ENG 4934 - Spring 2026 - Jaffe

This seminar examines how three epic twentieth-century texts construct literary words across radically different scales: from the intimate consciousness of a single day to global networks of war and capital, from the geological deep time of a coastal city to the incremental kismet of rocketry descent. Joyce's Ulysses, Olson's The Maximus Poems, and Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow each develop systematic approaches to representing totality, creating encyclopedic structures that move fluidly between the flesh and the cosmic, the local and the planetary. We'll explore how these works function as competing systems: ways of organizing and making sense of overwhelming complexity. Alongside these maximalist architectures, we'll read Daphne du Maurier's Don't Look Now as a study in scalar compression: how micro attention to psychological states and submedial sensory systems can generate effects as vast as any epic machinery. Our guiding questions: What scales of experience do literary forms privilege? How do systems of knowledge (mythic, scientific, historical, linguistic) interact within single texts? When does systematic thinking become paranoid thinking? And what happens when systems fail, fragment, or proliferate beyond control? These books reward students with a strong background in literary analysis; willingness to engage with formally experimental texts; those with capabilities of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without irritable reaching after reductive fact & reason.