R1A/R1B Course Descriptions
Spring 2010

Section: 1
Title: American Short Works
Instructor: Junkerman, Nicholas
Time: MWF 9-10
Location: 222 Wheeler

Book list: Henry James, The Turn of the Screw; Charles Chesnutt, The Conjure Woman; Diana Hacker, Rules for Writers; 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 19^th and 20^th 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 and writing.  This will take place alongside and in dialogue with the works that we encounter throughout the semester.  Students will be asked to write several papers, the length of which will increase as the semester progresses.  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: 2
Title: Social Ladders, Pyramids, and Circles
Instructor: Miller, Monica
Time: MWF 12-1
Location: 222 Wheeler

Book list: Mulk Raj Anand, Untouchable; E. M. Forster, Howards End; Elizabeth Gaskell, Cranford; Kazuo Ishiguro, Remains of the Day; George Orwell, 1984; course reader containing short stories and critical readings.

Course Description: In this class, we will look at the ways societies organize themselves and, in turn, the way literature reflects, reinforces, or criticizes those organizational schemes. How do classes, castes, or cliques form, and what purpose do they serve? Who becomes dominant? Who must submit? Who is left out entirely? We will examine a variety of imagined societies, some based on real nations or communities, others on their creators’ dreams or nightmares, in an attempt to think through some of these questions.

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 32 pages of written work through a gradual process of outlining, drafting, editing, and revising.

Section: 3
Title: The Power of I: Literary Constructions of the Self
Instructor: Bednarska, D.
Time: MWF 2-3
Location: 222 Wheeler

Book list: Mary Karr, The Liar’s Club; Eli Clare, Exile & Pride; Harry G. Frankfurt, On Bullshit; Jamaica Kincaid, My Brother; Jeanette Winterson, Written on the Body; Diane Hacker, Rules for Writers. (Some texts may be added later.)

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 and poetry.  We will examine how different choices made by the author construct specific understandings of who the author (or narrator) is and the story which they are telling.  Students may be asked to reflect on these issues through small in-class creative writing assignments if time permits.

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. This course fulfills the first half of the university’s R&C requirement.

Section: 4
Title: On the Anecdote
Instructor: Loofbourow, Liliana
Time: MW 4-5:30
Location: 222 Wheeler

Book list: Italo Calvino, If on a winter's night a traveler; Edwin Abbott, Flatland; Steve Tomasula, VAS: An Opera in Flatland; 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 and beyond.  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 storytelling 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 two major paper assignments. Easy access to an internet connection is strongly suggested; active participation is required.

Section: 5
Title: Method to Madness/Madness to Method
Instructor: Lee, Sookyoung
Time: TTh 8-9:30
Location: 222 Wheeler

Book list: Samuel Beckett, Murphy; Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland; Jose Saramago, Blindness; Bruno Schulz, The Street of Crocodiles; Virginia Woolf, Freshwater; a course reader with selections from Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster; Franz Fanon, Black Skin White Masks; Freud, The Uncanny; Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man; Wittgenstein Philosophical Investigations, World War I poetry

Recommended: Joseph M. Williams, Style: Ten Lessons in Clarity and Grace.

Film List: The Brothers Quay, Street of Crocodiles; Adam Curtis, The Trap: What happened to Our Dream of Freedom; Jan Svankmajer, Alice.

Course Description: The surrealist literary experimentation (exquisite corpse, automatic writing, etc) arises out of dissatisfaction with what the conscious and "rational" mind fails to express. Instead, Surrealists claim that an unconscious production will perform the theoretical labor better. Is there a method to their madness? On the other hand, consider tried and tested conventions like,“Don’t end a sentence with a preposition.” What methods and prescriptions have we been socialized into and is there madness in them? Since different authors struggle to articulate a similar set of problems in radically divergent ways, we will look at their choices in "expressive content." What strategy is at work and how is it effective? The object of our evaluation will range from the utmost particularity of grammar (passive vs. active voice) to genre (lyric poetry vs.prose essay, surreal cinematography vs. documentary) and disciplines (visual art vs. political manifesto). We will consider the integrity of artistic form and the rationale behind each “arbitrary”choice.

Section: 6
Title: Asian American Literature after Cultural Nationalism
Instructor: Wu Clark, Audrey
Time: TTh 12:30-2
Location: 222 Wheeler

Book list: Jhumpa Lahiri, Interpreter of Maladies; Lois-Ann Yamanaka, Blu’s Hanging; Chang-Rae Lee, A Gesture Life; Jessica Hagedorn, Dogeaters; Fae Myenne Ng, Steer Toward Rock

Course Description: Broadly, this course will acquaint you with the close readings of texts and the tools for writing expository essays. In this course, we will read Asian American texts written from the 1990s to 2008, nearly three decades after cultural national Asian American anthologies such as Frank Chin et al.’s Aiiieeeee! (1974) were published. In recent years, there has been considerable backlash among critics and writers against the nation-centric, masculinist identity politics espoused by 1970s cultural nationalists. But, if critics and writers have moved beyond problematic gender politics of cultural nationalism and refocused on Asian American transnationalism, what are the tropes, themes, and queries that define Asian American literature in the contemporary moment? What recent historical events have influenced and even informed the construction of these novels? In examining pan-ethnic texts which are mostly written by women and often take place in spaces other than the continental U.S., we will explore how such themes as border crossing and gender performances define Asian American literature. It is my hope that 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 revisions as well as short, intermittent writing exercises to do in class or at home.

Section: 7
Title: First Contact
Instructor: Bady, Aaron
Time: MWF 1-2
Location: 237 Cory

Book list: Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart and No Longer at Ease; Gabriel Garcia-Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude.

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 and Colombia. 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: 8
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 (1957); Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970); Salvador Plascencia, The People of Paper (2005); Teatro Chicana:  A Collective Memoir and Selected Plays (2008); 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: 9
Title: American Elegy
Instructor: Auclair, Tracy
Time: MWF 3-4
Location: 222 Wheeler

Book list: A course reader of elegies and essays; 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; 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 17^th-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 which will be broken down into 4 essays of equal length.

Section: 1
Title: Textual Histories
Instructor: Cecire, Natalia
Time: MWF 9-10
Location: 225 Wheeler

Book list: Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass (Library of America); Emily Dickinson, The Poems of Emily Dickinson (reading edition; Harvard UP); Charles W. Chesnutt, The Conjure Woman and Other Tales (ed. Brodhead; Duke UP); Marianne Moore, Complete Poems (Penguin); Djuna Barnes, Ladies Almanack (Harper Collins); MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers, 7th ed.

Course Description: What is it that we are reading when we read a text? Long-standing internet repositories like Project Gutenberg and the recent lurch toward e-books in the publishing industry suggest that texts are fungible data-sets whose digital transfer from computer to Kindle to paper are independent of how texts are read or what they mean. Yet this is just one of many theories of how text functions in society. In this research-oriented course, we will explore the historical and material manifestations of several nineteenth- and early twentieth-century texts and their literary consequences through a number of joint and individual projects. Students will produce a critical edition of a short text, a critical reflection on editing, and a medium-length research paper. In addition to more traditional paper media, students will think capaciously about the functions of textual media through electronic forms, including a course blog and Twitter.

Section: 2
Title: Native American Autobiography and Life Writing
Instructor: Gillis, Brian
Time: MWF 10-11
Location: 225 Wheeler

Book list: Charles Eastman, Indian Boyhood; Black Hawk, Black Hawk, an Autobiography; N. Scott Momaday, The Way to Rainy Mountain; Sarah Winnemucca, Life Among the Piutes; Zitkála-ša, American Indian Stories; a course reader including excerpts from: George Copway, Life, History, and Travels of Kah-ge-ga-gah-bowh; Francis La Flesche, The Middle Five; Wilma Mankiller, Mankiller; Leslie Marmon Silko, Storyteller.

Course Description: Long before European contact Native people in North America were telling, performing, and preserving their personal narratives through pictographs, oral stories, and performances.  This course will sample some of the diverse array of Native American artistic and literary production from the pre-contact, “pre-literate” period all the way to the present.  Along the way, as writers and readers, we will gain a better appreciation of the diversity and immensity of this field of literature, a knowledge of its changing relationship to Native American culture and identity, and an understanding of the tensions between autobiography, authorship, and authenticity.

While the primary goal of the class is to improve both the stylistics and mechanics of your academic writing, we will also devote time to our own life writing. To that end, each of us will keep a short journal of our personal reactions to the life-writers that we read and the artists that we examine, using them as exemplars for our own narratives. Additionally, we will engage in a process of peer review for three short essays due for the class. At the end of the semester, you will present a précis of your research at an in-class conference.

Section: 3
Title: Martyrdom and Literature
Instructor: Mead, Christopher
Time: MWF 10-11
Location: 222 Wheeler

Book list: William Shakespeare, King Lear; John Bunyan, Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners; John Milton, Samson Agonistes; a course reader.

Course Description: Between 1535 and 1681, at least six hundred people were executed in England for their religious beliefs. Many others were imprisoned and tortured. As we will see, however, one person's martyr is another person's traitor, and the primary medium for debating the difference was print.

This introduction to college writing and argument explores texts by and about English martyrs and martyrdom in the 16th and 17th centuries. Along with poetry and drama, we will read autobiography, eyewitness accounts, and propaganda. We will also examine some of the illustrations that often accompanied these materials. Our course readings will help us formulate questions about the definition of a martyr and the nature of martyrdom's relationship to belief, civic identity, and authorship itself. Your work for the term will culminate in a ten-page research paper that takes up one or more of these issues in a text of your choosing. As this is a writing-intensive course, you will also draft and revise three shorter essays. Our constant goal throughout the semester will be to hone and augment our skills as critical readers and to express our analyses in clear and sophisticated prose.

Section: 4
Title: Green Reading
Instructor: Legere, Charles
Time: MWF 11-12
Location: 225 Wheeler

Book list: Henry David Thoreau, Walden; Aldo Leopold, Sand County Almanac; J.M. Coetzee’s The Lives of Animals; David Sibley, The Sibley Field Guide to Birds of Western North America; and a course reader with poems, essays, and/or excerpts by William Wordsworth, Bill McKibben, David Owen, Elizabeth Kolbert, William Blake, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Robinson Jeffers, David Owen, Wendell Berry, William Cronon, Jacques Derrida, and Michael Pollan.

Course Description: In this class, you will become ecologically literate, and learn to write clear argumentative prose. You will learn to identify birds and trees, and keep a journal to practice writing about the environment. As exemplars, we will look at how other writers—Thoreau, Leopold, Steinbeck, McKibben—have written about their environments. In the meantime, in several short papers, you will synthesize your own observations into ecological hypotheses, and revise and perfect them in response to criticism and peer review. In this class, I hope to move together from nature writing to environmental justice. Ultimately, you will be encouraged to reflect on your own place in nature: at the end of the semester, you will present your final paper on “The Future of Nature” at an in-class conference. 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: 5
Title: Eat Read Write: Food as Socially Symbolic Act
Instructor: Arreglo, Carlo
Time: MWF 11-12
Location: 222 Wheeler

Book list: Gerald Graff, They Say, I Say; Michael Pollan, In Defense of Food; Ruth Ozeki, All Over Creation; Bich Minh Nguyen Stealing Buddha’s Dinner; Carlos Bulosan, America is in the Heart, Barbara Kingsolver, Animal Vegetable Miracle, Wendell Berry, Bringing it to the Table; 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 works that engage food in broad terms. For a good number of us, but by no means all of us, food has gone from survival and sustenance to art and craft. We will look at how food represents culture and how culture represents food in relation to place, process, urban-rural formations, race, immigration, and globalization.

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, journal entries, and peer feedback. You’ll research and evaluate food blogs in the first week so that by week two or three, you’ll start the first of your frequent postings throughout the semester. Two, perhaps three, longer essays will follow the diagnostic essay for a total of at least 16 pages of final drafts and an equal number of pages for preliminary drafts. Your final essay will be a research paper that involves original research examining some aspect of food, culture, and industry.

Section: 6
Title: Holiday Literature
Instructor: Drosdick, Alan
Time: MWF 12-1
Location: 225 Wheeler

Book list: Charles Dickens, “A Christmas Carol”; James Joyce “The Dead”; David Sedaris Holidays on Ice; William Shakespeare Twelfth Night; Thomas Kane The Oxford Essential Guide to Writing; a Course Reader.

Course Description: Holidays find much common ground with literature.  In their ways, both exist outside of time and place by means of their inherent, if relative, universality.  Thanksgiving is not celebrated around the globe, just as Donne is not read the world over, but both hold their places through shared perception and appreciation, their physical trappings– be they books or turkeys– merely symbols through which a greater project might be enacted, namely the poetry or the giving of thanks.  Holidays are strictly dictated by the calendar (Which do you call it, Independence Day or the 4^th of July?), but by their very nature function external to the calendar, as one Halloween is the same as the one before it, and is on some level every Halloween.  When celebrating a holiday, we feel like we have stepped out of our lives, and, as Washington Irving puts it, we do not “regulate...time by hours, but by [the smoking of] pipes.”  In short, holidays are magical days when time both stands still and extends back centuries, when the power of symbolism is heightened, and when we feel that on this day we can see a larger picture of both ourselves and the world.  While we shall take holidays as the subject matter for the materials of this course, this is first and foremost a class on writing.  The class will not focus on the assigned literature, but on the students, who will rigorously develop their analytical thinking and writing skills.  Students will learn to develop a working thesis and expand it into a cohesive extended examination of relevant issues regarding the primary texts or films under scrutiny.  Through weekly writing assignments, students will learn to think through writing, improving their ability to assess a work critically and to express the intricacies of their observations.  The final project will ask that students produce a sustained, multifaceted argument, which interprets individually collected research, in the form of a ten-page essay.  The final goal of the course will be to challenge students to become clear, efficient, effective writers.

Section: 7
Title: Short Stories in Literature
Instructor: Ungar-Sargon, Batya
Time: MWF 1-2
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: 8
Title: T.B.A.
Instructor: T.B.A.
Time: T.B.A.
Location: T.B.A.

Course Description:

Instructor, time, and location to be announced.

No one will be able to enroll in this section until it has been finalized, which might not be until November or so.

Section: 9
Title: Autobiography
Instructor: Beck, Rachel
Time: MWF 2-3
Location: 225 Wheeler

Book list: Diana Hacker, A Writer’s Reference; Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass; Studs Terkel, Working; Alison Bechdel, Fun Home; Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Dictee; and a course reader.

Course Description: James Frey’s memoir A Million Little Pieces created a sensation with its gripping treatment of addiction. But the book caused a far greater sensation in January 2006 when the website The Smoking Gun, examining police records, determined that Frey “had wholly fabricated or wildly embellished details of his criminal career.” Frey and his publisher were eventually sued for fraud by readers for selling fiction as fact—for violating a convention of genre.

In this course we will set out a provisional definition of autobiography and its conventions, a definition that we will test and complicate as we read texts that play with those conventions. Some questions we will consider: How do cultural norms influence the self that one is able to represent in writing? How do visual elements, or documentary ones, function in autobiography? What happens when another self is at the center of the writing? What does self-presentation look like in a work that is filled with many selves (like a collection of oral histories)? How does autobiography employ elements of fiction? And given that elements of fiction are present in autobiography, what’s the relationship between fiction and nonfiction? What difference does it make if a story is true?

Section: 10
Title: Learning and Constraint
Instructor: Weiner, Joshua
Time: MWF 3-4
Location: 225 Wheeler Hall

Book list: Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile; Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe; Jane Austen, Persuasion; Vikram Seth, The Golden Gate; Georges Perec, A Void

Course Description: This class will try to stimulate reflection on what learning is, and what its relation is to different kinds of constraint. The pressure of this question (learning) and this theme (constraint) will be everywhere brought to bear on the task of this course: learning to write and research better. How can we think more critically about our own learning processes and the forms of constraint that enable them?

The first part of our readings will consider some of the constraints around learning that we are perhaps most likely to think of – universities, classrooms, pedagogical relationships, the essay form, even language itself – by reading two Enlightenment texts that worked hardest to situate learning elsewhere: Rousseau’s Emile and Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. The second part of the course moves away from the scene of education to look at two late 20^th century texts that manifest the productive possibilities in different kinds of self-imposed constraint: Vikram Seth’s novel in verse The Golden Gate, and Gilbert Adair’s translation of Georges Perec’s La Disparition, written without the letter e. The hinge between these parts will tackle in many ways the hardest aspect of our theme, the relation between writing and the personal, through a reading of Austen’s novel Persuasion and a selection of poems by Gerald Manley Hopkins. These literary works will be interspersed with bite-sized selections from such theorists as D.A. Miller, Jacques Ranciere, Gregory Bateson, and Jacques Derrida.

Section: 11
Title: Travel Writing
Instructor: Thomas-Bignami, Ian
Time: MW 4-5:30
Location: 225 Wheeler

Book list: Bruce Chatwin In Patagonia, Ryszard Kapuscinski, Travels with Herodotus, George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia, W. G. Sebald, The Rings of Saturn. Readings by the following will be included in a course reader: Herodotus, Homer, Virgil, Francis Bacon, Ibn Battuta, Jorge Luis Borges, Antonio Piagafetta, Richard Hakluyt, Jonathan Swift, Charles Darwin, Ernest Hemingway, 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: 12
Title: The Victorian Detective
Instructor: Covalciuc, Alexander
Time: TTh 8-9:30
Location: 225 Wheeler

Book list: Arthur Conan Doyle, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes; Robert Louis Stevenson The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde; Wilkie Collins The Moonstone; Mary Braddon, Lady Audley’s Secret; Kate Summerscale, The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher; A Course Reader.

Course Description: In addition to giving us some of the greatest novels ever written, the Victorian period (roughly 1832-1900) also gave us the detective. This does not mean that people didn’t use their brains to solve crimes before 1832, far from it; it is, however, during the Victorian period that the detective becomes not only an essential constituent of any serious police force, but also an object of public fascination and attention. Indeed, one of the most famous detectives of all, Sherlock Holmes, comes at the tail-end of the period, as if he were the consummation of the preceding generations’ interests. In this course, we will read a number of Sherlock Holmes’ stories, several stories by Poe, and several novels in which detection plays an integral part. In addition to attempting to satiate our always-unsatisfied quest to find out “whodunit,” we will write a number of essays, ultimately culminating in a larger, research paper. This course satisfies the second half of the Reading and Composition requirement.

Section: 13
Title: The Elements of Surprise
Instructor: Martin, Theodore
Time: TTH 9.30-11
Location: 225 Wheeler

Book list: Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot; Henry James, The Turn of the Screw; Heidi Julavits, The Uses of Enchantment; Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49; and a course reader with stories by Haruki Murakami and David Foster Wallace and essays by Sigmund Freud, 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 hoped-for moment at which 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.

As the second half of the University’s “Reading and Composition” requirement, English R1B is a writing-intensive introduction to critical reading, interpretive thinking, and scholarly research. Building from a series of short reading responses, two formal essays, and a continuous process of peer editing and revision, your main task in this course will the be the completion of a 10-page research project.  This project will ask you to explore primary sources as well as secondary accounts in order to offer a new critical and historical perspective on the many ways we experience—as both readers and writers—the surprises of literature.

Section: 14
Title: Framing the Modern Death and Paralysis
Instructor: Sullivan, Khalil
Time: TTh 9:30 - 11
Location: 222 Wheeler

Book list: William Shakespeare, Hamlet; Arthur Miller, The Crucible; Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse; Sarah Kane 4:48 Psychosis; Suzan-Lori Parks, Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World; and an online reader of poems and essays by T.S. Eliot, Thomas Hardy, Judith Butler, Cheryl A. Harris.

Screenings:  Hirokazu Koreeda, After Life; Jennie Livingston, Paris is Burning; Werner Herzog, Grizzly Man; Gus Van Sant, Paranoid Park.

Course Description: In Radiohead's 2006 song "Videotape" (inspired by Koreeda's After life), Thom Yorke dourly laments the inevitable fact:  one day we shall all encounter death.  Yet, how will we be remembered?  Figures as far back as Shakespeare's Hamlet have taken up this modern problem and the paralysis it induces.  We will interrogate not only the depictions and discussions of modern death (particularly its ethical considerations) but how each form (film, novel, play, and poem) allows for different perspectives on what makes death the hardest concept to grasp until it's far, far too late.

Section: 15
Title: The Fall of Woman
Instructor: Obi, Gertrude
Time: TTh 11-12:30
Location: 225 Wheeler

Book list: King James Bible (1611), John Milton, Paradise Lost (1674); Christina Rossetti, “Goblin Market” (1862); Thomas Hardy, Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891); course reader.

Course Description: This class will focus on the role and treatment of women in the story of the Fall of Man. We begin with two texts that have shaped the way the Fall is viewed in the Western imagination: the creation story in the book of Genesis and Milton’s Paradise Lost. We will next jump to Victorian England and examine two works that center on a woman’s fall from innocence: Christina Rossetti’s “Goblin Market” and Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles. There will be two short papers on Milton and Rossetti, and one longer final paper which will involve a synthesis of what we’ve discussed about all four texts.

In our reading, we will explore the implications of the various shifts in and/or modifications of gender roles in each retelling of the Fall. What does Milton’s account of the differing motives of Adam and Eve for sinning suggest about the relationship of each to God? What happens when the Adam figure disappears, as in Rossetti’s “Goblin Market”? Are there any substitutes for the God figure in the Victorian retellings?

Section: 16
Title: Conspiracy Fiction
Instructor: Seidel, Matthew
Time: MWF 12-1
Location: 237 Cory

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 longer research project.

Section: 17
Title: Skeletons in the Closet
Instructor: Knox, Marisa
Time: TTh 2-3:30
Location: 225 Wheeler

Book list: Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey; Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre; James Weldon Johnson, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man; Horace Walpole, The Castle of Otranto.

Course Description: The plot of many works of fiction is often that of a secret being gradually revealed to the reader. This course will examine texts in which characters conceal things from each other, from the most mundane motives to the darkest Gothic sins of the past. We will also trace the methods in which a secret is uncovered, whether by accidental revelation or deliberate detection. Expanding our focus outward, we will examine the expectations of genre created by these texts in engaging the question of how the ability of protagonists to “read” certain clues is connected with the reader’s experience with and understanding of the narrative.

As we apply our own reading resources to analyzing texts built upon strategic obscurity, the class will continuously work on developing the ability to write with clear exposition and argumentation. In order to expand and integrate these arguments within a larger intellectual context, students will cultivate their own sleuthing skills in learning and deploying methods of research through periodic assignments. Students will ultimately apply these practices in writing and revising three papers of increasing length, ranging from three to ten pages.

Section: 18
Title: America in the Thirties
Instructor: Pugh, Megan
Time: TTh 3:30-5:00
Location: 225 Wheeler

Book list: Tillie Olsen, Yonnondio; Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God; Nathanael West, Day of the Locust; a course reader including work by James Agee, Hart Crane, Pietro di Dinato, Woody Guthrie, Langston Hughes, Toshio Mori, and William Saroyan.

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, labor, and politics, and between race, gender, and nation—themes you will explore in an eight to ten page research paper analyzing a cultural document of your choice. You will also complete two shorter essays, and we’ll spend much of our time discussing how to improve your research and composition skills.

Section: 19
Title: Reading the Past, Writing the Future: Literary Communication Across Ages
Instructor: Williams, Karen
Time: TTh 5-6:30 pm
Location: 225 Wheeler

Book list: Diana Hacker, Rules for Writers (6th ed.); Walter Miller, A Canticle for Leibowitz; Mark Twain, (a.k.a. Samuel Langhorne Clemens), A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court; H.G. Wells, When the Sleeper Wakes. A Course Reader containing short works, including: “The Ruin” (in Old English, and in translation); “The Seven Sleepers of Ephesus” (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 Greek 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.