ENG 333 - Studies in Fiction

American Feminist Fiction, Post-1945
Full course for one semester. While some feminist literary history simply traces a teleology-from “prefeminist” to fully feminist to “postfeminist” works-this course asks instead: How is feminist fiction in dialogue with feminist theory? Rather than ask of a work, “Is it feminist?” we will ask (with Rita Felski) “Feminist-for whom?” and “How is it feminist?” We will consider the poetics and politics of (white) women’s liberation novels and fiction that explores women’s identity as intersectional, including race, ethnicity, sexuality, class, age, and [dis]ability. In addition to fictional narratives, readings will include feminist theory. Writers whose works may be studied include Octavia Butler, Louise Erdrich, Joanne Greenberg, Gayl Jones, Maxine Hong Kingston, Ursula Le Guin, Paule Marshall, Gloria Naylor, Joyce Carol Oates, Grace Paley, Marge Piercy, Alice Walker, Rita Felski, Shulamith Firestone, Gilbert and Gubar, Gayle Greene, bell hooks, Teresa de Lauretis, Janice Radway, Adrienne Rich, Sonia Saldívar-Hull, Bonnie Zimmerman.

James Joyce
In 2022, the hundredth-anniversary year of the publication of Ulysses, critics and scholars have repeatedly hailed James Joyce as the most influential and important fiction writer of the twentieth century, noting that he effectively rewrote the configurations and capabilities of the short story, novel, and epic. Over the track of his career, Joyce’s fiction progressed from its roots in literary naturalism to more complex modernist forms, exhibiting his uncanny ability to master and also invent different rhetorical discourses. This course tracks the full range of this development, from his earliest fictions in Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man all the way through brief selections from his last and most difficult work, Finnegans Wake; we will focus particular attention on the entirety of Ulysses. We will pay attention as well to critical, biographical, and historical contexts for Joyce’s work.

Postbellum, Pre-Harlem: The Literature of Reconstruction
Born too late for the slave narrative and too early for the Harlem Renaissance-“Post-Bellum-Pre-Harlem,” as he puts it-Charles W. Chesnutt missed two major African American literary movements. Chesnutt’s life (1858-1932) spanned crucial moments in American history-the Civil War, Reconstruction, the rise of post-Reconstruction violence, the establishment of schools for Black children led by Black teachers, the emergence of the convict labor system, and the beginnings of the civil rights movement. This course examines Chesnutt’s fiction as the core of the literature of Reconstruction and its aftermath, from the pernicious myths of the plantation school to the protest fiction of the NAACP’s magazine, The Crisis. Methodologically, we will draw on recent work in African American archival recovery and periodical culture, examining the cultural politics of publication history. Genres will include realism, regionalism, and sentimentalism; the slave narrative and the social problem novel; journalism, legal writing, and essays. This course applies toward the department’s pre-1900 requirement.

Postcolonial Hauntings
Haunting is central to postcolonial thought and literature. This course examines the aesthetics of haunting in postcolonial novels from the latter half of the twentieth century. Haunting invite us to radically rethink the relations between the past and the present in terms of their contemporaneity and interdependence. It also makes us examine the relationship between subjectivity, embodiment, and place. We will reflect on alternative space and temporalities opened up by literary evocations of ghosts, phantoms, and specters, and explore the themes of memory, loss, and trauma in various historical and cultural contexts. How might the language of haunting help us understand the unresolved histories of colonial, racial, nationalist, sexist, and ecological violence? How do these texts register the experience of loss? In what ways do narrative texts imagine the possibility of justice by opening up a space for reexamining and reinterpreting the past in the present and alternative modes of inhabiting space and place? This course will put postcolonial narrative texts in conversation with various postcolonial and poststructuralist theories, psychoanalysis, critical race and Indigenous theories, and posthumanist and ecocritical writings. Primary texts will include works by Amitav Ghosh, Arundhati Roy, Leslie Marmon Silko, Patricia Grace, Erna Brodber, and Maisy Card.

Virginia Woolf’s Modernist Networks
The idea of the network was central not only to the ways in which Virginia Woolf conceived of relations between and among people in her novels but also according to the terms by which she understood her own fictional career. Woolf’s affiliations with her Bloomsbury Group cohort and her other literary collaborators and rivals informed her own sense of herself as an author, and were ultimately turned into literary capital regarding the complex manner by which selves are constituted through their engagements with others. This course will explore this dynamic not only through Woolf’s own fiction and essays but also those within Woolf’s modernist networks both during her lifetime and after by figures such as Katherine Mansfield, E. M. Forster, Lytton Strachey, Elizabeth Bowen, and Toni Morrison (among others).

Unit(s): 1
Group Distribution Requirement(s): Distribution Group I
Prerequisite(s): American Feminist Fiction, Post-1945: Two ENG courses at the 200-level or higher

Postbellum, Pre-Harlem: The Literature of Reconstruction: HUM 110 and two ENG courses at the 200-level or higher

Postcolonial Hauntings: Sophomore standing and two ENG courses at the 200-level or higher

Virginia Woolf’s Modernist Networks: Sophomore standing and two ENG courses at the 200-level or higher
Instructional Method: Conference
Grading Mode: Letter grading (A-F)
Repeatable for Credit: May be taken 4 times for credit
Notes: Not all topics offered every year. Review schedule of classes for availability. Review specific descriptions for applicability to department requirements.

Postbellum, Pre-Harlem: The Literature of Reconstruction
This course applies toward the department’s pre-1900 requirement.
Group Distribution Learning Outcome(s):

Understand how arguments can be made, visions presented, or feelings or ideas conveyed through language or other modes of expression (symbols, movement, images, sounds, etc.).
Analyze and interpret texts, whether literary or philosophical, in English or a foreign language, or works of the visual or performing arts.
Evaluate arguments made in or about texts (whether literary or philosophical, in English or a foreign language, or works of the visual or performing arts).