Courses of Instruction
Fall 2022 Courses
ENG 1a, Introduction to Literary Studies
[ wi ]
Topic for fall 2022: Modern Literature and the Problem of Evil. This course takes a fresh look at the study of literature by exploring how a variety of authors and genres confront the problem of evil in the modern world, from Elizabethan drama to graphic novels and film. We'll practice using several influential literary theories to make sense of what we read and see. Texts include the Book of Job, King Lear, Paradise Lost, Robinson Crusoe, Art Spiegelman's Maus, and Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things.
Jerome Tharaud
ENG 6a, The American Renaissance
Explores the transformation of U.S. literary culture before the Civil War: transcendentalism, the romance, the slave narrative, domestic fiction, sensationalism, and their relation to the visual art and architecture of the period. Authors will include Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Melville, Stowe, Poe, Ridge, and Crafts.
Jonathan Schoeder
HUM 10a The Western Canon
May not be taken by students who have taken NEJS 18a in prior years.
Foundational texts of the Western canon: the Bible, Homer, Virgil, and Dante. Thematic emphases and supplementary texts vary from year to year.
William Flesch
ENG 10b, Poetry: A Basic Course
Designed as a first course for all persons interested in the subject. It is intended to be basic without being elementary. The subject matter will consist of poems of short and middle length in English from the earliest period to the present.
William Flesch
ENG 19a Introduction to Creative Writing Workshop
[ wi ]
Offered exclusively on a credit/no credit basis.
A workshop for beginning writers. Practice and discussion of short literary forms such as fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction. Other forms may also be explored.
Porsha Olayiwola
ENG/HIST 20a, Violent Resistance: American Political Violence & Its Rhetorics
The history of the United States is, in some respects, a history of political violence. American literature, as a reflection of society, often depicts instances of political violence. Novels, poetry and short stories have a vexed and complicated relationship with history - are they just a representation of society as it is? Or can they be calls to action, provoking movements? In this course, we ask what political violence is and how it operates. Is that violence sometimes justified? If so, what conditions authorize it and what restrictions are there on its use? How much power does literature have to inspire or activate political action? What exactly is violence and what rhetorical and literary strategies are used to describe, validate or negate its use? “Violent Resistance” is envisioned as an introduction to these questions. In the course, we will investigate violent forms of American political protest through the lenses of some of the major theoretical approaches to violence, politics and literature available to us today. This is intentionally constituted as an interdisciplinary, cross listed course because we are fully convinced that interdisciplinary study not only offers a fuller, more rounded approach to the topic, but also because we are committed to the idea that each perspective broadens and deepens the other. As such, this course will incorporate methods from both disciplines.
Miranda Peery and Sarah Beth Gable
ENG 20a, Bollywood: Popular Film, Genre, and Society
[ djw ]
An introduction to popular Hindi cinema through a survey of the most important Bollywood films from the 1950s until today. Topics include melodrama, song and dance, love and sex, stardom, nationalism, religion, diasporic migration, and globalization.
Ulka Anjaria
COML/ENG 21a, The Literature of Walking
[ oc ]
Walking and talking have a long and friendly association. This course will explore that pairing. We will investigate the stories told during and about peripatetic adventures, and we will experiment ourselves with various sites, motives, and styles of walking so we can tell our own tales. Our journey will begin with the rise of pedestrianism as a form of leisure in the Romantic movement and then branch out to nature walks and rambles, pilgrimages, treks, marches, and promenades. Along the way we will sample many styles of writing about walking (memoirs, exhortations, polemics, reflective poems, wisdom books, graphic memoirs, and more), and we will make a few outings to trails and footpaths in our vicinity.
Caren Irr
ENG 26a, Novels on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown: Fiction as Psychological Inquiry
[ wi ]
This course explores novels as a mode of psychological inquiry, particularly into trauma, addiction, delusion, and depression. Our reading will help us consider the cultural complexity of mental illness and social dimensions of private suffering. How does the genre of the novel afford special attention to the intricacies of distressed mental life? And how has this art form been important for imagining psychological healing? Readings include novels from the 19th century to the present from several regions of the world, in a long lineage of narrative fiction about human psychology.
David Sherman
ENG 27b Classic Hollywood Cinema
A critical examination of the history of mainstream U.S. cinema from the 1930s to the present. Focuses on major developments in film content and form, the rise and fall of the studio and star system, the changing nature of spectatorship, and the social context of film production and reception.
Paul Morrison
ENG 33b, Shakespeare Now
This introductory Shakespeare course will be structured around the relationship between Shakespeare’s plays and issues of central relevance to our world today. We will be reading a small number of plays, leaving time to work on contemporary adaptations and uses of each of the plays we study. Topics to be explored include (but are by no means limited to) misogyny, racism, anti-Semitism, and colonialism.
Ramie Targoff
ENG 35b, Women's Friendship (and More) in Nineteenth-century Literature
While many people think nineteenth-century fiction is all about marriage, other relationships are equally important. This course will focus on intimate relationships between women, including friendship, sisterhood, and queer romance, in authors including Austen, Gaskell, Charlotte Brontë, and Levy.
Abigail Arnold
ENG 36a, Queer Poetry
A survey of queer poets from the 19th to the 21st century. Special attention will be paid to shared themes, the changing social and cultural climate of the time period covered, what is omitted in constructing a queer literary canon, and the development of queer reading practices.
Matthew Burkett
ENG 42a, Blackness and Horror
[ deis-us djw]
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
ENG 43b, Medieval Play: Drama, LARP, and Video Games
[ oc ]
Works with a selection of medieval mystery plays, medieval-themed video games and participatory live-action role play to explore: play structures and design; alternative-world creation by way of immersion; the significance of gender, race, disability, and sexuality in performance.
Dorothy Kim
AMST/ENG 47a, Frontier Visions: The West in American Literature and Culture
[ oc ]
May not be taken for credit by students who took ENG 47a in prior years.
Explores more than two centuries of literary and visual culture about the American West, including the frontier myth, Indian captivity narratives, frontier humor, dime novel and Hollywood westerns, the Native American Renaissance, and western regionalism. Authors include Black Hawk, Cather, Doig, Silko, Turner, and Twain.
Jerome Tharaud
ENG 62a, Documentary: Techniques and Controversies
An introduction to documentary, covering major works of nonfiction prose and film. Focuses on the variety of documentary techniques in both media and controversies surrounding efforts to represent the real.
Matthew Schratz
ENG 79a, Screenwriting Workshop: Beginning Screenplay
[ dl wi ]
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.
Fundamentals of screenwriting: structure, plot, conflict, character, and dialogue. Students read screenwriting theory, scripts, analyze files, and produce an outline and the first act of an original screenplay.
Marc Weinberg
AAPI/ENG 102a, Transpacific Science Fiction
[djw]
Through critically acclaimed examples of science fiction set in the vast, multitudinous site of the Pacific and its continental edges, this course explores the intersection of technology and the humanities through a range of topics including scientific colonialism, techno-orientalism and dystopia, racial formation in the post-apocalypse, artificial intelligence, and environmental destruction. Some of the course materials include films (Blade Runner, Ghost in the Shell), novels (Chang-Rae Lee, Ruth Ozeki), and a graphic novel.
Howie Tam
ENG 106a, Representing Slavery
[ deis-us, wi ]
The culture and politics of slavery in the US. We will read some of the classic slave narratives, some diaries of enslavers, political speeches by abolitionists and defenders of slavery, letters and public papers of President Lincoln, and novels written by authors with a close engagement with slavery.
John Burt
ENG 109a, Poetry Workshop
[ oc wi ]
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.
Porsha Olayiwola
ENG 109b, Fiction Workshop: Short Fiction
[ oc wi ]
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
ENG 114a, Enthusiam, Disappointment, Recovery: British Literature & the French Revolution
British radicals, including in their number the greatest poets of the age, responded joyously to the Fall of the Bastille and the early political reforms of the French Revolution. Like many European intellectuals, they saw in these developments the promise of major social change which would vindicate the ambitious optimism of the Enlightenment. The collapse of the French Revolution into violence and terror struck a blow to their hopes, their morale and their world-view. British literature of the Romantic age reflects this initial enthusiasm, the subsequent disappointment, and the painful effort of recovery. We will read 18th-century manifestos defending human rights by Thomas Paine and Mary Wollstonecraft; works of ardent support for the Revolution by first-generation Romantic poets such as Wordsworth and Coleridge; their later works grappling with the Revolution’s failure; and the reflections of the second-generation Romantics (Lord Byron, Mary Shelley, Percy Shelley) as they struggle to find new grounds of political hope.
Laura Quinney
ENG 119a, Fiction Workshop
[ oc wi ]
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 for students primarily interested in the short story. Students are expected to compose and revise three stories, complete typed critiques of each other's work weekly, and discuss readings based on examples of various techniques.
Christopher Castellani
ENG 139a, Publishing Workshop: Literary Editing and Publishing
[ dl oc ]
Offered exclusively on a credit/no credit basis. Students will be selected after the submission of an introductory letter including student's major, writing/editing experience, why publishing is of interest to them, any experimental literary publications/performances they've experienced. This course fulfills a workshop requirement for the Creative Writing major and minor. Please refer to the Schedule of Classes for submission formats and deadlines within the Registration periods.
Editing and publishing a literary journal -- either digital, print, or in more experimental forms -- can be an important component of a writer's creative life and sense of literary citizenship. This experiential learning course will engage students with theoretical and historical reading as well as provide practical hands-on tools for literary publishing. Broadsided Press (www.broadsidedpress.org) will be used as a case study. A group publishing project will be part of the coursework, and this can be tied into journals already being published on campus. By the end of the semester, students will have a fuller sense of the work, mindset, difficulties, strategies, and values of a literary publisher.
Elizabeth Bradfield
ENG 143a, The History of Mediascapes and Critical Maker Culture
[ dl oc deis-us ]
To decolonize book history and "maker culture," the class examines colonial erasure, colonial knowledge production, race, gender, disability, neurodiversity, sexuality in making an alternative book history that includes khipu, the girdle book, the wampum, pamphlets, zines, and wearable media technology.
Dorothy Kim
ENG 145a, Poetry and the Supernatural
Studies modern poetry and poetic theory of the Gothic and supernatural. What is at stake, psychologically and aesthetically, in the representation of supernatural phenomena? Figures include goblins, vampires, witches, ghosts and the goddess of the underworld. Texts include poetry by Coleridge, Keats, Shelley, Tennyson, Dickinson, Christina Rossetti, Louise Gluck and Rita Dov.
Laura Quinney
ENG 149a, Screenwriting Workshop: Writing for Television
[ dl wi ]
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.
Introduces students to the craft of writing for a variety of television programming formats, including episodic, late-night, and public service announcements. Students will read and view examples and create their own works within each genre.
Marc Weinberg
ENG 171b, African Feminism(s)
[djw]
Examines African Feminism(s) as a literary and activist movement that underlines the need for centering African women's experiences in the study of African cultures, societies, and histories.
Emilie Diouf
ENG 200a, Approaches to Literary and Cultural Studies
A broad-based theory course that will include a unit on research methods.
Caren Irr
ENG 211a, Black Queer Literatures
Examines various works by black queer critics and cultural producers, beginning in the early twentieth century and continuing into the present. While we largely focus upon varied attempts to create a shared sense of a world and a tradition in common, we will also attend to important divisions brought about by various intersections of identity, as well as divergent perspectives on desire, aesthetics, and organizing.
Brandon Callender
ENG 223a, Eros and Desire in the English Renaissance
This course will explore how English poets, playwrights, physicians, and philosophers thought about erotic desire. Topics will include: the literary investment in unrequited love; the emergence of carpe diem poetry; the medicalization of love sickness; conceptions of marital love and same-sex desire; celibacy and chastity; and posthumous love. Authors will include: Christopher Marlowe, William Shakespeare, Elizabeth Cary, Philip Sidney, John Donne, Aemilia Lanyer; George Gascoigne, John Milton.
Ramie Targoff
ENG 350a, Proseminar
Focuses on professional development, including teaching competency.
David Sherman