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Spring 2008 Graduate Expanded Course Descriptions

Click on instructor's name for their web page | Note: Descriptions subject to change.

NOTE: ALL COURSES SUBJECT TO TIME OR LOCATION CHANGE

ENL 230: Samuel Beckett and a Singular Modernity (4 units)
Assistant Professor Gregory Dobbins<gjdobbins@ucdavis.edu>
T 3:10-6 p.m., 308 Voohries, CRN: 66438

This course will serve as a comprehensive introduction to the comically
bleak and occasionally maddening-- in a good way, at least in my view--
writing of Samuel Beckett. We will be reading a wide selection of his
works, including novels like Murphy, Watt, Molloy, Malone Dies, and The
Unnamable, and How It Is; plays like Waiting for Godot, Endgame, Krapp's
Last Tape, Happy Days, Play, Not I and some of the so-called
'dramiticules'; and shorter texts like Texts for Nothing, Company, Ill Seen
Ill Said, and Worstword Ho. While that might sound like a lot, one must
keep in mind that Beckett's writing after a certain point is characterized
as much by the brevity of his texts as the experimental qualities of his
style, and we should have no problem reading all of these and possibly more
(though one must also proceed with the caveat that the brevity of these
texts doesn't necessarily make them easier to read). In addition to our
reading of Beckett, we will use his writing as a terrain in which to ground
an inquiry into the theorization of modernity, late modernity, and
postmodernity (as well as the artistic correlatives modernism, late
modernism, and postmodernism), ideally with the hopes of interrogating the
meaning of what has been termed by Fredric Jameson "a singular modernity."
Critical readings will most likely include selections by Jameson, Adorno,
Agamben, Badiou and others; some familiarity with James Knowlson's
magisterial biography of Beckett (Damned to Fame) will be helpful but is
not required.

ENL 233: Dickinson and Whitman (4 Units)
Professor Joanne Diehl<jfdiehl@ucdavis.edu>
T 12:10-3 p.m., 248 Voorhies, CRN: 66439

This course offers an intensive critical evaluation of Dickinson and Whitman. In addition to analyzing a substantial body of work from both poets, we will examine issues raised by current scholarship. For Dickinson, this includes the question of whether her philosophical stance evolves
throughout her writing life, the problem of interpreting the poems given the alternative words that appear on various parts of the page, the interactions between her and the cultural milieu that surrounds her, and the issue of whether to identify her poems as lyrics. We will approach Whitman through the lens of politics and sexuality and then go on to evaluate his influence on later American poets,among them Hart Crane and Wallace Stevens.

Seminar participants will be required to give brief presentations at the opening of class. There will be one final paper.  

Texts:

“The Poems of Emily Dickinson: Reading Edition” edited by R.W. Franklin
“Leaves of Grass,” Second Edition, (Norton Critical Editions) edited by Michael Moon

English 246 Seventeenth-Century Literature: Problems of Poetic Authority in Spenser, Lanyer, and Milton (4 Units)
Professor Margaret Ferguson<(mwferguson@ucdavis.edu>
W 12:10-3:00 p.m., 248 Voorhies, CRN 66440

This seminar will focus on works by three poets who investigate the question of the poet’s authority in ways that draw on, and intervene in, several spheres of cultural debate about religious, political, economic, and domestic authority and power.  Readings will be from Spenser’s The Faerie Queene (1590 and 1596 editions); Lanyer’s Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum (Hail God King of the Jews, 1611); and Milton’s 1645 Poems as well as his Paradise Lost.  There will be a Reader with key critical essays and other supplementary materials (available at Davis Copy Shop. at 3rd and B).  There will be a reading assignment for the first class; it will be emailed before the end of Winter Quarter to those who register for the course. 

Books ordered for the course are:

Milton: The Complete Poetry, ed. John Shawcross (Anchor) 0 385 02351

Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene Book One, ed. Carol V. Kaske (Hackett Publishing) 0 87220 808 7

Edmund Spenser The Faerie Queene, Books 3 and 4, ed. Dorothy Stephens (Hackett Publishing) 0 87220 8559

The Poems of Aemilia Lanyer, ed. Susanne Woods (Oxford) 0 189508 361 X

Important Websites you may wish to browse before the first class are:

http://www.english.cam.ac.uk/spenser/texts.htm

http://www.dartmouth.edu/~milton/reading_room/contents/index.shtml

English 248: “Feminism and Utopianism” (4 Units)
Professor Alessa Johns<amjohns@ucdavis.edu>
M 12:10-3 p.m., 248 Voorhies, CRN: 45383

Current debates question whether utopianism serves feminist ends. Is utopian thought today a useful liberatory tool or does it ultimately posit inflexible, hierarchical, and exclusive modes of social organization? This course will consider the extent to which feminism has invoked utopianism from the late middle ages into the twenty-first century and will evaluate the efficacy of feminism’s reliance on a vision of the ideal society for its articulation. At the same time utopian authors of all stripes have used utopia over the years to explore the feminine, to raise questions about gender, sexuality, reproduction, deviance, and difference in general. We will therefore query the mutual constitution of the terms feminism and utopianism and their delimitation as we consider both fictional and nonfictional texts, mainstream utopias as well as related genres (e.g. robinsonade, dystopia, science fiction), and the ways in which issues concerning race, class, and other categories can be illuminated alongside feminist interventions. We will read works by such authors as Christine de Pisan, Margaret Cavendish, Mary Astell, Sarah Scott, Mary Wollstonecraft, Frances Wright, John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor Mill, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Frances E. Harper, Joanna Russ, Marge Piercy, Margaret Atwood, Ursula LeGuin, and such theorists as Seyla Benhabib, Jennifer Burwell, Barbara Christian, Drucilla Cornell, David Harvey, Russell Jacoby, Fredric Jameson, Erin McKenna, Sally Kitch, Lucy Sargisson, and Joan Scott.

Textbooks:
Christine de Pisan, Treasure of the City of Ladies
Margaret Cavendish, Paper Bodies: A Margaret Cavendish Reader
Mary Astell, Serious Proposal to the Ladies
Sarah Scott, Millenium Hall
Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
Frances Wright, Reason, Religion, and Morals
Frances Harper, Lola Leroy I
Charlotte Perkins gilman, Herland, The Yellow Wall-Paper and Selected Writings
Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale



ENL 252: The Victorian Age: Defining a Period/Teaching a Canon
(4 Units)
Professor Catherine Robson <cmrobson@ucdavis.edu>
R 3:10-6 p.m., 308 Voorhies, CRN 66441

This course has a number of connected aims and strategies, and hopes to contribute towards your development as scholar, critic and teacher.  In certain respects, the class will function as an old-fashioned survey course at the graduate level: we'll read all of the big guys (and girls) of the period's poetry (so Tennyson, Browning, Arnold, Barrett Browning and Christina Rossetti) plus a selection of the works of other poets; and we'll also cover the major writers of non-fiction prose (so some Carlyle, Newman, Mill, Ruskin, Arnold and Pater).  At the same time, however, we'll be looking at the ways in which the literary works of the "Victorian Age" have been variously evaluated and excerpted over the twentieth, and into the twenty-first, centuries.  As part and parcel of this inquiry, we'll be considering not only the processes of critical consensus which determine what's important or distinctive about a particular writer or period, but the implications of such decisions within the undergraduate classroom.  What do we think an 18 year-old Californian in 2008 should learn in a ten-week course on Victorian literature, and how do we structure our syllabi and lesson-plans to make that happen?

To help us in our investigations, we'll read key works by theorists and critics like Foucault, Spivak, and Anderson who have helped to redefine the Victorianist agenda, as well as some more general pieces on periodization and literary historiography.  Our main text, however, will be the "Victorian Age" volume from the current edition (the eighth) of the Norton Anthology of English Literature, and I'll augment this with photocopies from much earlier editions, to allow us to track, and discuss, key changes over the past forty some years.

In keeping with the hybrid nature of this course, you will be assigned a diverse range of tasks.  Each week, all students will submit a one-page e-mail response to the assigned readings the day before class meets; pairs of students will then be responsible for structuring the discussion for a designated period of one of the seminars.  We'll also find a way to address the major stumbling block of all survey courses and anthologies of Victorian literature: how does one incorporate what most would designate the era's pre-eminent genre, the big baggy novel, into already straitened resources of time or space?  To this end, each week, pairs of students will present reports on a range of novels, arguing the case (or not) for the inclusion of a particular work.  Towards the end of the quarter, students will weigh up these different arguments as part of their deliberations in constructing an ideal syllabus for a Victorian survey course.  Because I'll be giving you quite a few time-consuming exercises during the quarter, the expected term-paper will be only 10 pages long, and you may choose your topic from a number of options, ranging from a traditional study of one of our assigned literary works to investigations of anthologies, exploration of critical editing practices, and so forth.  In all eventualities, students will work towards the final paper during the quarter, presenting initial ideas in both verbal and written forms, and submitting preliminary bibliographies at specified junctures.

Textbook:
ed. Greenblatt, Christ/Robson et al., The Norton Anthology of English Literature, The Victorian Age 8th ed Vol E

ENL 262-1: Cyberpunk and Cyberculture (4 Units)
Assistant Professor Colin Milburn<cnmilburn@ucdavis.edu>
M 3:10-6 p.m., 308/126 Voorhies, CRN: 45385

This seminar will address the role that cyberpunk has played in shaping American technoculture.  Tracing the history of cyberpunk and its links to experimental postmodernist fiction, we will study some of the most prominent literary texts in the genre while also exploring their conceptual and aesthetic relations to other coordinates of the global information society, including films, video games, online worlds, and the research fields of computer science.  Course assignments will attend to emerging possibilities for scholarship in the “digital humanities.”  Our seminar meetings will be held both in the flesh and in the synthetic world, Second Life.

Assignments include: in-class participation; weekly blog entries; a digital humanities project or a seminar paper.

Texts:
Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow
William Gibson, Neuromancer
William S. Burroughs, The Soft Machine and Blade Runner: A Movie
Kathy Acker, Empire of the Senseless
Philip K. Dick, Four Novels of the 1960s: The Man in the High Castle / The Three Stigmata of
Palmer Eldritch / Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? / Ubik
Vernor Vinge, et al., True Names and the Opening of the Cyberspace Frontier
David Bell, ed., The Cybercultures Reader, Second Edition
Neil Stephenson, Snow Crash
Sherry Turkle, The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit
Paul Ceruzzi, A History of Modern Computing
Steven Levy, Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution
Michael Rymaszewski, et al., Second Life: The Official Guide
Larry McCaffery, ed., Storming the Reality Studio

Films:
Blade Runner (4 cuts)
Akira
Tetsuo
Existenz
The Matrix Trilogy

Games:
Cyberpunk 2013, Deus Ex, System Shock, Halo, etc.

ENL 262-2: American Literature after 1914. “Poets of My Lifetime”
(4 units)
Professor Alan Williamson<abwilliamson@ucdavis.edu>
W 3:10-6 p.m., 308 Voorhies, CRN 66442

This is the third of my series of "Poets of My Lifetime" seminars.  Since it deals with poets who emerged in the 1970's and 1980's, it is necessarily more personal than the others, focusing on the poets who were important to me in my sense of the development of the art.  These will include Louis Gluck, C. K. Williams, Robert Pinsky, Frank Bidart, Anne Winters, and Jorie Graham, among others.  To counterbalance the potential self-centeredness of this approach, each student will be asked to report on a poet chosen from a much larger and more multifarious list.  Students will be asked to write two papers:  a position paper on a poem by one of the poets I have assigned; and a 10-15 page expansion of the report on the poet they choose.

Text:
J.D. McClatchy, The Vintage Book of Contemporary American Poetry.
Louise Gluck,  Averno
Robert Pinsky, The Figured Wheel
C.K. Williams,Selected Poems
Frank Bidart, In the Western Night
Jorie Graham, The End of Beauty
Anne Winters, The Displaced of Capital



English 270: Postcolonial Theory: Said and Spivak (4 Units)
Associate Professor Parama Roy<proy@ucdavis.edu>
T 6:10-9 p.m., 248 Voorhies, CRN: 45386

Edward Said and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak are perhaps the two most significant figures in postcolonial studies at the present moment, having produced some of the field’s most important, theoretically ambitious--and controversial--pronouncements. At the same time, they have produced two quite distinct elaborations/trajectories of the field. This course will serve as an introduction to the academic writing, journalism, translation, and memoirs of these two iconic figures, examining the relationship of their work to Continental philosophy (especially poststructuralism); Marxism; feminism; activism/political engagement and “secular criticism”; area studies; subaltern studies; exile, migrancy, and cosmopolitanism; and world literature/comparative literature.  The reading list includes many of their major critical statements as well as the work of their academic interlocutors, such as Aamir Mufti, Gauri Viswanathan, Homi Bhabha, Bruce Robbins, Pheng Cheah, Jenny Sharpe, Emily Apter, Franco Moretti, Sandhya Shetty and Elizabeth Jane Bellamy, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Lata Mani, and Rey Chow.  These works of academic postcoloniality will be supplemented with two works of literary postcoloniality: Amitav Ghosh’s In An Antique Land and J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace.

Texts:
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Death of a  Discipline
Edward W. Said,  Orientalism
Amitav Ghosh,  In An Antique Land
J. M. Coetzee, Disgrace
Edward Said, Mustafa Bayoumi, Andrew Rubin, The Edward Said Reader
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Dodnna Landry, Gerald MacLean, The Spivak Reader

ENL 290-F   Seminar in Creative Writing of Fiction (4 units)
Professor Lynn Freed<lrfreed@ucdavis.edu>
R 12:10-3 p.m., 308 Voorhies, CRN: TBA                     
                
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:

READER  available at Davis Copy Shop (formerly Navin’s)
Marguerite Duras, The Lover  
Vladimir Nabokov,  Lectures On Literature   
Patricia T. O'Connor,  Woe Is I

ENL 290P Seminar in Creative Writing of Poetry (4 Units)
Associate Professor Joe Wenderoth<jlwenderoth@ucdavis.edu>
T 12:10 – 3 p.m., 308 Voorhies, CRN: TBA

Scope and Purpose: 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.
Grading: Fifteen new poems will be expected from each student over the course of the quarter, and critical analyses of the poems of peers will occasionally be required.
    
Texts:
The Sighted Singer by Allen Grossman (The Johns Hopkins University Press; revised and augmented edition (December 1, 1991)

Poems of Paul Celan by Paul Celan and Michael Hamburger (Persea Books; Revised edition (November 2002)

ENL 391-Teaching Creative Writing (2 units) Offered Spring Qtr. Only for 2nd Year CW Students
Senior Lecturer Jack Hicks<wjhicks@ucdavis.edu>
F 9–10:50 a.m., 244 Olson, CRN: 45547

Prerequisite: Graduate standing, appointment as Teaching Assistant in the Composition Program. Designed for new instructors of English 5F or 5P; discussion of ways to facilitate creative writing workshops and to respond to student manuscripts.

ENL 393: Reading, Writing, Literature (2 Units) Offered Spring Qtr. Only for Ph.D. Students
Associate Professor Elizabeth Freeman<esfreeman@ucdavis.edu>
F 10-11:50 a.m., 248 Voorhies, CRN: 45548

 
This course is designed for 2008-09 instructors of ENL 3.  We will review
the formal vocabulary and close reading methods pertaining to fiction,
poetry, and genre.  As well as giving you an overview of ENL 3, I will model
and provide opportunities for practicing the teaching of each genre, and for
integrating the teaching of composition and literary analysis.  The emphasis
throughout will be on hands-on practice. We will explore such topics as
choosing an anthology (or not), the individual lesson plan, the kickoff
question, the grading standard and its application, the course description,
and the syllabus.  Assignments will consist of weekly exercises, 2 short
essays on topics to be determined, and a brief report on your visit to one
ENL 3 class. Your final paper, necessary for passing the class and being
admitted to teach ENL 3, will be a full ENL 3 syllabus with an attached
narrative explanation and sample lesson plan.
 
Required Texts: TBA

Up-dated 1/29/08