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Instructions "p.1-3"

Concentration Areas

Schedule of Courses

RIA/1B Descriptions

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150/1 This section has been cancelled (4/19/04).

150/2
Middleton, Anne
Senior Seminar: 14th-Century Alliterative Traditions
MW 10-12
204 Wheeler

(Though the official time of this section is 10-12, on most days it may end by 11:30.)

Areas of Concentration: 1A, 3

BOOKS REQUIRED (all in paperback) (E = early in course; M = middle; L = late)
M - Piers Plowman: An Edition of the C-Text, ed. Derek Pearsall. University of Exeter [England] Press (distributed in US by Northwestern U Press), 1994. 0-85989-429-0 [$16.95]
E - Poems of the Pearl Manuscript, ed. M. Andrew and R. Waldron. University of Exeter [England] Press (distributed in US by Northwestern U Press), 1997. 0-85989-514-9 [$19.95]
E - Wynnere and Wastoure and the Parlement of the Thre Ages, ed. Warren Ginsberg. Medieval Institute Publications, 1992. 1-879288-26-5 [$7.00]
M - The Piers Plowman Tradition, ed. Helen Barr. J. M. Dent, 1993. 0-460-87050-5 [$8.95]
L - King Arthur's Death: The Middle English The Stanzaic Morte Arthur and The Alliterative Morte Arthure, Ed. Larry D. Benson and Edward E. Foster. Medieval Institute Publications, 1994. 1-879288-38-9 [$13.]

Course Description: This seminar will read a substantial selection of the best alliterative poetry of the later 14C in England. These works represent an intensive cultivation, during a few decades, of a metrical preference with much deeper roots in earlier English verse, and a short "afterlife." We will examine the literary and cultural significance of this brief flourishing of alliterative verse--and the relations of the "masterpieces" of the form to antecedent and subsequent writings in this form--as it offers an unusual medieval case of the self-conscious clustering of explicit literary values and ideologies around a formal practice, and the nuanced articulation of relations between forms and cultural meanings.

Students will write a long (~15-18 pp) final research paper, reporting more briefly throughout the term on each of several steps in research and writing. There will also be a library reserve list, and a selection of photocopied material in a reader.

This course satisfies the pre-1800 requirement for the English major.

Enrollment is limited and a written application is due BY 4:00 P.M., TUESDAY, APRIL 20; be sure to read the paragraph on page 2 of this Announcement of Classes regarding enrollment in English 150!

150/3
Wagner, Bryan
Senior Seminar: Black Vernacular
MW 12-2
204 Wheeler

(Though the official time of this class is 12-2, on most days it may start at 12:30.)

Areas of Concentration: 1D, 2, 6

Book List: William Francis Allen, et. al., Slave Songs of the United States; Charles Chesnutt, The Conjure Woman; W. E. B. Du Bois, Souls of Black Folk; W. C. Handy, Father of the Blues; Joel Chandler Harris, Uncle Remus: His Songs and His Sayings; Zora Neale Hurston, Mules and Men; Leroi Jones, Blues People

There will also be a course reader with historical and theoretical materials by Houston Baker, Franz Boas, George Washington Cable, Hazel Carby, Nahum Chandler, Howard Courlander, Angela Davis, Gina Dent, Brent Edwards, Steven Hahn, Saidiya Hartman, Melville Herskovits, Tera Hunter, Robin Kelley, Lawrence Levine, Alain Locke, John Lomax, Wahneema Lubiano, Fred Moten, Howard Odum, Ronald Radano, Dorothy Scarborough, and Sterling Stuckey.

Course Description: This course will study the development of black vernacular culture in the United States from the end of slavery to the efflorescence of the blues -- a time when folklorists, both black and white, were collecting hundreds of songs, stories, legends, and anecdotes believed to be in general circulation within the black working class. Marred by its rampant imprecision and by its unavoidable condescension to its subjects, the archive built by these collectors has nevertheless been used to settle questions about the nature of racial identity, the roots of mass culture, and the scope and degree of African cultural retention in the New World. This course returns to this archive with two aims in mind. First, it seeks to understand how ethnographic knowledge of black culture became structurally essential to post-slavery narratives of political modernization. It asks, in other words, why the idea of a racial vernacular was persistently invoked to rationalize the relation of racial identity to the normative self-descriptions of modern law and economy. Second, the course seeks to explore and elaborate the alternative theories of racial identification that remain embedded within the materials collected under the auspices of these ethnographic campaigns. Because black culture continually decomposes the contexts in which it is preserved, it is possible to recover traces of these vernacular theories by reading bits of folklore, songs, and quoted speech against the grain of the dominant storylines in which they appear. Necessarily selective in focus, the course will be organized around significant places (Congo Square, Parchman Farm), people (Bessie Smith, Leadbelly, Zora Neale Hurston), and themes (cultural property, the voice, the form of repetition, ethnographic authority) rather than attempting an exhaustive approach to the field. The course will also consider the place of the black vernacular in recent theory and criticism. Along the way -- of course -- we will be listening to some very fine music as well as early recordings of personal testimony and storytelling.

Enrollment is limited and a written application is due BY 4:00 P.M., TUESDAY, APRIL 20; be sure to read the paragraph on page 2 of this Announcement of Classes regarding enrollment in English 150!

150/4
Beam, Dorri
Senior Seminar: Death and Antebellum American Literature
MW 2-4
106 Wheeler

(Though the official time of this class is 2-4, on most days it may end by 3:30.)

Areas of Concentration: 1D, 3

Book List: See below

Course Description: We will survey a wide swath of literature including lyric, elegy, sentimental fiction, sensation fiction, and protest literature as we think about how the literary treatment of death shapes the formal structures of a text, particularly genre or narrative voice. Our study of the intersection of literature and death will be grounded in student historical research (on rituals of death, death in art, murder and the press, and spiritualism and séances) in the mid-nineteenth-century. Topics covered will include: narrative voices of the dead, death’s genders, conjunctions of the aesthetic and the morbid, death as a state of being, formulations of spirit and body, spectacles of death, mourning and memory, intersections of political and spiritual resurrection. The broad range of material covered under our topic will allow students varied points of entry to shape their own research projects.

Major authors include Stowe, Emerson, Osgood, Sigourney, Douglass, Dickinson, Spofford, Phelps, Melville, Lippard and lots of Poe.

Enrollment is limited and a written application is due BY 4:00 P.M., TUESDAY, APRIL 20; be sure to read the paragraph on page 2 of this Announcement of Classes regarding enrollment in English 150!

150/5
Puckett, Kent
Senior Seminar: Reading Character
MW 2-4
109 Wheeler

(Though the official time of this class is 2-4, on most days it may end by 3:30.)

Areas of Concentration: 1C or 1D, 3, 5

Book List: Austen, J.: Pride and Prejudice; Burney, F.: Evelina; Dickens, C.: Great Expectations; Flaubert, G.: Madame Bovary; Goethe: Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship; Richardson, S.: Pamela; Shelley, M.: Frankenstein; Wilde, O.: The Picture of Dorian Gray

Course Description: Although characters are everywhere, they remain one of the least understood aspects of the novel. In this course, we will work to pull apart a tangle of assumptions about interiority, privacy, gender, identification, and agency that give form to character in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century novel. To this end, we will read a number of works that figure importantly in different accounts of the rise of the novel while considering how extraliterary concerns like psychology, etiquette, political economy, and ethics contributed to the way writers and their audiences thought about character. In addition to the primary texts, which we will read very closely, we will consider works of criticism and theory by Nancy Armstrong, Roland Barthes, Sigmund Freud, Diana Fuss, Deidre Lynch, Franco Moretti, Alex Woloch and others. Requirements include regular attendance, participation, one short paper, and one longer essay (15-20 pages).

Enrollment is limited and a written application is due BY 4:00 P.M., TUESDAY, APRIL 20; be sure to read the paragraph on page 2 of this Announcement of Classes regarding enrollment in English 150!

150/6
Shoptaw, John
Senior Seminar: T.S. Eliot--Poetry, Drama, Prose
MW 2-4
103 Wheeler

(Though the official time of this class is 2-4, on most days it may end by 3:30.)

Area of Concentration: 1E

Book List: Eliot, T.S.: The Complete Poems and Plays, 1909-1950, Inventions of the March Hare, Poems 1909-1917, The Letters, 1898-1922, vol.1, Selected Prose, The Waste Land and Other Poems, The Waste Land: A Facsimile;Gordon, Lyndall: Eliot, T.S.: An Imperfect Life; Course Reader

Course Description: A broad and intensive survey of the writings of a key modernist poet of the 20th century. We will read Eliot’s work across his career, and his genres. Our primary focus will be his poetry. We will spend a generous amount of time on The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, The Waste Land, and Four Quartets, moving, by way of their annotations and sources, back to the poems themselves. We will retrace the genesis of these poems by scrutinizing their drafts and early versions, along with Ezra Pound’s editorial suggestions for The Waste Land. We will also study his drama and essays, both for themselves and for the light they shed on his influential poems. We will read Eliot’s work in several contexts: his life; the poetry and prose of his contemporaries, his precursors and postcursors; contemporary painting and music, politics and history. We will also read strategically among critical essays on Eliot, particularly the more recent, looking for ways in which he is still our contemporary.

Enrollment is limited and a written application is due BY 4:00 P.M., TUESDAY, APRIL 20; be sure to read the paragraph on page 2 of this Announcement of Classes regarding enrollment in English 150!

150/7
Best, Stephen
Senior Seminar: Black Fiction/Southern Fiction
MW 4-5:30
103 Wheeler

Areas of Concentration: 1E, 2, 3

Book List: Ellison, R.: Invisible Man, Shadow and Act; Faulkner, W.: Go Down, Moses, Absalom, Absalom, The Sound and the Fury; Hurston, Z. N.: Their Eyes Were Watching God; Morrison, T., Playing in the Dark

Course Description: In this course we will read some major works by William Faulkner, Ralph Ellison, and Zora Neale Hurston, authors who took as a principal task the act of imagining "the South" in fiction. We will consider Faulkner’s influence on African-American literature and literary theory. We will emphasize some of the thematic concerns and technical strategies by means of which these authors transformed a geography of nebulous borders into literary topoi of trauma, absence, and flight -- e.g. overlapping temporalities, repetition, and multiple perspectives and voices.

Student responsibility in this course will include the following: class participation; a prospectus of the final paper (which will be distributed to and critiqued by the seminar members); and a substantial, twenty-page research paper.

Enrollment is limited and a written application is due BY 4:00 P.M., TUESDAY, APRIL 20; be sure to read the paragraph on page 2 of this Announcement of Classes regarding enrollment in English 150!

150/9
Langan, Celeste
Senior Seminar: Byron
TTh 11-12:30
103 Wheeler

Area of Concentration: 1D

Book List: Lord Byron, Complete Poems (Oxford UP); Gibson, W., The Difference Engine; Christensen, J., Lord Byron’s Strength; a COURSE READER

Course Description: This course, focusing on Byron’s writing and writing about Byron (by Harriet Beecher Stowe and William Gibson, among others), will consider three interrelated aspects of Byron’s "modernity." First is Byron’s celebrity. There is not perhaps a single modern passion or pathology that Byron did not appear to indulge: rumors of his sexual deviancies, accounts of his quasi-bulemic alterations in body size, and celebrations of his political radicalism contributed as much to his fame as did his unprecedented commercial success as a poet. How might the legend of Byron contribute to an analysis of the cross-dressed bodies that populate his narrative poems; do those bodies succeed in representing "identity"--racial, national, sexual--as a ‘sublime object’ of ideology? Second is Byron’s style: might we regard T.S. Eliot’s claim that Byron wrote as if "an accomplished foreigner writing English" as an unintended clue to Byron’s success in writing not a national but an international epic (Don Juan), and his wide appeal to colonial and post-colonial writers (including W.E.B. DuBois)? Third is Byron’s own self-description as "the grand Napoleon of the realms of rhyme." Can Byron’s brief dominion really be said to have reshaped the world of literature as Napoleon’s extension of the French Empire over much of Europe (and beyond) before his final defeat and exile can be said to have produced a new world order? In addition to reading all of Byron’s major poems and plays, students will have a chance to read Byron criticism and theories of the modern subject. A long final essay (16-20 pages) is required.

Enrollment is limited and a written application is due BY 4:00 P.M., TUESDAY, APRIL 20; be sure to read the paragraph on page 2 of this Announcement of Classes regarding enrollment in English 150!

150/10 This section has been cancelled.

150/11 This section has been cancelled.

150/12 This section has been cancelled.

150/13
Starr, George
Senior Seminar: Utopian Fiction
TTh 2-3:30
305 Wheeler

Areas of Concentration: 3, 6

Book List: More, T., et al.: Three Early Modern Utopias; Scott, S.: Millenium Hall; Butler, S.: Erewhon; Morris, W.: News from Nowhere; Wells, H.G.: Three Prophetic Novels; Orwell, G.: 1984; photocopies of other material either not in print (e.g. Jefferies, R.: After London) or presenting schemes that are ostensibly practical rather than mere flights of fancy (e.g. Owen, R: New View of Society; Marx & Engels: The Communist Manifesto, etc.)

Course Description: For more information on this course, please email the professor at gastarr@berkeley.edu.

Enrollment is limited and a written application is due BY 4:00 P.M., TUESDAY, APRIL 20; be sure to read the paragraph on page 2 of this Announcement of Classes regarding enrollment in English 150!

150/14 This section has been cancelled.

150/15
Bader, Julia
Senior Seminar: Alfred Hitchcock

Seminars TTh 5:30-7 P.M. in (note new room) 220 Wheeler, plus film screenings Thursdays 7-10 P.M. in (note new room) 220 Wheeler

Areas of Concentration: 1E, 3, 4, 6

Book List: Modleski, T.: The Women Who Knew Too Much; Freedman & Millington: Hitchcock’s America; Thornham, S.: Feminist Film Theory; Wood, R.: Hitchcock’s Films Revisited

Course Description: The course will focus on Alfred Hitchcock, from his early British films through the middle and late Hollywood ones. Problems of "auteurship," representations of violence, voyeurism, sexual perversion will be analyzed along with issues of institutional authority and national security.

Enrollment is limited and a written application is due BY 4:00 P.M., TUESDAY, APRIL 20; be sure to read the paragraph on page 2 of this Announcement of Classes regarding enrollment in English 150!

161
Puckett, Kent
Introduction to Literary Theory
MWF 10-11
110 Wheeler

Areas of Concentration: 5; 6

Book List: Barthes, R.: Mythologies; Lodge, D., ed.: Modern Criticism and Theory: A Reader; a course reader containing essays by Derrida, de Man, Marx, Adorno, Butler, Foucault, Freud, Lacan, Spivak, and others

Course Description: This course will serve as an introduction to literary and cultural theory. We will read closely a number of important (and difficult) theoretical texts while thinking about what relations exist between the different intellectual projects that we call theory (structuralism, poststructuralism, psychoanalysis, and gender studies are only a few). We will also ask and ask again the more general question: what is theory anyway?

165/1 This section has been cancelled.

Newly added section:
165/2
Honig, Elizabeth
Special Topics: Elizabethan Renaissance

Lectures TTh 9:30-11 in 106 Moffitt (course control #: 28798), plus one hour of discussion section per week (sec. 101: M 10-11 in 104 Moffitt, course control #: 29174; sec. 102: M 11-12 in 104 Moffitt, course control #: 29177)

This class is cross-listed with History of Art 190D, sec. 1.

Areas of Concentration: 1B or 1C, 5, 6

Book List: See below

Course Description: Queen Elizabeth I presided over a marvelous but quirky flowering of the arts in England. Her unique position as a female monarch surrounded by male courtiers produced a dynamic in which all artistic production seemed to reflect back upon her, the powerful focus of men’s desires and aspirations. From the building of stately houses to the writing of poetry, a rhetoric of courtship, persuasion, and double-meaning underlay Elizabeth’s renaissance. Following on a long period of state-sponsored iconoclasm, the relationship between the visual and verbal arts had to be redefined as well. This course will consider the Elizabethan period in relation to culture under Elizabeth’s father, Henry VIII, her brother and sister, and her Stuart heir James I. We will treat poetry, painting, and pageantry; rhetoric, architecture and urban development. Some of the writers and artists we will discuss will be Holbein, More, Hilliard, Sidney, Smythson, Jones, Jonson, Van Dyck and Rubens.

NOTE: This course involves interdisciplinary, research-based learning. The evaluation of your work will be based not on examinations but on a multi-part project, on which you will have ample, planned guidance from the professor, the GSI, and the library staff. All students will write an original research paper using primary sources available online.

This course does NOT satisfy the pre-1800 requirement for the English major.

166
Cheng, Anne
Special Topics: "No Body's Perfect"-- Love, Race, and the Marriage Plot in American Film Comedies

Lectures TTh 9:30-11, plus film screenings Wednesdays 5-8 P.M., both in 142 Dwinelle

This course is cross-listed with Film 108, section 3.

Areas of Concentration: 1E, 3, 4, 6

Book List: Course Reader

Film List: Hawkes, H: His Girl Friday; Cukor, G: The Philadelphia Story; Wilder, B: Some Like It Hot; Streisand, B: Yentel; Wood, S: A Night at the Opera; Allen, W: Hannah and her Sisters; Lee, S: Bamboozled; Brest, M: Beverly Hills Cop; Nair, M: Mississippi Masala; Wang, W: Eat a Bowl of Tea; Goei, G: That’s the Way I Like It; Lee, A: The Wedding Banquet.

Course Description: This course examines how comedy in American cinema has been enlisted to stage race, sexuality, and their conjunctions in twentieth-century America. Taking the marriage plot as the communal narrative through which sexual, racial, and national tensions negotiate their conflicts, this course will analyze films made by, and sometimes about, Jewish Americans, African Americans, and Asian Americans, as well as movies from mainstream Hollywood that do not, on first sight, seem to thematize race but are in fact projects working through the racial and sexual troubles haunting the formation of the nation. We will also expand our investigation into marriage beyond the traditional notion of a union between a heterosexual couple to various permutations, including untraditional "marriages of convenience," "green card marriages," "arranged marriages," and "marriage" between men.

We will begin with the classic Hollywood screwball comedies of the forties and fifties and study the ways that these films exemplify the gender fantasies plaguing mainstream America and unveil the more invisible labor of aligning heterosexual norm (ratified by marriage) with fidelity to "the American way." The second segment of the course focuses on representations of Jewish Americans as performative expositions on the erratic encounter between the immigrant and the new nation. The third segment of the course turns to African American films and the problems of restaging or subverting stereotypes, in order to explore how African American filmmakers and actors have used humor to negotiate the darker aspects of racial abjection. The last segment of the course concentrates on Asian American cinema, where we will focus on the antics of assimilation and the relationship between Orientalism and Occidentalism.

English 166 is open to English majors only; Film 108/3 is open to Film majors only.

179
Hanson, Kristin
Literature and Linguistics
TTh 11-12:30
106 Wheeler

Areas of Concentration: 5, 7

Book List: Fabb, N: Linguistics and Literature; a photocopied reader of articles, poems and short stories

Recommended Text: Pinker, S: The Language Instinct.

Course Description: It is a commonplace that the medium of literature is language. This course will develop a substantive understanding of this relationship through a survey of literary forms defined by special linguistic structures, and an exploration of how these structures are systematically like and unlike those of non-literary language. These forms will include meter; rhyme and alliteration; syntactic parallelism and other syntactic structures special to poetry; formulas of oral composition; special narrative uses of pronouns, tenses and subjective features of language to express point of view and render 'represented speech and thought'; and figurative language such as metaphor, metonymy and irony. Understanding these forms should enhance not only theoretical understanding of literature but also practical criticism. Throughout the emphasis will be on literature in English, but comparisons with literature in other languages will also be drawn. No knowledge of linguistics will be presupposed, but linguistic concepts will be introduced, explained and used.

180A This course has been cancelled; Prof. Wong will teach it in Spring 2005 instead.

H195A/1
Goldsmith, Steven
Honors Course
MW 12-2
103 Wheeler

(Though the official time of this section is 12-2, on most days it may end by 1:30.)

Area of Concentration: 5

Book List: Barthes, R: The Pleasures of the Text; Lentricchia, F. and T. McLaughlin: Critical Terms for Literary Study

Course Description: For a little more than half the semester, we will broadly survey important readings from the last half-century of literary theory, addressing such topics as poststructuralism (Barthes, Derrida, Foucault), gender and performativity (Irigaray, Butler, Sedgwick), and the various modes of cultural, ideological, and historical critique (Bhabha, Jameson, Said). In the second half, student groups will lead the class, with each group assigning literary, critical, and theoretical texts of its own choosing. By the end of the semester, you will hand in a prospectus for your thesis and a ten-page essay exploring one aspect of it.

Students admitted to H195 may choose to waive the 150 (Senior Seminar) requirement.

Enrollment is limited and a written application (and a photocopy of a critical paper that you wrote for another class) are due BY 4:00 P.M., TUESDAY, APRIL 20; be sure to read the paragraph beginning on page 2 of this Announcement of Classes regarding enrollment in the Honors Course!

H195A/2
Porter, Carolyn
Honors Course
TTh 9:30-11
103 Wheeler

Area of Concentration: 5

Book List: See below

Course Description: This section of H195 will focus on several forms of literary theory and criticism, beginning with some classic versions and moving onto Marxist, psychoanalytical, and post-structuralist approaches. Readings will include: David Lodge, Modern Criticism and Theory: A Reader; Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction; Raymond Williams, Keywords; Roland Barthes, S/Z; a course reader with essays by Freud, Marx, Luce Irigaray, as well as practical examples of various critical approaches. In the fall semester, students will be working toward the development of a prospectus for the 40-60 page honors thesis they will produce in the spring semester. In the spring semester, students will be divided into groups and meet regularly to help each other in developing their projects.

Students admitted to H195 may choose to waive the 150 (Senior Seminar) requirement.

H195A/3
Miller, D.A.
Honors Course
TTh 11-12:30
Note New Room: 251 Dwinelle

Area of Concentration: 5

Students admitted to H195 may choose to waive the 150 (Senior Seminar) requirement.

Book List and Course Description: For more information on this course, please email the professor at damiller@berkeley.edu. [an error occurred while processing this directive]