Graduate Courses
Fall 2008
Graduate students from other departments and exceptionally well-prepared undergraduates are welcome in English graduate courses (except for English 200) insofar as limitations of class size allow. Courses numbered 203 are usually limited to 20 students; courses numbered 250 are usually limited to 15. From time to time, instructors of other graduate courses may find it necessary to limit enrollment.
When demand for a graduate course exceeds the maximum enrollment limit, the instructor will determine priorities for enrollment and inform students of his/her decisions at the second class meeting. Tele-BEARS enrollment does not guarantee a place in a graduate course that turns out to be oversubscribed on the first day of class; in fact, a few students could be required to drop the course, starting with people who are not English Department graduate students -- though, fortunately, this situation does not arise very often.
200/1
Problems in the Study of Literature
Best, Stephen
MW 10:30-12
305 Wheeler
Book List: Chandler, J., , Davidson, A., and Harootunian, H., eds.: Questions of Evidence: Proof, Practice, and Persuasion across the Disciplines; Preminger, A., and Miner, T.V.F.: The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics
Course Description: Approaches to literary study, including textual analysis, scholarly methodology and bibliography, critical theory and practice.
200/2
Problems in the Study of Literature
Rubenstein, Michael
MW 10:30-12
301 Wheeler
Book List: T.B.A.
Course Description: Approaches to literary study, including textual analysis, scholarly methodology and bibliography, critical theory and practice.
203/1
This class has been canceled
203/2
Graduate Readings: The Turn to Language and the Writing of Everyday Life
Hejinian, Lyn
MW 1:30-3
301 Wheeler
Book List: Benjamin, W: The Arcades Project, Harvard University Press, 0-674-00802-2; Coultas, B: A Handmade Museum, Coffee House, 978-1-56689-143-1; De Certeau, M: The Practice of Everyday Life, University of California Press, 0-520-23699-8; Freud, S: The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, Penguin, 0-14-118403-5; Goldsmith, K: The Weather, Make Now Press, 0-9743554-2-9; Gordon, N and Sullivan, G: Swoon, Granary Books, 1-887123-54-7; Grenier, R: A Day at the Beach, Segue, 0-937804-14-2; Lefebvre, H: Everyday Life in the Modern World, Transaction Publishers, 0-87855-972-8; Mathews, H: 20 Lines a Day, Dalkey Archive Press, 1-56478-168-2; Mayer, B: Midwinter Day, New Directions, 0-8112-1406-0; Oppen, G: Selected Prose, Daybooks, and Papers, Univ. of California Press, 0-520-23579-7; Silliman, R: Tjanting, Salt Publishing, 1-876857-19-6; Weiner, H: Spoke, Sun and Moon, 978-0-940650-26-8; Williams, W.C.: Imaginations, New Directions, 0-8112-0229-1; Wittgenstein, L: Remarks on Colour John Wiley & Sons, 0-631-11641-9; Wolf, C: One Day a Year, 1960-2000, Europa Editions, 1-933372-22-2; Zolf, R: Human Resources, Coach House, 1-55245-182-8; A reader including works by Amiri Baraka, Barrett Watten, Lorine Niedecker, Marianne Moore, Theodor Adorno, and others will also be required.
Course Description: This seminar will undertake a critical reading of, and participation in, some possibilities (or impossibilities) of 20th/21st century “realism”; it will query, from an array of perspectives, problems of representation, referentiality, literary historiography, spectatorship, etc., with reference to a range of theoretical works read in parallel with the some recent (and largely “experimental”) literary texts. In addition to the readings, each student will be required to undertake a daily writing project of his or her own that is capable of querying its own language and the character of dailiness, as a subjective site and as an objective realm of experience.
203/3
Graduate Readings: Colonial America in the Atlantic World
Donegan, Kathleen
TTh 12:30-2
175 Dwinelle
Book List (tentative): Andrews, W. (ed.): Journeys in New Worlds
Bauer, R. (ed): Early Americas Digital Archive; Behn, A: Oronooko;
Bradford, W.: Of Plymouth Plantation; Brockden Brown, C.: Wieland;
Byrd, W.: A History of the Dividing Line; Caretta, V. (ed): Unchained Voices;
Hariot, T.: A Brief and True Report; Lake, H.: The Code of Handsome Lake;
Ligon, R.: A True and Exact History of the Island of Barbados; Rowson, S.: Charlotte Temple;
Smith, J: Generall History; Williams, R.: A Key into the Language of America; Course pack of critical readings
Course Description: This course will locate colonial and early national texts from North America in the broad circuit of the Atlantic world, examining that Atlantic context both as a cultural arena and as a critical construction. Through close literary readings, we will study the mediation of consciousness, epistemology, power, and identity through textual production in an era defined by unprecedented levels of global circulation of goods, peoples and ideas. Because this is a course in colonial literatures, our primary texts will include a great many genres: settlement histories, personal narratives, sermons, prophecy, translation guides, civic texts, natural sciences, dramas, and early novels. Given that scholars of early America have so recently and so radically re-conceived this field of study, we will also take up the challenge of examining how intellectual projects are shaped through critical discourse. This is field that has, with fair rapidity, broadened its scope from a myopic obsession with New England divines to a global purview that links Native America, Europe, Africa, North and South America, the Carribean, and all the waterways between them. How, in this transformation, do theory and methodology interact? How can older and newer critical models claim to map the same territory? How does critical practice translate across disciplines? What is the status of the text in the meantime? These and allied questions will give us plenty to discuss. Two 10-page essays and one seminar presentation on secondary critical materials are required.
203/4
Graduate Readings: Prospectus Workshop
Abel, Elizabeth
T 3:30-6:30
204 Wheeler
Course Description: This will be a hands-on writing workshop intended to facilitate and accelerate the transition from qualifying exams to prospectus conference, and from prospectus conference to the first dissertation chapter. The workshop will provide a collaborative critical community in which to try out successive versions of your dissertation project and to learn how your peers are constructing theirs. Weekly writing assignments will structure points of entry into these projects. Beginning with exercises to galvanize your thinking, the assignments will map increasingly onto the specific components of the prospectus as the semester proceeds. We will also review a range of prospectuses from the past to demystify the genre and to gain a better understanding of its form and function. The goal is to insure that by the end of the semester, every member of the workshop will have submitted a prospectus to his or her committee. If you complete a draft of the prospectus early in the semester, we will reserve time to consider it fully and to structure assignments relevant to the writing of the first chapter (including the question of which chapter should be written first).
203/5
Hale, Dorothy
Graduate Readings: The Novel in Theory
W 3-6
121 Latimer
Book List: Hale, D: The Novel: An Anthology of Criticism and Theory 1900-2000. Barthes, R: S/Z. Genette, G: Narrative Discourse. Eagleton, T: Literary Theory. James, H: What Maisie Knew. Hurston, Z. Their Eyes Were Watching God
Course Description: This course traces the development of novel theory in the twentieth century. Designed as an introduction to major arguments that have been--and still are--influential to literary studies generally, the course asks why so many different theoretical schools have made novels the privileged object of critical attention. Topics of discussion include the difference between narrative and the novel; the location of novelistic difference in the representation of time and space; the definition of subjectivity in terms of vision and voice; the valorization of grammatical structures; the search for a masterplot; the historicization of genre; the confusion of realism and reality; and the belief in a politics of form. Readings will be drawn from, but not limited to, works by H. James, Shklovsky, Lukács, Jameson, Barthes, Girard, Genette, Booth, Bakhtin, Bhabha and Spivak. James's What Maisie Knew and Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God will serve as test cases. Two short papers will facilitate the work of theoretical analysis and discussion.
This course fulfills the Ph.D. program's theory requirement.
205A
Old English
Thornbury, Emily
MW 9-10:30
301 Wheeler
Book list: Baker, P. Introduction to Old English, 2nd edition.
Course description: This class is intended to equip students with the linguistic and cultural knowledge necessary to read and analyze Old English texts in prose and verse. Much of the work for the earlier part of the course will consist of in-class translation and commentary, but as students’ reading skills develop, we will move on to examine issues of form and style; genre; the manuscript as context; and the cultural expectations that shaped vernacular writing in the Anglo-Saxon period. Depending on student interest, we may also consider topics such as the interaction of Latin and Old English; textual criticism; or modern translations and versions of Old English texts. No prior knowledge of Old English is necessary.
212
Readings in Middle English
Miller, Jennifer
TTh 12:30-2
233 Dwinelle
Course Description: Please email j_miller@berkeley.edu for information regarding this course.
217
Shakespeare
Booth, Stephen
TTh 5-6:30
263 Dwinelle
Book List: Book List: Shakespeare, W.: /The Complete Works/, ed. Alfred Harbage et al., or /The/ /Riverside Shakespeare/, ed. G.B. Evans et al., or /The Complete Works/, ed. David Bevington, or /Signet Classic Shakespeare/, ed. Barnet et al. McDonald’s /Bedford Companion.
Course Description: I expect this course to do all the basic work of a Shakespeare survey and also to have seminar-like intellectual crossfire. We will take up all the topics that concern Shakespeare scholars, but rather than approaching them systematically, we will wait for particulars of classroom discussion to invite comment and background on such issues as printing-house practices, Shakespeare's stage, and the composition of his audience. The course will concentrate on Shakespeare's language and on the plays as plays. I will ordinarily assign one play per week, although, if no one objects, I will twice ask you to read two plays (/Richard II /and /1 Henry IV; 2 Henry IV /and /Henry V/) in a single week/. /The other assigned plays will /probably /be/: Antony and Cleopatra, Julius Caesar, Love's Labor's Lost, Macbeth, The Merchant of Venice, Othello, Romeo and Juliet, The Tempest, Twelfth Night,/ and /The Winter's Tale./ (/Hamlet/ and /King Lear/ are not listed because I assume previous study of them; if my assumption is ill-founded, we can substitute one or both of them for one or two of the others on the list.)
Each week's play will be the basis for that week's writing. Every other week (or, if the class is unusually big, every third week), each member of the class will write a very short essay on some aspect of that week's play. In his or her week off (or weeks), each member of the class will read and comment scrupulously and strenuously on all the essays written by students in their "on" week. I will read all the comments on all the papers and comment on the comments. Essays will be due at the beginning of class on Tuesdays. Two sets of comments (one for each essayist, one full set for me) will be due at the beginning of class on Thursdays. You may, if you can conveniently do so, do your commenting by e-mail; my e-address is sbooth@berkeley.edu.
243B
Poetry Writing Workshop
Giscombe, Cecil
M 3-6
115 Barrows
Book List: Students should come to class before purchasing books. Texts will likely include poetry books by Bernadette Mayer, Kamau Brathwaite, and John Ashbery as well as statements/ essays on poetics.
Course Description: The point will be to write poetry in public spaces, to write with an eye toward performance/ publication. My assumption is that people entering the class will enter with projects underway and/ or with a strong interest in the problems and issues of producing and discussing a public art.
To be considered for admission to this class, please submit photocopies of no more than 8 of your poems to Professor Giscombe's mailbox in 322 Wheeler Hall BY 4:00 P.M., TUESDAY, APRIL 22, AT THE LATEST.
Be sure to read the paragraph concerning creative writing workshop courses on page 2 of this Announcement of Classes for further information on enrollment in such courses!
246E
Graduate Proseminar: Restoration and Early 18th Century
Turner, James
TTh 11-12:30
233 Wheeler
Book List: Behn, A. Oroonoko, The Rover, and Other Works; Bunyan, J. Grace Abounding; Defoe, D. Robinson Crusoe; Hammond, P . Restoration Literature: An Anthology; Lawrence, R. Restoration Plays; Pope, A.Selected Poetry; Rochester, J. Selected Works; Swift, J. The Writings
Course Description:
An exploration of the satire, devotional autobiography, prose fiction, letter-writing, diaries, heroic verse, drama, pornography and feminist polemic produced in England between the Restoration of Charles II (1660) and circa 1735; these will include Behn's Oroonoko, the world best-seller Robinson Crusoe, the earlier works of Pope (Rape of the Lock), selected letters of Mary Wortley Montagu describing her life in Turkey, and major writings by Swift (Tale of a Tub, Modest Proposal, Gulliver's Travels). Canonical figures like Milton, Congreve, Pope and Swift will be juxtaposed to scandalous and/or marginal authors: Bunyan, Behn, Rochester and Astell. My selections emphasize the aftermath of Civil War and Puritanism in defeat, the representation of transgressive sexuality, the search for the heroic, the encounter with the alien, the resistance to Amodernity, and the change in the idea of the author as women enter the literary marketplace; many of our texts combine all of these themes. My suggestions for further reading (including J.M. Coetzee's novel Foe) may help you find alternative themes and ways of focusing on this mercurial period
246J
Graduate Proseminar: American Literature, 1855-1900
McQuade, Donald
TTh. 2-3:30
103 Wheeler
Book List: P. T. Barnum, The Colossal P. T. Barnum Reader; Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward; Stephen Crane, The Red Badge of Courage; Theodore Dreiser, Sister Carrie; William James, The Writings of William James: A Comprehensive Edition; Frederick Winslow Taylor, Principles of Scientific Management; Mark Twain, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court; and Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth. Short fiction, essays, and contextual material will be drawn from such writers as Henry Adams, John Dewey,
W. E. B. DuBois, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, William Dean Howells, Alice James, Henry James, Jack London, Bernarr McFadden, Herman Melville, John Muir, Frank Norris, Charles Sanders Pierce, Jacob Riis, Theodore Roosevelt, Josiah Royce, George Santayana, Sui Sin Far, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Gertrude Stein, W. G. Sumner, Thorstein Veblen, Lester Frank Ward, and Anzia Yezierska, along with selected patent medicine and other late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century advertisements as well as other expressions of popular culture.
Course Description: We will read widely in prose from the mid-nineteenth through the early-twentieth century, with particular attention to the ways in which pragmatism functioned as a seam for American literature and popular culture. We will begin - and - end the course by considering William James's essay, "What Pragmatism Means" (1907) as an articulation of an American cultural temperament rather than as an epistemology-centered philosophy. We will explore how the pragmatists' interest in consequences rather than propositions, provocation rather than instruction, invention rather than tradition, and personality rather than community, offered a set of interpretations, a cultural commentary, that sought to explain America to itself - during a period in which public discourse seemed caught in the whirlwinds of ideological polemics as well as of class, racial, and gender conflicts.
250/1
Research Seminar: Ecocriticism Meets Biopolitics
Francois, Anne-Lise
M 3-6
204 Wheeler
Course Description: It is not yet certain whether or not this class will be offered. Please check this listing again in early July for an update. No one will be able to enroll in or wait list themselves for this class until we know if it will be offered.
250/3
Research Seminar: William Blake
Goldsmith, Steven
W 3-6
108 Wheeler
Book List: Ackroyd, P.: Blake: A Biography
Erdman, D., ed.: The Complete Poetry & Prose of William Blake
Johnson, M. and Grant, J., eds.: Blake’s Poetry and Designs
Oe, K.: Rouse Up O Young Men of the New Age
For in this Period the Poets Work is Done: and all the Great
Events of Time start forth & are concievd in such a Period—
Within a Moment: a Pulsation of the Artery.
Course Description: What does Blake mean by “the Poets Work,” and how can that work be achieved “Within a Moment” that has the length of a historical “Period” but is also as brief as “a Pulsation of the Artery”? We will read enough of Blake’s poetry to let us grapple with the questions raised by his last illuminated epics, Milton and Jerusalem, but we will also use our readings to interrogate the relationship between poetic and other forms of labor, especially artisanal and political labor. We will set Blake’s singular aesthetic practices within the relevant contexts of his own era (1790s radicalism, 18th century religious dissent, transatlantic sentimentalism and social reform, Romantic period economies of book and print production) while also considering our own critical contexts, where Blake has come to stand for critical agency itself and thus for the transformative potential of experimental art. Attention to the posthumous work of poetry—what Derrida generally calls teleiopoesis—will lead us to ask why Blake matters to new historicists and new formalists alike, and why the Japanese writer Kenzaburo Oe turns a reading of Blake into the organizing activity of his novel Rouse Up O Young Men of the New Age.
250/6
Research Seminar: Modernist Critical Prose
Blanton, Dan
W 3-6
Note new location: 204 Wheeler
Book List might include: T. S. Eliot, For Lancelot Andrewes, The Idea of a Christian Society; T. E. Hulme, Speculations; J. M. Keynes, The Economic Consequences of the Peace; D. H. Lawrence, Apocalypse; Wyndham Lewis, Blast; Time and Western Man; The Art of Being Ruled; Ezra Pound,ABC of Economics, Guide to Kulchur; Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas; W. B. Yeats, A Vision
Other possible readings include works by W. H. Auden, Julien Benda, William Empson, Roger Fry, Edmund Husserl, Georg Lukács, Karl Mannheim, F. T. Marinetti, John Crowe Ransom, I. A. Richards, Laura Riding, Jean-Paul Sartre, Carl Schmitt, Ernst Troeltsch, Leon Trotsky, Raymond Williams, among others.
Course Description: It is an odd fact of modernist literary history that a large number of the period’s major figures produced as much critical prose--by turns polemical, self-authorizing, speculative, outlandish, and extreme--as poetry or fiction. Scaling from aesthetic criticism to philosophical argument and cultural critique, this most ubiquitous but overlooked of modernist genres is often quoted secondarily, but rarely read on its own discursive terms. This seminar will attempt to do just that, sampling some of the period’s prosaic experiments in a seemingly minor and distinctly non-autonomous literary form: reviews, lectures, essays, tracts, treatises, and quasi-academic squabbles.
Moving from early avant-garde manifestoes to late modernist critical primers, we will grapple first with the modernist practice of criticism, tracing the period’s attempt to construct (and enforce) its own interpretive apparatus and criticism’s encroachment on a number of adjoining discursive fields, from economics to theology. We will next shift our attention to two of criticism’s cognate terms, briefly sampling some of the rhetorics of ‘crisis’ (of enlightenment, of perception, of semblance, of historicism, of parliamentary democracy, of European sciences) that so frequently emerge as descriptions of the moment, before turning to several versions of the corollary idea of ‘critique’. We will conclude with a consideration of one of the most contradictory and totalizing of the period’s emergent concepts, that of culture. Might modernism be said to constitute (among other things) an attempt at a systematic critique of culture: what Ezra Pound called ‘kulchur’ and T. S. Eliot conceived as ‘a whole way of life’? And how might such an understanding alter our sense of its aesthetic project?
302
The Teaching of Composition and Literature
Beam, Dorri
Th 3:30-5:30
305 Wheeler
Course Description: Please email dbeam@berkeley.edu for information regarding this course.
310
Field Studies in Tutoring Writing
Staff
Times and rooms T.B.A.
Course Description: Through seminars, discussions, and reading assignments, students are introduced to the language/writing/literacy needs of diverse college-age writers such as the developing, bi-dialectal, and non-native English-speaking (NNS) writer. The course will provide a theoretical and practical framework for tutoring and composition instruction.
The seminar will focus on various tutoring methodologies and the theories which underlie them. Students will become familiar with relevant terminology, approaches, and strategies in the fields of composition teaching and learning. New tutors will learn how to respond constructively to student writing, as well as develop and hone effective tutoring skills. By guiding others towards clarity and precision in prose, tutors will sharpen their own writing abilities. New tutors will tutor fellow Cal students in writing and/or literature courses. Tutoring occurs in the Cesar E. Chavez Student Center under the supervision of experienced writing program staff.
In order to enroll for the seminar, students must have at least sophomore standing and have completed their Reading and Composition R1A and R1B requirements.
Some requirements include: participating in a weekly training seminar and occasional workshops; reading assigned articles, videotaping a tutoring session, and becoming familiar with the resources available at the Student Learning Center; tutoring 4-6 hours per week; keeping a tutoring journal and writing a final paper; meeting periodically with both the tutor supervisor(s) and tutees' instructors.
This course meets the field study requirements for the Education minor, but it cannot be used toward fulfillment of the requirements for the English major. It must be taken P/NP.
Pick up an application for a pre–enrollment interview at the Student Learning Center, Atrium, Cesar Chavez Student Center (Lower Sproul Plaza), beginning April 7. No one will be admitted after the first week of fall classes.
Please read the paragraph on page 3 of this Announcement of Classes regarding enrollment in English 310!
Last modified: June 30, 2008