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Fall 2007 Expanded Course Descriptions

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4: Critical Inquiry and Literature: Freshman Seminar
Back from the Dead! : Ghosts, Vampires, and Others Who Won’t Stay Dead
Jolie Braun
Through careful reading and discussion of the primary texts, this class will explore the question of what it means to be alive and dead and the seemingly distinct boundary between the two. We will consider when and why nineteenth-century writers “resuscitate” the dead, and when and why the dead simply “refuse” to die. These questions will be a way into thinking about Victorians' understanding of and relationship to the dead and thinking about Victorian literature and culture more generally as well.  Frankenstein and Dracula will bookend the course, and allow students to consider how nineteenth-century ambivalence about death, the dead body, and the “Other” are represented through the figure of the reanimated or undead corpse and the dead as monstrosity. Ghost stories will help students think about the threat the dead pose to the living, and the power the dead possess to unsettle and upset. Poetry by Emily Dickinson and Christina Rossetti will encourage the class to contemplate the power and voice of the dead woman and what it means to have the dead “speak.” We will read Tess of D’Urbervilles with an eye to ancestors who won’t go away, and consider the potentially problematic legacy of dead relatives and ancestry. This class aims to make nineteenth-century literature engaging and accessible to students and introduce them to major writers of the period. Ultimately the course will encourage students to think about the ways in which Victorian ideas about life and death still circulate in popular culture and influence
the way we think about these concepts today.

Grading
TBA

Texts
Frankenstein, Mary Shelley
The Old Nurse’s Story, Elizabeth Gaskell
To Be Taken with a Grain of Salt, Charles Dickens
Emily Dickinson, selections
Christina Rossetti, selections
The Lost Stradivarius, John Meade Falkner
Tess of D’Urbervilles, Thomas Hardy
Dracula (excerpts), Bram Stoker



30B: Survey of American Literature
Colin Milburn
This course surveys American novels, short stories, and poetry from the Civil War to the present.  Emphasizing close reading skills, the course also provides historical perspectives on the evolution of American literary genres and modes. In particular, we will explore interrelations of the history of literature and the history of technology, asking how such divergent modes of cultural production have worked together in shaping American modernity.  Lectures and assignments will focus on methods of literary research and development of a critical vocabulary for successful literary scholarship.

Grading
2 papers (25% each); midterm (20%); final exam (30%)

Texts
Norton Anthology of American Literature: Package 2 (Vols. C, D, & E), Baym, ed.
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, Mark Twain
The Crying of Lot 49, Thomas Pynchon,
Course reader

42: Approaches to Reading
Brynne Gray
This course introduces students to a variety of traditional and contemporary approaches to reading literature.  The primary goal of the course is to refine students’ skills as interpreters of literary texts by developing a working knowledge of these critical methods.  There will be frequent writing assignments.

Grading
Based on papers, quizzes, a midterm, and a final.

Texts
Texts and Contexts: Writing About Literature with Critical Theory 4th ed., Lynn
Jane Eyre, Brontë (ed. Newman)

43: Introduction to the Study of Drama
Seeta Chaganti
This course will explore the major foundations of European and American drama: the ancient Greek understanding of tragedy, comedy, and structural unity; and the conception of theatre as sacred spectacle, popularized in medieval Europe.  Students will learn about techniques of close reading and analysis, as well as the fundamentals of performance theory and theatre studies.  They will use these tools to compare dramatic texts from the Middle Ages and the early modern period.  The course will then turn to modern and contemporary plays that draw upon and critique traditional theatrical conventions, challenging the boundaries separating artifice, reality, and the miraculous.

Grading
Based on three papers (totaling 50%); periodic quizzes (10%); a midterm (15%); a final exam (20%); and class participation (5%).

Texts 
Antigone, The Brome Abraham and Isaac
Everyman, Sophocles
Edward II, Marlowe
Measure for Measure, Shakespeare
She Stoops to Conquer, Goldsmith
The Island, Fugard
Glengarry Glen Ross, Mamet
The Weir, McPherson
Required course reader

44: Introduction to the Study of Fiction
Patricia Moran
In this class students will study both the formal and stylistic aspects of fiction as well as learn about its diverse forms, such as myths, tales, and epics.  Students will learn about the emergence of the novel and short story genres; students will also read a wide range of short stories.  Assignments include two short papers (4-6 typed, double-spaced pages); a midterm, and a final. 

Grading
TBA

Texts
The Short Story and Its Writer
Course Reader (available at Navin’s Copy Shop)

46A: Masterpieces of English Literature to 1640
Richard Levin
Study of major authors, including Chaucer, Marlowe, Shakespeare, and Donne, in the context of their times and in light of the literary conventions of their day. The course is designed to help you develop the ability to read and write about medieval and early modern literature.

Grading
Assignments: three essays and a final examination; several reading quizzes

Texts
Norton Anthology of English Literature, Volume B: The Sixteenth Century and the Early Seventeenth Century, 8th ed
Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Signet edition
a Chaucer text, to be announced

46B: Masterpieces of English Literature, 1640-1832
Brynne Gray
In this survey course students will read texts from a variety of literary genres. We will focus on the question, what are the functions of literature? We will read widely in the two volumes of the Norton Anthology and read one additional novel. As we explore the considerable variety of literary forms and conventions in the period, we will pay close attention to their social and cultural contexts.

Grading
Based on quizzes, papers, a midterm, and a final.

Texts
Norton Anthology of English Literature, 8th ed. Vols. C & D
Northanger Abbey, Austen (ed. Gaull)


46C: Masterpieces of English Literature, 1832-present
Catherine Robson
In addition to Jane Eyre and Heart of Darkness, we'll read widely in the Norton anthologies, studying poems by Tennyson, Browning, Barrett Browning, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Christina Rossetti, Arnold, Henley, Kipling, Yeats, Eliot, Heaney and Harrison, a range of pieces of non-fiction prose, short stories by Joyce, Lawrence and Mansfield, and a play by Brian Friel.  We'll pay particular attention to the social and cultural contexts of our literary works, and will focus on such topics as industrialism, science and faith, the construction of "separate spheres" for men and women, colonialism, nationalism and class. 

Grading
There will be two midterms (30%), a five page paper (30%) and a final (25%) plus section assignments (15%).

Texts   
The Norton Anthology of English Literature, vol. E, The Victorian Age, 8th ed.
The Norton Anthology of English Literature, vol. F, The Twentieth Century, 8th ed.
Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte (Penguin edition)
plus some photocopied material

100F: Creative Writing: Fiction
Jodi Angel
In this workshop we will refine techniques of narrative style in the short story form. We will focus on character-driven prose, the reliance on the concrete details of setting, the development of voice, and how these things all must work in tandem to produce a stratified story that is deeper than it is wide. During the quarter, we will read and study assigned stories that focus on capturing a confined moment in time; stories that are constructed like a glimpse---a scene that you pass and catch out of the corner of your eye. Students will be required to submit three stories to workshop, maintain a reading response journal as a platform to reflect upon the assigned readings, complete weekly written exercises outside of class, and participate in all aspects of the workshop.  
*Admission is by submission of manuscript and consent of instructor
(application available on-line).

100NF: Creative Writing: Non-Fiction
Elizabeth Davis
In this course, we will study the art of writing creative non-fiction, focusing on several forms, including the essay, personal essay, memoir, and journalistic creative non-fiction article.  We will focus on some of the influential authors in each sub-genre, analyzing how and why their styles have been important to the development of this popular field of professional writing.  In addition, we will pay attention to the social and political contexts of such writing.  The group workshops each other’s manuscripts.  Open admission to upper-division students up to a cap of 17 students

Grading 
Quizzes (20%); three papers (rough drafts and revisions) (60%); class participation (20%). 

Texts 
The Devil’s Highway:  A True Story, Luis Alberto Urrea, (selected for the 2007-2008 UC Davis Book Project)
Slouching Towards Bethlehem:  Essays, Joan Didion 

100P: Creative Writing: Poetry
Sandra McPherson
The texts for this quarter include books by two poets who have taught at UCD for 22-25 years, in order to give a sense of what can grow here.  (It is rare but forgivable, I hope, to use one of my own collections.)  A third text is meant to be provocative as it explores poetry without title or name on it.  The poetic correspondence between Kooser and Harrison will be used to trigger a weekly-increased simmering pot of short poems or shreds of poems that groups will assemble late in the term into a linked creation.  The fourth text gives us international poets in translation (Neruda, Tranströmer, Ponge, Issa, and Horace, among them)—we will base exercises on their work where it intersects thematically with our other authors.  Your poems are the heart of our work in this course: class time is entirely devoted to work shopping your new creations except for the time taken to explain the “assignments” and the model poems.  At term’s end, you will turn in a portfolio of your weekly work and revisions of it.  One-on-one conferencing with the professor is encouraged. 
*Admission is by submission of manuscript and consent of instructor
(application available on-line)

Grading
TBA

Texts
The Pattern More Complicated: New and Selected Poems, Alan Williamson,
Edge Effect: Trails and Portrayals, Sandra McPherson, Wesleyan/New England,
Braided Creek: A Conversation in Poetry, Jim Harrison and Ted Kooser
The Winged Energy of Delight: Selected Translations, Robert Bly, translator

105: History of the English Language
Winfried Schleiner
After introduction to some essential grammatical and linguistic terminology and some principles of historical linguistics, we will begin with the background of English in Indo-European language families and then study three stages of English: Old English, Middle English, and Early Modern English (Shakespeare's language). The course ends with a review of language varieties (dialects), gender in language, and the use of etymology. The course should make students more sensitive to language change and to the language they speak and write.

Grading
A five-page paper 25%; quizzes 20%; home assignments 15%; final exam 35%; attendance/participation 5%.  Paper: Various topics are acceptable (description of the dialect/language of a group of people, for instance, of a support group, sorority/fraternity, sports team), a linguistic/stylistic analysis of a brief text (one page) from a work of fiction.

Texts
History of the English Language, Baugh & Cable,
A Companion to B's & C's History of the English Language.
Since these texts are rather expensive, I will help you organize yourselves so that two students buy one set of texts

106: English Grammar (cross listed as LIN 106)
Kathleen Ward
This course deals with the grammatical structure of the English language, focusing on the major syntactical structures of sentences.  We will use modern language analysis techniques and the premise that it is necessary to understand how sentences are put together in order to be able to diagnose the problems sentences may have.  This has obvious implications for editing, for writing, and for writing instruction, but a knowledge of language structure can also enhance an appreciation of literature.  After this course, you should be able to explain to yourself and to others what is wrong with a questionable sentence and what can be done to improve the sentence.

In addition to writers and editors, people who would like to teach. English or language arts in the public schools are the natural audience of this course.  It is an irony of teacher training that English teachers are trained primarily in literature, but, in professional practice, they spend most of their time dealing with their students’ language problems.  As Carol Numrich has said (in a study of the diaries of beginning teachers) many teachers feel unprepared in their knowledge of language:

Lack of knowledge in grammar was probably one of the biggest concerns of the teachers in this study.  Their diary entries consistently reflected a lack of security in their teaching of grammar.  Novice teachers who have received not formal instruction in English grammar may feel particularly unequipped to deal with the kinds of questions posed by students.  Whether teachers choose to teach grammar explicitly or use a more inductive approach to teaching grammar, they can be sure that students’ questions will abound.  If novice teachers were to take a grammar course prior to or in conjunction with their first teaching practicum, they might have more security facing their students’ questions. 

Grading
Grading will be based on the following items:
6 homework assignments @ 5% each           30%
1 midterm                                                  30%
1 final examination                                      40%

Texts
Analyzing Sentences (NB-R), Noel Burton-Roberts:
Workbook/Reader for LIN/ENL 106 (distributed as a .pdf file)
Recommended: Any handbook
Recommended:  Language Debates, on line at
http://www.dianahacker.com/bedhandbook/subpages/language.html

110A: Introduction to Principles of Criticism
Greg Miller
We will explore some central concepts and influential texts in the history of literary criticism.  This course will place particular emphasis on the classical period (including Gorgias, Plato, Aristotle and Plotinus); then we will encounter Augustine, Sidney, Kant, Hegel, Schiller, Shelley and others before finishing with Nietzsche, Marx and Freud.

Grading
Daily quizzes, 7 page paper, midterm, and final exam

Text
The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, ed. Vincent Leitch

110B: Introduction to Principles of Criticism
Timothy Morton
Theory is a questioning attitude towards reality.  It is not simply a set of answers to questions, or even a specific set of questions.  Literary theory is one of the most important ways in which you can contemplate the nature and significance of language, writing, and art.  We will be journeying through a rich variety of hard, refreshing, and liberating ideas in literary and cultural theory in the twentieth century, from the time of the Russian Revolution, through the Cold War and the radicalism of the sixties, and recent developments in the era of deconstruction and postmodernism.  Literary theory is one of the most exciting and necessary ways of studying the very fabric of our social life. 

Texts
The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, ed. Leitch

115: Renaissance Literature
Don Abbott
This course is an introduction to the literature of the English Renaissance of the 16th and early 17th centuries. The course will explore such topics as Renaissance literacy, the teaching of reading and writing in England, and the evolution of English prose in the 16th and 17th centuries. Readings will include works by Sir Thomas More, Sir Philip Sidney, John Lyly, Robert Greene, Thomas Nashe, and Sir Francis Bacon.

Grading
(tentative) two examinations and two critical papers.

Texts
The Norton Anthology of English Literature: The 16th Century/The Early 17th Century, Vol. 1B, 7th ed., ed. M.H. Abrams
An Anthology of Elizabethan Prose Fiction, ed. Paul Salzman

117C: Shakespeare: The Later Works
Winfried Schleiner
The subject of this course is a selection of Shakespeare’s plays of his maturest period: 1605 to 1613. We will read three tragedies – King Lear, Macbeth, and Antony and Cleopatra – and two comedies/romances – The Winter’s Tale and The Tempest.

Grading
Based on two short papers, a couple of short quizzes on the assigned plays, a project: a dramatic presentation of a short scene or a section of a scene, participation/presence, and a final exam.

Text
The Riverside Shakespeare, second edition (or some other well-annotated edition).

130: British Romantic Literature
Timothy Morton
This class will investigate one of the most productive periods of literary activity in English.  The Romantic period witnessed the birth of major new forms of writing and thinking that are still relevant today.  In fact, many scholars wonder whether we have yet left the Romantic period completely behind.  The social transition from an age of commerce and colonialism to an era of industry and imperialism radically changed the entire surface of the world.  In Britain, farms and villages were uprooted and destroyed, transformed beyond recognition.  London began to sprawl.  The American and French Revolutions, buoyed up by the energy of the radical Enlightenment, generated firestorms of social, political and artistic activity.  Sciences that we take for granted were born: ecology, biology, psychology.  Adam Smith wrote his work on capitalism and the politics of working class was born, though it was not yet called socialism.  The period witnessed significant statements in feminism, democracy, anti-slavery, human and animal rights.  Being modern starts in the Romantic period.  This was the age of William Blake and Mary Shelley, of Jane Austen and William Wordsworth, of Coleridge and Keats and Mary Wollstonecraft.  This class will give you a sense of what the period looked like and felt like (and sounded like); and a feel for the ideas it established about poetry, society and nature, which are still with us. 

Grading
Participation, homework exercises (30% altogether), two four-page essays 40%, one final exam (short answer and essay) 30%

Texts
Frankenstein, Shelley
Romanticism: An Anthology, Duncan
Sense and Sensibility, Austen
Routledge Literary Sourcebook on Mary, Morton

138: British Literature 1945-Present
John Marx
This course is about what British imperial history means to contemporary British literature. We will consider fiction that looks to Britain’s past for clues to explain its multicultural present. These works discover the origins of what the scholar Paul Gilroy calls “English conviviality” in the nineteenth-century countryside, the international settlements of Shanghai, and the urban nightmare of World War II London during the Blitz. In addition to repackaging the past, these books also imagine the future of social life in a place the critic Kobena Mercer describes as “this strange space that constitutes our common postcolonial home, in Little England’s green and not always so pleasant land.”

Grading
Two essays, a mid-term, and a final

Texts
Small Island, Andrea Levy
Arthur and George, Julian Barnes
When We Were Orphans, Ishiguro Kazuo
The Swimming-Pool Library, Alan Hollinghurst
White Teeth, Zadie Smith
The Icarus Girl, Helen Oyeyemi

142: Early American Literature: Puritan Literature in Seventeenth-Century America     
David Van Leer
This course will concentrate on early American literature written during the 17th century in New England.  Having left Europe to pursue the utopian vision of a model society, a small religious group created in the new world a community whose importance long outlasted the sect itself.  We will examine Puritan poetry, biographies, histories, sermons, diaries, and philosophical tracts, focusing on both major writers like Anne Bradstreet and crucial historical moments like the Salem witch trials.  Our twin objectives will be to examine the full range of Puritan writing and to relate this literature to their political and religious beliefs.  For only
by understanding Puritan culture on its own terms can we appreciate its legacy to our American present.  Informal lecture with opportunity for (polite) questions on both sides.  With the goal of "coverage," however, limited opportunity for extended discussion.

Grading
An in-class mid-term exam and a somewhat more interpretive final exam. Both require identification and discussion of passages from the course reading.  Midterm grade counts for 25% and final for 40%.

Texts
The only required text is a xeroxed anthology currently available at Navin's.  Selected recommended texts, usually the full versions from which the xeroxes were drawn, are available at the campus book store.

149-1: Topics in Literature: Three Short Story Masters: James Joyce, Raymond Carver, and Katherine Anne Porter
Karl Zender
This course will examine closely short stories and novellas by three 20th-century masters of short fiction: James Joyce, an Irishman writing in exile; Katherine Anne Porter, a Texan from a part of the state more southern than western; and Raymond Carver, a norther Californian.  We will emphasize close reading and literary appreciation, seeking to identify the distinctive strengths of each writer’s artistic vision.  The course will be conducted by a combination of lecture and guided discussion.

Grading
There will be two midterms, a final examination and an 8 to 10 pager term paper.  The course may also include optional extra credit activities.

Texts
Cathedral, Carver
What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, Carver
The Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter, Porter
Dubliners: Text and Criticism, Scholes and Litz, ed.

149-2: Topics in Literature: The Victorian Cripple (Fulfills Victorian or 20th Century requirement)
Dana Fore
This course will examine Victorian attitudes toward disability and "disabled identity" as they are represented in key works of the period and beyond.  Each of the selected readings recognizes the fragility the human body and simultaneously acknowledges the instability of concepts like "independence" and "willpower" in a world ever more under the control of amoral scientific and technological forces.  We will examine how nineteenth-science incorporated rather than eliminated older religious views of disability, and how these new and more "respectable" scientific beliefs influenced modern views of  the self.  Throughout the quarter we will examine whether the passage of time has actually eliminated Victorian concepts of disability or whether these older ideas have not only endured but also crossed over temporal and cultural boundaries to influence attitudes in modern America.  Grading will be based on two short papers, a midterm, and a final. 

Grading
TBA

Texts
The Mill on the Floss, George Elliot
North and South, Elizabeth Gaskell
The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway
To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee 
Frankenstein, Mary Shelley
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Robert Louis Stevenson
Course Reader available from Navin's.

Texts
The Open Boat (1898), Stephen Crane
The Sport of the Gods (1902), Paul Lawrence Dunbar
The Beast in the Jungle (1903), Henry James
Tender Buttons (1914), Gertrude Stein
A Farewell to Arms (1929), Ernest Hemingway
Absalom, Absalom! (1936) William Faulkner
No-No Boy (1957), John Okada
Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1968),Truman Capote
Sula (1973), Toni Morrison
Course Reader

177: Study of an Individual Author: William Faulkner
Karl Zender
“The backbone of 20th –century American literature has been provided by two novelists--William Faulkner and Saul Bellow.  Together they are the Melville, Hawthorne, and Twain of the 20th century.”
---        Philip Roth, eulogizing Saul Bellow

In this course, we will sample the works of the earlier of the two writers Philip Roth praises so highly.  We will read four of William Faulkner’s novels together with a few of his short stories and a sampling of background materials.  Some attention will be paid to literary, historical, and cultural contexts, but our primary goal will be to master Faulkner’s complex style and to appreciate his artistic achievement.

Grading
Writing for the course will consist of a short paper (4-5 pp.) early on and a longer paper 9*-10 pp.) toward the end of the quarter.  There will be a midterm and a final examination.  The course will also include a set of optimal assignments that can be completed for extra credit.

Texts
The Sound and the Fury, Faulkner
Light in August, Faulkner
Absalom, Absalom!, Faulkner
The Hamlet, Faulkner
Course reader at Navin’s

180: Children’s Literature
Susan Fox
In this class, we will study the history and development of children’s literature in the Western world, beginning with early oral traditions, moving on to early publications specifically for children and ultimately ending with works appearing at the beginning of the 21st century. We will focus on some of the major authors and illustrators and on some of the most influential works and consistent trends/issues in this vast and diverse field. As we engage in our “survey,” we will focus on specific texts, analyzing as we go how and why they have been of major importance, how and why they have often been controversial and “subversive.” In all works we study, we will attend to the ways in which they reflect prevailing cultural attitudes about children and their nature, about adult/child relationships, about the maturation process and about the world (or life), in general. As we read, we will certainly also discuss the “appropriateness” and the “appropriation” of various children’s texts.

Grading
Grading will be as follows:  Midterm (short answer, essay), 25%; Class Portfolio (20%); Class Paper (30%); Final Exam (25%)

Texts
Folk and Fairy Tales, ed. Hallett & Karasek (3rd edition or most recent)
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Carroll
Struwwelpeter, Hoffmann
Pinocchio, Collodi
Ragged Dick, Alger
The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, Baum
The Secret Garden, Burnett
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Dahl
Where the Wild Things Are, Sendak
The Chocolate War, Cormier
Monster, Myers
Feed, Anderson
Speak, Halse Anderson
A Wreath for Emmett Till, Nelson
Rose Blanch, McEwan
The Bad Beginning, Lemony Snicket
American Born Chinese, Yang
The invention of Hugo Cabret, Selznick

188-1: Special Topics in Literary Studies: Literary Censorship
Don Abbott
This course will examine the nature and extent of literary censorship in the United States.  We will consider books that have been suppressed in the U.S. on political, religious, social, and sexual grounds.  The books censored in the U.S. include, for the most part, many of the classics of American and European literature.

Grading
Students will present reports on selected “banned books” and write an extended paper on an aspect of literary censorship in America.

Text
120 Banned Books: Censorship Histories of World Literature, Karolides, Sova, Bald

188-2: Special Topics in Literary Studies: Representing Disaster
Alessa Johns
In this interdisciplinary seminar we will consider how catastrophes are represented in fiction, journalism, art, and film from the eighteenth to the twenty-first centuries. Focusing on plagues, earthquakes, hurricanes, tsunamis, famines, fire, and global warming, we will ponder the cultural significance of such devastating events, considering, for instance: how representations of disasters have changed over time; which representations are the most effective; the effects of trauma on victims; the extent to which natural catastrophes are human-made; how different cultures respond to calamities in addition to the ways national identities emerge from such responses; the question of gender and disaster; and the role religion, science, and politics play in the anticipation and aftermath of catastrophic events.

Grading
Grading will be based on response papers (35%)
attendance and participation (15%)
a class presentation (15%)
a prospectus (10%)
a term paper (25%)

Texts
Journal of the Plague Year, Daniel Defoe,
The Perfect Storm, Sebastian Junger,
Young Men and Fire, Norman Maclean,
Illness as Metaphor, AIDS and Its Metaphors Susan Sontag
Ecology of Fear, Mike Davis,
Field Notes from a Catastrophe, Elizabeth Kolbert,
A Course Reader and Film excerpts

188-3: Special Topics in Literary Studies: Shakespeare’s Sonnets
Richard Levin
After briefly considering the background of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, we will spend the balance of the term on the sonnets themselves. Taken individually, these sonnets are very rich; taken together–154 in all–they seem to lead to the imaginative core of Shakespeare’s works, even if they are not autobiographical in any strict sense. The sonnets show the speaker engaged in two relationships. One, with a young, well-born man, elicits from the speaker a strain of exalted affection. The other, with a woman he accuses of loose morals, calls forth an emotion that one critic describes as “cruder than love and finer than lust.” The speaker’s feelings become even more complicated when the mistress and the friend commence to have an affair with one another. The speaker must now examine the meaning of love, friendship, and betrayal. Reluctant to cast all blame on others, he examines how the love triangle reveals his own character, including his faults of character. He considers, moreover, his artistic and professional choices, for the friend is his literary patron, and when the friendship falters, the speaker explores the disadvantages of depending on patronage. By identifying pressing personal and career concerns in the “rag-and-bone shop” of Shakespeare’s heart, the sonnets shed light on the more objective structures found in the plays.

To take this course, you need not have taken another Shakespeare class. However, in preparation for the class, you might want to read or reread The Merchant of Venice or King Henry IV, Part 1, two plays that were probably written at the same time as a key group of sonnets. These plays and these sonnets echo one another at many points. King Henry IV, Part 1, in particular; helps the reader get oriented in the Sonnets. If you get a chance before the term begins, read the sonnets twice through, once with and once without reference to the notes of a well-annotated edition. An excellent edition to start with is Orgel’s (see Textbooks below).

Grading
Assignments: Three short critical essays and brief e-mail commentary; a final examination in essay form. Students, in groups, will lead discussion of certain sonnets.

Texts
The Sonnets (in the Pelican Shakespeare series), ed. Stephen Orgel
The Sonnets (in the New Cambridge Shakespeare series), ed. G. Blakemore Evans

188-4: Special Topics in Literary Studies: Women Writers and Fairy Tales
Patricia Moran
The fairy tales most of us are familiar with are drawn from a tradition primarily shaped by men (e.g. Hans Christian Andersen, Charles Perrault, the Brothers Grimm, and most recently Walt Disney).  Yet women writers have a long and rich tradition of their own, a tradition that spans three hundred years, from the French conteuses in the seventeenth century to contemporaries such as Margaret Atwood and A. S. Byatt.  In this seminar we will read both tales authored by women and novels in which women have challenged and revised canonical, male-authored tales.  Students will be required to take an active role in discussion.  They will also write two papers:  a short, five-page paper that serves as a proposal for a longer, seminar-length paper of 8-10 pages.  Students will also take midterm and final examinations.

Grading
TBA

Texts
Forbidden Journeys:  Fairy Tales and Fantasies by Victorian Women Writers,
Nina Auerbach and U. C. Knoepflmacher,
The Annotated Classic Fairy Tales, edsMaria Tatar, ed. 
Wonder Tales, Marina Warner, ed. 
Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë,
Rebecca, Daphne du Maurier,
The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories, Angela Carter
Possession, A.S. Byatt,
The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye:  Five Fairy Stories, A.S. Byatt,
Course Reader (available at Navin’s Copy Shop)

188-5: Special Topics in Literary Studies: Constructing Race and Gender in the Late Renaissance
Judith Rose
This course will explore the ways in which the concept of ‘race’ was taking shape in the seventeenth century, a period in which the nascent transatlantic slave trade expanded from a trickle to a flood, and England’s role in this trade became pivotal.  We will study some of the earliest representations of the racial ‘other,’ examining Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice and Othello, as well as Ben Jonson’s curious courtly entertainment, The Masque of Blackness.  As we continue, we will read early explorations of racial difference penned by women who were themselves considered ‘others’ within the world of literature: Elizabeth Cary’s closet drama, Mariam;Amelia Lanyer’s poem, Salve Deus Rex Judeaorum; and Mary Wroth’s sonnets.  We will also consider some the very early anti-slavery writings by 17th century Quaker women and Caribbean travelers.  Finally, we will study the complex text that many consider to be the earliest English novel, Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko.  Behn’s novel, written from the point of view of an Englishwoman witnessing the horrors of chattel slavery, will allow us to discuss the complexity of the British response to slavery and to the newly formed category of racial difference.

Before the quarter begins, all enrolled students should plan to read selections in the ‘Texts and Contexts’ edition of Merchant of Venice; specific assignments will be sent via email as soon as the class list is finalized.  We will also schedule screenings of film versions of Othello and Merchant on two Wednesday evenings during the quarter.  Students who have not previously taken a Shakespeare course at UCD should plan to read chapters one and two in Ross McDonald’s Bedford Companion to Shakespeare before the course begins.

Grading
Class Attendance and Participation (10%)
Reading Journal (15%)
Position paper (10%)
Presentation (10%)
Research project (inc. proposal, bibliography, etc.) (35%)
Final exam(20%) 

Texts
Oroonoko, Aphra Behn,Ed. Janet Todd, London: Penguin Classics 2004
The Tragedy of Mariam, Elizabeth Cary, Ed. Margaret Ferguson, Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1994
The Merchant of Venice: Texts and Contexts, William Shakespeare, Ed. Lindsay Kaplan. Boston: Bedford/ St. Martin’s, 2002 (This edition only)
Othello: Texts and Contexts, William Shakespeare, Ed. Kim F. Hall, Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2007 (This edition only)
Course Reader for Enl 188-05: 17th Century ‘Race Matters’
Additional Reading:
The Bedford Companion to Shakespeare, Russ McDonald, Boston: Bedford/
St. Martin’s, 2001

189-1: Seminar in a Major Writer: Retelling Stories: Lawrence and Steinbeck in Mexico
Marijane Osborn
The focus of this course will be on several novels and novellas and in several instances the significance of the fact that they are rewritings: two of them rewrite a previous novel and one of then rewrites the author's own film. All involve interracial encounters in the Monterey (CA) region and south into northern Mexico and are written before 1950 (i.e., before Edward Said’s Orientalism of 1978). Steinbeck in particular is known for his concern about the underdog, and specifically about persons abused because of their race or poverty, and O'Dell has a particular concern for Native Americans (see his Island of the Blue Dolphins). Lawrence is not especially known for being "concerned," but he is fascinated by otherness of all kinds. We will look at these two authors' novels and stories and some others in terms of contemporary postcolonial theory. Since this theory was developed long after the stories were written, to what degree does the theory help us to understand not only the plight of the protagonist but also the position and politics of the novelists themselves? Examining these questions will constitute the main thrust of class discussion, and it is expected that course essays will address related issues in the work of two or more of our novelists.

In terms of our comparative readings (the rewritings), what appears to be most interesting here is “adversative intertextualities,” how people appropriate a narrative that intrigues or angers them – or even one they love – in order to create a counter-narrative. A major project throughout the course will be to find a term for this activity simpler than the one above in quotation marks but equally professional, a descriptive term conveying concepts that may be understood by the average person. Perhaps no such term exists. The modern term "intertextuality" refers to more than written texts; it refers also to the cultural nexus of signification that surrounds each text independently, and when two are brought together the ensuing “contact zone” may involve a clash of concepts that the appropriating author does not even imagine. Thus "postcolonialism," "intertextualities" and "the contact zone" are basic concepts that we will be examining throughout the course.

An additional though emphatically not lesser purpose, as in all department courses, is to enhance the students’ writing skills.

Grading
Anticipated grade breakdown:
Quizzes and Class Presentations 10%
Essay One 10%
Essay Two 30%
Midterm 10%
Final 40%

Texts
Quetzalcoatl, Lawrence, D.H. 
The Black Pearl, O’Dell, Scott 
Cannery Row, Steinbeck, John
The Pearl, Steinbeck, John
Zapata, Steinbeck, John
Course Reader from Navin's

189-2: Seminar in a Major Writer: Dickens
Catherine Robson
While we will consider four major works by Dickens in a broad range of contexts (historical, cultural, biographical, critical, and so forth), our major concern will be minute attention to the workings of the novelist's prose.  Close reading, then, is the essence of this course: we will analyze the building blocks of each novel --words, sentences, paragraphs and chapters - to see how Dickens creates his distinctive settings, characters and plots.  In our investigations of Dickens criticism, we will be particularly attentive to the ways in which critics deploy (or do not deploy) close readings to make their arguments; further, these examinations will help us to think about the ways we might move between Dickens's text and other kinds of texts, contemporary and otherwise, in our own critical writings.

Grading
Class participation = 10%
Oliver Twist essay (4 pages) = 10%
David Copperfield essay (4 pages) = 10%
Great Expectations essay (4 pages) = 10%
Expanded essay (8 pages) = 25%
Midterm = 20%                    
Close reading presentation = 10%
Critical essay presentation = 5%

Texts
Oliver Twist, Norton Critical Edition, ed. Kaplan
David Copperfield, Norton Critical Edition, ed. Buckley
Great Expectations, Norton Critical Edition, ed. Rosenberg
Plus a photocopied reader from Navin's which will include Dickens' Christmas Carol and works of literary criticism.