Undergraduate Courses

Undergraduate courses are listed by year, from Fall through Summer quarters.

2020-2021

Fall 2020

ENGL 15 | Introduction to Shakespeare

Instructor: Professor James Kearney

Introduction to Shakespeare in which a number of major plays are read with close attention to language, dramatic structure, and historical context.

ENGL 15S | Seminar on Shakespeare

Instructor: Professor James Kearney

Seminar course for a select number of students enrolled in English 15 designed to enrich the large lecture experience for the motivated student. Course includes either supplementary reading or more intensive study of the English 15 reading list, as well as supplemental writing.

ENGL 197 | Shakespeare’s Feelings 

Instructor: Professor James Kearney

In this seminar we will consider Shakespeare’s feelings, or rather the emotional experiences he conjures for his audiences on the early modern stage. Our inquiry will take up the history of emotions – as well as what it means that emotions have a history – with a particular focus on the relation of reason to the passions. We will touch on thinkers ranging from Aristotle to Ahmed in the course of our discussions, but our primary focus will be Shakespearean drama. Plays we address may include: Macbeth, King Lear, Twelfth Night, and The Winter’s Tale. Requirements: careful reading, regular attendance, active participation, a final research paper, and a final exam.

ENGL 101 | English Literature from the Medieval Period to 1650

Instructor: Professor Daniel Reeve

Introduction to English literature from the medieval period to 1650. The organizing thread of this course and the selection of texts to be studied vary from quarter to quarter. Consult the department’s Course Description Booklet to see what will be taught in any particular quarter.

Winter 2021

ENGL 102 | English and American Literature from 1650-1789

Instructor: Professor Rachael King Scarborough

Introduction to English and American literature from 1650 to 1789. The organizing thread of this course, and the selection of texts to be studied,vary from quarter to quarter. Consult the department’s Course Description Booklet to see what will be taught in any particular quarter.

ENGL 165EM | Early Modern Worlds: Empire, Race, and Desire

Instructors: Professor Bernadette Andrea   Anita Raychawdhuri

Studies of topics not limited to a specific author, period, or literary form. Specific course titles are announced prior to the beginning of each quarter.

Spring 2021

ENGL 197 | The History and Practice of Print 

Instructor: Professor Patricia Fumerton

2019-2020

Fall 2019

ENGL 15 | Introduction to Shakespeare

Instructor: Professor James Kearney

Introduction to Shakespeare in which a number of major plays are read with close attention to language, dramatic structure, and historical context.

ENGL 15S | Seminar on Shakespeare

Instructor: Professor James Kearney

Seminar course for a select number of students enrolled in English 15 designed to enrich the large lecture experience for the motivated student. Course includes either supplementary reading or more intensive study of the English 15 reading list, as well as supplemental writing.

ENGL 128EN | Going Postal: Epistolary Narratives

Instructor: Professor Elizabeth Heckendorn Cook

“Going Postal: Letter-Narratives” looks at creative fictional works that play with the letter’s built-in paradoxes of absence and presence, private and public. We’ll orient ourselves to stories told in letters and stories told about letters, mostly from the 18th century when postal networks and the print marketplace were expanding (Austen, Laclos, Montagu, Pope, Richardson), along with a couple of 20th-c. texts (Davis, Pynchon) that update the genre’s central concerns. Along the way we’ll consider recent critical work on epistolarity and postality. (EMS; lit-in-translation)

Winter 2020

ENGL 101 | English Literature from the Medieval Period to 1650

Instructor: Professor Heather Blurton 

Introduction to English literature from the medieval period to 1650. The organizing thread of this course and the selection of texts to be studied vary from quarter to quarter. Consult the department’s Course Description Booklet to see what will be taught in any particular quarter.

ENGL 102 | English and American Literature from 1650-1789

Instructor: Professor Elizabeth Heckendorn Cook

“The World Turned Upside Down” This lecture-course on British and American literature of the long 18th century (1660s-1790s) will focus on cultural representations of authorship and authority in the years from the English Civil Wars through the American War of Independence — a century-plus of revolution and (re)creation. We’ll be reading plays, poems, prose, and fiction by Aphra Behn, Benjamin Franklin, John Milton, Alexander Pope, Jonathan Swift, and Phillis Wheatley, the first Gothic novel and the Declaration of Independence, to see how these texts map out national and transatlantic conversations. In weekly discussion sections, you’ll talk and write about the works and reflect on your own writing.

ENGL 105B | Shakespeare, Later Plays

Instructor: Professor Mark Rose

Later Shakespeare. Close study of five Shakespeare plays: Othello, King Lear, Macbeth, The Winter’s Tale, and The Tempest. Requirements include two essays, several quizzes, and a final exam.

ENGL 128ML  | The Global Renaissance on the English Stage

Instructor: Professor Bernadette Andrea

The traditional understanding of “the Renaissance” focuses on the recovery of classical Greek and Roman sources by Western European writers from the fifteenth-century through the seventeenth-century. More recently, scholars have demonstrated that Western European culture was profoundly influenced by Islamicate cultures in Italy and Spain, which flourished during the medieval era, and by the Islamic empire of the Ottomans, which was a major European, African, and Asian power during the early modern period. Even though England (along with Wales, Scotland, and Ireland) was considered “marginal” to global geo-politics in this period, English playwrights imagined a Renaissance that encompassed classical Greek and Roman sources and histories of Islamicate cultures and Islamic empires in Eurasia and the Mediterranean. Our class will attend to this Global Renaissance through the genre of the stage play, focusing on works by Christopher Marlowe and William Shakespeare. We will also examine early modern women’s engagement with the same themes using the genre of the “closet drama,” which was written to be read rather than performed in an era when women actors and playwrights were barred from the public stage. Assignments will consist of in-class writing, a mid-term paper and presentation, and a final paper or project. The following editions are required, as we will be consulting the secondary sources therein.

ENGL 165EM | Pre-Modern Post-Human

Instructors: Professor Bernadette Andrea & Giorgina Paiella

The concept of the “post-human” arose in the fields of science fiction and philosophy to describe a person or being that reconceives or otherwise goes beyond the human and is commonly associated with the current digital age. But centuries before the rise of post-humanism, the early modern period contemplated and complicated what being “human” means. This course will explore the pre-modern origins of post-humanism—a rich literary world of monsters, chimeras, machines, and “Othered” beings. How did writers in the early modern period define the human? What constituted the “Other” in the early modern period, and how were boundaries established and blurred on the grounds of race, gender, sexuality, species, and other categories and distinctions? We will take a long historical approach through key literary texts to explore the early origins of some of our most pressing current-day investments related to the post-human. Texts we will consider include The Travels of John Mandeville, Sir Walter Raleigh’s The Discovery of Guiana, William Shakespeare’s The Tempest, Margaret Cavendish’s The Blazing World, Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Assignments will consist of in-class writing, a mid-term paper and presentation, and a final paper or project.

Spring 2020

ENGL 105A | Shakespeare, Poems and Earlier Plays

Instructor: Professor Patricia Fumerton

Major poems and plays of Shakespeare, 1593-1602, including such works as the Sonnets, Hamlet, A Midsummmer Night’s Dream, Henry the Fourth, Twelfth Night.

ENGL 145 | Studies in English Renaissance Literature

Instructor: Professor Bernadette Andrea

Studies in English literature of the period from 1500 to 1660. Topics will vary from quarter to quarter.

ENGL 197 | Upper-Division Seminar

Instructor: Professor Bernadette Andrea


2018-2019

Fall 2018

ENGL 15 | Introduction to Shakespeare

Introduction to Shakespeare in which a number of major plays are read with close attention to language, dramatic structure, and historical context.

ENGL 15S | Seminar for Introduction to Shakespeare

Seminar course for a select number of students enrolled in English 15 designed to enrich the large lecture experience for the motivated student. Course includes either supplementary reading or more intensive study of the English 15 reading list, as well as supplemental writing.

ENGL 101| English Literature from the Medieval Period to 1650

Introduction to English literature from the medieval period to 1650. The organizing thread of this course and the selection of texts to be studied vary from quarter to quarter. Consult the department’s Course Description Booklet to see what will be taught in any particular quarter.

ENGL 145 | Renaissance Literature

The English Renaissance represents a late blossoming of the general cultural “rebirth” in Western Europe characterized by the recovery of Greek and Roman classics, the celebration of the multifaceted individual, and a renewed emphasis on the secular world. Alternatively labeled “the early modern period,” this era also saw the voyages of Columbus, the development of the printing press, the Protestant Reformation, and the rise of centralized monarchies. English writers expressed the vitality and volatility of the Renaissance/early modern period in an outburst of prose, poetry, and drama that spanned the end of the sixteenth century and the beginning of the seventeenth century. This quarter, we will focus on Thomas More’s Utopia, written in the wake of the first Spanish-sponsored voyages to the Americas; a wide range of writings by and about Queen Elizabeth I, who was known as both “the virgin queen” and a “female king”; and Shakespeare’s late play, The Tempest, which engages questions related to England’s emerging global imperial project. This course should interest students in literature (English and comparative), history, global studies, and women’s studies, as well as related disciplines.

2017-2018

Fall 2017

ENGL 165EM | The Politics of Voice in Early Modern Literature

What is a voice? In English, the word “voice” undergoes  a transformation from the medieval to the early modern period that implicates it in political rule and authority: by the mid 16th and early 17th century, “voice” comes to mean not just speech and communication, but also “representation or mouthpiece,” a “right to vote,” and “agency.” But what kind of speech belongs to a “mouthpiece”? What does it mean to cast a vote? And what exactly does agency imply? Moreover, who gets to have a voice? What does it feel like to use one’s voice, or to refuse to use one’s voice? And what are the differences between voice as a concept, voice as a metaphor, and voice as a physically embodied experience?

This class takes these questions as its central focus. Reading primarily early modern drama, this course will also explore classical and contemporary literature and theory in order to think through what we might call the politics of voice. Our goals will be to explore the relationship between voice and politics, to question not only the ways that politics influences the experience of voice but also the way that the experience of voice influences politics, and to imagine what possibilities voice(s) might offer us for rethinking the political.

ENGL 157 | English Renaissance Drama

A course in the English drama of the period from 1500 to 1642, excluding Shakespeare. Such writers as Marlowe, Jonson, Dekker, Heywood, and Webster will be featured.

ENGL 147WT | History of Writing Technologies

This course explores methods of textual production and circulation from Plato through the invention of printing and today’s digital moment. How have the technologies of the pen, the press, the postal system, the telegraph, and the computer affected concepts of communication? How can we best understand the ways these technologies successively interact with one another? And how have literary works responded to such developments? Readings will incorporate both historical discussions of writing practices and key secondary texts on the history of books, printing, and media. Through our readings and class discussions, we will see that contemporary conversations about the effects of new media are not specific to the digital age, and we will identify recurrent patterns in history of responses to new writing technologies.

ENGL 101 | English Literature from the Medieval Period to 1650

ENGL 15 | Introduction to Shakespeare

2016-2017

Summer 2017

ENGL 165 | Shakespeare and Tragic Experience

In this course we will study only two of Shakespeare’s tragedies — Macbeth and King Lear — but we will study them well. Our focus will be tragedy and the nature of tragic experience in Shakespearean drama.  We will also examine film adaptations of these plays (Kurosawa, Kozintsev, Bhardwaj, Brook) to see how modern directors take up the tragic in Shakespeare. Requirements: careful reading, regular attendance, active participation, a final research paper, and a final exam.

ENGL 101 | English Literature from the Medieval Period to 1650

ENGL 15 | Introduction to Shakespeare

Spring 2017

ENGL 105B | Shakespeare, Later Plays

ENGL 102 | English Literature from 1650-1789

Winter 2017

ENGL 165WH | The World of Hamlet

ENGL 114EM | Early Modern Women Writers

Between 1650 and 1780, English readers and writers were part of a new and rapidly developing print-based media ecology.  In this context, what did it mean for women to declare themselves as authors, writing and publishing their work? The texts we study (poetry, plays, prose fiction, non-fiction) will familiarize you with the literary conventions and historical contexts of the period, as well as suggesting what it means to think about a literary genealogy of women writers.

ENGL 105A | Shakespeare, Poems and Earlier Plays

ENGL 102 | English Literature from 1650-1789

Fall 2016

ENGL 15 | Introduction to Shakespeare

ENGL 169 | Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Drama

2015-2016

Fall 2015

ENGL 101 | English Literature from the Medieval Period to 1650

ENGL 102 | English and American Literature from 1650-1789

ENGL 15 | Introduction to Shakespeare

Winter 2016

ENGL 102 | English and American Literature from 1650-1789

ENGL 105A | Shakespeare, Poems and Early Plays
We will study the early works of William Shakespeare, including sonnets and four plays: Romeo and Juliet, Richard II, Much Ado about Nothing, and Hamlet. Along the way, we’ll get a taste of the many genres in which Shakespeare worked, discussing his development of characters, his use of sources, and his attentiveness to both the natural world and the supernatural realm. We will also be talking about the early modern context of Shakespeare’s work, especially in terms of printing practices and the London stage.

ENGL 105B | Shakespeare, Later Plays
Major works of Shakespeare from 1603-1613, including such plays as King Lear, Macbeth, Antony and Cleopatra, Othello, The Tempest.

ENGL 136 | Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century American Literature

ENGL 165EM | Topics in Literature: Early Modern – “Renaissance Romance”

ENGL 197 | Upper-Division Seminar: 18th-Century Lives
In the eighteenth-century, readers began encountering a variety of factual and fictional “lives” in print. With new genres such as the novel, the biography, the secret history, the roman a clef, the criminal memoir, and the letter collection, the period saw a new interest in documenting and describing individual, everyday life. This marked a shift from previous eras of literature, which had often focused more on communal myths and representative experiences than on specific histories. This course will investigate the new ways of exploring real or realistic lives in both fact and fiction.

ENGL 197 | Upper-Division Seminar: Shakespeare’s History Plays

Spring 2016

ENGL 101 | English Literature from the Medieval Period to 1650

ENGL 102 | English and American Literature from 1650-1789

ENGL 105A | Shakespeare, Poems and Early Plays
Please use the follow link to the course page: http://english105a2016s.pbworks.com/w/page/105789735/FrontPage (link is external).

Summer 2016 (A)

ENGL 105B | Shakespeare, Later Plays
Major works of Shakespeare from 1603-1613, including such plays as King Lear, Macbeth, Antony and Cleopatra, Othello, The Tempest.

Summer 2016 (B)

ENGL 101 | English Literature from the Medieval Period to 1650

ENGL 102 | English and American Literature from 1650-1789


2014-2015

Fall 2014

ENGL 105A | Shakespeare, Poems and Early Plays
We will study five representative plays from the first part of Shakespeare’s career, often in conjunction with film adaptations of the works. The five plays are The Taming of the Shrew, Richard II, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Merchant of Venice, and Hamlet. Students are expected to read each play at least twice. The mid-term and exam will expect high familiarity with the plays. Lectures will not proceed in narrative order through the individual plays but will discuss dominant themes and issues addressed by each play in its entirety. A short paper and a longer extension of that paper will allow students to hone their critical writing skills. Individual sections will require students to attend regularly and contribute to the class discussions.

In addition to the lecture and discussion sections led by TAs, there will be an Honors Section led by the professor of the course. It will be held on Thursdays, 12:30-1:20 in SH 2510 (The Early Modern Center).

ENGL 126A | Survey of British Fiction (I) – Reality and the Novel
At least since the 18th century, the novel has often been understood to offer readers of literature its most “realistic” version of modern life. This course will explore and criticize this old thesis about the novel’s realism. We will read three path-breaking and enjoyable novels that were written to investigate the nature of reality. In Joseph Andrews, Henry Fielding takes us on the road into surprising adventures that test the love of Joseph Andrews and Fanny, at the same time those adventures expose the idealism of Parson Adams to the brutal comic reality of human desires, schemes, and error. In Jane Austen’s Emma, the reader must grapple with the role in real life of fiction-making, first, in Emma’s comically misguided romantic plans for her girl friends, and second, in the author’s own surprising amorous plans for Emma. Finally, in Charles Dicken’s Oliver Twist the reader must first take in Dicken’s exposé of the brutal realities of England’s child ‘welfare’ system, but then follow the counter-movement opened by the power of Oliver Twist’s virtue and goodness to sway strangers into sympathy with Oliver’s condition, and so join to deliver him from the evil of Fagin’s dangerous London criminal gang.

While the critical tradition has wanted to see “realism” as a kind of “virtual reality” constructed out of the make believer and authorial imagination, this course will explore how novelists use language, plots, narrative and their considerable analytical skills to investigate a reality that needs no qualifying quote marks.

Requirements: occasional quizzes on the reading; 2 short 2-page papers; one in-class remix performance, one final 6-page paper

ENGL 197 | Upper-Division Seminar: Cultures of Nature in the 18th Century
Against the idea that Enlightenment science fatally divided humans from the natural world, this course traces an early-modern history of environmentalism and environmental ethics, mostly in British contexts. We will explore ethical, historical, aesthetic, scientific, ethnographic, and political questions in a variety of literary genres (a lot of poetry!) – along the way engaging critical perspectives from environmental ethicists / ecophilosophers, literary ecocritics, and post-colonial theorists.

– What did “nature” mean to Europeans in the 17th and 18th centuries, and how was it valued (using ‘value’ in both the affective and economic senses)?
– How did writers imagine human relations with non-human others, and what literary genres did they see as appropriate for exploring these? What did (does) it mean to ‘speak for’ nature?
– How did Europeans see ‘nature’ as different in the stories they set in their circum-Caribbean colonized outposts?

We’ll end by looking at how and why some 18th-c. stories about human/non-human relations have been retold by later writers.

Winter 2015

ENGL 101 | English Literature from the Medieval Period to 1650: Neighbors, Human and Inhuman
This course will investigate humans’ relationship with their neighbors (both those that are also human and those that are not) in the literature of Medieval and Early Modern England. We will approach this issue through three thematic/conceptual paradigms: Ecocriticism, Gender/Sexuality Studies, and Critical Neighbor Studies.

ENGL 102 | English and American Literature from 1650-1789

ENGL 105A | Shakespeare, Poems and Early Plays
Major poems and plays of Shakespeare, 1593-1602, including such works as the Sonnets, Hamlet, A Midsummmer Night’s Dream, Henry the Fourth, Twelfth Night.

ENGL 105B | Shakespeare, Later Plays
Major works of Shakespeare from the later part of his career including Othello, King Lear, Macbeth, The Winter’s Tale, and The Tempest.

ENGL 197 | Upper-Division Seminar: Early Modern Drama and Historiography

ENGL 197 | Upper-Division Seminar: Epistolary Literature
‘A letter is a joy of Earth,’ wrote Emily Dickinson in 1862. In the age of email and Facebook, letters are both ubiquitous and rare: we spend all day sending each other written communication, but we rarely do so in a way earlier writers would recognize. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when postal systems first became accessible to everyday letter writers’ letters were everywhere in popular culture. Almost as soon as there were newspapers, people began writing letter to their editors, and the first novels also structured themselves as series of letters between characters. This course focuses on the theme of correspondence, examining both fictional and authentic letters, and its role in works of philosophy, history, journalism, fiction, and personal letters. While commentators have often seen the letter as a particularly feminine, introspective genre, we will see it showing up across literary realms from the late 1600s to today. Along the way, we will explore a number of questions: is the letter public or private? Is it a democratic or exclusive genre? And why do letters seem to pop up at moments of intellectual, political, and technological change? By reading a variety of epistolary genres in addition to adopting the epistolary form for some of our critical responses, we will investigate the letter’s impact on concepts of literature, originality, and the self.

ENGL 197 | Upper-Division Seminar: George Eliot’s Middlemarch
This course will focus entirely on one of the greatest nineteenth-century novels, George Eliot’sMiddlemarch. Because Middlemarch was published in eight installments over the course of a year (from December 1871 to December 1872), we will read this great novel in eight 120-page installments over the course of the quarter. Like the season finale episodes of a television series, each installment ends with a climax and crisis that provokes suspense about what will happen next. Centered on the live of four families, Eliot subtitled her novel “a Study of Provincial Life” to emphasize her analytic probing of all the levels of society and many of the central preoccupations of its characters: medicine, law, business, politics and, of course, love. Students in the seminar will do oral presentation on a critical essay on Middlemarch. The seminar will climax with a research paper. Note that the seminar meets once a week on Wednesdays. Because discussion is such an important part of the seminar, I am discouraging the use of laptops or tablets. Instead, we willl all be using THE PENGUIN CLASSIC MIDDLEMARCH. Ed. by Rosemary Ashton. Please bring this edition of Middlemarch to class for the first day, you can find it on Amazon for $6.50 here:
http://www.amazon.com/Middlemarch-Penguin-Classics-George-Eliot/dp/0141439548/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1416939542&sr=1-1&keywords=middlemarch+penguin+classics (link is external)

Requirements: 1 oral presentation; one 7-8 page research paper

Spring 2015

ENGL 15 | Introduction to Shakespeare

ENGL 101 | English Literature from the Medieval Period to 1650

ENGL 102 | English and American Literature from 1650-1789

ENGL 157 | English Renaissance Drama: Early Modern Tragedy
A course in the English drama of the period from 1500 to 1642, excluding Shakespeare. Such writers as Marlowe, Jonson, Dekker, Heywood, and Webster will be featured.

ENGL 169 | Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Drama: Performing the Restoration Playhouse
When the English monarchy was restored in 1660, English theaters were re-opened as well, but with big changes to the playhouses, the plays, the personnel, and the audiences from when they’d been shut down 11 years before. King and courtiers were enthusiastic patrons of the theater, especially its comedies, which drew on traditional roles including fops and fallen women, cuckolds and witty couples, curious virgins and male and female rakes. In this class, we will read, discuss, and write about five Restoration comedies and their contexts, along with current scholarship on them. Our ambitious final project will be to recreate the atmosphere of a Restoration playhouse during an afternoon performance.

ENGL 197 | Upper-Division Seminar: Premodern Literature and Early Media
Course Description: We encounter most medieval and early modern literature in the form of carefully edited, mass-produced printed books, often with rigorously researched footnotes and explanatory introductions. This format is in striking contrast to the actual ways in which these texts are preserved: on animal skin or handmade rag paper, and meticulously and laboriously laid out, lettered, and illustrated. This course will explore how premodern literature is intertwined with, and comments upon, the material realities of book creation.

We will read literary works from three enduringly significant codices: the Anglo-Saxon Exeter Book, the Ellesmere manuscript of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, and the First Folio of Shakespeare’s Complete Works. Throughout, we will pay attention to both the material books and the literature they contain, asking questions about how (and whether) the two facets are intertwined; how (and if) this literature breaks with the media which conveys it; and how the increasingly digital-born literature of our own day is like and unlike literature which appears in these earlier formats.

We’ll supplement this study with briefer looks at other important literary artifacts, such as the early medieval Lindisfarne Gospels and seventeenth-century broadside ballads. We will also visit UCSB Library’s Special Collections to view real premodern books; try our hands at medieval lettering and illumination; and visit UCSB’s Papermaking Studio to make our own rag paper. Your final project will involve close study of how a piece of literature of your choice – from ancient Sumerian epic to contemporary video game narrative, and anything in between – informs and is informed by its material form.

Summer 2015 (A)

ENGL 15 | Introduction to Shakespeare

ENGL 101 | English Literature from the Medieval Period to 1650
Students will become familiar with the poetry, prose, and drama of the English medieval and early modern periods, which occurred roughly between the years 500-1650CE. We will break this large period down into its four constituent phases of English literary history: the Anglo-Saxon period, the High Middle Ages or Anglo-Norman period, the Late Middle Ages, and the English Renaissance or early modern period. Together, we will read works from the major literary movements, genres, and authors in each of these four periods.

Our reading  will situate our selected texts in their historical contexts, although our discussions will not be limited by only historical questions. The readings selected converge around issues of sovereignty, the individual, the body politic and the political assemblage, group experience, and nation building, and this course will provide students with an appreciation and understanding of how these periods imagined the individual and the group at different scales of experience, through different modes of interaction, and through changing historical trends in literary representation. Accordingly, throughout the quarter, we will consider how these texts engage with their historical contexts and with our own contemporary concerns, paying particular attention to issues of the individual, the Other, group experience, attachment and detachment, and their ties to nation building. Likewise, we will explore and develop our own attachments to history and think about how contemporary desires and anxieties shape historical narratives – both in the past and today.

Course requirements: weekly forum posts, close reading paper, term paper, and final exam.

Selected texts:

Beowulf
– Selections from Marie de France’s Lais
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
– Geoffrey Chaucer’s Parliament of Fowls
Second Shepherd’s Play
– Thomas More’s Utopia
– Christopher Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta
– Sonnets by Thomas Wyatt, Edmund Spenser, Phillip Sydney, Mary Wroth, and William Shakespeare
– Metaphysical and devotional poetry by Mary Sydney, John Donne, Andrew Marvell, and George Herbert
– Ballads on the execution of Charles I

Summer 2015 (B)

ENGL 15 | Introduction to Shakespeare

ENGL 101 | English Literature from the Medieval Period to 1650

ENGL 102 | English and American Literature from 1650-1789

ENGL 105B | Shakespeare, Later Plays
Major works of Shakespeare from 1603-1613, including such plays as King Lear, Macbeth, Antony and Cleopatra, Othello, The Tempest.


2013-2014

Fall 2013

ENGL 15 | Introduction to Shakespeare
In this course we will study five representative plays from Shakespeare’s works: Richard III, Macbeth, Hamlet, The Merchant of Venice, and Much Ado About Nothing. Requirements: careful reading, regular attendance at lecture, attendance at film screenings, two analytical papers, and three exams.

ENGL 101 | English Literature from the Medieval Period to 1650

ENGL 169 | Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Drama: Restoration Comedy: Fops, Punks, Rakes & Wives
After executing the king in 1649, England’s Puritan government shut down London’s public theaters. When the monarchy was restored in 1660, the theaters were restored as well, with big changes in the playhouses, the plays, the theater personnel, and the audiences. King and courtiers were enthusiastic patrons of the theater, especially its comedies, which drew on traditional characters including fops and fallen women, cuckolds and witty couples, curious virgins and male and female rakes. In this class, we will read, discuss, and write about five Restoration comedies and their contexts, along with current scholarship on them. Our ambitious final project will be to recreate the atmosphere of a Restoration performance.

Winter 2014

ENGL 102 | English and American Literature from 1650 to 1789

ENGL 105A | Shakespeare: Poems and Early Plays
Close study of five important plays from the first decade of Shakespeare’s career: Richard III, The Merchant of Venice, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Romeo and Juliet, and Hamlet. We will study these plays with attention both to historical context and to the way the plays have worked as dramas at various times in the last four hundred years. Film clips will be used as illustrations. Written work will include quizzes on each play, two papers, and a final exam.

ENGL 162 | Milton

Spring 2014

ENGL 102 | English and American Literature from 1650 to 1789

ENGL 128EN | Going Postal: Letter-Narratives
“Going Postal: Letter-Narratives” examines fictional uses of the letter form, with its built-in paradoxes of absence and presence, private and public, and engages recent critical work on epistolarity and postality. We’ll orient ourselves to stories told in letters and stories told about letters through eighteenth-century examples of novels and poems, including works by Austen, Laclos, Montagu, Pope, and Richardson, then move ahead to Hoffmann, James, and Pynchon.

ENGL 165EM | Political and Ecological Invention in Early America
How did America become what it is? Americans, who they are? How did the colonial project – which included the idea of moral purification, the economic development of a new natural world, and encounter with native peoples – reshape the colonizers? We will explore these questions by reading a wide range of texts from the first 3 centuries of settlement. How does John Winthrop’s sermon envision America as “a city on the hill” that would become an exemplary beacon of light to a fallen world? To explore the hidden costs of this vision, we will read some of the tolerant, pro-Indian writing of the founder of Rhode Island, Roger Williams, as well as tales of early settlement by Nathanial Hawthorne. (“Young Goodman Brown”) To explore early American relationships to nature, we’ll read selected natural history writing from William Byrd (Secret History of the Line), J. Hector St. John de Crèvecœur (Letters from an American Farmer), and John James Audubon (Ornithological Biography and Birds of America), attending to the tensions between utility, beauty, and ecology, on the one hand, and the role of the individual, on the other. The writing of two American founders – Benjamin Franklin (Autobiography) and Thomas Jefferson (Notes on the State of Virginia and the Declaration of Independence) – will allow us to take account of the difference between American and European practice of politics and science. Finally, we will turn to three nineteenth-century authors of the “American Renaissance.” Each offers an imaginative exploration of the tensions between humans and nature: Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Nature, Henry David Thoreau’s Walden, and Herman Melville’s “Billy Budd” and “Benito Cereno.” Facing increasing industrialization, environmental degradation, and the ongoing disenfranchisement of Native Americans and African slaves, each writer developed a distinctive critique and updating of America’s heroic project: to invent itself in a new world.

Summer 2014 (A)

ENGL 102 | English and American Literature from 1650 to 1789

Summer 2014 (B)

ENGL 15 | Introduction to Shakespeare

ENGL 101 | English Literature from the Medieval Period to 1650

ENGL 105B | Shakespeare: Later Plays
Major works of Shakespeare from 1603-1613, including such plays as King Lear, Macbeth, Antony and Cleopatra, Othello, The Tempest.

ENGL 162 | Milton


2012-2013

Fall 2012

ENGL 15 | Introduction to Shakespeare

ENGL 101 | English Literature from the Medieval Period to 1650

Winter 2013

ENGL 101 | English Literature from the Medieval Period to 1650

ENGL 102 | English and American Literature from 1650 to 1789
This lecture on British and American literature of the long 18th century (1660s-1790s) will examine representations of authority and authorship in the politically and culturally lively period that extends from the English Civil Wars through the American War of Independence — a century-plus of revolutions. We’ll be reading works by Aphra Behn, Benjamin Franklin, John Milton, Alexander Pope, Jonathan Swift, and Phillis Wheatley, as well as the first Gothic novel, to see how these texts map out some of the period’s national and transatlantic conversations.

ENGL 105A | Shakespeare: Poems and Early Plays

ENGL 157 | English Renaissance Drama: Renaissance Comedy

ENGL 165MT | Topics in Literature: Material Text in Early Modern England
When we pick up a piece of literature, we tend not to think about the complex material conditions through which that literature becomes available to us. These conditions, however, can have a significant impact on the way we understand the literature of any given period. This course will examine those conditions for the early modern period. In doing so, we will discuss manuscript circulation of literature, print and the commercial book market, conditions of authorship, and the various transformations literature undergoes before it becomes available to us as modern readers and students.

ENGL 197 | Upper-Division Seminar: Broadside Ballads: Popular Culture in Early Modern England
This course will focus on cultural and historical contexts of broadside ballads in early modern England (1600-1700). Broadside Ballads were a very popular form of entertainment, printed on single sheets of paper with illustrations and tunes. We will discuss the development of this form, looking at the texts as art, music, and poetry. Most of our material will come from the English Broadside Ballad Archive.

Spring 2013

ENGL 65GL | Topics in Literature: The Good Life
Good friends, good food, good conversation: these are some of the things that make up “The Good Life” in the work of many poets in the mid-seventeenth century, including several living through the English civil wars. This course will explore the ideal of the “good life” as developed by English poets such as Ben Jonson, Robert Herrick, Richard Lovelace, Andrew Marvell, and more. It will also explore the ways writers used the ideal of the good life to cope with bad times and contest the political enemies during the English civil war.

ENGL 105B | Shakespeare: Later Plays
In this course we will study five plays from the second half of Shakespeare’s career: Coriolanus, Antony & Cleopatra, Macbeth, King Lear, and The Tempest.

ENGL 165EM | Topics in Literature: Cities and Literature: London and Boston in the 17th and 18th centuries
This course will investigate the relationship between, on the one hand, historically distinct forms of literature, and, on the other, the production of space into the lived places between the 16th and 18th century. Among our chief lines of investigation will be: How do distinct spaces and performances of literature (whether aural and silent) mediate each other? Can we understand literature, whether written or spoken, as vibrant matter that thrives within the ecological niche provided by the early modern city and town? Just how are the distinct genres and forms of literature (drama, poetry, non-fiction narrative, novel) shaped to urban spaces so they can proliferate as private and public entertainment? What sort of audience practices and experiences do they afford? Our course readings will range from two popular non-Shakespearean city comedies (Ben Jonson’s Epicene {1600} and Thomas Dekker’s The Shoe-maker’s Holiday {1609}); Defoe’s account of London’s response a health catastrophe in Journal of the Plague Year {1722}; the literary work needed to envision and execute the plantation of New England by the first Puritans (John Winthrop, Increase Mather, Ann Bradstreet, Ann Hutchinson), as well as Hawthorne’s classic account of the costs and contradictions of that project in the The Scarlett Letter {1850}. We will draw freely on maps and poetry to deepen our understanding of urban place and literary tropes. Course assignments include one short 2-page essay (a close reading of a literary text), a “media remix performance” at the end of the term, and a final paper related to that performance. Note: This course will be co-taught with Renaissance scholar and EMC Fellow, Christopher Foley.

ENGL 197 | Upper-Division Seminar: Literature of Boston, 1630-1850
This course will investigate the relationship between, on the one hand, historically distinct forms of literature, and, on the other, the production of space into the lived places (streets, wharfs, buildings) of Boston between the founding and 1850. Among our chief lines of investigation will be: How do distinct spaces the aural and silent performances of literature mediate one another? Can we understand literature, whether written or spoken, as vibrant matter that thrives within the ecological niche provided by the early modern town, thriving 18th century port, or great the 19th century city? What sort of audience practices and experiences does this literature afford? Our course readings will range from the literature of the founding of New England (John Winthrop, Increase Mather, Ann Bradstreet), to the contradictions between the religious and economic freedom the Puritans sought and the intolerance and punishments that they sometimes inflicted (Ann Hutchinson, Mary Dyer, Roger Williams and the Native American critique of the new settlements). The Native American rejection of the English settler invaders becomes violent with King Philips War, which kills one in every 10 English settler (Mary Rowlandson’s captivity narrative). We will take account of Boston’s emergence in the 18th century as a town of wealth, power and self-confidence, by studying Samuel Adam’s written and oral leadership of Boston’s vigorous opposition to British colonial rule, which culminates in the American Revolution. Finally the second part of the course will focus upon two classic rewritings of Boston as puritan settlement {Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlett Letter {1850}) and the Boston suburb of Concord as a place of nature (Henry David Thoreau’s Walden {1854}). Course assignments include quizzes on reading, one seminar presentation (with 2-page essay), and a final 7-page research paper.

Summer 2013 (A)

ENLG 15 | Introduction to Shakespeare

ENGL 102 | English and American Literature from 1650 to 1789

ENGL 105A | Shakespeare: Early Poems and Plays
This course will explore a selection of plays that make up the first decade of William Shakespeare’s career, roughly from 1591-1601, under the reign of Queen Elizabeth I. In doing so, we will sample a range of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men’s work across genres – considering histories, tragedies, and comedies – and complicating the parameters of these genres as we progress. Likewise, we will experience their work across media, not only reading each play, but viewing modern – and in most cases, experimental – film adaptations. Such an approach will allow us to pay close attention not only to the literariness of Shakespeare’s work, but also to how performance itself offers an interpretation that affects our understanding of each play.

In our analysis of the selected plays, we will work closely with Shakespeare’s language in order to understand its literal and historical meaning on the one hand, but also its literary and artistic meaning on the other. By closely reading each play and becoming evermore comfortable with early modern English, we will move from basic understanding to analytic, interpretative, and theoretical thinking.

Discussions will explore Shakespeare’s treatment of English history; situate his work within the artistic, social, and economic realities of late sixteenth-century London; and understand his characters through the social, political, and psychological tensions within each play. Some questions that will guide our discussions and interpretations include: how can history be an expression of collective trauma, memory, and mourning? How does the world of our earliest attachments influence the social bonds we create and sever? How is identity performed in various social contexts? How do performances influence our understanding of the plays? And lastly, how is Shakespeare re-adapted, re-imagined, and recycled in our contemporary world?

Plays (all Pelican Shakespeare editions):

Richard III
Romeo and Juliet
The Merchant of Venice
Hamlet
Twelfth Night

Films:

Richard III (1995, starring Ian McKellen)
Romeo + Juliet (1996, starring Leonardo DiCaprio)
Merchant of Venice (2004, starring Al Pacino)
Hamlet (2000, starring Ethan Hawke)
Twelfth Night (1996, starring Helena Bonham Carter)

ENGL 162 | Milton
How does a poet “justify the ways of God to man,” and claim to know the origins of the universe? How does a major political prose writer rise above politics to consider questions of theology, cosmology, and philosophy in verse? To answer these questions, we will study the poetry and prose of John Milton, who wrote one of the greatest poems of the English language while blind and jailed. By reading his major poems and prose works, we will also discover why he continues to be important to us, as readers, writers, and citizens of the modern world.

Summer 2013 (B)

ENGL 15 | Introduction to Shakespeare

ENGl 101 | English Literature from the Medieval Period to 1650


2011-2012

Fall 2011

ENGL 15 | Introduction to Shakespeare

ENGL 101 | English Literature from the Medieval Period to 1650

ENGL 105A | Shakespeare: Poems and Early Plays

ENGL 169 | Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Drama
Restoration and 18th-c. Comedy: Fops, Punks, Rakes, and Wives

When London theatres reopened in 1660 after an 18-year Puritan suppression of the stage, there was great excitement about what was new – including actresses and high-tech playhouses. This course asks you to read, discuss, perform, and write about late 17th- and (a couple) 18th-c. comedies, with some attention also to contemporary political and social spectacles off-stage.

ENGL 197 | Upper-Division Seminar: Early Modern Drama and Historiography

Winter 2012

ENGL 102 | English and American Literature from 1650-1789

ENGL 105B | Shakespeare: Later Plays

ENGL 165EB | Early Modern Media

ENGL 165PC | Popular and Elite Culture in Early Modern England

Spring 2012

ENGL 15 | Introduction to Shakespeare

ENGL 101 | English Literature from the Medieval Period to 1650
In this course, we will become familiar with the poetry, prose, and drama of the English medieval and early modern periods, which occurred roughly between the years 500-1650CE. We will break this large period down into its four constituent phases of English literary history, which include Anglo Saxon, Anglo-Norman or high medieval, late medieval, and early modern literature, sampling some of the most well known works, authors, and genres from each.

Throughout the quarter, we will consider how these texts engage with their contemporary moments, paying particular attention to issues of sovereignty, the body politic, the individual, group experience, and nation building. We will even consider how these texts might help us better understand our own contemporary moment, as well.

Texts include Beowulf, the Lais of Marie de France, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Geoffrey Chaucer’s Parliament of Fowls, Second Shepherd’s Play, Thomas More’s Utopia, Christopher Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta, William Shakespeare’s The Tempest, a selection of seventeenth-century poetry, and early modern ballads.

ENGL 157 | English Renaissance Drama
A course in the English drama of the period from 1500 to 1642, excluding Shakespeare. Such writers as Marlowe, Jonson, Dekker, Heywood, and Webster will be featured.

ENGL 162 | Milton


2010-2011

Fall 2010

ENGL 15 | Introduction to Shakespeare
We will study five representative plays of Shakespeare’s career in conjunction with film adaptations of the works. The five plays are The Taming of the Shrew, Richard II, The Merchant of Venice, Hamlet, and The Winter’s Tale. Class time includes film screenings and post-screening discussions. Requirements: a quiz after each play studied (the best 4 out of 5 scores will be counted), a final exam, two written papers, and i-clicker participation (an i-clicker is required on the first day of class).

Note: There is also a required film screening scheduled for R 500-650 in GIRV 1004.

ENGL 101 | English Literature from the Medieval Period to 1650

ENGL 105A | Shakespeare: Poems and Early Plays

ENGL 114EM | Women and Literature: Early Modern Women Writers
This course will explore the idea and history of “women’s writing” in relation to the early modern print market and notions about publicity, domesticity, professionalism, and educational privilege that are still with us today. We will read poetry, fiction, prose, drama, and letters by 17th- and 18th-c. writers, including Astell, Behn, Finch, Montagu, Philips, and Scott, along with current scholarship on these writers and their contexts.

Individual seminars will focus on representations of the female body and codes of femininity; female communities and utopias; satiric representations of women; debates on female education and authorship; the “consumer revolution”; and literary canon formation (who decides what is worth reading?) – then and now.

This is an Early Modern Studies Specialization course.

ENGL 197 | Upper-Division Seminar: Jane Austen and the Rise of the Novel
Jane Austen has long been the most popular novelist in the English language. Since her novels were published in the early nineteenth century, they have never gone out of print. Her novels helped to establish the novel form as the definitive way the 19th century represented social reality so that it could be the locus of both intellectual analysis and narrative enjoyment. To develop this new technology of narrative, Austen drew on novelistic genres she inherited from the 18th century: most notably the gothic novel, the vogue for the sentimental, and the novel of conduct and courtship. By recasting these genres, through the use of a style of telling named “free indirect discourse,” Austen developed a method of narrative that allowed the reader to enter the mind of the main character, without becoming subject to the biases of viewpoint made explicit in the novel of letters or the first person memoir. What resulted is a style of novel writing that manages, through the power of her writing, to be both authoritative and light in its touch. To explore Austen’s innovative novel writing we will read Sense and Sensibility, her recasting of the sentimental novel, Emma, a canny exploration of the pleasures and dangers of plotting the lives of others; and Persuasion, her last and in many ways her most mature, scathing and romantic novel.

ENGL 197 | Upper-Division Seminar: Ecstatic Milton
We study and discuss Milton’s great epic poem, Paradise Lost, with special attention to Milton’s representation of emotion, the heart, the “four Affections,” and ecstasy in all its early modern forms, from madness, to sexual transport, to sacred poetic rapture. Since this is an upper-division seminar, all students are expected to contribute to class discussion. In-class writing, a short and a long paper, and a final.

Winter 2011

ENGL 102 | English and American Literature from 1650 to 1789

ENGL 105B | Shakespeare: Later Plays

ENGL 157 | English Renaissance Drama: Early Modern Tragedy
This class asks about the “early modern-ness” of early modern tragedy. What, if anything, is uniquely, characteristically, or exclusively early modern about the tragedies that were staged between 1550 and 1650? To answer such a question, we will begin with a provisional definition of the tragic – as “spirit,” say, or as genre – and we’ll subsequently ask about the ways that a selection of early modern tragedies either swerve from or embody this definition. Along the way, we might recognize not only the historical specificity of early modern tragedy, but also the limits of the provisional definition with which we began.

ENGL 197 | Upper-Division Seminar: Nature and Value in Long-Eighteenth-Century British Culture
Against the idea that “the Enlightenment” necessarily entailed the “death of Nature,” this course asks whether we can construct instead an early modern environmentalist history. What did “nature” mean in the 18th century, and how was it valued? Did people imagine the possibility of non-human agency in the early modern period? Who was seen as entitled to “speak for” natural entities? How did Europeans and others read nature in colonial contexts?

Questions like these – ethical, historical, aesthetic, scientific, ethnographic, and political – will be explored in texts written in a variety of genres by Swift and Stedman, Pope and Collier, Erasmus Darwin (Charles’s father), Leapor, Goldsmith, Cowper … and Italo Calvino, among others. Our discussion of value will be developed in relation to environmental ethics.

ENGL 197 | Upper-Division Seminar: Popular Print, Ballad Culture, and the Roxburghe Archive

Spring 2011

ENGL 15 | Introduction to Shakespeare
NOTE: There is also a required film screening scheduled for W 500-750 in BRDA 1610.

In this course we will study five representative plays from Shakespeare’s works: Richard III, Macbeth, Othello, The Merchant of Venice, and The Tempest. Requirements: careful reading, regular attendance at lecture, attendance at film screenings, two analytical papers, and three exams.

ENGL 101 | English Literature from the Medieval Period to 1650

ENGL 102 | English and American Literature from 1650-1789

ENGL 165EM | Topics in Literature: What Else is Pastoral?
Of all the different ways of writing, pastoral may be the most versatile–and most misunderstood and overlooked. Pastoral can be lighthearted fun (as in Shakespeare’s As You Like It, which we will be reading), scathing, subversive, and dangerous political allegory (as it was for poet Edmund Spenser), astonishingly beautiful nature writing (such as the description of Eden in Milton’s Paradise Lost), or any number of other forms. In fact, pastoral can take nearly any shape: a play, a lyric poem, an epic, a novel, or even a film. In this course we will be tracing this remarkable mode of writing from its earliest beginnings to its height in the Renaissance and 18th century, while also considering how it is still very much at work in the world today.

ENGL 197 | Upper-Division Seminar: Reading Early Modern London

Summer 2011 (A)

ENGL 101 | English Literature from the Medieval Period to 1650

ENGL 102 | English and American Literature from 1650 to 1789

ENGL 105A | Shakespeare: Poems and Early Plays
Can be used for the Early Modern specialization. If this course is used to fulfill the Shakespeare requirement for English major, it cannot also be used as an upper-division English elective. One of the distinctive English arts is that of change ringing (example at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bix3S52VHsE&feature=related (link is external)). In this course, we will study five plays from the earlier half of Shakespeare’s corpus, with an eye to how he rang changes on dramatic, linguistic and cultural conventions as he wrote.

Together with lecture and discussion groups, each play will include a day of performance workshop, where we enact the texts (reading aloud from the book) and imagine ways to block and costume scenes. Requirements include attendance and participation, a midterm and final exam, a paper and a final project based on the performance workshops.

Required texts are the Pelican editions of Much Ado About Nothing, Romeo and Juliet, Merchant of Venice and Hamlet, and the Signet edition of Richard III.

ENGL 128PH | Literary Genres: Rise of the Novel
In 1750, Samuel Johnson set out to describe a genre of writing then new that was being eagerly read in the polite society of his day. He described this genre as filled by works which “exhibit life in its true state, diversified only by accidents that daily happen in the world, and influenced by passions and qualities which are really to be found in conversing with mankind.” Johnson, however, was also wary of this new genre, and its ability “to take possession of the memory by a kind of violence, and produce effects almost without the intervention of the will.” Johnson, of course, was talking about the novel. What is the novel? What distinguishes it from other forms of literature? When did it arise and why? And why did Johnson see it as potentially so dangerous?

In an attempt to answer these questions, we will read several English novels considered by many critics to be representative of the genre in its infancy. These include novels and novellas by Daniel Defoe, Aphra Behn, Henry Fielding, Eliza Haywood, Samuel Richardson, and of course Jane Austen. In addition, we will read and discuss several prominent theories about the genre from the twentieth century and contemporary to the rise of the novel. In our discussions and papers, we will evaluate these theories and develop some of our own. We will pay particular attention to issues of gender in early novels and to how the experience of women is represented. By the end of the course, students will have learned in outline several prominent theories of the novel’s rise and developed the tools and resources to engage (i.e. agree and disagree) with these theories critically and thoughtfully.

In addition to completing all the assigned reading and participating in our in class discussions, students will write two longer papers as well as twice weekly responses to that week’s reading. The longer papers will be 1000 to 1500 words in length. Prompts will be provided, though students are also encouraged to develop their own paper topics. Students will also be responsible for writing two responses per week of 250-500 words in length. Students will post these responses online at the course website in Gaucho Space. Although these responses will not be as formal as the papers, I do expect them to engage thoughtfully with the texts and with the issues raised in class. I will provide questions every week to guide student responses and weekly feedback to each student.

ENGL 197 | Upper-Division Seminar: Broadside Ballads: Popular Culture in Early Modern England

Summer 2011 (B)

ENGL 15 | Introduction to Shakespeare

ENGL 105B | Shakespeare: Later Plays

ENGL 162 | Milton


2009-2010

Fall 2009

ENGL 105A | Shakespeare: Poems and Early Plays

ENGL 128SS | Literary Genres: The Sonnet and the Sonneteer

Winter 2010

ENGL 165PC | Popular and Elite Culture in Early Modern England
This course will investigate the relationship between popular and elite literature in the early modern period. We will begin with Tottel’s Miscellany and A Handful of Pleasant Delights, two poetic miscellanies with much in common stylistically, yet marketed in very different ways. We will then look works such as Sidney’s Defense of Poetry, the Harvey/Spenser letters, and other critical works on poetry of the time. We will then contrast the works of Spenser and Sidney and Ben Jonson, with those of popular writers like William Elderton, Thomas Deloney, and Martin Parker. The course will end with Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale, a play that draws on both elite literary works, such as masques, and popular culture, such as ballads. This play will provide a way to tie the course together through investigating the distinctions, commonalities, and ambiguities in the relationship between elite and popular culture.


2008-2009

Fall 2008

ENGL 10 EM | Introduction to Literary Study

ENGL 10EM | Introduction to Literary Study

ENGL 105A | Shakespeare: Poems and Early Plays
We will study five representative plays from the first part of Shakespeare’s career, often in conjunction with film adaptations of the works. The five plays are The Taming of the Shrew, Richard II, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Merchant of Venice, and Hamlet. Students are expected to read each play at least twice. The mid-term and exam will expect high familiarity with the plays. Lectures will not proceed in narrative order through the individual plays but will discuss dominant themes and issues addressed by each play in its entirety. A short paper and a longer paper will allow students to hone their critical writing skills. Individual sections will require students to attend regularly and contribute to the class discussions.

ENGL 197 | Upper-Division Seminar: Reading and Transformation

Winter 2009

ENGL 15 | Introduction to Shakespeare
Close study of five representative plays: The Merchant of Venice, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Hamlet, Othello, The Tempest. We will study these plays with attention both to historical context and to the way the plays have worked as dramas at various times in the last four hundred years. Film and audio clips will be used as illustrations. The course is suitable both for majors and for non-majors interested in Shakespeare. Written work: quizzes on each play, two papers, and a final exam.

ENGL 105A | Shakespeare: Poems and Early Plays
In this course we will study six plays from the first half of Shakespeare’s career: Titus Andronicus, Hamlet, 1 Henry IV, Henry V, The Merchant of Venice, and As You Like It. We will also consider a selection of Shakespeare’s sonnets and view film versions of some of the plays. Requirements: careful reading, regular attendance, active participation, two analytical papers, and a final exam.

Spring 2009

ENGL 10EM | Introduction to Literary Study
Examining the poetry, prose, and drama of the Early Modern Period in England, this course will explore the 16th and 17th century understanding of nature, a period in which pastoral literature flourished. As English writers increasingly set their works in rural landscapes, did their understanding of nature evolve? More fundamentally, what did “nature” mean to Early Modern England? Did it mean any one thing? Was it simply a convenient site onto which a culture could project idealized and lost values that contrasted with the vices and insecurities of early modern life? Or did it serve other cultural fantasies? A source of lost origins: the garden as “The Garden of Eden” for example? In the desire to return more fundamentally to this sense of nature, which their literature suggests, was there any way of getting back to nature? Finally, as science advanced in the early seventeenth century, mapping out a project for knowing nature, what new meanings did nature acquire?

ENGL 105B | Shakespeare’s Later Plays
In this course we will study six plays from the second half of Shakespeare’s career: Othello, Antony & Cleopatra, Macbeth, King Lear, The Winter’s Tale, and The Tempest. Requirements: careful reading, regular attendance, active participation, two analytical papers, a midterm exam, and a final exam.

ENGL 128 | Literary Genres: Going Postal: Epistolary Narrative
The course will examine “epistolarity,” the paradoxes built into the letter-form itself, as well as the (re)appearance of the letter-novel at particular historical moments. Our collective readings emphasize eighteenth- and later twentieth-century novels, including works by Austen, Goethe, Hoffmann, James, Choderlos de Laclos, Lydia Davis, Pynchon.

ENGL 151ES | Studies in British Writers: Edmund Spenser
We will read the poetry of Edmund Spenser, including selections from The Shepherd’s Calendar, The Faerie Queene, and Amoretti. This course will focus especially on the role of – and attitudes about – women in Spenser’s poems.

ENGL 197 | Upper-Division Seminar: Alexander Pope’s Poetics of Rapture and Satire
Pope is the greatest English poet of the 18th century and is primarily known as a satirist. But he also wrote several poems about women in love, including Eloisa to Abelard, and female personification and the female Muses of poetry figure prominently in nearly all of his poetry. In this course we study and discuss Pope’s poetic career from the early love poems, The Pastorals, to his final satiric achievement, The Dunciad, with special attention to Pope’s representation of the feminine.


2007-2008

Fall 2007

ENGL 10EM | Introduction to Literary Study: Early Modern
Acquaints students with purposes and tools of literary interpretation. Introduces techniques and vocabulary of analytic discussion and critical writing. Emphasis is on early modern studies. The class also introduces students to the Early Modern Center located within the English Department.

ENGL 10EM | Introduction to Literature: Memory and Early Modern Studies
The purpose of English 10, or Introduction to Literary Study, is to familiarize you with the tools of literary interpretation, including the techniques and vocabulary of analytic discussion and critical writing, and to help you develop close reading skills. While cultivating these techniques, the class will focus equally on poetry, drama, and prose fiction. The theme of this particular course is Memory; we will focus on the many implications and meanings of memory and its relationship to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. We will examine mainly canonical, or classical, texts from the Renaissance and Neoclassical periods, and look forward to the Romantic period: as we do so, we’ll consider the differences between remembering people, remembering places, and remembering texts. How can a writer “remember” other writers’ works? Why is the concept of memory so important to us? In addition to exploring these works in their historical contexts, we will also examine issues of gender, sexuality, race, empire, and class. Texts will include Austen’s Northanger Abbey, Behn’s The Rover, the Bedford Glossary of Literary Terms, and a course reader. This course is recommended for students interested in doing a future Early Modern specialization. English 10 is required for all English majors and recommended for English minors. This course satisfies the last half of the GE Area A requirement.

ENGL 101 | English Literature from the Medieval Period to 1650
In this course, we’ll be making the acquaintance of English literature of the middle ages and the Renaissance. Among the authors we’ll read will be Geoffrey Chaucer, Edmund Spenser, Christopher Marlowe, William Shakespeare, and John Donne. The course will require timely reading, regular attendance, active participation, two 5-to-6 page papers, and a comprehensive final examination.

ENGL 102 | English and American Literature from 1650 to 1789
An introduction to English and American literature from 1650 to 1789. The organizing thread of this course, and the selection of texts to be studied, vary from quarter to quarter.

ENGL 105B | Shakespeare: Later Plays
In this course we will study six plays from the second half of Shakespeare’s career: Othello, Antony & Cleopatra, Macbeth, King Lear, The Winter’s Tale, and The Tempest. Requirements: careful reading, regular attendance, active participation, two analytical papers, a midterm exam, and a final exam. Can be used for the Early Modern specialization. If this course is used to fulfill the Shakespeare requirement for English major, it cannot also be used as an upper-division English elective.

ENGL 197 | Upper-Division Seminar: Writing Nature in the Eighteenth Century
What do we mean by “nature”? Do natural entities have rights? Are there non-human forms of agency? Who might “speak for” (or represent) Nature, and how? What is “environmental literature,” and where did it come from? Questions like these – ethical, historical, literary, scientific, and political – emerged in the early modern period, when new ways of thinking about the natural world developed that still shape environmental debates today.

Starting with the story of the Golden Spruce, a 250-year-old genetically unique specimen destroyed in 1997 by an ex-logger fighting against clearcutting, we trace the modern conflict of preservation and productivity in 18th-c. novels, poetry, satire, and travel and scientific writing by Swift, Pope, Leapor, Collier, Goldsmith, Cowper, and Goethe, among others.

This course counts toward the English Department’s “Early Modern Studies” and “Literature and the Environment” emphases.

ENGL 197 | Upper-Division Seminar: Brave New Worlds: Utopianism in Early Modern England
In this course we will explore utopian thought in the imaginative writing of early modern England. After a brief survey of relevant classical and medieval texts at the beginning of the term, we will read More’s Utopia, Shakespeare’s The Tempest, Bacon’s New Atlantis, Neville’s Isle of Pines, and Cavendish’s The Blazing World. Our study of these texts will be driven by questions concerning the rise of science and the desire to master nature; the economics of labor; the rationalization of the state; and the impact of the discovery of the new world on the cultural imagination of Europe.

This course cannot be repeated and is limited to upper-division English majors only.

Winter 2008

ENGL 10EM | Introduction to Literary Study: Early Modern
Acquaints students with purposes and tools of literary interpretation. Introduces techniques and vocabulary of analytic discussion and critical writing. Emphasis is on early modern studies. The class also introduces students to the Early Modern Center located within the English Department. Materials will focus on the EMC annual theme for 2007-2008, Science and Technology. Readings will include an assortment of poetry, nonfiction essays, short prose and two plays, Dr. Faustus and The Alchemist. Work for the course consists of two essays and a final exam, in addition to other in-class assignments.

ENGL 101 | English Literature from the Medieval Period to 1650
This course is an introduction to the first eight hundred years of English literature from the Anglo Saxon beginnings to the 1645 edition of Milton’s Poems. After surveying some very early works, such as the Dream of the Rood, we will read Beowulf, one of the greatest epics in the English language, in Seamus Heaney’s exquisite translation. From there we will move to excerpts from Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales before concluding in the Renaissance with Milton and Marvell. Throughout the quarter we will be considering just what these texts can tell us about the cultures that produced them, especially their attitudes toward gender, politics, religion, and the environment. What, for example, might “The Wife of Bath’s Tale” tell us about the position of women in Chaucer’s England? Similarly, does the Dream of the Rood, which is–quite remarkably–told in part from the perspective of a tree, tell us anything about how nature and the natural world was imagined?

ENGL 102 | English and American Literature from 1650 to 1789
This class on British and American literature of the “long 18th century”(1660s-1790s) will examine a range of anglophone representations of authority and authorship in the politically and culturally lively period that extends from the English Civil Wars through the American War of Independence. We’ll be reading works by Aphra Behn, Benjamin Franklin, John Milton, and Alexander Pope, as well as the first Gothic novel, to see how these texts map out some of the period’s national and transatlantic conversations.

ENGL 105A | Shakespeare: Poems and Early Plays
We will study five representative plays from the first part of Shakespeare’s career, often in conjunction with film adaptations of the works. The five plays are The Taming of the Shrew, Richard II, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Merchant of Venice, and Hamlet. Students are expected to read each play at least twice. The mid-term and exam will expect high familiarity with the plays. Lectures will not proceed in narrative order through the individual plays but will discuss dominant themes and issues addressed by each play in its entirety. A short paper and a longer paper will allow students to hone their critical writing skills. Individual sections will require students to attend regularly and contribute to the class discussions. For more information please refer to the course website.

ENGL 172 | Studies in the Enlightenment: Crime and Civil Society in Eighteenth-Century Britain
Eighteenth-century literature teems with criminals. Pirates, highwaymen, thieves, prison breakers, thief takers, prostitutes, and bawds are amongst its liveliest characters. In London, spaces associated with crime, such as Tyburn, Covent Garden, the Fleet Prison, and Spitalfields, were used to figure the city itself; outside the metropolis, criminal behavior enabled mercantile and colonial endeavors to flourish. This course will examine representations of eighteenth-century crime both as an abuse of civil society and as a means of achieving liberation from economic, political, and social oppression. We will be focusing on contemporary texts in less familiar genres: ballads, short fiction, criminal biographies, newspaper reports, and periodical publications. We will also read two novels, John Cleland’s Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (1748) and Henry Fielding’s Jonathan Wild (1743); and we will discuss Hogarth’s graphic narratives, A Harlot’s Progress, A Rake’s Progress, and Industry and Idleness. In addition, we will be consulting modern critical work on crime in eighteenth-century society by E.P. Thompson, Peter Linebaugh, Marcus Rediker, Michel Foucault, and John Bender, among others.

ENGL 197 | Upper-Division Seminar: Early English Broadside Ballads
This course will study the culture of the most published and most read of literary forms in early modern England: the broadside ballad. In the first weeks of the course, we will situate ballads within their historical, political, social, and aesthetic contexts. We will read a sampling of ballads of the period together with critical works about them, and consider the kinds of persons who wrote and published ballads, as well as the nature of ballad music (tunes and refrains), formal features of the ballads (woodblock images, black-letter print, meter), practices of circulation, and some recurrent themes popular in the period: for example, monstrous happening and husband murder. We will then focus on the collection of over 1,800 ballads made by Samuel Pepys, reading and analyzing a selection of ballads from each of the various categories by which Pepys grouped his collection (History, Love Fortunate, Love Unfortunate, Drinking and Good Fellowship, etc.). This course will further involve students in the Early Modern Center’s ongoing enterprise to create an unprecedented online English Broadside Ballad Archive, beginning with the ballads collected by Pepys. Assignments: Two oral and written reports on a facet of ballad culture generally and on a ballad theme in the Pepys collection (6-10 minutes; 3-4 pages each) as well as checking some transcriptions of black-letter ballads and/or using Photoshop to mount online Facsimile Transcriptions in the Pepys Ballad Archive. For more information please refer to the course website.

ENGL 197 | Upper-Division Seminar: Jane Austen and the Rise of the Novel
Of all the great novelists of the English literature tradition (from Samuel Richardson to Charles Dickens to Henry James) Jane Austen has recently been recognized as the most popular and most influential British novelist of the age when the novel was the most influential form of print entertainment and art (1750-1900). Since her novels were published in the early nineteenth century, they have never gone out of print. Her novels helped to establish the novel form as the definitive way the 19th century brought social reality into language so that it could be the locus of both intellectual analysis and narrative enjoyment. To develop this new technology of narrative, Austen drew on novelistic genres she inherited from the 18th century: most notably the gothic, the sentimental, and the novel of conduct. By recasting these genres, through the use of a style of telling named “free indirect discourse”, Austen developed a method of narrative that allowed the reader to enter the mind of the main character, without becoming subject to the biases of viewpoint made explicit in the novel of letters or the first person memoir. What resulted is a style of novel writing that manages, through the power of her writing, to be both authoritative and light in its touch. This course will read three novels of Jane Austen: Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, and Emma. We will consider how Sense and Sensibility allows readers to understand the pleasures and dangers of postal communication; how Pride and Prejudice develops an enlightenment program for overcoming prejudice and educating desire; and finally, how Emma allows a rethinking of ideals of both femininity and masculinity. Crucial to the course will be the use of on-line databases (of original 18th and early 19th century pamphlets, newspapers, review, conduct books, etc.) so that we can read these novels in relationship to the writings and concerns of their epoch. This archive research will be brought into a final paper, that will focus on one of the three novels discussed in the seminar. Requirements: regular attendance; seminar presentation (of 15 minutes); a short 2-page paper; a final 12-page paper.

Spring 2008

ENGL 10EM | Introduction to Literary Study: Early Modern
The purpose of English 10, or Introduction to Literary Study, is to familiarize you with the tools of literary interpretation, including the techniques and vocabulary of analytic discussion and critical writing, and to help you develop close reading skills. While cultivating these techniques, the class will focus on poetry, drama, and prose fiction. The theme of this particular course is Memory; we will focus on the many implications and meanings of memory and its relationship to the seventeenth- and eighteenth-centuries. We will examine mainly canonical texts and consider the differences between remembering people, remembering places, and remembering texts. How can a writer “remember” other writers’ works? Why is the concept of memory so important to us? In addition to exploring these works in their historical contexts, we will also examine issues of gender, sexuality, race, and class. Texts will include Austen’s Northanger Abbey, Behn’s The Rover, the Bedford Glossary of Literary Terms, and a course reader.

ENGL 149 | Media and Information Culture: Media History of the American Revolution

This course is developed out of three cardinal and interrelated assumptions:

1. History: The American Revolution is the formative historical episode of American history; it not only brings ‘invents’ America as an independent state; it also seeds our political culture with its most characteristic ideas, its dominant narrative (the struggle for freedom in popular cinema like Star Wars and The Matrix), as well as its specific scenarios for political action and social reform. More than a founding myth, the American Revolution haunts our political culture and periodically returns, for example in the struggle for Abolition (of Black slavery); Women’s Suffrage; Civil Rights; the Free Speech Movement; and even the Internet ‘Revolution’. Although our course will center on writing of the 18th century, we will occasionally cross cut between the first American Revolution and its periodic “returns.”

2. Action: To make revolution, the first men and women to call themselves Americans had recourse to a wide range of communications practices and media: speeches, letters, the newspaper article, pamphlets, the political petition, street demonstrations, songs, and, most consequentially of all, the collective public “declaration.” We will study this rich ecology of communication to take account of a) the media and communications infrastructure of colonial America: the Royal Post, the newspapers, and various voluntary associations (clubs, assemblies, town meetings); and b) some of the distinctive communication innovations of the revolution (Boston’s development of a network of towns and colonies; the organization of the Continental Congress; and, the performance of a collective public declaration {e.g. The Declaration of Independence in 1776}). Finally we will study how the communications protocols developed in the revolutionary period, which valued media that was distributed, open, public, and free, were incorporated into the official media policy of the American Republic.

3. Ideology: The core idea of the American Revolution is liberty. In the centuries since the American Revolution, liberty has been given numberless extensions and a daunting variety of roles. Liberty is often seen as the means, the end, and the chief virtue of American culture. It has been used to claim the natural rights of women and black slaves. But, more problematically, the claim to liberty has also been used to justify the conquest of the West and the invasion of other countries. Through a reading of some of the founding documents of this country, we will seek to analyze and specify this complex and multi-faceted concept. We will take account of its origins in the history and culture of England and seek to understand how “liberty” acquired new articulations in the struggle against British imperial rule.

In order to gain a useful preliminary understanding of the American Revolution, we will read a short but authoritative book, entitled The American Revolution, by Gordon Wood. To relate the American Revolution to its media history and ideology, we will read a broad spectrum of the literature of the American Revolution: Joseph Addison’s popular play about republican liberty, Cato {1704}; the influential articles written by the Pennsylvania lawyer John Dickinson to defend the colonists against new British laws, Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania {1768-9}; the pamphlet published by the Boston Committee of Correspondence to network the towns to Massachusetts and mobilize them to resist British measures, The Votes and Proceedings of the Town of Boston {1772}; Thomas Jefferson’s Summary View {1774}; the most popular pamphlet of the revolutionary era, which convinced most of the need for American independence from Britain, Thomas Paine’s Common Sense. By reading this ‘literature of liberty’ against the backdrop of the revolutionary events they reference and support, this course should provide a new context for reading American’s founding documents – The Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and the first acts establishing copyright and the post. Because of the persistence of the American Revolution in later epoch, we will be exploring modern media culture for analogs of 18th century American events. For example, we will discuss how the Vietnam War and the Iraq war have been justified through appeal to liberty and freedom.

Requirements: one short in class presentation; a quiz, a midterm, a paper (that links some aspect of the American Revolution to the present) and a final exam.

WARNING & TRUTH IN ADVERTISING: Although I find the writing of American’s revolutionary epoch to be political “literature” of the highest quality, it is not to everyone’s taste. While we will do the close readings of complex texts found in many of our English courses, we will also develop an historical and media studies approach to these texts that will be quite different than many English department courses.

Texts (key):

Course Reader:

Milton, John. Areopagitica, selections
Locke, John. 2nd Treatise, selections
Dickinson, John. Letters from a Farmer in Pennyslvania. [check on possible editions — perhaps I can Xerox from a 19th century edition in the public domain…or from newspaper editions]
Boston Committee of Correspondence, Votes and Proceedings
Jefferson, Thomas. Summary View
Yankee Doodle
and other ballads
Arendt, Hannah. Selections from On Revolution and “Labor, Work, Action”
Habermas, Jurgen. Encyclopedia article on Public Sphere

Wood, Gordon. The American Revolution
Addison, Joseph. Cato
Paine, Thomas. Common Sense
Declaration of Independence and Other Documents: from Patrick Henry to Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address 

Applies to LCI Specialization.

ENGL 151SR | Studies in British Writers: Samuel Richardson
This quarter, we will read Samuel Richardson’s mammoth epistolary novel, Clarissa, or The History of a Young Lady (1747-8). Arguably the most important novel in the history of the genre, it chronicles the struggles of its virtuous heroine: Clarissa is trapped between her family, who order her to marry the odious Mr. Solmes, and her admirer, the rake Lovelace, who concocts elaborate schemes to posses her. At 1536 pages long, it is not a text for the faint-hearted; but for its stunning display of artistic innovation, ventriloquism, and historical detail, it richly rewards the persistent reader. We will examine Richardson’s representations of eighteenth-century femininity, libertinism, marriage, parent-child relations, London, religion, female friendship, domestic violence, sexual violence, subjectivity, and writing; we will also explore critical responses to Clarissa from the eighteenth-century to the present. Requirements: attendance, reading comprehension quizzes, one calendar exercise, and one term-long individual writing project.

ENGL 151AP | Studies in British Writers: Alexander Pope
“Plant Seeds and Sing Songs.” We study and discuss the major works of Alexander Pope, the most important English poet of the 18th century, with special attention to Pope’s career as a poet, his prosody, and his influence.
Midterm, final, and term paper.

ENGL 157 | English Renaissance Drama
This course introduces students to English Drama of the period from 1500 to 1642, excluding Shakespeare. Writers we will discuss will include Elizabeth Cary, Ben Jonson, Thomas Kyd, Christopher Marlowe, and Thomas Middleton. Requirements: careful reading, regular attendance, active participation, two analytical papers, and a final exam.

ENGL 162 | Milton: Milton and Ecology
When confronted with the description of a literal dark cloud of air pollution hanging over Coketown in Charles Dickens’s novel Hard Times, many readers are immediately persuaded not only that our current environmental crisis has its roots in the nineteenth century, but that it was clearly making its appearance in the literature of the day. However, turn the clock back two centuries, to Shakespeare, Donne, and Milton, and many of the same readers are remarkably resistant to the notion that the roots of the crisis could reach back so far – at least with respect to issues such as urban air pollution. Nonetheless, air pollution, acid rain, deforestation, endangered species, wetland loss, animal rights, and rampant consumerism were all issues of great concern in Renaissance England. In this course we will consider a range of Milton’s works, including Paradise Lost, against the backdrop of these environmental issues. Just for fun, we will also be looking at excerpts from two very popular series of books that were profoundly influenced by Milton: The Chronicles of Narnia by C. S. Lewis (who was in fact a Milton scholar at Oxford) and His Dark Materials, especially The Golden Compass, by Phillip Pullman. (Incidentally, “His Dark Materials” is a quote from Paradise Lost.) This course satisfies the requirements of the Undergraduate Specialization in Literature and the Environment (USLE).


2006-2007

Fall 2006

ENGL 10 | Introduction to Literature: Print Culture

ENGL 10 | Introduction to Literature: Early Modern Specialization

ENGL 10 | Introduction to Literature: Early Modern Specialization

ENGL 15 | Introduction to Shakespeare

ENGL 101 | English Literature from the Medieval Period to 1650
Texts to Include: Norton Anthology of English Literature: Volumes A, B, C: The Middle Ages, The Sixteenth Century/The Early Seventeenth Century, Restoration and the Eighteenth Century. 8th Edition.

ENGL 101S | Seminar for English Literature from the Medieval Period to 1650

ENGL 114 | Women and Literature
This course will explore the idea and history of “women’s writing” in relation to the early modern print market and notions about publicity, domesticity, professionalism, and educational privilege that are still with us today. We will read poetry, fiction, prose, drama, and letters by 17th- and 18th-c. writers, including Astell, Behn, Finch, Montagu, Philips, and Scott, along with current scholarship on these writers and their contexts. Individual seminars will focus on representations of the female body and codes of femininity; female communities and utopias; satiric representations of women; debates on female education and authorship; the “consumer revolution”; and literary canon formation (who decides what is worth reading?) – then and now.

ENGL 162 | Milton
We study and discuss John Milton’s Paradise Lost and other poetry and prose by Milton. We also read selected criticism on Paradise Lost. Required work: midterm, term paper, final, and possible group presentation.

ENGL 197 | Upper-Division Seminar: Shakespeare and Gender
Texts Include: Hamlet, As You Like It, A Compact Documentary Life A Year in the Life

ENGL 197 | Upper-Division Seminar: The Unread Shakespeare
We’ll begin this course by choosing eight plays by Shakespeare that no one (or nearly no one) in the class has read. We will then spend a week on each of them with a final week for a mini-conference on the papers you will by then be writing. In addition to the term paper, there will be very brief position papers each week on the play for that week and a 90 minute final exam. The premises for the course are that every one of Shakespeare’s plays will reward our attention and that even an accidental collection of them will reveal valuable and interesting patterns we would otherwise not have expected. I’ve taught the course several times now, and so far he’s never let us down!

Winter 2007

ENGL 10 | Introduction to Literature

ENGL 10 | Introduction to Literature

ENGL 10 | Introduction to Literature

ENGL 15 | Introduction to Shakespeare
Close study of five representative plays: The Merchant of Venice, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Hamlet, Othello, The Tempest. We will study these plays with attention both to historical context and to the way the plays have worked as dramas at various times in the last four hundred years. Film and audio clips will be used as illustrations. The course is suitable both for majors and for non-majors interested in Shakespeare. Written work: quizes on each play, two papers, and a final exam.

ENGL 101 | English Literature from the Medieval Period to 1650
This course introduces students to British literature of the middle ages and Renaissance. In addition to paying close attention to literary form, we will concentrate on relating medieval and early modern poetic, dramatic, and prose texts to the historical contexts in which they were written. Writers we will discuss will include Geoffrey Chaucer, Edmund Spenser, Christopher Marlowe, and John Donne. Requirements: careful reading, regular attendance, active participation, two analytical papers, and a final exam.

ENGL 102 | English and American Literature from 1650-1789
This class on British and American literature of the “long 18th century”(1660s-1790s) will examine a range of anglophone representations of authority and authorship in the politically and culturally lively period that extends from the English Civil Wars through the American War of Independence. We’ll be reading works by Aphra Behn, Benjamin Franklin, John Milton, and Alexander Pope, as well as the first Gothic novel, to see how these texts map out some of the period’s national and transatlantic conversations.

ENGL 102S | Seminar for English and American Literature from 1650-1789

ENGL 105A | Shakespeare: Poems and Early Plays
In this course we will study six plays from the first half of Shakespeare’s career: Titus Andronicus, Hamlet, 1 Henry IV, Henry V, The Merchant of Venice, and As You Like It. We will also consider a selection of Shakespeare’s sonnets and view film versions of some of the plays. Requirements: careful reading, regular attendance, active participation, two analytical papers, and a final exam.

ENGL 105B | Shakespeare: Later Plays

ENGL 105BS | Seminar for Shakespeare: Later Plays

ENGL 162 | Milton
Milton wrote his major poems to provide readers with imaginative experiences through which they would come to know themselves and God aright, and thereby acquire the moral and political knowledge, the virtue, and the wisdom that would secure them inner freedom, outward liberty, and an understanding of the sources of their own happiness and misery. Our job in this course will be to undergo a literary experience that is answerable to Milton’s poetic and spiritual aims in his major works and most especially in Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained. To this end we’ll engage in a close reading of his two most important poems, but also read enough of his earlier poetry and prose to make ourselves conversant with Milton’s emerging poetic ambitions and with the language and the political and theological issues of the time, so we can be fit readers of his poems, able to understand them from the perspective of seventeenth century readers as well as our own. The class will be conducted largely as a workshop in which we interrogate the texts and our readings of them and work on passages and scenes that puzzle and confuse us. We’ll also write several short exploratory papers and one longer paper inquiring into some problem of particular interest to us in Paradise Lost or Paradise Regained.

ENGL 165 | Topics in Literature

ENGL 197 | Upper-Division Seminar: Metaphysical Poets

Spring 2007

ENGL 10EM | Introduction to Literature

ENGL 10EM | Introduction to Literary Study
Acquaints students with purposes and tools of literary interpretation. Introduces techniques and vocabulary of analytic discussion and critical writing. Emphasis is on early modern studies. The class also introduces students to the Early Modern Center located within the English Department.

ENGL 101 | English Literature from the Medieval Period to 1650
In this course, we’ll be making the acquaintance of English literature of the middle ages and Renaissance. Among the authors we’ll read will be Geoffrey Chaucer, Edmund Spenser, Christopher Marlowe, William Shakespeare, and John Donne. The course will require timely reading, regular attendance, active participation, two 5-to-6 page papers, and a comprehensive final examination.

ENGL 105A | Shakespeare: Poems and Early Plays
Major poems and plays of Shakespeare, 1593-1602, including such works as the Sonnets, Hamlet, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Henry the Fourth, Twelfth Night.

ENGL 197 | Upper-Division Seminar: Early Modern Romance
In Cervantes’ Don Quixote, the Knight of La Mancha famously loses himself in romances, heroic tales of amorous intrigues and knightly adventures. Why were these tales of knights and dragons, wizards and women warriors – these tales that Cervantes lovingly skewers – so immensely popular in the early modern period? How did these imagined worlds reflect, refract, or simply disregard the real world that readers of romance inhabited? In this course we will read a selection of romances, focusing primarily but not exclusively on the forms the genre takes in early modern England. Our goal will be to attend to the kinds of cultural work that the genre of romance performs. Topics of discussion will include the functions of genre; the power of nostalgia; the politics of gender; the ethics of representing violence; and the problem of justice. After getting our feet wet with selections from Homer’s Odyssey and Virgil’s Aeneid, we will turn to texts such as Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso, Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, Shakespeare’s The Tempest, Cervantes’ Don Quixote, and Wroth’s Urania.


2005-2006

Fall 2005

ENGL 101 | English Literature to 1650
We’ll be making the acquaintance of English literature of the Middle Ages and Renaissance through a selection of works from such writers as Geoffrey Chaucer, Edmund Spenser, Christopher Marlowe, William Shakespeare, and John Donne. The course will require timely reading, regular attendance, active participation, two five-to-six page papers, and a comprehensive final examination.

ENGL 169 | Restoration and Eighteenth Century Drama
Can be used for the Early Modern specialization. We study, discuss, perform, and write about key Restoration and 18c comedies from Wycherley’s The Country Wife (1675) to Sheridan’s The School for Scandal (1777). Midterm, Term Paper, Group presentations, and Final.

Winter 2006

ENGL 10EM | Introduction to Literary Studies
This course is recommended for students interested in doing a future Early Modern specialization. English 10 is required for all English majors and recommended for English minors. This course satisfies the last half of the GE Area A requirement.

ENGL 102 | English and American Literature from 1650 to 1789
Prerequisites: Writing 2, 50, or 109; English 10; or upper-division standing
Satisfies a GE area G and a Writing requirement Not open for credit to students who have completed English 30.

This class on British and American literature of the “long 18th century” (1660s-1790s) will examine a range of anglophone representations of authority and authorship in the politically and culturally lively period that extends from the English Civil Wars through the American War of Independence. We’ll be reading works by Aphra Behn, Daniel Defoe, Alexander Pope, and Benjamin Franklin, among others, that map out some of the period’s national and transatlantic conversations.

ENGL 105A | Shakespeare: Poems and Early Plays
Satisfies a GE area G and a Writing requirement Can be used for the Early Modern specialization. If this course is used to fulfill the Shakespeare requirement for English major, it cannot also be used as an upper-division English elective.

The course will cover five of Shakespeare’s plays from the first half of his theatrical career: A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Merchant of Venice, Richard II, Henry IV Part 1, and Hamlet. Video productions will supplement lectures and discussion as a way of understanding the dramatic character and values of the plays. Students can expect to write two essays, a midterm and a final exam.


2004-2005

Fall 2004

ENGL 197 | English Broadside Ballads, 1500-1800
We will study the culture of the most published and most read of literary forms in early modern England: the broadside ballad. In the first half of the course, we will situate ballads within their historical, political, social, and aesthetic contexts. We will read a sampling of ballads of the period together with critical works about them, and consider the kinds of persons who wrote and published ballads, as well as the nature of ballad music (tunes and refrains), formal features of the ballads (woodblock images, blackletter print, meter), practices of circulation, and some recurrent themes popular in the period. In the second half of the course, we shall enter workshop mode, focusing on reading, analyzing, and mounting online annotated transcriptions of some of the 1,775 ballads in the important Samuel Pepys collection. As part of this “hands on” approach, excursions to the UCSB library and to the Huntington library will be offered. The workshop part of the course will involve students in the Early Modern Center’s ongoing enterprise to create an unprecedented English Ballad Archive, 1500-1800, beginning with the ballads collected by Pepys. Assignments: Two oral and written reports on a facet of ballad culture generally and on a ballad theme in the Pepys collection (6-10 minutes; 2-3 pages each) as well as online annotated transcriptions of two Pepys ballads.

Spring 2005

ENGL 105A | Shakespeare: Poems and Early Plays
Can be used for the Early Modern specialization. If this course is used to fulfill the Shakespeare requirement for English major, it cannot also be used as an upper-division English elective. We will study five representative plays from the first part of Shakespeare’s career, often in relation to modern film versions of them: The Taming of the Shrew, Richard II, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Merchant of Venice, and Hamlet. Two weeks will be devoted to each play. Course requirements will include multiple short papers on assigned topics and a final exam. To enroll in and to obtain credit for this course, register for AND attend a section! Remember – ALL core English major and minor classes must be taken for a letter grade!


2003-2004

Fall 2003

ENGL 101 | English Literature from the Medieval Period to 1650

ENGL 101S | Seminar for English Literature from the Medieval Period to 1650
This one-unit honors seminar for students in English 101 will be devoted to reading and discussing a selection of brief medieval and Renaissance works from The Norton Anthology of English Literature. I’ll bring a list of possible works to our first meeting, and the students in the class will decide together what we will be reading.

ENGL 114EM | Women and Literature: Going Public: Early Modern Women
This course will explore the idea and history of “women’s writing” in relation to the early modern print market and notions about publicity, domesticity, professionalism, and educational privilege that are still with us today. We will read poetry, fiction, prose, drama, and letters by 17th- and 18th-c. authors including Astell, Behn, Finch, Montagu, Philips, and Scott, along with current scholarship on these writers and their contexts. Individual seminars will focus on codings of the female body and femininity; female communities and utopias; satiric representations of women; debates on female education and authorship; the “consumer revolution”; and literary canon formation (who decides what gets read?) – then and now.

Winter 2004

ENGL 144C | The European Renaissance
This course will focus on one of the most characteristic expressions of the European Renaissance, the “new poetry” of sixteenth-century Spain, France, and England – and, in particular, on sonnets and sonnet sequences. We’ll start with Francis Petrarch, the great Italian model for that new poetry, and will then move on to Garcilasso de la Vega, Pierre de Ronsard, Joachim du Bellay, Philip Sidney, and Edmund Spenser, before ending with two or three weeks on the sonnets of William Shakespeare. All Italian, Spanish, and French texts will be available in both their original language and English translation. (This course is also being offered as Comparative Literature 180.)

English 197 | Home and World: A Lowly Perspective
(in EMC but also scheduled in Seminar room or SH 1415 for access to digital projector, TR 12-1:15) This will be an undergraduate version of my grad course, also an EMC theme course pursuing the Center’s topic for the year 2003-2004 of “Home and World.” The course will adopt the perspective of the lower and middle classes. We will look at works by and for these classes that address questions of national, economic, and domestic identity as they are defined in contestation with a spatial or conceptual “other” (ie., not home, however “home” might be defined). Works will include: ballads about apprentices, the exotic, and the home; Arden of Faversham; Shakespeare’s Merry Wives of Windsor; Thomas Deloney’s Jack of Newbury, Thomas Nashe’s The Unfortunate Traveler, Christopher Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta, Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice; Shakespeare’s The Tempest; Raleigh’s “Discovery of the Guiana”; and the new world seaman’s narrative, “I Miles Philips.” Students who distinguish themselves in the class will be asked to participate in the spring undergraduate conference on the theme of “Home and World.”

Spring 2004

ENGL 197 | Upper-Division Seminar: Unread Shakespeare
We’ll begin this course by choosing eight plays by Shakespeare that no one (or nearly no one) in the class has read. We will then spend a week on each of them with a final week for a mini-conference on the papers you will by then be writing. In addition to the term paper, there will be very brief position papers each week on the play for that week and a 90 minute final exam. The premises for the course are that every one of Shakespeare’s plays will reward our attention and that even an accidental collection of them will reveal valuable and interesting patterns we would otherwise not have expected. I’ve taught the course several times now, and so far he’s never let us down!

ENGL 197 | Upper-Division Seminar: The Rise of Novels
The modern rise of novels, into a popular form of entertainment and a type of writing that claims to be literature, is deeply implicated in the home-building and home-improvement that secures England’s distinctive national difference from the other peoples of other lands (France, the Caribbean, the Americans). But, at least since the 17th century, novel writing has also been implicated in those acts of imperial expansion through which one secures other peoples and places as part of one’s empire. This course returns to the “rise of the novel” narrative as first formulated by the literary historian Ian Watt, to understand how the novel as a distinctively modern genre was shaped in its language and rhetoric to play a crucial role in both the construction of national identity, as well as the expansion of the British imperial project. We will read and discuss four novels in our course: two novels often described as the first English novels–Richardson’s Pamela (1740) and Fielding’s Joseph Andrews (1742); Jane Austen’s novel, Mansfield Park (1814), and Hawthrone’s attempt to write a distinctively American novel, out of English Puritan materials, with The Scarlet Letter (1850). While we will focus our study on four major novels, written between 1740 and 1850, we will also read some of the most influential accounts of the novel from 18th and modern critics (Diderot, S. Johnson, Bakhtin, etc.). Requirements: one short 4-page paper (as the basis of a seminar presentation); one 10-page term paper.


2002-2003

Fall 2002

ENGL 101 | English Literature from Medieval to 1650
We’ll be making the acquaintance of English literature of the middle ages and Renaissance through a selection of works from such writers as Geoffrey Chaucer, Edmund Spenser, Christopher Marlowe, William Shakespeare, and John Donne. The course will require timely reading, regular attendance, active participation, two five-to-six page papers, and a comprehensive final examination. The course is being given in conjunction with the Early Modern Center’s theme for 2002-2003, which is early modern women’s writing, and will lead to participation in a spring-quarter student-faculty conference on this topic.

ENGL 101S | Seminar for English Literature from Medieval to 1650 : Norton Women
This one-unit honors seminar for students in English 101 will be devoted to reading and discussing the medieval and Renaissance women writers who appear in The Norton Anthology of English Literature. The course is being given in conjunction with the Early Modern Center’s theme for 2002-2003, which is early modern women’s writing, and will lead to participation in a spring-quarter student-faculty conference on this topic.

ENGL 105A | Shakespeare, Poems and Earlier Plays
We will study five representative plays from the first part of Shakespeare’s career: The Taming of the Shrew, Richard II, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Merchant of Venice, and Hamlet. Two weeks will be devoted to each play. Course requirements will include multiple short papers on assigned topics and a final exam.

ENGL 105AS | Seminar on Shakespeare, Poems and Earlier Plays: Shakespeare’s Women
This one-unit honors seminar for students in English 105AS will focus on the women in Shakespeare’s plays as well as the women who played Shakespeare’s characters. The course is being given in conjunction with the Early Modern Center’s theme for 2002-2003, which is early modern women’s writing, and will lead to participation in a spring-quarter student-faculty conference on this topic. The course is being given in conjunction with the Early Modern Center’s theme for 2002-2003, which is early modern women’s writing, and will lead to participation in a spring-quarter student-faculty conference on this topic.

ENGL 151SP | Studies in British Writers: Swift and Pope
We will read and discuss the writings of Alexander Pope and Jonathan Swift, focusing on the representation of the body in satire. Midterm, term paper, and final.

ENGL 172 | Studies in the Enlightenment: The American Revolution
This course will range widely across a range of texts essential for understanding the political and cultural event named the American Revolution. We will study the selected writings of John Milton and John Locke, and the party journalism of Trenchard and Gordon; trace the history of the British Imperial project in America; read some pamphlet writings around the event that first triggers American questioning of British authority: the Stamp Act of 1765. We will seek to understand the revolutionary rhetoric at the center of the struggles around Boston between 1772 and 1776. Although our focus will be upon the construction of America through political writing, we will also seek to understand the American Revolution as a broadly cultural movement by studying private letters, ballads, poems and novels.

Winter 2003

ENGL 102 | English and American Literature from 1650 to 1789

ENGL 105B | Shakespeare, Later Plays

ENGL 165PT | Topics in Literature: Political Theory and the Novel

ENGL 197 | Upper-Division Seminar: Women Writers, 1550-1700
This course is being given in conjunction with the Early Modern Center’s theme for 2002-2003, which is early modern women’s writing, and will lead to participation in a spring-quarter student-faculty conference on this topic.

Spring 2003

ENGL 165VA | Early Modern Visual Culture

ENGL 197 | Seventeenth Century Poetry: The Poetics of Ecstasy and Rapture
The course is being given in conjunction with the Early Modern Center’s theme for 2002-2003, which is early modern women’s writing, and will lead to participation in a spring-quarter student-faculty conference on this topic.

ENGL 197 | Exploration and Engagement with the New World


2001-2002

Fall 2001

ENGL 197 | Drama as a Visual Art
The course, part of the year-long Visual Culture theme of the Early Modern Center, will consider drama as a visual art. The sixteenth-century saw a crisis in the status of the image unprecedented in Western Europe. The religious culture of Europe in the fifteenth and early decades of the sixteenth century was intensely visual, expressing itself in the visual art we associate with the Renaissance. But the Protestant Reformation attacked this art as idolatrous and unleashed a wave of iconoclasm across Northern Europe, including England. What were the consequences of this crisis for the drama of Elizabethan England? As a visual art, theater was also subject to attack. Acknowledging that theater is indeed a visual as well as a verbal art, we’ll study the ways in which the visual and theater were assailed, then read plays by Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, and others that respond to this crisis in the status of the visual.

ENGL 197 | Early Modern Visual Culture
This course would contribute to the EMC’s theme for next year. It would involve a study of the relation between the verbal and the visual through a survey of changing modes of self-representation in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century literature and art. Visual representations will include: formal portraits, emblems, ballad images, miniatures, architecture, perspective painting, and family portraits. Literary representations will include: Shakespeare’s Richard II, Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, ballads, Jonson’s masques, sonnets, and Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi. Some collaboration is expected with Ann Jensen Adams, in Art History, on the topic of formal portraits.

Spring 2002

ENGL 165 | Early Modern Ballad Art, 1500-1800
This course will study the evolution of the broadside ballad during a crucial phase of its history, when it was disseminated for the first time in massive numbers, due to the rise of cheap print, and became an especially occasional form. The course will emphasize the particular formal features of the ballad, which, for the lower orders, was quite literally “art,” pasted on the walls of their homes and alehouses. The course will culminate with each student converting an EEBO ballad into modern type, editing that ballad, and having it mounted on the EMC’s site.


2000-2001

Fall 2000

ENGL 105 | Shakespeare: Later Works

ENGL 162 | Milton

Winter 2001

ENGL 102 | Enlightenment Communications

ENGL 154 | Renaissance Drama

ENGL 162 | Milton

ENGL 197 | TBA

Spring 2001

ENGL 0 | The Old and the New: Medieval and Renaissance Drama

ENGL 114 | Women Writers: 1650-1760

ENGL 162 | Milton

ENGL 169 | Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Drama

ENGL 197 | The Old and the New: Medieval and Renaissance Drama

ENGL 197 | TBA

ENGL 197 | Unread Shakespeare