R1A/R1B Course Descriptions
Fall 2008
Course: English R1A
Section: 1
Topic: Poetry and the Varieties of English
Instructor: Natalia Cecire
Time: MWF 9-10
Location: 222 Wheeler
Book List: T. S. Eliot, The WasteLand; Harryette Mullen, Sleeping with the Dictionary;
Frank O’Hara, Lunch Poems; William Carlos Williams, Spring and All; Diana Hacker, Rules for Writers; Joseph M. Williams, Style: Toward Clarity and Grace
A course reader will include poems by John Donne, Anne Finch, Edgar Allan Poe, Emily Dickinson, William Butler Yeats, Marianne Moore, Langston Hughes, Kenneth Koch, and Wendy Cope, as well as a few critical essays.
Course Description: Students are often enjoined to read “the great authors” in order to absorb “good English.” But English has so many variations across time and space that it’s hard to imagine what that could possibly mean. In this course, we’ll read a lot of poetry in order to observe some (but by no means all) of those variations, focusing on how we receive cues from language. What makes a text easy or hard to read? What conventions of spelling, grammar, rhythm, lineation, punctuation, pagination, and semantics do we expect to encounter when we read, and what do we do with texts that don’t meet those expectations? What is “style”? What makes a poem sound Dickinsonian, or Yeatsian?
This course will emphasize the interrelation of reading and writing, as we work to render our own thoughts in one of the varieties of English, an American academic dialect. In addition to writing and revising several short critical essays, students will produce short works mimicking the styles of different authors.
English R1A
Section #: 2
Topic: Fictional Educations
Instructor: Arcadia Falcone
Time: MWF 10-11
Location: 222 Wheeler
Book List: Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë, Great Expectations by Charles Dickens, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce, To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit by Jeanette Winterson, Rules for Writers by Diana Hacker
Course Description: Everyone experiences childhood, but representing that experience from the perspective of adulthood is often an act as much of imagination as of memory. This course will engage with texts that undertake that imaginative act. We will discuss how these texts construct their child figures through language and narrative, and how cultural institutions such as the family and the school shape ideas of what a child is (or should be). Through examining these representations of childhood perception and of the process of education, we will consider how these texts might also attempt to educate their readers.
This course is a workshop for developing the skills necessary to be a perceptive reader and an expressive writer of texts. To that end we will break down the sometimes daunting task of producing an essay into a series of smaller, more manageable steps. We will discuss specific methods and strategies for the various stages of paper writing, from devising an initial topic to revising a final draft, from structuring an argument to structuring a sentence. To practice these skills, the course will require frequent reading and writing assignments; expect to turn in a piece of writing on most class days. The class will also require substantial engagement with your peers, through both class discussion and peer review of writing assignments.
Course: English R1A
Section #: 3
Topic: Contemporary African American and Asian American Experimental Poetry
Instructor: Chris Chen
Time: MWF 11-12
Location: 222 Wheeler
Readings:
A Course Reader
G.E. Patterson. To And From
Mullen, Harryette. Sleeping With The Dictionary
Cha, Theresa Hak-Kyung. Dictee
Yau, John. Ing Grish
Harvey, Michael. The Nuts And Bolts Guide To College Writing
Harvey also available free at: http://nutsandbolts.washcoll.edu/
Course Description: Within the traditions of contemporary African American and Asian American poetry, a category of self-identified “experimental” writing has emerged recently. What is minority “experimental” poetry? One of the primary aims of this course is to familiarize ourselves with some exemplary works along with the debates ignited by these new trends. Since this course is also meant to satisfy the R1A requirement, our other aim is to improve students’ reading, writing and research skills. The potential anxiety students might feel about writing longer expository essays should be lessened by breaking up assignments into research, prewriting, outlining, drafting, and editing components.
Our readings will be guided by several overarching questions. First, how might we provisionally define “experimental” writing in a minority context? Second, how are African American and Asian American versions of “innovative” or “experimental” writing conditioned by each group’s specific literary history? We will investigate arguments concerning identity politics, “political correctness,” and contemporary poetry’s notorious opacity and “difficulty.” We will also ask how poetry attempts to repress or engage the political.
This course will be focused on breaking the often anxiety-provoking essay writing process into more manageable bits: outlining, prewriting, grammar, sentence and paragraph construction, theses, revision, and the strategic use of evidence to support critical claims. Along with journal responses to weekly readings, students will be expected to write two papers (4-6 and 7-10 pages) that will be critiqued and revised over the course of the semester.
English R1A
Section: 4
Topic: Imagining History
Instructor: Kelvin C. Black
Time: MWF 12-1
Location: 222 Wheeler
Required Texts: Julian Barnes, The History of the World in 10½ Chapter;s, Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward; David Bradley, The Chaneysville Incident; Octavia Butler, Kindred
Supplementary Texts: Frederick Crews, The Random House Handbook, 6 th ed.; Joseph Gibaldi, MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers, 6 th ed.; William Strunk Jr., E.B. White, Roger Angell, The Elements of Style
Course Description: What is history? What effect does it have on our projects in the present? And on our future projects? This course is interested in exploring what role the way in which we imagine past events has in shaping our understanding of what’s possible and impossible, now or later. We will be reading texts which self-consciously take up the issue of history in a variety of ways – some do this by returning imaginatively to moments of historic significance, and some by imagining what happened in the past from the standpoint of the “present,” while others imagine the present as the past of some future time, all challenging us to consider history as an imaginative act with consequences.
This course is reading and writing intensive, and aims to develop in students fluency with the method and discourse of the analytical essay. Special emphasis shall be placed on the refinement of sentence construction and thesis development. Additionally, systematic reasoning through close reading will be stressed both in class discussion and in the course’s various writing opportunities.
English R1A
Section: 5
Topic: Contemporary Irish and Scottish Writing
Instructor: Sarah Townsend
Time: MWF 1-2
Location: 222 Wheeler
Book List: Banks, Iain, The Crow Road ; Boland, Eavan, Domestic Violence; Doyle, Roddy, Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha; Kennedy, A.L., Original Bliss; McGahern, John, Among Women; O’Brien, Kate, The Land of Spices ; O’Keeffe, Patrick, The Hill Road;
A Course Reader with poems, short stories (certainly including those of Bernard MacLaverty), and critical writings.
Film: Yu Ming is Ainm Dom (My Name is Yu Ming)—a short film
Course Description: This course will survey recent writing by Irish and Scottish authors and poets. (Kate O’Brien’s 1941 novel is an exception; the rest of the works we will study were written in the 1990s and beyond, and several are very recent). The course materials are quite diverse but touch upon common concerns of racial, national, and personal identity; religion; gender roles and family structure; violence; boredom; and changing rural and urban landscapes. Both Ireland and Scotland have experienced recent waves of immigration and are adjusting to more ethnically diverse populations; in addition, Ireland’s economic growth beginning in the mid-1990s (dubbed the Celtic Tiger) has had far-reaching effects on Irish life. We will take these conditions into consideration as we sample and enjoy recent offerings from these countries renowned for their literary prowess.
English R1A will situate these readings and interrogations around a series of writing assignments. The primary goal of this course is to develop your ability to read and write about literature. You will be required to complete frequent reading responses, short essays, and a longer final essay. You will also be required to revise everything you write and to peer-edit the work of your classmates.
English R1A
Section: 6
Topic: Victorian Industry
Instructor: Jhoanna Infante
Time: MWF 2-3
Location: 222 Wheeler
Book List: Dickens, C.: Hard Times. Gaskell, E.: Mary Barton. Course Reader.
Course Description: The problem of labor preoccupied writers of prose, fiction, and poetry during the reign of Queen Victorian, a period of industrial and urban expansion in England. The discourse around labor overlapped with aesthetic discourse, as both addressed the alienation of the laborer from the product of his hands. John Ruskin, a critic of art and society, promotes a pre-modern, Gothic aesthetic, in which objects are valued for the imperfections that bespeak the touch of numberless craftsmen. William Morris, too, promoted a return to craftsmanship as a way to counter the advance of a debased consumer culture in his essay “The Beauty of Life.” Charles Dickens and Elizabeth Gaskell addressed the oppression of the working class in their respective novels, Hard Times and Mary Barton. In addition to the texts mentioned above, we will read excerpts from Marx and Engels’ The Communist Manifesto and poems by Tennyson, Landon, and Hopkins; we will also examine textiles, books, and stained glass produced by Morris & Company.
This course is an introduction to analysis and argumentation; the instructor runs the class as a discussion seminar and writing workshop. The writing requirement includes five short essays of increasing length.
English R1A
Section: 7
This section has been canceled.
English R1A
Section: 8
Topic: Noir Fiction and Film
Instructor: Chris Eagle
Time: MW 4-5:30
Location: 222 Wheeler
Book List: James M Cain, Double Indemnity; Truman Capote, In Cold Blood; Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep; Graham Greene, The Third Man
Films: The Killers, Double Indemnity, The Third Man, Laura
Course Description: This course focuses on the period of American fiction and cinema often referred to as “Noir,” a cycle of crime and detective stories dating roughly from 1939 to 1958. We will begin the semester by trying to get at what exactly makes noir fiction and noir films ‘noir.’ In doing so, we will gain a familiarity with the cinematic features typical of noir style (night-for-night lighting, flashback and voice-over narration, unreliable narration, objective versus subjective camera, etc.) and attempt to connect these formal features back to the novels and pulp stories on which they are based. Some of the primary questions guiding our discussion will include the issues of gender and sexuality implicit in the figures of the Private Detective, the Femme Fatale, the Hit-man, and the Aesthete. We will also address the role of slang and dialects in the new ‘hard-boiled’ American lexicon developed by writers like Chandler , Hammett, and Hemingway.
Our method throughout will be a close in-class analysis of the texts. Our focus will be on the development of your close-reading skills as well as an improvement in your writing. While R1A is primarily designed to improve your writing, it is also a seminar, and so I anticipate active participation in the discussion from all members of the class.
Course: English R1A
Section: 9
Topic: Playing with Literature
Instructor: Jesse Costantino
Time: TTh 8-9:30
Location: 222 Wheeler
Book List: A course reader including theoretical works by Johan Huizinga, Roland Barthes, Tzvetan Todorov, and Ludwig Wittgenstein, and short fictional works and selections from E.A. Poe, Franz Kafka, Jorge Luis Borges, the Arabian Nights tales, Dave Eggers, Lewis Carroll, and Daniel Handler.
The Lost Ones, Samuel Beckett; Pale Fire, Vladimir Nabakov; Life, A User's Manual, Georges Perec; The Investigation, Stanislaw Lem; The Last Samurai, Helen DeWitt; Jimmy Corrigan, the Smartest Kid on Earth, Chris Ware; House of Leaves, Mark Z. Danielewski
Course Description: For this course, we will look at a handful of texts that equate “reading” and “writing” with “playing.” In these texts, stories become games, books become toys, and passive reading becomes active participation. We will consider a handful of theoretical approaches to these texts exploring the nature of literary gamesmanship, play, and fun. Despite the seemingly light course topic, we will also examine the heavier political and social implications of this type of reading and writing.
ince the course texts understand the notion of play as a critical component of both reading and writing, this will give us an avenue by which to engage with our own reading and writing practices. You will be expected to write and read often, and more importantly, you will be expected to reflect on your own writing and reading activities through course discussion and a number of other textual exercises.
As our course texts will prove, the activities of reading and writing are inextricably bound together in the field of play. Similarly, literary analysis is the organized writing out of a highly focused reading. As such, you will devote considerable time in this course to writing, peer editing, and revising three larger pieces of literary analysis based upon careful readings of course texts. We will also spend some class time discussing and practicing organizational/logical strategies, including everything from sentence-level construction all the way up to essay-wide argumentation.
Course: English R1A
Section: 10
Topic: The African Writer
Instructor: Aaron Bady
Time: TTh 9:30-11
Location: 305 Wheeler
Book List: Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart; Amos Tutuola, The Palm Wine Drinkard; Wole Soyinka, The Lion and the Jewel; Ngugi wa Thiong’o, The River Between and Matagari; Yvonne Vera, Butterfly Burning; Mia Couto, Under the Frangipani
Course Description: Africa's literatures are old, rich, and vast, from epic poems and religious verse to an extensive dramatic and storytelling folk culture that can be found in almost every corner of the continent. This class, however, will focus on *modern * African writers, men and women who have written with pen, typewriter, or computer, who publish in European languages rather than in those of their ancestors, and whose books are more often read by affluent readers in the West than by other Africans.
They are also, it is worth noting, the first writers to consider themselves African at all. Before the British created the colonial Nigerian state, for example, Igbo people, Yoruba people, Hausa-Fulani people, Ijaw people, and hundreds of other ethnic groups inhabiting the region surrounding the Niger river not only didn’t "realize" they were Nigerians (a term they had never heard), but didn’t even think of themselves as Africans. The word, after all, was coined by the Romans thousands of years ago to describe the continent to their south but until the twentieth century it was never a word used by the people it described. Nation-states are, however, only part of colonialism’s legacy: when colonialists forced Africans to put aside the traditions and languages of their communities, they forced them into schools and churches, teaching them to read the bible and write in English, or French, or Portuguese. This course will ask the interesting question, therefore, of what it means to be an African writer.
This course also aims to develop students’ ability to write persuasively, clearly, and precisely about literature. Students will therefore learn how to construct strong sentences and paragraphs, develop thesis statements, organize textual evidence and analysis, and make forceful interpretive arguments. Your writing will move from online responses to the reading to handed-in assignments to papers revised in consultation with me.
Course: English R1A
Section: 11
This section has been canceled
Course: English R1A
Section: 12
This section has been canceled
Course: English R1A
Section: 13
Topic: T.B.A.
Instructor: Carlo Arreglo
Time: 2-3:30
Location: 222 Wheeler
No additional information about this class is available at this time.
Course: English R1A
Section: 14
Topic: The Garden and the Century of Revolution: English Poetry, 1600-67
Instructor: Brendan M. Prawdzik
Time: TTh 3:30-5
Location: 222 Wheeler
Book List: The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol. I, ed. Stephen Greenblatt et. al. (Norton, 2005).
Course Reader. (Substantial, diverse material within).
Diana Hacker, Rules for Writers ( St. Martin’s, 2003).
Diana Hacker, Developmental Exercises to Accompany Rules for Writers ( St. Martin’s, 2007).
Course Description: Earth felt the wound, and nature from her seat Sighing gave signs of woe, that all was lost. --
John Milton, Paradise Lost (1667)
We will read and write about environmentally engaged poetry of seventeenth-century England as we develop practical fluency in analytical, thesis-driven writing. Emphases will include grammar, sentence- and paragraph-construction, thesis development, and organization. Students will write and revise five short (2-5 pp.) essays.
For England, the Seventeenth Century was a time of urbanization, pre-capitalist economic development, the emergence of global trade, the rise of mass-scale modern warfare, and a general distancing of God and religion from the center of psychological experience. Among so much else, Englanders lived through the beheading of the King by Parliament, the collapse of a state church, a civil war, the proliferation of radical religious sects, and the blights of urban life. Englanders benefited from scientific innovation, yet they also experienced environmental devastation and a changing relationship with the land. The traumatic transformations of religion, politics, society and culture were marked upon the changing face of the natural landscape, and they also compelled poets to re-imagine and recreate the natural world within their art. Genres like the country estate poem, pastoral lyric, and even the epic register the intimate link between history and the natural world in profound and surprising ways. For instance, Andrew Marvell’s Upon Appleton House imagines a field of shorn wheat as a “Camp of battle newly fought/ … quilted o’er with bodies slain.” Robert Herrick’s lyrics embrace an idealized countryside in order to register the acute agony of political disenfranchisement. John Milton’s Paradise Lost shows an army of devils tearing gashes into the soil in order to make canons, and nature herself bemoaning the act of Original Sin.
As we are just now learning to come to terms with the seeming imminence of an environmental apocalypse of our own making, we are in a position to empathize with and learn from these poetic mediations. We will strive to develop an environmentally centered interpretation of early modern literature based on the grounding of individual and collective consciousness in the experience of history; this could be called a “non-presentist ecocritical hermeneutic,” or, in plain old English, a way of reading that is both historically informed and environmentally engaged. At the same time, we should expect our interaction with the literature to inform our experience as cultivators of our own groaning Paradise.
Course: English R1A
Section: 15
Instructor: Karen Leibowitz
Time: TTh 5-6:30
Location: 222 Wheeler
No additional information about this class is available at this time.
Course: English R1B
Section: 1
Topic: Authenticity, Fraud, and Representation
Instructor: Ben Cannon
Time: MWF 9-10
Location: 225 Wheeler
Book List: William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night; Mary Shelley, Frankenstein; Peter Carey, My Life As a Fake
Course reader may include short stories, poetry, essays and excerpts by: Arthur Conan Doyle, Jorge Luis Borges, Edgar Allen Poe, Daniel Defoe, Herman Melville, Philip K. Dick, Wyndham Lewis, T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Fernando Pessoa, Plato, Rem Koolhaas, Jean Baudrillard, Hugh Kenner, and Walter Benjamin.
Films: F for Fake; Blade Runner
Course Description: Visual art may include: Rubens, Goya, Corot, Warhol, Koons.
This course will consider the relationship between concepts of fraud and authenticity in literature, using this basic opposition to explore questions about originality, representation, and identity. Can something fake be real if it provokes a genuine emotional response? Can fiction ever be “real”? What about things we are supposed to understand to be fake? Are collage and pastiche genuine artistic expressions, or simply legitimized modes of fraud? Is all art in some sense fake in that it is removed from direct experience? How does fraud complicate concepts of biography and personal history? Finally, why does it matter so much anyway? What is at stake in our claims of authenticity in relation to works of art?
This course will use these questions to help students generate and revise three papers of progressively greater length over the course of the semester as they develop their skills in analytical reading, research, and argumentation.
R1B
Section: 2
This class has been canceled
English R1B
Section: 3
Topic: : The Southernization of America : The 1930s to the 1950s
Instructor: Megan Pugh
Time: MWF 11-12
Location: 225 Wheeler
Book List: James Agee and Walker Evans, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men; William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury; Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God; Carson McCullers, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter; A course reader including work by Langston Hughes, Flannery O’Connor, Allen Tate, Robert Penn Warren, and Eudora Welty
Screenings: Cabin in the Sky; Gone With the Wind
Course Description: In 1927, the Mississippi River flooded some 27,000 square miles of American heartland, displacing hundreds of thousands of Southerners. Two years later, the stock market bottomed out and triggered the Great Depression. These national catastrophes provided a reason for the region to break with its agrarian past and explore progressive reforms. As rural Southerners moved to cities in record numbers, they brought their culture with them, a culture that was picked up by new neighbors and disseminated more broadly than ever before. Southern culture had become national culture.
This introduction to college writing and argument explores the Southernization of America from the 1930s to the 1950s. We’ll read a good deal of fiction and poetry alongside manifestos, documentary photography, music, and film. Our course material will help us ask questions about the relations between history and memory, race and nation, art and politics—themes you will explore in an eight to ten page research paper analyzing a cultural document of your choice. This is a writing-intensive course, so you will also complete two shorter essays, and we’ll spend much of our time discussing how to improve your research and composition skills.
R1B
Section: 4
This class has been canceled
R1B
Course: English R1B
Section: 5
This section has been canceled
Course: English R1B
Section: 6
Topic: Stylin’
Instructor: Stephen Katz
Time: MWF 2-3
Location: 225 Wheeler
Book List:
Greene, Graham, The End of The Affair.
Marie Borroff, editor, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.
Doctorow, E. L. The Book of Daniel.
Price, Reynolds. A Long and Happy Life.
Plus a course reader.
Course Description: In this class we will consider style as a literary and a cultural problematic. We will endeavor to find precise ways of talking about the distinctive style of a text, and we will think about style in a broader sense, as a currency that promises creativity and hipness to those who know how to find it. All of the texts for this course are fraught by a tension about style, finding themselves caught sorting out the difference between permanence and mere trendiness, bookishness and worldliness, an idiosyncratic voice and a collective mood. Above all, style is meant to be noticed, and each of our texts is also freighted by the awareness that it wants to be checked out.
Such issues will be our intellectual fodder as we address the writerly concerns of the R1B syllabus. Over the course of the semester, we will work to build your fluency and confidence in pulling off great college writing through a number of short to medium-length writing assignments, and culminating in a research project on a topic of your choosing. Our concentration on style will allow us to consider the technical aspects of good writing (grammar, thesis, evidence, voice) in ways more pulse-quickening than such a list might at first suggest. Our common goal will be the mastery of those competencies necessary for the production of startlingly good analytic prose. All of this will acquaint you with the forms of argumentation that you will need at your disposal for such perils as one encounters in the classrooms of Berkeley , and beyond.
Course: R1B
Section: 7
Topic: : The Ghostly Time of the ‘Present’ has no Boundaries
Instructor: David Menilla
Time: MWF 3-4
Location: 225 Wheeler
Book List: William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying; Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway; Maxine Hong Kingston, The Woman Warrior; Toni Morrison, Beloved; A course reader will also be assigned.
Course Description: The texts we will read in this course will challenge us to think about how a story is constructed. Our imagination and critical thinking skills will be stretched to their limits by novels which disrupt assumptions we may have about how a story develops in time. We will read novels where the story oscillates back and forth from the past to the present. And we will get to know characters that come back from the dead; some that seem to travel into the future, others into the past. Authors will become characters in their stories, characters will become third person narrators, and we will become active participants in the stories we read. Can you imagine being a character of the story you are reading? We will be confronted by scattered pieces of narrative that will require the work of our hands and our minds to piece together. The skill of close reading will help us to see the pieces more clearly and how they might fit together; moreover, the way we think about a text will also help us to think about how we write.
Course Objectives: I want us to think about writing as an ongoing discussion we have with ourselves and the ideas that others have had on the text. We will incorporate critical perspectives which will question our assumptions about a text at the same time that they will enrich our reading of it. Our job is to understand how we can incorporate the research that we conduct with the ideas we have found through close reading. The goal of this class is to develop the skills needed to read, analyze, and write about literature, and to acquaint you with the research skills needed to write larger expository essays. To this end, you will be asked to write a number of short essays of 4-6 pages based on class readings, which will culminate in a final expository essay of 8-10 pages. You will have the opportunity of honing your writing skills through peer-editing exercises, and meetings with me, that will focus on drafting and revising your work. Ultimately, you should be prepared to write a minimum of 32 pages in addition to completing the required reading for this course.
Course: English R1B
Section: 8
This section has been canceled
Course: English R1B
Section: 9
Topic: Vagrancy
Instructor: Ruth Baldwin
Time: TTh 8-9:30
Location: 225 Wheeler
Book List: Stephen Crane: Maggie, or, a Girl of the Streets; William Shakespeare: King Lear; Rudyard Kipling: Kim; Charles Dickens: Oliver Twist; Diana Hacker: Rules for Writers
Course Reader may include Henry Fielding’s pamphlets “An Enquiry into the Causes of the Late Increase of Robbers” (1751) and “A Proposal for Making an Effectual Provision for the Poor” (1753); excerpts from Book 7 of Wordsworth’s The Prelude (1805); excerpts from Rogues, Vagabonds, and Sturdy Beggars (ed. Kinney); from Vagrancy, Homeless, and Renaissance Literature (L.Woodbridge); from S. Schweik on American Ugly Laws; from book 2 of Gulliver’s Travels; excerpts from London Labour and the London Poor (H. Mayhew, 1863); “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” (S.T. Coleridge, 1798); CA State and SF County statutes on homelessness, etc.
Course Description: When did it become potentially criminal to be poor? Why is vagrancy a source of such contention and anxiety for so many? What are some of the popular myths and fantasies about vagrancy and homelessness, and where did they come from? What are the stories we tell ourselves about homelessness? These are just a few of the questions that will motivate our reading and research this semester. We will study a wide range of texts about vagrancy and placelessness, from Shakespeare’s King Lear and Elizabethan rogue pamphlets to California state laws concerning vagrancy and the current issue of Street Spirit. Your research may involve interviews at a local homeless shelter, of police officers, of business owners, and of other Cal students, in addition to sources available at the library.
Like all R&C classes, this course will focus on honing your skills as a critical reader and writer. The 1B class is designed to build on the fluency with sentence, paragraph, and thesis-development that you developed in 1A or elsewhere, and to develop your skills at academic research and essay writing. To that end, there will be three short (3-4 page) essays, two of which you will have the opportunity to draft and revise. A final research paper of 8-10 pages based on your collected research will conclude the semester. In addition to the written work, there will be 1-2 required in-class presentations.
Course: English R1B
Section: 10
Topic: Literature and the City
Instructor: Jasper Bernes
Time: TTh 9:30-11
Location: 225 Wheeler
Book List: André Breton, Nadja; Octavia Butler, Parable of the Sower;
Phillip K. Dick, A Scanner Darkly; Lisa Robertson, Occasional Work and Seven Walks Ed Roberson, City Eclogues; A course reader, including essays and poems by Baudelaire, Benjamin, Davis, Jameson, O’Hara and others.
This course will consider the ways in which literature has responded to the city and its accompanying modes of life: alienating, unhealthful and frightening; thrilling, liberatory and glamorous; the site of torments and marvels; of endless workdays and boundless consumption. Among our various lines of inquiry, we will want to identify the ways in which literary form—whether that of the lyric poem, the prose poem, the essay, or the science-fiction novel—impacts and is impacted by the social and historical forces at work in the city.
To this end, we’ll hone our skills as critical readers, learning how to make observations about the problems and intricacies that these texts offer, to broaden these observations through careful analysis, and to combine our analyses into a critical essay shaped by a thesis. As such, we will devote a large portion of class time to the particulars of students’ own essays, paying special attention to sentence mechanics, paragraph construction, thesis and argument. In addition, because one of the aims of an R1B course is to introduce you to research methods used in the humanities, each of our primary texts will serve as the entry-point for individual research from a wide variety of fields: literary criticism, history, cultural theory and urban studies. Students will conduct independent reading projects, report on their research to the class, and incorporate what they have learned into two 7-10 page research papers.
Course: English R1B
Section: 11
Topic: Illogical Fictions
Instructor: Monica Miller
Time: TTh 11-12:30
Location: 225 Wheeler
Book List: Beckett, Samuel. Waiting for Godot; Carroll, Lewis. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass; O’Brien, Flann. The Third Policeman; O rwell, George. 1984; Stein, Gertrude. Tender Buttons; Course Reader
Course Description: As you will learn in this course, the key to good writing is impeccable logic, but as you will also learn, good writing is often terribly illogical. Although that statement may make little sense, it should give you a good idea of the kinds of logic you’ll encounter in the reading for this course.
In this course, we will examine works that bend, twist, or butcher logic—whether deliberately or accidentally, seriously or facetiously—with the perverse aim of learning to do the opposite in academic writing. We will interweave lessons in logical argumentation with discussions of works that parody logic, turn it on its head, and empty it of content. We will also apply what we’ve learned to an analysis of the use and abuse of logic in current examples of argumentative writing, such as political speeches, op-ed pieces, and letters to the editor.
Meanwhile, you will be using these writers’ good or bad examples to assist you in crafting and critiquing your own writing. This course requires three essays: one short diagnostic paper and two longer papers that you will develop through a process of researching, drafting, reviewing, and revising.
Course: English RIB
Section: 12
Topic: Imagining Elizabeth
Instructor: Fiona Smythe
Time: TTh 12:30-2
Location: 225 Wheeler
Book List: Course reader: Philip Sidney, The Lady of May and Letter to Queen Elizabeth, 1580; Excerpts from Edmund Spenser, Complaints, Shepheards Calendar and The Faerie Queene, Book III; Thomas Dekker, The Whore of Babylon; George Gascoigne, The princely pleasures at Kenelworth Castle. Roy Strong, Gloriana: The Portraits of Queen Elizabeth I Leah H Marcus, Janel Mueller, Mary Beth Rose, eds. Elizabeth I: The Collected Works Jean Plaidy, Queen of This Realm Diana Hacker, Rules for Writers (5th ed.)
We will be viewing scenes from “Elizabeth,” “Elizabeth: The Golden Age,” and “Elizabeth I”(HBO Miniseries).
This course will examine the many ways in which the figure of Queen Elizabeth I fired the imagination of her contemporaries and of recent writers and directors. We will use Elizabeth as a touchstone; a central topic around which we will build skills of critical reading, basic research, and composition. The course will track her progress from a young and nubile virgin Queen to the eternal Virgin married to her country, examining how Elizabeth used her sexual status to ameliorate the challenges she faced as a female ruler. We will read her letters, speeches, prayers and poems, as well as plays and poems inspired by her. The class will devote some time to examining portraits of the queen in order to understand the role visual representation and iconography played in creating the myth of Elizabeth. Research topics will revolve around Elizabeth and the Elizabethan era, but can be tailored to each student’s field of interest. Topics might include court and international politics, fashion, music, economics, science, alchemy and early mathematics, etc.
The purpose of this course is to improve your writing and research skills. In pursuit of developing your critical reading we will proceed at a leisurely pace, allowing you time to analyze the text. A brief written commentary on the reading will be due on a weekly basis. A diagnostic essay will be assigned at the beginning of the semester. Two longer papers, one a 7-9 page critical essay, and the second a 10-11 page research paper, will be due at the mid-point and end of the semester. These will undergo several rounds of revision.
Course: English R1B
Section: 13
In the Wake of War
Instructor: Gina Patnaik
Time: TTh 2-3:30
Location: 225 Wheeler
Reading List: Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway; William Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom!; Spiegelman, Maus; William Strunk, Jr. and E.B. White, The Elements of Style, Illustrated; Diana Hacker, Rules for Writers; a course reader
Wars punctuate and define our history. Governments declare armistices, but do we ever really move past the moment of battle? In the wake of death, what new forms of living emerge? In this course, we’ll focus on texts which play out the days, months and years after war’s end. The works we will encounter grapple with the consequences of past violence and navigate the strangely unfamiliar terrain of the present. As T.S. Eliot writes shortly after the First World War, “I had not thought death had undone so many.” Reflecting upon an England shell-shocked by WWI, an American South haunted by the Civil War, or even the contemporary situation of Guantánamo detainees, the authors we’ll read pick up the threads of everyday life after – and perhaps in spite of – the trauma of war. As we read, we’ll try to come up with answers for some of the following questions: how does memory-production (or even memory loss) play a role in the shaping of individual, cultural or national identities? How do we appropriately mourn the dead? Can we even imagine a future in the wake of devastating loss?
This course is intended to equip you with the skills needed to think critically about poetry, fiction and non-fiction prose, graphic novels, and film. How might fiction (or film, or poetry, or newsmedia) capture the tensions of a post-war present in ways that other forms don’t? We’ll place literary texts in conversation with historical and theoretical accounts of war, mourning, and reparation from thinkers such as Sigmund Freud, Walter Benjamin, and Giorgio Agamben. You’ll build upon the analytical thinking and writing skills you developed in R1A, refining argumentation and organization as you begin to integrate your own research into progressively longer writing assignments.
English R1B
Section: 14
Topic: Secrecy and Detection
Instructor: Dan Clinton
Time: TTh 3:30-5
Location: 225 Wheeler
Book List: Sigmund Freud, Dora: An Analysis of a Case of Hysteria; Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl; Henry James, Turn of the Screw and The Aspern Papers; Herman Melville, Billy Budd and Other Tales. Edgar Allan Poe, The Fall of the House of Usher and Other Writings. Course Reader.
Screenings: Rear Window (dir. Alfred Hitchcock, 1954), The Mad Detective (dir. Johnnie To, 2007), or possibly other films.
Course Description: The critical reader may easily fall into the habit of regarding even the most innocent tale as a case awaiting solution, such that every bright country cottage or society salon becomes a crime scene to be scrutinized by the inch. Leaving aside the question of whether any tale is entirely innocent, this course will fully indulge the forensic impulse by examining texts that explicitly organize themselves around secrets (some dirtier than others). We will trace this theme through a variety of genres, from the detective story to the medical case history, in order to investigate how these authors began to decode human behavior and social systems. Throughout the course, detection will serve as a functional metaphor for reading, one that often allows authors to reflect on their practices of composition.
While many of the course readings will obsess over obfuscation, this course has as its primary aim the development of critical writing skills that will require a minimal effort of decryption on the reader’s part. Expect one short diagnostic essay followed by two progressively longer papers, in addition to exercises on topics such as thesis development, argumentation, sentence construction, and research.
Course: English R1B
Section: 15
Topic: Documents
Instructor: Josh Weiner
Time: TTh 5-6:30
Location: 225 Wheeler
Texts: Georges Bataille, "The Big Toe"; Alexander Pope, "The Rape of the Lock"; Samuel Richardson, Pamela; Percy Bysshe Shelley, The Cenci; Walter Benjamin, Berlin Childhood Around 1900; Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida; Films: Funny Games (Haaneke, 1997), Tarnation (Caouette, 2003)
Course Description: The document is a fragment that takes on a life of its own. An idea, a perception, an image gets uprooted and reframed, sculpted or distorted, and formed into something new. The result has an aura of 'the real'. Think of documents like your passport, drivers license, or credit card, in which are embedded your photograph, your signature, an authenticating secret number. The document plainly isn't the real thing (it isn't you but it has your photo), nor exactly a piece of you (a document is signed but not a fingerprint or a fingernail), but it's yours. It's official; you can use it; and it makes sense to other people.
This class will attempt to teach you composition as the production of documents in this sense: to embed your images, a signature style, even a secret – and work these into a communicating form. We will look at an eclectic selection of materials, each of which attempts this documenting thrill of the real, often without even pretending to be historically verifiable.
This feeling of the real is almost always connected to the ways sexuality and power by turns animate, inhibit, and get managed by the text. We will trace this thrill aimed at in both the contemporary documentary and the contemporary thriller back to the surrealist notion of the document. Our central text for theorizing this document-effect is an 18 th century epistolary novel that tries to write 'to the moment' of the happenings it describes. We will also explore a romantic true-crime drama, several kinds of autobiography, and a theory of the photographic document. By way of coda, we will consider some visual art (Raymond Pettibon and Cy Twombly) where image and text work together to produce this effect.
Last modified: June 18, 2008