233: Problems in American Literature

Joanne Diehl jfdiehl@ucdavis.edu
CANCELLED, CANCELLED, CRN 53202

This course investigates the various ways that psychoanalytic and neurocognitive approaches illuminate
early American fictional and poetic narration “to reuse what we already know about a representative
classic text in the service of what we are just beginning to learn about the parallels of mind-making and
narrative process.” Through close readings of works from Charles Brockden Brown to Henry James
alongside theoretical works that emphasize the creation of “self” and “memory,” we will examine how,
as Antonio Damasio remarks, “memory is best understood in terms of narrative process….” We will also
explore the implications of the assertion “that narrative construction (is) the very basis of
autobiographical memory” and vice versa. Finally, we will consider how mind-meaning and narrative
creation result both in a sense of imaginative autobiography and national as well as communal identity.

Requirements:

One in-class oral report
Final Essay (16-20 pp.)

Reading List:

Charles Brockden Brown, Wieland; or the Transformation and Memoirs of Carwin, The Biloquist (Oxford)
Damasio, Antonio, Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain (Pantheon)
Dickinson, Emily, The Poems of Emily Dickinson: Reading Edition (Franklin) (Belknap Press of Harvard
U.P.)
Douglas, Frederick, Harriet Jacobs: Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglas an American Slave &
Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (Modern Library Mass Market Paperbacks)
Hawthorne, Nathaniel, The Blithedale Romance, (Oxford World’s Classics, paper).
Irving, Washington, The Legend of Sleepy Hollow
James, Henry, The Turn of The Screw and Other Short Novels (Signet Classics, paper).

(In addition, there will be a class reader that will include Freud’s “Mourning and Melancholia,” a
selection from Giorgio Agamben’s Stanzas, and recent articles relating to memory, neurocognitive
advances, and narrative imagination.)

*Please purchase the specific editions cited in the bibliography.

Should you have questions about the seminar, feel free to contact me: jfdiehl@ucdavis.edu.

*For our first session, read Damasio’s book, especially his discussion of memory and its relation to the

construction of the “self.”

 

 

238: Special Topics in Literary Theory

Mark Jerng mcjerng@ucdavis.edu
T 12:10-3:00, 248 Voorhies, CRN 32577
Breadth: Later American
Focus: ID, Method, Theory

Topic: Theorizing Race

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 moves through various methodological approaches for analyzing the changing landscape and ‘visibility’ of race, taking up various prose fiction written by Frank Norris, Sui Sin Far, William Faulkner, Chang-rae Lee, Toni Morrison, and Samuel Delany along the way. Particular attention will be paid to racial formation, structures of being and perception (phenomenology and psychoanalysis), racial discourse, and theories of virtuality.

Grading
Class Participation
Oral Presentation
15-20 page article-length paper

Texts

selected stories, Frank Norris
selected stories and essays, Sui Sin Far
Light in August, William Faulkner
Einstein Intersection, Samuel Delany
Aloft, Chang-rae Lee
A Mercy, Toni Morrison

 

 

240: Medieval Literature

Seeta Chaganti schaganti@ucdavis.edu
R 3:10-6:00, 248 Voorhies, CRN 53203
Breadth: Earlier British
Focus: Method

The Canterbury Tales have held a central position in English medieval studies for many years. Because of this fact, a study of The Canterbury Tales is also in many ways a study of the history of medieval studies as a discipline. This class will introduce students to Chaucer’s text and use it as a vehicle for exploring late-medieval intellectual, religious, and social cultures. But it will at the same time consider the development of scholarly medieval studies in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries by examining the development of Chaucer criticism during this period. We will think about the ways that historical periods are constructed by those living in them and those looking back at them.

NOTE ON THE COURSE TEXT: I have ordered both the Riverside Chaucer (hardcover; contains all of Chaucer's works) and The Canterbury Tales Complete (paperback; contains the Riverside edition of the Canterbury Tales only). Students who plan to specialize in medieval and/or early modern studies should purchase the Riverside Chaucer. Students in other fields may consider the shorter text if they wish, though I encourage everyone to invest in the Riverside as we may consult other works by Chaucer, as well as the notes on textual variants in the Riverside, during class discussion.

Grading
Requirements:
-Weekly two-page written responses to the reading assigned for that week. These will be turned in to me two hours before class, and I will choose a couple to be read out loud during each class meeting. These will take the place of more traditional presentations.
-A research project, which will include an annotated bibliography and a research paper of 15-20 pages.

Texts

The Riverside Chaucer, Larry Benson, ed.
The Canterbury Tales Complete, Larry Benson, ed.

 

 

246: 17th C. Literature

Frances Dolan fdolan@ucdavis.edu
M 3:10-6:00, 248 Voorhies, CRN 53204
Breadth: Earlier British
Focus: Interdiscipline

In this course, we will study literary production and consumption in England from 1630 to 1660. During these decades, words were understood to matter desperately. Milton, for instance, famously described London on the brink of civil war as a city full of busy “pens and heads, sitting by their studious lamps, musing, searching, revolving new notions and ideas . . . others as fast reading, trying all things, assenting to the force of reason and convincement.” Although these decades fall between the still-conventional literary periodizations of “Renaissance” and “Restoration,” they have attracted vibrant scholarship in recent decades. This course hopes to engage students who are interested in the intertwined histories of print, literary form, and political struggle, as well as those specifically interested in the seventeenth century.

We will begin by discussing a history written by a literary critic, Diane Purkiss’s The English Civil War. We will then move in chronological order, roughly, hoping to use chronology to create unsettling juxtapositions of genre, class alliance, and political affiliation. In the 1630’s, we will examine the controversies surrounding Charles I and Henrietta Maria including Walter Montague’s masque The Shepherd’s Paradise (1632), in which the queen and her ladies took speaking parts, Shirley’s play The Bird in a Cage (1633), which restages this masque, selections from William Prynne’s attack on women actors from Histriomastix (printed in 1632, for which he was brutally punished), Milton’s masque Comus (1634), poetry by John Donne and George Herbert, both of whom published collections in 1633, and selections from Charles and Henrietta Maria’s alleged correspondence, published as The King’s Cabinet Opened (printed in 1645) and The Queen’s Cabinet Opened (a royalist recipe book printed in 1655). We will then turn to the role of the printing press in the civil war and regicide, including works by Henry Parker (Observations, 1642), John Lilburne (England’s New Chains Discovered, 1649), women prophets and petitioners such as Elizabeth Poole, Katherine Chidley, and Anna Trapnel, and Gerard Winstanley (The True Levellers Standard Advanced, 1649). We will also read Milton’s Areopagitica (1644), Tenure of Kings and Magistrates (1649), and Readie and Easy Way to Establish a Free Commonwealth (1660), as well as a pamphlet account of Charles’ trial and execution (in 1649). We will then read influential works from the 1650’s including Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan (1651). As we go, we will read poems circulated or published in the 1640’s and 1650s by Herrick, Carew, Shirley, Suckling, Lovelace, Vaughan, Dryden, and Phillips. We will probably read selections from memoirs of the civil war, including Margaret Cavendish’s A True Account of My Birth and Breeding; Lucy Hutchinson’s Memoirs of the Life of Colonel Hutchinson, and the Earl of Clarendon’s History of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in England. As we think about the printing press as a revolutionary information technology, we will also think about how electronic databases are transforming our study of this period. In addition to familiar databases (such as Early English Books Online), we will be using and evaluating digital editions of early newssheets (now available at http://www.bl.uk/collections/earlynewspapers.html); the Journal of the House of Commons (http://www.british-history.ac.uk/catalogue.aspx?type=2&gid=43); Richard Brome’s plays (http://www.hrionline.ac.uk/brome/); and radical writings now available on the internet as resources for political action today, whether as a history for “a land rights campaign for Britain” (the land is ours; http://www.tlio.org.uk/index.html) or as a “context” for Quakerism (the Street Corner Society; http://www.strecorsoc.org/world.html).

Grading
Students will write one short and one longer paper (which might be an expansion of the first paper). They will prepare an abstract of that longer paper as well. In the course of the quarter, students will also lead discussions, give short presentations, and engage in research exercises.

Many course materials will be available online or on smartsite. In addition I have ordered the books listed below.

Texts

English Civil War, Diane Purkiss
Leviathan, Thomas Hobbes
Milton's Poetry and Prose, Jason Rosenblatt, ed.
Seventeenth-Century British Poetry, John Rumrich and Gregory Chaplin, eds.
English Civil War, Diane Purkiss
Leviathan, Thomas Hobbes
Milton's Poetry and Prose, Jason Rosenblatt, ed.
Seventeenth-Century British Poetry, John Rumrich and Gregory Chaplin, eds.

 

 

252: Victorian Literature

Elizabeth Miller ecmill@ucdavis.edu
W 3:10-6:00, 248 Voorhies, CRN 32579

Victorian Media and the Victorian Novel


“In the old days men had the rack. Now they have the Press.” (Oscar Wilde, _Fortnightly Review_, 1891).
Wilde was not alone in recognizing that the Victorians had experienced an information revolution, and critics today have renewed interest in the question of how literary exchange participated in this shifting media sphere. This course will draw on several approaches to Victorian media that have changed critical conceptions of the Victorian novel: studies in seriality and serial reading; cultural-materialist approaches to print, periodicals, and the history of the book; theories of mass culture and mass media; and studies in photography, illustration, and visual culture. Reading prominent and lesser-known Victorian novels, we will consider the forms and forums in which these novels were published, and ask a variety of questions about narrative, visual, cultural, and social formations. Did Victorian serials and periodicals impose particular reading practices? What was the relationship between photography and novelistic realism? How did the verbal and the visual interact in illustrated novels? To what extent were mass media and mass literature emblematic of democracy? At the end of the course, we will turn to the late-Victorian invention of film, and consider Sergei Eisenstein’s claim that early film’s narrative practice followed from Victorian novels.

Texts

Course Reader
The English Common Reader: A Social History of the Mass Reading Public, 1800-1900, Altick, Richard
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Carroll, Lewis
The Woman in White, Collins, Wilkie
David Copperfield, Dickens, Charles
New Grub Street, Gissing, George
The Romance of a Shop, Levy, Amy
News from Nowhere, Morris, William

 

 

254: 20th C. British Literature

Gregory Dobbins gjdobbins@ucdavis.edu
T 3:10-6:00, 248 Voorhies, CRN 53205
Breadth: Later British
Focus: Other National, Method, Theory

Modernism Between the Wars

This course will provide coverage of the modernist canon and re-consider it in the light of what has come to be called the New Modernist Studies. This course will provide the coverage of a survey course but also would link it to the most recent critical debates identified with organizations like the Modernist Studies Association. We will begin with an interrogation of the genealogy of modernism prior to WWI, taking in aesthetic manifestos and polemics by figures like T.E. Hulme and the writers associated with Blast. We will then consider a survey of a number of critical positions that have emerged from the New Modernist Studies. The rest of the quarter will be devoted to a close focus on the following writers: W.B. Yeats, T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis, Virginia Woolf, and James Joyce. In order to sharpen the historical focus of the course, we will read various texts published by those writers between the two world wars. In each case, I hope to find in these texts test cases in which to juxtapose the suppositions of recent innovative scholarship in the field against an older critical lineage regarding modernism. Texts have not yet been completely finalized, but they will definitely include the journal BLAST 1, Eliot's 'The Wasteland', Yeats' 'The Tower' and 'The Winding Stair and other Poems', Pound's 'Hugh Selwyn Mauberly' and 'A Draft of XXX Cantos', Joyce's 'A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man' and sections of 'Finnegans Wake', Virginia Woolf's 'The Waves' and 'Between the Acts', and Wyndham Lewis' 'Tarr'.

Books will not be for sale at the university book store, but will instead be available at Culpepper Books in the University Mall.

Grading
Course assignments will include a term paper, a group oral presentation, and the preparation of a critical bibliography.

 

 

290F: Seminar in Creative Writing of Fiction

Pam Houston plhouston@ucdavis.edu
R 12:10-3:00, 248 Voorhies

This course will be an intensive and advanced fiction workshop. My goal as workshop leader is to create an environment where writers become excited about taking both stylistic and emotional risks with their work. 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 focus predominantly on structure, metaphor, image, dialogue, and voice, and will be aiming for stories in which the language is always working in at least two ways at once. We will learn to trust the way the physical world gives us the tools (and, incidentally, the courage) to tell our most problematic and potentially profound stories. We will talk about why writing is so hard, and why it should be, about ways to trick ourselves into getting and staying at the computer, about the moment where no matter how impossible it feels to begin a new story, it feels even more impossible not to.
Each student will be expected to turn in three new pieces of fiction during the course of the semester, either stories or novel chapters. 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.

Grading
Based on the quality of the work itself, the attention to the manuscripts of the other writers in class, quality of discussion of the assigned texts

Texts

Orientation
A Visit From The Goon Squad
20 Under 40
Rock Springs

 

 

290P: Seminar in Creative Writing of Poetry

Joe Wenderoth jlwenderoth@ucdavis.edu
T 12:10-3:00, 308 Voorhies

In this seminar, we will use a workshop format to foment the writing of poetry. At the same time, we will work to develop a productive way of discussing the poetry-writing process—its potentials and its inherent difficulties. In order to facilitate our discussion, we will read, both secretly and publicly, poems from different contexts.

Grading
Fifty percent of the grade will be based upon the quality of the creative work and the demonstrated improvement of the work as the course progresses. Twenty-five percent of the grade will be based upon attendance and participation. Twenty-five percent will be based upon assignments having to do with outside reading and reading the work of classmates.

 

 

391: Teaching Creative Writing

Jack Hicks wjhicks@ucdavis.edu
F 10:00-11:50, 308 Voorhies, CRN 32740

Offered Spring Qtr. ONLY for 1st Year Creative Writing Graduate Students
Senior Lecturer Jack Hicks

Prerequisite: Graduate standing, eligibility for appointment as Teaching Assistant in the English 5 program.

A seminar on the theory and practices of teaching introductory undergraduate creative writing, designed for new instructors of English 5F or 5P in 2010-2011. Reading, discussion and visitors to address designing and managing a workshop class, ways to facilitate creative writing workshops, encouraging and incorporating individual contributions to the course, methods of anticipating and coping with special situations and problems, and how to respond effectively to student manuscripts.

Grading
TBA

Texts

Can It Really Be Taught?, Ritter & Vanderslice

 

 

393: Teaching Literature & Composition

Evan Watkins epwatkins@ucdavis.edu
F 12:10-2:00, 308 Voorhies, CRN 32741

This course is intended for 2011-2012 instructors for ENL 3. The emphasis throughout will be on hands-on practice. I'll have you review some of the formal vocabulary and methods of close reading appropriate for teaching narrative, drama and poetry in ENL 3, and we'll discuss models for the teaching of each genre. We'll spend some considerable time in discussing ways of integrating the teaching of composition with literary analysis. In addition to these in-class exercises, I'll ask you to plan on visiting one of the ENL 3 courses being taught during the term. Books for the course are listed below, with ISBN numbers.

Grading
S/U grading. Students must submit a draft syllabus by deadline in order to receive an "S" grade.

Texts

Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms 9780199208272, Baldick
The Making of a Poem: An Anthology of Poetic Forms 9780393321784, Strand and Boland
Writing about Literature with 2009 MLA update 9780312607579, Gardner