Carmilla: A Critical Edition, Le Fanu: Sheridan; Turabian, Kate: A Manual for Writers; Wells, H. G.: The Island of Dr. Moreau
This course investigates monsters—from the stitched-together creatures of The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896) to present-day vampires, werewolves, body snatchers, and other frightening creatures of lore and literature. We will read two short novels (Dr. Moreau and Carmilla), watch the films Invasion of the Body Snatchers and Alien, and read a selection of short stories and articles. The material for this course will also include two student-nominated texts (one book and one film).
The monsters that we will investigate are "manufactured" in more than one sense of the word. Their minds and bodies are stitched together by mad scientists or transformed by a fateful bite, but they are also constructed and created socially. They emerge as monstrous because of the way in which they are portrayed. We will ask: what do a culture's fictional monsters suggest about what that culture fears and reviles? To come to grips with this question, we will practice critical habits of mind and draw on critiques from queer theory, feminism, disability studies, and critical race studies. We will also excavate the histories of particular monsters and consider the specific historical contexts in which they appear and reappear.
(Please note: While it's in the nature of monster fiction to be gory and terrifying, we will do what we can to accommodate those who strongly dislike violence and gore.)
Together we will tackle the project and the process of writing a research paper. We will break down this larger project into a series of steps designed to help you build on and expand your existing skills. Topic proposals, drafting, revision, and peer feedback will all be integral to this process. We will focus on developing research skills and on incorporating these source materials into our papers.
This course is open only to students who have passed the Entry Level Writing Requirement/Subject A test (or equivalent).
Note to international students: This is not a course in English as a Second Language. Please see College Writing Programs for E.S.L. courses offered in summer.
This course will be taught in Session C, from June 21 to August 11.
Shakespeare, William: The Norton Shakespeare: Based on the Oxford Edition: Tragedies
I will make a number of secondary readings available through our course website.
In his great book on Shakespearean Tragedy (1905), A. C. Bradley writes that, when we experience one of Shakespeare's tragic plays, "We seem to have before us a type of the mystery of the whole world, the tragic fact which extends far beyond the limits of tragedy. Everywhere, from the crushed rocks beneath our feet to the soul of man, we see power, intelligence, life and glory, which astound us and seem to call for our worship. And everywhere we see them perishing, devouring one another and destroying themselves, often with dreadful pain, as though they came into being for no other end." In this course we will look at several of Shakespeare's tragedies in order both to see how they work as individual plays and to relate them to ideas about the nature of tragedy from Aristotle to the present. We'll want both to understand Shakespeare's sense of the tragic as a response to his time and to see how Shakespeare's tragedies might help us to see something larger and still true about the experience of the tragic in life and literature.
This course will be taught in Session A, from May 23 to June 30.
Achebe, Chinua: Things Fall Apart; Ishiguro, Kazuo: Never Let Me Go; Woolf, Virginia: Mrs. Dalloway; Zola, Emile: La Bete 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, from May 23 to June 30.
la Plante, Alice: The Making of a Story
English N141 provides an introduction to the craft of writing short fiction through the practice of reading, writing and revision. We will explore key aspects of craft including voice, point of view, narrative structure, and characterization, and will read a wide range of short stories. In workshops, students will share work and develop tools for constructive critique, editing and revision. Students will submit a finished short story as well as shorter exercises.
This course will be taught in Session D, from July 5 to August 11.
NOTE: This course does NOT satisfy the Reading and Composition requirement! On July 1 we discovered that this was listed in error on this listing but we have not been able to remove it because our web person is away on vacation.
The instructor is also missing here; she is Kirsten Tranter.
Melville, Herman: Moby-Dick
In this summer session, we'll read one and only one novel: Herman Melville's Moby-Dick (1851). We'll read the book carefully and closely, working particularly to understand Melville's idiosyncratic use of particuar aesthetic and narrative techniques. In addition to working through the novel one section at a time, we'll also consult some classic analyses of the narrative and the novel (Lukacs, Genette, Bakhtin, Kristeva, etc.) in order to see both what narrative theory has to say about the whale and to what the whale has to say about narrative theory.
This course will be taught in Session A, from May 23 to June 30.
Feinberg, Leslie : Stone Butch Blues ; Himes, Chester: If He Hollers Let Him Go; Vonnegut, Kurt: Player Piano; Whitehead, Colson: Zone One
This course will examine the development of the U.S. novel in light of the profound reorganization of working life since 1945, a process that has involved a massive decline in manufacturing jobs and a corresponding rise in white-collar and service labor, the entry of large numbers of women into the workplace, the digitization of work processes and work methods, and the emergence of new organizational structures and managerial processes, to name just a few salient features of the landscape.
An important question for the writers we survey will concern the relationship between authorial labor and labor in general. To what extent are the skills and techniques necessary for the composition of a novel commensurate with the techniques of industrial, clerical, or in-person service work? What is the relationship between the organizational structure of the postwar workplace and the formal organization of the novel, in terms of plot and narrative point of view? What is the relationship between the set of conventions we associate with “character” and the personalities that workers perform on the job? To help us in our investigation, we will read a few pertinent works of labor sociology and labor history. Students will be required to produce regular reading responses, give presentations, and write two papers, one shorter (4-6 pages), and one longer (7-10 pages).
This course will be taught in Session C, from June 21 to August 11.
Photocopied materials will be handed out in class.
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 class is open to UC students only.
This course will be taught in Session C, from June 20 to August 10.
Dick, Philip: 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
Films: 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 stands 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 epperience, 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, from May 23 to June 30.