R1A/R1B Course Descriptions
Fall 2009

Section: 1
Title: Insular Fictions
Instructor: Townsend, Sarah
Time: MWF 9-10
Location: 222 Wheeler

Book list: Iain Banks, The Wasp Factory; Alfonso Cuarón, dir., Children of Men (film); Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe; Robert Flaherty, dir., Man of Aran (film); Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go; James Joyce, Dubliners; William Shakespeare, The Tempest

Course Description: This course examines the figure of the island in English and Irish literature. Through a series of readings we will explore the perceived possibilities and limitations of insularity. We will use literary models of geographical and psychological insularity to assess English and Irish national imagination. This section of English R1A will situate these readings around a series of written assignments. The primary goals of this course are to develop your ability to read and write about literature. Expect to compose frequent reading responses and a series of essays on literary analysis. You will also be required to revise everything you write and to peer-edit the work of your classmates.

Section: 2
Title: Horror Before Horror
Instructor: Covalciuc, Alexander
Time: MWF 9-10
Location: 221 Wheeler

Book list: Ann Radcliffe, Romance of the Forest; Matthew Lewis, The Monk; James Hogg, The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner; Mary Shelley, Frankenstein; Mary Braddon, Lady Audley’s Secret; Jane Austen, Northangar Abbey

Course Description: Haunted houses, rape, murder, violence, ghosts, deals with the devil: these are just some of the most common features of 20th-century horror fiction. While we tend to associate these characteristics with writers like Stephen King and movies like The Exorcist, one might be surprised to learn that most of them first found their way into popular culture via the Gothic novel of the later eighteenth century. Even though the internet and television were still a long way off, the writers of the period, and their literary progeny, possessed incredibly potent imaginations when it came to scaring people. In this course we’ll look at several Gothic novels and horror films, keeping in mind questions about why the Gothic emerges when it does (in the late Enlightenment), why people read books and see movies that scare them, etc. In addition to reading a lot of cool books, we’ll also spend time learning how to write argumentative essays; we’ll work on sentences, paragraphs, theses, and of course grammar. Gothic novels are rich, entertaining, and more sophisticated that one might expect; though you might be scared, you’ll also want to write about your reading.

Section: 3
Title: Things
Instructor: Miller, Monica
Time: MWF 10-11
Location: 222 Wheeler

Book list: Willa Cather, The Professor’s House; Henry James, The Golden Bowl; James Joyce, Dubliners; Gertrude Stein, Tender Buttons; Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray; course reader containing poems and critical essays

Course Description: This is a class about things. We will consider literary depictions of things, possessions, objects, or whaddyacallems — as the semester progresses, these vague terms will become less and less interchangeable. What, we will ask, is an object? What does it say about the person who owns it? The society that produces it? The writer who describes it? The reader who encounters it? How do we perceive things, make sense of them, and interact with them?

We will read the texts for this course as if they were pawn shops, full of objects that may or may not be valuable, that contain interesting stories or simply serve as means to an end. We will consider whether these things function as symbols, talismans, clutter, art objects, commodities, accessories to characters, or worthwhile subjects in their own right.

The primary goal of this class is to improve your writing. We will concentrate on both mechanics and style, learning how to read closely, formulate interesting arguments, gather evidence, and organize claims into persuasive essays. Over the course of the semester, you will produce about 32 pages of written work through a gradual process of outlining, drafting, editing, and revising.

Section: 4
Title: The Elements of Surprise
Instructor: Martin, Theodore
Time: MWF 11-12
Location: 222 Wheeler

Book list: Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot; Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go; Heidi Julavits, The Uses of Enchantment; Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49; Patricia T. O’Conner, Woe Is I: The Grammarphobe’s Guide to Better English in Plain English; and a course reader with stories by Herman Melville, Edgar Allan Poe, and David Foster Wallace and essays by Peter Brooks and David Grann

Course Description: Literature demands much of its readers—our time, our sympathy, our willing disbelief—and so it is probably inevitable that we readers will come to demand things in return. Surely, one of the central pleasures of reading is having these demands met—the hope that a story will disclose to us all of its secrets. Stories themselves, however, are often far less inclined to cooperate, and so it will be our task in this course to explore how and why literature both produces and consistently confounds our expectations. We will read for the different ways that suspense, surprise, uncertainty, and anticlimax organize both the experiences of literary characters and our experience of reading about them. Our readings will allow us to discover how narratives reveal and withhold information, how they promise the satisfaction of an ending that might never arrive, and how, through the steady flow of surprise and frustration, they mirror our own reading practices, habits, and assumptions back to us.

Exploring this interplay between reading and writing should prove particularly useful for a course that will be unflaggingly devoted to developing both of these skills in equal measure. As the first half of the University’s “Reading and Composition” requirement, English R1A is a writing-intensive introduction to critical reading, interpretive thinking, and lively discussion. Building from a series of short reading responses, a number of drafts, and an ongoing process of peer editing and revision, your main task in this course will be the completion of 3 five-page essays. Each of these essays will ask you to craft, clarify, and support a central argument as you use close literary analysis to explore the uses and abuses of narrative surprise.

Section: 5
Title: Early Modern Bogeymen
Instructor: Drosdick, Alan
Time: MWF 12-1
Location: 222 Wheeler

Book list: Kane, T., The Oxford Essential Guide to Critical Writing; Marlowe, C., The Jew of Malta; Massinger, P., A New Way to Pay Old Debts; Middleton, T. and William Rowley, The Changeling; Milton, J., Comus; Shakespeare, W., Richard III, The Tempest, Titus Andronicus

Course Description: Renaissance drama is rife with what can be called blocking figures—the doddering father who refuses to let his daughter marry her true love, the pesky servant who keeps an overly protective eye on our young hero. These characters are not quite enemies, but rivals, and need not be defeated, but merely overcome. They impede the progress of the plot and, once bypassed, prove entirely forgettable. Proper villains, on the other hand, actively propagate their ill will, usually with great bravado, and hold a stubbornly salient position in our comprehension of the play as a whole, perhaps greater even than the putative protagonist. This class seeks to examine how and why dramatists craft villainous characters so powerful that they can commandeer the plays that contain them.

In order to accomplish this sometimes daunting critical feat, students must develop their analytical instincts in order to articulate the intricacies of their observations in writing. To this end, students shall hone their observational skills by discussing, in the form of short weekly writing assignments, how the author goes about creating in them the reactions they register while reading his text. These short papers will prepare students to write longer essays (4-5 pages), in preparation for which we will hold thesis brainstorming sessions and peer editing workshops; students should expect to become very well acquainted with the writing of their peers.

Section: 6
Title: Veils: Race and Nineteenth-Century American Gothic Literature
Instructor: Wu Clark, Audrey
Time: MWF 12-1
Location: 203 Wheeler

Book list: Charles Brockden Brown, Edgar Huntly Or, Memoirs of a Sleep-Walker; Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Blithedale Romance; Edgar Allan Poe, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym; W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk. A course reader to include: selections from Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination; Thomas Jefferson, “Query XIV” and “Query XVII,” Notes on the State of Virginia; Nathaniel Hawthorne, “The Minister’s Black Veil”; selections from Sui Sin Far (Edith Eaton), Mrs. Spring Fragance

Course Description: Broadly, this course will acquaint you with the close readings of texts, research, and the tools for writing expository and research-based essays. Taking as a point of departure Toni Morrison’s assertion that thematic shadows and blackness in gothic American literature signify the racialization of black and, by contrast, white Americans, we will investigate the “racial unconscious” of gothic texts that are and are not explicitly about race. The texts we will read will span the historical period covering—among many events in which the exploitation of racial minorities comes to the fore—the consolidation of the U.S. nation (1776), the Indian Removal Act (1830), Mexican-American War (1846-1848), the Fugitive Slave Law (1850), the Civil War (1861-65), the Chinese Exclusion Act (1882), and the Spanish-American War (1898). Class discussions will engage with and attempt to decipher the American gothic conventions such as the trope of the dark veil or the mask that crops up in literature as diverse as Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia (1787) and W. E. B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk (1903) within the respective historical and literary contexts. We will also explore the significance of the imported European genre of the gothic romance in the articulation of American racial conflict during the nineteenth century. Our discussions will address such questions as: How do gothic conventions of gloom, terror, and violence assimilate or resist the racializations of Native Americans, African Americans, Asian Americans, and white Americans during this period? Class discussions will provide a space for students to explore their ideas and build conceptual arguments about the texts that will prepare them for their writing assignments. I will assign three essays and short, intermittent writing exercises to do in class or at home.

Section: 7
Title: The Modest Witness
Instructor: Cecire, Natalia
Time: MWF 1-2
Location: 222 Wheeler

Book list: Janet L. Gardner, Writing About Literature; Diana Hacker, Rules for Writers, 6th ed; Henry James, The Turn of the Screw and Other Tales; Marianne Moore, Complete Poems; Dodie Smith, I Capture the Castle; William Carlos Williams, Imaginations

Course Description: The science historians Steven Shapin and Simon Shaffer coined the term “modest witness” to describe a kind of scientific observer, one who can attest to reality without bias by eliminating any trace of personality. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries we see a new interest in modest witnessing and the kinds of literature it can produce. In this writing-centered course, we will read, discuss, and write about a selection of fiction and poetry that concerns itself with how to construct a literary “modest witness” in order to address questions like the following: How closely can literature adhere to reality? How closely should it adhere? What literary techniques can help ensure a witness’s modesty? Who is allowed to be a modest witness? To help us answer those questions, we will also read and discuss a selection of theoretical prose by Shapin and Shaffer, Donna Haraway, Thomas Nagel, and Henry James. Students will write and revise four papers.

Section: 8
Title: The Power of I: Literary Constructions of the Self
Instructor: Bednarska, Dominika
Time: MWF 2-3
Location: 123Wheeler

Book list: Mary Karr, The Liar’s Club; Jamaica Kincaid, My Brother; Jeanette Winterson, Written on the Body; Harry G. Frankfurt, On Bullshit; Eli Claire, Exile & Pride; Diane Hacker, Rules for Writers; a course reader

Course Description: What are the different ways that we come to understand first person narration? How are different selves created and chosen through texts and textual choices? How do issues of memory and claims to authenticity affect the way that we read different kinds of texts? This course will focus on how the self is constructed in literary non-fiction but will also incorporate fiction, poetry, and popular news media. We will examine how different choices made by the author construct specific understandings of both who the author or narrator is and the story being told. Through frequent writing assignments students will be asked to reflect on these issues in relation to the texts and their own lives.

This course is aimed at developing reading and writing skills in a variety of genres. Students will learn and practice strategies for all stages of the writing process, from prewriting to revision, and also work on grammar, syntax, and style. Course assignments will include a minimum of 32 pages of writing divided among a number of short essays, at least two of which will be revised.

Section: 9
Title: This class has been canceled.

Section: 10
Title: American Elegy
Instructor: Auclair, Tracy
Time: MW 4-5:30
Location: 222 Wheeler

Book list: A course reader of elegies; Max Cavitch, American Elegy: The Poetry of Mourning from the Puritans to Whitman; Diana Hacker, Rules for Writers; Jeffrey A. Hammond, The American Puritan Elegy: A Literary and Cultural Study; Mary Louise Kete, Sentimental Collaborations: Mourning and Middle-Class Identity in Nineteenth-Century America; Gary Laderman, The Sacred Remains: American Attitudes Toward Death, 1799-1883; Jahan Ramazani, Poetry of Mourning: The Modern Elegy from Hardy to Heaney; Melissa F. Zeiger. Beyond Consolation: Death, Sexuality, and the Changing Shapes of Elegy

Course Description: In this class, we will study the American elegy, following its development from the 17th century to the present. Reading poems in conjunction with essays in literary criticism and cultural history, we will ask the following question: How did elegiac conventions both reflect and create the conceptual meaning and psychological experience of death and grief in America? Students will pursue this line of inquiry while learning how to write clearly, read critically, and argue persuasively. Emphasizing the development of these skills, this course will teach students how to evaluate authors’ theses, formulate their own positions, and express them in clear sentences, paragraphs, and essays. Over the course of the semester, students will produce approximately 32 pages of writing. This writing will be broken down into three essays which will increase in length as the term progresses.

Section: 11
Title: Green Reading
Instructor: Legere, Charles
Time: TTh 8-9:30
Location: 222 Wheeler

Book list: Henry David Thoreau, Walden; Justin Kaplan, ed., Walt Whitman: Poetry and Prose; Aldo Leopold, Sand County Almanac; Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek; The Birds of Western North America, Jon L. Dunn and Jonathan Alderfer; and, a course reader with excerpts from Thoreau’s Walden, David Owen’s “Green Manhattan,” John Steinbeck’s Sea of Cortez, Wendell Berry, William Cronon, Emily Dickinson, Robinson Jeffers, Juliana Spahr’s Gentle Now, Don’t Add to Heartache, and Wordsworth’s Prelude

Course Description: The aims of this course are ecological literacy and clear argumentative prose. On a field trip to the UC Botanical Garden, and as homework, you will begin by observing and naming birds, trees, and flowers. You will keep an environmental journal to practice articulating the qualities of these fauna and flora precisely. As exemplars, we will look at what other writers—Thoreau, Leopold, Steinbeck, Dillard—have written about their own environments, and we will go see the Berkeley Art Museum’s exhibition “Human/Nature: Artists Respond to a Changing Planet.” You will learn about the carbon cycle, trophic structures, disturbance regimes, ecosystem services, bioremediation, and the sublime. In the meantime, in a series of short papers, you will practice synthesizing your own observations into ecological hypotheses, and revising and perfecting these arguments in response to peer review and criticism. Ultimately, you will be encouraged to reflect on your own place in nature: at the end of the semester, you will present a final paper on “The Future of Nature” at an in-class conference. The focus of this course will be on writing sentences with ascribable agency and active predication. By the end of the term, you will also be able to tell a Red-Tailed Hawk from a Turkey Vulture from half a mile away.

Section: 12
Title: This class has been canceled.

Section: 13
Title: Modern Selves and Others
Instructor: Hausman, Blake
Time: TTh 11-12:30
Location: 222 Wheeler

Book list: Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis; Sherman Alexie, Ten Little Indians; George Orwell, “Politics and the English Language”; and a course reader containing short stories by Jamaica Kincaid, Carolyn Forche, James Baldwin, Flannery O’Connor, Alice Walker, Louise Erdrich, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and others

Course Description: Many storytellers have suggested that “our stories tell us who we are.” How, then, do our stories tell us who we are not? How do we create define, and identify ourselves and others? During the twentieth century in particular, creative writers grappled with how we create images of ourselves and others within the maelstrom of modern technology and consciousness. This course will examine a range of prose fiction that represents modern subjectivity, from the captivating surrealism of Kafka to the edgy realism of Baldwin and beyond. Our readings will push us to question what makes us human, how humans tend to imagine themselves through divisions and oppositions, and how language attempts to come to terms with our modern conditions.

Section: 14
Title: America in the 1930s
Instructor: Pugh, Megan
Time: TTh 11-12:30
Location: 106 Wheeler

Book list: Nathanael West, Day of the Locust; Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God; a course reader including work by James Agee, Mike Gold, Langston Hughes, Alan Lomax, Clifford Odets, Muriel Rukeyser, Carl Sandburg, William Saroyan, and others

Course Description: By the relief office I seen my people;
As they stood there hungry, I stood there asking
Is this land made for you and me?
—Woody Guthrie

In the 1930s, as economic crisis brought new attention to the struggles of working men and women, Americans asked how their country had failed and how it could be fixed. What did—or perhaps, what should—America mean? The Great Depression was an era of stark deprivation, but also of committed idealism, as laborers, artists, and activists tried to reshape society. Americans embraced the promises of progress and change, but they also looked back toward folk cultures that they hoped would help unify the country.

This introduction to college writing and argument will be interdisciplinary in method. We’ll read a good deal of literature alongside proletarian manifestos, dance, photography, music, and film. Our course material will help us ask questions about the relations between “high” and “low” culture, between art, work, and politics, and between race, gender, and nation—themes you will explore in your papers. This is a writing-intensive course, so you will complete and revise four essays, and we’ll spend much of our time discussing how to improve your composition skills.

Section: 15
Title: Decolonial Epistemologies or Self-Reflexive Composition
Instructor: Maese-Cohen, Marcelle
Time: TTh 5-6:30pm
Location: 222 Wheeler

Book list: Frantz Fanon, Black Skin White Masks; Linda Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples; Salvador Plascencia. The People of Paper; Eileen R. Tabios, I Take Thee, English, for My Beloved; Teatro Chicana: A Collective Memoir and Selected Plays; a course reader

Course Description: This course is designed as a writing workshop. Through peer editing and multiple drafts of papers, we will begin with a focus on the syntax and grammar of the sentence, the basic unit for all prose writing. We will then study the paragraph, the transition, the thesis, and the conclusion as discrete units that work together to show the unfolding of a logical sequence of thoughts, i.e. an argument. Because a logically developed argument is not necessarily persuasive or interesting, we will also learn the difference between grammar and rhetoric. Taking decolonial thinkers as model rhetoricians, we will close-read for the effects of word choice, tone, figurative language, imagery, rhythm, and sentence length, and work across and in between a variety of literary forms (autobiography, novel, poetry, theatre, and political essay). By focusing on composition as a process of rewriting and rethinking that is always in relation to the social life of the author and the social life of language itself, we will embark on a self-reflexive study of the university as site for the intimate production of knowledge and power. We will consider the following presupposition: there is no global social justice without global cognitive justice.

Section: 1
Title: Work in Progress
Instructor: Oyama, Misa
Time: MWF 9-10
Location: 225 Wheeler

Book list:

Paul Auster, Man in the Dark; Tony Kushner, Caroline, or Change; Haruki Murakami, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running; Stephen King, On Writing; a course reader of short stories and articles. Recommended: Wayne C. Booth, Gregory G. Colomb, and Joseph M. Williams, The Craft of Research.

Film list: Wrestling with Angels: Playwright Tony Kushner (2006), Show Business: The Road to Broadway (2007), Grey Gardens (1975), Grey Gardens: From East Hampton to Broadway (2007), One True Thing (1998), Chess in Concert (2009), Fruit Fly (2009)

Film list: Wrestling with Angels: Playwright Tony Kushner (2006), Show Business: The Road to Broadway (2007), Grey Gardens (1975), Grey Gardens: From East Hampton to Broadway (2007), One True Thing (1998), Chess in Concert (2009), Fruit Fly (2009)

Course Description: Although our ultimate goal as writers is to finish our work, we can learn a great deal from the process of working through an idea. As Haruki Murakami suggests about his running, sometimes the process of a work is even more meaningful than the end product. This course examines the pleasures and frustrations that people experience while perfecting their work, whether the result is a novel, a film, a musical, or (for those who consider their lives a work in progress) a fulfilled life. What challenges do people face when putting an idea into practice? What can we draw from their examples to apply to our own writing? Students will begin by writing a close reading of one of the texts (2-3 pages), then write and revise two essays (5 and 10 pages) which link close readings together to form a larger argument. The second essay will involve the student’s own research project about the development of a creative work. Through these assignments, students will sharpen two skills: looking closely at evidence and making a claim that matters to them.

Section: 2
Title: Conspiracy Fiction
Instructor: Seidel, Matthew
Time: MWF 9-10
Location: 151 Barrows

Book list: Graham Greene, The Ministry of Fear; Franz Kafka, The Trial; Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49; William Shakespeare, Richard III; a course reader

Course Description: In his essay “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” Richard Hofstadter identifies the distinguishing feature of a conspiracy theory not in “the absence of verifiable facts,” but rather in the “curious leap in imagination…from the undeniable to the unbelievable.” This course is about how conspiracy fiction reverses this process, imaginatively leaping from the unbelievable to the undeniable.

We will be less concerned with determining the validity of the plentiful conspiracy theories in circulation than examining how they work narratively. What kinds of techniques do conspiracy fictions use, how does information get withheld and transmitted, and how do we describe the experience of reading them? We will begin with selections from Paradise Lost, making the acquaintance of Milton’s Archconspirator Lucifer. From there we’ll enter the realm of mortal scheming: Machiavellian plotting in Richard III, the extended juridical nightmare of Kafka’s The Trial, a World War II spy network in Graham Greene’s The Ministry of Fear, and a playfully ominous history of the postal system in Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49. The texts come at conspiracy fiction from different angles – tragic, epic, allegorical, realistic, stylized, parodic – so following this particular thread will also provide a broad survey of literary form. Though conspiracy tends towards opacity, the aim of this course is to avoid it at all cost in your writing. Writing assignments will build up from a series of shorter exercises and culminate in a final research project.

Section: 3
Title: Short Stories in Literature
Instructor: Ungar-Sargon, Batya
Time: MWF 10-11
Location: 225 Wheeler

Book list: A course reader including short stories by Mary Gaitskill, Lorrie Moore, Henry James, Flannery O’Connor, Raymond Carver, Anton Chekhov, Joyce Carol Oates, James Joyce, Franz Kafka, Vladimir Nabokov, and others

Course Description: The course will focus on close reading short stories for details that students will learn to use to make larger arguments about issues such as race, gender, class, history, narrative, and creativity, so come opinionated. There will be three papers (2, 5 and 8 pages) as well as a creative assignment, to help students come to terms with what it means to be on the writing side of a short story. We will also look at criticism so that students learn to position themselves in a critical context.

Section: 4
Title: Collaborative Production
Instructor: Beck, Rachel
Time: MWF 11-12
Location: 225 Wheeler

Book list: Diana Hacker, Rules for Writers; Simon Winchester, The Professor and the Madman; Studs Terkel, Working; Invisible Seattle. Selected internet content will include (but will not be limited to) “The Cathedral and the Bazaar,” urbandictionary.com, the Oxford English Dictionary, and wikipedia. A course reader will include (but will not be limited to) surrealist exquisite corpses, excerpts from the Oulipo Compendium, and collaboratively written articles from the sciences and social sciences.

Course Description: If you think of a team of researchers, its members are probably in lab coats: Marie and Pierre Curie, Watson and Crick, the Manhattan project. But there are sociable aspects of scholarly and creative work outside the hard sciences, too. In this R1B, we will sample a few scientific, literary, and journalistic projects that have resulted from collaboration, while exploring questions that collaborative production raises in a society with intellectual property laws: Why are multi-authored works comparatively rare in the humanities? Who is invited to contribute to a project? Who does the inviting? How do multiple authors share responsibilities? Who owns the resulting material? What’s the difference between collaboration and appropriation? How do we give credit where credit is due? And what does it mean to have “your own” ideas, anyway?

R1B is designed to develop the reading, critical thinking, discussion, and writing skills that will help you understand others’ ideas and articulate your own responses. We’ll put our developing ideas about collaboration into practice by reviewing each other’s writing and by taking on one small group-research project. In the second half of the semester you’ll have an opportunity to tailor your research writing to your individual interests.

Section: 5
Title: Apocalyptic and Dystopian Literature
Instructor: Goodwin, Peter
Time: MWF 12-1
Location: 225 Wheeler

Book list: Karel Capek, War With the Newts; Philip K. Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?; Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale; Cormac McCarthy, The Road; Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons, Watchmen; Diana Hacker, A Pocket Style Manual; a course reader including poems, stories, biblical readings, and critical essays. We will also watch at least one film, Children of Men (dir. Alfonso Cuaron, 2006); and listen to the recording of Diamanda Galas’s 1991 performance of her Plague Mass.

Course Description: War, environmental disaster, moral decadence, pervasive governmental intrusion into private life—we’ve learned to live with it. But a rich history of dystopian and apocalyptic literature continues to play a crucial role in awakening us to the horrors of these regrettably familiar aspects of life in the twenty-first century. This course will provide a brief tour through this blasted literary landscape. Due to budget constraints, radiation suits will not be provided. The primary goal of this course is to teach you how to conduct and present research in a clear and compelling way. With this in mind, the readings are designed to guide students in their own research about the social functions of apocalyptic thinking. Your final project will be a literary research paper on a topic of your own design. We will devote a considerable amount of class time to learning about the basic tools and techniques for writing a college research paper.

Section: 6
Title: Seeing Double
Instructor: Knox, Marisa
Time: MWF 12-1
Location: 121 Wheeler

Book list: Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White; Nella Larsen, Passing; Robert Louis Stevenson, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde; Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest; Joseph Gibaldi, MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers; and a course reader

Course Description: Although cases of mistaken identity often result in comedy, the figure of the “double” or “doppelgänger” tends to have more sinister associations. As a literary motif, the double can be an omen of doom, a deliberate exercise in role playing, or a psychological symptom of self-consciousness, dissociation, or repression. On the level of language, the double entendre is a mischievous figure of speech that nonetheless encapsulates the often ambiguous quality of words.

In this course, we will explore how novels, dramas, stories, and nonfictional texts explore the idea of “doubling” and its implications in characterization, plot, structure, and style. Even as students cultivate the ability to “see double” and interpret texts in various ways, they will also be developing their writing skills toward clear exposition and argumentation of their specific interpretations. In order to expand and integrate these arguments within a larger intellectual context, the class will learn and deploy methods of research through periodic assignments. Students will ultimately apply these practices in writing and revising three research papers of increasing length, ranging from four to ten pages.

Section: 7
Title: Portrait of an Artist as an Old Man
Instructor: Lee, Sookyoung
Time: MWF 1-2
Location: 225 Wheeler

Book list: Amitav Ghosh, The Shadow Lines; Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure; James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man; Philip Roth, Sabbath’s Theater; a course reader

Course Description: Longevity offers a curious dilemma for an artist: how are literary and historic movements articulated to him/her over time, and how does s/he in turn shape them? This is not only a question of tradition and the act of historical sense-making, but also of self-making—a writer’s relationship to his/her own writing and techniques of self-portraiture. Consider it quaintly as the dilemma of maturation, the vulnerability of growing old and having to account for several different versions of oneself. Consider it more hauntingly as the monomania and the failure of self-revision. How, for example, is the literary genre bildungsroman (the novel of growth and development) emblematic of the very act of authoring oneself at large? We will compare the formal and thematic changes in these works to examine issues of revision, autobiography, persona, experience and self-construction. You will also track the process and progress of your own writing by developing a writing portfolio. You will begin by writing a series of short response papers (1-2 pgs), one of which will undergo three stages of peer response and extended revision over the semester to result in a 10-page research paper.

Section: 8
Title: Travel Writing
Instructor: Thomas-Bignami, Ian
Time: MWF 1-2
Location: 121 Wheeler

Book list: Ryszard Kapuscinski, Travels with Herodotus; Bruce Chatwin, In Patagonia; George Orwell, In Catalonia; W. G. Sebald, The Rings of Saturn. Readings by the following will be included in a course reader: Herodotus, Homer, Ibn Battuta, Jorge Luis Borges, Antonio Piagafetta, John Mandeville, Richard Hakluyt, Jonathan Swift, Charles Darwin, Ernest Hemingway, Michael Herr, Dimiter Kenarov, Philip Gourvitch.

Course Description: “There is no frigate like a book, to take us lands away.” -- Emily Dickinson

Exotic lands, unfamiliar customs, and bizarre creatures challenge the ability of travelers, writers, and readers to make sense of what they experience. Reading a variety of texts, from narratives of New World discovery to accounts of twentieth-century genocide, we will explore how text and other media attempt to represent the world. Just as the writers we will read gather, shape, and carefully present their materials, so too will we engage in research, interpretation, and writing over the course of the semester. Through a series of progressively longer assignments we will hone reading, research, and writing practices, not simply as means to an end but as valuable processes in and of themselves. In the words of R. L. Stevenson: “I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel’s sake. The great affair is to move.”

Section: 9
Title: On the Anecdote
Instructor: Loofbourow, Liliana
Time: MWF 2-3
Location: 225 Wheeler

Book list: Italo Calvino, Cosmicomics; current issue of McSweeney's; a course Reader

Course Description: This course will examine the trajectory of the short story and its relationship to technology. We'll start off looking at the development of the genre from myth, tale, parable, joke, etc. to the “canonical” literary form as it emerged in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. We'll think about how and why it evolved as a “literary” form, how the conventions developed and how (or if) they're being challenged in the twenty-first century. Has the form undergone a process of ossification? What are the problems of story-telling in a 21st -century environment? Where should the form go? (Or, given the proliferation of blogs, status updates, twitter-feeds, etc., where has it gone?)

We'll consider the evolution of the written artifact not just across but within particular works. Revision—reseeing, editing, rewriting, overwriting—will be key both to the readings and to your own writing. We'll be working to sharpen your analytical skills, your prose and your argumentation. There will be creative and technological components to the class in addition to paper assignments culminating in a research paper. Easy access to an internet connection is strongly suggested; active participation is required.

Section: 10
Title: First Contact
Instructor: Bady, Aaron
Time: MWF 3-4
Location: 225 Wheeler

Book list: Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart; Gabriel Garcia-Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude; Abdelrahman Munif, Cities of Salt; a course reader

Course Description: In The Gods Must Be Crazy, an airline pilot drops a coke bottle into an isolated !Kung community in the Kalahari desert, their first experience of the outside world. As the hapless Xi attempts to get rid of the offending object, we are meant to laugh at the spectacle of a bushman wandering through a civilized world he cannot understand. Yet as a variety of critics have noted, the entire movie is a fantasy; actual isolated “native” communities that are unaffected by the outside world are very hard to find in practice. The “bushmen” of the Kalahari, in fact, originally retreated into the desert to escape European invaders!

Most stories of “first” contact seem to fall apart in the same way. After reading some critical work on the subject, we will carefully read three novels written less about “first” contact than about the myth of it, set in Nigeria, Colombia, and Saudi Arabia. Students' final projects will be a research assignment exploring and analyzing a story of “first contact” of their own choosing. This course will also focus on writing persuasively, clearly, and precisely about literature, and student writing will develop from brief response papers to full length argumentative essays and revisions.

Section: 11
Title: American Short Works
Instructor: Junkerman, Nicholas
Time: MW 4-5:30
Location: 225 Wheeler

Book list: Henry James, The Turn of the Screw; Charles Chesnutt, The Conjure Woman; Tennessee Williams, 27 Wagons Full of Cotton; a course reader featuring selected short stories and critical essays

Course Description: This course will examine a variety of short American works of art. We’ll start with major short stories from the 19th and 20th centuries and expand outward from there to look at other short forms, including film and theater. Along the way, we’ll tackle a variety of questions about the uses and the limitations of the short form. What draws artists and their audiences to short works? What can shorter stories, films and plays do that longer ones cannot? What happens when a short story becomes a long film? More broadly, we’ll think about our own roles as consumers and producers of short communications in our daily lives.

As we explore these issues, we will also be working to develop tools and strategies for effective reading, writing and research. This will take place alongside and in dialogue with the works that we encounter throughout the semester. Students will be asked to write three papers: an initial 2-3-page diagnostic essay, a 5-6-page paper at mid-semester, and a final 10-page research paper. We will take these papers through the crucial stages of drafting and revision, a process which will include peer review sessions and meetings with the instructor.

Section: 12
Title: Information, Crisis, Catastrophe
Instructor: Richards, Jill
Time: TTh 8-9:30
Location: 225 Wheeler

Book list: Nathaniel West, Miss Lonelyhearts and the Day of the Locust; Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God; Diane Hacker, Rules for Writers. Course reader includes: Stéphane Mallarmé, Guillaume Apollinaire, Flannery O’Connor, Gwendolyn Brooks, William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens, W.B. Yeats, George Oppen, H.D., Mary Ann Doane, Carl Schmitt, Walter Benjamin

Films: It (1927) and Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956)

Course Description: This course will explore representations of crisis, calamity, and general mayhem, moving from natural disaster to Hollywood stampede, from Mallarmé’s Crise de Vers to the Cold War to our current financial meltdown. We will think about how a crisis can both push at the limits of possible representation and create is own spectacular form of reality. We will consider how the catastrophic event delineates a space distinct from the “normal.” This will involve some questions about what, exactly, the “normal” might be. Our various meditations on emergency will ask: Is crisis a singular rupture or a more permanent form of experience in modernity?

We will take these assorted texts and films as an occasion to develop reading, writing, and research skills. The writing assignments for the course will include one short diagnostic paper and two longer papers that combine analysis of primary texts with research from secondary sources.

Section: 13
Title: Words for Nature: Representing Environments in American Literature
Instructor: Arreglo, Carlo
Time: TTh 11-12:30
Location: 225 Wheeler

Book list: Steven Gilbar, Natural State; David Mas Masumoto, Epitaph for a Peach; Ruth Ozeki, All Over Creation; Lois-Ann Yamanaka, Wild Meat and the Bully Burger; Diana Hacker, Rules for Writers; Frank L. Cioffi, The Imaginative Argument; a course reader

Course Description: This course is primarily concerned with developing and refining your writing, reading, and thinking skills. We will tackle these goals through the broad topic of American literature as it relates to the evolution of environmental thought. What makes a particular work environmental? Our readings--expository writing, the novel, poetry, and film, from nineteenth-century works to the present--will examine this question in relation to the participation of the humanities in the formation of past and current environmental thought. We’ll look beyond Thoreau, ecocriticism, and mainstream environmentalisms to discuss how race, place, and space inform alternate environmentalisms in the city, in farms, in communities of color, and beyond.

However, the main concern of the course is writing. A diagnostic essay will be assigned on the first day of class to assess your writing skills, which will see practice through writing exercises, revision, small group work, and peer feedback. Two, perhaps three, longer essays will follow for a total of at least 16 pages of final drafts and an equal number of pages for preliminary drafts. The final essay will involve researching some aspect of environmentalism.

Section: 14
Title: Contemporary American Narrative
Instructor: Gordon, Zachary
Time: TTh 12:30-2
Location: 225 Wheeler

Book list: Diana Hacker, Rules for Writers 6 th edition; Norman Mailer, The Armies of the Night; Toni Morrison, Jazz; Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49; Art Spiegelman, Maus: A Survivor’s Tale (volumes I and II); a course reader with selections from Jean Baudrillard, Walter Benjamin, Theresa Cha, Joan Didion, George Orwell, and Helena María Viramontes.

Course Description: This course will focus on strengthening your critical reading and writing skills through the study of contemporary American narrative. While the overarching thematic concerns of the course will be our texts’ self-conscious engagements with history, identity formation, and the limits of verbal and visual representation, we’ll also be exploring the formal features particular to each of these works and developing strategies for building claims around these features. How, for instance, does the ordering of events or their mediation by a narrator influence our reading of a text? How does a text work with or undercut our assumptions about how stories are constructed in order to achieve a particular effect? At what point does a historical narrative or autobiography become fictional?

Writing requirements: three longer essays, the last of which will incorporate independent research, and substantial revisions.

Section: 15
Title: This section has been canceled.