Courses of Instruction
Spring 2024 Courses
ENG 11a, Close Reading: Theory and Practice
Examines the theory, practice, technique, and method of close literary reading, with scrupulous attention to a variety of literary texts to ask not only what but also how they mean, and what justifies our thinking that they mean these things.
William Flesch
AMST/ENG 16b, Mark Twain's World
Reads major works by Mark Twain alongside several of his contemporaries as a lens through which to view key currents of American and global modernity, including race, colonialism, democracy, and secularization. Topics include the critical debate over the depiction of race and slavery in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and the role of humor in social and political change.
Jerome Tharaud
ENG 17b, Climate Fictions
Examines fictional narratives addressing climate change. Asks how authors from around the world imagine a future in which sea levels, animal populations, temperatures, access to food, and/or weather patterns are significantly different from those of the present.
Caren Irr
ENG 25b, Abolitionist Imaginaries: Literary Visions Beyond Prison
What does it mean to imagine a world without prisons? What role does literature play in this process? This course explores abolition as a theoretical concept and traces the genealogy of abolition from slavery to the carceral state. In addition to prison writing, we will read texts by early reformers/abolitionists and authors such as Bentham, Dickens, and Douglas and contemporary prison abolitionists like Davis, Fleetwood, and Gilmore. We will ask what role literature plays in the abolitionist vision and how it can shape and reflect our evolving ideas about justice, freedom, and the structure of society. The course will culminate in a community engaged project.
Jessica Brewer
ENG 32b, Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde and Medieval Dream Visions
Before there was Romeo and Juliet, there was Troilus and Criseyde. Before Shakespeare’s cultural behemoth defined what it meant to be star-crossed lovers, the story of Troilus and Criseyde was the dominant and popular narrative of doomed love. So, what happened? Did Shakespeare’s treatment of it kill the story? Why has it dropped out of the canon? This class will evaluate Chaucer’s other major poem Troilus and Criseyde and contextualize it by examining its sources, philosophical underpinnings, and its impact on literary production in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. We will begin by looking at both Benoît de St. Maure’s and Boccacio’s treatment of the story of Troilus as source texts; Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy and Chaucer’s translation the Boece; the French court poet Guillaume de Machaut’s contemporary influence on the poem; Chaucer’s Legend of Good Women; Henryson’s Testament of Cresseid; and Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cresseida. This class is what I call “slow Chaucer.” We will be reading Chaucer slowly in Middle English for the bulk of the semester. No previous knowledge of Middle English is required. You can take this for credit if you have taken English 143b in prior years.
Dorothy Kim
ENG 35a, The Weird and the Experimental in Contemporary Literature
What does it mean to be “weird”? What makes a text “experimental”? And what can experimental texts teach us about the ever-changing nature of society? This course explores innovation and experimentation in the narrative structure of contemporary novels and films from around the world within their cultural contexts.
Rachael Dale
ENG 38a, Fantasy Worlds: From Lilliput and Middle Earth to LARPs
Fantasy is as old as Gilgamesh, as new as Harry Potter; appealing to both young and old readers as few other genres do. We explore its historical roots in satires like Gulliver's Travels, its modern rebirth in Narnia, Middle Earth, Le Guin's Earthsea, as well as on film. Also explores recent participatory fantasy realms, including online gaming and live action role-playing.
John Plotz
ENG 48a, American Immigrant Narratives
With its essential role in U.S. society and history, immigration figures prominently in the American literary canon. This course traverses varied immigrant tales of twentieth-century and contemporary United States, set in the frontier of westward expansion, the Golden West, and the Eastern Seaboard. Some classics of this vast cultural corpus will anchor our critical inquiries into subject and nation formation, citizenship, and marginalization under powerful political forces both at home and abroad. By probing the complex aesthetic modes and narrative strategies in these and other texts, we will investigate deeply felt impacts of ever-shifting American cultural politics shaping immigrant experiences.
Howie Tam
FILM 100a, Introduction to the Moving Image
An interdisciplinary course surveying the history of moving image media from 1895 to the present, from the earliest silent cinema to the age of streaming media.
Paul Morrison
ENG 104b, Psalms and Stories: Poetry of the Sacred 1600-1900
This course will study a range of sacred poetry written in Britain and America during a long, contentious period in the history of Western Christianity, from the rise of radical Protestantism through the Enlightenment to the public airing of religious doubt in the 19th century. What were the subjects of contention, of anxiety, of misgiving? How did poets address them in poetic form? To address these questions, we will look at a number of uniquely powerful poems in English. Our goal will be to approach the poems with sympathy, appreciation and a discerning eye. No prior knowledge of Christian doctrine is required. Works include the Psalms from the King James Bible, Milton’s Paradise Lost, and selected poems of Emily Dickinson.
Laura Quinney
ENG 109a, Poetry Workshop
Offered exclusively on a credit/no credit basis. Enrollment is by instructor permission after the submission of a manuscript sample. Please refer to the schedule of classes for submission information. May be repeated for credit.
A workshop for poets willing to explore and develop their craft through intense reading in current poetry, stylistic explorations of content, and imaginative stretching of forms.
Elizabeth Bradfield
ENG 109b, Fiction Workshop: Short Fiction2
Offered exclusively on a credit/no credit basis. Enrollment is by instructor permission after the submission of a manuscript sample. Please refer to the schedule of classes for submission information. May be repeated for credit.
This workshop will focus on short fiction--stories ten pages and under in length. We will use writing exercises, assigned readings, and essays on craft to discuss structure, character development, point of view, and other elements of fiction. While appropriate for all levels, this workshop might be of special interest to writers who want a secure foundation in the basics.
Stephen McCauley
COML 117a, Magical Realism and Modern Myth
An exploration of magical realism, as well as the enduring importance of myth, in twentieth and twenty-first century fiction and film from Columbia, India, Nigeria, the United States, England, and elsewhere. Authors include Ben Okri, Toni Morrison, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and Salman Rushdie; films include Pan's Labyrinth and Beasts of the Southern Wild.
David Sherman
ENG 119a, Fiction Workshop
Offered exclusively on a credit/no credit basis. Enrollment is by instructor permission after the submission of a manuscript sample. Please refer to the schedule of classes for submission information. May be repeated for credit.
An advanced fiction workshop. Students are expected to compose and revise their fiction, complete typed critiques of each other's work weekly, and discuss readings based on examples of various techniques.
Christopher Castellani
ENG 126b, Joyce's Ulysses
An intensive, collaborative reading of James Joyce's Ulysses, with attention to its historical situation and cultural impact. Consideration of significant scholarly debates around the novel. How does this remarkable text work and what does it offer readers today? How is it still teaching us to read and think about the role of literature in modern societies? We will engage this novel with slow, close attention in an interdisciplinary context, in order to generate a combination of analytical and creative responses.
David Sherman
COML 132b, Poetry and Philosophy
Plato called the relationship between poetry and philosophy an "ancient quarrel." But within the last century some thinkers have attempted to effect a rapprochement. After considering the Platonic argument and its legacy, this course will explore the marriage of poetry and philosophy in later times, looking particularly at the experiments of German romantic aesthetics and its legacy in 20th-century Continental literary philosophy. What is the nature of the "ancient quarrel" between poetry and philosophy? In what sense do they compete for the same space? Can poetry be a kind of philosophy, or vice versa? Can philosophy help us to understand the nature of poetry, and vice versa?
Laura Quinney
ENG 133a, Advanced Shakespeare
Recommended prerequisite: ENG 33a or equivalent.
An intensive analysis of a single play or a small number of Shakespeare's plays.
Thomas King
ENG 136a, Imagining Apocalypse
Examines apocalypse as a literary genre and explores the modern apocalyptic imagination in diverse media including film, visual culture, and radio. Topics include slavery and race war, nuclear Armageddon, eco-apocalypse, evangelical rapture culture, and global pandemics. Authors include Octavia Butler, Stanley Kubrick, Ling Ma, Cormack McCarthy, Nat Turner, and H.G. Wells.
Jerome Tharaud
ENG 137b, Women and War
Examines how African women writers and filmmakers use testimony to bear witness to mass violence. How do these writers resist political and sociocultural silencing systems that reduce traumatic experience to silence, denial, and terror?
Emilie Diouf
ENG 139b, Screenwriting Workshop: Intermediate Screenwriting
Prerequisites: ENG 79a. Offered exclusively on a credit/no credit basis. Enrollment is by instructor permission after the submission of a manuscript sample. Please refer to the schedule of classes for submission information. May be repeated for credit.
In this writing-intensive course, students build on screenwriting basics and delve more deeply into the creative process. Participants read and critique each other's work, study screenplays and view films, and submit original written material on a biweekly basis. At the conclusion of the course each student will have completed the first draft of a screenplay (100-120 pages).
Marc Weinberg
AAPI/ENG 142a, Vietnam War Literature
What we have come to call the Vietnam War fundamentally changed the histories of Vietnam and the U.S. through the Cold War to the present day. Taking a transnational approach, this course will examine various understandings of the war through major U.S., Vietnamese, and Vietnamese American literary texts and films from the mid-twentieth century to the present day. All course materials are in English; no Vietnamese language knowledge is required.
Howie Tam
ENG 142a, Blackness and Horror
Examines the tense and transformative place that blackness has within the horror tradition, beginning with the late nineteenth century and moving into the present. In addition to documentaries and critical texts, we will analyze literature, films, and various aspects of material culture that explore the relationship between blackness and horror.
Brandon Callender
CLAS/ENG 148b, Faking Disability: Gender, Identity, & Performance in the Premodern Mediterranean
Course analyses the intersection between performance, gender, and disability in the premodern Mediterranean. Students will reflect on the cross-purpose between individual bodies and the social history of disability legislation, mendicancy, and literature. Students will analyze representations of “real” and “faked” disability and of perceived identity in Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron and contextualize his work with readings from Homer, Marie de France, Heldris de Cornuälle, Chaucer, 1001 Nights, Boiardo, Ariosto, Shakespeare, Montaigne, Bacon, and Arcangela Tarabotti. Special one-time offering, Spring 2024.
Catherine Bloomer
ENG 159a, Screenwriting Workshop: Variations on the Short Film
Offered exclusively on a credit/no credit basis. May be repeated for credit.
Introduces writing and producing of short films for independent production. Topics will include introduction to screenwriting, script format, loglines, pitch pages, beat sheets & outlines, short form structure, and the planning involved in pre-production.
Daniel Callahan
ENG 166b, The Promise of Poetry: Whitman, Dickinson, and Others
Poetry of Whitman, Dickinson, Emerson, and Melville, with representative poems of Whittier, Bryant, Longfellow, Poe, Sigourney, and Tuckerman.
John Burt
ENG 168b, Plotting Inheritance
Examines novels published in the last two decades set during slavery and indenture in the British Caribbean, alongside (and as) theorizations of accumulation, inheritance, and freedom. How does fiction account for and plot material, moral and emotional worth?
Faith Smith
ENG 169a, Eco-Writing Workshop
Offered exclusively on a credit/no credit basis. Enrollment is by instructor permission after the submission of a manuscript sample. Please refer to the schedule of classes for submission information.
A creative writing workshop focused on writing essays and poems that engage with environmental and eco-justice concerns. Readings, writing assignments, and class discussions will be augmented by field trips.
Elizabeth Bradfield
ENG 170a, Nigerian Movies in the World
Introduces students to Nigeria's film industry, one of the world's largest. It focuses on both the form and the content of Nollywood films. Examines how Nollywood films project local, national, and regional issues onto global screens. Usually offered every third year.
Emilie Diouf
ENG 175b, Getting Behind in Black Gay Men's Literatures
Examines black queer men’s sexualities in the field of twentieth and twenty-first century American literatures. Our focus on “getting behind” draws together topics that we will explore throughout term. These include varying attitudes that black queer writers have toward cruising and intimacy; falling behind the times; and falling behind at work, or in life, because of certain sexual pursuits.
Brandon Callender
PHIL 182a, Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations
An intensive study of Ludwig Wittgenstein's seminal work, Philosophical Investigations. This course should be of interest to philosophy and literature students who want to learn about this great philosopher's influential views on the nature of language and interpretation.
William Flesch
ENG 201a, Gender and Sexuality Studies
Investigates sex assignment, genders, and sexualities as categories of social knowledge and modes of social production. Reading recent critical discussions and crossing disciplinary boundaries, this course explores gender, desire, and pleasure in everyday and formal performance, literary and other written texts, and visual representations. Usually offered every fourth year.
Thomas King
ENG 202a, The Global Novel
This graduate seminar will interrogate the term “global novel” as a way to describe 20th- and 21st-century fiction with global scope and scale. Structured around a series of primary texts and theoretical readings, the course will look at how fiction responds to globally-scaled phenomena such as war, migration and climate change, and how events and practices such as colonialism, translation, the publishing market and book clubs structure our understanding of global fiction.
Ulka Anjaria
ENG 275b, Pedagogy
Dorothy Kim
Required of all PhD students. Optional for MA students. A broad-based course that will examine various methods and approaches to pedagogy.
ENG 350a, Proseminar
Yields half-course credit. Offered exclusively on a credit/no-credit basis. Required of all first-year PhD students. Optional for MA students.
Focuses on professional development, including teaching competency.
John Plotz