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Graduate Courses
Click on the course title to view its course description. Please note that all courses are subject to change without notice. For the most up-to-date and current day and time information, please refer to the University Time Schedules. Undergraduate course information is also available on this Web site.
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WINTER 2008 COURSES
ENGL 30201/21401 (GNDR 31400/21400) Introduction to Theories of Sex/Gender
Berlant, Lauren
Introduction to Theories of Sex/Gender: Orientation and Disorientation. This year this interdisciplinary introductory course will focus on conceptualizations of sex/gender formation derived from embodied practices and mediated fantasies that both ground and unground identity and normative worlds. Beginning with Michel Foucault and Eve Sedgwick, we turn to theoretical and practice-based formulations from psychoanalysis, Deleuzian epistemology, literary theory, and historical ethnomusicology, as they intersect with queer and feminist theory. Cases include: novels from Antigua and post-Apartheid South Africa, films like Scorpio Rising, Hedwig and the Angry Inch, and Me and You and Everyone We Know; queer autobiography, club/youth cultures, and postcolonial conceptions of emotional and economic labor. Theorists include: Judith Butler, Gayatri Spivak, Elspeth Probyn, John Paul Ricco, Sara Ahmed, Patricia Williams, Zachie Achmat, Leo Bersani, Michael Warner, Renata Salecl. MAPH and English students given preference. PQ: The registrar holds a few spots for undergraduates: but for them consent of instructors is required and GNDR 10100-10200 recommended.
Bevington, David; Coleman, Heidi
A survey of major trends and theatrical accomplishments in Western drama from the ancient Greeks through the Renaissance: Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes, medieval religious drama, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Jonson, along with some consideration of dramatic theory by Aristotle, Horace, Sir Philip Sidney, Dryden. The course features voluntary but highly recommended end-of-week workshops in which individual scenes will be read aloud dramatically and discussed. Assignments at mid-quarter and at the end of the quarter will give the option of two substantial essays, or (in place of either or both) the putting on of a short scene in cooperation with some other members of the class. Acting skill is not required; the point is to discover what is at work in the scene and to write up that process in a somewhat informal report.
ENGL 32800/12800 Theories of Media
Mitchell, W. J. T.
This course will explore the concept of media and mediation in very broad terms, looking not only at modern technical media and mass media, but at the very idea of a medium as a means of communication, a set of institutional practices, and a habitat" in which images proliferate and take on a "life of their own." The course will deal as much with ancient as with modern media, with writing, sculpture, and painting as well as television and virtual reality. Readings will include classic texts such as Plato's Allegory of the Cave and Cratylus, Aristotle's Poetics, and modern texts such as Marshall McLuhan's Understanding Media, Regis Debray's Mediology, and Friedrich Kittler's Gramaphone, Film, Typewriter. We will explore questions such as the following: What is a medium? What is the relation of technology to media? How do media affect, simulate, and stimulate sensory experiences? What sense can we make of concepts such as the "unmediated" or "immediate"? How do media become intelligible and concrete in the form of "metapictures" or exemplary instances, as when a medium reflects on itself (films about films, paintings about painting)? Is there a system of media? How do we tell one medium from another, and how do they become "mixed" in hybrid, intermedial formations? We will also look at recent films such as The Matrix and Existenz that project fantasies of a world of total mediation and hyperreality. Students will be expected to do one "show and tell" presentation introducing a specific medium. There will also be several short writing exercises, and a final paper. PQ: Any 100-level ARTH or COVA course, or consent of instructor.
ENGL 32802/12802 Aesthetics of Video Gaming
Hansen, Mark
Course will explore video games and gaming with an eye toward discovering both what is singular about this popular cultural form and what ties it to previous media including cinema and literature. Topics to be studied include: history of play, game theory, the history of the video game, the role of fictionality in gaming, gaming versus narration as models for organizing information, gaming and cinema, gaming as an algorithmic practice, embodiment and the contrast of platforms (Xbox, Playstation III, wi), massive multiplayer gaming, hacking and countergaming, and the ethics of gaming. One overriding interest of the course will be to explore if and in what ways gaming might be a "new media" in our world today, something comparable to cinema in (say) 1910, and what such an assertion might entail. Authors and artists to be studied may include: Roger Caillois, Johan Huizinga, John von Neuman, Jesper Juul, Henry Jenkins, Espen Aarseth, Alexander Galloway, Lev Manovich, Markku Eskelinen, Mary Flanagan, Jodi, and Cory Archangel. Games to be played may include: Civilization III, America's Army, Final Fantasy X, Special Force, Under Ash, Halflife, Sims Online, Ico, Shenmue and World of Warcraft.
ENGL 33000/13000 Academic and Professional Writing (LRS)
McEnerney, Larry; Cochran, Kathryn;
Weiner, Tracy
This course teaches the skills needed to write clear and coherent expository prose and to edit the writing of others. The course consists of weekly lectures on Thursdays, immediately followed by tutorials addressing the issues in the lecture. On Tuesdays, students discuss short weekly papers in two-hour tutorials consisting of seven students and a tutor. Students may replace the last three papers with a longer paper and, with the consent of relevant faculty, write it in conjunction with another class or as part of the senior project. Materials fee $25
ENGL 35200/15200 (two sections) Beowulf
von Nolcken, Christina
Please note that Section 02 will be held at the Newberry Library. This course will aim to help students read Beowulf while also acquainting them with some of the scholarly discussion that has accumulated around the poem. We will read the text primarily as edited by Bruce Mitchell and Fred C. Robinson, Beowulf: An Edition (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998); we will also draw on the Newberry Library's rich collection of early printed and facsimile editions when discussing textual and paleographical matters. Once students have defined their particular interests, we will choose which recent approaches to the poem to discuss in detail; we will, however, certainly view the poem both in itself and in relation to Anglo-Saxon history and culture in general. Prerequisite: Eng 149/349 or equivalent.
ENGL 35411 Perfection & Utopia in Late Medieval England
Miller, Mark
The culture of late medieval England was both haunted and goaded by the joint ambitions of individual ethical perfection and utopian sociality. This course will examine the ways these ambitions structure agency and identity, the forms of desire, disavowal, misrecognition, and shame that emerge around them, and the conceptual and political conditions of possibility, and impossibility, that inform them. Readings will explore the relations among subject-formation, agency, and social forms in chivalric romance, allegory, hagiography, mysticism, and monastic literature. While much of our work will be based in the close reading of primary texts, we will also do some reading in the social history of late-medieval England, in medieval and modern ethics, and in psychoanalytic and Marxist theory.
ENGL 36302 Renaissance Romance
Murrin, Michael
Selections from a trio of texts will be studied: Ovid's Metamorphoses (as the recognized classical model), Boiardo's Orlando innamorato (which set the norms for Renaissance romance), and Spenser's Faerie Queene. A paper will be required and perhaps an oral examination.
ENGL 36303 Marriage of Heaven and Hell: Poetry of Milton and Blake
Valenza, Robin
William Blake famously called John Milton "a poet of the devil's party without knowing it." Blake meant this as a compliment. Milton's dazzling portrayal of the darkly luminous, rebellious Satan, the archangel who briefly severed the great chain of being, exemplified a guiding principle of Blake's poetry: one "must create a system or be enslav'd by another['s]." In Blake's hands, the theodicy of Paradise Lost, Milton's attempt to "justify the ways of God to men," became a riotous cosmogony, a tumultuous and unorthodox story of the origin and development of the universe.
This class examines Blake's poetry, painting, and engravings alongside Milton's Paradise Lost, in order to examine the uneasy marriage between Milton's heaven and Blake's hell. Or is it the other way around?
ENGL 36705/16704 The Young Shakespeare and the Drama That He Knew
Bevington, David
We will explore some early Shakespeare plays, Titus Andronicus, The Taming of the Shrew, The Merchant of Venice, and Richard II, in the context of the drama that Shakespeare must (for the most part) have known and seen on stage in London in the 1590s or earlier in his youth in Stratford: the medieval cycle plays, Everyman, Thomas Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy, Ariosto's 'I Suppositi' in a lively English translation by George Gascoigne, and three plays by Christopher
Marlowe: Doctor Faustus, The Jew of Malta, and Edward II.
ENGL 37002 (SCTH 35990) Shakespeare on Jealousy: Othello and The Winter’s Tale
Most, Glenn
Note: This course will be taught the first five weeks of winter quarter and the last five weeks of spring quarter. Students must take the CRS in both WIN & SPR to receive a grade, which will be issued in the SPR. Jealousy plays an important role in Shakespeare’s emotional world, and not only in his. This course focuses on two plays which center upon jealousy and related emotions, but it will also examine some of Shakespeare’s sonnets, the sources of these two plays, and pertinent Renaissance texts on jealousy.
ENGL 37003 (SCTH 37100)
Love and Economics in Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice and Other Plays
Nirenberg, David
How can the necessary circulation of goods in society be kept from degenerating into materialism and self-interest? And how can a commitment to the binding power of words and symbols, so necessary for the making of promises and the circulation of property, be kept from degenerating into legalism and literalism? These were pressing questions for Shakespeare, who lived in an increasingly mercantile society that thought about its symbolic economies in Christian terms, and who wrote in the ontologically suspect and increasingly commercial genre of the theatre. We will focus on his exploration of these problems in the Merchant of Venice, with its proposal of love as a guarantor of virtuous communication and exchange in a Christian society. Our reading of the play will be accompanied by other sources that illuminate the history of the economics and hermeneutics of love that Shakespeare is investigating, as well as by readings from some of his other plays (Romeo and Juliet, Measure for Measure, Timon of Athens) that pursue similar ends. We will conclude with a brief look at one strand of later writers who explicitly commented on Shakespeare’s economics of love: Hegel, Börne, Heine, and Marx.
ENGL 38606 The Eighteenth-Century English Novel: Creations of Space
Wall, Cynthia
Novels radically reconfigured conceptions of space over the eighteenth century, from a theatrical emphasis on narrative action (isolated objects floating within dimly lit boundaries) in Bunyan, Behn, Haywood, and Defoe, to an embrace of description (contextualized objects set in fully drawn interiors) in Richardson, Radcliffe, Austen, and Scott. This course will mark the influence of cartographic, scientific, and commercial texts on the spaces of the novel; maps, meletetics, and country house guides all helped reposition things and boundaries within this (literally) expanding genre.
ENGL 39900 Intensive Reading & Research
Staff
A student who wishes to study an author or a topic not covered by the course offerings may arrange for independent study with a professor willing to supervise that study. The student should indicate on the Registration Program Card the name of the professor from whom a grade is to be expected. Consent of Instructor required.
ENGL 42302 Victorian Literature (Writing Intensive)
Hadley, Elaine
This Seminar will attempt to specify the perameters of Victorian liberalism, especially as a political and cultural practice. Briefly beginning with liberal forbearers such as Locke and Bentham, this course will especially concentrate on J.S. Mill, George Eliot, Anthony Trollope, and what some call second generation Victorian liberals, such as John Morley and George Meredith. The modern theoretical context for our discussions will be aided and abetted by, for instance, Habermas, Bordieu, Poovey, Michael Warner, and Uday Mehta. Although we will read the leading mid-century liberals, equal attention will be paid to the material manifestations of liberal practice in this era: periodicals, electoral reform, and political party organization.
ENGL 42402 Nation Building
Rothfield, Lawrence
This course explores the literature of nation-building. Readings include the Aeneid; Kipling's "White Man's Burden" and "The Man Who Would Be King"; Conrad's Lord Jim; T.E. Lawrence's Seven Pillars of Wisdom; and various contemporary writings on Iraq.
ENGL 43203/23404 (SCTH 34011) Saul Bellow
Leader, Zachary
This course examines four of the major novels of Saul Bellow—The Adventures of Augie March, Herzog, Humboldt’s Gift, and Ravelstein—as well as the best of his short fiction. James Wood has called Bellow ‘probably the greatest writer of American prose in the twentieth century,’ a claim he characterizes as ‘relatively uncontroversial.’ The course will seek to explain Wood’s claim—what exactly is ‘American prose’?—and to test it. It will also reflect on Bellow’s tradition, as defined by himself and others; on his sense of himself as American and Jewish; on the implicit politics of his novels, including their attitudes to Europe, Israel and American neo-conservatism; on his relation to ideas (do they power the novels or function as ‘material’?); on his relation to Chicago and of universities; on his gathering interest in the spiritual and the metaphysical; on the rival claims of life and art; on his development as a novelist; and on his depiction of women. Discussion of the longer novels will be interspersed with discussion of a selection of shorter works from the Collected Stories.
ENGL 44601 Roland Barthes, Today: The “Mythology” Legacy in Cultural Studies
Macdonald, Amanda
What intellectual ironies are entailed in the “legacy” of a critical method that was utterly of its time, of its “today”? If Barthes’ 1957 gem, Mythologies, remains one of the most important texts to the genesis and critical spirit of Cultural Studies, Barthes himself declared, in the preface to the 1970 French edition of the book, that both its ideological critique and its semiological analysis clearly “belong[ed] to the past”. Given that the English translation of Mythologies did not appear until 1972, only starting its enlivenment of Cultural Studies after its author had pronounced it passé, the question of critical timeliness and efficacy arises sharply in relation to the matter of critical longevity. Refusing to be intimidated by Barthes’ “semioclastic” reaction to the canonization of his work, yet taking seriously his doubts about the critical viability of the “attitudes” driving Mythologies, whilst also acknowledging the volume of criticism that continues to find Mythologies enabling, this course will reread this key work for both its method and its theoretical propositions, will examine how faithfully and productively it has been taken up in Cultural Studies criticism, and will test its critical purchase on the present cultural moment. The little “mythologies” will be studied closely for the method of their critical turns and critical “bite”, and students will be challenged to revivify Barthes’ “mythology” by writing on that model about “mass culture” phenomena of their own “today”.
ENGL 45002/25004 (YDDH 37800/27800) Jewish American Literature Since 1945
Schwarz, Jan
The goal of the course is to expand the conception of the field of Jewish American literature from English-only to English-plus. The course will examine how Yiddish literary models and styles influenced the resurgence of Jewish American literature since 1945, and discuss how recent Jewish American novels have renewed the engagement with the Yiddish literary tradition. Readings are by I.B.Singer, Chaim Grade, Saul Bellow, Cynthia Ozick, Philip Roth, Bernard Malamud, Grace Paley, Jonathan Safran Foer, Pearl Abraham and Dara Horn.
ENGL 47800/27800 American Poetry from 1945 to Present
Izenberg, Oren
The poetry of the present comes After. After the great syntheses of the High Moderns-Yeats, Eliot, Pound, Stevens. After the devastations of two World Wars. After the total crises of mind in which human rationality could seem compatible with the madness of Auschwitz and human creativity could devise the destruction Hiroshima. "After such knowledge," as T.S. Eliot asked, decades before the full force of the question would reveal itself, "what forgiveness?"
This course has two goals. The first is to introduce you to a representative sampling of important work done by American poets after WWII, including poems by Robert Lowell, Allen Ginsberg, Elizabeth Bishop, Sylvia Plath, Frank O'Hara, John Ashbery, Jorie Graham, Allen Grossman, Frank Bidart and others. Our close attention to the forms, modes and themes of American poetry in the last half-century will enable us to see the poetry of the present, in all its volume and variety, for all its originality and innovation, as deeply continuous with the poetry of the past.
The second goal will be to pose to the poetry of the present two recurrent and related questions. The first: Can there be a poetry of the present? Not just, that is, a poetry being written in the present, but one that responds to or represents the fleeting urgency of the lived moment without either refusing the unfinished present by taking refuge in the authoritative cultures and solutions of the past, or skipping over the imperfect present for the visionary perfection of an imagined future. And the second: How do poets make sense of the thing that happens only one time, or to only one person? Deprived of the confidence that they are players in a history that progresses toward triumph, or part of a species with a blessed fate and a certain future, how do our poets (and how can we) come to value or grant significance to the singular person: to my life, my family, my turmoil, my perception, my mind?
ENGL 48104 Radical Documentary
Scappettone, Jennifer
This course will examine the nostalgic and utopian impulses of documentary work in a range of genres: prose, poetry, photography, and film. We will be charting the extreme transformations of regional and urban culture that took place over the turn of the 20th century as they were expressed-and produced-by works of experimental documentary in various media. We will study regional sites whose endangered cultural artifacts demanded preservation by civic bodies, asking how efforts to salvage them through art led both to transmogrifications of local forms and to the articulation of cosmopolitan modernist aesthetics. We will also study sites whose promise of futurity enlisted records of and imaginative charts toward further modernization. We will be attuned to the distressed tempo of articulating a passing present, asking to what extent "the news" participates in history, how the documentation of the present or passing aims to alter the future, and how art oscillates between or blurs these temporalities. We will dwell throughout in the foregrounded or receding mediation of the real by technology and text, asking whether recording constitutes merely an act of preservation, or whether it contributes to a transcribed object/ambient's growth and emergence. Texts studied may include constellations of John Lomax, Adventures of a Ballad Hunter and selected field recordings; Joel Chandler Harris, Uncle Remus and His Friends; Jean Toomer, Cane; Sterling Brown, Collected Poems; Zora Neale Hurston, Mules and Men; James Agee and Walker Evans, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men; Luigi Russolo, "The Art of Noise" & selected futurist poems and recordings; Dziga Vertov, Kino-Eye and Enthusiasm; Louis Zukofsky and Lorine Niedecker, selected WPA project writings & poems; Charles Reznikoff, Testimony: The United States (1885-1915): Recitative; Gregory Whitehead, works for radio; Haskell Wexler, Medium Cool.
ENGL 48601/27600 Cinema in Africa
Kruger, Loren
This course examines cinema in Africa as well as films produced in Africa. It places cinema in SubSaharan Africa in its social, cultural, and aesthetic contexts ranging from neocolonial to postcolonial, Western to Southern Africa, documentary to fiction, art cinema to TV. We will begin with La Noire de... (1966), ground-breaking film by the "father" of African cinema, Ousmane Sembene, contrasted w/ a South African film, The Magic Garden (1960) that more closely resembles African American musical film, and anti-colonial and anti apartheid films from Lionel Rogosin's Come Back Africa (1959) to Sarah Maldoror's Sambizanga, Ousmane Sembene's Camp de Thiaroye (1984), and Jean Marie Teno's Afrique, Je te Plumerai (1995). The rest of the course will examine cinematic representations of tensions between urban and rural, traditional and modern life, and the different implications of these tensions for men and women, Western and Southern Africa, in fiction, documentary and ethnographic film.
ENGL 48900/29600 (CMST 48600/28600) History of International Cinema, Part II, Sound Era
Gunning, Thomas
PQ: This is the second part of the international survey history of film covering the sound era up to 1960. It is strongly recommended that students take the first section first. This course focuses on industrial practices and aesthetics during Hollywood's studio era (1927 to 1960) and alternatives to the Hollywood film, including French poetic realism, Italian neorealism, and Japanese cinema. We will also consider the important political, economic, social and cultural forces, which influenced Hollywood and other cinemas during this period, particularly the rise of fascism in the 1930s, WWII, Hollywood's postwar economic struggles, and various national new wave cinemas. Screenings will include films by Berkeley, Renoir, Huston, Welles, De Sica, Ozu, Hitchcock and Godard.
ENGL 48906/28906 (SLAV 35100/25100) The Individual, Form and the Novel
Steiner, Lina
The rise of the novel is typically connected with the emergence of the autonomous personality or individual. However, the shape of the literary character who represents an individual in the novel varies from one historical epoch to the next, and from one national tradition to another. In this course we will explore and compare several different strategies used by European novelists to represent an autonomous individual, all of which give rise to specific novelistic forms, such as the autobiography, the Bildungsroman, the novel of manners, and the psychological novel. The primary bibliography for this course includes works by Rousseau, Goethe, Stendhal, and Tolstoy. We will also read critical works by Georg Lukács, Franco Moretti, Clement Lugowski, Mikhail Bakhtin, Lidia Ginzburg, and Alex Woloch. Open to graduate students and advanced undergraduates. All texts can be read in English or in the original languages. Discussion and papers in English.
ENGL 53400 British Literary Culture, 1750-1850
Chandler, James
The point of the seminar is to foster a fairly wide range of work in this big composite field, which is meant to cut across traditional distinctions separating the age of sensibility, the Romantic era, and the Victorian period. The format I prefer is one in which we begin with three weeks or so of focused discussion of particular literary texts, historical materials, methodological approaches, important recent commentaries, or relevant critical problems. I would direct discussion in this first phase, but while it takes place we would negotiate a curriculum for weeks 4 through 9 of the seminar. These sessions would be prompted by oral presentations from the members of the seminar. We would then reconvene in the eleventh week for one or two marathon sessions on a seminar paper that might be (but needn't be) derived from the subject of the oral presentation. One issue I'd like to make central is that of the literary form or forms of sentiment, and the wider range of topics that the seminar might address topics includes the following: the sentimental public sphere, the transformation of the novel, antiquarianism, the prestige of poetry in an age of prose, the great essayists, the literature of the "Celtic fringe," new modes of literary and dramatic probability, the problem of media and mediation in the period. Some of the texts might include Sterne's Sentimental Journey and Mackenzie's Man of Feeling; novels by Edgeworth, Scott, and Dickens; poetry by canonical and non-canonical figures; essays by Lamb and Barbauld.
ENGL 57300 Poetry and the Philosophy of Mind
Izenberg, Oren
Poetry and the philosophy of mind share a number of concerns. Both attempt to create representations of thought and to explore the structures and limits of consciousness. Both are interested in the role that emotions play in knowing the world. Both explore the possibility that there might be such things as private languages or universal ones; both dwell upon the difficulties of knowing and understanding other minds. This course will consider what is to be learned when we consider literary texts (principally lyric poems) alongside some of our best recent philosophical accounts of how the mind is made.
ENGL 59302 South African Literature and Visual Culture
Kruger, Loren
PQ: This seminar is for graduate students (MA and PhD) who have taken courses in either African/post colonial literature or in film studies. Those uncertain of their qualifications should consult the instructor at the end of *autumn* quarter.
This course will address the theoretical and methodological problems posed by the thoroughly Northern metropolitan category of the "postcolonial" and its imposition of supposedly global categories on to distinctly local cultural forms and contents in South Africa. In addition to building knowledge of South African materials, seminar participants will thus develop tools for critiquing northern especially North American assumptions about "postcolonial" generalities in form and content, which can be profitably used in other contexts that make up the global South. We will begin by interrogating the persistent power of Alan Paton's Cry Thy Beloved Country (novel and film) in the American imagination, from its initial publication in New York (1947) to it adoption in Oprah's Book Club (2001), as against local tastes in the same period from Nadine Gordimer's fiction to films like Come Back Africa and continue to examine local responses and challenges to metropolitan norms of literary form, especially in fiction and drama, as well as film. We will consider the impact of apartheid and anti apartheid writing (1960s to 1980s) on metropolitan as well as local audiences and also examine post apartheid local/global configurations that run south/south rather than south/north, including emergent writing by "Indian" and other "minority" South Africans.
ENGL 59900 Reading & Research: English
Staff
A student who wishes to study an author or a topic not covered by the course offerings may arrange for independent study with a professor willing to supervise that study. The student should indicate on the Registration Program Card the name of the professor from whom a grade is to be expected. Consent of instructor and advisor required.
ENGL 60303 Algorithmic Cinema
Hansen, Mark
Focusing on affinities between 1960s/1970s experimental film and contemporary “new media” production, the course will propose a genealogy for the algorithmic aesthetics that (arguably) characterizes digital media technology. Much of the class will be devoted to a filmmaker, Hollis Frampton, whose work anticipates today’s algorithmic aesthetics in surprising ways. Frampton’s work will be contextualized through historical and contemporary debates over aesthetic form and media and will be juxtaposed with more recent works by digital artists devoted to an algorithmic practice. In this way, Frampton’s work will exemplify a practice of filmmaking that historicizes new media with some significant consequences. Some attention will be devoted to the algorithmic aesthetics of contemporary software (including computer games) and the plethora of amateur practices that have arisen from and around it. Authors and artists to be studied may include: Lev Manovich, P. Adams Sitney, Keith Sanborn, Michael Snow, Peter Kubelka, Annette Michelson, Kevin and Jennifer McCoy, John Simon, Jr., and Hollis Frampton.
ENGL 61401 Virginia Woolf
Ruddick, Lisa
Topics to be considered will include the imprint of the Great War, the decline of empire, and the rise of continental fascism; the intellectual and aesthetic surround of Bloomsbury; femininity, queerness, and national identity; psychological approaches to themes of trauma, mental illness, and mourning; and the prospects for Woolf scholarship opened up by the "turn to ethics" in criticism and the new formalism. Among my secret goals for the course is to offer enough exposure to formally invested criticism to enable students to envision integrating treatment of Woolf's remarkable prose into any piece of criticism grappling as well with other theoretical or historical issues.
ENGL 63810
‘The Collision of Mind with Mind’: Conversation, Controversy, and Literature 1780-1822
Mee, Jon
Please note: This PhD-level seminar will meet from 10:30 until 1:20 on the following Tuesdays and Thursdays in Winter and Spring 2008: Jan. 8, Jan. 31, Feb. 5, Feb. 28, Mar. 4, Apr. 15, Apr. 17, Apr. 22, May 15, and May 20.
'The conversation of culture' is widely acknowledged to have crystallised as a concept at the beginning of the eighteenth century. Less often observed is that there was more than one idea of what constituted 'conversation': it could imply an ideal of harmonious exchange, but also a more contentious 'collision' of opinions. The discussion of literature has been seen as one origin for the new emphasis on 'public opinion' at the time. By the period 1780-1822, however, the open invitation implied by the idea of a conversation of culture was under increasing pressure from campaigns for democratic reform demanding that more voices be heard. Literature's place at the heart of a society based on opinion and discussion was complicated by definitions of it as a higher activity beyond the threatening proximity of the crowd, even if it sometimes still took forms predicated on ideas of dialogue or conversational language. By examining the development of such contradictions with an inter-disciplinary approach anchored in literary and cultural history, this project represents an important contribution to understanding the ideal of 'the conversation of culture' still relevant to debates about democracy and participation today. (Click here for the full course description.)
ENGL 66701 (HIST 61801, SALC 50401) Postcolonial Theory and Beyond
Chakrabarty, Dipesh; Gandhi, Leela
This course intercepts postcolonial theory at an important moment in its disciplinary mutation. In recent years critics and commentators both within the field and hostile to it appear increasingly at one in their dramatisation of a certain theoretical ‘exhaustion’ with questions hitherto raised under the banner of postcolonialism. What are the reasons for this new critical ennui? What relation does it bear to earlier critiques of the field? What, if any, are the (epistemological and political) costs of giving full credence to this recent version of anti-postcolonialism? To what extent may we map a future for postcolonial theory? In our readings and discussions we will review crucial and canonical moments in the gestation of the field (Bhabha, Spivak), canvass some recent critiques (Hardt and Negri, Badiou), and review some new directions (cosmopolitanism, transnationalism, ethics).
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