ENG 0291-01
Graduate Seminar: Unbecoming Theories: Against "Modernism"
Edelman, Lee

For the theorists whose work we will study this semester, the question of language and representation is inseparable from the potential dissolution of intellectual, ideological, or conceptual systems. They all focus, in their various ways, on what several, including Derrida and Badiou, evoke as the promise of a radical "event"—an event that undoes, with a necessary violence, the logical frameworks of established order while ushering in what that order consigns to the space of the unthinkable. In the process, they often conduct a polemic against the concept of modernism as a historical category, posing against it a notion of rupture with a structural, not historical, provenance. We will approach the tension such theories engage by thinking about the death drive and its place in recent critical thought (including psychoanalysis, deconstruction, and queer theory). After looking at the relation between the death drive (especially as articulated by Lacan) and the renewed interest in what Benjamin characterizes as a certain sort of "weak messianism," we will see Derrida brings these two concepts together in Archive Fever. This will lead to a sequence of readings in which questions of literariness broach political and ethical concerns that center on the imperative of an "unbecoming" that the literary both occasions and resists. In addition to Lacan, Derrida, and Benjamin, critics whose works we will read may include Adorno, Agamben, Badiou, Bersani, Deleuze, de Man, Johnson, Kristeva, Rancierre, and Santner.
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ENG 0291-02
Graduate Seminar: U.S. Fictions
Ammons, E

This seminar focuses on late 19^th- and early 20^th-century U.S. literature. We will read a multiracial grouping of texts by Asian American, Latino/a, Native American, white European American, and African American authors, asking what binds them together and what divisions are significant. The historical period resonates with a number of concerns still current today—issues of feminist self-determination, debate about immigration, Indigenous resistance to imperialism, the exploitation of working people, and black, Latino, and Asian American insistence on self-definition. Theoretical reading will help us think about all of these issues, and we will be especially concerned with how writers in this period used fiction as social criticism. Primary texts will include work by Henry James, Sui Sin Far, María Cristina Mena, W. E. B. Du Bois, Edith Wharton, Zitkala Ŝa, Upton Sinclair, Pauline Hopkins, and Anzia Yezierska, as well as others. We will also view several films, including D. W. Griffith's KKK recruiting film which was the first movie shown in the White House, The Birth of a Nation. Group discussion, co-teaching, and a conference paper will be important parts of the course.
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ENG 0291-03
Graduate Seminar: The Victorian Novel
Litvak, J

We will read novels by Dickens, Thackeray, Charlotte Brontë, Emily Brontë, Collins, Braddon, Eliot, Trollope, Hardy, and Stoker, placing them in the context of recent criticism and theory. Discussions will be based on careful analysis of the novels, but we will also be considering such general literary and cultural issues as realism, the gothic, and the grotesque; comedy, sentimentality, and sensationalism; gender and the novel; subjectivity and middle-class ideology; "Englishness" and its racial others; sexuality and the marriage plot; childhood, illness and death; fiction, literacy, and the marketplace.
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ENG 0291-04
Graduate Seminar: The Canterbury Tales
Fyler, J

This seminar will undertake a close reading of the Canterbury Tales, with a focus on Chaucer's use of his sources, his cultural and literary contexts, and his pervasive interest in gender issues.
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