The course will cover about as many of the theoretical figures and critics in the period from 1780-1930 as I think we can reasonably fit into ten weeks.  We’ll begin with an intensive study of Kant, whose work gave a decisive turn to aesthetic and literary theory that persists into the present.  After a few weeks with Kant, we will spend a week each on six different theoretical orientations that provide crucial background for contemporary criticism and theory: British Romanticism (and ethical criticism), Continental Romanticism (and hermeneutics), Marx (and Marxist criticism), Nietzsche and Wilde (poststructuralism and deconstruction), Woolf (feminism), Freud (psychoanalytic theory).  Though the reading for the course will be primarily theoretical, we will also be looking at a few short literary texts to give our reflections some practical grounding.

      Your work for the course will include ungraded response papers, several short essays, and one longer essay on a particular theoretical figure.  We will also set up collaborative groups devoted to each of the six main groupings of texts, with each group responsible for doing more intensive background work in its area and making an in-class presentation.

     This course will introduce students to several ongoing debates within contemporary theory and literary study.  It will provide an overview of linguistic and anthropological structuralism, and will examine the challenges posed to these forms of structuralist thought by varieties of deconstruction, Marxism, feminism and psychoanalysis.  Emphasis will be placed on close and careful reading of texts and on coming to terms with the dialogues among them.  Questions that will guide our discussion include:  What is theory?  What guises does theory come in?  How are various strategies of interpretation construed as more theoretical than others?  How and why has “theory” become the name for the interpretation of language and power in contemporary literary study?  What are the social, political and intellectual stakes involved in different kinds of theorizing?  What is the value of theory to the reader of literature?

      Texts: Selections from de Saussure, Volosinov, Levi-Strauss, Williams, Benjamin, Barthes, Christian, Derrida, Foucault, Gates, Althusser, Freud, Lacan, Klein, Butler, Irigaray, Cixous, Spivak, and Lowe.

      give order that these bodies

     High on a stage be placed to the view,

     And let me speak to th’yet unknowing world

     How these things came about.  So shall you hear

     Of carnal, bloody, and unnatural acts,

     Of accidental judgments, casual slaughters,

     Of deaths put on by cunning and forced cause,

     And, in this upshot, purposes misook

     Fall’n on th’inventors’ heads.  All this can I

     Truly deliver.

      That of course is from Hamlet—but its playbill-like language makes it a perfectly appropriate prologue to the much more widely conceived project of the Spring quarter edition of English 520.  Though the Name of this course (as Lewis Carroll’s White Knight might have explained) is “Seventeenth Century Literature,” and though it is called “English 520,” what it IS is “Tudor and Stuart Drama.”  And what a time for it.  Hollywood has embraced us—or at least SOME of us—with Shakespeare in Love, Elizabeth, and the upcoming A Midsummer Night’s Dream.  We’re only a hop, step and a jump, we could hope, from new films of The Alchemist and The Malcontent.

      So the business here will be to prepare ourselves for such an eventuality by the reading and involving of ourselves in English Drama from about 1590 to 1642.  Shakespeare will figure only indirectly; he was of course only one of many writing for the stage.  It was an exciting, upstart industry supported by dozens of writers, and it’s a shame that Shakespeare’s certainly wonderful playlist has been allowed to usurp their fame.  Here we’ll redress that a bit by reading plays by Jonson and Ford, Marston and Marlowe, Webster (why the rats?) and Tourneur, Beaumont and Fletcher.  We’ll be aiming at a play a week; weekly writing on your part.  We’ll be surveying critical perspectives as we go.  Each of you will adopt a play for your own project.

      Finally, even though these plays have now become less taught in undergraduate curricula, we’ll nevertheless spend time with each talking about how they might best be taught.  Where and how might one teach them?  Why?  With what outcomes?  To whom?

      So all in all—a little theory, a little culture, a little pedagogy, but mainly: a whole lot of drama.  Useful to anyone interested in the reading or the teaching of Early Modern Literature, in the history of drama, in Shakespeare.

     This course will explore theories of the state, citizenship and individual rights and education during the late 18th century.  The first half will focus on the language of rights in European political philosophers including Locke, Montesquieu, Hume, Rousseau and Wollstonecraft.  We will consider how that language reflected and shaped changing conceptions of individuals and groups. The second half will explore the documents that constitued the US.  Particular attention will be paid not only to the ideas that shaped the new nation, but to the language and stories through which it was articulated, to the role of literature in the shaping of experience, and to the importance of literary analysis to our own understanding of and access to the past.  We will consider a broad range of literary works, including political documents, journalism, philosophical treatises and fiction: works, for example, by Jefferson, "Publius," Franklin, Paine, Rush, Webster, and Foster.

     In this course we will use literary and historical notions of realism (and to a lesser extent, naturalism) to explore questions of race that emerge in turn-of-the-century American literature.  During the course we will read writing by William Dean Howells, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Charles Chesnutt, Pauline Hopkins,Frances Harper, Kate Chopin, Henry James and W.E.B. DuBois. Other readings about the period and the question of race in the United  States include enthnography, journalism, early sociology, and literary criticism.

     This course will focus on critical problems in the study of narrative, with direct work on Joyce, Fitzgerald, Djuna Banes, Faulkner, and Margeurite Young.

      Texts: Joyce, Dubliners;  Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby;  Woolf, To the Lighthouse;  Barnes, Nightwood;  Faulkner, Light in August;  Young, Miss Macintosh, My Darling.

      This course will concentrate primarily on the relationship between H.D.’s extensive body of autobiographical fiction and her poetry.  While H.D. is primarily known for her poetry, a few critics maintain that her autobiographical fiction is far more crucial for H.D.’s capacity to create herself as a writer.  Through a chronological study of H.D.’s poetry and prose, we will examine the relationship between her prose and poetry.  In the last couple of weeks of the course, we will turn to the exploratory, experimental work of a few contemporary women poets, considering it through the elusive concept of “life-writing.”  The course will benefit from campus visits by two of these poets, Alice Notley and Harryette Mullen.

     --Withdrawn--

     While film-makers and critics have long made sporadic attempts to theorize the cinema--one thinks of the work of Eisenstein, Kracauer, Bazin -- it has only been in recent decades that film semiotics emerged as a powerful and comprehensive movement.  This course will take up the concerns of "modern" film theory, beginning with its inception in the late 1960s in structural linguistics, Marxism, psychoanalysis and feminism and quickly surveying the resulting model of spectatorship (often called "gaze theory") that emerged and flourished in the 1970s.  Gaze theory taught us much about the workings of power and pleasure in images, but the hegemony of that model has since been challenged by a range of diverse positionalities, not only of gender but also of class, race, sexual orientation, ethnicity and historicity.  The majority of our time will be spent reading debates of the past ten years that question the orthodoxies of a classical spectatorship without abandoning the fundamental insight that there is something to be gained by theorizing the relationship between moving picture viewers and the textual field of vision. 

      Requirements:  Active class participation, 1 brief oral presentation, and a final paper.

     This seminar will provide participants with an opportunity to read six recent works in the field at a pace that will allow us to examine carefully both their methodologies and their theoretical assumptions. In the first section, we'll consider historiography and archival research as methods.  For the second section, we'll also examine corpus linguistics and the methods of history and philosophy of science.  For the third section, we'll discuss qualitative and theoretically-driven analyses.

     [Discussion and practice of second-language teaching techniques. Three hours per week teaching required in addition to regular class meetings. Credit/no-credit only. Prerequisite: 571 or permission of instructor.]

      This course is intended to improve your understanding of the research process, to familiarize you with recent research in second language acquisition, and to provide basic, practical skills in designing, carrying out, and reporting on a research project.  The main work of the quarter involves conducting an original research project.  In addition, you will read and critique selected research in second language acquisition.

      Texts: David Nunan, Research Methods in Language Learning (Cambridge University Press).  Coursepack of readings.

      Prerequisite:  ENGL 571 or permission of instructor. 

     [Evaluation and testing of second language proficiency, including testing theory, types of tests, and teacher-prepared classroom tests. Prerequisite: 571 and 572 or permission of instructor.]

     This will be a hands-on course in materials development.  Students will spend the bulk of the time writing and critiquing classroom materials for language teaching.  For students who wish, the final project can be a book proposal with sample materials that they can send to a publisher.

     Odd Biography

      Recent years have seen renewed and fervent interest in the genres of autobiography and memoir. In this course, we will read works that simultaneously participate in and question these genres, works that question the nature of 

     the self, the nature of memory, and what it means to write about the self.  Requirements include an oral presentation, a paper, and a piece of autobiographical writing.

      Prerequisites: Priority given to MFA students.  Other grad students welcome.

     Prerequisite: MFA status in fiction, or permission of professor.

     Prerequisite: MFA status in poetry, or permission of professor.

     The seminar, the fourth in the core series for the Textual Studies Program, considers the capabilities of computer and network technology and their applications in the creation, reproduction, and study of literary texts. The seminar will take up a number of theoretical and practical issues and problems, such as: electronic archives and editions, textual mark-up systems, the "authenticity" of e-texts and their stability, digital rhetoric and the multiplicity of audiences, research sites, digital presentation/delivery of texts, text and image/graphics, and some legal (e.g., copyright) and ethical issues. We will consider how hypertext may impact pedagogy and definitions of literacy.  And we will become familiar with various existing hypertext sites and projects, and initiate (or develop) our own digital editions/archives/sites. Participants will deliver reports on one or more of these topics and will develop a (small) editing project as a site for testing theoretical and practical issues associated with development and presentation of electronic texts. Completion of (at least one of) the earlier three seminars in the series is recommended.

     Readings include:  Richard J. Finneran, ed.  The Literary Text in the Digital Age.  Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1996; David C. Greetham.  Textual Scholarship: An Introduction. New York: Garland, 1994; George P. Landow. Hypertext 2.0: The Convergence of Contmeporary Critical Theory and Technology. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1997; Richard A. Lanham.  The Electronic Word: Democracy, Technology and the Arts.  Chicago: University of Chicago, 1994; Peter L. Shillingsburg.  Scholarly Editing in the Computer Age: Theory and Practice.  Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1996. Additional readings online or in course packet. 

      This course brings together the achievements and experience of early modern women in Italy, France, Spain (Mexico), Germany, and England.  After surveying the problem of women’s literacy in early modern Europe, we will read works by Marguerite de Navarre, Louise Labe, Gaspara Stampa, Mme. De Motteville, Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz, and a selection of English women writers.  The writers range from aristocrats to servants, from a Catholic nun to radical Protestants.  We will look at the way their works circulated: some in manuscripts for a coterie, some in printed texts.  We’ll also look at women’s roles in the printing trade, both as passive heirs and as active professionals.  This segment of the course will focus on women in Italy and in England.  Students will have the opportunity to read texts in the original or in translation. 

      There will be a course packet of secondary materials, as well as the following required texts: Marguerite de Navarre, Heptameron; Warnke, ed., Three Women Poets, Renaissance and Baroque: Louise Labe, Garpara Stama, and Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz; Mme. E Motteville, Memoir of Henrietta Maria (in course packet); Elspeth Graham, ed., Her Own Life: Autobiographical Writings of 17th c. Englishwomen; Lady Mary Wroth, selections from Urania and Pamphilia to Amphilanthus; James Fitzmaurice, ed., Major Women Writers of 17th c. England.  Three secondary texts are strongly recommended: Wendy Wall: The Imprint of Gender: Authorship and Publication in the English Renaissance; Ann Rosalind Jones: The Currency of Eros: Women’s Love Lyric in Europe, 1540-1620; and Joy Wiltenburg: Disorderly Women and Female Power in the Street Literature in Early Modern England and Germany.

      Requirements: one class presentation, final paper.  This course is intended to offer students an opportunity for original research and interpretation.