to understand, rather than take for granted, just how these terms were constituted and extended during the period under consideration, particularly as “poetry” came to describe something more and other than just verse writing (as in Shelley’s “Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the World”). Another burden of our inquiry: to comprehend why, or at the least how, literary criticism and theory of the last decade has embraced such terms as “feeling,” “emotion,” and “affect” so dramatically, entering what might be construed as a second—but also “secondary” or scholarly—Age of Sensibility.
For poetry, the focus of our reading will fall on Wordsworth, Coleridge, Charlotte Smith, Erasmus Darwin, and Keats, but we will also read selections from Collins, Cowper, Barbauld, Beddoes, and Shelley. On the moral-philosophical and scientific side: selections from Cheyne, Willis, Locke, Burke, Hume, Adam Smith, Reid, Davy, Priestley, Hutton, and Kant.
Note to students in the English Department concerned about course distribution: this course can satisfy either the eighteenth- or the nineteenth-century historical field requirements (but not both at once).
203/2
Graduate Readings: Visual Autobiography
Wong, Hertha Sweet
TTh 11-12:30
300 Wheeler
Book List: Tentative (and Partial) List of Required Texts and Art:
Primary:
Norma Elia Cantú. Canícula: Snapshots of a Girlhood en la Frontera, Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1995.
Theresa Hak Kyung Cha. Dictee, 1982. Berkeley: Third Woman Press, 1995
N. Scott Momaday. The Way to Rainy Mountain, 1969. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1976.
Leslie Marmon Silko. Sacred Waters: Narratives and Pictures. Tucson: Flood Plain Press, 1981.
Art Speigelman. Maus: A Survivor's Tale. Part I: My Father Bleeds History; Part II: ... And Here My Troubles Began. New York: Pantheon, 1986, 1991.
Carrie Mae Weems. Photo-biography.
Faith Ringgold. Story Quilts.
Artists' books by various authors/artists.
Suggested Secondary:
Marianne Hirsch. Family Frames: Photography, Narrative, and Postmemory. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997.
Nicholas Mirzoeff. The Visual Culture Reader, 2nd ed. 1998. New York: Routledge, 2001.
W.J.T. Mitchell. Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994.
Reader with essays on autobiography theory and visual culture theory.
Course Description: Visual culture is not just about pictures, but the (post) "modern tendency to picture or visualize existence,” what W.J.T. Mitchell refers to as "the pictorial turn." While visual and literary studies have been seen as historically separate disciplines, we will use theories from each to study those forms of self-representation that defy disciplinary boundaries, what I am calling "visual autobiography." Visual autobiography encompasses a wide range of self-representations and self-narrations: conventional books in which images are integral to the whole, rather than mere supplementation or illustration; pictographic (picture-writing) ledgerbooks; photo-biographies; artists' books (individually handmade textual art objects); co-mix (comics); narrative quilts; electronic personal narratives; autobiographical performance art; digital storytelling; auto-topographies; and other visual forms, ranging from “textual pictures” to “pictorial texts.”
We will read a great deal of scholarship in the fields of autobiography and visual culture as well as read and look at primary texts and objects.
203/3
Graduate Readings: On Life
Jones, Donna
TTh 12:30-2
204 Wheeler
The structuring influence of vitalist aesthetics can be felt in the philosophy of the Fruhromantiks, Georg Simmel's tragedy of culture, the cult of Bergson in France, the pseudo-Nietzschean politics of Rosenberg, modernist poetics in North America, the Sorelian politics of Mariategui, and the radical poetics of N'gritude. While because of its association with fascist politics on the one hand and the breathtaking advances in the understanding of cellular machinery on the other hand Lebensphilosphie seems today to be mystifying and obstructionist, I urge against the building of an intellectual cordon sanitaire around a powerful discourse which is all too easy to repress. It is best in my opinion to face squarely the challenges which vitalist thought poses or rather the limits which vitalism exposes the limited hold of Enlightenment reason, scientific method, and parliamentary palaver on modern subjects. Whether as anti-dialectical philosophy vitalism is necessarily a form of ahistoric naturalism will be a major question.
Robert J. Richards, The Romantic View of Life
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Hints Towards a Notion of a More Comprehensive Theory of Life
Friedrich Nietzsche, Birth of Tragedy
Henri Bergson, Selected Writings, Matter and Memory
Aime Cesaire, Collected Poetry
Leopold Sengho,r Liberation
Jose Carlos Mariategui, Selected Essays
Gilles Deleuze, Bergsonism, Immanent Life
Elizabeth Grosz The Nick of Time
203/4
Research Seminar: Gender, Sexuality, Modernism
Abel, Elizabeth
Wed. 3-6
Note New Room: 122 Barrows
Book List: Barnes, D.: Nightwood; Butler, Judith: Gender Trouble; Faulkner, William: The Sound and the Fury; Ford, Madox Ford: The Good Soldier; Foucault, Michel: The History of Sexuality; James, Henry: Short Novels; Kristeva, Julia: The Powers of Horror; Larsen, Nella: Passing and Quicksand; Sedgwick, Eve: Epistemology of the Closet; Wilde, Oscar: The Importance of Being Earnest, The Picture of Dorian Gray; Woolf, V.: A Room of One's Own, Mrs. Dalloway, Orlando, The Waves
Course Description: Gender norms and literary forms both exploded at the turn of the twentieth century. These paired crises in social and literary narratives were perceived on the one hand as the stuttering end of western culture's story, the drying up of libidinal fuel; and on the other as the freeing of desire from the burden of reproduction, and of language from the burden of reference. Sexual and literary experimentation went hand in hand, but their intersections varied considerably. At the end of the twentieth century, a different phase of the sexual revolution produced a set of theoretical debates about the construction of gender and sexuality. In this course, we will read back and forth across the century to stage a series of encounters between the narratives and practices of literature and theory. Some of the topics we will address are: gender and literary production; modernist aesthetics and gender performance; hysteria as sexual disorder and as literary style; racial and sexual abjection; narrative structure and the archaeology of femininity; transvestitism and literary authority; sexual and textual closets; and queer aestheticism.
Since the readings include both British and American texts, students will be able to satisfy requirements in either field (as determined by the choice of paper topics).
205B
This course has been cancelled.
243A
Fiction Writing Workshop
Mukherjee (Blaise), Bharati
TTh 2-3:30
305 Wheeler
Book List: T.B.A.
Course Description: This is a limited-enrollment workshop for graduate and undergraduate fiction writers. Workshop members will be expected to write approximately 45 pages of original fiction, which may be several short stories or chapters of a novel-in-progress. The course requirements include participation in workshop discussions of peers’ manuscripts and fulfilling assignments on specific aspects of craft.
Undergraduates are welcome to apply.
To be considered for admission to this class, please submit approximately 15 photocopied pages of your fiction (short story or chapter of a novel) to Professor Mukherjee’s mailbox in 322 Wheeler Hall BY 4:00 P.M., TUESDAY, OCTOBER 25, AT THE LATEST.
Be sure to read the paragraph concerning creative writing courses on page 2 of this Announcement of Classes for further information on enrollment in such courses!
243B
Poetry Writing Workshop
O’Brien, Geoffrey
W 3-6
108 Wheeler
Book List: Course Reader
Course Description: Topics in poetics raised by philosophers (Agamben, Badiou, Barthes, Bourdieu) and by practitioners (Alcalay, Ashbery, Joron, Moxley, Palmer) will focus our discussion of each other’s poetry. In addition to writing poems every week you’ll have two semester-long assignments: 1) the re-ordering and revision of a published book of poetry and 2) a set of operations on a common source text.
To be considered for admission to this class, please submit 5-7 photocopied pages of your poems to Professor O’Brien’s mailbox in 322 Wheeler Hall BY 4:00 P.M., TUESDAY, OCTOBER 25, AT THE LATEST.
Be sure to read the paragraph concerning creative writing courses on page 2 of this Announcement of Classes for further information on enrollment in such courses!
246H
Graduate Pro-seminar: Victorian Period
Puckett, Kent
MW 1:30-3
305 Wheeler
Book List: The list may include Brontë, E.: Wuthering Heights; Carlyle, T.: Sartor Resartus; Darwin, C.: The Origin of Species; Dickens, C.: Great Expectations; Eliot, G.: Middlemarch; Abrams et al., eds.: The Norton Anthology of English Literature Vol. 2B: The Victorian Age
Course Description: This course is an introduction to the literature and culture of the Victorian period. Victorian poets, novelists, and critics responded to rapid industrial growth, colonial expansion, and profound developments in science, technology, and social life with a mixture of exuberance, anxiety, and dismay. We will focus on the period's poetry, fiction, and non-fiction prose in order to understand how particular texts represent and sometimes undermine particularly Victorian ideas about aesthetics, politics, progress, money, religion, gender, sexuality, and science.
246L
Graduate Pro-seminar: Literature in English, 1945 to the Present
Saul, Scott
MW 9-10:30
Note New Room: 300 Wheeler
Class assignments and discussions will focus on the interpretation of the period's documentary sources -- its literature, film, music, art and cultural commentary. We'll pay particular attention to the emergence of new subgenres in the novel (the postwar bildungromans of Salinger and Ellison, the different 'postmodern' novels of Pynchon, Banks and Yamashita); in music (rock 'n' roll, rap); in theater (off-Broadway and off-off-Broadway performance); and in film (film noir, the Biblical epic, New Hollywood's reinvention of the gangster film). And we'll think about how these new cultural forms grapple with larger structural shifts in US society -- from such political developments as McCarthyism, the Civil Rights Movement, the New Left, Women’s Liberation, the New Right and the neo-liberal ‘consensus’, to such social phenomena as the sacralization of the nuclear family, the transformation of urban and suburban spaces, the rise of the prison-industrial complex, and the simultaneous globalization and concentration of the mass media.
250/1
Research Seminar: Renaissance Economies
Landreth, David
Tues. 3:30-6:30
108 Wheeler
Book List: Dekker, T.: The Shoemaker’s Holiday; Donne, J.: Major Works; Jonson, B.: The Devil Is an Ass; Kinney, A., ed.: Rogues, Vagabonds, and Sturdy Beggars; Marlowe, C.: The Jew of Malta; Marx, K.: Capital, vol. 1; Nashe, T.: The Unfortunate Traveler and Other Works; McCluskie, K., ed.: Plays on Women; Shakespeare, W.: King Lear, Measure for Measure, The Taming of the Shrew; Spenser, E.: The Faerie Queene; and a Course Reader
Recommended Texts: Cox, J., and Kastan, D., eds.: A New History of Early English Drama; de Grazia, M., et. al., eds.: Subject and Object in Renaissance Culture
Course Description: This research seminar considers a range of possible forms that an economic criticism of sixteenth- and early-seventeenth-century texts might take. The totality of scarcity-engendered choice that we know as ‘the economy’ was not a concept available to the Renaissance; their word ‘oeconomy’ refers not to any such universalized institution, but to the practice (Aristotle’s oikonomia) of managing an individual household. Our discussion of these topics will locate itself, therefore, in the sphere of the domestic, before passing to the broader registers of the London luxury market, the print market, the ideal of communal prosperity present in the formulation of nation as ‘commonwealth,’ and the fantasized venues of exchange in such un-local readings as The Faerie Queene and The Jew of Malta. We will consider in each of these registers the relationships of individuals to the things they own and to the things they want.
We will read a different early modern text each week in conjunction with recent historical or critical writing. Following current critical preoccupations, most of the literary readings will come from the drama, but as I am interested in expanding those preoccupations to the full breadth of Renaissance genres (and in helping out those of you drawing up your exam lists), we will read more widely into the canon as well. A problematic that greatly concerns me is the Marxian one of reading across the historical rupture of ‘primitive accumulation’ from our own inescapable locus in modernity; we will be using economic difference as a privileged instance of historical difference, and will discuss the different ways in which thinkers modern and early modern have sought to imagine such a difference.
250/2
Research Seminar: Theory, Secular and Post-secular
Nealon, Christopher
Tues. 3:30-6:30
201 Wheeler
Book List:
Schleiermacher, On Religion: Speeches to its Cultured Despisers
Kierkegaard, Provocations: Spiritual Writings of Kierkegaard
Durkheim, Elementary Forms Of The Religious Life
James, Varieties of Religious Experience
Sartre, No Exit & Other Plays
Russell, Why I Am Not a Christian
Derrida, Acts of Religion
Agamben, The Time That Remains: A Commentary On The Letter To The Romans
Conolley, Why I Am Not a Secularist
Course Description: Do we still live in a "secular era"? Did we ever? By what gestures has "the secular" become an unmarked or habitual term? This course will offer one genealogy of secularism in the west -- we will trace the articulation of its terms in philosophy, criticism, and "theory" -- beginning with Kant and turning, at term's end, both to contemporary "political theology" and to political writing on religion and secularism today.
250/4
Research Seminar: Modernism and the City
Snyder, Katherine
Thurs. 3:30-6:30
201 Wheeler
Book List: To be selected from the following (consult the course syllabus, available at the first class, before buying your books!): Auster, P.: City of Glass; Dos Passos, J.: Manhattan Transfer or The Big Money; Fitzgerald, F.S.: The Great Gatsby; Eliot, T.S.: The Waste Land; Hughes, L.: The Ways of White Folks; Larsen, N.: Passing; Stein, G.: The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas; Toomer, J.: Cane; Woolf, V.: Mrs. Dalloway
If time permits, we will also view and discuss several “city symphony” films, such as Charles Sheeler and Paul Strand’s “Manhatta” (1921), Walter Ruttman’s “Berlin” (1927), and Dziga Vertov’s “Man with the Movie Camera” (1929). We will supplement these texts with a photocopied course reader containing poetry, short stories, and critical and theoretical essays; among those likely to be included are Poe, Whitman, Simmel, Baudelaire, Benjamin, Eliot, Joyce, Calvino, Barthes, R. Williams, Jameson, Michael North, and Susan Stanford Friedman.
Course Description: Skyscrapers and subways, crowds and solitary strollers, cacophony and kaleidoscope—the modern city provoked, both urged onward and challenged, the makers of literary modernism. We will investigate how a handful of more-or-less canonical modernist writers of the 1920s and 30s, as well as a few postmodernist ones, responded to the urbanism associated with twentieth-century life. What plots and themes, what narrative forms and rhetorical devices, what stylistic experiments and formal innovations were employed to “make it new” in the modern city? We will consider representations of a number of key modern cities including London, Paris, Dublin, and New York, especially the Bohemian enclaves within these cities—Bloomsbury, the Left Bank, Greenwich Village, and Harlem—that were so crucial to the making of modernism. We will also read theoretical and literary critical essays to buttress our understanding of urbanism, the figure of the flaneur, modernity and modernism, the modern and the postmodern, private and public spaces, coteries and salons, cosmopolitanism and nationalism, immigration and migration, and the role of gender and race in the production of modernist literature and culture. Requirements: several shorter writing assignments, an annotated bibliography, and at least one oral report, culminating in a longer seminar paper.
250/5
Research Seminar: Occultism, Postcoloniality, and Modernism
Viswanathan, Gauri
Thurs. 3:30-6:30
108 Wheeler
Book List: Readings include Freud, Adorno, Weber, Blavatsky, Besant, Kipling, Doyle, Rushdie, among others.
Course Description: This course probes the shaping of the modern subject through such "occult" devises as mesmerism, ventriloquism, hypnotism, telepathy, disembodiment, telekinesis, and clairvoyance. We will examine the ways that occultism constituted a crucial enactment of modernity's contradictions and provided postcoloniality with the tools for critical definitions of selfhood and society. Several questions raised by the course are: How does one account for occultism's persistence in modernity? Is occultism a form of residual irrationalism, a mode of thought superseded by Enlightment rationality? Or is it a constitutive element of modernity itself, reflecting its contradictions and ambiguities? How does occultism become a tool for both relating to the past and imagining future worlds, especiallyfor the decolonizing imagination? In what ways, if at all, does occultism signal the emergence of a postcolonial movement in literature?
310
Field Studies in Tutoring Writing
Times and rooms T.B.A.
Book List: Meyer, E. and Smith, L.: The Practical Tutor
Recommended Text: Leki, I.: Understanding ESL Writers
Course Description: Through seminars, discussions, and reading assignments, students are introduced to the language/writing/literacy needs of diverse college-age writers such as the developing, bi-dialectal, and non-native English-speaking (NNS) writer. The course will provide a theoretical and practical framework for tutoring and composition instruction.
The seminar will focus on various tutoring methodologies and the theories which underlie them. Students will become familiar with relevant terminology, approaches, and strategies in the fields of composition teaching and learning. New tutors will learn how to respond constructively to student writing, as well as develop and hone effective tutoring skills. By guiding others towards clarity and precision in prose, tutors will sharpen their own writing abilities. New tutors will tutor fellow Cal students in writing and/or literature courses. Tutoring occurs in the Cesar E. Chavez Student Center under the supervision of experienced writing program staff.
In order to enroll for the seminar, students must have at least sophomore standing and have completed their Reading and Composition R1A and R1B requirements.
Some requirements include: participating in a weekly training seminar and occasional workshops; reading assigned articles, videotaping a tutoring session, and becoming familiar with the resources available at the Student Learning Center; tutoring 4-6 hours per week; keeping a tutoring journal and writing a final paper; meeting periodically with both the tutor supervisor(s) and tutees' instructors.
This course meets the field study requirements for the Education minor, but it cannot be used toward fulfillment of the requirements for the English major. It must be taken P/NP.
Pick up an application for a pre–enrollment interview at the Student Learning Center, Atrium, Cesar Chavez Student Center (Lower Sproul Plaza), beginning October 10. No one will be admitted after Wednesday of the first week of spring classes.
Please read the paragraph on page 3 of this Announcement of Classes regarding enrollment in English 310!
Last modified: Thursday, 30-Mar-2006 08:31:39 PST