Redfield / Course Offerings

This page lists courses I teach regularly at CGU. I offer them (or versions of them) on a rotating basis. The texts change, and sometimes the focus changes. Once, for instance, I taught a whole seminar on “Victorian Poetry,” but usually I tend to offer the more general course described below, “Readings in the Nineteenth Century.”

All of my courses seek to provide a professional introduction to their subject matter. Consequently, despite the broad focus of many of these courses, I always require some reading in the field’s secondary literature, and I always try to bring into focus some of the main critical or theoretical disputes that have helped define the field in recent years. At present, I am not posting syllabi; but these descriptions should provide an idea of the kinds of texts and topics my seminars engage. I usually require one five-page paper, one 20-pp. term paper, and an in-class report; these requirements, however, vary with the subject matter.

British Eighteenth-Century Literature

English 320. Readings in the Eighteenth Century.

This course seeks to provide a context within which to place eighteenth-century English literary texts. We shall read at least one long novel; one or two plays; poets and poetic genres from Swift and Pope to the pre-Romantics; the periodical essay; the oriental tale; the Gothic and sentimental novel. Since English literature in the eighteenth century (or indeed in any other century) is deeply informed by developments on the Continent and in the other arts, we shall also, to the extent that time allows, examine some major texts and topics of the Enlightenment in France, and study the (discourses of) painting, architecture, and landscaping that figure so prominently in eighteenth-century English literature.

English 321. The Eighteenth-Century Novel.

This course will provide a survey of the novel's development in England from Defoe through Radcliffe. We'll study the mid-century opposition between Richardson's epistolary novel and Fielding's "comic epic," and the subsequent advent of the sentimental and Gothic novel. Though the course's principal aim is to provide generic coverage, we'll also seek to address ancillary cultural and theoretical issues: the relations between capitalism and the rise of the novel; the production of new ideologies of the family; the construction of sexuality and gender identity; the role of empiricism and associationist psychology in the development of literary "realism," etc.

British Nineteenth-Century Literature

English 325. Readings in Romanticism.

Romanticism remains a dense and intriguing, even perplexing phenomenon in literary history. Its advent marks that of a certain "modernity" that we arguably continue to inhabit: our notions of consciousness, identity, and history derive in large part from the writings and events of this period. However, the major Romantic texts have resisted easy comprehension and retained a power to disturb and inspire criticism, serving as springboards for some of the most imaginative developments in recent literary theory: phenomenology, psychoanalysis, deconstruction, and deconstructive or psychoanalytically-inclined feminisms. This course will provide a survey of Romantic literature, and a (limited) introduction to certain forms of literary criticism which this literature has inspired.

English 330. Readings in the Nineteenth Century.

In many respects the modern world as we know it takes shape during the nineteenth century, which witnessed industrialization, technical revolution, and full-scale imperialism; the development of biology, medicine, and the social sciences; the beginnings of mass education and the modern university; the triumph of the novel and the middle class; and the emergence of a highly theorized notion of the “modern.” We’ll focus on literary and cultural developments in Great Britain, reading texts by Dickens, Collins, George Eliot, the Brownings, Tennyson, and others; we’ll also read a few important texts by Continental authors.

English 331. Gender and Narrative in the Nineteenth-Century Novel.

Nineteenth-century fiction predicts Freud's work in many ways, not least in the connections it seeks between narrative and desire. Characters in Victorian novels are burdened by the past and live for the future; and in pursuing their objects of desire they often also serve as models of narrative activity itself. Victorian narrators, in other words, frequently represent their activity as a quest (for the truth about a character, the solution to a mystery, etc.). And the narrative "object" of desire is frequently a woman, or the representation of a woman--i.e., the "portrait of a lady." This course will examine the relations among desire, gender identity, and narrative in a selection of nineteenth-century novels: Emma, Villette, Madame Bovary, Daniel Deronda, Little Dorrit, and one or two other novels; we shall also read texts by Sigmund Freud, Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, and other theorists of sexuality and gender.

Twentieth-Century Literature

English 335. Literary Modernism.

This course will investigate the notion of "modernity" in literature by examining texts drawn from the British, U.S., and Continental traditions. Authors to be discussed include Joyce, Woolf, Yeats, Pound, Eliot, Stevens, Proust, and possibly Kafka, Rilke, and others.

English 371. (Post)modern Times: Literature, Technology, Trauma.

This course proposes to rethink the notion of "postmodernism" by focusing on relations between aesthetics and technology, on the one hand, and technology and trauma, on the other. Art and technology have ancient links in common (as the classical Greek notions of techne and poiesis demonstrate). To the extent that modernity can be defined as a technological event (e.g., the industrial and scientific revolutions), one needs to think about technology in order to think about the role of art in a modern or postmodern world. The question of technology also leads to that of trauma: a term that acquired its modern connotations in the wake of the First World War. The syllabus for the course is still in flux, but we shall be reading in some of the following areas: the history of technology and aesthetics; philosophy (Heidegger, Derrida); definitions of postmodernism, especially in relation to technology (Jameson, Lyotard, Ronell); bureaucracy and technology (Kafka); literature’s role in the postmodern university (Guillory, Readings); writings on trauma from the perspective of psychoanalysis (Freud), modernity (Benjamin), deconstruction (Caruth) and Holocaust studies (LaCapra); the American naturalist tradition in its relation to technology (Seltzer); science fiction and cyberpunk (Philip K. Dick); the genre-defying work of Pynchon; a couple of popular films (Terminator, Blade Runner); cultural reflections on the Gulf War and the aestheticization of technology (Weber). Seminar participants can count on having to read Pynchon: useful reading during the break would be V. and Gravity’s Rainbow.

Literary Theory

English 370. Introduction to Literary Theory

This course will provide a survey of the most visible schools, movements, and texts making up the amorphous field of scholarly activity we call “theory.” We shall study instances of New Critical, phenomenological, deconstructive, psychoanalytic, Marxist, New Historical, feminist, postcolonial, and gay/lesbian critical writing. This is an introductory course which presupposes no familiarity with theoretical or philosophical texts.

Eng 372. Literary Theory at Yale

This course provides an introduction to literary theory by focusing on an institution. From the era of the New Critics to that of deconstruction and Lacanian psychoanalysis, Yale has played a remarkably prominent role in the history of Anglo-American literary criticism and theory. We shall examine representative authors and texts drawn from various schools or trends: the New Critics (Cleanth Brooks, Robert Penn Warren, René Wellek, William Wimsatt); phenomenology (the early work of Geoffrey Hartman, Paul de Man, and J. Hillis Miller); idiosyncratic humanism (Harold Bloom); Lacanian psychoanalysis (Shoshana Felman); deconstruction (Jacques Derrida, Paul de Man, J. Hillis Miller, Barbara Johnson); Marxism (Fredric Jameson); narratology (Peter Brooks) and Bakhtin (Michael Holquist). In order to provide well-rounded coverage, we'll cheat a little and study a few critics not associated with Yale (Judith Butler, Slavoj Zizek). The course thus aspires to provide the benefits of a survey or "introduction to theory," but, by focusing on Yale, also seeks to analyze the role of institutions in the production of knowledge. By examining some texts drawn from the 1995 Yale graduate student grade strike, we'll also be able to discuss some of the sociological pressures currently at work reshaping the world of the academy.