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{Home > Courses/Schedules> Spring 2007 Graduate Expanded Course Descriptions}------------ Spring
2007 Graduate Expanded Course Descriptions ENL 236:
Poetics ENL 240:
CANCELLED 3/06/07 ENL 242:
Mixed Genres, Contested Authorities: In this seminar we will explore Renaissance theories of genre ("the resources of kind," as Rosalie Colie calls them) in relation to constructions of authority that emerge from writing practices that blur generic and other ideologically charged boundaries including those among genders, religious affiliations, and social ranks. We will start with Sir Philip Sidney's Defense of Poetry (with its invective against "mongrel" or mixed genres). We will focus on debates about the relations between tragedy and comedy, between epic and romance, and, more generally, between poetry, drama, and prose. Readings will include Thomas Nashe's The Unfortunate Traveller (with its embedded poems), selections from Spenser's The Faerie Queene, Shakespeare's Measure for Measure and The Winter's Tale, Mary Wroth's pastoral play Love's Victory, selections from her prose romance The Urania (read in conjunction with Jonson's Masque of Blackness and excerpts from Philip Sidney's Arcadia), selections from Margaret Cavendish's The World's Olio, from Milton's Paradise Lost and, last but not least, Aphra Behn's tragicomedy Abdelazar. ENL 248:
Eighteenth-Century Literature: Despite eighteenth-century Britain’s significant innovations in social, economic, religious, and political institutions, scholarship on the period has often ignored the utopian impulse that contributed to setting those trends in motion. In this seminar we will work toward a definition of the utopian impulse in eighteenth-century Britain, considering not only fictional ideal societies but also the non-fictional texts that elucidate utopianism in scientific and technological developments, colonial endeavors, capitalist development, demands for female education, sentimentalism, the movement toward revolution, and socialism. Please read Thomas Mores Utopia (ed. Robert Adams, Norton edition, pp. 1-133, Text and Backgrounds) for the first class meeting. Texts
ENL 254 :
Twentieth-Century British Literature: In the introduction to a book entitled The Break-up of Britain written
in 1976, Tom Nairn argued "there is no doubt that the old British state
is going down. But, so far at least, it has been a slow foundering
rather than the Titanic-type disaster so often predicted. But in the
1970s it has begun to assume a form which practically no one
foresaw...everything conspired to cause an inexorable spiral of decline.
The slide would end in break-down sooner rather than later." That same
year, violence in Northern Ireland reached devastating levels; the riots
at that summer's Notting Hill Carnival (in which Black British youth
fought back against an increasingly repressive police force) symbolized
a particularly tense moment in British race relations; and the nihilism
of the punks, the new subculture of choice for disaffected British
youth, suggested the very real sense that there was no viable positive
future. It is no wonder that Margaret Drabble, then working on a novel
that would be published the following year, would title her book "The
Ice Age"-- a phrase that might be extended to Britain throughout the
decade of the 1970s.
ENL 262 : American Literature After 1914: One of the most exciting areas that energizes the field of gender studies is critical work on masculinity, which has deftly applied the methods of an array of discourses on male subjectivity. The scholarship in critical masculinities has, for instance, considered the role of race, sexuality, nation, and geography in masculine formations, clarified from a critical and theoretical standpoint a range of male-centered social movements, and considered the phenomenon of female masculinity and the intersection of law and masculinity. Furthermore, masculinity and manhood have been conceptually engaged in a range of disciplines in recent years. This course will take up a range of critical and theoretical perspectives in this field with one major goal of thinking through and clarifying with more precision this body of work on masculinity and why it matters, and navigating this complex terrain . Critics who will be considered include Maurice Wallace, David Eng, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Judith Halberstam, Dwight McBride, Robyn Wiegman, and Dana Nelson, among others. ENL 270: Studies in Contemporary World Literature: This course will serve as a theoretical introduction to the field known as postcolonial studies. In addition to examining some of the major statements in this area that have emerged over the last quarter-century and revisiting earlier theoretical pronouncements (most notably those of Ernest Renan, Aime Cesaire, and Frantz Fanon), we will endeavor to chart the philosophical, institutional, and political genealogies of the field and to ponder its possible future(s). We will give our attention to some at least of the following questions: Orientalism/Orientalism’s legacies; the colonial encounter and psycho-political fantasy; nationalisms, diasporas, and globalizations; sovereignty and citizenship; feminism and decolonization; postcolonial intellectuals, the academy, and civil society; and subaltern studies, subaltern speech, and the colonial archive. Our readings will include works by Edward Said, Homi Bhabha, Gayatri Spivak, Anne McClintock, Deniz Kandiyoti, Frantz Fanon, Aime Cesaire, Lata Mani, Ann Stoler, Stuart Hall, Paul Gilroy, Benedict Anderson, Robert Young, Ian Baucom, Achille Mbembe, and Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri. We will supplement our theoretical readings with the scrutiny of a single literary text, Assia Djebar’s Fantasia: An Algerian Cavalcade. Assignments include oral presentations, a key words project, and a seminar paper. ENL 290F: Seminar in Creative Writing of Fiction This is an advanced fiction workshop, concentrating on the analysis both of assigned texts, and of two, occasionally three, student manuscripts per week. Each student will be responsible for submitting, for class discussion, two pieces of new fiction, to a maximum length of 25 pages each, or, with permission, one piece of new fiction and one major rewrite. Exercises will be assigned both for spontaneous writing in class, and for submission the following week. Texts ENL 290F: Seminar in Creative Writing of Non-Fiction My goal as workshop leader is to create an environment where writers become excited about
talking both stylistic and emotional risks in their work.
Texts ENL 290P: Seminar in Creative Writing of Poetry This course will be a graduate workshop in the writing of poetry, organized by the linked concepts of autonomy and unlearning. It starts from two very simple propositions: first, that poetry has as its birthright as the unbounded, autonomous expression of existence and human imagination. And second, that to claim this birthright, poets must unlearn as many habits of mind as possible, since habits are horizons. In pursuing these, we'll try various experiments and assignments designed to circumvent our own habits of composition, and reveal horizons we may have stopped noticing so as to one day travel beyond them. Students should expect to read and write unfamiliar material, and engage in energetic conversation, each week. Final project will involve making the world new again. Perfect for beginners. Texts
ENL 391 :
Teaching Creative Writing (2 units) ENL 393:
Teaching Literature and Composition (2 units)
Critical Theory 200B
Prof. David Van Leer
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