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{Home > Courses/Schedules > Expanded Course Descriptions }---------------
Graduate Expanded Course Descriptions: Fall 2006 ENL 200Introduction to Graduate Studies in EnglishAssistant Professor Desireé Martín <dmartin@ucdavis.edu>M 3:10-6 p.m., 248 Voorhies, CRN: 23245 This course aims to equip new graduate students with the information and skills they need to have successful and rewarding careers in the UC Davis English Department and beyond. Subjects covered will include: the landscape of academe; career possibilities; optimal graduate trajectories and timelines; basic research and bibliographic techniques; theoretical, methodological, and archival options; common genres of academic writing; devising a research program; initiating and maintaining mentor relationships; teaching strategies; and a host of smaller pragmatic issues. A different pair of faculty members will visit every class meeting to introduce themselves and their fields of specialization.
ENL 233The Bellum Era in American LiteratureProfessor Michael Ziser <mgziser@ucdavis.edu>W 12:10 – 3 p.m., 263 Olson, CRN: 43524 In this seminar we will gaze into the abyss that divides and organizes 19th century American literary historiography long enough for it to gaze back into us. Beginning with the cultural foment of the Civil War in the rhetorical battle between defenders of the southern and national Slave Power and the increasingly radical abolitionist movements in New York and Boston, we will track the role of sentimental novel in providing the rationale and setting the terms for war, deliberate over the legal justifications for secession and Lincoln’s response, assess the influence of photographic technology on the narrative and poetic genres of mid-century, probe the medical trauma and the medico-literary responses it, and address the afterlife of the war in American literature and culture. Authors treated will include William Gilmore Simms, George Fitzhugh, Nat Turner, John Brown, Emerson, Thoreau, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Sarah Josepha Hale, Caroline Lee Hentz, Ulysses S. Grant, Matthew Brady, Melville, Whitman, Henry Timrod, Sidney Lanier, S. Weir Mitchell, Albion Tourgee, Ambrose Bierce, John W. DeForest, George Washington Cable, Faulkner, The Agrarians, and Margaret Mitchell. Depending on the subject of the final paper, this class may count for either Early or Later American.
ENL 238 Derrida and Deconstruction Professor Scott C. Shershow <scshershow@ucdavis.edu> W 3:10-6 p.m., 248 Voorhies, CRN: 23248
ENL 240 Medieval Literature Assistant Professor Seeta Chaganti <schaganti@ucdavis.edu> T 12:10-3 p.m., 144 Olson, CRN: 23249 In bringing together the world of language and the material world, English drama from the late Middle Ages raises important questions about representation and semiosis. It allows us to think about relationships between literary and material culture both within the context of the Middle Ages itself and in subsequent Anglophone dramatic traditions. Medieval theatre often challenges our expectations of what theatre should look like and what purposes it is meant to serve. Performance in the Middle Ages dynamically disregarded boundaries between audience and performer, and between sacred and secular worlds. It also provided an important locus for debate about the meaning and validity of religious images. In this seminar, we will read examples of late-medieval English dramatic texts from a variety of categories, including Corpus Christi cycles, morality plays, and saints’ and miracle plays. We will also look at the performance conventions surrounding liturgical ceremonies and the mass. We will approach all these occasions of spectacle as cultural documents that can teach us about the history of performance. But at the same time, we will think as well about the new perspectives that early drama creates on critical theories of performance and performativity.
ENL 244ShakespeareProfessor Richard Levin <ralevin@ucdavis.edu> M 12:10-3 p.m., 248 Voorhies, CRN: 435278 We will read plays (see list below) that span a considerable part of Shakespeare’s career and that are among his greatest achievement in the dramatic genres in which he worked. We will attempt to interpret the plays in the context of developments in criticism during the last quarter century.
ENL 254 Twentieth-Century British Literature Associate Professor Patricia Moran <plmoran@ucdavis.edu> R 3:10-6 p.m., 1106 Hart Hall, CRN: 43529 In this course we will read such writers as A. S. Byatt, Margaret Drabble, Jeanette Winterson, and Angela Carter, contemporary or near contemporary British women writers whose fiction looks back to Victorian and Modernist predecessors. We will explore the depiction of the literary canon as well as specific returns to individual writers. We will also consider how gender, class, and ethnicity impact contemporary women writers’ revisionary representations.
ENL 262 The Generation of 1927 Professor Alan Williamson <abwilliamson@ucdavis.edu> R 3:10-6 p.m., 248 Voorhies, CRN: 23253 An extraordinary group of poets, born around 1927, coming to prominence in the 1950's or early 1960's, expanded the possibilities of American poetry in many directions, which we are still far from exhausting. We will be concentrating on particularly influential individual volumes, though in some cases we'll resort to larger selections. Major emphasis on Ginsberg, Snyder, Rich, Merwin, Wright, Merrill and Ashbery--though other poets will also be considered.
ENL 290F Seminar in Creative Writing of Fiction Assistant Professor Lucy Corin <lcorin@ucdavis.edu> R 12:10-3 p.m., 248 Voorhies, CRN: TBA This is a fiction writing workshop. Because this is the fall, it will be the first workshop for many (though certainly not all) of you. We’ll begin with some exercises designed for generating new material and playing with unfamiliar ways of writing. Expect to have two or three workshops and to present around 50 pages of fiction in “ready for workshop” shape, that is: as done as you know how to make it on your own but not so done that you’re finished thinking about it. Bring pieces you are willing and ready to revise. You are expected to show revision work on some but not all your pieces by the end of the quarter.
ENL 290P Seminar in Creative Writing of Poetry Associate Professor Joe Wenderoth <jlwenderoth@ucdavis.edu> T 12:10-3, 248 Voorhies, CRN: TBA Scope and Purpose: In this seminar, we will use a workshop format to foment the writing of poetry. At the same time, we will work to develop a productive way of discussing the poetry-writing process—its potentials and its inherent difficulties. In order to facilitate our discussion, we will read, both secretly and publicly, poems from different contexts.
Critical Theory 200A Professor David Simpson <desimpson@ucdavis.edu> R 12:10-3 p.m. The canon of literary theory has always exceeded what can be taught or read in a quarter or semester. Here we can only aspire to set down some markers. We will focus on some of the major writers whose work was produced before and just before the contemporary moment: Hegel, Marx, Freud, Saussure, Lacan, and Derrida will be the major topics, but there will be other writers too.
Critical Theory 200B Transgression in Early Modern England: Theory and Method Professor Frances E. Dolan <fdolan@ucdavis.edu> W 3:10-6 p.m. This course will begin with a set of theoretical readings about historical method (Foucault, Greenblatt, Hayden White, Trouillot, and Braudel). Our focus will then turn to the early modern period because it was a time in which standards of evidence were being debated and revised in the intersecting arenas of law, religion, and science. We will first work through David Cressy’s collection Agnes Bowker’s Cat: Travesties and Transgressions in Tudor and Stuart England, scrutinizing the evidence he presents there and following some of his leads into printed texts available through the Early English Books Online database. In the rest of the quarter, our readings will be organized around scandalous (legal) cases from the early modern period that are well-documented and much studied: the Overbury affair (poisoning and witchcraft), particularly as discussed by Alistair Bellany and David Lindley, the Earl of Castlehaven’s trial for rape and sodomy, especially as it is discussed in Cynthia Herrup’s A House in Gross Disorder, and several contested witchcraft prosecutions, including the case of Anne Gunter, as discussed by Brian Levack and James Sharpe. One of the things we will consider is why these cases were found so scandalous at the time and why they have figured so importantly in our histories of the period. In other words, why have they generated so much representation and interrogation, then and now? As a class, we will work through some of the evidence in each case, considering what constituted evidence at the time, and how that evidence is now evaluated. What protocols guide the selection and evaluation of evidence? Are there meaningful disciplinary and historical differences in these protocols? Students will work toward a substantial research paper at the end of the quarter (about 15-20 pages). They will also make presentations and prepare short written assignments throughout the quarter. |
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