Greenblatt, S., ed.: The Norton Shakespeare
Shakespeare’s poems and plays are relentlessly unsettling, crazy beautiful, deeply moving, rigorously brilliant, and compulsively meaningful: they complicate everything, they simplify nothing, and for 400 years, they have been a touchstone—indeed, something like an obsession—for literary artists from Milton to Goethe to George Eliot to Joyce to Brecht to Zukofsky to Sarah Kane and for philosophers and theorists from Hegel to Marx to Freud to Derrida to Lacan to Zizeck. We will be especially concerned with five large issues: compassion; political representation and its discontents; the nature of identity and subjectivity; colonialism; and the relation between the ways Shakespeare’s plays make meaning and the ways they produce emotional experience.
If you own a good complete Shakespeare (Norton, Riverside, Pelican), you need not purchase the edition that I have ordered for the class.
This course satisfies the Shakespeare requirement for the English major.
This course will be taught in Session D, which runs from July 7 to August 15.
Bronte, Emily: Wuthering Heights; Carroll, Lewis: Alice's Adventures in Wonderland; Conrad, Joseph: Lord Jim; Dickens, Charles: Hard Times; Eliot, George: Silas Marner; Stevenson, Robert Louis: The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde; Wilde, Oscar: The Picture of Dorian Gray
In this class we'll read novels by Charles Dickens, Emily Brontë, George Eliot, Lewis Carroll and others. We'll think about these novels in two related ways. First, what was it about the novel—as opposed, for instance, to the poem or the essay—that made it so important to nineteenth-century culture (as well as to our more or less accurate twenty-first-century ideas about that culture)? Was it because it showed the world as it really was or because it offered an opportunity to escape that world? Was it because it said something persuasive or true or seductive about life, about other people, about history, about sex, love or money? What, in other words, were nineteenth-century readers reading (and reading for) when they read Silas Marner, Wuthering Heights, or Alice's Adventures in Wonderland? Second, we'll use "The English Novel: Dickens through Conrad" to ask and, perhaps, to answer persistent questions about the novel as such. What is a novel? Is a novel most about its characters or most about its plot? Should the novel educate or entertain? Thinking about the novel as a particular game with particular rules ("I don't think they play at all fairly,' Alice began...") will help us both to understand the novel in its context and maybe to know what we talk about when we talk about novels.
This course will be taught in Session C, which runs from June 23 to August 15.
Achebe , Chinua: Things Fall Apart; Ishiguro, Kazuo : Never Let Me Go; Woolf , Virginia: Mrs. Dalloway; Zola , Emile: La Bête Humaine
This course is a general survey of the 20th-century novel. The novel is the quintessential form of expression of modernity and modern subjectivity. In this survey of key works of the century, we will explore the novel form as it is framed by these three thematics--history, modernism, and empire. These are some questions we will address: How have the vicissitudes of modernity led to a re-direction of historical narration within the novel? How has modernist aesthetic experimentation re-shaped the very form of the novel? And lastly, how has the phenomenon of imperialism, the asymmetrical relations of power between center and periphery, widened the scope of fictive milieu?
This course will be taught in Session A, which runs from May 27 to July 3.
Fitzgerald, F. Scott: The Great Gatsby; Hawthorne, N.: The Scarlet Letter; Hurston, Z. N.: Their Eyes Were Watching God; Islas, A.: The Rain God; Robinson, Marilynne: Housekeeping; Twain, M.: Huckleberry Finn
We will concentrate on the central issues deeded to the American novel by democratic ideology -- refusal and autonomy, loyalty, guilt, and atonement, futurity and the burden of the past -- and try to figure out how the formal innovations in the American novel are responses to those issues.
Two six-page essays, a final exam, and regular attendance and participation will be required.
This course will be taught in Session C, which runs from June 23 to August 15.
No assigned texts. Xeroxed critical essays will be distributed.
Regular attendance is required. Two seven-page essays and a final quiz. Viewing notes taken during films viewed on Mondays will be handed in on Wednesdays. The class will be a mix of lecture and discussion.
This course will be taught in Session C, which runs from June 23 to August 15.
Dick, Philip, K. : Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?; Hoffmann, E.T.A. : Tales of E.T.A. Hoffmann; Shelley, Mary : Frankenstein; Strugatsky, Arkady and Boris: Roadside Picnic; Whitehead, Colson : Zone One
Fiilms: The Matrix; Stalker; Bladerunner
This course will examine in depth the history of speculative fiction and its engagement with the thematics and topoi of the new life sciences—representation of cloning, ecological dystopias, hybrid life-forms, genetic engineering dystopias. While science is the thematic point of departure of speculative fiction, the concerns of this course will be the literary. How does literature’s encounter with the projected realities of the new biology revise our conceptions of the subject? Could there be a Leopold Bloom of the genetically engineered, a subject whose interior voice is the free-flowing expression of experience? Behind the endless removes of social, material and technological mediation stand the construction of a flesh and blood body, separated from itself through the workings of consciousness. If indeed the post/modern subject requires a psychic space shaped by the authenticity of ‘being’, a consciousness deeply rooted in the human experience, then how do we represent that being whose point of origin is the artificial, the inauthentic? These are some of the questions to be addressed in this course.
This course will be taught in Session A, which runs from May 27 to July 3.