Featured Courses

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.

TOPIC: Forms of Trauma

This course explores representations of trauma across various genres of literature and media. In each case, we will consider how and why trauma can foster both debilitating stasis and alienation as well as opportunities for growth and belonging. A key feature of the course will involve examining how texts communicate trauma through their formal attributes (genre [un]convention, structure and sequencing, narrative devices, linguistic tools, etc.), revealing aspects of loss, remembrance, and grief that can only be expressed through such techniques of form. Content warning: this course involves reading, discussing, and writing about disturbing materials, including instances of physical and emotional abuse, sexual violence, and suicidal ideation.

The theater stage has always been a popular medium for Shakespeare’s plays, and the plays have also been reimagined for other media, especially film and video. Today, Shakespearean drama is transposed to just about every media form imaginable, and this great range of popular culture adaptations is the focus of our course. We’ll explore how Shakespeare’s plays are rendered on screen (via television, film, social media, and videogames) and off-screen (comic books, music, and board/role-playing games). How does reenvisioning Shakespeare for popular audiences and through different media forms affect the meaning of Shakespeare’s plays? How can Shakespeare help us think anew about popular media that we use every day? How does transposing the plays to these popular media enable the plays to address wider, more diverse audiences, and to speak to human differences such as those relating to gender, race, ethnicity, sexuality, religion, socio-economic status? How can adaptations of plays performed 400 years ago in England help us think about issues important to us here and now?

This course will consider how literary works by BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People-of-Color) authors have framed and responded to specific historical contexts of racial and colonial violence—such as slavery, colonization, imperial wars, forced migration, labor exploitation, and environmental injustice. Our focus will be on comparing forms of racial and colonial violence: not only the different forms that violence and inequity can take, but the different ways that authors have repurposed literary forms (for example, the novel, speculative fiction, lyric poetry, and film) to do justice to experiences of violence that range from microaggressions to environmental toxicity, from the “afterlife of slavery” to cultural genocide. Further, how do literary works explore and enact modes of resistance, community formation, and/or futurity in the wake of racial and colonial violence? We will put literary concepts in dialogue with concepts drawn from interdisciplinary scholarship, including trauma, microaggression, criminalization, settler colonialism, and Indigenous resurgence. Through readings, discussions, and writing assignments, the class will explore conceptual frameworks for understanding how different contexts of racial violence (as well as its inter-articulations with other aspects of identity such as class, gender, sexuality, and ability) inflect psychological, historical, and social aspects of everyday life, as well as how these conditions of experience shape—and are shaped by—literary form.

Poetry is political, and politics, as Mourid Barghouti writes in 'I Saw Ramallah', "is the family at breakfast. Who is there, and who is absent and why. Who misses whom when the coffee is poured into the waiting cup." This course will explore the cataclysmic changes of the past century (1920-2020) through the prism of poetry. We will consider the role of politically engaged poetry during social revolutions over the course of the past century (1920-2020) and explore a cosmopolitan range of writers from the Middle East, North, Central and South America, and Africa. We will read and write poems that explore the following questions: does political poetry have a particular style? Can poetry propel revolution - or decolonization, or prison abolition - as well as respond to it? 

In this course, we will consider the work of thinkers
ranging from Plato to Oscar Wilde as we engage in what
one literary theorist has called “a controlled reflection on
the formation of method.” More than an introduction to
the philosophy of literature, we will carefully and
rigorously consider normative distinctions between
literary and non-literary language, different accounts of
idealism and materialism, key formulations about the
relationship between ethics and aesthetics, and competing
accounts of the roles that different modes of
representation and interpretation should or should not
play in a given society.

What does the food we eat say about the societies we live in? In this course, we will explore fiction, film, memoirs, and other nonfiction works from 20th and 21st-century writers and filmmakers that center around the growing, cooking, and eating of food. Throughout, we will ask how what we eat and how we eat it says about modern life. This class will use cultural production to investigate the sociology of food and will feature hands-on culinary activities.

Going ‘back’ to Africa has been a vexing theme – at times uplifting, at others mournful, and others spiritual – since the beginnings of various African diasporic literary traditions. Recent waves of African diasporic emigration and tourism to Africa suggest that this theme enjoys considerable contemporary resonance. In this course, we will explore a range of twentieth-century African and African-diasporic literature, music, and film that contemplates the realities, implications, and impossibilities of returning to the ‘Africa’ various travelers seek. We will pay particular attention to historical moments that intensified dreams, political movements, and cultural production of African and African diasporic peoples surrounding questions of return; we will also turn our attention to contemporary currents and conversations. Throughout, we will ask, what did Africa mean to thinkers, travelers, revolutionaries, and everyday people in each of these moments, and, what does and can Africa mean to us today?

This course will examine the “lover’s discourse” of twentieth- and twenty-first- century American poetry. We will consider how poems represent the various states and stages of eros through different genres, tropes, and figures. We will also explore the necessarily political and cultural valences of love, from queer intimacies to ecological interrelation to revolutionary desire. And we’ll think, as well, about how various poems portray the ends of love, what philosopher Roland Barthes calls its “last words.” This course is intended to teach students about the forms and modes of representation central to the traditions of love poetry, focusing sustained attention on key forms such as sonnets, elegies, odes, lyric, and epistolary poems and on central techniques such as apostrophe and blason. At the same time, the course will explore the innovations of modern and contemporary North American poetry, as poets experiment with old forms and invent new ones to write of the manifold experiences of love in a changing world. 

It is a truth universally acknowledged that Jane Austen has much to say about marriage and manners. But what might her novels have to say about war, empire, revolution, politics, poverty, and the world beyond the English country house? This course places the novels of Jane Austen in the context of the literary, cultural, and political world that surrounded them. We will become expert, engaged, and curious readers of Austen’s novels while immersing ourselves in the historical context of Austen’s time and considering her place in a broader literary culture. At the same time, we will sharpen our skills of literary analysis and historical research, as we consider how Austen can teach us how narrative works and how novels create worlds of their own. 

How do we sense the environment, and how might we sense it otherwise? How has the Western privileging of vision and hearing influenced understandings of “nature,” and of what kinds of environments need to be protected? How can writers and artists help retrain our sensory capacities so that we might perceive and attend to invisible environmental processes—and injustices—that often escape perception? And how can “lower” senses like touch, taste, and smell teach us to experience ecological relationships in different, more embodied ways? This class will consider how Western, colonial, and patriarchal hierarchies of the senses constrain our environmental relationships, and how literary and cultural experiments with the senses critique and seek to transform our ways of sensing the world. In addition to exploring supposedly “lower,” embodied senses, we will consider speculative fiction that imagines alternative ways of sensing.

This course grows out of a partnership between the English Department and three research groups at UC Davis: The DataLab, the ModLab, and the Center for Artificial Intelligence and Experimental Futures. The course examines how recent technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI), mixed reality (MR), and virtual reality (VR) are shaping the experience of Shakespeare for 21st century audiences. Students will not only read about, but experience first-hand a number of interactive projects that use digital technologies to stage--or enable their users to stage--Shakespeare’s plays. What are the limitations and affordances of these technologies for reimagining Shakespeare in the 21st century? To what extent do these technologies help us gain new insights into Shakespeare’s plays? How are experiments with interactive media changing more traditional ways of experiencing Shakespeare in classrooms, theaters, popular media, and public spaces? Are these changes beneficial and, if so, for whom and why? A more practical aim of this course is to help students think about how a passion for Shakespeare could be channeled into career paths where new technologies have been gaining traction: K-12 teaching, theatre production, game-making, and academic scholarship. To that end, students will focus their term project on a career path that most interests them. For instance, those on a teaching path might create course materials for teaching Shakespeare with new technologies or assess our own course’s approach to this topic; those on a game-making path might prototype a game designed to be played using one of these technologies; those on a theatre path might write a pitch or script for a theatre production that uses a particular technology to re-envision a Shakespeare play; those on a scholarship track might write a research essay examining one or more existing interactive Shakespeare projects. Students do not need any background or familiarity with VR, AI, and MR technologies in order to take this course. They just need to be open to experimenting with interactive media.