Winter 2009 Graduate Course Descriptions:

ENL 210:  Science/Literature/History (Part II of STS Seminar Series) (4 Units)

Assistant Professor Colin Milburn
W 3:10 – 6 p.m., 248 Voorhies, CRN 32705

This seminar is the second course in a yearlong sequence surveying current approaches to science & technology studies (STS).  This sequence of courses is co-organized by Tim Choy (Anthropology), Joe Dumit (Anthropology), Jim Griesemer (Philosophy), and Colin Milburn (English). The three interlinked courses are:

Fall 08: ANT 210 (Dumit)
Win 09: ENL 210 (Milburn)
Spr 09: ANT 210 (Choy)

We are loosely breaking up the topics to be covered during each quarter as follows: (Fall 2008) Anthropology and Sociology of Science; (Winter 2009) History of Science and Literary Studies of Science; and (Spring 2009) Systems Theory and Environmental Studies of Science.  However, we are much more interested in broad, multi-departmental student participation than in adhering to these categories (which we intend to trouble anyway).

Students are encouraged, if at all possible, to take all three quarters. 

Together, these seminars will constitute a strong foundation in a variety of STS approaches, and will provide a unique opportunity for networking with STS leaders across the country, many of whom will be guest visitors in the seminars. (We plan to have a guest STS scholar join our session meetings every other week). 

During the Winter 2009 (ENL 210) seminar, we will explore intersections between the history of science and literature from the middle ages through the present day.  Readings from core critical texts will accompany specific case studies.  Topics will include: the rhetoric of science; the literary structure of scientific arguments; the history of scientific disciplines; scientific and literary modes of authorship; and fictive representations of science and technology.  We will also investigate various sites of contemporary technoculture that partake equally from the practices of experimental science and experimental fiction.

ENL 233: Transnational American Studies (4 Units)

Assistant Professor Desirée Martín
M 12:10 – 3 p.m., 248 Voorhies, CRN: 53592

In this course, we will examine the field of Transnational American Studies.  This field, which also goes by the name of Inter-American Studies, is rapidly growing within literary and cultural studies.  However, as we will see, it is far from being a new field – on the contrary, one of the course goals is to investigate the manner in which transnational perspectives and touchstones actually form the basis of more “traditional” American studies.  We will study a variety of literary and critical texts from the late 19th century to the present in order to examine the historical interrelation between the United States and the rest of the world, particularly Latin America, the Caribbean, and Africa.  Special attention will be paid to the slave trade and its aftermath, the transnational flows of migration and exile, the U.S.-Mexico borderlands, travel writing, and processes of globalization.  We will also question the tendency to construct a transnational American studies from a primarily (or exclusively) U.S.-based national perspective. 

Authors and critics will likely include Toni Morrison, John Carlos Rowe, José David Saldívar, George Yúdice, W.E.B. DuBois, José Martí, Octavio Paz, Nella Larsen, Langston Hughes, María Amparo Ruíz de Burton, Sandra Cisneros, and others.     

Possible texts:
Cisneros, Sandra. Caramelo
Gruesz, Kirsten Silva. Ambassadors of Culture (excerpt)
Hughes, Langston. Selected poems
Larsen, Nella. Passing or Quicksand
Martí, José. Selected writings from
Morrison, Toni. Playing in the Dark (excerpt)
Rowe, John Carlos. The New American Studies (excerpt)
Ruiz de Burton, María Amparo. Who Would Have Thought It? or The Squatter and the Don
Saldívar, José David.
Yúdice, George. The Expediency of Culture (excerpt)

ENL 238: Remaking Ecocritical Theory (4 Units)

Assistant Professor Michael Ziser
M 3:10 – 6 p.m., 248 Voorhies, CRN: 32706

In this seminar we will collectively remodel ecocriticism by identifying its central concerns and then exploring those concerns laterally into adjacent fields.  Environmental Justice’s interest in waste, for example, will be illuminated by the “garbage poetry” of Ammons, Whitman, and Thoreau, as well as by psychoanalytic treatments of abjection from Lacan, Kristeva, Žižek, Ngai, and Bollas.  Natural history’s revisionist temporalities—Thoreau’s phenological Kalendar, for example—will be interrogated with Prigogine, Bachelard, and Bergson.  The “real things” so dear to ecocritics will meet not just Heidegger but Winnicott, John Brewer, Bill Brown, and Nathan Brown.  Ecomimesis ancient (Zeuxis) and modern (Audubon) will be prodded with Buell, Phillips, Morton, and Mitchell.  Food webs and climax ecosystems will tangle with feedback loops and Latourian assemblies.  Bambi will be hunted by Muybridge and Kittler; Agamben will bring flowers to Pet Sematary.  At the end of it all, we will have a renewed sense of ecotheory’s largely untapped potential to reweave a wide range of current theoretical issues into a single canopy.  Seminar participants can expect to work and write on an author, genre, coterie, place, or theoretical problem from their own field throughout the quarter.

Requirements:
Weekly Attendance and Participation (10%)
Discussion Leading (1 x 10%)
Ecocritical Teaching Set (1 x 10%)
Weekly Writing (4 x 2.5 = 10%)
Preliminary Paper Workshare (1 x 10%)
Final paper, 20pp (50%)

Required Reading:
•    Giorgio Agamben, The Open: Man and Animal (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2004) ISBN:978-0804747387
•    A. R. Ammons, Garbage: A Poem (NY: Norton, 1993) ISBN 978-0393324112
•    Matthew Calarco, Zoographies: The Question of the Animal from Heidegger to Derrida (NY: Columbia UP, 2008) ISBN 978-0231140232
•    Greg Garrard, Ecocriticism (London: Routledge, 2004) ISBN 978-0415196925
•    Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory (NY: Oxford UP, 2007) ISBN 978-0199256051
•    Janisse Ray, Ecology of a Cracker Childhood (Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, 2000)
•    Henry David Thoreau, Cape Cod (NY: Penguin, 1987) ISBN 978-0140170023
•    Barbara Gowdy, The White Bone (NY: Picador, 2003) ISBN 978-0312264123
•    Amitav Ghosh, The Hungry Tide: A Novel (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 2005) ISBN: 978-0618329977

ENL 240: Landscape and Space in Medieval Culture (4 Units)

Associate Professor Seeta Chaganti
T 3:10 – 6 p.m., 248 Voorhies, CRN: 53954

From our twenty-first-century perspective, the terms landscape and space are inevitably inflected by Romantic, transcendentalist, and ecocritical developments in thought and discourse. But how did premodern societies experience the natural and built spaces in which they lived? This course explores this question through a variety of medieval European texts. We will begin by establishing some traditional ways of finding meaning in medieval depictions of landscape, such as its allegorical function in the Romance of the Rose and Pearl. Creating this foundation will allow us to question it. We will investigate the limits of this allegorical model, as well as the extent to which medieval readers and writers formed other kinds of relationships with the spaces around them. Through diverse texts such as the Voyage of Saint Brendan, the Lais of Marie de France, and the Canterbury Tales, we will aim to arrive at some new ways of seeing physical spatiality and place in medieval texts. We will think about how place inflects the poetics, narrative structures, and cultural investments of medieval literature. But at the same time, we will also consider how literary evidence might help to construct theories of place for the Middle Ages.

ENL 248:  Fear, 1685-1796  (4 Units)

Assistant Professor Christopher Loar<cfloar@ucdavis.edu>
T 12:10-3 p.m., 248 Voohries, CRN:  32708

Critical work on eighteenth-century emotion has tended to emphasize melancholy, sensibility, and tearfulness. But these were hardly the only emotions that played important roles in the culture of the period. This seminar will examine a different feeling—fear—as a way of expanding our sense of how emotions were understood to regulate or destabilize culture, society, and the individual. We will examine representations of and discussions of fear in a number of different contexts (religious terror, theories of tragedy, the aesthetics of the sublime, scenes of social failure) to consider some interrelated questions. How was fear thought to shape the political and social subject? How was fear of a monarch’s, a state’s, a society's, or a deity’s power related to the problems of governmentality, discipline, and obedience? Were women and men thought to respond to fearful situations and stimuli in the same way—and, if not, why not? Was fear something to be suppressed, cultivated, or shaped? The seminar will examine novels, plays, poetry, sermons, and early psychological writings under a variety of rubrics. We will also consider these writings in light of recent critical work on the cultures of emotion by Adela Pinch, Julie Ellison, G. J. Barker-Benfield, Victoria Kahn, Neil Saccamano, and Brian Massumi.

Primary texts (tentative):

Otway, The Orphan
Rowe, The Tragedy of Miss Jane Shore
Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful
Thomson, "Winter"
Bunyan, Grace Abounding and other religious writings
Selections from Christopher Smart and/or William Cowper
Defoe, Journal of the Plague Year
Boswell, London Journal
Burney, Evelina
Godwin, Caleb Williams
Radcliffe, The Italian

ENL 252:  Wilde and Shaw  (4 Units)

Assistant Professor Elizabeth Miller
T 3:10 – 6 p.m., 308 Voorhies, CRN 53956

“In matters of grave importance, style, not sincerity is the vital thing.” – Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest

“Effectiveness of assertion is the Alpha and Omega of style. He who has nothing to assert has no style and can have none.” – George Bernard Shaw, Preface to Man and Superman

Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw were born in Dublin within two years and a few miles of one another. As young men, they both settled in London to launch literary careers, and they both played a significant role in the late-nineteenth-century revival of English drama. Their work, however, is dissimilar in many respects. Wilde, a key theorist of the aesthetic movement, considered art to be an autonomous sphere apart from social reality, while Shaw wrote gritty plays about slumlords and prostitutes, with didactic prefaces thrown in for good measure. Wilde’s work championed individual and sexual liberation, while Shaw emphasized economic liberation via social collectivism. Still, Wilde imagined that they were both part of a “great Celtic School” of literature, opposed to Victorian values and English social convention, and both men fashioned celebrity personalities based on dress, habits, and verbal deftness.

In this class, we will read a wide range of works by both authors, including drama, fiction, journalism, and criticism, and we will reconsider the critical tradition that has viewed them as oppositional. To maximize opportunities for comparison, we will focus on the earlier portion of Shaw’s long career, up until 1914. Our topics of discussion will include but not be limited to: literary movements and genres such as aestheticism, decadence, realism, naturalism, and satire; socialism and the politics of aesthetics; sexuality and homosexuality; gender and late-Victorian feminism; national identity and Irish nationalism; the late-Victorian press and the role of the critic in public discourse; language and linguistic play, from puns to spelling reform; and the late-Victorian stage, including censorship, melodrama and stage formula, actresses, and diva worship (a pastime of both authors).

Assignments will include class presentations, a shorter paper, and a longer paper due at the end of the quarter.

ENL 254: What do we mean when we say “Twentieth-Century British Fiction”? (4 Units)

Associate Professor John Marx
R 3:10- 6 p.m., 248 Voorhies, CRN 32710

Think of this seminar as a venue for discussing what twentieth-century British fiction might be. We’ll talk about what it has been, namely, a field subdivided between high and low, early and late, modernist and postcolonial. By reading novels that have edged into the canon without becoming central to it, we’ll work to formulate alternate distinctions and techniques for comparing the last century’s novels on the British and postcolonial side of the curriculum. Scholarly readings will likely include such figures as Fredric Jameson and Simon Gikandi, as well as essays from the next generation of twentieth-century novel critics.

Novels will include George Lamming, The Emigrants (1954); Virginia Woolf, Jacob’s Room (1922); G.V. Desani, All About H. Hatterr (1948); James Kelman, How Late it Was, How Late (1994); Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim (1900); Alan Hollinghurst, The Swimming-Pool Library (1988); Soueif, Ahdaf, The Map of Love (2000).

ENL 262: Sexuality and Temporality in Twentieth-Century American Literature (4 Units)

Associate Professor Elizabeth Freeman<esfreeman@ucdavis.edu>
W 12:10-3 p.m., 248 Voorhies, CRN: 32712

The biggest cliché about twentieth-century literature is that it disrupts “master narratives” -- of the bourgeois novel, of temporal continuity and historical progress, of Freudian sexual development.   Yet the alternatives are perhaps more interesting than the abstract idea of disruption.  Both modernism and postmodernism develop models of embodied political futurity through a differential and even sometimes eroticized relation to collective pasts, and through untimely relations between bodies.  This course will explore the political/ aesthetic possibilities latent in the intersection of – loosely thought—sex and time in America.  We will begin roughly chronologically, exploring the role of degeneration and decadence in 1900s American naturalism and then moving to the role of sexualized primitivism in the New Negro movement and Anglo-American  Modernism in the 1920s and 30s.  Moving to fiction written after World War II, we will proceed through a series of case studies that link alternative temporalities to sexual alterity: the child and Cold War amnesia, the aesthetic avant-garde and the sexual revolution of the 1960s, the 1970s reclamation of a lesbianized “women’s time,” the 1980s production of a  mestiza queer time, and the apocalyptic writings of the early 1990s AIDS era.  Likely Continental theorists to make an appearance are Benjamin, Derrida, Freud, Kristeva, and Nietzsche.  Theorists from U.S. academies will probably include some mix of Judith Butler, Wendy Brown, Lee Edelman, Avery Gordon, Walter Johnson, José Muñoz, Elizabeth Povinelli, and Kathryn Bond Stockton—all people working on politics and time—among others.

Probable texts (subject to change):
    Gertrude Stein, “Melanctha,” from Three Lives: And Tender Buttons (Penguin, 0-451-52872-7)
    Jean Toomer, Cane (Liveright Pub. Co., 0-87140-151-7)
    William Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom!: The Corrected Text (Random House, 0-679-60072-8)
    Djuna Barnes, Nightwood: The Original Version and Related Drafts (Dalkey Archive Press, 1-56478-080-5)
    Vladimir Nabokov, The Annotated Lolita (Knopf, 0-679-72729-9)
    Selected poems and ephemera from 1960s and 1970s radical movements (in Special Collections)
    Bertha Harris, Lover (NYU Press, 0-8147-3505-3)
    Cherríe Moraga, “Giving Up the Ghost,” from Heroes and Saints and Other Plays (West End Press, 0-931122-74-0)
    Tony Kushner, Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes (Theater Communications Group, 1-55936-231-6)

ENL 270:  21st CENTURY POETRY & POETICS

Assistant Professor Nathan Brown
R 12:10 – 3 p.m., 248 Voorhies, CRN 53957

What can poetry tell us about the new century?  The turn of the past century was marked by the emergence of the modernist avant-gardes (Futurism, Cubism, Dadaism, Suprematism, Surrealism, etc.), and many would argue that 20th century poetry was driven forward by movements:  Imagism, Objectivism, Projective Verse, the Beats, Ethnopoetics, the New York School, Language Poetry, etc.  These, in turn, presumably marked something about the time and place in which they unfolded, indexing the energies of what Ezra Pound would have called a particular “Vortex”:  London in the ‘teens, New York in the ‘30s, Black Mountain College in the ‘50s, San Francisco in ‘70s…  The study of particular poetic formations and communities has helped us to map the reciprocal determination of art and history, the manner in which aesthetic priorities and socio-political forces interact—and how their interaction affects what Raymond Williams called “the structure of feeling.”

But what now?  At the beginning of the 21st century, lines of poetic filiation appear increasingly hybridized and the distinction between the “avant-garde” and the “mainstream” is perhaps less clearly drawn than it used to be.  In this class we will dedicate ourselves to starting over, reading new poetry as new poetry in order to find out for ourselves what exactly is unfolding at the outset of the new century.  Focusing on volumes rather than individual poems, we’ll attempt to discern and map the discrepant methodologies, affective registers, rhetorical styles, and fields of reference involved in various poetic projects.  Areas of emphasis will include:  the politics of public address, relations between science and poetry, feminist poetics, the status of the long poem, the arrival of digital poetry and the persistence of the analog, constraint-based and procedural methods of composition, and the immersion of poetry in other systems of construction and communication (architecture, advertising, etc.).  Throughout, we’ll continue to ask: what can the new century tell us about poetry?  

TENTATIVE READING LIST:
Caroline Bergvall, Goan Atom (Krupskaya, 2001)
Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Drafts: Torques, 58-76 (Salt, 2007)
Joshua Clover, The Totality for Kids (U. of California Press, 2006)
Kenneth Goldsmith, The Weather (Make Now, 2005)
Noah Eli Gordon, The Frequencies (Tougher Disguises, 2003)
Ben Lerner, Angle of Yaw (Copper Canyon Press, 2006)
Nathaniel Mackey, Splay Anthem (New Directions, 2006)
Lisa Robertson, The Weather (New Star Books, 2001)
Ara Shirinyan, Your Country is Great (Futurepoem Books, 2008)
Shanxing Wang, Mad Science in Imperial City (Futurepoem Books, 2005)
Joshua Marie Wilkinson, Lug Your Careless Body out of the Careful Dusk (U. of Iowa Press, 2006)
Critical Readings TBA

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

Professor Pam Houston
R 12:10 – 3 p.m., 308 Voorhies, CRN: TBA


This course will be an intensive and advanced fiction workshop. I feel that it is my job as workshop leader to create and hold a space in which students feel free to take stylistic, artistic, and emotional risks. We will focus on what I believe to be the real artistry of fiction: the translation of the emotional stakes of the story onto its physical landscape; the way we dip our ladles into the bottomless pot of metaphor soup and pull out what we need, what we can then shape into story. We will be aiming for stories in which the language is always working in at least two ways at once, where metaphors dance between meanings like beads of water on a too hot grill. We will work toward demystifying some of the essential components of fiction (image, metaphor, structure, dialogue, character, scene, among others) and turning them into comprehensible tools that are at our disposal. At the same time we will honor (and hope for) the inexplicable flights of creativity (and madness?) that take a good story and make it great.

Each student will be expected to turn in three new pieces of fiction during the course of the semester (either stories or novel chapters), and turn in approximately 50 pages of workshopped and polished fiction by the end of the semester. There will be some reading and brief weekly exercises at the beginning of the semester that will become optional as we get farther into the real work.

Texts:
The Gateway, by T. M. McNally
The Mother Garden, by Robin Romm,
White Noise, by Don Delillo
Veronica, by Mary Gaitskill

ENL290P:  Seminar in Creative Writing of Poetry (4 Units)

Associate Professor Joshua Clover
T 12:10 – 3 p.m., 308 Voorhies, CRN: TBA

This will be a graduate poetry workshop with a special emphasis on "realism." We will read about, think about, talk about, and write exclusively realist material, with an emphasis on the matters of everyday life. This will include a parallel study in the history of realism in art. In short: got to be real.

Obligations will include weekly poetry-writing assignments, weekly reading of both poetry and other stuff, one presentation of a poet from the anthology, and a final portfolio of poems.

A grade cannot be received unless all obligations are met diligently. After that, grades are based entirely on providing thoughtful, nuanced, attentive and carefully considered response to peer work, in class.

REQUIRED TEXTS:
Poems for the Millennium vol. 2, Jerome Rothenberg, Pierre Joris
Realism, Linda Nochlin
The Savage Detectives, Roberto Bolano