[Cwgrad-announcements] Fw: Here's the all-inclusive list of all W'07 course descriptions & pre-reg. instructions

[Andrew Winer]

Dear MFAs,
FYI.
Best,
Andrew

10/31/06

Please notify your students of one update in our W'07 schedule:

English 270 (American Lit. since 1900) with Professor Steve Axelrod will
now be taught on Tuesdays, 5:10-8:00
and
English 279 (Rhetorical Studies) with Professor Rise Axelrod will now be
taught on Mondays, 5:10-8:00.

Please send Professor Axelrod an email, before the 12:00 noon deadline
tomorrow, Wednesday, November 1, if you would like to make a change in the
preference sheet that you sent to Professor Axelrod recently.

Thank you.

Tina Feldmann

10/24/06

TO:   Faculty graduate advisors, staff graduate advisors

Please forward this all-inclusive list of W'07 seminar course descriptions
to all graduate students in your department(s).   Please also be sure that
every graduate student in your department is made aware of our department's
policy that all seminar enrollments must first be approved by the English
department's faculty graduate advisor, Professor Steven Axelrod (see
further information and form below).    Once permission is granted by
Professor Axelrod, your students may sign up through GROWL during the
pre-registration period beginning Monday, November 6.

When a student is given permission to enroll in a seminar, their place is
reserved, therefore, we ask that any student who changes their mind and no
longer wishes to enroll in the seminar or if they drop it, to please notify
Professor Axelrod by email so that he can then make that slot available to
another student.     While first priority must be given to English graduate
students, we recognize the need and interest of graduate students outside
our department, and in that spirit, we are happy to notify interested
graduate students of the remaining seminar spaces if they will send their
seminar preference email to Professor Axelrod in part II, listed below).

When a student is given permission to enroll in the seminar, their place is
reserved, therefore, we ask that any student that changes their mind and no
longer wishes to enroll in the class, to please notify Professor Axelrod,
by email, so that he can then make that enrollment slot available to
another student.     If you would like anyone added to or deleted from this
quarterly email, please email me directly at tina.feldmann at ucr.edu.

Thank you.

Tina Feldman

NOTE:   This email has 3 parts:

Part I   -- The seminar preference form that should be sent to Professor
Axelrod
Part II --  The seminar listing.
Part III -- The seminar course descriptions to assist students in
completing Part II.
------------------------------------------

Part I  (the seminar preference sheet):
Please return this form, alone, to Professor Axelrod (without the course
descriptions and in the text of the email and not by attachment)

Seminar Preference Form for Winter Quarter 2007

This form is only for students wishing to take English Department graduate
seminars in winter 2007. Please indicate the courses that you would prefer
to take, and email this form back to me by 12:00 noon on Wednesday,
November 1, 2006.    Please put it in the body of your email rather than in
an attachment.     Forms received by the deadline will receive first
priority. Forms received after that time will get second priority.
I will email seminar rosters to everyone by Saturday, November
4.   Pre-registration begins on Monday, November 6.     If you wish to take
two English Department seminars, fill out at least four choices. If you
wish to take only one English Department seminar, you should fill out at
least two choices.   Course descriptions are added to the bottom of this 
email.

Best wishes,

Steve Axelrod

Director of Graduate Studies

Your department is:   _________________________
This quarter you are (place X after year):
MA1    MA2   MFA  PhD1    PhD2    PhD3

Your areas of specialization are (name 2 or 3):


Number of English Department seminars you want (1 or 2?):  ________________

1st Choice:     English______ with Professor _____________.

2nd Choice:     English______ with Professor _____________.

3rd Choice:     English______ with Professor _____________.

4th Choice:     English______ with Professor _____________.

5th Choice:     English______ with Professor _____________.

________________________    ____________________    ________________________

                 Your
Name                       Date                    Email Address

---------------------------------------

Part II (course listing):

WINTER 2007 ENGLISH DEPARTMENT SEMINARS
as of 10/24/06


MONDAY

English 279 - Rhetorical Studies (R. Axelrod)
5:10-8:00 pm in HMNSS 1502


TUESDAY

English 262 - Renaissance Literature (S. Stewart)
2:10-5:00 pm in Watkins 1111

English 273 - Cultural Studies (K. Harris)
2:10-5:00 pm, Room:   TBA

English 270 - American Literature since 1900  (S. Axelrod)
5:10-8:00 pm in HMNSS 2212


WEDNESDAY

English 275 - Film and Visual Cultures (V. Nunley)
2:10-5:00 pm in HMNSS 1407 + 5:10-8:00 screening in Sproul 2212

English 264 - Restoration and 18th C. Literature (C. Fabricant)
5:10-8:00 pm in Watkins 1117


THURSDAY

English 289 - Seminar: Genres (J. Doyle)
2:10-5:00 pm in Watkins 1404

English 274 - Feminist Discourses (C. A. Tyler)
5:10-8:00 pm in HMNSS 1407


FRIDAY

English 268 - British Literature since 1900  (K. Devlin)
2:10-5:00 pm in HMNSS 1407

-------------------------------------------------

Part III (course description):


English 270  (American Lit. since 1900)
Professor Steven Axelrod

This seminar will focus on the poetry of sadness in the Cold War era. We
will meditate on the psychoanalytical aspects of depression, loss, grief,
and anger as well as the historical specificity of the period 1945-89. We
will consider the etiology of the new poetics of sadness and the different
and innovative forms this poetics took. Texts will include Elizabeth
Bishop's Complete Poems and Collected Prose; Robert Lowell's Collected
Poems; Allen Ginsberg's Collected Poems 1947-1997; Bob Kaufman's Solitudes
Crowded with Loneliness; Sylvia Plath's Collected Poems and The Bell Jar;
and Mitsuye Yamada's Camp Notes and Other Writings. We will also study The
Freud Reader (ed. Peter Gay); John Bowlby's Loss: Sadness and Depression;
and Howard Kushner's American Suicide. Class responsibilities will include
engaged participation, two oral reports, and a term paper.

"It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the
Rosenbergs. . . . It had nothing to do with me, but I couldn't help
wondering what it would be like, being burned alive all along your nerves."
­Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

Pity the planet, all joy gone
from this sweet volcanic cone;
peace to our children when they fall
in small war on the heels of small
war­until the end of time. ­Robert Lowell, "Waking Early Sunday Morning"


English 262 (Turks, Moors, Jews, Catholics, and Sexual Deviates on the
Renaissance London Stage)
Professor Stanley Stewart

             During the Renaissance, as commerce expanded, bringing new
wealth to the London Pool, the English theatre flourished.  There was a
constant demand for new scripts, with new plots.  Sometimes these included
exotic characters, such as one might find in foreign lands, but not usually
in London.  Plays might be set in the legendary Venice, the most
cosmopolitan of European cities, with the most outrageously liberal laws
governing racial and religious groups.  This seminar will focus on types of
social difference, and how they might be understood in Early Modern
England.  Seminar participants will select a play or a type of social or
religious difference that might interest theatre audiences.  Examples might
be The Jew of Malta, Titus Andronicus, The Merchant of Venice, Othello,
Volpone, Epicene, The Roaring Girl, The Changeling, The Duchess of Malfi,
'Tis Pity She's a Whore, or The Cardinal (not in the Bevington
text).  During the first three weeks, members of the seminar will read and
discuss these plays.  Then each participant will select a topic, perhaps an
author, a theme, or a single play, or even a single scene from a play.  The
participant will prepare a report, showing how the social distance between
the individual and the societal norm works to inform, amuse, exhort, or
terrify the audience, and, perhaps, suggest how an understanding of the
rhetorical dynamics of the work might aid one's understanding of the period.
             The two texts will be:
                 1) any well annotated edition of Shakespeare
                 2) English Renaissance Drama: A Norton Anthology.  Ed.
David Bevington et
                          al.   New York: W. W.  Norton, 2002.  ISBN
0-393-97655-6


English 273 (Cultural Studies)
Professor Keith M. Harris

This seminar is a detailed study of the contemporary male nude in film and
photography. The goal of the seminar is to examine the shifts in meanings
of the male nude as a sign. We, therefore, discuss the nude, male and
female, in the visual arts, including sculpture, painting, drawing and
etching; the discursive significations of the nude as a form; and the
divergence of these significations along the lines of male and female.
Topics include gender construction and performance, race and semiotics,
sexuality and visible difference. Students are required to do extensive
readings and research leading to a final research paper.


English 279 (Rhetorical Studies)
Professor Rise Axelrod

This course is designed as a comprehensive introduction to the
thriving,  eclectic field of rhetoric and composition, a field that is very
much in demand in today's academic job market. We will engage the current
theories and debates that will make you competitive in a way that teaching
experience alone will not. We will begin by surveying the foundational
texts in the twentieth-century rebirth of rhet/comp and then read more
recent works on topics such as literacy and multi-literacy studies, genre
theory, process and post-process theory, and critical pedagogy. We will
also spend some time on writing across the curriculum theory in light of
UCR's new initiative in this area. We will read such texts as Susan Jarratt
and Lynn Worsham, Feminism and Composition Studies (1998); Janice Wolff,
Professing in the Contact Zone (2002); Bruce McComiskey and Cynthia Ryan,
City Comp: Identity, Spaces, Practices (2003); and James Paul Gee, What
Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy (2003).The
requirements for the course include a seminar paper on a topic of your
choice plus one or two oral reports (depending on the number of students).


English 275  (Rhetoric Excess: Visual Tropes of Masculinity, Femininity,
and Race in the Construction and Consumption of the American Imaginary)
Professor Vorris Nunley

Borrowing from sociologist Zygmunt Bauman's notion that the idea of the
"norm" would never occur and have no content if it were not for the
experience and the rhetorical construction of excess, this class will
explore the construction of "America" as masculine trope and as
nation-state. Specifically, class will examine how hegemonic, American
masculinity has been normed through tropes of masculinity, femininity, and
race through the visual rhetorics and public pedagogies of film, popular
culture, public policy, war, documentaries, and neo-liberalism. These
public pedagogies function to camouflage the productive "lack" often
haunting masculinities performed by males and females. The goal of the
class is to provide students with a critical lens grounded enough in
rhetorical and critical theory, visual rhetoric, cultural studies, and
neo-liberalism understood as public pedagogies to facilitate its use in a
variety of academic and non-academic contexts.  Class will wrestle with
such provocative questions such as: Do masculinity/femininity function best
as categories of identity or as categories of politics?  Is neo-liberalism
the new secular-religion?  How are females complicit in the propping up of
hegemonic masculinity in the context of romantic love? Is Condoleeza Rice
too masculine and too manly?  Is rhetoric more useful than philosophy as an
epistemic (knowledge) resource? Why is Blackness a feminine trope?


English 264.  The 'Progressive' Eighteenth Century
Professor Carole Fabricant

In this seminar I want to explore certain 'progressive' (some might
justifiably be termed 'radical', others not) political and ideological
strains running throughout a century usually thought of in very different
terms:  strains that helped to shape social and cultural institutions in
Britain and that inform - sometimes by overtly contributing to, sometimes
by lurking silently at the margins and threatening to destabilize - the
writings of the period.  A few of these strains rose to the level of
organized social or political movements; most remained intellectual threads
that functioned in less systematic, more subtle and/or unconscious ways,
influencing even the most putatively 'conservative' outlooks and literary
texts of the period.  Examples include republicanism, anti-colonialism;
feminism; abolitionism; religious dissent; deism; antinomianism (along with
its political companion, anarchism); communalism; utopianism;
anti-militarism; and of course at the end of the century Jacobinism (along
with related forms of pro-French Revolution fervor).  Anti-capitalist
sentiment falls into these categories although its reactionary as well as
progressive aspects need to be considered (for which some understanding of
historical materialism and dialectical history will be necessary).  Of
particular interest and relevance for today (!) are Swift's writings
against the War of the Spanish Succession and Samuel Johnson's writing
against the Falkland's Islands War, where we find perhaps the earliest
articulations of the grounds upon which a government can be indicted for
war crimes.  (The verdict of the International Commission of Inquiry on War
Crimes and Crimes vs. Humanity Committed by the Bush Administration was
delivered on Sept. 13, GUILTY on all counts, for those of you folks who
haven't been keeping up.)

Our discussions will require some theoretical understanding of what
ideology is and how it works (especially in terms of its contradictions),
as well as some reflection about why it was often precisely the 'Tory'
writers of the period who embraced certain of the most progressive, even
radical ideas then current.  Time permitting, we'll also briefly consider
'right-wing' radical movements and ideologies of the period, especially
Jacobitism:  What are we to make of the recent spate of 'Jacobite'
historians and literary critics of the 18th century?  What are the cultural
and ideological stakes (for the 21st as well as for the 18th-century) in
labeling major writers like Pope, Swift, and Johnson 'Jacobite' and in
trying to package the entire century as a 'Jacobite era'?

References to Marxist (or at least socialist) theory and history (Antonio
Gramsci, Frederic Jameson, Raymond Williams, E.P. Thompson, etc.) will
inevitably be included in some of our discussions but this is not conceived
of as a theory course.  Students should be prepared to undertake close-up,
intensive analysis of both canonical and non-canonical texts in order to
try to grasp the complex interrelationship of literary form (style,
language, genre, etc.) and ideology.  Requirements for the seminar include
1 or 2 short oral presentations and a 20-page research paper (with
annotated bibliography attached), due the last class period of the quarter.


English 289 (Genres:  Impulse to Realism)
Professor Jennifer Doyle

A graduate seminar tracking realism and naturalism as aesthetic
impulses (rather than well-defined movements) that shape a range of
literary and artistic practices.  Reading critical theory, literary
and art historical criticism in addition to fiction, we will ask how
the signature gestures of nineteenth-century realism re-emerge in
20th & 21st century art and literature.  Special attention is given
in this course to the association of realism with a poetics of the
body - with representations of sex, desire, and difference.  This
course should appeal to students interested in interdisciplinary
study, visual culture, feminist criticism, and critical theory. The
reading for this course is very heavy.  Please read ahead over the
winter break.

Required Texts (should be purchased on-line/where there are multiple
editions, I've indicated which publisher to use - please use most
recent edition from that publisher/all assigned books will also be on
reserve at Rivera)

Rebecca Harding Davis, "Life In the Iron Mills" (any edition is o.k.
- this also is a widely anthologized short story)
Honoré de Balzac, Eugenie Grandet (penguin)
Frank Norris, McTeague (penguin)
Emile Zola, L'Assommoir (penguin)
Michelle Houellbecq, Elementary Particles
David Wojnarowicz, Close to the Knives
Upton Sinclair, The Jungle
Hal Foster, Return of the Real

Criticism/Theory will include:

Michael Fried, excerpts from Realism, Writing, and Disfiguration &
Menzel's Realism
Nancy Glazener, excerpt from Reading for Realism
Eric Sundquist, "The Country of the Blue" from American Realism: New
Essays
Susan Stewart, excerpts from Crimes of Writing
Fredric Jameson, chapters 1 & 3 from The Political Unconscious;
"Cognitive Mapping"
Emile Zola's "The Experimental Novel"
Leo Bersani, "Realism and the Fear of Desire" from A Future for
Astyanax (excerpted in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture)
Mark Seltzer, "Statistical Persons" from Bodies and Machines
Amelia Jones, "The Body In Action: Vito Acconci and the 'Coherent
Male Artist Subject" in Body Art: Performing the Subject
Coco Fusco, "The Unbearable Weightiness of Beings: Art in Mexico
After NAFTA" from The Bodies That Were Not Ours

Visual Art:
Franko B.
Nan Goldin
Teresa Margolles/SEMEFO Collective
Santiago Sierra
Allen Sekula
Carrie Mae Weems
David Wojnarowicz

Requirements:  Presentation (must relate directly to the course
topic, sign-up in second week)  & 20 page final paper (revised
version of presentation with bibliography)


English 274  (Feminist Discourses)
Professor Carole-Anne Tyler

I will teach English 274 as Contemporary Feminist
Theory.  We will read and discuss key texts, figures, and
issues in contemporary feminist theory, focussing on the
social construction and deconstruction of sex, gender, and
transgender identities; the body, embodiment, experience,
and "the signature"; equal rights vs. differences feminisms
and the problem of the "universal"; representation and
feminist demands for "recognition"; and feminisms and
sexuality.  The (tentative) reading list includes work by
Beauvoir, Butler, Garber, Halberstam, Irigaray, Freud,
Lacan, Miller, Kamuf, Derrida, Bartky, Foucault, Spivak,
Fraser, Martinez Alcoff, hooks, Smith, and Grosz.  We will
read 4-5 essays for each three hour seminar, depending on
the length and difficulty of the texts.


English 268 (British Literature)
Professor Kimberly Devlin

A survey of 20th Century British fiction, inaugurated by an influential
late 19th century "pretext"--Ibsen's A Doll House (Signet,
0-451-51939-6)--widely translated and almost immediately infamous for its
"door slam heard round the world."  We will then read Joyce's Dubliners
(Norton Critical Edition, due out in November 2005), Conrad's Heart of
Darkness (the new 4th Norton Critical Edition), his later--and more
bizarre--novel The Secret Agent (Penguin, 0-14-018096-6), Forster's Howards
End (Bedford, 030-312-11182-7), Woolf's The Waves (Harcourt Brace
Jonanovich, 0-15-694960-1), Waugh's A Handful of Dust (Little, Brown,
0-316-92605-1), and Fowles' The French Lieutenant's Woman (Signet,
0-451-11095-1).  Topics for discussion are open, but will (in general)
include the representations of women and their various "roles" (in both
senses of the word); of imperialism and colonized regions; of shifting
class structures; of the influence of childhood on "mature" selfhood; and,
in many texts, modernism's obsession with the past--its recurrent "backward
glance."  M.A students will be required to write a 12-15 page paper, Ph.D.
students a 18-25 page one.