ENGLISH 1:
English Reading Group
A forum for conversation and exchange on different literary topics
Terms: Spr
| Units: 1
| Repeatable
5 times
(up to 5 units total)
ENGLISH 14Q:
'Tis All in Pieces: John Donne and the Early Modern World
One of the most innovative and dramatic poets in literary history, John Donne¿s writing bears the marks of the profound changes that were occurring on the threshold of the modern world, in such areas as science, astronomy,mathematical perspective, religion, exploration, theatre, and art. Donne¿s dramatic realism exerted a shaping influence on such modern poets as Browning, Eliot, and Rich; on contemporary composers such as Bob Dylan, Van Morrison, and Benjamin Britten; and on Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright: Margaret Edson. Topics include Donne's work within the vibrant historical and cultural milieu of the early modern world and related developments in early modern art and theatre.
Terms: Win
| Units: 2-3
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum
ENGLISH 19SI:
Science Fiction for Writers
A survey of several genres of fantasy and science fiction (soft or social science fiction, cyberpunk, dystopian fiction, new wave, zombies, etc.) with an eye towards exploring techniques for imbuing stories thematic depth and complex imaginings. Students will compose their own story for end-of-quarter workshop. Readings (may) include: Jonathan Lethem, Philip K. Dick, Adam Johnson, Neil Gaiman, William Gibson, Tzvetan Todorov, film.
Terms: Aut
| Units: 1-2
ENGLISH 21:
Masterpieces of American Literature (AMSTUD 121, ENGLISH 121)
(English majors and others taking 5 units, register for 121.) A survey of some of the definitive texts of American writing, such as Leaves of Grass, Benito Cereno, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The Waste Land, The Sun Also Rises, The Golden Apples, and The Crying of Lot 49.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 3-5
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, WAY-A-II, WAY-EDP
ENGLISH 22N:
Virginia Woolf: Art and Politics
Introduction to Woolf's diverse oeuvres: her novels, essays, short stories, diaries, and letters focusing on how she devised an art form shaped by political consciousness but not subordinate to it. How, for Woolf, were art and politics, the private and the public, the artist and the activist conjoined. Navigation of the multiple intersections of Woolf's artistic experimentation and sociopolitical consciousness from 1917 to 1941.
Terms: Aut
| Units: 3
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum
ENGLISH 32:
Technologies of Reading and Writing: The Nineteenth Century versus the Digital Age (ENGLISH 132)
The nineteenth century was a critical period for technological development that accelerated forms of communication. As the telegraph replaced the letter, daily gossip columns replaced word of mouth, and photographs replaced the painted illustration, theories of writing and reading changed dramatically. Through texts such as Keats's Letters, Shelley's Frankenstein, Carroll's Alice in Wonderland, and Stoker's Dracula, this course explores the effects of media on the creation, dissemination, and reception of literature. This course also facilitates comparative work by juxtaposing 19th-century media with contemporary technologies of writing and reading, such as emails, blogs, and wikis, and the impact of these technologies on the creation, dissemination, and reception of literature today.
Terms: Sum
| Units: 3-4
ENGLISH 43:
Introduction to African American Literature (AFRICAAM 43, AMSTUD 143, ENGLISH 143)
(English majors and others taking 5 units, register for 143.) African American literature from its earliest manifestations in the spirituals, trickster tales, and slave narratives to recent developments such as black feminist theory, postmodern fiction, and hip hop lyricism. The defining debates and phenomena within African American cultural history, including the status of realist aesthetics in black writing; the contested role of literature in black political struggle; the question of diaspora; the problem of intra-racial racism; and the emergence of black internationalism. Attention to the discourse of the Enlightenment, modernist aesthetics, and the role of Marxism in black political and literary history.
Terms: Aut
| Units: 3-5
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, GER:EC-AmerCul, WAY-A-II, WAY-EDP
ENGLISH 43A:
American Indian Mythology, Legend, and Lore (ENGLISH 143A, NATIVEAM 143A)
(English majors and others taking 5 units, register for 143A.)Readings from American Indian literatures, old and new. Stories, songs, and rituals from the 19th century, including the Navajo Night Chant. Tricksters and trickster stories; war, healing, and hunting songs; Aztec songs from the 16th century. Readings from modern poets and novelists including N. Scott Momaday, Louise Erdrich, and Leslie Marmon Silko, and the classic autobiography, Black Elk Speaks.
Terms: Aut
| Units: 3-5
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, WAY-A-II, WAY-EDP
ENGLISH 45F:
The Human Love of Mystery: A Journey Through Detective Fiction (ENGLISH 145F)
Reading and discussion of mystery and detective fiction from Sherlock Holmes through the Golden Age of Agatha Christie, to the "hard-boiled private eye" in Ross Macdonald's Lew Archer novels. Topics include the independent female private eye and social changes that allowed her emergence; the definition of mystery and detective fiction to include Sophocles' Oedipus Rex, Morrison¿s Song of Solomon, and Freud's theories; the enduring hold this genre has on imaginations; the fundamental concerns with justice and fear; and stimulation of the deep human fascination with the apparently inexplicable and the intellectual satisfaction of arriving at understanding.
Terms: Sum
| Units: 3-4
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum
ENGLISH 47:
Masterpieces of Contemporary Literature (ENGLISH 147)
Examination of seven predominately twentieth-century novels juxtaposed to interrogate the contemporary moment. How do novelists understand the present by representing the past? How and why do novelists rewrite, reinvent, or renounce the plotlines of influential forebears? Narrative forms include Realism, Romance, Modernism, Postmodernism, Utopia/Dystopia. Topics include narrative voice, intertextuality, social satire, politics and war, time and memory, gender and race in novels by Charlotte Bronte, Jean Rhys, George Orwell, Margaret Atwood, Virginia Woolf, Michael Cunningham and Ian McEwan. Relevant clips from recent film adaptations.
Terms: Aut
| Units: 3-5
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum
ENGLISH 62N:
Eros in Modern American Poetry
Preference to freshmen. Anne Carson, treating love from Sappho to Socrates, shows how the Greeks derived their philosophy from the erotic poetic tradition. Readings include: Carson's poetry which locates erotic desire in the larger context of the desire for knowledge; classic Japanese haiku masters such as Basho; and William Carlos Williams, Louise Bogan, and C.K. Williams.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 3
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum
ENGLISH 65N:
Contemporary Women Fiction Writers
Preference to freshmen. Novels and story collections by women writers whose work explores: domestic and global politics; love, sexuality, and orientation; and spirituality and its meanings. Readings includes Dandicant, Eisenberg, Munro, Morrison, O'Brien, and Erdrich.
Terms: Aut
| Units: 3
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, WAY-A-II
ENGLISH 73N:
Conflict and Resolution in the Novel
Preference to freshmen. The social work of the novel, its strategies for articulating difference, and its capacity to objectify points of view and posit resolutions to ideological disputes. The novel as an artistic device, part of material history, and style of social consciousness. Its relationship to language and cultural systems of representation. Readings from Franz Kafka, Milan Kundera, Toni Morrison, Umberto Eco, and John Coetzee.
| Units: 3
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum
ENGLISH 77N:
Living in the Past: Italy in the Anglo-American Imagination
Preference to freshmen. Italy as metaphor, in depictions by British and American writers from Shakespeare and Byron to D.H.Lawrence and Robert Hellenga.
| Units: 3
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum
ENGLISH 81:
Philosophy and Literature (CLASSGEN 81, COMPLIT 181, FRENGEN 181, GERGEN 181, ITALGEN 181, PHIL 81, SLAVGEN 181)
Required gateway course for Philosophical and Literary Thought; crosslisted in departments sponsoring the Philosophy and Literature track: majors should register in their home department; non-majors may register in any sponsoring department. Introduction to major problems at the intersection of philosophy and literature. Issues may include authorship, selfhood, truth and fiction, the importance of literary form to philosophical works, and the ethical significance of literary works. Texts include philosophical analyses of literature, works of imaginative literature, and works of both philosophical and literary significance. Authors may include Plato, Montaigne, Nietzsche, Borges, Beckett, Barthes, Foucault, Nussbaum, Walton, Nehamas, Pavel, and Pippin.
Terms: Win
| Units: 4-5
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, WAY-A-II
ENGLISH 81N:
Lyric Voice
Lyric poetry asks its reader to imagine a speaking voice. But whose voice inhabits the lyric poem? How have historical developments ¿ such as new printing technologies, the rise of liberal individualism, or the emergence of sound recording - influenced our sense of how a lyric should sound? Treatment of poems from a variety of historical periods while stressing the crucial role of the poetry of British Romanticism in shaping the modern sense of the lyric voice.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 3
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum
ENGLISH 82Q:
Shakespeare's Plays
Preference to sophomores. Eight representative plays; sonnets. Student papers provide topics for discussion. Students direct and perform scenes from the plays studied.
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum
ENGLISH 90:
Fiction Writing
The elements of fiction writing: narration, description, and dialogue. Students write complete stories and participate in story workshops. May be repeated for credit. Prerequisite: PWR 1 (waived in summer quarter).
Terms: Aut, Win, Spr, Sum
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II, WAY-CE
| Repeatable
2 times
(up to 10 units total)
ENGLISH 91:
Creative Nonfiction
(Formerly 94A.) Historical and contemporary as a broad genre including travel and nature writing, memoir, biography, journalism, and the personal essay. Students use creative means to express factual content.
Terms: Aut, Win, Spr, Sum
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II, WAY-CE
Instructors: ;
Antopol, M. (PI);
Evans, J. (PI);
Frisch, S. (PI);
Horack, S. (PI);
Hummel, M. (PI);
Hutchins, S. (PI);
Kealey, T. (PI);
Michas-Martin, S. (PI);
Soileau, S. (PI);
Tanaka, S. (PI)
ENGLISH 92:
Reading and Writing Poetry
Prerequisite: PWR 1. Issues of poetic craft. How elements of form, music, structure, and content work together to create meaning and experience in a poem. May be repeated for credit.
Terms: Aut, Win, Spr
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II, WAY-CE
| Repeatable
2 times
(up to 10 units total)
ENGLISH 94:
Writing Across Genres
For minors in creative writing. The forms and conventions of the contemporary short story and poem. How form, technique, and content combine to make stories and poems organic. Prerequisite: 90, 91, or 92.
Terms: Win, Spr
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II, WAY-CE
ENGLISH 100A:
Literary History I
First in a three quarter sequence. Team-taught, and ranging in subject matter across almost a millennium from the age of parchment to the age of Facebook, this required sequence of classes is the department's account of the major historical arc traced so far by literature in English. It maps changes and innovations as well as continuities, ideas, and aesthetic forms, providing a grid of knowledge and contexts for other, more specialized classes.
Terms: Aut
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, WAY-A-II
ENGLISH 100B:
Literary History II
Second in a three quarter sequence. Team-taught, and ranging in subject matter across almost a millennium from the age of parchment to the age of Facebook, this required sequence of classes is the department's account of the major historical arc traced so far by literature in English. It maps changes and innovations as well as continuities, ideas as well as aesthetic forms, providing a grid of knowledge and contexts for other, more specialized classes.
Terms: Win
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, WAY-A-II
ENGLISH 100C:
Literary History III
Third in a three quarter sequence. Team-taught, and ranging in subject matter across almost a millennium from the age of parchment to the age of Facebook, this required sequence of classes is the department's account of the major historical arc traced so far by literature in English. It maps changes and innovations as well as continuities, ideas as well as aesthetic forms, providing a grid of knowledge and contexts for other, more specialized classes.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, WAY-A-II
ENGLISH 103Q:
Reading and Writing Poetry about Science (STS 103Q)
Preference to sophomores. Students will study recent poetry inspired by the phenomena and history of the sciences in order to write such poems themselves. These poems bring sensuous human experience to bear on biology, ecology, neuroscience, physics, astronomy, and geology, as well as on technological advances and missteps. Poets such as Mark Doty, Jody Gladding, Albert Goldbarth, Jorie Graham, Sarah Lindsay, Adrienne Rich, W.S. Merwin, and C. K. Williams. Grounding in poetics, research in individually chosen areas of science, weekly analytical and creative writing. Enrollment limited to 12.
Terms: Win
| Units: 4
| UG Reqs: WAY-CE
ENGLISH 105H:
Medievalism
The "medievalism" of nineteenth-century British writers, their adoption of medieval subjects and themes, within the context of medieval literature. Leading questions cluster around three topics: Romance, Nation, and Space. Readings include Marie de France¿s Lais, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Malory¿s Morte D¿Arthure, Chaucer¿s House of Fame, Spenser's Faerie Queene, Scott's Ivanhoe, poems by Morris, R. Browning, D. G. Rossetti, and Hopkins, criticism by Arnold and Ruskin, and selections from Tennyson¿s Idylls of the Kings.
Terms: Aut
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, WAY-A-II
ENGLISH 111:
Medieval Literature
Survey of late-medieval English literature. Major authors include Chaucer, Langland, Margery Kempe, and the Pearl-poet. Genres include dream vision, romance, and lyric. Issues include the politics of writing in Middle English, the Christianization of Arthurian romance, and the construction of social class.
Terms: Win
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum
ENGLISH 112:
Literature and ....
A study of the relationship between literary texts ranging from Boccaccio's Decameron and Montaigne's Essays to T.S.Eliot's Murder in the Cathedral and such issues as morality, politics, religion, and nationality.
Terms: Win
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum
ENGLISH 114B:
Renaissance Poetry and Drama
Major playwrights who were also major poets; the relation both between the drama and the non-dramatic poetry, and between text and performance, manuscript and publication. Both stage history and the history of the texts will be considered. Plays discussed will include Doctor Faustus, the three texts of Hamlet and the two of Troilus and Cressida, and Volpone and The Alchemist. Poetry will include Venus and Adonis and Lucrece, the Shakespeare sonnets, poems of Jonson¿s, and Marlowe¿s Hero and Leander.
Terms: Aut
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum
ENGLISH 115A:
Shakespeare and Modern Critical Developments
Approaches include gender studies and feminism, race studies, Shakespeare's geographies in relation to the field of cultural geography, and the importance of religion in the period.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, WAY-A-II
ENGLISH 116A:
The Poetry of John Milton
Milton did not just write Paradise Lost! Living through one of England¿s most turbulent periods, which saw him defending the right of free speech, liberty of conscience, divorce, and even regicide (almost unthinkable in his day), Milton wrote examples of almost every genre (sacred hymn, masque, pastoral elegy, epic, brief epic, and tragedy), often blending the biblical and the classical. Readings include the major poems and selected prose, paying close attention to literary form and historical context.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum
ENGLISH 121:
Masterpieces of American Literature (AMSTUD 121, ENGLISH 21)
(English majors and others taking 5 units, register for 121.) A survey of some of the definitive texts of American writing, such as Leaves of Grass, Benito Cereno, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The Waste Land, The Sun Also Rises, The Golden Apples, and The Crying of Lot 49.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 3-5
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, WAY-A-II, WAY-EDP
ENGLISH 123:
American Literature and Culture to 1855 (AMSTUD 150)
Sources include histories, poetry, autobiography, captivity and slave narratives, drama, and fiction. Authors include Mather, Bradstreet, Rowlandson, Franklin, Brockden Brown, Emerson, Douglass, Hawthorne, and Melville.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, GER:EC-AmerCul, WAY-A-II
ENGLISH 123D:
American Literature, 1855 to World War I (AMSTUD 123D)
A survey of American writers from Whitman to T.S. Eliot, including Emily Dickinson, Mark Twain, Stephen Crane, Frank Norris, Kate Chopin, Theodore Dreiser, and Henry James. Topics include the tension between romance and realism, the impact of naturalism and modernism, as well as race, gender, and the literary evolution of the American language.
Terms: Aut
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum
ENGLISH 126B:
The Major Victorian Novel
The Victorian novel was a hugely influential cultural form, not unlike serial television dramas or role playing video games today. Examination of key Victorian novels with an eye to contextualizing themes, categorizing technical achievements and tracing each novel's position in the development of this major literary form.
Terms: Win
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum
ENGLISH 126D:
Victorian Sex
How can we make sense of a culture of extraordinary sexual repression that nevertheless seemed fully preoccupied with sex? Examination of the depictions of sex in Victorian literary and cultural texts. Authors include: Collins, Braddon, the Brownings, Swinburne, Stoker and Wilde.
Terms: Win
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, GER:EC-Gender, WAY-A-II, WAY-EDP
ENGLISH 131:
Representations of Women in 18th C. British Literature
Examination of the various literary incarnations of the eighteenth-century "Woman": virgin, harlot, matron, monster, feminist. Topics include representations of women in the 18th-c. satiric tradition--in the poetry of Pope and Swift, and visual works such as Hogarth's "Harlot's Progress" and "Marriage à la Mode". Emphasis on fictional representations, and the complex revolutionary heroines of Richardson, Cleland, Burney and Wollstonecraft.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum
ENGLISH 132:
Technologies of Reading and Writing: The Nineteenth Century versus the Digital Age (ENGLISH 32)
The nineteenth century was a critical period for technological development that accelerated forms of communication. As the telegraph replaced the letter, daily gossip columns replaced word of mouth, and photographs replaced the painted illustration, theories of writing and reading changed dramatically. Through texts such as Keats's Letters, Shelley's Frankenstein, Carroll's Alice in Wonderland, and Stoker's Dracula, this course explores the effects of media on the creation, dissemination, and reception of literature. This course also facilitates comparative work by juxtaposing 19th-century media with contemporary technologies of writing and reading, such as emails, blogs, and wikis, and the impact of these technologies on the creation, dissemination, and reception of literature today.
Terms: Sum
| Units: 3-4
ENGLISH 134:
The Marriage Plot
The marriage plot in British fiction. Novels include Pamela, Pride and Prejudice, Middlemarch, Jude the Obscure and Mrs. Dalloway.
Terms: Aut
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, GER:EC-Gender, WAY-SI
ENGLISH 136D:
Wordsworth and Hopkins
Comparative survey of the works of William Wordsworth and Gerard Manley Hopkins, who helped shape modern poetry. Emphasis on their innovative approaches to poetics, distinctive but profound spiritualism, idiosyncratic conceptions of masculinity, and pioneering writing about the natural environment.
Terms: Aut
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum
ENGLISH 140A:
Creative Resistance and the Holocaust (JEWISHST 150A)
"Creative resistance," a little-known phenomenon and a new term, emerges astonishingly during times of devastation. Under the Nazis, it took form in graffiti, diaries, chronicles, poems, paintings, photos, and music. How did a human spirit of creativity arise from such duress, and to what end? Why would acts of imagination, incapable of stopping destruction, count as resistance? Guests include a string quartet playing music by a prisoner, and a guest speaker who is a survivor of seven camps. Works include Goya¿s counter-Napoleon etchings, poems from World War I and Iraq, and contemporary examples.
Terms: Win
| Units: 3-5
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum
ENGLISH 141A:
British Literary Culture, 1900-1922
The first two decades of the twentieth century were a period of unparalleled social, political, and cultural change in Britain, beginning in the last year of Queen Victoria's reign, through the Great War of 1914-18, and ending in 1922, the year when The Waste Land and Ulysses were published. How did writers and readers get from the Victorian novel to the modernist one, from metered verse to experiments in free verse? Themes include: violence and resistance (aesthetic and actual); the inner life and outer life; shifting relations between classes, genders, and generations; and the relationship between literary form and historical process.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum
ENGLISH 143:
Introduction to African American Literature (AFRICAAM 43, AMSTUD 143, ENGLISH 43)
(English majors and others taking 5 units, register for 143.) African American literature from its earliest manifestations in the spirituals, trickster tales, and slave narratives to recent developments such as black feminist theory, postmodern fiction, and hip hop lyricism. The defining debates and phenomena within African American cultural history, including the status of realist aesthetics in black writing; the contested role of literature in black political struggle; the question of diaspora; the problem of intra-racial racism; and the emergence of black internationalism. Attention to the discourse of the Enlightenment, modernist aesthetics, and the role of Marxism in black political and literary history.
Terms: Aut
| Units: 3-5
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, GER:EC-AmerCul, WAY-A-II, WAY-EDP
ENGLISH 143A:
American Indian Mythology, Legend, and Lore (ENGLISH 43A, NATIVEAM 143A)
(English majors and others taking 5 units, register for 143A.)Readings from American Indian literatures, old and new. Stories, songs, and rituals from the 19th century, including the Navajo Night Chant. Tricksters and trickster stories; war, healing, and hunting songs; Aztec songs from the 16th century. Readings from modern poets and novelists including N. Scott Momaday, Louise Erdrich, and Leslie Marmon Silko, and the classic autobiography, Black Elk Speaks.
Terms: Aut
| Units: 3-5
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, WAY-A-II, WAY-EDP
ENGLISH 144:
British Modernism, 1890-1950
The history and theory of modernism, with particular focus on literature written in Britain from 1890 to 1950. Major authors include James, Conrad, Yeats, Joyce, Woolf, Eliot, Pound, and Beckett. Why was it necessary to "make it new"? What were the ambitions, strategies, and limitations of modernism as a project?
Terms: Spr
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum
ENGLISH 144B:
Contemporary British Fiction
How do British novelists chart the dramatic changes in culture, class, gender and race relations, economy, and nation that followed the end of the Second World War? Particular focus on writers who came of age during this period and the generation who succeeded them, including some of today¿s most internationally acclaimed authors. What political, cultural, and historical concerns shape the narrative poetics of works by Margaret Drabble, Martin Amis, AS Byatt, Julian Barnes, Kazuo Ishiguro, Salman Rushdie, Zadie Smith, and Ian McEwan.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, WAY-A-II
ENGLISH 145:
Another Way to be: Writings by Women of Color
(English majors and others taking 5 units, register for 145.) Themes include family relations, identity formation, racism and colorism, gender and sexuality, spirituality, and globalization. Rhetorical and aesthetic strategies and the associated development of a method of cultural analysis. Authors may include the following: Gloria Anzaldua, Cherrie Moraga, Toni Cade Bambara, Leslie Marmon Silko, Maxine Hong Kingston, Toni Morrison, Helena Maria Viramontes, Sandra Cisneros, among others.
| Units: 3-5
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, GER:EC-Gender
ENGLISH 145F:
The Human Love of Mystery: A Journey Through Detective Fiction (ENGLISH 45F)
Reading and discussion of mystery and detective fiction from Sherlock Holmes through the Golden Age of Agatha Christie, to the "hard-boiled private eye" in Ross Macdonald's Lew Archer novels. Topics include the independent female private eye and social changes that allowed her emergence; the definition of mystery and detective fiction to include Sophocles' Oedipus Rex, Morrison¿s Song of Solomon, and Freud's theories; the enduring hold this genre has on imaginations; the fundamental concerns with justice and fear; and stimulation of the deep human fascination with the apparently inexplicable and the intellectual satisfaction of arriving at understanding.
Terms: Sum
| Units: 3-4
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum
ENGLISH 146:
Development of the Short Story: Continuity and Innovation
The dual concepts of continuity and innovation. The illumination of love, death, desire, violence, and empathy. Texts include Maupassant, Babel, Chopin, D.H. Lawrence, Woolf, and Flannery O'Connor. Required for Creative Writing emphasis.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, WAY-A-II
ENGLISH 146C:
Hemingway, Hurston, Faulkner, and Fitzgerald
While Hemingway and Fitzgerald were flirting with the expatriate avant-garde in Europe, Hurston and Faulkner were performing anthropological field-work in the local cultures of the American South. This course will address the tremendous diversity of concerns and styles of four writers who marked America's coming-of-age as a literary nation with their multifarious experiments in representing the regional and the global, the racial and the cosmopolitan, the macho and the feminist, the decadent and the impoverished.
Last offered: Autumn 2009
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, GER:EC-AmerCul, WAY-A-II, WAY-EDP
ENGLISH 147:
Masterpieces of Contemporary Literature (ENGLISH 47)
Examination of seven predominately twentieth-century novels juxtaposed to interrogate the contemporary moment. How do novelists understand the present by representing the past? How and why do novelists rewrite, reinvent, or renounce the plotlines of influential forebears? Narrative forms include Realism, Romance, Modernism, Postmodernism, Utopia/Dystopia. Topics include narrative voice, intertextuality, social satire, politics and war, time and memory, gender and race in novels by Charlotte Bronte, Jean Rhys, George Orwell, Margaret Atwood, Virginia Woolf, Michael Cunningham and Ian McEwan. Relevant clips from recent film adaptations.
Terms: Aut
| Units: 3-5
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum
ENGLISH 150:
Modern Poetry and the Visual Arts
The relationship between photography, painting, and sculpture, and poetry in the 20th century.
Terms: Win
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum
ENGLISH 151A:
T. S. Eliot and 20th Century Poetry
An intensive introduction to the full range of Eliot's work in poetry, prose, and drama. The formal properties of Eliot's writing--his metrics, syntax, use of allusion, and wit--alongside its recurring preoccupation with history, landscape, death, and redemption. How and why did he become the most influential poet-critic of the twentieth century?
Terms: Aut
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum
ENGLISH 151B:
John Berryman's Dream Songs and His Archive
When John Berryman published the first volume of this Dream Songs in 1964, readers were baffled and intrigued by this stylistically radical work. Even his friend Robert Lowell was angered by the difficulty of this powerful, eccentric book, which won the Pulitzer Prize that year. Readings include The Dream Songs and works of some of the writers that formed Berryman's archive: Shakespeare, Freud, Hopkins, Yeats, Rilke, Frost, Hemingway, Williams, Lowell, Plath.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum
ENGLISH 152A:
"Mutually Assured Destruction": American Culture and the Cold War (AMSTUD 152A)
The temperature of the early Cold War years via readings of Soviet and U.S. propaganda; documentary film and film noir; fiction by Bellow, Ellison, O¿Connor, and Mailer; social theory by Arendt, the New York Intellectuals, and the Frankfurt School; and political texts such as Kennan¿s Sources of Soviet Conduct, the ¿Truman Doctrine¿ speech, and the National Security Council Report 68. Major themes include the discourse of totalitarianism, MacCarthyism, strategies of containment, the nuclear threat, the figure of the ¿outsider¿ and the counterculture, and the cultural shift from sociological to psychological idioms.
Terms: Aut
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum
ENGLISH 152G:
Global Harlem Renaissance (AFRICAAM 152G, AMSTUD 152G)
Examination of the explosion of African American artistic expression during 1920s and 30s New York known as the Harlem Renaissance. Amiri Baraka once referred to the Renaissance as a kind of ¿vicious Modernism,¿ as a ¿BangClash,¿ that impacted and was impacted by political, cultural and aesthetic changes not only in the U.S. but Europe, the Caribbean and Latin America. Focus on the literature, graphic arts, and the music of the era in this global context.
Terms: Aut
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, GER:EC-AmerCul, WAY-A-II, WAY-EDP
ENGLISH 154B:
Everything But Modernism: Low to Middling Genres
Since the era of modernism (circa 1890-1945), we have learned to distinguish sharply between "high" literature--difficult, serious, advanced--and "low," popular, or even bourgeois literature. And we have tended to think only the Joyces, Woolfs, and Eliots worthy of study. But what about that great discarded mass of other kinds of writing? Survey of works from the early 1900s in the modes scorned by the modernists, exploring the ancestry of the ever-popular but still-stigmatized realm of "genre" fiction. Genres include: mystery, dialect poetry, early scifi, melodrama, sentimental lyric, the arrière-garde realist novel. Knowledge of modernism not required.
Terms: Aut
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum
ENGLISH 154C:
Modern British Poetry
Poets include Thomas Hardy, G. M. Hopkins, Thom Gunn, and W. S. Graham.
Terms: Win
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum
ENGLISH 154E:
Twentieth-Century Irish Literature
Plays, poems, short stories, and novels. Writers include James Joyce, William Yeats, Mary Lavin, Kate O'Brien,William Trevor, Seamus Heaney, and Samuel Beckett. How the writer can sustain imaginative freedom and literary experiment in the face of a turbulent history.
Terms: Win
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum
ENGLISH 156A:
The Poetry of Wallace Stevens
Intensive study of one of the greatest and most challenging twentieth-century poets, Wallace Stevens, from his early, playful lyrics to his monumental meditative sequences of the 1940s and 1950s. Topics include: modernism 1910-1955, abstraction, literary politics in the 1930s, poetry and war, the late-Romantic lyric, philosophical poetry, the sequence form, poetic sound, humor, "late style" , concluding with a survey of Stevens's influence on later poets.
Terms: Win
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum
ENGLISH 160:
Poetry and Poetics
Introduction to the reading of poetry, with emphasis on how the sense of poems is shaped through diction, imagery, and technical elements of verse.
Terms: Aut, Win, Spr
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, WAY-A-II
ENGLISH 161:
Narrative and Narrative Theory
An introduction to stories and storytelling--that is, to narrative. What is narrative? When is narrative fictional and when non-fictional? How is it done, word by word, sentence by sentence? Must it be in prose? Can it be in pictures? How has storytelling changed over time? Focus on various forms, genres, structures, and characteristics of narrative.
Terms: Aut, Win, Spr
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, WAY-A-II
ENGLISH 162:
Critical Methods
Introduction to the different intellectual models which help us explain and interpret literary texts, genres, and movements.
Terms: Aut, Win, Spr
| Units: 5
Terms: Win
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum
ENGLISH 170H:
Textual Selves
A survey of the way in which human identity has been constructed in a variety of different literary texts ranging from Augustine's Confessions and Dante's Divine Comedy to Thomas Hardy's Mayor of Casterbridge and Graham Greene's The Quiet American.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum
ENGLISH 172:
Modern Indian Literature
Engagement with the various vernacular and Anglophone literary traditions of modern India. What is gained, and what is lost for the large and complex phenomenon of modern Indian literature, when its most visible representative, Anglophone fiction, threatens to overshadow the rest and sits easy with the new image of rise and growth that engulfs the nation and its diaspora today? Texts by Dutt, Chatterjee, Tagore, Devi, Premchand, Verma, Sobti, Manto, Murthy, Ambai, Narayan, Rao, Ezekiel, Lal, Ghosh, Rushdie, and others.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum
ENGLISH 172D:
Introduction to Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity (CSRE 196C, PSYCH 155, SOC 146)
How different disciplines approach topics and issues central to the study of ethnic and race relations in the U.S. and elsewhere. Lectures by senior faculty affiliated with CSRE. Discussions led by CSRE teaching fellows.
Terms: Win
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-SocSci, GER:EC-AmerCul, WAY-EDP, WAY-SI
ENGLISH 172E:
The Literature of the Americas (COMPLIT 142)
The intellectual and aesthetic problems of inter-American literature conceived as an entirety. Emphasis is on continuities and crises relevant to N., Central, and S. American literatures. Issues such as the encounters between world views, the emergence of creole and racially mixed populations, slavery, the New World voice, myths of America as paradise or utopia, the coming of modernism, 20th-century avant gardes, and distinctive modern episodes such as the Harlem Renaissance, the Beats, magical realism, and Noigandres in comparative perspective.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, GER:EC-AmerCul, WAY-A-II
ENGLISH 174H:
The Triumph of the Normal: The English Novel from Bunyan to Orwell
Unlike French, Russian, North and Latin American novels, with their often oppositional or marginal heroes, the English novel has given a central role to the figure of the normal hero/ine, viewed as both normative and common. Focus is on uncovering the social logic behind this choice, and following the parallel evolution of novelistic style towards normal language.
Terms: Win
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum
ENGLISH 180:
The Bible as Literature
English literature abounds with references to the Bible that register not only the cultural and religious significance of the text but also its power and beauty as literature. Focus on its literary qualities, reading selections from the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament. Study of the text's form, style, structure, and themes, as well as the historical circumstances of the text¿s composition. No prior knowledge of the Bible is necessary.
Terms: Aut
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum
ENGLISH 183C:
Feminism and American Literature (AMSTUD 183C, JEWISHST 153C)
How writers have endeavored to enlarge the canvas on which women can paint their lives. Fiction, journalism, and poetry engaging how women come to understand who they might become; women's role in the home and outside the home; motherhood, marriage, work; etc. Writing by Euro-American, African-American, Asian-American and Latino writers. Particular focus on feminists' use of humor to undercut demeaning assumptions, stereotypes and texts. Readings will include feminist parodies of advice manuals, cookbooks, literary criticism and fairy tales.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, GER:EC-Gender
ENGLISH 183E:
First Person: Autobiography and Memoir
Study of classic literary autobiographies and memoirs, including Gertrude Stein's Autobiography Of Alice B. Toklas; Ernest Hemingway's A Moveable Feast; and J.R. Ackerley's My Father And Myself, plus various more recent autobiographical experiments---e.g., graphic memoirs (Art Spiegelman's Maus and Alison Bechdel's Fun Home) as well as certain recent autobiographical films such as Capturing The Friedmans.
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum
ENGLISH 185A:
The Trauma Narrative
It's expected that literary characters grow and change. It's accepted that characters value insight and discovery and are willing to face conflict, overcome obstacles and make meaningful choices on their paths toward satisfying deeply held desires. But what of characters whose stories are of loss, dislocation and marginalization? What shapes and structures are organic to painful stories? By combining a critical and creative approach, this seminar will examine essays, short stories and novels to reveal how trauma narratives make special use of architecture, temporality and narrative strategy to produce forms that challenge traditional conventions and reader's expectations.
Terms: Win
| Units: 5
ENGLISH 185B:
¿Mammy-Made¿ Right Here at Home: Twain, Hemingway, Faulkner, Ellison
Examination of four important novels, Twain¿s Huckleberry Finn, Hemingway¿s The Sun Also Rises, Faulkner¿s Absalom, Absalom and Ellison¿s Invisible Man, each centrally motivated by the complex and ongoing literary project of describing and creating the concept of Americanness. Each of the four authors uses the novel genre to explore complex configurations of culture, race and class through distinct (and distinctive) masculinist narrative modes that ventriloquize the fantasies and realities of the American Hero they speak into being. Careful readings of these four rich and difficult texts alongside significant critical responses and with an emphasis on historical context.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum
ENGLISH 185J:
Creative Non-Fiction: A Form for Our Times
In the early decades of the novel, relatively few questioned what the form was and how it came into fashion. Examination of ¿creative non-fiction,¿ a genre that has appeared, Athena-like, armed with verisimilitude, emotional truth and narrative drive. Readings across the genre, a survey of its influences and an attempt at definition. Topics include personal and critical writing in the hopes that students will better appreciate this mode of discourse not only as a rare glimpse at a genre forming itself, but as a powerful tool for creative expression.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 5
ENGLISH 186:
Tales of Three Cities: New York, Chicago, Los Angeles (AMSTUD 186)
How urban form and experience shape literary texts and how literary texts participate in the creation of place, through the literature of three American cities as they ascended to cultural and iconographical prominence: New York in the early to mid 19th century; Chicago in the late 19th and early 20th centuries; and Los Angeles in the mid to late 20th century.
Terms: Win
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, WAY-A-II
ENGLISH 187J:
Lady Sings the Blues: Blues, Literature, and Black Feminism (AFRICAAM 187J)
(Formally ENGLISH 187H) Examination of a long tradition of feminist articulations in black women's blues expressed in sound and literature over the course of the twentieth century. Familiarity with the recurrent tropes of black women's blues and how these coalesce in a feminism based on the intersections of race, gender, class, and sexuality by bringing together black women writers, thinkers, and songstresses such as Gayl Jones, Bessie Smith, Zora Neale Hurston, Alice Walker, Nina Simone, and Billie Holiday. Supplemental readings from cultural theorists such as Angela Davis, Hazel Carby, Farah Jasmine Griffin, and others in order to build a critical framework for interpreting, historicizing, and theorizing black women's blues.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, GER:EC-Gender
ENGLISH 187P:
Updike, Cheever and Roth
Close reading and discussion of fiction by John Updike, John Cheever, and Philip Roth, closely connected writers whose work has altered the course of American fiction. Primary focus will be style, as will questions of craft in general: approach will be writerly rather than theoretical. Texts include short stories, essays, letters, interviews, and novels including Updike¿s Centaur and Rabbit, Run, Cheever¿s short stories and his novel Falconer, Roth¿s Ghost Writer and The Dying Animal.
Terms: Win
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum
ENGLISH 190:
Intermediate Fiction Writing
May be taken twice for credit. Lottery. Priority to last quarter/year in school, majors in English with Creative Writing emphasis, and Creative Writing minors. Prerequisite: 90 or 91.
Terms: Aut, Win, Spr
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: WAY-CE
| Repeatable
2 times
(up to 10 units total)
ENGLISH 190F:
Fiction into Film
Workshop. For screenwriting students. Story craft, structure, and dialogue. Assignments include short scene creation, character development, and a long story. How fictional works are adapted to screenplays, and how each form uses elements of conflict, time, summary, and scene. Priority to seniors and Film Studies majors. Prerequisite: 90.
Terms: Win
| Units: 5
ENGLISH 190G:
The Graphic Novel
Interdisciplinary. Evolution, subject matter, form, conventions, possibilities, and future of the graphic novel genre. Guest lectures. Collaborative creation of a graphic novel by a team of writers, illustrators, and designers. Prerequisite: consent of instructor.
Last offered: Spring 2010
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: WAY-CE
| Repeatable
2 times
(up to 10 units total)
ENGLISH 190T:
Special Topics in Intermediate Fiction Writing
Focus on a particular topic or process. Work includes aspects of reading short stories and novels, writing at least 30-50 pages of fiction, and responding to peers' work in workshop. May be repeated for credit. Prerequisite: 91 or 90.
Terms: Aut, Spr
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: WAY-CE
| Repeatable
2 times
(up to 10 units total)
ENGLISH 190V:
Reading for Writers
Taught by the Stein Visiting Fiction Writer. Prerequisite: 90.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 5
| Repeatable
for credit
ENGLISH 191:
Intermediate Creative Nonfiction
Continuation of 91. Workshop. The application of advanced storytelling techniques to fact-based personal narratives, emphasizing organic writing, discovering audience, and publication. Guest lecturers, collaborative writing, and publication of the final project in print, audio, or web formats. Prerequisite: 91 or 90.
Terms: Aut, Win, Spr, Sum
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II, WAY-CE
| Repeatable
2 times
(up to 10 units total)
ENGLISH 191T:
Special Topics in Intermediate Creative Nonfiction
Workshop. Continuation of 91. Focus is on forms of the essay. Works from across time and nationality for their craft and technique; experimentation with writing exercises. Students read and respond to each other's longer nonfiction projects. May be repeated for credit. Prerequisite: 91 or 90.
Terms: Win, Spr
| Units: 5
| Repeatable
1 times
(up to 5 units total)
ENGLISH 192:
Intermediate Poetry Writing
May be taken twice. Lottery. Priority to last quarter/year in school, majors in English with Creative Writing emphasis, and Creative Writing minors. Prerequisite: 92.
Terms: Aut, Win, Spr
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: WAY-CE
| Repeatable
2 times
(up to 10 units total)
ENGLISH 192V:
The Occasions of Poetry
Taught by the Mohr Visiting Poet. Prerequisite: 92.
Terms: Win
| Units: 5
| Repeatable
for credit
ENGLISH 194:
Individual Research
See section above on Undergraduate Programs, Opportunities for Advanced Work, Individual Research.
Terms: Aut, Win, Spr, Sum
| Units: 5
| Repeatable
for credit
ENGLISH 195W:
Writing Center Peer Tutor Seminar (PWR 195)
For students selected to serve as peer writing tutors in the Stanford Writing Center and/or at other campus sites. Readings on and reflection about writing processes, the dynamics of writing and tutoring situations, tutoring techniques, learning styles, diversity, and ethics. Observation of tutoring sessions, written responses to readings, and other written work.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 3
ENGLISH 196A:
Honors Seminar: Critical Approaches to Literature
Required of students in the English honors program. Reading and writing advanced literary criticism. Critical writings and approaches. Goal is to support the development of students' honors theses.
Terms: Aut
| Units: 3
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II
ENGLISH 196B:
Honors Essay Workshop
Required of English honors students.
Terms: Aut
| Units: 2
ENGLISH 197:
Seniors Honors Essay
In two quarters.
Terms: Win, Spr
| Units: 1-10
| Repeatable
for credit
ENGLISH 198:
Individual Work
Undergraduates who wish to study a subject or area not covered by regular courses may, with consent, enroll for individual work under the supervision of a member of the department. 198 may not be used to fulfill departmental area or elective requirements without consent. Group seminars are not appropriate for 198.
Terms: Aut, Win, Spr, Sum
| Units: 1-5
| Repeatable
for credit
Instructors: ;
Antopol, M. (PI);
Boland, E. (PI);
Castle, T. (PI);
Di Piero, W. (PI);
Drake, S. (PI);
Elam, M. (PI);
Evans, J. (PI);
Fields, K. (PI);
Frisch, S. (PI);
Gordon, M. (PI);
Greene, R. (PI);
Hummel, M. (PI);
Hutchins, S. (PI);
Jarvis, C. (PI);
Johnson, A. (PI);
Jones, G. (PI);
Kealey, T. (PI);
Keller, A. (PI);
Kline, P. (PI);
Lunsford, A. (PI);
MacDonald, D. (PI);
McGriff, M. (PI);
Michas-Martin, S. (PI);
Moya, P. (PI);
Orgel, S. (PI);
Paulson, L. (PI);
Rampersad, A. (PI);
Riggs, D. (PI);
Rovee, C. (PI);
Shloss, C. (PI);
Tallent, E. (PI);
Tanaka, S. (PI);
Vermeule, B. (PI);
Wolff, T. (PI);
Ablaza, C. (GP);
Hutchins, S. (GP)
ENGLISH 198L:
Individual Work: Levinthal Tutorial
Undergraduate writers work individually with visiting Stegner Fellows in poetry, fiction, and if available, nonfiction. Students design their own curriculum; Stegner Fellows act as writing mentors and advisers. Prerequisites: 90, 91, or 92; submitted manuscript.
Terms: Win, Spr
| Units: 5
ENGLISH 199:
Senior Independent Essay
Open, with department approval, to seniors majoring in non-Honors English who wish to work throughout the year on a 10,000 word critical or scholarly essay. Applicants submit a sample of their expository prose, proposed topic, and bibliography to the Director of Undergraduate Studies before preregistration in May of the junior year. Each student accepted is responsible for finding a department faculty adviser. May be repeated for credit.
Terms: Aut, Win
| Units: 1-10
| Repeatable
for credit
ENGLISH 201:
The Bible and Literature
Differences in translations of the Bible into English. Recognizing and interpreting biblical allusion in texts from the medieval to modern periods. Readings from the Bible and from British, Canadian, American, and African American, and African literature in English.
Terms: Win
| Units: 5
ENGLISH 202:
History of the Book
The book as developing concept and material object, from scroll to codex, manuscript to print, cold type to electronic medium. Bibliographical and paleographical techniques. History and theory. The use of books; the history of reading practices, including marginalia and other marks of ownership. Students develop individual projects from Stanford's rare book collection.
Terms: Win
| Units: 5
ENGLISH 214:
Three modern epics: Paradise Lost, The Prelude, Don Juan
To speak of a modern epic is something of a paradox because epic is the oldest genre in the Western poetic tradition and the one with the most imposing ancient exemplars. And yet the genre proves an irresistible challenge to poets even after the rise of the novel, a genre which might seem more appropriate to a mercantile class and to philosophies of individualism. Examination of how Milton, Wordsworth, and Byron respond to the conditions and challenges of modernity through and against epic conventions--and how the genre itself is transformed as a result.
Terms: Win
| Units: 5
ENGLISH 227:
Melville's Moby-Dick
A close reading of Melville's 1850 masterpiece, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale. Focus on the novel's 19th-century literary-historical context and on 20th- and 21st-century critical, literary-theoretical, and political-theoretical readings of Moby-Dick.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 5
ENGLISH 253:
Literary Studies and the Digital Library
Ways of reading, interpreting, and understanding literature at the macro scale as an aggregate system. Theoretical issues; landmark essays in the field; how digital libraries and literary corpora invite new types of literary research that challenge conventional approaches.
Terms: Aut
| Units: 5
ENGLISH 257:
Journalism and Imaginative Writing in America (AMSTUD 257, COMM 278)
Walt Whitman spent twenty-five years as a journalist before publishing his first book of poems. Mark Twain was a journalist for twenty years before publishing his first novel. Topics include examination of how writers¿ backgrounds in journalism shaped the poetry or fiction for which they are best known; study of recent controversies surrounding writers who blurred the line between journalism and fiction. Writers include Whitman, Fanny Fern, Twain, Pauline Hopkins, Theodore Dreiser, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Ernest Hemingway, Meridel LeSueur.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 5
ENGLISH 260G:
Century's End: Race, Gender, and Ethnicity at the Turn of the Century (AMSTUD 260G, JEWISHST 250G)
How race, gender and ethnicity were constructed and construed in American culture from 1890 to 1914. Readings include stories, poetry, drama, and journalism by Euro-American, African-American, Asian-American, Jewish-American and Native American writers that illuminate how race, gender and ethnicity inflected such issues as the performance of identity, the purpose of education, the uses of dialect, and the dynamics of violence during this period.
Terms: Win
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: GER:EC-AmerCul
ENGLISH 261A:
Geography, Time, and Trauma in Asian American Literature (AMSTUD 261A, ASNAMST 187)
The notion that homes can be stable locations for cultural, racial, ethnic, and similarly situated identity categories. Tthe possibility that there really is no place like home for Asian American subjects. How geography, landscape, and time situate traumas within fictional Asian American narratives.
Terms: Aut
| Units: 5
ENGLISH 261E:
Mixed Race Literature in the U.S. and South Africa (AFRICAAM 261E, AMSTUD 261E)
As scholar Werner Sollors recently suggested, novels, poems, stories about interracial contacts and mixed race constitute ¿an orphan literature belonging to no clear ethnic or national tradition.¿ Yet the theme of mixed race is at the center of many national self-definitions, even in our U.S. post-Civil Rights and South Africa¿s post-Apartheid era. This course examines aesthetic engagements with mixed race politics in these trans- and post-national dialogues, beginning in the 1700s and focusing on the 20th and 21st centuries.
Terms: Win
| Units: 5
ENGLISH 262D:
African American Poetics (AFRICAAM 262D, AMSTUD 262D)
Examination of African American poetic expressive forms from the 1700s to the 2000s, considering the central role of the genre--from sonnets to spoken word, from blues poetry to new media performance--in defining an evolving literary tradition and cultural identity.
Terms: Win
| Units: 5
ENGLISH 269T:
Imprisonment and the Dramatic Imagination: Censorship Reconsidered (DRAMA 169H, DRAMA 369)
Once again we are back in a nascent "culture war." This call will analyze historically significant instances of the politics of arts censorship, with an emphasis on the last twenty five years in the United States. Issues of funding, free speech, and ideological performance will be considered. Class meets every other week.
Terms: Win
| Units: 2
ENGLISH 271B:
Chaucer
An introduction to Chaucer¿s writings, including the Canterbury Tales, the Book of the Duchess, and the Parliament of Fowls. Readings in Middle English. No prior knowledge of Middle English or medieval literature is expected.
Terms: Win
| Units: 5
ENGLISH 279D:
James Joyce and Ulysses
Close reading of Ulysses as one of the most significant literary works of modernism and 20th-century literary history. The nature and variety of its significance, and the meanings that Joyce's epic of modernism generates.
Terms: Win
| Units: 5
ENGLISH 290:
Advanced Fiction Writing
Workshop critique of original short stories or novel. Prerequisites: manuscript, consent of instructor, and 190-level fiction workshop.
Terms: Aut, Win
| Units: 5
ENGLISH 292:
Advanced Poetry Writing
Focus is on generation and discussion of student poems, and seeking published models for the work.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 5
ENGLISH 293:
Literary Translation
An overview of translation theories and practices over time. The aesthetic, ethical, and political questions raised by the act and art of translation and how these pertain to the translator's tasks. Discussion of particular translation challenges and the decision processes taken to address these issues. Coursework includes assigned theoretical readings, comparative translations, and the undertaking of an individual translation project.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 3-5
ENGLISH 299D:
Tooling Up for Digital Humanities (ENGLISH 399D, HISTORY 299D, HISTORY 399D)
What are the digital humanities? The twenty-first century presents new opportunities in the humanities, such as unprecedented access to millions upon millions of digitized sources along with powerful technological tools to study those sources. Yet it also raises new challenges, such as the responsible and effective use of technology, and defining the nature of digital scholarship and communication. This workshop offers an introduction to fundamental concepts, methods, and issues within the growing field of digital humanities, including managing your online identity, digitizing sources, managing databases, text mining, spatial analysis, visualization, and pedagogy.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 1
ENGLISH 303:
Experiment and the Novel (COMPLIT 353A)
A double exploration of experiment in the novel from 1750 into the 19th century. Taking off from Zola's The Experimental Novel, consideration of the novel's aspect as scientific instrument. Taking the idea of experimental fiction in the usual sense of departures from standard practice, consideration of works that seem to break away from techniques of "realism" devised prior to 1750. Possible texts by: Lennox, Sterne, Walpole, Goldsmith, Godwin, Lewis, Shelley, Hogg, Emily Bronte, and Diderot.
Terms: Aut
| Units: 5
ENGLISH 311:
Female Modernists: Women Writers in Paris Between the Wars
Focus on expatriate women writers, American and British, who lived and wrote in Paris between the wars including Edith Wharton, Stein and Toklas, Djuna Barnes, Margaret Anderson, Janet Flanner, Natalie Barney, Kay Boyle, Mina Loy, Romaine Brooks, Mary Butts, Radclyffe Hall, Colette, and Jean Rhys. Central theme will be Paris as a lure and inspiration for bohemian female modernists, and the various alternative and emancipatory literary communities they created.
Terms: Aut
| Units: 5
ENGLISH 314:
Epic and Empire (COMPLIT 320A)
Focus is on Virgil's Aeneid and its influence, tracing the European epic tradition (Ariosto, Tasso, Camoes, Spenser, and Milton) to New World discovery and mercantile expansion in the early modern period.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 5
ENGLISH 314D:
Late 17th Century English Literature
From the preface to Gondibert to Pope¿s Dunciad, English literature produced a frenzied series of epic experiments, some in rhyme, some in blank verse, some even written for the stage. Survey of the literary landscape of the late seventeenth-century through a single lens: the problem posed by the imperative to write in the heroic vein. Genres will include panegyric, epic, heroic play, tragedy, and opera. Authors will include Davenant, Dennis, Dryden, Marvell, Milton, Rochester, and Addison.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 5
ENGLISH 334B:
Concepts of Modernity 2: Aesthetics and the Public Sphere (MTL 334B)
A selection of 20th-century theory focusing on the relation of aesthetics and the public sphere. Themes include the conceptualization of the public sphere, the debates over the relation of art and politics, aesthetics as form of public rhetoric, the social mission of literature and other arts. Readings from Habermas, Adorno, Horkheimer, Arendt, Lukacs, Bloch, Brecht, Jameson, Negt and Kluge, Kristeva, Spivak, Appiah, Coetzee.
Terms: Win
| Units: 5
ENGLISH 336:
Victorian Literature and Photography
The theoretical implications of photography; its relationship to concepts such as realism and surrealism, and to the study of material culture and book-history; its conceptual emergence in Romantic (pre-photographic) writing and its expression in Victorian writing; its peculiar literariness (including its significance for our study of literature); and the lively, surprising culture of early photography.
Terms: Aut
| Units: 5
ENGLISH 360:
North American Literature in Comparative Context: Revolution
Tracing the articulation of a new transatlantic symbolic order in political-theoretical and literary texts written in ¿the age of democratic revolutions.¿ Examination of the ways in which insights or convictions related to the political and social realm are translated into fictional forms, and the ways in which literature¿precisely insofar as it figures the excess of revolutionary change¿supplements its ¿other,¿ whether historiography or political philosophy.
Terms: Win
| Units: 5
ENGLISH 360B:
The Theory of the Novel
Topics will include: theories of the novel¿s origin; novelistic subjectivity; voice and text; body and text; the problem of the quotidian; democracy, revolution and novelistic form; and the peculiar dynamic of the novelistic trinity (author, character, reader).
Terms: Spr
| Units: 5
ENGLISH 363:
The Bourgeois (COMPLIT 330)
Goal is to define the ruling class of modern times. Social history (Weber, Hirschmann, Marx); literary texts (Defoe, Goethe, Gaskell); and Henrik Ibsen who produced an intransigent criticism of the bourgeois ethos.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 5
ENGLISH 366G:
Poetics Now and Then
The fundamental issues and recent problems in poetics. Exploration of both classic statements and current scholarship to obtain an overview of a field in the process of renewal. Topics may include the nature of the poetic; figurative language; technical, social and historical approaches; poetological accounts of major periods and movements (e.g. the baroque, classicism, symbolism, modernism, Language poetry); and recent experiments in poetry that respond to developments in poetics. Both the scholarship and the poems under consideration come from multiple traditions, national and ideological. Readings include works by Auerbach, Jakobson, De Man, Paz, Hartman, Forrest-Thomson, and Agamben.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 5
ENGLISH 373C:
Text of Shakespeare
The nature and history of the Shakespearean text from its beginnings, from script and performance to quartos, to the folios, to the multitude of editions, and constantly back to script and performance. What, historically, has constituted a 'good' text of Shakespeare, and what is bad about 'bad' quartos? What have been, historically, the ethics and politics of editing, and what has been the relation of editorial practice to stage practice on the one hand, and to what we want Shakespeare to be on the other? Plays with multiple original texts will be studied, (e.g. Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, King Lear) through the lenses of theatrical history, bibliography and editorial theory.
Terms: Aut
| Units: 5
ENGLISH 381B:
Theories of Race and Ethnicity
Race theory in the humanities is a heterogeneous field with diverse theoretical frameworks deriving from poststructuralism, postcolonialism, historical materialism, psychoanalysis, and realism. We will examine various theorizations of race and ethnicity as they have developed in literary and cultural studies, performance studies, visual studies, and philosophy. Particular attention will be paid to how they illuminate issues under current debate: subjectivity, identity, biological difference, racial representation, and political activism. Theorists may include Alcoff, Appiah, Bogues, DuBois, Elam, Fanon, Flores, Gilroy, Goldberg, Gordon, Hames-Garcia, Hartman, Haslanger, Lugones, Mendieta, Mercer, Ong, Shelby, Taylor, Wallis, West, Wiegman, Wynter, and Zack among others.
Terms: Aut
| Units: 5
ENGLISH 382:
Race, Formalisms, & Narrative Theory
Concerned with understanding how the traditional forms of the novel are altered in the context of the contemporary drive to represent a new stage in global and hemispheric race relations. How do modern versions of literary realism change to represent the experiences of decolonization, modernization, and postmodernity? Addresses the poetics of genre and the generative power of generic hybridity in classic narrative forms in order to examine how aesthetics and conceptions of history are fundamentally reshaped by modernization and globalization.
Terms: Win
| Units: 5
ENGLISH 389:
Modernism's Everyday
An approach to literary modernism¿s commitment to the motifs of everyday life. Topics include newer aesthetic meanings of the ordinary, its relationship with late 19th and early 20th century developments in ethnography, art, emergent landscapes of urban modernity, flanerie and the poetics of space, advertising, consumerism and the quotidian embodiment of imperialist ideologies, gender-relations, representations of domesticity and boredom. Texts by James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, William Carlos Williams, T.S. Eliot, Katherine Mansfield, Michel De Certeau, Bronislaw Malinowski, Alice Kaplan, Kristin Ross, Henry Lefebvre, Erving Goffman, Patricia Meyer Spacks, Stanley Cavell, Elizabeth Goodstein and others.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 5
ENGLISH 389B:
Beckett (DRAMA 152, DRAMA 358C)
Beckett's plays and late writing, which have been described as proto-performance art. Recent Beckett scholarship, including new work about his analysis with Bion.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 3-5
ENGLISH 390:
Graduate Fiction Workshop
For Stegner fellows in the writing program. May be repeated for credit. Prerequisite: consent of instructor.
Terms: Aut, Win, Spr
| Units: 3
| Repeatable
for credit
ENGLISH 392:
Graduate Poetry Workshop
For Stegner fellows in the writing program. May be repeated for credit. Prerequisite: consent of instructor.
Terms: Aut, Win, Spr
| Units: 3
| Repeatable
for credit
ENGLISH 394:
Independent Study
Preparation for first-year Ph.D. qualifying examination.
Terms: Sum
| Units: 1-10
| Repeatable
for credit
Instructors: ;
Bender, J. (PI);
Elam, M. (PI);
Gigante, D. (PI);
Heise, U. (PI);
Jarvis, C. (PI);
Jenkins, N. (PI);
Jones, G. (PI);
Majumdar, S. (PI);
Moretti, F. (PI);
Ruttenburg, N. (PI);
Saldivar, R. (PI);
Sullivan, H. (PI);
Vermeule, B. (PI);
Woloch, A. (PI)
ENGLISH 395:
Ad Hoc Graduate Seminar
Three or more graduate students who wish in the following quarter to study a subject or an area not covered by regular courses and seminars may plan an informal seminar and approach a member of the department to supervise it.
Terms: Aut, Win
| Units: 1-5
| Repeatable
for credit
ENGLISH 396:
Introduction to Graduate Study for Ph.D. Students
For incoming Ph.D. students. The major historical, professional, and methodological approaches to the study of literature in English.
Terms: Aut
| Units: 5
ENGLISH 396L:
Pedagogy Seminar I (COMPLIT 396L)
Required for first-year Ph.D students in English, Modern Thought and Literature, and Comparative Literature. Preparation for surviving as teaching assistants in undergraduate literature courses. Focus is on leading discussions and grading papers.
Terms: Aut
| Units: 2
ENGLISH 397A:
Pedagogy Seminar II
Apprenticeship for second-year graduate students in English, Modern Thought and Literature, and Comparative Literature who teach in the Program in Writing and Rhetoric. Each student is assigned as an apprentice to an experienced teacher and sits in on classes, conferences, and tutorials, with eventual responsibility for conducting a class, grading papers, and holding conferences. Meetings explore rhetoric, theories and philosophies of composition, and the teaching of writing. Each student designs a syllabus in preparation for teaching PWR 1.
Terms: Aut
| Units: 1
ENGLISH 397W:
What is the Future of English Studies?
The origins of English Departments from the 19th century to the present, attempting to answer not only MLA President William Riley Parker's 1967 question "where do English departments come from?" but the more pressing "where are English departments going in the future?"and what does that trajectory suggest for graduate students preparing to enter the profession? Readings from Bourdieu, Graff, Guillory, Berlin, Elbow, Hutcheon, Menand. Colloquium planned around this set of questions, with guest speakers.
Terms: Aut
| Units: 3-5
ENGLISH 398:
Research Course
A special subject of investigation under supervision of a member of the department. Thesis work is not registered under this number.
Terms: Aut, Win, Spr, Sum
| Units: 1-18
| Repeatable
for credit
Instructors: ;
Bender, J. (PI);
Castle, T. (PI);
Elam, M. (PI);
Fields, K. (PI);
Fishkin, S. (PI);
Gigante, D. (PI);
Greene, R. (PI);
Heise, U. (PI);
Hoxby, B. (PI);
Jenkins, N. (PI);
Johnson, A. (PI);
Jones, G. (PI);
Karnes, M. (PI);
Lerer, S. (PI);
Lunsford, A. (PI);
Moretti, F. (PI);
Moya, P. (PI);
Orgel, S. (PI);
Polhemus, R. (PI);
Rampersad, A. (PI);
Riggs, D. (PI);
Saldivar, R. (PI);
Sohn, S. (PI);
Summit, J. (PI);
Vermeule, B. (PI);
Woloch, A. (PI)
ENGLISH 398L:
Literary Lab
Gathering and analyzing data, constructing hypotheses and designing experiments to test them, writing programs [if needed], preparing visuals and texts for articles or conferences. Requires a year-long participation in the activities of the Lab.
Terms: Aut, Win, Spr
| Units: 5
| Repeatable
2 times
(up to 10 units total)
ENGLISH 398R:
Revision and Development of a Paper
Students revise and develop a paper under the supervision of a faculty member with a view to possible publication.
Terms: Aut, Win, Spr
| Units: 4-5
| Repeatable
for credit
Instructors: ;
Bender, J. (PI);
Castle, T. (PI);
Elam, M. (PI);
Fishkin, S. (PI);
Gigante, D. (PI);
Greene, R. (PI);
Heise, U. (PI);
Jenkins, N. (PI);
Jones, G. (PI);
Karnes, M. (PI);
Lerer, S. (PI);
Lunsford, A. (PI);
Moretti, F. (PI);
Moya, P. (PI);
Orgel, S. (PI);
Polhemus, R. (PI);
Rampersad, A. (PI);
Riggs, D. (PI);
Rovee, C. (PI);
Saldivar, R. (PI);
Sohn, S. (PI);
Summit, J. (PI);
Vermeule, B. (PI);
Woloch, A. (PI)
ENGLISH 398W:
Orals, Publication and Dissertation Workshop
For third- and fourth-year graduate students in English. Strategies for studying for and passing the oral examination, publishing articles, and for writing and researching dissertations and dissertation proposals. May be repeated for credit.
Terms: Aut, Win, Spr
| Units: 2
| Repeatable
for credit
ENGLISH 399:
Thesis
For M.A. students only. Regular meetings with thesis advisers required.
Terms: Aut, Win, Spr, Sum
| Units: 1-10
| Repeatable
for credit
ENGLISH 399D:
Tooling Up for Digital Humanities (ENGLISH 299D, HISTORY 299D, HISTORY 399D)
What are the digital humanities? The twenty-first century presents new opportunities in the humanities, such as unprecedented access to millions upon millions of digitized sources along with powerful technological tools to study those sources. Yet it also raises new challenges, such as the responsible and effective use of technology, and defining the nature of digital scholarship and communication. This workshop offers an introduction to fundamental concepts, methods, and issues within the growing field of digital humanities, including managing your online identity, digitizing sources, managing databases, text mining, spatial analysis, visualization, and pedagogy.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 1
ENGLISH 74N:
Race and Ethnicity in Contemporary American Fiction: Boundaries and Border Crossings (ASNAMST 74N)
The question of "place" and "locality" in studies of identity and racial formation. Goal is to engage and examine texts with a critical eye both toward the social contexts represented and to the imaginative aesthetic techniques that American writers of color offer to bring their fictional worlds to life. Theme of border hopping and boundary crossing in works by authors including Charles Johnson, Toni Morrison, Alejandro Morales, Julie Otsuka, Stephen Graham Jones, and Lan Samantha Chang.
| Units: 3
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum
ENGLISH 802:
TGR Dissertation
Terms: Aut, Win, Spr, Sum
| Units: 0
| Repeatable
for credit
Instructors: ;
Bender, J. (PI);
Castle, T. (PI);
Elam, M. (PI);
Fishkin, S. (PI);
Gigante, D. (PI);
Greene, R. (PI);
Heise, U. (PI);
Jenkins, N. (PI);
Jones, G. (PI);
Lerer, S. (PI);
Lunsford, A. (PI);
Moretti, F. (PI);
Moya, P. (PI);
Orgel, S. (PI);
Polhemus, R. (PI);
Rampersad, A. (PI);
Riggs, D. (PI);
Ruttenburg, N. (PI);
Saldivar, R. (PI);
Summit, J. (PI);
Vermeule, B. (PI);
Woloch, A. (PI)
ENGLISH 109:
Masterpieces of English Literature I: Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, and their Contemporaries
(English majors and others taking 5 units, register for 109.) A survey of English literature from Beowulf through Paradise Lost. Readings from Chaucer, the Gawain-poet, Margery Kempe, Langland, Shakespeare, Spenser, Donne, and Milton.
| Units: 3-5
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum
ENGLISH 120:
Masterpieces of English Literature II: From the Enlightenment to the Modern Period
(English majors and others taking 5 units, register for 120.) British literature from the 18th to the 20th centuries. Topics include the rise of the novel, Romanticism, realism, naturalism, genre, modernism and narration. Authors include Austen, M. Shelley, Dickens and Woolf.
| Units: 3-5
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum
ENGLISH 122A:
Austen and Woolf
Reading of three novels by Jane Austen¿arguably the most influential and gifted of British female novelists-¿and three novels by Virginia Woolf, whose debt to Austen was immense. Topics include the relationship between women writers and the evolution of the English novel; the extraordinary predominance of the marriage plot in Austen¿s fiction (and the various transformations Woolf works on it); each novelist¿s relationship to the cultural and social milieu in which she wrote.
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum
ENGLISH 143C:
Introduction to Asian American Literature
(English majors and others taking 5 units, register for 143C.) Asian American literature as an interdisciplinary field, combining history, politics, and literature to articulate changing group and individual identity. Themes include aesthetics, colonialism, immigration, transnationalism, globalization, gender, and sexuality.
| Units: 3-5
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, GER:EC-AmerCul
ENGLISH 153F:
The Moment in Modernism
Examines modernist obsession with time (looking at texts by Bergson, Benjamin, Ricoeur, Doane and Mulvey) and emergence of moments of epiphany and revelation as pressing category in modernist texts (by Joyce, Woolf, Proust , Rilke, Wittgenstein) and their precursors (Wordsworth, Kant) and attends to the relationship among cinematic, photographic and literary representations of the moment and its role in the ethical and aesthetic projects of modernism.
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum
ENGLISH 153G:
Technology, Ecology, and the Imagination of the Future (STS 114)
Seminar. Literary visions of the future from the 60s to the present. How such texts imagine new and existing technologies in interrelation with the evolution of natural ecosystems. The development of wild habitats, alterations of the human body, and visions of the future city. The role of images and stories about globalization. Literary, scientific, and technical texts.
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum
ENGLISH 184B:
Text and Context in Humanities: Oedipus and His Vicissitudes
Tales of Modernity from Sophocles, Freud, Chekhov, Babel, and Woolf. Introduction to cross-disciplinary approach in humanities through foundational texts in the modern tradition. The main focus is on Sigmund Freud's Totem and Taboo (1913), alongside his ancillary writings. Contemporary social thought and historical scholarship provide the context (Georg Simmel, Norbert Elias, Karl Schorske, John Murray Cuddihy) while works of imaginative literature (Sophocles, Anton Chekhov, Isaac Babel, and Virginia Woolf) illuminate the significance of the Oedipus myth for understanding the inter-generational conflict in antiquity and modernity.
| Units: 3
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum
ENGLISH 185:
Sex, Sacrifice, and Civilization: Baroque Opera and Tragedy
The revival of ancient tragedy in the Baroque opera house. The central mysteries of tragedy: knowledge of suffering, necessity of sacrifice, pleasure of pathos. How tragic drama and opera used poetry, dance, and music to sway the passions and prompt reflection. Greek myths of Medea, Iphigenia, Alceste, Idomeneo. Plays by Euripides and Racine; operas by Mozart, Gluck, and Charpentier.
| Units: 4-5
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum
ENGLISH 261F:
Gender and Sexuality in Asian American Literature (AMSTUD 261F, ASNAMST 188)
How writers and representations dialogue, challenge, resist, and complicate such formative constructions of gendered/sexual identities. How queer Asian Americans face ¿multiple negations¿ that include potential expulsion from their own families and from various communities. Authors include Bharati Mukherjee, Russell Leong, Suki Kim, Shawn Wong, Louis Chu, Lawrence Chua, Catherine Liu, Jessica Hagedorn, Timothy Liu, Shani Mootoo, David Mura, among others. Secondary readings will include literary criticism, feminist and queer theory.
| Units: 5
