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2012-13 Catalog

En 1 a

English Composition for ESL Writers

9 units (3-0-6 or 4-0-5)   |  first term
An introduction to English composition for students whose first language is not English and who need focused instruction before taking a freshman humanities course. This course offers fundamental strategies for composing fluent standard written English and for constructing academic arguments. Students are assigned to En 1 a based on a writing assessment that is required of all incoming students. Not available for credit toward the humanities-social science requirement.
Instructor: Daley
En 1 b

English Composition for ESL Writers

9 units (3-0-6 or 4-0-5)   |  second term
Continuation of En 1 a for students who need additional instruction before taking a freshman humanities course. Not available for credit toward the humanities-social science requirement.
Instructor: S. Hall
En 2

Introduction to College Writing

9 units (2-2-5)   |  first term
A course in developing forceful academic essays, for students who need more focused attention to writing before entering freshman humanities courses. It emphasizes analytic and argumentative writing and critical reading. The class features small seminar discussions and weekly conferences with the instructor. Students are assigned to En 2 based on a writing assessment that is required of all incoming students. Not available for credit toward the humanities-social science requirement.
Instructors: S. Hall, Daley
En 3

Tutorial in Writing

3 units (1-2-0)   |  second term
Prerequisites: Simultaneous registration in a freshman humanities course.
Individualized instruction for students who need extra support for writing in the humanities. Not available for credit toward the humanities-social science requirement. Not offered 2012-13.
Hum/En 5

Major British Authors

9 units (3-0-6)   |  offered by announcement
This course will introduce students to one or more of the genres of English literature, including poetry, drama, and prose fiction, by studying major authors from different periods. Sometimes the course will cover a wide range of authors, while at others it will concentrate on a few. Authors might include Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Austen, George Eliot, or Joyce.
Instructors: Gilmore, Haugen, Pigman, Jahner
Hum/En 6

American Literature and Culture

9 units (3-0-6)   |  offered by announcement
Studies of American aesthetics, genres, and ideas from the birth of the nation to the present. Students will be introduced to the techniques of formal analysis. We will consider what constitutes evidence in relation to texts and how to develop a persuasive interpretation. Topics may include Nature's Nation, slavery and its aftermath, individualism and the marketplace, the "New Woman," and the relation between word and image.
Instructors: Hunter, Weinstein, Jurca
Hum/En 7

Modern European Literature

9 units (3-0-6)   |  offered by announcement
An introduction to literary analysis through a sustained exploration of the rise and aftermath of modernism. What was the modernist revolt of the early 20th century, how did it challenge literary tradition and existing social forms, and to what extent have we inherited a world remade by modernism? While the course will focus on British and Continental literature, writers from other parts of the world whose work closely engages the European tradition may also be considered.Authors may include Flaubert, James, Conrad, Joyce, Woolf, Kafka, Borges, Yeats, and Eliot.
Instructors: Gilmartin, Gilmore
F/En 30

Introduction to Film

9 units (3-0-6)
This course examines film as an art and as an institution from 1895 through the present. Students will acquire the basic vocabulary and techniques of film analysis, focusing on questions of form (mise-en-scene, cinematography, editing, sound) and narrative, as well as an understanding of the historical development of the medium with an emphasis on the American, European, and Asian contexts. Topics will include the early cinema of illusion, the actuality film, the transition to sound, the Hollywood star system, Italian neorealism, the French New Wave, Dogma 95, and Hong Kong action cinema. Not offered 2012-13.
En 84

Writing About Science

9 units (3-0-6)   |  second, third terms
Instruction and practice in writing about science and technology for general audiences. The course considers how to convey complex technical information in clear, engaging prose that nonspecialists can understand and appreciate. Readings in different genres (e.g., magazine and newspaper journalism, reflective essays, case studies, popularizations) raise issues for discussion and serve as models for preliminary writing assignments and for a more substantial final project on a topic of each student's choice. Includes oral presentation. Satisfies the Institute scientific writing requirement and the option oral communication requirement for humanities majors.
Instructor: S. Hall
En 85

Writing Poetry

9 units (3-0-6)   |  third term
Students will develop their poetic craft by creating poems in a variety of forms. The lecturer will provide guidance and direction, supervise class discussions of students' works, and assign outside reading as needed. Students may apply one term of En 85, 86, 87, 88, and 89 to the additional HSS requirements, and all other courses in this series will receive Institute credit.
Instructor: J. Hall
En 86

Fiction and Creative Nonfiction Writing

9 units (3-0-6)   |  second term
The class is conducted as a writing workshop in the short-story and personal essay/memoir form. Modern literary stories and essays are discussed, as well as the art and craft of writing well, aspects of "the writing life," and the nature of the publishing world today. Students are urged to write fiction or nonfiction that reflects on the nature of life. Humor is welcome, although not genre fiction such as formula romance, horror, thrillers, fantasy, or sci-fi. Students may apply one term of En 85, 86, 87, 88, and 89 to the additional HSS requirements, and all other courses in this series will receive Institute credit.
Instructor: Gerber
En 87

Introduction to Screenwriting

9 units (3-0-6)   |  offered by announcement
The course will focus on format, structure and basic story elements of a feature length screenplay. Students will read samples of successful screenplays, discuss their own ideas, learn how to formulate an outline, and be given exercises to help them develop their first act. Students may apply only one term of En 85, 86, or 87 to the 108 unit HSS requirements. Additional courses in this series will receive Institute credit toward graduation.
Instructor: Yamashita
En 89

Writing The News - Journalistic Writing

9 units (3-0-6)   |  first term
This class will explore journalistic writing - that is, writing that pays careful attention to fact, accuracy, and precision. It will also examine other aspects of the craft, such as theme, scene, character and, as an equally important result, storytelling. We will begin by examining how traditional print journalism offers up the news through newspapers - their structure, rules, process and presentation. We'll spend time on new media, its process and principles. Then, we'll use the knowledge gained to look at longer-form journalistic writing and at what has become known as literary journalism. Students will produce numerous stories and other writing during the class, including profiles, issues, and reviews. Several of these will be for publication in The California Tech. There may be visits by professional journalists and off-campus excursions, including an outing to the Los Angeles Times.
Instructor: Kipling
En 98

Reading in English

9 units (1-0-8)
Prerequisites: instructor's permission.
An individual program of directed reading in English or American literature, in areas not covered by regular courses.
Instructor: Staff
En 99 ab

Senior Tutorial for English Majors

9 units (1-0-8)
Students will study research methods and write a research paper. Required of students in the English option.
Instructor: Staff
En 113 ab

Shakespeare's Career

9 units (3-0-6)   |  first, third terms
A survey of Shakespeare's career as a dramatist. The first term will study his comedies and histories; the second, his tragedies and tragicomedies. Students will need to read one play per week.
Instructor: Pigman
En 114 ab

Shakespeare

9 units (3-0-6)   |  second term
A close study of Shakespeare's plays with an emphasis on his language, dramatic structures, characters, and themes. Each term will concentrate on a detailed consideration of three or four of Shakespeare's major plays. The first term is not a prerequisite for the second. Not offered 2012-13.
En 116

Milton and the Epic Tradition

9 units (3-0-6)   |  third term
Epic poetry is a competitive and self-referential genre. Virgil imitates and revises Homer, Dante makes Virgil his guide through hell and most of purgatory before leaving him behind, and Milton transforms the entire epic tradition. Since Milton's engagement with and criticism of the epic are essential elements of Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained, we will focus on his dialogue with Homer, Virgil, and Dante and their differing conceptions of heroism. Not offered 2012-13.
En 118

Classical Mythology

9 units (3-0-6)   |  first, third terms
Why did the Greeks and Romans remain fascinated with the same stories of gods and demigods for more than a thousand years? On the other hand, how did they adapt those stories to fit new times and places? Starting with the earliest Greek poems and advancing through classical Athens, Hellenistic Alexandria, and Augustan Rome, we consider the history of writing poetry as a history of reading the past; the course also serves as an excellent introduction to ancient literary history at large. Readings may include Homer's 'Odyssey,' Hesiod, Aeschylus, Euripides, Apollonius Rhodius, Ovid, and Seneca.
Instructor: Haugen
En 119

Displacement

9 units (3-0-6)   |  first term
The literary fascination with people who change places, temporarily or permanently, over a short distance or across the globe, in works dating from our lifetimes and from the recent and the remote past. How readily can such stories be compared, how easy is it to apply traditional categories of literary evaluation, and, in the contemporary world, how have poetry and prose fictions about migration survived alongside other media? 21st-century works will receive considerable attention; other readings may include Virgil, Swift, Flaubert, Mann, Achebe, Nabokov, Didion, Morrison. Not offered 2012-13.
En 121

Literature and Its Readers

9 units (3-0-6)   |  first term
The course will investigate readers who have made adventurous uses of their favorite works of literature, from Greek antiquity through the 20th century. Sometimes those readers count, at least temporarily, as literary critics, as when the philosopher Aristotle made Sophocles' Oedipus the King the central model in his wildly successful essay on the literary form of tragedy. Other readers have been even more experimental, as when Sigmund Freud, studying the same play, made the "Oedipus complex" a meeting point for his theory of psychology, his vision of human societies, and his fascination with literary narrative. It will discuss some basic questions about the phenomenon of literary reading. Does a book have a single meaning? Can it be used rightly or wrongly? Not offered 2012-13.
En 122

Early History of the Novel

9 units (3-0-6)   |  third term
The realistic novel is a surprising, even experimental moment in the history of fiction. How and why did daily life become a legitimate topic for narrative in the 18th century? The realistic turn clearly attracted new classes of readers, but did it also make the novel a better vehicle for commenting on society at large? Why were the formal conventions of realistic writing so tightly circumscribed? Authors may include Cervantes, Defoe, Richardson, Fielding, Sterne, Walpole, Boswell, and Austen. Not offered 2012-13.
En 123

The 19th-Century English Novel

9 units (3-0-6)   |  third term
A survey of the 19th-century novel from Austen through Conrad, with special emphasis upon the Victorians. Major authors may include Austen, Shelley, Dickens, Eliot, Thackeray, Gaskell, Bronte, Collins, Trollope, Stoker, Hardy. Not offered 2012-13.
En 124

20th-Century British Fiction

9 units (3-0-6)   |  third term
A survey of the 20th-century British and Irish novel, from the modernist novel to the postcolonial novel. Major authors may include Conrad, Joyce, Woolf, Forster, Lawrence, Orwell, Amis, Lessing, Rushdie. Not offered 2012-13.
En 125

British Romantic Literature

9 units (3-0-6)   |  second term
A selective survey of English writing in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Major authors may include Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Keats, Percy Shelley, Mary Shelley, and Austen. Particular attention will be paid to intellectual and historical contexts and to new understandings of the role of literature in society.
Instructor: Gilmartin
En 126

Gothic Fiction

9 units (3-0-6)   |  third term
The literature of horror, fantasy, and the supernatural, from the late 18th century to the present day. Particular attention will be paid to gothic's shifting cultural imperative, from its origins as a qualified reaction to Enlightenment rationalism, to the contemporary ghost story as an instrument of social and psychological exploration. Issues will include atmosphere and the gothic sense of space; gothic as a popular pathology; and the gendering of gothic narrative. Fiction by Walpole, Shelley, Bronte, Stoker, Poe, Wilde, Angela Carter, and Toni Morrison. Film versions of the gothic may be included.
Instructor: Gilmartin
En 128

Modern and Contemporary Irish Literature

9 units (3-0-6)   |  third term
The development of Irish fiction, poetry, and drama from the early 20th-century Irish literary renaissance, through the impact of modernism, to the Field Day movement and other contemporary developments. Topics may include the impact of political violence and national division upon the literary imagination; the use of folk and fairy-tale traditions; patterns of emigration and literary exile; the challenge of the English language and the relation of Irish writing to British literary tradition; and recent treatments of Irish literature in regional, postcolonial, and global terms. Works by Joyce, Yeats, Synge, Friel, O'Brien, Heaney, Boland, and others. Not offered 2012-13.
En 129

Enlightenment Fiction

9 units (3-0-6)   |  second term
What was the fate of fiction in an Age of Reason? Historians have questioned whether a conventional sense of the Enlightenment adequately accounts for European culture in the 18th century, and the literary imagination can seem particularly unsuited to generalizations about progress, optimism, reason, and social order. This course will consider experimental narratives and philosophical satires from the English and Continental tradition, as well as early Romantic responses to the Enlightenment. Readings may include Defoe, Sterne, Voltaire, Diderot, Mary Shelley, Hoffman, and fairy tales from the brothers Grimm. Not offered 2012-13.
En 131

Poe's Afterlife

9 units (3-0-6)   |  second term
This course focuses on Edgar Allan Poe and the considerable influence his works have had on other writers. Authors as diverse as Charles Baudelaire, Jules Verne, Jorge Luis Borges, Vladimir Nabokov, John Barth, and Philip Roth have used Poe's stories as departure points for their own work. We shall begin by reading some of Poe's s classic short stories, including "The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym," "The Purloined Letter," and others. We shall then explore how and why Poe's stories have been so important for authors, despite the fact that his reputation as a great American writer, unlike Hawthorne's and Melville's, for example, is a relatively recent phenomenon. Not offered 2012-13.
En 132

American Literature Until the Civil War

9 units (3-0-6)   |  first term
The course will analyze the literature of this period, from the Puritans through Melville, to determine how various writers understood their relationship to a new world of seemingly unlimited possibility. Authors covered may include Mary Rowlandson, Benjamin Franklin, Hannah Foster, Harriet Jacobs, Emerson, Thoreau, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Hawthorne, and Melville. Not offered 2012-13.
En 133

19th-Century American Women Writers

9 units (3-0-6), second term
This course will analyze many of the most popular novels written in the 19th century. How might we account for their success in the 19th century and their marginalization (until recently) in the 20th century? Why were so many of these texts "sentimental"? How might we understand the appeal of "sentimental" literature? What are the ideological implications of sentimentalism? Authors may include Stowe, Warner, Cummins, Alcott, Phelps, Fern, etc. Not offered 2012-13.
En 134

The Career of Herman Melville

9 units (3-0-6), third term
The course will focus on Melville's works from Typee through Billy Budd. Special emphasis will be placed on Melville's relations to 19th-century American culture. Not offered 2012-13.
En 136

The Fiction of Charles Dickens

9 units (3-0-6)   |  Oliver Twist Dombey and Son Bleak House Our Mutual Friend
An overview of the Great Inimitable's fiction, concentrating on four texts representative of different phases of his novel-writing career and their relationship to the changing world of Victorian Britain: ,,, Not offered 2012-13.
En 137

African American Literature

9 units (3-0-6)   |  second term
This course analyzes some of the great works of American literature written by African Americans. This body of writing gives rise to two crucial questions: How does African American literature constitute a literary tradition of its own? How is that tradition inextricable from American literary history? From slave narratives to Toni Morrison's Beloved, from the Harlem Renaissance to Alice Walker, from Ralph Ellison to Walter Mosley, African American literature has examined topics as diverse and important as race relations, class identification, and family life. We shall analyze these texts not only in relation to these cultural issues, but also in terms of their aesthetic and formal contributions. Not offered 2012-13.
En 138

Twain and His Contemporaries

9 units (3-0-6)   |  third term
This course will study the divergent theories of realism that arose in the period after the Civil War and before World War I. Authors covered may include Howells, James, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Twain, Sarah Orne Jewett, Jacob Riis, Stephen Crane, and W. E. B. DuBois. Not offered 2012-13.
En 141

James and Wharton

9 units (3-0-6)   |  first term
The course covers selected novels, short fiction, and nonfiction writings of friends and expatriates Henry James and Edith Wharton. It will consider formal questions of style and genre as well as the literature's preoccupation with describing and defining American modernity, despite the authors' shared ambivalence toward their native country. Students will read as many as, but no more than, five novels. Texts covered may include The Portrait of a Lady, Daisy Miller, The Ambassadors, selections from The Decoration of Houses, The House of Mirth, The Custom of the Country, and The Age of Innocence. Not offered 2012-13.
En 145

American Ethnic Literature

9 units (3-0-6)   |  second term
From the idea of the melting pot to contemporary debates about multiculturalism, the costs and benefits of assimilation have been crucial to understanding what it means to be American in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. We will be reading novels, autobiographies, sociology, and other texts that describe the struggles of newcomers to adapt to an alien culture while also, often, trying to negotiate a meaningful relation to their native culture. Authors covered may include Anzia Yezierska, Maxine Hong Kingston, Frank Chin, Richard Rodriguez, Philip Roth, and T. C. Boyle. Not offered 2012-13.
En/F 160 ab

Introduction to Classical Hollywood Film

9 units (3-0-6)   |  first, second terms
This course introduces students to Hollywood films and filmmaking during the classical period, from the coming of sound through the '50s. It will cover basic techniques and vocabulary of film analysis, as we learn to think of films as texts with distinctive formal properties. Topics include the rise and collapse of the studio system, technical transformations (sound, color, deep focus), genre (the musical, the melodrama), cultural contexts (the Depression, World War II, the Cold War), audience responses, and the economic history of the film corporations. Terms may be taken independently. Part a covers the period 1927-1940. Part b covers 1941-1960.
Instructor: Jurca
En 180

Special Topics in English

9 units (3-0-6)   |  See registrar's announcement for details
Instructor: Staff
En 181

Hardy: The Wessex Novels

9 units (3-0-6)   |  third term
This course will examine the body of work that the late Victorian novelist Thomas Hardy published under the general title The Wessex Novels, that is, the sequence of works from Far from the Madding Crowd to Jude the Obscure. The six main novels will be read critically to give a sense of the totality of this greatest British regional novelist's achievement.
Instructor: Gilmore
En 182

Literature and the First Amendment

9 units (3-0-6)   |  second term
"Freedom of speech," writes Benjamin Cardozo in Palko v. Connecticut (1937), "is the matrix, the indispensable condition, of nearly every other form of freedom." We will go inside the matrix, focusing on how it has affected the books we read. This is not a course in constitutional law or political philosophy, but an opportunity to examine how American literary culture has intersected with law and politics. We will investigate the ways in which the meanings of "freedom," what it entails, and who is entitled to it have changed over time. Possible topics include the obscenity trials surrounding Allen Ginsberg's Howl and James Joyce's Ulysses, crackdowns on anti-war propagandists, and the legal battle between Hustler publisher Larry Flynt and televangelist and Moral Majority cofounder Jerry Falwell.
Instructor: Hunter
En 183

Victorian Crime Fiction

9 units (3-0-6)   |  first term
In 19th-century Britain, for the first time in human history, more of a nation's citizens came to live in urban areas than in rural ones. This result of the Industrial Revolution produced many effects, but in the fiction of the period, one of the most striking was an obsession with the problem of crime. Victorian authors filled their novels with murder, prisons, poisonings, prostitution, criminals, and the new figure of the detective; in this class we will look at the social history, publishing developments, and formal dilemmas that underlay such a response. Authors studied may include Dickens, Collins, Braddon, Conan Doyle, Chesterton, and Conrad, among others.
Instructor: Gilmore
En 184

Literary Biography

9 units (3-0-6)   |  third term
This course is devoted to The Life of Samuel Johnson (1791), one of the strangest biographies and indeed one of the strangest books in English literature. Johnson, a respected poet and the best-known critic of his time, was also famous for editing Shakespeare, publishing biographies of earlier poets, and compiling a mammoth dictionary of English. James Boswell, his much younger admirer, obsessively recorded Johnson's conversation and gathered documents of his life in an effort to produce a real, unvarnished, and unprecedented kind of biography. In addition to The Life, we examine some of Johnson's own works, poetry by other contemporaries, Boswell's diaries, and other relevant sources. The aim is to understand the literary culture of eighteenth-century England by means of one focused and particularly rich case study. Not offered 2012-13.
En 185

Dickens and the Dickensian

9 units (3-0-6)
The adjective "Dickensian" makes an almost daily appearance in today's newspapers, magazines, and other media sources. It is used to describe everything from outrageous political scandals, to Bollywood musicals, to multiplot novels. But what does the word really mean? And what part of Charles Dickens's output does it refer to? This class will consider some of Dickens's most famous works alongside a series of contemporary novels, all critically described in "Dickensian" terms. The main concern will be equally with style and form, and 19th-century and present-day circumstances of production (e.g., serialization, mass production, Web publication, etc.). Authors considered (aside from Dickens) may include Richard Price, Zadie Smith, Monica Ali, and Jonathan Franzen. Not offered 2012-13.
En 186

The Novel of Education

9 units (3-0-6)   |  first term
What does it mean to be educated? This class will consider this question via a series of novels that take us from secondary school to the university, and from the nineteenth century to the present. Concentrating on British literature, with its compelling tendency to focalize historical anxieties about class, race and social reform through depictions of formal schooling practices, we too will consider these issues as we enter classrooms and eavesdrop on faculty conversations. At the same time, there will be ample scope to engage with more abstract questions about power, pedagogy, and alienation, and we will use our reading's rich stock of schoolyard bullies, boarding school mean girls, struggling scholars and power-mad professors as the concrete anchor for such considerations. Authors read may include Dickens, Bronte, Waugh, Amis, Spark, Lodge, Ishiguro and Zadie Smith. Not offered 2012-13.
En 187

Introduction to Medieval English Literature

9 units (3-0-6)   |  first
This course offers a tour of major (as well as some minor) genres and works written in Britain prior to 1500. Far from a literary "dark age," the Middle Ages fostered dramatic experiments in narrative form, bequeathing to modern literature some of its best-loved genres and texts. We will practice reading in Middle English-the language of Chaucer and his contemporaries-while we concentrate on the following questions: how did these texts circulate among readers? How do they establish their authority? What kinds of historical and cultural currents to they engage? Texts may include the lives of saints, the confessions of sinners, drama, lyrics, romances, selections from Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, and Malory's Morte Darthur. Readings will be in Middle and modern English.
Instructor: Jahner
En 188

Medieval Romance

9 units (3-0-6)   |  second term
The medieval term romanz designated both a language, French, and a genre, romance, dedicated to the adventures of knights and ladies and the villains, monsters, magic, and miles that stood in their way. This course explores key examples from the twelfth through the fifteenth centuries, while also examining evolutions in the form. We will consider how romances figured love and desire as well as negotiated questions of law, territory, and cultural difference. Authors and texts may include Chretien de Troyes, Marie de France, Gawain and the Green Knight, Arthurian legends, outlaw tales, and hagiography. Readings will be in modern English translation, with Old French and Middle English available for the adventurous.
Instructor: Jahner
En/H 193

Cervantes, Truth or Dare: Don Quixote in an Age of Empire

9 units (3-0-6)   |  third term
Studies Cervantes's literary masterpiece, Don Quixote, with a view to the great upheavals that shaped the early modern world: Renaissance Europe's discovery of America; feudalism's demise and the rise of mass poverty; Reformation and Counter-Reformation; extermination of heretics and war against infidels; and the decline of the Hapsburg dynasty. The hapless protagonist of Don Quixote calls into question the boundaries between sanity and madness, truth and falsehood, history and fiction, objectivity and individual experience. What might be modern, perhaps even revolutionary, in Cervantes's dramatization of the moral and material dilemmas of his time? Conducted in English.
Instructor: Wey-Gomez
En/H 197

American Literature and the Technologies of Reading

9 units (3-0-6)   |  third term
This course explores the material forms of American literature from the colonial era through the nineteenth century. We will study how and by whom books and other kinds of texts were produced, and how these forms shaped and were shaped by readers' engagement with them. Possible topics include the history of such printing technologies as presses, types, paper, ink, binding, and illustration; the business of bookmaking and the development of the publishing industry; the rise of literary authorship; the career of Benjamin Franklin; print, politics, and the American Revolution; and manuscript culture.
Instructor: C. Hunter
Published Date: July 28, 2022