Class Archive

190/1

Research Seminar:
Ulysses

MW 5-6:30

This year marks the centenary of James Joyce’s Ulysses, widely considered the most important novel of the twentieth century. We will consider the book at a variety of scales: word, sentence, narrative strategy, and organizational ...(read more)

190/3

Research Seminar:
Nineteenth Century American Ecologies

MW 3:30-5

What did “nature” mean in nineteenth-century America? How did writers, artists, and activists from the period represent and interact with the natural world around them? In this research seminar, we will approach these questions through ...(read more)

190/4

Research Seminar:
Material Dickinson

MW 11-12:30

This single author seminar will explore and compare the different kinds of textual materiality—manuscript, print, digital, and aural—in which Emily Dickinson’s writings have circulated. Questions will include: what are the ecologi...(read more)

190/5

Research Seminar:
1922: Modernism's Year 1

MW 2-3:30

At the end of October 1921 (on his own birthday), writing in the small avant-garde magazine The Little Review, Ezra Pound declared a new calendar, celebrating the dawn of a new ‘Year 1’. This new calendar, he suggested, wo...(read more)

190/6

Research Seminar:
Crisis and Culture: The 1930s, 1970s, and post-2008 in Comparative Perspective

TuTh 9:30-11

This research seminar will explore the impact of economic crisis and systemic transformation on symbolic authority and cultural production.  To what extent is culture determined by economic forces, and to what extent is it separate from these ...(read more)

190/7

Research Seminar:
Medieval Sexualities

TuTh 5-6:30

Contact Jennifer Miller at j_miller@berkeley.edu for more information about this class.

190/8

Research Seminar:
The Work of Ursula Le Guin

TuTh 5-6:30

“Science Fiction is often described, and even defined, as extrapolative. The science fiction writer is supposed to take a trend or phenomenon of the here-and-now, purify and intensify it for dramat...(read more)

190/9

Research Seminar:
Modern California Books and Movies

MW 5-6:30

Besides reading and discussing fiction and essays attempting to identify or explain distinctive regional characteristics, this course will include consideration of some movies shaped by and shaping conceptions of California. Writing will consi...(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)

190/1

Research Seminar:
Emily Dickinson

TTh 2-3:30

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)

190/4

Research Seminar:
What is Community?

MW 8-9:30

Deference to the instincts of a community serves as final arbiter in much intellectual and political work: when, for example, the linguist Noam Chomsky defines a the syntax of a language as the “instincts of a native speaker.” Yet as th...(read more)

190/5

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 literary works, mainly novels. We’ll examine various forms of repression—physical, social, political, and psychological&mda...(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)

190/7

Research Seminar:
Race and Travel: Relative Alterity in Medieval Times and Places

MW 5-6:30

Anyone who has travelled or lived in parts of the world (including their own country) where they were visibly an outsider—by countenance, clothing or conduct—will have experienced the sometimes fearful instability of “otherness&rd...(read more)

190/8

Research Seminar:
Modern California Books and Movies

MW 6:30-8

Besides reading and discussing fiction 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 California. Writing will consi...(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)

190/5

Research Seminar:
Anti-Jewish Diatribe in Medieval England

TTh 3:30-5

190/8

Research Seminar:
Utopian and Dystopian Books and Movies

T 5:30-8:30

Most utopian and dystopian authors and film-makers are more concerned with persuading readers and viewers of the merits of their ideas than with the "merely" literary or artistic qualities of their work. Although utopias have sometimes ma...(read more)

190/10

Research Seminar

TTh 3:30-5

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

190/11

Research Seminar:
Latinx Modernism

TuTh 2-3:30

In this course we will investigate the prodigious archive of ...(read more)

190/1

Research Seminar:
Literary Collaboration: Samuel Coleridge and William and Dorothy Wordsworth

MW 5-630

190/2

Research Seminar:
The Art of Reconstruction

MW 9-10:30

This course will explore the role and legacy of art in the most important project of American self-creation since the nation’s founding: the post–Civil War era known as Reconstruction. The diverse group of writers, painters, sculptors, ...(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)

190/4

Research Seminar:
Emily Dickinson

MW 1:30-3

In this class we’ll concentrate on just one poet, Emily Dickinson, using her work as an occasion to think about how poetry and history get made, revised, codified, brought forward, pushed aside, theorized, contested, remixed and – since...(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)

190/6

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)

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)

190/9

Research Seminar:
Chicanx Literature, Art and Performance

TTh 5-6:30

In this course, we will read the classics of Chicanx literature from the 1960s through the present.  We will open with Jose Antonio Villareall's Pocho (1959), a novel of both immigrant and first generation experience in ...(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)

190/2

Research Seminar:
Eco-crisis and Climate Refugueeism

MW 9-10:30

Note:  Newly added section of English 190 (as of 4/20):

In this seminar, we will analyze historical, contemporary, and speculative narratives that explore social locations of eco-crisis and climate refugeeism. We will consider John S...(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)

190/4

Research Seminar:
Modern California Books and Movies

W 5-8

Besides reading and discussing fiction 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 California. Writing will consi...(read more)

190/5

Research Seminar:
Is It Useless to Revolt?

TTh 9:30-11

“Is it useless to revolt?”  Our course borrows its title from an essay by Michel Foucault on the Iranian Revolution of 1979.  Foucault urges us to suspend judgment and listen to the voices of revolt, even as they seem entangle...(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)

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)

190/10

Research Seminar:
Medieval Sexuality

TTh 5-6:30

For more information about this section of English 190, please contact Professor Miller at j_miller@berkeley.edu.

This course satisfies the pre-1800 requirement for the English major.

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)

190/2

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)

190/3

Research Seminar:
American Romanticism

MW 3-4:30

The course offers a close engagement with major U.S. authors before the Civil War.  We will work across literary genres—poetry, essays, novels, and autobiographies—while asking questions about the conditions in which these genres a...(read more)

190/4

Research Seminar:
Poetry and the Virtues

MW 5-6:30

Arguments for the moral value of literary study often focus on how narrative forms like the novel offer opportunities for the cultivation of empathy. But in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, literary style itself was treated as an extension ...(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)

190/6

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)

190/7

Research Seminar:
Jane Austen

TTh 2-3:30

Close readings of several of Jane Austen's major works.

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

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)

190/9

Research Seminar:
Victorian Versification

TTh 3:30-5

The Victorian period (1837-1901) is striking for its social, political, economic, technical and scientific developments that seem at once old-fashioned and recognizably modern.  Its formal poetic achievements are no exception to this character...(read more)

190/10

Research Seminar:
Modern California Books and Film

Thurs. 5-8:30 PM

Besides reading and discussing fiction 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 California. Writing will consi...(read more)

190/1

Research Seminar:
Creative Sentences

MW 9-10:30

Samuel Taylor Coleridge once praised a sentence of his own, noting that it was 241 words long and that the main verb didn’t appear until the 216th word. Is that wait for a verb too long? Gertrude Stein wrote this sentence: “Very little ...(read more)

190/2

Research Seminar:
Shakespeare and Company

MW 1:30-3

In this research seminar, we'll be considering Shakespeare, his playwriting rivals, his actorly partners, and their audiences as participants in the burgeoning entertainment industry of early modern London. We'll attend to the conditions an...(read more)

190/3

Research Seminar:
American Transcendentalism

TTh 9:30-11

We will immerse ourselves in the literary, political, philosophical, and aesthetic thought of the influential mid-nineteenth-century movement in the United States known as Transcendentalism. We will read fiction, essays, autobiographies, and poems ...(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)

190/8

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)

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)

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)

190/3

Research Seminar:
James / Baldwin

MW 5-6:30

James Baldwin never made a secret of the importance of Henry James to his creative life.  The numerous quotations, echoes, and nods to James sprinkled throughout Baldwin’s writings all but directly invite us to think of James as we read ...(read more)

190/5

Research Seminar:
California Books and Movies Since World War I

Thurs. 5-8:30 (incl. 1/2 hr. break)

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 Califor...(read more)

190/6

Research Seminar:
Carnal Knowledge in Medieval and Early Modern Literature

TTh 9:30-11

Medieval feminist scholar Carolyn Dinshaw has argued that the body is "a field on which issues of representation and interpretation are literally and metaphorically played out" ("Eunuch Hermeneutics," 27). This re...(read more)

190/7

Research Seminar

 This section of English 190 was canceled on November 2.

190/8

Research Seminar:
Edgar Allan Poe

TTh 12:30-2

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)

190/9

Research Seminar:
Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln

TTh 12:30-2

We will read works by Douglass, Lincoln, their contemporaries, and their modern interpreters, taking up issues of literature, biography, politics, race, gender, and style and also debates about slavery, Civil War, and Reconstruction, then and now. ...(read more)

190/10

Research Seminar:
Emily Dickinson

TTh 2-3:30

This seminar will provide you with a sustained reading course in the poetry of Emily Dickinson, my favorite poet.  We’ll begin with her early poetry, and trace her evolution into the singular poet we read today, with particular attention...(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)

190/13

Research Seminar:
Sixties Cinema

TTh 5-6:30

British and American cinema experienced a renaissance in the 1960s, when it arguably surpassed the literature of its time in artistic ambition and achievement.  We’ll be exploring a wide range of film genres and topics throughout the per...(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)

190/3

Research Seminar:
Representations of Coercion and Resistance in African American Slave, Jim Crow, and Neo-slave Narratives

MW 5-6:30

Within the context of slavery, the Jim Crow version of slavery, and the continuing racism in the U.S., African American literature bears witness to centuries of oppression, coercion, and exploitation; at the same time it documents great tenacity an...(read more)

190/4

Research Seminar:
William Blake

TTh 9:30-11

In this seminar, we will read our way slowly into William Blake's forbidding and exciting “fourfold” poetic environments: graphic works of “Illuminated Printing” in which a city like London, or “Golgonooza,” ...(read more)

190/7

Research Seminar:
The Urban Postcolonial

TTh 12:30-2

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)

190/8

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)

190/9

Research Seminar:
Mark Twain

TTh 2-3:30

This course is designed as an investigation of Mark Twain's writings, and a chance to develop skills essential to research.  Classes will be held in the Bancroft Library, making use of the unique collections of the Mark Twain Papers—...(read more)

190/10

Research Seminar

This section of English 190 has been canceled.

190/11

Research Seminar

This section of English 190 has been canceled.

190/12

Research Seminar:
California Books and Movies Since World War I

Thurs. 5-8:30 (incl. 1/2-hr. break)

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 Califor...(read more)

190/13

Research Seminar:
The Jamesian Novel

MW 10:30-12

This seminar seeks to introduce students to the pleasure of Jamesian difficulty. We will undertake an intensive reading of James's fiction, playing close attention to the extended figuration and syntax that is the signature of Jamesian style. T...(read more)

190/14

Research Seminar

MW 5-6:30

For more information on this course, please contact Professor Miller at j_miller@berkeley.edu.

This course satisfies the pre-1800 requirement for the English major.

Please read the paragraph about English 190 on page 2 ...(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)

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)

190/4

Research Seminar:
Reading Walden Carefully

MW 5-6:30

Assigned text: Henry David Thoreau, Walden, Civil Disobedience and Other Writings (Norton Critical Editions).  You are required to use this edition.

We will read Walden twice, in order to gain a deeper understanding...(read more)

190/5

Research Seminar:
Harlem Renaissance

MW 5-6:30

The Harlem Renaissance was a cultural and intellectual movement of black artists and writers in the 1920s. Centered in the Harlem neighborhood in Manhattan, the movement extended outward through international collaboration that reached to Hava...(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)

190/7

Research Seminar:
Contemporary Historical Fiction

TTh 9:30-11

The last few decades of British fiction have brought with them a notable resurgence of interest in historical literary fiction. Why this renewed investment in writing about the past now, two centuries after the historical novel’s emergence? I...(read more)

190/8

Research Seminar:
Literary Theory and Its Objects

TTh 12:30-2

This course explores some ...(read more)

190/9

Research Seminar:
The Faerie Queene: The Ethics of Imagination

TTh 2-3:30

Edmund Spenser's Faerie Queene (1590-96) is the most vast, most gorgeous, and most deliriously strange of English poems. Its hallucinatory dreamworld mingles self with landscape, character with plot, happenstance events with ...(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)

190/11

Research Seminar:
Andrew Marvell

TTh 5-6:30

An intensive study of Marvell's poetry and prose. Students will complete a final research paper of 15-20 pages. 

All readings will be made available on the course site.

This section of English 190 satisfies the pre-...(read more)

190/12

Research Seminar:
California Books and Movies Since World War I

Tues. 5-8:30 (incl. 1/2 hr. break)

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 Califor...(read more)

190/13

Research Seminar:
Alfred Hitchcock

W 4-7:30 (incl. a 1/2-hour break)

This course will focus on the Hitchcock oeuvre from the early British through the American period, with emphasis on analysis of cinematic representation of crime, victimhood, and the investigation of guilt. Our discussions and critical readings wil...(read more)

190/1

Research Seminar:
Britain in the ‘60s

MW 2-3:30

This seminar will examine the fiction, drama, poetry, film, and music of Great Britain in the 1960s. Topics will possibly include: post-war and post-Empire; race and immigration; economic austerity and welfare policy; social realism and dystopia; f...(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)

190/6

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)

190/7

Research Seminar:
Monsters, Exiles, and Outlaws in Medieval Literature

TTh 9:30-11

This course focuses on murderers, monsters, and thieves. Zombies, although not our main focus, also arise. Such figures are excluded from society and cut off from their fellow human beings, whether because they have committed an unpardonable crime ...(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)

190/9

Research Seminar:
Historiography and Narrative: Literature and the Interstices of History

TTh 2-3:30

Historiography is a study of the writing of history; indeed, it is an examination of the problematic of historical writing—how does one derive and form a coherent narrative of what has happened from incomplete and fragmented artifacts of the ...(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)

190/11

Research Seminar:
Nonsense

TTh 3:30-5

This course will explore nonsense as a literary genre, connecting its distinctive linguistic form to the ideas it takes up.   In nonsense, conventional meanings of linguistic forms are prevented from arising, but the forms themselves are ...(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)

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)

190/1

Research Seminar:
The Urban Postcolonial

MW 9:30-11

This is a course that weds postcolonial literary theory to cultural studies to critical geography to art. We'll read novels and watch films from several cities--London, Kingston, Johannesburg, New York, New Orleans, Lagos, Bombay/Mu...(read more)

190/2

Research Seminar:
Harlem Renaissance

MW 11-12:30

The Harlem Renaissance was a cultural and intellectual movement of black artists and writers in the 1920s. Centered in the Harlem neighborhood in Manhattan, the movement extended outward through international collaboration that reached all the way...(read more)

190/3

Research Seminar:
Literature and the Linguistic Turn

MWF 12-1

In the early twentieth century, philosophers began to suspect that all their ancient problems—from the riddle of selfhood to the mystery of other minds to the imprecision of sensation—were actually problems with language. We could fix ...(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)

190/6

Research Seminar:
Shakespeare: From the Globe to the Global

MWF 2-3

William Shakespeare's works have been staged all over the world, adapted as films, operas, musicals, ballets, and novels.  They have been transposed into diverse settings, from fascist Italy to the Wild West, medieval Japan to the fiction...(read more)

190/7

Research Seminar:
Place-Love: Fiction and the Melancholy of Form

MWF 3-4

Philosophy as a form has been governed by a sense of “homesickness.” Literary discourse has similarly grappled with a longing for remembered places. Thornfield Hall, Satis House, Brideshead Castle, the Isle of Skye, Manderley—fro...(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)

190/9

Research Seminar:
Beowulf

TTh 9:30-11

Beowulf is the longest, subtlest, and in many ways the strangest and most difficult Old English poem that has survived from Anglo-Saxon England. Since its rediscovery in the 18^th century, we have learned much about its language...(read more)

190/10

Research Seminar:
Hollywood in the 1930s

TTh 12:30-2

Our subject will be the theory and practice of mass entertainment in Hollywood from the birth of talking pictures to the start of W.W. II.  We'll sample the extraordinary range of films that Golden-Age Hollywood offered its consumers: fro...(read more)

190/11

Research Seminar:
The Literature of Immortality

TTh 12:30-2

Class description to come.

190/13

Research Seminar:
California Literature & Film Since WWI

Tues. 5-8:30 PM (see the course description)

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)

190/1

Research Seminar:
Emily Dickinson

MWF 10-11

This seminar will provide you with a sustained reading course in the poetry of Emily Dickinson, my favorite poet.  We’ll begin with her early poetry, and trace her evolution into the singular poet we read today, with particular attentio...(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)

190/3

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)

190/5

Research Seminar:
Alfred Hitchcock

W 5-8 PM

The course will focus on the Hitchcock oeuvre from the early British through the American period, with emphasis on analysis of cinematic representation of crime, victimhood, and the investigation of guilt. Our discussions and critical readings wil...(read more)

190/6

Research Seminar:
The Medium Is the Message: Reading Poetry in Manuscript & Print, 1300-1600

TTh 9:30-11

Modern readers almost exclusively encounter medieval and Renaissance literature in highly mediated anthologies and scholarly editions, far removed from the manuscripts and early print books in which they first circulated. In this course, we will p...(read more)

190/7

Research Seminar:
Note new topic: Troy and Tragedy

TTh 11-12:30

Note the new topic (and book list and instructor):

From the earliest moments of the western literary tradition, the story of the fall of Troy has been associated with the genre of tragedy. This course charts that association from Ancient Ro...(read more)

190/8

Research Seminar:
James / Baldwin

TTh 12:30-2

James Baldwin never made a secret of the importance of Henry James to his creative life.  The numerous quotations, echoes, and nods to James sprinkled throughout Baldwin’s writings all but directly invite us to think of James as we read...(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)

190/1

Research Seminar:
The Sixties

MW 10:30-12

This class will explore the literature, film, and art of the 1960s in America, with a particular focus on the complex interactions between various forms of modernism and the social movements whose politics, aesthetics, and cultural ambitions most ...(read more)

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)

190/3

Research Seminar:
Late Henry James

MW 4-5:30

Close readings of Henry James' notoriously difficult final novels. This will be a very demanding class, but a rewarding one too, I hope. Two ten-page essays will be required, along with regular attendance and participation in class discussion....(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)

190/5

Research Seminar:
Contemporary British Literature and Culture

MW 4-5:30

In this course, we will investigate the literary and cultural landscape of contemporary Britain.  After several introductory sessions on the postwar period (1945-1979), we'll spend the bulk of our time working our way from the 1980s to th...(read more)

190/6

Research Seminar:
Classical and Renaissance Drama

MW 4-5:30

In a poem for the first edition of Shakespeare’s collected works, Ben Jonson expressed a characteristic ambivalence about classical drama.  On the one hand, he praised it as the standard by which all subsequent playwriting sh...(read more)

190/7

Research Seminar:
Materiality: How the Physical World Is Made to Mean

TTh 9:30-11

We might think of physical matter as being simply present, but the stuff of the world is and has been understood very differently in different times and cultures. This research seminar will explore a broad range of understandings of matter, from t...(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)

190/9

Research Seminar:
Medieval and Renaissance Lyric

TTh 2-3:30

From drinking songs and poems of seduction to works of religious meditation and devotion, the lyric reflects a variety of subjects and concerns.  This course serves as an extensive introduction to lyric poetry from the twelfth to the sixteent...(read more)

190/10

Research Seminar:
Purcell and Handel: Their Art in Setting English Texts to Music

TTh 3:30-5

In the early 1600s, in England Shakespeare was exploring new ways of creating drama through language, with music often playing an important role, but a mostly distinct one.  In those same years, in Italy Monteverdi was exploring new ways of c...(read more)

190/11

Research Seminar

This section of English 190 has been canceled.

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)

190/13

Research Seminar:
Keats and Literary Tradition

TTh 5-6:30 P.M.

This research seminar focuses on the poems and letters of John Keats. We will read his work in relation to some of his predecessors (Shakespeare, Milton) and near contemporaries (Wordsworth, Hazlitt) while addressing questions of the burdens of cu...(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)

190/2

Research Seminar:
Materialism: Ancient and Modern

MW 11-12:30

“As human beings we inhabit an ineluctably material world. We live our everyday lives surrounded by, immersed in, matter . . . Our existence depends from one moment to the next . . . on our own hazily understood bodily and cellular reactions...(read more)

190/3

Research Seminar:
Henry James and Novelistic Aesthetics

MW 2-3:30

This course focuses on the art of the novel as practiced and theorized by Henry James.  James believed that, despite two centuries of novelistic production, the art of the novel was still to be discovered.   During his lifetime and ...(read more)

190/4

Research Seminar

This section of English 190 has been canceled.

190/6

Research Seminar:
Emily Dickinson

TTh 9:30-11

This seminar will provide you with a sustained reading course in the poetry of Emily Dickinson, my favorite poet.  We’ll begin with her early poetry, and trace her evolution into the singular poet we read today, with particular attentio...(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)

190/8

Research Seminar:
Reading Walden

TTh 12:30-2

Thoreau believed that "[b]ooks must be read as deliberately and reservedly as they were written." That's what we'll try to do, reading Walden twice over the course of the semester, once to get our bearings, then again to...(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)

190/10

Research Seminar:
Contemporary Native American Fiction

This section of English 190 has been canceled.

190/11

Research Seminar:
Poetry and Poetics in the Middle Ages

TTh 2-3:30

This class will explore early England's shifting literary landscape in order to better understand what poetry was and what it was for in the Middle Ages. Juxtaposing our close analyses of individual poems and groups of poems with medieval theo...(read more)

190/13

Research Seminar:
Race and Rumors of Race in American Prose

TTh 3:30-5

Race in 2015 is still a taboo topic in many literary conversations.  In Race and Rumors of Race in American Prose we’ll take a look back and a look forward.  We’ll start with Toni Morrison’s Playing in the Dark: Whi...(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)

190/15

Research Seminar:
Film Noir

MW 5:30-7 PM

We will examine the influence of film noir on neo-noir and its relationship to "classical" Hollywood cinema, as well as its history, theory, and generic markers, while analyzing in detail the major films in this area. The course will als...(read more)

190/1

Research Seminar:
The Temporality of Faulkner's Novels

MW 12:30-2

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 a...(read more)

190/2

Research Seminar:
Metamorphosis, Monsters, and the Supernatural Everyday

M 3-6

We dream of becoming something other than what we are. To be human is to be in love with transformation. That love of becoming something other, of transforming ourselves from one thing to another, infuses our literature since the first artists too...(read more)

190/4

Research Seminar

This section of English 190 was canceled (1/14/15).

190/5

Research Seminar:
Materialism--Ancient and Modern

TTh 9:30-11

“As human beings we inhabit an ineluctably material world. We live our everyday lives surrounded by, immersed in, matter . . . Our existence depends from one moment to the next . . . on our own hazily understood bodily and cellular reactions...(read more)

190/6

Research Seminar:
Literature and Revolution

TTh 11-12:30

This course 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)

190/7

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)

190/8

Research Seminar:
Shakespeare’s Versification

TTh 3:30-5

This course will explore Shakespeare's artistic use of the formal resources of verse, especially meter, rhyme, alliteration and syntactic parallelism, as well as, by way of contrast, some of his use of music.  We will consider what define...(read more)

190/9

Research Seminar:
Mass Entertainment in Classical Hollywood Film

TTh 3:30-5

Our topic will be the theory and practice of mass entertainment in Hollywood from the birth of talking pictures to the start of W.W. II.  Among the films we'll discuss are The Jazz Singer, Public Enemy, Footlight Par...(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)

190/11

Research Seminar:
Alfred Hitchcock

MW 5:30-7 P.M. + films W 7-10 P.M.

The course will focus on the Hitchcock oeuvre from the early British through the American period, with emphasis on analysis of cinematic representation of crime, victimhood, and the investigation of guilt. Our discussions and critical readings wil...(read more)

190/12

Research Seminar:
The Oversexed Cinema of Pedro Almodóvar

TTh 2-3:30 + films W 7-10 P.M.

Tabloid, soap opera, camp, porn, classicism, citation, stories-within-stories, films-within-films—these are some of the styles and devices that Pedro Almodovar mixes together to render a subject matter typically consisting of exorbitant and ...(read more)

190/1

Research Seminar:
American Captivities

MW 3-4:30

The Indian captivity narrative is the first literary genre that might be called uniquely “American.”  Its standard protagonist was a white woman kidnapped by Indians, but American captivity narratives also related the captivities ...(read more)

190/2

Research Seminar:
Recent African American Literature

MW 3-4:30

A seminar focused on poetry and prose published by African Americans in the last 25 years. One short essay, one group presentation, and one long essay due at the end of the semester.

Please read the paragraph on page 2 of the instructio...(read more)

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)

190/4

Research Seminar:
Victorian Masculinities

TTh 9:30-11

The Queen for whom the Victorian era was named defines the period’s cultural reputation in more ways than one; the stereotypes of Victorianism—moral constraint, prudery, repression—are almost always associated with women. This co...(read more)

190/5

Research Seminar:
Paradise Lost and the Ancient Epic

TTh 11-12:30

“Not less but more heroic” … that is Milton’s claim in his modern epic Paradise Lost, comparing his own Biblical theme to the achievements of ancient epic, Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey and Vir...(read more)

190/6

Research Seminar:
Ecopoetry

TTh 12:30-2

What is ecopoetry, and what, if anything, distinguishes it from nature poetry? How does ecopoetics differ from another poetics? In this seminar we will explore topics surrounding this question, which include the pathetic fallacy and anthropomorphi...(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)

190/9

Research Seminar:
Contemporary British Culture and Literature

TTh 12:30-2

In this course, we will investigate the literary and cultural landscape of contemporary Britain.  After several introductory sessions on the postwar period (1945-1979), we'll spend the bulk of our time in the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s.&nbsp...(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)

190/11

Research Seminar:
Manifesto Modernism

TTh 2-3:30

This course will examine modernist prose and poetry in English from the perspective of a particularly modern genre of writing, the manifesto. By exploring the literary qualities of the manifesto as well as the manifesto-like qualities of modernist...(read more)

190/12

Research Seminar:
The Rejection of Closure: Slow Readings

TTh 3:30-5

This is a seminar in the poetics of reading. Over the course of the semester, students will undertake prolonged, exploratory, multi-contextual readings of a selection of recent and contemporary “difficult” poems. Works by Larry Eigner,...(read more)

190/13

Research Seminar

190/14

Research Seminar:
20th-Century California Literature and Film

Tues. 6-9 P.M.

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

190/15

Research Seminar:
Film Noir

MW 5:30-7 P.M. + film screenings W 7-10 P.M.

We will examine the influence of film noir on neo-noir and its relationship to "classical" Hollywood cinema, as well as its history, theory, and generic markers, while analyzing in detail the major films in this area. The course...(read more)

190/1

Research Seminar:
American Gothic

MW 4-5:30

In this course, we will study the Gothic tradition in American literature from the aftermath of the Revolution to the cusp of the Civil War.  We will explore how and why the dark energies of the Gothic imagination haunted our national literat...(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)

190/3

Research Seminar:
Reflections of the French Revolution

TTh 9:30-11

“In France it was what people did that was wild and elemental; in England it was what people wrote…Verbally considered, Carlyle’s French Revolution was more revolutionary than the real French Revolution” –G....(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)

190/11

Research Seminar:
American Poetry After 1950

TTh 3:30-5

This course will survey trends in recent American poetry.  We will start by familiarizing ourselves with the work that has been most influential on contemporary writing--John Ashbery, Frank O'Hara, Sylvia Plath, and Robert Creeley.  ...(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)

190/14

Research Seminar:
Crisis and Culture: The 1930s, 1970s, and Post-2008 in Comparative Perspective

TTh 3:30-5

This research seminar will explore the impact of economic crisis and systemic transformation on cultural production.  To what extent is culture determined by economic forces, and to what extent is it separate from these forces?  How do m...(read more)

190/15

Research Seminar:
Alfred Hitchcock

MW 11-12:30 + films Tues. 7-10 P.M.

Unique among Hollywood directors, Hitchcock played on two boards. As a master of entertainment who had nothing to say, he produced work as thoroughly trivial as it was utterly compelling. But thanks to the French reception of his work in the 1950s...(read more)

190/16

Research Seminar:
Film Melodrama/The Woman's Film

MW 5:30-7 P.M. + films W 7-10 P.M.

In this course we will examine a range of examples of the genre "the woman's film" of the 40's and 50's, emphasizing maternal, paranoid, romantic and medical discourses, issues of spectatorship, consumerism,...(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)

190/5

Research Seminar

This section of English 190 has been canceled.

190/6

Research Seminar:
The Urban Postcolonial

TTh 11-12:30

For reasons to do with some of its most canonical texts, postcolonial literature is often thought to present a conflict between “tradition” and “modernity,” a conflict often imagined as the peaceful village intruded upon by...(read more)

190/7

Research Seminar:
Ecopoetry and Ecopoetics

TTh 11-12:30

What is ecopoetry, and what, if anything, distinguishes it from nature poetry?   How does ecopoetics differ from another poetics?  In this seminar we will explore topics surrounding this question, which include the pathetic fallacy ...(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)

190/9

Research Seminar:
Words and Images: The Intellectual Marketplace of Antebellum America

TTh 12:30-2

This seminar will focus on the literature and visual culture of the early United States — roughly the 1790s through the 1840s, with more than a glance back to George Whitefield and Jonathan Edwards and forward to Walt Whitman and Herman Melv...(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)

190/12

Research Seminar:
Metaphysical Poets from Donne to Vaughan

TTh 2-3:30

This class focuses on a group of poets who were philosophical before there was philosophy. Four decades before the publication of René Descartes’ Meditations, John Donne began writing poems in which, in the words of a later c...(read more)

190/15

Research Seminar:
Studies in Children's Literature

TTh 3:30-5

This course will explore the history and theory of writing for children from the mid-eighteenth century through the present. We’ll read works that, in twenty-first-century terms, are considered appropriate for readers from kindergarten throu...(read more)

190/16

Research Seminar:
Film Noir

MW 5:30-7 P.M. + film screenings W 7-10 P.M.

We will examine film noir’s influence on neo-noir and its relationship to “classical” Hollywood cinema, as well as its history, theory and generic markers, while analyzing in detail the major films in this area. The cour...(read more)

190/17

Research Seminar:
Utopian and Dystopian Literature

TTh 5-6:30 + film screenings 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)

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)

190/1

Research Seminar:
Literature and the Post-human

MW 10:30-12

Does a life become a human life through the possibility of narrating a coherent story about a bounded person through time? This class explores the connection between narrative and the human against the backdrop of technological d...(read more)

190/2

Research Seminar:
Too-Close Reading: Poe and Others

MW 11-12:30

Here are the main things we experience from within the reading practice scapegoated as “too close.” The first is that it is worse than useless: the futility, the irrelevance of its mountainous molehills demoralizes us all the more prof...(read more)

190/3

Research Seminar:
Sentimentality

MW 1:30-3

In this seminar, we will examine the place of sentimentality in American literature of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Considering works of fiction, poetry, and performance, we will ask how and why certain kinds of feeling—and ...(read more)

190/5

Research Seminar:
Poetry and the Archive

note new time: MW 9-10:30

This is a class about poets who have gone looking for the muse. They’ve found her in the form of libraries, photographs, legal records, interviews, websites, advertisements, and material artifacts, and have used these archival materials to s...(read more)

190/8

Research Seminar:
Utopian & Dystopian Stories and Movies

W 6-9 P.M.

Most Utopian authors are more concerned with persuading readers of the social or political merits of their schemes than with the "merely" literary qualities of their writing.  Although some Utopian writing has succeeded in the sense...(read more)

190/9

Research Seminar:
The Urban Postcolonial

TTh 9:30-11

For reasons to do with some of its most canonical texts (Achebe’s Things Fall Apart being the most proffered example), postcolonial literature is often thought to present a conflict between “tradition” and “moderni...(read more)

190/10

Research Seminar:
John Clare: A Peasant Naturalist Among the Romantic Poets

TTh 9:30-11

John Clare was an uneducated farm laborer, a contemporary of Keats, who became very briefly a very famous poet in the 1820's in the wake of the great years of Burns, Byron, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Shelley.  He published three books, co...(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)

190/13

Research Seminar:
Ben Jonson, Robert Herrick, and the Cavalier Poets

MW 9-10:30

This seminar will focus on Jonson’s and Herrick’s verse, particularly on the openly frivolous poems. Our aim will be to come to conclusions about what these poems do that gives pleasure. We will also think about the usefulness and accu...(read more)

190/15

Research Seminar:
Animals in Literature and Theory

note new time: MW 4-5:30

This course engages the question of the animal through novels, poetry, philosophy, theory, film, painting and photography, and popular culture.  Our approach will be to examine and track major trends in the burgeoning field of animal studies,...(read more)

190/16

Research Seminar:
Film Noir and Neo-Noir

TTh 5:30-7 P.M. + films Thurs. 7-10 P.M.

We will examine film noir’s influence on neo-noir and its relationship to “classical” Hollywood cinema, as well as its history, theory and generic markers, while analyzing in detail the major films in this area. The course will a...(read more)

190/17

Research Seminar:
Narrating Health--An Introduction to the Medical Humanities

MW 4-5:30

What is the relationship between medicine and the humanities? How do literature and medicine relate to one another? How do texts create ideas about health and wellness, illness and disability? This course will serve as an introduction to many issu...(read more)

190/18

Research Seminar:
The New Journalism and the Nonfiction Novel

note new time: TTh 5-6:30

This course focuses on the intersection of literature and journalism, with particular attention to the emergence of the New Journalism. The genre, defined in terms of its application of literary techniques to news reporting, often constructs stori...(read more)

250/3

Research Seminars:
Reconstruction

Thurs. 3:30-6:30

“Among the revolutionary processes that transformed the nineteenth-century world, none was so dramatic in its human consequences or far-reaching in its social implications as the abolition of chattel slavery,” the historian Eric Foner ...(read more)

190/1

Research Seminar

This section of English 190 has been canceled.

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)

190/3

Research Seminar:
Nonsense

MW 4-5:30

This course will explore the relationship between two characteristics of these classic works of nonsense literature for children. One is their foregrounding of linguistic form, shared with language games and of obvious special interest to children...(read more)

190/4

Research Seminar:
American Gothic

TTh 9:30-11

In this course, we will study the Gothic tradition in American literature from the aftermath of the Revolution to the cusp of the Civil War.  We will explore how and why the dark energies of the Gothic imagination haunted our national literat...(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)

190/6

Research Seminar:
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, becoming attuned to th...(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)

190/8

Research Seminar:
Medieval English Poetry

TTh 12:30-2

The poetry of medieval England, often witty, sometimes moving, occasionally shocking, and frequently creative in form, style and use of language, has inspired poets including Seamus Heaney, Gerard Manley Hopkins and Geoffrey Hill. We will be explo...(read more)

190/9

Research Seminar:
Emily Dickinson

TTh 12:30-2

This is an intensive reading course in the poetry of Emily Dickinson.  We will also read poems and essays by her contemporaries (e.g., Emerson, Longfellow, Helen Hunt).  Topics include early poems and prosody, love and gender, definition...(read more)

190/10

Research Seminar:
Mark Twain

TTh 2-3:30

The seminar will read a generous selection of Mark Twain's most important published writings. We will work our way chronologically through his life and career, beginning with his earliest extant writings and ending with Mysterious Stranger...(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)

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)

190/15

Research Seminar:
Literature of California & the West Since WWI

Thurs. 6-9 P.M.

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

190/16

Research Seminar:
Film Noir

MW 5:30-7 P.M., + films W 7-10 P. M.

We will examine film noir’s influence on neo-noir and its relationship to “classical” Hollywood cinema, as well as its history, theory and generic markers, while analyzing in detail the major films in this area.  The course ...(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)

250/2

Research Seminar:
Renaissance Things

Thurs. 3:30-6:30

In the middle of the nineteenth century, the intellectual historian Jacob Burckhardt argued that the Renaissance marked the beginning of modern culture—an emergence which he defined as the disruption of medieval systems that had discouraged ...(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)

190/1

Research Seminar:
The Rejection of Closure: Slow Readings

MW 1:30-3

This is a seminar in the poetics of reading. Over the course of the semester, students will undertake prolonged, exploratory, multi-contextual readings of a selection of recent and contemporary “difficult” poems. Works by Larry Eigner,...(read more)

190/2

Research Seminar:
Another Nature

MW 1:30-3

The poet... doth grow in effect another nature, in making things either better than nature brings forth, or quite anew. —Sidney

In 1770, English painter George Stubbs painted a painting of a moose standing in front o...(read more)

190/3

Research Seminar:
The Writings of Daniel Defoe

MW 4-5:30

Reading and discussion of representative works in various genres, treating Defoe’s career and writings as of interest in themselves, and as offering direct (if slanted) access to all the major cultural issues of his day, political, economic,...(read more)

190/4

Research Seminar:
Literature of California and the West pre-1920

MW 5:30-7

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

190/5

Research Seminar:
The New Journalism and the Nonfiction Novel

TTh 9:30-11

This course focuses on the intersection of literature and journalism, with particular attention to the emergence of the New Journalism. The genre, defined in terms of its application of literary techniques to news reporting, often constructs stori...(read more)

190/6

Research Seminar:
In Defense of Literature

TTh 9:30-11

This course addresses the so-called “crisis in the humanities” by examining the history of this perceived crisis and its relationship to the formation of the field of literary studies. Can we still find solutions to our problems in lit...(read more)

190/7

Research Seminar:
Walter Scott and Jane Austen

TTh 11-12:30

The two major British novelists of the Romantic period were reading each other: warily, in Austen’s case—“Walter Scott has no business to write novels, especially good ones. I do not like him, and do not mean to like Waverley...(read more)

190/9

Research Seminar:
Asian American Fiction

TTh 11-12:30

If we accept that “Asian American” names a fictive ethnicity, what has been the power of Asian American literature’s social imagination? How has Asian American literature not only reflected the constructedness of Asian American i...(read more)

190/10

Research Seminar:
Contemporary Ethnic Surrealist Poetry and Poetics

TTh 12:30-2

Inspired by an eclectic mixture of influences ranging from Negritude to Sun-Ra, and from Yellow Peril pulp novels and films to counterfactual histories, a number of contemporary African American and Asian American poets have attempted to articulat...(read more)

190/12

Research Seminar:
Paradise Lost, Found, Lost Again

TTh 12:30-2

An intensive reading of John Milton’s great epic Paradise Lost and two works that adapt it in imaginative ways, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy. The modern an...(read more)

190/14

Research Seminar:
Words and Bodies in Space: Poems for the Stage

TTh 2-3:30

This course focuses on bringing canonical modern and contemporary poetry on the page, in conversation with slam poetry, performance poetry and finally performance theory. Whether we are talking about Homer or the Beat poets, how a poem is spoken h...(read more)

190/15

Research Seminar:
American Captivities

TTh 2-3:30

The captivity narrative is the first literary genre that might be called uniquely “American.” Although its standard protagonist was a white woman kidnapped by Indians, the captivity narrative genre extended to the capture of sailors an...(read more)

190/16

Research Seminar:
Chaucer and His Contexts

TTh 2-3:30

The works of Geoffrey Chaucer (c. 1343-1400) have been canonized as the most important and best-known materials in Middle English literature. But Chaucer did not appear in a vacuum. On the contrary, Chaucer participated in several rich literary co...(read more)

190/17

Research Seminar:
History of the Book, 597-2011

TTh 2-3:30

In this research seminar, we will study the development of one of the most influential technologies ever created: the book. Beginning with the introduction of the manuscript codex into England, we will trace the book through many transformations: ...(read more)

190/18

Research Seminar:
Alfred Hitchcock

TTh 5:30-7 P.M. + film screenings Thurs. 7-10 P.M.

The course will focus on the Hitchcock oeuvre from the early British through the American period, with emphasis on analysis of cinematic representation of crime, victimhood and the investigation of guilt. Our discussions and critical readings will...(read more)

190/1

Research Seminar:
Music and Poetry

MW 10-11:30

From a number of different angles, we will approach a single, complicated question: what is the relationship between poetry and music? The two arts have been paired for millennia, and there have been many moments in literary and musical history in...(read more)

190/2

Research Seminar:
The Continental Renaissance

MW 10-11:30

This course will survey some of the major prose writings of the continental Renaissance. In addition to situating these works in their cultural and historical contexts, we will consider running topics such as the social function of rhetoric; human...(read more)

190/3

Research Seminar:
Stages of Conflict: Alternative Early Modern English Theater Traditions

MW 4-5:30

This course will push against scholarly paradigms that have separated the early modern stage from the era's turbulent religious and political conflicts.  It will challenge assumptions about the early modern dramatic canon, exposing permea...(read more)

190/4

Research Seminar:
Herman Melville

MW 11:30-1

This course takes a close and critical look at the literary career of Herman Melville, from his first sea narratives through Moby-Dick, his Civil War poetry, and Billy Budd.  We will read each work within its historical and ...(read more)

190/5

Research Seminar:
Literature of California Since WWI

MW 3-4:30

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

190/6

Research Seminar:
The Literature of Utopia, Anti-Utopia, & Dystopia

TTh 11-12:30

"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)

190/7

Research Seminar:
Emily Dickinson

TTh 11-12:30

This is an intensive seminar in the poetry of Emily Dickinson. We will learn how to read (to describe and interpret) Dickinson's poems, with pleasure and confidence, deeply and also broadly throughout her career. Topics will include early poet...(read more)

190/8

Research Seminar:
My Lost City: (Post)-Modernist and Post-9/11 Fiction

TTh 11-12:30

In 1948, referring to the nuclear threat from the Soviet Union, E. B. White wrote that "the city, for the first time in its long history, is destructible. A single flight of planes no bigger than a wedge of geese can quickly end this island f...(read more)

190/9

Research Seminar:
Victorian Mysteries

TTh 12:30-2

This class will explore the invention of Mystery as a literary genre. We will discuss the historical development of professional detectives in the 1840s and the creation of detective fiction soon thereafter. We will read a gripping history of the ...(read more)

190/10

Research Seminar:
Homocinema

TTh 12:30-2 + film screenings Wednesdays 5-7:30 P.M.

Under the assumption that male homosexual fantasy is not the peculiar coinage of a homosexual brain, but the common, even central daydream of the normal world, the course identifies three modes of broaching it in narrative cinema. In Hollywood cla...(read more)

190/11

Research Seminar:
Christopher Marlowe

TTh 2-3:30

Marlowe invented the modern theater, unleashing a power of spectacle, dialogue, and oratory that instantly addicted much of the teeming city of London and horrified the rest. This seminar will use the unbounded, amoral ambition of Marlowe's st...(read more)

190/12

Research Seminar:
"Rotten English"--on contemporary dialect literature

TTh 3:30-5

The English were unique in assuming that the word “barbarism” encompassed both language and social condition – taking it to refer to both the specific mistakes that non-native speakers made when essaying a strange language and th...(read more)

190/13

Research Seminar:
Nathaniel Hawthorne

TTh 3:30-5

We will be reading Nathanial Hawthorne.

Two ten page essays will be required, along with regular attendance and participation.

English 190 replaced English 100 and 150 as of Fall '09. English majors may fulfill the seminar re...(read more)

190/14

Research Seminar:
Modernist Poetry and Poetics

TTh 11-12:30

"Nothing changes from generation to generation except the thing seen and that makes a composition," Gertrude Stein writes in "Composition as Explanation," insisting that "each generation has something different at which th...(read more)

190/1

Research Seminar:
Speculative Fiction and Dystopias

MW 9-10:30

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)

190/2

Research Seminar:
Late Dickens Novels

MW 9-10:30

In this seminar we will study some of the late Dickens novels: A Tale of Two Cities, Great Expectations, Our Mutual Friend(read more)

190/3

Research Seminar:
Alfred Hitchcock

MW 12:30-2 + film screenings Th 6-9 P.M.

Unique among Hollywood directors, Hitchcock played on two boards. As a master of entertainment who had nothing to say, he produced work as thoroughly trivial as it was utterly compelling. But thanks to the French reception of his work in the 1950...(read more)

190/4

Research Seminar:
The 1890s

M 3-6

What difference does a date make? What is it about the end of a century that encourages such strong feelings of apocalypse, degeneration or renewal? This course will consider texts written in and around the 1890s, a decade characterized by its int...(read more)

190/5

Research Seminar:
The Nineteenth-Century Self

MW 4-5:30

In this class, we will read the word “I” many times—in poems, novels, and memoirs. Our texts will span the nineteenth century both chronologically and tonally—from earnest self-portraiture to playful ventriloquism. In the co...(read more)

190/6

Research Seminar:
Native America/Early America

MW 4-5:30

In 1705, the colonist Robert Beverley introduced his History and Present State of Virginia with the proud declaration: “I am an Indian, and don’t pretend to be exact in my Language.” What might such a proclamation have...(read more)

190/7

(new section as of 5/6/10) Research Seminar:
Second Worlds in Shakespeare

TTh 9:30-11

Shakespeare’s plays often project stereoptic visions of worlds set apart from the geographical center of the dramatic action. These removed places, like Arden forest in As You Like It, the realm of fairies in A Midsummer Night&rs...(read more)

190/10

Research Seminar:
Invasions of Britain in Medieval Literature

TTh 11-12:30

How does history become literature?

By examining medieval narratives about the four great invasions of early Britain, we will try to understand how bare lists of events can be transformed into great works of art. We will begin with the Norman...(read more)

190/11

Research Seminar

190/12

Research Seminar:
Cultures of 19th-Century U.S. Poetry

TTh 12:30-2

Poetry enjoyed extraordinary popularity and pervasiveness in 19th-century America. In this class, we will encounter the variety of poetic output from the period while also taking the opportunity to study the social life of a literary form by think...(read more)

190/13

Research Seminar:
Postcolonial Cinema

TTh 12:30-2

This course examines cinematic productions originating in or concerning themselves with the former colonial territories of the European empires of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. We will cover some general film studies theories ...(read more)

190/14

Research Seminar:
American Transcendentalism

TTh 2-3:30

A close look at the internal coherences and stresses of this literary movement, with an emphasis on the intellectual and affective motives for formal innovation. Two ten-page essays and regular attendance and participation will be required.

<...(read more)

190/15

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 pay attention especially to the ways that ideology has been useful for litera...(read more)

190/16

Research Seminar

190/17

Research Seminar:
When This You See—The Writings of Gertrude Stein

TTh 3:30-5

Gertrude Stein’s radical experimentation was just that — an investigation into the roots of meaning. As such, her writings vastly extended the horizons of literature and of language. And her inquiry into the relation of syntax to sense,...(read more)

190/18

Research Seminar

190/19

Research Seminar:
African American Poetry

TTh 5-6:30

An introduction to African American poetry and poetics, moving from the eighteenth century to the present. Our reading will include critical essays as well as poems by Lucy Terry, Phillis Wheatley, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Countee Cullen, Langston Hug...(read more)

190/20

Research Seminar:
Women’s Films of the ‘40s & ‘50s

MW 5:30-7 P.M. + film screenings W 7-10 P.M.

In this course we will examine a range of examples of the genre “the woman’s film” of the 40's and 50's, emphasizing maternal, paranoid, romantic and medical discourses, issues of spectatorship, consumerism, and various “fe...(read more)

190/1

Research Seminar:
Crisis and Culture: The 1930s, 1970s, and Today in Comparative Perspective

MW 9-10:30

190/2

Research Seminar:
Comedy

MW 10:30-12

190/3

Research Seminar:
Emerson and Thoreau

MW 12-1:30

190/5

Research Seminar:
Literature of California and the West Since WWI

MW 4-5:30

190/6

Research Seminar:
Black Rhetoric: From Douglass to Obama

TTh 9:30-11

190/7

Research Seminar:
Modernism, Postmodernism, and the Body

TTh 11-12:30

190/8

Research Seminar:
American Children’s Literature

TTh 11-12:30

190/9

Research Seminar:
A Brief History of Enthusiasm

TTh 12:30-2

190/10

Research Seminar:
Emily Dickinson

TTh 12:30-2

190/11

Research Seminar:
Mark Twain

TTh 2-3:30

190/12

Research Seminar:
Confidence, Trust, Belief, and Faith: Questions of Self-Representation, Imaginative Authority, and Cultural Transaction in pre- and post-Civil War America

TTh 2-3:30

190/13

Research Seminar:
Samuel Beckett

TTh 3:30-5

190/15

Research Seminar:
Racial Passing

TTh 3:30-5

190/17

Research Seminar:
Alfred Hitchcock

MW 5:30-7 Films: Mon. 7-10 pm

190/1

Research Seminar: Close Reading

MW 12-1:30

190/3

Research Seminar: Avant-Gardes

TTh 9:30-11

190/4

Research Seminar: Film Noir.

TTh 9:30-11 + mandatory attendance at film screenings on Tuesdays, 5-8, 206 Wheeler.

190/6

Research Seminar: The Contemporary Novel

TTh 11-12:30

190/7

Research Seminar: Fictions of Los Angeles

TTh 11-12:30

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)

190/8

Research Seminar: The Urban Postcolonial

TTh 12:30-2

190/9

Research Seminar: Flannery O’Connor

TTh 12:30-2:00

190/10

Research Seminar: Chicana Art, Fiction and Film-making

TTh 2-3:30

190/11

Research Seminar: The Seventies

TTh 2-3:30

190/12

Research Seminar: The Writings of Daniel Defoe

TTh 2-3:30

190/13

Research Seminar: Visuality, Textuality, and Modernity

TTh 3:30-5

190/14

Research Seminar: Shakespeare's Versification

TTh 3:30-5

190/15

Research Seminar: Literature of California and the West pre-1920

TTh 5-6:30

190/17

Dystopian Fiction and the Fate of the Body

MW 1:30-3