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R1A/R1B Course Descriptions

Spring 2005

Course: English R1A
Section #: 1
Topic: Noise
Instructor: Jami Bartlett
Time: MWF 9-10
Location: 204 Wheeler

Course Description: This course is about reading and writing through noise. I have chosen texts that teach us how to listen, that are deliberately indulgent, layered, provocative, and intense. Because the opposite of noise isn't silence but signal, no matter where you write or how you read you're going to have to learn to hear it. We will ask ourselves the following: Does reading have to bully us into bad behavior, searching for the idea at the expense of detail? Is it inherently subject to the interference of memory and projective hypotheses? Why is the 'too little' as noisy as the 'too much'?

I will assign five short, revised papers (each 2-4 pages), two in-class essays, four peer-editing sessions, and weekly weblog responses to course readings. Our aim, as always, is the development of your ability to analyze difficult work, and to use that analysis to produce credible arguments. My hope is that a topic like 'Noise' will allow us to locate more effectively the causes of interference, giving us the tools to understand our distractions, and strategize our responses.

Required Texts:
Seeing & Writing 2, Donald McQuade, Christine McQuade
The Mezzanine, Nicholson Baker
A Severed Head, Iris Murdoch
Poor Miss Finch, Wilkie Collins
The Conversation, dir. Francis Ford Coppola
Powerful Paragraphs, Bruce Ross-Larson
Course reader with excerpts from Wilde, Dickens, Carver, Pinter, Foster Wallace and more

Course: R1A
Section: 2
Topic: The Language of Authorship
Instructor: Sophia Wang
Time: MWF 11:00-12:00
Location: 109 Wheeler

Course Description: This course will focus on the language and craft of writing through our examination of the themes of authorship and narration in experimental, twentieth century literature. We will read, discuss and write about literature and critical essays that challenge traditional notions of the relationship between author, narrator and text. Woolf's gender-shifting narrator, Nabokov's unreliable Humbert Humbert, and Kate, the elliptical diarist of Markson's novel, are some of the voices we will analyze as we look at the ways our authors have conceived of narrative obligation and identity. By attending to the kinds of voices that literary language produces and the manipulations that define or destabilize our narrators, we will become attuned to the assumptions we make as readers, enabling us to become more sensitive writers.

The expository writing you will produce in this class requires your close attention to the language and themes of our texts, which in turn depends on your timely completion of all reading assignments and active contributions to class discussion, in-class exercises, oral presentations and peer revision. There will be short, weekly writing assignments, as well as longer essay assignments that will emphasize each stage of the writing process including outlining, drafting, revision and rewriting. We will focus as much on becoming comfortable with literary analysis as with developing the skills of exposition and argumentation central to a productive exchange of ideas.

Book List:
DeLillo, Don: Mao II
Markson, David: Wittgenstein's Mistress
Nabokov, Vladimir : Lolita
Strunk, William, Jr: The Elements of Style
Woolf, Virginia : Orlando
Course Reader (short stories, essays, and writing guidelines)

Course: English R1A
Section #: 3
Topic: Austenmania!
Instructor: Leslie Walton
Time: MWF 12-1
Location: 259 Dwinelle

Course Description: This course seeks to refine composition skills (thesis building, argumentation, processes of analysis, use of evidence, and mechanics) while also introducing students to the discipline of literary study. Students will be responsible for 32 pages of written work, consisting of short essay drafts and revisions. Coursework will culminate in a 4-5 page essay on a course-related topic of the student's choosing.

The line of literary study we will pursue in this class follows the efflorescence of all things Austen in the mid- to late-1990s and even into the early years of the new millennium. We will explore various uses of Austen in this period and endeavor to understand Austen's continuing appeal (and relevance to) late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century society, particularly, though by no means exclusively, British and American society.

In addition to the following required texts and films, there will be a reader including (but not restricted to) excerpts from Austen's Mansfield Park, Sense and Sensibility, and Northanger Abbey, Azar Nafizi's Reading Lolita in Tehran, Karen Jay Fowler's The Jane Austen Book Club, Fay Weldon's Letters to Alice on First Reading Jane Austen, and Helen Fielding's Bridget Jones's Diary and Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason.

Required Texts:
Pride and Prejudice, J. Austen
Emma, J. Austen
Persuasion, J. Austen
The Random House Handbook, F. Crews

Required Films:
Pride and Prejudice (Langton, 1995)
Sense and Sensibility (Lee, 1995)
Clueless (Heckerling, 1995)
Bridget Jones's Diary (Maguire, 2001)
Persuasion (Michell, 1995)
Mansfield Park (Rozema, 1999)

Course: English R1A
Section #: 4
Topic: Literary Sleuths
Instructor: Kristine Ha
Time: MWF 3 - 4 pm
Location: 235 Dwinelle Hall

Course Description: From Sherlock Holmes to Columbo, fictional detectives have captured the popular imagination in books, movies, and television. These figures are often set apart from the crowd by their extraordinary skills in perception, analysis, and deduction as well as the accompanying quirks of personality, demeanor, and appearance. This course will examine detective fiction in various narrative works, focusing on the peculiar creatures we will call 'literary sleuths' and their relation to narrative construction. As figures who negotiate a chaotic field of information and weave together disparate details into a coherent whole, literary sleuths also serve as a model of critical investigation and interpretation. We will begin with Doyle's Sherlock Holmes-arguably the most famous sleuth in popular culture-and other detectives whose climactic, and at times hammy, scenes of discovery and revelation speak to their function as skillful weavers of narrative. Moreover, we will examine the complex relationship between the reader/critic and these literary detectives, especially in works which make sorting information and creating narrative coherence difficult. What holds these narratives together when the case itself cannot be solved or when the detective figure is less skillful and charismatic than Holmes or Poirot?

In addition to primary texts, we will read some critical material to help complicate and expand our initial model of the literary critic as detective. Finally, and most importantly, we will examine the crucial elements of composition (style, argumentation, persuasion, revision) by exploring how form (e.g. syntax, structure, and genre), in which the content is shaped, performs specific rhetorical and investigative functions in these texts. Specific works on writing and style will accompany our list of detective fictions to help us form the bridge between reading/investigation and writing/argumentation. You will write thirty-three pages for this course: an initial three page diagnostic essay, 4 five-page essays, and 10 one-page short responses to the week's reading. For the 4 five-page essays, we will especially focus on the process of revision in peer-editing sessions and individual conferences with me.

Book List: Auster, Paul. City of Glass
Christie, Agatha. The Murder of Roger Ackroyd
Doyle, Arthur Conan. A Study in Scarlet
Poe, Edgar Allen. stories (in the course reader)
Pynchon, Thomas. The Crying of Lot 49
Shakespeare, William. Hamlet (Pelican Shakespeare)
Strunk and White. Elements of Style
Course Reader

Course: English R1A
Section #: 5
Topic: Bringing the Dead Paper to Life
Instructor: Kristin Fujie
Time: T/TH 8-9:30
Location: 103 Wheeler

Course Description: This course is an introduction to the mechanics and pleasures of critical reading and writing. We will explore what your professors mean when they ask you to read texts 'critically,' and what they want when they ask you to write a 'critical' essay. If you're not sure how critical reading and writing differ from other kinds of reading and writing, don't despair! That's precisely what we're here to figure out. We will begin by abandoning the idea that writing-creative or critical-just happens, and instead approach it as a series of careful and strategic choices. Thus, with respect to both the texts we read (see list below) and the texts you write (see writing requirement below), we will think very carefully about how little decisions such as word choice, verb tense, or the ordering of events/ideas, can influence the overall meaning and effect of a sentence, paragraph or even an entire work. By becoming more conscious of words as active creators of meaning, rather than passive transmitters of information, you will become more perceptive readers and more skillful writers by the end of the semester.

You will also, I hope, find that a critical approach to the words on the page animates the experiences of reading and writing, that it brings, (to borrow words from one of our texts), the 'dead paper' to life. Indeed, the core texts for this course made the cut precisely because they challenge their readers, in a variety of ways, to bring them to life, to make them meaningful. Whether the diary of a woman driven to despair by the detestable wallpaper in her room, or the story of a man obsessed with his wife's perfectly white teeth, each of these texts uses its language to veil, delay and disperse meaning. Refusing to arrive at a clear 'point,' these stories and novels invite their readers to complete them, to participate in the process of making their meaning. Our project this semester, then, will be to accept the invitation. Dense language makes for rich reading, and we will therefore read slowly, both for the sake of sanity and maximum enjoyment! Students will read thoroughly, write furiously, and participate earnestly in class discussion.

Writing Requirement: The formal writing for this course will break into approximately five essays of increasing length and complexity. At least two of these papers will undergo serious revision. Informal writing will include weekly reading responses, peer-editing, and anything else I can think of to get your pens to paper.

Required Texts:
Henry James: 'The Figure in the Carpet'
Charlotte Perkins Gilman: 'The Yellow Wallpaper'
Joseph Conrad: Heart of Darkness
Virginia Woolf: To the Lighthouse
Andrea A. Lunsford: The Everyday Writer

*Students will also be required to purchase a course reader.

Course: R1A
Section: 6
Topic: Literary and Cinematic Cities
Instructor: Erin E. Edwards
Time: TTh 9:30-11
Location: B51 Hildebrand

Course Description: In one of the conversations that compose Invisible Cities, Marco Polo tells Kublai Khan:

With cities it is as with dreams; everything imaginable can be dreamed, but even the most unexpected dream is a rebus that conceals a desire or its reverse, a fear Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their perspectives deceitful, and everything conceals something else.

In addition to considering the material demands of urban spaces, this course will explore literary and cinematic cities as a 'made of desires and fears,' as complex, unstable sites of community and alienation, cultural production and dystopian industrialization, novel enticements and novel anxieties. Marco's statement to Kublai suggests that the city, like a text, is a kind of representational riddle that invites interpretation or decoding. We will thus examine the particular difficulty in depicting the vastness of the city or narrating the perceptual vicissitudes of experiencing the city. Attention to such formal elements will aid us in the primary goals of the course--becoming more critical readers and more deliberate writers. Over the course of the semester, students will complete a number of short essays that develop their analytical and argumentative writing skills.

Required Texts:
Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities
Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man
Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49
Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway
A course reader, which includes selections from Charles Baudelaire, Andre Breton, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Flannery O'Connor, Edgar Allan Poe, as well as critical and theoretical essays

Recommended Text:
Diana Hacker, A Writer's Reference

Films:
Fritz Lang, Metropolis
Ridley Scott, Bladerunner

Course: English R1A
Section 7
Topic: High Modernism and its Others
Instructor: Charles Sumner
Time: Tuesday and Thursday 12:30-2:00
Location: 78 Barrows

Course Description: In this class we will spend time acquainting ourselves with some of the literary works known as 'high modernist' and the orthodox critical views of what it means to be high modern. Once we have a good idea of what this term means, we will try to develop a sense of the peripheral modernisms that simultaneously employ the aesthetic innovations of high modernism while challenging the dominant ideological attitudes that hang their hats on these innovations. Specifically, we will investigate the possibility of defining distinctly feminist and African-American modernisms.

This class is intended to focus on developing the students' capacity for analytical thinking and improving their composition skills. In fact, the course will be intensively if not tediously focused on writing.

Book List:
Dostoevsky, Fyodor - Notes from the Underground
Ellison, Ralph - Invisible Man
Ford, Madox - The Good Soldier
Hemingway, Ernest - The Sun Also Rises
Rhys, Jean - Good Morning, Midnight
Woolf, Virginia - To the Lighthouse.

There will also be a course reader including several short stories and poems.

Course: R1A
Section: 8
Topic: Science and Literature
Instructor: Jhoanna Infante
Time: TTh 2-3:30
Location: 204 Wheeler

Course Description: Several of last year's Hollywood movies-I, Robot, Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, and Van Helsing-seem to register a continuing anxiety that scientists lack a moral sense and cannot control their invented technologies. Neither this anxiety that science and technology could pass some moral boundary and endanger society, nor its expression in imaginative work, is new. In the 19th century, poets and fiction writers such as Mary Shelley and Robert Louis Stevenson engage with questions regarding science and society: Should scientific inquiry be controlled and restrained? If so, how? What are the moral limits of scientific inquiry? What are the dangers of technology? Are scientists moral enough to be trusted with the power of technology? Who is moral enough and why? What is the role of the imagination in both scientific invention and artistic production? What perspective do women have on the power of science? Should poets and novelists (who are non-specialists and non-scientists) intervene?

In this course, you will not only read 19th century critiques of science but also develop and practice your own skills in critical reading and writing. In five essays of varying length (2-4 pages), you will develop skills in close reading, comparative thinking, and analytical writing. You will also develop skills in revision, editing, and peer-response. This course fulfills the first part of the undergraduate reading and composition requirement.

Required texts include the Norton edition (2002) of Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, the Broadview edition (1997) of Shelley's Frankenstein, and a course reader. The reader will contain selected poetry by British poets Hardy, Wordsworth, P.B. Shelley, Barbauld, Keats, and Coleridge, as well as short stories by American authors Poe and Hawthorne.

Book List:
Shelley, M.: Frankenstein.
Stevenson, R.L.: The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.
Hawthorne, N.: 'Rappaccini's Daughter,' 'The Birthmark.'
Poe, E.A.: 'The Murders in the Rue Morgue'; 'The Pendulum.'

Course: English R1A
Section #9
Topic: Making and Unmaking the Self-Made (Wo)Man
Instructor: Liza Kramer
Time: T Th 3:30-5
Location: 204 Wheeler

Course Description: In this course we will work to hone your analytical reading, writing, and thinking skills by examining stories -- including your own -- of self-made men (and women), as well as alternatives to, and critiques of, this archetypal American story. To what extent is it possible to be self-made? How do forces of privilege and exclusion shape the stories we hear? How might the story be revised by someone who has 'made it' despite having been subject to exclusion and/or exploitation? How might it be revised to reveal a more communal view of what it takes to survive? We will discuss how the writer's social position -- his or her race, class, gender -- as well as her/his language and choice of literary form affect the story s/he tells.

Required Texts:
Benjamin Franklin, Autobiography
Linda Brent (Harriet Jacobs), Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl
Maxine Hong Kingston, China Men
Richard Rodriguez, The Hunger of Memory
Leslie Marmon Silko, Storyteller
+ a xeroxed Reader

Course: English R1A
Section #: 10
Topic: Language, Writing and the Self
Instructor: Richards, diane
Time: TuTh 3:30-5:00
Location: 104 Barrows

Course description: The purpose of the course is to teach you what it means to "think critically" about sophisticated texts and how to express the results of this critical thinking in well-conceived, thesis-driven essays as well as orally. In working towards our goals, we will debunk the notion that good writing "just happens" to talented individuals and learn, rather, that good writing means rewriting (and hard work). Formal writing assignments will emphasize various phases of writing as a process: brainstorming and outlining, drafting and revision. Drafts will be required for each essay. If you have the time and the desire, you will have unlimited opportunity to revise your essays, as long as your revisions are substantive and not merely cosmetic. Reading and critiquing the essays of your fellow students will also be an essential part of the course, since it is often easier to recognize what works (or doesn't) in someone else's writing. Class discussion will provide an additional forum to hone your critical thinking skills by enabling you to question and evaluate your own ideas in the context of those of your classmates.

The texts for the course were chosen for their ability to require attention to the nuances of linguistic usage as well as to inspire critical thinking about language and its role in shaping the individual self. We will begin with a selection of short stories and go on to read three relatively short full-length works which focus both implicitly and explicitly on the intersection between language and the formation of the self as it plays out in a variety of cultural milieux. We'll begin with Tobias Wolff and DeLillo and build up to the linguistic density of Faulkner's modernist tour de force.

Writing Requirements: three formal essays of progressively increasing lengths; one required revision; one in-class essay; drafts (ungraded) for each formal essay; graded peer evaluations, and informal written responses for each reading assignment.

Book List:
Crews, Frederick. The Random House Handbook
DeLillo, Don. White Noise
Faulkner, William. As I Lay Dying
Wolff, Tobias. Old School.

A course reader including short stories and critical essays by, among others, Toni Morrison, James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, William Faulkner, Gish Jen, Raymond Carver, John Wideman, Jhumpa Lahiri, and Margaret Atwood.

Course: English R1B
Section: 1
Topic: The Prose Poem: The Past, Present and Future of a Form
Instructor: Julie Carr
Time: MWF 9-10
Location: 103 Wheeler Hall

Course Description: In this course we will be reading and responding to nineteenth and twentieth, and twenty-first century texts which fall into the amorphous category of the prose-poem. With an eye toward sharpening our sensitivity to form and our appreciation for experimental writing of all kinds we will read, discuss and write about prose-poems from authors such as William Blake, Charles Baudelaire, Arthur Rimbaud, Gertrude Stein, William Carlos Williams, John Ashbery, Lyn Hejinian, as well as many lesser-known practitioners. Some of the questions we will ask are: when do we call a text a "prose poem" and why? What motivates an author to choose a particular form for their work? What effect does form have on the reader? What effect does the lack of line-breaks have on a reader expecting poetry, and, conversely, what effect does what we might call poetical language have on a reader expecting prose? What is poetical language?

With the goal of developing simultaneously as critical readers and skilled writers, you will be asked to write a total of thirty-two pages throughout the course. Some of this writing will be in the mode of informal response, but the bulk of it will be in the form of three short essays and one longer essay. While much of class time will be spent in discussing the reading, we will also work together on how to develop a thesis statement, research outside material, organize an argument, and polish a final draft. This course satisfies the second half of the University's reading and composition requirement.

Course Requirements: Attendance is, of course mandatory. And in addition to completing the assigned reading, you will be required to hand in a total of six written responses of 1-2 pages. These can be informal, but should include thoughts and questions about the texts, not simply descriptions. You will also be asked to complete three 3-5 page papers, one 8-10 page research paper, and to give one presentation during the semester. I will provide essay prompts for the papers, though these will always be optional. I will encourage you to develop the ideas in your response pages into the longer papers. You will also be asked to revise two of these papers. We will work on the revisions independently during office hours as well as occasionally in peer-editing exercises in class. The revised papers will be graded after the final revision.

Reading List:
William Blake: selections from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (in course reader)
Charles Baudelaire: a selection of prose-poems, excerpts from essays (in course reader)
Arthur Rimbaud: a selection from Illuminations (in course reader)
Gertrude Stein: Selections from Tender Buttons (in course reader)
Selections from Great American Prose-Poems, ed. David Lehman
Lyn Hejinian: My Life
Claudia Rankine: Don't Let Me be Lonely: An American Lyric

Course: English R1B
Section: 2
Topic: 'You See a Dead Pig That Has Been Lying There a Long Time': Dirt, Darwin,
Dickens, Dogma
Instructor: D. Rae Greiner
Time: MWF 10:00-11:00
Location: 103 Wheeler

Course Description: In this class, we will examine a wide variety of texts leading up to the 'Darwinian Revolution,' and will read from several of his core texts, as well as letters and entries from his travel logs and autobiography. We will then move from Darwin's core materials to an examination of the wider cultural response, focusing in particular on the ways in which novelists and poets reacted to theories of evolution and natural selection. In addition, we will take a look at some more contemporary reactions to Darwin, from excerpts of the Scopes 'Monkey' Trial transcripts to the 1960 film Inherit the Wind, from 'Marxist Darwins' to the recent and rather bizarre incarnation that is Nancy Etcoff's Survival of the Prettiest. Near the end of the semester, we will be reading an extraordinarily long novel by (you guessed it) Charles Dickens which will inform our reading of Darwin and will help direct your final research projects.

English R1B requires approximately 8000 words of writing, the reading of 5 complete works (two of them book length), with at least two works written originally in English. There is a stipulation that readings include essays produced by the students themselves. In English 1B, readings are chosen to facilitate student writing projects and to introduce students to a coherent area of intellectual inquiry. Like R1A, the R1B course stresses the recursive nature of writing and reading and offers students frequent practice in a variety of forms of discourse leading toward exposition and argumentation in common standard English. R1B aims at incorporating research results into argumentation. A short essay is assigned at the beginning of the semester to assess the students' writing skills. Students will then be assigned at least two progressively longer essays (totaling at least 16 typewritten pages), with at least an equal number of pages of preliminary drafting and revising. The final paper will be a research paper on a directed topic of your own design.

Required Texts:
Dickens, Charles. Our Mutual Friend (Oxford UP 1998)
Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus: the 1818 Text (Oxford 1998)
Hacker, Diane. A Writer's Reference 5th Edition (Bedford/St. Martin's)
as well as a Big, Thick, and Thrilling Course Reader (TBA)

Course: English R1B
Section: 3
Topic: The Faust Tradition
Instructor: Adrienne Williams Boyarin
Time: MWF 11-12
Location: 204 Wheeler

Course Description: This course will focus on the Faust story, the legend of the magician (or scholar) who sells his soul to the Devil for love (or knowledge, or money). The Faust character has had a long life in legend and folklore, from early Christian times to the present day, and he incorporates some our most troubling and fundamental religious and philosophical problems: the struggle in man between good and evil, the desire for knowledge, impulses toward greed and lust. We will examine the evolution of the legend and its characters and elements. Comparative studies will provide ample opportunity to refine your writing and research skills, the practice of which will always be our first priority.

Book List:
Goethe, Faust: A Tragedy (Norton Critical Edition)
Rose, ed., History of the Damnable Life & Deserved Death of Doctor John Faustus
Marlowe, Rasmussen, and Bevington, eds., Doctor Faustus and Other Plays
Palmer and More, The Sources of the Faust Tradition, from Simon Magus to Lessing

Course: English R1B
Section #: 4
Topic: The Politics of Romance and Miscegenation
Instructor: Janice Tanemura
Time: Monday, Wednesday, Friday 12-1
Location: 246 Dwinelle

Course Description: The purpose of this course is to trace the history of 'romance' beginning with its early use by American authors to introduce a humane foundation for American democracy. We will follow how the idea of romance as a literary form that emerges alongside processes of nation-formation engages with fears of racial Otherness in the 19th and 20th century by also looking at U.S. anti-miscegenation laws. Then we will try to understand how these renderings of romance as it confronts sexuality and race affects the experience of romance itself on a private level, as the experience of 'love.' Racialized romances are always more than a simple 'love story.' Race is a prominent theme that complicates the idea of 'love' by foregrounding oppression, woundedness, and the desire to heal through assimilation. The course will focus on consensual romance narratives in order to explore the romance genre's embeddedness within nationalist ideals, specifically its foundation in the idea of universal love.

The course will offer the student frequent practice writing in various forms. We will compose essays gradually, beginning with questions that emerge from our initial responses to the texts, in order to achieve a practical fluency with sentence, paragraph, and thesis-development skills. Students will be assigned two progressively longer essays that we will workshop and peer-edit in class.

Texts:
Typee, Herman Melville
American Knees, Shawn Wong
Quicksand, Nella Larsen
When Heaven and Earth Changed Places, Le Ly Hayslip
Iola Leroy, Frances Harper
All About Love, bell hooks
Course Reader
(Texts subject to change)

Films:
Hiroshima, Mon Amour (1959)
Guess Who's Coming to Dinner? (1967)
The Guru (2002)

Course: English R1B
Section #: 5
Topic Strange Relationships
Instructor: Misa Oyama
Time: MWF 1-2 p.m.
Location: 259 Dwinelle

Course Description: The thing these books and films have in common is the problematic nature of the main character's relationship to other people, usually one particular person. The relationships range from the disturbing and exploitative to the comical and unconventional. Sometimes the relationship involves a power imbalance in class, age, or profession. In many of them, the main character has difficulty interpreting another person and understanding what their relationship is really about. What do people look for in their relationships with parents, friends, lovers, and colleagues? What problems arise when there is a conflict of expectations? I hope these texts will provoke discussion about the nature of relationships and the possibility of seeing another individual clearly.

Students will begin the course by writing short close readings of small moments in the texts, and progress to longer essays which link these close readings together to form a larger argument. Through these assignments (several of which will be rewritten), students will sharpen two skills looking closely at evidence and using that evidence to make a claim that matters to them. Additional requirements include three reading quizzes and an oral presentation on one of the works.

Films will be screened outside of class in the late afternoon or evening; students who cannot make the screening can see the films on their own at the Media Center in Moffitt. Texts may be subject to change; please come to the first class before purchasing any books.

Texts
Tony Kushner, Caroline, or Change
Arthur Miller, After the Fall
Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita
Tennessee Williams, Summer and Smoke
Course reader (essays and short stories)

Films
Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant, "The Office" (selections)
Michel Gondry, "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind"
Taylor Hackford, "Dolores Claiborne"
John Cameron Mitchell, "Hedwig and the Angry Inch"
David O. Russell, "Flirting with Disaster"

Course: English R1B
Section #: 6
Topic: Subjects of Mobility: Wanderers, Outcasts, Detectives, and Expatriates
Instructor: Monika Gehlawat
Time: MWF (2-3 p.m.)
Location: 103 Wheeler

Course Description: This class will examine the individual character in literature as a subject of mobility, autonomy, and alienation, while exploring his or her relationship to larger social networks and systems of belief. The characters in the works that we will read exercise their independence of movement in relation to the confines of cities, race or gender marginality, crime and loss, as well as artistic or sexual development. We will explore how movement can affect the body, mind, senses and a person's identity. We will read across literary genres and forms - investigating novels, short stories, poetry, plays and pulp fiction - in order to cultivate a contemporary understanding of the individual subject who moves restlessly through space. Does the fact of dislocation, travel, or homelessness serve to provide these characters with greater freedom from the cultural and social definitions of their communities? Can a wandering individual be both alienated from and sensually attached to his or her immediate world? What can we learn about the city and the country, patriotic and cosmopolitan attitudes, or private and public space through our study of the nomadic figure?

This examination of the subject of mobility will serve as the substantive thematic groundwork upon which students will improve their own writing skills. This course will focus on developing students' practical fluency with larger expository and argumentative units, and it aims to refine the student's research skills. Therefore, in addition to reading the short stories on the reading list, students will be responsible for independent research related to literary criticism of the texts in question, as well as socio-historical research that may enhance their understanding of the place of these works within the larger context of the author's particular experiences and political motivations. A short diagnostic essay (3 pp.) will be assigned at the start of the semester. Students will then be assigned longer essays (totaling at least 16 typewritten pages), with at least an equal number of pages of preliminary drafting and revising.

Book List:
Mrs. Dalloway - Virginia Woolf
Tender Is the Night - F.Scott Fitzgerald
Chronicle of a Death Foretold - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Good Morning Midnight - Jean Rhys
Farewell My Lovely - Raymond Chandler
Les Fleurs du Mal - Charles Baudelaire.

There will be a course reader including short stories by Flannery O'Connor, James Joyce, Arthur Conan Doyle, Edgar Allen Poe, Mary McCarthy, James Baldwin, and Ernest Hemingway. The reader will also include a play by Tom Stoppard and poetry by William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens, W.H.Auden.

Course: R1B
Section: 7
Topic: Holiday Literature
Instructor: Alan Drosdick
Time: MWF 3-4
Location: 78 Barrows

Course Description: Holidays find much common ground with literature. In their ways, both exist outside of time and place by means of their inherent, if relative, universality. Thanksgiving is not celebrated around the globe, just as Donne is not read the world over, but both hold their places through shared perception and appreciation, their physical trappings- be they books or turkeys- merely symbols through which a greater project might be enacted, namely the poetry or the giving of thanks. Holidays are strictly dictated by the calendar (Which do you call it, Independence Day or the 4th of July?), but by their very nature function external to the calendar, as one Halloween is the same as the one before it, and is on some level every Halloween. When celebrating a holiday, we feel like we have stepped out of our lives, and, as Washington Irving puts it, we do not 'regulate...time by hours, but by [the smoking of] pipes.' In short, holidays are magical days when time both stands still and extends back centuries, when the power of symbolism is heightened, and when we feel that on this day we can see a larger picture both of ourselves and the world.

While we shall take holidays as the subject matter for the materials of this course, this is first and foremost a class on writing. The class will not focus on the assigned literature, but on the students, who will rigorously develop their analytical thinking and writing skills. Students will learn to develop a working thesis and expand it into a cohesive extended examination of relevant issues regarding the primary texts or films under scrutiny. Through weekly writing assignments, students will learn to think through writing, simultaneously improving their ability to assess a work critically and to express the intricacies of their observations. The final project will ask that students produce a sustained, multifaceted argument, which interprets individually collected research, in the form of a ten-page essay. The final goal of the course will be to challenge students to become clear, efficient, effective writers.

Book List
A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens
The Dead, James Joyce
Holidays on Ice, David Sedaris
Twelfth Night, William Shakespeare
Elements of Style, William Strunk Jr. & E. B. White

Course Reader including shorter pieces and excerpts.

Course: R1B
Section: 8
Topic: The Mind's Island
Instructor: Joseph Ring
Time: MWF 3-4
Location: 204 Wheeler

'No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.' -John Donne, Meditation 17

Course Description:
This course takes as its organizing topic early modern and modern literary islands. As we hop from island to island, starting with Thomas More's Utopia (at once overdetermined as literally 'nowhere,' as a mirrored double of England, and as the New World), we will be guided by the following steering questions: is the island indeed a space 'out there,' a location that signifies the freshness, the possibility, and the rejuvenation of the New World? Or, is the island in its literary manifestation the ultimate space of self-confrontation and of confinement? We will closely examine these twinned suggestions of escape and entrapment, of home and not-home, and of hope and despair that inhere in the very notion of 'island.' As many of the texts that we will read perform a crossing of the anthropological and the literary in the form of colonial and post-colonial encounters, we will also return throughout the semester to the question of ethnography, both as a mode of writing a verbal portrait of another culture and of turning a critical lens back against one's own culture. This course is designed to teach you not only how to work with principal modes of academic rhetoric (description, analysis, and argument) but also how to incorporate secondary sources and research in your writing projects. To this end, students will be required to write a short diagnostic essay and three formal essays, the first two of which they will substantially revise, and the last of which will include a research component.

Texts:
Thomas More, Utopia
William Shakespeare, The Tempest
Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe
V.S. Naipaul, The Mimic Men
J.G. Ballard, Concrete Island
J.M. Coetzee, Foe
Course Reader

Recommended: a good grammar and style book (e.g. The Random House Handbook)

Course: English R1B
Section: 9
Topic: City Images
Instructor: Katherine Anderson
Time: TTh 8:00-9:30
Location: 109 Wheeler

Course Description: A number of prominent 19th and 20th century writers and artists felt drawn to represent urban experience in their imaginative works, as well as to analyze critically the place of cities in their lives and those of their contemporaries. What is so compelling about cities? Why the double urge to address the city creatively as well as critically? How do the city images we will encounter this semester (mainly literary, with supplemental examples from visual arts and film) portray the awe, fear, desire or pain they inspire? What formal and stylistic devices do these writers and artists use to build city images? And what tools will we, as critical readers and writers, use to build our own arguments concerning this urban obsession? This course takes something of an architectural approach to the processes of reading and writing. They say Rome wasn't built in a day: neither are close reading techniques and argumentative or expository writing skills. We will break down these seemingly mystical talents into a number of specific elements that you can actually practice! The main writing goal for this course is two substantial papers: achieving this will involve lots of drafting. We will devote in-class time to exercises on structuring arguments, selecting evidence and effectively incorporating it to support your claims, as well as to draft workshops and peer-review sessions aimed at helping you confidently revise.

Book List:
A. Lunsford, The Everyday Writer
Jean Rhys, After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie
Nathanael West, Day of the Locust

A course reader will include Walt Whitman, Charles Baudelaire, Edgar Allan Poe, Stephen Crane, H.G. Wells, George Orwell, Virginia Woolf, Janet Flanner, Langston Hughes and Dashiell Hammett.

Course: R1B
Section: 10
Topic: 'Fessing Up
Instructor: Stephen Katz
Time: TTH 8-9:30
Location: 204 Wheeler

Course Description: The most casual glance at 'bad' television or print media is enough to confirm Michel Foucault's claim that 'Western man has become a confessing animal.' From Jerry Springer and Pete Rose to that inimitable Hilton heiress herself, public and truthful self-revelation has become synonymous with the act of confessing: the staged moment of coming clean (or at least its promise) that makes for a peculiar way of reflecting on a life. What are the rules for confessing, and what version of ourselves, including our pasts and our faults, does this bizarre form of autobiography depend on? The readings for this class each cash in on confession as a way of narrating a life story, with its sensationalistic potential, its guilty pleasures for us as readers, and its way of making acceptable the recounting of socially aberrant behavior. We'll be primarily interested in confession as a literary gambit, but we will also be attentive to the resonances of legal, therapeutic, and religious ideas within the various works. This range of concerns should offer you the opportunity to choose paper topics that intersect with your own academic interests.

Such issues will be our intellectual fodder as we address the writerly concerns of the R1B syllabus. Our common approach to texts as literary productions will allow us to consider the technical aspects of good writing (grammar, sentence and paragraph construction, thesis development, evidence, and style) 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 solid, analytical prose, and an introduction to the methods of academic research. 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.

Over the course of the semester, you will be assigned three papers and a number of short take-home assignments. The final project will involve your writing a longer research paper that will draw on multiple sources. Each paper will involve a primary draft, peer editing, and a final revision and submission for a grade. You will receive a substantial amount of feedback from the instructor on all three essays.

Constant attendance, frequent in-class participation, and dedication to the reading are all required for this course.

Book List:
Hawthorne, Nathaniel. The Scarlet Letter
Nabokov, Vladimir. Lolita
Stevenson, Robert Louis. The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
Kingston, Maxine Hong. The Woman Warrior
Dubus, Andre. Selected Stories
A course reader including excerpted works by St. Augustine, Abelard and Heloise, Geoffrey Chaucer, and critical essays.

Course: English R1B
Section #: 11
Topic: Literature and World War I
Instructor: James Murphy
Time: T Th 9:30-11
Location: 47 Evans

Course Description: World War I, or the Great War, has inspired a tremendous amount of great poetry and fiction. Writers immediately turned the experience of war into the subject of verse and novelists continue to use it as a subject more than eighty years after the war ended. This course will examine the literature of World War I; we will also look at memoirs and letters written during and after the war by soldiers and civilians and at work by historians and literary critics. The focus of this course will be on the development of extended arguments and the mastery of different forms of writing, which we will develop in several short essays and a longer research paper. We will also work on the analysis of arguments and some basics of logic. You will be required to revise everything you write several times.

Required texts:
Course Reader
Pat Barker, Regeneration
Ford Madox Ford, The Good Soldier
Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front
Rebecca West Return of the Soldier
The Little Brown Handbook

Course: English R1B
Section: 12
Topic: Cities and their Representations
Instructor: Slavica Naumovska
Time: TTH 9:30-11:00
Location: 335 Cheit

Course Description: Rousseau described cities as 'the abyss of the human species,' and this conviction lives on in modern consciousness. But cities--both then and now--also represent the promise of diverse global community, innovation, and the ideals of human civilization. These varied, and often contradictory, notions of the city form the material for at least four centuries of artistic representation; from poems of the 18th-century to films of today, the city dominates as a subject and functions as an occasion to contemplate the meaning of modernity and civilization, as well as to weigh the consequences of industrialization.

In this course, we will explore diverse aspects of the 'city,' as both a real place where real experiences are constructed and as a concept into which various types of thinkers--from Swift to the creators of 'The Matrix'--pour their utopian fantasies and disillusionments alike. We will begin the course by reading maps of major cities and a sample of contemporary theories in Urban Studies. From there, we will read 'fictional' accounts of city experience in order to explore the more subjective and particular ways in which this larger historical experience is mediated through art. Among the questions that we will address (but won't, by any means, be limited to) are: How do urban spaces reflect or construct social experience? What challenges does the rise of the city present? How does the city change our means of understanding and, subsequently, representing the world that we live in? What is the city's relation to the past and future, and how do we imagine cities today?

This course satisfies the second half of the reading and composition requirement. Our investigation into city space will accompany intensive in-class work on improving your research and composition skills. You will be responsible for a total of 40 pages of writing during the course of the semester that will be divided up into shorter essays and drafts of various lengths. In addition to reviewing and refining the writing skills learned in R1A, we will focus on incorporating research successfully into argumentation.

Book List:
Course Reader (includes poems, essays, and maps)
Auster, P. City of Glass
Calvino, I. Invisible Cities
Chandler, R. The Big Sleep
Williams, J. Style: Towards Clarity and Grace
Williams, R. The Country and the City
White, E.B. Here is New York

Films:
Metropolis
The Matrix
The Cruise

Course: English R1B
Section #: 13
Instructor: erin Khue Ninh
Topic: female subjects: an exploration of harm
TTh 11-12:30
Location: 2062 VLSB

Course Description: This course will take a brief look at what it is to be a woman in American culture. We will pair readings in psychoanalysis and philosophy with the texts listed below to flesh out the questions they raise about our society: Why are these girls' coming-of-age stories scored by sexual violence, racked by the dictates of beauty, scarred by what it takes to become 'American feminine'? We will address theories of power, trauma, and ideology in forging an understanding of race, class and gender-based subject formations.

The development of analytical reading and argumentative writing skills is a central objective of this course. To this end, a large portion of class time will be devoted to individual writing exercises and group writing workshops. Students will be required to write three analytical essays with selected rewrites, culminating in a final research paper.

Reading List:
Dorothy Allison, Bastard out of Carolina
Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye
And a course reader

Course: English R1B
Section #: 14
Topic: Gods and Monsters
Instructor: Sharon Goetz
Time: TTh 12:30-2
Location: 80 Barrows

Course Description: Using texts that explore the exercise of unusual power by unusual characters, this course examines the entangled interfaces linking human and almost-human, individual and community, and identity and responsibility. Who determines what is "human" or "normal"? How does ignoring or minimizing difference impact someone's relationship with society? Where and how do personal and social responsibility overlap and come into conflict? What are some ramifications of the resulting ideological compromise? These questions and others offer points of departure for class discussion as well as the written component of this course. In several pieces of analytical writing, both formal and informal, we will develop skills pertaining to the argumentative thesis, overall essay structure, use of textual evidence, the process of revision, and research methodology. An 8-10pp. paper at the end of the semester will combine an argument of your own with guided library and online research. In addition, please be aware that active participation in class is vital to your success in this course.

Book List:
Anon. (trans. Heaney): Beowulf
Delany, S.: The Einstein Intersection
Sturgeon, T.: More Than Human

plus a course reader containing the following short texts:
Anon. (trans. Bradley): Judith
Butler, O.: "The Evening and the Morning and the Night"
Chiang, T.: "Liking What You See"
Ford, J. M.: "Heat of Fusion"
Keats, J.: Lamia
Murphy, P.: "His Vegetable Wife"
Wolfe, G.: "The Fifth Head of Cerberus"
Zelazny, R.: "24 Views of Mt. Fuji, by Hokusai"
and critical essays on several of the above

Course: English R1B
Section: 15
Topic: Literature of the Suburbs
Instructor: Nicholas Nace
Time: TTh 12:30-2:00
Location: 204 Wheeler

Course Description: White picket fences, well-groomed lawns, 2.5 well-groomed kids, a station wagon in the font, an elm tree in the back: Middle America is a seemingly benign place, but it is also where extremes collide. It's not quite rural, and it's not completely urban. It's a little bit country, a little bit rock n' roll, and it's everywhere in our culture's artistic output. With its cul-de-sacs and workaday routines, 1950s-style suburban bliss is an invention that has in its very nature the elements of its own undoing: cookie-cutter impersonality and obsessions with constantly keeping up appearances soon return the dangerous twin byproducts monotony and covetousness. So, our side project in this class, apart from our central focus on relentlessly improving our writing, research and revising skills, will be to 'read' suburbs through their more self-conscious artistic products, a process that will present us the opportunity to write incisively about a variety of literary forms. We'll also learn to draw upon insights developed during our library research into the surprisingly old history of suburbia as well as into non-literary forms such as films (Faces, The Ice Storm, Happiness, American Beauty), visual art, and even suburban kitsch such as lawn ornaments and Tupperware ads. If there is time, we will also devote some energy to thinking about the composed realities of utopian suburban social experiments such as Levittown and Disney's Celebration. Along the way you will produce thirty-two pages of your own polished and immaculate writing, much of which will be required reading for your classmates.

REQUIRED TEXTS
Albanese, L. Blue Suburbia
Amis, K. The King's English
Antrim, D. Elect Mr. Robinson for a Better World
Eugenides, J. The Virgin Suicides
Pynchon, T. The Crying of Lot 49
Silverstone, J., ed. Visions of Suburbia
Updike, J. A Month of Sundays

Also, a course reader containing a few short stories by Ann Beattie, T. C. Boyle, John Cheever, Robert Coover, William Maxwell, and Joyce Carol Oates; some poems by Mona Van Duyn, Mary Jo Salter, and Anne Sexton; and a small selection of model essays by Joseph Epstein, Adam Gopnik, Rose Macaulay and Cynthia Ozick.

Course: English R1B
Section # 16
Topic: Tales of Two Places
Instructor: Vlasta Vranjeŝ
Time: TTh 2:00-3:30
Location: 283 Dwinelle

Course Description: Over the last few decades many scholars have written extensively on the nature of Otherness and on various ways in which portrayal and creation of one's ethnic, racial, or gender 'opposite' reflect concerns and dilemmas of one's own subjectivity or society. In this class we will touch upon some of these theoretical issues as we look at a variety of texts - and some films - that depict a particular geographic region or cultural group from the point of view of an outsider.

This course is designed to be writing-intensive rather than reading-intensive. We will therefore devote most of our class-time to honing students' analytical and research skills. After a short diagnostic essay, students will write two longer, research essays (totaling at least 16 typewritten pages). The first of these essays will incorporate literary criticism. In the second, each student will focus on any representation of a geographic area or a nation that is of interest to him or her.

In addition to completing all writing assignments, students will be expected to come to class regularly and prepared to discuss the readings.

Book List:
E. M. Forster, A Room with a View
Gordon Harvey, Writing with Sources: A Guide for Students
Zadie Smith, White Teeth

The Course Reader will be a compilation of poems, short stories, essays, journalistic articles, and excerpts from memoirs.

Course: English R1B
Section #: 17
Topic: (Ab)Normal Bodies
Instructor: Rebekah Edwards
Time: T TH 3:30-5
Location: 103 Wheeler

Course Description: The novels and short stories we will read for this class revolve around characters who are perceived by their community as being physically 'abnormal.' We will read these texts in conversation with a series of essays on the history and/or social construction of the body and of the development of the concept of 'normality.' Some of the questions we will explore are what are the various metaphoric and narrative roles abnormal bodies perform in these texts; what does it mean to have a narrator or main character who is consider 'abnormal' and what kind of point of view do they offer us; who decides and how do we define what it means to be human; if there is a relationship between the structure of a text and the story it tells what kinds of textual strategies are needed to present a story about abnormal bodies; do monstrosity and/or bodily difference (gendered, sexual, racial, and/or physical ability) in these texts become an exploration of 'universal' human experience; what does the abnormal body tell us about social/historical ideas about sameness, difference and notions of 'truth'?

As a student in English 1B, you will be expected to develop skills in critical reading, analytical writing and developing a research paper. You will write two short papers and a longer research paper. As revision is a key component to writing a strong paper we will go over revision strategies and work together in class on revising your papers. Extensive revision will be required for the second and third papers. This course (if taken for a letter grade) fulfills the second part of the undergraduate reading and composition requirement.

Books :
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein
Carson McCullers, Ballad of the Sad Café
Manual Puig, Kiss of the Spider Woman
Shani Mootoo, Cereus Blooms at Night
Philip K. Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

Course: English R1B
Section: 18
Topic: Realism and Contemporary Fiction
Instructor: Ben Graves
Time: T Th 3:30-5:00
Location: 54 Barrows

Course Description: Realism names a complicated array of literary conventions and procedures, but it is also a familiar term in everyday usage. One film or TV show may be 'realistic' while another is not, but in either case we tend to judge the success of the work in terms of the fullness of its engagement with a given world. In this course, we will explore how some contemporary writers have responded to this call, and how they have used realist fictions to address the fateful changes of recent years. Their close attention to these changes will be mirrored in our own attention to both their work and our own, as we will concentrate our efforts on sharpening our skills as writers in a variety of contexts. Several short responses will lead to a final research project of 9-10 pages, but more important will be the peer-editing and revising sessions in the weeks between. In these, we will pay special attention to gathering and weighing textual evidence, turning observations into arguments, and crafting theses that show a developing sense of a text's possibilities and the way they are imagined.

Note: Please attend first meeting before purchasing books.

Texts:
Eduardo Galeano, Upside Down
Jonathan Coe, The Winshaw Legacy: or, What a Carve Up!
Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things
Fae Myenne Ng, Bone
Timothy Mo, The Redundancy of Courage
Scarlett Thomas, Popco
Xeroxed reader

Course: English R1B
Section #: 19
Topic: Advocacy and Abilidad: Filipino American Literature
Instructor: Jean Vengua Gier
Time: TTh 3:30-5,
Location: 2062 VLSB

Course Description: This course examines selected texts in Filipino American literature, with emphasis on elements of advocacy and abilidad (the latter is a Filipino term for creating with found and scavenged resources) as expressed through media (newspapers, magazines, film), short stories and novels for a minority literature. We focus on how Filipinos in the United States have utilized newspapers and magazines in order to advocate for political change during the early 20th century, when it was difficult or almost impossible to publish in the mainstream press. Many of the texts that we will read during the first half of the class will be from periodicals. We will begin by looking at the historical (colonial) contexts of Filipino writing in the Philippines, at the cultural transitions of Filipino writers who migrated to the United States in the early 20th century, how they advocated for change, and how they managed to produce a body of writing with few material resources. We will read documents -- essays, speeches, letters -- of the Philippine Independence movement published in the United States, in relation to texts written by American authors - for example, Mark Twain -- involved in the Anti-Imperialist movement. These early documents form the framework for a literature that expresses a strong transnational awareness, and a concern for both local and global community action. Close reading and discussion of stories, essays, speeches and reportage will allow us to discuss and write about what makes an essay or speech convincing, and a short story or novel meaningful within various personal and social contexts. There will be equal emphasis in this class on both critical reading and essay writing.

Online: The World Wide Web is providing new venues and reading constituencies for minority writers that is unprecedented. We will become part of this online community in our class "weblog," (online journal), where we can ask questions and discuss the assigned texts. You are encouraged to browse authors' websites and blogs, and Filipino American writers will also be invited to "visit" online and participate in our discussions.

Required Books:
Carlos Bulosan: America is in the Heart
Eileen Tabios: Reproductions of the Empty Flagpole
Marianne Villanueva & Virginia Cerenio, editors: Going Home to a Landscape: Writings by Filipinas
Brian Ascalon Roley: American Son
Nick Carbo, editor: Pinoy Poetics

Films (in-class):
Pennee Bender, Joshua Brown and Andrea Ades Vasquez, Savage Acts, Wars,Fairs & Empire
Curtis Choy, Fall of the I-Hotel
Gene Cajayon and John Manal Castro, the Debut
(other films to be announced)

Course Reader

Course: R1B
Section: 20
Topic: Psychological Approaches to Contemporary Asian-American Literature and Film
Instructor: Carlos Reyes
Time: MWF 9-10
Location: 305 Wheeler

Course Description: While psychological discourse often claims universality, literary discourse by and large celebrates particularity, which leads us to ask: what do these two discourses have to say to each other? Dividing our reading roughly equally between literature and psychology, we shall explore how these two modes of investigating human behavior illuminate, complement, and conflict with each other. In this process, we shall hopefully learn something about both Asian-American literature and various types of psychological thinking, including Freudian, scientific, and Buddhist psychology. This is not a class on the simple 'application' of psychological theories (generally Freudian, in literary studies) to literature. Rather, our approach will be to study literature and psychology as two distinctive ways of posing and responding to various ethical questions.

Since this is a composition class, we shall devote considerable effort to learning how to communicate ideas effectively, specifically through writing persuasive essays. To this end, we shall gain plenty of practice in the various stages of the writing process, including pre-writing, drafting, revising, and editing.

Texts:
Her Wild American Self, M. Evelina Galang
Hunger, Lan Samantha Chang
The Language of Blood, Jane Jeong Trenka
Emotions Revealed, Paul Ekman
Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, Sigmund Freud
The Heart of the Buddha's Teaching, Thich Nhat Hanh
The Geography of Thought, Richard E. Nisbett
The Bedford Handbook (6th Edition), Diana Hacker

Films:
Better Luck Tomorrow, Justin Lin
The Wedding Banquet, Ang Lee

Course: English R1B
Section: # 21
Topic: Ethics, Morality, Law and Literature
Time: MWF 10-11
Location: 305 Wheeler

Course description: This course focuses on issues of ethics, morality, and law as a way to both analyze arguments and to apply critical thinking and reading to one's own writing. The readings include essays on current events such as first amendment rights, affirmative action, abortion, the death penalty, and the concept of a "just war," as well as literary and philosophical texts that explore the role of narrative and rhetoric in judicial decision, interpretive practice, and policy making. How does literary justice differ from legal justice? What philosophical and ethical underpinnings of law does literature reveal? Finally, we will use the Holocaust as a case study to raise questions concerning morality and human motivation, the right or the ability to judge, and the ethics of representation.

Writing requirements include short weekly response papers, peer editing, and longer essays that emphasize the development of ideas, drafting and revision, and the organization of an argument. The final paper will incorporate research on a topic of the student's choosing.

Book List:
Barnet, S. and H. Bedau, Current Issues and Enduring Questions; Schlink, B., The Reader; Shakespeare, W., Measure for MeasureSpiegelman, A., Maus; Tolstoy, L. The Kreutzer Sonata; Course Reader.

Recommended: Hacker, Diana, A Writer's Reference.

Course: English R1B
Section: 22
Title: British Literature and Culture, 1840s - 1914
Instructor: Antoinette Chevalier
Time: TTh 8- 9:30
Location: 305 Wheeler Hall

Course Description: This course will introduce students to a wide range of fiction and non-fiction prose written during the Victorian and Edwardian eras. Selected works of literary criticism and theory will deepen our understanding of the social and historical climate affecting the production and reception of these texts. Likewise, we will consider formal issues such as genre and narrative methodologies alongside thematic debates of class, gender, empire, immigration, and race which permeated social discourses in England during this time.

In addition to a short diagnostic essay in the beginning, students will produce at least 5 thesis-driven essays of increasing length over the course of the semester. There will be preliminary drafts required of most papers, and the composition and final revisions of essays will be facilitated by work in peer-editing groups. Students will not only learn to perform critical analyses of both literary and non-literary texts, but how to produce writing that may effectively respond to and cogently participate in the critical discourses surrounding published works.

Required Texts:
Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre
Wilkie Collins, The Moonstone
Robert Louis Stevenson, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
E.M. Forster, Howards End

Frederick Crews, The Random House Handbook

Course: English R1B
Section #: 23
Topic: Storytelling and the Problem of History
Instructor: Joy Viveros
Time: T Th 9:30-11
Location: 305 Wheeler

Course Description: This course is designed to prepare you to compose college level essays that are superior in form and content. Our focus will be on acquiring strategies that enable you to develop your intuitions about what you read into viable, complex theses. We will work, among other things, on recognizing the difference between an opinion about a text and analysis of it, as well as on generating the kinds of questions that lead to analytic theses. We will also work to make sophisticated use of research in our writing.

Our readings center on storytelling and the problem of history. We will be examining the different narrative strategies postcolonial and postmodernist authors use to approach telling life stories and situating lives within the matrix of history. In addition, we will pursue the questions you bring to bear on our texts.

Required Texts:
Dangarembga, T. Nervous Conditions
DeLillo, D. White Noise
Erdrich, L. Tracks
Pynchon, T. The Crying of Lot 49
Speigelman, A. Maus I: A Survivor's Tale and Maus II: Here My Troubles Began
Troyka, Lynn Q. Quick Access Reference for Writers

Recommended:
Cambridge International Dictionary of English
Williams, Joseph M. Style Toward Clarity and Grace

Course: English R1B
Section #: 24
Topic: Storytelling and the Problem of History
Instructor: Joy Viveros
Time: T Th 12:30-2
Location: 305 Wheeler

Recommended:
Cambridge International Dictionary of English
Williams, Joseph M. Style Toward Clarity and Grace

Joy Viveros is teaching both R1B Sec. 23 and R1B Sec. 24. They have the same course description.

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Last modified: Tuesday, 25-Jan-2005 14:51:47 PST

R1A/R1B Course Descriptions

Spring 2005

Courses: