Announcement of Classes: Spring 2015
Middle English Literature
English 112
Section: 1
Instructor: Miller, Jennifer
Time: TTh 11-12:30
Location: Note new location: 587 Barrows
Other Readings and Media
A course reader
Description
For more information on this course, please contact Professor Miller at .
This course satisfies the pre-1800 requirement for the English major.
English Drama to 1603
English 114A
Section: 1
Instructor: Miller, Jennifer
Time: TTh 2-3:30
Location: 130 Wheeler
Other Readings and Media
A course reader
Description
For more information on this course, please contact Professor Miller at
This course satisfies the pre-1800 requirement for the English major.
Shakespeare
English 117B
Section: 1
Instructor: Hass, Robert L.
Time: MW 10-11 + discussion sections F 10-11
Location: 2 LeConte
Other Readings and Media
The book(s) for this course will be available at University Press Books, on Bancroft Way, a little west of Telegraph Avenue.
Description
English 117B is a course in the last ten years or so of Shakespeare's career. It is a chance to read the tragedies: Hamlet, Macbeth, Othello, King Lear, Anthony and Cleopatra; at least one of the problematic late comedies, Measure for Measure; and the three plays that the critics have described as "romances," Cymbeline, The Winter's Tale, and The Tempest. These are among the most brilliant, corruscating, and magical stories veer imagined into the English language, and some of the most astonishing poetry. Students will be expected to keep up with the reading. There will be discussion sections on Fridays, and the Monday/Wednesday lecture meetings will include some conversation plus some informal staging and a bit of memorization. You'll know, when you're through, the "To be or not to be" speech and the "out, out, brief candle" speech and perhaps a couple of others.
Shakespeare
English 117S
Section: 1
Instructor: Knapp, Jeffrey
Time: TTh 12:30-2
Location: 159 Mulford
Book List
Shakespeare, William: Comedy of Errors; Shakespeare, William: Norton Shakespeare: Essential Plays
Description
Shakespeare wrote a massivenumber of plays. Focusing on a selection of them, we’ll consider the range of Shakespeare's dramaturgy and why this range was important to him. We’ll also explore how the variety of dramatic genres in which he wrote affected Shakespeare’s representation of plot and character, as well as the literary, social, sexual, religious, political, and philosophical issues he conceptualized through plot and character. Finally, we’ll think about Shakespeare’s plays in relation to the range of social types and classes in his mass audience.
Milton
English 118
Section: 1
Instructor: Goodman, Kevis
Time: TTh 9:30-11
Location: 20 Barrows
Book List
Milton, John: The Complete Poetry and Essential Prose of John Milton
Description
Probably the most influential and famous (sometimes infamous) literary figure of the seventeenth century, John Milton has been misrepresented too often as a mainstay of a traditional canon rather than the rebel he was. He is also sometimes assumed to be a remote religious poet rather than an independent thinker, who distrusted any passively held faith that was not self-questioning. However, as we follow Milton’s carefully shaped career from the shorter early poems, through some of the controversial prose of the English Civil War era, and at last through the astounding work that emerged in the wake of political defeat (Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, Samson Agonistes), we will discover a very different literary and political figure, known in his time as a statesman as well as a poet, and in both pursuits more an iconoclast than an icon. We will come to understand Milton’s writing in relation to the revolutions that he witnessed and took part in, and we will also think about his experiments in poetic form, his ambivalent incorporations, revisions, and expansions of classical literature and biblical texts alike, the literary dimension of his unorthodox theology, his writings on love, marriage, and divorce, his long preoccupation with vocation – and more.
Our required text will be The Complete Poetry and Essential Prose of John Milton, eds. William Kerrigan, John Rumrich, and Stephen Fallon (Modern Library; ISBN-13: 978-0679642534).
This course satisfies the pre-1800 requirement for the English major.
Literature of the Later 18th Century
English 120
Section: 1
Instructor: Sorensen, Janet
Time: TTh 2-3:30
Location: 166 Barrows
Other Readings and Media
The books for this course will be available at University Press Books, on Bancroft Way, a little west of Telegraph Avenue.
Description
Late-eighteenth-century writing shaped many of the forms and institutions of literature we now take for granted. Fiction writers worked to establish the genre—and—legitimate as worthy reading—what we now call novels, while others experimented with the first gothic horror stories. Poets reckoned with a literary market and tidal wave of printed works that threatened to render all writing mere commodities. They thematized their position as misunderstood guardians of creative spirit, sometimes of a national past, in model of the tortured poet with which we are still familiar. Women writers cannily intervened in the republic of letters, even as their public writing was seen as semi-scandalous. All helped develop a new sense of Literature with a capital “L”—not just writing but imaginative writing that might play a special role in society, from protecting classical values in a modernizing world, to promoting a standard national language and literature, to cultivating sentimental feelings for others in an increasingly anonymous society.
Authors include: David Hume, Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding, Frances Burney, Horace Walpole, Jane Austen, Samuel Johnson, Thomas Gray, William Collins, William Cowper, Charlotte Smith.
This course satisfies the pre-1800 requirement for the English major.
The Romantic Period
English 121
Section: 1
Instructor: Langan, Celeste
Time: TTh 11-12:30
Location: 130 Wheeler
Book List
Austen, J.: Persuasion; Blake, W.: Blake's Poetry and Designs; Byron: Major Works; Coleridge, S. T.: Major Works; Godwin, W.: Caleb Williams; Keats, J.: Major Works; Shelley, M.W.G.: Frankenstein; Shelley, P.B.: Major Works; Wordsworth, W.: Major Works
Description
This course will look with wild surmise at the event of Romanticism. What happened to literature between 1789 and 1830? Is it true, as some critics have claimed, that Romantic writers revolutionized the concept of literature? What is the relation between Romantic writing and the signal historical and social events of the period:the political revolutions of the late eighteenth century, the Napoleonic wars, the rise of finance capitalism, the dominion of “the news”? With so much “happening” on the level of world history, why do Romantic writers sometimes turn to the past, to the provinces, to the everyday? Why, given the increased popularity of the novel, do so many writers turn to poetry-- to evoke nostalgia for the past or to forge an aesthetic avant-garde? Through extensive reading of major poets (Blake, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Shelley, Byron, and Keats), novelists (Godwin, Austen, Mary Shelley) and essayists (Lamb, Hazlitt, Burke, Paine) we will explore the event of Romanticism by examining literary events. What “happens” in Romantic texts: how do they understand origins, events, and effects?
The Victorian Period
English 122
Section: 1
Instructor: Lavery, Grace
Time: TTh 3:30-5
Location: note new location: 123 Wheeler
Book List
Barrett Browning, Elizabeth : Aurora Leigh; Dickens, Charles: Great Expectations; Haggard, H. Rider: She; Lord Tennyson, Alfred,: In Memoriam A. H. H.; Prince, Mary: The History of Mary Prince; Trollope, Anthony: The Warden
Description
The Victorian period witnessed dramatic and probably permanent changes to the literary culture of Britain, including: the morphing of scattered memoirs into formal autobiographies; the rise of the realist novel as the indispensable genre of bourgeois life; the investment of culture with the power to effect epochal political change and rearrange readers' sexualities; the invention of vampires, robots, serial killers, and other new forms of monstrosity; the modernization of narrative pornography; and the rejuvenation of bardic poetry. At the same time British authors were trying and failing to manage the largest empire in history, both devising new ways to dominate the world through writing and interrupting the violence that imperialism – the so-called "final phase of capitalism" – produced.
This course engages the major theoretical questions posed by Victorian literature, questions which emerge from the unprecedented global suffusion of British imperial influence. How might the enormity of this new world be meaningfully represented in language? What new accounts of personhood, ethics, sexuality, ethnicity, evolution, and art are required? Dealing with these and related questions, we will perhaps come to understand the enduring power of Victorian literature to speak to our own moment of globalization and crisis – our perennial return to the unanswered questions and open wounds of the nineteenth century.
The English Novel (Defoe through Scott)
English 125A
Section: 1
Instructor: Sorensen, Janet
Time: TTh 9:30-11
Location: 100 Wheeler
Other Readings and Media
The books for this course will be available at University Press Books, on Bancroft Way, a little west of Telegraph Avenue.
Description
This class explores eighteenth-century British innovations in narrative prose writings that we have come to call novels. A scientific revolution, broadened financial speculation, expanding empire, changing notions of gender, and new philosophies of mind challenged old ways of knowing, of ordering society, and of interacting socially. How did experiments in fiction writing enable new ways of knowing and new ways of acting virtuously in a society in which such things were open for debate? Haunted by fiction’s connection to “lower” forms of writing, writers—many of them women--also negotiated the tricky new terrain of writing for a public print market. We shall examine their rhetorical and thematic means of legitimating their writing--appealing to (and sometimes transforming) moral discourse, creating hybrids of new and classical writing, deploying authorized genres of writing, such as history. Yet all of them resist easy divisions between legitimate and illegitimate, offering instead complex new forms of writing and, some would argue, consciousness; our work will be to identify and analyze some of these.
Authors will include Eiza Haywood, Daniel Defoe, Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding, Horace Walpole, Frances Burney, Jane Austen.
This course satisfies the pre-1800 requirement for the English major.
The English Novel (Defoe through Scott)
English 125A
Section: 2
Instructor: Starr, George A.
Time: TTh 3:30-5
Location: 300 Wheeler
Book List
Austen, J.: Persuasion; Beckford, W.: Vathek; Behn, A.: Oroonoko; Burney, F.: Evelina; Defoe, D.: Robinson Crusoe; Godwin, W.: Caleb Williams; Richardson, S.: Pamela; Scott, W.: Bride of Lammermoor; Smollett, T.: Humphry Clinker
Description
A survey of early fiction, much of which pretended to be anything but. Most was published anonymously and purported to be a true "History," "Expedition," or the like, about "Things as They Are." We will consider at the outset why these works so strenuously disavowed their status as romances or novels, and why they disguised themselves as they did.
This course satisfies the pre-1800 requirement for the English major.
The English Novel (Dickens through Conrad)
English 125B
Section: 1
Instructor: Christ, Carol T. & Christ, Carol
Time:
Location:
Description
This course has been canceled.
The Contemporary Novel: The Latest Pulitzer Prize-Winning Fiction
English 125E
Section: 1
Instructor: Wong, Hertha D. Sweet
Time: MW 9-10 + discussion sections F 9-10
Location: 2060 Valley LSB
Book List
Diaz, Junot: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao; Egan, Jennifer: A Visit from the Goon Squad; Harding, Paul: Tinkers; Johnson, Adam: The Orphan Master's Son; McCarthy, Cormac: The Road; Strout, Elizabeth: Olive Kittredge; Tartt, Donna: The Goldfinch
Other Readings and Media
Reader.
Description
The Pulitzer Prize in Fiction is awarded for “distinguished fiction by an American author, preferably dealing with American life.” In this course, we will read the seven most recent (2007-2014) Pulitzer Prize-winning novels (actually, one of them is a collection of short fiction). In addition to examining narrative form and literary style, we will consider cultural and historical contexts and thematic resonances. We will discuss the trends in types of topics and styles selected for the Pultizer as well.
Note: Many of these are lengthy and/or dense novels, so start reading soon.
American Literature: Before 1800
English 130A
Section: 1
Instructor: McQuade, Donald
Time:
Location:
Description
This class has been canceled.
American Literature: 1900-1945
English 130D
Section: 1
Instructor: Porter, Carolyn
Time: MWF 12-1
Location: 88 Dwinelle
Book List
Ellison, Ralph: Invisible Man; Fitzgerald, F. Scott: The Great Gatsby; Hurston, Zora Neale: Their Eyes Were Watching God; James, Henry: The Portrait of a Lady
Description
This course will survey major works of early twentieth-century American literature by Stephen Crane, Theodore Dreiser, Ralph Ellison, William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Zora Neale Hurston, Henry James, James Weldon Johnson, and Frank Norris, with the goal of understating how their writings respond to the experience of modernity. The twentieth century was marked during its first half by a string of ups and downs (many of which no doubt feel familiar to us at the dawn of the twenty-first): two wars, gilded age excess, broad economic privation, and, as W.E.B. DuBois predicted for it, a dogged “problem of the color line.” We will explore how the modern American novel grapples with issues of moral ambiguity, anomie, belonging, and the attraction and antipathy toward blackness. My lectures will focus on the formal concerns of point of view, frames of reference, and the representation of time, all with the goal of understanding how these authors’ experiments in the novel form produce a reality rather than reflect it. Regarding this last, I will be keen to foreground the ways in which the modernist novel comes into its own during “the age of mechanical reproduction,” and thus often in dialogue with the emerging technologies of cinema, camera, and phonograph (not to mention television, radio, and telephone).
Two ten-page essays and a final exam will be required, along with regular attendance
American Poetry
English 131
Section: 1
Instructor: O'Brien, Geoffrey G.
Time: TTh 12:30-2
Location: 20 Barrows
Book List
Lerner, Ben: Mean Free Path; Rankine, Claudia: Don't Let Me Be Lonely
Description
This survey of U.S. poetries will begin with Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson and then touch down in expatriate and stateside modernisms, the Harlem Renaissance, the New York School, and Language Poetry, on our way to the contemporary. Rather than cover all major figures briefly, we’ll spend extended time with the work of a few: poets considered will include Paul Dunbar, Gertrude Stein, T. S. Eliot, Claude McKay, Jean Toomer, Charles Olson, Frank O’Hara, John Ashbery, Lyn Hejinian, Claudia Rankine, and Ben Lerner. Along the way we’ll consider renovations and dissipations of conventional form and meter, the task and materials of the long poem, seriality, citationality, who and what counts as a poetic subject, and how U.S. poetries have imagined community over and against their actual Americas. In addition to the two required books, primary and secondary readings will be drawn from a Course Reader. There will be a take-home midterm, a term paper, and a final exam.