English 100 — 199

Please Note: Class times are subject to change. Before you register, consult course lists posted in the English Department.

(Pre-requisite: English 1 and 2)

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ENG  0139	Early African American Literature		1	Rodríguez

Frederick Douglass called his autobiography, The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass: an American Slave. His subtitle and designation evoked American ideals of independence, liberty, and self-made success, at the time that it called attention to the fact that the system of slavery circumscribed Douglass' identity even after he escaped to the North, and to "freedom." This course will begin with a reading of Douglass' Narrative, and will continue with a treatment of other slave narratives by Harriet Jacobs, Olaudah Equiano, John Gronniosaw, and others. We will devote much of the first half of the semester to questions about the idea of the "tradition" itself; the authors of slave narratives read each other's works, and developed a formula for the life-story of the fugitive slave. The rest of the course will involve analyses of African-American literature. Complementing this will be readings from other disciplines; we will read historical documents, Supreme Court rulings, and works of sociology and philosophy.

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ENG  0145	American Realism				D+	Ammons

We will examine fiction, prose, and film from 1880-1920, a period of unusual social upheaval and conflict that offers striking insights into a number of important issues today, such as racism in the United States, economic injustice, anti-immigrant policies and attitudes, feminist movements, US imperialism, anti-Semitism, and changing sexual mores. Our study will be multicultural in focus - we will read works by African American, Native American, European American, Asian American, and Mexican American writers - and we will place major emphasis on analysis of social issues in the literature. Also we will pay special attention to how narrative form was experimented with - questioned, altered, invented-as writers and early filmmakers helped generate what we do now recognize as the modern period. We will ask: How do fiction and film operate as social criticism? Who gets to create art in America-and who does not? That is, what are the politics of representation and who decides them why should we care? Class will be run on a discussion basis and authors will include Zitkala Ša, Henry James, W.E.B. Du Bois, Anzia Yezierska, Pauline Hopkins, María Cristina Mena, Charles Chesnutt, Edith Wharton, Sui Sin Far, and Upton Sinclair. Also, we will view and discuss D.W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation (1915); a contemporary film about American Indian issues during the period; and Loni Ding's documentary about Asian American immigration, Ancestors in the Americans: Sailors, Coolies, and Settlers. Writing assignments will encourage students to do research and to experiment in one of the two papers with writing prose fiction.

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ENG  0171	Psychoanalysis and Cultural Criticism		L+	Edelman

For many who work in the fields of cultural criticism, feminism, queer theory, and post-colonial studies, psychoanalysis remains an indispensable tool for reading the relations among language, sexuality, history, and cultural production. This class, intended as a very small and tightly integrated seminar for graduate students and advanced undergraduates interested in examining psychoanalysis in the context of contemporary literary and cultural theory, will focus on how central concepts of psychoanalysis (the unconscious, sexual difference, the logic of the symptom, and the death drive) get taken up in postmodern thought in ways that contest the normalizing tendencies of psychoanalytic modernism." Although we will begin by looking at a few texts by Freud, our attention will center largely on the work and thought of Jacques Lacan as we consider how Lacan and those influenced by him (Jane Gallop, Slavoj Zizek, Judith Butler, Barbara Johnson, and Diana Fuss, among others) have transformed contemporary critical accounts of the connection between sexuality and textuality, between desire and signification. Students who enroll in this class must be prepared to take seriously the difficulties of the material and to work closely with each other in a collective enterprise. Though this is not an introductory course in psychoanalysis or literary theory, no previous study of psychoanalysis or critical theory is required of students so long as they are willing to engage in an extremely demanding critical dialogue.

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ENG  0175	Contemporary Jewish Fiction			D+	Freedman-Bellow

An exploration of the novels and short stories of writers whose work has been at the center of literary life for the last half-century and promises to transport us arguing, laughing and reflecting deeply into this century as well. We'll be reading fiction by Saul Bellow, Phillip Roth, Cynthia Ozick, Bernard Malamud, Anne Michaels, Primo Levi and others.

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ENG  0191A	God, Sex, and Politics in Shakespeare's England		H+TR	Dunn/Haefeli

An interdisciplinary approach to English literature and history in the years between the Reformation of the mid-16th century and the Revolution of the mid-17th century. Plays, poems, and paintings are combined with political and religious texts to explore debates over the social, political & sexual behavior of individuals and politicians and illuminate the cultural world of Shakespeare.

Prerequisite: one course in preindustrial European history or a course in Renaissance literature and permission of the professors. We will admit 30 students (15 English majors, 15 History majors) who pre-register with professors.

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ENG  0191B	Contemporary Multi Ethnic Literature		E+ MW	Sharpe

In this class we will consider, among other things, the ways that various gendered, national, linguistic, and racial identifications impel these writers and filmmakers toward experimentation. Among other things, we will examine their use of fictional narrative to produce alternative kinds of histories.

Texts/films may include work by: Michelle Cliff, Chang-Rae Lee, Ana Castillo, Camille Billops, Meena Alexander, Junot Diaz, Su Friedrich, James Baldwin, Dionne Brand, and Nourbese Philip.

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ENG  0191C	Hemingway & Faulkner				F+TR	Lebowitz

We will read the major novels, focusing on the authors' careers and creative lives and on the environmental, cultural and psychological influences on their work.

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ENG  0191D	Major Figures of the Irish Renaissance		E+ MW	Ullman

In this course, we will consider, and perhaps stretch, the idea of the Irish Literary Renaissance that is generally thought of as occurring in the late 19th century and early 20th century. We shall be looking at major writers: the reading list will include Yeats, Synge, Joyce (Dubliners and Portrait). Others may be Oscar Wilde, Lady Gregory, Shaw, Elizabeth Bowen, George Moore and, if we have time, Samuel Beckett. I am particularly interested in the interplay of specifically "Irish" culture and politics and literary traditions, and the internationalist leanings of some of these figures.

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ENG  0191E	Mapping London					2 9:10-11:40	Flynn

We will consider London as an urban space that can be mapped, measured, ordered, and imagined. First we will look at two major maps of London: the 1746, John Rocque map, measuring thirteen feet by six and a half feet, an unwieldy feat of representation, and the Tallis Street Views, 1738-1740, representations of individual streets, published serially, showing front views of buildings, elevations, including brief histories of neighborhood, packed with advertisements originating from establishments on each street. Applying the theory of Benjamin, Foucault and deCerteau, we will study "urban" texts of the eighteenth and nineteenth century including Ned Ward's London Spy, Addison and Steele's The Spectator, Aphra Behn's The Lucky Chance, Rochester's London Poetry, Gay's Beggar's Opera, Defoe's narratives of the life of Jack Sheppard, Defoe's Journal of the Plague Year, Pope's Dunciad, Swift's urban poetry, Fielding's Amelia, Burney's Evelina, Boswell's London Journal, Wollstonecraft's Maria, Blake's London poetry, and Thackeray's Vanity Fair. An important part of this course will be the Bolles Collection of eighteenth and nineteenth century maps, artifacts, guide books, and illustrations, located in the archives. It is particularly rich in nineteenth century material.

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ENG  0191G	The Victorian Novel				G+	Litvak

We will read six novels: Charles Dickens's Dombey and Son, Charlotte Brontė's Jane Eyre, Emily Brontė's Wuthering Heights, George Eliot's Middlemarch, Anthony Trollope's The Prime Minister, and Thomas Hardy's Tess of the D'Urbervilles. Our discussions will be based on careful analysis of the novels, but we will also be considering such general literary and cultural issues as realism and the gothic; comedy, sentimentality, and melodrama; gender and genre; subjectivity and middle-class ideology; "Englishness" and its racial others; sexuality and the marriage plot; childhood, illness, and death; fiction, literacy, and the marketplace. Dombey and Son, Middlemarch, and The Prime Minister are all long, so you should try to read one of them during vacation. A list of editions will be available in the English Department office during the registration period.

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ENG  0191H	Backgrounds to English Literature:  Vergil and Dante		G+	Fyler

This course will focus on two major texts in European literary tradition, Vergil's Aeneid and Dante's Commedia. The two are linked because Virgil is Dante's guide in his journey into Hell and up the mountain of Purgatory: he is the guide because Aeneid 6 describes an earlier trip to the underworld, but even more, because Dante has the whole Aeneid very much in mind throughout his own great poem. We will also look at a number of allusions to these works in English and American literature.

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ENG  0191I	Perspectives on American Poetry			E+ MW	Bamber

The contemporary philosophy that has been so important to literary studies, deconstruction, and the ancient philosophical religion of Buddhism are both versions of "the negative way." Both are attacks on the center and on the hierarchical, dualistic, teleological tendency of Western metaphysics. Both are intent on taking things away from us — things like our identity as a separate self and the idea of Truth or God or any word that begins with a capital letter. Both are silent or deliberately frustrating on the question of what we gain by so much renunciation. "I don't talk about the dharma," says the American Buddhist teacher Charlotte Beck. "Why talk about it? My job is to notice how I violate it." Barbara Johnson, a Harvard deconstructionist, writes "Truth is preserved [only] in vestigial form in the notion of error." Both systems are a kind of dance around an empty space; the same can be said for much of the imaginative language of poetry. "Tell all the truth but tell it slant," says Emily Dickinson, for whom poetic language is one long evasive maneuver.

In the course we will look at selected American poets whose work is illuminated by these systems of thought. We will begin with some contemporary poets (e.g., Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, Jane Hirshfield, Mary Kean) who are themselves Buddhists and who are part of the current effort to translate Buddhism into a modern American idiom. (As one Buddhist teacher put it, we need to understand how Buddhism changes when life is no longer a matter of "Chop wood, carry water," but "Make love, drive freeway.") Then we will consider the two great American poets of the nineteenth century, Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman, to see if they can be understood as part of an alternative tradition. We will also consider the poetry of Wallace Stevens, Elizabeth Bishop, and Mark Halliday; the writings of John Cage; and a relevant movie or two.

No prior experience with either Buddhist thought or deconstructionism is required.

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ENG  0191J     Asian American Literature			D+ TR 10:25-11:40	Talusan

Description TBA