51 - 60 of 68 results for: ENGLISH

Performance theory through topics including: affect/trauma, embodiment, empathy, theatricality/performativity, specularity/visibility, liveness/disappearance, belonging/abjection, and utopias and dystopias. Readings from Schechner, Phelan, Austin, Butler, Conquergood, Roach, Schneider, Silverman, Caruth, Fanon, Moten, Anzaldúa, Agamben, Freud, and Lacan. May be repeated for credit.

From classical Athens to the present, critics have repeatedly redefined tragedy, and in modernity they have often identified the predicaments of individual and social existence with the tragic. We will read the major theorists of tragedy and the tragic from Aristotle to the present together with a handful of touchstone tragedies. Dramatists include Sophocles, Euripides, Shakespeare, Racine, and Milton. Theorists include Aristotle, Renaissance humanists, Schelling, Hegel, Nietzsche, Freud, Vernant, Steiner, and recent critics.

Varieties of literary irony from Plato through the present. Topics include: verbal, dramatic, situational, and romantic irony. Focus will be on questions about what irony is and why writers use it. How does irony go astray? What kinds of topics seem to require irony? How does irony work? Writers include Chaucer, Swift, Thomas Mann, J.M. Coetzee and David Foster Wallace.

Emphasis on world-system theory, theories of coloniality and power, and aesthetic modernity/postmodernity in their relation to culture broadly understood.

How has Western culture constructed the world's oceans since the beginning of global ocean exploration? How have imaginative visions of the ocean been shaped by marine science, technology, exploration, commerce and leisure? Primary authors read might include Cook, Banks, Equiano, Ricketts, and Steinbeck; Defoe, Cooper, Verne, Conrad, Woolf and Hemingway; Coleridge, Baudelaire, Moore, Bishop and Walcott. Critical readings include Schmitt, Rediker and Linebaugh, Baucom, Best, Corbin, Auden, Sontag and Heller-Roazen. Films by Sekula, Painlevé and Bigelow. Seminar coordinated with a 2015 Cantor Arts Center public exhibition. Visits to the Cantor; other possible field trips include Hopkins Marine Station and SF Maritime Historical Park. Open to graduate students only.

A major critical and theoretical legacy, the New Historicism continues to inform, in both positive and negative ways, the recent scholarly work devoted to the relationship between literature and history in the early modern period. While focusing on issues of political meaning and political thought that both inform literary production and are partly shaped by it, the seminar will ask what it means to have a dominant critical paradigm for the understanding of fundamental relations between literary and non-literary (or at least less literary) discourses. Even though we will be studying major Renaissance authors such as Sidney, Spenser, and Shakespeare, the theoretical and methodological issues the course is designed to raise transcend period boundaries. We will look at recent scholarly production in the field of early modern studies to see how scholars go about defining and positioning their critical agendas in their attempts to offer new or modified conceptions of the relationship between Renaissance literature, and literature more generally, and politics.

This interdisciplinary and reading-intensive course has been designed to familiarize you with the key scholars, as well as the most recent developments, in theorizations of race and ethnicity in literary and cultural studies, performance studies, visual studies, and philosophy. As we work our way through this diverse set of readings, particular attention will be paid to how the various approaches illuminate key issues under current debate: subjectivity, identity, biological difference, racial representation, affect, and political activism.

For Stegner fellows in the writing program. May be repeated for credit. Prerequisite: consent of instructor.

For Stegner fellows in the writing program. May be repeated for credit. Prerequisite: consent of instructor.