printer friendly pageENGLISH 124C: Cultures of the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands (AMSTUD 124, CHILATST 124C)
Cultures of the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands: Since becoming president, Donald Trump has deported more than a million migrants and started building a multi-billion-dollar border wall. Although some of Trump¿s actions have seemed anomalous, they have all relied on and reaffirmed longstanding legacies of settler colonialism and racial capitalism. In this seminar, we will look at these legacies through the eyes of the Natives, Latinxs, whites, and others who have lived in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. Within the confines of literature, we will read novelists like Willa Cather, essayists like Valeria Luiselli, and poets like Simon Ortiz (Acoma Pueblo). Meanwhile, across the more capacious category of culture, we will engage with promoters who encouraged whites to claim homesteads, periodistas who emboldened Latinxs to protect pueblos, and leaders who helped Natives fight for sovereignty. By blending literary studies and ethnic studies, we will gain a thorough grasp of the territories that have taken shape since the U.S.-Mexico War (1846¿48), especially the ones that we currently call Arizona, California, New Mexico, and Texas. From these concrete contexts, we will ask and answer more abstract questions: What are borders¿are they physical boundaries, or are they psychosocial conditions? Similarly, what are nations¿are they stable and homogeneous groups, or are they flexible and diverse communities? Ultimately, what are human beings¿can they be branded as illegal aliens, or do they have inalienable rights? During the quarter, we will work through these questions both collectively and individually: to enrich our in-class discussions, each five-unit student will complete a four- to five-page reading of a single source, a six- to eight-page paper on several sources, and a multimedia borderlands map.
Terms: Aut
| Units: 3-5
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II, WAY-EDP
Instructors:
Nugent, C. (PI)
ENGLISH 129A: Body Text (FEMGEN 129A)
Written on the body is a secret code only visible in certain lights; the accumulations of a lifetime gather there. In places the palimpsest is so heavily worked that the letters feel like braille. I like to keep my body rolled up away from prying eyes. Never unfold too much, tell the whole story. Jeanette Winterson, Written on the BodynThis course asks when and where flesh becomes text. Through an eclectic mix of short stories, novels, film, nonfiction, and critical theory, we will think through how text becomes a metaphor for, substitute for, and/or extension of the body. What exactly do we talk about when we talk about The Body How are bodies written into and out of existence? Topics will include the virtual body, the eating-disordered body, the choreographed body, the medicalized trans body, and the black body in the carceral state. Throughout the course, we will draw out the theoretical in the literary and the literary in the theoretical, and will pay special attention to the relationship between embodied practice and (traditionally) disembodied thought.
Terms: Sum
| Units: 3-5
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II, WAY-EDP
Instructors:
Atura Bushnell, A. (PI)
ENGLISH 137B: We see into the life of things: Forms of Romanticism
This course will offer a survey of ten major Romantic writers who published between the 1780s and 1820s, and of their innovations in four key genres: poetry, life-writing (including both travel-writing and autobiography), essays, and the novel. These texts variously appeared as strange, absurd, trivial, alarming and even revolutionary to their first readers, and this course will seek to recapture the artistic, imaginative, social, political and philosophical ferment which inspired the Romantics and which they hoped would reanimate and refocus their contemporaries at a time of remarkable socio-political change.
Terms: Aut
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II
Instructors:
Owens, T. (PI)
ENGLISH 139B: American Women Writers, 1850-1920 (AMSTUD 139B, FEMGEN 139B)
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.
Terms: Sum
| Units: 3-5
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, GER:EC-Gender, WAY-A-II
Instructors:
Richardson, J. (PI)
ENGLISH 143B: Exist to Resist: The Problem of Politics in Native Art
This course will examine the ways in which the politics of tribal sovereignty, decolonization and resistance to American presence and perspective play out in the various artistic mediums Native artists engage. This will include but not be limited to fiction, creative nonfiction, poetry, film and visual art.
Terms: Sum
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II, WAY-EDP
Instructors:
HolyWhiteMountain, S. (PI)
ENGLISH 144D: American Arts & The Great Depression (AMSTUD 144D)
American culture in the 1930s and 40s is easy to dismiss. It can seem too parochial, too patriotic, too escapist. But looking closer we find 'bold and persistent experimentation' in the face of inequality and unrest. How does a photograph respond to want? A novel produce community? A musical call for revolution? In this course we'll consider a diverse cast of objects and artists: phototexts by James Agee and Walker Evans, Richard Wright, and Dorothea Lange and Paul Taylor; the films of Busby Berkeley, Charlie Chaplin, Frank Capra, Fred Astaire, and Pere Lorenz; paintings by Grant Wood, Grandma Moses, and Diego Rivera; and the fiction of Tillie Olsen and Nathanael West. We'll explore the Federal Arts Projects - which put thousands to work - describing America to Americans in the form of government-funded plays, symphonies, and guidebooks, and were fiercely contested by conservative critics of the New Deal - and examine their continuing legacy. Students will reflect on primary and secondary readings and digital archives in a series of short papers.
Terms: Sum
| Units: 3-5
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II
Instructors:
Bolten, R. (PI)
ENGLISH 145D: Jewish American Literature and Film (AMSTUD 145D, JEWISHST 155D, REES 145D)
From its inception, Jewish-American literature has taken as its subject as well as its context the idea of Jewishness itself. Jewish culture is a diasporic one, and for this reason the concept of Jewishness differs from country to country and across time. What stays remarkably similar, though, is Jewish self-perception and relatedly Jewish literary style. This is as true for the first-generation immigrant writers like Isaac Bashevis Singer and Anzia Yezierska who came to the United States from abroad as it is for their second-generation children born in the United States, and the children of those children. In this course, we will consider the difficulties of displacement for the emigrant generation and their efforts to sustain their cultural integrity in the multicultural American environment. We'll also examine the often comic revolt of their American-born children and grandchildren against their (grand-)parents nostalgia and failure to assimilate. Only by considering these transnational roots can one understand the particularity of the Jewish-American novel in relation to mainstream and minority American literatures. In investigating the link between American Jewish writers and their literary progenitors, we will draw largely but not exclusively from Russia and the countries of Eastern Europe.
Terms: Win
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, GER:EC-AmerCul, WAY-A-II, WAY-EDP
Instructors:
Ruttenburg, N. (PI)
ENGLISH 145G: US Fiction 1945 to 2000
Major works of US fiction since World War II, in social, historical, and aesthetic perspective. Ellison, Bellow, O'Connor, Pynchon, Reed, Morrison, Robinson, DeLillo, Gaitskill.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II, GER:DB-Hum, WAY-EDP
Instructors:
McGurl, M. (PI)
ENGLISH 146C: Hemingway, Hurston, Faulkner, and Fitzgerald (AMSTUD 146C)
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. Focus on 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.
Terms: Sum
| Units: 3-5
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, GER:EC-AmerCul, WAY-A-II, WAY-EDP
Instructors:
Jones, G. (PI)
;
Beaty, G. (TA)
ENGLISH 146S: Secret Lives of the Short Story
An exploration of the short story¿s evolution, variety of voices, and formal techniques from its emergence in the 19th century to the present day. We¿ll study a range of American writers, with an aim to uncover the historical, cultural, and stylistic secrets of the Short Story, from both a literary criticism and a creative writing viewpoint.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II, WAY-CE
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