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Major novels by Charles Dickens and George Eliot, with a focus on our readerly and critical engagement with this basic category (¿major novel¿). Why such long narratives, such complicated plots, such multifarious character-systems? Why the strange mixture of realism and aesthetic eccentricity? How do we experience and understand the conspicuous scale, density, energy, or excess of such novels as Pickwick Papers, Bleak House, Mill on the Floss, Middlemarch? The focus of the seminar will be reading these challenging, provoking, seductive texts; on the peculiar reading experiences produced by the nineteenth-century novel; and the history of critical response to this experience.

This course will explore the illuminated world of William Blake poet, prophet, revolutionary, and visionary artist in the context of intellectual history, culture, and aesthetics. To study Blake is to witness the birth pangs of modernity and the pathos energy and agony of alternate, impossible histories that fell by the wayside. The task is multidisciplinary, and it is one that opens literary history into our contemporary moment. Blake challenges virtually every aspect of literary representation, from character to narrative structure, from poetic meter to typology and other features of print culture. He is historical in his situatedness (religious dissent, the chemical revolution, industrialization, commodification, and controversies about human and animal rights were all part of his milieu) but he is also radically present in his ongoing influence and relevance. The course will unpack Blake's iconography, ideology, mythology, and infernal method which made every illuminated book a unique work of art.

This course serves as the Core Seminar for the PhD Minor in Philosophy, Literature, and the Arts. It introduces students to a wide range of topics at the intersection of philosophy with literary and arts criticism. The seminar is intended for graduate students. It is suitable for theoretically ambitious students of literature and the arts, philosophers with interests in value theory, aesthetics, and topics in language and mind, and other students with strong interest in the psychological importance of engagement with the arts. May be repeated for credit. In this year¿s installment, we focus on how artistic kinds or genres help set the terms on which individual works are experienced, understood, and valued, with special attention to lyric poetry and music.

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

The fate of lyric in nineteenth-century British Literature. An expansion of the traditional category of lyric to include both narrative and dramatic forms of poetry, yielding such hybrid forms as lyrical ballads and lyricized epic fragments, on the one hand, and monodrama, dramatic monologues, conversation poems, and Romantic closet drama, on the other. The transformation of the courtly form of the sonnet into vehicles of domesticated sentiment, and the emergence of sprung rhythm and symbolism by century¿s end.

We will read a series of plays set in or around early modern London, written by playwrights such as Ben Jonson, Thomas Middleton, and John Marston. The course will explore the plays¿ hilarious representations of the London underworld, with its confidence tricksters and naive victims, as well as more serious topics such as social mobility and social relations, economic expansion, disease transmission, and the built environment. Plays studied will include: The Alchemist, Epicene, The Roaring Girl, A Chaste Maid In Cheapside, The Dutch Courtesan.

Exploration of various post45 literary phenomena with special attention to broader conceptual models in and by which they might be interpreted.

After its heyday in the 1970s and 1980s, many wondered whether the law and literature movement would retain vitality. Within the last decade there has, however, been an explosion of energy in the field, which has expanded beyond the boundaries of the literary text narrowly conceived and incorporated a range of other genres and humanistic approaches. Several recent or forthcoming books survey the range of emerging scholarship and the potential for new directions within the field.  Using one of these--New Directions in Law and Literature (Oxford, 2017)--as a guide, this course will delve into a variety of topics that law and literature approaches can illuminate. These include, among others, conceptions of sovereignty and non-sovereign collectivities, the construction of the citizen and refugee, competing visions of marriage and its alternatives, law and the rhetorical tradition, and theoretical perspectives on intellectual property. Nearly every session will pair recent scholarship in the field with a literary or artistic work, ranging from Claudia Rankine's Citizen to Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice. Students taking the course for R credit can take the course for either 3 or 4 units, depending on the paper length.  This class is limited to 22 students, with an effort made to have students from SLS (16 students will be selected by lottery) and six non-law students by consent of instructor.  Elements used in grading:  Attendance, Class Participation, Written Assignments, Final Paper. Cross-listed with the Law School ( LAW 3517).