The Announcement of Classes is available one week before Tele-Bears begins every semester. Creative Writing and (for fall) Honors Course applications are available at the same time in the racks outside of 322 Wheeler Hall.
Graduate students from other departments and exceptionally well-prepared undergraduates are welcome in English graduate courses (except for English 200 and 375) insofar as limitations of class size allow. Graduate courses are usually limited to 15 students; courses numbered 250 are usually limited to 10.
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. Prior enrollment does not guarantee a place in a graduate course that turns out to be oversubscribed on the first day of class; fortunately, this situation does not arise very often.
Adorno, T. and M. Horkheimer: The Dialectic of Enlightenment; Auerbach, E.: Mimesis; Buzard, J.: The Autoethnographic Work of Nineteenth-Century British Novels; Clark, T.J.: The Painting of Modern Life; Jameson, F.: The Political Unconscious,Marxism and Form; Krishnan, S.: Reading the Global; Lukacs, G.: History and Class Consciousness, The Historical Novel; Mufti, A.: Enlightenment in the Colony; Schwarz, R.: A Master on the Periphery of Capitalism; Williams, R.: The Country and the City; there will be also be a course packet containing selections from Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Louis Althusser, John Frow, Paul Ricoeur, Jason Read, Edward Said, Margaret Cohen, Sharon Marcus, Marjorie Levinson, Rob Kaufman, and others.
This course in the �History of Literary Criticism� will be an intensively focused and partial survey of the dialectic of formalism and historicism in the history of literary (and aesthetic) criticism. A core focus of the course will be the theoretical resources afforded by critical realism, understood in an expansive sense as an aesthetic mode of cognition or form of epistemology�generated in particular by situations of crisis, transition, and unevenness. To this extent, we will also be interested in the legacies of critical realism for postcolonial literary criticism�attempts to grasp the marvelous or misplaced realities of the periphery, attempts to draw a transnational cognitive map of metropolitan subjectivity. We will begin by taking stock of our contemporary critical context by examining characterizations of our �new formalist� turn in literary studies and critiques of ideological reading, before returning to a longer view of historicist and formalist impulses within the discipline. This course should be useful to students seeking an acquaintance with Marxist literary criticism in general and/or those interested in developing interdisciplinary or worldly dissertation projects.
Course Reader
Disability Studies as it has emerged in the academy in the last decade is a multidisciplinary, cross-disciplinary, interdisciplinary field. For complex historical reasons themselves worth exploring, in the United States that field has had particularly strong anchoring in the arts and humanities. This course will explore the meanings of �disability,� of �theory,� of �art� and of �the humanities� by considering each term in its relation to each others. Our conversations and readings will be determined to a significant extent by students� own research interests (but that doesn�t mean I presuppose any knowledge of disability issues), and also by the current interests of some of the foundational shapers of the field from across the country who will join us as guests. They will include a number of literary critics, scholars in deaf studies and performance studies, historians, legal scholars, and artists and photographers.
Woolf, V.: Between the Acts, Jacob�s Room, Moments of Being, Orlando, Mrs. Dalloway, A Room of One�s Own, Three Guineas, To the Lighthouse, The Voyage Out, The Waves, A Writer�s Diary, The Years; Lee, H: Virginia Woolf
This course will examine the evolution of Woolf�s career across the nearly three decades that define the arc of British modernism. This co-incidence will allow us to theorize the shape of a career and of a literary movement, and to re-read that movement through a literary oeuvre that has been cherry picked to illustrate a particular turn within it. As we map the trajectory from Woolf�s apprenticeship works in the teens through the experimental narratives of the twenties to the politically pressured projects of the late thirties, we will explore the textual strategies through which these turns were achieved and the cultural crosscurrents in which they were embedded. We will read Woolf�s critical essays to situate her narrative practice within her commentary on it (as well as within narrative theory generally); we will take advantage of the recently published holograph manuscripts to read published texts in the context of their revisions; we will exploit the proliferation of Woolf biographies to revisit her ambivalence about biography; and we will put pressure on her appropriation and revision by various critical schools and contemporary writers. Two approximately 12-page papers will be required, in addition to seminar presentations that will expand our frames of cultural and critical reference.
Jonathan Edwards, A Jonathan Edwards Reader (Yale); Benjamin Franklin, The Autobiography (Penguin); Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia (Penguin); Ralph Waldo Emerson, Selected Essays (Penguin); Henry David Thoreau, Walden and Civil Disobedience (Penguin); Herman Melville, Moby-Dick (Penguin); William James, The Writings of William James. (University of Chicago Press)
We will study the (mostly) productive tension between consolidating and dispersing impulses in American philosophical literature. Most of the discussion time will be spent on close reading, but members of the class will on occasion present secondary critical materials they have found instructive. Two ten-page essays will be required, one about halfway through, the other at the end.
Haywood, E.: Fantomina; Defoe, D.: Roxana; Richardson, S.: Pamela; Fielding, H.: Shamela, Joseph Andrews; Smollett, T.: Roderick Random; Lennox , C.: The Female Quixote; Radcliffe, A.: Mysteries of Udolpho
As we read a variety of works of eighteenth-century fiction we shall consider a series of revisionist (especially feminist) histories and theories of the early novel. The eighteenth-century British texts we have retroactively named novels often argued with each other about the status of this new form. In these debates the novels deployed and actively intervened in contemporary theories of sexuality, gender and class (all of which some saw as dangerously unstable in the period), and we shall have these debates in mind as we study these texts. Also increasingly important in the legitimating narratives around the novel was the novel�s status as a British form, and we shall think about the novels of this period in relation to national and transnational developments. Although we shall approach the readings through these specific foci, I do intend the course as a broad-based introduction to these eighteenth-century texts and some of the critical issues they have raised. Written work will reflect that introductory tone; in several 5-6-page papers you will engage these issues on an exploratory basis rather than a thorough and conclusive one.
T.J. Clark: Farewell to an Idea ; Tim Armstrong: Modernism ; Charles Altieri: The Art of Modernist American Poetry; John Ashbery: Selected Poems ; Wallace Stevens: Collected Poems and Prose ; W.C. Williams: Spring and All ; also a course reader
"I am concerned with what the new historical work in modernism puts at risk�the possibility that it has continuing vitality for engaged imaginations because it still does significant affective and intellectual work. I think much of this work derives not so much from what writers ""say"" as the arenas they construct for making visible complex systems of mutual interrelations that can only be shown and not ""said."" What can be the power of such showings? To begin answering these questions this course will begin with brief readings on relationality (Nietzsche and baby Hegel), then two weeks on Cezanne, Picasso, and non-iconic abstraction, then mostly prose and highly selected poems from Pound and Eliot as well as short stories by Wyndham Lewis. The extended case study will be Wallace Stevens for four weeks as we think about what he can use in modernism and how he feels he must modify his heritage. Finally we will spend one week on Pollock and Johns for figures of how relationality gets literalized separates visuality from various contextual backgrounds. We will close with how Ashbery at once culminates the sense of relationality and proves so amazingly fertile for younger writers."
Austen, J.: Northanger Abbey, Persuasion; Edgeworth, M.: Castle Rackrent and Ennui; Godwin, W.: Caleb Williams; Hogg, J.: Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner; Radcliffe, A.: The Romance of the Forest; Scott, W.: Waverley, The Antiquary; Shelley, M.: Frankenstein; Smith, C.: Desmond; Walpole, H.: The Castle of Otranto
We will read major works of Gothic, Jacobin, domestic, regional, national and historical fiction, published in Great Britain between 1764 and 1824, in relation to the literary and historical contexts of British Romanticism. Critical readings will be assigned. Course requirements will include a short (3-page) paper plus two 8-10 page papers and one or two in-class presentations.
King, Stephen & Heidi Pitlor, eds.: The Best American Short Stories, 2007; Nabokov, Vladimir : Lectures on Literature
"A graduate-level fiction workshop. Students will write fiction, produce critiques of work submitted to the workshop, and participate in discussions about the theory and practice of writing. We�ll also read published fiction and essays about writing from various sources. Students will produce at least 40 pages of fiction over the course of the semester.
Undergraduates are welcome to apply. Please note that the class will assume prior experience with workshops, and familiarity with the basic elements of fiction and the critical vocabulary used by writers to analyze narrative. Class attendance is mandatory."
Boswell, J.: The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides; Johnson, S.: Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland; Sterne, L.: A Sentimental Journey; Burney, F.: Evelina; Walpole, H.: The Castle of Otranto; Burke, E.: A Philosophical Inquiry, Reflections on the Revolution in France; Smith, A.: Theory of Moral Sentiments; Hume, D.: Treatise of Human Nature; Blake, W.: Songs of Innocence and Experience; Wordsworth W. and Coleridge, S. T.: Lyrical Ballads; Williams, H.M.: Letters Written from France; Williams, R.: Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society . In addition, the following works will be either in a course reader or available on-line: selected poems of William Collins, Thomas Gray, Oliver Goldsmith, George Crabbe, William Cowper (The Task), Christopher Smart (Jubilitate Agno), Anna Barbauld, and Charlotte Smith; further prose works by Samuel Johnson (e.g., �Preface� to the Dictionary and to Shakespeare) and Edward Young (�Conjectures on Original Composition�); also an array of critical essays on the period.
This course offers a survey of the period from 1740 to 1800, or from Hume�s new �science of man� to Wordsworth�s account of poetry as the �history or science of feelings.� The many different titles that have affixed themselves to these years (Pre-Romantic, Post-Augustan, the Age of Johnson, the Culture of Sensibility) might testify to its excitements and eccentricities, its metamorphic riot of genres and authors. We will try to do justice to its heterogeneity, sampling all genres of poetry and prose, although�since there is a course on the eighteenth-century novel offered concurrently in the department�we can devote relatively more time to poetry and non-fictional prose. Threads that will receive particular attention include: the emergence of aesthetics as a new science; sensibility and inequity; skirmishes over the �common tongue� and the constitution of �the people�; changing definitions of literature (printed matter or creative writing?) and authorial identity (the author as producer, as �nobody,� as genius); residual and simulated oral culture in an age of print; the Scottish Enlightenment and the romance of the Highlands; Britain in international space and nostalgia for home; gothic and Revolution; likely and unlikely versions of pastoral. To some extent our concerns will be methodological as well: what sorts of critical approaches have shaped and reshaped this shifting field�and what kinds of study seem productive for its future?
Austen, J.: Sense and Sensibility; Brown, C. B.: Wieland; Cooper, J. F.: The Prairie; Dickens, C.: Bleak House; Douglass, F.: My Bondage and My Freedom; Equiano, O.: Interesting Narrative; Fern, F.: Ruth Hall; Franklin, B.: Autobiography; Fuller, M.: Woman in the Nineteenth Century; Irving, I.: The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon; Lewis, M.: The Monk; Melville, H.: Great Short Works; Scott, W.: Rob Roy; Sterne, L.: Sentimental Journey; Webb, F. J.: The Garies and Their Friends; Wollstonecraft, M.: Mary and The Wrongs of Woman; photocopied Course Reader
We will consider American prose literature from the late-eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth century in a transatlantic context. We will analyze literary influence as it travels, in some familiar and some surprising ways, between North America and England , Scotland , and Ireland . As we do, we will take stock of recent work in transatlantic studies (Giles, Gilroy , Linebaugh and Rediker, Tamarkin, Tennenhouse, and others). Course requirements include two 8-10 page essays and one or two oral presentations.
Pearsall, D. and D. Wu: Poetry from Chaucer to Spenser; Hirsh, J.: Medieval Lyric
In this course, we will explore the lyric tradition in English, beginning with Chaucerian lyrics and ending with Spenser�s sonnets. Along the way, we will read poems from figures like Gower, Hoccleve, Lydgate, Charles d�Orleans, Hawes, Barclay, Audelay, Henryson, Douglas , Dunbar , Skelton, Wyatt, Surrey , and a raft of anonymous poets. We will focus on the development of style in Middle English and Renaissance poetry, asking if some form of continuity can be discerned between the 14 th and the 16 th centuries, or if a radical break occurred in the 16 th century that manifested itself formally and stylistically in poetry. We will pay special attention to the manuscript and print contexts for poems, examining works in compilations and anthologies and considering what vision of poetry such an examination yields.
Shakespeare, W.: Titus Andronicus, Julius Caesar, Hamlet, King Lear; Milton, J: Paradise Lost ; Kyd, T.: The Spanish Tragedy. A (very heavy) course reader will include a wide range of early modern materials (tracts about slavery, an obscure play about a slave revolt, speeches in the House of Commons, tracts about the poor, sermons, and poems by Sidney, Spenser, Donne, Crashaw, Herbert, Layner and others) and selections from theoretical and philosophical texts by Aristotle, Agamben, Zizek, Boltanski, Berlant, Ricoeur, Garber, Girard, and Nussbaum.
How did early modern subjects represent and conceptualize compassion, pity, and sympathy? We will be especially interested in compassion as a complex point of intersection among literary, political, theological, and devotional discourses and practices. Put another way, we will ask how fictions, the poor, and Christ, to take a few examples, were distinguished�or conflated�as objects of compassion. We will also juxtapose the ways in which early modern theories of compassion and other cultural logics�sacrifice, political representation, revenge�construct identity and the relationship between self and other. The importance of imagination, fiction, and fictionalizing to the development of compassion as a social, moral, and political category will be a persistent concern. If Hamlet�s astonishment over the player�s capacity to shed tears for Hecuba seems to instantiate the problem of compassionating fictions, many Renaissance authors suggest that it is easier to feel compassion for fictions or persons so distant from us that they have the status of fictions. We will also think about compassion as ideology, the relation between regarding others and self-fashioning, and what is at stake in making distinctions among compassion, sympathy, and pity. The reading list will take us all the way from Elizabethan sonneteers to the early 18 th century, when compassion emerged as one of the central terms in British culture.
A reading of Proust�s Recherche (in the Moncrieff/Kilmartin translation) alongside�and as�a reflection on traditional novel form.
Gregory, A.: selected plays; Joyce, J.: Dubliners and Ulysses; Beckett, S.: First Love and selected other works TBA; Synge, J.M.: The Aran Islands; Yeats, W.B.: selected poems and prose TBA; O�Brien, F.: The Third Policeman and selections from The Best of Myles TBA; Bowen, E.: The Last September; McGahern, J.: Amongst Women; O�Neill, J.: At Swim Two Boys; a required course reader, with selections of critical essays, plays, poems and short stories
This course is a survey of Irish literature and culture from the Celtic Revival (1890-1930) to the Celtic Tiger (1990s-present). The Celtic Revival was an upsurge of nationalist sentiment that resulted in the creation of an Irish Republic in defiance of Great Britain . The Celtic Tiger was a surge of transnational capital investment that transformed Ireland from one of the poorest to one of the richest of European countries: once marked by emigration and decline, now by prosperity, population growth, and an influx of immigrants from Eastern Europe , Africa , and Asia . Such reversals of fortune and the relative recentness of their manifestation make Ireland a unique locus of study for the experimental application of postcolonial theory, world-systems theory, and theories of nationalism, race and ethnicity. In Irish Studies the debate between postcolonialists (and nationalists) on the one hand and historical revisionists on the other is lively and occasionally brutal. Then there is the literature, which Pascale Casanova has described as itself a kind of �Irish miracle.� Looking at well-known modernists like Gregory, Yeats, Synge, Joyce, O�Brien, and Bowen, we�ll study the connections between the cultural revival, formations of national literature, and modernist formal innovation, following closely on recent theories of modernism that relocate its genesis from the metropole to the periphery. From there we�ll look at what�s happened since: fictions dealing with the partition of Ireland (the Belfast poets, The Field Day Theatre Company); fictions dealing, in the midst of the new prosperity, with the traumas of famine, emigration, civil war, stagnation, state censorship and isolation (The Field, The Butcher Boy, The Wind That Shakes the Barley, Korea, At Swim Two Boys); and finally fictions of the Celtic Tiger (�Riverdance,� Aqua, Intermission, The Snapper, etc.). The course is designed to appeal to anyone interested in Irish Studies, modernism, postcolonial theory, and sociological theories of literature (Bourdieu, Casanova et al.). We�ll also be screening a few films in the class, though the theory of film won�t be rigorously covered. Required are one or two in-class presentations (depending on enrollment), a project proposal for the final paper, and one final 20-30 page research paper of publishable quality.
"Meyer, E. and L. Smith: The Practical Tutor
Recommended Text: Leki, I. : Understanding ESL Writers"
"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. "