2016-2017

This course probes the nature and limits of theater by exploring a range of theatrical texts whose relation to performances are either partially or fully virtual. Like the works we will read, the course transgresses disciplinary, generic, and temporal boundaries, bringing together from various centuries philosophical dialogues (Plato), closet dramas, novel chapters in dramatic form (Melville’s Moby-Dick, Joyce’s Ulysses), radio drama, nonsense drama, and new media forms that test conventional definitions of theatrical performance: twitter theater, digital theater, algorithmic theater, and transmedia games. (20th/21st)

This seminar explores the history and theory of science fiction, focusing on the moment of its modern emergence from Jules Verne to H.G. Wells. In historical terms, we will understand the speculative fictions, utopias, and alternative histories of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries as approaching questions posed by the natural and physical sciences: how could one imagine the possibility that humans might degenerate or go extinct, that the sun and earth would someday freeze, that years were to be measured at the scale of millions? We will also explore the political significance of early science fiction, which denaturalized the progress of technology, the organization of labor, and notions of gender, often taking on challenging political questions far more explicitly than the realist novel. As we address these questions, we will examine some of the ways in which literary scholars and cultural critics have developed theories and historical narratives to account for the emergence, formal features, and political significance of science fiction. Literary works may include novels and stories by Samuel Butler, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Jules Verne, H. Rider Haggard, H.G. Wells, Edwin Abbott, Robert Louis Stevenson, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, William Morris, and Edward Bellamy. We will also read work by Fredric Jameson, Darko Suvin, and Raymond Williams. (18th/19th)

Both Gower and Langland are centrally concerned with developing literary forms that give expression to moral and political demands. For this reason, both are determinedly anti-moralistic, troubling the terms in which such demands might be formulated. This course focuses on the questions of how moral and political claims and problems are represented, and what is thereby lost or repressed. “Representation” here points us towards aesthetics, in the sense that close attention to literary form is essential to making out how these questions emerge in the texts of Gower and Langland. But we will also attend to the broader senses in which figuration and formalization are at issue in psychic and social representation, and therefore in the ways that the dimensions of the moral and the political emerge and are foreclosed, whether literarily or otherwise. Our main texts will be John Gower’s Confessio Amantis and William Langland’s The Vision of Piers Plowman. Writing for the course will include regular Chalk postings, a short (3-page) paper and a longer (15-page) final paper. (Med/Ren)

This course covers the classics in the field of marxist social theory (Marx, Engels, Lenin, Gramsci, Reich, Lukacs, Fanon) as well as key figures in the development of Marxist aesthetics (Adorno, Benjamin, Brecht, Marcuse, Williams) and recent developments in Marxist critiques of new media, post-colonial theory and other contemporary topics. It is suitable for graduate students in literature depts. and art history. It is not suitable for students in the social sciences. (20th/21st)

This course takes its title, and its guiding premise, from Deidre Lynch’s marvelous 2010 article, which suggests that received notions of “green romanticism”—the familiar idea that the romantic era was a foundational moment in the history of ecological consciousness—“might benefit from some pondering of greenhouse romanticism.” Lynch coins this phrase to register the plurality and portability nature to which colonial natural history gave rise, as well as the proximity of this nature (natures) to the artifice, or simply cultivation, of culture. The notion of “greenhouse romanticism,” then, means to “disallow” common polarities: between the organic and the cultural, genuine Nature and figurative language, as well as between the domestic and the exotic, growth and fabrication. It also brings gender and sexuality to the fore of questions about nature, normativity, and development. This class will explore the possibilities for thinking “greenhouse romanticism” in and out of a range of late eighteenth-century and early nineteenth-century texts, likely to include poetry by James Thomson, William Cowper, Erasmus Darwin, Anna Seward, Anna Barbauld, Charlotte Smith, and William Wordsworth; novels by Maria Edgeworth, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Jane Austen; and selections from contemporary natural histories, gardening manuals, aesthetic treatises, political polemics, and juvenile fiction. They will be supplemented by secondary readings in the history of sexuality, science, and imperialism, as well as eco-criticism. (18th/19th)

This course surveys the traffic between popular balladry and “literary” poetry from the Restoration to the twentieth century. We will consider the influence of the 18th century ballad and song revival on Romantic style, from major eighteenth-century ballad collections and forgeries to poems by Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, Clare, Tennyson, Rossetti, Morris, and Swinburne; we'll also look at a few examples of later poets' continuing interest in popular ballad and song (from Thomas Hardy, John Davidson, and W. B. Yeats to Tom Pickard). We will spend time in Special Collections examining broadside ballads and popular songbooks, and we will consider how political radicals took up ballad and song in the period. (18th/19th)

PQ: Second- and third-year English PhD students only. The Advanced Writing Workshop consists of several workshops led by an English faculty member. Students will take a paper from a previous class and revise it; the revisions will be read by other students in the workshop, along with at least two faculty.

Readings will include historical and theoretical works along with poetry (Eliot, HD, Lynette Roberts) and fiction (Bowen, Hamilton, Waugh, Hanley, Christie, Storm Jameson, etc.) (20th/21st)

Comedy is a serious subject and art is no laughing matter, but levity displays a type of intelligence that is both profound and nimble and must be met on its own terms. Toward that end, this interdisciplinary seminar will investigate: the various modes through which comedy infects contemporary art, questions of form in the art of comedy, performative objects, the object of comedic performance, and the seriousness of play. Prerequisite: Consent of instructor(s) required; English and DOVA students will have priority. (20th/21st)

This is a new one-quarter, seminar-style introductory course for undergraduates. Its aim is triple: to engage scenes and concepts central to the interdisciplinary study of gender and sexuality; to provide familiarity with key theoretical anchors for that study; and to provide skills for deriving the theoretical bases of any kind of method. Students will produce descriptive, argumentative, and experimental engagements with theory and its scenes as the quarter progresses. Prior course experience in gender/sexuality studies (by way of the general education civilization studies courses or other course work) is strongly advised. (H)