Lower Division Courses
Spring 2005
24/1
Freshman Seminar: Representing Psychiatric Disability
Susan Schweik and Aaron Cohen
M 12-1
220 Wheeler
1 unit
Book List: Kaysen, S.: Girl Interrupted; Gilman, C.: The Yellow Wallpaper; Palahniuk, C.: Fight Club; a xeroxed course reader
Course Description: In this seminar we will view films and read works of fiction that deal with various issues related to psychiatric disability (including questions of the social construction of mental illness, diagnosis, treatment, accommodation, ADA court cases, and the idea of survivorship). Along with your two co-teachers, you will examine these issues from both clinical and humanities perspectives.
24/2
Freshman Seminar: Pleasure, Politics, and Public Fantasy in Bollywood Cinema
Joshi, Priya
M 4-5
300 Wheeler
1 unit
(Also see the paragraph at the end of the course description about additional weekly film screenings.)
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: Every day, over twelve million people go to the movies in India. Seated on planks of wood and on the floor, in air-conditioned movie palaces and open maidans, the world's most avid cinema-goer watches the hundreds of films that roll out of the world's most prolific film industry. Our class will examine the pleasures of this cinema that has often been dismissed for being saccharine, melodramatic, and escapist. We will be watching a cluster of Hindi films made in Bombay (or Bollywood, as it is often called) from the 1950s, 1970s, and 1990s and will spend time in class discussing them. We will pay particular attention during our discussions to the manner in which these films embody public fantasies --those of gender and masculinity, religion and nation, sexuality and the state, family and friends --in an effort to examine how Bombay's blockbusters have dealt with India's preoccupation with its emerging modernity.
All films are subtitled and no prior experience of India or knowledge of Hindi is required, though it will, of course, be greatly welcomed. Course requirements include regular attendance and participation in discussions and the weekly film screenings. Students will be expected to attend weekly film screenings on Wednesdays from 4-7:30 P.M. in 300 Wheeler Hall, though they will officially enroll only in the seminar portion of the class that meets on Mondays. There will be no additional outside-of-class work required, nor any required texts.
24/3
Freshman Seminar: Shakespeare's Sonnets
Nelson, Alan
W 12-1
201 Wheeler
1 unit
Book List: Wells, Stanley, ed.: Shakespeare's Sonnets and a Lover's Complaint
Course Description: Shakespeare's sonnets were 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 the seminar, and present both informal and formal oral reports on one or more sonnets of their choosing.
24/4
Freshman Seminar: Reading Walden Carefully
Breitwieser, Mitchell
Tues. 2-3
225 Wheeler
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 identity 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.
31AC
Literature of American Cultures: Exceptional Bodies --Disability, Race, Ethnicity and Medicine in American Cultures
Schweik, Susan
TTh 12:30-2
105 North Gate
Book List: Adams, M., et. al.: Readings for Diversity and Social Justice; Lai, H., et. al.: Island: Poetry and History of Chinese Immigrants on Angel Island; Craft, W. and E.: Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom; Dreger, A.: One of Us: Conjoined Twins and the Future of Normal; Dorris, M.: The Broken Cord; Moraga, C.: Heroes and Saints and Other Plays; a xeroxed course reader
Course Description: This course will analyze the categories of 'disability,' 'race' and 'ethnicity' critically. Much work on that ambiguous umbrella term 'disability' treats disabled people as ungendered (that is, male), unraced (that is, white), without nationality (that is, native-born American but barely a citizen), and unsexualized (that is, heterosexual, but only in default). My aim in this course is to set up situations in which you can think about several of these categories simultaneously in the context of American cultures present and past. To this end, we will take four historical examples as case studies. First we will examine immigration history (with some emphasis on Angel Island and Chinese immigration). Second, we will focus on how race, disability and gender issues intersect on the freak show (or today the talk show) stage. In the third unit, on slavery, we will begin to unearth a history of disability in American slavery. In the fourth module, we will discuss eugenics and the tight connections between race and disability in eugenic models of degeneration. The final section of the course will move into the present, first giving you some exposure to contemporary activist history that counters the dynamics we have been exploring, and then ending with two close readings of two texts: Native American novelist Michael Dorris's controversial memoir of raising his son who had Fetal Alcohol Syndrome, The Broken Cord, and Chicana writer Cherrie Moraga's play about farmworkers'organizing and the health effects of pesticides, Heroes and Saints.
A variety of guest speakers, including performance artists and disability movement activists, will visit us, and we'll view a series of films. Written requirements: Two in-class midterms and a final paper/project.
This course satisfies U.C. Berkeley's American Cultures requirement.
43B
Introduction to the Writing of Verse
Scappettone, Jennifer
MW 1:30-3
301 Wheeler
Book List: Reader containing poems by Thomas Wyatt, William Shakespeare, John Donne, John Milton, John Keats, & others; Dickinson, E.: Final Harvest; Whitman, W.: Leaves of Grass; Stevens, W.: Harmonium; Allen, D., ed.: The New American Poetry: 1945-1960; Silliman, R., ed.: In the American Tree; Ashbery, J.: The Tennis Court Oath; Scalapino, L.: Considering how exaggerated music is; Notley, A.: Descent of Alette; Mullen, H.: Muse and Drudge; Robertson, L.: The Weather
Course Description: In this workshop, we will analyze and experiment with archaic through current modes of writing in verse. We will develop and discuss a substantial number of poems over the course of the semester: approximately one a week. On the premise that creative work is profoundly social, however, and that even writing aimed at 'self-expression' is never conducted in a vacuum, we will also be reading extensively (though not exhaustively) and trying our individual and collective hands at responses to the texts of others. We will examine a range of poetry collections and anthologies, asking how they might reorient prevalent values attendant to freestanding poems. We will also delve into discussions of 'poetics,' exploring the routes through which that term differs from or dovetails with 'poetry.' Attendance at readings and participation in a number of other poetry-related activities will be both celebrated and required.
To be considered for admission to this course, please submit photocopies of five of your poems, along with an application form, to J. Scappettone's mailbox in 322 Wheeler Hall 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!
45A/1
Literature in English: Through Milton
Justice, Steven
Lectures MW 12-1 in 3 LeConte, plus one hour of discussion section per week (all sections F 12-1)
Book List: Chaucer, G.: Canterbury Tales; Spenser, E.: Poetry of Edmund Spenser; Donne, J.: John Donne's Poetry; Milton, J.: Paradise Lost
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
Howe, Nicholas
Lectures MW 3-4 in 390 Hearst Mining, plus one hour of discussion section per week (all sections F 3-4)
Book List: Liuzza, R.M., trans.: Beowulf; Chaucer, G.: Canterbury Tales; Spenser, E.: The Faerie Queen; Milton, J.: Paradise Lost
Course Description: This course will consider four long poems: Beowulf, The Canterbury Tales, The Faerie Queen and Paradise Lost. Twice weekly lectures will focus on reading the texts, with some attention paid to questions of literary and linguistic history.
45B/1
Literature in English: Late-17th through Mid-19th Century
Knapp, Jeffrey
Lectures MW 10-11 in 60 Evans, plus one hour of discussion section per week (all sections F 10-11)
Book List: See below
Course Description: An introduction to literature in English from the eighteenth through the mid-nineteenth centuries, including works by Pope, Franklin, Equiano, Wordsworth, Emily Bronte, Hawthorne, Dickens, Browning, and Whitman. (It is strongly recommended that you take English 45A before enrolling in this course.)
45B/2
Literature in English: Late-17th through Mid-19th Century
Breitwieser, Mitchell
Lectures MW 3-4 in 3 LeConte, plus one hour of discussion section per week (all sections F 3-4)
Book List: Rowlandson, M.: Sovereignty and Goodness of God; Franklin, B.: Autobiography; Swift, J.: Gulliver's Travels; Austen, J.: Emma; Wordsworth, W. and S.T. Coleridge: Lyrical Ballads and Related Writings; Bronte, E.: Wuthering Heights; Whitman, W.: Leaves of Grass: His Original Edition; Douglass, F. and H. Jacobs: Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, and Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl.
Course Description: I will lecture on the cataclysmic rise of bourgeois modernity as it registers in English and American literature during the period 1660-1860. I will emphasize the mixture of euphoria, wonder, deprivation, and anxiety that this transformation provokes, and I will concentrate on the Enlightenment and Romanticism as attempts to exploit historical opportunity while compensating for history's deficiencies. Two five-page essays, a final exam, and regular participation in lecture and discussion section will be required.
45C/1
Literature in English: Mid-19th through the 20th Century
Rubenstein, Michael
Lectures MW 11-12 in 3 LeConte, plus one hour of discussion section per week (all sections F 11-12)
Book List: Stoker, B.: Dracula; Dreiser, T.: Sister Carrie; Woolf, V.: Mrs. Dalloway; Morrison, T.: Song of Solomon; Coetzee, J.M.: Disgrace; a course reader including poetry, drama, and short fiction by O. Wilde, W.B. Yeats, T.S. Eliot, S. Beckett, V.S. Naipaul, W.C. Williams, E. Bishop, T.C. Bambara, T. Olsen, J. Diaz, and others
Course Description: We will survey a broad range of literature in English, paying careful attention to situate our texts in their world-historical and literary-historical contexts. A major preoccupation of the class will be to distinguish between different technologies and techniques of narrative, that is, how stories get told, and how story-telling changes, across an enormously broad swath of time and space. Course requirements include two short papers, a mid-term, and a final exam.
45C/2
Literature in English: Mid-19th through the 20th Century
Bishop, John
Lectures MW 1-2 in 2 LeConte, plus one hour of discussion section per week (all sections F 1-2)
Book List: Ellmann, R., O'Clair, R., and Ramazani, J.: The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry vol. i (3rd ed.); Faulkner, W: Absalom, Absalom!; Hemingway, E: The Sun Also Rises; Nabokov, V: Lolita; Toomer, J: Cane; Woolf, V: Mrs. Dalloway
Course Description: A survey of English and American literature from the late nineteenth through the mid-twentieth century, with attention given both to conceptions of literature intrinsically claimed by the texts assigned and to the historical and cultural grounds out of which they emerged. The course will inevitably investigate the emergence and rise of modernism and also, in passing, the value and nature of such constructions as "the author," "literature," "literary history," and "period." Active participation in discussion sections will be essential. There will be two short papers, a final exam, and possibly a midterm.
R50/1
Freshman and Sophomore Studies: Tradition and Dislocation
Stasi, Paul
MWF 11-12
103 Wheeler
Book List: Forster, E.M.: A Passage to India; Hemingway, E.: The Sun Also Rises; Joyce, J.: Dubliners; Smith, Z.: White Teeth; a course reader
Course Description: 'The child,' William Wordsworth famously wrote, 'is father to the man,' a line that argues for the determinant power of an individual's past on his/her future. The modern world, however, has lost faith in this concept, leading to our so-called 'postmodern moment' with its attendant lack of historical consciousness. Modernization, it has been argued, has severed us from our roots and our traditions. The modern subject is seen as alienated --a faceless consumer in the anonymous industrial city.
This course will examine the notion of the modern individual as someone who is disconnected from his/her roots. What is it that dislocates people from their traditions? Who is it that feels dislocated from his/her past and who feels all too tied to that past? How does one negotiate the desire to hold onto a local tradition with the reality of an increasingly hybrid, increasingly globalized world?
To respond to these questions we will look at several canonical examples of early 20th-century Western alienation --Eliot's 'Wasteland' and Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises. Then we will read Joyce's Dubliners as a kind of response to the previous works. We will then turn to Forster's A Passage to India, and Zadie Smith's White Teeth, for two different versions of the relationship between Imperial England and her colonies.
Students will be required to write three essays that engage with these issues in a substantive and original way. All three essays will be developed through draft work. Two will be revised. For the final essay students will be required to do outside research. In addition there will also be a number of homework assignments --largely responses to the reading --and some in-class writing.
English R50 is intended for people who are planning to be English majors and who have already taken R1A. It satisfies the College's R1B requirement. It may not be counted as one of the twelve courses required for the English major.
R50/2
Freshman and Sophomore Studies: 'Grim Things That Must Be Told' -- The Graphic Novel in an Era of Human Rights
Hong, Christine
TTh 2-3:30
287 Dwinelle
Primary Texts: (in chronological order, according to original date of publication): Okubo, Miné: Citizen 13660 (1946); Nakazawa, Keiji: Barefoot Gen (originally serialized under the title Hadashi no Gen, 1972-3); Spiegelman, Art: Complete Maus (1996); Satrapi, Mirjane: Persepolis (2003); Sacco, Joe: Safe Area Gorazde. (2000), Palestine (2003)
Secondary Texts: McCloud, Scott: Understanding Comics (1994); Gibaldi, Joseph: MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers, sixth edition (2003)
Please note that the texts can be purchased at Signal Books, 1816 Euclid Ave. (cross-street: Hearst, near LeVal's Pizza, north of North Gate), tel. 843-1816.
Course Description: 'It performs the essential magic trick of all good narrative art: the characters come to living, breathing life. The drawing's greatest virtue is its straightforward, blunt sincerity. Its conviction and honesty allow you to believe in the unbelievable and impossible things that did, indeed happen. It is the inexorable art of the witness.'
--Art Spiegelman
In an essay on Keiji Nakazawa's early seventies' manga, Barefoot Gen: A Cartoon Story of Hiroshima, acclaimed 'commix' artist and teller of 'grim things that must be told,' Art Spiegelman, writes of his virtual encounter with the illustrated Hiroshima narrative: 'I've found myself remembering images and events from the Gen books with a clarity that made them seem like memories from my own life, rather than Nakazawa's.' By engaging the look of its reader/observer, the graphic novel fundamentally reconceives the usual role of the novelistic 'reader,' whose encounter with the 'commix' medium ('commix' as a co-mixture of word and image) cannot persuasively be defined solely along the lines of conventional textual reading strategies. Rather, the 'reader' of the graphic novel is placed in the performative role of an onlooker who is imaginatively present at the illustrated scene --'you are there with me' is the way a recent reviewer put it. A self-consciously hybrid genre, the graphic novel is a notably complex representational medium, powerfully combining telling and showing. Within this genre, the texts selected for this course may even be further distinguished by virtue of their investment in detailed --indeed, 'graphic' --exposure of mid-to-late twentieth-century human rights abuses, their at once personal and political content, and their solicitation of 'embedded' reading practices. These texts offer either an autobiographical or a firsthand observational portrait of human turmoil, suffering, and endurance, a portrait that is intensified by an urgent politics of witnessing --what Spiegelman calls the 'inexorable art of the witness.' Japanese American internment, the bombing of civilians in Hiroshima, the Nazi genocide of European Jews and its 'postmemorial' toll, the reactionary politics and social upheaval of the Islamic Revolution in Iran, Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory, and the terror of life in a designated 'safe area' during the war in eastern Bosnia --all of these carefully observed, often deeply personal portraits of life in a time of crisis form the respective subject matter of the graphic novels that we will consider.
Requirements for the Course: This course is intended, above all, to give you the opportunity to hone your critical thinking skills as well as to strengthen and to refine the quality of your written expression. With graphic novels as the textual and visual interest of our course, we will focus on developing attentive 'reading' skills; staking interpretative, thoughtful claims based on foundational observations of each 'text'; and crafting written arguments (with, it should be added, a strong emphasis on substantial revisions of your original drafts). In addition to short responses, group journal-keeping, presentations, and participation (including one field-outing), you will write three papers (the first two with at least one revision).
English R50 is intended for people who are planning to be English majors and who have already taken R1A. It satisfies the College's R1B requirement. It may not be counted as one of the twelve courses required for the English major.
84/1
Sophomore Seminar: High Culture / Low Culture
Bader, Julia
M 2-5
56 Hildebrand
1 unit
Book List: Carver, R.: Where I'm Calling From
Course Description: Using neo-noir films, the short stories of Raymond Carver and cultural events, the course will analyze issues of representation, narration, and modernism.
95
Other Voices: Multicultural Literary Perspectives
Padilla, Genaro
2 units
Lectures M 12-1 in 315 Wheeler, plus one hour of discussion section per week (all sections W 12-1)
Book List: A course reader
Course Description: This course will introduce students to the work currently being undertaken by both Berkeley faculty and local artists in issues of race and class, gender and ethnicity, and the formations of minority discourse. Each week a different scholar or writer will lecture on literary study that reflects cultural and racial concerns. Upper-division undergraduates will lead discussion groups focusing on the methods advocated in the lecture and on various readings. Attendance is required at both the one-hour lecture and the one-hour discussion. Discussion sections will be limited to 15 students. A six- to ten-page term paper will be due the final week of class, and during the semester there will be regular, short, ungraded writing assignments in preparation for the term paper.
This course may not be counted as one of the twelve courses required for the English major.
Last modified: Tuesday, 25-Jan-2005 14:40:41 PST