[Cwgrad-announcements] english seminars

[Carly Kimmel]

Hi everyone - i pasted the listings into the email to make it  
easier.. some of these classes look AMAZING!
-Carly Kimmel

ENGLISH DEPARTMENT GRADUATE SEMINARS FOR WINTER 2008
                           SCHEDULE/COURSE DESCRIPTIONS

SCHEDULE:

English 262, Sem. in Ren. Lit. with Professor Stewart:  Wed.  
2:10-5:00 pm in HMNSS 1407

English 267, Sem. in Victorian Lit. with Professor Zieger:  Mon.  
10:10 am - 1:00 pm in HMNSS 1407

English 268, Sem. in 20th C. British Lit. with Professor Devlin:   
Fri. 2:10-5:00 pm in HMNSS 1407

English 270, Sem. in Amer. Lit. Since 1900 with Professor Yamamoto:   
Tues. 2:10-5:00 pm in Watkins 1117

English 272, Sem. in Critical Theory with Professor Tobias:  Thursday  
2:10-5:00 pm in Watkins 1117

English 275, Sem. in Film & Visual Culture with Professor Harris:   
Wed. 5:10-8:00 pm in HMNSS 1502

English 278, Sem. in MInority Discourse with Professor Edwards:  Wed.  
10:10 am - 1:00 pm in HMNSS 1407

English 289, Sem. in Genres with Professor Kinney:  Thursday  
5:10-8:00 pm in HMNSS 1502

COURSE DESCRIPTIONS:

English 262:   Seminar in Renaissance Literature with Professor  
Stanley Stewart
Unnecessary Shakespeare: Constructing the Canon

             David Bevington, an eminent Shakespearean, recently  
published an edition entitled The Necessary Shakespeare.  Given the  
price of books, and the lengthening years of undergraduate careers,  
it is helpful to have a volume of select plays and poems from the  
Shakespeare canon.  But even so-called “Complete Works of  
Shakespeare” dubiously include or exclude plays or poems.  The second  
edition of The Riverside Shakespeare (19970includes John Ford’s “A  
Funeral Elegy: To Master John Peter,” and excludes Shakespeare’s  
Edward III, which Yale University Press editor Eric Sams presents,  
along with Edmund Ironside, as “early play[s] restored to the  
[Shakespeare] canon,” a view which he claims is “generally accepted  
by literary Academia.”  Even so, in his new book, Shakespeare the  
Thinker (2007), A. D. Nuttall makes Love’s Labor’s Lost central to  
the Shakespeare canon, and so, one might think, “necessary” to the  
Shakespeare student.  Then too, given the dominant critical focus in  
criticism on political themes, it might be thought strange that  
Shakespeare’s two most political plays, Timon of Athens and  
Coriolanus are missing from The Necessary Shakespeare, as are The  
Comedy of Errors, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, The Merry Wives of  
Windsor, All’s Well that Ends Well, Troilus and Cressida, Pericles,  
Cymbeline, Two Noble Kinsmen, “Venus and Adonis,” “The Rape of  
Lucrece,” “The Passionate Pilgrim,” and “The Phoenix and Turtle.”   
The Bevington edition also excludes King John, most of the first and  
half of the second Henriad, as well as Henry VIII.  Again, the point  
is not to deny the usefulness of selected editions for classroom  
assignments.  So the aim of this seminar is not to construct  
alternative anthologies of Shakespeare’s “necessary” works, but  
rather to find a critical purchase on one or more of the works  
excluded from the Bevington edition.  Students will be asked to find  
one or more critical texts which affirm or deny the authenticity or  
importance of one or more of the works not in the Bevington  
anthology.  Or one might argue that, even if Edward III belongs in  
the Shakespeare canon, editors and critics are right to ignore it,  
because of such and such historical, political, or aesthetic  
reasons.  Or one might claim that Nuttall overstates the linguistic  
features of Love’s Labor’s Lost, and therefore mistakes the  
importance of that work in the development of Shakespeare’s  
“thinking.”  Regardless of whether Shakespeare or Ford wrote “A  
Funeral Elegy,” is the poem worth reading today, and if so, why?   
What about “The Phoenix and Turtle”?  Some critics argue that the  
poem is essential to a proper understanding of Shakespeare’s Roman  
Catholic predilections.  What is the difference between a “major” and  
a “minor” work, or between a “major” and a “minor” author?
Students will ask a question concerning the kinds of choices that  
editors and critics make when they establish texts or say why certain  
texts or certain authors are, to the exclusion of others, worthy of  
attention.  Then they will examine assertions on the subject that  
seem to them important, and prepare remarks (first in oral, later in  
draft form) for the seminar.  Finally, the seminar will consider the  
ways in which construction of a syllabus is like that of editing a  
literary anthology (that is, of constructing a “canon”), and the ways  
in which critical conversation about such works proceeds in according  
to stated or assumed criteria meant to justify attention to certain  
works and certain authors rather than to others.


             TEXT: The Riverside Shakespeare or any comparable, well- 
annotated edition of Shakespeare.


English 267:  Seminar in Victorian Literature with Professor Susan  
Zieger

The Victorian Novel: Adaptation and Mutation



This course serves as an introduction to the Victorian novel through  
the critical lens of adaptation and mutation. Using contemporary  
theories of adaptation, and studying four Victorian novels (Great  
Expectations, Jane Eyre, Middlemarch, and The Invisible Man) and  
their literary and/or cinematic adaptations, we will learn how  
adaptations critique aspects of the original, the period, and of  
novel form. We will also consider adaptation and mutation as  
themselves Victorian concepts, since they were central to Charles  
Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection. Although the  
course’s primary focus is the Victorian novel (rather than the vast  
and increasing universe of adaptation), students primarily intrigued  
by the relationships between literature and film should also find  
much of interest. Requirements include copious reading, a  
facilitation of class discussion, general participation in  
discussion, one annotated bibliography, and one 20-page research  
paper. Students are asked to perform some reading and viewing for the  
first class, on January 7 (see below), and are encouraged to make a  
start on Great Expectations and/or Jane Eyre over the winter break.  
Please also note that there will be eight class sessions, due to the  
observance of Martin Luther King Jr. Day and President’s Day.



Required Novels and Course-Standard Editions:

Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre (Penguin) ISBN-13: 978-0141441146

Charles Dickens, Great Expectations (Penguin) ISBN-13: 978-0141439563

George Eliot, Middlemarch (broadview) ISBN-13: 978-1551112336

Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea (Norton) ISBN-13: 978-0393308808

H.G. Wells, The Invisible Man (Penguin) ISBN-13: 978-0141439983



Required Films:

Jonze, Adaptation (2002)

Lean, Great Expectations (1946)

Tourneur, I Walked with a Zombie (1943)

Whale, The Invisible Man (1933)



For Monday, January 7:

Kamilla Elliott, Rethinking the Novel/Film Debate (Introduction,  
chapters 1, 4, 5)

Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Adaptation (chapters 2, 5)

Spike Jonze, Adaptation (2002)

Susan Orlean, “The Orchid Thief” (“prologue” and “A Mortal Occupation”)



English 268:   20th C. British Literature with Professor Kim Devlin

One of the legacies of the Jamesian articulation of “point of view”  
is a discernible preoccupation, in several modernist novels, with  
visuality and positionality.   This preoccupation takes many forms:  
an interest in spectatorship, sightseeing, and visual explorations of  
“otherness”; the emergence of the genre of “portraiture” novels;  
representations of voyeurism and exhibitionism; explorations of  
visual intersubjectivity; curiosity about visual curiosity;  
depictions of visual phobias, visual fixations, and the gaze.   In  
this seminar, we will be reading seven modernist texts that provide  
particularly good examples of these visual and positional concerns:   
James’s The Portrait of a Lady, Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Joyce’s A  
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and its remnant early draft,  
Stephen Hero, Joyce’s “Nausicaa,” Lawrence’s St. Mawr, and Woolf’s To  
the Lighthouse.  We will try to examine some of the following  
questions:  What are the implications of “taking up’ a particular  
position?  Why is positionality sometimes psychically unstable?   Why  
do some subjectivities find point of view difficult to establish?    
What makes some visual positions politically problematic, dishonest,  
or imperiling?   To help us explore these questions, we will be  
reading simultaneously a survey of interrelated theoretical texts  
that make various claims about visuality and/or positionality (texts  
by Freud, Caillois, Lacan, Silverman, Mulvey, Neale, Alloula, Doane,  
Newman, and Bhabha).   One of the aims of the course is to  
demonstrate how theoretical arguments can open up one’s understanding  
of novelistic discourse; another is to explore the ways novelistic  
discourse can strengthen and/or call into question various  
theoretical claims.

Course Requirements:

Oral presentations, class participation, and a final essay (12-15  
pages for students without MA degree; BA; 20-25 pages for students  
with MA degree).


English 270:  Seminar in American Literature since 1900 with  
Professor Traise Yamamoto
Shoring the Fragments:
Racialization and Whiteness in 20th Century American Literature

             This seminar will be shaped around the role of national  
identity and race in American literature, particularly as both  
underpin constructions of heterosexuality and notions of home.  Of  
key importance will be formulations of both modernism and  
postmodernism that focus on aesthetic formalism and linguistic  
transparency at the exclusion of racialized/gendered constructions of  
the subject, both authorial and textual.   Much of the conversation  
about the shifts and differences between Modernism and Postmodernism  
has focused around the difference between modernist alienation and  
postmodern fragmentation, as well as the different relationship of  
each to the aesthetic.   In this course, we are going to read this  
“split” through the notion that the 20th century has been one deeply  
concerned with and anxious about race and that this concern has  
crucially shaped notions of space, form and the aesthetic.  More  
particularly, the century is one in which whiteness is both secured  
and troubled, anxiously constructed and deeply problematized.  We  
will be thinking about the problematics of whiteness in three periods  
over the century: the early years, marked aesthetically by high  
Modernism; the 1950’s, particularly as they give rise to the Beats  
and the so-called Confessional poets; and the latter decades that  
comprise the contemporary period, in which notions of race are self- 
consciously both queried and queered.  Most of the conversation about  
race in the U.S. has been overtly shaped by the black-white dyad, but  
we will be paying particular attention to the “invisible third” –  
Asian Americans – and how that term destabilizes notions of  
whiteness, citizenship, masculinity and heterosexuality.

Texts listed below are provisional, though very likely.  I will send  
a finalized list before the end of fall quarter.

Robyn Wiegman, American Anatomies: Theorizing Race and Gender
Michael North,The Dialect of Modernism: Race, Language & Twentieth  
Century Literature
F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
Gertrude Stein, Three Lives & Tender Buttons
John Okada, No-No Boy
Carson McCullers, The Member of the Wedding
Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar
Jack Kerouac, On the Road
Norman Mailer, The White Negro
James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room
Dorothy Allison, Bastard Out of Carolina
Monique Truong, The Book of Salt
Nina Revoyr, Southland

We will also mostly likely be reading selections from the short  
stories of Sui Sin Far (Edith Eaton), Hemingway’s The Nick Adams  
Stories, Anne Cheng’s The Melancholy of Race, Richard Dyer’s White,  
and Gwendolyn Brooks’ Selected Poems.   Most of these will be  
available as PDFs on Blackboard.


English 272:  Seminar in Critical Theory with Professor Jim Tobias
Technoculture After Deleuze: Post-Deleuzian Critical and Cultural Theory

Since Gilles Deleuze’ death in 1995, a resurgence of interest in the  
philosopher’s analytics of art, culture, media, technology, and  
expression have resulted in a contemporary outpouring of extensions,  
revisions, and challenges to the philosopher’s work. Treatments and  
responses of Deleuzian analysis have appeared in a variety of forms,  
ranging beyond rigorous scholarly treatments to include graphic  
novels, works of popular culture, or works of interactive digital  
media; the 2007 appearance of the initial volume of the English- 
language journal Deleuze Studies confirms the contemporary interest  
in Deleuzian thought for Anglophone critical and cultural theories.

This seminar will survey the important precursors, concepts, and  
contexts for Deleuzian analysis, and focus critical attention on the  
most significant contemporary responses to Deleuzian analytics of  
technoculture in Anglophone contexts.  Working through Deleuzian and  
post-Deleuzian approaches to affective labor, bio-ethics, globalizing  
media technics, the virtual, corporeality, violence, and aesthetic,  
philosophical, and technoscientific expression, this seminar asks the  
following questions:  What form would a Deleuzian materialism take  
today?  How, and how well, are Deleuzian understandings of media and  
technology applied within contemporary digital media studies? How  
does Deleuzian virtuality account for transitions in technoscientific  
expression, and how do alternative accounts of the virtual differ  
from that of Deleuze?  What value might a Deleuzian understanding of  
affect have for contemporary work on “post-genomic” bodies?  How do  
contemporary narratives of sexuality or gender take up or depart from  
Deleuzian understandings of corporeality and difference?  In what  
ways is the conduct of everyday industrial-informatic life within  
neoliberal processes of globalization indicative of a Deleuzian  
ethics, and to what degree might Deleuzian ethics have been  
historically superceded?

By contextualizing Deleuzian thought with reference to post-war  
studies of language, technics, and expression (by Leroi-Gourhan,  
Hjelmslev, Bateson, or others), reading major texts by Deleuze in  
conversation with contemporary work (by Hardt, Negri, Glissant,  
Rodowick, Braidotti, Agamben, Ansell-Pearson, Massumi, or others),  
and by weighing the insights gained against late 20th and early 21st  
century aesthetic and narrative texts or cultural developments, this  
seminar will provide an overview of post-Deleuzian approaches to  
technoculture.

Readings from the following texts by Deleuze will be complemented by  
additional critical and narrative material on the relevant topic  
(indicated in parentheses): 1. Spinoza: Practical Philosophy  
(affect); 2. Bergsonism (virtuality); 3. The Logic of Sense  
(seriality and simulacrum); 4. Masochism: Coldness and Cruelty and  
Venus in Furs (clinical and critical interpretation after  
psychoanalysis); 5. Thousand Plateaus (with Guattari; stylistics as  
pragmatics) 6. Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation (diagrammatic  
expression); 7. Foucault (diagram, ethics, and subjectification); 8.  
Cinema I: The Movement-Image (sign, temporality, and historical style  
in audiovisual media); 9. What is Philosophy? (with Guattari: the  
ethics of art, science, or philosophy); 10. The Fold: Leibniz and the  
Baroque: summary.  (Note: this reading list is indicative but may not  
be final.)



English 275: Film and Visual Culture with Professor Keith M. Harris

The subject of this seminar is racial peformativity. The goal of the  
seminar is to develop further the notion of peformativity beyond that  
of gender performativity, and develop ways of discussing race within  
its proper contexts of culture and ideology. In an effort to  
exptrapolate a theory of racial performativity from theories of  
gender peformativity, we will, therefore, explore theories and  
histories of race alongside contemporary Cultural Studies and  
Performance Studies theories of performance and performativity. We  
will seek our objectives through the use of visual and written texts  
in various racial and ethnic cultural traditions. There will be five  
screenings on Tuesdays from 5:00-8:00. Date and location of the  
screenings: TBA.


English 278, Sem. in Minority Discourse with Professor Erica Edwards
African American Literary Theory: Death, Desire, and the Subject

This course approaches African American literary theory through the  
lens of the dead, considering various treatments of death and subject 
(ion) to investigate how the category of death has animated black  
cultural production and literary theory throughout the twentieth  
century.  The course begins with a meditation on Spike Lee’s recent  
televisual requiem, When the Levees Broke, and goes on to juxtapose  
several readings in death and subjectivity that attempt to work  
through, or mourn, the complex and often violent relationships  
between black identity, capital, desire, and the state, such as:  
Orlando Patterson’s Slavery and Social Death; Saidiya Hartman’s Lose  
Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route; various works  
in psychoanalysis by Freud, Lacan, Zizek, and Deleuze; Sharon  
Holland’s Raising the Dead; Karla Holloway’s Passed On; and Abdul  
JanMohamed’s The Death-Bound Subject.

Requirements: Readings will be demanding and interdisciplinary in  
nature, and students’ familiarity with Morrison’s Beloved and  
Wright’s Native Son will be assumed.  The course will require a  
conference-paper length research project and proposal, an annotated  
bibliography, and a book review.  Students interested in reading  
ahead should begin with Orlando Patterson’s Slavery and Social Death:  
A Comparative Study (Harvard UP, 1982).


English 289:  Seminar in Genres with Professor Katherine Kinney
War Literature

War has tested the power of literature throughout the twentieth  
century, challenging with an ethical immediacy the efficacy of  
realism, modernism, and postmodernism. In this seminar we will  
examine this challenge through an in depth examination of three  
topics: the “good-bye to all that” narrative of disillusionment which  
emerged so powerfully from the trenches of WWI; the meaning of  
embodiment, for, as Elaine Scarry argues, “War is relentless in  
taking for its own interior content the interior content of the  
wounded and open human body”; and the narrative and symbolic  
implications of the transformative development of air war from  
Guernica to Hiroshima to smart bombs. We will end by reading Jarhead,  
Anthony Swofford’s highly literary memoir of the First Gulf War and  
consider the significance of 20th c. war literature to an  
understanding of “limited” wars.

Readings may include: Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory;  
Robert Graves, Goodbye to all That; Pat Barker, Regeneration; Elaine  
Scarry, The Body in Pain;  Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms;  
James Jones, The Thin Red Line; Joseph Heller, Catch-22; Kurt  
Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five; Ralph Ellison, “Flying Home”; Michael  
Herr, Dispatches; Joan Didion, Democracy; Anthony Swofford, Jarhead.   
We will also read a selection of poems by Rupert Brooke, Siegfried  
Sassoon, Wilfred Owen, Langston Hughes, and others.

In addition to the readings, there will be a weekly film screening,  
including films such as: All Quiet on the Western Front, The Sands of  
Iwo Jima; Saving Private Ryan, The Thin Red Line, Dr. Strangelove,  
Notre Musique, Black Hawk Down, Three Kings.



On Oct 26, 2007, at 6:43 PM, Brenda Varda wrote:

> Could you resend the English seminars list?
>
> The link opened as unreadable - at least on my computer...
>
> Thanks
> BV
>
> _______________________________________________
> Cwgrad-announcements mailing list
> Cwgrad-announcements at lists.ucr.edu
> http://lists.ucr.edu/mailman/listinfo/cwgrad-announcements

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