ENG 333 - Studies in Fiction

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.

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.

Queer Modernist Fiction
The advent of literary modernism in the Anglophone world, with its emphasis on new forms for cultural expression, coincided with the reconception of same-sex desire in the very late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when a new array of sexual identities became articulated and substantiated in different forms of medical, legal, and political discourse. This course studies the ways in which fictional works in primarily the United Kingdom and the United States in the modernist period (roughly 1900-1960) negotiate expressions of queerness before the time of the Stonewall riots. We will study important fictions by authors such as E. M. Forster, Virginia Woolf, Djuna Barnes, Claude McKay, Christopher Isherwood, Patricia Highsmith, Han Suyin, and James Baldwin. Alongside these works we will also read some relevant critical and theoretical work in queer studies (by figures such as Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Judith Butler, Jack Halberstam, Michael Warner, and Heather Love), although the emphasis of the course will be mostly on the fiction.

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): 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 up to 4 times for credit if different topics.
Notes: Not all topics offered every year. Review schedule of classes for availability. Review specific descriptions for applicability to department requirements.
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).