Our classes have general descriptions in the bulletin and on our course pages, available here. Detailed individual descriptions are posted below. We will post additional descriptions as they arrive. You may also contact faculty for more information.

SPRING 2010 COURSE DESCRIPTIONS

EH 502 Graduate Writing in English
Dr. Justin St. Clair
EH 502 serves as an introduction to graduate-level reading, writing, and research, and is required of all MA students in their first year of work.  In this section of EH 502 we will examine the role of California in the American literary imagination from the 19th century to the present.  Readings will range from the regional sketches of Mark Twain, Ambrose Bierce and Bret Harte to the postmodern meanderings of Thomas Pynchon.  Assignments will include essays, annotated bibliographies, and presentations.

EH 525 Restoration and Early 18th-Century Literature
Dr. Linda Payne

EH 532 Early Romantics
Dr. Cristopher Hollingsworth
This course’s subject is the rise of what we now call Romanticism, a late enlightenment style of excess that dramatizes and interrogates the feeling individual’s place in the universe. The result is a complex of feeling—a system of values, types, and situations— that informs much of the West’s artistic expression for the next two centuries. Rather than assuming a distinction between Gothic and Romantic literature, we will examine texts that pursue knowledge, freedom—and sometimes transcendence—through a struggle with the “mind-forg’d manacles” of history and darkness: what Wordsworth calls the “prison house” of the social world. We will read works such as Friedrich Schiller’s Aesthetic Letters, Heinrich Kleist’s Michael Kohlhaas, Rousseau’s Discourse on the Origin of Human Inequality, Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Women, William Godwin’s Caleb Williams, and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, as well as poems by William Blake, S. T. Coleridge, William Wordsworth, and essays by Thomas de Quincey and R. W. Emerson.

EH 583/584 Graduate Fiction Writing Workshop I/II
Prof. Carolyn Haines
Special individual instruction in fiction writing. This course requires special permission.

EH 585/586 Graduate Poetry Writing Workshop I/II
Dr. Sue Walker
I am thinking of the Spring Graduate Poetry Class as a Gathering of
Senses and Sensibilities.  We will write various topics in various
voices.  We will w/read (Charles Bernstein’s method of integrating
reading and writing) a gathering of poets and a sampling of verses:
Poetry and food – and we’ll eat what we write, create a menu of poetic
courses—appetizer through desert in forms of verse:  Acrostic Appetizer –
to a delicious Dream Vision Desert.  We will write the Environment—the
slither of snake in a one-line snaky-concrete poem, the eye of the owl,
the tour of the tern as it makes its daily way.  We’ll write the sound
of poetry, the poetry of sound. We’ll write war poetry, poetical poetry;
we’ll write jazz and put it to music, and we’ll write and discover the
healing power of words.  We’ll write the news and fabricate our own
headlines.  We’ll explore, be innovative, arrive as we are, and leave
enriched by the power of the poetic line.

            Think of it, spacetrips, vato
            loco of the starts, this is what you get
            in this life, the lockdown
            of nothing.

                        - From Lorna Dee Cervantes's Drive: The First Quartet

EH 590: S.T: Studies in Film: Getting to Know Your Eye and “I” 
Dr. Becky McLaughlin
Because seeing is connected to understanding, in this class we’ll be exploring the relationship between sight and knowledge, sight and subjectivity, sight and sexuality—all of which are tightly knotted together in what sometimes appears to be a tangled mess.  In order to attempt sorting things out, we’ll deal with concepts such as desire, lack, deception, the gaze, the masquerade, disavowal, paranoia, and projection, each of which is intimately connected to the eye and the “I.”

One of the central aims of this class, then, will be to get acquainted with our “I” (what has traditionally been called the “self” but what contemporary film theory refers to as the “subject”) by getting acquainted with our eye.  What this will entail is an effort to think more reflectively about how and why we see what we see, to understand how sight manipulates and is manipulated by the world in which it operates, and to develop a critical and self-aware eye.  If our more grandiose aim is to understand looking as a cultural practice, our more modest but no less important aim is to learn how to look at movies.  (Of course, these two aims are clearly dialectical, for in looking at or “reading” movies we look at or “read” our culture.)  By the end of the semester, I hope that we will have 1) gained a deeper understanding of the characteristic elements of film, 2) comprehended the multiple perspectives from which a particular film might be viewed, 3) expanded our knowledge of the varied forms in which the medium appears, 4) discovered something new about our viewing tastes and preferences, and 5) gained a more specific knowledge of the styles, themes, and concerns of certain filmic auteurs.  (Please note that we will be watching films disturbingly sexual and frequently violent in their content.)

Course requirements: viewing portfolio, montage, midterm exam, final paper, and oral defense.

EH 592 Seminar: The Spirituals
Dr. Kern Jackson
This course explores the themes of desperation to return and loss of meaning in one’s life expressed in the songs known traditionally as “Negro Spirituals.” Students explore these themes through the spirituals, slave narratives and other prose in order to develop an understanding of an aesthetic that began on the decks of the ships that brought enslaved Africans to North America.  Students apply how these songs are central in the works of four prominent descendents of the sorrow song singer prophets Zora Hurston, Richard Wright, James Baldwin and Toni Morrison.

The course will explore how these modern artist continue the tradition using the same aesthetic principles that can be discovered in the spirituals, and utilizing these artistic principles for the same reasons: to lead their companions on that dreadful journey out of the wilderness and into homeland.

EH 599 Thesis
Please see Dr. Harrington if you would like to register for thesis hours and have not already discussed your committee, graduation requirements, etc.