Courses
2009-2010
Fall Quarter
English 146EL: Literature of Technology: Electronic Literature (Instructor: Rita Raley)
This course will consider literature for which the computer is both the composition and the delivery medium. What formal, generic, and aesthetic properties can we see in texts written in production environments such as Flash? What are the central issues and questions for the field of electronic literature as a whole? What are its links to print-based experimental writing practices? After some consideration of precursors to hypertext and the first generation of hypertext authors and critics, we will continue to map out a brief history of electronic literature and move to studying some of the most technically and intellectually compelling works on the web. Toward the end of the term, we will expand our study of screen-based literature to think about literature beyond the screen as well (e.g. SMS texts & performances, locative narrative, and GPS writing). Texts and themes that we will study include print hypertexts, combinatorial writing, interactive fiction and text adventure games, experimental narrative, visual poetry, new media poetics, codework, and 3D writing. Reading will include John Cayley, mez, Talan Memmott, Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries, J. Yellowlees Douglas, Jorge Luis Borges, Olia Lialina, Florian Cramer, Ted Warnell, Dan Waber, John Cayley, Judd Morrissey and many others.
Print texts will include N. Katherine Hayles, Electronic Literature: New Horizons for the Literary and Espen Aarseth, Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature.
Students will have the option of composing their own works of electronic literature at the end of the term.
English 197: Poetry Lab (Instructor: Yunte Huang)
Winter Quarter
English 147: Media History and Theory: Social Media (instructor: Rita Raley)
Our topic for the term is social media, with a particular emphasis on issues of work, affect, and community. We will think about ideologies of individualism (neoliberalism, “bowling alone”) and concepts of the collective (hives, swarms, the multitude, the people, crowds). We will also study participatory culture (especially fandom), flash mobs, and peer property. As one might expect, we will be using and thinking about blogs, wikis, Facebook, and Twitter and one of the primary assignments will be collaborative. Texts by Robert Putnam, Geert Lovink, Henry Jenkins, Constance Penley, Howard Rheingold, Michael Warner, Lev Manovich, McKenzie Wark, Trebor Scholz, Tiziana Terranova, and many others.
Note: it seems necessary to crowdsource the syllabus for this course in some fashion, so feel free to send suggestions for essays, books, films, websites, and tools to raley at english dot ucsb dot edu.
Spring Quarter
English 147: Media History and Theory (instructor: Kris McAbee)
English 147: Media History and Theory: Translation and Mutation (instructor: Bishnupriya Ghosh)
2008-2009
Fall Quarter
English 10LC: Introduction to Literary Study–Serial Media (instructor: Charlotte Becker). This course will explore practices of serialization beginning with the innovative phenomenon of 19th-century serial fiction, and will extend to analyses of the ways that various media—including radio, television, and the internet—have subsequently adopted and adapted serial formats. Discussion and reading topics will include the authorial practices, copyright issues, economic concerns, and social/cultural responses related to serial media. Through these discussions we will develop a vocabulary to discuss narrative techniques that make a serial format effective, and to describe the unique features of each series with which we engage. Major coursework will include a piece of online serial fiction (written in collaboration with classmates) and a critical essay on a serial publication. Required texts: Charles Dickens, David Copperfield; Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, The Hound of the Baskervilles; Henry James, Henry James: Selected Stories; course reader from ASUCSB (available in September).
English 10LC: Introduction to Literary Study–Modernism and Media (instructor: Mike Frangos). [Description TBA]
English 147VP: Media History and Theory–The Voice and the Page (instructor: Carol Pasternak). Printed editions of medieval texts give only the barest suggestions of what these texts might have meant to their contemporaries because they experienced them either in oral performance, possibly with music and even movement, or in manuscript, sometimes highly decorated and with commentary in the margins or between the lines, always unique. In this class, we will examine medieval texts with the goal of figuring out how they were meaningful at the time of their production and/or performances. In addition to edited texts, we will look at manuscript facsimiles (digital and print) and a few actual medieval manuscripts in order to see the traces of oral composition and performance and see how the texts were written and read. And we will consider the impacts of distinctive information technologies on ‘literature’ and ‘information.’ Among the literary texts we will study are Beowulf, psalms, Middle English lyrics,Sir Orfeo, and parts of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. Webpage authoring will be part of the work.
Winter Quarter
English 10LC: Introduction to Literary Study–Fakeries and Forgeries: Crying Wolf(instructor: Jeffrey Beckstrand). In addition to literary form, genre and method, this course seeks to examine the manner in which fictions are faked, forged, counterfeited and otherwise conceived: From “forging in the smithy of our souls” to forging from the smithy of our “soles“; from art rates to heart rates; from the body to the bawdy, we will pay specific attention to context, the “tall grass,” from which works are born…and born into.
Featuring novels, poems, plays, film, art, theory and music by Joyce, Beckett, Welles, Johnson, Shakespeare, Sophocles, Hirst, van Veldt, Newman, Kipling, Stevens, Frost, Tennyson, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, Browning, Borges, Cage, Göttsching and Liquid Crystal Display Soundsystem.
English 10LC: Introduction to Literary Study–Literature and Memory (instructor: Jeanne Provost). This course will prepare you to participate in conversations in upper-level English courses about texts from an array of literary genres: poetry, drama, short fiction, and the novel. We will practice applying the techniques and terminology of literary studies to analyze texts and to shape essays for upper-division literature classes. We will also learn how various critical and theoretical approaches can open up literature in different ways. The works we will read all offer diverse variations on the theme of memory. While our conversations won’t be limited to this theme, it will give us a conceptual touchstone to unify our conversations about the readings. We will explore questions about the relationship between gender and memory, how memory shapes our notions of identity, the role of memory in legal systems, and the memorial functions of literature itself.
English 122NW: Narratives of War (instructor: Rita Raley). This course examines twentieth-century narratives of war from the perspective of our contemporary moment. It thus does not aim to be historically comprehensive; instead our reading will be focused on certain questions and themes, including smart war; total war; just war; military intervention; models of the enemy; trauma; and the reformulation of human rights in the context of the “war on terror.” Print narratives will include Pat Barker, Regeneration (and short selections of WWI poetry by Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen); Joe Sacco, Safe Area Goražde: The War in Eastern Bosnia, 1992-1995; Tim O’Brien, The Things They Carried; Etel Adnan, Sitt Marie Rose; and others. Theory and criticism will include Ernst Friedrich, Jordan Crandall, Paul Virilio, James Der Derian, Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others, and Manuel De Landa, War in the Age of Intelligent Machines. Films will include Apocalypse Now and West Beirut. Games and other media projects will include September 12; Antiwargame; America’s Army; Full Spectrum Warrior; and Baghdad <> San Francisco. (Media projects such as The Great Game will illuminate the shift from representation to information visualization.) We will also consider the rhetoric and function of war reporting and discuss excerpts from films such as The Mills of the Gods, War Feels Like War, Gunner Palace and Jarhead.
English 147A: Media History and Theory: Theorizing Adaptation–Translation and Mutation (instructor: Bishnupriya Ghosh). This course examines adaptation as a mode of translation geared to increase the life span of a text: adaptation is both reinterpretation (recoding, exchange, invention) and evolution (appropriation, updating, excision). Taking film to be our major media practice, we will look at several texts (fiction, non-fiction, feature films, plays) that are “adapted,” in order to consider a series of questions pertinent to adaptation theory: what is translated into film? What kinds of semiotic codes are at work in such translation? What is the common term of exchange? What kinds of value are produced in these acts? What context governs these acts of production? How are they received? These queries are ultimately aimed at a larger inquiry: can there be such a thing as “adaptation theory”? And if so, what are its disciplinary constraints? Students will be expected to watch five or six films outside of class time (time equivalent to the one-two hours you would spend preparing for a class), participate in class discussions, and write a research paper on a topic of their choice.
This course will include one and a half weeks on digital translations of television or graphic novels, and will give students the option of doing projects on new media.
English 149: Media and Information Culture–Literary Imagination and Virtual Reality (co-instructors: James Donelan and Alan Liu) (5-unit course with seminar meetings and a lab). Because of the recent, shared emphasis in many fields on digital methods, scholars in the humanities, arts, social sciences, and sciences increasingly need to collaborate across disciplines. This course reflects theoretically and practically on the concept of literary study by asking students to choose a literary work and treat it according to one or more of the research paradigms prevalent in other fields. Students, for example, could choose a story or poem to model, simulate, map, visualize, encode, text-analyze, sample, storyboard, blog, or redesign as a game, database, hypertext, or virtual world. What are the strengths and weaknesses of literary interpretation, close reading, or theory by comparison with other research methods?
Spring Quarter
English 10LC: Introduction to Literary Study–Information (and) Technology in Literature (instructor: Bola C. King). This course will provide an introduction to the study of literature by pursing questions of genre, form, and theory. We will investigate ideas on the nature of communication, of information, and of information technology, and what these mean for literature and for readers of literature. Our investigations will include a broad definition of “literature” and will include novels, film, poetry, and digital and interactive works.
English 10LC: Introduction to Literary Study–Orality and Visuality in Twentieth-Century Literature (instructor: Marthine Satris). This course introduces the genres of poetry, drama, and narrative fiction. We will examine the text on the page, but also beyond it, including poetry and plays in performance, the representation of visual phenomena in language, and the transformation of speech into writing and vice versa. Students will engage with these texts by learning the skills of close reading and analytical writing, and will also be expected to make several podcasts each week, encouraging students to move beyond the written medium in their own compositions.
English 25: Introduction to Literature and Culture of Information (Instructor: Mike Frangos)
Is there culture online? This class will provide an introduction to the new forms of culture that have emerged in the wake of recent innovations in new and social media (so-called “web 2.0”), including: blogs, wikis, photo and video sharing, “indie” and DIY culture, webcomics, the mashup and the remix, machinima, social networking, flash art and flash games. We will also pay attention to two of the most recent developments in “Web 2.0” culture: microblogging and lifestreaming. To make our way through this constellation of new technologies, the course will draw on relevant techniques of analysis from new media studies, cultural studies, and literary close reading. We will structure our investigation around the topics of culture and subculture, cultural economies, techno-futurism and cyber-libertarianism, the Obama campaign and the new progressive movement, and the avant-gardes and innovation. In addition to a paper and an exam, students will be expected to produce their own social media projects at the end of the quarter.
English 165: Post-Human Fiction (Instructor: Kenneth Brewer)
This course will examine, through fiction, the concept of the “post-human.” Have we become post-human? And if so, how has this happened and what does it mean? Course materials include Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations, Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange, Michel Houellebecq’s The Elementary Particles, Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake, and the filmEternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.
English 197: Upper-Division Seminar–Poetry Lab (instructor: Yunte Huang). Texts include Tender Buttons, Pisan Cantos, Cribs, The Muse Learns to Write Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry.