ENL 200: Introduction to Graduate Studies in English (4 units)

Assistant Professor Mark Jerng<mcjerng@ucdavis.edu>
Mon. 3:10 – 6 p.m., 248 Voorhies, CRN  22487

This seminar introduces Ph.D. students to graduate study in English by focusing on contemporary and ongoing debates in literary study. The aim of this course is to prepare new students for advanced work in the field and to orient them in the profession. Much of what we do as scholars is familiarize ourselves with debates and problems both inside and outside our field, follow our own curiosities, and work to shape new interventions. In order to model this process and develop your own engagements as scholars, we will read selections of work that helped define and move forward some of the developments in our field. Occasional faculty visitors will supplement our readings by sharing their own thinking about these developments. Possible topics include both conceptual and methodological issues such as the problem of form (new formalism and the underlying issue of what is form); reading (the recent emphasis on the practices and processes of reading); the status of evidence; transnationalism; post-humanism; new forms of historicist criticism. A few literary texts will be paired with these topics so that we can think more concretely about what kinds of claims we make for texts, and how we back them up. In addition, this course will address a few practical issues in graduate study: the seminar paper/writing; the practice of teaching.

ENL 232: Men, Women, and Chain Mail: Medieval Knighthood and Gender (4 Units)

Professor Claire Waters<cmwaters@ucdavis.edu>
Mon. 12:10 – 3 p.m., 248 Voorhies, CRN: 43631

Knighthood--literal, spiritual, allegorical--was a central category of high- and late-medieval culture. This course will consider how, from its beginnings, the seemingly hyper-masculine realm of chivalry (chevalerie) is invaded by and reimagined in relation to the competing realms of "clergie," or scholarly/religious discourse, and "femenye," the world of women, as well as by shadings of divinity and animality. Juxtaposing primary texts and modern scholarship, we will reflect on how the intersections of knighthood with sex and gender inform medieval ideas of what it means to be human, on the instability of and connections between literary genres, and on what similar kinds of models might be at work in modern discussions of gender and sexuality.
Course requirements: In addition to class participation, one informal presentation and a research project conducted in stages: annotated bibliography, 10-page draft, and 15-20 page final paper.

ENL 233: “American Regionalisms/Regional Americanisms” (4 Units)

Assistant Professor Desirée Martín<dmartin@ucdavis.edu>
Wed. 3:10 – 6 p.m., 248 Voorhies, CRN: 22488

In recent years, American cultural studies have been productively redirected away from the hegemonic national model and towards other categories such as the transnational and the regional.  These are categories that might seem to be diametrically opposed to one another, as regional literatures have been historically thought of as minor or peripheral categories of a national tradition, while transnationalism is generally regarded through the lens of border-crossing, narratives of contact zones, and globalization.  Yet narratives of nationalism are also structured through the transnational and regional, while the transnational and regional may be read through various forms of nationalism.  In this seminar, we will examine the intersections between the national, transnational, regional, paying particular attention to the manner in which all of these terms shape each other.

Possible texts may include:

Frank Norris, The Octopus
Helen Hunt Jackson, Ramona
William Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom!
Américo Paredes, George Washington Gómez
María Amparo Ruíz de Burton, Who Would Have Thought It?
Willa Cather, Death Comes for the Archbishop
Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God
Henry David Thoreau, Walden, or Life in the Woods

ENL 238: Literature Reloaded: The Digital Humanities and the Posthumanities (4 Units)

Associate Professor Colin Milburn<cnmilburn@ucdavis.edu>
TR 9:00 - 10:20 a.m., 123 Wellman, CRN 43999

This seminar introduces the emerging field of the “digital humanities” (the humanistic study of digital systems, cybercultures, and new media, where research methods and modes of scholarly publication increasingly rely on advanced information technologies) as one dimension of the ongoing disciplinary transformations addressed by the “posthumanities” (those discourses that seek to revise the epistemic assumptions of the humanities through engagement with the sciences, putting pressure on the notion of the “human” as the center for disciplinary knowledge).  Topics to be covered will include: electronic literature and new media ecologies; video games as literature; massively-multiplayer online worlds (MMOs) as sites of collective intelligence and interactive narrative; posthumanism as a cultural movement and a mode of critical theory; cyberpunk fiction as the principal narrative form of the global network society; “mods” and modding practices as textual operations; and the fate of the literary text in the age of electronic convergence.  Students will also survey the innovative forms of post-print scholarship that increasingly shape the landscapes of the “new humanities,” becoming familiar with the methods and technologies for producing their own digital research projects.

Selected Texts:
Fiction
William Gibson, Neuromancer
Mark Z. Danielewski, House of Leaves
N. Katherine Hayles, ed., The Electronic Literature Collection, Volume 1
Thomas Pynchon, Vineland
Bioshock
Half-Life and Counter-Strike
Spore
Nonfiction

ENL 248: Utopianism and the Politics of Gender (4 Units)

Professor Alessa Johns<amjohns@ucdavis.edu>
Thur. 12:10 – 3 p.m., 248 Voorhies, CRN: 43984

Utopia has consistently been used as a way of reaffirming, critiquing, or simply playing with gender roles. Writers of all political persuasions have addressed questions of feminine and masculine, sexuality, reproduction, deviance, and difference in general, defining these in the interest of a larger political program that is conceived in ideal-society terms. Surveying texts from the early modern period through today, we will ponder surprising continuities as well as significant discontinuities through the centuries in an attempt to explain the meaning of, for example, social, economic, and cultural upheaval on utopian expression; the impacts of theory on practice; patterns of dystopian visions; the uses of science fiction; utopia/dystopia, empire and diaspora; the utopian appeal of political rhetoric and the call to collective action; process versus blueprint utopianism; varieties of utopian theory (e.g. Marxist, pragmatist, feminist, postcolonial). We will read both fictional and nonfictional texts, mainstream utopias as well as related genres (e.g. robinsonade, dystopia, science fiction, political programs), and will look at the ways in which questions of race, class, disability, sexuality, and other categories can be illuminated alongside gender issues. The juxtaposition of texts (or excerpts) each week will allow us to view socio-political issues in relief and will include such authors as: Christine de Pizan and Thomas More; Daniel Defoe and Sarah Scott; Mary Wollstonecraft, William Godwin, and Mary Shelley; Nathaniel Hawthorne and Frances Wright; Frances Harper and Sutton Griggs; William Morris and Charlotte Perkins Gilman; Joanna Russ and Marge Piercy; Ursula K. Le Guin and Kim Stanley Robinson; M. John Harrison and China Miéville; Ernst Bloch and Barack Obama. A course reader might include excerpts from e.g. Francis Bacon, Margaret Cavendish, Adam Smith, Robert Owen, Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr., Jürgen Habermas, Fredric Jameson, Richard Rorty, Seyla Benhabib, Angelika Bammer, Drucilla Cornell, and Russell Jacoby. Can utopian thought be a useful liberatory tool or does it ultimately posit inflexible, hierarchical, and exclusive modes of social organization? Does utopianism further or impede feminist goals? How does what has been termed utopia’s “principle of hope” (Bloch) dovetail with contemporary talk of the “audacity of hope” (Wright and Obama), and where does gender enter such discussions? Is utopia still a useful tool today or has it run its course?

 ENL 260: Kinship and U.S. Empire (4 Units)

Associate Professor Elizabeth Freeman <esfreeman@ucdavis.edu>
Thur. 3:10 – 6 p.m., 248 Voorhies, CRN: 43635

Dominant antebellum Anglo-American culture was shaped by the seemingly smooth fit of the middle-class family, a liberal-democratic polis, and the novel as a genre that bound these things together.   Yet during the rise of a United States empire after the Civil War, this alignment was troubled.  On the one hand, kinship law helped imperialist projects remake the subjects of the territories they conquered.  On the other, exploration, occupation, and annexation of territories exposed Anglo-Americans to kinship norms that threatened to denaturalize their own. While the kinship practices of Native Americans and the experiments of the Second Great Awakening had certainly outraged many Anglos, new postbellum developments such as the Westward movement,  Reconstruction, the annexation of Hawaii,  Chinese immigration, and the Spanish-American war exposed them to even more kinship forms that rendered their own families merely “relative.”  And meanwhile, by about 1870, the discipline of anthropology had found its home in the U.S., such that educated Americans were aware that kinship itself was an object of study, while fictional genres such as local color and naturalism emerged as a kind of lay anthropology.  This course, then, will explore U.S. literature through the lens of kinship studies, asking how, in the years 1865-1900, encounters with new forms of family threatened Anglo-Americans, offered them possibilities, and triggered remakings of both American and New World cultures.  What effect might these encounters with New World kinship have had on literary genre and form?  What role might literature have had as a successful or failed part of any particular imperialist remaking of kinship?

Reading list:  TBA

ENL 270: The Novel and the City (4 Units)

Associate Professor John Marx <jmarx@ucdavis.edu>
Tue. 3:10 – 6 p.m., 248 Voorhies, CRN: 43636

Sexy, scary, and sometimes smelly, the city that fiction built is replete with pleasure and danger. For all that, fiction’s city is also ordinary, the setting for domestic routine and habitual novelistic themes of personal development and interpersonal intrigue. This course will consider the city’s paradoxical combination of normality and novelty in fiction by writers likely to range from Defoe to Dickens, Woolf to Chamoiseau. To understand how and why fiction’s city became simultaneously strange and ordinary, we need to relate it to the city described by non-fiction. Scholarship from a range of disciplines collaborates and competes with fiction to render the speed and scale of metropolitan life. Scholars charge the urban with altering the senses (Benjamin, Simmel), theorize its organization of development and administration (Foucault, Koolhaas, Prakash), explain its steering role in global networks (Braudel, Mbembe, Sassen), and analyze the politics in its streets (Butler, Harvey, Lefebvre). Only after composing a brisk genealogy of city writing both novelistic and scholarly will we be capable of saying how fiction works with and against the disciplines to represent mercantile cities and industrial cities, imperial capitals and global metropolises, posh neighborhoods and mega-slums.

ENL 290F: Seminar in Creative Writing of Fiction (4 Units)

Visiting Professor  Salvadore Plascencia 
Thur. 12:10-3:00, 308 Voorhies, CRN: TBA

This course is an advanced fiction workshop concentrating on close readings and analysis of student manuscripts. Each student will be responsible for submitting two pieces of never before workshopped fiction. In addition, each participant is required to provide marginalia and typed feedback for each student piece discussed. Supplementary exercises and readings, tailored to address issues arising from our workshop sessions, will also be assigned. Submissions are limited to a maximum of 25 pages and are to be distributed one full week before the scheduled workshop date.

ENL 290P: Poetry Workshop and Meta-Workshop.(4 Units)

Associate Professor Joshua Clover jclover@ucdavis.edu
Tue. 12:10 – 3 p.m., 308 Voorhies, CRN: TBA

This will be in main a traditional workshop: we will write and circulate new poems every week, and puzzle through them at the rate of about four or five per seminar meeting, often thinking about them in the context of relevant poems from the tradition and contemporary scene. The basic goal will not be to polish individual poems but extend our capacities to conceptualize and generate further poems that are surprising, unfamiliar, and free of habit; you could say it's a course about our writing more than our poems.

At the same time, the workshop hopes to address head-on "the problem of workshops." As the writing workshop has increased in popularity, it has met with strident critiques. These doubts often seem overblown: as one poet has remarked, "twelve people sitting around a table talking are not going to ruin poetry." At the same time, these concerns seem like a useful frame for thinking about how to use the workshop to its best advantage. Is there a homogenizing effect? Do concerns about career and professionalization influence the work that gets done? Is there any truth to the romantic image of the artist as solitary creator, and does the workshop help or hinder such pursuits? Can art- making be taught?

We will try to touch on these issues as a context to think about our own work as writers and as critics, by way of making ourselves aware of pitfalls to be avoided. We will keep an eye always on the compassionate, care-filled, and communal process of poetry making in cahoots.

Grading based entirely on contributions to discussion. Readings to be announced.