R1A/R1B Course Descriptions
Spring 2009

Section: 1
Title: Reading and Composition: Beyond Good and Evil
Instructor: Kerschen, Paul
Time: MWF 9-10
Location: 222 Wheeler

Book list: Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart; William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell; Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness; Henry James, The Turn of the Screw; James Joyce, Dubliners; Mary Shelley, Frankenstein; a Course Reader containing poems, stories, essays and critical articles.

Course Description: This course takes its title from Friedrich Nietzsche’s book on the "philosophy of the future," in which he argues that traditional moral categories no longer apply to the modern world. In this course we will test that claim. After a brief look at good and evil as understood in Homer, Dante and Milton, we will turn to modern texts which seek to rework these moral categories for their own time. We will ask what is gained and what is lost along the way - as good and evil become more doubtful and provisional, to what extent can they be judged at all? This inquiry will give us a vantage point on some of the monumental changes in Western culture and society over the last two centuries.

In addition to reading and enjoying these works, we will work hard on skillful writing about literature. Students will learn to read closely and carefully, to construct solid theses and arguments, and to deploy the resources of the English language to express their insights with clarity, conviction, and verve. Course assignments will include at least 32 pages of writing divided among several short essays; peer editing and revision will be mainstays. This course fulfills the first half of the university's reading and composition requirement.

Section: 2
Title: Reading and Composition: Storytelling
Instructor: Baldwin, Ruth
Time: MWF 12-1
Location: 222 Wheeler

Book list: G. Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales; H. James, The Turn of the Screw; Z. N. Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God; M. Shelley, Frankenstein; D. Hacker, Rules for Writers, 6th edition; and a Course Reader.

Course Description:

“…the art of storytelling is coming to an end.  Less and less frequently do we encounter people with the ability to tell a tale properly.  More and more often there is embarrassment all around when the wish to hear a story is expressed.  It is as if something that seemed inalienable to us, the securest among our possessions, were taken from us: the ability to exchange experiences.”
                        -Walter Benjamin, “The Storyteller”

Storytelling is a practice as old as language.  Is it really, as Benjamin has argued, a dying art?  How do we tell our own stories?  Structuring narrative as a text (i.e., the move from oral to written narrative tradition) has resulted in the development of a variety of formal narrative techniques and genres.  How do we think about narration?  How do we discuss it?  How do we play with expectations by making and breaking narrative conventions?  How does narration create character and identity?  

Each of the texts we’ll be reading this semester employs a different set of narrative techniques.  We’ll address questions and problems of storytelling through a range of different types of narrative, including film, television, frame narratives, first person narrative, travel narrative/journal, epistolary novels, limited third person and omniscient narration.  Primary texts will be supplemented by a number of critical essays.

Like all R&C courses, the focus of this class will be on student writing: in addition to a number of short, in-class assignments (roughly 1-2 pages), there will be three longer (3-4 page) papers, two of which will be turned in as a rough draft and then revised prior to its final submission.  The final, fourth paper will be a revision and expansion of one of the first four papers.  The 1A course is intended to develop your practical fluency with sentence, paragraph, and thesis-development skills; with that in mind, although some in-class work will be designed to improve writing mechanics (including grammar, syntax, and vocabulary), most assignments will focus on your ability to analyze and interpret difficult work, and to use that analysis to produce credible and defensible arguments.  My hope is that a topic like “Storytelling,” with its emphasis on the forms we use to narrate, will make us think differently about the choices we make in our own writing.

Section: 3
Title: Reading and Composition: Talking Normal
Instructor: Eagle, Chris
Time: MWF 3-4
Location: 222 Wheeler

Book list: Ken Kesey, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest; Yukio Mishima, Temple of the Golden Pavilion; George Bernard Shaw, Pygmalion; Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis; Jean-Dominique Bauby, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly; Charles M. Jones, Looney Tunes.

Course Description: This course explores the ways in which speech disorders and disability have been interrelated in twentieth-century literary and visual culture.  Students will engage with a range of genres including novels, autobiographies, critical essays, films, and cartoons, all of which treat the conditions of stuttering or aphasia as forms of disability.  Each primary text will be presented alongside relevant secondary literature from the related fields of psychology, linguistics, speech pathology, and disability studies.  Because this course is also intended as an introduction to issues of disability across the humanities, many of the central concerns of the emerging field of disability studies will guide our discussions throughout the semester.  Some topics under consideration will include cultural definitions of what constitute ‘regular’ or ‘normal’ ways of speaking, the socially constructed status of the ‘normal’ or ‘able’ person, the stigmas and comic effects often associated with speech disorders, dialects, and accents.  Our method throughout will be a close in-class analysis of the primary texts.  Our focus will be on the development of your close-reading skills as well as an improvement in your writing.  Students will also be expected to give a final presentation related to some aspect of speech pathology.  While R1A is primarily designed to improve your writing, it is also a seminar, and so I anticipate active participation from all members of the class. 

Section: 4
Title: Reading and Composition: The African Writer
Instructor: Bady, Aron
Time: MW 4-5:30
Location: 222 Wheeler

Book list: Chris Abani, Graceland; Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart; Wole Soyinka, The Lion and the Jewel; Ngugi wa Thiong'o, I Will Marry When I Want; Yvonne Vera, Butterfly Burning.

Course Description: The literatures produced on the continent of Africa are old, rich, and vast, from epic poems and religious verse to extensive dramatic and storytelling folk cultures. This class, however, will focus on modern African writers, men and women who have written with pen, typewriter, or computer, who publish in European languages rather than in those of their ancestors, and whose books are more often read by affluent readers in the West than by other Africans.

They are also, it is worth noting, the first writers to consider themselves African at all. Before the British created the colonial Nigerian state, for example, Igbo people, Yoruba people, Hausa-Fulani people, Ijaw people, and hundreds of other ethnic groups inhabiting the region surrounding the Niger river not only didn’t think of themselves as Nigerians (a term they had never heard), but they didn’t even think of themselves Africans. The word, after all, was coined by the Romans thousands of years ago to describe the continent to their south but until the twentieth century it was never a word used  by the people it described. Nation-states are, however, only part of colonialism’s legacy: when colonialists forced Africans to put aside the traditions and languages of their communities, they put them into schools and churches, teaching them to read the bible and write in English, or French, or Portuguese. What then does it mean to be a writer in Africa?

This course also aims to develop students’ ability to write persuasively, clearly, and precisely about literature. Students will therefore learn how to construct strong sentences and paragraphs, develop thesis statements, organize textual evidence and analysis, and make forceful interpretive arguments. Your writing will move from online responses to the reading to handed-in assignments to papers revised in consultation with me.

Section: 5
Title: Reading and Composition: The Southernization of America
Instructor: Pugh, Megan
Time: TTh 8-9:30
Location: 222 Wheeler

Book list: Erskine Caldwell and Margaret Bourke-White, You Have Seen Their Faces; Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God; Flannery O’Connor, A Good Man is Hard to Find; a course reader, including works by James Agee, Langston Hughes, William Faulkner, and others.

Film list: Gone With the Wind; The Little Colonel; Cabin in the Sky.

Course Description: In 1927, the Mississippi River flooded some 27,000 square miles of American heartland, displacing hundreds of thousands of Southerners. Two years later, the stock market bottomed out and triggered the Great Depression. These national catastrophes provided a reason for the region to break with its agrarian past and explore progressive reforms. As rural Southerners moved to cities in record numbers, they brought their culture with them, a culture that was picked up by new neighbors and disseminated more broadly than ever before. Southern culture had become national culture.

This introduction to college writing and argument explores the Southernization of America from the 1930s to the 1950s. We’ll read a good deal of fiction and poetry alongside manifestos, documentary photography, music, and film. Our course material will help us ask questions about the relations between history and memory, race and nation, art and politics—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: 7
Title: Reading and Composition: Authenticity, Fraud, and Representation
Instructor: Cannon, Ben
Time: TTh 11-12:30
Location: 222 Wheeler

Book list: Peter Carey, My Life As a Fake; William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night; Mary Shelley, Frankenstein. A Course Reader may include short stories, poetry, essays and excerpts by: Arthur Conan Doyle, Jorge Luis Borges, Edgar Allan Poe, Daniel Defoe, Herman Melville, Philip K. Dick, Wyndham Lewis, T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Fernando Pessoa, Plato, Rem Koolhaas, Jean Baudrillard, Hugh Kenner, and Walter Benjamin.    

Film List: Bladerunner; F for Fake.

 Visual Art: Rubens, Goya, Corot, Picasso, Warhol, Koons.

Course Description: This course will consider the relationship between concepts of fraud and authenticity in literary and artistic representation, using this basic opposition to explore questions about originality, mimesis, and identity. Can something fake be real if it provokes a genuine emotional response? Conversely, can something real be fake if it feels derivative? What about things we are supposed to understand to be fake? Are collage and pastiche genuine artistic expressions, or simply legitimized modes of fraud? Is all art in some sense fake in that it is removed from direct experience of the object? How does fraud complicate concepts of biography and personal history? Finally, why does it matter so much anyway? What is at stake in our claims of authenticity in relation to works of art?

This course will use these questions to help students generate a series of short papers over the course of the semester in order to develop their skills in analytical reading and composition. This course fulfills the first part of the undergraduate reading and composition requirement.

Section: 8
Title: Reading and Composition: Poetry and Science
Instructor: Cecire, Natalia
Time: TTh 12:30-2
Location: 222 Wheeler

Book list: Janet L. Gardner, Writing About Literature; Diana Hacker, Rules for Writers, 6th ed.; Gertrude Stein, Tender Buttons; William Carlos Williams, Imaginations; and a Course Reader.

Course Description: In college lore, the stereotypical easy science class is “Physics for Poets,” a class supposedly evacuated of all the specifics that make physics what it is. The premise of a title like “Physics for Poets” is that the poet is the ultimate inept scientist. Yet in some sense, the scientist and the poet are engaged in  the same activity—the production of a true descriptive rendering of the world. In this course, we will suspend judgment on the poet’s methodology in order to come to a better understanding of how poets undertake to describe the natural world—and how they implicitly or explicitly engage with their fellow observers, the scientists.

This discussion-based class fulfills the first half of the Reading and Composition requirement. We will establish a forum for developing our ideas together, trying out theories, and practicing thinking on our feet, while also exploring the mechanics of writing analytical essays. The course will require that students write four short papers with revisions; smaller supplementary exercises will also be assigned.

Readings will include poems by William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Willliam Cullen Bryant, Walt Whitman, Gertrude Stein, Marianne Moore, and William Carlos Williams; technical and theoretical essays; and students’ essays.

Section: 1
Title: Reading and Composition: Secrecy and Detection (note new title)
Instructor: Clinton, Dan (note new instructor)
Time: MWF 9-10
Location: 225 Wheeler

Book list: Sigmund Freud, Dora: An Analysis of a Case of Hysteria; Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl; Henry James, Turn of the Screw and The Aspern Papers; Herman Melville, Billy Budd and Other Tales. Edgar Allan Poe, The Portable Edgar Allan Poe, Course Reader.
Screenings: Rear Window (dir. Alfred Hitchcock, 1954), Sparrow (dir. Johnnie To, 2008), or possibly other films.

Course Description: The critical reader may easily fall into the habit of regarding even the most innocent tale as a case awaiting solution, such that every bright country cottage or society salon becomes a crime scene to be scrutinized by the inch. Leaving aside the question of whether any tale is entirely innocent, this course will fully indulge this forensic impulse by examining texts that explicitly organize themselves around secrets (some dirtier than others). We will trace this theme through a variety of genres, from the detective story to the medical case history, in order to investigate how the authors writing within these genres began to decode human behavior and social systems. Throughout the course, detection will serve as a functional metaphor for reading, one that often allows authors to reflect with varying degrees of explicitness on their own practices of composition.

While many of the course readings will obsess over obfuscation, this course has as its primary aim the development of critical writing skills that will require a minimal effort of decryption on the reader’s part. Expect one short diagnostic essay followed by three progressively longer papers, in addition to exercises on topics such as thesis development, argumentation, sentence construction, and research.

Section: 2
Title: Reading and Composition: Science! Fiction!
Instructor: Fan, Chris
Time: MWF 10-11
Location: 222 Wheeler

Book list: M. Shelley, M., Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus; S. Lem, S., Solaris; K. Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go; P. Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?; D. Hacker, Rules for Writers.

Film List: Soderbergh, Solaris (2002) or Tarkovsky, Solaris (1972) [TBD]; “Measure of a Man,” Star Trek: The Next Generation, Season 2 (1989); Battlestar Galactica (2004): Miniseries, part 1; Ridley Scott, Bladerunner (1982)

Course Description: This course will explore both traditional and non-traditional examples of science fiction with a special emphasis on book-to-film adaptations. Some of our organizing questions will be: If science has on one hand become notorious for taking the life out of life (the humanity out of the human, etc), why, on the other hand, is it also one of the most fertile grounds for our imagination? What exactly does science fiction help us to imagine that other genres don’t? What can literature do that film can’t, and vice-versa? Is science fiction worth imagining – does it change anything? How does science fiction help us to rethink political categories such as nation and race, and do its lessons last? Does it succeed in helping us to imagine beyond the human? Most importantly … does it change us?

This course will focus on developing students’ practical fluency with exposition and argumentation, with an emphasis on research skills. A short diagnostic essay will be assigned at the beginning of the semester followed by two progressively longer essays (totaling at least 16 typewritten pages). These will be substantially revised and accompanied by various research activities and exercises.

Section: 4
Title: Reading and Composition: The Confessing Animal
Instructor: Browning, Catherine
Time: MWF 11-12
Location: 222 Wheeler

Book list: Augustine, Confessions; De Quincey, Confessions of an English Opium-Eater; Hacker, A Writer’s Reference (6th ed. 2007); Hogg, Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner; Rousseau, Confessions; and a Course Reader.

Course Description:

Written and oral confessions are a mainstay of western culture, with manifestations as different as Augustine's fourth-century spiritual autobiography and Rousseau's shocking eighteenth-century tell-all memoir. Confession in a variety of forms is central to many religious faiths, to our criminal justice system, and to our popular culture.  Confessions play a part in psychoanalysis and in politics.  This course will explore the phenomenon of confession, asking such questions as:  What is confession? How and why do we value it?  What social, literary, and political conventions govern its performance?  How does confession both reinforce and destabilize the social order?

As part of the university’s Reading and Composition requirement, this course develops reading, writing, and research skills that are applicable across the curriculum.  We will focus on how to find, evaluate, and make effective use of research tools and resources for analytic writing.  The primary writing assignments for the course will be three progressively longer papers (2-3 pages, 6-8 pages, 8-10 pages), combining analysis of primary texts with research from secondary sources.  The first paper will be a personal essay in response to Augustine’s Confessions; the second, an argumentative essay supported by research and evidence; and the third, an expository research paper.  Strategies for revision will form another major focus of the course, and the second and third papers will include substantial work (and feedback) at the prewriting and draft stages of composition.

Section: 5
Title: Reading and Composition: Reading the Past, Writing the Future: Literary Communication Across Ages
Instructor: Williams, Karen
Time: MWF 11-12
Location: 225 Wheeler

Book list: (please wait to purchase books!): Ford, Ford Madox, Ladies Whose Bright Eyes; Hacker, Diana, Rules for Writers (6th ed.); Miller, Walter M., A Canticle for Leibowitz; Twain, Mark (a.k.a. Samuel Langhorne Clemens), A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court; Wells, H.G., When the Sleeper Wakes. A Course Reader containing short works, including: “The Ruin” (in Old English, and in translation); “The Seven Sleepers of Eusepheus” (Old English version, Koran version, and in translation); “Pandora's Box” (in Greek, Latin, and translation); and others TBA

Course Description: The developers of Nevada's Yucca Mountain Nuclear Waste Repository have a problem: how do they effectively tell humans not to open the site for the 10,000 years needed for the radioactive waste to decay--despite the fact that languages and technologies for transmitting information will almost certainly have changed? 

This course takes the Yucca Mountain problem as an imaginative jumping-off point for thinking about reading and writing across time periods, aiming to improve your reading and writing skills by studying the history--and future--of reading and writing. We will begin by analyzing the literature of older civilizations, studying ancient Egyptian writings on papyrus at Berkeley's Center for the Tebtunis Papyri, and considering the manuscript contexts of works in Old English and Middle English.  (Translations will be provided.)  Then we'll approach the problem of linguistic dislocation through the lens of modern fiction, reading works that pull characters out of their current time and throw them into the distant future or past.  How can such literary imaginings help us think about the way our own era's texts will later be received?  

Though we'll be studying reading and writing in a broad thematic sense, we'll also be doing plenty of it ourselves, since the purpose of this course is to develop your skills in reading comprehension, essay composition, and scholarly research.  There will be a short diagnostic essay, followed by two other essays (6-8 and 8-10 pages, respectively). The third paper will include a research component oriented around the course topic.

Section: 6
Title: Reading and Composition: Plotting Suspicion
Instructor: Ring, Joseph
Time: MWF 12-1
Location: 225 Wheeler

Book list: William S. Burroughs, Cities of the Red Night; Arthur Conan Doyle, The Sign of Four; Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams; Sigmund Freud, Dora: An Analysis of a Case of Hysteria; Jamyang Norbu, The Mandala of Sherlock Holmes; William Shakespeare, Hamlet; selected short stories by Jorge Luis Borges and Edgar Allan Poe.

Course Description: This course will inspect a lineup of “unusual suspects” plucked from what might be called a literature of suspicion. Although a motley generic arrangement encompassing revenge tragedy, psychoanalytic theory, detective fiction, and postmodern apocalypse, the texts that we will read nevertheless all, in different but related ways, assign a prime role to fiction in procedures of suspicion, detection, and evidence evaluation. This course will concentrate on close, careful reading of these works and their interpretive methods, placing them in historical and cultural context.

Above all, this course is designed to teach you how to work with principal modes of academic rhetoric: description, analysis, and argument. You will be required to write, in addition to a diagnostic essay and a number of short writing assignments, at least two formal essays, each of which you will substantially revise, and the last of which will include a research component. As each student will also workshop these essays with a peer-editing group, you must be prepared to write detailed comments on other students’ work.

Section: 7
Title: Reading and Composition: The Capitalist
Instructor: Constantino, Jesse
Time: MWF 1-2
Location: 222 Wheeler

Book list: Vladimir Bartol, Alamut; Bret Easton Ellis, American Psycho; Herman Melville, The Confidence-Man; and Course Reader.

Film List: Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory; Imitation of Life; There Will Be Blood.

Course Description: This course will explore the figure of the capitalist in literature and film. We will question to what extent he and she is a useful model for describing the modern ideal self in all its excesses, its brutalities, and its pleasures. While most of our course texts portray twentieth-century American representations of the figure, we will also briefly examine other national and historical variations. In addition to the novels and films listed above, we will also read excerpts from Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations, Johann Goethe’s Faust, Karl Marx’s The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, William Whyte’s The Organization Man, and Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged.

This is a writing course, so your primary goal will be to refine and develop analytical writing skills.  You will be expected to write a series of progressively longer and more complicated essays throughout the semester.  In addition, this course carries a research component; you will learn basic research methods (library, internet, etc.) and apply them to your writing.  You will also be required to purchase a course reader that includes additional literature, theory, and criticism relevant to the course topic.

Section: 8
Title: Reading and Composition: A People’s History of the English Language
Instructor: Sergi, Matthew
Time: MWF 1-2
Location: 225 Wheeler

Book list: W;t (Margaret Edson); Rules for Writers, 6th Edition (Diana Hacker); Inventing English: A Portable History of the Language (Seth Lerer); 1984, with “Politics and the English Language” (George Orwell); The Elements of Style Illustrated (Strunk, White and Kalman); Eats, Shoots and Leaves (Lynne Truss). Selected internet and audio content, including (but not limited to) urbandictionary.com, oed.com, and the work of A Tribe Called Quest, Jay-Z, Mos Def, Saul Williams, and Dr. Dre. A course reader, including (but not limited to) writing by Geoffrey Chaucer,     Seamus Heaney, Ælfric of Eynsham, Benjamin Franklin, Noah Webster, Norton Juster, and excerpts from Wyclif’s Bible.

Course Description: The R1 series is built to hone your critical thinking, and to train you in the basic reading and composition techniques necessary to organize, sharpen, and communicate that thinking.  When you master the rules of the language in which you write or speak, you will organize your ideas more effectively, communicate them more clearly, and be taken more seriously in professional discourse.

But who has the authority over those rules?  Are the standards really all that standard?  How have they changed?  Are they changing now?  Does good English always facilitate communication, or can it sometimes oppress or exclude?  Can bad English do the opposite?  Consider: the way we are taught to write is linked to, even synonymous with, the way we think.

Constructed loosely around the history of the English language, this R1B will give students mastery over English-language standards by examining key moments in the historical development of those standards—how they have been controlled, preserved, described, prescribed, or rejected.  We will examine written texts as well as Internet content and recorded music, and even as we use style guides to write, we’ll write about the guides, and think critically about the power they exert on our thought.

Section: 9
Title: Reading and Composition: Stylin’
Instructor: Katz, Stephen
Time: MWF 2-3
Location: 222 Wheeler

Book list: Nicholson Baker, The Mezzanine; Graham Greene, The End of The Affair; Casey Finch, editor, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight;  Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises; and a Course Reader.

Course Description: In this class we will consider style as a literary and a cultural problematic.  We will endeavor to find precise ways of talking about the distinctive style of a text, and we will think about style in a broader sense, as a currency that promises creativity and hipness to those who know how to find it.  All of the texts for this course are fraught by a tension about style, finding themselves caught sorting out the difference between permanence and mere trendiness, bookishness and worldliness, an idiosyncratic voice and a collective mood.  Above all, style is meant to be noticed, and each of our texts is also freighted by the awareness that it wants to be “checked out.”

Such issues will be our intellectual fodder as we address the writerly concerns of the R1A syllabus. Over the course of the semester, we will work to build your fluency and confidence in pulling off great college writing through a number of shorter writing assignments.  Our concentration on style will allow us to consider the technical aspects of good writing (grammar, thesis development, evidence, voice) in ways more pulse-quickening than such a list might at first suggest.  Our common goal will be the mastery of those competencies necessary for the production of startlingly good analytic prose.  All of this will acquaint you with the forms of argumentation that you will need at your disposal for such perils as one encounters in the classrooms of Berkeley, and beyond. 

Section: 10
Title: Reading and Composition: How Form Plots the Historical
Instructor: Menilla, David
Time: MWF 2-3
Location: 225 Wheeler

Book list: William Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom!; Toni Morrison, Beloved; Virginia Woolf, To The Lighthouse; Diana Hacker, Rules for Writers; and a course reader.

Course Description: The texts we will read in this course will compel us to think about how characters and stories develop in time.  How does the concept of History change when time moves non-linearly instead of linearly? What happens to a character's experience of History, what happens to his very identity--when the conventional boundaries of past-present-future which have defined subjectivity are ruptured? The past will become a ghostly present haunting characters' desire to move forward into the future. Insofar as characters will be defined by their relationship with the past, the validity of that experience as a Historical one will depend on our intense engagement with narrative form.  We will work to understand how the larger themes of character identity and a broader national History are determined by the writer's stylistic choices.  How do authors manipulate point of view to suggest that a character's experience maybe Historical? What is the relationship between free-indirect style and seeming conflation of the past and the present? The skill of close reading will help us to see how the pieces might fit together more clearly, as well as facilitate our engagement with outside sources.

Section: 11
Title: Reading and Composition: “Native American Literature”
Instructor: Hausman, Blake
Time: MWF 3-4
Location: 225 Wheeler

Book list: Sherman Alexie, Ten Little Indians; John Rollin Ridge,, the The Life and Adventures of Joaquin Murieta, the Celebrated California Bandit: Louise Erdrich, Love Medicine. There will also be a course reader containing works by writers such as E. Pauline Johnson, Zitkala-Sa, D’arcy McNickle, N. Scott Momaday, Leslie Marmon Silko, Simon Ortiz, Michael Dorris, Linda Hogan, Wendy Rose, Joy Harjo, Marilou Awiatkwa, and Thomas King.

Film List: The Business of Fancydancing

Course Description: As studies in “American literature” or “Literature in English” grow increasingly diverse and inclusive, several important questions arise in relation to “Native American literature.”  What is Native American literature, and how does it relate to the larger canons of American and Anglophone literature?  On one level, Native literature predates European settlement by thousands of years; on another level, Native literature in English is barely older than the United States itself.

This class will examine a wide range of word art produced in English during the last 160 years by writers of Indigenous American descent.  We will engage works of poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and film.  Since the writers who create these texts come from such different backgrounds and employ great variations of style and substance, we will ultimately question what makes “Native American literature” what it is.  From the 19th century myth of Joaquin Murieta to the widely popular contemporary work of Sherman Alexie, how does Native American literature give readers some wonderfully entertaining stories while simultaneously pushing us to question the implications of living in “America” in the 21st century?

Section: 12
Title: Reading and Composition: Literature of the Undocumented
Instructor: Huerta, Javier
Time: MW 4-5:30
Location: 225 Wheeler

Book list: Ramón Tianguis Pérez, Diary of an Undocumented Immigrant; Salvador Plascencia, The People of Paper; Strunk and White, The Elements of Style; and a Course Reader.

Film List: La Misma Luna/Under the Same Moon; (short film) AB540 The Movie.

Course Description: The texts we will read this semester ask us to engage our critical reading and writing skills on the topical question of undocumented immigration. We will turn our critical attention to articles from both sides of current debates on immigration in order to analyze and evaluate the efficacy of those arguments. In the literary works--a novel, a nonfiction diary, and poems--we will focus on those characters that are either defined by documents or by the lack of documents. We will also look at the importance of documents in our lives: birth certificates, driver's licenses, school identification cards, passports, death certificates, etc. 

The primary goal of this class is to develop students' practical fluency in argumentative writing and research skills. Taking these texts as occasions to produce further writing about documents and the undocumented, students will write a couple of short writing assignments and a couple of long argumentative essays (each 8-10 pages long).

Section: 13
Title: Reading and Composition: The Long and Short of It
Instructor: Tsao, Tiffany
Time: Th 8-9:30
Location: 225 Wheeler

Book list: Charles Dickens, Bleak House; James Joyce, Dubliners; Jhumpa Lahiri, Interpreter of Maladies; Rohinton Mistry, A Fine Balance; Jean Rhys, Good Morning, Midnight!; a course reader.

Course Description: You can’t judge a book by its cover, but can you judge it by its length?  Why is it that some of us love burying our noses in a large book, while others of us feel drowsy at the very sight of anything over 200 pages long?  Why don’t they sell books by the pound, like meat or produce?  Why are so many of the “timeless classics” we feel we should read sooooooooo darn long?  Was Yoda right when he told Luke in Empire Strikes Back, “Size matters not”?

In this class, we’ll explore the respective merits of wordiness and brevity by reading two long works over the course of the entire semester, alongside a series of short works.  For the long novels, we’ll start in post-independence New Delhi with Rohinton Mistry’s A Fine Balance, and travel back in time to Victorian London in Charles Dickens’s Bleak House.  The shorter works we’ll be reading include short stories by Jhumpa Lahiri and James Joyce, a short novel by Jean Rhys, and a variety of other stories, plays, excerpts, and essays included in a course-reader.

Students will be required to write three essays, respectively, 2-3 pages, 6-7 pages, and 8-10 pages in length. The last two essays will each undergo a substantial amount of revision (including peer-revision), and the 8-10 page writing assignment will be a research paper.

Section: 14
Title: Reading and Composition: Googleable: Language, Politics and Mass Media
Instructor: Ecke, Jeremy
Time: TTh 9:30-11
Location: 225 Wheeler

Book list: Joseph Gibaldi,  MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers; George Orwell,  1984; Richard Marius,  A Writer's Companion; and a course reader containing selections from George Orwell, Don Watson, Frank Luntz, George Lakoff, Geoffrey Nunberg, J.L. Austin, Steven Pinker, and Robert Stockwell and Donka Minkova.

Course Description: George Orwell's 1984 envisions a world where language, thought, and information are controlled by the ruling Party. Reading 1984 as a primer of media and information control, we will examine the challenges that mass media and the internet present in the so-called information age. We will examine the democratization of information, the credibility of sources, issues of access, and the problems that arise when journalists, researchers, and students limit their information to that which is "googleable."

Your research project will span the semester.  You will propose a set of related research topics, compose a research prospectus, and compile bibliographies.  You will be required to attend office hours, prior to the submission of your prospectus, following the submission of your bibliography, and during one of your essay revisions.  Your research will culminate in a final expository essay of 7-10 pages, and you will revise your essay twice.  A strong emphasis will be placed on feedback and self-evaluation.

Section: 15
Title: Reading and Composition: On and Off the Map
Instructor: Townsend, Sarah
Time: TTh 11-12:30
Location: 225 Wheeler

Book list: Kiran Desai, The Inheritance of Loss; Brian Friel, Translations; Cormac McCarthy, The Road; Michael Pollan, The Omnivore’s Dilemma.

Recommended Texts: Stephen Gaghan, dir., Syriana; Diana Hacker, Rules for Writers; Fernando Meirelles and Kátia Lund, dirs., City of God.

Course Description: This course examines the topic of map-making in contemporary American and world literature and film.  We will begin with Brian Friel’s 1980 play Translations, which takes up a literal mapping project, the British Odnance Survey that mapped 19th-century colonial Ireland.  From there we will turn to less literal maps, examining both the difficulty and the grave importance of mapping spaces and human relationships in a global age.  Throughout the semester we will consider the politics of mapping by asking the following questions: who draws the map and why?  Who makes it onto the map?  Who is left off?  We will finish the semester with Cormac McCarthy’s recent novel The Road and Michael Pollan’s non-fiction work The Omnivore’s Dilemma, two different texts that turn to the environment in order to re-map human relationships.

English R1B will situate these readings and interrogations around a series of writing assignments.  The primary goals of this course are to develop your ability to read and write about literature, and to strengthen your research skills.  You will be required to complete frequent reading responses, short essays on literary analysis, and a longer research essay.  You will also be required to revise everything you write and to peer-edit the work of your classmates.

Section: 16
Title: Reading and Composition: Speaking to Power in Early Modern England
Instructor: Smythe, Fiona
Time: TTh 11-12:30
Location: 301 Wheeler

Book list: Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince; John Milton, Paradise Lost; Thomas More, Utopia; William Shakespeare, Richard II; Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene. A course reader will include: Francis Bacon, excerpts from Essays; Elizabeth I, excerpts from her speeches to Parliament; John Gauden, Eikon Basilica; John Milton,  Eikonoklastes; John Stubbs, The Discoverie of a Gaping Gulf; Philip Sidney, The Lady of May

Course Description: How do writers influence and persuade?  Can an artist change the course of history?   Are there rhetorical techniques which can touch and sway an audience?  This course examines a variety of texts from early modern Europe which attempted to influence either the monarch or the court of public opinion. Writers and visual artists pursued varying methods of enacting change, attempting to move the lector to imitate or avoid examples presented to them in art and literature.  The course reading will examine the varying success of different types of persuasive rhetoric and art, from panegyrics to criticism.  Contemporary portraits and visual arts will be shown in class and discussed. Reading will include modern equivalents of such missives, in the form of opinion pieces drawn from newspapers and blogs.  The final research paper will require the student to research the publication and reception of a text of their choosing, delineate and analyze its rhetorical strategies, and evaluate its persuasive success.
 
The purpose of this course is to improve your reading, writing and research.  We will proceed through the reading at a leisurely pace, working on developing analytic and observational skills through discussion of the material.  Substantial time will be given to in-class writing, discussion and peer review exercises.  A diagnostic essay will be assigned at the beginning of the semester.  A 5-6 page essay will be due at the mid-point of the semester, and a longer 10-12 page research paper will be due at the end of the course.

Section: 17
Title: Reading and Composition: Think Like the Pacific: American Literature and Alternate Environmentalisms
Instructor: Arreglo, Carlo
Time: TTh 2-3:30
Location: 222 Wheeler

Book list: Carlos Bulosan, America is in the Heart; Steven Gilbar, Natural State; Diana Hacker, Rules for Writers; Constance Hale, Sin and Syntax; Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac; David Mas Masumoto, Epitaph for a Peach; Ruth Ozeki, All Over Creation; a course reader.

Course Description: This course is primarily concerned with developing and refining your writing, reading, and thinking skills. We will, however, tackle these goals through the broad topic of American literature as it relates to the evolution of environmental thought and geographical imaginations. Our readings, taken from nineteenth century works to the present, will engage expository writing, the novel, poetry, and film as we examine the overlapping branches of environmentalism, literature, subjectivity, and ethnicity. How does the environment and environmentalism inflect such issues as immigration, globalization, urban-rural formations, food, the outdoors, and land conservation? Looking beyond Thoreau, ecocriticism, and mainstream environmentalisms, we will discuss how race, place and space inform alternate environmentalisms in the city, in the fields, in the Pacific, 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: 18
Title: Reading and Composition: Dystopian Fiction and the Fate of the Body
Instructor: Edwards, Erin
Time: TTh 3:30-5
Location: 301 Wheeler

Book list: Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale; William Gibson, Neuromancer; Diana Hacker, Rules for Writers; Aldous Huxley, Brave New World; Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go; Thomas More, Utopia; and a Course Reader.

Film List: Blade Runner (1982); Children of Men (2007)

Course Description: This course will examine the body as a site through which dystopian fiction enacts many of its central conflicts.  We will discuss ways in which dystopian fiction both speculates about the future of the body and registers anxiety about the loss of more traditional bodily forms.  Reading and viewing a range of novels and films, we will encounter topics such as gender, sexuality, reproduction, cloning, and cyborg bodies.  Despite the apparent exoticism of its worlds and bodies, dystopian fiction asks fundamental questions about what a body is, and how it is produced, controlled, or altered by outside forces.  The course will thus consider how dystopian fiction affords a critical distance through which contemporary political and social contexts are critiqued.

In class discussions and in short paper assignments, we will practice close readings skills, working toward developing arguments from initials questions and observations about the text.  The course will also introduce students to research skills and will culminate in a final paper that incorporates historical, theoretical, or critical sources into its argument.

Section: 19
Title: Reading and Composition: The Garden and Revolution—English ‘Eco’ Poetry, 1603-67
Instructor: Prawdzik, Brendan
Time: TTh 5-6:30
Location: 222 Wheeler

Book list: John Milton, Paradise Lost; Diana Hacker, Rules for Writers; and a Course Reader.

Course Description: Earth felt the wound, and nature from her seat
Sighing gave signs of woe, that all was lost.
— John Milton, Paradise Lost (1667)

We will read and write about environmentally engaged poetry of seventeenth-century England as we develop practical fluency in expansive analytical writing, argumentation, and research.  Students will write and revise two analytical essays (5-10 pp.) and complete a 12-pp. research paper.

For England, the Seventeenth Century was a time of urbanization, pre-capitalist economic development, the emergence of global trade, the rise of mass-scale modern warfare, and a general distancing of God and religion from the center of psychological experience. Englanders benefited from scientific and technological innovations, yet also experienced environmental devastation and a changing relationship with the land.  Trauma and alienation marked the changing face of the natural landscape, compelling poetic re-imaginings of the natural world.  Genres like the country estate poem, pastoral lyric, and even the epic register an intimate link between history and the natural world in profound, often surprising ways. As we are just now learning to come to terms with the seeming imminence of an environmental apocalypse of our own making, we are in a position to sympathize with and learn from these poetic mediations.  We should expect our interaction with the literature to inform our experience as cultivators of our own groaning Paradise.