Class Archive

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)

H195A/2

Honors Course

TuTh 11-12:30

H195A/B is a two-semester seminar that lays the groundwork for and guides you through the completion a 40-60 page Honors thesis on a subject of your choice. The first semester offers an inquiry into critical approaches, research methods, and theore...(read more)

201A/1

Topics in the Structure of the English Language:
Meter

TuTh 5-6:30

            This course offers an introduction to meter from the perspective of theoretical linguistics.  Fundamental to this approach is the assumption that any meter is shaped, sometimes...(read more)

100/4

The Seminar on Criticism:
Histories of Writing

TuTh 9:30-11

In this seminar of literary criticism, we will explore some of the stories that have been told about writing as a technology of reproduction, dissemination, circulation, amplification, preservation, and citation. While writing commonly refers to th...(read more)

165/1

Special Topics:
Ecopoetry and Ecopoetics

MW 5-6:30

Ecopoetry – nature poetry that is environmental and environmentalist – is an international twenty-first century movement.  But in the nature poetry and poetics of the United States it has deep and wide-spread roots.  This semi...(read more)

179/1

Literature and Linguistics

TTh 12:30-2

The medium of literature is language.  This course aims to deepen understanding of what this means through consideration of how certain literary forms can be defined as grammatical forms.  These literary forms include meter; rhyme and all...(read more)

190/2

Research Seminar:
Anatomy of Criticism

TTh 3:30-5

What is literary criticism?  All English majors and English professors do it, or try to do it; but articulating what it is, or should be, is not easy.  The question is a theoretical one, which in this course we will consider with Canadian...(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)

100/1

The Seminar on Criticism:
Close Reading

TTh 5-6:30

This junior seminar will give students the chance to sharpen and develop their practice as close readers—and it will do so through an examination of close reading’s histories, pedagogies, methodological controversies, and political impl...(read more)

100/3

The Seminar on Criticism:
Marxist Theory and Criticism

MWF 1-2

In the literary academy, general interest in Marxism began to ebb in the 1980s and hit a low in the 1990s—decades when a new vogue for government deregulation, the collapse of the Soviet Union and the market liberalization of China also affec...(read more)

100/4

The Seminar on Criticism:
Emily Dickinson and Her Critics

TTh 12:30-2

From the editors who first shaped her posthumously discovered poems into publishable form to the recent scholars who have sought to restore their category-defying strangeness, Emily Dickinson’s writing has thrust readers into acts of co-creat...(read more)

100/5

The Seminar on Criticism:
Freud and His Followers

TTh 3:30-5

100/7

The Seminar on Criticism:
Victorian Versification

TTh 5-6:30

The Victorian period (1837-1901) is striking for social, poli...(read more)

166/2

Special Topics:
Burn it Down/Build it Up: Protest, Dissent, and the Politics of Resistance

TTh 11-12:30

This course takes up the question of protest and dissent &nda...(read more)

178A/1

Literature and Law

MWF 1-2

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

H195A/1

Honors Course

MW 3:30-5

H195 is a two-semester course that gives students the trainin...(read more)

H195A/2

Honors Course

TuTh 12:30-2

English H195A is the first part of a two-semester sequence fo...(read more)

160/1

Methods and Materials of Literary Criticism

TTh 2-3:30

If you're reading this, and you've done coursework in English or other languages and literatures, then you're probably a literary critic. You've written who knows how many critical, interpretive, or comparative essays with more clos...(read more)

161/1

Introduction to Literary Theory

TTh 12:30-2

This course explores the distinctive nature of “theory” as a twentieth-century approach to the study of literature.  Our inquiry is organized around the major movements in the field: formalism, structuralism, deconstruction, Marxis...(read more)

177/1

Literature and Philosophy:
Reading Capital

TTh 9:30-11

Why read the first volume of Capital more than 150 years after its initial publication in 1867?  Not only is Marx being seriously and widely read again since the financial crisis of 2008, but Capital Vol. 1 in particular is c...(read more)

190/6

Research Seminar:
Black Postcolonial Cultures: Real and Imagined Spaces

TTh 12:30-2

This research seminar explores black postcolonial cultures with an emphasis on texts that engage creatively with spatial constraint and possibility. Readings in theories of postcoloniality and diaspora as well as studies in questions of s...(read more)

190/7

Research Seminar:
Ecopoetry and Ecopoetics

TTh 2-3:30

Ecopoetry – nature poetry that is environmental and environmentalist – is an international twenty-first century movement.  But in the nature poetry and poetics of the United States it has deep and wide-spread roots.  This semi...(read more)

138/2

Studies in World Literature in English:
Multi-Culty: Cults, Pop Culture, and Globalization

TTh 12:30-2

We are fascinated by cults. What is it about communities and groups that promise total belief and total enthrallment that so captures the imagination?

This course will look at a range of representations of cults in popular culture—f...(read more)

161/1

Introduction to Literary Theory:
Free Speech, in Theory

TTh 11-12:30

This course will interrogate the way in which "free" speech informs and complicates our understanding of literature and the literary. We will trace the conceptual intersection of freedom and speech both historically and across severa...(read more)

179/1

Literature and Linguistics

TTh 11-12:30

The medium of literature is language. This course aims to deepen understanding of what this means through consideration of how certain literary forms cn be defined as grammatical forms. These literary forms include meter; rhyme and alliteration; sy...(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)

190/8

Research Seminar:
Anatomy of Criticism

TTh 3:30-5

What is literary criticism?  All English majors and their professors do it, or try to do it; but articulating what it is, or should be, is not easy.  In this course we will consider this question with Canadian literary critic and theorist...(read more)

H195A/1

Honors Course

MW 9-10:30

In the first semester of this two-semester-long course, we will familiarize ourselves with a number of critical approaches to literary study and reflect a bit on the institution of criticism itself. These discussions will provide a background from ...(read more)

H195A/2

Honors Course

TTh 3:30-5

In the fall semester we will consider what makes a research question, problem, or project a significant one. Does it merely involve choosing to study a "significant" writer or text? (And what makes some writers/texts more significant than...(read more)

250/1

Research Seminar:
Symposia in Trans Method

F 9-12

Is there a trans method? Should there be? These two questions will guide our study of work by trans writers, artists, and activists, both within the historical institution of "trans studies" (conceived of as distinct from and even opposit...(read more)

160/1

Methods and Materials of Literary Criticism

Thurs. 2-5

In this course, we will look at some major moments in and read some major works of literary criticism written in English.  Beginning with Sir Philip Sidney’s “The Defence of Poesy” and moving through writing by William Wordsw...(read more)

172/1

Literature and Psychology:
Literature and Therapy

Lectures MW 1-2 in 2060 Valley LSB + one hour of discussion section per week in different locations (sec. 101: F 1-2; sec. 102: F 2-3; sec. 103: W 3-4; sec. 104: W 4-5; sec. 105: F 9-10; sec. 106: F 10-11)

The originator of the “talking cure,” Sigmund Freud, placed a great deal of faith in the capacities of literature: both to depict and figure psychic problematics for a reader, and to transform an author’s own neurotic condition in...(read more)

190/1

Research Seminar:
Ecopoetry and Ecopoetics

MW 10:30-12

Ecopoetry – nature poetry that is environmental and environmentalist – is an international twenty-first century movement.  But in the nature poetry and poetics of the United States it has deep and wide-spread roots.  This semi...(read more)

190/6

Research Seminar:
Hollywood in the Thirties

TTh 12:30-2

Our subject will be Hollywood cinema from the birth of talking pictures to the start of World War II.  We'll sample the extraordinary range of films that Golden-Age Hollywood offered its consumers: from gangster pictures and screwball come...(read more)

130D/1

American Literature: 1900-1945:
Class, Race, Critique, Rewound

MW 5-6:30

This course is a retrospective or "rewound" survey of American literature and criticism from 1945 to 1900. We'll begin in the 1940s, working our way back in time, not only through key works in prose and poetry, but also through c...(read more)

161/1

Introduction to Literary Theory

TTh 12:30-2

In this course we will study how literary theory developed as a field in the twentieth century, even as it regularly drew its principles, methods, and inspiration from other academic disciplines and social discourses.  Our focus will be on the...(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)

190/8

Research Seminar:
Ideology

TTh 2-3:30

This research seminar will focus on how the concept of ideology historically has been employed by literary and cultural critics. During the first half of the semester, the reading material will include major theoretical statements on the meaning an...(read more)

H195A/1

Honors Course

MW 3:30-5

(read more)

H195A/2

Honors Course

TTh 11-12:30

H195A/B is a two-semester seminar that lays the groundwork for and guides you through the completion a 40-60 page Honors thesis on a subject of your choice. The first semester offers an inquiry into critical approaches, research methods, and theore...(read more)

166/2

Special Topics:
Marxism and Literature

MWF 2-3

In the early 1990s, the Marxist literary theorist Fredric Jameson responded to critics who were at once proclaiming the emergence of a capitalist “new world order” and asserting the death of Marxism.  Jameson wrote: “It does ...(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)

176/1

Literature and Popular Culture:
The Sitcom

Lectures MW 3-4 + one hour of discussion section per week in various locations (sec. 101: F 2-3; section 102: F 3-4; sec. 103: Thurs. 10-11; sec. 104: Thurs. 11-12; sec. 105: Thurs. 12-1; sec. 106: Thurs. 12-1; sec. 107: F 11-12; sec. 108: F 10-11)

The television situation comedy has been one of the most durable, wide-ranging, and successful genres of  popular  culture  of  all  time.  Its  narrative  forms  (such  as  the  &ldq...(read more)

180N/1

The Novel

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

190/7

Research Seminar

 This section of English 190 was canceled on November 2.

161/1

Introduction to Literary Theory:
Free Speech, in Theory

TTh 2-3:30

This course will interrogate the way in which “free” speech informs and complicates our understanding of literature and the literary.  We will trace the conceptual intersection of freedom and speech both historically and across sev...(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)

173/1

The Language and Literature of Films:
The Film Essay: James Baldwin, Roland Barthes, Susan Sontag

Lectures TTh 3:30-5 + film screenings Thurs. 5-8

This course offers an in-depth study of three of the most influential public intellectuals of the twentieth century: James Baldwin, Roland Barthes, and Susan Sontag. Working in the postwar period between France and the United States, and grappling ...(read more)

202/1

History of Literary Criticism

W 2-5

An introduction to Western literary theory from antiquity to the present, focusing on the historical shift from the disciplines of poetics and rhetoric to that of aesthetics, with special attention to the concept of aesthetics and the discourse of ...(read more)

203/1

Graduate Readings:
Allegorical Moments: Public, Private, and the Writing of Everyday Life

MW 10:30-12

This seminar will undertake a critical reading of, and participation in, some possibilities (or impossibilities) of contemporary realisms and realities, public and private. It will query, from an array of perspectives, problems of process, represen...(read more)

160/1

Special Topics:
Methods and Materials of Literary Criticism

TTh 12:30-2

In this course, we will look at some major moments in and read some major works of literary criticism written in English.  Beginning with Sir Philip Sidney’s “The Defence of Poesy” and moving through writing by William Wordsw...(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)

174/2

Literature and History:
History as Literature

TTh 3:30-5

Are the events of the world and human lives meaningful? And if they are, how do we discern the meaning?

History, as a form of narrative literature, seeks to answer these questions. In this class we will read a range of historical texts, w...(read more)

190/8

Research Seminar:
Literary Theory and Its Objects

TTh 12:30-2

This course explores some ...(read more)

190/10

Research Seminar:
Pagan Fictions in Christian Literature

TTh 5-6:30

Although late antique and medieval Christian authors routinely decried the falsehood of pagan literature, they could hardly get enough of it. Pagan mythology became not only a major inspiration of medieval poetry and philosophy but even a part of e...(read more)

203/1

Graduate Readings:
Radical Enlightenment?

Note new time: TTh 9:30-11

Channeling the voice of his own Enlightened despot, Kant’s famous answer to the question “What is Enlightenment?” included the chilling injunction to “argue as much as you want and about whatever you want, ...(read more)

203/2

Graduate Readings:
The Novel in Theory

TTh 11-12:30

This course traces the development of novel theory in the twentieth century.  Designed as an introduction to major arguments that are still influential in literary studies generally, the course asks why so many different theoretical schools ha...(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)

161/1

Introduction to Literary Theory

MWF 2-3

This course will offer an introduction to literary theory with a focus on twentieth- and twenty-first-century political approaches to the study of literature, including theories of Marxism, feminism, sexuality, race, post-colonialism, and ecocritic...(read more)

165/1

Special Topics:
Genres of Free Speech

MW 5-6:30

We endure a difficult relation to free speech. Most arguments on the topic, whether for or against, focus on the capacity of language to harm others, directly or indirectly, and therefore concern the scope and nature of necessary prohibitions of sp...(read more)

165/2

Special Topics:
Art of Writing

TTh 2-3:30

This seminar/workshop, co-taught by Lyn Hejinian and Daniel Benjamin, will be devoted to collaboratively composed writing in a range of genres, including poetry, short fiction, performance, and critical essays. Multiple examples of collaborations w...(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)

179/1

Literature and Linguistics

TTh 11-12:30

The medium of literature is language.  This course aims to deepen understanding of what this means through consideration of how certain literary forms can be defined as grammatical forms.  These literary forms include meter; rhyme and all...(read more)

180L/1

Lyric Verse

TTh 5-6:30 PM

This course will examine the historical trajectory of a very fuzzy category, “lyric,” from its identified origins and early practice in English (anonymous medieval lyrics) to its 20^th- and 21^st- cent...(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)

190/6

Research Seminar:
Literature and Revolution

MW 5-6:30

This seminar will piece together a cross-regional, cross-linguistic genre that we will loosely call “the literature of revolution”—texts that try to capture (and, at times, direct) great historical and political upheaval.  Ou...(read more)

190/10

Research Seminar:
Suspicious Mind

TTh 12:30-2

Literary critics have made suspicion an essential aspect of what it means to read.  When we set out to do a “suspicious reading” of a text we assume a few things about it: that its true meaning consists in what it cannot say, know,...(read more)

H195A/2

Honors Course

TTh 12:30-2

This two-semester course is designed as an accompaniment to the writing of your Honors Thesis. The fall semester prepares you to write this long essay (40-60 pages) on a topic and texts of your choosing. It will behoove you to decide on t...(read more)

250/1

Research Seminar:
Victorian Cultural Studies

W 9-12

This course will follow the long history of the culture concept in Britain.  We will begin by working through Raymond Williams’ account in Culture & Society in order to see how several senses of the word “culture&rdquo...(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)

166/3

Special Topics:
Slavery and Conspiracy

MWF 3-4

This is a multidisciplinary seminar on the law and literature of slave conspiracy. We will be reading novels and stories by authors such as Martin Delany and Herman Melville alongside contemporary newspapers, confessions, warrants, witness deposit...(read more)

180L/1

Lyric Verse

TTh 2-3:30

This course will examine the historical trajectory of a very fuzzy category, “lyric,” from its identified origins and early practice in antiquity (Sappho, Catullus, et al.) to its 20^th and 21^st century rejections ...(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)

190/5

Research Seminar:
Writing a World in Crisis: Medieval and Modern

MWF 1-2

Please note the changes in the topic, book list, and courses description of this class (as of November 22).

This course looks at two distinct moments in which individual authors attempted to create encyclopedic visions in an attemp...(read more)

161/1

Introduction to Literary Theory

MWF 11-12

This course offers an introduction to literary theory with a focus on 20^th- and 21^st-century social and political approaches, including Marxism, feminism, race and ethnicity, post-colonialism, and ecocriticism. The course wil...(read more)

190/2

Research Seminar:
Slow Seeing / Slow Reading

MWF 11-12

This is a seminar in the poetics of reading poems and seeing paintings. Over the course of the semester, students will undertake prolonged, exploratory, multi-contextual readings of a selection of recent and contemporary “difficult” po...(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)

H195A/1

Honors Course

TTh 11-12:30

The Honors Thesis is a long research essay. Length, however, is not the only way it differs from every essay you have ever written in the English Department. In most literature classes, the function of essay assignments is to he...(read more)

H195A/2

Honors Course

TTh 2-3:30

(read more)

250/2

Research Seminar:
Ethnic Modernisms

Tues. 3:30-6:30

This seminar will explore the convergence of modernist and ethnic cultures in twentieth-century America and Europe, placing race and ethnicity in dialogue with the modernist compulsion to "make it new" and the avant-gardist compulsion to...(read more)

138/1

Studies in World Literature in English:
Postcolonial Sex

TTh 9:30-11

This course will explore the intersection of theories of gender and sexuality and the postcolonial world. We will consider how gender and nation are shaped and represented in literature and film. Why are nations routinely imagined as women, and im...(read more)

161/1

Introduction to Literary Theory:
Free Speech, In Theory

TTh 11-12:30

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.  W...(read more)

165/5

Special Topics:
Is It Useless to Revolt?: Literature of Revolt

TTh 2-3:30

“Is it useless to revolt?”  Our course borrows its title from an essay by Foucault on the Iranian Revolution of 1979.  Foucault urges us to suspe...(read more)

165/6

Special Topics:
Queer Lifestyles in Literature and Theory

TTh 3:30-5

172/1

Literature and Psychology:
Literature and the Brain

TTh 3:30-5

What can the scientific study of mind tell us about literature? And what can literature tell us about the ways our minds and brains do—and do not—work? Looking at literature, philosophy, and the sciences of mind from the past three hun...(read more)

190/8

Research Seminar:
Vital Texts: Literature and the Discourse of Life

TTh 11-12:30

If the romantic trope of “organic form” naturalizes literature by likening literary texts to living organisms, it equally suggests that man-made forms can be "alive." In this course, our task will be to trace the trope of &qu...(read more)

202/1

History of Literary Criticism

note new time: F 2-5

An introduction to Western literary theory from antiquity to the present, focusing on the historical shift from the disciplines of poetics and rhetoric to that of aesthetics, with special attention to the discourse of the sublime. Readings in Plat...(read more)

203/2

Graduate Readings:
Aesthetics and Politics: Kant and Beyond

TTh 9:30-11

This introduction to aesthetics will navigate between the following quotations: 1) “If man is ever to solve that problem of politics in practice he will have to approach it through the problem of the aesthetic, because it is only through Bea...(read more)

203/4

Graduate Readings:
What Does Critical Theory Have to Do with the Postcolonial?

TTh 12:30-2

This course considers the relationship between the development of critical theory and the colonized and postcolonial worlds. It will ask how and where histories, cultures, and philosophies of the global south appear and intersect with continental ...(read more)

250/1

Research Seminar:
Capitalist Crisis and Literature

M 3-6

Since the global financial crisis of 2007-08 and the onset of the “Great Recession,” a small but growing number of literary scholars have strived to theorize the relation between capitalist crisis and literary studies. Two short articl...(read more)

250/2

Research Seminar:
The Limits of Historicism

Tues. 3:30-6:30

Fredric Jameson famously enjoined critics to “Always historicize!,” and while many responded by committing to ideology critique and the project of demystification, of late a number have sought to satisfy the imperative by “practi...(read more)

250/4

Research Seminar:
Modernism's Metaphysics

F 9-12

Over recent decades, we have become accustomed to speaking of the ‘cultural logic’ of modernism, using a periodizing term to delineate a larger complex of historical effects, while also insinuating its availability to the integrated de...(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)

166/1

Special Topics:
Epistles: The Letter in Life and Literature

MWF 12-1

In this course, we will explore one of the most intimate, versatile, and surprising of literary forms: (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)

190/1

Research Seminar:
Aesthetics and Enlightenment

MW 9:30-11

The enlightenment was the first great century of modern aesthetics, giving us a critical vocabulary to think about how, as Foucault put it, we construct ourselves as works of art. This course will give the student a taste of some of the foundation...(read more)

190/9

Research Seminar:
Ideology

TTh 2-3:30

This research seminar will focus on the concept of ideology. We will examine the manner in which ideology has been employed as a category for social analysis, but we will gear our attention especially toward the ways ideology has been useful for l...(read more)

203/1

Graduate Readings:
Poetic Meter

W 2-5

This course will provide a basic introduction to the major meters of the modern English poetic tradition from the perspective of a theory of poetic meter rooted in generative linguistics.  Taking the "strict" iambic pentameter of Sh...(read more)

203/3

Graduate Readings:
Victorian Literature from Hegel to Freud

TTh 2-3:30

This course embarks from the premise that “Victorian” names neither a period of time (1837 – 1901) nor the body of a British sovereign (Alexandrina Victoria Hanover) but a spatially and temporally mobile set of stylistic practice...(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)

179/1

Literature and Linguistics

TTh 11-12:30

<!--{cke_protected}{C}%3C!%2D%2D%0A%20%2F*%20Font%20Definitions%20*%2F%0A%40font-face%0A%09%7Bfont-family%3A%22Cambria%20Math%22%3B%0A%09panose-1%3A2%204%205%203%205%204%206%203%...<a href="/courses/4519" target="_blank">(read more)</a>

161/1

Introduction to Literary Theory

TTh 11-12:30

In this course we will study how literary theory developed as a field in the twentieth century, even as it regularly drew its principles, methods, and inspiration from other academic disciplines and social discourses.  Our focus will be on th...(read more)

165/1

Special Topics:
Critical Influences in Contemporary Culture

TTh 9:30-11

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)

190/13

Research Seminar

250/1

Research Seminars:
Comintern Modernisms

W 3-6

It has long been common practice to see Western metropolises like Paris and New York as competing centers of global modernism, as capitals of a "world republic of letters."  The aim of this seminar is to posit an alternate mapping o...(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)

166/1

Special Topics:
Theory of the Poet

MWF 11-12

The figure of The Poet occupies a significant place in cultural imagination, even when The Poet is thought to occupy a marginal position or engage in useless activity. Bard, rebel, cultural diplomat, priest, historian, recluse—who or what is...(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)

202/1

History of Literary Criticism

W 2-5

An introduction to Western literary theory from antiquity to the present, focusing on the historical shift from the disciplines of poetics and rhetoric to that of aesthetics, with special attention to the concept of mimesis and the discourse of th...(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)

250/2

Research Seminars:
Aesthetics and the Orient

Thurs. 3:30-6:30

The kinds of writing called “aesthetics” and “Orientalism” are usually studied in relative isolation from each other, but they share certain features. Both pull readers outside their comfort zones, towards an unfamiliar pla...(read more)

180A/1

Autobiography:
American Autobiography: Race, Gender, Culture

TTh 11-12:30

We will take a group of texts--conventional memoir, poetry, painting, photography, and I-focused new media--to explore what American auto/bio/graphy really means.  We will start in the 18th century with Benjamin Franklin and close with a...(read more)

190/8

Research Seminar:
Suspicious Mind

TTh 12:30-2

Suspicious reading, which is sometimes called “symptomatic reading,” starts from the assumption that a text’s true meaning lies in what it does not say, know, or cannot understand.  For symptomatic readers, influenced by the...(read more)

190/11

Research Seminar:
The Politics and Aesthetics of Participation

TTh 2-3:30

This course will track the concept of participation across the 20th century, tracing its manifestation in key aesthetic, political, economic and technological forms. The first half of the course will investigate how, over the course of the 20th ce...(read more)

H195A/1

Honors Course

MW 12-1:30

This course is designed as the accompaniment to the writing of an honors thesis, the research for and the writing of which will take place in the second semester (H195B). The first semester will prepare you to move toward crafting this long essay ...(read more)

H195A/2

Honors Course

MW 1:30-3

This seminar has the goal of preparing students to write an Honors thesis on a topic of their own devising in the spring semester.  To prepare for that adventure, together we will read ...(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)

203/2

Graduate Readings:
Modernism and Film

MW 4-5:30

This course surveys a range of twentieth-century texts that allow us to explore connections between film and modernist literary practice, and the cultural implications of cinema for the period as a whole. Working with a broad conception of moderni...(read more)

250/1

Research Seminar:
Critical and Peripheral Realisms

Tues. 3:30-6:30

To what extent has our tendency to measure aesthetic achievement within the terms set by the historical modernisms of 1890-1920 blocked our perception of twentieth century peripheral literatures? This course will entertain historical diagnoses of ...(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)

166/3

Special Topics:
Infrastructuralism: Reading Setting in Literature and Film

TTh 3:30-5

In a film essay on the way movies depict Los Angeles, Thom Andersen raises a question that will form the basis for this course: “If we can appreciate documentaries for their dramatic qualities, perhaps we can appreciate fiction films for the...(read more)

N166 /1

Special Topics:
Freud, Marx, Nietzsche

TTh 3:30-5

Graphic novel is often defined as “a single-author, book-length work, meant for a grown-up reader, with a memoirist or novelistic nature, usually devoid of superheroes.” Many comic artists, ...(read more)

166/2

Special Topics:
Specters of the Atlantic

TTh 12:30-2

The large scale transportation of Africans to the Americas is a signal fact of modernity in the West. The trouble is that we both do and do not know this. One of the most salient, confounding aspects of life in the Caribbean and the United States,...(read more)

190/11

Research Seminar:
Environmental Poetry and Poetics

TTh 11-12:30

I have emarked on this course to help us think about an emergent situation for poets—the earth in crisis.  In this seminar we will explore how poets represent, and think about their place in, their natural environment.  Our primary...(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)

143T/1

Poetry Translation Workshop

TTh 2-3:30

This is a workshop course in the translation of poetry. Participants need to be at least moderately competent in some language other than English. All of the work will involve translating from other languages into English. Participants will be exp...(read more)

161/1

Introduction to Literary Theory

TTh 11-12:30

In this course we will study how literary theory developed as a field in the twentieth century, even as it regularly drew its principles, practices, and inspiration from other academic disciplines.  Our focus will be on the major theoretical ...(read more)

190/11

Research Seminar:
Mass Entertainment in 1930s Hollywood

TTh 3:30-5

Hollywood movies have always been treated as examples of mass entertainment, but rarely as analyses of the phenomenon.  We'll be exploring a wide range of 1930s Hollywood film -- from gangster pictures to cartoons, music...(read more)

212/1

Readings in Middle English:
The Auchinleck Manuscript

W 3-6

This course will consider a wide range of Middle English writing through examination of a single manuscript book surviving to us from the early fourteenth-century:  Edinburgh, National Library of Scotland, Advocates' MS 19.2.1, now known ...(read more)

250/1

Research Seminar:
Marxist Literary Theory

Tues. 3:30-6:30

In the early 1990s, literary theorist Fredric Jameson responded to critics who were at once proclaiming the emergence of a rejuvenated capitalist "new world order" and asserting the death of Marxism.  "It does not seem to make ...(read more)

161/1

Introduction to Literary Theory:
The Theory Monster

MW 4-5:30

At the close of “Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences,” Jacques Derrida takes recourse to the language of monstrosity in his account of the loss of a stable center for human discourse: “the as yet unnam...(read more)

160/1

Special Topics:
Methods and Materials of Literary Criticism

TTh 9:30-11

161/1

Upper Division Coursework:
Introduction to Literary Theory

TTh 12:30-2

160/1

Upper Division Coursework:
Methods and Materials of Literary Criticism

TTh 11-12:30

161/1

Upper Division Coursework:
Introduction to Literary Theory

TTh 3:30-5