R1A/R1B Course Descriptions
Spring 2006
English R1A
Section: 1
Topic: American Captivity
Instructor: Katie Simon
Time: MWF 10-11
Location: 204 Wheeler
The highest priority in this class will be to work on our reading and writing and to practice the kinds of critical thinking and analytical skills one needs to participate in an academic environment. Thus we will spend time questioning, interpreting, discussing, and critiquing texts, working out our ideas collaboratively and individually. Another goal of this class, however, will be to create an environment within the academic setting where the collective activity of writing is valued as a thing worth doing in and of itself, whether it furthers an argument or not. We will therefore engage in a multiplicity of writing modes this semester -- formal and informal, analytic and personal, rough and revised -- in order to demystify the whole process and engage energetically in the construction of identities for ourselves as writers. Be prepared for a hands-on experience, a writing workshop in which you are, in fact, constantly writing.
This semester we will focus on texts that thematize the experience of captivity in America. We will read from a variety of contexts including Puritain encounters with Native Americans, the peculiar institution of American chattel slavery, Gothic romance fiction, and autobiographical accounts of life in the prison system. We will ask ourselves how the notion of freedom in this country is bound up with a preoccupation and fear about unfreedom, and why the trope of captivity is such a recurrent one in the American imagination. We will pay attention throughout to the language, rhetoric, and construction of these texts, in order to ground our interdisciplinary analysis in the details and particulars of what we read, developing a facility with 'close reading' as a technique and as a habit of mind.
Assignments include: paper drafts and revisions, peer-editing exercises, in-class free-writes, reading quizzes, an oral presentation, and group work. A portfolio of your work in the class will be due the final day of the semester.
Required Texts:
Mary Rowlandson, The Sovereignty and Goodness of God
Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself
Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Yellow Wallpaper
John Edgar Wideman, Brothers and Keepers
Course Reader, including narratives by John Marrant, Cotton Mather, Henry David Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allen Poe, Flannery O'Connor and others.
Recommended Text: The Random House Handbook, Frederick Crews
English R1A
Section: 2
Topic: Marriage
Instructor: Peter Goodwin
Time: MWF 1:00-2:00
Location: 103 Wheeler
The literary, legal, and expository texts for this class will remind us that marriage is not simply an expression of love between men and women, but also a social institution that structures property relations and individual civil rights. These texts and films will furnish the basis for examining the complex web of amative, economic, and power relations that hold marriages together or tear them apart. We will also devote considerable attention to the current debates over gay marriage, setting them in the context of our broader reading.
The primary aim of the course is to develop students? expertise in writing persuasively, clearly, and precisely. With this in mind, the readings and films are designed to help students form their own arguments about various aspects of marriage. In addition to essays of literary analysis, students will write argumentative, personal, and expository essays, developing skills that will apply to all types of college and professional writing.
Book List:
Jane Austen, Emma
Kate Chopin, The Awakening
Tennessee Williams, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
A course reader including stories, poems, and essays on marriage by Alexis de Toqueville, Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, Wendell Barry, Michael Warner, Stephanie Coontz and others; legal decisions regarding gay marriage and interracial marriage; wedding vows and liturgies.
Recommended films:
Who?s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, dir. Mike Nichols
Monsoon Wedding, dir. Mira Nair
The Wedding Banquet, dir. Ang Lee
English R1A
Section: 3
Topic: Consciousness and Feeling in Narrative
Instructor: Ryan P. McDermott
Time: MWF 3:00-4:00 P.M.
Location: 234 Dwinelle Hall
This course begins with a rather basic assumption about the experience of reading literature: namely, that we not only feel and experience emotions when we read, but also that the narratives we encounter in literature--as in, say, the form of a novel--seem to house feelings and forms of consciousness radically distinct from our own. While we often take this assumption for granted, chalking it up to literature's unfathomable 'essence' or perhaps tracing it back to an author's most probable intention/meaning, we stumble upon a difficult problem in trying to account for these aspects of narrative analytically. In this class, we will begin with the challenging question, What is it about narratives that enables them to produce and sustain the illusion of a world composed of, among other things, consciousness and feeling? In other words, how do feelings and consciousness "happen" in narrative?
As a way of tackling these abstractions, we will consider the various roles that narrators play in the world of their narratives. A number of questions will guide us throughout our inquiries. For example, what role does the consciousness of a first-person or a third-person narrator play in the world of a text, both in relation to and apart from the ?minds? of (other) characters? Can we find a language to analyze textual consciousness and feeling without assuming an automatic correspondence between the particular world of a narrative and our own? (Or, to re-phrase the latter, how can we analyze characters' feelings without pretending that they are ?real? people?) After our romp through these formal inquiries, we will think more broadly about the political, historical, and cultural implications of feelings. Navigating between the subjective and objective, we will ask: what kind of 'work' do feelings perform, within and without a text? Given our pervasive tendency to objectivize history, what would it mean to think of certain feelings as historical? Finally, what is the importance--if any--of such seemingly unproductive yet nonetheless pervasive feelings as boredom, anxiety, envy, and paranoia?
In this course, we will be concerned with developing critical thinking and analytical writing skills. More specifically, we will practice applying our close reading skills of literary texts to the writing of solid analytical prose. Our journey through the world of 'exposition and argumentation' (two of the main foci of this course) will include visits at the following destinations: grammar; sentence and paragraph construction; essay structure; thesis development; proper use of evidence; and style. The majority of class time will revolve around class discussions and in-class workshops that will allow us to practice and build upon our close reading skills, and then work to 'translate' these skills into writing.
Over the course of the semester, each student will be assigned five papers and a number of short take-home assignments. Class time will frequently be spent on group work and in-class writing. Three of the papers will involve a primary draft, a peer editing phase, and then the revision and resubmission of a final draft to the instructor for a grade. Students can expect to receive a substantial amount of commentary from the instructor on all five essays.
Constant attendance, frequent in-class participation, and dedication to the reading are required for this course.
Book List:
Austen, Jane, Persuasion
Hacker, Diana, Rules for Writers
James, Henry, Turn of the Screw
Rushdie, Salman, Shame
Saramago, Jos', Blindness
Woolf, Virginia, To the Lighthouse
A short course reader including excerpted material from Melville, Mansfield, Wharton, and others.
English R1A
Section: 4
Topic: TBA
Instructor: Paul Hurh
Time: T Th 8-9:30
Location: 103 Wheeler
No course description is available at this time.
English R1A
Section: 5
Topic: TBA
Instructor: Padma Ranganaran
Time: T Th 8-9:30
Location: 109 Wheeler
No course description is available at this time.
English R1A
Section: 6
Topic: Deconstruction & (Strict) Constructivism
Instructor: Jeremy S. Ecke
Time: TTH, 9:30-11:00
Location: 204 Wheeler
This course will examine the relationship between reading, writing, and interpretation. In doing so, we will center our conversation around the competing philosophies of deconstruction and strict constructivism, posing the following questions: Does a text mean only what its author intended? Must words be read with only their denotative sense in mind? Or, is an author only one source of meaning in a text? Can the historical, semantic, and political/social weight of words support different interpretations than those which were originally intended?
Drawing on our collective experiences with language and interpretation, this course will examine a diverse set of texts and textual acts. Students will be encouraged to supplement the assigned class readings with texts from their own reading experience to illustrate personal examples of the more theoretic concepts upon which we will ground our discussion of language and interpretation (i.e.-- euphemism, jargon, modality, ambiguity, entailment, etc.). By the end of the course, students will be able to identify deconstructive and constructive strategies of 'reading' (or interpretation) in their own arguments and those of others; and ultimately, students will be able to evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of such strategies as they apply to a particular argument or issue. The writing requirements for this course will be satisfied with three short creative/experimental essays, followed by two longer and more formal essays. A strong emphasis will be placed on feedback, revision, and self-evaluation.
Texts:
Course Reader; and selections from the following text:
Breyer, Stephen. Interpreting our Democratic Constitution. Alfred A. Knopf, 2005.
Crane, Lee ed. US Constitution. Pavilion Press, 2004.
Lakoff, George. Don't Think of an Elephant!: Know Your Values and Frame the Debate: The Essential Guide for Progressives. Chelsea-Green, 2005.
MacNeil, Robert et al. Do You Speak American? Harcourt Trade Publishers, 2005.
Scalia, Antonin et al. A Matter of Interpretation: Federal Courts and the Law. Princeton University Press, 1998.
Watson, Don. Death Sentence: The Decay of Public Language. Alfred A. Knopf, 2003.
English R1A
Section: 7
Topic: TBA
Instructor: Arthur Bahr
Time: T Th 11-12:30
Location: 204 Wheeler
No course description is available at this time.
English R1A
Section: 8
Topic: TBA
Instructor: Joel Nickels
Time: T Th 12:30-2
Location: 103 Wheeler
No course description is available at this time.
English R1A
Section: 9
Topic: Pains-taking: The Body in Pain
Instructor: Rae Greiner
Time: 2:00-3:30
Location: 80 Barrows
This class begins with a deceptively simple question: what is pain? Is pain something so personal that one can only feel it, but never describe it? Why might one need, or want, to write about pain? How does an author translate physical or psychological pain into language? Do readers experience pain? Why does writing hurt so much? Can the sharing of pain produce something other than more pain? To what extent can pain be recorded and transmitted?
We will be reading a variety of texts in this class in our efforts to examine how the British writers of the 19th century experienced and represented their own (or, sometimes, a communal or shared) pain. Although our focus will sometimes center on Romantic and Victorian authors?like poet John Keats (suffering from and ultimately dying of tuberculosis), Life in the Sick-Room author Harriet Martineau, the opium-addicted Thomas de Quincey and the poet-invalid Elizabeth Barrett Browning--who were themselves the victims of severe and debilitating pain, we will also be reading some of the most famous fictional accounts of bodies in pain, from Jane Austen?s Sense and Sensibility to Robert Louis Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Charles Dicken's A Christmas Carol, the tale of a miser plagued by crippling dreams. Students will then be assigned between 3 and 4 short essays (totaling a minimum of 32 typewritten pages) and are required to revise at least three of these essays.
Required Texts:
Austen, Jane. Sense and Sensibility. New Riverside 2002 edition (ed. Beth Lau)
Stevenson, Robert Louis. The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde Penguin Classics 2003
Dickens, Charles. A Christmas Carol.
Hacker, Diane. A Writer?s Reference 5th Edition (Bedford/St. Martin?s)
Course Reader (available at University Copy on Channing Way)
English R1A
Section: 10
Topic: Split Personalities
Instructor: Alan Drosdick
Time: TTh 3:30-5
Location: 246 Dwinelle
The idea that an individual's consciousness' cleaved by trauma, science, or skill could become so compartmentalized as to yield seemingly distinct personalities both fascinates readers and provides a useful analogue to the act of critical reading. This course will teach students to be two readers at once: one enjoying the plot twists, exciting surprises, and powerful emotional crescendos of the stories; the other strictly scrutinizing how the author crafts the language of her text to produce those effects in the first reader. This perforation between reaction and reflection will provide the scaffolding for the development of students? analytical writing skills. Short weekly assignments written as the reactive reader will prepare them for longer papers (4-5 pages) written by the reflective one. For these longer papers, we shall conduct thesis brainstorming sessions and peer editing workshops. Students should expect their cohorts? work to become very familiar.
Book List:
Hogg, J. The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a
Justified Sinner
Larsen, N. Passing
Milton, J. Samson Agonistes
Shakespeare, W. Hamlet
Stevenson, R. L. Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr.
Hyde
Wilde, O. The Picture of Dorian Gray
Films:
Eastwood, C. Unforgiven
LeRoy, M. I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang
Proyas, A. Dark City
English R1A
Section: 11
Topic: Second Nature: The Artificial Person in and as Representation
Instructor: Joseph Ring
Time: TTh 3:30-5
Location: 221 Wheeler
The texts that we will read in this course afford a long, if sometimes discontinuous, vista on the ancient fiction of the artificial person, created not by nature but of a second nature. From the armored, mechanized body of the proto-fascist Roman warrior in Shakespeare's Coriolanus to the virtual world of cyberpunk fiction, the recurring textual figure of the artificial person appears as both fantasy and nightmare, both fulfillment of the ageless dream of bodily transcendence and threat of shattering dependence. The artificial anthropoid--be it automaton, the robot, the android, or the intelligent machine--represents at once an imitation or simulacrum of a person and an alienated condition of humanity itself. We will thus ask not only how the machine comes to life but also how life becomes machine. We will also consider through these texts how binary terms like mind and body, masculine and feminine, biological and technological, knowledge and object, language and world, self and other, natural and artificial, and reason and desire are both raised and complicated by a secondary or counterfeit human.
The literature of this course is, however, secondary to another artificial body: your own writing. The texts will provide the material out of which we will fashion critical readings and formal essays. This course is thus primarily designed to teach you how to work with principal modes of academic rhetoric: description, analysis, and argument. You will be required to write, in addition to a diagnostic essay and a number of short writing assignments, two formal essays, both of which you will substantially revise. As each student will also workshop both essays with a peer-editing group, you must be prepared to write detailed comments on other students' work.
Texts:
William Shakespeare, Coriolanus
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein
J.G. Ballard, Crash
William Gibson, Neuromancer
Frederick Crews, The Random House Handbook
A Course Reader
Possible Films:
Metropolis (Fritz Lang)
Blade Runner (Ridley Scott)
The Matrix (Andy and Larry Wachowski)
Artificial Intelligence: AI (Steven Spielberg)
English R1B
Section: 1
Topic: Introducing Cultural Studies
Instructor: Ben Graves
Time: MWF 9-10
Location: 103 Wheeler
Course Description: This course is intended to develop skills in reading, writing, and critical analysis. Assignments move from personal response papers to formal academic essays, culminating in a research project and presentation at the end of term. While the course will introduce certain techniques and frameworks of cultural analysis, our main interest will be to practice cultural studies on the ground, and to address the many representational dilemmas facing us in everyday life. We will read promiscuously, but with a sustained focus on "culture" in its many guises, ranging from fashion, university life, and TV to the various food, health, and work cultures that we daily negotiate here in Berkeley. Questions of race, gender, and disability will figure prominently in our discussions, and we will use these questions to think about the meanings encoded in cultures both local and global, high and low, literary and otherwise. Various in-class and out-of-class writing exercises should be expected, along with work-shopping, peer-editing, and rough-drafting of papers. No previous knowledge required.
Book List:
McQuade, D. and C. McQuade, Seeing and Writing 2
During, S.: The Cultural Studies Reader
A substantial course-reader (details TBA)
English R1B
Section: 2
Topic: Censorship and Self-Censorship
Instructor: Karen Leibowitz
Time: MWF 9-10
Location: 204 Wheeler
In this class we will read works from the late 19th and early 20th centuries that either discuss censorship, depict censorship, or were subject to censorship--whether by a government, an editor, or the author of the work itself. We will discuss the causes and effects of censorship, the meaning of "obscenity," the role of taboos on literary creation, and the politics of censorship. Through students' own research into the laws and culture of this period, we will develop a sense of what made certain kinds of writing acceptable or unacceptable.
This course is designed to develop reading, writing, and research skills, and students are expected to participate actively in class discussion. Each student will write a short essay of 3 pages and then two longer essays (6 and 10 pages), each of which will be revised. We'll treat writing as a process: working from thesis-formation, to defining research terms, to information gathering, to outlines, and through multiple drafts. Students will respond to each others' work in both written and oral comments. This course satisfies the second half of the R & C requirement
Texts:
Merchant of Venice William Shakespeare
Lady Chatterley's Lover DH Lawrence
Inherit the Wind Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee
Lolita Vladimir Nabokov
Reading Lolita in Tehran Azar Nafisi
1984 George Orwell
Course Reader including excerpts from Emma Goldman's political writings, Walt Whitman's "Leaves of Grass," Allen Ginsburg's "Howl," and James Joyce's Ulysses.
Sin and Syntax Constance Hale
English R1B
Section: 3
Topic: Teaching, Learning, and Literature
Instructor: Dori Aspuru-Takata
Time: MWF 10-11
Location: 80 Barrows
In the midst, as we are, of this learning environment here at UC Berkeley, we will embark together to explore literary representations of educational spaces. Our study will range widely among various time periods, genres, and works by an eclectic assortment of writers, but all the texts we will read this semester focus either directly or obliquely upon the place of learning: the walls and halls of educational institutions--those physical spaces where teaching and learning happen--and the process and function of learning for individuals and communities. This course opens up a space for us to think about our own educational experiences in a reflexive, critical, and ideally transformative way. Through our engagement with these texts, we will consider a wide range of attendant issues: How does the spatial metaphor play out in the depiction of various campus settings? How do the material constraints of one's educational environment impinge upon the learning experience? Is the educational environment conducive to teaching and learning? These questions are only the start of the critical questioning crucial for the writing and thinking process.
In this course, we will focus primarily upon developing strong critical reading, writing, and research skills--skills that are not only transportable to your other academic courses, but also applicable within your personal and professional worlds. Students will write progressively longer essays culminating in a final paper that incorporates research into a tightly argued essay. The possibilities for research topics are wide open: You might venture into current debates on educational reform, affirmative action, or the inclusion of intelligent design theory in school curriculum; or you might investigate the history of student activism on Berkeley's campus (to name a few options). It is my hope that this course will provide you with sufficient guidance along with ample room for your own learning.
Book List:
Gordon Harvey, Writing with Sources: A Guide for Students
Robert Coles, Teaching Stories: An Anthology on the Power of Learning and Literature
Thomas Hughes, Tom Brown?s Schooldays
Virginia Woolf, A Room of One?s Own
Richard Rodriguez, Hunger of Memory
Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
Javier Mar?as, All Souls
J. K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone
English R1B
Section: 4
Topic: American Literature Between the Wars
Instructor: Audrey Wu Clark
Time: MWF 11-12
Location: 204 Wheeler
Course Description: This course will acquaint you with the close readings of texts, research, and the mechanics of writing expository and research-based essays. In class, we will examine texts written by authors in the U.S. between World War I and World War II. The course will begin with a brief poetry section that will be supplied in the course reader. Our readings of all the texts will focus on how the U.S. is portrayed in local, national, and international frames during the Roaring Twenties, the Great Depression, and the advent of World War II. Our class discussion will center on the following lines of inquiry: How do these texts affirm or challenge the historical images surrounding the historical prosperity in the postwar U.S. nation and the New Dealian populism of the 1930s? Do these texts account for other nations that were ravaged by war? More generally, how does literature relate to history? And how does an international framing of the production and content of these texts alter our perceptions of the domestic U.S. during the corresponding period? Since the texts offered in this course are written predominantly by minority writers in the U.S. during this period, our class discussions will investigate questions surrounding the author's and the protagonist's identities and their relations to the social. We will also read these texts alongside contemporary movements of transatlantic Modernism and Social Realism. It is my hope that our classroom discussions will provide a space for the students to explore their own questions and to formulate the conceptual arguments that they need for their papers. For this class, you will need to write three essays and revisions of the two longer, research-based essays.
Required Texts:
Cather, Willa. The Professor's House. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1925. New
York: Vintage Books, 1990
Faulkner, William. Light in August. New York: Harrison Smith and Robert Haas, Inc.,
1932. Ed. Noel Polk. New York: Vintage Books, 1990
Hurston, Zora Neale. Their Eyes Were Watching God. Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott, Inc.,
1937. New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1990
Kang, Younghill. East Goes West. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1937. New York:
Kaya Production, Inc., 1997
Wright, Richard. Native Son. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1940. New York: Perennial
Classics, 1998.
Xeroxed Course Reader
English R1B
Section: 5
Topic: Proof
Instructor: Fiona Murphy
Time: MWF 11-12
Location: 103 Wheeler Hall
What constitutes evidence? Epistemology is the study of the origin, nature, and methods of human knowledge, and in this course we will address in our reading, writing, and discussion such questions as: When should one trust one's intuition? When and how should one seek validation? When should one trust others instead of one's own instinct? How can one be fooled or misinterpret things? An essential aspect of analytical writing is finding and utilizing evidence to substantiate one's points, and our interrogations into literary characters who must face their own conceptions and misconceptions about proof will inform our own strategies of writing and developing a convincing argument. R1B is a course that incorporates research into analytical writing, and part of our focus will be learning how to integrate the opinions of others into our own, whether as supplement or counterpoint.
There will be four required papers in this class: a two-page diagnostic essay, two four-page papers, and a seven-page research paper. The latter three each will be revised and rewritten. Each student is also required to present two oral reports, and there will be a final exam.
Course Readings:
Bantock, Nick: Griffin and Sabine
Shakespeare, William: Hamlet
McEwan, Ian: Atonement
Austen, Jane: Pride and Prejudice
A course reader will include sonnets by John Donne, essays by Ralph Waldo Emerson, a short story by Edgar Allan Poe, and a reading from Immanuel Kant.
Movies:
A Very Long Engagement
A Beautiful Mind
English R1B
Section: 6
Topic: Getting Outside: Literature and the Environment
Instructor: Carlo Arreglo
Time: MWF 12-1
Location: 103 Wheeler Hall
Two concerns will drive this course. The first is an interest in the environment and its role and representation in nineteenth and twentieth century American literature. Our readings will engage expository writing, the novel, and poetry as we examine the intertwined genealogy of the environment and literature from early manifestations in Puritan thought to postmodern versions of the Pacific pastoral. How does the environment relate to migration, displacement, urban development, the outdoors industry, and land conservation? Who writes about the environment and does it matter? How is identity bound up with space and place?
The second concern of the course is writing. After a short 2-3 page diagnostic essay at the start of the semester, you will be expected to produce a minimum course total of 32 pages, 16 pages of draft and revision and 16 pages of final drafts. Expect frequent written exercises that will refine your expository and argumentative skills. Since research forms a crucial component of 1B and, presumably, your own field, we will find, evaluate, and integrate various types of sources into the essay writing process.
Required Texts
Jim Harrison, The Woman Lit by Fireflies
Lois-Ann Yamanaka, Blu?s Hanging
Frank Norris, McTeague
Shawn Wong, Homebase
Herman Melville, Typee
Leslie Marmon Silko, Ceremony
Diana Hacker, Rules for Writers
Course reader
Required Texts:
Norton Anthology of Poetry, 4th ed.
plus course reader
English R1B
Section: 7
Topic: TBA
Instructor: Leslie Walton
Time: MWF 1-2
Location: 204 Wheeler
No course description is available at this time.
English R1B
Section: 8
Topic: Poetic Visions
Instructor: Kimberly Tsau
Time: MWF 2-3
Location: 103 Wheeler
This course aims to help you with two of the more daunting aspects of the study of literature: 1) the understanding and interpretation of poetry; and 2) writing analytical papers. Designed as a college-level introduction to poetry, this course will help you overcome the difficulties of reading poetry by providing you with the tools necessary for critical analysis. We will focus on quality, not quantity, and will spend time thoroughly exploring individual pieces and developing your own arguments about them, which will help you with the second emphasis of the course, the writing. This is a highly-intensive writing course, so be prepared to write and rewrite, write and rewrite. We will devote class time each week to addressing specific writing needs and will work on developing argumentative and expository skills as well as refining analytic and research skills. You will find that honing these skills will prove invaluable and readily applicable outside the study of literature as they will enable you to think through and analyze complex issues and processes.
The selection of poetry is eclectic, as we will look at poetry from all over the world (America, Europe, the Caribbean, and Africa) produced in the 20th century. These poems are chosen thematically around issues of representation. Some questions we will ask are: how does poetry represent the world? How does poetry respond to social and political concerns? The first half of the course will focus on poetry from America and Europe in the early part of the 20th century, when poets experimented with sound, language, and form in innovative ways in response to the rapidly changing world around them. The second half of the course will focus on poetry from Africa and the Caribbean, where it played (and continues to play) a central role in the fight against colonialism and its aftermath. We will supplement the poetry with some short stories.
The Poem's Heartbeat : A Manual of Prosody, Alfred Corn
The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry, Third Edition, Eds. Richard Ellman, Robert O'Clair, Jahan Ramazani
Elements of Style, Strunk and White
Course Reader
English R1B
Section: 9
Topic: A Sense of Dissonance: Reading Inscrutable Poems
Instructor: Simon Huynh
Time: MWF 3-4
Location: 78 Barrows
Why is poetry so difficult and modern poetry downright inscrutable? We'll address that question first by familiarizing ourselves with the forms of poetic verse (from Shakesperean sonnets to free verse and even a few examples of non-rhythmic contemporary poetry) and then by considering directly the problem of difficulty. What generates it, and how does it function? As the semester progresses our texts will be less formally organized and less immediately sensible; practically, they will require alternative reading strategies. By the end of the course, the poems will be no less difficult, but we will have a better understanding of why difficulty in poetry matters.
As with R1A, the highest priority of this class is to improve student reading and writing, so weekly writing assignments will be required, as will projects involving student revision and peer editing. However, R1B has the added goal of developing research skills as well. To that end, you will complete an extensive research project on a topic of you choice in the later half of the semester. As per course requirement, completed student papers will total to at least 16 pages; this breaks down to three- and four-page close reading papers, plus a nine-page final research project with at least an equal number of pages of devoted to drat and revision.
Required Texts:
Norton Anthology of Poetry, 4th ed.
plus course reader
English R1B
Section: 10
Topic: Seeing the Future: Science Fiction and Society
Instructor: Monica Soare
Time: MWF 3-4
Location: 109 Wheeler
Leonard Cohen sings: "I've seen the future, brother: it is murder." The science fiction writers and filmmakers we will consider in this course make an equally bold statement about the future of society in order to draw attention to the very real problems in the present. We will start with The Parable of the Sower, and then travel back in time to the beginnings of modern science fiction. As we read and view our way through some classics of the genre, we will take up many questions--questions about human relations, morality and technology, the power of the individual, etc. And we will consider why science fiction is such a powerful means of social critique. This is a writing intensive course: you will be writing several essays of various lengths (from 3 to 10 pages) and revising these essays. The focus will be on developing ease in writing longer argumentative essays, on improving your research skills, and on learning how to incorporate research into your writing. We will discuss writing and research strategies throughout the semester, and we will use peer review extensively. Note: There will be film screenings outside of class. Attending these screenings is not mandatory, but seeing the films is, so they will also be available at the Media Center for you to view on your own.
English R1B
Section: 11
Topic: Things that Go Bump in the New World
Instructor: Lael Gold
Time: T Th 8-9:30
Location: 206 Dwinelle
The Strunk and White dictum to “omit needless words” will guide our work on writing. Students interested in crafting streamlined, energetic prose and prepared to peer edit and rewrite may find this class especially congenial. Along with prose composition, students will also receive instruction and practice in researching topics in the humanities. Besides assigned essays, requirements of the course include active participation in classroom and online discussion, regular attendance and a group presentation.
Thematically, this course invites consideration of literary and cinematic production of and related to the African and Asian diasporas. Of particular interest will be the representation of supernatural beliefs. What do these writings and films indicate about how this aspect of culture travels to a new homeland? How do artists of nonwestern heritage navigate the West’s rationalist bias, on the one hand, and its tendency to sentimentalize and exoticize, on the other? What space between internalization and rejection of these sentiments do these works inhabit? Our exploration of these negotiations will trace attitudes ranging from celebration and defiance to ambivalence and self-hatred. Supplementary works by white Western authors will raise questions regarding identity and literary categorization. And works by non-diasporic Asian and African authors will highlight how globalization and colonialism effect internal exiles of cultural rather than physical dislocation.
Likely reading and viewing list:
**NOTE: Students are requested not to buy texts for this course prior to the first class meeting.**
Lan Samantha Chang, Hunger
William Faulkner, "Pantaloon in Black" (in course reader)
Maxine Hong Kingston, The Woman Warrior
Kasi Lemmons, Eve’s Bayou (film)
Toni Morrison, Beloved
Han Ong, Fixer Chao
Mina Shum, Long Life, Happiness and Prosperity (film)
Amos Tutuola, The Palm-Wine Drinkard
English 1B
Section: 12
Topic: Modernism from the Margins
Instructor: Sarah Townsend
Time: T TH 8-9:30am
Location: 204 Wheeler
The title of this course may surprise you; it should. While several authors on this list come from socio-political perspectives which we consider marginal for their time (and perhaps still today)--colonial, feminist, African-American, homosexual--many of these authors seem to fit the White Anglo-Saxon Protestant "center." It is not the purpose of this course to reify these (or any) positions of centrality and marginality, but rather, to examine the importance of an idea of marginality to literary Modernism. How did Modernist authors conceive of themselves as peripheral, and what was their relationship to the literary and cultural center? The course will assume a provisional thesis that perceived revision to/struggle against a "center" is crucial to the Modernist project. Ultimately we will use our readings throughout the semester to assess the successes and failures of literary Modernism, particularly in light of the Postmodern critique of Modernism's alleged heterogeneity and complicity with the normative, hegemonic status-quo.
It is my hope that studying these challenging works will make us more critical writers and readers. The primary focus of this course is the development of your writing and research skills. Expect frequent reading responses, short essays, and a longer research essay. You will also be required to revise everything you write and to peer-edit the work of your classmates.
Required texts:
Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury
Ford, The Good Soldier
Forster, A Passage to India
Forster, Howard's End
Toomer, Cane
Woolf, To the Lighthouse
And a Course Reader.
English R1B
Section: 13
Topic: Going Troppo:
Travels, Landscapes, and Restless Natives
Instructor: Dr. Jenny L. White
Time: T Th 9:30-11
Location: 103 Wheeler
"Going troppo" is Australian slang for going crazy from being in the tropics too long--with the added sense that it means adopting a "primitive" lifestyle. As such, it conveys in one fell swoop the cluster of issues that we'll be considering over the course of the semester. To what degree does the past's blunt conflation of native peoples with their wild landscape survive in our contemporary dreams? How much do the encounters of the past between "modern" explorers and "native," "authentic" locals survive in our (post)modern forms of tourism and travel, or in our current forms of narrative? What power relations determine our notions of travel, landscape, and the foreign? How has imperialism been complicit in practices of travel, and how has (post)colonialism changed those practices? How have "natives" answered to the travel narratives that defined them as such?
Western empire has created, extended, and identified itself, in large part, by reinforcing difference, coded variously as civilized vs. savage, culture vs. nature, masculine vs. feminine, mobile vs. static, traveler vs. native, self vs. Other. The West defines itself over and against this "other," an "other" that has been encountered, explored, surveyed, and defined through travel. Expeditions of discovery and conquest were followed by expeditions in the name of science, all of which served to incorporate new areas into Western systems of power and representation. Whether the surveyor filling in the "blank" spaces on the map, the missionary, the biologist cataloguing flora and fauna, or the anthropologist, the Western traveler has embodied power, knowledge, and authority. The practices of travel and travel writing are not simply manifestations of this power, but constitutive of it.
At the same time, these journeys are characterized by contact, if not conflict, between the supposedly "civilized" traveler and the so-called "savage" landscapes and peoples through which he travels--contact that often threatens to undermine the ideological and cultural assumptions on which this difference is built, the threat of "going native." Travel both serves to define cultural difference and to blur it. It is a process of "transculturation" (in Mary Louise Pratt's terminology) that works both ways. Not only does it encompass the point of view of the traveler visiting foreign lands, but also the perspective of the inhabitants of those lands on whom travel and empire are visited.
Our reading list includes accounts and fictions of travel from the 19th century to the 21st; we will examine both how the difference between the traveler and the encountered landscape/people has been constructed historically and how those historical patterns are both recalled and twisted by contemporary authors.
We will stress close readings as a method of textual analysis, and revision and peer editing as part of an intensive focus on writing skills. Course requirements include regular participation in class discussions, peer editing and self-evaluation exercises, a weekly interactive (online) reading journal, and several papers (at least one of which will be a substantial revision, and one of which will require a research component).
Texts may include:
- Christopher Columbus, from The Four Voyages (journal, letters) *
- William Carlos Williams, from In the American Grain (poetic essay) *
- Wendy Rose, "It happened that we were gathering shellfish" (poem) *
- Carter Revard, "Report to the Nation: Claiming Europe" (short story) *
- Carlos Fuentes, from The Orange Tree (short stories) *
- Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness (novella)
- Montaigne, "Of Cannibals" (essay) *
- Mary Louise Pratt, from Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (theory/history) *
- Alexander von Humboldt, from Personal Narrative (travel narrative/scientific record) *
- Charles Darwin, from The Voyage of the "Beagle" (travel narrative/naturalist record) *
- Elizabeth Bishop, from The Complete Poems: 1927-1979 (poetry) *
- Michelle Cliff, from The Land of Look Behind (prose/poetry) *
- Sam Shepard, from Cruising Paradise (short stories) *
- Jim Jarmusch (dir.), Dead Man (film)
- Guillermo Gómez-Peña, from Warrior for Gringostroika and The New World Border (monologue and performance art) *
- Francis Ford Coppola (dir.), Apocalypse Now (film)
- Jessica Hagedorn, Jungle Dreams (novel)
(texts marked with * will be available in a course reader)
English R1B
Section: 14
Topic: Violence and Self-Determination
Instructor: Len von Morze
Time: TuTh 9:30-11:00
Location: 81 Evans
Writing from prison in 1963, Martin Luther King, Jr., identified what he saw as many white Americans' mechanical willingness to "live by a mythical concept of time" the insidious notion that a law of progress guides the unfolding of history, and sets a 'timetable' according to which various oppressed groups can expect their 'freedom.' This merely chronological view of time King went on to charge with ignoring the role of violence in history. In this course, we will be looking at some of the authors and historical actors of whom King may have been thinking when he made his radical and controversial claim. Reading mostly American Indian and African-American writers of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, we will ponder thorny issues of identity and self-determination, self-writing and the concept of a 'life,' critiques of violence and theories of history. The centerpiece will be Frank Webb's stunning examination of violence in Philadelphia, The Garies and Their Friends; but we will also consider works that treat settings closer to home, such as California history. Included in the course reader will be a few shorter autobiographical narratives, such as execution sermons.
Much attention will be paid in this class to practicing skills of critical reading. We will carefully distinguish observation and description from analysis and argument, and talk about how to move from one to the next. All students will be required to write several short essays, culminating in a longish research paper about one of these texts. The research paper will invite students to move beyond 'lit-crit' to consider other types of secondary sources. This final paper will be evaluated according to the strength of research and argument represented in it, as well as by the effort put into draft revisions.
Booklist:
Equiano, O.: Interesting Narrative
Douglass, F.: My Bondage and My Freedom
Ridge, H.R.: Joaquin Murieta
Webb, F.: The Garies and Their Friends
IMPORTANT NOTE: DO NOT PURCHASE COURSE TEXTS BEFORE THE FIRST DAY OF CLASS!
English R1B
Section: 15
Topic: Writing America
Instructor: Kristin Fujie
Time: T/TH 11-12:30
Location: 321 Haviland
The American historian Frederick Jackson Turner argued in 1893 that the United States was essentially born on the frontier, that it had forged its unique national, legislative, social, and intellectual identity upon the 'hither edge of free land.' To study the frontier, Turner argued, was to study the 'really American part of our history.' We'll start off the semester with Turner's now famous essay and then borrow the questions it raises as launch points for our own investigations: What is really American about America? What defines American character, American culture, American-ness? How does one study America? Where and with whom does its meaning lie? Turner approached these questions as an historian, but the topic of 'America' has inspired and vexed American poets, novelists, politicians, and scholars as well as individuals denied the status of American citizens, such as slaves and Native Americans. Our readings from these sources will be necessarily selective, and our goal not to settle the question of what defines 'America,' but rather to explore some of the different ways this country has been represented and theorized. While Turner located America on what he defined as the 'hither edge of free land,' other writers have found it elsewhere; in the immigrant communities of New York, in the 'borderlands' between the U.S. and Mexico, and even on a slave ship off the coast of Chile. These writers have depicted America as everything from an 'infant giant,' to a poem, to an open wound. They have cast the 'American' as a self-made man, a satyr, an individualist, and a traitor/spy. Your project for the semester will be to immerse yourself in this debate, and to discover therein something that interests, inspires, disturbs, tickles, infuriates or otherwise affects you sufficiently to make you want to find out more about it.
If you find the idea of research intimidating, don't despair!! Research will constitute one of our primary occupations in this class, but it will also constitute one of our central subjects; that is to say, we'll do research while also approaching it as something to be studied in its own right. What is research and why do we do it? Does research mean the same thing in different fields? (What, if anything, does a lab report have to do with an English essay?) Where does research happen? Is it a solitary or social activity? How do we distinguish between 'good' and 'bad' research? What's the point of writing a 'research paper'? These would not be true questions if their answers were foregone. We will sincerely explore this subject of research with the goal of gaining a clearer and more personal understanding of it by the end of the term. Students should bring an open mind and come prepared to work very hard and spend a lot of time in the library!
Writing Requirements: Students will complete weekly assignments targeting specific reading, writing and research skills, and apply these skills toward a final paper due at the end of the semester on a subject of their own choosing. While the research topic should incorporate themes and readings from the course, interdisciplinary projects which draw upon students? outside knowledge and interests will be very much encouraged.
Required Texts: Melville, Benito Cereno (Penguin Classics); F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (Simon and Schuster); Gloria Anzaldua, Borderlands (Aunt Lute Books, 2nd ed.,); Chang Rae-Lee, Native Speaker (Penguin Group, Inc.);
**A course reader including writings by Frederick Douglass, W.E.B. Du Bois, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Benjamin Franklin, Margaret Fuller, Washington Irving, Frederick Jackson Turner, Walt Whitman, and others.
English R1B
Section: 16
Topic: Autobiographical Narratives
Instructor: Erin Edwards
Time: T Th 11-12:30
Location: 103 Wheeler
"But was I I when I had no written word inside me."
Gertrude Stein, Everybody's Autobiography
This course examines both how historical, social, and familial forces impact on or form the self, and how the self can be represented, or formed, through the act of writing. Reading a range of autobiographies and memoirs, we will consider themes such as the reliability of memory, the process of retrospection and revision, the temporal disparity between the "I" who writes and the one whose past experience is recounted, and the generic differences and similarities between autobiography and the novel. What novelistic elements, such as character development, plot unity, or symbolism, does autobiography employ, and how do they bear upon the autobiography's claim to be truth?
In class discussions and in short essays, we will practice extensive close reading--considering rhetorical strategies of self-presentation, narrative inconsistencies, omissions, etc. The course will culminate in a longer essay that supports its argument with both such close reading and with theoretical, critical, or historical research.
Booklist:
Eggers, D.: A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Hacker, D.: Rules for Writers
Kingston, M. H.: The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts
Spiegelman, A.: Maus: A Survivor's Tale (parts I and II)
X, Malcolm: The Autobiography of Malcolm X: As Told to Alex Haley
Course Reader
English R1B
Section: 17
Topic: Laughter in the Long Eighteenth Century
Instructor: Amy Campion
Time: T Th 12:30-2
Location: 54 Barrows
The eighteenth century witnessed an outpouring of social satire, much of which is still funny today. We can see descendants of this literary humor in modern media examples such as John Stewart's "The Daily Show," the satirical online publication "The Onion," and television shows such as "Coupling" or "Curb Your Enthusiasm." The primary texts in this course will be a number of serio-comic works in various genres written between 1660 and 1820. We will also read excerpts from philosophical essays on humor, look at satirical graphic prints from the period, and view a modern film adaptation of one of the novels. And we will use these materials to entertain such questions as: what causes laughter? how does humor work? is humor timeless? what kinds of humor are historically bound? how does linguistic humor differ from dramatic or visual humor? is narrative a necessary part of the comic effect?
While you work on developing critical reading skills, you will also learn how to write concise and engaging analytical essays. Much of our time will be spent discussing the literature, but we will also devote part of each class to working on writing mechanics. Every week during class we will cover a different writing topic, including: taking notes while you read, close reading of poetry and prose, finding a paper topic, outlining, developing an argument, building paragraphs and transitions, and conducting research. These discussions will be supplemented with short exercises using The Random House Handbook and with a research-oriented class meeting in the library.
Students will be expected to write three 4-5-page essays, to write a longer research paper, and to participate in our in-class writing workshops. Three of the four papers, including the research paper, must be revised.
Required Texts: Henry Fielding, Tom Jones; Oliver Goldsmith, She Stoops to Conquer; Jane Austen, Emma; William Congreve, Love for Love; a course reader containing reproductions of engravings by William Hogarth, selections from Cervantes's Don Quixote and texts by Rochester, Jonathan Swift, Alexander Pope, Robert Burns, and Lord Byron.
Recommended Texts: The Random House Handbook
English R1B
Section: 18
Topic: TBA
Instructor: Janice Tanemura
Time: T Th 12:30-2
Location: 104 Barrows
No course description is available at this time.
English R1B
Section: 19
Topic: Poetry
Instructor: Vitaly Eyber
Time: TTh 2-3:30
Note New Location: 235 Dwinelle
Poetry and, to a lesser extent, poetic drama will be our main concern in this class. We will be reading some of the most famous and best loved poems in the language, as well as its greatest play, and talking about the ways they give their readers the experiences of poetic richness. It is the experience of poetry that is going to be our focus; we will concentrate not so much on what poems have to say as on the mental and emotional experiences that they give their readers. Poetic richness is a very broad term I am using to describe multiple harmonies of sound and meaning that constitute the aesthetics of poetry.
As we savor the works on the reading list, we will also consider them critically: we will ponder the ways such things as irony, ambiguity, paradox, to name a few, create rich layers of coherence and complexity that often escape the conscious attention of casual readers. Ultimately, we will be concerned with what it is that makes these works beautiful, and what impact they have upon the minds of their readers. In many ways this course is meant to be an accessible introduction to poetry. It will also provide you with a number of tools for critical observation that will come in handy with a variety of majors. We will spend about two thirds of the course reading short poems by Shakespeare, Marlowe, Donne, Marvel, Jonson, Herrick, a poem or two by Coleridge, Keats, Hardy, Tennyson, Houseman, and possibly a few others. The remaining time will be spent on Hamlet.
As far as the writing component of this course is concerned, its objective is to enable you to construct complex academic arguments based on clear thinking and sound research. The reading load of primary texts for this course is quite light. However, you will have to spend some time exploring secondary sources, first under my guidance and then on your own. For instance, when dealing with a certain poem, you may be asked to ground your account of it in the response of a given literary critic. When dealing with Hamlet, I will also ask you, among other things, to consider it in the light of one or two film adaptations of this play. You can expect some work with electronic sources, including online journal databases and the Oxford English Dictionary. I will assign three essays of progressive length (you will be able to revise two of them). You may expect some peer editing and group work as well.
Reading List:
William Shakespeare: Hamlet, Norton Critical Edition.
The Norton Anthology of Poetry, 5th edition.
MLA Handbook.
English R1B
Section: 20
Instructor: Suzanne Popkin
Topic: Too Terrible For Words: Trauma in Literature and History
Time: T Th 2-3:30
Location: 287 Dwinelle
Traumatic experiences are often intensely difficult to talk about. And yet, there is also often an intense compulsion to talk about them. Any glimpse of the news will testify to this impulse to report a traumatic story again and again. This course will look at three historical events that have deeply affected the American psyche: slavery, the Holocaust and 9/11. We will read literary, historical and journalistic texts relating to these three traumas.
In looking at these events, we will examine how narratives of trauma grapple with this paradox of wanting, but not wanting, to reveal horrifying events. We will look for the silences and the gaps in the stories we read. We will think about how language gets reshaped to both tell and hide the story. We will consider what outside forces are at work that make the story so tempting, and yet so difficult to tell. Secondly, we will examine how traumatic events become inscribed in history and journalism. Although we might like to think otherwise, historical and journalistic texts are also subject to this same paradox of wanting, and not wanting, to tell it all. Reading at the intersection of literature, history and journalism will allow us to see the gaps of each genre more vividly. What does the literature of trauma, deeply personal and haunted by shame, leave out? And what do the journalistic and historical texts, often attempting to be objective and distant, cover over? How is national identity forged on the boundaries of speakability? We will also reflect on the ethical burden of the post-witness the witness to the witness. How do we as students and as interlocutors respond?
This course will also pay considerable attention to developing your writing skills. In addition to a rigorous review of the nuts and bolts of argumentative and expository writing, we will consider how you as writers grapple with this paradox of writing about trauma. You will be assigned several short essays and one long research paper. For the research paper, you will be expected to study a particular literary work on trauma and its historical or journalistic context. You may choose to look at one of the events discussed in class, or another event not touched on in class.
Booklist:
Jacobs, H.: Incidents in the Life of A Slave Girl
Morrison, T.: Beloved
Ozick, C.: The Shawl
Spiegelman, A.: Maus and In the Shadow of No Towers
Wiesel, E.: The Night Trilogy
Safran Foer, J.: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
Oats, J.C.: "The Mutant"
Course reader to include historical and journalistic materials.
English R1B
Section: 21
Topic: Magical Realism
Instructor: Kelvin C. Black
Time: TTh 3:30PM-5PM
Location: 204 Wheeler
In this course we will explore the literary genre called magical realism; a genre which often challenges both our sense of the 'real' and the 'fantastic' by encouraging us to consider improbable juxtapositions and marvelous mixtures. Our explorations shall include, but will not be limited to, how magical realism as a genre seeks to come to new understandings of the past and to new appreciations of the possibilities of the present.
This course is 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, thesis development, and research methods. Additionally, systematic reasoning through close reading will be stressed both in class discussion and in the course?s various writing opportunities. This course fulfills the second half of the University Reading and Composition requirement.
Required Texts:
Alejo Carpentier, Kingdom of this World
Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses
Derek Walcott, Dream on Monkey Mountain
Jeanette Winterson, Sexing the Cherry
Virginia Woolf, Orlando
Supplementary Texts:
Joseph Gibaldi, MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers, Sixth Edition
Anne Stilman, Grammatically Correct
William Strunk Jr., E.B. White, Roger Angell, The Elements of Style
English R1B
Section: 22
Topic: TBA
Instructor: Matt Ritchie
Time: T Th 3:30-5
Location: 106 Wheeler
No course description is available at this time.
English R1B
Section: 23
Topic: TBA
Instructor: Slavica Naumovska
Time: T Th 3:30-5
Location: 79 Dwinelle
No course description is available at this time.
Last modified: Tuesday, 07-Feb-2006 10:34:34 PST