DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH

[Prerequisite to English Major in Writing]

Course Description: An introduction to the major forms of poetry in English from the dual perspective of the poet-critic. Creative work will be assigned in the form of poems and revisions; analytic writing will be assigned in the form of critiques of other class members’ poems. A scansion exercise will be given early on. All of these exercises, creative and expository, as well as the required readings from the anthology, are designed to help students increase their understanding of poetry rapidly and profoundly; the more wholehearted students’ participation, the more they will learn from the course. Prerequisites: No prerequisites. No P/N registration. Attendance of first class is mandatory. Freshmen are NOT permitted to enroll until winter quarter. Seniors require department permission. Prerequisite for the writing major and sequence-based minor. Literature Majors are also welcome. Teaching Method: Discussion; one-half to two-thirds of the classes will be devoted to discussion of readings and principles, the other classes to discussion of student poems.

Evaluation Method: Evidence given in written work and class participation of students’ understanding of poetry; improvement will count for a great deal in estimating achievement.

Texts include: An anthology, a critical guide, a 206 Reader prepared by the instructor, and the work of other students.

Note: This course may also be counted toward the English Literature major.

[Prerequisite to English Major in Writing]

Course Description: An introduction to the major forms of poetry in English from the dual perspective of the poet-critic. Creative work will be assigned in the form of poems and revisions; analytic writing will be assigned in the form of critiques of other class members’ poems. A scansion exercise will be given early on. All of these exercises, creative and expository, as well as the required readings from the anthology, are designed to help students increase their understanding of poetry rapidly and profoundly; the more wholehearted students’ participation, the more they will learn from the course. Prerequisites: No prerequisites. No P/N registration. Attendance of first class is mandatory. Freshmen are NOT permitted to enroll until winter quarter. Seniors require department permission. Prerequisite for the writing major and sequence-based minor. Literature Majors are also welcome. Teaching Method: Discussion; one-half to two-thirds of the classes will be devoted to discussion of readings and principles, the other classes to discussion of student poems.

Evaluation Method: Evidence given in written work and class participation of students’ understanding of poetry; improvement will count for a great deal in estimating achievement.

Texts include: An anthology, a critical guide, a 206 Reader prepared by the instructor, and the work of other students.

Note: This course may also be counted toward the English Literature major.

[Prerequisite to English Major in Writing]

Course Description: A reading and writing course in short fiction. Students will read widely in traditional as well as experimental short stories, seeing how writers of different culture and temperament use conventions such as plot, character, and techniques of voice and distance to shape their art. Students will also receive intensive practice in the craft of the short story, writing at least one story, along with revisions, short exercises, and a critical study of at least one work of fiction, concentrating on technique.

Prerequisites: English 206. No P/N registration. Attendance of first class is mandatory. Course especially recommended for prospective Writing Majors. Literature Majors also welcome. Teaching Method: Discussion of readings and principles; workshop of student drafts. Evaluation Method: Evidence given in written work and class participation of students’ growing understanding of fiction; improvement will count for a great deal in estimating achievement.

Texts include: Selected short stories, essays on craft, and the work of the other students.

[Prerequisite to English Major in Writing]

Course Description: An introduction to some of the many possible voices, styles, and structures of the creative essay. Students will read from the full aesthetic breadth of the essay, including memoir, meditation, lyric essay, and literary journalism. Discussions will address how the essay creates an artistic space distinct from the worlds of poetry and fiction, and how truth and fact function within creative nonfiction. Students will be asked to analyze the readings closely, and to write six short essays based on imitations of the style, structure, syntax, and narrative devices found in the readings. Students can also expect to do some brief writing exercises and at least one revision.

Prerequisites: English 206. No P/N registration. Attendance of first class is mandatory. Course especially recommended for prospective Writing Majors. Literature Majors also welcome.

Teaching Method: Discussion; one-half to two-thirds of the classes will be devoted to discussion of readings and principles, the other classes to discussion of student work.

Course Description: This course offers an introduction to the early English literary canon, extending from the late medieval period through the eighteenth century. In addition to gaining a general familiarity with some of the most influential texts of English literature, we will be especially interested in discovering how literary texts construct, engage in, and transform political discourse. What kinds of political interventions are literary texts capable of making? What are the political implications of particular rhetorical strategies and generic choices? How do literary texts encode or allegorize particular political questions? How, at a particular historical moment, does it become possible to ignore or overlook the political projects embedded in these texts? In readings of Chaucer, More, Sidney, Shakespeare, Milton, Behn, and Swift, among others, we will consider how important it is to understand these texts from a political perspective, and wonder why this perspective is so often ignored in favor of psychologizing and subjectivizing readings.

Teaching Method: Two lectures per week, plus a required discussion section.

Evaluation Method: Regular reading quizzes (15%); class participation (25%); midterm exam (20%); final exam (20%); final paper (20%).

Texts include: Beowulf; Mystery Plays; Chaucer, Canterbury Tales; More, Utopia; Sidney, Defense of Poesy; Shakespeare, Tempest and selected sonnets; Milton, Paradise Lost; Behn, Oroonoko; Swift, Gulliver’s Travels.

Note: English 210-1 is an English Literature major and minor requirement; it is also designed for nonmajors and counts as an Area VI WCAS distribution requirement.

Course Description: This course is a survey of American literature from the aftermath of the Civil War
to first decade of the twentieth century. The course will take as a cue how writers experimented with various styles and genres of literature to explore the idea, if not always the realities, of “America.” Our
exploration of these writers and their texts will fold into the contexts of social histories about the U.S.
and reunification, the rise of capital and the Gilded Age, imperialism, and immigration.

Teaching Methods: Two lectures per week, plus a required discussion section.

Evaluation Methods: Evaluation will be based on two short (3-page) essays, in which students will
perform a close reading of a literary passage from one of the texts on the syllabus; a final examination,
involving short answers and essays; and active participation in section and lecture. Attendance at all
sections is required; anyone who misses more than one section meeting will fail the course unless
both the T.A. and the professor give permission to continue.

Texts include: Rebecca Harding Davis, “Life in the Iron Mills”; Mark Twain, The Adventures of
Huckleberry Finn; Henry James, “Daisy Miller”; Frederick Jackson Turner, “The Significance of the
Frontier in American History”; José Martí, “Our America”; Theodore Dreiser, Sister Carrie; W.E.B. Du
Bois, The Souls of Black Folk; Selected poems by Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, and Paul Laurence
Dunbar, among others.

Note: English 270-2 is an English Literature major and minor requirement; it is also designed for nonmajors and counts as an Area VI WCAS distribution requirement.

Course Description: This class will approach its central question—how literary traditions are created and developed over time—by way of the Bible, the single most important source of themes and stories in Western culture. We will concentrate on a few books of great literary interest: Genesis, Exodus, the Song of Solomon, the short stories of Ruth and Jonah, and the Gospels. Other readings will include a selection of poems inspired by these books, two novels, and a distinguished critical study that reads the Bible itself as if it were a novel.

Teaching method: Discussion.

Evaluation methods: Active participation; four short papers to develop a range of literary skills. Six will be assigned and you can choose the four you want to write, but everyone must write the first paper. Texts: Bible (NRSV recommended; the original RSV and NIV are also acceptable); Chapters into Verse: A Selection of Poetry in English Inspired by the Bible from Genesis through Revelation, ed. Robert Atwan and Lawrence Wieder; Jack Miles, God: A Biography; Anita Diamant, The Red Tent; Fyodor Dostoevsky, “The Grand Inquisitor”; Nikos Kazantzakis, The Last Temptation of Christ; Marguerite Yourcenar, “Mary Magdalene,” from Fires.

Notes: English 300 is an English Literature major and minor requirement. First class mandatory. No P/N registration. This course does NOT fulfill the WCAS Area VI distribution requirement. This course may not be repeated for major or minor credit.

MIXED-GENRE

Course Description: As writers of fiction, we try to delve deep into uncomfortable emotions: desire, loss, belonging, madness, personal and historical trauma. We start with our own raw experiences, but all too often find them hard to formulate, and end up self-censoring or resorting to clichés and conventional narrative strategies. How then do we create works of insight, clarity, and narrative power? In this class, we will learn from contemporary writers who have successfully engaged this difficult terrain. Since writing the unspeakable depends on creating innovative forms--and reinventing existing ones--we will focus intensively on the narrative structure of these published pieces. Reading like writers, we will also take them apart to examine craft issues like point-of-view, time management, characterization, and dialogue. Five short, craft-based writing assignments will approach the unspeakable in different ways, and spark ideas/forms for your final project, a full-length short story. A draft of this will be workshopped in class, and you will also provide critical feedback for one other student’s story. The final grade will be based on a writing portfolio consisting of the short assignments and a second draft of your full-length story. This is an intensive class aimed at creating a community of engaged, thoughtful writers, and class participation is essential.

Teaching Methods: Class discussion, workshop.

Evaluation Methods: TBA.

Texts include: Short stories, novellas and novel excerpts by Cormac McCarthy, Toni Morrison, Paul Harding, Ian McEwen, Junot Diaz, Michael Cunningham, Haruki Murakami, Rohinton Mistry, Doris Lessing, Sam Shepard, David Means, Dinaw Mengestu.

Post-1830

Course Description: How can a rewarding relationship be based on manipulation and suspicion? Many of the swerves, shocking revelations, and anti-heroes in television and film have their precedents in the novelistic techniques of Charles Dickens and Vladimir Nabokov. (For example, consider the ways The Walking Dead or Grey’s Anatomy manipulate viewers by limiting information about who lives and who dies at the end of an episode, or how limited omniscience is essentially the narrative engine for  Memento or Fight Club.) In both visual media and the novel, suspicion can directly fuel aesthetic engagement— after all, a cautious reader is a close reader. In this class, we will examine what conniving, naive, shrewd, or deranged narrative voices ask of readers in texts from Henry James, Charles Wright, Nabokov, Kathy Acker, Jenny Holzer, and Teju Cole. One goal of this class will be to address the historical contexts of marginalization in the social sphere— in terms of gender, race, sexuality, age, and disability—to ask how suspicious reading affects our social life. As a result, we will apply our cautious, careful reading habits to writing online in order to critically examine online writing persona.

Evaluation Method: Essays, Canvas posts, class discussion.

Texts Include: Henry James, The Turn of the Screw; Charles Wright, The Wig; Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire; Kathy Acker, Blood and Guts in High School; Jenny Holzer, Truisms and Inflammatory Essays; Danzy Senna, Caucasia; Sesshu Foster, Atomik Aztex; Teju Cole, Open City.

In our time of Snapchat and Twitter, the term epic has entered the urban dictionary. As the genre of "heroic song," though, one way it defines itself, epic predates even the invention of writing. What has allowed such epic success, so that epic is perhaps the oldest continuing form of poetic production? The persistence of epic through cultural and linguistic change is one of the form's central themes: how can words heroically uttered and deed heroically dared be passed on from one lifetime to those that follow? How are they transformed when they are? What does it mean to take up as one's own something that has been passed down from a culture no longer present? Such questions become even more pressing in moments when one culture encounters another and is asked in its new context what to retain, what to adopt, and what to invent. In this course we will consider how epic narrative projects, recalls, and reworks its history as tradition -- literally as what is handed over -- and follow several examples of epic through their cross-cultural contexts. We will also consider related issues such as the difference between literature and "orature," or orally composed poetry; the places of women in traditional and revisionary epics; the Romantic linking of epic and the nation; and some developments in the epic in the twentieth century. In handling four thousand years of epic poetry, we will at least glance at works like the anonymous Mesopotamian Gilgamesh, the Mahabharata, the Irish Tain, the Hildebrandslied, Dante's Commedia, Tasso's Jerusalem Delivered; "Ossian," the ancient Scots poet whose works were written in the eighteenth century; the Kalevala, gathered and recomposed by Finnish scholars in the nineteenth century, and modernist epics like Pound's Cantos or Joyce's Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. The bulk of our time, though, will go to reading and analyzing Homer's Iliad, Vergil's Aeneid, The Song of Roland, Camoes' Lusiads, Milton's Paradise Lost, and Wolcott's Omeros.

Teaching Methods: TBA

Evaluation Methods: TBA

Note: The above course is combined with COMP_LIT 303-0.

The 20th century British poet and literary critic T. S. Eliot wrote that one "must know all of Shakespeare's work in order to know any of it." This course takes a journey along the whole of Shakespeare's plays that will enable us to ask: what do we learn when we pursue this comprehensive perspective? As Eliot puts it, "The standard set by Shakespeare is that of a continuous development from first to last" that ultimately becomes a display of Shakespeare's "power of development." In various ways we will consider what generates this power and what role different genres at different moments may play in activating this ongoing process. What stories do we see when we imagine the Shakespeare corpus as incremental narratives? How does Shakespeare's use of generic form change over time? How does the overall sequence of these changes create strikingly different endings and outcomes?

Teaching Method: TBA

Evaluation Method: TBA

Texts include: Titus Andronicus; The Merchant of Venice; As You Like It; Henry the Fifth; All's Well That Ends Well; Othello; Antony and Cleopatra; The Winter's Tale.

Note: This course is combined with Humanities 370-6.

Spell-casting witches, blood-sucking vampires, mindless zombies, evil robots, and invading aliens. What do our obsessions with specific supernatural, technological, or extraterrestrial threats to humanity tell us about cultural investments at a specific time and place? In this course, we will examine popular culture's preoccupation with supernatural or extra-worldly "villains" in literature, nonfiction, films, and other media. This course will contextualize those trends in the historical, cultural, and political anxieties or interests of the time, including contemporaneous ideas of national identity, gender and sexuality, and developments in science and technology. For instance, the recent popularity of zombies has been linked to fears about increasing globalization, and alien invasion was a particularly popular theme in movies and literature at the intersection of the Cold War and humans' exploration of space. Course material will also include satires of these crazes, which often expose the fears or desires underlying our fascination with particular literary figures or genres. We will investigate existing academic and nonfiction theses about why certain threats to humanity are popular in certain cultural moments; we will also develop our own hypotheses about why particular "monsters" or narratives captivate the popular imagination.

Teaching Methods: Discussion.

Evaluation Methods: Two papers, Canvas posts, participation; final group presentation.

Texts include: Bram Stoker, Dracula; H.G. Wells, War of the Worlds; Orson Welles, War of the Worlds Radio Broadcast; Isaac Asimov, I, Robot; Max Brooks, World War Z and The Zombie Survival Guide; George Romero, Night of the Living Dead. Texts will be available at: Beck's, Quartet Copies.

Note: Students who have completed English 300-0-22 offered in Fall 2017 with this topic may not take this course.

This course examines the conventions, ideologies, and limitations of the "campus novel," which offers fictional--often satirical--treatments of collegiate cultures, academic discourses, and campus politics. Engaging novels by Kingsley Amis, Philip Roth, J.M. Coetzee, and Zadie Smith, we will chart the changing contours of higher education, considering why the campus setting emerges as a prime site for interrogating broad social issues like institutional racism, cultural alienation, free speech, and the cross-currents of gender and sexuality. We will evaluate the genre's persistent vacillation between constructions of the college campus as an enclosed, privileged 'tower' of edification and elitism, on one hand, and as "a kind of microcosm of society at large," as David Lodge puts it, "in which the principles, drives, and conflicts that govern collective human life are displayed," on the other. We will pair novels written from the 1950s to the present with more theoretical texts on Title IX, the "civility wars," and the future of the humanities to reflect on the history and current state of the university system and imagine its future directions.

Teaching Method: Discussion.

Evaluation Method: Participation, short response papers, and two longer essays.

Texts Include: Kingsley Amis, Lucky Jim; Don DeLillo, White Noise; J.M. Coetzee, Disgrace; Philip Roth, The Human Stain; Zadie Smith, On Beauty; and Jeffrey Eugenides, The Marriage Plot.

This course will involve the close reading of Faulkner's four great tragic novels of race and identity: The Sound and The Fury (1929), As I Lay Dying (1930), Light In August (1932), and Absalom, Absalom! (1936). Until very recently, these works have been considered central to the canon of modernist fiction and read as meditations on the tortured consciousness of the artist (TSATF, AILD, AA!) or the dilemma of the outsider adrift in an alienating world (LIA). Saturating Faulkner's novels are images of the anguished history of race relations in the American South from the 19th century to the Great Migration and Great Depression. Yet the tragic legacy of slavery, Faulkner's abiding subject, has been understood by critics as a figure for more abstract and universal moral predicaments. Our investigation seeks to localize Faulkner's representation of history, particularly his vision of slavery and the effects of the color line, as a specifically American crisis, embodied in the remarkable chorus of narrative voices and visions that constitute his fictive world.

Teaching Method: Lecture and discussion.

Evaluation Method: During the quarter, you will write two take-home close reading examinations of two pages each, as well as a final paper of 8-10 pages on a topic of your choice that you have discussed with me. All written exercises are due over email in the form of Microsoft Word attachments. One quarter of your grade will be based on your participation in class discussion. Anyone who misses a class will require the professor's permission to continue in the course. No late papers will be accepted. Conflicts with deadlines must be discussed with the professor and any extensions must be approved in advance.

War, as you might have heard, is good for absolutely nothing. But can it help us see ourselves in a different light? In this course, we will use this guiding question in order to explore how some of the most important events in American military history have given rise to new ways of conceiving of the United States and of the various aspects of life within it. Throughout the quarter, we will turn our attention to a wide range of works, including Kurt Vonnegut's WWII satire SlaughterhouseFive, Vietnam-era protest songs, and Maximilian Uriarte's The White Donkey, a graphic novel about the Iraq War and PTSD. As we work our way through these texts and others, we will focus on content, examining how wars have affected the representation of gender, race, age, and sexuality in the US, as well as to form, exploring how authors have called on experimental styles and new or unusual genres in their attempts to depict the magnitude of wartime. We will ask such questions as: In what ways have wars--or the protests that surrounded them--helped shape youth culture in the US? How are women represented in times of war versus times of peace? And how do we think of WWII differently if we read about it in a graphic novel about mice?

Teaching Method: Discussion.

Evaluation Methods: Participation and three papers.

Texts include: Walt Whitman, “The Wound-Dresser”; Louisa May Alcott, Little Women; Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms; e. e. cummings, “next to of course god america i”; Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five; Bob Dylan, “Blowin’ in the Wind”; Crosby, Stills & Nash, “Ohio”; Green Day, “American Idiot”; episodes of M.A.S.H; Randa Jarrar, “A Frame for the Sky”; Art Spiegelman, MAUS; Maximilian Uriarte, The White Donkey.

Urbanologist Yi Fu Tuan writes, "What begins as undifferentiated space becomes place when we get to know it better and endow it with values." In The Untouchables, Sean Connery tells Kevin Costner, "You want to get Capone? Here's how you get Capone. He pulls a knife, you pull a gun. He puts one of yours in the hospital, you put one of his in the morgue. That's the Chicago way." In this class, we will examine "the Chicago way" from many different angles in order to interrogate the values with which various artists have endowed Chicago. We will read in a broad range of media: journalism, poetry, song, fiction, film, and sequential art to see how a sense of Chicago as a place works over time. We will pay close attention to depictions of the construction of American identity, and to the role of the artist and intellectual in the city.

Teaching Method: Discussion, brief lectures, guest speakers, and an optional urban tour.

Evaluation Method: Class participation; brief written responses to each text; several options for papers of various lengths.

Texts Include: Nelson Algren's Chicago: City on the Make and The Neon Wilderness; Richard Wright's Native Son; Stuart Dybek's The Coast of Chicago; journalism by Ben Hecht, Mike Royko and others; short fiction by Sandra Cisneros, James T. Farrell and others; poetry by Carl Sandburg, Gwendolyn Brooks, Tony Fitzpatrick and others; the films The Untouchables, The Blues Brothers, Call Northside 777, and Barbershop; the graphic novel 100 Bullets: First Shot, Last Call.

Note: Texts will be available at Comix Revolution, 606 Davis Street.

This course will examine ideas of justice in western cultural and literary traditions. The focus will be the classical tradition, the biblical tradition, and Shakespeare who inherited both and reworked them in the early modern period. The trial of Socrates, the trial of Jesus, biblical prophecy, tragedy in Aeschylus and Shakespeare, and a modern work by Melville will be included. Our exploration will be done in the context of theories of justice, and we will read those theories alongside the literature. But we will also heed how literature itself offers elaborations of theories of justice, following their consequences both within legal frameworks and beyond, as they shape the public and intimate lives of people. We will ask how religious ideas of justice inform and depart from secular ideas of justice, how retributive and distributive ideas of justice are imagined and critiqued, and how the relation between justice and law has been conceived.

Teaching Methods: Lecture and discussion.

Evaluation Methods: Discussion and papers.

Texts include: Excerpts from Plato and Aristotle; Aeschylus, The Eumenides; Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet; excerpts from Rawls; Kymlicka, Political Philosophy.

You may well think of 19th-century novels as chronicles of country houses and petticoats and long engagements, but in this class we will examine how 19th-century novelists also investigated banks, investments, and hot technologies. Writers from Anthony Trollope to Charlotte Bronte were acutely aware of how the fluctuations of the market affect not only the financial sector but society itself, chronicling how financial crises and economic booms shape the assumptions, norms, and ethics of social interaction. If the social consequences of the market's ups and down -- such as the 2008 housing crisis or the 2016 election -- can seem urgent, modern, and of the moment, the past can also teach us a lot about the relationship between financial technologies and social technologies. In this class, we will revel in classic Victorian novels as we explore the ways in which Victorian literature consciously participated in and shaped the discourse of free-market capitalism, and trace its lessons to our own time. How are concepts like scarcity, risk, exchange, labor, and wealth figured? How do these concepts map onto and shape social, as well as financial, interactions? What can those of us living in the era theorists refer to as "late capitalism" learn from those who watched its rise and told its unfolding tales?

Teaching Methods: Seminar-style discussion.

Evaluation Methods: Class participation, short summary paper, class presentation, midterm project, final research paper.

Texts include: Trollope, The Way We Live Now; Herman Melville, "Bartleby the Scrivener"; G.H. Lewes, Game of Speculation; selections from Charlotte Bronte, Shirley; Elizabeth Gaskell, North and South; Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own.

This course will allow you to explore how fiction works. We’ll be looking at, discussing, writing about, commenting on, and researching the elements of fiction, but mostly what we’ll be doing is writing buckets (you will be turning in a completed piece every other week during the Fall quarter), so we’ll be reading mostly to steal: we’ll figure out what works and we’ll use it for our own material. We’ll be engaged in the reading of a concise, funny book on the craft of fiction, and we’ll also be reading a wide and varied array of short stories. Again, though, this work is geared to do one simple thing: to find out what means and modes of expression you best respond to, and to figure out ways to approach this question: Given all the other potentially more awesome forms of entertainment out there, what is the role of sitting around scribbling things and reading other people’s scribblings? Why do it? Just so you know, what we’re doing in class closely replicates what all successful fiction writers do on a daily basis: reading the work of their peers and those of established and emerging authors with care, attention, and greed, and writing copious amounts to see what sticks. The more you do both of these activities, the better and more confident you’ll get.

Teaching Method: Lectures, discussion, small- and large-peer workshops.

Evaluation Method: This is a portfolio- and participation-based course. Grade based on timely delivery of all assigned work, with equal weight placed on your own stories and revisions and on your peer feedback.

Texts Include: TBA

Note: No P/N registration. Attendance at first class mandatory. Admission by application only

Conrad's Marlow piloting a rattletrap steamship carrying armed "pilgrims" up the Congo; industrial war machines shelling tiny, fragile human bodies in fields of red poppies in France; Hemingway driving an ambulance on the Italian front; Chaplin's Tramp cast opposite a zeppelin in a censored wartime short film; Eliot's London typist coming home at teatime to play her gramophone; the clanking newsroom presses and the printed newspapers, ads, posters, and flyers that beckon, call and cry to Dubliners in Ulysses's river-threaded cityscapes; Forster's train to the Caves and automobile accident on the Marabar Road in A Passage to India; Mrs Dalloway's aeroplane writing on the sky above astonished Londoners; Giles Oliver's vision of Hitler bombing the village church to smithereens on the festival day of the annual pageant in 1939 in Woolf's Between the Acts; Time Magazine bringing the shocking news of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima to the American prison camp in Pisa, where it reverberates in Pound's Pisan Cantos: twentieth-century literature abounds in depictions of emergent technologies in specific landscapes shaping conditions and events of human life and thought.

In our research seminar, we'll read a selection of such works alongside essays by Benjamin, Kittler, Woolf, Leopold, Hansen, and others. Working closely with the instructor and our Humanities Bibliographer, Charlotte Cubbage, each student will zero in on a topic and design a juicy, imaginative, feasible project that combines scholarly research and literary interpretation. One for all and all for one, we'll learn to frame promising research questions; to navigate scholarly databases and archives; to evaluate sources; to explore readings in context while capturing and testing our own insights and ideas; and to give and take constructive critique. Each student will produce a work notebook, a preliminary proposal, an annotated bibliography, a working proposal and bibliography, and a 12-15 page research paper.

Teaching Methods: Seminar discussions and workshops and individual conferences.

Evaluation Methods: Attendance, preparation, class participation; exercises, such as posts, peer review, and in-class workshops; a preliminary proposal and bibliography, annotated bibliography, working proposal and bibliography, drafts, and the 12-15 page research paper.

Texts may include: Some exemplary selected works, excerpts, essays, and research guides to be read by us all; plus each student's particular bibliography. Everyone will learn from each other's projects while pursuing his or her own.

Prerequisites: Open to juniors and seniors only. Students must successfully complete 4-6 300-level English courses before taking English 397.

With the dominance of the Atlantic as a model for the study of cultural exchanges between continents, the Indian Ocean is often excluded from critical theory discussions despite its centrality in the circulations of various philosophical traditions in Africa, Asia, Australia, New Zealand, and Latin America. This course will use literary and philosophical texts from and about the Indian Ocean to comparatively examine how intellectuals and artists have viewed the world using scripts and terms different from those developed in the West. It is out of convenience that we use epistemology as an entry point toward a comprehensive engagement with Indian Ocean critical theory; much of the philosophical debates from the region (e.g., work by Mbiti, Nyerere, Tempel, Masolo) are on epistemological issues. However, a transdisciplinary reading of each text will engage with various perceptions of the critical practice the Global South, including the interface of aesthetics and activism. Taking Indian Ocean theories of knowledge as multiple because of their diverse sources and cross-cultural interactions for centuries, the course will be interested in unearthing the splintering differences among the philosophers and the changes over time in what might be considered a single school of thought. We read works by such thinkers as Bonaventura de Sousa Santos, Ngugi wa Thiong'o, Valentin Mudimbe, Sugata Bose, Sharifa Ahjum, and Achille Mbembe, especially in relation to their critiques or repurposing of western epistemologies. Indian Ocean philosophical traditions to be compared with western ones (and with one another) include Sufi sm, Negritude, Creolite, Transmodernism, Coolitude, and Ubuntu.

Texts (tentative): Appanah, Nathacha. The Last Brother. Graywolf Press ISBN-10: 1555975755; ISBN-13: 978-1555975753 Ghosh, Amitav. Sea of Poppies: A Novel. Picador. ISBN-10: 0312428596. ISBN-13: 978-0312428594 Gurnah, Abdulrazak. Paradise. New Press, 1995. ISBN-10: 1565841638, ISBN-13: 978-1565841635. Mahjoub, Jamal. The Carrier. Phoenix (Orion). ISBN-10: 0753806673; ISBN-13: 978-0753806678 Owuor, Yvonne. The Dragonfly Sea. In press.

Evaluation method(s): 7000-word essay, annotated bibliographies.

This course approaches animal studies from the point of view of "zoography" -- a mode of writing that calls upon species difference or variety and that makes use of crossspecies comparisons to produce meaning. We will not pursue the grounds for a "human/animal divide," but stress instead encounters and engagement across species. We'll explore the modern history of how we have imagined there was an objective standard of humanness, against which the endless variety of all other animated things might be made homogeneous and compressed together as a lesser order of life in the conception of "the animal." One goal will be to think about the central place of animals in the history of what we call "human" knowledge. Another goal will be to understand the capacities of the now-obsolete term, "creature," as a name for all living things -- the term enshrines biological variation as a sign of wonder and plenty and also makes clear how sympathy, collaboration, and identification routinely occur across the differences of species. At the broadest level, the seminar will challenge the notion that all human thought has always been or must inevitably be "human-exceptionalist" thought. To the contrary: animals are not just "good to think with" (as Levi-Strauss famously put it); it might be more accurate to say that has been impossible to "think" without them.

Texts: Readings will include most of the following primary and secondary texts (listed chronologically for now) and possibly some others: The Book of Genesis (selections); William Baldwin, Beware the Cat (1533); Thomas Wyatt, "Lux, My Fair Falcon" (c. 1540); The case of the green weevils of St. Julien (1545-87); Giovanni Battista Gelli, Circe (1549); George Turberville, The Book of Falconry (1575); Michel de Montaigne, "The Apology for Raymond Sebond" (1580-92); William Shakespeare, King Lear (1606); Rene Descartes, Discourse on Method (1637); Francis Coventry, Pompey the Little, Life & Adventures of a Lap-Dog (1752); Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man (selections) (1871); Gerard Manly Hopkins, "The Windhover," (1877); Virginia Woolf, Flush: A Biography (1933); J.R. Ackerley, My Dog Tulip (1956); T.H. White, The Goshawk (1951); Thomas Nagel, "What Is It Like to Be a Bat?" (The Philosophical Review, 1974); Emmanuel Levinas, "The Name of the Dog" (1975); J.M. Coetzee, The Lives of Animals (1999); Julia Reinhard Lupton, "Creature Caliban" (Shakespeare Quarterly, 2000); Giorgio Agamben, "Umwelf" and "Tick" (2002); Jacques Derrida, "The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow)" (Critical Inquiry, 2002); Donna Haraway, The Companion Species Manifesto (2003); Barbara Herrnstein Smith, "Animal Relatives, Difficult Relations" (differences, 2004); Laurie, Shannon, "The Eight Animals in Shakespeare" (PMLA, 2009); Helen Macdonald, H is for Hawk (2014).