Course Schedule Fall 2025

Premodern England: Strangers, Familiars, and (Other)worldly Journeys

Course Description:

The aim of this course is to introduce you to the strange, worldly- and other-worldly deep history of English literature to prepare you for advanced study. We will focus on literature written in English prior to 1700. Covering a wide range of texts—religious polemic, poetry, drama, travel narratives, and prose fiction—we will explore the “strangeness” of premodern England: a world that is simultaneously familiar and unsettling in its difference from our own twenty-first century Pacific West Coast perspective. Religious reform, explosive mercantile growth, other-world contact, catastrophic disease, the persistent threat of the Islamic Ottoman empire, as well as new technologies such as the printing press and the telescope, transformed how people understood the world around them, how they lived, loved, died, and how they wrote. We will be engaging in the skills of what neuroscientists call “deep reading,” a process that is slow, analytical, and meant to encourage the evocative process of “passing over.” This entails the act of taking on perspectives and feelings of others who are deeply different from ourselves—in time, space, and geography. In doing so, the course will foster encounters and perspectives that will allow us access to feelings, imagining, and thoughts of a world long passed but one that still reaches forward into our present culture. The course encourages that we converse with the dead to better know ourselves.

This course satisfies the following GEs: General Education: Arts & Humanities (AH); Writing Experience (WE).

How did literature get from Shakespeare to Virginia Woolf? Take this survey lecture course to explore the major evolutionary developments--some gradual, others quite sudden--in Anglophone literature as it spread across the globe between the late 1600s and the end of the 1800s.

Our aim in this second segment of the required three-part Literatures in English sequence will be to lay down a solid foundation of historical, terminological, methodological, and pragmatic knowledge in preparation for more advanced study in the major. The specific focus of this class will be on writing produced between 1700 and 1900 in England, the United States, and a few other parts of the English-speaking world, with emphasis on the major transitions in English cultural and literary history. This is a reading- and writing-intensive course designed to encourage your curiosity about the literature of the past, improve your skills in close reading within historical contexts, and guide you towards fruitful analytic strategies for research in upper-division courses. The format will be 2 80-minute lecture/discussion sessions per week, plus a more focused 50-minute weekly discussion led by graduate student teaching assistants, all in person. GE Credit: Writing Experience

Texts

Norton Anthology of English Literature, Volume C: Restoration and 18th Century

Norton Anthology of English Literature, Volume D: Romantic Period

Norton Anthology of English Literature, Volume E: Victorian Age

Norton Anthology of American Literature, Volume B: 1820-1865

“The More Than Human World in Contemporary Literature”
This class will investigate the power and strategies of contemporary works of literature that take as their subject (and take seriously) the more than human world. Animals, fish, plants, geologic formations, as well as realities that may exist parallel to the realities the dominant culture takes for granted. We will contemplate ourselves as creatures. We will consider models of thinking (practiced historically and currently by Indigenous cultures) of ourselves in relation to the nonhuman beings on this planet that may not have led so inevitably to climate collapse and fascistic uprising (just to name two things). We will consider why the same machine that wants to kill wolf puppies and bear cubs in their dens also wants to deny women, queer and trans people bodily autonomy. We will consider the problematic nature of the word anthropomorphize, of consistently assigning little or no “intelligence” to beings we wish to oppress. We will imagine living within a system where the inherent and ancient knowledge of plants and animals was revered rather than ignored, a world in which more humans learned how to listen. We may even imagine the future of an Earth that has managed to shake vast numbers of its most relentless parasite off its back.

There will be weekly writing assignments (mostly creative) and one seminar paper (some combination of creative and scholarly) that each student and the teacher will agree upon. Grades will be based on the quality of the class discussion, the completion of the weekly creative assignments, and the quality of the 20 (ish) page seminar paper, which can be a combination of creative and scholarly writing if the student wishes.

Texts:
How Far The Light Reaches, Sabrina Imbler
What We Fed To The Manticore, Talia Lakshmi Kolluri
Nobody Gets Out Alive, Leigh Newman
Life In A Field, Katie Peterson
Pig Son, (short story), Sequoia Nagamatsu
The Bear, Andrew Krivak
The Council of Animals, Nick McDonell
The Removed, Brandon Hobson
Gods of Jade and Shadow, Sylvia Moreno-Garcia
The Blue Fox, Sjón
Ceremony, Leslie Marmon Silko