Upper-Division Courses, Part I
Fall 2008
ENGLISH MAJORS: The areas of concentration for each upper-division course are typed right above the book list for the class. In addition, please click on the Areas of Concentration for a list of all the courses that fall under each area of concentration, as well as a list of Fall 2008 courses that satisfy the pre-1800 requirement for the English major.
IMPORTANT NOTICE FOR MAJORS:
The English Department has changed its seminar requirement effective Fall 2008. Only one upper-division seminar--either English 100 OR English 150--will be required for the major. If you have already completed English 100 OR English 150 (or both), you have fulfilled the seminar requirement. As usual, English H195A-B, the Honors Seminar, fulfills the major seminar requirement. 12 courses are still required to complete the major.
100/1
Junior Seminar: Late 18th-Century British Literature
Murphy, Fiona
MW 1:30-3
305 Wheeler
Areas of Concentration: 1C, 2, 3
Book List: James Boswell/ Samuel Johnson: Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides/ Journey to the Western Isles of Scotland; Tobias Smollett: Humphry Clinker; Richard Brinsley Sheridan: School for Scandal; Mary Wollstonecraft: Letters From Sweden; Olaudah Equiano: Interesting Narrative; Mary Shelley: Frankenstein (optional)
Course Description: The theme of this course is the discourse of travel in later eighteenth-century British literature. In this, the period of the “grand tour,” developing ideas of cultural identity and national identity inflect travelers’ perceptions of both the foreign and the domestic, and vice versa. Readings include both the impressions of fictional travelers who venture abroad and within Britain itself, and also a selection of biographical accounts of such journeys. In addition, we will study issues surrounding the horror of travel in the eighteenth century, specifically focusing on the narrative of a former slave who recounts both his abduction and transportation from Africa and his eventual voyages as a free man. We will concentrate on these writers’ preoccupations with questions of what constitutes British-ness (or, in some cases, specifically English-ness or Scottish-ness), what the relationships are between the “civilized” and the “primitive,” and notions of human history and human progress. The culmination of the Senior Seminar in a 20-page research paper, and part of the focus of the class will be learning how to do literary research and integrate the opinions of others into our own, whether as supplement or counterpoint. There will also be a final exam.
This course satisfies the pre-1800 requirement for the English major.
Both junior and senior English majors and intended majors may enroll directly into this section of English 100.
100/2
Junior Seminar: Note new topic: Coercion and Reproduction (“birth,” “death,” “love,” and “family”) in modern Black Feminist Fiction .
JanMohamed, Abdul
Note new time: MW 12-1:30
Note new room: 301 Wheeler
Areas of Concentration: 1E, 2, 3, 4
Course Description: This course is premised on the notion that the threat of death (e.g. the threat of lynching) is the most fundamental mode of coercion and that oppressive social structures like slavery and Jim Crow society are grounded on the deployment of that threat. In order to function effectively, that threat must permeate the individual and the collective subject – the parent and child and the relationship between them that comes to constitute the “family.” Modern Black feminist fiction provides a remarkable retrospective meditation on the different ways in which such coercion permeates the process of reproduction, the structure of the family, and the structure of individual psyches as well as on the different ways in which such coercion can and must be resisted. This course will examine the “politics” and the meaning of birth, death, love, and family in the following texts: Nella Larsen, Quicksand and Passing; Alice Walker, The Third Life of Grange Copeland and The Color Purple; Gayl Jones, Corregidora; Toni Morrison, Beloved and A Mercy; Carolivia Herron, Thereafter Johnnie; Sherley Anne Williams, Dessa Rose; Octavia Butler, Kindred; Edwidge Danticat, The Farming of Bones.
Be sure to read the paragraph on
page 1 of this Announcement of Classes regarding enrollment in English 100!
100/3
Junior Seminar: Toni Morrison
JanMohamed, Abdul
MW 4-5:30
2070 Valley LSB
Areas of Concentration: 1E, 2, 3, 4
Book List: Morrison, T.: The Bluest Eye, Sula, Song of Solomon, Tar Baby, Beloved, Jazz, Paradise, Love, Playing in the Dark, A Mercy
Course Description:An examination of the development of various themes in Toni Morrison's fiction and the aesthetic rendition of these themes.
Be sure to read the paragraph on
page 1 of this Announcement of Classes regarding enrollment in English 100!
100/4
Junior Seminar
Children's Literature: Up Close and Personal
Wright, Katharine
MW 4-5:30
20 Wheeler
Course Description: Please email kwright@berkeley.edu for information regarding this course.
Be sure to read the paragraph on page 1 of this Announcement of Classes regarding enrollment in English 100!
100/5
Junior Seminar: Poe and Hawthorne
Tamarkin, Elisa
TTh 9:30-11
222 Wheeler
Areas of Concentration: 1D, 3
Book list: Emerson, R. W., Selected Essays; Poe, E. A., Selected Tales; Poe, E. A., The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym; Hawthorne, N., Selected Tales ; Hawthorne, N., The Scarlet Letter; Hawthorne, N., The Blithedale Romance; Hawthorne, N., The House of Seven Gables; a course reader with addition selections from Hawthorne and Poe and short pieces by P. T. Barnum, Herman Melville, Margaret Fuller, Harriet Prescott Spofford, Nat Turner, Catharine Beecher, and more.
Course Description: Close reading of works by Edgar Allan Poe and Nathaniel Hawthorne, considering questions of literary production, literary form and critical taste. We will examine both representative texts and lesser-known pieces (Hawthorne's stories for children, Poe's science fiction and journalism) in hopes of better understanding the full range of each author's attempts to represent, and make sense of, antebellum America. Topics for discussion include: changing definitions of the author and the intellectual; new mass-market genres of entertainment; the literary culture of democracy; the techniques of the gothic; the afterlife of Transcendentalism; the language of sectionalism and slavery; and the relationship between romance and history. Course assignments include two short essays and a final essay.
Be sure to read the paragraph on
page 1 of this Announcement of Classes regarding enrollment in English 100!
100/7
Junior Seminar: American Literature and the News
Nguyen, Marguerite
TTh 9:30-11
206 Wheeler
Areas of Concentration: 1E, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6
Book List : Bishop, Elizabeth: selected poetry; Bradley, David: The Chaneysville Incident; Bradshaw, Steve and Ben Loeterman: Rwanda: The Triumph of Evil; Clooney, George: Good Night and Good Luck; Dreiser, Theodore: “Maggie: A Girl of the Streets”; Hall, Stuart et al: “The Social Production of News”; Hurston, Zora Neale: Their Eyes Were Watching God; Lappe, Anthony and Dan Goldman: Shooting War; Morrison, Toni: Playing in the Dark; Yamada, Mitsuye: Camp Notes
Course Description: This course will explore the interconnections between American literature and the news throughout the 20 th-21 st centuries. We will read theoretical and primary texts to scrutinize how American writers, graphic novelists, and photojournalists affirm, dispute, or qualify the dominant modes of news reporting concurrent with their times. Understanding that news can be conceptualized in concrete ways yet contains no irreducible content, we will look at how notions of newsworthy materials and the forms used to represent them shift in relation to socio-political conditions as well as the strictures of genre, and how inequalities of race, gender, and class organize what gets to be reported and how. The class will end with a consideration of the pressures and possibilities that globalization and border-crossing technologies bear to a nuanced and ethical treatment of news, whether moments of war and transnational migration or the conditions of local, everyday life. Assignments include a research paper and presentation.
Be sure to read the paragraph on page 1 of this Announcement of Classes regarding enrollment in English 100!
100/8
Junior Seminar: Caribbean Literature
Premnath, Gautam
Note new time: M 3-6
Note new location: 305 Wheeler
Areas of Concentration: 1E, 2
Probable Booklist: McKay, C: Banana Bottom; Selvon, S: A Brighter Sun; Naipaul, V.S: A House for Mr. Biswas; Rhys, J: Wide Sargasso Sea; James, C.L.R: Beyond a Boundary; Collins, M: Angel; Levy, Andrea: Small Island; and a substantial course reader.
Course Description: In 1955 the leading Caribbean intellectual and political leader Eric Williams characterized the new writing coming out of the region as “a literature of poverty, oppression, ignorance, violence, sex, and racial friction.” From such inauspicious beginnings has emerged one of the most distinctive, inventive, and influential bodies of twentieth-century writing. This course will serve as an introduction to the literature of the Anglophone Caribbean, broaching the great diversity of work it encompasses while inquiring into the factors that unify it. Organizing themes of our discussion will include: the living memory of the past; the imaginative recovery of experiences of slavery, indentureship, and colonialism; continuities and discontinuities between literary and political movements; and literature’s relationship to oral culture. Our booklist emphasizes prose narrative, but we will also read widely in poetry and pay some attention to drama, film, visual art, and popular music. We may also read some work translated from other linguistic traditions. Requirements for the course include two shorter papers, guided research assignments, and a term paper of 10-12 pages.
Be sure to read the paragraph on page 1 of this Announcement of Classes regarding enrollment in English 100!
100/9
Junior Seminar:
Immigrant Narratives:
Migration, Nation, Empire
Fajardo, Margaret
TTh 12:30-2
101 Wheeler
Areas of Concentration: 1E, 2, 3
Tentative book list: C. Bulosan, America is in the Heart; E. Danticat, Breath, Eyes, Memory; t. lê, The Gangster We’re All Looking For; A. Phan, We Should Never Meet; B. N. Santos, The Scent of Apples; P. Thomas, Down these Mean Streets; H. Tobar, The Tattooed Soldier
Course Description: This course examines the relationship between imperialism and migration through literary texts. We will look at notions of space, the homeland, and belonging. We will also pay attention to the way in which authors engage with U.S. imperial history.
Be sure to read the paragraph on
page 1 of this Announcement of Classes regarding enrollment in English 100!
100/10
Junior Seminar:
Literature of California and the West Up to World War I
Starr, George
TTh 2-3:30
221 Wheeler
Areas of Concentration: 1D or 1E, 3, 6
Book List (works marked with an asterisk, or selections from them, will be available online or in a course reader) *Dana, Richard H., Two Years before the Mast; *Vallejo, Mariano G., et al., Mexican California/Gold Rush Narratives; *Farnham, Eliza, California, in-doors and out; *Harte, Bret, Stories and Sketches; *Browne, J. Ross, A Peep at Washoe/Washoe Revisited; *Ridge, John. R., Life and Adventures of Joaquin Murieta; *King, Clarence, Mountaineering in the Sierra Nevada;
*Stevenson, Robert L., The Silverado Squatters; *Muir, John, The Mountains of California; Clemens, Samuel C. [Mark Twain], Roughing It: U C Press, ISBN 978-0-520-23892-3; Ruiz de Burton, Maria A., The Squatter and the Don: Random House, ISBN 978-0-8129-7289-4; Jackson, Helen H., Ramona: Penguin, ISBN 978-0-451-52842-1; Norris, Frank, The Octopus: Dover, ISBN 978-0-486-43212-0; Austin, Mary, The Land of Little Rain: Random House, ISBN 978-0-8129-6852-1.
Course Description: Besides reading and discussing fiction and poetry with Western settings, and essays attempting to identify or explain distinctive regional characteristics, this course will include consideration of some movies shaped by and shaping conceptions of California . Writing will consist of a term paper of 16-20 pages. Depending on enrollment, each student will be responsible for organizing and leading class discussion (probably teamed with another student) once during the semester. There will be no quizzes or exams, but seminar attendance and participation will be expected, and will affect grades.
Be sure to read the paragraph on
page 1 of this Announcement of Classes regarding enrollment in English 100!
100/11
Junior Seminar: Henry James and Edith Wharton
Goble, Mark
TTh 2-3:30
224 Wheeler
Areas of Concentration: 1D or 1E, 3, 4
Book list: James, H., Daisy Miller; James, H., The Portrait of a Lady; James, H., “The Turn of the Screw”; James, H., “The Aspern Papers”; James, H., What Maisie Knew; James, H., Selected Tales; Wharton, E., The House of Mirth; Wharton, E., Ethan Frome; Wharton, E., Summer; Wharton, E., The Custom of the Country; Wharton, E., The Age of Innocence.
Course Description: This course considers major texts by Henry James and Edith Wharton in light of their shared fascination with marriage, manners, and extravagant wealth. Our readings will survey the shape of each author’s career, beginning with some of James’s earlier and more popular texts and moving on to later works that demonstrate his stylistic and thematic development. The second half of the course will focus on Wharton. We will read several of her best-known novels, as well as some lesser-known works and short fiction which explore dimensions of her career that complicate her image as the elite chronicler of “Old New York.” We will be especially interested in the ways each author investigates the world of manners, courtship, and sophisticated sociability in order to understand better the violence, sexuality, and even brutality that this tries desperately to channel and contain. We will also discuss how James and Wharton can help us understand historical relations between literary realism and depictions of modernity, between gender, sexuality, and professional authorship, and between nationality and cosmopolitanism at the turn of the twentieth century.
Be sure to read the paragraph on
page 1 of this Announcement of Classes regarding enrollment in English 100!
100/12
Junior Seminar: "The Parasite" - Dyads in Modern and Postmodern Literature
Clowes, Erika
TTh 2-3:30
101 Wheeler
Areas of Concentration: 1E, 3, 4, 5
Book List: Beckett, Samuel: How It Is; Endgame; Conrad, Joseph: The Secret Sharer; McCarthy, Cormac: The Road; Nabokov, Vladimir: Pale Fire; Norris, Frank: McTeague; and a selection of critical essays from Alain Badiou, Sigmund Freud, René Girard, Jacques Lacan, Eve Sedgwick, Slavoj Zizek and others.
Film screenings: Hitchcock, Alfred: Strangers on a Train; Scorsese, Martin: The King of Comedy; Polanski, Roman: Knife in the Water; Selected shorts (Laurel & Hardy, etc.)
Course description: Jacques Lacan has said that “the first object of desire is to be recognized by the other.” The subject does not desire autonomously; who he is and what he wants are the by-products of a social relation. In this course, we will focus on perverse manifestations of desire, in which the protagonist’s inextricable bond with the other is aggressive and parasitic . . . not just symbiotic or mutually constitutive. How does this perverse relation reflect the dominant concerns of the modern and postmodern eras about the status of the subject? How does it affect the subject’s engagement with sexuality, creativity, agency, authority? How does the dyad work as a literary device to yield information about the protagonist’s interior? Our observation of the “parasite” dynamic will allow us to apply critical theories of subjectivity and desire to various narrative forms, and in turn, to use fictional constructions in narrative to inform and modify the theoretical conception of the constructed subject.
Be sure to read the paragraph on page 1 of this Announcement of Classes regarding enrollment in English 100!
100/13
This class has been canceled
105
Anglo-Saxon England
O’Brien O’Keeffe, Katherine
MW 10:30-12
300 Wheeler
Areas of Concentration: 1A, 7
Book List: Bede, Ecclesiastical History of the English People; Campbell, J., ed., The Anglo-Saxons; Crossley-Holland, K., ed., The Anglo-Saxon World; Liuzza, Roy, ed. and trans., Beowulf; Keynes, S. and Lapidge, M., eds., Alfred the Great; Webb, J. F. and Farmer, D. H., eds., The Age of Bede; Additional readings on electronic reserve
Course Description: Who were the Angelcynn? What were the English like before they were “English”?
The name “Anglo-Saxon England” is a relatively modern term to designate peoples and kingdoms that, across several centuries before the Norman Conquest, knew themselves by various other names. The names “England,” “English,” and “Anglo-Saxon” are thus terms that mark a history of contest over lands and identities and a narrative about modern England.
In this course we will read a wide range of texts from Anglo-Saxon England in order to explore both the writings and the intellectual world of the Angelcynn (a.k.a. Angli) and the ways in which they came to know themselves as “English” (Englisc). Our texts will include chronicle and history, epic and elegy, saints’ lives and riddles, and samplings of the curious (recipes, charms, prognostications). We will consider the role of writing itself as a new technology in England , and discuss how that new technology changed both history and culture. Course materials will include visual images, both of manuscript pages and of artifacts — ornaments, weapons, grave goods. We will ask ourselves what such object s reveal about the culture that created them and think through the relationship between visual images and written text . Certain historical events will be very important to us. The invasion of England by Viking marauders and the Viking colonization of the land had profound effects on English culture. So did the Christianization of the Anglo-Saxons, an ongoing process throughout the period. Co-existing uneasily with Christianity was the heroic culture of the Anglo-Saxons, the world of warriors and battle, weapons and armor. We will explore what it meant to be a hero in the Anglo-Saxon world, and ask ourselves if being a hero and being a Christian at the same time was possible. Women in Anglo-Saxon England weren’t just “cup-bearers” and “peace-weavers,” though it might seem that way in heroic narratives. The lives of female saints were often constructed using a heroic model, and women played other important roles in English culture as well.
If you are interested in Old English poetry, we will be spending a large part of the semester reading Beowulf and other Old English poems. We will compare translations, examine the original, and experiment with the Old English alliterative mode. You will hear Old English read aloud, and have the chance to read it aloud yourself.
As part of our explorations, we will investigate the ways writing as a technology impacted their culture and will use various artifacts (for example, images of manuscript pages and their illustrations, ornaments, weapons, grave goods) to help visualize their world. We will interrogate claims about Christianity and paganism and the ways in which these ideas were deployed in constructing identity and in defending against colonization by Viking marauders. We will explore notions of gender, and the ways in which constructions of the heroic found its ways into lives of saints, both male and female And we will have the opportunity to experiment with Old English poetry as it looked and as it sounded.
No prior knowledge of Old English or of Anglo-Saxon history is required; all texts will be in translation.
This course satisfies the pre-1800 requirement for the English major.
110
Medieval Literature
Miller, Jennifer
TTh 9:30-11
20 Barrows
Areas of Concentration: 1A, 7
Course Description: Please email j_miller@berkeley.edu for information regarding this course.
This course satisfies the pre-1800 requirement for the English major.
111
Chaucer
Justice, Steven
MW 5-6:30
155 Kroeber
Areas of Concentration: 1A, 7
Book List: Chaucer, G. Canterbury Tales (ed. Mann); Chaucer, G. Troilus and Criseyde (ed. Barney)
Course Description: This course will concentrate on Chaucer’s two greatest works, the Troilus and Criseyde and the Canterbury Tales, glancing more quickly at other bits of his oeuvre and at pieces of the literary tradition he assembled from Latin, French, and Italian sources. Chaucer readings will of course be in Middle English; we will give some brief attention at the beginning of the semester to properties of the language, and occasional quizzes will check on the students’ mastery of it.
This course satisfies the pre-1800 requirement for the English major.
114B
English Drama from 1603 to 1700
Landreth, David
TTh 3:30-5
170 Barrows
Areas of Concentration: 1B, 3
Book List: Beaumont, Francis. The Knight of the Burning Pestle. Jonson, Ben. Ben Jonson's Plays and Masques. Middleton, Thomas. Five Plays. Middleton and Dekker. The Roaring Girl. Shakespeare, William. Hamlet. Webster, John. The Duchess of Malfi.
Course Description: The English theater was the first mass medium, an avowedly commercial, hyper-competitive, fad-driven industry of sound and spectacle, which both catered to and ruthlessly parodied the sophisticated, novelty-craving consumerism of the seventeeth century’s greatest boom-town: the sprawling, incomprehensible, luxurious, grotesque metropolis of London. The brilliance of the Jacobean drama displays itself in the players' drive to go over the top, to push past the limits of realism (and to surpass their competitors’ plays) into the experiences of satire and sensation, in order to represent to their audiences the strangeness of their own city and society. The rapid transformations of urban form, of social status, and of luxury consumption continually remade the lived spaces of London and of its theaters into new shapes of both intimate sensual delight and alien sensual decadence, at once more and less than real.
This course satisfies the pre-1800 requirement for the English major.
115A
The English Renaissance (through the 16th Century)
Booth, Stephen
TTh 2-3:30
534 Davis
Areas of Concentration: 1B, 3
Book List (I advise against buying books for 115A until after the first class meeting): Shakespeare's narrative poems (use EITHER The Poems, eds. D. Bevington et al. [Bantam Books] OR The Narrative Poems, ed. J. Crewe [Penguin] OR one of the one-volume complete Shakespeares assigned in 117J or 117S or 117A or 117B); Marlowe's Hero and Leander (use EITHER Complete Poems and Translations, ed. S. Orgel [Penguin] OR The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol. I, eds. Abrams et al. OR The Norton Anthology of Poetry, eds. Ferguson et al.); Spenser's Faerie Queene (use EITHER The Faerie Queene, ed. T. Roche [Penguin] OR any other annotated, post-1970 edition of the whole poem)
Course Description: This will be a survey course, but a highly selective one. Although I plan to look at the best and/or most interesting work of several lesser sixteenth-century writers--for instance, some lyrics by Wyatt and some by Sidney, and Surrey's blank verse--I mean to give over the bulk of class time on the verse of Spenser, Marlowe, and Shakespeare, particularly their narrative verse.
I think I can teach you more about the sixteenth-century works I don't discuss in class by looking in detail at a few works than I could by scurrying through a handful of anthologies or by generalizing at length about either the particular qualities of particular authors or schools or by focusing on the particular qualities that characterize the culture that sixteenth-century literature reflects. I'm not good at categorizing, and I deeply mistrust categorization as an intellectual tool.
Three papers, each of a length determined by how much you have to say and how efficient you are in saying it. The third paper will take the place of a final examination and will be due in my box in 322 Wheeler Hall any time between the last class meeting and 3:30 p.m. on the day assigned this course for a final exam.
This course satisfies the pre-1800 requirement for the English major.
117A
The Elizabethan Shakespeare
Altman, Joel
TTh 2-3:30
390 Hearst Mining
Areas of Concentration: 1B, 3
Book List: Stephen Greenblatt, ed., The Norton Shakespeare
Course Description: In this course, we’re going to trace the development of Shakespeare’s dramatic work over the first half of his career, as he became the premier playwright of London’s leading stage company. We’ll also read many of his sonnets, which are related thematically and psychologically to the plays, offering glimpses of the writer as friend, lover, poet, and actor. Shakespeare’s plays were written to be performed, not simply read, so we’ll approach them with their performative aspects ever in sight. Studying the texts closely, we’ll observe diction and speech patterns, theme, character, motive, and movement--imaginatively transferring the words on the page into space, sound, and action. We’ll screen and critique scenes from filmed stage performances and movie versions, and see a live performance at the nearby California Shakespeare Festival. At least one week will be devoted to each play so that we can analyze and discuss different interpretive possibilities. There will be two midterms, two papers, and a final exam.
117S
Shakespeare
Knapp, Jeffrey
Note new time: TTh 3:30-5
Note new location: 10 Evans
Areas of Concentration: 1B, 3
Book List: Required - Shakespeare, W.: The Riverside Shakespeare (2nd ed.); Recommended - Gurr, A.: The Shakespearean Stage, 1574-1642 (3rd ed.) Cambridge University Press (ISBN 052142240X); Greenblatt, S.: Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare Norton (ISBN 039332737X)
Course Description: This course is designed to give you a sense of the range of Shakespeare’s career. Lectures will focus on two related topics: first, how Shakespeare uses plot and character to think about literary, social, sexual, religious, political, and philosophical issues; and second, how Shakespeare justifies his life in the theater, when much of English society regarded the theater as a frivolous, debased, and vaguely criminal institution.
119
The Augustan Age
Turner, James
TTh 2-3:30
101 Wurster
Area of Concentration: 1C
Book List: The Norton Anthology of English Literature, 8th edition, Volume C, The Restoration and the Eighteenth Century; Wycherley, W.: The Country Wife
Course Description: The period from the "Restoration" of Charles II (1660) to the death of Alexander Pope (1744) produced the last poems of Milton, the first English pornography and feminist polemic, the most devastating satires ever written, some of the most influential novels, the most amusing comedies, and the most outrageous obscenity. London (already the largest city in the world) burned to the ground -we will begin the course by reading contemporary accounts of this catastrophe -but within a few generations had developed all the benefits of modern civilization: a stock market, a scientific revolution, an insurance industry, a colonial empire based on slavery. This course will try to convey not only the abundance and brilliance of this period, but its contrasts and contradictions. Canonical figures like Milton, Hobbes, Dryden, Congreve, Pope and Swift will be juxtaposed to scandalous and/or marginal authors: women writers like Aphra Behn, Mary Astell and Mary Wortley Montagu, Puritan outlaws like John Bunyan, and renegade aristocrats like the Earl of Rochester. This stylish but realistic literature tackles fundamental questions: How can a culture restore its self-confidence after a devastating civil war? Is the success of society incompatible with morality? Does reason help us to lead a better life, or is it a cruel delusion? How can men and women live together in a civilized world? What resourses are available for those who are excluded from this "civilization," especially the enslaved and the colonized? Is this "the best of all possible worlds"? If not, are irony and humor absolutely necessary to make existence bearable? Are babies tastier roasted or boiled?
Most of our readings come from the Norton Anthology, plus Wycherley's sex-farce The Country Wife.
The class will be a mixture of informal lectures and class discussions, normally on questions already assigned during the previous class; you should come prepared to participate as fully as possible, and I may sometimes give out small written assignments to help you prepare. You will be graded on class participation, the occasional quiz, a short essay (7-10 pages) due about mid term, and a final examination that will include passages to identify and another written essay.
This course satisfies the pre-1800 requirement for the English major.
127
Modern Poetry
Blanton, Dan
Lectures MW 1-2, New Room: 60 Evans, plus discussion sections F 1-2
Areas of Concentration: 1E, 3
Book List: Auden, W. Selected Poems; Eliot, T., Four Quartets; Selected Poems; Moore, M., Collected Poems; Pound, E., A Draft of XXX Cantos; Stein, G., Tender Buttons; Stevens, W., Collected Poems; Williams, W., Paterson; Yeats, W., Collected Poems
Course Description: A survey of the modernist turn in poetry. This course will explore some of the more remarkable (and occasionally notorious) formal experiments of the twentieth century’s turbulent first half. We will contend with work from Britain, Ireland, and the United States, seeking to devise strategies with which to read texts that often seem impervious to reading and striving to account for the historical pressures that made such experiments seem necessary in the first place.
130A
American Literature: Before 1800
Tamarkin, Elisa
TTh 2-3:30
200 Wheeler
Areas of Concentration: 1C, 2, 4
Course Description: A survey of English-language American literature to 1800. We will examine a wide range of texts from narratives of discovery and exploration through the literature of the American Revolution and the formations of an early national culture. Topics to be discussed include the role of Puritanism in American society, ethnic difference and the experience of the frontier, evangelism and secularism, the social makings of the new republic, the rise of the novel in America, and the literary place of women and slaves. Readings will also look at the language of rights and representation within a public culture that staged encounters between rational thinking and sentimental feeling, between neoclassical models and romantic expression, and between the will to independence and the respect for history. Authors include William Bradford, John Winthrop, Anne Bradstreet, Mary Rowlandson, Cotton Mather, Samuel Sewell, Jonathan Edwards, Benjamin Franklin, Phillis Wheatley, Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Paine, Olaudah Equiano, J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur, Hannah Foster, and Charles Brockden Brown.
This course satisfies the pre-1800 requirement for the English major.
130B
American Literature: 1800-1865
Beam, Dorri
TTh 11-12:30
New Room: 123 Wheeler
Areas of Concentration: 1D,2
Book List: Lauter, The Heath Anthology of American Literature; Turner, The Confessions of Nat Turner; Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin; Hawthorne, The Blithedale Romance; Spofford, The Amber Gods and Other Stories.
Course Description: This class moves from the early national period to the Civil War and surveys the oral and written histories, autobiographies, novels, stories, private letters, public appeals, speeches, and poems of this age of reform, romance, and rebellion. We will examine the literature of this period as a product of contact, exchange, and conflict across the nation’s changing external borders and across its increasingly pressured internal divides. We’ll examine the formal strategies involved in declarations of freedom and appeals to reform, in the visions and prophecies that inundate the period, in presentations of the weird and of the familiar, in print and oral expression, in irony and sentiment, and in exhortations to self-reliance and narratives of slavery. Authors studied include Fuller, Emerson, Thoreau, Poe, Spofford, Hawthorne, Melville, Stowe, Douglass, Jacobs, Turner, Walker, Stewart, Apess, Fern, Osgood, Sigourney, Longfellow, Whittier, Whitman, and Dickinson.
130C
American Literature: 1865-1900
Wagner, Bryan
MWF 10-11
56 Barrows
Areas of Concentration: 1D, 2, 4
Book List: Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin; Rebecca Harding Davis, Life in the Iron-Mills; Emily Dickinson, Complete Poems; Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn; William Dean Howells, A Hazard of New Fortunes; Kate Chopin, The Awakening; Theodore Dreiser, Sister Carrie. There will also be a course reader with poetry, short stories, and journalism by Walt Whitman, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Charles Chesnutt, Frederick Jackson Turner, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Sui Sin Far, Andrew Carnegie, Frances E. W. Harper, Henry James, Sarah Orne Jewett, Horatio Alger, Booker T. Washington, Stephen Crane, Hamlin Garland, and Woodrow Wilson.
Course Description: A survey in United States literature from the Civil War to the beginning of the twentieth century. Course requirements include weekly reading responses, two essays, one midterm, and one final exam.
130D
American Literature: 1900-1945
Best, Stephen
MWF 2-3
213 Wheeler
Areas of Concentration: 1E, 3
Book list: Chesnutt, C.: The Conjure Woman; Dreiser, T.: Sister Carrie; Faulkner. W.: The Sound and the Fury; Fitzgerald, F.: The Great Gatsby; James, H.: The Portrait of a Lady; Johnson, J.: The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man; Norris, F.: McTeague; Ellison, R.: Invisible Man
Course description: This course will survey a range of significant works of American literature from the first half of the twentieth century, paying particular attention to literary form and technique –- to formal innovation and style -- as responses to the experience of “modernity.” My lectures will focus on questions of freedom and constraint, desire and drive, anomie and loss. Requirements will include two midterm take-home exams and a final.
133A
African American Literature and Culture Before 1917
Wagner, Bryan
MWF 2-3
206 Wheeler
Areas of Concentration: 1D, 2, 6
Book List: Olaudah Equiano, The Interesting Narrative and Other Writings; David Walker, Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World; Frederick Douglass: The Narrative of the Life; Harriet Wilson, Our Nig; Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl; Frances E. W. Harper, Iola Leroy; Charles Chesnutt, The Marrow of Tradition; W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk; James Weldon Johnson, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man. There will also be a course reader with short works by Lucy Terry, Phillis Wheatley, Nat Turner, Maria Stewart, Sojourner Truth, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Booker T. Washington, and Pauline Hopkins.
Course Description: A survey of major African American writers in the context of slavery and its immediate aftermath. There will be weekly writing, a midterm, two essays, and a final exam.
C136
Topics In American Studies:
American Literature and the City
Otter, Sam and Henkin, David
Lectures TTh 12:30-2 in 390 Hearst Mining, plus one hour of discussion section per week (sec. 101: W 3-4; sec. 102: W 4-5; sec. 103: T 3-4; sec. 104: T 4--5; sec. 105: W 12-1; sec. 106: Th 9-10)
This course is cross-listed with American Studies C111E Sec. 1 and History 100 Sec.1.
Areas of Concentration: 1D or 1E, 3
Book List: Child, L. : Letters from New York
Foster, G.: New York By Gaslight
Lippard, G.: Quaker City
Thompson, G.: Venus in Boston
Webb, F.: Garies and Their Friends
Riis, J.: How the Other Half Lives
Addams, J.: Twenty Years at Hull-House
Levy, 920 O'Farrell Street
Norris, F.: McTeague
Johnson, J.: Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man
Hammett, D.: Maltese Falcon
Chandler, R.: Big Sleep
West, N.: Day of the Locust
Dick, P.: Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
Delany, S.: Times Square Red, Times Square Blue
Course Description: Co-taught by a literary scholar and a historian, this course offers an interdisciplinary examination of how the American metropolis has been portrayed in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in novels, short stories, poetry, journalism, essays, photography, and film. We will pay special attention to texts and images of New York, but we also will devote significant attention to four other cities (Philadelphia, Chicago, San Francisco, and Los Angeles) in different periods of American urban history. There will be two midterms and one final examination. All examinations will include both in-class and take-home components.
143A/1
Short Fiction
Mukherjee, Bharati (a.k.a. Blaise, Bharati)
TTh 11-12:30
301 Wheeler
Areas of Concentration: None
Texts: (eds. R.V. Cassill & Joyce Carol Oates): The Norton Anthology of Contemporary Fiction; Mukherjee, B: The Middleman & Other Stories
Course Description: This is a course on the form, theory and practice of short fiction. Students are required to fulfill assignments on specific aspects of craft, analyze aesthetic strategies in selected stories by published authors, and to write approximately 45 pages of original fiction.
To be considered for admission to this class, please submit 10 photocopied pages of your fiction writing, along with an application form, to Professor Mukherjee’s mailbox in 322 Wheeler, BY 4:00 P.M., Tuesday, April 22, AT THE LATEST.
Be sure to read the paragraph concerning creative writing courses on page 2 of this Announcement of Classes for further information regarding enrollment in such courses!
143A/2
Short Fiction
Blaise, Clark
TTh 12:30-2
305 Wheeler
Areas of Concentration: None
Course Description: A short fiction workshop, with accompanying readings from a
contemporary anthology. Typically, workshops are free-wheeling explorations of form, style and content and this one will be no different. Course demands: depending upon the final size of the class, a minimal expectation of 3-4 stories, full participation, written critiques returned to the authors. There will of course be hectoring asides from the leader on structure, pacing, sequencing, scene and narration. The watchword for this course: energy—how to generate it, how to capture it, how to use it.
To be considered for admission to this class, please submit photocopies of 10 pages of your fiction writing, along with an application form, to Professor Blaise’s mailbox in 322 Wheeler, BY 4:00 P.M., Tuesday, April 22, AT THE LATEST.
Be sure to read the paragraph concerning creative writing courses on page 2 of this Announcement of Classes for further information regarding enrollment in such courses!
143A/3
Short Fiction
Kleege, Georgina
TTh 2-3:30
301 Wheeler
Areas of Concentration: None
Book List: Ford, R.: The New Granta Book of the American Short Story.
Course Description: This class will be conducted as a writing workshop where students will submit and discuss their own short fiction. We will also closely examine the work of published writers. Students will complete 3 short writing assignments approximately 40 pages of new fiction, and one-page critiques of classmates’ work.
To be considered for admission in this course, please submit 10 photocopied pages of your fiction writing, along with an application form, to Professor Kleege’s mailbox in 322 Wheeler BY 4:00 P.M. TUESDAY, April 22 AT THE LATEST.
Be sure to read the paragraph concerning creative writing courses on page 2 of this Announcement of Classes for further information regarding enrollment in such courses.
143B/1
Verse
Hejinian, Lyn
MW 4-5:30
301 Wheeler
Areas of Concentration: None
Book List: A course reader
Please note: This version of English 143B will be tied in with Prof. Charles Altieri’s English 45C/1 class; for entrance into this 143B class, students must be enrolled in (or, under special circumstances, auditing) that 45C class. This 143b/45c connection is intended to encourage critical rigor in poetry and creative thinking in criticism.
Please note that if you are selected for admittance to this 143B section, but have not enrolled yourself into Professor Altieri's 45C/1 by the time fall classes begin, your place in this 143B may be given to someone else.
To be considered for admission to this class, please submit 5 photocopied pages of your poems, along with an application form, to Professor Hejinian ’s mailbox in 322 Wheeler, BY 4:00 P.M., Tuesday, April 22, AT THE LATEST.
Be sure to read the paragraph concerning creative writing courses on page 2 of this Announcement of Classes for further information regarding enrollment in such courses!
143B/2
Verse
Shoptaw, John
TTh 11-12:30
305 Wheeler
Areas of Concentration: None
Course Description: Please email jshoptaw@berkeley.edu for more information regarding this course.
To be considered for admission to this class, please submit 5 photocopied pages of your poems, along with an application form, to Professor Shoptaw's mailbox in 322 Wheeler, BY 4:00 P.M., Tuesday, April 22, AT THE LATEST.
Be sure to read the paragraph concerning creative writing courses on page 2 of this Announcement of Classes for further information regarding enrollment in such courses.
143B/3
This class has been canceled
143N
Mukherjee, Bharati (aka Blaise, Bharati)
Prose Nonfiction
TTh 2-3:30
305 Wheeler
Areas of Concentration: None
Text: (ed. Atwan, R): The Best American Essays
Course Description: This course concentrates on the practice of creative non-fiction, particularly on the writing of the personal essay. Students are expected to fulfill specific assignments and to write approximately 45 pages of original non-fictional narrative.
To be considered for admission to this course, please submit 10 photocopied pages of your creative non-fiction, along with an application form, to Professor Mukherjee’s mailbox in 322 Wheeler, BY 4:00 P.M., Tuesday, April 22, AT THE LATEST.
Be sure to read the paragraph concerning creative writing courses on page 2 of this Announcement of Classes for further information regarding enrollment in such courses!
143T
Poetry Translation Workshop
Hass, Robert
TTh 9:30-11
301 Wheeler
Areas of Concentration: None
Book List: Course Reader
Course Description: The purpose of the class is to give students a chance to work on verse translation, to share translations and give and receive feedback on their work, to read about the theory and practice of translation, and perhaps to try out different practices and techniques. Participants must have some competence in a language they want to translate from and develop a project in that language. For each workshop students will provide original texts, word-for-word versions, and a draft of a translation which the class can then discuss. It makes for an interesting way to study poetry and verse technique—to see how one goes about making poetry in one language come alive in another.
Admission will be by permission of the instructor, based on (1) three pages of your own translations of poems into English, as well as the corresponding pages in the original language, (2) a one-paragraph statement of your interest in translation, and (3) an application form; all of the above is to be submitted to Professor Hass’s mailbox in 322 Wheeler, BY 4:00 P.M., TUESDAY, APRIL 22, AT THE LATEST.
Be sure to read the paragraph concerning creative writing courses on page 2 of this Announcement of Classes for further information regarding enrollment in such courses!
C143V
This class has been canceled
Last modified: August 22, 2008