Tuesday, 21 November: Marvin and Gossett, Stanley, and Burton
Agenda
In the tradition of trans literary historians and DIY culture, we’ll spend our final class creating some literature of our own in the form of zines. The idea of this creative practice is not only to change the tempo of our usual discussions (and therefore to engage different parts of our brain) but also to think about the concepts of the trans curio and trans visibility that we read about for today in terms of visual arts. What does it mean to tell a history via a collage of images and words?
In your zine, I would like you to explore some aspect of our class. You might incorporate quotations, images, illustrations; you might offer a manifesto; you could include song lyrics of your own or from media. Please include a title on your cover, your name somewhere on the zine, and the year. If you would like to use a completed zine as an additional assignment, you’ll need to email me with a 400-word reflection on how your zine engages with our class; please also let me know if you’d like me to make copies of your zine to distribute to our class.
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Assignments
1. Circulate your essay to your peer review group* ASAP by responding to my email with an attachment. Decide which two essays will be discussed on Tuesday and which two essays will be discussed on Thursday. Come prepared to give ~10 minutes of feedback on each essay (with annotations on a print out or digital copy). For your essay’s peer review, come with specific questions about your own essay. Note that this is a more extensive peer review session than the one for your analytic essay, but the idea is to use our class time rigorously and effectively. Your final research essay should be at least 40% different from your first draft.
2. Sign up for a one-on-one meeting with me during reading week here. This meeting is mandatory: we will check in about your peer review session, I will share my own tailored feedback, and we will make a revision plan for your research essay.
Groups for peer review:
Chloe, Claire, Angie, Nayiri
Tex, Isela, Dasha, Júlia
Sophie, Jane, Nithya, Sophia
Rachel, Ella G., Ella P., Ashley
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Thursday, 15 November: Towle and Morgan
Agenda
After some housekeeping (feedback on your drafts, our grading contract, a film series at the BAMPFA in Jan/Feb 2024), I’ll ask you to respond in (more) writing to today’s reading, “Romancing the Transgender Native.” These written reflections can build on your bCourse discussion, and will prepare us for the twin goals of our conversation: (1) What argument is being advanced in Towle and Morgan’s essay? (2) Based on this essay, and our readings throughout the semester, how can we responsibly and attentively use the term “trans” when talking about literary histories? (Which literatures? Which histories?) Moreover, what do we mean when we use the word trans? You’ll discuss the first question in small groups, and I’ll answer some questions raised in the virtual symposium. In order to spur a lively discussion (and perhaps even a debate) around the second question, we’ll put together a chart with two (false!) oppositions (x-axis: trans v. not-trans; y-axis: historical v. fictional). Each of you will have a character, text, and/or author to place on this chart. As a class, we’ll work to develop a case for multiple perspectives on how we might or might not understand “trans literary history.”
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Assignments
1. Read Amy Marvin’s “Transsexuality, the Curio, and the Transgender Tipping Point” and Reina Gossett, Eric A. Stanley, and Johanna Burton’s “Known Unknowns: An Introduction to Trap Door.”
2. Post a short response to the reading on bCourses under Virtual Symposium #7 by Tuesday at noon.
3. Begin revising and expanding your essay. Consider making an appointment with the Art of Writing tutors.
4. Sign up for a one-on-one meeting with me during reading week here.
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Tuesday, 14 November: Miranda, Cruz, and Driskill
Agenda
For the first part of class, you will workshop one another’s introductions. In doing so, you will be returning to some guidelines that we went over earlier in the semester (and you will be able to see how you’ve integrated what you’ve learned into your prose). As a reminder, here are the four aspects of an effective introduction:
1. A stable context.
2. A destabilizing condition.
3. Motive/consequence.
4. Thesis (or, for prewriting, a guiding question).
Since you’re engaging with secondary sources, you might be able to incorporate other scholars’ ideas into your introduction: “Other people think this about my text. However, they overlook this aspect, which I account for by doing X. The result of doing X changes our understanding of the text in this way. These aspects of the text result in this interpretation of the text.”
In your peer review groups, read one another’s introductions. Where could your peers be more specific? What questions do their theses raise? Do you find their argument to be debatable? (Note: if everyone in your group is making the same argument, your thesis might not be specific enough! A claim should not be self-evident.)
During the second half of class, we will turn to the readings, which take up the question of contemporary trans literary histories from a slightly different perspective than the one we talked about on Tuesday. For Indigenous people who have experienced colonization and for whom a historical record is often limited, how do people recuperate or reinvent language? How do these stories layer on the historical record? (How) do our readings for today—“Coyote Takes a Trip” and “Puo’winue’l Prayers”—relate to Hartman’s idea of critical fabulation?
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Assignments
1. Turn in a first draft of your research essay by Thursday at noon. Find instructions here. Your essay should be ~2000 words, engage with three secondary sources (no more, no less), and follow MLA format.
2. Read Evan B. Towle and Lynn M. Morgan’s “Romancing the Transgender Native: Rethinking the Use of the ‘Third Gender’ Concept.”
3. Post a short response to the reading on bCourses under Virtual Symposium #6 by Thursday at noon.
4. Consider making an appointment with the Art of Writing tutors. If you do so, send me an email with your appointment confirmation and a short summary (one or two sentences) of what you talked about with the writing tutor.
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Thursday, 9 November: Hartman, Seville, and Pelaez Lopez
Agenda
Our class today will center entirely on the readings, and we will split our time evenly among the texts. Our discussion will begin with a collective effort to locate the stakes of Saidiya Hartman’s “Venus in Two Acts” as well as the essay’s suggested approach to the history of slavery and how historians might deal with the absence of any “autobiography narrative of a female captive who survived the Middle Passage” (3). With Hartman’s idea of critical fabulation in mind, we will pose the question of what it means to tell a trans literary history that intertwines histories of enslavement and the emergence of racial categories. How can we, as scholars, be responsible toward the lacunae in the archives without recapitulating the violence of the archive?
With these questions in mind, we will turn to the two poems you’ve read for today, taking turns reading both of them aloud before splitting into two groups. Each group will spend ten minutes discussing one of the poems, answering the question of how the text might offer a form of critical fabulation for a trans literary history. As a group, you’ll prepare a claim about the poem that attends to details of form and content. The claim can be specific to a single line/detail or about the poem as a whole. We’ll return together to talk, in turn, about “how to meet the Piton mountain” and “The Spine of Gorée Island” with these claims as our guide. How do these poems use form to convey meaning? How do they diverge from poems we encountered earlier in the semester? What do they convey about the experience of diaspora, of migration, of colonization, and of enslavement? How do they encode history into literature, or literary form into history?
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Assignments
1. Read Deborah Miranda’s “Coyote Takes a Trip” and Louis Esme Cruz and Qwo-Li Driskill’s “Puo’winue’l Prayers.”
2. Bring in 3 hard copies of a working introductory paragraph for your research essay to workshop on Tuesday. If you don’t have an introductory paragraph ready to go, bring in copies of a polished body paragraph.
3. Start writing the first draft of your full essay, which will be due next Thursday.
4. Consider making an appointment with the Art of Writing tutors. This is the most effective and impactful “additional” activity you can do.
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Tuesday, 7 November: William Shakespeare
Agenda
We will focus today on engaging with secondary sources both in our discussion of The Tempest and in our writing workshop. Over the next few weeks, our readings will deal with histories of Blackness and Indigeneity as they intersect with histories of gender variance. As we saw early in the semester from Leah DeVun’s discussion of maps and discussions of hyenas, the monstrosity accorded to gender variant people also extended to Western European conceptions of non-European subjects, linking differences in gender presentation to racial differences. With this history of the “human” as a concept in mind, we might contextualize The Tempest along these lines (and this is a very rough sketch): during the period that Shakespeare was writing, imperial European forces were colonizing peoples in the so-called New World, forces supported—and even made possible—by chattel slavery. Today, we will look again at the triangulation between Prospero, Ariel, and Caliban with attention to (1) their respective humanity and (2) the power dynamics between them. As a class, we’ll develop a claim on Google Docs about Prospero’s plea to the audience to release him from the bondage of the stage and then place our claim in dialogue with the argument made by Matthieu Chapman in “Red, White, and Black: Shakespeare’s The Tempest and the Structuring of Racial Antagonisms in Early Modern England and the New World” (2020).
This discussion will set us up for your peer review activity. For each of your peers’ passages, please add the following annotations: their claim (underline), evidence from the focal text (squiggly underline), information from the secondary source (square brackets), and language that indicates how the secondary source relates to their claim (parentheses). If any of these pieces are missing, how might the student add them in? In your discussion of each person’s work, take the time to give an account of what the student is already doing before you offer feedback or advice.
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Assignments
1. Read Saidiya Hartman’s “Venus in Two Acts,” Carnelian Seville’s “how to meet the Piton mountain” (content warning: self-harm), and Alan Pelaez Lopez’s “The Spine of Gorée Island.”
2. Start writing the first draft of your full essay, which will be due a week from Thursday.
3. Consider making an appointment with the Art of Writing tutors. This is the most effective and impactful “additional” activity you can do.
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Tuesday, 31 October: William Shakespeare
Agenda
Our first discussion of William Shakespeare’s The Tempest, supposed to be the last play he wrote, will offer a bridge between our discussion of early modern transgender fairies and the broader gender dynamics in this nearly all-male play. Thinking about gender in relation to power, race, and colonization (which have been attendant to this text for well over a century), we will think about what it means to use “trans” as a way to examine not only the gender-crossing roles of Ariel but also the triangulation between Ariel, Caliban, and Prospero. On its surface, this play is one of most tenuously-positioned texts of our syllabus, but my hope is that we’ll be able to use it as a way to think about the edges or limits of a “trans” analytic method.
During our writing workshop, we’ll brainstorm and discuss specific strategies for incorporating secondary sources into your writing. We’ll continue this discussion at our next class meeting in a workshop format.
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Assignments
1. Turn in your annotated bibliography by Thursday at noon.
2. Finish The Tempest.
3. Continue working on your prewriting for your research essay. P2 will be due on Tuesday, and involves engaging your focal text as well as a secondary source. Here are the instructions:
For P2, you will write another short draft (~750 words) that relates one of your secondary sources to your interpretation of the focal text in P1. This source should be the one that is most important for your argument. You might use this draft to augment your own ideas, to contest a reading that contests your own, to apply a theoretical concept, or to otherwise complicate your original response.
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Thursday, 26 October: Ezra Horbury
Agenda
We’ll begin class with a segue from MLA citations into annotated bibliographies. First, we will return to your MLA citation activity from Tuesday to go over some corrections. I’m highlighting these now so that you might be able to catch these kinds of errors for yourselves. Second, we will turn to a sample annotated bibliography. As much as writing an annotated bibliography can feel like a task, it’s a useful tool in the writing process for several reasons: (a) you process and synthesis the argument/ideas of any source (which improves that skill for the future), (b) you have a chance to compare/contrast your ideas with those of the author(s), and (c) you begin to think about how a source might or might not relate to your own essay. For your annotated bibliography, you will select four or five sources to discuss; you will only engage three in your final research essay. This means that as you are reading secondary sources, you should already be narrowing the scope of your argument.
In our discussion of Ezra Horbury’s research on fairies, historical transness, the gendering of childhood in the early modern period, we will have a fishbowl-style conversation. Since you had the option of either reading “Early Modern Transgender Fairies” OR listening to “Transgender Fairies in Early Modern Literature,” I’d like you each to get a chance to teach one another what you gleaned from the article or episode. In doing so, I hope that you will discover some differences that result from Horbury’s addressing different audiences. We will also talk about how one might use Horbury for thinking about Galatea vs. for thinking about The Tempest.
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Assignments
1. Read acts 1–3 of The Tempest. If you are using an edition other than the Arden Shakespeare, please let me know in advance.
2. Begin working on your annotated bibliography, which will be due next Thursday, 2 November.
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Tuesday, 24 October: Masha Raskolnikov
Agenda
We’ll begin class by doing an MLA-citations related activity using the books you’ve brought to class. Please create two citations: (1) for your book as a whole and (2) for a chapter in your book. If you have time, please make a third citation for a relevant article in a peer-reviewed journal. Post your citations on this shared Google doc.
In our writing workshop today, we’ll spend a little bit more time going over kinds of sources that you might use for your research essay, but this time we will focus on ways to evaluate sources to identify whether they’ll be useful for your ideas.
As we turn to Masha Raskolnikov’s excellent essay on Silence, we’ll keep this critical lens in view. What are the different ways one might engage with Raskolnikov’s multi-faceted argument? To answer this question, we will have to break down what, exactly, Raskolnikov’s argument is and how, exactly, she advances this argument. In order to do so, we will collectively outline different parts of her essay and (drawing on your bCourses posts) put together a revised thesis that speaks to the way those different parts come together to inform our reading of Silence and its implicit theory of gender and sex.
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Assignments
1. Read Ezra Horbury’s “Early Modern Transgender Fairies” OR listen to the episode “Transgender Fairies in Early Modern Literature” of the podcast Not Just the Tudors.
2. P1 of your research essay is due on Thursday at noon.
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Thursday, 19 October: Heldris of Cornwall
Agenda
Now that you’ve all (at least tentatively) decided on the texts you’re writing about, we’ll be able to focus some class time on finding sources. We’ll begin the class by taking about 15 minutes to start the research process: (1) find the call number for your primary text in the library. This call number will help you with one of your assignments (#3 below) over the weekend. (2) Find a few PDFs of articles or dissertations that might be intriguing to you. (At this point, do not worry about whether or not you’ll use these sources—the point is to practice using the databases!)
Our discussion of Silence will pick up on last class’s conversation, and particularly on the debates between Nature and Nurture. We will talk about how this debate within a medieval text provides a counterpoint to mainstream contemporary trans narratives (see Kay Gabriel on the trans memoir and gender novel) by separating out assigned sex and assigned gender and mapping them onto nature and nurture, respectively. In doing so, as we discussed last class, they also turn out to show that both nature and nurture are malleable—there is no stable ground, and the way that the text conveys Silence’s gender changes throughout the text. What would it mean to call Silence trans? The complexity of this question comes through when we consider the question of whether we consider the ending’s resolution to result in a transition or a detransition.
We will also spend some time discussing some of the passages that you brought to class, focusing in on developing claims about the way that gender is working in the text.
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Assignments
1. Read Masha Raskolnikov’s “Without Magic or Miracle: The Romance of Silence and the Prehistory of Genderqueerness.”
2. By Tuesday at noon, respond to Virtual Symposium #5. Note that you’ll be asked to summarize Raskolnikov’s argument as a thesis statement, so take notes while you read.
3. Physically go to the stacks and check out at least one book that you might use for your research paper. Do not just request a book. Bring this book to class on Tuesday.
4. Begin your preliminary research for your research essay. If you are writing on The Tempest, start reading the play. If you are writing on texts we’ve already discussed in class, REREAD the text you are writing about. Identify at least two passages that are relevant to your topic that you’d like to analyze (you’ll analyze one of these for P1). You might also begin to start reading secondary sources. (Note: I expect that you will be reading an additional ~30 pages each week—think two or three articles/chapters, in addition to skimming first paragraphs. Anticipate devoting about two hours to research each week. I also do expect you to reread the entirety of whatever text you’re writing about.)
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Tuesday, 17 October: Heldris of Cornwall
Agenda
We’ll begin class with an anonymous “temperature-check,” before moving on to our writing workshop.
The first part of class will be devoted to going more explicitly over the MLA guidelines that have been required for each of your writing assignments throughout this semester.
I’ll then spend some more time going over the various research databases at your disposal. For future reference, here are some key links:
– UC Berkeley’s library search engine
– A research “cheat sheet” courtesy of Stacy Reardon
– Databases: JSTOR (scholarly articles/essays), Project Muse (scholarly articles/essays), ProQuest (dissertations)
If these databases do not seem fruitful, you might also find it useful to look into various journals of cultural and literary criticism, like the London Review of Books, New York Review of Books, Los Angeles Review of Books, Boston Review, n+1, etc.
After returning to the anonymous temperature check, we’ll go over the events described in the first part of Silence to make sure that we’re all on the same page. As we did last class, we break into small groups, this time to discuss different passages. As a group, you’ll rotate through these passages every five minutes: (1) the opening, (2) the outlawing of female inheritance, (3) the “ami”/“ah me” moment, (4) the birth of Silence, and (5) the debate between Nature and Nurture. We’ll close by coming back together as a group to discuss 4 and 5.
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Assignments
1. Finish Heldris of Cornwall’s Silence. Come prepared with a passage that you think is important for the way in which we can think of this text as a piece of “trans literary history.”
2. Turn in your research essay letter on bCourses by Thursday at noon. The instructions for this letter are: “Relate which text you think you’d like to focus on, what questions it raises for you, and what issue, problem, or question you’d want to look further into as you research.” Think of these instructions as a checklist.
3. Consider attending a research 101 workshop through the library.
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Thursday, 12 October: Djuna Barnes
Agenda
Together, we’ll go over your feedback from mid-semester and have a meta-discussion about the way our class is going. It sounds like there’s mixed feedback about the virtual symposia and a general desire to do more collaborative writing practice around skills we discuss in class. I also want to check in about punctuality, communication about assignments/deadlines, and my expectations around work and attentiveness.
We’ll also go over the plan for the rest of the semester, particularly around the research essay.
Our discussion of Nightwood will proceed in two parts. First, you’ll divide into groups of three to discuss the second half of the reading. I’ll ask your group to do three things: (1) talk about what you liked and didn’t like; (2) find a moment (a sentence or two) from “Go Down, Matthew” that perplexed you, and make an observation about its form and then develop a claim to share with the rest of the class on this Google Doc, and (3) make a case for a reading of “The Possessed” using textual evidence (what, exactly, happens in the chapel? what is ambiguous? what is definitive?). Second, we’ll come back together as a class to share your claims and readings. With your Virtual Symposium posts in mind, we will likely find ourselves in a little (friendly) debate!
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Assignments
1. Read the translator’s introduction (pp. xi–xxiv) and lines 1–2656 of Heldris of Cornwall’s Silence.
2. Start thinking about your research essay (and maybe start your research essay letter).
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Tuesday, 10 October: Djuna Barnes
Agenda
Congratulations! We’ve officially made it to the halfway point of our semester. In order to mark this turning point, you’ll spend time filling out anonymous mid-semester evaluations. These evaluations will help me plan our time for the rest of the semester so that it best helps your learning needs, so make certain to be honest and thorough. These evaluations are also a moment for you to reflect back on what you’ve learned over the course of the semester (which is itself a valuable aspect of the learning process).
Once everyone has finished filling out the midsemester evaluations, we’ll take a couple of minutes to revisit and review our community guidelines. If anyone has any suggestions of things to add, remove, or revise, this is one opportunity to do so—but as ever, you are welcome to suggest changes at any point!
Looking ahead, I’ll go over a few announcements:
– The rest of the semester will require significant planning on your part in preparing for your research essay. While the final weeks of the semester will be devoted entirely to revising and improving your work (which will entail research and revisiting your focal texts in addition to editing), these next few weeks will require you to take initiative to think about what you’d like to write about.
– If you haven’t already acquired copies of Silence (ISBN: 0870135430) and The Tempest (ISBN: 1408133474)—now is the time to do so.
– If you haven’t already acquired copies of Silence (ISBN: 0870135430) and The Tempest (ISBN: 1408133474)—now is the time to do so.
For the rest of class, we’ll move to a discussion of Nightwood, with the trans femininity of the doctor as the focus of our conversation. In the (first) extended conversation with Nora, how does the doctor produce a coalition around a shared femininity? How and why does (erotic) suffering become the ground of feminine experience? And to what extent is this sinuous and baroque dialogue, for all its aesthetic experimentation, situated in histories of trans and queer sexual cultures?
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Assignments
1. Finish Nightwood.
2. Post a SECOND brief response on Nightwood in Virtual Symposium #4 on bCourses by Thursday at noon dealing with the second half of the book. You may add a new post or respond to one of your peers, but make sure to cite the text.
3. Read the prompt for your research essay. We’ll go over it in class on Thursday; come prepared with questions.
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Tuesday, 5 October: Djuna Barnes
Agenda
We’ll begin today’s class by talking about composing titles in the humanities, and we’ll use this time to workshop potential titles for the essays you have written and are currently in the process of revising. Since you have read peers’ essays, you might use this time to make suggestions to your peers—especially if you noticed something clever (a pun, a relevant quotation) going on in their work!
For the second part of class, we’ll turn to your Virtual Symposium posts, taking up questions that you raised about the language of race and religion, the “necessity” of certain passages, the fantastic feeling or caricature-like descriptions, and so on.
Finally, we’ll have an open discussion of the love triangle in today’s reading, again focusing on the relation between narrative and affect. Why do scholars like Alison Rieke and Teresa de Lauretis respectively call the affair between Robin and Nora a “neurotic and possessive union of two lesbians” (“Two Women: The Transformations,” 71) and, more succinctly, “disastrous” (“Nightwood and the ‘Terror of Uncertain Signs’”119)? Can we point to evidence to read this relationship against the grain of critical interpretation? How do we make sense of Jenny’s role in the text? What positivity, if any, is there in a text like Nightwood?
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Assignments
1. Read pp. 84–131 of Nightwood (through “Where the Tree Falls”). Note that the first of these two chapters entails an encounter between Nora and Dr. O’Connor that includes very long monologues. Don’t worry about understanding every little thing, but make a point to annotate/record what you do find interesting. Please come to class with one interesting moment (a phrase, a sentence) that you’d like to discuss.
2. Turn in the final draft of your analytic essay by Tuesday at noon. Your final essay must be substantially different from your first draft (at least 40% different). As the grading contract specifies, I expect you “to reshape, extend, complicate, or substantially clarify your ideas—or relate your ideas to new things. You won’t just correct or touch up. Revisions must somehow respond to or consider seriously feedback in order to be complete.” If you have not already done so, make an appointment with the Art of Writing tutors here (this counts as ½ of an additional item).
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Tuesday, 3 October: Djuna Barnes
Agenda
Our class will open with an index card activity. On one side of your index card, please write a response to the following question: “What is shame, and why does it arise?” On the other side, please locate a moment from today’s reading (refer by page and what happens) that intrigued or confused you. Why did that moment catch your attention?
For our first discussion of Nightwood, I’ve put together a mini-lecture (the text of which I’ll distribute) that frames the text in terms of its relation to affect as opposed to narrative. However, it will be helpful—necessary, even—for us to get on the same page as far as narrative goes, so we’ll then spend some time talking about the characters introduced in these first two chapters, focusing on Baron Felix Volkbein, Frau Mann (the Duchess of Broadback), Nora Flood, Dr. Matthew-Mighty-grain-of-salt-Dante-O’Connor, and Robin Vote.
As a class, we will use this framework of characters to return to thinking about ‘affect’ in Nightwood—both in terms of the text’s relation to shame and its potential for a more positive reading.
We’ll conclude class by discussing…conclusions. After going over a handout of do’s and don’t’s, you’ll divide into four small groups to discuss the four examples of conclusions and what they are doing (this exercise is not evaluative but descriptive: your task is not to assess how good these conclusions are, but to figure out how they are working).
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Assignments
1. Read pp. 55–83 of of Nightwood (through “The Squatter”).
2. Post a brief response on Nightwood in Virtual Symposium #4 on bCourses by Thursday at noon.
3. Continue revising your analytic essay. Your final essay must be substantially different from your first draft (at least 40% different). I also encourage you to make an appointment with the Art of Writing tutors here (this counts as ½ of an additional item). As the grading contract specifies, I expect you “to reshape, extend, complicate, or substantially clarify your ideas—or relate your ideas to new things. You won’t just correct or touch up. Revisions must somehow respond to or consider seriously feedback in order to be complete.” Your final draft will be due on Tuesday, 10 October.
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Thursday, 28 September: Peer Review Workshops
Agenda
You’ll be working with your peer review groups today:
OVID (IPHIS & IANTHE) & SPENSER: Isela, Nithya, Ella P.
SWINBURNE (FRAGOLETTA & HERMAPHRODITUS): Ella G., Júlia, Sophia
BALZAC (THE GIRL WITH THE GOLDEN EYES): Angie, Claire, Tex, Chloe
BALZAC (THE GIRL WITH THE GOLDEN EYES): Ashley, Bethany, Sophie
BALZAC (SARRASINE) & LEMEBEL (WILD DESIRE): Nayiri, Jane, Rachel, Dasha
SWINBURNE (FRAGOLETTA & HERMAPHRODITUS): Ella G., Júlia, Sophia
BALZAC (THE GIRL WITH THE GOLDEN EYES): Angie, Claire, Tex, Chloe
BALZAC (THE GIRL WITH THE GOLDEN EYES): Ashley, Bethany, Sophie
BALZAC (SARRASINE) & LEMEBEL (WILD DESIRE): Nayiri, Jane, Rachel, Dasha
Our class today will be devoted to peer review. After taking ~10 minutes to re-familiarize yourself with the essays that you’ve annotated, break into your peer review groups. When it is your turn to receive feedback, it is your responsibility to listen rather than to speak. If there is time once you have received feedback, then you may pose questions or ask for clarification.
5:30–5:45 – Provide feedback for the first essay. Make sure that you first describe to the author what their argument is (if, indeed, there is an argument) and what they are doing well in the essay.
5:45–6:00 – Provide feedback for the second essay.
6:00–6:15 – Provide feedback for the third essay.
6:15–6:30 – Provide feedback for the fourth essay OR return to any of the previous essays for clarification/questions/discussion.
During the peer review workshops, I’ll meet with those of you I didn’t get a chance to talk to on Tuesday for a tête-à-tête about your essays—this is so I can give you feedback that’s tailored to your needs.5:45–6:00 – Provide feedback for the second essay.
6:00–6:15 – Provide feedback for the third essay.
6:15–6:30 – Provide feedback for the fourth essay OR return to any of the previous essays for clarification/questions/discussion.
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Assignments
1. Read pp. 1–54 of Nightwood. Note that Djuna Barnes’s writing is dense and baroque, and will likely require looking up a lot of vocabulary. It’s worth scheduling at least two hours for this reading.
2. Continue revising your own essay. I will upload feedback to bCourses by the end of the day on Monday. I also encourage you to make an appointment with the Art of Writing tutors here (this counts as ½ of an additional item). As the grading contract specifies, I expect you “to reshape, extend, complicate, or substantially clarify your ideas—or relate your ideas to new things. You won’t just correct or touch up. Revisions must somehow respond to or consider seriously feedback in order to be complete.” Your final draft will be due on Tuesday, 10 October.
3. If you would like to complete an additional draft of either your analytic essay or your research essay, you must let me know by October 1. Each additional draft counts as 1 additional item (improving your grade by ⅓). Find instructions in our grading contract.
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Tuesday, 26 September: John Lyly
Agenda
Once again, please sit with your peer review groups:
OVID (IPHIS & IANTHE) & SPENSER: Isela, Nithya, Ella P.
SWINBURNE (FRAGOLETTA & HERMAPHRODITUS): Ella G., Júlia, Sophia
BALZAC (THE GIRL WITH THE GOLDEN EYES): Angie, Sophie, Claire, Tex
BALZAC (THE GIRL WITH THE GOLDEN EYES): Chloe, Ashley, Bethany
BALZAC (SARRASINE) & LEMEBEL (WILD DESIRE): Nayiri, Jane, Rachel, Dasha
SWINBURNE (FRAGOLETTA & HERMAPHRODITUS): Ella G., Júlia, Sophia
BALZAC (THE GIRL WITH THE GOLDEN EYES): Angie, Sophie, Claire, Tex
BALZAC (THE GIRL WITH THE GOLDEN EYES): Chloe, Ashley, Bethany
BALZAC (SARRASINE) & LEMEBEL (WILD DESIRE): Nayiri, Jane, Rachel, Dasha
For the beginning of class, we will begin our peer review process around workshopping the introductions you’ve brought to class. First, you’ll spend some time reading one another’s working introductions and annotating them. Try to focus your attention on the paragraph’s thesis, and keep our thesis checklist in mind. What kind of argument do you think this paper is advancing? How could the author better articulate their thesis (or working questions)? Is it clear what passage they will be discussing and what the stakes of their argument are? Is the thesis debatable?
Once you’ve had time to read one another’s introductions, you will discuss each working thesis in turn. When your work is being discussed, it is your task to listen (not to speak) and to take notes on what each of your group members has to say. After everyone’s thesis has been discussed, you’ll be able to use the rest of the time to discuss the text(s) that you’re all working on.
During this time, I will also ask half of you to meet with me for a few minutes each, to check in about your writing process and to help me get a sense of what skills you’d like to focus on between your draft and the final version. This will help me focus my feedback to meet your needs. (I’ll meet with the other half of the class on Thursday.)
The last half hour of class will be devoted to our second discussion of John Lyly’s Galatea—focusing on the mysteries that remain unresolved even at the end of the play. (Note: this is a pun, since in Lyly’s time “mysteries” and “mistress” were homophones.) What does it mean that no one knows whether Galatea or Phillida will be transformed into a man, and that the curtain falls without representing a heterosexual resolution? What does it mean that Venus misidentifies herself as the goddess who turned Iphis into a man (at least in Ovid)? How do all of these unrealized transformations relate to the theme of alchemy/transubstantiation that is introduced in the prologue and recurs in the comedic, realistic subplot? And what is going on with the three brothers, Rafe, Robin, and Dick?
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Assignments
1. Read your peers’ essays. The first time you read each essay, do so without a pen or pencil in hand. Once you have finished, write a few sentences summarizing what the essay argues and how it does so. Then, go back and re-read, marking…
— moments where the argument/analysis works particularly well (* in the margin)
— moments you thought didn’t work—perhaps you’d cut it, or revise it; make a suggestion (x in the margin)
— moments you thought need to be expanded upon (+ in the margin)
— moments you thought need clarification (? in the margin)
— anything else that comes to mind (e.g., are the paragraphs in the right order?)
— moments where the argument/analysis works particularly well (* in the margin)
— moments you thought didn’t work—perhaps you’d cut it, or revise it; make a suggestion (x in the margin)
— moments you thought need to be expanded upon (+ in the margin)
— moments you thought need clarification (? in the margin)
— anything else that comes to mind (e.g., are the paragraphs in the right order?)
2. Begin revising your own essay. Start by rereading your work with a fresh pair of eyes. Make an appointment with the Art of Writing tutors here (this counts as ½ of an additional item). Schedule time to come to my office hours. As the grading contract specifies, I expect you “to reshape, extend, complicate, or substantially clarify your ideas—or relate your ideas to new things. You won’t just correct or touch up. Revisions must somehow respond to or consider seriously feedback in order to be complete.” Your final draft will be due in two weeks, on Tuesday, 10 October.
3. If you would like to complete an additional draft of either your analytic essay or your research essay, you must let me know by October 1. Find instructions in our grading contract.
4. You will need a hard copy of Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood for next week. Please secure a copy ASAP if you have not done so already. (ISBN-10: 0811216713)
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Thursday, 21 September: John Lyly
Agenda
Please sit with your peer review groups:
OVID (IPHIS & IANTHE) & SPENSER: Isela, Nithya, Ella P.
SWINBURNE (FRAGOLETTA & HERMAPHRODITUS): Ella G., Júlia, Sophia
BALZAC (THE GIRL WITH THE GOLDEN EYES): Angie, Sophie, Claire, [Tex]
BALZAC (THE GIRL WITH THE GOLDEN EYES): Chloe, Ashley, Bethany
BALZAC (SARRASINE) & LEMEBEL (WILD DESIRE): Nayiri, Jane, Rachel, Dasha
SWINBURNE (FRAGOLETTA & HERMAPHRODITUS): Ella G., Júlia, Sophia
BALZAC (THE GIRL WITH THE GOLDEN EYES): Angie, Sophie, Claire, [Tex]
BALZAC (THE GIRL WITH THE GOLDEN EYES): Chloe, Ashley, Bethany
BALZAC (SARRASINE) & LEMEBEL (WILD DESIRE): Nayiri, Jane, Rachel, Dasha
Because the first full draft of your analytic essay is due on Tuesday, we’ll go over the plan for next week’s Thursday assignment, which is based on preparing for peer review. The idea here is that you should plan your writing with consideration for your peer reviewers in mind. Remember that you are expected to treat this essay with the same level of thought and engagement that you would bring to a final version.
Since today is our first day of discussing John Lyly’s Galatea, we will go over some (1) literary, (2) historical, and (3) performance context for the play. (1) Lyly was influenced by transformation myths from Ovid as well as the pastoral tradition (which can be traced back to Hellenistic Greek literature, but is exemplified by Vergil’s Eclogues); in turn, Galatea directly influenced William Shakespeare (see Love’s Labour’s Lost, As You Like It, and Twelfth Night). (2) To a certain extent, the play’s investment in chastity (personified by Diana) and love (personified by Venus and Cupid) has to do with the historical and religious context in which it was presented. Performed for Queen Elizabeth I, the so-called “Virgin Queen,” the play is in direct conversation with a cultural shift in England from away from Roman Catholicism: after the Reformation of the Church of England (in which England broke away from papal authority and Roman doctrine) from 1509, Mary I, Elizabeth I’s predecessor, had restored Catholicism. Under the reign of Elizabeth, the Catholic figure of Mary (the Virgin and the Queen) was replaced by Elizabeth, whose unmarried and “virginal” status is reflected in the themes of Galatea. (3) The performance of the play itself was undertaken by a group of boys between around eight and fifteen or sixteen, as part of a humanistic education program that displayed the skills in speaking, singing, and (to a lesser extent) dancing. Given the subject matter, however, the involvement of children raises some questions about the gender of childhood. At what point in life, from a cultural perspective, does gender difference matter for an early modern English audience? What about when love and marriage are taken off the table?
With this context in mind, we will turn to an open discussion of two scenes between Galatea and Phillida: Act 2, Scene 1, and Act 3, Scene 2.
The second half of our class will be focused around thesis statements as the first of a two-part workshop that we will continue on Tuesday. We’ll go over a thesis checklist, and then you’ll work with your peer review groups (these may change slightly in the next week due to absences) to discuss how each of you is approaching your passage. At this point, you will have already written a prewrite, so even if you are not yet at the point of having a working thesis, a set of guiding questions, or even an introduction, this will be a good point to brainstorm with a group of your peers! You’ll spend about ten minutes talking about each group member’s ideas. Make sure you go through these three points:
1. Share a stable context around this passage. In other words, offer a description of what the passage is about or a basic reading. Your peers should then paraphrase back to you what you’ve said: “what I’m hearing is that you’re writing about [this passage], which seems to be about [stable context].”
2. Share a destabilizing condition (or conditions) that you’ve noticed. What tensions are you interested in the text? Are there ambiguities or multiple meanings? What is going on metatextually?
3. Finally, share some questions or ideas you have about your essay—the stakes, the motives, the consequences. What do you hope your reader will learn from reading your essay that they don’t already know?
You might not be at a point to share these three points, so this is a moment to talk through some working ideas and respond to your peers. Are they focusing too narrowly on characters or plot? What might they consider when it comes to narration, or speakers, or poetics? What’s going on with sentence structure, vocabulary? What kinds of feedback have been helpful as you’ve been working through your prewrites? What do you still feel confused about? Think of this as an opportunity to do some preparations for your writing, and to organize your writing process.
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Assignments
1. Read acts 4 and 5 of John Lyly’s Galatea.
2. Turn in the full draft of your Analytic Essay by Tuesday at noon on bCourses. If you need an extension, you must request it by Monday at noon; the maximum extension I will grant is Wednesday at midnight (note that this will directly impact your peer reviewers, so I encourage you to turn in and circulate whatever you have).
3. Bring four printed copies of your introduction (including a thesis statement) to class for the second part of our thesis workshop. If you’ve asked for an extension, make sure that you at least have a set of guiding questions in a working introduction.
4. Consider completing part of one additional item by making an appointment with an Art of Writing tutor to help you with your first draft here. Make sure to (1) email me your appointment confirmation and (2) provide a short write-up (a few sentences) on how the tutoring appointment helped or influenced your writing process.
5. If you would like to complete an additional draft of either your analytic essay or your research essay, you must let me know by October 1. Find instructions in our grading contract.
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Tuesday, 19 September: Pedro Lemebel
Agenda
The first twenty minutes of our class will be devoted to thinking about topic sentences—what function they serve in an essay, what components make for an effective topic sentence, and how to go about revising one.
Around 5:30, Gwendolyn Harper, the translator of the short stories we read for today, will join us for a conversation about Pedro Lemebel and the work of translation. In order to (re)introduce ourselves, we’ll go around the room and share (1) our names and (2) the languages you know aside from English OR a language you’d like to learn. Your questions from bCourses will form the basis for our conversation; we will also talk about the genre of crónica, Lemebel’s style, and the challenges of translating his writing for an Anglophone audience. In the last part of class, we’ll take a look at the specific pieces that you read for class: “Her Throaty Laugh (Or, The Travesti Streetwalker’s Sweet Deceit),” “Wild Desire” (“Loco afán”), and “The Million Names of María Chameleon.”
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Assignments
1. Read acts 1–3 of John Lyly’s Galatea. You might also want to reread (or skim) the Iphis and Ianthe myth in Ovid. Note that you must bring your copy of Galatea to class on Thursday.
2. If you have not already done so, begin working on the full draft of your Analytic Essay. Please let me know which text you’ll be writing on by Thursday at 4pm here.
3. Consider completing part of one additional item by making an appointment with an Art of Writing tutor to help you with your first draft here. Make sure to (1) email me your appointment confirmation and (2) provide a short write-up (a few sentences) on how the tutoring appointment helped or influenced your writing process.
4. If you would like to complete an additional draft of either your analytic essay or your research essay, you must let me know by October 1. Find instructions in our grading contract.
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Thursday, 14 September: Honoré de Balzac (The Girl with the Golden Eyes)
Agenda
We’ll begin class today with a discussion of how to introduce analytic writing. There are four moves that will be crucial for you to consider not only in drafting your full essay but in developing your argument: 1) the stable content of your passage, 2) the destabilizing context which your interpretation brings, 3) the motives or consequences that result from your interpretation, and 4) a thesis statement (or, for a first draft, a guiding question) that articulates a clear and contestable stance on the tension you’ve noticed in the text. Later in the class, you’ll practice distilling stable content and destabilizing contexts in small groups.
We will then turn to our final discussion of “The Girl With the Golden Eyes.” I’ll begin with some prefatory remarks giving us some context, including a part of a chapter by Michael Lucey, which speaks to some historical context as well as the literary context provided by the postface published by Balzac in the text’s original publication. We’ll break up into five groups for our discussion, focusing in on the following passages:
GROUP A: “‘Come then, my love,’ . . . died in her heart.” pp. 369–70 (Sophie, Isela, Ashley)
GROUP B: “As for the girl with the golden eyes . . . the proverbial axiom ‘extremes meet.’” pp. 372–73 (Nithya, Tex, Júlia)
GROUP C: “At about noon . . . ‘What have you got for us?’” pp. 374–75 (Chloe, Angie, Sophia)
GROUP D: “‘What do you expect?’ . . . ‘Perhaps I shall be lucky enough to lose’” pp. 377–78 (Ella G., Rachel , Claire)
GROUP E: “‘But what about the mother?’ . . . to whom she made a sign to stay.” pp. 390–91 (Ella P., Jane, Nayiri)
GROUP B: “As for the girl with the golden eyes . . . the proverbial axiom ‘extremes meet.’” pp. 372–73 (Nithya, Tex, Júlia)
GROUP C: “At about noon . . . ‘What have you got for us?’” pp. 374–75 (Chloe, Angie, Sophia)
GROUP D: “‘What do you expect?’ . . . ‘Perhaps I shall be lucky enough to lose’” pp. 377–78 (Ella G., Rachel , Claire)
GROUP E: “‘But what about the mother?’ . . . to whom she made a sign to stay.” pp. 390–91 (Ella P., Jane, Nayiri)
In your group, discuss what you notice about this passage. Together, your task will be to come up with a stable context, destabilizing condition, and guiding question that could generate analysis. Each group will share these with the class. Your goal is to reveal something to your classmates that they did not already realize about the passage!
If we have time, we will turn to a more informal discussion about the text. We know from reading Anne Linton’s work that Balzac wrote “The Girl with the Golden Eyes” after reading Fragoletta, a novel of “doubtful sex.” What doubts about sexual difference does this text raise? In Balzac’s hands, what other interpersonal differences become the site of similar doubts? And how does the collapse of sexual difference between the siblings at the text’s climax fit with its first half (the pseudo-sociological overview of Parisian types)?
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Assignments
1. Read Pedro Lemebel’s “Her Throaty Laugh (Or, The Travesti Streetwalker’s Sweet Deceit),” “Wild Desire” (“Loco afán”), and “The Million Names of María Chameleon.” Also read Gwen’s introduction to her translation of Lemebel’s writing.
2. By Monday at noon, post a brief question about the reading in our Virtual Symposium #3. I will share your questions with Gwendolyn Harper, who will be visiting our class on Tuesday, so that she can best prepare for our class discussion. Your question might be about the translation itself, about Lemebel, about the text, or about anything else.
3. Complete P3 for your Analytic Essay. If you’d like to expand upon your P1 or P2 in preparation for writing a full draft of your analytic essay, rather than writing about “The Girl with the Golden Eyes,” send me an email letting me know. (Remember: P1, P2, and P3 are pre-writing steps in which you can experiment with possible ideas in order to develop a nuanced, sophisticated idea. And remember, all of our in-class handouts can be found here.)
4. If you have not already secured a copy of John Lyly’s Galatea, please do so, as you will need the text beginning next week. You must use the copy specified on the syllabus (available here; ISBN-10: 0719088054).
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Tuesday, 12 September: Honoré de Balzac (The Girl with the Golden Eyes)
Agenda
I will begin our week on Honoré de Balzac’s short story (or novella?) “The Girl with the Golden Eyes” with some notes on the translation (in brief, the scandal of sexuality led to the story’s censorship for Anglophone readers in earlier “complete” editions of Balzac’s fiction—a question of moral differences that the story itself makes explicit), followed by a discussion of its long opening about the different (similar?) types of people who make up the city of Paris. This long opening has at least two functions: (1) distinguishing Henri from the masses and (2) distinguishing a Francophone (even Parisian) reader from the Parisian people described.
As I mentioned last week, this story comprises one part of Balzac’s grand literary project of dealing with humanity: his novels and stories recycle the same characters and settings, existing in the same literary universe. If we read “The Girl with the Golden Eyes” with this more comprehensive and universal literary project as a backdrop, we might begin to think about the story as a study of human character, of how exceptional characters (like Henri de Marsay) turn out to be not entirely exceptions—which is to say, this story might be seen as a study of the exception as a “type” or “category” of Parisian, just as the profligate youth and the educated bourgeoisie make up categories. Or, perhaps, we can read this text as a self-declared play—an artifice or plot constructed within what might otherwise be read as a realistic reflection on how society functions (according to pleasure and gold, perhaps, as our narrator tells us again and again).
We’ll take a break from Balzac to take about organizing analytic essays, and I’ll make some remarks about how we can think of structure as a way to ensure that your essays advance contestable arguments situated within the scope of the text as opposed to reiterated observations that emphasis an objective (if not well-supported point). You might think of organization as a way to go about writing your essay, but at this level of writing, there is no fixed formula; you must let your ideas dictate how you express them. In other words, organization is the principal tool of revision. To organize an essay well is to return to it, revise it, reconsider what narrative your ideas tell and how to introduce them to a reader step by logical step. To organize an essay is therefore also a way of checking that you have, indeed, advanced an argument about the text at all. It is only through revision that you can figure out points where a reader might disagree, might offer up a different interpretation using the same evidence and observations.
The last portion of our class will be devoted to a discussion of what is happening in “The Girl with the Golden Eyes.” I would argue that the plot of this story (or at least its outcome) is revealed from the beginning of its narrative, but requires that we sift through the immense amount of particular detail, innuendo, irony, and humor in which Balzac embeds the narrative. In this sense, in contrast to Sarrasine, where information is constantly withheld, here information is constantly offered. In order to talk about these formal qualities (which will be the focus of our discussion on Thursday), we have to be on the same page in terms of who is who and what is what in the story. This is a conversation in which I’ll only intervene if it seems like the conversation is digressing; it will be up to you to work together to describe what happens. (Note: to describe what is happening contains elements of plot summary, but insofar as it requires that you return to the text, you’ll begin to notice how plot is revealed/described/explicated. This rereading is an essential part—the first step—of any analysis.)
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Assignments
1. Finish Honoré de Balzac’s “The Girl with the Golden Eyes.”
2. By Thursday at noon, post a brief response in our Virtual Symposium #2 engaging with some aspect of the text (from any part of the short story) and/or something brought up during class on Tuesday.
3. Begin to think about P3 for your Analytic Essay. If you’d like to expand upon your P1 or P2 in preparation for writing a full draft of your analytic essay, rather than writing about “The Girl with the Golden Eyes,” send me an email letting me know. (Remember: P1, P2, and P3 are pre-writing steps in which you can experiment with possible ideas in order to develop a nuanced, sophisticated idea.)
4. If you have not already secured a copy of John Lyly’s Galatea, please do so, as you will need the text beginning next week. You must use the copy specified on the syllabus (available here; ISBN-10: 0719088054).
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Thursday, 7 September: Honoré Balzac (Sarrasine)
Agenda
We’ll begin class today with some silent reflections on Honoré de Balzac’s short novella (or long short story) Sarrasine. Anne E. Linton includes Sarrasine among the nineteenth-century novels of “doubtful sex,” in which “suspense promises a temporary excursion away from sexual difference . . . but ultimately sublimates such ‘dangerous’ forays, allowing for the reestablishment of heteronormative values which had at first seemed threatened” (95). At the same time, she suggests that this reestablishment tends to be unsuccessful, and “actually undermines clear binary distinctions between men and women” (ibid.); in Sarrasine, she points out, it is Sarrasine who dies and Zambinella who survives. I’ll ask you to make some notes to yourself about (1) who’s who in the text, (2) the shape of the frame narratives (or story-within-a-story, or mise-en-abyme), and (3) whether you think the text’s ending actually offers a “revelation of ‘true sex,’” if that revelation is only an appearance (and not a reality), as Linton hints. In other words, does Balzac leaves the question of Zambinella’s sex ambiguous? Please find textual evidence to support your stance.
With these notes at hand, we will get everyone on the same page about the characters and overall structure of the text. I’ll also offer some background on Honoré de Balzac and the place of this novella within the field of literary criticism. This common ground will offer us a foundation for focusing in on a few key passages, including some moments that you may have overlooked. Taking Linton’s (and Roland Barthes’s) suggestions that ambiguous sex is a basic tool for motivating plot (and for keeping a reader’s interest), we’ll keep returning to the following central question: when do we, as readers, first learn that this is a text that deals with ambiguous sex? And at what points does this ambiguity seem to resolve?
For reference, here is the list of passages we’ll discuss:
– “Looking more closely, I recognized the speakers . . . . a wonderful party’” (110–11).
– “The frame harmonized . . . . in the course of an inventory” (118).
– “There before his marveling eyes . . . masterpiece!” (126).
– “‘And if I was not a woman?’ . . . ‘still claim you are not a woman?’” (135–36).
– “‘But,’ said Madame de Rochefide to me . . . . ‘crushing disappointment.’” (140–41).
If you know that you are someone who speaks up often and easily, I encourage you to try to focus today on listening to other members of the class and taking notes on what they have to say rather than jumping in. Inversely, if you know that you are someone who hesitates to speak up, I encourage you to try to chip in! Remember that this is a class where you get to build skills outside of your comfort zone.
In the writing-exercise part of our class, we’ll do an activity centered around body paragraphs.
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Assignments
1. Read pp. 309–367 of Honoré de Balzac’s “The Girl with the Golden Eyes.” (Note: this is a heavy load of reading, especially because the first thirty-some pages of this text tend to feel like a slog! I promise that the story picks up in the second half—don’t worry too much about keeping track of all of the details about the “Parisian person.” We’ll go over it in class.)
2. Complete P2 for your Analytic Essay, which will be due on bCourses on Tuesday, 12 September, at noon. If you would like to expand on your analyses in P1 and continue writing about Ovid or Spenser, please feel free to do so, but note that this is an opportunity to try your hand at dealing with another text. Note, also, that the rule of thumb for these pre-writes is that you’re collecting clusters of claims—think body paragraphs. No need for introductory preamble; we’ll talk about introductions next week!
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Tuesday, 5 September: A. C. Swinburne, Michael Field, and Emma Heaney
Agenda
As a pre-class activity, I’ll pass around a set of index cards. Take one, and on one side, please write one word naming a feeling you had in response to the Emma Heaney lecture. On the other side, pose a question about the lecture, something interesting that you noticed, or something with which you disagreed.
We’ll start class today with the three poems you read: the diptych “Hermaphroditus” and “Fragoletta” from Algernon Charles Swinburne’s 1866 collection, Poems and Ballads, First Series, and the untitled fifty-second poem from Michael Field’s 1889 collection, Long Ago. I’ll over a little bit of context about (1) Swinburne’s reputation as an iconoclastic whose writing depicts sexual practices that were deemed taboo, and does so through literary practices of literary/artistic allusion (as we see in these two poems) and (2) Michael Field, the pseudonym used by the collaborators and aunt-niece lesbian couple (you read that right!) Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper, who turned to the extant fragments of Sappho (in part inspired by Swinburne) as the ground for a book of poems exploring feminine desire, as well as lover’s loss. When it comes to the Tiresias poem, Yopie Prins puts it well: “Tiresias embodies the contradictions of a poem written by two women (Bradley and Cooper) writing as a man (Michael Field) writing as a woman (Sappho) who writes about a man (Tiresias) who was once a woman” (Victorian Sappho, 92). I’ll also offer some context for thinking about “Hermaphroditus” and “Fragoletta” as poems responding to a sculpture and a novel, respectively.
With all of this context in mind, we will turn to three small sections from each of these poems, reflecting on the following questions:
1. What is going on with poetic form? (Verse, meter, rhyme, syntax, anything else.) Without delving into interpretation, can you describe what is happening on the level of language?
2. What is going on with meaning? What is happening, or what is being depicted? What words or phrases seem to be most important? What parts feel the most confusing? (These are confusing and ambiguous fragments!)
3. Look at what you wrote about poetic form. How do you think these features contribute to the passages meaning? What contradictions do you notice? What patterns? Does the poem ever say things outright or does it stay in the realm of metaphor? What does this tell us about the subject matter? What even is the subject matter?
Each of you will have the chance to respond individually to these three questions about one fragment, and then we’ll have a tripartite discussion. In the first part, those of you who were looking at “Hermaphroditus” will speak, and the other two groups will listen; in the second, the group looking at “Fragoletta” will speak; and in the third, it’ll be the turn of those who were working with poem LII from Long Ago. In each of the three parts, I’ll ask that everyone in that group speak before anyone speaks a second time so that we can include everyone in the conversation. Note that this artificial constraint will probably feel awkward, even uncomfortable—but this is an exercise in recognizing that every contribution has the potential to be valuable, even if it feels obvious.
After our tripartite discussion of these Victorian poems, we’ll redistribute the index cards from the beginning of class, and everyone will read the (new) card they picked. If we have time, I’ll offer some takeaway points from the lecture.
Toward the end of class, we’ll be talking about moving from observations and claims to the arguments that structure an entire analytic essay. In order to practice this kind of developing move, I’ll ask you to pick a different stanza from those we’ve discussed to practice your close-reading skills and try to move from specific claims towards ones that speak to the stanza (or even the poem as a whole). (Notice that this exercise has overlap with the exercise we did earlier in the class. The idea is to try approaching the work of close reading from multiple angles.)
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Assignments
1. Read Honoré de Balzac’s short story “Sarrasine.”
2. Read the excerpts of Anne Linton’s “Is She or Isn’t He?: Plotting Ambiguous Gender.”
3. If you haven’t done so already, please plan to come to my office hours (W 3–5p) to introduce yourself next week! This will be a casual conversation so I can get to know you a little bit, and so you can start a routine of coming to my office hours regularly. If you would like to come after 3:30p or can’t come during my regular office hours, send me an email to make an appointment. Note that the 4:30–4:45p slot is spoken for. (If you want to come to my office hours again, please feel free to do so: office hours are there for you!)
4. Consider getting started on P2 for your Analytic Essay, which will be due on bCourses on Tuesday, 12 September, at noon.
5. Consider whether you’d like to complete additional items on the grading contract. If you know already that you’d like to complete an additional draft of one or both of your essays, please send me an email.
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Thursday, 31 August: Medieval Bestiaries, Edmund Spenser, Leah DeVun
Agenda
Today, we’ll begin class by going over the community guidelines we drafted. (Note: I’ve added a few points, which are up for discussion.) As a class, we’ll suggest any revisions, and then vote to ratify the guidelines. Since our class will develop and grow over the course of the semester, these guidelines are always subject to revision: you are always welcome to suggest that we revisit a guideline, or to add another one.
Over the course of the next six weeks, you’ll be developing your first essay for this class, an analytic essay arguing for a close reading of one of the literary texts we read during the first half of the course. We’ll go over the instructions for each stage of this essay, my expectations, and you’ll have an opportunity to ask any questions you may have at this point.
We’ll then move on to an activity centered around noticing formal qualities using the hyena images you were asked to look at.
In the second half of class, we’ll turn our attention to the readings from the Physiologus and Leah DeVun’s essay to ground our conversation about the excerpt from Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene.
Some context for The Faerie Queene: One of the longest poems in the English language, published in two parts (in 1590 and 1596, during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I), The Faerie Queene poem is structured in regular stanzas of nine lines (eight of iambic pentameter; one of iambic hexameter) with a regular rhyming scheme (ABABBCBCC) and uses language that was considered to be obsolete or archaic even for the time period in which it was written. In addition to Middle English (i.e., late Medieval English) sources, Spenser also turned to sources from Greek and Roman antiquity. The content of the poem is largely allegorical, and deals with themes running from the Protestant Reformation to the House of Tudor. (Note: The Faerie Queene is roughly contemporaneous with a few other texts that we’ll read this semester. John Lyly’s Galatea was first performed in 1588; William Shakespeare’s Tempest is estimated to have been written in 1610 or 1611.) Although this cultural context may inform our interpretations, we won’t focus on these larger historical contexts in this class; for now, our task will be close reading the excerpt featuring Florimell’s interactions with the witch, her son, and the beast as well as Satyrane’s binding the beast. The cultural context that we will use is the information that we have about how Spenser may have received the idea of the “hyena” figure.
In order to kickstart our discussion, we will discuss strategies to develop claims out of observations. At this point, you’ll have a chance to build on your bCourses posts about the Spenser reading in a collective conversation. This discussion will be organized around your responses, particularly around the question of who the different figures are (Is the witches son the same as the beast? Why might a reader conflate the two?) and what it means for Satyrane to bind the beast with Florimell’s girdle.
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Assignments
1. Read “Hermaphroditus” and “Fragoletta” by Algernon Charles Swinburne (“Hermaphroditus” is an ekphrastic poem responding to this sculpture) as well as poem LII from Michael Field’s Long Ago, a book of poems expanding on Sappho’s verse (Sappho was a poet from Lesbos who wrote in the 6th century BCE, and came to be understood as a literary archetype for feminine same-sex desire in the nineteenth century—she’s the Lesbian behind lesbianism, the Sappho behind sapphism).
2. Watch Emma Heaney’s lecture “Soft, Hard; Penetrable and Capable of Penetration: Bodies Against Cisness” (the lecture is ~45 minutes; you don’t need to watch the Q&A). Pro-tip: do not watch this lecture at double speed! Heaney’s arguments are dense, and taking the extra time will improve your understanding of what she’s saying. Note that we’ll be reading Nightwood later in the semester, so this lecture will help prepare you for that reading, too.
3. P1 for your Analytic Essay will be due on bCourses on Tuesday, 5 September, at noon. Here is the updated handout.
4. If you haven’t done so already, please plan to come to my office hours (W 3–5p) to introduce yourself next week! This will be a casual conversation so I can get to know you a little bit, and so you can start a routine of coming to my office hours regularly. If you would like to come after 3:30p or can’t come during my regular office hours, send me an email to make an appointment. (If you want to come to my office hours again, please feel free to do so: office hours are there for you!)
Stray thoughts/updates after class: (1) all of the handouts from our class as well as documents from classroom activities can be found on this page of the website. (2) A correction: to the best of my knowledge, Florimell is represented as a human, and not actually a “faerie” (the titular fairy queen is Gloriana). However, her epithet “faire”—which appears three times in the passage we read alone, at III.vii.17.5, 31.2, and 31.5—recalls the word “fairy,” which draws a relation between her status as a chaste/virtuous/virginal lady/damsel/woman/maiden and fairies. In a poem where rhymes are everywhere, these formal similarities matter. (3) Another correction: Spenser and his readers would indeed likely have been aware of an affiliation between satyrs and Satan; from late antiquity, Christian writers described satyrs as demonic and even as symbols of Satan, conflating mythological satyr figures with anti-Christian viewpoints or diabolical symbolism. In a poem where a satyr becomes a virtuous knight, the tension around this iconography is meaningful.
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Tuesday, 29 August: Ovid, Diodorus Sicilus, Anne Fausto-Sterling
Agenda
Please find a seat near the group with whom you'll be working on writing community guidelines as well as our first close reading activity. I’ve selected the groups based on rough thematic parameters drawn from our bCourses posts:
GROUP A: MULTIPLE READERS, MULTIPLE READINGS (Chloe, Tex, Dasha)
GROUP B: TRUST & CONFIDENTIALITY (Jane, Sophie, Sophia)
GROUP C: COLLABORATION & RESPECT (Nayiri, Angie)
GROUP D: PREPARATION & WILLINGNESS (Ella G., Nithya)
GROUP E: OPENNESS & FLEXIBILITY (Claire, Bethany, Isela)
GROUP F: DISAGREEMENT & GROWTH (Ella P., Ashley)
GROUP B: TRUST & CONFIDENTIALITY (Jane, Sophie, Sophia)
GROUP C: COLLABORATION & RESPECT (Nayiri, Angie)
GROUP D: PREPARATION & WILLINGNESS (Ella G., Nithya)
GROUP E: OPENNESS & FLEXIBILITY (Claire, Bethany, Isela)
GROUP F: DISAGREEMENT & GROWTH (Ella P., Ashley)
We’ll begin class today with a deep-listening exercise adapted from Pauline Oliveros. Once you’ve found your seat, take a minute to settle in and (if you’re comfortable) close your eyes. With your eyes closed, shift your attention to what you hear (or what you don’t hear). As others settle into the classroom, listen to the sounds in the room, outside of the room, outside of the building—as far as your listening can extend. Then turn your attention inward, to the sound of any movements your body may be making, to the sound of your breathing, and to the (silent) sound of your thoughts. When you reach this point in the exercise, take a moment to find a word for what you’re feeling, and when you’re ready, open your eyes. Note this word down.
We’ll do another quick round of introductions by going around the room. Please share your name (and pronouns); an academic interest, intended major, or another class you’re taking; and a fun fact.
We’ll then turn to drafting community guidelines in the above groups. Community guidelines establish collective expectations for our interactions both inside and beyond the classroom. I hope that what we draft together today will foster an environment of mutual respect and collaborative inquiry as we confront challenging subject matter and learn from each other over the course of the semester. Community guidelines are different for each class. They depend on your learning needs and our group dynamic. These guidelines will always be open to editing, revision, additions, etc. In your groups, please complete the following steps:
1. As a group, review each other’s individual bCourses posts and consider how they pertain to the group’s theme.
2. Together, draft a guideline (or two) for your group’s theme. The statement(s) should start with the phrase “We will…”
3. When the draft is complete, please have one group member post it to the bCourses discussion “Community Guidelines: We will…” (If no one has a laptop on hand, ask to borrow Mary’s.)
2. Together, draft a guideline (or two) for your group’s theme. The statement(s) should start with the phrase “We will…”
3. When the draft is complete, please have one group member post it to the bCourses discussion “Community Guidelines: We will…” (If no one has a laptop on hand, ask to borrow Mary’s.)
Our community guidelines are meant to be treated as a living document, and we’ll continue revisiting, revising, and expanding these guidelines over the course of the semester.
(Community guidelines adapted from Alex Brostoff and Taylor Johnston)
During the second part of our class, we’ll begin to discuss close reading, the principle technique we’ll use for analyzing literature in this course. We’ll go over a handout that provides a way to think about close reading in the abstract before turning to texts that we can close read as a group.
Since we’ve all read Anne Fausto-Sterling’s “Dueling Dualisms,” we should all be a little more familiar with the various “dualisms” that surround conversations about the sexed body—male/female, sex/gender, real/constructed, nature/nurture, and so on. We should also have a better understanding of the value and the limitations of these dichotomies as we begin to have conversations about “transness,” which we might think of as a term for the sites where dualisms around male/female begin to break down, or where we have to think beyond dualisms. Fausto-Sterling’s writing adds another perspective to Judith Butler’s theory of “gender performativity” that we briefly talked about in our first session. To recap, Butler argues that gender is “real only to the extent that it is performed”—which is not to say that gender isn’t real, but rather than gender happens through its repeated enactment.
We’ll keep these considerations around the body and gender performativity in mind as we turn to the selections from two ancient texts: Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Diodorus Sicilus’s Library of History. One of these texts presents itself as a series of transformation myths rendered in poetic verses; the other presents itself as a more factual history of the world, which includes religious (or mythological) history. But both of these textual documents use the particularities of language to produce their meanings. Our task will be to look at these particularities of language and to begin performing close readings.
Each group will work together to collect a series of observations—both formal or stylistic and content-based—about a brief passage from one of the texts. Note: each passage has been assigned to two groups…there isn’t a “right” set of observations or a “correct” set of claims that derive from those observations—the tricky part about literary texts is that they contain ambiguities and are therefore subject to interpretation. This is why it is worth making arguments advocating for different interpretations—room for disagreement means room for dialogue!
Reread the passage individually at least two times on your own copy of the text. Make observations of anything that you find interesting: patterns, weirdnesses, metaphors/literary devices, things that are strikingly absent, repetitions, words taken from a particular lexicon (medical, domestic, religious, etc.). What kinds of things do you find yourself wanting to say more about? What reactions to you have to different phrases?
As a group, share what you have observed in the text. You might find that in your discussion, your observations proliferate and that you find more aspects of your passage worthy of discussion. Mark these observations as annotations on the blown up version of your passage.
As a group, select a couple (two to four) of observations that you’d like to talk about more. Try to come up with some ways of explaining why this observation is interesting, and, if you can, begin to answer the question what does it mean for our understanding of the text? This kind of work is the work of a claim (which we’ll talk about more on Thursday). Whereas an observation is a fairly objective fact about a piece of evidence, a claim starts to interpret that piece of evidence. Write out these interpretations as annotations, and circle/outline/zig-zag around these ideas so that they are clearly demarcated.
As a class, we’ll do a “gallery” walk around the room to see what other groups have found.
If we have time, we’ll come back together as a class to have a brief, open discussion about the texts.
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Assignments
1. Please read over the Community Guidelines that you proposed and posted on bCourses during class. Examine the other groups’ posts. Is there any language you’d like to edit or revise? Any additions you’d like to make? What’s missing? Please post a reply if there’s anything you’d like to edit, revise, cut, add, etc. We’ll have a vote on Thursday to reach consensus. Each and every individual should feel comfortable with the community guidelines we establish for this class.
2. Read “On the Hyena or the Brute,” look at the images of hyenas from manuscripts of medieval bestiaries, and read Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene, III.vii.1–36 (focus on stanzas 22, 29–30, 35–36). The gloss of Book III, canto vii will help give context for what’s going on at this point in The Faerie Queene. I expect you to come to class having reflected on what is going on in these texts and also having noted a few passages that you found interesting, confusing, or perhaps even boring.
3. Read Leah DeVun’s essay “The Monstrous Races: Mapping the Borders of Sex.” This essay will help give us a framework for talking about the medieval and early modern representations of hyenas—and for talking about how ideas of gender worked to regulate the “human.”
4. By Thursday at noon, please post a short response to the Spenser reading on the bCourses discussion thread “Virtual Symposium #1.” Your response may be posed as a set of questions, phrased as a series of impressions, or be formatted in some other way (like bullet points), but should engage with specific moments in the passage you read. (Quote the reading, and cite stanza and line numbers!) You may also refer to the other texts you read, or even one of the bestiary images.
5. Read over the instructions for the Analytic Essay, which you’ll be working on for the next six weeks. We’ll go over this assignment in class on Thursday, so if you have any confusions/questions, please come to class ready to ask about these!
6. Please come to my office hours (W 3–5p) to introduce yourself! This will be a casual conversation so I can get to know you a little bit, and so you can start a routine of coming to office hours regularly. If you can’t come on Wednesday, send me an email to make an appointment.
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Thursday, 24 August: Introduction
Agenda
Please take some time to explore our course website and read about our class.
Each class, you’ll find an agenda and assignments posted on the home page of this website. Here’s what we’ll be doing on our first day, Thursday, 24 August 2023:
We’ll begin the class by filling out an introductory questionnaire. Then we’ll go around the room with brief introductions (we’ll get to know each other better once registration settles):
– Please repeat the name of the person who spoke before you
– Share your full name, what you like to be called, and your gender pronouns
– Tell us where you’re from…
– …and what genre a film about your life would be
– Share your full name, what you like to be called, and your gender pronouns
– Tell us where you’re from…
– …and what genre a film about your life would be
Once we’ve gone around the room, we’ll go over some introductory logistics (the syllabus, general objectives and guidelines for the class, Tuesday’s assignment).
After these introductions, we’ll discuss what we think about when we think about “literary history.” What does it mean to think about “trans literary history”? We’ll also talk briefly about using the term “trans” as an interpretive tool (rather than a diagnostic category). After watching part of an interview with theorist Judith Butler about their theory that gender is performative, we will discuss what it means for gender to function as “an act that has real consequences” in the context of literary history.
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Assignments
1. Please read through the Trans Literary History syllabus and grading contract carefully.
2. Print out our course reader (tip: print double-sided). I strongly encourage you to acquire a three-ring binder (~1.5″) to organize readings, hand-outs, and your own writing. If you need to borrow a three-hole punch, you can borrow mine: drop by my office (4319 Dwinelle) during office hours next Wednesday.
3. Acquire copies of Nightwood, Silence, Galatea, and The Tempest. You must use the editions indicated on the syllabus. You can find these texts online (search by ISBN, listed below); you may be able to find copies through the Berkeley library, Interlibrary loans, at the Berkeley Public Library, and/or at local bookstores. Please email me if you’re having trouble finding copies! I’ve linked possible options for buying these books:
– Barnes, Djuna – Nightwood (ISBN-10: 0811216713) (available here)
– Heldris of Cornwall – Silence: A Thirteenth-Century French Romance (trans. Sarah Roche-Mahdi) (ISBN-10: 0870135430) (available here or digitally here)
– Lyly, John – Galatea (ISBN-10: 0719088054) (available here)
– Shakespeare, William – The Tempest (ISBN-10: 1408133474) (available here or here)
4. By noon on Monday, 28 August, post a brief response on bCourses under the discussion “Community Guidelines.” For you, what factors contribute to creating a collective learning environment? What is the most important guideline you’d suggest to help build our reading and writing community? Explain why this is important and how it will impact your and our shared experiences in this class. You might want to consider guidelines pertaining to respect, listening, peer review, electronics, access and accommodations, etc. For examples, check out the University of Michigan’s CRLT. Feel free to respond to one another’s posts—and we’ll continue the discussion during our evening class on Tuesday.
5. Your introductory text is due on bCourses at noon on Tuesday, 29 August.
6. Complete the reading for Tuesday’s class: (a) the selections from Ovid’s Metamorphoses (myth of Tiresias; myth of Iphis and Ianthe); (b) the selections from Diodorus Sicilus’s Library of History (IV.6.5 [paragraph about Hermaphroditus], XXXII.10–12 [paragraphs about intersex figures]); and (c) Anne Fausto-Sterling’s “Dueling Dualisms.” Reading Ovid’s version of the Salmacis and Hermaphroditus myth is optional (content warning: SVSH). Come to class prepared with questions, comments, responses to these texts—you may want to annotate as you read, or take a few notes to gather your thoughts.
2. Print out our course reader (tip: print double-sided). I strongly encourage you to acquire a three-ring binder (~1.5″) to organize readings, hand-outs, and your own writing. If you need to borrow a three-hole punch, you can borrow mine: drop by my office (4319 Dwinelle) during office hours next Wednesday.
3. Acquire copies of Nightwood, Silence, Galatea, and The Tempest. You must use the editions indicated on the syllabus. You can find these texts online (search by ISBN, listed below); you may be able to find copies through the Berkeley library, Interlibrary loans, at the Berkeley Public Library, and/or at local bookstores. Please email me if you’re having trouble finding copies! I’ve linked possible options for buying these books:
– Barnes, Djuna – Nightwood (ISBN-10: 0811216713) (available here)
– Heldris of Cornwall – Silence: A Thirteenth-Century French Romance (trans. Sarah Roche-Mahdi) (ISBN-10: 0870135430) (available here or digitally here)
– Lyly, John – Galatea (ISBN-10: 0719088054) (available here)
– Shakespeare, William – The Tempest (ISBN-10: 1408133474) (available here or here)
4. By noon on Monday, 28 August, post a brief response on bCourses under the discussion “Community Guidelines.” For you, what factors contribute to creating a collective learning environment? What is the most important guideline you’d suggest to help build our reading and writing community? Explain why this is important and how it will impact your and our shared experiences in this class. You might want to consider guidelines pertaining to respect, listening, peer review, electronics, access and accommodations, etc. For examples, check out the University of Michigan’s CRLT. Feel free to respond to one another’s posts—and we’ll continue the discussion during our evening class on Tuesday.
5. Your introductory text is due on bCourses at noon on Tuesday, 29 August.
6. Complete the reading for Tuesday’s class: (a) the selections from Ovid’s Metamorphoses (myth of Tiresias; myth of Iphis and Ianthe); (b) the selections from Diodorus Sicilus’s Library of History (IV.6.5 [paragraph about Hermaphroditus], XXXII.10–12 [paragraphs about intersex figures]); and (c) Anne Fausto-Sterling’s “Dueling Dualisms.” Reading Ovid’s version of the Salmacis and Hermaphroditus myth is optional (content warning: SVSH). Come to class prepared with questions, comments, responses to these texts—you may want to annotate as you read, or take a few notes to gather your thoughts.