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{Home > Courses/Schedules > Expanded Course Descriptions }---------------
Graduate Expanded Course Descriptions: Winter 2007 ENL 230: Study of a Major Writer In the ashes of high modernism, the New York School’s cultural turn in the 1950’s devalued classical and European tradition to engage various contemporary spheres both as reference and methodology. John Ashbery and Frank O’Hara (notably, an art critic and curator, respectively), moved fluidly from high to popular culture to camp, in a motion that predicts or premiers the vaunted flattening of cultural hierarchies so often associated with postmodernism. In this course we’ll read the two poets and their cohorts and contemporaries with care, as well as considering such parallel motions as Abstract Expressionism; Hollywood in all its Technicolor glory; queer cosmopolite culture before Stonewall; and the tragicomic arena of politics -- all with an eye to periodizing 20th-century American poetry, and using this in turn to understand cultural formations of late capitalism/globalism.
ENL 233: Problems in American Literature:
ENL 240: Medieval Literature Saints and Hagiography in Medieval England Associate Professor Claire Waters <cmwaters@ucdavis.edu> W 12:10-3:00, 248 Voorhies, CRN: 64907 The modern usage of the term hagiography belies the widely varied and not infrequently bizarre world of medieval saints’ lives. This course will look at texts dealing with sinners, kings, hermits, virgin martyrs, archbishops, and others who attained sanctity (or had it thrust upon them) that were produced in medieval England after the Norman Conquest—mostly in (accessible) Middle English, but with some Latin and French examples in translation. We’ll be considering the multiple contexts and uses of the legends of the saints in medieval culture, with particular attention to their appeara nce in manuscript anthologies and their role in popular culture.
ENL 246: 17th-century Literature Tudor and Stuart Drama Professor Fran Dolan <fdolan@ucdavis.edu> T 4:10-7:00 p.m., 156 Voorhies, CRN: 64908 TIME CHANGE In this course, participants will work through the Norton Anthology of English Renaissance Drama, reading plays by a number of playwrights (Kyd, Marlowe, Dekker, Middleton, Cary, Webster, Beaumont and Fletcher) written in a range of subgenres (city comedy, tragicomedy, revenge tragedy, etc.) across about 60 years. While we will devote most of our time to reading and discussing the plays themselves, we will also read a sampling of recent criticism (provided in a slender and modestly priced course packet). We will also read some scholarship on the Renaissance stage and its audiences. Students will be expected to write the usual seminar paper (15 pages), but will also complete some other exercises, individually and collaboratively, most in the service of preparing them to teach these plays. For instance, each student will prepare a rough teaching plan, a writing assignment, and a quiz for one play. As a group, we will assemble a lecture on early modern London and its performance spaces. We will also do a "staged reading" of one play in the course of the quarter. I hope to make this course useful to students specializing in the medieval and/or early modern periods, as well as students interested in drama and performance more generally or in thinking collaboratively about teaching literature.
ENL 250: Romantic Literature Romanticism Professor Timothy Morton <tbmorton@ucdavis.edu> W 3:10-6:00 p.m., 248 Voorhies, CRN: 64909 William Blake, William Wordsworth, William Cobbett, William Pitt, Helen Maria Williams: a host of Williams, and there were other people too. The Romantic period was the beginning of modernity. The American and French Revolutions and the birth of the working class and industrial capitalism are the main historical events. The cultural moment witnessed the emergence of consumerism (and resistance to it), the growth of feminism, anti-slavery activism and art. Artistic production resulted in Romantic irony, the sublime, modern media technologies (such as the Panorama), dizzyingly reflexive literary forms, a new kind of novel (realism). Authors became increasingly inward and, at the very same time, their work was highly politicized and the notion of a poetic avant garde came into being, for the first time in literary history. The ensuing and continuing literary movements (up to and including L.A.N.G.U.A.G.E. poetry) are, in theoretical terms at least, within the parameters of Romanticism. Studying the Romantic period provides a very strong grounding in understanding the poetics and politics of modernity.
English 262: American Literature After 1914 Critical Multiculturalism Assistant Professor Mark Jerng R 12:10-3:00, location TBA, CRN: 43477 "Race, class, gender…Isn't all that just history?" (Adrienne Rich) This course will examine the theoretical legacies of multiculturalism – defined broadly as the claim for equal respect for different cultures as a measure of public and private life – and evaluate its impact on literature, politics, and literary theory. Beyond polemical debates regarding the uses and abuses of multiculturalism, the term coined in the '70s has been central in reorienting and perhaps disorienting certain categories central to literature and society. We will proceed through four thematic/conceptual clusters throughout the term: 1) subjection and ideology; 2) the politics of recognition; 3) identity and agency; 4) citizenship, belonging, and community. We will alternate between weeks in which we draw from political philosophy (Balibar, Althusser, Appiah, Honneth, Foucault, Bernard Williams, Arendt), literary theory (Bakhtin, Chow, Butler, Bhabha, Palumbo-Liu, Wong), and psychoanalysis (Lacan, Winnicott), and weeks in which we read contemporary novelists such as Philip Roth, Chang-rae Lee, Larissa Lai, Karen Tei Yamashita, and Toni Morrison in order to elaborate on these issues. Our goals will be to analyze the paradigms and assumptions of multiculturalism, and develop literary and critical analyses that help us construct new paradigms of difference, belonging, representation and rights. Assignments: 15-page seminar paper, Oral Presentation, 5-7 page book review assignment.
ENL 264: Studies in Modern British and American Literature “Literature & Science” Assistant Professor Colin Milburn <cnmilburn@ucdavis.edu> M 12:10-3:00, 248 Voorhies, CRN: 64911 This seminar will focus on research methods and theoretical concepts for the integrated study of literature, science, and technoculture. Readings from core critical texts will accompany specific case studies from the crossroads of literature and science. The course will cover the history of scientific genres, the literary structure of scientific arguments, and fictive representations of science and technology. We will develop methodological toolkits for transdisciplinary scholarship that seeks to bridge the “two cultures,” as well as opening possibilities for collaboration between scientists and humanists. Models of analysis drawing from both literary and scientific modes of thinking will be explored as a way of working towards development of the “posthumanities
ENL 290F: Seminar in Creative Writing of Fiction Professor Pam Houston <plhouston@ucdavis.edu> R 12:10-3:00 p.m., 248 Voorhies, CRN: TBA This course will be an intensive and advanced fiction workshop. We will focus on what I believe to be the real artistry of fiction: the translation of the emotional stakes of the story onto its physical landscape; the way we dip our ladles into the bottomless pot of metaphor soup and pull out what we need, what we can then shape into story. We will be aiming for stories in which the language is always working in at least two ways at once, where metaphors dance between meanings like beads of water on a too hot grill. Each student will be expected to turn in three new pieces of fiction during the course of the semester (either stories or novel chapters), and turn in approximately 50 pages of workshopped and polished fiction by the end of the semester. There will be some reading and brief weekly exercises at the beginning of the semester that will become optional as we get farther into the real work.
Professor Sandra McPherson <sandyjmc@mindspring.com> T 12:10-3:00, 248 Voorhies, CRN: TBA With an eye (& ear) to being practiced in poetic range, we will try some difficult metrical and rhymed forms (Drury and handouts) and encourage tonal variegation and other virtues of Akhmatova. Each week a new assignment will provide focus and impetus. Possibilities include Alcaics, Dialogue Poem, Ghazal, Terza Rima, Dramatic Monologue, Shortlined Free Verse, or similar challenges. Your poems are the heart of our work in this course: almost all class time is devoted to workshopping your new creations. At term’s end, you will turn in a portfolio of your term’s work and revisions of it. One-on-one conferencing with the professor will be encouraged.
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