Lower-Division Courses
Fall 2007
24/1
Freshman Seminar: Visual Culture and Autobiography
Wong, Hertha
Tues. 5-8
300 Wheeler
1 unit
Note: This class will run from August 28 through September 25 only.
Book List: Momaday, N.S.: The Way to Rainy Mountain; Speigelman, A.: Maus I and II
Course Description: Visual culture is not just about pictures, but the (post)“modern tendency to picture or visualize experience”—what W.J.T. Mitchell calls “the pictorial turn.” Not surprisingly, as contemporary writers and artists struggle to find forms that convey postmodern individual identities in multicultural, often urban, social landscapes, they experiment with visual/verbal forms of self-representation and self-narration: story quilts, family photo albums, letters, comic books (co-mix), artists' books, photo-biographies, video and film, performance art, home pages, “zines,” and more. Course requirements include attendance, participation, completion of in-class activities, and a short course journal.
This course may not be counted as one of the twelve courses required to complete the English major.
24/2
Freshman Seminar: Reading Walden Carefully
Breitwieser, Mitchell
M 4-5
175 Dwinelle
1 unit
Book List: Thoreau, H.D.: Walden
Course Description: We will read Thoreau's Walden in small chunks, probably about thirty pages per week. This will allow us time to dwell upon the complexities of a book that is much more mysterious than those who have read the book casually, or those who have only heard about it, realize. We will also try to work some with online versions of the book, using the wordsearch command to identify words such as "woodchuck" or "root" that reappear frequently, in order to speculate on patterns Thoreau is trying to establish. Regular attendance and participation, along with a loose five-page essay at the end, are required.
This course may not be counted as one of the twelve courses required to complete the English major.
24/3
Freshman Seminar: Shakespeare's Sonnets
Nelson, Alan
W 12-1
203 Wheeler
1 unit
Book List: Wells, Stanley , ed.: Shakespeare’s Sonnets and a Lover’s Complaint
Course Description: Shakespeare's sonnets were first published in 1609. Although little is known about how they were first received by the reading public, they are known to have caused delight and puzzlement since their second edition in 1640. Over the course of the semester, we will read all 154 sonnets, at the rate of approximately ten per week. All students will be expected to participate actively in seminar discussions, and present both informal and formal oral reports.
This course may not be counted as one of the twelve courses required to complete the English major.
24/4
Freshman Seminar:
Gary Wills' Lincoln at Gettysburg : The U.S. and the Civil War Era
Hutson, Richard
F 12-1
203 Wheeler
1 unit
Book List: Wills, G.: Lincoln at Gettysburg
Course Description: I would like to read Wills' book slowly and carefully with students. I plan to offer some other materials about the culture of the mid-19th-century U.S. , perhaps some of the Ken Burns documentary on the Civil War, letters and other speeches by Lincoln . I would like students who are interested in American history: politics, culture, literature. This seminar is part of the Food for Thought Seminar Series and part of the On the Same Page initiative: http://onthesamepage.berkeley.edu. Food for Thought dining arrangements will be discussed in class.
This course may not be counted as one of the twelve courses required to complete the English major.
24/5
Freshman Seminar: Contemporary Irish Theater: The Plays of Brian Friel
Tracy, Robert
M 3-5
Room L20 Unit II (at 2650 Haste St.)
1 unit
Note: This class will run from September 10 through November 5; class might not meet one of those weeks.
Book List: Friel, B.: Selected Plays of Brian Friel
Course Description: Brian Friel (b. 1928) is the most prominent playwright of the contemporary Irish theater, best known for Translations and Dancing at Lughnasa. In a series of innovative plays, he has examined some of the stories the Irish tell themselves about their past and present. He uses the theater to examine issues of role-playing, story-telling, and self-delusion, that is, the nature of theatricality. While he explores Ireland's national and personal myths, Friel is saying something about us all and the parts we cast ourselves in when rehearsing our own dramas. This is a seminar, not a lecture course, so I will expect you all to contribute to discussions. Students will also be paired to lead discussions. I'm hoping for students who like literature and are interested in thinking about drama not just as texts but also as performance. We will sometimes read scenes to suggest how different voices affect perception of what is happening. Brien Friel is a playwright from the North of Ireland, so that his work often reflects certain tensions from that society, so I'm hoping for students who will discuss social and moral issues facing the dramatic characters.
This course may not be counted as one of the twelve courses required to complete the English major.
24/6
Freshman Seminar: Three Novels by Jane Austen
Gallagher, Catherine
Thurs. 1-2
note new room: 300 Wheeler
1 unit
Book List: See below
Course Description: We will read three of Jane Austen's novels very slowly to learn why they are among the world's most enduringly popular and the most technically innovative. The novels are Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, and Emma. For additional insights, we will turn to recent film adaptations of all three. I hope to teach students who not only love to read but also feel curiosity about why they love to read. The students should want to learn more about the aspects of writing that attract them to certain authors and kinds of narratives.
This course may not be counted as one of the twelve courses required to complete the English major.
26
Introduction to the Study of Poetry
Campion, John
TTh 2-3:30
221 Wheeler
Book List: Ellman, R.: The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry, second ed.; Course Reader (supplemental essays and poetry for the course)
Course Description: The lectures, class discussions, and readings for this course are intended to develop students’ ability to analyze, understand, and evaluate poetry, while they gain greater self-confidence and authority in writing about poems. Special attention will be paid to the essential poetic aspects of idea, image, and music. The course will mainly focus on modern poetry, but will begin with Walt Whitman and continue through the post-modern work of Charles Olson. We may look at some contemporary work if time allows. Attendance and active participation is essential. Expect to write two papers, take a final, and additionally, to write ten short papers as part of your participation.
43A
Introduction to the Writing of Short Fiction
Abrams, Melanie (a.k.a. Chandra, M.J.)
MW 3-4:30
305 Wheeler
Book List: Burroway, J.: Writing Fiction; Reader available at Copy Central
Course Description: The aim of this course is to introduce students to the study of short fiction - to explore the elements that make up the genre, and to enable students to talk critically about short stories and begin to feel comfortable and confident with their own writing of them. Students will write two short stories, along with various exercises, and critiques of their peers’ work. The course will be organized as a workshop. All student stories will be edited and critiqued by the instructor and by other students in the class.
To be considered for admission to this class, please submit 5 photocopied pages of your fiction, along with an application form, to Professor Abrams' mailbox in 322 Wheeler Hall, BY 4:00 P.M., TUESDAY, APRIL 17, 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 regarding enrollment in such courses!
45A/1
Literature in English: Through Milton
Justice, Steven
Lectures MW 10-11 in 277 Cory, plus one hour of discussion section per week (all sections F 10-11)
Book List: Chaucer, G.: Canterbury Tales; Spenser, E.: The Faerie Queen; Milton, J.: Paradise Lost; Donne, J.: John Donne's Poetry
Course Description: An introduction to English literary history from the fourteenth through the seventeenth centuries. Canterbury Tales, The Faerie Queene, and Paradise Lost will dominate the semester, as objects of study in themselves, of course, but also as occasions for considering issues of linguistic and cultural change, and of literary language, form, and innovation.
45A/2
Literature in English: Through Milton
Turner, James
Lectures MW 12-1 in 3 LeConte, plus one hour of discussion section per week (all sections F 12-1)
Book List: Norton Anthology of English Literature: Medieval; Norton Anthology of English Literature: Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries; Shakespeare, W.: Hamlet
Course Description: We will study the changing nature of creative writing "through" Milton, Spenser and Chaucer, but the point is to introduce many voices rather than studying just three authors. This will not be a strict chronological "survey" but more a sampling of key themes, as they are constructed in different genres and in different periods across a thousand years of turbulent history. What makes a hero or heroine (epic)? what makes us fall in love (desire and the lyric)? what makes us laugh (satire and comedy)? The syllabus will highlight important episodes from Paradise Lost, The Faerie Queene, The Canterbury Tales and Beowulf, often difficult, but short enough that all students can keep up with the reading; interpretation will be focused by selected passages from Shakespeare's Hamlet and Sidney 's Defense of Poetry. Though this is a lecture course your attendance and participation as a live audience is required; there is no substitute for hearing the work read out loud. Occasionally, instead of the lecture I will schedule a close reading exercise. Two quizzes, two papers (one from prompts, one free-choice), and a final exam.
45B/1
Literature in English: Late-17th Through the Mid-19th Century
Hutson, Richard
Lectures MW 1-2 in 141 McCone, plus one hour of discussion section per week (all sections F 1-2)
Book List: Austen, J.: Pride and Prejudice; Emily Bronte: Wuthering Heights; Douglass, F.: The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass; Franklin, B.: The Autobiography and Other Writings; Goldsmith, O.: The Vicar of Wakefield; Hawthorne, N.: The Scarlet Letter; Irving, W.: The Sketch-Book; Pope, A.: Essay on Man and Other Poems; Rowlandson, M.: The Sovereignty and Goodness of God; Swift, J.: Gulliver's Travels; Walpole, H.: The Castle of Otranto; Wordsworth, W.: The Five-Book Prelude
Course Description: This is a course in a few major works of English and American literature from the end of the 17th-century through the first half of the 19th-century. We will work our way from Puritanism through the Enlightenment and into Romanticism. There are major intellectual and literary transformations taking place in the course of this century and a half, and we will follow a few of them.
45B/2
Literature in English: Late-17th Through the Mid-19th Century
Goldsmith, Steven
Lectures MW 2-3 in 277 Cory, plus one hour of discussion section per week (all sections F 2-3)
Book List: Norton Anthology of English Literature , Volume C; Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol. D; Austen, J.: Pride and Prejudice (Broadview); Brown, C.: Wieland (Penguin); Franklin, B.: Autobiography (Penguin); Melville, H.: Benito Cereno: A Cultural Edition ( Bedford ); Shelley, M.: Frankenstein (Broadview)
Course Description: Our course begins at sea, with the “violent storm” and shipwreck of Gulliver’s Travels, and ends at sea in Benito Cereno, with a tragic convergence of Europe , America , and Africa , just off “a small, desert, uninhabited island toward the southern extremity of the long coast of Chili .” These scenes of dislocation correspond to the rise of modernity that forms our topic. Eighteenth- and nineteenth- century modernity involves a variety of new or accelerating instabilities: epistemological uncertainty; cultural relativism in newly imagined global contexts; the transformation of economic value from land to (liquid) capital; linguistic self-consciousness in a rapidly expanding print culture; and altered forms of subjectivity navigating the new political rhetoric of republicanism, freedom, and individualism. The subtitle of Wieland sums up our course in a word: “The Transformation.” Throughout, we will ask what literary anxieties and opportunities such “transformation” entails, at a time when everything solid—self, world, and society—turns fluid, as if at sea.
45C/1
Literature in English: Mid-19th Through the 20th Century
Falci, Eric
Lectures MW 11-12 in 2 LeConte, plus one hour of discussion section per week (all sections F 11-12)
Book List: Ramazani, J., Ellmann, R., O’Clair, R. (editors): The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry (vol. 1 only); Beckett, S.: Waiting for Godot; Faulkner: The Sound and the Fury; Hurston, Z.: Their Eyes Were Watching God; Joyce, J.: Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man; Rhys: Wide Sargasso Sea; Woolf, V.: To the Lighthouse
Course Description: This course will survey British, Irish, and American literature from the late-nineteenth century through the mid-twentieth. We will try to evoke some of the key aesthetic, cultural, and socio-political trends that characterized the movements of modernity as we closely investigate a selection of the major texts from this sprawling period. At times the lectures will zoom in on particular features of texts, and at other times they will zoom out to cultural conditions and aesthetic drifts. There will be two essays, a final exam, and (perhaps) a mid-term.
45C/2
Literature in English: Mid-19th Through the 20th Century
Hejinian, Lyn
Lectures MW 3-4 in 3 LeConte, plus one hour of discussion section per week (all sections F 3-4)
Book List: Benson, S., et al.: The Grand Piano Part 3; Stein, G.: Three Lives and Q.E.D; James, H.: Turn of the Screw; Williams, W. C.: Imaginations; Woolf, V.: Mrs. Dalloway; Mullen, H.: Sleeping with the Dictionary; Ngugi Wa Thiong’o: The River Between; Locke, A., ed.: The New Negro. In addition to these texts, a required reader will be available at Copy Central on Bancroft.
Course Description: Intended as a general survey of imaginative responses to the not always positive progress of modernity, this course will examine works produced by an array of prominent figures and representative of some of the principal Modernist and Postmodern movements, and / or events. We will begin with the rise of Realism in the mid-19 th century and finish the course with works in experimental modes of the almost immediate present. The Armory Show, Imagism, Russian Formalism, Surrealism, the Harlem Renaissance, the Beat Movement, the Black Arts Movement, and Language Writing are among the cultural moments we will experience along the way.
C77
Introduction to Environmental Studies
Hass, Robert and Sposito, Gary
Lectures TTh 12:30-2 in 100 GPB (note new room), plus one and a half hours of discussion section per week (sec. 101: Tues. 4-5:30; sec. 102: W 4-5:30; sec. 103: Thurs. 9:30-11; sec. 104: F 4-5:30; sec. 105 (note new time) : Thurs. 4-5:30; sec 106: Tues. 2-3:30)
Book List: Cunningham and Cunningham: Principles of Environmental Science; Gilbar, S, ed.: Natural State ; Leopold, A.: A Sand County Almanac; Snyder, G.: No Nature; Williams, T. T.: Refuge; also a course reader
Course Description: This is an innovative team-taught course that surveys global environmental issues at the beginning of the twenty-first century and that introduces students to the basic intellectual tools of environmental science and to the history of environmental thought in American poetry, fiction, and the nature writing tradition. One instructor is a scientist specializing in the behavior of soils and ecosystems (Garrison Sposito); the other is a poet (Robert Hass). The aim of the course is to examine the ways in which the common tools of scientific and literary analysis, of scientific method and imaginative thinking, can clarify what is at stake in environmental issues and environmental citizenship.
84/1
Sophomore Seminar: High Culture/Low Culture
Bader, Julia
Thurs. 2-5
300 Wheeler
2 units
Book List: Lahiri, J.: The Interpreter of Maladies; Palmer, R. B.: Joel and Ethan Coen; Water, S.: The Night Watch
Course Description: We will discuss a novel and a collection of stories, view the films of the Coen brothers, and attend some Cal Performances events in order to analyze the role and affect of cultural productions.
This course may not be counted as one of the twelve courses required to complete the English major.
84/2
Sophomore Seminar: Socrates as a Cultural Icon
Coolidge, John
T 2-4
108 Wheeler
2 units
Book List: Four Texts on Socrates
Course Description: Socrates has often been compared to Jesus, an enigmatic yet somehow unmistakable figure who left nothing in writing yet decisively influenced the mind of his own and later ages. We will read Aristophanes’ comic send-up of Socrates in Clouds and the Platonic dialogues purporting to tell the story of Socrates’ trial and death, Euthyphro, Apology of Socrates, Crito, and selections from Phaedo attempting to trace the construction of the Socratic icon and assess its relevance to issues in our contemporary “culture wars,” e.g.: identity, freedom of speech, elitism, science and religion, “know thyself”, the aims of education, authority, male chauvinism, virtue, anti-intellectualism, academic freedom, family, civil disobedience, “spin,” body and soul, self-esteem, anomie, patriarchy, individualism, relativism, reductionism, self-ownership, conscience, reason etc. Links to Wikipedia and other on-line resources on these topics are provided in the syllabus. To get discussion going, each meeting (after the second) will begin with a brief (5-10 minute) individual or panel presentation on one or another such issue, assigned on a volunteer basis at the conclusion of the previous meeting and prepared in office-hour consultation with the instructor.
This course may not be counted as one of the twelve courses required to complete the English major.
Last modified: August 24, 2007