Updates

Thursday, 18 April: 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.

As you create zines, I will share some of the historical zines that have been collected as well as some insights about the two essays we read for class, takeaways from your final virtual symposium, and recommended reading for contemporary trans literature. I will also invite you to reflect on the past thirteen weeks of our class in an open discussion.

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Assignments

1. Print TWO HARD COPIES of your research essay draft to bring in for peer review. (Information about printing can be found here.) If you do not bring two hard copies by the beginning of class (5:10pm), you will receive an unexcused absence for non-participation, as we will not be using laptops or electronics on Tuesday.* Why? There is an abundance of research on the benefits of handwriting over typing; reading digital texts as opposed to print versions can impact learning outcomes in ways that perpetuate inequities.

Some caveats around accessibility:

(a) If you need help printing AND have already used your 200 pages of free printing for the semester, send me your essay by Sunday night. I will print copies of your essay for you.

(b) This activity can be challenging for people with dysgraphia, arthritis, other forms of neuralgia or muscular inflammation—acute or chronic. If you need an an accommodation, please email me by Sunday night. We will coordinate an alternative.

*I am willing to make exceptions for laptop use for writing up paragraph-style feedback for part of class time (5:40–5:50pm and 6:20–6:30pm) on Tuesday. I will ask you to cc me when you email feedback to your group mates.

Groups for peer review:

NIGHTWOOD: Inez, Audrey, Gael
NIGHTWOOD & HAMLET: Layomi, Catherine, Michelle
NIGHTWOOD & DETERMINISM: Matteos, Sabrina, Sonia
GALATEA & SILENCE: Edward, Meera, Ariel
THE TEMPEST & SILENCE: Dolyn, Abel, Kazandra

2. Begin revising and expanding your research essay. Your final research essay should be at least 40% different from your first draft, incorporate my feedback on bCourses, AND engage with your peers’ feedback. Consider making an appointment with the Art of Writing tutors—at the end of the semester, tutoring spots fill up quickly, so plan in advance! You also have the option of meeting with me during RRR week by signing up here. (If you would like to meet with me but none of these times work, please send me an email.) This meeting is optional: we can use it to check in about your peer review session, make a revision plan for your research essay, and reflect on the semester.

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Tuesday, 16 April: Towle and Morgan

Agenda

After some housekeeping, 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 Thursday at noon.

3. Begin revising and expanding your essay. Consider making an appointment with the Art of Writing tutors.

4. If you would like to meet with me during RRR week, please sign up for a one-on-one meeting here. (If you would like to meet with me but none of these times work, please send me an email.)

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Thursday, 11 April: Miranda, Cruz, and Driskill

Agenda

For the first part of class, you will workshop one another’s introductions in the following peer review groups:

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.)

While you workshop one another’s introductions, I’ll read through the third hard copies you’ve been asked to bring to class. Depending on the drafts, I will curate a selection of successful strategies that we can learn from as a class.

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. How have Indigenous people—who have experienced colonization and of whose peoples a “historical record” is often limited—recuperated or reinvented language? How do these stories layer on the historical record/archive? 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 *Tuesday* at noon. Find instructions here. In order to be marked as complete, your essay should be ~2400 words, engage with three secondary sources (no more, no fewer), follow MLA format, analyze quoted textual evidence in every body paragraph, and be fully proofread (a typo here and there is acceptable, but if you haven’t even run spellcheck, it will be obvious).

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 Tuesday 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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Tuesday, 9 April: 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 Thursday. Here is a reminder of the moves of a successful introduction. Note: you may only have guiding question(s) at this point, rather than a full thesis. If you do not bring a working introductory paragraph, you will receive an unexcused absence for non-participation.

3. Start writing the first draft of your full essay, which will be due next Tuesday.

4. Consider making an appointment with the Art of Writing tutors (here). This is the most effective and impactful “additional” activity you can do.

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Thursday, 4 April: 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 more closely 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. Your peer review groups (these might change) will be:

NIGHTWOOD: Inez, Audrey, Matteos
NIGHTWOOD & HAMLET: Layomi, Gael, Michelle
NIGHTWOOD & DETERMINISM: Catherine, Sabrina, Sonia
GALATEA & SILENCE: Edward, Ariel, Meera
THE TEMPEST & SILENCE: Dolyn, Abel, Kazandra

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 essay “Venus in Two Acts,” Carnelian Seville’s poem “how to meet the Piton mountain” (content warning: self-harm), and Alan Pelaez Lopez’s poem “The Spine of Gorée Island.”

2. P2 is due on Tuesday at noon. Find instructions here. Please follow MLA format and include a works cited (with your focal text and the secondary source you engage).

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Tuesday, 2 April: 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 a nearly all-male play where many of the characters are contending with the unfamiliar. 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. Your annotated bibliography will identify “four or five sources that may be helpful for your paper. Your sources should be cited using MLA-style in alphabetical order. Your annotations should consist in a brief paragraph summarizing the argument or focus of the source, as well as another brief paragraph describing how you would use the source in your paper (or why you wouldn’t).” Try to keep your annotations concise (think two pages total, maybe a little over).

2. Finish The Tempest.

3. Continue working on your prewriting for your research essay. P2 will be due next Tuesday, but we will begin workshopping your writing in class on Thursday. To this end, please bring in one paragraph in which you (1) analyze your primary text and (2) engage one of your secondary sources. In this paragraph, you should forward your own claim (providing evidence from and analysis of your focal text) and incorporate the information from your secondary source (indicating how the secondary source relates to your claim).

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Thursday, 21 March: 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 where one half of the class listens and the other half of the class takes notes. When it’s your turn to listen, I would like you each to come up with one question for the other half of the class. I’d like you each to get a chance to teach one another what you gleaned from the podcast episode. We will close by coming together and thinking about how one might use Horbury for thinking about Galatea vs. for thinking about The Tempest.

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Assignments

1. Take one full week off from this class for spring break. While stress can sometimes promote learning, taking time to process and recover from distress can help our brains learn more effectively.

2. Read acts 1–3 of The Tempest. If you are using an edition other than the Arden Shakespeare, please let me know in advance and I will help you find the correct copy.

3. Begin working on your annotated bibliography, which will be due the Thursday after spring break.

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Tuesday, 19 March: Masha Raskolnikov

Agenda

Our class today will move through three writing-based workshops.

In part one, we’ll do 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 part two, 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.

In part three, we will 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 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. You’ll first work in groups and then we’ll come together to put together a collective final draft.

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Assignments

1. Listen to the episode “Transgender Fairies in Early Modern Literature” of the podcast Not Just the Tudors. (Also available on other podcast streaming platforms.)

2. Keep doing research for your research essay! Gather PDFs and online sources to read and make a folder to go through. Start evaluating sources.

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Thursday, 14 March: Heldris of Cornwall

Agenda

Our discussion of Silence will be organized according to the passages that you brought into class. We will begin by talking about how the Nature-Nurture debate within this medieval text provides a counterpoint to mainstream contemporary trans narratives (see Kay Gabriel on the trans memoir and gender novel): it separates out assigned sex and assigned gender and maps them onto nature and nurture, respectively. 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. To organize our discussion, I’ll collect on pieces of paper the passages you’ve chosen and we’ll move through the text, talking about why these moments would be important for what it means to consider the text to be a piece of trans literary history.

We will close our discussion of Silence by looking at another kind of passage, indeed, at a different level of narrative. At 1660ff, we learn that Heldris of Cornwall, our poem’s narrator, “found” the story of Silence in a different text, which was purportedly written in Latin. Toward the end of the book, the narrative interruptions all but disappear, though we receive a reminder that Heldris gets his plot from a “book where [he] found this story” (6678). What do we make of the conceit of this interrupting narrator? Of a text retold from a found source? How does this shift our understanding of the text’s depiction of Nature, Nurture, and Silence?

In the last 20 minutes of class, we’ll devote some class time to finding sources. I’ll ask you to do the following: (1) Search for book chapters that deal with your primary text. (2) Search for a few 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!)

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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 online—look up the call number and go to the stacks. If you’re stuck, talk to a librarian. Bring this book to class on Tuesday.

4. P1 of your research essay is due on Tuesday at noon.

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Tuesday, 12 March: Heldris of Cornwall

Agenda

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

– The UC Berkeley library’s guide for literature research (n.b. links for JSTOR and Project Muse)

– A research “cheat sheet” courtesy of former humanities librarian 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.

Turning to the day’s reading, 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 (1–106), (2) the outlawing of female inheritance (276–336), (3) the “ami”/“ah me” moment (879–915), (4) the birth of Silence (esp. 1861–974), and (5) the debate between Nature and Nurture (2497–624). 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.” Your passage should be shorter than a single page and you should write down the line numbers.

2. Consider attending a research 101 workshop through the library.

3. Begin reading 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 gathering secondary sources. (Note: I expect that you will be reading an additional ~30–50 pages each week—think two or three articles/chapters, in addition to skimming first paragraphs. Anticipate devoting about two hours to research each week. On top of this, I expect you to reread the entirety of whatever text you’re writing about.)

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Thursday, 7 March: 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 an overwhelming desire to collectively step up participation in discussion as well as an interest in more in-class writing-based activities. As we shift into discussion of the research essay, I will try to incorporate review of components of analytic writing into our discussions.

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 a few parts.

I will give an overview of one reading of “Watchman, What of the Night?,” the first long conversation between the doctor and Nora, as a dialogue that produces feminine solidarity: by moving from transfeminine experience to lesbian experience to a third account of the night that ended Robin and Nora’s relationship, the doctor threads a line of shared (erotic) suffering. Moreover, I am interested in how this sinuous and baroque dialogue, for all its aesthetic experimentation, is situated in histories of trans and queer sexual cultures—particularly, histories of cruising and community formation.

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?). We’ll close by coming back together as a class to share your claims and readings.

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Assignments

1. Read the translator’s introduction (pp. xi–xxiv) and lines 1–2656 of Heldris of Cornwall’s Silence. Pay particular attention to the following moments (which we will discuss): (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.

2. Turn in your research essay letter on bCourses by Tuesday 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.

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Tuesday, 5 March: Djuna Barnes

Agenda

Class is canceled. Please fill out your midsemester evaluation here.

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).

Some notes looking ahead:

– 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; available online at the library) and The Tempest (ISBN: 1408133474)—now is the time to do so.

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Assignments

1. Finish Nightwood. The penultimate chapter is another long conversation between the doctor and Nora—glean whatever you can, but make sure you read the final chapter. On Thursday, we will talk about the second half of the novel with the trans femininity of the doctor as the focus of our conversation. Consider the following questions: 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?

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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Thursday, 29 February: Djuna Barnes

Agenda

Happy Leap Day! 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 heterosexual parody, the ubiquity of gender variance, performance, animality, 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, 27 February: 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, 5 March.

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Thursday, 22 February: Peer Review

Agenda

You’ll be working with your peer review groups today:

LEE & SWINBURNE (HERMAPHRODITUS): Ariel, Dolyn, Michelle
BALZAC (THE GIRL WITH THE GOLDEN EYES) & OVID (TIRESIAS): Abel, Inez, Matteos
BALZAC (SARRASINE): Audrey, Kazandra, Sabrina
SPENSER & OVID (IPHIS & IANTHE): Catherine, Edward, Sonia
BALZAC (THE GIRL WITH THE GOLDEN EYES): Layomi, Gael, Meera

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.

5:30–5:50 – 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.
5:50–6:10 – Provide feedback for the second essay.
6:10–6:30 – Provide feedback for the third 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.

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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. You will likely need to use a dictionary. (The OED Online is one possible resource.)

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, 5 March.

3. If you attended screenings as part of BAMPFA’s Masc Series, your reflections are due this coming Tuesday, 27 February. Find instructions on the grading contract. The final two screenings are this Sunday.

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Tuesday, 20 February: John Lyly

Agenda

Once again, please sit with your peer review groups:

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 alongside your bCourses responses. (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—without making any annotations. 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?)

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.” To put this in quantitative terms, you should expect to rewrite at least 40% of your essay (or ~1000 words over two weeks). Your final draft will be due in two weeks, on Tuesday, 5 March.

3. 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. You must have the exact edition specified on the syllabus with the same page numbers. (ISBN-10: 0811216713)

4. If you have not yet done so, post a response on bCourses to Virtual Symposium #3.

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Thursday, 15 February: John Lyly

Agenda

Please sit with your peer review groups (in progress):

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 (peer review). 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. After reading aloud (“performing”) each scene, we’ll talk about what we notice in terms of the way gender expression/identity/roles are constituted. Since we have two classes to talk about Galatea, the point of this discussion is not to arrive at a convincing interpretation; rather, it’s to give some attention to

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) to discuss how each of you is approaching your passage. At this point, you will have already written a prewrite (or at least begun to do so), 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 your 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, and form? 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. Post a response on bCourses to Virtual Symposium #3.

2. Turn in the full draft of your Analytic Essay by Tuesday at noon on bCourses. If you need an extension, you must let me AND your peer review group know by Monday at noon; the maximum extension 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 three 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 your 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.

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Tuesday, 13 February: Vernon Lee

Agenda

We’ll begin class by responding anonymously on index cards to the question: how does Vernon Lee’s “A Wicked Voice” respond to the poems by Swinburne and the short stories by Balzac that we’ve read in the past two weeks? How might you approach the representations of masculinity, femininity, and androgyny in this piece?

The writing portion 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.

After discussing some context around Vernon Lee’s “A Wicked Voice” as a group, you’ll break into small groups to practice applying the stable context/destabilizing condition concepts that we went over last week in relation to introductions (and which we skipped in order to have a more open discussion):

GROUP A: “Singer, thing of evil . . . . ‘even of the very highest quality.’” pp. 156–57 (Sonia, Sabrina, Catherine)
GROUP B: “ . . . If this state of things goes on . . . . expression of wickedness.” pp. 161–62 (Edward, Inez, Meera)
GROUP C: “At last the long prelude . . . . out of the room.” p. 170 (Dolyn, Gael, Michelle)
GROUP D: “But despite my fatigue . . . . old villa of Mistrà.” p. 176–77 (Layomi, Abel, Kazandra)
GROUP E: “He struck a few chords and sang . . . . with his wicked voice.” pp. 179–80 (Audrey, Ariel, Matteos)

The instructions for this activity are exactly what they would have been for “The Girl with the Golden Eyes” (elaborated in the post below): 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!

Coming back together, we will share our stable contexts/destabilizing claims in order to see if we can get a shared sense of the whole story from its parts. We will also discuss the responses from your index cards at the beginning of class.

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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 February 15 (this Thursday). Find instructions in our grading contract.

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Thursday, 8 February: 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 group discussion of “The Girl With the Golden Eyes,” building off of your discussion posts. Before we get into our discussion, I want to introduce a stable content and destabilizing condition for our discussion.

STABLE CONTEXT: “The Girl With the Golden Eyes” cannot properly be classified as a “trans” text for the simple reason that there are no overtly trans characters.

DESTABILIZING CONDITION: However, we know that from reading Anne Linton’s work that Balzac wrote “The Girl with the Golden Eyes” after reading Fragoletta, a novel of “doubtful sex,” and was interested in discourses around gender variance (evidenced in Sarrasine).

GUIDING QUESTIONS: Where do we find Balzac’s engagement with what we might call trans discursive history in this text? What doubts about sexual difference does this text raise? In Balzac’s hands, what other interpersonal differences become the site of similar doubts? 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)? What , then, does it mean to include this text in “trans literary history”? What understanding of “trans” or “trans literature” do we need to have in order to develop this kind of archive?

In notes to yourself, please come up with an idea—using textual evidence—for how approaching this text as “trans literature” changes our understanding of the text. We’ll use these questions as a frame for talking through some concerns you raised in your bCourses posts: incest, vice, focus on voluptuousness, fungibility, violence, foreshadowing, passion, and so on.

If we have time, we’ll shift into group work to focus on the following passages:

GROUP A: “‘Come then, my love,’ . . . died in her heart.” pp. 369–70 (Sonia, Sabrina, Catherine)
GROUP B: “As for the girl with the golden eyes . . . the proverbial axiom ‘extremes meet.’” pp. 372–73 (Matteos, Inez, Meera)
GROUP C: “At about noon . . . ‘What have you got for us?’” pp. 374–75 (Dolyn, Gael, Michelle)
GROUP D: “‘What do you expect?’ . . . ‘Perhaps I shall be lucky enough to lose’” pp. 377–78 (Layomi, Edward, Kazandra)
GROUP E: “‘But what about the mother?’ . . . to whom she made a sign to stay.” pp. 390–91 (Audrey, Ariel, Abel)

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!

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Assignments

1. Read Vernon Lee’s “A Wicked Voice.”

2. 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.)

3. 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, 6 February: 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, 1 February: Honoré de 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, 6 February, at noon. If you would like to expand on your analyses in P1 and continue writing about Ovid or Diodorus Sicilus 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, 30 January: Algernon Charles Swinburne

Agenda

We’ll start class today with the two poems you read: “Hermaphroditus” and “Fragoletta,” which together form a diptych—they were published next to one another in Algernon Charles Swinburne’s 1866 collection, Poems and Ballads, First Series. I’ll go over a little bit of context about Swinburne’s reputation as an iconoclastic figure 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). Specifically, I’ll also offer some context for thinking about “Hermaphroditus” and “Fragoletta” as poems responding via allusion to a sculpture and a novel, respectively.

With all this context in mind, we will turn to one small section 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 passage’s 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 a fragment from one of the poems, and then we’ll have a discussion in two parts. In the first part, those of you who were looking at “Hermaphroditus” will speak, and the other group will listen; in the second, the group looking at “Fragoletta” will speak, and the first group will listen. In each of the two 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.

I’ll follow up our discussion with possible ways of approaching each of these poems, speaking to some of the critical tensions surrounding them.

In the second part 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. (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, 6 February, 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, 25 January: Edmund Spenser

Agenda

We’ll open with some housekeeping: (1) I received an email that there’s a chance the screening Chavela on Sunday might sell out, so if you’re interested in attending, you are encouraged to arrive early to pick up your ticket. (2) It’s always your responsibility to ensure that your assignments are turned in. For these first few weeks, I’ve sent emails following up about missing posts and assignments, but if you miss a discussion post or assignment going forward, it will be your responsibility to make it up.

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.

Turning to The Faerie Queene, I’ll provide some context: 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 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 using a handout. 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 the gendering of different figures (Why is Florimell’s horse gendered? What about the beast?), the question of virginity/chastity, and the issue of appearances. We will also talk about what it means for Satyrane (in particular) 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).

2. P1 for your Analytic Essay will be due on bCourses on Tuesday, 30 January, at noon.

Tuesday, 23 January: Medieval Bestiaries & Leah DeVun

Agenda

Today, we’ll begin class by going over the community guidelines we drafted last class. (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.

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 Leah DeVun’s essay “The Monstrous Races: Mapping the Borders of Sex.” This will be our first open discussion. To ensure that everyone has a chance to speak, I’ll begin by posing the following questions and ask you to spend some time revisiting the essay to gather your responses. Please note down page relevant numbers so others can see how you’re reaching your interpretations: What is at stake in the medieval depictions of non-binary sex that DeVun discusses? How do these stakes relate to what Anne Fausto-Sterling calls “a mythology of the normal” (8)? How does the idea of the human get wrapped up in boundaries, and which boundaries are relevant? In what ways might these boundaries impact the workings of everyday life for a European person in the medieval period?

When we come back together, I’ll open up the room for some first impressions—feelings, gut impressions, moments that stood out. This will help us take a temperature of our response to this text and start to tease out the work of analysis (interpreting what is going on and articulating the significance) from normative work (naming what is going on as good or bad).

You will then share answers to some of these questions. Then, I’ll ask you to break into pairs to talk about the relationship between the bestiary images that we looked at and the figures of non-binary sex from medieval maps and travelogues. When it comes to thinking about the relationship between form and content, how do these figures perform similar functions? Different functions?

Finally, we’ll come back together to wrap up our discussion of monstrosity and humanity (yet another dualism)—a theme that will (for better or for worse) recur throughout the semester.

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Assignments

1. 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 this text and also having noted a few passages that you found interesting, confusing, or perhaps even boring.

2. 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 other texts you’ve read in this course, or even one of the bestiary images.

3. Plan to come to my office hours tomorrow (Wednesday, 3–5p) to introduce yourself. (First come, first served for the full two hours.) 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.

4. 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!

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: ACCESSIBILITY & MULTIPLICITY (Gael, Inez, Jasmine, [Meera])
GROUP B: COLLABORATION & CRITIQUE (Caroline, Catherine, Edward)
GROUP C: RESPECT & TRUST (Abel, Matteos, Sonia)
GROUP D: DISCOMFORT & SAFETY (Ariel, Dolyn)
GROUP E: CURIOSITY & MISSTEPS (Audrey, Layomi, Michelle)
GROUP F: ATTENTIVENESS & DISTRACTION (Kazandra, Sabrina)

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.

After taking some time for questions about the syllabus and grading contract, 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…” Try to be as specific as possible and (if it makes sense) offer a rationale for why this particular guideline might support learning. If there are potential pitfalls to a guideline, try to anticipate those! (Inviting multiple perspectives is different than making space for devil’s advocate thought experiments; using electronic devices or a notebook to take notes is different from sending emails or having a side conversation; speaking up in class is different from speaking over others; active listening is different from doubting the value of your own voice.)
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 that gender comes into being (for everyone) 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. Your introductory text is due on bCourses at noon on Tuesday, 23 January.

2. 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.

3. Read “On the Hyena or the Brute,” look at the images of hyenas from manuscripts of medieval bestiaries. (Note: the brief paragraph “On the Hyena or the Brute” contains antisemitic language.)

4. 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.”

5. Plan to come to my office hours next Wednesday (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.

Tuesday, 16 January: 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, Tuesday, 16 January 2024:

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

Once we’ve gone around the room, we’ll go over some introductory logistics (the syllabus, general objectives and guidelines for the class, assignments for the next week).

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. If you have not already done so, 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 and you must begin the process of acquiring them now. You can find these texts online (search by ISBN, listed below); you may be able to find copies through the UC 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 Thursday, 18 January, 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. Complete the reading for Thursday’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.
6. Your introductory text is due on bCourses at noon on Tuesday, 23 January.

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