Class Archive

90/2

Practices of Literary Study:
Reading and Writing about Science Fiction

MW 2-3:30

As a genre, science fiction has always pushed at the limits of the human—What makes us different from machines or animals? What is our place in the universe? What can the future tell us about the present day and the historical past? Yet scien...(read more)

100/5

The Seminar on Criticism:
The Victorian Novel

TuTh 8-9:30

Focusing on the Victorian novel, this course will examine why it emerged as the dominant literary form in nineteenth-century Britain. What made the novel so popular, and in what ways did the novel shape—and was shaped in turn...(read more)

175/1

Literature and Disability:
States of Exception

TuTh 12:30-2

From the blind poet to the fat detective to the “twisted” villain, literature often foregrounds bodily difference as an exceptional condition. What are the stakes and effects of literature’s interest in the exception—and in ...(read more)

90/2

Practices of Literary Study:
Where Did the Realist Novel Come From?

TTh 3:30-5

Before the literary form we now think of as the realist novel took critical shape as an aesthetic entity in the nineteenth century, a wide range of very interesting and new forms of prose fiction in eighteenth-century Britain (works we now...(read more)

100/7

The Seminar on Criticism:
In the Wake of Moby-Dick

TTh 5-6:30

We will read Moby-Dick slowly and scrupulously, immersing ourselves in Melville’s extraordinary prose and assessing the book’s literary, historical, and biographical contexts; the 20^th- and 21^st-century cr...(read more)

125A/1

The English Novel (Defoe through Scott)

TTh 12:30-2

The period from which our reading draws has been credited with the “rise of the novel”—the emergence of the then new genre, the “novel,” so familiar to us today. While critics have qualified and revised that claim, the...(read more)

125C/1

The European Novel

MWF 10-11

In The Theory of the Novel the critic Georg Lukacs writes, “The novel form is, like no other, an expression of transcendental homelessness.” This course will survey the history of the European novel in the context of “rootl...(read more)

125E/1

The Contemporary Novel:
Screens, Pages, and Visual Rhetoric in Contemporary Fiction

MWF 11-12

A study from the Global Web Index reveals that internet users aged sixteen to sixty-four averaged 6 hours and 43 minutes online per day in 2019. This amounts to 102 full days of screentime per person. If people are spending nearly a third...(read more)

190/6

Research Seminar:
The Historical Novel

TTh 5-6:30

What is historical and what is fictional about the genre of historical fiction? Since the nineteenth century, this oxymoronic genre has redrawn the border between history and fiction, realism and romance. In this survey, we will begin by reading a ...(read more)

203/3

Graduate Readings:
Novel Theory, Narrative Theory, and the Sociology of the Novel

Tuesday 9-12

In this course, we will read a lot of writing about narrative and the novel for a few related reasons.  First, we’ll consider several representative texts in narratology, novel theory, and the sociology of the novel to trace out som...(read more)

29/1

Major Writers:
Virginia Woolf

TTh 8-9:30

"On or around December 1910, human character changed.&qu...(read more)

90/1

Practices of Literary Study:
Faulkner

MWF 3-4

William Faulkner was one of the crucial writers of the twentieth century. In this course, we will focus on The Sound and the Fury (1929), Light in August (1932), Absalom, Absalom! (1936)—thre...(read more)

125C/1

European Novel:
The Many Faces of the 19th-Century Novel

TTh 2-3:30

The novel emerged as the principal literary genre in 19^{t...(read more)}

132/1

American Novel

MWF 2-3

“The”? “American”? “Novel&rdquo...(read more)

C136/1

Topics in American Studies:
American Culture in the Age of Obama

TTh 3:30-5 + one hour of discussion

This course traces, across many forms of American culture, what might be called “the Obama effect.” Writer Ta-Nehisi Coates has suggested that the election of Obama prompted a renaissance of black writing, in part by stimulating “...(read more)

137B/1

Chicana/o Literature and Culture Since 1910

MWF 12-1

This course will focus exclusively on the study of Chicanx/La...(read more)

177/1

Literature and Philosophy:
"Minds, Morals, and the Novel"

TTh 3:30-5

This course will examine key texts from the history of moral ...(read more)

178A/1

Literature and Law

MWF 1-2

This course is an introduction to the field of law and litera...(read more)

180Z/1

Science Fiction

TTh 9:30-11

Book List

Dick, Philip K.: Do Androids D...(read more)

190/1

Research Seminar:
Beckett's Prose

MW 9-10:30

The career of Samuel Beckett began with some (rather ragged) poetry, continued with a handful of novels and short stories, and culminated with a handful of the twentieth century’s most important plays. But most of his work refuses generic des...(read more)

190/2

Research Seminar:
Literature on Trial: Romanticism, Law, Justice

W 2-5

This seminar will introduce students to “law and literature” studies, focusing on the way literature imagines the relation between law and justice. We’ll begin with literature of the Romantic period, and concentrate on intersectio...(read more)

190/3

Research Seminar:
Sensation Novels in Victorian England

T 3:30-6:30

Sensation novels constitute a vastly popular...(read more)

190/10

Research Seminar

TTh 3:30-5

This course will survey a variety of spy novels, comparing th...(read more)

125B/1

The English Novel (Dickens through Conrad)

TTh 9:30-11

In this course we will read novels that were written from the 1840s through the end of the nineteenth century, a period that is marked by Britain’s growth as the first modern industrialized society and as an expansive colonial power. This was...(read more)

125C/1

The European Novel:
Desire and Form

TTh 9:30-11

The genre of the novel is named for its capacity for novelty or imaginative invention. This course will examine spectacularly creative instances of fictional prose in the European novel from the fourteenth to the twentieth century. We will examine ...(read more)

134/1

Contemporary Literature:
Contemporary British Fiction (and a few films)

Lectures TTh 11-12 + one hour of discussion section per week (sec. 103: F 11-12; sec. 104: F 12-1)

This course will examine British novels and films from the past thirty years--from roughly 1990 through the present. Topics of discussion will include: the legacies of empire, World War II, Thatcherism, and New Labor; the erosion of the welfare sta...(read more)

165/3

Special Topics:
Popular Music and Social Critique

TTh 9:30-11

At the onset of the Second World War, a Communist country music singer armed with an acoustic guitar demands the nation examine the consequences of a man-made climate crisis and pledges to destroy fascism both at home and abroad…  ...(read more)

166/3

Special Topics:
Hemingway and Masculinity

TTh 11-12:30

DIfficult to point to a more foundational American writer than Ernest Hemingway. Hemingway embodied a kind of balls-to-the-wall masculine energy that dominated American modernist fiction for decades of war and conflict. For more than fifty yea...(read more)

180Z/1

Science Fiction

TTh 2-3:30

“Not real can tell us about real.” This is one of the fundamental lessons learned by a new race of genetically engineered trans-humans in Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake. It is also one of the fundamental principles of t...(read more)

190/3

Research Seminar:
Fictions of Los Angeles

MW 12-1:30

Los Angeles has been described, variously, as a "circus without a tent" (Carey McWilliams), "seventy-two suburbs in search of a city" (Dorothy Parker), "the capital of the Third World" (David Rieff), and "the only...(read more)

190/5

Research Seminar:
Climate Change Fiction, or Cli-Fi

TTh 11-12:30

Contemporary fiction writers have increasingly been turning their gaze, and ours, toward global climate change, an accelerating environmental crisis of our own making. In this class, we will consider the rise of the literary genre known since 2008 ...(read more)

190/8

Research Seminar:
The Other Melville

TTh 3:30-5

We will read widely across Herman Melville’s literary career, exclusive of Moby-Dick: South Sea romance (Typee), transatlantic novel (Redburn), short fiction (“Bartleby,” “Benito Cereno,” and...(read more)

125D/1

The 20th-Century Novel

TWTh 12-2:30

This course is a 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 th...(read more)

180Z/1

Science Fiction

MW 9-12

This course presents the genre of speculative fiction and its historical commitment to imagining plausible and implausible alternatives to the present. It will begin by looking at the Golden Age of the science fiction short story, the 1950s and 60s...(read more)

20/1

Modern British and American Literature:
Pandemic Fiction

MW 5-6:30

Through the centuries, pandemics have supplied storytellers with fodder for reflections on community and isolation, humanity and inhumanity, hope and despair, and how the future might be imagined in the face of widespread disease and death.&nb...(read more)

31AC/1

Literature of American Cultures:
American Hustle: Race, Ethnicity, and Dreams of Getting Ahead

TTh 9:30-11

In this class, we are going to do and to talk about work: getting work, making it work, working the system.

This course, which constitutes a survey of ethnic American literature, asks about the desires, imagination, and labor that go into...(read more)

53/1

Asian American Literature and Culture:
Voice, Text, Image

TTh 2-3:30

This is a lecture and discussion course that surveys early to contemporary Asian American literary and cultural production. We'll study the broad range of forms that have served as vehicles of Asian American political and cultura...(read more)

125E/1

The Contemporary Novel:
The Historical Novel

TTh 11-12:30

Texts: Anna Burns: Milkman; E. L. Doctorow: Ragtime; Amitav Ghosh: Sea of Poppies; Toni Morrison: Song of Solomon; Viet Thanh Nguyen: The Sympathizer 

What is historica...(read more)

132/1

American Novel

Lectures MW 2-3 + one hour of discussion section per week (sec. 101: F 1-2; sec. 102: F 2-3)

Rather than define a canon, this survey ...(read more)

133B/1

African American Literature and Culture Since 1917

MWF 1-2

This course will examine some major 20^th-century African American novels; however, given the nature of the terrain, the course will also dip back into the period of slavery in the U.S. (the works of Douglass and Jacobs).  Belove...(read more)

190/1

Research Seminar:
Utopia and Anti-Utopia

MW 10:30-12

“A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not even worth glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing.  And when Humanity lands there, it looks out, and, seeing a better country, sets sail....(read more)

190/3

Research Seminar:
The Spy Novel

MW 5-6:30

This course will survey a variety of spy novels, comparing their diverse modalities.  We will explore the genre’s origins that lie in values dictated by a traditional white masculinity, from the machismo of a James Bond to the quiet, del...(read more)

190/9

Research Seminar:
James / Baldwin

TTh 5-6:30

James Baldwin made little secret of the importance of Henry James to his creative life, paying debt in complex, archly poetic sentences that drew snide dismissals from friends and rivals alike (Mailer: “even the best of his paragraphs are spr...(read more)

27/1

Introduction to the Study of Fiction

MWF 11-12

We will immerse ourselves in the extraordinary and influential literary career of Edgar Allan Poe: poetry, tales, satires, and essays. We will examine Poe’s work in relation to mid-nineteenth-century short fiction by Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herm...(read more)

125A/1

The English Novel (Defoe through Scott)

MWF 1-2

The period from which our reading draws has been credited with the “rise of the novel”—the emergence of the then new genre, the “novel,” so familiar to us today. While critics have qualified and revised that claim, the...(read more)

125C/1

The European Novel

TTh 9:30-11

In The Theory of the Novel, Georg Lukacs writes, “The novel form is, like no other, an expression of transcendental homelessness.”  This course will survey the history of the European novel in the context of “rootlessn...(read more)

125C/2

The European Novel:
The Many Faces of the 19th-Century European Novel

TTh 2-3:30

The novel emerged as the principal literary genre in 19th-century Europe and has continued to dominate the literary market in Europe and North America ever since. What were the constitutive formal elements as well as social and psychological concer...(read more)

125E/1

The Contemporary Novel

Lectures MW 9-10 in 20 Wheeler (note new location) + one hour of discussion section per week in different locations (sec. 101: F 9-10; sec. 103: F 10-11)

While the novel has a rich and storied past, its newness—its NOVEL-ty—is built into its very name. In this course, we will consider the innovations, formal and otherwise, through which the novel continues to surprise and engage us in th...(read more)

126/1

British Literature, 1900-1945

Lectures TTh 2-3 in 20 Barrows + one hour of discussion section per week in 305 Wheeler (sec. 101: F 2-3; sec. 102: F 3-4)

In this course, we will examine British and Irish literature from the turn of the twentieth century through the aftermath of World War II. This was a period of tremendous turmoil and thoroughgoing change in Britain, Ireland, and the world. Looking ...(read more)

132/1

American Novel

MWF 2-3

This survey of the American novel begins with a somnambulist whose surprisingly violent rambles in the summer of 1787 raise questions about responsibility for the land theft that undergirded the emergent nation. It ends with a twenty-first-century ...(read more)

137T/1

Topics in Chicanx Literature and Culture:
Chicanx Novels

MWF 1-2

This course will focus exclusively on the study of Chicanx novels. The themes and formal features in these novels have been influenced to a large degree by a broad range of social experiences: living in the borderlands of nationality, language, pol...(read more)

165/4

Special Topics:
Family Histories from the Margins

TTh 3:30-5

This seminar will explore the fraught status of families in literature and what it means to write about one’s own family. The family has generated a diverse range of literary and textual forms, from the list of “begats” in th...(read more)

165AC/1

Special Topics in American Cultures:
Ethnicity, Religion and Literature

TTh 11-12:30

This class will explore how 20^th- and 21^st-century American prose fictions have imagined the relationship between religion and ethnicity. Our first questions will be formal: How do different formal choices allow these writers ...(read more)

166/3

Special Topics:
Moby-Dick

TTh 11-12:30

Baroque, intense, and demanding, Moby-Dick richly rewards all the attention a reader can muster. We will delve in as slowly as we can in order to cultivate the intellectual receptivity that Melville hoped for in his readers, beco...(read more)

166/4

Special Topics:
Pomo: Exploring the Landscape of Postmodernism

TTh 3:30-5

Postmodernism is one of those peculiar words, like "nonfiction," that struggles to define something by what it is not. Or rather, in this case, by what it comes after: Postmodernism was what came after modernism. In this sem...(read more)

180N/1

The Novel:
Intimates and Strangers: Henry James, J.M. Coetzee and the Ethics of Otherness

MW 5-6:30

Henry James (1843-1916) and J.M. Coetzee (b.1940), born just about a century apart, share a view of novel writing as an inquiry into the ethics of inter-personal relations.  Both fiction writers favor plots that initiate an ethical crisis by t...(read more)

180Z/1

Science Fiction

TTh 12:30-2

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. W...(read more)

190/2

Research Seminar:
William Faulkner’s Temporalities

MW 12-1:30

Jean-Paul Sartre has famously compared Faulkner’s sense of time to “a man sitting in a convertible and looking back.”  From this perspective, Sartre contends, the only view is that of the past, made “hard, clear and imm...(read more)

190/5

Research Seminar:
British Fiction Since 1945

TTh 9:30-11

This research seminar will survey the British novel (broadly construed) since 1945. Topics of discussion will likely include: realism and alternatives to realism; formal experimentation and novel psychology; race, immigration, and empire; feminism;...(read more)

190/8

Research Seminar:
James Joyce

TTh 3:30-5

This seminar will focus on James Joyce’s landmark modernist novel, Ulysses. In preparing to tackle the text, we will read Homer’s Odyssey, some of Joyce’s early writings, and parts of A Portrait of the Artist...(read more)

125E/1

The Contemporary Novel:
Character and Collectivity

TWTh 12-2

What options are there for novelists who want to tell the story of the many rather than the story of the one? If history represents the actions of millions of people, how does literature represent these collective histories?  Contemporary soci...(read more)

166/2

Special Topics:
Global Catastrophe and Modern Literature

TTh 2-5

Global crisis defined the first part of the twentieth century. Pandemic illness and catastrophic economic collapse, along with World War after World War, meant it was a time rife with ethnic, racial, imperial, and political tensions, and a time als...(read more)

180Z/1

Science Fiction:
A Survey of Science Fiction from E.T.A. Hoffman to N.K. Jemisin

TWTh 9:30-12

This course will examine in depth the history of speculative fiction and its engagement with the themes and topics of the new life sciences, representation of cloning, ecological dystopias, hybrid life-forms, genetic engineering dystopias. While sc...(read more)

20/1

Modern British and American Literature:
The Handmaid's Tale in Adaptation

TTh 12:30-2

With the advent of the Trump presidency (2016-present), Margaret Atwood’s dystopian, feminist masterpiece, The Handmaid’s Tale, has gained new relevance. And with the popular and critical success of its Hulu TV series adaptatio...(read more)

122/1

The Victorian Period

TTh 9:30-11

The Victorian period (1837 - 1901) is a notoriously arbitrary periodic designation, tied to the reign of one particular woman, Victoria Alexandrina Hanover, otherwise known as Queen Victoria I. The period is not self-evidently defined by any generi...(read more)

125D/1

The 20th-Century Novel

MWF 11-12

This course is a 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 th...(read more)

137B/1

Chicana/o Literature and Culture Since 1910:
Riding Chicanx Literature's First Wave and Beyond, c/s

TTh 11-12:30

"The student of Chicano literature will look back at this group and this first period as the foundation of whatever is to come, even if only as the generation against whom those to come rebel. The best of the best will survive—but then s...(read more)

166/4

Special Topics:
Literatures of the Asian Diaspora in America

TTh 9:30-11

This aim of this survey is two-fold: First, to interrogate the concept of nationhood and, particularly, what it means to be American.  Focusing on writings by and about peoples of Asian descent across the twentieth century and into the twenty-...(read more)

166/7

Special Topics:
Charles Dickens

TTh 2-3:30

Close readings of several of Charles Dickens's major works.

Grading will be based on two eight-page essays, on-time completion of all assigned reading, and attendance and participation in discussion.

Please purchase the indi...(read more)

166/11

Special Topics:
The Works of Vladimir Nabokov

TTh 11-12:30

We will study the work of Nabokov as a novelist on two continents over a period of nearly sixty years. The course will be structured (more or less) chronologically and divided between novels translated from Russian and written in English. After beg...(read more)

175/1

Literature and Disability

TTh 3:30-5

This course will allow students to explore theories and representations of disability.  We’ll wonder whether it’s possible to develop an inclusive, common “theory” adequate to vario...(read more)

190/4

Research Seminar:
Cli Fi (Climate Change Fiction)

TTh 9:30-11

How do we imagine the unimaginable? When it comes to global climate change, we have for the most part avoided imagining it altogether. But contemporary fiction writers are increasingly turning their gaze, and ours, toward the impact and meanings of...(read more)

190/5

Research Seminar:
The Urban Postcolonial

TTh 11-12:30

An intensive research seminar exploring the relationship between urban landscapes and postcolonial literary cultures. Readings in theories of postcoloniality and diaspora as well as studies in city planning and architecture will accompany...(read more)

190/6

Research Seminar:
Literature on Trial: Romanticism, Law, Justice

TTh 11-12:30

This course will introduce students to “law and literature” studies, focusing on the way literature imagines the relation between law and justice.  We’ll concentrate on literature of the ...(read more)

190/10

Research Seminar:
Inventing Nature and Constructing Race

TTh 3:30-5

Scholars have recently argued that race and nature were "invented" around the turn of the nineteenth century. We'll begin by unpacking their counterintuitive arguments: what does it mean to argue that fundamental conceptual categories...(read more)

20/1

Modern British and American Literature:
Post-Apocalypse Now

MW 1:30-3

Apocalyptic stories have been told for centuries, even millenia. But novels, movies, and other forms of media that imagine the end of the world—and what comes after that—seem to have inundated us (floods!) in recent times....(read more)

80K/1

Children's Literature

TTh 9:30-11

This course has two principal aims: (1) to provide an overview of the history of children's literature in English; (2) to introduce students to the major generic, political, aesthetic, and philosophical questions such literature has posed. Amon...(read more)

121/1

The Romantic Period:
Romantic Voices

MWF 2-3

Romanticism has long been identified with democratic revolutions of the late 18^th century, and the social demand that every citizen have a “voice” in the constitution of community and law.  In this survey of li...(read more)

125C/1

The European Novel:
Lost Illusions

Thurs. 2-5

In his 1917 essay, “Science as a Vocation,” the sociologist Max Weber writes, “The fate of our times is characterized by rationalization and intellectualization and, above all, by the ‘disenchantment of the world.’ Pre...(read more)

C136/2

Topics in American Studies:
Noir: Films, Fiction, Criticism

TTh 3:30-5

“A city no worse than others, a city rich and vigorous and full of pride, a city lost and beaten and full of emptiness. It all depends on where you sit and what your own private score is. I didn't have one. I didn't care.&rdq...(read more)

166/1

Special Topics:
Gothic

MWF 2-3

In the eighteenth century, Gothic was a historical category (the “Dark” or “Middle” Ages, between the fall of Rome and the Renaissance) and then an ethnic one (the Germanic peoples who overthrew classical civilization). It&r...(read more)

166/5

Special Topics:
Asian American Literature - World, Nation, Locality

MWF 1-2

This class provides a foundation for reading Asian American literature at three levels of scale: world, nation, and locality. At the world scale, we will discuss the political origins of the phrase “Asian American” in the late 1960...(read more)

166/6

Special Topics:
Realism, Then and Now

MW 5-6:30

This course explores the relationship between life and literature, with a focus on the following types of questions: How have novelists and poets—as well as filmmakers, television producers, and Instagram aficionados—attempted to repres...(read more)

180N/1

The Novel

This course has been canceled (Jan. 7, 2019).

180Z/1

Science Fiction

MWF 12-1

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. W...(read more)

190/1

Research Seminar:
Flann O'Brien and Irish Literature

MW 10:30-12

In this seminar, we will explore the comic, satirical, and genre-crossing writings of Flann O’Brien/Myles na gCopaleen/Brian O’Nolan. We will examine him as an heir to modernist innovation, starting with his novels and moving on to his ...(read more)

190/2

Research Seminar:
Transsexual Literatures and Cultures

MW 12-1:30

Trans people are not a novelty. A desire to change sex, or else the fact of an individual whose sex has changed, is depicted in some of the most canonical texts of the literary canon: from the Metaphorphoses of Ovid, through the cross-identificatio...(read more)

190/11

Research Seminar:
Willa Cather

TTh 3:30-5

Two essays (seven pages and thirteen pages) will be required, along with regular attendance and participation in discussion.

Please read the paragraph about English 190 on page 2 of the instructions area of this Announcement of Classes fo...(read more)

152/1

Women Writers:
Jane Austen

MTuTh 4-6

In this course we will read—closely and deeply—a handful of novels by Jane Austen, considering them in terms of their historical context, their stylistic sophistication and innovation, and their enduring popular appeal. Accord...(read more)

176/1

Literature and Popular Culture:
O, the horror! Horror Films and Horror Fiction

TuWTh 12:30-3

This course will examine the historical development of the horror genre in both film and literature. Horror is a notoriously comprehensive genre, borrowing from  numerous story-telling and literary traditions. In this class we will address the...(read more)

20/1

Modern British and American Literature:
Reliving the Past: Art and the Historical Imagination

TTh 9:30-11

In 1951, William Faulkner wrote: "The past is never dead. It's not even past." In 2008, Barack Obama invoked Faulkner to discuss the racial inequalities that continue to fracture the American nation, suggesting that we can only allevi...(read more)

122/1

Victorian Period

Lectures MW 12-1 + one hour of discussion section per week (sec. 101: F 12-1; sec. 102: F 2-3)

The Victorian period witnessed dramatic and probably permanent changes to the literary culture of Britain, including: the morphing of scattered memoirs into formal autobiographies; the rise of the realist novel as the indispensable genre of bourgeo...(read more)

125C/1

The European Novel:
Society and Desire

TTh 2-3:30

This course will examine diverse instances of the European novel from the sixteenth to the twentieth century and consider how appetites of various kinds feature as organizing forces. How do hunger, lust, material greed, and the desire for order, be...(read more)

125C/2

The European Novel:
The Many Faces of the 19th-Century European Novel

TTh 5-6:30

The novel emerged as the principal literary genre in 19th-century Europe and has continued to dominate the literary market in Europe and North America ever since. What were the constitutive formal elements as well as social and psychological c...(read more)

125D/1

The 20th-Century Novel

TTh 11-12:30

This course is a 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 th...(read more)

125E/1

The Contemporary Novel:
The Latest Pulitzer Prize-Winning Novels

Lectures MW 11-12 + one hour of discussion section per week (sec. 101: F 11-12; sec. 102: F 2-3; sec. 103: Thurs. 9-10; sec. 104: Thurs. 10-11)

The Pulitzer Prize in Fiction is awarded for “distinguished fiction by an American author, preferably dealing with American life.” In this course, we will read the four most recent (2015-2018) Pulitzer-Prize winning novels and two novel...(read more)

126/1

British Literature, 1900-1945

MWF 2-3

How did British and Irish literature change over the first half of the twentieth-century? Was “modernism” a historical moment, an aesthetic movement, or a critical attitude—or some combination of the three? How did write...(read more)

165/3

Special Topics:
Literature and Media Theory

TTh 9:30-11

This course will consider literature in relation to media theory.  Is literature made obsolete by new media?  What happens when we consider print literature in re...(read more)

175/1

Literature and Disability

TTh 3:30-5

We will examine the ways disability is represented in a variety of works of fiction and drama.  Sometimes disability is used as a metaphor or symbol of something else.  In other cases, texts explore disability as a lived experience. ...(read more)

190/1

Research Seminar:
Melville in the 50s

MW 9-10:30

In this seminar we will read as much of Herman Melville’s fiction from the 1850s as we can, delving patiently into Moby-Dick (1851) early in the semester and then tracking the experiments in prose that eventually led Melville to the ...(read more)

190/2

Research Seminar:
Laughter and Vision: Explorations in the Novel of Ideas

Note new time: Tuesdays 2-5

In this seminar we will trod fiction's "path not taken"—the tradition of the novel of ideas that, with the triumph of Realism in the nineteenth century of Dickens and Balzac, became mainstream fiction's dark shadow. Our expl...(read more)

190/8

Research Seminar:
Repression and Resistance

TTh 2-3:30

In this course, we’ll analyze representations of repression and resistance in a collection of contemporary American novels. We’ll examine various forms of repression—physical, social, political, and psychological—represented...(read more)

250/4

Research Seminar:
Evolution and Literary Form, 1800-1900

Thurs. 3:30-6:30

Reading the newly published On the Origin of Species together in November 1859, George Eliot and George Henry Lewes hailed Charles Darwin’s book as confirmation of the “Development Hypothesis,” founded a hundred years ear...(read more)

125A/1

The English Novel (Defoe through Scott)

TTh 12:30-2

The period from which our reading draws has been credited with the “rise of the novel”—the emergence of the then new genre, the “novel,” so familiar to us today. While critics have qualified and revised that claim, the...(read more)

125B/1

The English Novel (Dickens through Conrad)

TTh 3:30-5

In this class we'll read novels by Charles Dickens, Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, W.M. Thackeray, and others. We'll think about these novels in two related ways. First, what was it about the novel—as opposed, for instance, to t...(read more)

125E/1

The Contemporary Novel:
The Latest Pulitzer Prize-Winning Novels

Lectures MW 9-10 + one hour of discussion section per week (sec. 101: F 9-10; sec. 102: F 11-12; sec. 103: Thurs. 9-10; sec. 104: Thurs. 11-12)

The Pulitzer Prize in Fiction is awarded for “distinguished fiction by an American author, preferably dealing with American life.” In this course, we will read the five most recent (2013-2017) Pulitzer-Prize winning novels and two novel...(read more)

134/1

Contemporary Literature

Lectures MW 11-12 + one hour of discussion section per week (sec. 101: F 9-10; sec. 102: F 11-12; sec. 103: Thurs. 9-10; sec. 104: Thurs. 1-2)

This course will survey Irish and British writing since World War II.  As we dig into the formal and generic workings of a range of texts, we will also think through the political and cultural contexts from which they emerge.  Along ...(read more)

137B/1

Chicana/o Literature and Culture Since 1910:
Chicanx Novels

TTh 11-12:30

This course will focus exclusively on the study of Chicanx novels. As we shall see, the formal features and thematic representations of these novels have been influenced to a large degree by a broad range of social experiences: living in the border...(read more)

166/1

Special Topics:
Comedy & Violence

MWF 2-3

What relation does comedy have to violence? Can humor be a gauge of political freedom? How does it resist violence or ally itself with it? In this class, we will consider various styles of humor—wit, buffoonery, satire, parody, nonsense, absu...(read more)

166/4

Special Topics:
Marxism & Literature

TTh 3:30-5

For the past thirty years, it’s become a cliché that it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. Yet, ever since the 2008 financial crash, there’s been rising popular consciousness of capitalism&...(read more)

166/6

Special Topics:
Speculative Fiction

Lectures MW 1-2 + one hour of discussion section per week (sec. 101: F 10-11; sec. 102: F 1-2)

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. W...(read more)

190/1

Research Seminar:
Trials of Literature: Romanticism, Justice, and the Law

MW 9:30-11

This seminar will focus on the way literature imagines the relation between law and justice, concentrating on literature of the Romantic period. We’ll consider writers’ interest in persons (from beggars and trespassers to gods and sover...(read more)

190/2

Research Seminar:
James Joyce

MW 10:30-12

Our course traces the evolution of Joyce’s writing, from his angry essays at the turn of the twentieth century to his all-compassing comedy, Finnegans Wake, published just before the outbreak of World War II. We will consider the tra...(read more)

190/3

Research Seminar:
Hawthorne & Melville

MW 2-3:30

This course takes a close and critical look at the literary careers of Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville.  We will read their works in relation to each other and within their historical and intellectual contexts, with special attention t...(read more)

190/6

Research Seminar:
Sixty Years Since: The Historical Novel

TTh 9:30-11

“Sixty Years Since” takes up Waverley’s audacious claim that sixty years is the ideal distance for fictional representations of history. Grounded in theories of the novel in relation to history, we’ll ask how (and ...(read more)

190/8

Research Seminar:
Literary Theory and Its Objects

TTh 12:30-2

This course explores some ...(read more)

203/5

Graduate Readings:
Contemporary Chicanx/Latinx Novels

TTh 2-3:30

In this course, we’ll examine narrative form in several Chicanx/Latinx novels, focusing on the role of problematic narrators. We’ll explore the specific ways that these novels tend to reify the social world through the eyes and voice of...(read more)

250/4

Research Seminar:
The Rhetoric of Technique

Thurs. 3:30-6:30

“Sex is boring,” Foucault declared in an interview published posthumously in 1986, before expressing his interest in those “intentional and voluntary actions by which men […] make their life an oeuvre that car...(read more)

125D/1

The 20th-Century Novel

MTuTh 9:30-12

This course is a 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 ...(read more)

166/1

Special Topics:
Speculative Fictions, Possible Futures

TuWTh 4-6:30

This course will present the genre of speculative fiction and its historical commitment to imagining plausible and implausible alternatives to the present. We will begin by looking at the Golden Age of the science fiction short story, the 1950s and...(read more)

122/1

The Victorian Period

MW 2-3 + discussion sections F 2-3

The Victorian period witnessed dramatic and probably permanent changes to the literary culture of Britain, including: the morphing of scattered memoirs into formal autobiographies; the rise of the realist novel as the indispensable genre of bourgeo...(read more)

125D/1

The 20th-Century Novel

TTh 9:30-11

This course is a general survey of the 20th-century novel. The novel is the quintessential form of experession 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...(read more)

175/1

Literature and Disability

TTh 3:30-5

This course will have several components. An introductory section will provide students with a grounding in disability theory; we’ll wonder whether it’s possible to develop a common “theory” adequate to various disability ca...(read more)

180N/1

The Novel:
"The Novel as the Book of Other People"

MW 5-6:30

In 2007, Zadie Smith edited an anthology of short fiction entitled The Book of Other People.  In her preface to this volume, Smith describes her desire to give contemporary writers the opportunity to try on “different skins,&rdq...(read more)

190/2

Research Seminar:
The Historical Novel

MW 2-3:30

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the ...(read more)

190/3

Research Seminar:
Another Day in Purgatory: Irish Literature and the Afterlife

MW 3:30-5

Life is full of death; the steps of the living cannot press the earth without disturbing the ashes of the dead—we walk upon our ancestors—the globe itself is one vast churchyard.
(read more)

190/8

Research Seminar:
George Eliot and the Realist Novel

TTh 11-12:30

Note the changes in the topic, book list, and course description for this section of English 190 as of early June, 2017.

Beginning at the age of 37, publishing under a male pen name,George Eliot reinvented the novel as we know it...(read more)

190/12

Research Seminar:
Making Memories

TTh 5-6:30

This seminar examines a literary turn toward narratives of counterfeit confessional memory. It asks what is at stake in narratiing and even confessing a past that didn't happen—and what that even means in the context of a fictional text. ...(read more)

119/1

Literature of the Restoration and the Early 18th Century

TTh 12:30-2

In an age of commercial print expansion, men and women writers negotiated the possibilities, limits, and perceived dangers of publishing. In this class, we will explore the forms and strategies writers deployed in those negotiati...(read more)

125C/1

The European Novel:
The Many Faces of the 19th-Century European Novel

MWF 3-4

The novel emerged as the principal literary genre in 19^th-century Europe and has continued to dominate the literary market in Europe and North America ever since.  What were the constitutive formal elements as well as social and ps...(read more)

125E/1

The Contemporary Novel

MW 1-2 + discussion sections F 1-2

132/1

The American Novel

MW 2-3 + discussion sections F 2-3

This course is a survey of major American novels from the late-nineteenth century to the present, with a focus on realism, naturalism, and modernism. Rather than trace a single history of the novel in this period, we will explore a range of genres...(read more)

137B/1

Chicana/o Literature and Culture Since 1910:
Chicanx/Latinx Novels

TTh 11-12:30

In this course, we’ll read a cluster of post-1970 Chicanx/Latinx novels.  We’ll explore a variety of issues and experiences—race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, political activism, revolution, philosophy, art, storytelling, a...(read more)

166/1

Special Topics:
Marxism and Literature

MWF 1-2

For the past thirty years, it’s become a cliché that it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. Yet, ever since the 2008 financial crash, there’s been rising popular consciousness of capitalism...(read more)

166/5

Special Topics:
Modern Irish Literature

TTh 11-12:30

180Z/1

Science Fiction

TTh 9:30-11

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. ...(read more)

190/4

Research Seminar:
Jane Austen and the Theory of the Novel

MW 12:30-2

While there is hardly a dearth of criticism on Jane Austen, it is rare to find her used, as Balzac, Flaubert, Dostoevsky, or Proust is used, as the basis for theorizing the Novel as a form.  The gender bias of classic continental novel theory...(read more)

190/8

Research Seminar:
Literatures of the Ocean

TTh 9:30-11

In this seminar we’ll explore literary (and some non-literary) representations of life at sea and of sailors, both offshore and on, primarily but not exclusively during the expansion of Britain’s first empire during the eighteenth cent...(read more)

N125D/1

The 20th-Century Novel

MTTh 2-4

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 ...(read more)

N180Z/1

Science Fiction

MTTh 10-12

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 dystopia...(read more)

27/1

Introduction to the Study of Fiction

This class has been canceled.

125D/1

The 20th-Century Novel

MWF 1-2

(read more)

166/2

Special Topics:
Vladimir Nabokov

MWF 10-11

We will study the work of Nabokov as a novelist on two continents over a period of nearly sixty years. The course will be structured (more or less) chronologically and divided between novels translated from Russian and written in English. After be...(read more)

171/2

Literature and Sexual Identity:
Gender, Sexuality, and Modernism

TTh 2-3:30

“Is queer modernism simply another name for modernism?” The question Heather Love poses in her special issue of PMLA will also guide this seminar on the crossovers between formal and sexual “deviance” in modernist ...(read more)

175/1

Literature and Disability

TTh 9:30-11

We will examine the ways disability is represented in a variety of works of fiction and drama.  Assignments will include two short (5-8 page) critical essays, a group performance project and a take-home final examination.  (This is a cor...(read more)

190/3

Research Seminar:
Moby-Dick, and More

MW 3:30-5

We will read Moby-Dick scrupulously, and we also will consider historical and literary contexts, Melville’s range of sources, 19th-century responses, 20^th- and 21^st-century literary criticism, and the pres...(read more)

190/4

Research Seminar:
U.S. Modernism

MW 5-6:30 PM

We will survey major American writers from the first half of the twentieth century, with a special focus on texts that challenged both the formal and social conventions of literature in the period. We will examine a ran...(read more)

190/9

Research Seminar:
On Style

TTh 2-3:30

NOTE: The topic, course description, book list, and instructor for this section of English 190 changed on May 2.

Good style is easy to spot but tough to imitate, and "style," good or bad, is itself difficult to define: does style ...(read more)

190/10

Research Seminar:
Do I Dare? Indecision and Modernist Literature

TTh 3:30-5

From Prufrock's peach to Frost's two roads, modernism gave us many famous moments of indecision. We will follow along with texts depicting speakers and characters as they hesitate, delay, cavil, evade, hedge, sidestep, prevaricate, tergive...(read more)

190/11

Research Seminar:
Modern California Literature and Film

Tues. 5-8 PM

Besides reading and discussing some fiction and poetry with Western settings, and essays that attempt to identify or explain distinctive regional characteristics, this course will consider various movies shaped by and shaping conceptions of Califo...(read more)

190/12

Research Seminar:
Modern Utopian and Dystopian Literature and Film

Thurs. 5-8 PM

Most utopian and dystopian authors are more concerned with persuading readers of the merits of their ideas than with the "merely" literary qualities of their writing. Although utopian writing has sometimes made converts, inspiring reader...(read more)

122/1

The Victorian Period

MWF 12-1

The Victorian period witnessed dramatic and probably permanent changes to the literary culture of Britain, including: the morphing of scattered memoirs into formal autobiographies; the rise of the realist novel as the indispensable genre of bourge...(read more)

125E/1

The Contemporary Novel:
The Latest Pulitzer Prize-Winning Novels

MW 10-11; discussion sections F 10-11

The Pulitzer Prize in Fiction is awarded for “distinguished fiction by an American author, preferably dealing with American life.”  In this cou...(read more)

126/1

British Literature: 1900-1945:
The Modernist Novel

TTh 2-3:30

The British novel in the first half of the twentieth century was a site of massive formal experimentation. Time, space, narrators, characters, and language were dismantled and reconfigured in startling new ways. In this survey, we will look at nov...(read more)

132/1

The American Novel

MW 3-4; discussion sections F 3-4

A survey of major American novels from the late-nineteenth century to the present, with a focus on realism, naturalism, and modernism. Rather than trace a single history of the novel in this period, we will explore a range of genres—includin...(read more)

137T/1

Topics in Chicana/o Literature and Culture:
The Chicana/o Novel

MWF 12-1

This course on Chicana/o and Latina/o novels complements a Chicana/o literature course I taught in the fall entitled “Migrant Narratives.”  But whereas the fall course included works that represented various literary genres (the n...(read more)

180N/1

The Novel:
The Novel as "The Book of Other People"

TTh 12:30-2

In 2007, Zadie Smith edited an anthology of short fiction entitled The Book of Other People.  In her preface to this volume, Smith describes her desire to give contemporary writers the opportunity to try on “different skins,&rd...(read more)

180Z/1

Science Fiction

This course has been canceled.

190/2

Research Seminar:
Through a Future Darkly: Global Crisis and the Triumph of Dystopia

M 3-6

At what past moment did the future grow so dark? Formal liteary dystopia has been with us prominently since at least 1726, with the arrival of Swift's Gulliver. But the tendency to critique the present by imagining a darkly extrapolated future...(read more)

190/4

Research Seminar:
The Urban Postcolonial

MW 4-5:30

In this seminar we will explore recent issues in postcolonial studies by focusing on cities. Moving through a diverse set of texts and very different cities—London and Lagos, Kingston and Mumbai, New York and Johannesburg, New Orl...(read more)

190/12

Research Seminar:
Daniel Defoe and the Rise of the 18th-Century Novel

TTh 3:30-5

Reading, discussing, and writing mainly about the fictional works of Daniel Defoe, and (depending on student interests) about contemporary writing on some of Defoe’s subjects, such as overseas commerce, colonies, and piracy; the predicaments...(read more)

203/1

Graduate Readings:
George Eliot and Victorian Science

MW1:30-3

A study of the Victorian novel in relation to nineteenth-century theories of natural and aesthetic form, focused on major writings by George Eliot and Charles Darwin. We will read two novels -- Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda &nda...(read more)

250/3

Research Seminar:
How It Strikes a Contemporary: Reading the Novel in the 21st Century

Thurs. 3:30-6:30

N125D/1

The 20th-Century Novel

MTTh 2-4

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...(read more)

N166/1

Special Topics:
Moby-Dick and the Theory of the Novel

MTTh 4-6

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 aesthet...(read more)

N166/2

Special Topics:
The U.S. Novel Since 1945: Authors and Workers

TTh 10-12

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 m...(read more)

N180Z/1

Science Fiction

MTTh 10-12

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 dystopi...(read more)

27/1

Introduction to the Study of Fiction

MWF 1-2

This section of English 27 has been canceled.

27/3

Introduction to the Study of Fiction

TTh 3:30-5

The title of the course is “Introduction to the Study of Fiction,” but more specifically the course will be an introduction to analytic critical writing about fiction. We will work on close reading, on learning how to read with a mind ...(read more)

125B/1

The English Novel:
Dickens through Conrad

MW 4-5:30

In this class we'll read novels by Charles Dickens, Charlotte Bronte, 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 poe...(read more)

125C/1

The European Novel:
Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and the English Novel

TTh 3:30-5

A close reading of selected works of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy in conjunction with English novels. We will focus on how the Russian and English novels resemble one another, differ from one another, and respond to one another, especially in their trea...(read more)

125D/1

The 20th-Century Novel

MWF 9-10

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...(read more)

126/1

British Literature: 1900-1945

MWF 1-2

How did the form, content, circulation, and ambitions of British literature change over the first half of the twentieth century? How did writers contend with historical upheavals such as World War I, suffrage, and the wane of empire? With the adve...(read more)

139/1

The Cultures of English:
Literature of The Great War

MWF 11-12

In the years following World War One, European intellectuals debated the implications of the new balance of power and the terms of the peace among the combatant nations, but they were haunted by the prospect of the decline of the West itself. A fo...(read more)

141/1

Modes of Writing (Exposition, Fiction, Verse, etc.)

TTh 9:30-11

This course will introduce students to the study of creative writing--fiction, poetry, and drama.  Students will learn to talk critically about these forms and begin to feel comfortable and confident writing within these genres.  Student...(read more)

141/2

Modes of Writing (Exposition, Fiction, Verse, etc.)

TTh 9:30-11

This course will introduce students to the study of creative writing--fiction, poetry, and drama.  Students will learn to talk critically about these forms and begin to feel comfortable and confident writing within these genres.  Student...(read more)

143C/1

Long Narrative:
The Novel

TTh 2-3:30

The purpose of this course is to begin writing a novel. None of us will finish writing a novel in the three months we spend together. Novels take time, notwithstanding NaNoWriMo. There are some reported exceptions to this—Jack Kerouac wrote ...(read more)

165/4

Special Topics:
Longing and Belonging in Contemporary Writing

MW 3-4:30

This course will interrogate the possible relationships between desire and social position or identity (what I conceive myself to have and to lack) by reading contemporary literature in which (read more)

165/7

Special Topics:
Modern California Books and Movies

Tuesdays 6-9 P.M.

Besides discussing fiction and poetry with Western settings, and essays that attempt to identify or explain distinctive regional characteristics, this course will include consideration of various movies shaped by and shaping conceptions of Califor...(read more)

171/1

Literature and Sexual Identity:
Gender, Sexuality, and Modernism

TTh 12:30-2

“Is queer modernism simply another name for modernism?” The question Heather Love poses in her special issue of PMLA will also guide this seminar on the crossovers between formal and sexual “deviance” in modernist ...(read more)

175/1

Literature and Disability

MWF 12-1

In this course we will think about the concept of literature via the category of disability. We are told that "poems make nothing happen" (Auden); for speech-act theory, fictional utterance is a peculiarly "parasitic" form of s...(read more)

190/7

Research Seminar:
Ethics and U.S. Fiction

TTh 11-12:30

Is reading good for us? Or bad for us? How does literature work as, or against, moral philosophy? What responsibilities do the author and the reader hold with regard to texts? What is the relationship between ethics, aesthetics, and affect? How do...(read more)

190/14

Research Seminar:
Modern Utopian and Dystopian Books and Movies

Thursdays 6-9 PM

Most utopian and dystopian authors are more concerned with persuading readers of the merits of their ideas than with the "merely" literary qualities of their writing. Although utopian writing has sometimes made converts, inspiring reader...(read more)

27/1

Introduction to the Study of Fiction

MWF 2-3

A 2013 study at the New School for Social Research corroborates the truism that reading literary fiction enhances our ability to understand the emotional states of other people. Even without the blessing of the sciences, it is undeniable that fict...(read more)

27/2

Introduction to the Study of Fiction

TTh 3:30-5

The title of the course is “Introduction to the Study of Fiction,” but, more specifically, the course will be an introduction to analytic critical writing about fiction. We will work on close reading, on learning how to read with a min...(read more)

121/1

The Romantic Period

TTh 11-12:30

This course will look with wild surmise at the event of Romanticism.  What happened to literature between 1789 and 1830?  Is it true, as some critics have claimed, that Romantic w...(read more)

122/1

The Victorian Period

TTh 3:30-5

The Victorian period witnessed dramatic and probably permanent changes to the literary culture of Britain, including: the morphing of scattered memoirs into formal autobiographies; the rise of the realist novel as the indispensable genre of bourge...(read more)

125A/1

The English Novel (Defoe through Scott)

TTh 9:30-11

This class explores eighteenth-century British innovations in narrative prose writings that we have come to call novels. A scientific revolution, broadened financial speculation, expanding empire, changing notions of gender, and new philosophies o...(read more)

125A/2

The English Novel (Defoe through Scott)

TTh 3:30-5

A survey of early fiction, much of which pretended to be anything but. Most was published anonymously and purported to be a true "History," "Expedition," or the like, about "Things as They Are." We will consider at th...(read more)

125E/1

The Contemporary Novel:
The Latest Pulitzer Prize-Winning Fiction

MW 9-10 + discussion sections F 9-10

The Pulitzer Prize in Fiction is awarded for “distinguished fiction by an American author, preferably dealing with American life.” In this course, we will read the seven most recent (2007-2014) Pulitzer Prize-winning novels (actually, ...(read more)

166/1

Special Topics:
Scotland and Romanticism

MWF 11-12

Between 1760 and 1830 Scotland was one of the centers of the European-North Atlantic “Republic of Letters.” Here were invented the signature forms and discourses of the “Enlightenment” and “Romanticism” (terms f...(read more)

166/3

Special Topics:
The Works of Vladimir Nabokov

TTh 9:30-11

We will study the work of Nabokov as a novelist on two continents over a period of nearly sixty years. The course will be structured (more or less) chronologically and divided between novels translated from Russian and written in English. Aft...(read more)

174/1

Literature and History:
The Seventies

TTh 12:30-2

As one historian has quipped, it was the worst of times, it was the worst of times. "The '70s" routinely come in for mockery: even at the time, it was known as the decade when "it seemed like nothing happened."

Yet w...(read more)

180N/1

The Novel:
The Novel as a Literary Genre

Note new time: MW 2:30-4

Henry James, writing in 1888, describes his cultural moment as a time of remarkable transformation in the production and reception of the English language novel.  At the beginning of the century, James observes, “there was a comfortable...(read more)

180Z/1

Science Fiction

TTh 12:30-2

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...(read more)

190/7

Research Seminar:
Toni Morrison

TTh 12:30-2

We will read as many of Toni Morrison’s novels as we can in the time we have. Most class meetings will be organized around discussion of the assigned daily reading, though I will intrude with brief lectures when I feel that doing so will hel...(read more)

190/10

Research Seminar:
Utopian and Dystopian Literature and Film

Tues. 7-10 P.M.

Most utopian and dystopian authors are more concerned with persuading readers of the merits of their ideas than with the "merely" literary qualities of their writing. Although utopian writing has sometimes made converts, inspiring reader...(read more)

N125D/1

The 20th-Century Novel

MTTh 2-4

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...(read more)

N125E/1

The Contemporary Novel:
Selected Pulitzer Prize-Winning Novels, 2007-2014

MTTh 12-2

The Pulitzer Prize in Fiction is awarded for “distinguished fiction by an American author, preferably dealing with American life.”  In this course, we will read a selection of the most recent (2007-2014) Pulitzer Priz...(read more)

N180Z/1

Science Fiction

MTTh 10-12

(read more)

119/1

Literature of the Restoration & the Early 18th Century

TTh 3:30-5

The period from the "Restoration" of Charles II (1660) to the death of Alexander Pope (1744) produced the last poems of Milton, the first English pornography and feminist polemic, the most devastating satires ever written, some of the mo...(read more)

125D/1

The 20th -Century Novel

TTh 9:30-11

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...(read more)

126/1

British Literature: 1900-1945

MW 3-4 + discussion sections F 3-4

(read more)

C136/1

Topics in American Studies:
Boys and Girls in the Era of Mark Twain and Henry James

MWF 12-1

Historians often define the era after the Civil War and especially from 1880 to ca. 1915 as the “era of the child.”  Children became the heroes of popular  culture as well as major subjects for painters and intellectuals and ...(read more)

141/1

Modes of Writing:
Writing Fiction, Poetry, and Plays

TTh 9:30-11

This course will introduce students to the study of creative writing--fiction, poetry, and drama.  Students will learn to talk critically about these forms and begin to feel comfortable and confident writing within these genres.  Student...(read more)

141/2

Modes of Writing:
Writing Fiction, Poetry, and Plays

TTh 9:30-11

This course will introduce students to the study of creative writing--fiction, poetry, and drama.  Students will learn to talk critically about these forms and begin to feel comfortable and confident writing within these genres.  Student...(read more)

171/1

Literature and Sexual Identity:
Gender, Sexuality, and Modernism

TTh 3:30-5

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 libidin...(read more)

174/1

Literature and History:
The French Revolution

MWF 12-1

“The French Revolution did not take place.”

“The French Revolution is not yet over.”

These two sentences might seem not only counterfactual, but also contr...(read more)

175/1

Literature and Disability

MW 4-5:30

We will examine the ways disability is represented in a variety of works of fiction and drama.  Assignments will include two short (5-8 page) critical essays, a group presentation project, and a take-home final examination.  (This is a c...(read more)

180N/1

The Novel

This course has been canceled.

190/3

Research Seminar:
James Joyce

MW 4-5:30

Our course traces the evolution of Joyce’s writing, from his angry essays at the turn of the twentieth century to his all-compassing comedy, Finnegans Wake, published just before the outbreak of World War II. We will consider the tr...(read more)

190/7

Research Seminar:
Virginia Woolf

TTh 12:30-2

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 t...(read more)

190/10

Research Seminar:
The Romantic Novel

TTh 2-3:30

Readings in the “novelistic revolution” (Franco Moretti’s phrase) of European Romanticism. With our main focus on the establishment of  “the classical form of the historical novel” in Scott’s Waverley(read more)

246K/1

Literature in English 1900-1945:
The Modernist Novel

MW 12-1:30

130D/1

American Literature: 1900-1945

TTh 11-12:30

 A survey of American texts tracing the literary response to the emerging shape of modern life in the first decades of the twentieth century. We will read across a range of genres and styles to assess the influence of modernism and other expe...(read more)

161/1

Introduction to Literary Theory:
Free Speech, in Theory

TTh 2-3:30

This course will interrogate the way in which “free” speech, as moral value or political right, informs and complicates our understanding of literature and the literary.  We...(read more)

171/1

Literature and Sexual Identity:
Gender, Sexuality, and Modernism

MW 4-5:30

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 libidin...(read more)

174/1

Literature and History:
Writing the British Nation

TTh 12:30-2

This course will offer an introduction to critical methods focused on practices of historical interpretation. While we will read widely in critical and theoretical writing, our case studies will focus on key texts in the history of nationhood and ...(read more)

180N/1

The Novel

MWF 12-1

A survey of the novel, this course will cover eight examples of the genre from the beginning of the 19th century to the end of the 20th, with a focus on the representation of subjectivity and history....(read more)

190/2

Research Seminar:
Charles Darwin and George Eliot

MW 4-5:30

George Eliot was the Victorian novelist most attuned to contemporary developments in the natural and human sciences. We will read three of her major novels -- The Mill on ...(read more)

190/4

Research Seminar:
Samuel Beckett

TTh 11-12:30

An intensive reading of the works of Samuel Beckett.

Please read the paragraph on page 2 of the instructions area of this Announcement of Classes for more details about enrolling in or wait-listing for this course.

190/5

Research Seminar:
Reading Like a Victorian

TTh 11-12:30

This course will recreate the reading experiences of the nineteenth-century public, examining publishing trends and literary forms in Victorian Britain. We'll explore the rise of mass literacy, the growth of the periodical press, the serializa...(read more)

190/7

Research Seminar:
Cybernetics; or Control and Communication in the Postwar Novel

TTh 12:30-2

The title of this course plays on Norbert Wiener’s highly influential 1948 book, Cybernetics; or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine. Though hardly remembered today, the field that it inaugurated, cybernetics, en...(read more)

190/8

Research Seminar:
Moby Dick

TTh 12:30-2

We will read Moby-Dick very closely, twice. Regular attendance and participation will be required, along with two ten-page essays. Students should purchase the Penguin Classics edition, not the Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition.

...(read more)

190/9

Research Seminar:
Literature of the Ocean

TTh 12:30-2

Provisional Book List:  William Wycherley, The Plain-Dealer; Ned Ward, The Wooden World Dissected; Daniel Defoe, Captain Singleton; Olaudah Equiano, Interesting Narrative; Tobias Smollett, Roderick Rand...(read more)

190/12

Research Seminar:
Henry James

TTh 3:30-5

Henry James asked a lot of his readers, especially in these fictions written late in his career, but they’re extremely rewarding, and worth the labor they require, rewarding because of the labor they require. Students enrolling in the class ...(read more)

190/13

Research Seminar:
Realism and Naturalism

TTh 3:30-5

Our readings will focus on major American writers of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century whose works helped to define the literary modes of realism and naturalism. We will be asking questions about how literature responds to new ways o...(read more)

203/2

Graduate Readings:
Campus/Novel/Theory

Tues. 3:30-6:30

This course considers the relationship between the campus, the novel, and literary theory in the West. Accordingly, we will discuss theories of the novel, read some post-war British and American “campus novels,” consider the campu...(read more)

N20/1

Modern British and American Literature

MTuTh 10-12

Virginia Woolf famously wrote that “on or about December 1910, human character changed.” In her view, the exciting and experimental works of modernism—written by authors like T.S. Eliot, James Joyce, and Woolf herself—came ...(read more)

N125B/1

The English Novel: Dickens through Conrad

TTh 12-2

In this class we'll read novels by Charles Dickens, Emily Brontë, George Eliot, Lewis Carroll and others. We'll think about these novels...(read more)

N180Z/1

Science Fiction:
Speculative Fiction and Dystopias

MTuTh 10-12

This cou...(read more)

125D/1

The 20th-Century Novel

TTh 9:30-11

In this course we will analyze nine 20th-century American novels, taking note of how their formal organization participates in their thematic concerns.  We'll spend the first few class meetings reviewing the history of the novel as a form...(read more)

125E/1

The Contemporary Novel

TTh 8-9:30

A survey of major novels, including nonfiction novels, published in the last fifty years.  There will be two papers, a midterm, and a final exam.

Note:  The instructor (and book list and course description) of this course changed ...(read more)

132/1

American Novel

TTh 12:30-2

This course will explore eight major American novels.  There will be two papers, a midterm, and a final exam.

Note:  The instructor (and book list and course description) of this course changed in June.  There has been no cha...(read more)

180N/1

The Novel:
The American Novel Since 1900

MW 3-4 + discussion sections F 3-4

A survey of the American novel: its forms, patterns, techniques, ideas, cultural context, and interaction with other media. Special attention will be paid to questions of aesthetics, epistemology, and ethics—w...(read more)

190/1

Research Seminar:
Victorian Sensations

MW 4-5:30

The literary genre of the Victorian sensation novel of the 1860s-1870s was defined less by its form and content than by the response it was supposed to engender in its readers. This course will explore the significance of physical and psy...(read more)

203/1

Graduate Readings:
Post-9/11 Fiction

M 1-4

Note: Those interested in taking the course, please email me (ksnyder@berkeley.edu) the first week of classes for the reading assignment required for our first seminar meeting on September 9.

For mo...(read more)

250/3

Research Seminar:
The Romantic Novel and the History of Man

Thurs. 3:30-6:30

In his introduction to Tom Jones (1749) Henry Fielding formally announced the “rise of the novel” by grounding the new genre on “human nature,” which David Hume had recently proclaimed the foundation of all the sci...(read more)

119/1

Literature of the Restoration and the Early 18th Century

TTh 12:30-2

We will explore the relationship between literature and everyday life in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Areas of emphasis include popular periodical literature (England's first advice column, the first "women's m...(read more)

125B/1

The English Novel (Dickens through Conrad)

TTh 11-12:30

What do novels do? How do they 'think'? How do they change the ways in which we perceive fictional and real worlds? Why does the novel come to dominate the literary scene so thoroughly in the Victorian period and into the twentieth century...(read more)

125D/1

The 20th-Century Novel

TTh 9:30-11

This course is a genera...(read more)

125E/1

The Contemporary Novel:
The Novel Since 2000

TTh 12:30-2

We who study literature are perhaps always belated. This course aims to redefine at least one literary period: the “contemporary” novel, scholarship about which sometimes stretches as far back as novels written in the 1950s! I protest....(read more)

132/1

The American Novel

MWF 1-2

This course traces the formal and thematic development of the American novel, focusing on innovations in the novel’s form as it engages with history, identity, race, class and gender.  A principle goal of this course is to increase your...(read more)

135AC/1

Literature of American Cultures:
Repression and Resistance

TTh 12:30-2

In this course we will analyze representations of repression and resistance in nine novels, three each from the following three cultural groups: Chicanos/Chicanas, African Americans, and Euro-Americans.  We will examine various forms of repre...(read more)

H195A/2

Honors Course

TTh 3:30-5

English H195A is the first part of a two-semester sequence for those English majors writing honors theses. It is designed to give students the critical tools and practical skills to write a strong essay, in the spring semester, that will have a gr...(read more)

119/1

Augustan Age: Literature of the Restoration and the Early 18th Century

TTh 3:30-5

We will explore the relationship between literature and everyday life in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Areas of emphasis include popu...(read more)

125A/1

The English Novel (Defoe through Scott)

TTh 12:30-2

This class explores eighteenth-century British innovations in narrative prose writings that we have come to call novels. A scientific revolution, broadened financial speculation, expanding empire, changing notions of gender, and new philosophies o...(read more)

125C/1

The European Novel:
Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and the English Novel

TTh 3:30-5

A close reading of works by Dostoevsky and Tolstoy in conjunction with two English novels. We will focus on how the Russian and English novels respond to one another, resemble one another, and differ from one another, especially in their treatment...(read more)

133T/1

Topics in African American Literature and Culture:
Slavery--Theory and Literature

TTh 11-12:30

This course will explore the differences and similarities between the “theory” of slavery and the “experience” of slavery.  Theoretical explorations of slavery will be chosen from the writings of Aristotle, John Locke,...(read more)

134/1

Contemporary Literature

MWF 11-12

This course will survey British and Irish writing since World War II.  We will dig deeply into the texts' formal and generic workings, and think through the cultural and social contexts from which they emerge. Along the way, we'l...(read more)

143C/1

Long Narrative:
The Short Novel

W 3-6

In this class, we’ll be reading and discussing various novels under 150 pages from a diverse group of authors. The point is to take a close look at a text of manageable size, paying attention to its structure – how the author manages t...(read more)

166/2

Special Topics:
Narrating the Nation

TTh 12:30-2

This course will focus on each novelist’s invention of, or critique of, national identity myths in a time of national crisis. Students will explore the intimate connection between choice of narrative strategy and construction of meaning.

180Z/1

Science Fiction:
Speculative Fiction and Dystopias

MWF 12-1

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 dy...(read more)

190/2

Research Seminar:
Yeats, Joyce, & Beckett

MW 4-5:30

This course will focus on the major writings by this trio of Irish modernists.  We will think about the ways in which these writers fit into and challenge international canons of modernist literature, about the Irish attachments and condition...(read more)

190/5

Research Seminar:
The Historical Novel

TTh 9:30-11

A survey of the historical novel.  This course covers a selection of major examples of the genre, focusing on its development in the nineteenth century in Great Britain, France, and Russia, and concluding with a contemporary Amer...(read more)

190/7

Research Seminar:
Literature of Racial Passing

TTh 11-12:30

A passing narrative is an account—fiction or nonfiction—of a person (or group) claiming a racial or ethnic identity that she does not (or they do not) “possess.”  Such narratives speak—directly, indirectly, and v...(read more)

190/12

Research Seminar:
Henry James

TTh 3:30-5

We will read novels, shorter fiction, and essays written by Henry James across his career and also analyses of James’s work, and we will consider how James has become a central figure for rethinking literary criticism, especially for those i...(read more)

190/14

Research Seminar:
Cultures of Realism in Postwar Britain

Tues. 3:30-6:30

This course traces transformations in British literary culture in the two decades following the Second World War.  Toward that end we'll read a diverse set of writings, emphasizing prose narrative in genres including documentary, social c...(read more)

203/4

Graduate Readings:
British Novel--1800-1900

W 3-6

Reading and discussion of a selection of major nineteenth-century British novels.  We will bring large questions to bear on one another, concerning: the worlds and communities the novel aims to represent and to address (region or province; na...(read more)

250/3

Research Seminar:
Everyday Postcoloniality

Thurs. 3:30-6:30

One of the defining preoccupations of literary realism is the precise, penetrating depiction of everyday life. This course will consider how this ambition is pursued in the context of postcolonial writing. Our primary reading will be a series of f...(read more)

N132/1

American Novel

TTh 2-4

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 Am...(read more)

N180Z/1

Science Fiction:
New Currents in Science Fiction

MTuTh 10-12

This course will examin...(read more)

125D/1

The 20th-Century Novel

TTh 3:30-5

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...(read more)

125D/1

The 20th-Century Novel

MWF 12-1

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 ...(read more)

180N/1

The Novel

MWF 1-2 (note new time)

A survey of the American novel since 1900: its forms, patterns, techniques, ideas, cultural context, and intertextuality. Special attention will be paid to questions of aesthetics, epistemology, and ethics—what is beautiful? how do we know? w...(read more)

125A/1

The English Novel (Defoe through Austen)

MWF 2-3

125D/1

The 20th -Century Novel

TTh 12:30-2

125E/1

The (Really) Contemporary Novel

MW 3-4 + Discussion F 3-4

N125E/1

The Contemporary Novel

MWF 12-2

In this course, we will read seven contemporary novels published from 1939 to 1997.  The common thread in these novels is that they all focus on the internal turmoil of characters involved in social conflicts: war, racism, sexism, sexual abuse...(read more)

125A/1

The English Novel (Defoe through Scott)

MW 3-4 + Discussion F 3-4

125C/1

The European Novel

TTh 2-3:30

125D/1

The 20th Century Novel

TTh 2-3:30

125C/1

The European Novel

MWF 1-2

Focusing on key texts from English, Russian, and French literatures, this course traces the development of the modern novel in Europe, from the early 19th to the early 20t...(read more)

125D/1

The 20th-Century Novel

TTh 11-12:30

180N/1

Literature:
The Novel: The American Novel Since 1900

MWF 1-2

125C/1

:
The European Novel: History and the Novel

TTh 9:30-11

125D/1

:
The Twentieth -Century Novel

TTh 12:30-2

125D/1

:
The 20th-Century Novel

MWF 1-2

125E/1

:
The Contemporary Novel

TTh 2-3:30

125C/1

Junior Coursework:
European Novel: History and the Novel

TTh 9:30-11

125D/1

Junior Coursework:
The 20th-Century Novel

TTh 12:30-2

125E/1

Upper Division Coursework:
The Contemporary Novel

TTh 3:30-5

125C/1

Upper Division Coursework:
The European Novel

TTh 3:30-5

125D/1

Upper Division Coursework:
The 20th-Century Novel

TTh 12:30-2

125C/1

Upper Division Coursework:
The European Novel

TTh 11-12:30

125D/1

Upper Division Coursework:
The 20th-Century Novel

MWF 12-1

125E/1

Upper Division Coursework:
The Contemporary Novel

TTh 12:30-2

180N/1

Upper Division Coursework:
The Novel

MWF 11-12

125D/1

Upper Division Coursework:
The 20th-Century Novel

TTh 12:30-2

125C/1

Upper Division Coursework:
The European Novel

TTh 9:30-11