- The Epistolary Novel (Instructor: Huang-Hua Chen, Associate Professor)
In this course, we will attempt to answer the following questions: what makes the letter a particularly enticing genre? Why is it that some of the most important early novels like Pamela (1740) associate themselves and experiment with this form? What are the sorts of themes and questions that the epistolary novel is concerned with?
- Contemporary Text-based Theatre
- U.S. Proletarian Literature (Instructor: Shyh-Jen Fuh, Professor)
In the United States, proletarian literature flourished in the years surrounding the Great Depression. Having witnessed various social injustices inflicted upon workers in farms and factories alike, writers diversely gendered and racialized committed themselves to exposing capitalist exploitation and envisioning a just society. The course studies selective works from the proletarian movement in the period, and explores their political arts as well as social outlooks in order to cast light on the achievements and limitations of their literary projects for social critique. It also explores the ways gender and race intersect with class in the dynamics of social formation through critically examining their representations of the struggle of the working class.
- Classical Myth and Literary Contexts (Instructor: Magaret Kim, Professor)
This course is designed for the serious literature student who wants an advanced, in-depth understanding of the significance and influence of classical myth in the study of literature. Students will develop ways to work with the material of classical myth in research on literature and culture, including modern versions, representations of and allusions to classical narratives found in Western literature of all periods and genres.
- The Postcolonial Moment
- Modernism (Instructor: Yi-Chuang E. Lin, Associate Professor)
This is a course devoted to the most important aesthetic/literary movement of the 20th century. It is in relation to which that “post-modernism” is problematically defined. In this course, we will probe and examine the aesthetic ideal, the appeal, and the endeavour for cultural regeneration of High Modernism and how does this cultural regeneration correlate to its social-economic agenda. We will begin with the acclaimed modernist precursor Joseph Conrad and his pungent critique of Western imperialists in Heart of Darkness, moves towards E. M. Forster and T. S Eliot’s delineation of a fast changing modern epoch and the loss of cultural, ethical anchor in a speculative modernity in Howards End and The Waste Land. Following, we will study the innovative narrative techniques of James Joyce and Virginia Woolf by means of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Mrs. Dalloway. Lastly, we will peruse William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying.
- Postmodernism (Instructor: Yi-Chuang E. Lin, Associate Professor)
This is a course devoted to the study, discussion, and understanding of Postmodernism. Throughout the course, following critics such as Fredric Jameson, we attempt to define “what is postmodernism?” and therefore how does Postmodernism arise after Modernism and why does it define itself in relation to Modernism must be thoroughly examined first. Is Postmodernism a continuation of or a break from Modernism? In order to arrive at a better understanding of Postmodernism, we will study Six postmodernist tour de force, including Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five, Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49, Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, Italo Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller, John Barth’s Lost in the Funhouse, and Jorge Luis Borges’s The Garden of Forking Paths. We will try to examine the Labyrinthine intertextuality, language game of Postmodernism and lose ourselves in the funhouse of Postmodernism.
- The English Bible and Literature (Instructor: Magaret Kim, Professor)
This course introduces students to some of the most famous narratives, characters, literary forms, and teachings of the Bible in the context of their significance for literature and culture.
- Shakespeare (Instructor: Magaret Kim, Professor)
Graduate students read major plays of Shakespeare and engage with the relevance the plays to intellectual and social conversations in the present.
- Narrative Anxiety and The Rise of the Novel (Instructor: Huang-Hua Chen, Associate Professor)
The course attempts to answer the following sets of questions: to what extend does narrative anxiety affect and inform the early novels? How is the rise of the novel a cultural response to the crisis of this anxiety?
- Daniel Defoe: A Forerunner in the Evolution of English Prose Fiction
- Drama, medicine and ethics in the 20th century (Instructor: Shih-Yi Huang, Associate Professor)
This seminar aims to discuss the intricate relationship among medicine, theatre and ethics in last century. In the context of positivism, Darwinism, realism and naturalism, both medicine and theatre redefined their own discourses and practices in the modern period, and explored the technological relations of human bodies and living environments. In modern science’s attempt to control human fate, it (un-)wittingly shapes ethics, especially those ethical issues arising in personal and professional relationships. Theatre and medicine come into confluence as theatre becomes a venue of contagion, and emotions and empathy are generated to such extent that identity transformation becomes possible; similarly, clinical practices, as a cultural form in their own right, share the goal of managing human lives, albeit through medicine. Issues that will be discussed include the political/social meaning of diseases, the formation of influential medical policies and the ethical/moral mechanisms they engender, the shifting roles of playwrights, and how the theatre itself was altered by and adapted in light of medicine/disease/health discourses.
- Deleuze and Literature (Instructor: Shu-Yu Lee, Assistant Professor)
French philosopher Gilles Deleuze (1925-1995) has had lasting influence not only on continental philosophy but also on literary studies. Deleuze’s works and his collaborations with psychoanalyst/philosopher Felix Guattari has contributed significantly to gender theories, ethnic studies, ecocriticism, posthuman and new materialisms, and various other critical perspectives on literature to this day. In Deleuze and Literature, we will discover how literature inspires Deleuze’s philosophy and how Deleuze’s philosophy provides conceptual tools for literary studies. Our goal is to explore how Deleuzian thought can help us approach the metaphysical, aesthetic, ethnical, and socio-political elements of literary works.
- Political Economy in Contemporary American Literature (Instructor: Shu-Yu Lee, Assistant Professor)
Political Economy in Contemporary American Literature examines how the rise of neoliberal capitalism has changed what it means to be a worker, citizen, and human being in the US and beyond. We will explore the dynamics of individual freedom and the free market, gender equality and women’s work, authenticity and emotional labor, postmodernism and consumerism, and self-care and the attention economy, as they play out in fictions and films from the 1960s to the 21st-century.
- The Posthuman (Instructor: Chien-Heng Wu, Associate Professor)
The concept of the posthuman has gained widespread currency in recent years. However, there is still controversy around what the term “posthuman” means and how we should react to the growing trend across different disciplines that calls into question the traditional concept of man. The first thing to note is that the posthuman or posthumanism comes in different shades and guises. This course will provide a basic mapping of these different views, and raise ethical and practical questions concerning the use and abuse of big data, artificial intelligence, bio-engineering, and the enhancement of man through technological aid-ons. Will these developments deliver the promised liberation? Or are they simply a new form of enslavement? What are other challenges faced by the human in the coming posthuman age? Is “human” a concept that is too outdated to survive in the posthuman age? Should we jettison all the qualities that have traditionally been associated with the human? Is it an either/or choice between human and posthuman? Or can we be human and posthuman at the same time? These are questions that will be explored in this course and they will be examined through film and popular culture.
- Dystopian Literature (Instructor: Yi-Chuang E. Lin, Associate Professor)
In this course, we will follow the discussion in and the vision of Plato’s Republic, Thomas More’s Utopia, Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travel, Karl Marx’s “The Manifesto of the Communist Party” in search of the origin of that unremitting pursuit for an ideal society that is just and jolly. It has been widely-acknowledged that democratic capitalism is not the best economic and political system and yet through various narrative exploration and actual socio-political experiment of twentieth century communist regimes, at least it has been proven to be the lesser evil. By reading George Orwell’s 1984, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, and Margaret Atwood’s Maddaddam trilogy, we will discuss the inherent irony and paradox of human rational pursuit and calculation of an ideal society.
- American Modern Poetry (Instructor: Shyh-Jen Fuh, Professor)
This course aims to explore the development of modern poetry in the multicultural United States. It will study the long canonized figures since Walt Whitman along with recently recognized poets, including those who have been overlooked due to their unprivileged status of gender, race or class and those who have newly emerged on the scene. Besides considering the poetic genealogy in the American scene, we will put the poetic production during this period in the context of cross-cultural and cross-national movements and ponder its significance in the world scene.
- Contemporary American Theatre (Instructor: Shih-Yi Huang, Associate Professor)
This seminar explores major plays and theatrical movements since the 1960s, a time when the society began to witness drastic changes in various regions and contexts. These changes are reflected in the changing role of theatre, for instance, in off-off Broadway theatres, which have been continuously developing since then. We will cover theatres and playwrights that present social issues and cultural diversity, including African American playwrights, Latino playwrights and Asian American playwrights. Reading materials may range from play scripts, performance and production reviews, past and current criticism, theatre history and related socio-historical background materials.
- Bio and social communities: Drama, medicine and ethics in the 20th century (Instructor: Shih-Yi Huang, Associate Professor)
The class will assume parallel readings between play scripts, dramatic criticism and contemporary community theories , specifically those from Jean-Luc Nancy, Giorgio Agambenand Roberto Esposito for spurring dialogue among different disciplines. Conceptualization of community with different emphasis by various thinkers, such as political economy, ontological, biopolitics, morality, epistemology, beg the question of the occurrence, form and definition of social and biological communities. In the spirit of exploring the technological relations of human bodies and living environments, both medicine and theatre negotiate the physical and social boundary between the self and the group of which it is a part. Terms and issues such as property, propriety, appropriation, expropriation, as well as relationship of dispositif and bare life and that of actor and character, and so on, would be of focus in the class.
