Graduate Courses
Spring 2005
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.
203/1 This course has been cancelled.
203/2
Goldsmith, Steven
Graduate Readings: Aesthetics Now and Then
TTh 11-12:30
204 Wheeler
Book List: Burke, E: Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful; Kant, I: Critique of Judgment; Schiller, F: On the Aesthetic Education of Man, In a Series of Letters; Adorno, T: Aesthetic Theory; Derrida, J: The Truth in Painting; De Man, P: Ideology of the Aesthetic
Course Description: As an introduction to the problems and questions raised by aesthetics, this class will navigate between the following quotations, which can serve as our epigraphs: 'If man is ever to solve that problem of politics in practice he will have to approach it through the problem of the aesthetic, because it is only through Beauty that man makes his way to Freedom' (Schiller); 'Poetry makes nothing happen' (Auden). Historically, we will concentrate on the eighteenth-century discourses of Burke, Kant, and Schiller (supplemented by readings in British Romanticism). Theoretically, we will read various twentieth-century (but mostly recent) elaborations, including among others Adorno, Derrida, De Man, Lyotard, and Bourdieu, while also taking up the arguments of those recently advocating a return to formalism. Because lyric poetry will often be the focal point of these aesthetic discourses, we may also want to feature a poet we can return to regularly in our discussions.
203/3
Altieri, Charles
Graduate Readings: Modern Poetry
TTh 12:30-2
103 Wheeler
Book List: Stevens, Wallace: Collected Poetry and Prose; Eliot, T.S.: Selected Prose of T.S. Eliot; Eliot, T.S.: The Waste Land and Other Poems; Moore, Marianne: Complete Poems; Pound, Ezra: The Literary Essays of Ezra Pound; Pound, Ezra: Gaudier-Brzeska: A Memoir; Pound, Ezra: Collected Early Poems of Ezra Pound; Ashbery, John: Selected Poems; Creeley, Robert: Selected Poems; Plath, Sylvia: Poems
Course Description: This Course will be devoted to the Modernist heritage in American Poetry. I want to explore what the modernists accomplished that has claims to being world historical, at least for poetry, then attend a little to how their successors struggled with and tried to modify that inheritance. Emphases will be on Eliot, Pound, Moore, Stevens, Ashbery, Creeley; then we will spend the last two or three weeks reading some much younger writers. I am concerned with how different generations of writers can be identified by what they chose to engage in their heritage and what they ignore. A few classes will also be devoted to painterly analogues for stylistic developments.
203/4
Joshi, Priya
Graduate Readings: Nationalism and Public Fantasy in Bollywood Cinema
Lectures MW 2-3:30 in 300 Wheeler, plus film screenings W 4-8 P.M. in 300 Wheeler
This course is cross-listed with Film 240, section 5.
Book List: Anderson, B.: Imagined Communities; Barnouw and Krishnaswamy: Indian Film; Chakravarty , S.: National Identity in Indian Popular Cinema; Kazmi, F.: The Politics of India's Conventional Cinema; Mulvey, L.: Visual and Other Pleasures; Nandy, A., ed.: The Secret Politics of Our Desires; Rajadhyaksha and Willemen: Encyclopedia of Indian Cinema; Bhabha, H., ed.: Nation and Narration; Chatterjee, G.: Mother India; Chopra, A.: Sholay: The Making of a Classic; Dissanayake and Sahai: Sholay: A Cultural Reading; Kabir, N.: Bollywood: The Indian Cinema Story; Kabir, N.M.: Guru Dutt: A Life in Cinema; Prasad, M.: Ideology of the Hindi Film
Film list: Awara (1951), Shree 420 (1955), Mother India (1957), Pyaasa (1958), Bobby (1973); Sholay (1975), Amar, Akbar, Anthony (1977), Bombay (1995), Dilwale Dulhaniya le Jayenge (1995), Dil Se (1998), Hey Ram (2000), Fiza (2000), Mohabbattein (2001)
Course Description: Nationalism, Benedict Anderson has famously argued, can best be understood by aligning it alongside the large cultural systems that preceded it -- out of which, as well as against which, it came into being. Using India as a case study (a country where full literacy is still a distant dream), we will examine the extent to which popular film is Anderson's 'cultural system' par excellence that deploys and addresses the social, cultural, and political myths of the modern nation. We will investigate the extent to which Hindi films made in Bombay (or Bollywood as it is frequently called) exerted, diverted, and contorted the many impulses toward nationalism preying upon and purveyed by the country that annually produces the most films in the world. Within months of the cinèmatographe's debut, the Lumiére brothers' invention arrived in Bombay in 1896 inaugurating an ongoing romance between film and India, one that saw the rise of the anti-colonial movement, the nationalist movement, Independence, Partition, and the almost daily recreation of modern India, that place that Salman Rushdie has called "a broken creature spilling pieces of itself into the street." Focusing on blockbusters largely from the Golden Fifties (Awara, Shree 420, Mother India, Pyaasa), the Angry Seventies (Bobby, Sholay, Amar, Akbar, Anthony), and the Saccharine Nineties (Dilwale Dulhaniya le Jayenge, Hey Ram, Dil Se, Fiza, Mohabbattein), we will explore how Bollywood movies construct and critique the grand narratives of Indian nationalism, ask what fantasies and illusions they elicit and project, and interrogate their relationship to India's preoccupations with its emerging modernity.
All films are approximately three hours long and subtitled. This is a cinema that has kept billions around the world rapt for over half a century, so plan to submit entirely to its pleasures. No prior experience of India or knowledge of Hindi is required, though it will, of course, be greatly welcomed. Course requirements include attendance in all meetings and the weekly screening, an oral presentation, a web presentation, and a seminar paper of 15 pages.
205A
Howe, Nicholas
Old English
MW 12-2
108 Wheeler
(Though the official time of this class is 12-2, on most days it may end by 1:30.)
Book List: Baker, P.: Introduction to Old English; Marsden, R., The Cambridge Old English Reader
Course Description: This course will offer an introduction to the phonology, grammar and lexicon of Old English as well as some basic readings in Old English prose and lyric poetry. No prior knowledge of Old English is required or expected, though some experience with an inflected language such as German or Latin will be useful. Regular attendance and careful preparation of translations are mandatory.
212
Miller, Jennifer
Readings in Middle English
TTh 3:30-5
202 Wheeler
Book List and Course Description: For more information on this class, please email the professor at j_miller@berkeley.edu .
218
Goodman, Kevis
Milton
M 3-6 (but see below)
103 Wheeler
Book List: Milton, J.: Complete Poems and Major Prose (ed. Merritt Y. Hughes). There will also be 1-2 Course Readers with secondary readings in literary theory and critical responses to Milton from Samuel Johnson to the present.
Description: In this seminar, we will discuss Milton's poetry (the shorter poems, Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, and Samson Agonistes) and selections from his controversial prose (including portions of the divorce tracts, the political defenses, Areopagitica, "Of Education," The Christian Doctrine). We will consider Milton's participation in two seventeenth-century revolutions, political and scientific, his politics of gender, his eccentric brand of radical Protestantism and its relation to new notions of subjectivity in the period, his self-production as an author, and his equivocal place in literary history, which has both guided and troubled our habits of periodization. Time will also be made for special interests or concerns that you bring with you to the course. Although the primary texts will remain primary, we will develop a working knowledge of the history of Milton scholarship and reception, asking ourselves what various methodologies can at their best accomplish, as well as what works and issues have remained resistant to the reach of literary criticism.
N.B.: Professor Goodman is willing to meet M 3:30-6:30 in order to make it possible for students concurrently enrolled in English 203/4 (Bollywood) to take the class, should they want to do so. If you intend to enroll and this change would present a problem for you, please let her know; the switch will only be made if it can accommodate all in the class.
243A
Farber, Thomas
Fiction Writing Workshop
Tues. 3:30-6:30
301 Wheeler
Recommended Text: Farber, T.: A Lover's Question: Selected Stories
Course Description: A graduate-level short fiction workshop presuming either earlier fiction classes or advanced skills. Open to students from any department. Students will write three short stories, 10-20 pages in length. Each week, students will also turn in one-page written critiques of student stories being workshopped as well as a 2-page journal entry. Probable semester total of written pages, including critiques: 70-80. Class attendance mandatory.
Students not admitted or late in applying can come to office hours the first week of class to speak with Professor Farber or email tfar@uclink4.berkeley.edu
(Any students admitted who have worked with me before must contact me in November about bringing their first new story, with xeroxes, to the first class meeting.)
To be considered for admission to this class, please submit photocopies of 10-15 pages of your fiction, along with an application form, to Professor Farber's mailbox in 322 Wheeler, BY 4:00 P.M., TUESDAY, OCTOBER 26, AT THE LATEST.
Be sure to read the paragraph concerning creative writing courses on page 2 of this Announcement of Classes for further information regarding enrollment in such courses!
243B
Robert Hass and William Bolcom
Poetry Writing Workshop
W 2-5
210 Hargrove Library
This class is cross-listed with Music 202, section 1.
Book List: TBA
Course Description: This course will be team-taught by Robert Hass and the Music Department's visiting composer William Balcom. The course will bring poets and composers together to collaborate on original works. We will study the basic forms of verse in English and ways in which poetry and music have been combined from the Renaissance lyric to the blues lyric and the American pop song. Some of the collaborative projects will probably include setting poems to music in connection with the study of various popular and art-song forms; the setting of recitation to musical accompaniment and a study of instances from melodrama to jazz poetry; and dramatic composition moving in the direction of opera. Performance of the collaborations will be a regular feature of the course. The course is available to graduate students and advanced undergraduates. No musical training is required of the poets.
To be considered for admission to this class, please submit a photocopy of no more than eight of your poems and a brief statement of the reasons for your interest in participating, as well as an application form, to Professor Hass' mailbox in 322 Wheeler BY 4:00 P.M., TUESDAY, OCTOBER 26, AT THE LATEST.
Be sure to read the paragraph concerning creative writing courses on page 2 of this Announcement of Classes for further information regarding enrollment in such courses!
246G
Langan, Celeste
Graduate Pro-Seminar: Romantic Period
MW 10-12
211 Dwinelle
(Though the official time of this class is 10-12, on most days it may end by 11:30.)
Book List and Course Description: For more information on this class, please email the professor at clangan@socrates.berkeley.edu .
246I
Wagner, Bryan
Graduate Pro-Seminar: American Literature to 1855
Tues. 3:30-6:30
225 Wheeler
Book List: Readings have not been determined but will likely include the following: Cabeza de Vaca, A. N: Voyage into the Unknown Interior of America; Mather, C: Pillars of Salt; Rowlandson, M: True History of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson; Defoe, D: Moll Flanders; Hanson, E: God's Mercy Surmounting Man's Cruelty; Hammon, B: Narrative of the Uncommon Sufferings and Surprising Deliverance; Horsmanden, D: Proceedings in the Detection of the Conspiracy formed by some White People in Conjunction with Negro and Other Slaves, for the Burning of the City of New York; Occum, S: A Sermon Preached at the Execution of Moses Paul; Olaudah Equiano, Interesting Narrative of the Life; Jefferson, T: Notes on the State of Virginia; Lewis, M. G: Journal of a West India Proprietor; Tubbee, O: The Life of Okah Tubbee; Delany, M: Blake; or the Huts of America; Earle, W: Wonderful Life and Adventures of Three-Fingered Jack, the Terror of Jamaica; Lhamon, W: Jump Jim Crow: Lost Plays, Lyrics and Street Prose of the First Atlantic Popular Culture; Lippard, G: The Quaker City; McLaurin, M: Celia, A Slave; Stowe, H. B.: Uncle Tom's Cabin. There will also be a course reader with maritime writings (Richard Brome's The Joviall Crew, The Narrative of Richard Adams), slave confessions (from Johnson Green, Sylvanus Conant, Nat Turner), and legal materials (Declarations of Independence from the United States and Liberia, the U.S. Constitution and Indian Removal Act, the court cases Dred Scott v. Sandford and State v. Mann).
Course Description: Introduction to Early American Studies. Much has changed in Early American Studies during the last fifteen years. A field once guided by its faith in the singularity of U.S. history has turned its critical energies against the ideals of exceptionalism and mythic integrity that formerly provided its analytic foundations. As a result, a literature long studied as an allegory of national identity has been broken down and reinterpreted in the broad and internally diverse context of anglophone print culture. After a brief review of these questions of scope and method, we will turn our attention to a collection of novels, sermons, songs, autobiographies, captivity narratives, tracts, diaries, poems, and charters whose language is variously accented by the advent of transatlantic trade and colonialism. In reading this archive, we will be thinking especially about the cultural transmission of origin stories (primitive accumulation, the social contract, romantic nationalism) associated with the founding of the United States and about the supernumerary figures (beggars, criminals, slaves) whose exclusion enables these stories to retain their coherence. These poorly-lit figures, who participate neither in the pledge of popular sovereignty nor in the modern theory of political economy, will take center stage in the second half of the course, appearing as the authors of conspiracies and criminal confessions and also as the primary actors in the first transatlantic mass culture -- blackface minstrelsy. In tracing the derivation of blackface in the maritime social networks of sailors and slaves and dockworkers, we will be concerned not only with the perseverance of vernacular gesture in popular entertainment (for instance, the reappearance of the ring shout in the minstrel show's walk-around) but also with the overlapping trajectories of itinerant characters who shuttle across the modern domains of law, culture, and economy even as they travel from point to point around the Atlantic. We will look closely, for instance, at the career of Three-Fingered Jack -- a maroon warrior in Jamaica, who became a favorite object of scorn in the colonial assemblies, the hero of an epistolary novel published in England and Massachusetts, the subject of a pantomime performed at London's Haymarket Theatre, as well as the impassioned speaker of a soliloquy transcribed at the African Grove in New York City, now recognized as the earliest extant manuscript of African American drama. At the course's end, we will tie together these concerns with a reading of Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852) geared toward its indebtedness to minstrelsy and the bourgeois cult of sensibility as well as toward problems of global reception, translation, and reprinting that while not unanticipated were only formalized with the publication of Stowe's novel. Our survey will be leavened throughout with theoretical readings from Marx, Arendt, Fanon, Lefort, Dayan, and Ranciére as well as historical accounts by Winthrop Jordan, David Brion Davis, Robin Blackburn, Diana Paton, Marcus Rediker, and Peter Linebaugh.
250/1
Porter, Carolyn
Research Seminar: William Faulkner
W 3-6
205 Wheeler
Prof. Porter is considering changing the time of this course slightly--to W 3:30-6:30. If you intend to enroll and this change would present a problem for you, please let her know.
Book List: Faulkner, William, Absalom, Absalom!; As I Lay Dying; Go Down, Moses; The Hamlet; Light in August; The Sound and the Fury; Minter, David L, William Faulkner: His Life and Work
Course Description: A Seminar on the major works of William Faulkner.
250/2
Starr, George
Research Seminar: Defoe
W 3-6
202 Wheeler
Book List: All works are by Defoe: Starr, ed.: Fortunes and Misfortunes of the Famous Moll Flanders; Landa, ed.: Journal of the Plague Year; Richetti, ed.: Robinson Crusoe; Blewett, ed.: Roxana; Furbank & Owens, eds.: True-Born Englishman and Other Writings; all other reading, whether required or recommended, will be based on library copies or photocopies.
Course Description: Reading and discussion of representative works in various genres, treating Defoe's career and writings as of interest in themselves, and as offering direct (if slanted) access to all the major cultural issues of his day, political, economic, and religious as well as literary. Writings with less obvious claims on our attention than the prose fiction will figure prominently, although proportions can be adjusted as the course unfolds.
250/3
Best, Stephen
Research Seminar: Reconstruction
Thurs. 3:30-6:30
108 Wheeler
Book List: Brown, W.: Clotel; Chesnutt, C.: Paul Marchand FMC; Douglass, F.: 1845 Narrative, My Bondage and My Freedom; DuBois, W.E.B.: Black Reconstruction; Hartman, S.: Scenes of Subjection; Mbembe, A.: On the Postcolony; Scott, D.: Conscripts of Modernity; Stowe, H.: Uncle Tom's Cabin; Twain, M.: Pudd'nhead Wilson
Course Description: On the wake of war (on its eve), Frederick Douglass cautioned his listeners that the nation was living through the 'seed time' of a great reform, one whose 'harvest' would prove as bloody as it was inevitable; in the wake that followed, he warned that the still-potent Confederacy was like a 'deadly upas' that must be 'root and branch, leaf and fibre, body and sap. . . utterly destroyed.' Not surprisingly, the windy jeremiad would soon lose much of its wind (certainly that capable of wreaking atmospheric destruction on the South), and Douglass and others would find themselves shifting emphasis and appealing to the state for the fulfillment of its promises to the former slaves. Douglass's isn't simply a shift in strategy but a shift in thought: from calling for slavery to stop to appealing for its redress; from messianic calls for the destruction of the 'Slave Power' to embrace of Pauline notions of resurrection; from speaking the language of arrest and intervention to speaking that of defeat, exhaustion, and debt; from conceiving of slavery less as a criminal offense and more as a matter for tort (requiring just compensation for 'pain and suffering'); from belief in the romance of salvation and redemption to confrontation with the tragic fact that the future does not appear as part of a seamless forward movement and feels more like a series of stops and starts.
This is a class on the emergence of this discourse of redress in the half-century following the Civil War -- the period of Reconstruction and its defeat. We will look to the law, literature, and scholarship of the period for various accounts of how redress was conceived less often as a thing you could get and more often as the simple gesture of making a claim for justice: what is it that makes the claim for redress possible, that enables the thought that slavery as an institution had to be redressed as opposed to simply stopped? Literature offers here a 'prose of counter-history' -- the genres in which this shift can be said to inhere (e.g., satire, romance, tragedy, jeremiad, manifesto), or the idea, simply, that it is the genre itself that shapes the demand. Our readings will be centered on a variety of themes, some of which include: the notion of the unthought; dispossession and negative inheritance; history, counterhistory, and the state; the social performance of apology; the genealogies of racism and the burden of identity; matter, spirit, and negative theology (Mbembe's 'necropolitics').
310/1
Staff
Field Studies in Tutoring Writing
Times and rooms TBA
Book List: Meyer, E. and L Smith: The Practical Tutor
Recommended Text: Leki, I.: Understanding ESL Writers
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 (for this section of English 310) at the Student Learning Center, Atrium, Cesar Chavez Student Center (Lower Sproul Plaza), beginning October 11. No one will be admitted after Wednesday of the first week of spring classes.
Please read the paragraph on page 3 of this Announcement of Classes regarding enrollment in English 310!
310/2
Staff
Field Studies in Tutoring Writing
Times and rooms TBA
Book List: Meyer, E. and L. Smith: The Practical Tutor
Recommended Text: Leki, I.: Understanding ESL Writers
Course Description: English 310, section 2, is designed to provide an overview of the language, writing, and literacy needs of university writers and to train students as peer writing tutors for the Re-Entry Program. The course focuses on various tutoring methodologies and the theories which underlie them. Students learn terminology, approaches, and strategies in the field of composition teaching and learning. Moreover, they gain a theoretical and practical framework for tutoring. In addition to participating in the training seminar, students are required to tutor in the Re-Entry Writing Program, keep a journal of their tutoring experience, videotape a tutoring session, and write a final (4-5 pp) paper for the course.
This course cannot be used toward fulfillment of the requirements for the English major.
Pick up an application for a pre-enrollment interview (for this section of English 310) at the Re-Entry Program office in the Cesar Chavez Student Center, room 104, beginning October 11. No one will be admitted after Wednesday of the first week of spring classes.
Please read the paragraph on page 3 of this Announcement of Classes regarding enrollment in English 310!
Last modified: Tuesday, 25-Jan-2005 13:35:39 PST