Graduate Courses
Spring 2007
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.
201A
Topics in the Structure of the English Language: Syntax and the Language Arts
Banfield, Ann
TTh 11-12:30
225 Wheeler
Book List: Auerbach, Erich: Mimesis; Beckett, Samuel: Nohow On, How It Is; Beowulf, Seamus Heaney, translator, Ang & Eng [dual language edition]; Foley, John Miles: The Theory of Oral Composition: History and Methodology, Joyce, James: Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man; Mansfield, Katherine: Stories (1956); McKeon, Michael: Theory of the Novel: A Historical Approach, A Critical Anthology; Lord, Albert: A Singer of Tales; Pinker, Steven: Word and Object; Radford, Andrew: Transformational Grammar: A First Course; Woolf, Virginia: To the Lighthouse
Course Description: This course will explore the relations between syntax and literary form. We will begin by acquainting ourselves with grammatical theory and argumentation and then consider hypotheses about the language of literature that they seem to open up, beginning with the “oral formulaic theory” of the epic, then turning to the syntax of time and point of view in the novel, specifically, represented speech and thought (“free indirect style”). This will lead to a contrast between the genres epic and novel. We will then consider recent theories of the lexicon as they suggest ways to analyze Samuel Beckett’s late style. Beckett’s “revolution of the syntax” will be compared with Joyce’s “revolution of the word” in Finnegans Wake. This will also raise the question of the nature of prose. What I hope will emerge in the course of the semester is how many interesting research projects can be defined starting from certain conclusions of syntactic theory and how few of them have been actually undertaken. No prior background in linguistics will be assumed.
203/1
Graduate Readings: British Novel, 1800-1900
Duncan, Ian
M 3-6
103 Wheeler
Book List: Edgeworth, Maria: Castle Rackrent and Ennui; Scott, Walter: Waverley OR Old Mortality OR Ivanhoe; Austen, Jane: Persuasion; Shelley, Mary: Frankenstein; Hogg, James: Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner; Gaskell, Elizabeth: Mary Barton; Braddon, Mary: Lady Audley’s Secret; Collins, Wilkie: The Moonstone; Dickens, Charles: Little Dorrit; Eliot, George: Daniel Deronda; Hardy, Thomas: The Mayor of Casterbridge
Course Description: A selection of major nineteenth-century British novels. We will bring some large questions to bear on one another: questions about the world, locality or society the novel aims to represent (region or province; nation; empire / “the globe”; “the condition of England”), looking at the function of history (personal and collective, with attention to the century’s shift from national history to natural history as authoritative discourses) and representative types or figures (including the alien, misfit, criminal, monster, scapegoat); questions about form, including narrative form (first-person memoir or confession; third-person modes of free indirect style and omniscient narration), genre (not only the different kinds of the novel in the period—regional, domestic, historical, industrial, sensation fiction, etc.—but the novel’s internal posing of itself in relation to other genres and modes, e.g. romance, history, allegory, lyric), and material form (publishing, format, institutions of production and reception).
203/2
This section has been cancelled.
203/3
Graduate Readings: History and the Postcolonial
Jones, Donna
TTh 9:30-11
204 Wheeler
Book List: Augusto Roa Bastos: I the Supreme; Achille Mbembe: On the Postcolony; Ben Okri: The Famished Road; Alejo Carpentier: Explosion in the Cathedral; Dipesh Chakravorty: Proventializing Europe; Hayden White: Metahistory; Michel-Rolph Trouillot: Silencing the Past; T. Adorno & M. Horkheimer: Dialectic of Enlightenment; Aimé Césaire: Discourse on Colonialism
Course Description: This class will examine the question of history and the conceptualization of the modern in postcolonial literature and theory. It is only at death, when the possibility of future action for an individual is foreclosed, that we are able to begin to give final significance to what he has done in life. After the implosion of the West in the Great War, colonial intellectuals concluded that the history of the West could be finally written because it had come to an end not in the eternal present of the Hegelian triumph but in suicidal despair not in spite of but because of the very achievements of the Hegelian Geist. The key moments in Hegel’s triumphant narrative of the Geist in its advance to the Prussian state were also re-evaluated and different aspects of the past became important. Once explored at the margins of European literature in the period of pan-European pacifism, colonial violence for example proved itself altogether more fateful. Moreover, and perhaps most importantly, reason itself was revealed to be based on the partial assumptions of the technologist who aimed to master, control and use matter. Descartes became a key figure in the emergence of the Western ideology that had led to auto-destruction. Also coming under scrutiny was the dialectical theory of history which implied that past gains are preserved in the higher stages, so that no progress is lost, and progress is cumulative. Anything worth preserving is sublated. The crisis of the West then lead to a revaluation of what had to be negatively dismissed because it had not been preserved and intensive study of what had been ignored or stood outside the march of progress. The texts chosen for this course are both the classic articulations of the Western narratives of progress and postcolonial works which place the mechanics of progress under rigorous scrutiny.
203/4
Graduate Readings: Edmund Spenser
Adelman, Janet
TTh 11-12:30
Note new location: 223 Dwinelle (was moved from a similarly numbered room, 233)
Book List: Spenser, E.: The Faerie Queene; (the Yale U.P. edition of) The Shorter Poems of Edmund Spenser
Course Description: Perhaps this course should be sub-titled Spenserian Recoveries and Explorations, or Wandering in the Spenserian Landscape. I take enormous pleasure in reading The Faerie Queene, but I think it’s hard for people to find that pleasure when it is crammed into a week or two of anxious reading for a course or for orals. A semester won’t really give us the all the time for wandering that we need, but I hope that we can nonetheless create a classroom atmosphere of wandering in which we can acknowledge that we don’t always know where we are going and can be prepared to be surprised—and at least sometimes delighted—by what we find. The wandering won’t be entirely unconstrained—we will read through The Faerie Queene accompanied by various of the shorter works as they seem appropriate and will bump into various critics (monsters? seductive temptresses? trustworthy guides?) along the way—but my hope is that you will find the Spenser most useful and pleasurable to you in the process. I want to leave specifications about class structure and writing requirements a little vague until I see who is actually in the class and what you want Spenser for, but my expectation is that the class will depend in part on group work and that the writing (which will amount to roughly 20 pages) will be configured differently for different students.
203/5
Graduate Readings: Poetic Meter
Hanson, Kristin
TTh 12:30-2
Note new location: 205 Wheeler
Book List: See below
Course Description: This course will provide a basic introduction to the major meters of the modern English poetic tradition from the perspective of a specific theory of meter rooted in generative linguistics. Taking the strict iambic pentameter of Shakespeare's Sonnets, the looser iambic pentameter of Shakespeare's plays, and Hopkins' Sprung Rhythm pentameter as representatives of three distinct but overlapping meters, we will explore the structural properties of stress, syllable count and caesura placement in these forms, the range of variation they allow, their different manifestations in closely related forms and in the practice of other poets, their aesthetic effects in particular poems, their formal relationships to their Romance, Old English and Classical Latin and Greek influences, and their relationships to the rhythmic structure of language itself. No prior background in either metrics or linguistics is required. The principal text for the course will be a draft of a book I am writing as an introduction to the subject; we will use it and the poetry on which its claims are based to establish a common foundation from which each student will explore the metrical practice of a poet or poets of his or her own choosing.
203/6
Graduate Readings: Nineteenth-Century American Women Writers
Beam, Dorri
Thurs. 2-5
103 Wheeler
Book List: Fuller, M.: The Essential Margaret Fuller; Beecher, C.: Treatise on Domestic Economy; Stowe, H.: Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Dred; Howe, J. W.: The Hermaphrodite; Sweat, M.: Ethel’s Love-Life; Lee, J.: Religious Experience and Journal; Hawthorne, N.: The Blithedale Romance; Wilson, H.: Our Nig; Stoddard, E.: The Morgesons; Oakes-Smith, E.: Bertha and Lily; Spofford, H.: The Amber Gods and Other Stories; Alcott, L.: Alternative Alcott; Gutjar, P.: Popular American Fiction of the Nineteenth Century; Walker, C.: American Women Poets of the Nineteenth Century
Course Description: This course offers the opportunity to read a wide selection of fiction, essays, and poetry written by women prior to and during the Civil War. We will examine the history of recovery of nineteenth-century American women writers and the key debates around the politics, and more recently aesthetics, of sentimentality and domesticity. Yet we will also move beyond the small canon installed by this scholarship to read several newly republished (even some yet un-republished) works; to consider the mutual engagement of women writers and Poe, Hawthorne, and Melville (who we will also read), and to reconsider the role of feminism, literary experiment, and sexuality in women’s writing of this period. Along the way, we will query the politics of recovery, assess the possibility of comparative frameworks, and explore the use of gender as a lens of analysis. A portion of the semester will be reserved for the study of women’s poetry, an exciting area attracting new scholarly attention at the moment.
203/7
Graduate Readings: Chekhov, the Conventions of Realism, and the Depiction of Reality
Hass, Robert and Danner, Mark
Note new time: Tues. 6-9 P.M.
Note new room: 104 North Gate
This course is cross-listed with Journalism 251.
Book List: Chekhov, Anton: Selected Stories, The Complete Plays, The Island: A Journey to Sakhalin, Notebooks
Course Description: This is a team-taught course, cross-listed with the Department of Journalism. The instructors are Robert Hass from the English Department and Mark Danner from Journalism. Danner is a staff writer for the New Yorker and the New York Review of Books, who has written extensively about political violence. The course will be an investigation of the procedures of Anton Chekhov, who reinvented the forms of the prose tale and the stage play in the last years of the nineteenth century. It will include a very demanding amount of reading, including almost all the stories of Chekhov, most of the major plays, his account of his visit to the prison island of Sakhalin, and relevant criticism of his work. The format will be seminar-style discussion. Written assignments will be developed based on student interest and the range of questions about Chekhov, the social life of Russia in the years before the revolution, the conventions of realism, and narrative theory. No reading knowledge of Russian is required.
212
Readings in Middle English
Justice, Steven
TTh 9:30-11
222 Wheeler
Book List: Burrow and Turville-Petre, eds.: A Book of Middle English (3rd ed.); Pearsall, ed.: Piers Plowman: The C Version; other readings online or in a photocopied reader
Course Description: The course aims to introduce students to the Middle English, as a period both of the language and of literary history. There will be three main "movements" to the course. The first three weeks will introduce Middle English itself, offering a broad sense of its linguistic characteristics and the history of literary expression in it, with an emphasis on reading; during this time we will read short passages from a wide variety of works. In the three weeks or so to follow, we will do some rather more extended readings in Middle English poetry along with readings in contemporary scholarship, to get a rough sense of the present state of the field. The remainder of the semester will be spent discussing Langland's Piers Plowman.
218
Milton
Picciotto, Joanna
Note new time: Thurs. 2-5
Note new location: 262 Dwinelle
Book List: Milton, J.: The Riverside Milton
Course Description: An intensive study of Milton’s major works.
243A
Fiction Writing Workshop
Mukherjee (Blaise), Bharati
Tues. 2-5
301 Wheeler
Book List: The Norton Anthology of Contemporary Fiction; Flash Fiction: Very Short Stories
Course Description: This limited-enrollment workshop course will concentrate on the form, theory and practice of fiction. Undergraduate students are welcome to apply for admission to this graduate workshop.
To be considered for admission to this class, please submit approximately 12-15 photocopied pages of your original fiction (short story or chapter of a novel) to Professor Mukherjee’s mailbox in 322 Wheeler Hall BY 4:00 P.M., TUESDAY, OCTOBER 31, 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!
246C
Graduate Pro-seminar: Renaissance—16th Century
Booth, Stephen
TTh 5-6:30
222 Wheeler
Book List: No required texts
Course Description: My chief concern as a student of literature is aesthetic. This therefore is probably not a serviceable course for students swatting up answers for doctor’s orals. This will be a survey course, but a highly selective one. Although I plan to look at the best and/or most interesting work of several lesser sixteenth-century writers—for instance, some lyrics by Wyatt and some by Sidney, and Surrey's blank verse—I mean to give over the bulk of class time to the verse of Spenser, Marlowe, and Shakespeare, particularly their narrative verse.
I will print out most of the short things we will talk about in class. Although there are no required texts for the course, these are recommendations for texts to use for the long narrative poems.
1. Shakespeare’s Narrative poems (use Either The Poems, ed., D. Bevington et al. [Bantam books] or The Narrative Poems, ed., J. Crewe [Penguin] or one of the one-volume complete Shakespeares assigned in English 117J or 117S or 117A or 117B).
2 Marlowe’s Hero and Leander (use Either Complete Poems and Translations, ed., S. Orgel [Penguin] or The Norton Anthology of English Lit, ed. Abrams et al., Volume 1 or The Norton Anthology of Poetry, ed., Ferguson et.al.).
3 Spenser’s Faerie Queene (use Either The Faerie Queene, ed., T. Roche [Penguin] or any other annotated, post-1970 edition that gives the whole poem).
246K
Graduate Pro-seminar: Literature in English, 1900-1945
Snyder, Katherine
TTh 12:30-2
305 Wheeler
Book List: Readings are not yet finalized, but may include many of the following: Djuna Barnes: Nightwood; Willa Cather: Death Comes for the Archbishop; Joseph Conrad: The Secret Agent; Ford Madox Ford: The Good Soldier; Forster: A Passage to India; F. Scott Fitzgerald: The Great Gatsby; T. S. Eliot: The Waste Land; Nella Larsen: Passing; Gertrude Stein: The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas; Jean Toomer: Cane; Virginia Woolf: Mrs. Dalloway. There will also be a photocopied course reader containing poetry, essays, short fiction, and secondary theoretical and critical articles.
Course Description: We will read widely in British and American literature of the first half of the twentieth century with an eye to the intersections between modernism and modernity. While attending closely to aesthetic and formal concerns, our discussions may also range among such topics as urbanism and regionalism; primitivism and cosmopolitanism; war, nationalism, and imperialism; immigration, migration, and expatriatism; coteries and collaboration; technology and the rise of celebrity culture; modern identity and its discontents; and the role of gender and race in the production of modern(ist) literature and culture. In addition to oral presentations and annotated bibliographies, students will be required to write two 10-12 page essays.
250/1
Research Seminar: Black Reconstruction
Wagner, Bryan
M 11-2
305 Wheeler
Book List: Harriet Beecher Stowe: Uncle Tom’s Cabin; Helen Brown: John Freeman and His Family; John W. De Forest: Miss Ravenel’s Conversion from Secession to Loyalty; George W. Cable: The Grandissimes; Joel Chandler Harris: Uncle Remus: His Songs and His Sayings; Mark Twain: Huckleberry Finn; Frances Harper: Iola Leroy; Booker T. Washington: Up From Slavery; Thomas Nelson Page: Red Rock; Charles Chesnutt: The Marrow of Tradition; Ida B. Wells: Mob Rule in New Orleans; W. E. B. Du Bois: Black Reconstruction
There will also be a course reader with shorter works by Claude Bowers, Lydia Maria Child, Anna Julia Cooper, William Archibald Dunning, Rebecca Latimer Felton, Henry Grady, Albert Bushnell Hart, John R. Lynch, Kelly Miller, Mildred Thompson, Albion Tourgée, Jared Bell Waterbury, Woodrow Wilson, and Carter G. Woodson.
Films include Birth of a Nation (D. W. Griffith), Within Our Gates (Oscar Micheaux), and Gone with the Wind (Victor Fleming).
Course Description: “Among the revolutionary processes that transformed the nineteenth-century world, none was so dramatic in its human consequences or far-reaching in its social implications as the abolition of chattel slavery,” the historian Eric Foner has written. And nowhere was this revolutionary process more dramatic, more all-encompassing, than in the United States—the only society in the history of the world where ex-slaves were granted citizenship rights and meaningful political representation directly on the heels of emancipation. Reconstruction was an exceptional event in world history, to be sure, but one that swelled with the main currents of its time. It was an experiment in statecraft that tried to remake society all at once, turning a traditional situation where individuals were restricted by inherited relations of dependency into a modern scene based upon the liberty to contract. This course aims to grasp Reconstruction, in all its complexity, as a narrative problem. We will be thinking in the abstract about the nature of historical transition, and in particular about the role of violence in times of transition, while we look to some of the major works from the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries that turned Reconstruction into a story to be passed down. We will be interested in how these works sustain their most parochial commitments—blood, family, race, nation—by adapting the moral vocabulary of the marketplace, and we will try to understand how those commitments became variously inflected as romance, tragedy, and farce. We will pay close attention to the formal strategies (marriage plots, framing devices, analepses) that propel these narratives from slavery to freedom as well as to the developing conditions (the stratification of the book trade, the professionalization of historical research, the emergence of the cinema) that determined how those strategies could be employed.
250/2 This section has been cancelled.
250/3
Research Seminar: Melville and Aesthetics
Otter, Samuel
Tues. 3:30-6:30
201 Wheeler
Book List: Bennett, T: Formalism and Marxism; Creech, J: Closet Writing/Gay Reading: The Case of Melville’s Pierre; Culler, J: The Literary in Theory; Eagleton, T: The Ideology of the Aesthetic; James, C. L. R.: Mariners, Renegades, and Castaways: The Story of Herman Melville and the World We Live In; Kearney, R. and Rasmusen, D.: Continental Aesthetics: Romanticism to Postmodernism; Lemon, L. and M.J. Reis: Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays; Melville, H: Typee, Moby-Dick, Pierre, The Piazza Tales, The Confidence-Man, Poems, Billy Budd; Michaels, W: The Shape of the Signifier; Olson, C: Call Me Ishmael; Taylor, R. ed.: Aesthetics and Politics; photocopied cornucopia
Course Description: What do literary critics mean by an “aesthetic turn” or a “return to form”? (Have we ever left? If we are “returning” to form, where have we been?) Are these reactionary moves, conjuring the specter of the New Criticism? The latest swing in the pendulum that oscillates between formalism and historicism? An effort to rethink the issues of literary difference and literary value? To rejuvenate the practice of close reading? To replace it? To develop modes of criticism that are attentive to aesthetic experience in the context of the theoretical insights that have been developed over the past thirty years?
One sees the terms everywhere, from special issues of the journals American Literature and MLQ to recent books with titles like The Politics of Aesthetics, The Radical Aesthetic, and Revenge of the Aesthetic. We will try to figure out what is happening out there (and in here) by considering the example of Melville. For reasons of canonicity and complexity, Melville has become a pivotal figure for literary critics who reflect upon their practice. We will examine the range of Melville’s career (prose and poetry) and the institutional reception of his work, including key essays in deconstruction, new historicism, and queer studies. We also will read classic and recent statements in aesthetic theory and major essays in twentieth-century formalism.
Requirements include an oral presentation (or two) and a 30-page research essay, written in stages across the semester. For those not drawn into Melville’s orbit, the research essay need not be limited to Melville’s texts.
250/4
Research Seminar: Class and Race in U.S. Ethnic Literature
Gonzalez, Marcial
Thurs. 3:30-6:30
202 Wheeler
Book List: Benitez, S.: The Weight of All Things; Brainard, C. M.: When the Rainbow Goddess Wept; Silko, L. M.: Ceremony; Vea, A.: Gods Go Begging; Wideman, J. E.: The Lynchers
Course Description: What would happen if we placed class at the center of U.S. ethnic literary studies? Is class analysis obsolete? Does the study of class in literature necessarily preclude the importance of theorizing the specificity of race and racism? How can we critique class consciousness in a literary work so as to enhance rather than limit the theorization of racial formations? In this course, we will be concerned with theorizing the relation between race and class in U.S. ethnic literature. We will begin with a careful examination of essays by Moishe Postone, whose Marxist analysis of anti-Semitism lays the foundation for a theory of race as a reified social form—or as an abstraction of social relations. We will also read selections from Frantz Fanon, W.E.B. Dubois, Barbara Fields, Rosaura Sánchez, Jinqi Ling, Stuart Hall, Paul Gilroy, Ian Haney López, Carl Gutiérrez-Jones, Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Ernesto Laclau, Chantal Mouffe, Etienne Balibar and Theodore Allen, among others. The literary works we will read alongside the theoretical material represent to varying degrees the lives of racial subjects who strive to understand the historicized class character of their experiences. A research paper will be required.
250/5
Research Seminar: James Joyce
Bishop, John
F 11-2
305 Wheeler
Book List: Ellmann, R.: James Joyce; Joyce, J.: Finnegans Wake, Ulysses; a Course Reader (criticism and theory)
Recommended Texts: Gifford, D.: 'Ulysses' Annotated; McHugh, R.: Annotations to 'Finnegans Wake'; Tindall, W. Y.: A Reader's Guide to 'Finnegans Wake'; Vico, G.: The New Science of Giambattista Vico (trans. Bergin and Fisch)
Course Description: This course will explore Joyce's later work—focusing in its first nine or ten weeks on Ulysses, and then moving into an initiatory probe of Finnegans Wake. Though particular topics explored in the seminar will be determined by the research interests of its members, we will consider, in tandem with the course's core texts, the current state of Joyce (and author) studies and their relation to issues topically of interest across the profession as a whole. These will likely include: Joyce's manipulable status as representative modernist in debates about modernism/post-modernism and in aggregating accounts of the ethics, politics and ideology of modernism; his role, more generally, as paradigmatic touchstone or spoiler in theorizations of literature; his paradoxical status as a canonized colonial writer, and the growing body of work on Joyce, race, and national culture; Joyce and gender; the history of Joyce's canonization, not simply as it opens to view literature's embranglements with the law, but also as it illumines the nature of authorial reception in different academic, non-academic, and national milieus; Joyce's paradoxical resistance to and sanctioning of deauthorizing strategies; the new forms of literary study arising from the publication of Joyce's Archives and the ensuing development, especially in France, of "pretextual" and "genetic criticism"; and Joyce's assimilation both of and in popular culture. Requirements will include one class presentation on the week's assigned reading; a free-form gloss of a passage from Finnegans Wake; and one long paper, due at the end of the term.
310
Field Studies in Tutoring Writing
Staff
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 16. 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: January 26, 2007