Upper-Division Courses, Part II
Fall 2008
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.
150/1
Senior Seminar: James Joyce
Bishop, John
MWF 11-12
223 Wheeler
Areas of Concentration: 1E, 3
Book List: Ellmann, R.: James Joyce; Joyce, J.: Dubliners; Joyce, J.: Finnegans Wake; Joyce, J.: Occasional, Critical, and Political Writing; Joyce, J.: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: Text & Criticism; Joyce, J.: Ulysses
Recommended: Blamires, H.: The New Bloomsday Book: A Guide through Ulysses; Budgen, F.: James Joyce and the Making of 'Ulysses'; Gifford, D.:Ulysses Annotated; Gilbert, S.: James Joyce's 'Ulysses'
Course Description: A polytropically intensive examination of Joyce's fiction. We'll begin the semester with a rapid study of Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, focus lengthily on Ulysses over the major part of the term, and conclude with a brief gaze into the lucid darknesses of Finnegans Wake. Members of the seminar will be expected to work on a long seminar-paper during the semester and to participate in class discussions.
Enrollment is limited and a written application is due BY 4:00 P.M., Tuesday, April 22; be sure to read the paragraph on page 2 of this Announcement of Classes regarding enrollment in English 150!
150/2
This course has been converted to 100/1.
150/4
Senior Seminar: Irish Writing From 1890 to the Present
Rubenstein, Michael
MW 4-5:30
223 Wheeler
Areas of Concentration: 1E; 2; 4; 6
Book List (tentative): Yeats, W.B.: selected poetry and prose; Synge, J.M.: The Playboy of the Western World; Joyce, J.: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man; Bowen, E.: The Last September; Beckett, S.: First Love; O’Brien, F.: The Poor Mouth,The House of Splendid Isolation; Jordan, N.: The Crying Game; DeEmmony, A. and Lowney, D.: Father Ted; Doyle, R: A Star Called Henry; Sheeran, P.: Aqua; O’Neill, J.: At Swim Two Boys
Course Description: This course surveys some of the most popular Irish literature in the last one hundred years. Irish Writing in the early part of the 20th century was part of a cultural revolution that culminated in a political revolution, a war of independence and the foundation (in the south) of a free state . In this course, we’ll be looking at some of the key texts that influenced and were influenced by the cultural nationalist movement. Then we’ll look to later-century fictions, some of which look back to the revolutionary period, and some of which look, very deliberately, away from it. Along the way we’ll try to identify as many thematic and aesthetic continuities as we can in order to come up with a conception of what Irish literature is, or may be, in the 20th century. One medium-length essay, one final 15pp research paper, one in-class presentation required.
Enrollment is limited and a written application is due BY 4:00 P.M., Tuesday, April 22; be sure to read the paragraph on page 2 of this Announcement of Classes regarding enrollment in 150!
150/5
Senior Seminar:
Virtual Worlds: Wonderland and Wessex:
Lewis Carroll and Thomas Hardy
Langan, Celeste
TTh 11-12:30
New Room: 109 Wheeler
Areas of Concentration: 1D, 3, 5
Book List: .Abbott, E. Flatland (1884) ; Carroll, The Hunting of the Snark (1874); Sylvie and Bruno (1893); Gardner, M., ed. The Annotated Alice; Hardy, T.: The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886); Tess of the Durbervilles (1891); Jude the Obscure (1895).
Course Description: By focusing on the starkly different fictional worlds created by two (late) nineteenth-century writers, Lewis Carroll and Thomas Hardy, this course is designed to raise questions about the phenomenology of representation. How do these writers produce the very different effects of the ‘virtual’ and the ‘real’: are these effects of style or of content? In what variety of ways can readers “enter” or immerse themselves in the “flatland” (that is, the two-dimensional space) of the page? What are the roles of narration and description—of language in general--- in generating a fictional “world”? How minimalist or detailed must a rendering be to produce the effect of the real or the virtual? Is the difference between the real and the virtual parallel to the difference between sensory and cognitive experience? Or do we only distinguish between sensory experience and its hallucination or simulation by means of concepts that are themselves fictions? How are such questions illuminated by the translation or “remediation” of a literary text by a technology like film? By theories and technologies of computer-generated “virtual reality”? |In addition to reading various critics on Carroll and Hardy—including Gilles Deleuze and Elaine Scarry-students will read some foundational essays in phenomenology and media theory. Students will have the option of writing a 20-page essay that focuses on either one of the writers or on both.
Enrollment is limited and a written application is due BY 4:00 P.M., Tuesday, April 22; be sure to read the paragraph on page 2 of this Announcement of Classes regarding enrollment in English 150!
150/6
Senior Seminar:
The Literary Image
Picciotto, Joanna
TTh 12:30-2
223 Wheeler
Areas of Concentration: 1C, 5
Book List: Lessing, G.E.: Laocoon: An Essay upon the Limits of Painting and Poetry; Scarry, E.: Dreaming by the Book
There will be a course reader containing 1) selections from theorists such as Horace, Jean Paul Sartre, Frank Kermode, and Ellen Esrock; 2) extracts from recent research on mental imagery and the neuropsychology of reading; and 3) passages of poetry and prose fiction from the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries.
Course Description: Reading relies on the neural and cognitive mechanisms of actual perception, but what this reliance tells us about the actual experience of readers is far from clear; there is no consensus regarding the proper definition or even the very existence of the literary image. Exploring the critical tradition that treats literature as “word-painting” and the counter-tradition it inspired, we will try to develop a critical language to describe the relationship between reading and imagining. Does writing praised for its “vividness” employ techniques to overcome the fragility and thinness of our mental imagery or does it make a virtue out of that very weakness? How does the felt concreteness or vagueness of a given fictional world shape the reader’s sense of implication in that world? Finally, what sorts of experiences, and readers, do visually oriented models of reading exclude? Students will produce two short analyses and one longer paper.
This course satisfies the pre-1800 requirement for the English major.
Enrollment is limited and a written application is due BY 4:00 P.M., Tuesday, April 22; be sure to read the paragraph on page 2 of this Announcement of Classes regarding enrollment in English 150!
150/7
Senior Seminar: Modern Horror
Oyama, Misa
TTh 12:30-2
106 Wheeler
Areas of Concentration: 1E; 3; 6
Book List: Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill; HouseStephen King, The Stand; Martin McDonagh, The Pillowman; Joyce Carol Oates, Beasts; Peter Straub, Ghost Story; course reader of short stories and criticism
Film List: Juan Antonio Bayona, The Orphanage; Tim Burton, Sweeney Todd; James Cameron, Aliens; David Fincher, Zodiac; Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Cure; Nicolas Roeg, Don’t Look Now; Robert Wise, The Haunting
Course Description: Within the past decade, the phenomenon of J-horror (originally Japanese, but now associated with other Asian countries) has gone from minor cult status to accepted Hollywood convention, due to the success of American adaptations like The Ring. But as Takashi Shimizu noted while directing an American adaptation of his own film, horror which comes from a specific tradition can be difficult to adapt to another culture. This course considers the horror genre in cultural context, primarily focusing on its presence in American literature and film over the past fifty years, but also examining its revitalization through more recent international influences. In what ways does horror transcend cultural differences, and in what ways does it depend on cultural specificity? To what extent do these texts derive their power from racial, sexual, and social fears? Assignments will include a brief oral presentation, bibliography, and final research paper on a topic of the student’s choice. Films will be screened outside of class in the evening; students who cannot make the screening can see the films on their own at the Media Center in Moffitt. Students interested in taking this course may want to read The Stand over the summer, so that we can approach this thousand-page novel as familiar readers.
Enrollment is limited and a written application is due BY 4:00 P.M., Tuesday, April 22; be sure to read the paragraph on page 2 of this Announcement of Classes regarding enrollment in English 150!
150/9
Senior Seminar: The New York School
O'Brien, Geoffrey
TTh 2-3:30
263 Dwinelle,
Areas of Concentration: 1E, 3, 6
Course Description: Met these four boys Frank O’Hara, John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, and Jimmy Schuyler…at the Cedar Bar in ’52 or ’53. Met them through Bill (de Kooning) who was a friend of theirs and they admired Kline and all those people. Painters who went to the Cedar had more or less coined the phrase “New York School” in opposition to the School of Paris (which also originated as a joke in opposition to the School of Florence and the School of Venice)…..So the poets adopted the expression “New York School” out of homage to the people who had de-provincialized American painting. —Edwin Denby
It’s easy to name the first generation of New York School poets, as Denby does incompletely above (Barbara Guest makes the fifth), but much harder to decide what, if anything, that rubric yields beyond friendships, a tendency to have gone to Harvard, to write for ARTNews, and, of course, to live in New York City. It’s this last that makes it into the name and may make its way furthest into the poetry: “New York…that kaleidoscopic lumber-room where laws of space and time are altered—where one can live a few yards away from a friend whom one never sees and whom one would travel miles to visit in the country” Ashbery). Despite Ashbery’s pyrrhic definition of the group via “its avoidance of anything like a program,” this course will use the convenient critical grouping as an excuse to think about the poetry of a specific place and time (1956-1975 in NYC) and what it might tell us about how poetry models, and is modeled by, the U.S. megacity—a de-provincialized space of shock, anonymity, chance, poverty, commodities, and friendship that stays open “terribly late.”
Enrollment is limited and a written application is due BY 4:00 P.M., Tuesday, April 22; be sure to read the paragraph on page 2 of this Announcement of Classes regarding enrollment in English 150!
150/11
Senior Seminar: Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville
Otter, Samuel
TTh 3:30-5
109 Wheeler
Areas of Concentration: 1D, 3, 4
Book List: J. Argersinger and L. Person, eds., Hawthorne and Melville: Writing a Relationship; N. Hawthorne, Blithedale Romance; N. Hawthorne, House of the Seven Gables; N. Hawthorne, Scarlet Letter; N. Hawthorne, Selected Tales and SketcheS; H. Melville, Great Short Works; H. Melville, Moby-Dick; H. Melville, Poems of Herman MelvillE; H. Melville, Typee; W. Shakespeare, King Lear
Course Description: We will immerse ourselves in the careers of Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville, taking up issues of literary influence, biography, psychology, authorship, sexuality, aesthetics, and politics. Readings will include a variety of works by the two writers: short stories, novels, essays, and (in the case of Melville) poetry. We will examine literary criticism that pairs and contrasts the two writers. Given Melville’s linking of Hawthorne with Shakespeare in his review “Hawthorne and His Mosses” and given the influence of Shakespeare on Moby-Dick, we also will read King Lear and consider the role Shakespeare plays in this literary relationship. Course requirements include an oral presentation and a substantial research essay to be written in stages across the semester.
Enrollment is limited and a written application is due BY 4:00 P.M. Tuesday, April 22; be sure to read the paragraph on page 2 of this Announcement of Classes regarding enrollment in English 150!
150/12
Senior Seminar: Utopian Literature
Starr, George
TTh 3:30-5
Note new location: 221 Wheeler (starting 9/16)
Areas of Concentration: 3, 6
Book List: More, UTOPIA; Swift, GULLIVER’S TRAVELS Books 3 & 4; Scott, MILLENIUM HALL; Bellamy, LOOKING BACKWARD; Morris, NEWS FROM NOWHERE; Wells, TIME MACHINE; Gilman, HERLAND; Zamiatin, WE; Huxley, BRAVE NEW WORLD; Orwell, 1984; Dick, DO ANDROIDS DREAM OF ELECTRIC SHEEP?; Atwood, THE HANDMAID’S TALE
Course Description: Most Utopian authors are more concerned with selling readers on the social or political merits of their schemes than with the "merely" literary qualities of their writing. Although some Utopian writing has succeeded in the sense of making converts, and inspiring some readers to try to realize the ideal society, most has had limited practical impact, yet has managed to provoke readers in various ways—for instance, as a kind of imaginative fiction that comments on "things as they are" only indirectly, with fantasy and satire in varying doses. Among the critical questions posed by such material are the problematic status of fiction that is not primarily mimetic, but written in the service of some ulterior purpose; the shifting relationships between what is and what authors think might be or ought to be; how to create the new and strange other than by recombining the old and familiar; and so on. The reading list will include anti-Utopian as well as Utopian works, and possibly some writings by Malthus, Owen, Engels and Marx that do not present themselves as flights of fancy. Several films will be assigned (based on holdings in the Moffitt Library AVMC) and discussed (but not shown) in class, e.g. Lang’s Metropolis, Chaplin’s Modern Times, Gilliam’s Brazil and the like. Required writing will consist of a single 15-20-page term paper. 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.
Enrollment is limited and a written application is due BY 4:00 P.M. Tuesday, April 22; be sure to read the paragraph on page 2 of this Announcement of Classes regarding enrollment in English 150!
160
Methods and Materials of Literary Criticism
Hale, Dorothy
TTh 9:30-11
101 Wheeler
Area of Concentration: 5
Book List: Leitch, V: The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism
Course Description: What gives literature its special status, both as an art form and as a culturally important discourse? Does the value of literature reside in its power to improve society? In the quality of the emotion it produces? In the type of knowledge it makes possible? In the beauty it offers? This course studies the way questions about literariness and literary value have been theorized in the history of criticism. Course reading ranges broadly from Plato to Derrida, from Aristotle to Adorno. Our investigation of the problem of the literary will lead us to consider related topics such as genre, genius, mimesis, imagination, beauty, ethics, authorship, intentionality, textuality, fictionality, social discourse, ideology, and canonicity. The seminar format invites students to bring their own questions and investments to the course reading. Requirements include one oral presentation and two short essays (each 7-8 pages).
165
Special Topics: Greek Drama in Translation
Campion, John
TTh 9:30-11
121 Wheeler
Areas of Concentration: 3, 6
Book List: The Complete Greek Tragedies, University of Chicago: Sophocles I: Oedipus the King, Oedipus at Colonus, Antigone; Aeschylus I: Agamemnon, The Libation Bearers, The Eumenides; Euripides I : Medea, Hyppolytus; Euripides V: Bacchae, Electra.
Course Description: The lectures, class discussions, readings, and writing assignments are intended to develop students ability to analyze, understand, and evaluate a number of important ancient texts. The class will examine the deep implications of these early sources and how they raised critical questions that concern western societies up to the present day. The class will look at their concepts of individuality, family, freedom, will, meaning, knowledge, mind, God, andpolitical practice. Along the way, the course will consider some connecting tissue, such as psychotherapy, economics, gender, literary theory, and ecology.
Note: This course is open to English majors only.
166/1
Special Topics: The Works of Vladimir Nabokov
Naiman, Eric
MWF 10-11
213 Wheeler
This course is cross-listed with Slavic 134F.
Areas of Concentration: 1E, 3, 4
Book List : Nabokov, Vladimir: The Defense, Laughter in the Dark, The Gift, Bend Sinister, Lolita, Pnin, Pale Fire
Course Description: We will study the work of Nabokov as a novelist on two continents over a period of nearly sixty years. The course will be structured (more or less) chronologically and evenly divided between novels translated from Russian and written in English. After beginning with Nabokov’s second novel and two short stories, we will examine the major fiction of his European period, which culminates with the publication in Paris of (most of) The Gift. Competing interpretations of Nabokov will be considered, but our emphasis will be on metafiction, the theme of perversity and Nabokov's cultivation of a perverse reader.
Students should expect to devote a considerable amount of time to reading and rereading. They should come to class prepared to discuss the assigned texts. Written work will consist of two papers (5 to 10 pages) on topics to be chosen in consultation with the professor. Penalties will be assessed for late papers. The will be a midterm and a final examination.
166/2
Special Topics: The Global South: William Faulkner, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Toni Morrison, & Sandra Cisneros
Saldivar, Jose
MWF 11-12
130 Wheeler
Areas of Concentration: 1E, 2, 3, 4, 6
Book List: Faulkner, “The Bear,” Go Down, Moses, Absalom; Garcia Marquez, Collected Stories, Living to Tell the Tale, One Hundred Years of Solitude; Morrison, Toni, Sula, Beloved; Cisneros, The House On Mango Street, Carmero, Or Puro Cuento
Course Description: This course is an intensive and rigorous course in the literature of the Americas and in trans-American literary and cultural criticism. We will be reading intensively and extensively, and the format of our course requires constant attendance. Our course is a detailed trans-American study of William Faulkner, Gabriel García Márquez, Toni Morrison, and Sandra Cisneros’ major imaginative writings in the aesthetic and geopolitical contexts of the South and the Global South. What does it mean to read, South by South? South by North? We will be considering the idea of the South as a real and imaginary territory, a rich ideological geography, and a geo-culture, where regional mythology, ethnic and racial formations and divisions, national and transnational contestations, and the new imperialism together produce extraordinary narratives. Additionally, our course will look at the photographs of the South by Walker Evans, and some of the Global South's paintings by Kara Walker and Fernando Botero, among others. Throughout this special topics course, we will grapple with the research question--do the Américas have a common literature?
166/3
Special Topics: Literature in the Century of Film
Goble, Mark
TTh 9:30-11
130 Wheeler
Areas of Concentration: 1E, 3, 6
Book List: Stoker, B., Dracula; Dreiser, T., Sister Carrie; Johnson, J. W., The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man; West, N., Day of the Locusts; Cendrars, B., Hollywood: Mecca of the Movies; Fitzgerald, F. S., The Last Tycoon; Lambert, G., Inside Daisy Clover; Gibson, W., Pattern Recognition.
Films: The Jazz Singer (1927), The Cameraman (1928), Sunset Boulevard (1950), Singin’ in the Rain (1952), It Should Happen to You (1954)
Course Description: This course examines the intersections between literature and visual media in the twentieth century, with a particular focus on film and its cultural effects. We will read novels, short stories, poetry, and essays that not only track the social and historical implications of cinema, but also show how literature tries to understand its situation and appeal among competing media technologies. Lectures and discussions will consider such topics as the status of reading in a culture of looking, the politics of mass popularity, celebrity as a way of life, and the commercial origins of the modern work of art. The course also looks at what happens when “new” media, such as film, grow old and perhaps even die, and charts the literary emergence of film connoisseurship as a response to TV and other technologies that come to challenge film’s place as the century’s dominant medium. Of particular interest will be texts and films that directly address the mythology of Hollywood, as well as writers who borrow from film practice and technique as an aesthetic resource.
166AC
Special Topics in American Cultures:
Race and Performance in the 20th-Century U.S.
Saul, Scott
MWF 11-12
102 Moffitt
Areas of Concentration: 1E, 2, 4, 6
Required books and other readings:Wesley Brown, Darktown Strutters (1994)
Angela Davis, Blues Legacies and Black Feminism: Gertrude 'Ma' Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday (1998)
Jessica Hagedorn, Dogeaters (1990)
James Weldon Johnson, Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man
Much of the reading materials are found in the course packet, the first volume of which can be picked up at University Copy Service (2425 Channing Way).
Course Description: This course is two courses wrapped up in one. First, it offers a selected history of major innovations in American popular culture of the last hundred years — from the origins of the American culture industries in blackface minstrelsy, ragtime, and jazz to the development of the Hollywood studio system, rock 'n' roll, soul music, and the "New Hollywood".
Second, it tells that first very large story through America's unique history of crossracial and crossethnic interplay. Why, we might ask, is the story of the US so often told through stories of interracial dependency or conflict, whether it's the story of American colonists dressing up as Indians at the Boston Tea Party, Little Eva blessing Uncle Tom, or Elvis or Eminem borrowing from the 'other side of the tracks'? Following this line of inquiry, we will trace America's history through the development of structures of inequity and opportunity that define our social history, and through the development of complicated race-inflected stories of camaraderie, rivalry, beset virtue, and desire that often define our national fantasy life.
This course satisfies UC Berkeley's American Cultures requirement.
170
Literature and the Arts
Hanson, Kristin
MWF 11-12
103 Wheeler
Areas of Concentration: 1C, 3, 7
Book List: Campion, T., Dowland, J. and Johnson, R.: various lute songs; Byrd, W.: The Great Service; Milton, J. and Lawes, H.: Comus; Tate, N. and Purcell, H.: Dido and Aeneas; Gay, J. and Pepusch, J.C.:The Beggar's Opera, Watts, I: various hymns; Handel, G.F. and Gay, J.: Acis and Galatea, Dryden, J. and Handel, G.F.: A Song for St. Cecilia's Day, Dryden, J. and Handel, G.F.: Alexander's Feast, Handel, G.F., Jennens, C. and Milton, J.: L'Allegro, il Penseroso ed il moderato; Handel, G.F. and Jennens, C.: Messiah
Course Description: Literature, especially poetry, has in common with one other art, music, that a key element of its aesthetic structure is rhythm. This course will explore rhythm, considering how even its most basic forms are similar yet also different in each of these arts and also in ordinary experience, including language. This subject has been broached in recent work on "textsetting", bringing psychology, linguistics, music and poetics together in studies of how words are set to tunes in folk songs. We will build on the formal foundation established by this work, and use it to address aesthetic questions raised by textsetting in more ambitious works of art. These works will be drawn primarily from the eighteenth century, a particularly flourishing time for collaborations between poets and composers in England. The course will include several excursions to hear live performances. There are no prerequisites.
This course satisfies the pre-1800 requirement for the English major.
179
Literature and Linguistics
Hanson, Kristin
MWF 2-3
100 Wheeler
Areas of Concentration: 5, 7
Book List:A photocopied reader of articles, poems and short stories.
Course Description: It is a commonplace that the medium of literature is language. This course will develop a substantive understanding of this relationship through a survey of literary forms defined by special linguistic structures, and an exploration of how these structures are systematically like and unlike those of non-literary language. These forms will include meter; rhyme and alliteration; syntactic parallelism and other syntactic structures special to poetry; formulas of oral composition; special narrative uses of pronouns, tenses and subjective features of language to express point of view and render 'represented speech and thought'; and figurative language such as metaphor, metonymy and irony. The emphasis will be on literature in English, but comparisons with literature in other languages will also be drawn. No knowledge of linguistics will be presupposed, but linguistic concepts will be introduced, explained and used.
180A
Autobiography: Disability Memoir
Kleege, Georgina
TTh 11-12:30
110 Wheeler
Areas of Concentration: 1E, 2, 3
Book List: Grandin, T: Thinking in Pictures; Grealy, L: Autobiography of A Face; Hathaway, K: The Little Locksmith; Hockenberry, J: Moving Violations; Keller, H: The World I Live In; Laborit, E: The Cry of the Gull; Mairs, N: Waist-High in the World; Roche, D: The Church of 80% Sincerity; Skloot, F: In the Shadow of Memory.
Course Description: Autobiographies written by people with disabilities offer readers a glimpse into lives at the margins of mainstream culture, and thus can make disability seem less alien and frightening. Disability rights activists, however, often criticize these texts because they tend to reinforce the notion that disability is a personal tragedy that must be overcome through superhuman effort, rather than a set of cultural conditions that could be changed to benefit a wide range of individuals with similar impairments. Are these texts agents for social change or merely another form of freak show? In this course, we will examine a diverse selection of disability memoirs and consider both what they reveal about cultural attitudes toward disability and what they have in common with other forms of autobiography. Requirements will include two 5-8 page papers, and a take-home final exam.
180L
Lyric Verse
Falci, Eric
TTh 11-12:30
213 Wheeler
Areas of Concentration: 3; 5
Book List: Poems and essays will be available in a course reader or, whenever possible, electronically. No books will be required.
Course Description: We will spend much of the semester sorting out what the title of this course means. We’ll start by thinking about the so-called “roots of lyric,” not only Sappho and Greek lyric, but other forms and shapes that are deeply buried within the matrices of modern poetry—chants, spells, charms, riddles, curses. Along the way, we’ll revisit some favorites from the English-language canon (Donne, Marvell, Blake, Keats, Hopkins, Dickinson, Stevens, Hughes, Moore, Bishop, Ashbery, Plath) as well as several recent experiments (Anne Carson, Harryette Mullen, Lisa Robertson). We’ll pair various poems with various media (painting, music, movies, dance, video games) and concepts (chaos theory, ecology, literary theory, cognitive science) in order to tease out some of the alternate currents running through the texts. Reading assignments will be small, but dense. In addition to a final exam, there will be one short essay (3-5 pages), and one longer essay (7-9 pages) that may be critical, historical, or a hybrid critical-creative piece.
180N
The Novel: The American Novel Since 1900
Serpell, Namwali
MWF 1-2
20 Barrows
Areas of Concentration: 1E, 3, 5, 6
Book List: Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth (1905);
James Weldon Johnson, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1912);
F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (1925); William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury (1929);
Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita (1955); Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49 (1966); Don DeLillo, White Noise (1985); Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian (1985); Toni Morrison, Beloved (1987);
Philip Roth, American Pastoral (1997)
Short stories by: Hemingway, O'Connor, Parker, Faulkner, James, Paley, Toomer, Ellison, Barth, Barthelme, Foster Wallace, Alexie, Lahiri, Du Bois, Hurston.
Course Description: A survey of the American novel, its forms, patterns, techniques,
ideas, cultural context, and intertextua- lity. Special attention will be paid to questions of aesthetics, epistemology, and ethics—what is beautiful? how do we know? what ought we do?—in the American milieu as it develops in the twentieth century. Average 250 pages per week. Two papers (5-8 pages); ID midterm; essay final.
H195A/1
Honors Course
Goldsmith, Steven
MW 12-1:30
305 Wheeler
Area of Concentration: 5
Book List: Leitch, V., ed..: Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism; Barthes, R.: The Pleasure of the Text
Course Description: We will spend most of the first semester sampling readings in literary theory, introducing such topics as poststructuralism (Barthes, Derrida, Lyotard); sex, gender, and performativity (Irigaray, Butler, Sedgwick, Miller); and various modes of cultural, ideological, and historical critique (Benjamin, Foucault, Bhabha, Jameson). Toward the end of the semester student groups will lead the class, assigning literary, critical, and theoretical texts of their own choosing. By December you will hand in a prospectus for your thesis and a ten-page essay exploring one aspect of it.
Students who satisfactorily complete H195A-B (the Honors Course) may choose to waive the seminar requirement.
Enrollment is limited and a written application (and a photocopy of a critical paper that you wrote for another class) are due BY 4:00 P.M., Tuesday, April 22; be sure to read the paragraph on page 2 of this Announcement of Classes regarding enrollment in the Honors Course!
H195A/2
Honors Course
Lye, Colleen
MW 4-5:30
83 Dwinelle
Area of Concentration: 5
Book List: A course reader (TBA)
Course Description: The purpose of this section of H195 is to provide an exposure to literary theory that should be of equal value to honors projects belonging to earlier and later periods. The approach taken to the reading, however, will likely be most useful to students particularly invested in exploring the relationship between literature and history, and between literature and politics. First, we will establish some grounding in the traditions considered fundamental to the moment of “literary theory”: structuralism, psychoanalysis, marxism, deconstruction. With the aid of this grounding, we will take stock of some topical concerns of contemporary literary criticism: globalization and transnationalism, aesthetic form and affect. In the fall semester, students will simultaneously be working toward the development of a prospectus for the 40-60 page honors thesis they will produce in the spring semester. The spring semester will be devoted to the research and writing of the thesis, and students will be divided into groups to help each other with this process.
Students who satisfactorily complete H195A-B (The Honors Course) may choose to waive the seminar requirement.
Enrollment is limited and a written application (and a photocopy of a critical paper that you wrote for another class) are due BY 4:00 P.M., Tuesday, April 22; be sure to read the paragraph on page 2 of this Announcement of Classes regarding enrollment in the Honors Course!
H195A/3
Honors Course
Langan, Celeste
TTh 3:30-5
83 Dwinelle
Area of Concentration: 5
Book List : R. Barthes, Mythologies; Muller, J., ed., The Purloined Poe; a course reader.
Course Description: The fall component of this year-long course-- in which students develop a topic, conduct research, and write a thesis of 40+ pages--will provide an intensive introduction to key issues in literary theory and familiarize you with the tools and conventions of textual scholarship. The assigned readings are selected to enable you to undertake what might be called (after Poe) a “thorough research of the premises” of reading and literary interpretation—including the analysis of institutions (like the university) and practices (literary scholarship, the critical essay) that help to form, sustain, and reform the category of literature. You will also begin to shape your thesis topic, first by developing bibliographies on specific topics in literary theory relevant to your own interests, and on key works on the writer, period, genre, medium, or issue you seek to investigate; second, by writing a 7-10 page thesis proposal, due in early December. Each student will participate in a “working group” whose members will read and comment on each other’s work throughout the year. Working groups will be responsible for designing a one-week syllabus and leading discussion on materials pertinent to their common interests—that is, more specifically about an given genre, historical period, medium, political issue or cultural location than the readings assigned by me.
Students who satisfactorily complete H195A-B (the Honors Course) may choose to waive the seminar requirement.
Enrollment is limited and a written application (and a photocopy of a critical paper that you wrote for another class) are due BY 4:00 P.M., Tuesday, April 22; be sure to read the paragraph on page 2 of this Announcement of Classes regarding enrollment in the Honors Course!
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Last modified: November 05, 2008