Graduate Courses
EMC-Related Courses
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Studies in Renaissance Literature: Sequels and Series – Publishing "The Making of a Broadside Ballad" (Graduate) This course is designed as a sequel or extension of the course I taught last year in Winter '14 on early modern ballad culture and popular print. As the students and I explored making ballads in all their materiality, from ourselves making paper broadside sheets in UCSB's Art Studio, to learning the distinctive tricks that go into ballad writing, to fitting tunes to such texts (with the help of EBBA's ethnomusicologists), to setting type and printing our own self-created ballads on our own self-created paper at the UC-Riverside Print Shop, the entire class (instructor included) underwent a radical discovery. In a major way we came to understand that so much that is involved in the "making" of a printed artifact--especially of a single ballad sheet of printed, illustrated, and (as indicated in the printed tune title) sung text--influences our perception of what ballads "are" and how they would have been received in their own time. So much did our "makings" change our "interpretations," that we realized we had in a fresh and important way redefined the methods of research on print and material culture. We thus decided to publish our discoveries in a six-issue special series of the Early Modern Center's *emcImprint* (a new refereed, online journal produced by the EMC). Co-editing these special issues with myself are Professor Andrew Griffin and Dr. Carl Stahmer (EBBA Associate Director). |
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Studies in Restoration and 18th Century Literature: Reality and the Novel (Graduate) For too long we have emphasized Literature's power to figure, to trope and to construct fantasy. Critics and readers of novels have understood realism as a technique of creating a virtual reality that is not (real). But this ignores the novel's hold upon reality. It is time to strip the quotes that the linguistic turn in literary studies has put around reality. Only then can we recover how novel writers used fiction to investigate reality. (c.f. Bruno Latour, An Inquiry Into the Modes of Existence) But what, you might well ask, do you mean by reality? That is always a difficult question and must be handled with care. In reading a series of important novels, written between 1605 and 1872, we will read some of the literary theorists of this question (Eric Auerbach; Ian Watt, Bruno Latour). But our main attention will be directed as tracing the strategies by which six writers use novelistic narrative to investigate some aspect of reality. In Don Quixote, Cervantes thematicizes the power of novel-induced belief to displace non-novelistic reality. In Eliza Haywood’s Fantomina the power of fantasy collides with the embodied power of the heroines all too real body. In writing Joseph Andrews “written in imitation of the Manner of Cervantes”, Henry Fielding uses Cervantes’ style to challenge the first person bias and high moral seriousness of Richardson’s Pamela. Sterne's Tristram Shandy embeds reality in the mental associations that are both free and constrained. In Oliver Twist, Dickens incorporates the dialects and ideolects of London to deliver a withering---and he insists, all too real---exposé of the fate of the orphan in industrializing England. In George Eliot's "study of provincial life," the interdependence of the lives, places, intentions and actions in Middlemarch figures reality as a social system as complex as those conceptualized by classics of 19th century sociology (Compt, Weber, Marx). |
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Studies in Restoration and 18th Century Literature: Writing Early Modern Nature (Graduate) |
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ENGL 595GE: Special Graduate Colloquium: The Genres of the long Enlightenment, their Origins and Destinations (Graduate) |
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ENGL 595BP: Special Graduate Colloquium : The Ballad of the Dissertation (Graduate) |
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ENGL 231: Studies in Renaissance Literature: The Makings of Popular Media – Broadside Ballads, 1500-1800 (Graduate) This course will study the evolving culture of the most published and most read of literary forms in early modern England: the broadside ballad. The goal is to understand the printed ballad within its changing aesthetic and historical contexts. In each class, we will read a sampling of ballads from the period in light of critical works that address the following topics: definition (what is a ballad?), formal features (paper and ink; woodcut illustrations), production and dissemination (authors, printers/publishers, and peddlers/chapmen), orality (music and performance), collectors and collecting processes (with a focus on the Crawford collection), and making a digital ballad archive. The course will be in many ways "hands on." We will make paper as it was made in the 16th and 17th centuries at the UCSB Art Studio, work a printing press at UC-Riverside, handle original broadside ballads and woodcuts at the Huntington Library, and both transcribe and make facsimile transcriptions for the English Broadside Ballad Archive in the EMC. |
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ENGL 595GE: Special Graduate Colloquium: The Genres of the long Enlightenment, their Origins and Destinations (Graduate) |
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ENGL 595BP: Special Graduate Colloquium : The Ballad of the Dissertation (Graduate) |
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ENGL 595GE: Special Graduate Colloquium: The Genres of the long Enlightenment, their Origins and Destinations (Graduate) |
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ENGL 595BP: Special Graduate Colloquium : The Ballad of the Dissertation (Graduate) This three-quarter colloquium involves a series of 9 mostly Skype lectures by graduate students and junior scholars of English Literature and History who have incorporated broadside ballads from the 16th to the 19th centuries into their dissertations. Presentations will be informal and designed to answer questions that address generally the challenges of defining the topic and the parameters of a dissertation as well as how introducing popular print changes, enhances or productively “disturbs” one's perspective. Some presenters who have already filed their dissertations will further address strategies for turning a dissertation into a publishable book. |
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ENGL 231: Studies in Renaissance Literature : Shakespeare, Marlowe, & EM Political Thought (Graduate) |
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ENGL 231: Early Modern Risk (Graduate) Inspired by the “Speculative Risk” programming of last year, this course will pursue the topic of risk in early modern England. In most contemporary discussions of the topic, risk is correlated with modernity. In this course we will address the emergence of some modern conceptions of risk in early modern economic practice and political theory. We will also explore premodern cognates to the notion of risk in concepts like chance and hazard, contingency and calculation, uncertainty and exposure to loss. In our inquiry into early modern risk, we will read More’s Utopia, Bacon’s New Atlantis, book two of Spenser’s Faerie Queene, Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, and Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice and The Winter’s Tale. In the course of our conversation we will also touch on the thought of Aristotle, Augustine, Luther, Hobbes, Blumenberg, Derrida, and Butler as we discuss topics ranging from utopian desire and societal engineering to the rise of speculative capitalism and insurance, from the dangers of maritime trade and metaphors of shipwreck to moral philosophy and the technologies of the self, from the hazards of transformative reading and religious conversion to hospitality, affective calculation, and the madness of decision. |
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ENGL 23: Renaissance Drama and Historiography (Graduate) |
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ENGL 231: Milton (Graduate) |
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ENGL 231: Early Modern Women (Graduate) |
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ENGL 231: Some Shakespeare, Some Theory (Graduate) |
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ENGL 236: Studies in Renaissance Literature: Shakespearean Romance (Graduate) |
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EMCC: Ballad Project (Graduate) Trains students in the use of Early Modern Center databases and courses; web page design; colloquia and conference organization. Includes an exploration of research facilities both on and off campus. |
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EMCC (Graduate) The EMC Colloquium is an ongoing resource for graduate students and faculty with early modern interests, where they present work in progress, such as dissertation chapters and conference papers, as well as workshop fields lists, prospectuses, job letters and talks, and so forth. |
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ENGL 231: Milton and Ecology (Graduate) |
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ENGL 231: Studies in Renaissance Literature: Gift, Commodity, Fetish: Imagined Economies in Early Modern English (Graduate) |
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ENGL 231: Studies in Renaissance Literature: Technologies of Reading in Early Modern England (Graduate) In this course we will explore technologies of reading in early modern England. In the first part of the course we will consider the materials of reading (scrolls, codices, script, print, type, glosses, indices) and ask how these materials might shape the ways readers attend to texts. We will then turn to historically specific methods of engaging with the written (humanist, Christian, literary) in order to better understand the strategies and purposes of early modern reading. We will not only discuss the work of scholars concerned with the history of the book and the history of reading (Chartier, Eisenstein, Grafton), but will also take up scholarship addressing the history of hermeneutics and exegesis (Cave, Derrida, Ricoeur). Early modern writers we will address will include Bacon, Erasmus, Luther, Marlowe, Petrarch, Shakespeare, and Spenser. |
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ENGL 231: Studies in Renaissance Literature: Poets Present Themselves: Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton (Graduate) This course will focus on three epoch-making books of poems: Edmund Spenser's Shepheardes Calender (1579), William Shakespeare's Sonnets (1609), and John Milton's Poems (1645). How, we will be asking, does poetry and the figure of the poet emerge in each of these books? And what specifically literary work is each book doing? |
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ENGL 232: Studies in Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Literature: Poetry and the Public, 1650-1750 (Graduate) This seminar examines the public roles of poetry in Great Britain from just before the Restoration through the first half of the 18th century. In eighteenth-c. studies, interest in print culture and/or the public sphere is often associated with accounts of the "rise of the novel"; this course attends to an influential form of literary production not addressed by that critical perspective. The goals of the class include 1) getting to know a range of poems from this period, many of them considered canonical, and developing our ability to find pleasure in their formal aspects; 2) learning about the contexts of publication in this period: how poems got published, in what formats, for what kinds of audiences, and who all was involved in that process; and 3) reconsidering public-sphere theory in relation to scholarship on early modern print culture. Mild phobias about poetics accommodated. |
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ENGL 231 Studies in Renaissance Literature : The Faerie Queene (Graduate) In this course we will read Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene in its entirety. Our goal will be to attend to the ways in which Spenser's epic is responsive both to literary tradition and to the pressing concerns of the historical moment in which it was written. Topics of discussion will include epic, romance, and genre theory; allegory and Christian hermeneutics; iconoclasm and literary form; representations of gender; erotic language and sexual desire; ethnography and the project of empire; and England's presence in Ireland and the New World. |
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ENGL 232 Studies in Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Literature : Libertine Literature and Eighteenth-Century Fiction (Graduate) We study and discuss a variety of works (poetry, drama, short and long fiction) relating to “libertinism,” a complex early modern cultural movement characterized by religious skepticism, resistance to political and religious authority, flouting of middle-class social conventions, disregard of moral constraint, violence against urban authority, and promotion of a varied and hedonistic sensualism (including male and female bi-sexuality), among other traits. We shall test the argument (advanced by James G. Turner) that libertinism was not a single cultural entity with different facets, but three distinct movements of thought comprising religious, philosophical, and sexual libertinism. We shall begin with Milton’s representation of sexual relations in Paradise Lost, esp books 4, 5, 8, and 9, then move on to other works of the English Restoration, including Behn’s The Fair Jilt, Wycherley’s The Country Wife, and the poems of Rochester. We shall also read English translations of the “big three” French libertine prepornographic classics, The School of Venus (1680),Venus in the Cloister (1725), and A Dialogue Between a Married Lady and a Maid (1740), as well as an important early 18c medical treatise on sexuality and venereal disease, all available in When Flesh Becomes Word (2004). The course will conclude with an exploration of libertinism in Defoe’s Roxana, Richardson’s Pamela, Fielding’s Shamela and Joseph Andrews, and Cleland’s Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (Fanny Hill). One ten page term paper, some in-class writing, and discussion. Reader discretion strongly advised. |
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ENGL 231 Studies in Renaissance Literature : English Broadside Ballads, 1500-1800 (Graduate) Note: Attendance in Giles Bergel's Fall Colloquium (which meets every other week, Wed. 11-1:30 pm), titled "New Approaches to Media History and Criticism," is highly recommended as preparation for this winter grad course described below. 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, black-letter 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 transcriptions of an citations for some of the 1,857 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, funded by the NEH, beginning with the ballads collected by Pepys. REQUIREMENTS: Regular attendance and participation. 1) for students relatively new to ballad study (those who did not take my ballad course in Fall 2004: one oral report (5-10 minutes) on a group of ballads we have read for the day; 10 ballad transcriptions (or comparable work on the Pepys ballad project, such as completing full citations for 10 ballads, checking ballad transcriptions and citations, or, for the courageous, singing and recording ballad songs); and a research essay (10 pages in length). 2) for continuing students from the Fall 2004 ballad course: one oral report (5-10 minutes) on the topic of ballad culture you have been investigating (as well as a short written essay, on the subject); also, reading all the ballads in the Pepys category you have been assigned and writing another short essay about them. Essays should be 4-6 pages. The second essay may be submitted at the end of spring quarter. |
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ENGL 231: Studies in Renaissance Literature : Milton and His Contemporaries (Graduate) |
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ENGL 231: Studies in Renaissance Literature : Unread Shakespeare (Graduate) We'll begin this course by choosing eight to twelve plays and/or poems by Shakespeare that no one (or nearly no one) in the class has read. We will then spend the quarter reading and discussing the works we have chosen, saving the 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 work or works selected for that week. The premises for the course are that every one of Shakespeare's plays and poems 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 have taught a course like this several times to undergraduates, and so far he has never let us down! |
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ENGL 232: Studies in Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Literature : Readings in Milton's Poetry and Prose (Graduate) A reading course in which we study, discuss, enact, and write about the major poetry and prose of John Milton in his cultural context. Readings also in selected criticism. In-class writing; 12-page term paper; final. |
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ENGL 231: English Broadside Ballads 1500-1800 (Graduate) 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. |
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English 232: The Rise of Novels: Nation and Empire (Graduate) 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 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 (Anderson's "imagined communities"), as well as the expansion of the British imperial project. Hawthorne's attempt to write a distinctively American novel, out of English Puritan materials, demonstrates the flexibility of the novel as a vehicle for writing other than English identity. While we will focus our study on five 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.). For a final paper, students may write on any appropriate novel from the Renaissance to the modern period, including modern novels where these issues are most salient, like Garcia-Marquez's 100 Years of Solitude, Achebe's, Things Fall Apart. 1: Introduction: a brief genealogy of “rise of novel” story; nation and empire; nation versus empire 2: The imperial project at the beginnings of the national English novel: (Lafayette's "The Princess of Monpellier"--a very short "novelle"; and referencing passages from, without a full reading of Oroonoko, and Robinson Crusoe) Criticism: Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel; Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities 3: Richardson’s Pamela 1740: Ian Watt on the modern “self” and novel Criticism: Ian Watt; Nancy Armstrong 4: Haywood’s Fantomina 1725, Fielding’s Shamela 1741, and Fielding’s Joseph Andrews, 1742. the struggle around moralizing the novel so as to English it Criticism: Denis Diderot (Eloge a Richardson), Samuel Johnson (Rambler #4), Hippolyte Taine. 5: Fielding, Joseph Andrews, 1742; theatricality, and the novel (week 2) Criticism: Fielding (essay on character, world as theater); Bakhtin (dialogism, heteroglossia), Michael Fried (theatricality) 6: Austen, Mansfield Park, 1814: Austen harnesses the technology of “recit indirect libre” to write the “classic” novel of English identity Criticism: Ann Banfield & Dorrit Cohn on narrative; Deidre Lynch on Austen's Englishness 7: Mansfield Park, week 2 (Guest professor: David Marshall) Criticism: David Marshall, Fanny Price and the problem of theatricality; Edward Said and the imperialism of the “domestic” novel 8: Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter. 1850 Writing a distinctively American novel through a turn to toward a romance narrative of the English Puritan origins of America Criticism: Perry Miller (American Renaissance); Lauren Berlant (National fantasy); Alexis de Tocqueville 9: The Scarlet Letter, week 2 10: open for reports |
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HIST 277AB The Human and the Other in Early Modern Europe (Graduate) This course will look at animals, monsters, the disabled and other examples of the "not human" in natural philosophy as a way of defining the human in the period from about 1500-1800. |
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English 231: Home and World: A Lowly Perspective (Graduate) (in EMC but also scheduled in Seminar Room, for access to the digital projector, R: 2-4:30) This will be 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 Marlow'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." |
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ENGL 232: Poetry of Domesticity (Graduate) We study and discuss what I call the poetry of stasis (from the Greek, "to stand"), poems relating to a place, to house and home, to tradition, stability, constancy, domesticity, community, "nature." Many of these poems are written by women, and we'll begin with Aemilia Lanyer's "The Description of Cooke-ham" and read other "country house" poems by Jonson, Marvell, and Pope. We shall read the "paradise" books of Milton's Paradise Lost (esp. 4, 5, and 8), and other poems by Dryden, Finch, Montagu, Thomson, Gray, Leapor, Carter, Blamire, Hannah More, and others. And by way of contrast we'll also look at some poems of ekstasis ("a being put out of its place"), or ecstasy. This course was devised for the Early Modern Center "Home and the World" theme for 2003-2004. |
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HIST 277AB The Human and the Other in Early Modern Europe (Graduate) This course will look at animals, monsters, the disabled and other examples of the "not human" in natural philosophy as a way of defining the human in the period from about 1500-1800. |
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CL 265 The New Poetry of 16th C Spain, France, and England (Graduate) In sixteenth-century Spain, France, and England, a new poetry appeared that radically and quite deliberately broke with the vernacular literary past. In Spain, this new poetry was identified most strongly with Juan Boscán and Garcilaso de la Vega. Joachim du Bellay, Pierre de Ronsard, and the other members of the group made famous as the "Pléiade" dominated the comparable movement in France. And in England, Philip Sidney and Edmund Spenser played a similar role. This course will examine these three movements and some of the shared conditions that shaped them, including the relation of literature to the royal court and court politics, the divided allegiance of poetry to manuscript transmission and print, the dependence of poetic reform on linguistic reform more generally, the question of appropriate metric and generic forms, the informing precedence of Greece, Rome, and especially Renaissance Italy, and the central place accorded the erotic. How, we will be asking, did this new poetry provide a cultural home in a rapidly changing world? Note on language: Students will be encouraged to use whatever relevant language skills they may have, but the course will be taught in English and all non-English texts will be available in English translation as well as in their original languages. |
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ENGL 265 Early Modern Women Writers, 1500-1760 (Graduate) The course is being given in conjunction with the Early Modern Center's theme for 2002-2003, which is early modern women's writing. (EMC course) |
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ENGL 231 Seventeenth Century Poetry in Print (Graduate) This course will be devoted to the close examination of four great books of poems from the first half of the seventeenth century: Shakespeare's Sonnets (1609), Donne's Songs and Sonnets (1635), Herbert's The Temple (1633), and Milton's Poems (1645). As well as reading and discussing the individual poems from these books, we'll be asking about the books themselves. How did they come to be produced? How are they organized? How does print contribute to the meaning and effect of the poems they contain? |
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ENGL 232 Atlantic Culture: Empire, Colonization, and Rebellion (Graduate) In the past two decades, studies of the eighteenth century Britain and America have been transformed by a simple insight: nothing has had more influence upon the countries and peoples of the Atlantic periphery than the projects of colonization and empire that follow first contact with America. While these projects redirect flows of wealth, people and power, they also provoke rebellion among native peoples, slaves and colonists. To explore this terrain we will read a blend of canonical and non-canonical texts written at the cosmopolitan center (London) and the colonial peripheries (West Indies and North America). |
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ENGL231 Early Modern Visual Culture (Graduate) This will be a graduate version of the undergraduate course that will require more substantive reading of primary and critical texts. |
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ENGL0 The Old and the New: Medieval and Renaissance Drama (Graduate) |
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ENGL0 New Identities: Incorporation, Inscription, and Life Stories (Graduate) |
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ENGL265 New Worlds (Graduate) |