Spring 2009 Graduate Course Descriptions: 

ENL 225:  James Joyce and the Ireland of his Time (4 Units)

Assistant Professor Gregory Dobbins <gjdobbins@ucdavis.edu>
M 3:10-6 p.m., 308 Voorhies, CRN: 93473


The primary purpose of this course is to undertake a slow, detailed reading of James Joyce's 'Ulysses.' My goal is to consider that novel in three different but interrelated historical/textual contexts: the various literary works, journals, little magazines, and ephemeral texts of the Irish Literary Revival which contribute to the cultural context of the book’s setting; the similar institutions produced by a nascent Modernist movement in which the novel was initially received upon
publication in 1922; and a brief voyage into the contentious world of Joycean manuscript debates in order to address the totemic quality of Joyce’s writing within later scholarship. In addition to 'Ulysses,' we will read 'Dubliners,' 'A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man,' and sections of 'Finnegans Wake.'

We will also be reading works by W.B. Yeats, J.M. Synge, James Connolly, Lady Gregory, T.S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Ezra Pound, Samuel Beckett and other contemporaries. As well as serving as a thoroughgoing consideration of Joyce, this course will also function as an introduction to the methods and aims of cultural materialism.

ENL 233: “Race” in a Post-Race Era (4 Units)

Assistant Professor Mark Jerng <mcjerng@ucdavis.edu>
T 3:20 – 6 p.m., 308 Voorhies, CRN: 72517

The end of structures of formal inequality such as Jim Crow and apartheid has left the significance and study of race in crisis. Various pronouncements have been made on the one hand "against" race: the world is beyond race; race no longer exists; race has been superseded by more significant questions of difference; we use race to avoid issues like poverty. Others argue for the continuing realities of
race. Both of these positions use the notion of the social construction of race to argue for its obsolescence or its continuing reconstruction. But what the idea of social construction fails to explain is, as Howard Winant puts it, the "persistence and depth of racial categorization and racialized perception of self and society." In other words, why does race persist in playing such a crucial role in how we imagine ourselves and others? 

This course approaches the current crisis in paradigms for thinking about the significance of race through two interrelated questions: 1) how does race get reproduced and through what terms? 2) how does race appear, and why does it continue to appear? We will begin by surveying some of the major debates concerning the status of race and race critique, and getting a sense of the different paradigms that are being used to "look" at race: the critique of ontology in favor of performativity; the critique of freedom as telos; comparative racialization; interracial connections; biopolitics; technological reproduction; liberalism and the status of persons. Then we will move through a series
of novels, texts, primary documents, and secondary readings that will take up each of the two above questions in turn. The first set of fictional texts (A Mercy, Our Nig, The Ways of White Folks, The Pagoda) will be read in conversation with other works in order to think about the particular status of race in terms of both philosophies of freedom and the question of reproduction. The second set of
fictional texts (Light in August, Yokohama, California, The Toughest Indian in the World) will be read alongside works on the phenomenology of perception in order to think about how we perceive race in the first place. We will take up this problem of perception in particular with regard to literary texts that may or may not be "about" race at all; that might deliberately erase racial descriptors; or that
merge the question of race within problems of genre, allegory, or narrative strategy. Our goal in this unit will be to develop reading strategies and forms of analysis that can adequately analyze the changing landscape and 'visibility' of race.
 
Required Texts:
William Faulkner, Light in August
Toni Morrison, A Mercy
Patricia Powell, The Pagoda
Harriet Wilson, Our Nig
Chang-rae Lee, Aloft
Sherman Alexie, The Toughest Indian in the World
 Additional stories by Langston Hughes, The Ways of White Folks; Ann Petry, Miss Muriel and Other
Stories; Otono Watanna, A Half-Caste and Other Short Stories; Toshio Mori, Yokohama, California
Secondary Readings
Essays on the crisis in race critique and the question of race as a category by Etienne Balibar, John
L. Jackson, Paul Gilroy, David Theo Goldberg, Robert Warrior,
Essays on race, reproduction, and status by Amy Dru Stanley, Fred Moten, Jared Sexton, Jacquelyn
Stevens, Alyse Eve Weinbaum, Walter Mignolo;
Essays on phenomenology and perception by Jean-Paul Sartre, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Andre Green, Albert
Memmi, Franz Fanon, Sara Ahmed 

ENL 242:   Sixteenth-Century Literature (Poetry) (4 Units)

Professor Richard Levin <ralevin@ucdavis.edu>
W 6:10 – 9 p.m., 248 Voorhies, CRN: 93475

We will read poetry (predominantly lyric, but also satire, elegy, eclogue, “epyllion”; predominantly secular but some religious) that was written during the century, with more attention to the later decades.   The course will begin with Wyatt (and Surrey), move to the mid-century poet Gascoigne, and then spend substantial time on Sidney (Astrophil and Stella), Spenser (parts of The Shepherd’s Calendar), Marlowe (Hero and Leander), Shakespeare (Venus and Adonis and the first twenty of the Sonnets), and Donne (Songs and Sonnets and a sampling of other work).  We will give attention to the poetic styles of the century: the evolution of the plain and courtly styles and the rich mix of
stylistic resources available towards the close of the century.  We will consider how the love poetry of the period addresses gender and sexuality, and ask how and to what extent poetry that seems to be about romantic relationships is better understood as treating relationships at court.  We will examine the distinctive contribution of different poetic forms and discuss connections among the forms.  We will be concerned with the role of poetry in a rich cultural moment.  

Texts:
English Sixteenth-Century Verse: An Anthology, edited by Richard S. Sylvester;     publisher, Norton
Penguin Book of Renaissance Verse: 1509-1659, selected and introduced by
 David Norbrook, edited by David Norbrook   
John Donne’s Poetry, Norton Critical Edition, edited by Donald R. Dickson

ENL 246: Seventeenth-Century Literature: “Restoration Cultural Debates” (4 units)

Professor Margaret Ferguson<mwferguson@ucdavis.edu>
W 12:10-3 p.m., 248 Voorhies, CRN: 72518

This seminar will focus on debates about politics (including sexual politics), religion, and aesthetics during the period celebrated by some as the "Restoration" but excoriated by others as the defeat of the English Revolution. We will read several texts in which aspects of the revolutionary conflict are polemically represented (Milton's Samson Agonistes, for example, and Behn's The Widow Ranter); we will have a unit on Restoration drama focusing on debates about the institution of marriage (Cavendish’s The Convent of Pleasure and The Religious; Behn's The Rover, Wycherley's The Country Wife, Etheridge's The Man of Mode); and we will also study certain social scandals pertaining to the monarchy and to conflicts between Protestants and Catholics (the "warming-pan scandal" of 1688, for instance) and dramatized in both popular and elite discursive modes. In each seminar we will consider differing interpretations of cultural documents by modern critics as well as by early modern writers.  

There will be a Course Reader at the Davis Copy Shop on 3rd St. between B and A Sts’ primary texts will be available at the Campus Book Store. Seminar requirements will include one group exercise (pedagogically oriented) to be uploaded onto the class SmartSite and one term paper, with abstract and
provisional bibliography due three weeks before the end of the term.[Fulfills Ph.D. breadth requirement category: "Earlier National: British"]

The following texts have been ordered for the course; if you already own these works in another edition or wish to download them from online sources, please consult with me (at mwferguson@ucdavis.edu) about adequacy of editorial apparatus.

Required Text books:   

Four Great Restoration Comedies (includes The Country Wife by William Wycherley; The Man of Mode by

Sir George Etheredge; The Rover by Aphra Benn; and The Relapse by Sir John Vanbrugh) ($5.00)
    * Publisher: Dover Publications
    * ISBN-13: 9780486445700

Aphra Behn. Oroonoko and Other Writings, ed. Paul Salzman. ($9.50) Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN 019 28 3460 6

Paper Bodies: A Margaret Cavendish Reader, ed. Sylvia Bowerbank and Sara Mendelson (Broadview)
ISBN 155111172X

Recommended texts:  (Purchase from Amazon)

Gerald MacLean's useful collection, Culture and Society in the Stuart Restoration (Cambridge UP, 1995,
paperback)

Christopher Hill, The Century of Revolution: 1603-1714 (Norton; ISBN 0393003655) and or Robert Bucholz
and Newton Key, Early Modern England, 1485-1714:  A Narrative History (Blackwell, 2004)

Milton, Ccmplete Shorter Poems, ed. John Carey (2nd ed., Longman publishers, ISBN 0582019850)
    
The Norton Anthology of English Literature Vol. 1 (Medieval through 18th c.) or, if you want to get
the shorter “break out” volumes, buy volumes B and C (Renaissance and Restoration respectively; these
are what the preliminary exams are based on!)

The Cambridge Companion to Aphra Behn, ed. Derek Hughes, Janet Todd.

Cultural readings of Restoration and eighteenth-century English theater, edited by J. Douglas Canfield
and Deborah C. Athens: U. of Georgia P., 1995.

ENL 250:  Romantic Cosmopolitanism (4 units)

Professor David Simpson<desimpson@ucdavis.edu>
R 12:10-3 p.m., 308 Voorhies, CRN: 93476

 
What happens to our model of Romanticism if we pass over the powerful works (by e.g. Wordsworth, Blake, Austen) that contribute to a self-consciously national tradition and focus instead on those who saw themselves as cosmopolitans: Moore, Southey, Shelley, Byron, Hemans, for example? What did cosmopolitanism mean to them?

The course will begin with some contemporary theories of cosmopolitanism (e.g. Kant, Goethe, Herder) and move on to study travel writing and literary works by (among others) Cook, Goldsmith, Montagu, Southey, Moore, Shelley (Queen Mab), Byron (Childe Harold) and Hemans. Much of the material will be available in a course reader at Third St. Copy Shop.

Texts:

Owenson’s Wild Irish Girl
Helen Maria Williams’s Letters From France.

Requirements:
Attendance at all classes, participation in discussion, and a 15-20 page paper due at the end of the quarter.

 

ENL 252: Victorian Sexualities (4 Units)

Assistant Professor Kathleen Frederickson<kfrederickson@ucdavis.edu>
R  3:10-6 p.m., 248 Voorhies, CRN: 72520


By reading fiction from the Victorian period along with contemporary texts in queer theory, feminism, and Victorian studies, this course will work through a number of interrelated questions.  What practices, aspirations, and identifications count as "sexual"? How do imperialism and colonial rule structure the sexual cultures of the British metropole? How is "sexuality" related to and yet distinct
from "gender"? What is the role of affect in organizing sexual experience? And how did literature participate in the production of sexual ideologies and communities?

Requirements:
Short midterm paper (5 pages)
Final research paper (20 pages)
In-class presentation; weekly postings on SmartSite

Texts
Christopher Bollas Hysteria
Joseph Breuer and Sigmund Freud Studies in Hysteria
Judith Butler Undoing Gender
Charles Dickens Our Mutual Friend
Catherine Gallagher The Body Economic
Michel Foucault The Birth of Biopolitics
Eliza Lynn Linton The Rebel in the Family
Thomas Malthus An Essay on the Principle of Population
Richard Marsh The Beetle
George Meredith Diana of the Crossways
John Stuart Mill The Subjection of Women
Elizabeth Povinelli The Empire of Love
Robert Louis Stevenson The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr Hyde
Judith Walkowitz City of Dreadful Delight
 

ENL 256: White Atlantic: The Invention of America (4 Units)

Professor David Van Leer<dmvanleer@ucdavis.edu>
W 3:10-6 p.m., 248 Voorhies, CRN 93477

`Few words are so poorly defined as “America.”  The name derives from the cartographer Amerigo Vespucci, who discovered neither of the continents bearing his name.  Over the years inhabitants of the US have used it to name only their country, blithely ignoring not only “South”America, but Mexico, Canada, and the various other principalities that occupy the continent and its environs.   This course focuses on seventeenth-century texts which are seen to create that concept of “America,” 150 years before the English colonies would unite into a single political entity.

As is implied by my somewhat facetious neologism “White Atlantic,” the course will use paradigms drawn from the New Social History and from Postcolonial and Cultural Studies to explore that society.  Obviously the “colonists” saw themselves in close relation to Great Britain, of which they were still citizens.   They themselves are rarely seen as “colonials” in any of the modern senses of
this word.  The course will examine this assumption:  whether to challenge or reassert it, we will only know at the end.  Is any of the terminology of postcolonial theory – for example, “contact zone,” “imagined community,” or even “hybridization”  – useful in understanding the colonists relation to the
“mother” country and the indigenous peoples they themselves “colonized”?  Can that relation be understood as a kind of “diaspora,” creating a White Atlantic comparable to Paul Gilroy’s notion of a Black Atlantic?

As an historical survey, the course will introduce general techniques for reading the (somewhat rarefied) canonical texts of seventeenth-century New England.  The course will explore in particular the extent to which traditional Puritan texts, whether intentionally or not, become a forum for the biographies of minorities (particularly white women) largely without a voice in the seventeenth-century.   This approach will of course consider the overt transcultural contacts and
clashes registered in these texts.  But it will explore also the covert ways in which subaltern voices speak from within (and despite) dominant cultural discourse.  After a consideration of the reigning paradigms for reading disenfranchised voices, the course will focus on comparatively canonical texts such as those by William Bradford, John Winthrop, John Cotton, Thomas Shepard, Anne Hutchinson, Anne Bradstreet, Edward Taylor, Michael Wigglesworth, Mary Rowlandson, Cabeza de Vaca, Cotton Mather, Jonathan Edwards.

 Required Texts:

Bradford, OF PLYMOUTH PLANTATION
Hall, ed., THE ANTINOMIAN CONTROVERSY
Shepard, GOD’S PLOT
Derounian-Stodola, ed.,  WOMEN’S CAPTIVITY NARRATIVES
Cabeza  de Vaca, ADVENTURES IN TH EUNKNOWN INTERIOR OF AMERICA

Requirements:

A.  Seminar Report:  Brief cogent analysis of primary or secondary texts for that week.  No more than
15 minutes in length, the report should concern itself less with summary than with identification of
key exegetical problems, methodological techniques, and philosophical assumptions.

Each report must be accompanied by a bibliography of relevant secondary scholarship on the week's
author and any related theoretical issues -- to be xeroxed and distributed to all in the seminar.

Presence at and participation in all seminar meetings goes without saying.

B.  Writing 
    1.  Research / analytic piece - approx. 20-30 pages.
    2.  Theoretical piece -- 10-15 pages
    3.  Conference paper / lecture -- 8-12 pages

ENL 262-1: The Space of Literature (4 Units)

Assistant Professor Hsuan L. Hsu<hlhsu@ucdavis.edu>
T 12:10 – 3 p.m., 308 Voorhies, CRN: 72521

In this course, we will consider various models of the relationship between literary form and social space. Taking as our point of departure Henry Lefebvre’s theoreization of “the production of space,” we will sharpen our thinking about 1. how space works “in” literary texts (through setting, travel, circulation, and rhetoric); 2. how different spaces function in social, economic, and political terms;
and 3. how social space is imagined, critiqued, or refashioned by literature.

Drawing on important work in the fields of cultural geography, urban studies, American Studies, ecocriticism, and literary criticism, as well as primary texts from various moments and locations in U.S. literary history, we will develop frameworks for researching points of intersection between literature, space, and power. Among the concepts and themes we will consider are spaces of social reproduction, cosmopolitanism, U.S. empire, geographical scale, the ideological and analytic uses of maps, racialization, diaspora, and environmental criticism. We will ground our discussions of these concepts in literary texts by authors ranging from Walt Whitman and Stephen Crane to Sui Sin Far, Claude MacKay, Shawn Wong and Helena Viramontes.

ENL 262-2:  The American Lyric Poem (4 Units)

Professor Joanne Diehl< jfdiehl@ucdavis.edu>
M 3:10 – 6 p.m., 248 Voorhies, CRN: 72522

In this course, we will read Dickinson, Whitman, Stevens, and Ashbery in order to familiarize ourselves with the social and rhetorical legacies of the American lyric poem. Among the topics we will consider: the relation between subjectivity and the social (Adorno), literary experimentation, the development of a poetic tradition, and the creation of a lyric voice. Despite their apparent intimacy, lyric poems are necessarly contextualized in  highly charged social situations. Our discussions will include a consideration of theoretical texts that seek to explore the relation between the historical and the literary. Against a background of cultural anxieties and social contestation, Dickinson and Whitman, albeit in radically different ways, essentially reinvented the possibilities for the lyric voice. Through close reading, we will examine how each poet develops her/his style and how the lyric at once expresses intense subjectivity and engages with the world. Recent works on Dickinson, especially Victoria Jackson’s “Dickinson’s Misery,” use a variety of critical methods to analyze her poetry; and we will consider these historicist and cultural materialist approaches. Along with studying poets individually, we will listen to the ways that Stevens invokes Whitman and  Ashbery modifies Stevens. Such literary echoes and poetic differences delineate the distinctive aspects of an emergent American literary tradition. Finally, drawing on Helen Vendler’s recent book, “Invisible Listeners: Lyric Intimacy in Herbert, Whitman, and Ashbery,” we will consider the ways in which the poet’s creation of an imagined, interior listener contributes to the effect of intimacy in lyric poetry.


Tentative Reading List:

Adorno, Theodor. “Lyric Poetry and Society.”
Ashbery, John. “A Worldly Country”
Ashbery, John. “Selected Poems”
Berger, Charles. “Forms of Farewell”
de Man, Paul. “Anthropomorphism and Trope in The Lyric”
Bishop, Elizabeth, "Complete Poems"
Dickinson, Emily. “The Poems of Emily Dickinson” (Franklin)
DuBois, Andrew. “Ashbery’s Forms of Attention”
Jackson, Victoria. “Dickinson’s Misery”
Kaufman, Robert. “Adorno’s Social Lyric, and Literary Criticism Today: Poetics, Aesthetics, Modernity”
Stevens, Wallace. “Collected Poems”
Vendler, Helen. “Invisible Listeners”
Vendler, Helen. “On Extended Wings”
Whitman, Walt. “Leaves of Grass and Other Writings” (Michael Moon)

Requirements:

Each seminar participant will present a brief, in-class position paper and lead a discussion based upon issues raised in the paper.
A final 18-20- page essay

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

Associate Professor Lucy Corin<lcorin@ucdavis.edu>
R 12:10 – 3 p.m., 248 Voorhies, CRN: TBA


This is a graduate level fiction writing workshop. My approach privileges intensity and awareness of language textures and narrative shape, and asks each student to make each new work press the boundaries (intellectual, emotional, formal) of previous work. While making an immaculate-feeling piece of art is the ultimate goal, and we will work toward making your stories as beautiful as they can be, I am less interested in you finishing pieces than I am in you challenging yourself
artistically. Any time you are having trouble coming up with a story to write for workshop e-mail me and I will give you an assignment.

Consistent thorough attention to each other’s work both written and in discussion is essential and required. If you are working on a novel or novella contact me asap so we can discuss how to orchestrate a workshop for it. This requires planning ahead but it can be done if you're deep enough
into the project.

ENL 290NF Seminar in Creative Non-Fiction (4 Units)                

Professor Lynn Freed<lrfreed@ucdavis.
T 3:10-6 p.m., 248 Voorhies, CRN: TBA      TIME CORRECTION!                                                          

               
This is an advanced nonfiction workshop, concentrating on the analysis both of assigned texts, and of two or three, student manuscripts per week.  Each student will be responsible for submitting, for class discussion, two pieces of new non-fiction, to a maximum length of 20 pages each, or one new piece and a major rewrite. 

The most popular form of contemporary non-fiction is the personal essay, often in the form of memoir.  But there are also adventure essays, ruminations on works of art, appreciations of one writer by another, family histories, travel writing, and myriad other forms and variations.  For some essays, research is a necessary and integral factor; for others, the research is contemplative.

Each week we will read and discuss assigned essays, or excerpts of longer works, in order to gain an idea of the form and its possibilities.  Exercises will be assigned both for spontaneous writing in class, and for submission the following week. 


REQUIRED TEXTS:

Reference:

* WOE IS I  by Patricia O’Conner, Riverhead Books ISBN: 1-57322-252-6

•    A READER to be purchased from Third Street Copy Shop

ENL 290P: Seminar in Creative Writing of Poetry (4 Units)

Professor Alan Williamson<abwilliamson@ucdavis.edu>
T 12:10 – 3 p.m., 248 Voorhies, CRN: TBA


The basic assignment is a poem a week, and a final selection of the student's four best poems from the term.  We will also be looking at three of what seem to me the most interesting new books from the last two years; and students will be asked to compile a personal anthology.

Textbooks:

Frank Bidart, “Watching the Spring Festival”
Jane Mead, “The Usable Field”
Robert Pinsky, “Gulf Music”

ENL 391-Teaching Creative Writing (2 units)

Offered Spring Qtr. Only for 2nd Year CW Students  (2 Units)
Senior Lecturer Jack Hicks<wjhicks@ucdavis.edu>
F 9:00 – 10:50, 308 Voorhies, CRN:  72683

Prerequisite: Graduate standing, appointment as Teaching Assistant in the Composition Program.

Designed for new instructors of English 5F or 5P; discussion of ways to facilitate creative writing workshops and to respond to student manuscripts.

Text:

Eds. Ritter, K. , Vanderslice, S., "Can It Really Be Taught?"

ENL 393: Reading, Writing, Literature (2 Units)

Offered Spring Quarter only. This course is for Ph.D. Students
Associate Professor Elizabeth Freeman<esfreeman@ucdavis.edu>
F 10-11:50 a.m., 248 Voorhies, CRN: 72684

This course is designed for 3rd year Ph.D. students who will be ENL 3 instructors next year, beginning in the Fall. 

We will review the formal vocabulary and close reading methods pertaining to fiction, poetry, and genre.  As well as giving you an overview of ENL 3, I will model and provide opportunities for practicing the teaching of each genre, and for integrating the teaching of composition and literary analysis.  The emphasis throughout will be on hands-on practice. We will explore such topics as choosing an anthology (or not), the individual lesson plan, the kickoff question, the grading standard and its application, the course description, and the syllabus.

Assignments will consist of weekly exercises, 2 short essays on topics to be determined, and a brief report on your visit to one ENL 3 class. Your final paper, necessary for passing the class and being admitted to teach ENL 3, will be a full ENL 3 syllabus with an attached narrative explanation and sample lesson plan.
 
Required Texts: TBA 

CT 200B – Critical Theory: Derrida & Deconstruction (4 Units)

Professor Scott Shershow <scshershow@ucdavis.edu>
W 3:10 – 6 p.m., 308 Voorhies, CRN: 67806

This course will be an introduction to the foundational texts of Jacques Derrida. We’ll study highlights of Derrida’s books, essays and interviews as a way of sketching the basic theoretical presuppositions of deconstruction, with particular interest in his potential application for literary study and political critique. A majority of the course will focus on Derrida’s early texts, but we’ll conclude by considering a few of the more explicitly political and ethical texts from the last decade of his career.

Tentative reading list:

"Structure, Sign and Play" (1966)

"From Restricted to General Economy" (1967)

"Différance," (1968)

Of Grammatology, Part One, “Writing Before the Letter” (1974)

Selections from Positions (1981)

"Plato’s Pharmacy" from Disseminations (1981)

"Force of Law" (1994)

CT 200C – Critical Theory Representation, Aesthetics and Economics (4 Units)

Professor Evan Watkins<epwatkins@ucdavis.edu>
M 12:10 – 3 p.m., 308 Voorhies, CRN: 67807


The emergence of conceptions of the aesthetic marks a very distinct break from earlier traditions of thinking about poetry. We’ll begin the course looking at issues of representation in some classic texts of Plato, Aristotle and Longinus. These texts are crucial to understand in relation to claims about aesthetics, and needless to say they are very frequently referenced throughout discourses on the
aesthetic. Nevertheless, one premise for the course is that in many ways aesthetic discourses have more in common with economics as their immediate neighbor than with classical criticism. Admittedly, in their current avatars of MBA and English major the study of economics and the study of aesthetics
don’t seem to have a lot to do with each other. But as modern thought developed through the late 17th, 18th and into the 19th-centuries in Europe there was a lot of interbreeding. Elaborating ideas of both modern economics and aesthetics required, for example, explaining (or explaining away) the force of desire. Both required complex negotiations with moral values and ethical principles. Each, often surreptitiously, found support in the other, particularly in the matter of how to get from individual sorts of things to universal things. In addition to Plato, Aristotle and Longinus, we’ll try to take a look at some of this history, probably including among other things selections from Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations and The Theory of Moral Sentiments; David Ricardo’s The Principles of Political
Economy and Taxation; Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication; Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful; David Hume’s Essays; Kant’s Critique of Judgment; Friedrich Von Schiller’s Aesthetic Education of Man; Marx’s Grundrisse…and just maybe some
econometric based game (aesthetic) theory from the 21st century. I’m hoping we can have a couple of options for papers. If you’re interested especially in these historical periods or in the conceptual focus you can certainly do a seminar paper. Alternatively, you can think in terms of two shorter papers, one primarily interpretive and the other elaborating ways of linking the course content to
your direction of research interest.