Aestheticism in Modern and Contemporary American Poetry (Materer).

After defining aestheticism through studying the works of philosophers such as Kant, Hegel and the Kierkegaard of The Concept of Irony, the seminar will explore aestheticism in modern poetry. We will discuss the freedom it offers to poets in a skeptical age as well as the limitations it may impose on their art. Background readings will include works from the period of English aestheticism, including Henry James's The Spoils of Poyton and Wilde's dialogues and Picture of Dorian Gray. The seminar will trace both aestheticism and the critique of it through the poetry of Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore and James Merrill. Although the seminar will focus on these three poets, students may write their seminar papers on any poet they wish.

Confession and Autobiography in Modern Poetry (Materer)

Well before the confessional poets or the public confessionalism of the talk shows, Michel Foucault wrote that the medieval institution of confession had pervaded modern culture: "It plays a part in justice, medicine, education, family relationships, and love relations, in the most ordinary affairs of everyday life, and in the most solemn rites: one confesses one's crimes, one's sins, one's thoughts and desires, one's illnesses and troubles; one goes about telling, with the greatest precision, what is most difficult to tell. [Think of Clinton.] One confesses in public and in private, to one's parents, one's educators, one's doctor, to those one loves; one admits to oneself, in pleasure and in pain, things it would be impossible to tell to anyone else, the things people write books about." The "confessional" poetry of Lowell, Plath, Sexton and Berryman seemed shockingly new in the 50s and 60s; and today the term "confessional" is pejorative when applied to poets. Yet if Foucault is right confessionalism belongs to the mainstream of modern literature. After a brief look at early confessional writers such as Augustine and Rousseau, the seminar will examine T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land as a confessional work before going on to the American confessional school. Texts will include The Waste Land, Ginsburg's Howl and Kaddish, Lowell's Life Studies, Plath's Ariel, poems by John Berryman and Anne Sexton and selections from later poets. Students may choose any English language poet or poets as the subject for their seminar paper. (course website)

Capstone Course in the Decadent Movement (Glick)

"The first duty in life is to be as artificial as possible," declared Oscar Wilde. "What the second duty is no one has as yet discovered." Our task in this course will be to investigate the cult of artificiality and perversity celebrated by the decadent movement of the late nineteenth century. Focusing on decadence as a political and aesthetic movement, we will interrogate the stylistic, theoretical, and political strategies of decadent texts. Topics will include critiques of "the natural," dandyism, prostitution, aestheticism, commodity culture and consumerism, feminism, hysteria, gay/lesbian identity and eroticism, degeneration, masquerade and gender performance, male masochism, the sadistic woman, sexology and psychology, and monstrosity. Readings will include works by Charles Baudelaire, J.K Huysmans, Walter Pater, Rachilde, Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, Bram Stoker, Renée Vivien, and Wilde.

Modernism (Hoberek)

This course has two main purposes. The first is to provide an introduction to the literature and some of the other art produced in America and Europe during the first half of the twentieth-century. Secondly, and more importantly, however, this course means to serve as an introduction to the crucial skill of assessing and critically deploying an "ism": in this case the periodizing term "modernism," which is generally used to refer to the most important art produced between, say, 1890 and 1939 (as we shall see, these dates are among the debated aspects of the term). Modernism is particularly useful for our purposes because it is (seemingly paradoxically) both under attack and, as a rubric for new scholarship, stronger than ever. That is to say that modernism as an object of study is currently undergoing the sorts of debate and critical scrutiny that give a literary field, and the scholarship produced within it, strength. Beginning with this sense of productive revision, we will look at a range of primary and secondary texts to try and come up with both a shared understanding of what someone might mean when they say a work is "modernist" and an understanding of the value of always subjecting such terms to critical examination. One particularly bad form of literary scholarship takes the form of a tautology in which an "ism" (modernism, postmodernism, Marxism, postcolonialism) is postulated but undefined, and then a text is shown to fall within the rubric by terms derived from the text itself (ie, this text is modernist because modernism looks like this text). Such scholarship will be the standard we work against in this class. In fact, we will take it as an article of faith that there was not one big Modernism but rather a number of different but related modernisms.

The Portrait in Twentieth-Century American Poetry (Dickey)

This course examines the “portrait” as a literary genre from Henry James (Portrait of a Lady), through the modernists (Eliot, Pound, Williams, cummings, Stein) and into the postwar period (Lowell, Bidart). What conceptions of subjectivity are built into these portraits, or, what doubts about subjectivity do they raise? We will consider the history of the genre (the character sketch, the dramatic monologue) as well as late-nineteenth-century innovations in portrait painting that changed the meaning of the form. We will primarily focus on poetry rather than fiction, and in particular examine the relationship between dramatic speaking and portraiture. Secondary reading will draw from art criticism (Clement Greenberg on flatness and modernity; Michael Fried on absorption and theatricality) and philosophy (Descartes; Charles Taylor on the history of the self) as well as literary criticism on the individual authors. Coursework includes short position papers, annotated bibliography, and research paper.

New Approaches to Post-World War II American Fiction (Hoberek)

In this course we'll read a representative sample of postwar US fiction, along with recent examples of criticism and theory that stake out methodological approaches to this body of work. This course isn't a survey of the postwar fictional canon, mainly because there is no canon of postwar fiction (yet). This is both a problem and an opportunity for us as critics: a problem because it's hard to know what to read and how, and an opportunity because we can stake our own claim on the ultimate direction of the field. For the sake of coherence we'll focus our in-class discussions on one framework for reading postwar fiction that seems likely to shape future work, transnationalism or globalism. For this purpose we'll not only read fiction and criticism with a transnational element, but also Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri's monumental (and already much cited) recent book Empire. Meanwhile, you'll also pursue a collective research project (more on this below) that takes a somewhat broader approach to our canonical and methodological questions.

Class and Social Representation in Contemporary British and American Fiction (Hoberek, Winter 2005).

In 1948 the literary critic Lionel Trilling wrote that in postwar society the continued existence of the novel was in doubt because "money and class," two of the novel's "defining conditions," no longer "have the same place in our social and mental life that they once had." Trilling's prediction of the novel's demise was, of course, mistaken, although he may have had a point about the end of a particular realist tradition associated with the historical rise of the middle class. Beginning with F. Scott Fitzgerald's defining representation of the American class system in The Great Gatsby, we'll undertake a comparative reading of contemporary British and American fiction to ask whether--given the recent return of income disparities to their 1920s levels--the novel is again taking class as a subject. Our primary focus will be on the pressure class exerts on form to produce novels' (never simply mimetic) representations of society. Along the way we'll consider such issues as what class is (and what it isn't); the historical relationship between class and the novel; and the theory that class has never mattered in American fiction (because class doesn't exist here, or it's always diffused by the omnipresent social logic of race). Contemporary authors whose work we may read include Iris Murdoch, Kazuo Ishiguro, Hanif Kureishi, Philip Roth, Dorothy Allison, John Edgar Wideman, and Russell Banks.

L.A. Fiction (Piper)

Aldous Huxley once called Los Angeles a "city of dreadful joy." L.A. is generally portrayed as a place of both promise and deception, a "paradise" awaiting apocalypse. In this course, we read L.A. fiction within the context of journalism and film from the 1920s to the present. Our reading is organized around the concepts of "booster" and "noir," looking at how the city has been both promoted and demonized from its inception. Some of the authors included in this course are T.C. Boyle, Joan Didion, Nathanael West, Octavio Butler, Upton Sinclair, and Philip K. Dick. We also look at short fiction, poetry, essays, journalism, and diaries from Writing Los Angeles. Theoretical texts include Mike Davis and Theodor Adorno.

Skepticism and American Poetry (Dickey)

This course introduces graduate students to a canonical body of American poetry and to a methodology of literary criticism based on epistemology. Beginning with representative examples from Whitman and Dickinson, we will then turn to major works by twentieth-century American poets including Frost, Eliot, Stevens, Hart Crane, Bishop, and possibly others. We will interpret these poems as interventions in the long history (carried on in both philosophy and literature) of skepticism. Topics to be discussed include the problem of other minds, the relationship between doubt and religion, consequences of skepticism (relativism, solipsism), ways of resisting skepticism, and the historical and cultural roots of American skepticism. We will consult supplementary readings in philosophy and literary criticism to orient our discussion, but our main focus will be close readings of poems.

Studies in 20th Century American Literature: “Contemporary American Fiction and the Metafictional Impulse” (Cohen)

In this course we will read a number of examples of self-conscious, self-reflexive American fiction (as well as some precursors and works by writers not from the U.S.) and address the questions they raise about genre, literary history, social history, and politics: How de we define metafiction? How does metafiction cause us to rethink representation? Was metafiction born in post-WWII America or does it have roots in the novel’s past? What can be said about contemporary American metafiction in its post-WWII historical context? Are there political ramifications of the metafictional approach to representation? Possible texts: John Barth, The Floating Opera and “The Literature of Exhaustion”; Donald Barthelme, 60 Stories; Jorge Luis Borges, Ficciones; Richard Brautigan, Trout Fishing in America; Robert Coover, The Public Burning; Denis Diderot, Jacques the Fatalist; Linda Hutcheon, The Poetics of Postmodernism; Fredric Jameson, “Postmodernism and Consumer Society"; Milan Kundera, The Art of the Novel; Toni Morrison, Jazz; Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire; Ishmael Reed, Mumbo Jumbo; Thomas Pynchon, “The Crying of Lot 49”; William Spanos, "The Detective and the Boundary: Some Notes on the Postmodern Literary Imagination"; Patricia Waugh, Metafiction: The Theory and Practice of Self-Conscious Fiction.