Lower Division Courses
Spring 2006
24/1
Freshman Seminar: Shakespeare’s Sonnets
Nelson, Alan
M 12-1
289 Dwinelle
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.
This course may not be counted as one of the twelve courses required to complete the English major.
24/2
Freshman Seminar: Pop Song Poetics
Hanson, Kristin
Tues. 2-3
Note New Room: 140 Barrows
1 unit
Book List: Photocopied readings, and CD's—including the Flatlanders' "Wheel of Fortune" and "Now Again"
Course Description: All the core elements of versification found the world over—meter, rhyme, alliteration and syntactic parallelism—are normally taught with reference to high art forms of poetry. But these same basic elements are also found in some form in the lyrics of high-quality contemporary songs in all kinds of non-classical styles. This course will therefore provide an introduction to these elements of versification through attention to such lyrics: we will begin together with songs of the Flatlanders—Jimmie Dale Gilmour, Butch Hancock and Joe Ely—and move on to others, including songs of the student’s own choice. We will also give some attention to ways in which versification is different in poetry from what is in songs: meter, for example, achieves aesthetic effects in ways which are somewhat distinct from those achieved through setting texts to music.
This course may not be counted as one of the twelve courses required to complete the English major.
24/3
Freshman Seminar: Boys and Girls in Mark Twain and Henry James
Hutson, Richard
W 3-4
279 Dwinelle
1 unit
Book List: James, H.: The Turn of the Screw and other Short Novels, What Maisie Knew; Twain, M.: The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Course Description: Historians often define the era from 1880 to ca. 1915 as the “era of the child.” Some historians also include the problem of American adolescence in this period. Just as there developed an issue of defining masculinity and femininity, authors of the period focused on children and adolescents. The crisis of major cultural/political/economic rapid change seems to demand these difficult and painful reconsiderations and redefinitions. At least, the narratives of boys and girls gave the culture the opportunity to observe, scrutinize, critique. Questions about boys and girls might also be not only about gender definitions but also about the development of an ethical consciousness, what might be called everyday ethical coping.
This course may not be counted as one of the twelve courses required to complete the English major.
24/4
Freshman Seminar: Through Hell—Reading Dante’s Inferno
Duncan, Ian
W 2-3
Note New Room: 301 Wheeler
1 unit
Book List: See course description below
Course Description: "Divine Power, Supreme Wisdom and Primal Love made me," declares the scandalous inscription on the gate of Dante's Hell, the "city of suffering," a place that resembles the totalitarian prison-states of our own political nightmares. Dante's journey to the center of the earth, guided by the prince of classical poets, Virgil, makes up the first part (of three) of a vast dream-vision of a pilgrimage through the medieval Christian cosmos. Intricately allegorical, harrowingly vivid, often outrageously funny, Dante's poem retains its power to move and shock. We will spend the semester reading the whole of the Inferno, in English translation, pondering the question (among others): What does it mean for divine love to have made such a place, and for Dante to have imagined it? We will be using the literal verse translation by Robert Hollander and Jean Hollander (Anchor Books) alongside a contemporary poetic version by Ciaran Carson (New York Review Books).
This course may not be counted as one of the twelve courses required to complete the English major.
25
English as a Language
Hanson, Kristin
TTh 11-12:30
24 Wheeler
Book List: Brinton, L.: The Structure of Modern English
Recommended Text: Pinker, S.: The Language Instinct
Course Description: This course examines the structure of modern English, including its phonology (sound structure), morphology (word structure), syntax (sentence structure) and semantics (linguistic meaning), as well as some aspects of pragmatics (contextual meaning). The focus is on standard American English, but some consideration is also given to other varieties of English throughout the world and to comparison of English with other languages. No previous background in linguistics is required.
Requirements: Three quizzes, a short paper and a final exam.
43A
Introduction to the Writing of Short Fiction
Abrams, Melanie
TTh 11-12:30
301 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 Melanie Abrams’s mailbox in 322 Wheeler Hall, BY 4:00 P.M., TUESDAY, OCTOBER 25, 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!
43B
Introduction to the Writing of Verse
Carr, Julie
TTh 12:30-2
301 Wheeler
Book List: All readings for this course will be provided in a course reader or as handouts.
Course Description: This workshop aims to help you develop skills as a writer of poetry. My hope is that you will bring to class works that you consider incomplete, that are still unfamiliar to you, and about which you are sincerely curious. In each meeting we will read works by nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first-century poets in order to expand our ideas about what poems are and what they can do. We will then discuss each other’s poems, working to develop as a community of rigorous and thoughtful readers. I will provide writing assignments based on the texts we read and on the issues raised in your poems. As a final assignment, we will collaboratively edit a collection of our combined work.
To be considered for admission to this class, please submit 5 photocopied pages of your poems, along with an application form, to Julie Carr’s mailbox in 322 Wheeler Hall, BY 4:00 P.M., TUESDAY, OCTOBER 25, 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
Nelson, Alan
Lectures MW 9-10 in 105 North Gate, plus one hour of discussion section per week (all sections F 9-10)
Book List: Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol. I; Chaucer, G.: The Canterbury Tales; Milton, J.: Paradise Lost
Course Description: This course will concentrate on Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, Spenser’s Faery Queene (Book I), and Milton’s Paradise Lost; additional works will be read for the sake of historical context. Written work for the semester will consist of short quizzes, one midterm exam, short papers, and a final exam. Students enrolling in this section must be prepared to attend lectures and discussion sections faithfully. Accumulated absences without a viable excuse, especially for sections, will result in a severe reduction in the final grade.
45A/2 This class has been cancelled.
45B/1
Literature in English: Late-17th Through Mid-19th Centuries
Puckett, Kent
Lectures MW 10-11 in 3 LeConte, plus one hour of discussion section per week (all sections F 10-11)
Book List: The list may include The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol. II; Austen, J.: Pride and Prejudice; Franklin, B.: Autobiography; Gates, H.: Classic Slave Narratives; Melville, H.: Bartleby and Benito Cereno; Sterne, L.: A Sentimental Journey.
Course Description: This course is an introduction to British and American literature from the eighteenth through the mid-nineteenth century. We'll read works from that period (by Pope, Sterne, Franklin, Equiano, Wordsworth, Austen, Melville, Browning, Dickinson, Whitman, and others) and think about how politics, the everyday, race, gender, and identity all find expression in a number of different literary forms. We'll especially consider the material and symbolic roles played by the idea and practice of revolution in the period.
45B/2
Literature in English: Late-17th Through Mid-19th Centuries
Altieri, Charles
Lectures MW 2-3 in 3 LeConte, plus one hour of discussion section per week (all sections F 2-3)
Book List: Norton Anthology of English Literature; Norton Anthology of American Literature to 1870; Jane Austen’s Emma
Course Description: This course will attempt to survey major texts from the period 1660 to 1850. The instructor has a bias toward philosophy and toward the close reading of poetry, and is not an expert on the period. This may produce enthusiasm in the place of knowledge, or enthusiasm at what knowledge can be produced or pretended to on the run. Attendance will be required and there will be two papers as well as a mid-term and final.
45C/1
Literature in English: Mid-19th through the 20th Century
Bishop, John
Lectures MW 11-12 in 101 Barker, plus one hour of discussion section per week (all sections F 11-12)
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 a midterm.
45C/2
Literature in English: Mid-19th through the 20th Century
Premnath, Gautam
Lectures MW 1-2 in 2 LeConte , plus one hour of discussion section per week (all sections F 1-2)
Book List: The book list for this course has not been finalized, but will include several of the following titles: Douglass, F.: Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave; Stevenson, R.L.: The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde; Conrad, J.: Heart of Darkness; Forster, E.M.: Howards End; West, N.: The Day of the Locust; Dangarembga, T.: Nervous Conditions; Ng, F.: Bone. There will also be a course reader containing stories by Melville, Poe, and Rushdie; poems by Tennyson, Dickinson, Hardy, Eliot, Yeats, Bennett, Walcott, Rich, and Dabydeen; plays by Wilde and Soyinka; and criticism by Arnold, DuBois, Eliot, Woolf, and Ghosh.
Course Description: In this semester we will cut a selective path through a vast swathe of literature in English from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. Our aim is less to survey the “greatest hits” of the period than to get a feel for and analytical grasp of patterns of continuity and change in the history of English literature. Yet in many ways this will be as much a course in literary geography as in literary history: one of our key tasks will be to trace the transformation of English into a worldwide literary language.
R50/1
Freshman and Sophomore Studies: Stylin’
Katz, Stephen
MWF 11-12
Note New Room: 121 Wheeler
Book List: Borroff, M. ed.: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight; Morrison, T.: Jazz; Nabokov, V.: Lolita; plus a course reader
Course Description: Humbert Humbert, the narrator of Lolita, speaks of the “refuge of art” – a notion that the sheer beauty of his text renders it permanent, impervious to the incursions of time or the judgments of his readers. But if transcendent immortality is the preserve of beauty, what of that gorgeous pair of Uggs (just last fall so crucially de mode), which now languish at the back of the closet, and just don’t seem to cut it anymore? Where does beauty stop and mere gorgeousness begin?
In this class we will consider style – in its various senses – as a literary and a cultural problematic. We will endeavor to find precise ways of talking about the distinctive style of a text (is it a mood? A voice? An aesthetic? A grammar?). And we will think about style in a broader sense, as the currency of a runway culture that promises creativity and hipness to all. All of the texts for this course are fraught by a tension about style, finding themselves caught sorting out the difference between permanence and mere trendiness, bookishness and worldliness, an idiosyncratic voice and a collective mood. Above all, style is meant to be noticed, and each of our texts is also freighted by the awareness that it desperately wants to be “checked out.” What are these texts seeking, or alternately fleeing from, through style?
Such issues will be our intellectual fodder as we address the writerly concerns of the R50 syllabus. Our concentration on stylistics will allow us to consider the technical aspects of good writing (grammar, sentence and paragraph construction, thesis development, evidence, and style) in ways more pulse-quickening than such a list might at first suggest. Our common goal will be the mastery of those competencies necessary for the production of startlingly good analytical prose, and an introduction to the methods of academic research. All of this will acquaint you with the forms of argumentation that you will need at your disposal for such perils as one encounters in the classrooms of Berkeley, and beyond.
Over the course of the semester, you will be assigned three papers and a number of short take-home assignments. The final paper will involve your producing a longer research project that will draw on multiple sources. Each paper will involve a primary draft, peer editing, and a final revision and submission for a grade. You will receive a substantial amount of feedback from the instructor on all three essays.
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 to complete the English major.
R50/2
Freshman and Sophomore Studies: Textual Embodiment—What is a text? What is a body?
Edwards, Rebekah
TTh 2-3:30
246 Dwinelle
Book List: Shelley, M.: Frankenstein; Mootoo, S.: Cereus Blooms at Night; Course Reader; and the film Ma Vie En Rose
Recommended Texts: Eagleton, T.: Literary Theory; Butler, J.: Bodies that Matter; Thompson, R.: Extraordinary Bodies; Fausto-Sterling, A.: Sexing the Body
Course Description:
“…in order to see what a photograph is of, we must first repress the knowledge of what the photograph is…” George Batchen
This quote about the transparency of the photograph as object in relation to its photographic content is also a good description of the transparency of the literary text. Often, English students are expected to perform a task opposite to the repression Batchen comments on – that is, students are expected to expose and negotiate what a text “is” (for example, the relationship between the content, genre, and/or circumstances of production and reception of a literary text) —in order to say something about what they understand the text to be “of.” Human bodies, even more than photographs, and certainly more than literary texts, are often perceived as given, immutable, biologically real and therefore immediate – exactly what they “are.” Some thinkers contend, however, that the material, “real” body is at least in part produced and maintained by various discourses, including those concerned with sex, gender, race and ability. What happens when literary texts are concerned with human bodies? When texts are about bodies, then reading them as texts inevitably opens questions about how bodies themselves are read, received, and produced as being of different genres (kinds). The primary texts we will read for this course -- novels, short stories and films -- are centrally concerned with bodies that disrupt ideas of physical/social normalcy; such disruptions inevitably expose underlying concerns with issues of subjectivity and humanness. These texts have been written about from within various modes of critical practice, enabling us to read a number of approaches to the same text and hence explore the possibilities of both the literary and the theoretical texts.
This is a course designed to introduce the future English major to various modes of literary critical practice both in our readings and in our written work, in order to develop and hone skills for writing about literary texts. The goal of the course is to help you develop your skills in critical reading, analytical writing and scholarly research. You will complete a number of different writing exercises, including: close-readings, developmental and explorative exercises, an annotated bibliography, and three analytical papers. This course assumes that revision is a key component to writing a strong paper; hence, revision strategies and practices will be a central focus of this course.
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 to complete the English major.
84/1
Sophomore Seminar: High Culture, Low Culture—The Films of Woody Allen
Bader, Julia
M 2-5
56 Hildebrand
2 units
Book List: Allen, Woody: Without Feathers, Side Effects, Four Films, Getting Even, Non-Being and Somethingness; Kimball, ed.: Woody Allen, A Casebook
Course Description: We will examine the films and writings of Woody Allen in terms of themes, narration, comic and visual inventiveness and ideology. The course will also include a consideration of cultural contexts and events at Cal Performances and the Pacific Film Archive.
This course may not be counted as one of the twelve courses required to complete the English major.
84/2
Sophomore Seminar: Socrates as Cultural Icon
Coolidge, John
W 2-4
Note New Room: 205 Wheeler
2 units
Book List: See below
Course Description: Socrates has often been compared to Jesus, an enigmatic yet somehow unmistakable figure who left nothing in writing yet decisively influenced the minds of his own and later ages. We will read the contemporary representations of Socrates—Aristophanes’ comic send-up in “Clouds,” the Platonic dialogues purporting to tell the story of Socrates’ trial and death, selections from Plato’s Symposium and Alcibiades and from Xenophon’s Memorabilia—and discuss such topics as Socrates’ questionable political associations; Socrates as protomartyr of academic freedom and of civil disobedience; and Socrates and the heroic self. The assigned text is The Trials of Socrates: Six Classic Texts, ed. C.D.C. Reeve. There will be a reader illustrating possible meanings of “values” like “piety” and “virtue,” etc. and the maxims “know thyself” and “the unexamined life is not worth living.”
This course may not be counted as one of the twelve courses required to complete the English major.
95
Other Voices: Multicultural Literary Perspectives
Padilla, Genaro
Note new room:
Lectures M 12-1 in 315 Wheeler, plus one hour of discussion section per week (all sections W 12-1)
2 units
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 to complete the English major.
Last modified: Tuesday, 07-Feb-2006 10:30:20 PST