121 - 130 of 149 results for: ENGLISH

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.

Provides students with an overview of some major genres in the history of the modern novel, along with major theorists in the critical understanding of the form. Novels might include works by Cervantes, Defoe, Lafayette, Radcliffe, Goethe, Scott, Balzac, Melville, and Woolf. Theorists might include Lukacs, Bakhtin, Jameson, Gallagher, Barthes, Kristeva, and Bourdieu. *PLEASE NOTE: Course for graduate students only.*

In the late eighteenth century Immanuel Kant proclaimed his age to be "the genuine age of criticism." He went on to develop the critique of reason, which set the stage for many of the themes and problems that have preoccupied Western thinkers for the last two centuries. This fall quarter course is intended as an introduction to these themes and problems. We begin this course with an examination of Kant's philosophy before approaching a number of texts that extend and further interrogate the critique of reason. In addition to Kant, we will read texts by Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Weber, Freud, Lukács, and Heidegger.nThis course is the first of a two-course sequence. Priority to graduate students in MTL and English. The course will be capped at 12 students.

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

This course examines the Gothic as a both a narrative subgenre and an aesthetic mode, since its 18th century invention. Starting with different narrative genres of Gothic expression such as the Gothic novel, the ghost tale, and the fantastic tale by writers such as Walpole, Radcliffe, Sade, Poe, and E.T.A. Hoffmann, the course goes on to ask how the Gothic sensibility permeates a wide range of 19th century cultural phenomena that explore the dark side of Enlightenment, from Romantic poetry and art to melodrama, feuilleton novels, popular spectacles like the wax museum and the morgue. If time permits, we will also ask how the Gothic is updated into our present in popular novels and cinema. Critical readings will examine both the psychology of the Gothic sensibility and its social context, and might be drawn from theorists such as Benjamin, Freud, Lacan, Kristeva, and Zizek.

The course considers major playwrights who were also major poets; and examines the relation both between the drama and the non-dramatic poetry, and between text and performance, manuscript and publication. 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.

The course constitutes both a broad overview of Freudian theory and a collective conversation on the usefulness of Freud's ideas for literary scholarship in our 'post-post-post' age. The readings include a selection of classic Freud essays and case histories, as well as excerpts from The Interpretation of Dreams. In conjunction with the primary works, several short British and American literary works (by H.D., Edith Wharton and others) and three Hitchcock films-, Rope, Rear Window and Vertigo. The intellectual goal here is to consider how well such works might serve as 'test cases' for a reinvented 21st-century Freudian interpretation.

An inquiry into the nature of fictionalization through an examination of the mutual construction of author, character, and reader in the novel. What is the nature of literary being? Does an ontological crossing-over occur in the act of reading? If so, what conditions enable that passage? Where do we locate the foundational antithesis of flesh and word? To what degree is it possible to differentiate autobiography, memoir, and novel? We¿ll read Roth, Kenzaburo Oe, Coetzee, Elena Ferrante, Nabokov, and Barthes.