Courses

ENGL 6620: Early Modern Literature

Prof. Richard Preiss
Mo/We 11:50am – 1:05pm
LNCO 3875

Course Description:

Shakespeare: The Histories

 

What is Shakespeare’s masterpiece? It isn’t Hamlet, or King Lear, or Romeo and Juliet – or, for that matter, any single play. Between roughly 1590 and 1592, and again between 1596 and 1598, he wrote (or co-wrote) two cycles of plays – two tetralogies, or groups of four, for a total of eight – all dealing with the Wars of the Roses, the calamitous dynastic conflict that ravaged England for most of the 15th century. These eight plays – Richard II, 1 Henry IV, 2 Henry IV, Henry V, 1 Henry VI, 2 Henry VI, 3 Henry VI, and Richard III – constitute the bulk of his “Histories,” all based to some degree on his reading of national chronicles. Though less often taught and performed today than his Comedies or Tragedies, collectively they went through more printings during his lifetime than the rest of his plays combined. These were the plays that established his reputation, that introduced his most beloved and diabolical characters, and that made the chronicle history play the first bonafide blockbuster genre of early modern English theater. They are Shakespeare’s House of Cards, his Game of Thrones.

They also represent his most sustained dramatic engagement with any historical moment – urgently worth revisiting in our own, when our own nation is likewise revealing itself to have been composed of many nations and is disintegrating into tribal factions, when privilege pretends to populism, when cynicism masquerades as idealism, when tectonic political divisions emanate from personal grudges, when constant hypocrisy breeds amnesia, when warfare is transacted across the bodies of women, when propaganda makes it impossible to discern fact from fiction and all too easy to conflate good and evil – and these plays demand to be experienced that way, as a single, continuous text. Yet they are also designed to disrupt any such identity or continuity. Their order of composition inverts the chronology of the events they depict: Shakespeare began with the latter episodes, 1, 2, 3 Henry VI and Richard III, and only later returned to the earlier ones – the prequels – Richard II, 1 & 2 Henry IV, and Henry V. We will read them in that original, preposterous sequence, to consider how their study of temporality, language, power, gender, kingship, identity, and duplicity is endlessly complicated by their own dramatic form. How many plays, we will often ask, are we reading at once, and how did their mutual ghosting shape what playgoers saw? How did Shakespeare segment, expand, compress, and distort his sources, in response to political pressures and to give each dramatic unit an internal structure? How have modern adaptations faced the same problems, and extended the same project? Do the Histories really comprise eight discrete plays? Or two tetralogies? Or one, immense super-play? When audiences were not only compelled to watch them out of order, but free to watch them in any order – as they recycled themselves at random in the early modern repertory – is there any proper way to engage them? Can we develop a vocabulary to describe this labyrinthine narratological experiment? What does it mean, ultimately, to dramatize a story whose end – the present – is known in advance? What does “history” mean, in a universe where time flows backwards, and in circles?

Readings:

• 1 Henry VI (c.1591) (probably co-written with Marlowe and Thomas Nashe)
• 2 Henry VI (c.1589) (yup… Parts II & III may have been written before Part I)
• 3 Henry VI (c. 1590)
• Richard III (c. 1592)

 

• Richard II (c. 1596)
• 1 Henry IV (c. 1597)
• 2 Henry IV (c. 1597)
• Henry V (c. 1598)

Required Texts (this edition is compulsory; see below for why):

- Orgel and Braunmuller, eds., The Complete Pelican Shakespeare (2002)

(to be purchased by students individually in advance; please match with ISBN 978-0141000589)

 

Early modern playbooks were printed haphazardly. Not only are they replete with errors, but many of Shakespeare’s plays exist in multiple, distinct versions. As a result, modern editions vary wildly from one another, dependent on ubiquitous, subjective emendation. The Pelican is one of the most affordable and best scholarly editions on the market. Please do not even consider substituting it for some old edition gathering dust on your parents’ bookshelves, or for some vinyl-bound, previously out-of-print edition from 1927 on sale at Barnes and Noble for $14.99 and designed to look like furniture. The few dollars you will save are not worth the frustration of your literally not being on the same page as the rest of the class, or of your not having the same words on those pages. You may buy individual plays if you wish (provided you obtain them in time to keep up with the readings), but be sure they are from the Pelican series. The cost of eight paperbacks pretty much equals or exceeds the cost of the single-volume collection, so consider just purchasing the latter. It will be heavy, but impossible to misplace, and a good, serious edition of Shakespeare will not soon outlive its utility. The hardback also contains extra material (e.g. genealogical tables of the English royal family) that may prove particularly useful in this course.

ENGL 6810.001: Special Topics

Prof. Andrew Shephard
Mo/We 3:00 – 4:20PM
LNCO 3875

Course Description:

Feeling Rather Strangely: Horror Fiction, Affect, and Aesthetic Theory

 

American horror fiction author H.P. Lovecraft once stated that “The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is the fear of the unknown.” Indeed, the enduring popularity of the horror genre would seem to lend credence to this observation.  And, yet, it is also true that there many different ways in which to experience fear: The emotionally shattering encounter with something truly alien to one’s frame of reference and the way in which it forces one to reconsider their understanding of the world; the uncanny feeling of recognition upon encountering a thing that is all the more horrifying for its familiarity; the eerie sensation of seeing a creature or object exhibiting an agency it should not by any rights possess; the visceral disgust of seeing the body in a state of decay or unnatural transformation; the slow, creeping paranoia that a situation isn’t right for reasons that you just can’t put your finger upon.

Using the tools of affect theory and aesthetic theory, this course proposes to taxonomize various modes of being afraid.  It does so in the interest of better understanding the things that frighten us, why they affect us the way they do, and what our fears can tell us about ourselves in a more holistic sense. To this end, we will be looking at prose fiction, films, and comics from a variety of creatives, including Bram Stoker, Ira Levin, Daphne Du Maurier, Clive Barker, David Cronenberg, Junji Ito, Jordan Peele, and Coralee Fargeat.  And we will be drawing upon the theories of figures such as Sigmund Freud, Julia Kristeva, Barbara Creed, and Mark Fisher, among others.

ENGL 6810.002: Special Topics

Prof. Kathryn Stockton
Tu/Th 10:45 – 12:05PM
LNCO 3870

Course Description:

Canonical Perversions

 

Texts We’ll Read (fully or in part):

• Jean Genet, Querelle
• Georges Bataille, Visions of Excess
• James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room
• Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility
• Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism
• Charlotte Bronte, Villette
• Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, Venus in Furs
• Gilles Deleuze, Coldness and Cruelty
• Henry James, The Pupil
• Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
• Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita
• Toni Morrison, Sula
• Djuna Barnes, Nightwood

Course enigmas and trajectories:

“The strong magnetism of genius drew my heart out of its wonted orbit; the sunflower turned from the south to a fierce light, not solar--a rushing, red, cometary light--hot on vision and to sensation.”--Charlotte Bronte, Villette

Narratives, by nature, lead us astray.  They corrupt expectations, while forcing certain contracts with the letters of their law. Reading, however, is itself perverse.  Drawing words inside our bodies, we lead the text beside itself, ensuring that in readings it is never self-same.  Leading canonical texts astray (taking their lead?), we will unfold their views of perversion.

Genet (with Bataille) will present one view of novel narration as fabrication: the divine humiliation of devotion to . . . fabric. Changing tone and context, Baldwin will carve new takes on debasement and “immaculate manhood.”  Austen and Bronte next will focus on autoeroticism, forged by a love of looking on loss.  Then, in a masterful turn of the screw, Henry James, in the context of nineteenth-century masochism (Venus in Furs; Krafft-Ebing’s case studies), will shed new light on pedagogic devotions.  Wilde’s pedagogy will school us in the thought that art is not about us, even as his novel trades on the dangerous wonders of an influence.  Nabokov, though he turns directly to the pedophile, will track the motions and motives of a child, by wedding what is “animal” to the “mechanical.”  With a hint of animal, Barnes will interrogate whether a desire to be a mother triggers a sudden desire to sleep with one.  Lesbian lovers as mother and child will become, in the hands of Djuna Barnes, an intricate metaphorical skein, one unraveled by a dog, after all, and by relations around “bowing down.”  Finally, Toni Morrison will bring us to the bottom through Black labor history, with views of historical cruelty and tenderness.

Wending our way back and forth along a chain of concepts yoked through narrative pressures and reconfigured by historical change, we will encounter fictions written from 1811 to 1999.  All contexts will be treated heuristically—that is, as occasions for asking questions—and have been chosen to provide a balanced inquiry into historical, literary, and theoretical dimensions of our fictions.  This is where all balance will end.

Clear-sighted objectives:

1. To ask about perversities of the novel form, in the broadest sense: how are the writing and reading of novels acts of perversion?
2. To scout what counts as perversion in fiction: how do you know perversion when you see it?
3. To learn which canonical texts have been tagged as obscene or perverse and which not—how and why?

ENGL 7000: Experimental Forms

Prof. Michael Mejia
Mondays 4:35 – 7:25pm
LNCO 3875

Course Description: Collaboration

In this course we’ll experiment with the potentials of creating [in] community, seeking inspiration from several ventures of artistic collaboration, including authors producing texts together; authors submitting themselves to the unconscious; authors working in conjunction with archives, researchers, mapmakers, and artificial intelligence; authors making work with artists in other media, etc. Students will be tasked with creating work together, in small and large confederations, and also constructing a network of collaborators outside our class. Reading may include work by André Breton and Philippe Soupault; Andrew Colarusso and Karen An-hwei Lee; Sophie Calle et al.; David Clark; Shelley Jackson et al.; Lázló Krasznahorkai, Max Neumann, and Szilveszter Miklós; M. NourbeSe Philip; and Rebecca Solnit et al.

ENGL 7030: Fiction Workshop

Prof. Lindsey Drager
Tuesdays 4:35 – 7:25pm
LNCO 3875

Course Description

This is a fiction workshop. Using Suzanne Keen’s theory of narrative as our foundation, we will study narratology in order to become more nuanced and savvy readers of what narrative theory deems “the narrative situation.” Our conversations will oscillate organically between our identities as readers and writers, thinkers and interlocutors, people who navigate the Real World and people who spend a lot of time in fictional worlds. I will propose (and I hope we will consider) that in facing a variety of different forms of catastrophe, there is still a reason to make art. To guide these discussions, we will engage Natalie Loveless’s theory of “research-creation” in How to Make Art at the End of the World (2019). Rather than critique the writing we make and share with each other, we will engage in open-ended discussions of what we noticed about our in-progress work. This pedagogy of noticing (rather than critiquing) is informed by Rachel and Stephen Kaplan’s eco-critical theory of “soft fascination.” We will slow down and paying attention (in short, we will notice) not only that which demands our consideration, but that which piques our more covert, unconscious interest and therefore—precisely because it is not demanded of us—might otherwise go unobserved. The term “notice” shares an etymology with the term “narrative”: they are both to some degree about the experience of coming to know. Together, we will “come to know” as a collaborative literary community this semester.

Texts will include your peers’ (marvelous) stories. We may also read work from: Leni Zumas; Hiroshi Yamamoto; Jamil Jan Kochai; Colson Whitehead; Clarice Lispector; Jose Saramago; Shirley Jackson; Charles Yu; Percival Everett; Georgi Gospodinov; Jorge Luis Borges; Yan Ge; K-Ming Chang; Franz Kafka; Helen Oyeyemi; Henry Hoke; Akil Kumarasamy; Saïd Sayrafiezadeh; Mary Shelley; etc.

ENGL 7040: Poetry Workshop

Prof. Jacqueline Osherow
Tuesdays 4:35 – 7:25pm
LNCO 3865

Course Description:

Students in the graduate workshop will write one poem a week and read one book or selected works of one poet each week. The poems submitted weekly will alternate between poet’s choice (form and subject determined by the student) and poems responding to thematic or formal assignments, mostly drawn from what we’ve read in the previous two weeks.  For the reading, my hope is both to introduce students to poems they may not be familiar with and deepen their experience of others they’ve read previously.   We’ll read a number of poets in translation to emphasize that there is a great deal more to a poem than its surface.

We’ll begin by looking, the very first day of class, at a few examples of Biblical poetry.  We’ll move on to at Arthur Sze’s brand-new expansion of his translations of Chinese Poems, Silk Dragon II,  then Poems of Arab Andalucia, George Herbert (I always do one canonical English poet), Emily Dickinson (on whom we’ll spend two weeks, per the request of a number of students taking ), Anna Akhmatova,  Lorca (very much inspired by the poems of Arab Andalucia) and finally Langston Hughes, who translated Lorca.  For the final six weeks of class, “books” will be collections from students.  These might simply be collections of the poems students have written for this workshop.  They could also be manuscripts students are completing and sending out to publishers and contests.  A great deal emerges when students’ poems are read in collections, rather than one by one. 

Assigned Reading will be discussed for the first hour to seventy-five minutes of class; the rest of class time will be spent workshopping students’ weekly poems.  Any student might have a poem workshopped on any week.  Each student will, in the course of the semester, write one two-page position paper on one of the poets we’ll be discussing, to be distributed the day before the class when that poet is to be discussed, to jump-start class conversation.  For their final assignments, students will rewrite at least five of the poems they have written for the semester.

ENGL 7460: Theory & Practice of Poetry

Prof. Katharine Coles
Wednesdays 4:35 – 7:25pm
LNCO 3865

Course Description:

In English 7460/Poetic Theory and Practice, we will be using both poetic texts, translations and interpretations, and prose by poets writing about their thinking and practices to consider questions of intertextuality and originality, specifically of how our own creative works and practices are intimately tied to what we take as our influences.  We will look closely at ways in which poets may engage with the work of others to formulate and express their aesthetic commitments.  We will also be thinking about risk, estrangement, freedom, and comfort and discomfort as they come into play in the making of poems.

The texts will be clustered in ways that are meant to help us examine relationships among them.  One such cluster will group Wanda Coleman’s Wicked Enchantment (edited by Terrance Hayes), Hayes’ American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin (inspired by Coleman’s American Sonnets) and his To Float in the Space Between: A Life and Work in Conversation with the Life and Work of Etheridge Knight.  Another will look at Anne Carson’s translation from Sappho, If Not, Winter; her prose book Eros, the Bittersweet; her recent collection Bad Norma; and her collaboration with artist Rosanna Bruno, The Trojan Women: A Comic. Lingering in the Classical world, we’ll read selections of The Iliad and The Odyssey (Wilson translations) and Oswald’s versions, Memorial and Nobody.  Last but not least, a cluster revolving around Dickinson will include The Gorgeous Nothings and selections, Adrienne Rich’s “Vesuvius at Home” and other selections from her poems and prose, and Susan Howe’s My Emily Dickinson.

ENGL 7800: History and Literature

Prof. Anne Jamison
Tu/TH 2:00 – 3:20pm
LNCO 3875

Course Description:

Benjamin, Baudelaire, Kafka

Widely understood as one of the leading thinkers on modernity, Walter Benjamin was profoundly influenced in this thinking by two very different writers: Charles Baudelaire and Franz Kafka. Baudelaire was a nineteenth-century French poet of the Paris that Benjamin theorized as “the capital of the nineteenth century.”  Kafka, by contrast, was a twentieth-century fiction writer from Prague, a city Benjamin likely never visited and rarely mentioned. Though he did speculate that Kafka’s fiction might reflect “a long-forgotten capital,” he also claimed that this reflection could be found only in the future of which Kafka was a prophet. Also of Kafka, a German-speaking Jew like himself, Benjamin wrote that he appears in his fiction as one who “had spent his entire life wondering what he looked like, without ever discovering that there are mirrors.” In Baudelaire’s Paris, they are inescapable: it is “the city of mirrors.” Separated by century, country of origin, language, genre, style, and aesthetic outlook, Baudelaire and Kafka are rarely associated in other contexts, but Benjamin’s impact has been such that they continue to shape our understanding of the modern, while his understanding of the modern has guided how they are read.

In this course, we will read some of Benjamin’s best-known essays and letters alongside the texts by Baudelaire and Kafka they engage, among them Les Fleurs du Mal; “The Painter of Modern Life”; The Trial; The Castle, and a range of Kafka’s shorter fictions. We will examine how each text differently contributes to Benjamin’s understanding of topics such as commodities and crowds; history and temporality; poetry and storytelling, and his unusual combination of Marxist historical materialism and Jewish mysticism. We will also, however, consider perspectives on these same texts that Benjamin missed or simply did not emphasize. What other stories might Baudelaire and Kafka tell us about the modern if we ask different questions or attend to different elements of their work?