ENGLISH 312A: Making and Interpreting Historical Records, 100-1600 (ENGLISH 212)
Accessing the past through the cultural record provides us with the ability to read primary sources for ourselves; and determine the reasons behind, and resources given over to, the production of documents and manuscripts. This course will introduce students to the places and spaces that created literary and historical texts, the materials and skills involved, and the methods by which these artifacts were produced. In this course, students will be introduced to the essential skills of epigraphy, paleography, codicology and diplomatics, which involve learning how to read inscriptions, manuscripts, and single-leaf documents, like writs and charters. Students will be immersed in first-hand learning in Special Collections, and will work collaboratively on a project that brings to light thoroughly interpreted and edited early textual materials from archive to publication.
Last offered: Spring 2025
| Units: 3-5
ENGLISH 313: Performance and Performativity (ARTHIST 313, FEMGEN 313, TAPS 313)
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.
Terms: Win
| Units: 3-5
| Repeatable
for credit
Instructors:
Menon, J. (PI)
;
Dahal, Y. (TA)
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.
Last offered: Spring 2024
| Units: 5
ENGLISH 315: Publishing on Paradise Lost
This course will combine an intensive study of Milton's Paradise Lost, its sources, and its critical reception with a writing workshop intended to help students publish scholarly articles on Milton. Students should ideally already have a solid grounding in Paradise Lost and a draft essay in hand that they intend to transform into a polished article publishable in a scholarly journal.
Terms: Aut
| Units: 5
Instructors:
Hoxby, B. (PI)
ENGLISH 316: American Story Cycles
A survey of US literature told through the history of an important, complex, and neglected genre, the short story cycle, ranging from Nathaniel Hawthorne's incomplete The Story Teller to Jennifer Egan's A Visit From the Goon Squad (2011). Other authors include Sarah Orne Jewett, Charles Chesnutt, Gertrude Stein, Jean Toomer, and Louise Erdrich. An introduction to the patterns of American literary development, its social and cultural contexts, and the major critical/theoretical lenses through which it has been understood. We will consider the unique formal qualities of the story cycle: its liminal status between novel and story collection, its vacillation between unity and multiplicity, connection and disconnection, in relation to broader American questions of identity and community.
Last offered: Spring 2025
| Units: 5
ENGLISH 317: History, Memory , Fiction (JEWISHST 317)
In this course we will consider the role of fiction in the writing of history as well as in the production of memory. How do these three components of individual and collective self-understanding interact? How porous are the borders between them, and what ethical problems are entailed in questioning their categorical integrity. This course is open to Graduate Students Only.
Terms: Win
| Units: 5
Instructors:
Ruttenburg, N. (PI)
ENGLISH 318: Pitching and Publishing in Popular Media (DLCL 312, FEMGEN 312F)
FOR GRADUATE STUDENTS (undergraduates enroll in 119) Most of the time, writing a pitch for a popular outlet just means writing an email. So why be intimidated? This course will outline the procedure for pitching essays and articles to popular media: how to convince an editor, agent, or anyone else that your idea is compelling, relevant, and deliverable. We'll take a holistic approach to self-presentation that includes presenting yourself with confidence, optimizing your social media and web platform, networking effectively, writing excellent queries and pitches, avoiding the slush pile, and perhaps most importantly, persevering through the inevitable self-doubt and rejection.We will focus on distinguishing the language, topics and hooks of popular media writing from those of academic writing, learn how to target and query editors on shortform pieces (personal essays, news stories, etc.), and explore how humanists can effectively self-advocate and get paid for their work.
Terms: Win
| Units: 1
Instructors:
Goode, L. (PI)
ENGLISH 318A: Advanced Workshop in Pitching and Publishing for Popular Media (FEMGEN 312G)
Graduate students may self-determine a popular media project - such as an essay, column/series of essays, podcast, agent query, or book proposal - to be completed, with consent, under the mentorship of the Graduate Humanities Public Writing Project. Prerequisite: Pitching and Publishing in Popular Media (
DLCL 312/ENG 318/
FEMGEN 312F), approved project proposal. Students will determine their individual meeting schedule with the instructor, and will also convene for at least one group meeting.
Terms: Sum
| Units: 1
Instructors:
Goode, L. (PI)
ENGLISH 319A: The World, The Globe, The Planet
This course will introduce graduate students to several competing concepts of world-circulating literatures and methodologies for studying them. As the title suggests, the course introduces students to more established ideas of "World Literature", concepts around "globalization" and its distinction from the World category, as well as ideas of Planetarity, including ecocritical approaches.
Last offered: Autumn 2022
| Units: 4-5
ENGLISH 319C: Utopian Realism and the Global South
What is Utopia and why does it generate so many different versions of itself, including, most powerfully, negations of itself as dystopia? As a vision of human perfectibility, Utopian literature has from its inception in Thomas More's Utopia (1517) been concerned with the social nature of humanity. It is always therefore political in nature. Almost exactly contemporaneous with the defining moments of the modern era (the conquest of the Americas, Machiavelli and modern politics, the emergence of modern literature in Cervantes, Luther and modern consciousness, printing and the beginning of the modern public sphere), Utopia is also unavoidably a product of the literary and imaginary worlds. Concerned with the development of Utopian and anti-Utopian thinking in the modern world, we will see how issues of science and technology, race and sexuality, freedom and determination, and salvation and apocalypse are embedded in the history of utopian literature and contemporary science fiction. Why
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What is Utopia and why does it generate so many different versions of itself, including, most powerfully, negations of itself as dystopia? As a vision of human perfectibility, Utopian literature has from its inception in Thomas More's Utopia (1517) been concerned with the social nature of humanity. It is always therefore political in nature. Almost exactly contemporaneous with the defining moments of the modern era (the conquest of the Americas, Machiavelli and modern politics, the emergence of modern literature in Cervantes, Luther and modern consciousness, printing and the beginning of the modern public sphere), Utopia is also unavoidably a product of the literary and imaginary worlds. Concerned with the development of Utopian and anti-Utopian thinking in the modern world, we will see how issues of science and technology, race and sexuality, freedom and determination, and salvation and apocalypse are embedded in the history of utopian literature and contemporary science fiction. Why did the modern world develop as it did? Can we imagine alternative worlds and histories? As future-oriented thinking, how does utopian literature offer possibilities for a better life? As a forum for future thinking Utopia also offers a platform for thinking anew the working of race and racial formations as well as constructions of gender in the contexts of what has been called "the Subject of Utopia." This course addresses the poetics and generative power of classic Utopian forms to examine how differing aesthetics as well as differing conceptions of history are linked fundamentally to the possibility of reshaping conceptions of race and gender in sustainable future orientations. 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 as well as by the forces of global climate change and the imperatives of decolonization, our readings will investigate how contemporary versions of literary realism change to represent the experiences of the crises of our time and the need to imagine alternative futures.
Last offered: Winter 2024
| Units: 5