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Winter 2005 Expanded Undergraduate Course Descriptions
See the faculty page for contact information | Note: Descriptions subject to change.

4: Critical Inquiry and Literature
Instructor: J. Samaine Lockwood
Topic: The Haunted House in U.S. Literature. In this seminar students will tour nineteenth- and twentieth-century fiction about haunted houses in order to explore how history and historical memory have shaped U.S. literature's settings, structures, and obsessions. Students will read the work of authors such as Edgar Allan Poe, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Henry James, Harper Lee, and Toni Morrison, all writers who grapple with the dark aspects of the American national legacy, particularly slavery, racism, gender inequality, and insanity. Students will also learn techniques for placing literature in its historical context and will therefore examine other sources alongside stories and novels. These sources include magazine articles, advertisements, illustrations, photographs, short works of literary theory and criticism, and secondary works of history.

Grading
Two essays (60%), two short written responses (20%), presentation (10%), and participation (10%).

Texts
The Yellow Wallpaper, Charlotte Perkins Gilman
The Turn of the Screw, Henry James
To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee
Beloved, Toni Morrison
Course Reader.

42: Approaches to Reading
Instructor: Evan Watkins
This is primarily a methods course. We'll study ways of reading and how historical, philosophical and sociopolitical contexts influence our interpretations as we read a wide variety of texts including film, video games and music as well as literary texts. We'll also look at the theoretical debates that have shaped the fields of literary study and cultural studies. Course goals are to give students an introduction to major approaches to reading within the discipline of English as well as to develop student skills as interpretive readers. There will be frequent writing assignments.

Grading
based on papers, discussion section, and final.

Texts
The Theory Toolbox, Jeffrey Nealon, Susan Searls Giroux
Texts and Contexts: Writing About Literature With Critical Theory, Steven Lynn
Postmodern American Fiction - A Norton Anthology, Paula Geyh, et. al. eds,

43: Introduction to the Study of Drama
Instructor: 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 theater as sacred spectacle, popularized in medieval Europe. Students will learn about techniques of close reading and analysis as they compare dramatic texts from the Middle Ages and the early modern period. We 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 (45%); periodic quizzes (10%); a midterm (15%); a final exam (20%); and class participation (10%).

Texts
Sophocles, Antigone
Everyman and Medieval Miracle Plays, A.C. Cowley
Doctor Faustus and Other Plays, Christopher Marlow
A Midsummer Night's Dream, William Shakespeare
The Duchess of Malfi, John Webster
The Real Inspector Hound and Other Plays, Tom Stoppard
The Weir, Conor McPherson
Course Reader

44: Introduction to the Study of Fiction
Instructor: Bishnu Ghosh
This course introduces you to the basic formal and generic elements of fiction, with illustrations from several major British, American, and Anglophone writers in English. We will focus on how texts speak to their historical contexts, and how writers manipulate literary form to present their view of those contexts. Students are expected to demonstrate their critical and writing skills in exams and a short paper, as well as to attend classes regularly and participate in discussions of the texts under scrutiny.

Grading
Short critical argument, three to four pages, (20%); midterm, (30%); final, (30%); group work, (10%); class participation, (10%).

Texts
The Story and Its Writers, Ann Charters
Beloved, Toni Morrison
The God of Small Things, Arundhati Roy

45: Introduction to the Study of Poetry
Instructor: Clarence Major
This is a close reading of selections from American and English poems.

Grading
Three papers (30 % each) and participation (10 %). There will also be written assignments in the discussion sections.

Text
Course Reader available at Navin's.

46B: Masterpieces of English Literature, 1640 - 1832
Instructor: David Simpson
We will read two novels, Defoe's Moll Flanders and Austen's Northanger Abbey, and study Wordsworth's poetry in some detail. These will be the core texts around which extra readings (which will be available in a reader at Navin's Copy Shop) will be gathered - poetry and prose from the period that relates to and informs our primary readings.

Grading
Midterm and final exams and one or two papers will be required.

Texts
Moll Flanders, Daniel Defoe, ed. David Blewett (Penguin)
Northanger Abbey, Jane Austen, ed. Marilyn Butler (Penguin)
The Major Works, William Wordsworth, ed. Stephen Gill (Penguin)
Course Reader available at Navin's

100F: Creative Writing: Fiction
Instructor: Lucy Corin
This is an upper-level seminar/workshop in fiction writing. Students are expected to have some experience reading contemporary short fiction (in courses or independently) as this is the context in which we will be discussing student work. Emphasis is placed on discovering how to read great fiction as well as works in progress to teach ourselves about our own writing. East student will produce two or three short (5 - 15 pages each) stories at least one of which will be revised significantly, if not repeatedly, in response to workshop and individual conference with instructor. Each student will also keep a journal, collecting writing exercises, fiction ideas and fragments, and responses to assigned readings and peer work. We will strive for a mixture of skill development (creating characters, intensifying prose, finding a story's shape, understanding point of view.) and risk-taking exploration. Admission is by submission of manuscript and consent of instructor (application available on-line).

Grading
51% creative work (quality and improvement of submitted stories) 49% analytic work (quality of seminar participation, writing exercises, peer critique and written responses to reading materials)

Text:
The Anchor Book of New American Short Stories, Ben Marcus, Ed.- ISBN 1-4000-3482-5 Expect to spend money copying your fiction for distribution

100P Creative Writing: Poetry
Instructor: Clarence Major
This course, the writing of poetry, includes the development and evaluation of written materials and conferences with individual students. Admission is by submission of manuscript and consent of instructor (application available on line).

Grading
TBA

Text
Course Reader

110A Introduction to the Principles of Criticism
Instructor: Glenn Keyser
This course serves as an introduction to the Western tradition of literary criticism and its historical development through the end of the 19th century. We will begin by examining texts by Plato and Aristotle and work our way through English critics including Sidney, Dryden, Johnson, Coleridge, Shelley, and others.

Grading
Based on a major paper, midterm and final exam.

Text
Criticism: Major Statements, Kaplan and Anderson

110B-A Introduction to the Principles of Criticism
Instructor: Scott Shershow
This course will consider some of the major currents of that nearly indefinable field today commonly referred to as "theory": an interdisciplinary combination of philosophy, literature, linguistics, and social theory. The course will not be a historical survey, but will focus instead on contemporary theoretical concepts and approaches especially Marxism, feminism and deconstruction.

Grading
Based on daily response notes, two papers, midterm, and final exam.

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

110B-B Introduction to the Principles of Criticism
Instructor: Evan Watkins
This course will be an introduction to some of the major developments of modern theory and criticism. It is especially recommended for anyone considering graduate school. We will read some selections from pre-20th-century texts that have been especially influential, but for the most part, we'll concentrate on 20th-century traditions, including formalism, structuralism and poststructuralism, Marxism, feminism, psychoanalysis, postcolonial studies, and cultural studies.

Grading
Based on in-class exercises and on three papers that will include rough draft and revision.

Text
Norton Anthology of Literary Criticism, Leitch, et al

111 Topics in Medieval Literature
Instructor: Janice Hawes
This class will be focusing on medieval hero tales and considering the various challenges that the heroes face, especially in the form of monsters. In particular we will be exploring texts with threats to heroic identity. For our purposes, we will be reading works from both the early medieval period and the late medieval period, and one of the issues we will be exploring is the difference in the way heroism is defined in the early heroic poetry and in the later romances we will be reading. Although the focus will be on English literature, we will also be briefly considering a few other European works of heroic literature to highlight the issues our English authors seem to be exploring. All of the texts we will be reading contain monstrous beings who pose a threat to an individual hero's identity or to the identity of the larger society depicted in the text. We will see how this monstrous threat can take many forms: the threat of the feminine "Other," the threat of the cultural "Other," and even the threat of masculinity which knows no bounds. Students should note that some of the later works will be read in the original Middle English.

Grading
Two short papers (15% each), a third paper based on one of the first two (25%), participation (10%), a midterm (15%), and a final exam (20%).

Texts
Beowulf: A New Verse Translation, Trans. Seamus Heaney
Grettir's Saga, Trans. Denton Fox, Herman Palsson
The Wife of Bath (Case Studies in Contemporary Criticism), Ed. Peter G. Beidler
King Arthur's Death: The Middle English Stanzaic Morte Arthur and Alliterative Morte Arthure, (Exeter Medieval English Texts and Studies) Ed. Larry D. Benson
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Patience, Pearl: Verse Translations, Trans. Marie Borroff
Course Reader

117A Shakespeare: The Early Works
Instructor: Scott Shershow
This course will focus on the first period of Shakespeare's career, and on the plays generally believed to have been composed before 1600. We'll begin by studying one early comedy (The Taming of the Shrew) and one early tragedy (Titus Andronicus). Then we will focus on Shakespeare's second cycle of English history plays: Richard II, Henry IV, Part One, and Henry V, trying to draw from them, among other things, some insights on the difficult questions of sovereignty and empire that are still at the forefront of world affairs today.

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

Texts
Penguin editions of the following:
Taming of the Shrew
Titus Andronicus
Richard II
Henry IV Part I
Henry V

Grading
Based on reading quizzes, two papers, and a midterm and a final exam.

Texts
The following well-edited paperback editions have been ordered from the campus book store; if you own or would like to buy a complete text of Shakespeare's works (e.g., the Riverside or the Norton editions, both easily available on Amazon.com), you may also use that book for our course. Othello, the Moor of Venice, ed. Russ McDonald Hamlet, ed. Stephen Orgel Measure for Measure, ed. Jonathan Crewe As You Like It, ed. Frances E. Dolan Twelfth Night, ed. Jonathan Crewe

122 Milton
Instructor: Margaret Ferguson
In this course, we will study Milton's works in a variety of genres (lyric, masque, prose treatise, epic) with special attention to his development as a writer, his ambivalent attitudes toward some of his precursors (e.g., Shakespeare), toward kings, toward publication, and toward women. We will look at his engagement in contemporary controversies about divorce, cross-dressing, monarchy, religion, and state censorship.

Grading
Announced quizzes, two papers, a midterm, and a final.

Texts
Complete English Poems, John Milton, ed. Gordon Campbell. Everyman edition, J.M. Dent; ISBN 0 460 872753 Course Reader available at Navin's Copy Shop

130 British Romantic Literature
Instructor: Timothy Morton
This class will investigate one of the most productive period 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, reports and homework exercises (30% altogether), two six-page essays (40%), one final exam (short answer and essay) (30%).

Texts
Sense and Sensibility, Jane Austen
Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, T. Morton
Frankenstein, Mary Shelley
Romanticism: An Anthology, Duncan Wu

142 Early American Literature
Instructor: David Van Leer
This course will concentrate on early American literature written during the 17th and 18th centuries 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.

Grading
One short essay, a midterm, and a final.

Texts
Course Reader

147 American Literature 1945 to the Present
Kerry Hanlon
After WWII, American authors depict an America wrought with tensions between surface and depth, appearance and reality, and between success and its cost. In this course we will examine novels, plays, stories, and poems that bring these tensions to the fore that uncover rotten foundations underpinning brilliant facades, and reveal the hidden sacrifices demanded by the pursuit of contemporary American ideals.

Grading
Grade will be determined according to the following formula: midterm 1 (20%); midterm 2 (20%); 5 page paper (30%); and final exam (30%).

Texts
Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov
Giovanni's Room, James Baldwin
White Noise, Don Delillo
In the Lake of the Woods, Tim O'Brien
Course Reader containing works by authors including Edward Albee, Amiri Baraka, Elizabeth Bishop, T. C. Boyle, John Cheever, Shirley Jackson, Yusef Komunyakaa, Ursula LeGuin, Toni Morrison, Flannery O'Connor, Amy Tan, and Richard Wright.

155B 19th-Century British Novel (Versions of a Pastoral Interrupted)
Instructor: Peter Dale
The course examines the work of six of 19th-century Britain's most important novelists and how each responds to the threat to settled community life and customary beliefs posed by extensive social, economic, and intellectual changes. In the process it asks why the realistic novel became a particularly appropriate genre not only for exploring but also trying to resolve critical problems in human relations caused by these changes.

Grading
TBA

Texts
Persuasion, Jane Austen
Wuthering Heights, Emily Bronte
Hard Times, Charles Dickens
Silas Marner, George Eliot
The Return of the Native, Thomas Hardy
The Warden, Anthony Trollope

156 The Short Story
Instructor: Lucy Corin
The goal of this course is to expose students to an enormous variety of aesthetic approaches to the short story. We'll begin by reading widely anthologized stories written in the tradition of realism, and familiarize ourselves with standard approaches to reading fictions that strive to create what John Gardner called a "continuous dream." Then we'll explore fictions that emerge from traditions that challenge or are uninterested in being "realistic" or "believable" in the way we might usually think of those terms. By reading "through" technical elements of short stories (point of view, shape and structure, chronology, imagery, sound and rhythm, etc.) we will come to thorough and intense interaction with the stories' content (characters, situations, themes, ideas). Is there a difference between a story and the way it is written? When we read, we'll be asking questions like: What's this story trying to do? How is it "asking" to be read? How does it create its particular world and worldview? What does it have to say? Why would it say such a thing? Why does reading it feel the way it feels? How does it relate to or interact with other stories in the course?

Grading
Two papers (5-7 pages each), midterm, final, participation.

Texts
The Story and Its Writer, ed. Ann Charters, 6th edition (ISBN: 0312397313)
Extreme Fiction: Fabulists and Formalists, ed. Robin Hemley and Michael Martone, (ISBN: 0321179722)

158B The American Novel from 1900 to the Present
Karl Zender
The course will focus on the American novel of the 1920s, arguably one of the greatest decades in the history of American prose fiction. The course will combine acknowledged masterworks -- My Ántonia, The Sun Also Rises, The Great Gatsby, The Sound and the Fury -- with such lesser-known works as Nella Larsen's Passing and Katherine Anne Porter's Pale Horse, Pale Rider. The course will emphasize close reading, historical and social backgrounds, and literary appreciation. It will be taught by a combination of lecture and guided discussion.

Grading
Based on two papers (50%); a midterm (20%); and a final (30%).

Texts
The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway
The Sound and the Fury, William Faulkner
The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald
My Ántonia, Willa Cather
Winesburg, Ohio, Sherwood Anderson
Passing, Nella Larsen
Pale Horse, Pale Rider, Katherine Porter

165 Topics In Poetry: The Failure Of Song In American Poetry
Joe Wenderoth
Fulfills American Literature Post-1865 Requirement.
This course will investigate, first, Walt Whitman's notion of Song, looking particularly at his "Song of Myself," in order to foreground an investigation of John Berryman's "Dream Songs." The goal of the course is to develop an understanding of the space wherein Poetry and Song (as Whitman understood it) might overlap, and then to articulate a particular history of that space in American poetry by looking at Whitman's "I" and Berryman's "Henry." In articulating this history we will produce and pursue questions relevant to readers and writers of Contemporary American poetry, such as: what hopes, if any, do poems nowadays evidence? are poems sung by, at or for the subject they implicitly concern? are poems like songs in that they must take place? do poems thus necessitate and prefigure populations? and is it possible for poetry to be "democratic" (again, using Whitman's definition of this term)?

Grading
Mid-term exam, final exam, one major essay, and written responses to each class and to each assigned reading.

Texts
The Dream Songs, John Berryman (Farrar, Straus and Giroux: ISBN 0374516707)
Poetry and Prose, Walt Whitman (Library Of America: ISBN 1883011353)
Course Reader.

ENL 161B Film History II: 1945 to Present
David Laderman
This course is the second half of a two-quarter overview of the cultural and aesthetic history of filmmaking. (The courses may be taken separately and need not be taken in sequence.) Our loosely chronological survey begins this quarter at the end of World War II with the development of "film noir" in the United States and the international spread of Italian Neorealist styles. Of particular focus will be the flourishing of the Japanese cinema in the postwar decade, the French New Wave after the late 1950s, the European "art film" in the 1960s, and some Third World and post-colonial cinemas in Latin America and Africa. We will also look into the expanded options for independent American filmmaking that arose in the wake of the breakdown of the Hollywood studio system and its Production Code censorship. The six class hours each week typically include at least one full-length screening and a number of excerpted sequences.

Grading
TBA

Texts
Film History, second edition, Thompson and Bordwell Course Reader

178 Introduction to Latino/a Literature: Exiles, Migrants and Border-Crossers
Instructor: Desirée Martín
This course will focus on narratives of Latino/a identity, specifically the condition of existing "in between" cultures, communities, languages, and homelands. We will examine novels, short stories, and essays which focus on the contradictions inherent to various Latino/a identities. The course concentrates on routes of exile and migration between Latin America and the United States and the shifting relation between immigrant groups and their multiple "homelands." We will also analyze the political, social, and economic factors which produce migration and exile, and examine the cultural sensitivities surrounding language, gender, sexuality, and family in Latino/a communities. Finally, we will consider the trope of the border and borderlands and its implications of hybridity and division for the lives of many Latinos/as in the United States. The primary goal of the course is to introduce students to the complexities of the Latino/a experience, as situated between and within the United States and Latin American context. All readings will be English.

Grading
Paper 1, five pages (30%); Paper 2, seven to 10 pages (35%); take-home midterm exam (15%); multiple choice final exam (15%); class participation (5%).
Texts
TBA

188 001 Special Topics in Literary Studies Topic: Imagining LA in Film and Fiction
Instructor: Jack Hicks

188 002 Special Topics in Literary Studies Topic: Literature of the American South: Faulkner & After
Instructor: Karl Zender
This seminar will sample 70 years of the fiction of the American south: works written by southern writers, set (usually) in the south, and addressing southern themes. We will begin with William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury (1929) and end with Charles Frazier's Cold Mountain (1998). In between, we will read novellas by Katherine Anne Porter, short stories by Eudora Welty and Flannery O'Connor, and a novel by Ernest Gaines. The seminar will emphasize close reading and literary appreciation. Some attention will be paid to the historical and cultural contexts within which these writers lived and wrote.

Grading
The course will combine guided discussion and seminar presentations. Writing for the course will consist of a position paper (serving as the basis for an oral presentation); a term paper, 10 to 12 pages; and occasional reading quizzes.

Texts
The Sound and the Fury, William Faulkner
Cold Mountain, Charles Frazier
A Gathering of Old Men, Ernest Gaines
A Good Man is Hard to Find and Other Stories, Flannery O'Connor
Pale Horse, Pale Rider, Katherine Anne Porter
A Curtain of Green and Other Stories, Eudora Welty

188 003 Special Topics in Literary Studies Topic: American Humor Instructor: Linda Morris
The seminar will focus primarily on literary humor of the twentieth century, but we will begin the course by reading The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. We will examine some of the cultural assumptions underlying the humor, and we will develop a set of perspectives for analyzing humor, as well as a vocabulary to identify various humorous techniques. We will also explore themes and patterns in twentieth-century humor. Students will be expected to participate actively in the seminar, including leading a portion of a class discussion, writing short "position" papers, and coming to class prepared to ask questions and contribute to the discussions. The course will follow a seminar format.

Grading
Writing assignments will consist of two, two-page position papers and a 6-8 page study of one of the authors we read in the course; students will be encourage to develop their own topics on writers or humorous venues not on our reading list. There will be a mid-term and a final exam.

Texts
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Mark Twain
Me Talk Pretty One Day, David Sedaris
Thurber Carnival, James Thurber
Cat's Cradle, Kurt Vonnegut
Sick Puppy, Carl Hiaasen

189 Seminar in a Major Writer The Novels of Henry James - "Love's Knowledge"
Instructor: Peter Dale
The course examines the social, moral, and aesthetic complexities of James' mature writing, with a focus on works published at the turn of the 19th century.

Grading
TBA

Texts
The Portrait of a Lady
The Awkward Age
The Wings of the Dove
The Ambassadors