printer friendly pageENGLISH 308: The Civilizing Process
This course considers historical changes in daily life, as practices and everyday ethics as well as ideas and rhetoric, to conceptualize the large-scale meanings of modernity and modernization, from roughly 1600 to the present. Beginning with a series of major thinkers from the mid-20th century Norbert Elias, Hannah Arendt, Michel Foucault, and Pierre Bourdieu we will assess the compatibility of their accounts of modern changes to domains they call, variously, habitus,interdependence,power,action,work,labor, and life. The first half of the quarter will be devoted to these theories. The second half will consider recent work in literary history, social and cultural history, gender and sexual theory, which has attempted to demarcate and explain a number of revolutions in human practices located in different historical moments and phases of the ongoing modernizing process: an affective revolution,humanitarian revolution,rights revolution, sex-gender and sexual revolutions, towards revolutions, too, of practices concerning nonhuman entities and statistical or aggregated visions of humanity. Though oriented to literary-historical knowledge, reading will be heavily historical and social-scientific; students are expected to absorb and respect the disciplinary and methodological canons of various disciplines, and graduate students from outside literature will welcomed.
Last offered: Spring 2019
ENGLISH 308B: Gilded Age American Literature
Introduction to the creative innovations and the political tensions that stemmed from the formation of a multicultural society during the age of industrialization. We will attempt to place literary works in their historical and cultural contexts, while also surveying recent critical and theoretical developments in areas such as Realism, Naturalism, Regionalism, Minority and Race Studies, and so on.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 5
Instructors:
Jones, G. (PI)
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