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Winter 2008 Expanded Course Descriptions
See the faculty page for contact information | Note: Descriptions subject to change.

4: Critical Inquiry and Literature: “What We Talk About When We Talk About the Weather”
Clara Van Zanten
A recent article in U.S. News laments weather’s transformation from pleasantry to “serious” subject: “Used to be talk about the weather was just that. Nowadays, though, things have gotten so strange it’s almost inevitably just a grim prelude to dark maunderings.” What do we talk about when we talk about the weather? Is it really just an empty topic for killing time at the bus stop or the supermarket check-out line? What beliefs and anxieties underlie our discussions of this increasingly “strange,” “grim,” “dark” subject? Does weather have history? Politics? Aesthetics? Has talk about the weather ever really been “just that”? Discussions of Hurricane Katrina—variously described as a natural, social, political, cultural, economic and infrastructural disaster—reveal that our understanding of weather has everything to do with representation. In this course, we will read a broad selection of writing about the weather, with the goal of discovering what aesthetic and ideological concerns underlie weather representations. Readings will include works of fiction and non-fiction prose, poetry, drama, and film, as well as popular media coverage of Hurricane Katrina and other weather events. By tracing how we have imagined weather in the past, we will discover how we imagine it in the present, and consider how we may imagine it in the future. We will come away with a more complex, and exciting, view of this most “everyday” subject.

Grading: TBA

Texts
The Tempest, William Shakespeare
Journals (excerpts), Henry David Thoreau                                   
Selected poems by William Wordsworth, Percy Shelley,
Wallace Stevens, John Ashbery, Frank O’Hara, Larry Eigner                
The Weather, Lisa Robertson                    
The Weather, Kenneth Goldsmith            
White Noise, Don DeLillo                        
The Meadow, James Galvin  
“Rhizome Vs. Trees”, Gilles Deleuze  
The Order of Things (excerpts), Michel Foucault  
 By Mike Davis - “The Dialectic of Ordinary Disaster”
 By Andrew Ross - “The Drought This Time”
“The Day After Tomorrow”
“An Inconvenient Truth”
“When the Levees Broke” (excerpts)
selected Weather Channel “Storm Stories”

30B: Survey of American Literature
Joanne Diehl
This course introduces students to early nineteenth-century American literature. Among the themes we will consider are the individual's relation to the natural world, the horrors of slavery, and the experimental cast of the literature of this period. Our approach will combine close reading of texts with broader cultural analysis.

Grading
One short paper, one midterm, and a final exam

Texts
TBA

44: Introduction to the Study of Fiction
Mark Jerng
This course will focus on developing reading strategies for the analysis of fiction. Our readings will span various genres and experiments with the form of fiction that highlight how stories are told and challenge our senses of what fiction both is and does. We will treat four general aspects or problems within fiction: 1) narrative structure (plot, sequence, beginnings, endings, and turning points); 2) the relationship between fiction and reality; 3) the role of the narrator and the place of the reader; 4) the ethics of fiction in imagining character, individuality, and sympathy. Readings will be drawn variously from early-eighteenth century fiction all the way to the present.

Grading
One Close-reading Assignment (2-3 pages)
Two Short Papers (5 pages)
Midterm
Final

Texts
Poetics, Aristotle,
Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov
Never Let Me Go, Kazuo Ishiguro
Wuthering Heights, Emily Bronte
We Should Never Meet, Aimee Phan
Billy Budd and Other Stories, Herman Melville
Turn of the Screw, Henry James
Additional readings: Sir Philip Sydney, "Defense of Poesy," Jonathan Nolan, "Memento Mori," Peter Brooks, "Reading for the Plot," Roland Barthes, "Reality Effect," Frank Kermode, A Sense of an Ending; Julio Cortazar, "Continuity of Parks"

45: Introduction to the Study of Poetry
Alan Williamson
Lyric poetry is the most universal (if, for some, the most puzzling) of the literary genres.  People in almost all cultures have used it to represent and understand the complexities of their experience.  We will try to understand the tools by which poetry accomplishes this representation--metrics, sound-play, the logic of metaphor, diction, and voice--using examples from all periods of English and American literature.

Grading
There will be four 3-5 page papers, some in-class writing, and a final exam.

Texts 
The Norton Anthology of Poetry,5th editon, Ferguson, Salter, Stallworthy.
The Sounds of Poetry, Pinsky

46A: Masterpieces of English Literature
Candace Taylor
In this course we will read and discuss texts from the early-medieval to early-modern period of British literature. The class emphasizes close reading of these texts and attention to their cultural contexts; we will look particularly at how writers in this tradition used the classical past, pagan or foreign otherworlds, and Christian belief to shape their ideas of England and develop their poetic expression. Texts may include Beowulf; Sir Gawain and the Green Knight; the Wife of Bath's and Franklin's Tales from the Canterbury Tales; selections from metaphysical poets (Donne, Herrick, Herbert, Marvell) and Edmund Spenser's Faerie Queene; and Shakespeare's The Tempest.

Grading
Two papers, quizzes, midterm and final.

Texts
Broadview Anthology of British Literature, Concise Edition, Volume A
The Tempest, Shakespeare

46B: Masterpieces of English Literature, 1640-1832
Candace Taylor
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
Two papers, quizzes, midterm and final.

Texts
Norton Anthology of English Literature, 8th ed. Vols. C & D

46C: Masterpieces of English Literature: from 1832 to present
Parama Roy
This course will serve primarily as an introduction to the poetry, fiction, and discursive prose of the Victorian and Modernist periods in Britain, with a brief glance at the literature of the postcolonial era.  It will examine some of the most compelling and contentious philosophical, political, and aesthetic debates of the period, debates that showcase Victorian and Modernist views about the emergence of the modern era and its relation to myriad imagined pasts and imaginable futures.  It will focus on the following topics and questions: domesticity, “women’s work,” feminism, and masculinity; industrial capitalism, “progress,” and the meaning of modernity; colonialism, slavery, and national identity; and religious crisis and scientific discourse.  It will feature such authors as Thomas Carlyle, J.S. Mill, T.B. Macaulay, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Alfred Tennyson, Robert Browning, Charlotte Bronte, John Ruskin, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Oscar Wilde, Joseph Conrad, Rudyard Kipling, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, W.B. Yeats, T.S. Eliot, Derek Walcott, and Nadine Gordimer.  An attention to the social and cultural contexts of the literary works will be combined with the cultivation of the skills of close reading. 

Grading
Two essays, a midterm, and an open-book take-home final examination. 

Texts
The Norton Anthology of English Literature, volume 2, 8th edition, ed. Stephen Greenblatt et al.
Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte, ed. Richard J. Dunn (3rd edition)

100F: Creative Writing: Fiction
Joe Wenderoth
We will practice and study the art of fiction in this seminar course.  To facilitate our studies, we will read and discuss successful works of fiction throughout the course.  We will try to develop a method for identifying and articulating the relationships between the components of a work of fiction.  Students will be expected to submit to the workshop three new works of fiction and will be expected to revise their work over the course of the term, turning in a final folder of creative work amounting to at least 20 pages.  Admission is by permission of the professor.  Admission is by application and acceptance of instructor (application is available on-line).

Grading
Fifty percent of the grade will be based upon the quality of the creative work and the demonstrated improvement of the work as the course progresses.  Twenty-five percent of the grade will be based upon attendance and participation.  Twenty-five percent will be based upon assignments having to do with outside reading and reading the work of classmates.

Texts
The Anchor Book Of New American Short Stories, ed. by Ben Marcus
The Art Of The Tale, ed. by Daniel Halpern

100P: Creative Writing: Poetry
Alan Williamson
This course will be a workshop in the writing of poetry with some reading and discussion of modern poetry chiefly from a technical point of view. The course is intended for undergraduates who have had some experience with, though not necessarily a course in, poetry writing. Admission is by application and acceptance of instructor (application is available on-line).

Grading
One poem a week is expected. The final assignment is the student’s own
selection of his or her four best poems. The grade is based mainly on the quality
of this final sheaf; but participation, quality of work, and improvement are also
taken into account. A report on a volume of contemporary poetry will also be
expected.

Texts
Vintage Book of Contemporary American Poetry, J.D. McClatchy

110B: Introduction to Principles of Criticism
David Simpson
This course will introduce students to some of the major modern developments in literary criticism and theory. Most of our time will be spent in the 20th century, but we will look back as appropriate to the past precursors of the recent debates. Students will gain at least an introduction to such theoretical traditions as structuralism and post-structuralism, Marxism, psychoanalysis, and formalism, and to their contribution to present-day developments in cultural and multicultural, feminist and gender studies. Students considering graduate school should take this course.

Grading        
Based on attendance at class, participation in discussion sections, one or two
papers, and a midterm and final examination. Quizzes may be given as
appropriate.

Texts                         
The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism

111: Topics in Medieval Literature
Marijane Osborn
English 111 (Medieval Literature) for Winter 2008 will be focused on that most popular of medieval narrative forms, the verse romance. We will read a range of these romances, from "King Horn," the earliest recorded romance in English, to the late "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight," with along the way some Chaucer's romances from The Canterbury Tales and a sampling of the "tail-rhyme" romances that Chaucer mocks. These include some "scary fairy" romances and Breton lays, a Celtic form, and we will also read one Anglo-Norman romance set firmly on English soil, in Celtic Cornwall. While medieval romance typically concerns a young hero on a noble quest, we will also look at one or two romances having women protagonists. Because the intention of this course is to cover as many romances and types of romance as possible, the reading of these will mainly be in modern English verse translations, though we will study at least two of the "scary fairies" in the original Middle English, with translations for backup.

Grading
Five items contribute to the final grade, as follows:
Quizzes 10% total.                First essay 10%
Midterm 20 %                       Second essay 30%
Final 30%

Texts
The Romance of Tristan, Beroul
The Middle English Breton Lays, ed. Laskaya and Salisbury.
TEAMS 1995. 1879288621 [$18].
[Order the TEAMS text from Medieval Institute Publications at MIPcatalog.com.]
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, ed. Winny.
Tales of Love and Valor: a large course reader to be available from Davis Copy Shop at 231 3rd Street. (It will contain some or all of these: Horn, Gowther, Orfeo, Launfal, Floris and Blancheflour, Emaré, Thopaz, Eglamore, the lamia from Libeaus, WBT.)

117A: Shakespeare: The Early Works
Richard Levin
This class covers the early years of Shakespeare’s dramatic career.  Though it is the first of our three sequenced Shakespeare courses (117A, B, and C), none of these classes is a prerequisite to any of the others.  We will read five plays, as follows:   A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Merchant of Venice, Much Ado About Nothing, King Richard II, and King Henry IV, Part 1. 

To prepare for the class, you may wish to read the introductory pages and the appendices of either The Riverside Shakespeare, 2d edition, or The Norton Shakespeare.   The Norton Shakespeare is the text we will use in the course.

Our main concerns will be (1) to read the plays very closely, with attention to the meaning of the language and the significance of stylistic devices; (2) to write critical essays that examine aspects of the plays in depth; (3) to discuss our views and exchange ideas; (4) to develop an understanding of the relation of the plays to one another and to the culture of early modern England.                    

Assignments: three critical essays, approximately 5 pages each; several shorter, less formal, essays; a final examination, in essay form.

Grading
The first (warm-up) paper, 15%; the 2nd and 3rd papers, 20% each; the shorter essays and class work, 15%; exam, 30%.   Regular attendance is required. 

Texts
The Norton Shakespeare, edited by Stephen Greenblatt et al.

117B: Shakespeare: The Middle Works
Judith Rose
This course will focus on Shakespeare’s intriguing “middle” period, the years around 1600 when an aging Queen Elizabeth squelched dissent, rebellion, and questions about the succession—and was then succeeded by James I, the son of her nemesis, the executed Mary Queen of Scots. We will study two of Shakespeare’s “bittersweet” romantic comedies, As You Like It and Twelfth Night; a “problem play,” Measure for Measure, and two complex tragedies, Hamlet and Othello.  As we explore the text of each play, we will consider the complex interaction of social, political, and sexual expectations encoded therein, as well as the dynamics of race and gender within an early 17th century context.  Our class will also include a performance component: readings and group performances will help us to see the works as scripts, and as collaborative ventures.

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

Texts
The Bedford Companion to Shakespeare (2nd ed.), Russ McDonald
Folger Shakespeare Library Editions of:
As You Like It
Hamlet
Measure for Measure
Othello
Twelfth Night

122: Milton
Judith Rose
As the course begins, we will explore several genres of Milton’s poetry, comparing his preoccupations to those of his contemporaries, particularly women writers with similar concerns.  The center of our inquiry will be Milton’s great epic, Paradise Lost, which we will examine in the light of his complex and often ambivalent views on gender, politics, and religion.  To illuminate the gestation of Milton’s thought, we will investigate the historical context of the period, considering the effect of the English Civil War and the Restoration upon his writing and political action.

Grading
Quizzes, homework exercises, papers, a midterm and a final.

Texts
The Complete Poetry of John Milton. Ed. by John Shawcross. Revised ed., 1971.
Course Reader for Enl 122
Optional:
The Holy Bible Containing the Old and New Testaments (King James Version)

137N: British Literature 1900-1945
Gregory Dobbins
This course will provide a survey of literature produced in the first half of the twentieth century and will focus on the aesthetics and politics of modernism. We will begin with works written during the apex of the British Empire at the turn of the century and complete the quarter with a consideration of the aftermath of WWII. Along the way we will consider the numerous and profound political, social, and cultural changes that occurred during this period as we seek to understand what impact such transformations of the world made upon British literary conventions. In doing so, we will be reading works by  Joseph Conrad, W.B. Yeats, James Joyce, Wyndham Lewis, Rebecca West, H.D., T.S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Flann O'Brien, and Samuel Beckett.

Grading
2 essays (5-7 pages)—25% each (50% in all)
Short Writing Assignment—15%
Final exam—25%
Class Participation—10%

Texts (Provisional)
Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce
To the Lighthouse or Mrs. Dalloway (tba), Virginia Woolf
At Swim-Two-Birds, Flann O’Brien
Waiting for Godot, Samuel Beckett
Course Reader (Available at Navin’s Copy Shop, 231 3rd St.)

(Note: text selection might change prior to beginning of the quarter)

146N: American Literatures: 1900-1945
Joe Wenderoth
In this course we will read texts from American Literature 1900-1945.  Rather than attempt to read this period broadly, we will look in depth at four important books from the period: two prose works (Winesburg, Ohio and Their Eyes Were Watching God) and two books of poems (Harmonium and Spring And All).  By way of these texts we will seek to develop a sense of the period’s textual practices—its definitive concerns and its shared assumptions.

Grading
Two short essays, one longer essay, and a final exam.

Texts  
Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston
Winesburg, Ohio, Sherwood Anderson
The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens, Wallace Stevens
The 25 Greatest Hot Fives And Hot Sevens (CD), Louis Armstrong

149-1: Topics in Literature: Modern Irish Literature
Greg Dobbins

* Fulfills Victorian or 20th Century British Literature requirement *

From roughly the 1890s up through the early 1920s, Irish writing came into its own as something unique and significant. In this period - generally known as the Irish Literary Revival - a wide range of writers can be said to have "invented Ireland" in that they sought to depict the cultural specificity of that nation as something separate from Great Britain. The Revival had important ramifications: not only did the cultural nationalism of the period help to provide justification for the political movements that established Ireland as a separate nation from Britain in this time, but some of the writers identified with the Revival (such as Yeats and Joyce) became some of the more influential and widely praised literary artists of the 20th century. While the fortunes of an independent Ireland have varied over the year, Irish literary production remains an unqualified success up to the present day. This course serves as an introduction to twentieth century Irish literature from the Revival to the present day

Grading
2 essays (5-7 pages)—25% each (50% in all)
Short Writing Assignment—15%
Final exam—25%
Class Participation—10%

Texts
TBA, but including works by W.B. Yeats, James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, Flann O’Brien, Elizabeth Bowen, Brian Friel, Seamus Heaney, Marina Carr among others.

155A: 18th-Century British Novel
Christopher Loar
The eighteenth century in Britain was a period of cultural, political, economic, and social transformation. It was also the period which, arguably, saw one of the most important developments in literary history: the emergence of the modern novel. In this course we will read a number of novels from this early period and attempt to understand something of the form and content of these texts. What made novels distinct from the kinds of fiction that preceded it? How did these texts respond to the massive transformations in British society during this period? To narrow our focus, we will be particularly interested in how novels try to reimagine “feelings”—or what we more formally call “affect”; the implication of the novel in the creation of private, domestic spaces; the (not unrelated) ways in which the British empire and its colonies appear in fictional form; the development of what we now call “realism”; and the importance of new gender ideals and forms of selfhood for men and women. We will begin at the ending, reading Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility, which some critics have seen as the natural endpoint and perfection of the growth of fiction in this period. We will then move a century back in time to examine some of Britain’s earliest novels, challenging as we go the assumption that all fictional roads lead to Austen. (Some of these tomes are quite weighty, but don't panic--we'll be reading selected portions of certain works.)

Grading
Grades will be based on two essays (approx. 20% each), quizzes and
in-class exercises (approx. 10%), reading journal/notes (10%), midterm
(approx. 15%), and a final (approx. 25%).

Texts
Sense and Sensibility, (Jane Austen,1811)
Oroonoko, (Aprha Behn, 1688)
Robinson Crusoe, (Daniel Defoe, 1719)
Pamela, (Samuel Richardson, 1741)
Joseph Andrews/Shamela, (Henry Fielding, 1741-42)
Tristram Shandy, (Laurence Sterne, 1759 and beyond)
Obi, (William Earle, 1800)

155C: 20th-Century British Novel
Patricia Moran
In this course we will read modernist prose works that take up the topic of marriage, sexuality, and gender.  We will pay special attention to the portrayal of memory and psychology.

Grading
Two papers, (25% each); midterm (20%); and final exam (30%)

Texts
Dubliners, James Joyce
Howards End, E. M. Forster
Women in Love, D. H. Lawrence
Selected Stories, Katherine Mansfield
Ulysses, James Joyce
To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf
Good Morning, Midnight, Jean Rhys

156: The Short Story
Jodi Angel
The goal of this course is to expose students to the short story and its evolution over the past century. During the quarter we will discuss each story’s relationship to the elements of fiction and study stories not only through critical analysis, but also in terms of analyzing the decisions the writers make in order to obtain the ultimate goal of each individual work. We will approach the stories as readers, and as writers. We will discuss how some writers subvert particular elements, while other writers magnify them. Not only will we look at stories individually, but we will also discuss how the stories work thematically in contemporary groups, the possible reflection of societal issues that they may represent, and how those perceptions of social issues mutate over time.

Grading:
TBA

Texts
The Story and Its Writer, ed. Ann Charters, 6th edition

158A: The American Novel to 1900
Janice Naoko Tanemura
This course is a survey of the nineteenth-century American novel. We will examine the dominant genres of the period as it relates to the theme of nature. Since the environment undergoes such rapid transformation, reflecting the shift from an agrarian to an industrial economy, a study of the literary representations of nature will uncover a number of significant ideological changes that occurred in the conception of nature in the nineteenth century.  We will look at the romance and gothic fiction as early attempts to represent nature’s transcendental power. Then we will examine the relationship between nature and morality as it is explored in realism. And finally we will explore naturalism’s attempts to represent the impact of capitalism through natural imagery. The larger goal of the class will be to examine how ideas of nature interact with and transform conceptions of race, gender, and class in the nineteenth-century.    

Grading
Students will be required to complete two papers, one midterm, and a final exam.

Texts
The Pioneers, (1823) James Fennimore Cooper
Blithedale Romance, (1852) Nathaniel Hawthorne
Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, (1861) Harriet Jacobs
Daisy Miller, (1878) Henry James
The Country of the Pointed Firs, (1896) Sarah Orne Jewett
The Octopus, (1901) Frank Norris
Up From Slavery, (1901) Booker T. Washington
Course Reader

159: Topics in the Novel: Looking Back to Look Forward:
The British Historical Novel 1820-2006
Brynne Gray
* Fulfills Victorian or 20th Century Requirement *
The historical novel in Great Britain gained substantial popularity through the works of Sir Walter Scott, and this subgenre has maintained its attraction for novelists and readers throughout the intervening decades. The historical novel offers a compelling perspective on contemporary life by distancing issues in time while affirming the universality of human experience. How does a text’s representation of the past shape the reader’s conception of history?

Grading:
TBA

Texts
The Heart of Mid-Lothian, Sir Walter Scott
A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens
Adam Bede, George Eliot
Possession: A Romance, A. S. Byatt
The Lambs of London, Peter Ackroyd

160: Film as Narrative: The Western and the Twentieth-Century West
Scott Simmon
This quarter, we explore narrative through the film Western, conceived widely to extend into tales of the contemporary American West.  (Of the full-length films screened, most are set in the twentieth century.)  After locating patterns of the “classic” Western, our main focus will turn to films that bend formulas and violate expectations.  We will look into the Western’s way of narrating through landscape and silent gestures, into Hollywood’s genre crossbreeding, and into experimental narratives from independent and international filmmakers.  Demanding study too will be the Western’s heavy cultural baggage: its revealing representations of history, race, and gender.  Movies are our central subject, but we will also read recent fiction that redeploys the genre’s conventions for new ends.  (The six class hours each week will include one full‑length screening and a number of excerpted sequences.) 

Grading
Two midterm quizzes, 15% each; critical papers, 40%, final, 30%.  

Texts
All the Pretty Horses, Cormac McCarthy (1992)
Flight, Sherman Alexie (2007)
Horizons West, Jim Kitses (2004)
Little Big Man, Thomas Berger (1964)
The Invention of the Western Film, Scott Simmon (2003)
West of Everything: The Inner Life of Westerns, Jane Tompkins (1992)

177: Study of an Individual Author: Christopher Marlowe
Richard Levin
The subject of the class is the literary career of Christopher Marlowe.  Born in the same year as Shakespeare (1564), he developed as a dramatist at a quicker pace.  The brilliance and boldness of his plays at once attracted attention.  No writer of the English Renaissance challenged more powerfully than he the orthodox views of his age.  He did so with his “mighty line”–blank verse full of energy and exotic allusion.  Even writers who opposed his cultural ideas acknowledged his greatness and were influenced by him.  He was no less controversial as a man than as a writer.  He was accused of voicing heretical and subversive opinions.   Before he left university he probably spied on behalf of the Crown but the authorities in time became mistrustful of him.  He was murdered under circumstances still not understood at the age of 29.  

We will read Marlowe’s plays–the two parts of Tamburlaine, Dr. Faustus. The Jew of Malta, King Edward II, Dido, Queen of Carthage, The Massacre at Paris–and his erotic epyllion, Hero and Leander.

Assignments:  three critical essays, approximately 5 pages each, several short, more casual, essays, possibly in the form of emails circulated to the class; a final examination in essay form.

Grading
The first (warm-up) paper, 15%; the 2nd and 3rd papers, 20% each; shorter essays and class work, 15%; exam, 30%. Regular attendance is required. 

Texts: TBA

178: Special Topics in Ethnic Literature: Literature of the Contemporary Asian Diaspora: Conditions of Belonging
*Fulfills American Lit Post 1865 Requirement*
Mark Jerng
This course will explore contemporary narratives of Asian diasporas and how they rethink forms of community, national belonging, and settlement. The Asian diasporan subject is often defined in terms of perpetual movement, travel, and migration. But this definition does not account for the problem of what it means to settle, and how the attempts to settle and make a home disrupt conventional forms of belonging such as the nation and family, as well as conventional narratives of immigration. Our primary interest will be in analyzing novels and films and how they figure such difficult modes of settlement in relation to identity-formation, sociality, the politics of race and language, and citizenship. We will also analyze relevant legal doctrine and cases on citizenship and the status of refugees, as well as social theory that seeks to expand our definitions of belonging. The primary goal of the course is to rethink what “Asian American” and other racial and social categories might mean in relation to a global politics of settlement.

Grading
2-page Close Reading Assignment (15%)
8-10 page paper (20%)
Paper Revision (20%)
Quiz (15%)
Final Exam (30%)

Texts
Who’s Irish, Gish Jen
The Love Wife, Gish Jen
Native Speaker, Chang-rae Lee’s
Through the Arc of the Rain-Forest, Karen Tei Yamashita
In A Free State, V.S. Naipaul
The Pagoda, Patricia Powell
Leave It To Me, Bharati Mukherjee,

Film Screening
Daughter from Danang

182 - Literature of California
Jack Hicks
In c. 1510, Garci Ordóñez de Montalvo published a popular Spanish romance, The Adventures of Esplandiàn, in which he imagined a "fantastic island very near the Terrestrial Paradise." He paved his streets with gold, and set the warrior Queen Calafia in power, a statuesque Amazon who captured men for breeding and thereafter fed them (live) to her griffins. Ordóñez called his island "California," and his romance named the state and offered the first mythic vision of the largest, most populous and most controversial political entity in the United States. This course examines literary treatments of the Golden State, ranging from Ordóñez' fantasy and early tales of the indigenous Indian peoples before Euroamerican "discovery," to 19th- and 20th-century prose and poetry by Mark Twain, Helen Hunt Jackson, John Muir, Robinson Jeffers, Raymond Chandler, David Mas Masumoto, Héctor Tobar and Octavia Butler. Readings include tall tales from the Gold Rush; the epic poetry of the stormy Pacific; tough-guy noir detective stories; a lyric celebration of a Central Valley family farm; a novel of Guatemalan immigrants who transpose their civil war to California during the Rodney King riots; and a feminist science fiction narrative of the trek out of Los Angeles on freeways (and on foot), "back to the country" after the city collapses.
 
Grading
Midterm, one paper, final exam

Texts                        
The Literature of California, Vol. I, ed. Hicks, et al
Epitaph for a Peach, Masumoto
The Tattooed Soldier, Tobar
Parable of the Sower, Butler

186: Literature, Sexuality, and Gender
Riche Richardson
From rap music and the recent controversy related to talk show host Don Imus to the fashion runway and the phenomenon of Tyra Banks's America's Next Top Model, how women's bodies are represented has been a topic of ongoing fascination, and even debate, in U.S. national culture.  Indeed, supermodel Heidi Klum has been nicknamed "the body."  The Hollywood screen goddesses of the 1930s, the pinups of the 1940s and the runway icons of the 1990s have saliently shaped iconography related to the woman's body in U.S. culture, as have figures ranging from Jennifer Lopez to Jessica Simpson.  In recent times, the popularity of the contemporary television series Ugly Betty has provided only the latest evidence of the fundamental links between the visual and the feminine on screen.  Literary representations of the woman's body are often less familiar and yet more mystifying, which is one good reason to study such texts in tandem alongside media representations.  This course will focus on the representation of the female body in -and beyond -literature.  This includes, for instance, representations of the female body in popular culture such as music and film, as well as dialogues in selected essays.  We will build skills in analyzing and discussing a range of texts, drawing on the definitions of cultural studies to conceive the idea of the textuality broadly.  We will consider novels such as Ira Levin's The Stepford Wives and clips from the related films, Edith Wharton's Ethan Frome, Shay Youngblood's Black Girl in Paris, Angela Carter's The Birth of a New Eve, Suzan-Lori Parks's play Venus, and short stories such as Flannery O'Connor's "Good Country People" to explore themes related to the female body.  In addition, we will draw on a range of contexts in art, film, and music, an approach that will allow us to consider the artistic representations of Kara Walker, and use a technological resource such as YouTube to examine selected rap, pop and R&B video archives highlighting images and themes related to the body, in the genre of Sir Mix-A-Lot's "Baby Got Back."  Ultimately, this video element also relates to the larger historical frameworks that consider Sarah Bartmann's portrayal as the "Hottentot Venus."  Finally, we will revisit Naomi Wolf's The Beauty Myth and Nancy Etcoff's Survival of the Prettiest to examine some conflicting dialogues on the female body, as related to the topic of beauty, in recent decades. 

Grading
Midterm
Final
Final Paper
Class project

Texts
African Queen, Rachel Holmes
Venus, Susan-Lori Parks
The Stepford Wives, Ira Levin
Black Girl in Paris, Shay Youngblood
Ethan Frome, Eidth Whatron
Passion of New Eve, Angela Carter
The Beauty Myth, Naomi Wolf
Survival of the Prettiest, Nancy Etcoff

188-1: Special Topics in Literary Studies: Imagining Los Angeles
Jack Hicks
Until 1900, Los Angeles was San Francisco’s embarrassing country cousin, but with the discovery of oil, highjacking of water from the Owens Valley, and the explosion of new money via the film industry, it was marketed as a paradise on earth by railroad barons, real estate hucksters, land developers and chambers of commerce, exploding exponentially in size and population. One hundred years later, for filmmakers and writers--and plate tectonicists, urban geographers and political theorists--the “City of Lost Angels” has become a convenient metaphor for the postmodern city as smoggy dystopia, a cautionary example of an overripe California gone rotten.   From the pages of Raymond Chandler, James Ellroy, John McPhee, Octavia Butler, Hector Tobar and D.J. Waldie to Chinatown,”Zoot Suit,” “Blade Runner” and “L.A. Confidential” on the big screen, L.A. has been treated as a palmy landscape of social collapse and psychic nightmare. We take a look at some of the most artful renderings of those bad dreams in this course and consider them as works of art and cultural documents.
Enrollment limited to 15.

Grading
Three short papers. 

Texts
The Control of Nature, John McPhee
The Big Sleep, Raymond Chandler
Holy Land, D.J. Waldie
My Dark Places, James Ellroy
The Tattooed Soldier,Héctor Tobar
Parable of the Sower, Octavia Butler and films TBA

188-2: Special Topics in Literary Studies: Opera as Literature
David Van Leer
Since the beginning of the seventeenth century, musical theater in Western Europe and the Americas has combined voice, instruments, plot, character, and spectacle to create the most all-inclusive conglomerate of live theatrical performances, called simply “opera” (Italian / Latin for “work”).  We will examine four operas as works of theater, focusing on their literary aspects (character, plot, language) and their additional theatrical components (most obviously singing and orchestration, but also musical structure, staging, design, and spectacle).  Each work will of course be considered in itself as artistic achievement (and pleasurable experience).   Each will also be studied as representative of various operatic genres (comic, serious, mythic, etc) and as a stage in the historical development of opera.  Finally all will be examined more generally as cultural products.  We will explore the relation of these operas to their literary predecessors in epic poetry and romance novels and to their offspring in modern popular culture (e.g., twentieth-century cartoons, Rent, and the Disney Aida).   We will also the popular folk traditions and nationalist politics that gave birth to this art form.

The course will be focused on four familiar operatic masterpieces:   Puccini’s La Boheme, Verdi’s Aida, Mozart’s Don Giovanni, and Wagner’s Die Walküre.   Although video- and sound-recordings of the operas will be available at Hart Hall, students will probably wish to purchase their own copies of the four required texts.  There will also be readings about opera history and more general cultural theory in an anthology of Xeroxed material.

The course requires no previous experience in music or theater: no knowledge about the history of music and theater; about singing; about score reading; about instrumental performance; about acting; or about theatrical staging.  Any experience in these areas will, of course, be welcome, and all these topics will be discussed in the course.  Students should from their other courses in literature be familiar with the discussion of literary structure, characterization and similar approaches to textual analysis.  The only true prerequisite, however, is the willingness to explore this exciting but unusual form of theater through the fairly time-consuming process of listening to cds, watching dvds, and reading scripts and other print material.

Grading
The course will be structured as a seminar with two 80-minute classes a week.  Students will be expected to: participate actively in general class discussion; deliver one or two seminar reports; and write two papers, a short (2-page) one on a seminar report, and a longer (10-page) final paper on a topic of the student’s choosing.  The grade is based one-half on seminar work (discussion, reports, short paper) and one half on the final paper.

Texts
Required
Anthology of Xeroxed materials, on sale at Navin’s
Scripts or (preferably) scores of the four operas
Recommended
CDs, DVDs, All will be available on reserve but students will be strongly
encouraged to purchase and annotate their own copies of at least some of this
material.

189: Seminar in a Major Writer:
Elizabeth Bishop, Wallace Stevens, & John Ashbery
Joanne Diehl
"All poetry is experimental poetry," remarked Wallace Stevens. The three poets whom we will read in this course -- Stevens, Elizabeth Bishop, and John Ashbery -- each conceive or "experiment" with the very meaning of the term. Stevens explores the results of the encounter between the imagination and experience. Bishop redefines the relation of the self to the natural world. And Ashbery develops a concept of poetry as process. Our method will be a close reading of texts in order to achieve a nuanced, differentiated sense of poetic experimentation. Students will be expected to write a short paper on each poet. Individual classes will open with prepared student questions.

Grading:
TBA

Texts:
TBA