91 - 100 of 230 results for: ENGLISH

How did American and British women writers express their experiences of modernity? A major critical lens on modernism interrogates questions of gender and sexuality, including how women expressed the experiences of `writing as a woman during these years (1910-1940). But distinctions of race, class, culture, nation, and literary inheritance were powerful determinants on how individual writers gave voice to their creative aspirations. This course explores what binds and what differentiates various forms of aesthetic, political, and cultural representation in the works of pioneering transatlantic innovators: Virginia Woolf; Charlotte Perkins Gilman; Zora Neale Hurston; Djuna Barnes; Katherine Mansfield; Nella Larson; Amy Lowell; H.D.; Jessie Fauset; Nancy Cunard.

Thomas Malory's Arthurian epic Le Morte D'Arthur (The Death of Arthur) is often thought of as the last medieval English text. As a prose narrative describing the gradual annihilation of King Arthur's legendary court at Camelot and the disintegration of the medieval courtly values that once held it together, the book seems to be a fitting swan song for what we think of as the English middle ages. In this course students will read Malory's Middle English legend of King Arthur in its historical and material context, developing an appreciation for its literary style and cultivating an awareness of the medieval traditions and technologies that shaped the author's work. We will then read T. H. White's The Once and Future King, a 20th century Arthurian novel based on Le Morte D'Arthur, and students will compare White's interpretation and adaptation to their own encounter with Malory's text. This course examines how authors and readers confront and imagine the medieval, and how the quest to capture the elusive idea of the dark ages illuminates the preoccupations of the present.

The centrality of the marriage plot in the development of the British novel beginning in the 18th century with Samuel Richardson's Pamela and ending with Woolf's modernist novel Mrs. Dalloway. The relationship between novelistic plotting and the development of female characters into marriageable women. What is the relationship between the novel and feminine subjectivity? What aspects of marriage make it work as a plotting device? What kinds of marriages do marriage plots allow? Is the development of women's political agency related to their prominence in the novel form?

How does the past come to life, on the page and on the screen? From Walter Scott, to Toni Morrison, to the popular romances, films, and television series of today, this course considers a range of texts that draw their settings, characters, and plots from history. We will examine how each work addresses some of the central tensions of historical fiction: between the imagined past and the past as reconstructed through research, between description and the spirit of the past, between accuracy and relevance. Our focus will be on the craft of historical fiction and the power of techniques like description, dialogue, setting, and character to reanimate the past. For the final assessment, students will choose between a traditional argumentative paper and a historical story of their own invention.

The Wild West: a mythical place seared deep into the American imagination. Its familiar tropes lone riders on horseback, desert sunsets, saloon fights, train robberies echo through countless Western stories, novels, films, radio programs, and television series. Both formulaic and flexible, the Western has endured as a popular genre in American culture for more than a century, embodying and responding to many of the nation's broader anxieties surrounding its colonial history, its notions of masculinity and gender roles, its fascination with guns and violence, and its ideals of self-reliance and individualism. In this class we'll examine the Western genre through a selection of its central works in fiction and film, from the first dime novel Western, Ann S. Stephens Malaeska (1860), to Cormac McCarthy¿s acclaimed Blood Meridian (1985); and from the first silent film Western, Edwin S. Porter's The Great Train Robbery (1903), to the mid-century Hollywood films of John Ford, to Maggie Greenwald¿s feminist Western, The Ballad of Little Jo (1993). Along the way we'll examine the Western as both a literary form and a cultural phenomenon, probing the history of its enduring appeal as a genre. How do these novels and films construct, adapt, and subvert the form and expectations of the Western, and how do they both perpetuate and challenge the broader cultural problems of their, and our, time? Finally, as Californians and inheritors of the nation's westward expansion, what does the Western tell us about national myths of the West, and the place in which we live?

This course examines the literary and cultural significance of the personal essay. We will begin with some influential theories of the essay, and conclude by considering the changing media from periodicals to blogs in which it appears. In between, we will explore some of the many reasons writers have had for writing themselves into their essays, such as explaining their personal tastes, demanding action from their readers, bearing witness to trauma, and making the personal political. Course readings will be drawn from across the rich history of the personal essay, including works by Charles Lamb, Virginia Woolf, George Orwell, James Baldwin, Susan Sontag, Joan Didion, Alice Walker, David Foster Wallace, Elif Batuman, and Ta-Nehisi Coates. As we explore the literary history, structure, and style of the personal essay, we will also reflect on what this genre reveals about the modern person. How are individuals shaped by social, cultural, and political forces? How are the ways we construct and express ourselves affected by changes in the media? And what might the personal essay reveal about the shifting boundaries between self and other, public and private, fact and fiction? Throughout the course, students will complete a series of short critical assignments, culminating in a final paper in which they will apply what they have learned to produce personal essays of their own.

An introduction to the illuminated world of William Blake¿poet, prophet, revolutionary, and visionary artist. The course will address Blake's visual iconography, belief system and ideology, unique mythology, and method of relief etching that allowed him to make every illuminated book a unique work of art, among them, The Songs of Innocence and Experience; The Marriage of Heaven and Hell; The Book of Thel; Visions of the Daughters of Albion; The Book of Urizen; America a Prophecy; and Europe a Prophecy.

In American politics where `alternative facts has entered the lexicon in a `post-truth attempt at media control, and in Britain where Brexit has reactivated a `little England model of insular nationalism, the concerns of British writers in the 1930s that `low dishonest decade as the poet W.H. Auden famously described it on nationalism, militarism, and the politics of language seem especially prescient now. Alert to nativism in a post-Depression era, and the losses of progressive ideals (unevenly) cultured during the 1920s, these writers explored the relationship and stakes between words and politics as they faced an increasingly fascistic continent. Writers include: George Orwell, Storm Jameson, Winifred Holtby, Vera Brittain, Naomi Michinson, Evelyn Waugh, Virginia Woolf, Aldous Huxley, W.H. Auden, Christopher Isherwood, and C.L.R. James.

This course traces the ways in which female writers negotiated a series of literary, social, and intellectual movements, from abolitionism and sentimentalism in the nineteenth century to Progressivism and avant-garde modernism in the twentieth. Authors include Harriet Beecher Stowe, Harriet Jacobs, Rebecca Harding Davis, Emily Dickinson, Kate Chopin, Edith Wharton, Gertrude Stein, Willa Cather, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman.