This is a course on modern criticism from Kant up to the point immediately preceding the onset of structuralism and post-structuralism. We will spend the first three weeks of the term on Kant’s Critique of Judgment (known informally as the "Third Critique"), which is universally considered the beginning of modern aesthetics and is an extremely difficult read. Our
readings will be taken from Critical Theory Since Plato, ed. Hazard Adams and Leroy Searle. This is a big, very expensive book, but it is an invaluable work of reference, containing many of the essential texts in critical theory from over two millennia.

Tentative reading list:
Schiller, from Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man
Baudelaire, from The Salon of 1859
Nietzsche, from The Birth of Tragedy and Truth and Falsity in an Ultramoral Sense
Mallarme, selections
T. S. Eliot, Tradition and the Individual Talent
Eichenbaum, The Theory of the Formal Method
Trotsky, The Formalist School of Poetry and Marxism
Bakhtin, Epic and Novel
Wimsatt and Beardsley, The Intentional Fallacy
Brooks, The Heresy of Paraphrase and Irony as a Principle of Structure

I will ask for two short papers during the quarter, with an 8-10 page final paper.

Theories of “Life Itself”

This course will create a genealogy of modern and contemporary theories of “life itself.” We will consider life as a biological, moral, sexual, social, economic, and political entity—one subject to various regimes of power, and itself a source of power, profit, and meaning. During the first part of the course we will treat key theorists of life including Freud, Marx, Nietzsche, Foucault, Giorgio Agamben, Judith Butler, and Saidiya Hartman. In the second part of the course we will turn our attention to the transformation of the concept of life that has been precipitated by the mapping of the human genome and the development of new markets in biological materials and products. Here our focus will be on a variety of writers who have sought to understand the biologization of “nature”, the geneticization of biology, and the instrumentalization of geneticized biology in crafting new regimes of power, new forms of sovereignty, new identities, new circuits of exchange, and new social and political alliances. Among others, we may read Donna Haraway, Octavia Butler, Jenny Reardon, Bruno Latour, Sarah Franklin, and Evelyn Fox Keller. Throughout the quarter our discussion will be animated by the following questions, along side others to be developed by our seminar group: how have various theorists shaped the modern meaning of life? How do various theories of life impact-- even necessitate--particular theories of power? How is subjection to power constitutive to being alive? How has the life/death binary been produced? How do we theorize related distinctions between species-life and species-being, zoe and bios, non-human animal life and human life, free life and life in bondage? How do material transformations in the life sciences force us to recalibrate our understanding of life itself, the power it exerts, and the forms of power to which it is subjected? With few exceptions we will read entire books by each author—usually one per week.

In this course we will be exploring some of Chaucer’s best works from early in his career (The House of Fame, The Parliament of Fowls) to late (The Canterbury Tales). We will consider the issue of textual survival from a manuscript culture to a print culture, and attend to two main critical issues: Chaucer’s use of sources and models (including his own work) and the recent advances of New Historicism and gender studies.

TEXTS
Main:
Benson, Larry D., ed. The Riverside Chaucer (Paperback). New York: Oxford University Press, 1988. ISBN: 0192821091

Secondary:
Capellanus, Andreas, intro. by John J Parry, The Art of Courtly Love. New York: Columbia University Press, 1990. ISBN: 0231073054

Miller, Robert P. Chaucer: Sources and Backgrounds. New York: Oxford University Press, 1977. ISBN: 0195021673

The Rule of St. Benedict, trans. by Anthony Meisel and M. L. Del Mastro. New York: Doubleday, Image Books, 1975. ISBN: 0385009488

The Cambridge Companion to Chaucer, ed. by Piero Boitani and Jill Mann. 2nd edition. Cambridge University Press: 2004. ISBN: 0521894670

Course Workload: Two class presentations and a paper (ca. 20 pp.).

We'll spend the quarter equipping ourselves with the knowledge--paleographical, textual, historical, literary--that will enable us to evalute the extent to which we might be able to discover what Shakespeare wrote. We'll give special attention to three different kinds of textual problems--those found in Macbeth, King Lear, and Henry V. Along the way we'll have an opportunity to explore the contemporary image of an editor as a cultural Visigoth with an obsessive-compulsive disorder, methodically (re)covering our literary heritage. The course has no prerequisites. Requirements: reports and essay or project. Books: William Proctor Williams and Craig S. Abbott, An Introduction to Bibliographical and Textual Studies, 3rd ed. (New York: MLA, 1999), and your favorite collected edition of Shakespeare's works published within the past twenty-five years.

An exploration of antebellum American literary texts, supplemented by appropriate theory and some attention to visual culture, which throw the constructed, culturally mediated character of landscape into relief. On the one hand, controlling the perception and intelligibility of landscape, and situating it within the US national imaginary, are fundamental to an expansionary American nationalism in an era of so-called “Manifest Destiny.” Such projection of US nationhood into landscape and topographical feature includes: 1) extensive mapwork organizing an initially alien continent into sections and townships mandated by the Congressional Land Ordinance of 1785, effectually insuring what William Boelhower terms a “single bounded juridical space” whereby great variations in climate and topography become visible in print as a “uniform” geometric language; 2) picturesque, highly aestheticized images of national landscape, widely circulated in picture-books or available on museum canvas, that cater to a growing geographic chauvinism while often relying, nevertheless, on European painterly techniques extending all the way back to the seventeenth century; 3) the emergence in art and writing of an American sublime whereby natural spectacles such as Niagara Falls are located within a specifically nationalized geography while ostensibly endowing such geography with a timeless, sacred dimension. But even as sense of landscape is controlled and mediated through such organizing lenses, a counter-sensitivity develops to the way landscape ultimately remains in the play of culturally mediated truth, falling between, for example, Western paintings and cartography and an alternative sense of landscape that writers such as Thoreau and Margaret Fuller begin to develop in studying native tribal cultures. In what will be predominantly a literary course supplemented by extra-literary cultural materials, our focus will be on how landscape remains an unsettled question rather than a site of visual and cartographical settlement in the antebellum US.

The specific focus of this course is a reconsideration of American Transcendentalism and Pragmatism, from its philosophical and critical sources in Kant, Schelling, and Coleridge, to the work of Emerson and Charles Sanders Peirce. Most of the texts will be on-line; a course reader will be available at Professional Copy and Print after the start of the quarter.

This seminar is addressed not just to the philosophical issues of the subject, but on the essential role of the imaginative and the literary, for all the heirs of Kant and especially Emerson. The pivotal question is the social, political, and intellectual function of imaginative work, with a bearing on frequently divergent models of what the subject of "American studies" ought to be. Central to the work of the seminar will be thorough readings of Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, Melville's Moby Dick, and Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass and Democratic Vistas, as essential manifestations of the aspirations and dilemmas of the movement from Transcendental Idealism to Pragmatism.

Texts: NOTE: I have ordered these texts for convenience of reference, but virtually all of them will be available on line in machine readable and searchable format. If students have other editions, that should present no insurmountable problems. The books ordered, however, are well worth the cost.

Immanuel Kant: Critique of Judgment, Bernard translation
Friedrich Schelling: The System of Transcendental Idealism
Samuel Taylor Coleridge: selections from The Friend, Biographia Literaria, and On the Constitution of Church and State
Ralph Waldo Emerson; Essays and Lectures, ed. Joel Porte (Library of America)
Nathaniel Hawthorne; Collected Novels, ed.Millicent Bell (Library of America)
Herman Melville: Moby Dick (Norton Critical Edition)
Walt Whitman: Poetry and Prose, ed. Justin Kaplan (Library of America)
Charles Sanders Peirce: The Essential Peirce, vols I & II (Indiana)

Shorter works by William James, John Dewey, Richard Rorty, Walter Benn Michaels, and others.

This seminar will investigate what happened to British Literature after "High Modernism" had reached its zenith. Instead of focusing on the well-known "masterpieces" of the 1920s (such as The Waste Land, Ulysses, and To the Lighthouse), we will consider texts which reflect the profound social changes brought about by the Depression, World War II, and the breaking-down of the power of the British Empire. We will look at some later works by Virginia Woolf and T.S. Eliot to see how they responded to these dramatic changes and then consider the younger generation of writers who wrote in their wake, such as W.H. Auden, Elizabeth Bowen, Graham Greene, and George Orwell. We'll also read a good portion of Jed Esty's recent study: A Shrinking Island, Modernism and National Culture in England, and consider his views on how "English intellectuals translated the end of empire into a resurgent concept of national culture".
Although this course has no prerequisites, students should have some background in modernist literature. (If you haven't read any Eliot or Woolf, I hope that you will at least read The Waste Land and either Mrs. Dalloway or To the Lighthouse during Spring break. Also, if you've never read Orwell's 1984, this is a good time to do so).

The post-World War II European novel. Following a brief summary of the history of the genre, and some discussion of major European modernist novels (by Joyce, Proust, and Kafka), the course will focus on contemporary novels whose distinctive quality is their setting in a different, mostly past era. Readings will include most or all of the following texts: John Fowles The French Lieutenant's Woman, Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day, Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, Christa Wolf's Cassandra, Marguerite Yourcenar's Memoirs of Hadrian, and Mesa Selimovic's Dervish and Death (one of the very few European novels engaging the Qur?an on a number of levels). We will examine how and why these novels choose a non-contemporary setting, and what they achieve by invoking the pre-Homeric, classic, late pre-modern, Victorian, or early twentieth-century eras. While the course offers an overview of some major theories of the novel (e.g., Bakhtin, Auerbach, Barthes, Jameson, Morson), it will chiefly be centered on an in-depth study of the literary works.

Language Ideology, Nation, and History

In modern history, conceptions of language have been central to developing conceptions of nationhood. Language ideologies inform national cultural perceptions, educational philosophies, and public policy, and therefore shape the relation between a changing language and a changing nation. This course examines some present-day ideologies of English -- including ideas about a standard English, varieties of English, and the role of English abroad -- and investigates the ways that these ideologies were constructed through and informed by language history. How was English spelling regularized (mostly)? How do present-day usage manuals reveal eighteenth-century cultural ideas about English? How do "English-only" policies stem from nineteenth-century ideas about the relation between language and nation? This course will address these and other questions as we examine the historical relationship between language ideology and ideas of nationhood. Course requirements include several brief response papers and one seminar paper. Students are not expected to have previous experience with the history of English or with language study; interest in these questions and enthusiasm for the English language are the only prerequisites.

This course aims to familiarize students to representative research methods in the field of applied linguistics. Although I am a qualitative researcher by both training and inclination, we will discuss both quantitative and qualitative approaches in this class. You will learn principles and examples of survey research, experimental research, ethnography, case study/narrative inquiry, and classroom interaction research. You will also conduct a piece of original research that involves data collection and analysis.

This course aims to familiarize students to representative research methods in the field of applied linguistics. Although I am a qualitative researcher by both training and inclination, we will discuss both quantitative and qualitative approaches in this class. You will learn principles and examples of survey research, experimental research, ethnography, case study/narrative inquiry, and classroom interaction research. You will also conduct a piece of original research that involves data collection and analysis.

ENGLISH 581: Creative Writer As Critical Reader
“Writing What Are You Afraid Of”

This class will examine, through various forms of writing and other media, how to write the erotic, the horrific, the funny, the romantic, and the redemptive happy ending and other scary subjects. The students in the class will work collaboratively with each subject, assigning readings in each area, and leading discussion of writerly approaches to each topic and engaging in collaborative writing projects in small groups.

Admission limited to fiction students in the MFA program, or by permission of the professor