Claudia Klaver's Recent Courses

ETS 192 Gender and Literary Texts: Contemporary Texts; Political Contexts

This course will examine the writings of contemporary women authors from around the world who have chosen to enter public discourse through both literary and more political modes of writing. The goal of the course is to expose students to the passionate commitments of writers seeking to intervene in and reshape their worlds through different kinds of textual projects. We will examine how these commitments and the visions that accompany them are inflected differently in the genres of fiction, poetry, autobiography, the essay, and political polemic. At the same time, we will also be noting connections and crossovers between the thematics of the self-consciously literary and the more overtly political writings of each author. The underlying assumption of the course itself is that literary visions do not emerge in a vacuum of “culture” and “aesthetics,” but rather that their authors are often deeply committed to social and political projects that are inextricable from their literary work.

Readings for the course will begin with the American feminist literary and political writings of Adrienne Rich and Audrey Lorde in the 1970s and 1980s. We will then read one of Toni Morrison's novels ( Song of Solomon or Beloved ) in conjunction with her black, feminist literary criticism. We may also read selections of Gloria Anzuldua's Borderlands/La Frontera , which combines political prose and poetry as well as Spanish and English within the same published text. If we have time, we may also examine texts by the lesbian novelist and essayist Dorothy Allison.

After this initial grounding in the political and literary visions of contemporary American writers, the course will shift focus to examine writers in a number of other political and global contexts: Nadine Gordimer's writing in South Africa , Arundhati Roy's writing in India , and Nawal el-Saadawi's writing in Egypt .

The class will be organized around class discussion and brief student presentations. As well as writing frequent short close-reading essays and two 4-6 page papers, students will be responsible for researching and presenting information on the historical, political, and biographical contexts of the authors we will be reading. Students will be asked to post some of this material on a class webboard.

ETS 242: Reading and Interpretation

ETS 242 introduces students to the discipline of English and Textual Studies, stressing not what is read but how we read it.  The goal is not only to show how meanings are created through acts of critical reading, but also to demonstrate the consequences of pursuing one way of reading over another.  

ETS 242 focuses on problems of reading and interpreting various texts of culture. It will enhance your ability to read and interpret diverse works contextually as well as closely, and to emphasize strong connections between reading and writing, enabling you to articulate your understanding effectively.  Through close, deep, and thoughtful reading of literary and non-literary cultural texts as well as essays by noted critics and theorists, we will explore the ways texts mean and readers produce their meaning. 

Each section of ETS 242 takes up a number of several major issues of concern to contemporary literary and cultural studies.  These issues include representation, reading, authorship, language, subjectivity, ideology, history, culture, and difference.  As we explore each area, you will be introduced to the issues at stake and then examine those issues as they arise in a range of cultural texts.  You will also be invited to explore these issues in cultural texts you locate outside the class which you will bring in to share in discussion or in your formal papers. 

Think of this course as a writing-intensive reading and interpretation workshop:  The issues and texts can be challenging when encountered for the first time, and the language in some of the readings may be difficult.  But through the course, you will gain skill at critical reading and effective academic writing.

Texts: Fr ank Lentricchia and Thomas McLaughlin, Critical Terms for Literary Study ; Jeffrey Nealon and Susan Searls Giroux; The Theory Toolbox, Joseph Childers and Gary Hentzi, The Columbia Dictionary of Modern Literary and Cultural Criticism; Brian Friel, Translations; J.M. Coetzee, Foe; William Shakespeare, The Taming of the Shrew; Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway; Arundhati R oy, The God of Small Things

ETS 340 Theorizing of Forms and Genres: Autobiography/Memoir/Testimony

In this course we will work together to understand the similarities and differences between the genres of autobiography, memoir, and testimony. Obviously these genres overlap and share important similarities, most notably first-person narration about “real” experiences in which the narrator him or herself has been involved. The premise of this course, however, is that these are three somewhat different genres, that despite their similarities of autobiography, memoir, and testimony, they are not the same thing.

In this course we will read examples of each of these genres alongside theoretical texts that will help us to understand the differences between these genres and, more importantly, the stakes of those differences. Given my own interests and knowledge base, we will focus these questions around works by British and postcolonial women authors of the twentieth century. Thus questions of gender will also be central to the course. Theoretical and critical texts for the course will include work by Sidonie Smith, Leigh Gilmore, Julia Watson, Adriana Caverero, and others.

The objective of the course will be to develop an understanding the contours of these narrative forms, as well as the political, psychological, and aesthetic stakes and possibilities embedded in them.

Required texts: Vera Brittain, Testament of Youth, Carolyn Steedman, Landscape for a Good Woman, Doris Lessing, Under My Skin, Meena Alexander, Fault Lines, Azar Nafisi, R eading Lolita in Tehran, Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson, Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives, Leigh Gilmore, Autobiographics: A Feminist Theory of Women's Self-Representation.

ETS 360 Reading Gender and Sexuality: “Other” Women in Victorian Fiction

The domestic ideology that dominated the culture of bourgeois Victorian England dictated that in order to be good or “true,” a woman must be firmly rooted in and largely confined to the domain of the home. Her primary identity was to be that of a virtuous wife and mother, and before that a chaste and dutiful sister and daughter. Because of the rigidity of this ideology, almost any deviation from its ideals catapulted a woman from the status of “angel” to that of “demon,” or from “Madonna” to “Magdalene.”

Such “other” Victorian women—fallen, odd, evil, or perverse—occupy center stage in many nineteenth-century novels. Even when such novels impugn, punish, or banish these wayward women, their figures still trouble the snug domestic scenes with which the texts often conclude. In other novels, these figures play such a powerful role in the text as to make any such a turn toward a happy ending impossible.

In this course we will explore a number of nineteenth-century fictions of these “other” Victorian women, including most, if not all, of the following novels, Elizabeth Gaskell's Ruth , Charlotte Bronte's Villette , Charles Dickens's Bleak House , George Eliot's Mill on the Floss , Wilkie Collins's Woman in White , Mary Elizabeth Braddon's Lady Audley's Secret, Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure , and George Gissing's Odd Women . We will supplement our readings of the novels with contemporary feminist theory and criticism, as well as with selected primary source material.

Each student will present a formal oral presentation and write two or three papers. Students will also be asked to post regularly on the course Blackboard.

ETS 360 Reading Gender and Sexualities: Theories of Gender and Sexuality

This course will examine the major contemporary paradigms that theorize the construction of gender, sexuality, and the intersection of the two. The course will be divided into five segments, each of which will examine one of these paradigms. We will begin by looking at the paradigm of psychoanalysis, which until the 1970s and 1980s dominated the theoretical discourse around gender and sexuality. We will then examine feminism, focusing on the writings of French, American, and British materialist feminist theorists. The remaining three paradigms that the course will explore are to some extent reactions to, as well as being informed by, these two initial models, including theoretical work in the traditions of Michel Foucault, , Eve Sedgwick, and Judith Butler.

While the readings for the course will be predominantly theoretical in character, much of the class's written and oral exploration of this material will focus on political implications and questions of “application.” Since the readings are themselves cumulative and self-referential, the course will unfold more as a seminar exploring certain issues and questions than as a survey of distinct theoretical traditions. At the same time, there will be an emphasis on recognizing and examining the distinct theoretical assumptions and implications of different theoretical paradigms.

Required course texts: Peter Gay, ed., The Freud Reader; Monique Wittig, The Lesbian Body; Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, Vol. 1; Michel Foucault, H ercule Barbin; Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity

ETS 360 Reading Gender and Sexualities: Third World and Transnational Feminist Theory

This course grows directly out of an earlier course that I taught in contemporary feminist and gender theory. In the process of teaching that course, I and a number of my students grew frustrated with mainstream academic feminist theory's continued reliance upon Western European philosophical and theoretical paradigms. Even though such paradigms were always revised and critiqued, they were also almost always the epistemological starting point. This course, then, is designed as a way to look “outside of the box” in feminist theorizing. I see the primary instructors in the course as the books and essays that we will be reading. I have selected and loosely organized these readings, and I will facilitate our discussions of them, but for the most part I see my role here as that of embarking on an exciting collective learning project with you.

We will begin by reading three major statements/voices by American women of color who some call “U. S. Third World feminists,” though they do not describe themselves as such. We will then examine various formulations of and challenges to the concept of third world feminism and the third world feminist. In the latter section of the course, we will examine a range of writings by third world and transnational feminists that theorize issues of nation, globalization, postmodernity, and postcoloniality, while at the same time rearticulating feminist theory itself in new forms. These readings will by no means exhaust the rich field of third world and transnational feminist theory, but they do represent major contributions to and interventions in this emergent body of theoretical knowledge.

Texts: bell hooks, Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center; Gloria Anzuldua, Borderlands/La Frontera; Trinh T. Minh-ha, Woman, Native, Other; Chandra Mohanty, Feminism Without Borders; Gayatria Spivak, Outside in the Teaching Machine; Uma Narayan, Dislocating Cultures; Sara Ahmed, Strange Encounters Embodied Others In Post-Coloniality

ETS 410 Forms and Genres: Transformations and Transgressions of Victorian Realism

When most people think of the Victorian novel, they think of “realism” (even if they are not precisely sure what that is). For many nineteenth-century novelists, however, the formal literary conventions of realism were too limiting, and their narrative projects demonstrate their frustration with realism's strictures, as well as with the values, priorities, and definitions of what counted as “real” that inhered in realist conventions. In this course we will examine the conventions of Victorian realism, including the epistemological, cultural, and ideological assumptions behind those conventions. We will examine these conventions first through critical writings on realism and through three canonical Victorian novels that simultaneously rely upon such conventions and push the boundaries of those conventions. For the remainder of the course, we will examine the assumptions of those conventions from the perspective of those novelists who self-consciously rejected or revised those conventions in the name of alternative sets of values and visions of “reality.” Using secondary accounts which historically contextualize the formal features of the novels, we will explore the ways that these novelists' transgressions and transformations of Victorian realism enabled them to interrogate the assumptions of the dominant bourgeois culture of nineteenth-century England and to engage with aspects of human experience rendered invisible by that dominant culture.

ETS 479 Senior Seminar in Politics: Gender and Sexuality in 19 th -Century England

The goal of this course is to introduce advanced undergraduate students to a range of feminist and queer readings of nineteenth-century literature and to teach them research methods that will lead to a graduate level seminar paper. Although our reading will be heavily weighted toward the Victorian novel, we will also read a significant selection of Victorian poetry.

The course will be divided into three segments (though most of the literature that we read could fall into more than one segment). First, we will examine fictional, poetic, theoretical, and critical models of normative genders and heterosexualities in Victorian England. We will explore the domestic ideology that dominated the organization of such cultural norms, examining particularly the forms of masculinity and femininity that it naturalized, and the institutions of romantic love and bourgeois marriage that the ideology supported.

In the second segment of the course we will examine the demonized figures of the prostitute and the fallen woman—figures that haunted the edge of the Victorian cultural imagination, including virtually every canonical Victorian novel, even those celebrating chaste domesticity. We will explore the disruptive and seductive power of these figures as they operate in texts of social investigation and journalism, as well as in the poetry and novels of the period.

Finally, in the third segment of the course we will explore the presence and “problem” of queer genders and sexualities in Victorian fiction and poetry. We will not only explore the role that “queer” characters and relationships play in a number of texts, but also the analytical and historical questions that accompany such perverse readings and re-readings of characters and texts.

Texts: Anne Bronte, Tenant of Wildfell Hall, Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist, Elizabeth Gaskell, Mary Barton, Charlotte Bronte, Villette, Bram Stoker, Dracula , and photocopied course packet

ENG 700 Graduate Readings : Gender and Sexuality in 19 th -Century England

The goal of this course is to introduce graduate students to a range of feminist and queer readings of nineteenth-century literature. Although our reading will be heavily weighted toward the Victorian novel, we will also read a significant selection of Victorian poetry.

The course will be divided into three segments (though most of the literature that we read could fall into more than one segment). First, we will examine fictional, poetic, theoretical, and critical models of normative genders and heterosexualities in Victorian England. We will explore the domestic ideology that dominated the organization of such cultural norms, examining particularly the forms of masculinity and femininity that it naturalized, and the institutions of romantic love and bourgeois marriage that the ideology supported.

In the second segment of the course we will examine the demonized figures of the prostitute and the fallen woman—figures that haunted the edge of the Victorian cultural imagination, including virtually every canonical Victorian novel, even those celebrating chaste domesticity. We will explore the disruptive and seductive power of these figures as they operate in texts of social investigation and journalism, as well as in the poetry and novels of the period.

Finally, in the third segment of the course we will explore the presence and “problem” of queer genders and sexualities in Victorian fiction and poetry. We will not only explore the role that “queer” characters and relationships play in a number of texts, but also the analytical and historical questions that accompany such perverse readings and re-readings of characters and texts.

ENG 747: Studies in British Literature: Nineteenth-Century Capitalism and the Victorian Novel

This course will examine the ways in which the Victorian novel negotiates its relationship to the imperial-industrial capitalist economics that were newly dominant in nineteenth-century Britain . The course will begin by looking at texts that theorize and popularize political economy as the central discursive articulation of capitalist economics and ideology in the nineteenth century. These texts are some of the “original” texts of what is now seen at the (social) “science” of economics. As such , they function both as template for and counterdiscourse to many of the “literary” engagements with capitalist economics that we will explore for the bulk of the semester.

In addition to the contemporary context of nineteenth-century economic theory, we will read the novels for the course in conjunction with more recent discussions of various aspects of capitalist economics, of capitalist ideology, and of the relationship between capitalism and Victorian fiction. These readings will draw on a number of contemporary critical theories, including various forms of Marxism, psychoanalysis, Foucauldianism, postcolonial theory, and gender theory. The aim of these readings will be to help us explore the multiple ways in which the project and popularity of the nineteenth-century novel drew upon, reinforced, and contested fundamental impulses in the development of a capitalist economy, state, and society. The readings will give particular attention to the intersection of the Victorian novel with class formation, gendered identities, imperialism, financial speculation, consumerism and advertising.

Readings for the course will include nineteenth-century economic texts by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, John Stuart Mill, Harriet Martineau, and Karl Marx; novels by Dickens, Charlotte Bronte, Elizabeth Gaskell, and Anthony Trollope, and possibly also by William Thackeray, Charles Kingsley, Rudyard Kipling and H. Rider Haggard; and twentieth-century theory, history, and cultural criticism by Louis Althusser, Fredric Jameson, Leonore Davidoff, Catherine Hall, Sonya Rose, Jennifer Wicke, Mary Poovey, Jeff Nunokawa, Andrew Miller, Patrick Brantinger, and N.N. Feltes. Novels will include Charlote Bronte's, Jane Eyre (Broadview Edition), Elizabeth Gaskell, North and South , George Eliot, Silas Marner , Wilkie Collins, No Name , Charles Dickens, Our Mutual Friend , Anthony Trollope, The Way We Live Now .

ENG 825 Advanced Seminar in Critical Theory: Gender and Sexuality

This seminar will rigorously examine four contemporary theoretical models of the social construction of gender and sexuality. One possible subtitle for this course could be “Theories of Gender and Sexuality: Beyond Psychoanalysis,” because we will be examining theoretical models that at once draw upon and critique the “high” psychoanalytic theory of Freud and Lacan. Thus the course will presume some familiarity with psychoanalytic theory, but will not directly examine such theory.

We will begin by examining a number of materialist feminist formulations of gender, sexuality, and their imbrication, particularly the work of Monique Wittig, Luce Irigaray, Cora Kaplan and Adrienne Rich. Next we will study Foucault's major writings on sexuality, as well as selected essays on politics and power. Our third theoretical focus will be the feminist gender theory of Judith Butler, as well as a number of queer applications of her notion of performative genders and sexualities. Finally, the class will examine Felix Deleuze and Gilles Guattari's Anti-Oedipus alongside feminist and queer appropriations and critiques of their theorization of sexuality.

Because many of these theoretical texts are in such close conversation with one another, as well as with psychoanalytic theory, our exploration of them will be densely self-referential and intertextual, rather than linear and direct. In addition to closely examining each of these theoretical paradigms, the goal of the class will be to explore the critical and political potentialities of these models for an analysis of gender and sexuality in culture and society. Students' own areas of interest and specialization will help to shape the focus of this exploration and to provide the class with analytical “test cases.”

All students will give one formal oral presentation and produce an extensive seminar paper. Other oral and written work for the class will include discussion questions, presentation response questions, and one or more short (5-7 page) essays.