Lower-Division Courses
Fall 2008
24/1
Freshman Seminar
Shakespearean Comedy: Twelfth Night
A. Nelson
M 12-1
205 Wheeler
1 unit
Book List: Twelfth Night (New Penguin Shakespeare edition).
Course Description: This seminar will investigate the nature of Shakespearean comedy in Twelfth Night, which involves disguise, cross-dressing, gender-bending, mistaken identities, and misdirected affections. The seminar will read the entire play through in the first week or two of the semester, then go through the text again scene by scene, character by character. Each participant will give one "practice" and one formal oral presentation to the rest of the seminar. We will also attend the production of Twelfth Night scheduled for performance by the California Shakespeare Theater in nearby Orinda (accessible by BART). Students should therefore be prepared to purchase a ticket to the play (estimate $15) in addition to the required text.
This course may not be counted as one of the twelve courses required to complete the English major.
24/2: Postponed till Spring 2009
24/3
Freshman Seminar: Rethinking Hemingway
Snyder, Katie
W 2-3
125 Dwinelle
1 unit
Book List: Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises (Scribners)
Course Description: The past two decades have seen a dramatic reassessment of Ernest Hemingway. Departing from earlier critical traditions that first celebrated him as a macho sportsman, then vilified him as a misogynist, a homophobe, and a racist, the current critical reassessment reveals a Hemingway whose work and life was shaped by his obsession with and ambivalence toward gender norms and sexual aberrations. We will participate in this critical rethinking by attending to the centrality of issues of identity-especially gender and sexual identity, but also racial, ethnic, and class identity-to the man and his fiction. We will read one, or at most two, of Hemingway's most famous novels (probably The Sun Also Rises, and possibly one other to be determined by class vote), slowly and carefully mapping the intersections among gender and sexual concerns, narrative strategies, characterization, and plotting. The leisurely pace of our reading will allow us to inhabit the text in a way that the more hectic pace of most 4-unit classes generally does not permit. We will supplement our reading of the fiction with literary critical articles and historical and biographical essays. Assigned work will include oral presentations of selected passages and short written responses to the readings, and will culminate with in-class readings of our own attempts at writing Hemingway parodies.
This course may not be counted as one of the twelve courses required to complete the English major.
24/4
Freshman Seminar: The Mystery of Edwin Drood
Tracy, Robert
M 3-5 (September 15 through November 3 only)
Room L20 of Unit II (2650 Haste St.)
1 unit
Book List: Dickens, C.: The Mystery of Edwin Drood
Course Description: Dickens's last novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, is the most successful mystery story ever written. Dickens died before finishing it, or solving the mystery. Unlike other mystery stories, it fails to reassure us that justice is done, and forces us to accept the absence of closure. We must move beyond reassurance into the larger mysteries of motivation and behavior that lie behind any crime. Dickens is writing a new kind of novel, in which the imaginative process and its translation into writing become the central subject. At the peak of his powers, Dickens is exploring his own motivations as a writer, and the geography of his own imagination. Please read chapters 1-4 for the first class meeting.
This course may not be counted as one of the twelve courses required to complete the English major.
24/5
Freshman Seminar: The Monster in the Mirror: Frankenstein and Dracula
Loewinsohn, Ron
W 4-5
104 Dwinelle
1 unit
Course Description:We will read Bram Stoker's Dracula and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, together with some film versions of these two archetypal horror tales, appreciating them as mirror opposites of each other, and investigating what they have to tell us about human agency, responsibility and denial.
This course may not be counted as one of the twelve courses required to complete the English major.
24/6
Freshman Seminar: Reading Walden Carefully
Breitwieser, Mitchell
W 2-3
104 Dwinelle
1 unit
Course Description: We will read Thoreau's Walden in small chunks, probably about thirty pages per week. This will allow us time to dwell upon the complexities of a book that is much more mysterious than those who have read the book casually, or those who have only heard about it, realize. We will also try to work some with online versions of the books, using the wordsearch command to identify words such as "woodchuck" or "dimple" that reappear frequently, in order to speculate on patterns Thoreau is trying to establish. Regular attendance and participation, along with a loose five-page essay at the end, are required.
This course may not be counted as one of the twelve courses required to complete the English major.
45A/1
Literature in English: Through Milton
Nelson, Alan H.
Lectures MW 10-11 in 60 Evans, plus one hour of discussion section F 10-11
Book List: Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol. I; Chaucer, G.: The Canterbury Tales; Milton, J.: Paradise Lost
Course Description: This course will concentrate on Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, Spenser's Faery Queene (Book I); and Milton's Paradise Lost; additional works in the Norton Anthology will be read for the sake of historical context. If this course has a thesis, it is that English authors, far from being content with native traditions, tended to look to ancient Greece and Rome, and to modern Italy and France for inspiration and approval. Written work for the semester will consist of several quizzes, one midterm exam, several short papers, and a final exam. Students must be prepared to attend lectures and discussion sections faithfully, as accumulated absences without a viable excuse, especially for section, will result in a severe reduction in the final grade.
45A/2
Literature in English: Through Milton
Justice, Steven
101 Barker
Lectures MW 3-4 in 101 Barker, plus one hour of discussion section per week F 3-4
Book List: Chaucer, G.: Canterbury Tales; Spenser, E.: The Faerie Queene; Marlowe, C.: Doctor Faustus ; Milton, J.: Paradise Lost; Donne, J.: John Donne's Poetry
Course Description: An introduction to English literary history from the fourteenth through the seventeenth centuries. Canterbury Tales, The Faerie Queene, and Paradise Lost will dominate the semester, as objects of study in themselves, of course, but also as occasions for considering issues of linguistic and cultural change, and of literary language, form, and innovation.
45B/1
Literature in English: Late-17th through the Mid-19th Century
Sorensen, Janet
Lectures MW 9-10 in 159 Mulford, plus one hour of discussion section per week F 9-10
Book List: A. Behn, Oroonoko, A. Pope, The Rape of the Lock, Elizabeth Mary Wortley Montagu, Selected Poems, Jonathan Edwards, Selected Writings, D. Defoe, Robinson Crusoe, Samuel Johnson, Selected Works, O. Equiano, The Interesting Narrative of the Life, P. Wheatley, Selected Poems, W. Cowper, Selected Poems, W. Scott, Redgauntlet, J. Cooper, The Last of the Mohicans, H. Melville, Benito Cereno.
Course Description: As we read works produced in a period of often tumultuous change, we shall consider those works as zones of contact, reflecting and sometimes negotiating conflict. In a world of expanding global commerce (imports like tea suddenly become commonplace in England), political revolution (English, French, American), and changing conceptions of what it means to be a man or woman (a new medical discourse wants to view them as categorically distinct), increasingly available printed texts become sites of contestation—including debates about what constitutes “proper” language itself. We shall think about the ways in which separate groups—British and African, masters and slaves, slave owners and abolitionists, arch capitalists and devout religious thinkers, Republicans and Conservatives, and men and women—use writing to devise ongoing relationships with each other, often under conditions of inequality. Throughout we shall be especially attuned to formal choices—from linguistic register to generic conventions—and how writers deploy these to incorporate opposition, resist authority or authorize themselves. Requirements will include two papers, a mid-term, a final, and occasional quizzes.
45B/2
Literature in English: Late-17th through the Mid-19th Century
Altieri, Charles
Lectures MW 2-3 in 141 McCone, plus one hour of discussion section per week F 2-3
Course Description: This course will be a survey of some major texts in British and American literature written between 1670 and 1850. There will probably be two papers and mid-term and a final. Texts are three Norton anthologies, which come cheaper ordered together, the first volume of their American Literature survey, the romantic period and the British 18th century. In addition, there will be Jane Austen's Emma and perhaps Dickens' Our Mutual Friend as well as one Restoration play by Wycherly.
45C/1
Literature in English: Mid-19th through the 20th Century
Altieri, Charles
Lectures MW 11-12 in 141 McCone, plus one hour of discussion section per week F 11-12
Texts will include the Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry, Oscar Wilde, Portrait of Dorian Gray/Henry James, The Turn of the Screw Virginia Woolf, /Mrs Dalloway James Joyce The Dubliners William Faulker, the Sound and the Fury Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart, and a reader of Eighteenth Century British Literature.
Course Description: English 45C will offer a survey of major texts in British and American literature from about 1880 until 1950. Thanks to Lyn Hejinian, this class will provide a distinctive opportunity. Students admitted to her 143B/1 course will also enroll in this section of 45C, and she will contour many assignments to the English 45C syllabus. And she and I will attend and be present in both classes. Our ambition is to dramatize how reading and writing can mutually inform one another.
Note: If you are interested in being considered for admittance to Professor Hejinian's 143B/1, please be sure to read her course description for further details. Students applying for 143B must submit an application and a writing sample by April 22.
English 45C/2
Literature in English: Mid-19th through the 20th Century
John Bishop
Lectures MW 3-4 in 60 Evans, plus one hour of discussion section per week F 3-4
Book List: Ellmann, R., O'Clair, R, and Ramazani, J.: The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry Vol. I, (Faulkner, W: Absalom, Absalom!,Hemingway, E: The Sun Also Rises,Nabokov, V: Lolita,Toomer, J: Cane Woolf, V: Mrs. Dalloway
Course Description: A survey of English and American literature from the late nineteenththrough the mid-twentieth century, with attention given both to conceptions of literature intrinsically claimed by the texts assigned and to the historical and cultural grounds out of which they emerged. The course will inevitably investigate the emergence and rise of modernism and also , in passing, the value and nature ofsuch constructions as "the author," "literature," "literary history," and"period." Active participation in discussion sections will be essential. There will be two short papers, a final exam, and possibly a midterm.
C77/1
Introduction to Environmental Studies
Hass, Robert and Sposito, Garrison
Lectures TTh 12:30-2 in 159 Mulford, plus one and a half hours of discussion section per week (101, T 4-5:30; 102, W4-5:30; 103, Thurs 2-3:30;
104, F 4-5:30; 105, Th 4-5:30; 106, T2-3:30)
This course is cross-listed with E.S.P.M. C12 and U.G.I.S. C12.
Book List: Cunningham and Cunningham: Principles of Environmental Science; Gilbar, S, ed.: Natural State; Leopold, A.: A Sand County Almanac; Snyder, G.: No Nature; Williams, T. T.: Refuge; also a course reader
Course Description: This is an innovative team-taught course that surveys global environmental issues at the beginning of the twenty-first century and that introduces students to the basic intellectual tools of environmental science and to the history of environmental thought in American poetry, fiction, and the nature writing tradition. One instructor is a scientist specializing in the behavior of soils and ecosystems (Garrison Sposito); the other is a poet (Robert Hass). The aim of the course is to examine the ways in which the common tools of scientific and literary analysis, of scientific method and imaginative thinking, can clarify what is at stake in environmental issues and environmental citizenship.
84/1
Sophomore Seminar: Contemporary Native American Short Fiction
Wong, Hertha Sweet
T 4-6, Sept 2 to Oct 21 only
305 Wheeler
1 unit
Book List: Wong, H., et. al, Reckonings: Contemporary Short Fiction by Native American Women, New York: Oxford University Press, 2008;
Reader (available at Copy Central, 2560 Bancroft Way.
Course Description: Contemporary Native American stories are survival stories, reckonings with the brutal history of colonization and its ongoing consequences: they calculate indigenous positions, settle overdue accounts, note old debts, and demand an accounting. These are the stories, says Joy Harjo, that “keep us from giving up in this land of nightmares, which is also the land of miracles.” Focusing on the short fiction of a select number of contemporary Native North American writers from within the U.S., we will examine how these Native writers convey: cultural survival in the wake of colonization; struggles for sovereignty; rejuvenations of ceremonial healing; retellings of myth and history; experiments with orality and literacy; and articulations of a geocentric epistemology and land-based narrative. In addition, we will examine the literary, cultural and regional influences on these writers and place their work in the context of Native American literatures specifically and U.S.literatures and global indigenous literatures, generally.
This course may not be counted as one of the twelve courses required to complete the English major.
84/2
Sophomore Seminar: Socrates as a Cultural Icon
Coolidge, John
W 3-5
305 Wheeler
2 units
Book List: Four Texts on Socrates
Course Description: Socrates has often been compared to Jesus, an enigmatic yet somehow unmistakable figure who left nothing in writing yet decisively influenced the mind of his own and later ages. We will read Aristophanes' comic send-up of Socrates in Clouds and the Platonic dialogues purporting to tell the story of Socrates' trial and death (Euthyphro, Apology of Socrates, Crito, and selections from Phaedo) attempting to trace the construction of the Socratic icon and assess its relevance to issues in our contemporary "culture wars," e.g. identity, freedom of speech, elitism, science and religion, "know thyself," the aims of education, authority, male chauvinism, virtue, anti-intellectualism, academic freedom, family, civil disobedience, "spin," body and soul, self-esteem, anomie, patriarchy, individualism, relativism, reductionism, self-ownership, conscience, reason, etc. Links to Wikipedia articles and other on-line resources on these topics are provided in the syllabus. Weekly meetings consist of two 50-minute sessions, each devoted to class discussion of one or another such issue, led by a team of two or more students who are to prepare for it in office-hour consultation with the instructor. The object is to provoke a lively debate. The course is intended to appeal especially to students who are desirous of getting in on the intellectual conversation of our time and curious about its cultural antecedents.
This course may not be counted as one of the twelve courses required to complete the English major.
84/3
Sophomore Seminar: High Culture/Low Culture: Film Genres and the Cinema of Ang Lee
Bader, Julia
W 5:30-8:30 P.M.
205 Wheeler
2 units
Book List: Moody, R.: The Ice Storm; Grant, B.: Film Genre Reader; Jenkins, H. and Karmik, K.: Classical Hollywood Comedy; Pizzitola, L: Hearst Over Hollywood
Course Description: This course will examine the formal techniques, expectations, experiences, and thematic concerns of some of Ang Lee's films, in the context of Hollywood and foreign films. We will also take advantage of the resources of Cal Performances and the Pacific Film Archive.
This course may not be counted as one of the twelve courses required to complete the English major.
Last modified: June 26, 2008