Berkeley English: Courses: Upper Division
Fall 2005
ENGLISH MAJORS: The areas of concentration for each upper-division course are typed right above the book list for the class. In addition, see the page right after the description of English H195A/3 (the last undergraduate course) for a list of all the courses that fall under each area of concentration.
100/1
Junior Seminar: Work in the Mid-Victorian Novel-- Elisabeth Gaskell and Charles Dickens
Ben-Yishai, Ayelet
MWF 1-2
109 Wheeler
Areas of Concentration: 1D; 3; 4
Book List: Dickens, C.: Sketches by Boz, Hard Times, Great Expectations; Gaskell, E.: Mary Barton, Cranford, North and South; course reader containing essays and excerpts from Victorian social, economic, and political texts
Course Description: In this course we will read novels by two of Victorian England's most brilliant writers of social fiction, Elizabeth Gaskell and Charles Dickens. Focusing on theme of work, we will discuss central questions of Victorian social, economic and political life such as class structure, industrialism, empire, reform, social mobility, utilitarianism, Marxism, and the debate over "The Condition of England." Looking at manual and domestic labor, clerical and professional work, work-houses and factories, we will examine the relationship between work and social class. We will ask whether and why a woman's work is never done; think about the role of work in capitalism; and consider the way the work of the individual relates to the identification of a national and imperial economy. Finally, discussing the writer as worker, we will move from an analysis of work in the novel to an inquiry into the work of the novel. Through a close study of the work of narration and story-telling we shall examine the how work goes beyond subject matter to influence the structure and form of the text.
Be sure to read the paragraph starting on page 1 of this Announcement of Classes regarding enrollment in English 100!
100/2
Junior Seminar: Zora Neale Hurston
Kramer, Eliza
MW 3-4:30
305 Wheeler
Areas of Concentration: 1E; 2; 3; 4; 6
Book List: Hughes, L. and Hurston, Z. N.: Mule Bone; Hurston, Z. N.: Folklore, Memoirs and Other Writings, Novels and Stories
Recommended Texts: Boyd, V.: Wrapped in Rainbows: The Life of Zora Neale Hurston; Davis, A.: Blues Legacies and Black Feminism; Hemenway, R. E.: Zora Neale Hurston: A Literary Biography; Kaplan, C. ed.: Zora Neale Hurston: A Life in Letters
Course Description: The two-volume Library of America edition of Hurston's major works will provide the foundation for our exploration of one of the twentieth century's most brilliant, elusive and contradictory writers. Our goal will be to understand how Hurston used her talent and her training ("the spy-glass of Anthropology") to give artistic form to the genius of African American culture. Drawing on recent criticism that takes seriously Hurston's initiation into voodoo practice, and theory that compares her purpose to that of blues singer Bessie Smith, we will consider the literary as well as the extra-literary dimensions of this project. We will begin with Hurston's earliest published stories and Mule Bone, the play she wrote with Langston Hughes in an effort both to capture the drama of the black vernacular and to transform American theater. These readings will prepare us for a sustained examination of Hurston's four novels, two collections of folklore, and her famously slippery autobiography.
Requirements: weekly written responses to the reading, a 10-15 minute presentation to be written up as a 4-5 page paper, and a 10-12 page seminar paper.
Be sure to read the paragraph starting on page 1 of this Announcement of Classes regarding enrollment in English 100!
100/4
Junior Seminar: The End of the Poem
O'Brien, Geoffrey
MW 4-5:30
106 Wheeler
Areas of Concentration: 3; 5
Book List: All primary and secondary readings will be drawn from a Course Reader, which will include critical essays by Giorgio Agamben, Timothy Bahti, Lyn Hejinian, G.E. Lessing, I.A. Richards, Barbara Herrnstein Smith, and John Emil Vincent, among others, and poems by William Shakespeare, John Donne, George Herbert, John Milton, Christopher Smart, John Keats, Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, Wallace Stevens, Gertrude Stein, W.C. Williams, Jean Toomer, Louis Zukofsky, Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Duncan, Allen Ginsberg, John Ashbery, Michael Palmer, Harryette Mullen, Lisa Jarnot, Juliana Spahr, and Mark McMorris.
Course Description: This class addresses an inevitable feature of all poems, the last line: the position from which the poem's entire form is, for the first time, apprehended. This focus will require attention to all the formal and thematic principles by which a poem generates itself, deferring then delivering (or thwarting) the sense of an ending. In addition to the question I.A. Richards poses in his essay "How Does a Poem Know When It is Finished?" we'll ask some versions of the following: Can a poem end without "finishing"? What comes after the last line of the poem? Why do so many poems close by recalling their beginnings? How have closural strategies in English poetry changed over time? We'll pair theoretical accounts of closure with test-cases from across the history of poetry in English, acquiring along the way some facility with its prosodies, its use of figures from classical rhetoric (especially figures of repetition), and its major and minor formal environments.
Be sure to read the paragraph starting on page 1 of this Announcement of Classes regarding enrollment in English 100!
100/5
Junior Seminar: Diasporic Identities
Hartman, Saidiya
TTh 9:30-11
106 Wheeler
Areas of Concentration: 1E; 2; 6
Book List: Edwards, B.: The Practice of Diaspora; Gilroy, P.: The Black Atlantic; Diawara, M.: In Search of Africa; Chamoiseau, P.: Texaco; Kincaid, J.: The Autobiography of My Mother, Lucy: A Small Place (Course Reader); Phillips, C.: Crossing the River, Higher Ground, The Atlantic Sound; Glissant, E.: The Fourth Century, Caribbean Discourse; Danticat, E.: Breath, Eyes, Memory, The Dew Breaker; Conde, M.: Windward Heights; Naylor, G.: Mama Day; Nunez, E.: Beyond the Limbo Dance; Perez, L. M.: Geographies of Home
Course Description: This course examines representations of the African diaspora in contemporary literature by black writers in the U.S., Africa and the Caribbean. Through an engagement with literature, film and theories of diaspora, the class will consider a range of questions about the nature of the identity, history, and displacement. Specifically, the course will explore issues of racial formation and national genealogies, narratives of dispersal and return, histories of slavery and colonialism, and the convergences and disputes that define the relations between black populations scattered throughout the Americas and Europe. Some of the questions to be considered are: What is the relation between dispossession and self-making in the diasporic imagination? What are the cultural and political linkages that connect the diaspora? What is the role of gender and sexuality in the construction of black identities? What is the role of memory in mobilizing political struggle? What is the role of literary and cultural production in redressing historical injury?
Be sure to read the paragraph starting on page 1 of this Announcement of Classes regarding enrollment in English 100!
100/6
Junior Seminar: Christopher Marlowe
Landreth, David
TTh 9:30-11
204 Wheeler
Areas of Concentration: 1B; 3
Book List: Marlowe, C.: complete plays (Dido, Queen of Carthage, Tamburlaine the Great, The Jew of Malta, Edward II, Doctor Faustus, The Massacre at Paris), Complete Poetry. Further readings may include Vergil: Aeneid (Books 1 and 4); Ovid: Heroides; Machiavelli: The Prince; Shakespeare: Titus Andronicus, Richard III, As You Like It; and a course reader.
Course Description: Marlowe invented the modern theater, unleashing a power of spectacle, dialogue, and oratory that instantly addicted much of the teeming city of London and horrified the rest. This seminar will use the unbounded, amoral ambition of Marlowe's staged protagonists to imagine the limitless possibility and indefinable dangers that attended upon the new institution of the theater in the early 1590s, and to understand the ways in which Marlowe himself came to be deemed a dangerous man: brawler, blasphemer, spy, counterfeiter, atheist, sodomite.
We will consider as contexts the classical materials that Marlowe made his own; the contemporary world of literary rivalry and of national and religious paranoia into which he inserted himself; and the afterlife that Marlowe's drama and his own memory enjoyed after his early and violent death--most of all in the work of Shakespeare, his greatest rival and successor.
100/7
Junior Seminar: Criminal Literature--Writing Against the Law
Fielding, John
TTh 9:30-11
123 Wheeler
Areas of Concentration: 1E; 3; 6
Book List: Black, J.: You Can't Win; Burroughs, W.: Junkie; Thompson, J.: Savage Night; Carr, J.: Bad; Slim, I.: Trick Baby; Bunker, E.: No Beast So Fierce; Heard, N.: Howard Street; Brossard, C.: The Bold Saboteurs; course reader (consisting of critical treatments of crime and crime fiction), as well as a student-compiled course reader of songs, poems, tales
Films: "White Heat"; "Man Bites Dog"; "Natural Born Killers"; "Thelma and Louise"; "Dead Presidents"; "House of Games"
Course Description: This course will focus on a selection of twentieth-century American crime novels (as well as upon a few films). Throughout the course we will consider why America, a nation founded by puritan zealots and known infamously as the policeman of the world, is also a violent and crime-riddled country, and produces a steady stream of crime fiction gems. Why does the American outlaw draw more admiration than repugnance, or inspire a tendency to heroicize as much as vilify criminal behavior? As the course title suggests, the focus will be on the point of view of those living outside of the law, rather than the pursuits of those attempting to reign them in, on robbers rather than cops. Through such a perspective we will consider what it is about the American myth of individualism coupled with rapacious capitalism that fuels the criminal response. Specifically, we will explore the cultural, social, economic, existential and racial aspects of crime as they are artistically rendered in the texts listed. Thus, above all, we will explore the art of crime by analyzing the different aesthetic forms through which such deviance is represented.
Finally, because most, if not all, of the texts fall well outside the traditional academic canon, we will use this deviance to explore the parameters of high art from the outside. That is, we will inquire how these texts are both similar to and different from the paragons of American literature.
Be warned: Almost all of these texts depict a disturbing depravity in jarring violent and sexual detail.
Be sure to read the paragraph starting on page 1 of this Announcement of Classes regarding enrollment in English 100!
100/8
Junior Seminar: Ventriloquism and the Novel
Miller, D. A.
TTh 11-12:30
79 Dwinelle
Areas of Concentration: 1D; 3; 5
Book List: Austen, J.: Emma; Flaubert, G.: Madame Bovary; James, H.: The Portrait of a Lady; Zola, E.: L'Assommoir; course reader
Course Description: Our topic is the curious relation of identification-and-dissociation between a novel's implied author and its given protagonist. We will concentrate on specific formal features that structure this relation: narration, focalization, and, most important, free indirect discourse, the technique by which the novel represents a character's thoughts in the third person past tense. In all the landmark cases of FID in the Novel, moreover, the authorial voice is being thrown not simply from one formal position to another--from narration to character--but also from one social status to another--from male to female, bourgeois to worker, single to married, writer to failed writer. It is the argument of the course that FID typically bespeaks a social relation along with the formal, literary one. We will read four examples of FID, all of which are particularly strong examples of such social ventriloquism: Jane Austen, Emma; Flaubert, Madame Bovary, Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady, and Emile Zola, L'Assommoir. If time remains, we will also try to identify the structure of free indirect discourse in film. (Examples, Claude Chabrol, L'Oeil de Vichy [The Eye of Vichy] and Federico Fellini, 8 1/2.) Course reader will include works by Banfield, Barthes, Bourdieu, Cohn, Genette, Sartre, Woloch.
Be sure to read the paragraph starting on page 1 of this Announcement of Classes regarding enrollment in English 100!
100/9
Junior Seminar: Holocaust Literature
Liu, Sarah
TTh 11-12:30
106 Wheeler
Areas of Concentration: 1E; 5
Book List: Amery, J.: At the Mind's Limits; Borowski, T.: This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen; Clendinnen, I.: Reading the Holocaust; Delbo, C.: Auschwitz and After; Levi, P.: The Drowned and the Saved; Schiff, H. ed.: Holocaust Poetry; Schlink, B.: The Reader; Spiegelman, A.: Maus I and Maus II; course reader
Course Description: The German philosopher Theodor Adorno made the famous comment that to write poetry after Auschwitz was barbaric--but not to produce it even more barbarous. In this class we will focus on how literary art responds to this paradoxical injunction. How can one depict the unimaginable in writing? What limits, if any, are there upon representation of the Shoah ? How does literature shape contemporary awareness of the event? We will focus on the tension between moral and artistic integrity, exploring how different narrative strategies and genres express or evade the moral issue inherent in the subject. The course material ranges from the testimonial to the comic book, poetry to propaganda, scholarship to bestseller.
Be sure to read the paragraph starting on page 1 of this Announcement of Classes regarding enrollment in English 100!
100/10
Junior Seminar: Darkest London--Exploring the Post-1945 Metropolis
Premnath, Gautam
TTh 12:30-2
221 Wheeler
Areas of Concentration: 1E; 2
Book List: The booklist for this class has not been finalized, but will include several of the following texts: Rhys, J.: Voyage in the Dark; Selvon, S.: The Lonely Londoners; Naipaul, V.S.: The Mimic Men; MacInnes, C.: City of Spades; Lessing, D.: In Pursuit of the English; Dunn, N.: Up the Junction; Emecheta, B.: Second-Class Citizen; Rushdie, S.: The Satanic Verses; Headley, V.: Yardie; Ali, M.: Brick Lane; and a course reader
Course Description: Throw away your A to Z Street Atlas--we'll find our way around London this semester with a different set of guides. Our reading will foreground a series of narratives of colonial and postcolonial figures at loose in twentieth-century London. We'll consider the prevalence of tropes of voyaging, exploration, and adventure in their texts, and ask what they reveal about the uses of the city: both as a site of self-making and self-mastery, and as an arena in which to discover and confront the imperial past. Alongside these texts we'll read the work of contemporary journalists and sociologists responding to the changing face of post-1945 London. The course reader will include work by poets (Fred D'Aguiar, Una Marson), urban sociologists (Georg Simmel, St. Clair Drake, Young and Wilmott, Michael Banton), insurgent intellectuals (Claudia Jones, A. Sivanandan), and literary and cultural critics (Franco Moretti, Elizabeth Wilson, Sukhdev Sandhu). Time permitting, we'll also view a handful of films ("Sapphire," "Young Soul Rebels," and "Dirty Pretty Things").
Be sure to read the paragraph starting on page 1 of this Announcement of Classes regarding enrollment in English 100!
100/11
Junior Seminar: Literature and Psychoanalysis
Puckett, Kent
TTh 12:30-2
109 Wheeler
Areas of Concentration: 1E; 4; 5; 6
Book List: Readings will include works by Walter Benjamin, Leo Bersani, Peter Brooks, Soshana Felman, Sigmund Freud, Geoffrey Hartman, Neil Hertz, Barbara Johnson, Melanie Klein, Jacques Lacan, D. W. Winnicott, and others.
Course Description: What do literature and psychoanalysis have in common? For one, both are usually about two or more of the following: sex, death, love, hate, work, jealousy, obsession, parents, children, anxiety, and loss. Seemingly made for each other, literature and psychoanalysis have been in a more or less close conversation since the latter's emergence at the end of the nineteenth century. In this course, we will consider the relationship between literature and psychoanalysis in a number of ways: we will look at Freud's own writing as literature in the context of psychoanalysis's early days as practice, institution, and scandal; we will consider historical and intellectual connections between Freudian and post-Freudian psychoanalysis and different kinds of literary interpretation; and we will work to derive from the language of psychoanalysis tools to help us cope with the considerable formal and thematic complexity of literary texts. The syllabus will include psychoanalytic writing by Freud, Lacan, Klein, Winnicott, and others as well as works by literary critics who derive some or all of their terms from psychoanalysis. We will also read some stories and watch some films along the way.
Be sure to read the paragraph starting on page 1 of this Announcement of Classes regarding enrollment in English 100!
100/12
Junior Seminar: Literature of California and the West
Starr, George
TTh 12:30-2
106 Wheeler
Areas of Concentration: 1D or 1E; 6
Book List: Austin, M.: The Land of Little Rain; Chandler, R.: The Big Sleep; Dick, P.: BladeRunner (Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?); Didion, J.: Slouching Toward Bethlehem; Harte, B.: Luck of Roaring Camp; Norris, F.: McTeague; Stegner, W.: Angle of Repose; Steinbeck, J.: East of Eden; Twain, M.: Roughing It; West, N.: Day of the Locust
Course Description: Reading, discussion , and writing about fiction, poetry, memoirs, and essays that have western settings, or that try to describe or account for western experience in "regional" terms--emphasizing, for example, the formative influence of the natural landscape, or of racial, economic, and social groups in distinctive, defining relationships with their surroundings (and with one another).
Be sure to read the paragraph starting on page 1 of this Announcement of Classes regarding enrollment in English 100!
100/13
Junior Seminar: Tragedy, Agony, Vision, and Death
Altman, Joel
TTh 2-3:30
283 Dwinelle
Area of Concentration: 3
Book List: Aeschylus: Oresteia; Beckett: Waiting for Godot; Euripides: Medea and Other Plays; Miller: Death of a Salesman; Marlowe: Doctor Faustus; O'Neill: Long Day's Journey into Night; Shakespeare: Coriolanus; Sophocles: Sophocles I; Webster: The Duchess of Malfi; Course Reader (available at Copygrafik, 2282 Fulton St.).
Course Description: In this course, we will explore the dramatic genre of tragedy as it has manifested itself at three different times in history: Athens in the 5th century, B.C.; late 16th- and early 17th-century England, and 20th-century France and America. All the plays we'll read represent human beings in extreme situations; several end in death, mutilation, or both; others, in a kind of psychic death or inertia. Some represent behavior that we recognize as "heroic" and leave us feeling reassured; some do not. All show the individual imaginatively engaged to social and metaphysical powers, and--more immediately--to the audience of spectators. Our project will be to try to understand how tragic drama functions in its various environments; what conditions encourage the writing of tragedy; which elements may be said to constitute "the tragic"; what lies behind tragic drama's obsession with transgressive acts; what happens when there seems nothing left to violate; and whether and what manner of redemption is to be sought in tragedy, even in the twentieth century, when the possibility of tragedy was in doubt. Besides studying the plays, we'll read and discuss theoretical and critical writings in a Course Reader that will help us pursue these questions. All seminar members are expected to participate actively and to write three essays and a final exam.
Be sure to read the paragraph starting on page 1 of this Announcement of Classes regarding enrollment in English 100!
100/14
This class has been cancelled.
100/15
Junior Seminar: Gender, Sexuality, and Modernism
Abel, Elizabeth
TTh 3:30-5
283 Dwinelle
Areas of Concentration: 1E; 3; 4
Book List: Barnes, D: Nightwood; Faulkner, W: The Sound and the Fury; Ford, F: The Good Soldier; Forster, E: A Passage to India; Freud, S: Dora; Larsen, N: Quicksand and Passing; James, H: The Turn of the Screw and Other Short Novels; Joyce, J: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man; Rhys, J: Wide Sargasso Sea; Wilde, O: The Picture of Dorian Gray and Other Writings; Woolf, V: Mrs. Dalloway
Course Description: Gender norms and literary forms both exploded at the turn of the twentieth century. These paired crises in social and literary narratives were perceived on the one hand as the stuttering end of western culture's story, the drying up of libidinal fuel; and on the other as the freeing of desire from the burden of reproduction, and of language from the burden of reference. Sexual and literary experimentation went hand in hand, but their intersections varied considerably. At the end of the twentieth century, a different phase of the sexual revolution produced a set of intensive theoretical debates about the construction of gender and sexuality. In this course, we will read back and forth across the century to stage a series of encounters between the narratives and practices of literature and theory. Three 5-7 page papers will be required.
Be sure to read the paragraph starting on page 1 of this Announcement of Classes regarding enrollment in English 100!
100/16
Junior Seminar: William Carlos Williams
Buck, Chansonette
TTh 3:30-5
109 Wheeler
Areas of Concentration: 1E; 3
Book List: Williams, W.C.: The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams, Volumes I & II (ed. A. Walton Litz & Christopher MacGowan), In The American Grain, The Autobiography of William Carlos Williams, Yes, Mrs. Williams, Paterson; Mariani, P.: William Carlos Williams: A New World Naked; Breslin, J.: William Carlos Williams, An American Artist; a course reader containing selections from Williams's letters and criticism, plus a smattering of what I consider to be the most interesting critical approaches to Williams
Course Description: This course will introduce you to one of the most prolific, most daringly experimental, most influential, and most passionately autobiographical American writers of the 20th century. William Carlos Williams is primarily known, anthologized, and taught as a rigorously objective, unemotional, clear-eyed observer of the natural world, who wrote small, spare, jewel-like poems on prescription pads during breaks between patients in his busy pediatrics practice, and whose revolutionary line breaks and focus on the mundane inspired a generation of poets to break free from earlier formal strictures into "free verse." This is one facet of Williams, one truth about him. But this is not the Williams we should settle for. William Carlos Williams wrote small poems on prescription pads between patients, and then after a full day of work and family he disappeared into his study, where he wrote obsessively, in torrents, in every imaginable genre, into the wee hours. Far from being simply a dispassionate observer of the natural world, he splayed his passions, his torments, his questions, his theories about poetry and art, his family traumas, his agonized quest for an American literary identity, and his domestic joys and pains onto the page, leaving behind him a huge, sprawling, dizzyingly complex body of work. This semester we will dive into this body of work, leaving behind our presuppositions, and we will navigate its currents with the aid of some of the best Williams critics on record.
The essence of this course is discovery and communication. To that end, you will be expected to stay current with the reading, to find and actively share with your classmates each week your own anchor in the works, to write two small exploratory papers and one long final paper, and to present to your classmates at the end of the semester your own, newly discovered view of Williams. Expect to come away inspired.
Please read to page 48 in Mariani, and "Asphodel That Greeny Flower" (MacGowan, 310-337) in preparation for our first class.
Be sure to read the paragraph starting on page 1 of this Announcement of Classes regarding enrollment in English 100!
102
Topics in the English Language: English Phonology
Hanson, Kristin
MWF 2-3
24 Wheeler
Area of Concentration: 7
Book List: McMahon, A.: An Introduction to English Phonology
Course Description: Phonology is the part of grammar which involves the structure of sound in language. It has three principal components: melody, the qualitative aspects of sounds which distinguish for example a [p] from an [f], or an [i] from a [u]; rhythm, the organization of sounds into syllables, stress groups, phrases, etc.; and tone and intonation, the grammatically significant structuring of pitch differences for grammatical purposes. This course will explore all three aspects of English phonology, seeking to answer basic descriptive questions of what speakers intuitively know about the organization of sound in English which distinguishes it from other languages, while also addressing theoretical questions of how sound is organized in language in general and where English fits in that universal picture. The focus will be on Present Day Standard American English, but dialectal and historical variation will also be explored. In addition to providing knowledge of this subject for its own sake, the course should be helpful preparation for exploring the phonological characteristics of literary texts, and for understanding ideas about language which have influenced twentieth-century literary theory. No previous background in linguistics is required, but exercises and assignments will span a variety of levels so as to also accommodate students who have already taken an upper-division phonology course and are particularly interested in exploring English further.
105
Anglo-Saxon England
This course has been cancelled. However, it will be offered in Spring 2006 instead.
114A
English Drama to 1603
Miller, Jennifer
MWF 2-3
170 Barrows
Areas of Concentration: 1B; 3
Book List: A course reader
Course Description: For more information on this class, please email the professor at j_miller@berkeley.edu.
This course satisfies the pre-1800 requirement for the English major.
114B
English Drama from 1603 to 1700
Altman, Joel
TTh 11-12:30
170 Barrows
Areas of Concentration: 1B; 3
Book List: Fraser and Rabkin ed.: Drama of the English Renaissance II: The Stuart Period; course reader
Course Description: In the first three decades of the seventeenth century, an extraordinary burst of energy and talent was visible and audible on the London stage. Socially aspiring dramatists satirized the pretensions of the upwardly mobile, revealed the tragic, sometimes grotesque implications of assigned gender behavior, explored the often quirky nature of sexual taste, dared to dabble in forbidden political commentary, and challenged and manipulated theatrical conventions by remarking self-reflexively on theatrical representation so obsessively that early 20th century critics (including T.S. Eliot) thought their work decadent. This was very much a theater-on-demand, a competitive cultural institution to which people on many levels of society flocked to see their interests represented by brilliant, often idiosyncratic writers--among them John Marston, Ben Jonson, George Chapman, Thomas Middleton, John Webster, Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher, John Ford, and Philip Massinger--who were Shakespeare's contemporaries and his professional competitors. Their work will shape our study of the role of theater amid the increasing social tensions that arose under the Jacobean and Caroline regimes.
Requirements: two papers, a midterm, and final exam.
This course satisfies the pre-1800 requirement for the English major.
117A
Shakespeare
Koory, Mary Ann
TTh 2-3:30
105 North Gate
Areas of Concentration: 1B; 3
Book List: Maus, K. E., ed.: Four Revenge Tragedies; Steane, J. B. ed.: Complete Plays by Christopher Marlowe; Greenblatt, S. J., ed.: The Norton Shakespeare; course reader
Course Description: We'll read six plays from the chronological first half of Shakespeare's output, considered loosely to allow us to end with a reading of Hamlet. Our approach will be to consider Shakespeare's plays as they shaped and were shaped by a lively theatrical tradition, in the context of which we will read The Spanish Tragedy, by Thomas Kyd, and Tamburlaine, by Christopher Marlowe. (That makes a total of 8 Elizabethan plays.) We'll also examine some of the historical and social issues put into "play" in the plays, including issues of the representation of subjectivity, gender, personal ambition, revenge, and the relationship of the stage (as a reflection, metaphor, microcosm, map, experiment) to the political, social and religious world which surrounds it. Further, we'll be conscious of Shakespeare as a cultural icon, specifically our critical sense that the chronological order of his plays represents a progression away from the very plays and poems that we'll spend most of the semester reading. Reading list: The following plays by Shakespeare: The Taming of the Shrew, Titus Andronicus, Richard III, Midsummer Night's Dream, 1 Henry IV, Hamlet, plus The Spanish Tragedy (Thomas Kyd) and Tamburlaine (Christopher Marlowe).
117S
Shakespeare
Adelman, Janet
MW 4-5:30
390 Hearst Mining
Areas of Concentration: 1B; 3; 4
Book List: Shakespeare, W.: The Norton Shakespeare
Course Description: In this course we will analyze a selection of Shakespeare's plays, arranged both by genre and chronologically, in order to explore not only what is peculiar to each play but also what links the plays to each other and to the culture and the psyche that produced them. In addition, we will think about the uses to which "Shakespeare" is put by our own culture/s. My lectures will tend to emphasize Shakespeare's reworkings of race, gender, sexuality, and the family in these plays, but I hope that the classroom will be a place of lively exchange, in which you feel free to challenge my ideas and to develop your own interests. In addition to a final exam, possibly a midterm exam, and several required papers of varying lengths (probably two or three very short papers, followed by an extended revision/amplification for a final paper), you will be asked to complete two ungraded acting exercises in small groups to help you understand some aspects of Shakespeare's verse and his theatrical medium.
118
Milton
Kahn, Victoria
MWF 1-2
213 Wheeler
Areas of Concentration: 1B or 1C
Book List: Milton, J.: Selected Prose, Paradise Lost, Complete Shorter Poems
Course Description: An introduction to the poetry and prose of one of the greatest writers in English literature. Sexual radical, political revolutionary, and literary genius, Milton is a one-man introduction to the cultural ferment of the English Renaissance, the Reformation, and the English civil war. Readings include: Milton's early poems, his political treatises, Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, and Samson Agonistes.
This course satisfies the pre-1800 requirement for the English major.
120
This class has been cancelled.
122
The Victorian Period
Puckett, Kent
TTh 9:30-11
Note New Room: 110 Barrows
Areas of Concentration: 1D; 4
Book List: Brontë, E.: Wuthering Heights; Darwin, C.: The Origin of the Species; Kipling, R.: Kim; Abrams et al., eds.: The Norton Anthology of English Literature Vol. 2 B: The Victorian Age; course reader
Course Description: This course is an introduction to the literature and culture of the Victorian period. Victorian poets, novelists, and critics responded to rapid industrial growth, colonial expansion, and profound developments in science, technology, and social life with a mixture of exuberance, anxiety, and dismay. We will focus on the period's poetry and non-fiction prose in order to understand how particular texts represent and sometimes undermine particularly Victorian ideas about aesthetics, politics, progress, money, religion, gender, and science.
125A
The English Novel: Defoe through Scott
Starr, George
TTh 3:30-5
110 Wheeler
Areas of Concentration: 1C; 3
Book List: Austen, J.: Persuasion; Beckford, W.: Vathek; Behn, A.: Oroonoko; Burney, F.: Evelina; Defoe, D.: Moll Flanders; Godwin, W.: Caleb Williams; Richardson, S.: Pamela; Smollett, T.: Humphry Clinker
Course Description: The English Novel, 1660-1800.
This course satisfies the pre-1800 requirement for the English major.
125C
The European Novel
Paperno, Irene
TTh 11-12:30
126 Barrows
This course is cross-listed with Slavic 133.
Areas of Concentration: 1D; 3; 4
Book List: Dickens, C.: Oliver Twist; Balzac, H. de: Père Goriot; Dostoevsky, F.: Crime and Punishment; Austen, J.: Emma; Flaubert, G.: Madame Bovary; Tolstoy, L.: Anna Karenina
Course Description: Focusing on key texts from English, French, and Russian literatures, this course traces the development of the novel as a genre in 19th-century Europe. Our discussions will emphasize strategies of close reading and literary analysis and elements of the theory of the novel. The texts are grouped into two thematic units. First, as we read Oliver Twist, Old Goriot, and Crime and Punishment, we will examine the use of social discourse in narrative form; crime as a paradigm for a work of fiction; and the role of the city in structuring the modern novel. Second, as we read Emma, Madame Bovary, and Anna Karenina, we will examine the novel's involvement with family, marriage, and adultery; the representation of consciousness in narrative; and the construction of the self in a work of literature. In comparing novels from different national traditions, the course explores the interplay between genre and culture. All readings are in English. Workload (reading): 150-200 pages per week. Written work: short written assignments and quizzes, take-home midterm paper, final paper, in-class final exam (textual explication).
125D
The 20th-Century Novel
Rubenstein, Michael
MWF 12-1
Note New Room: 100 McCone
Areas of Concentration: 1E; 2; 3
Book List: Conrad, J.: Heart of Darkness; Woolf, V.: Mrs. Dalloway; Robbe-Grillet, A.: Jealousy; Rushdie, S.: Satanic Verses; Amis, M.: Time's Arrow; Barker, P.: Regeneration; Dangarembga, T.: Nervous Conditions; Coetzee, J.M.: Disgrace; a course reader.
Course Description: Novels take a really long time to read, and they are filled with lies, or, more politely, fictions. Why write novels? Why read them? If you can ask these questions, and at the same time and without hesitation look forward to reading novels, then this is your class. What does the novel do for us that, say, poetry or anthropology or sociology or psychology or economics cannot? We'll look at a range of novels spanning the 20th century from Conrad to Coetzee, with a special focus on innovation and experimentation in narrative technique (after all, the word "novel" also means "new," and the restless drive for novelty is one of the novel's central characteristics). Concurrently, we'll study a selection of criticism that aims to define and understand the novel as a generic, historical and sociological phenomenon.
125E
The Contemporary Novel
Bishop, John
TTh 12:30-2
50 Birge
Areas of Concentration: 1E; 3
Book List: Beckett, S.: Company; Byatt, A.S.: Possession: A Romance; DeLillo, D.: White Noise; Markson, D.: Wittgenstein's Mistress; McCarthy, C.: Blood Meridian; Mitchell, D.: Cloud Atlas; Nabokov, V.: Pale Fire; Pynchon, T.: Mason & Dixon; Roth, P.: American Pastoral; Silko, L.M.: Ceremony
Course Description: An exploration of the novels listed above, all of them written in the second half of the twentieth century. The course will move through these texts inductively, without any particular preconceptions or thematic axes to grind, in an effort both to understand these writers on their own terms and to discover among them commonly shared concerns and practices. There will be two shorter papers, a midterm, a final paper, and a final exam.
126
British Literature: 1900-1945
Bishop, John
TTh 3:30-5
155 Donner Lab
Areas of Concentration: 1E; 3
Book List: Conrad, J.: Lord Jim; Ford, F.M.: The Good Soldier; Forster, E.M.: Howard's End; Joyce, J.: Ulysses; Lawrence, D.H.: Women in Love; Lowry, M.: Under the Volcano; Rhys, J.: Good Morning, Midnight; Woolf, V.: To the Lighthouse; Wells, H.G.: Tono-Bungay; West, R.: The Return of the Soldier
Course Description: A survey of early modern British literature, treating representative works of major figures (see book list) in their literary, historical, and cultural contexts. There will be two midterm papers and a final exam.
127
Modern Poetry
Blanton, Dan
MWF 11-12
200 Wheeler
Areas of Concentration: 1E; 3
Book List: Auden, W.H.: Selected Poems; Eliot, T.S.: Selected Poems; Frost, R.: The Poetry of Robert Frost; Hardy, T.: Selected Poetry; Hughes, Langston: Selected Poems; Larkin, Philip: Collected Poems; Loy, M.: The Lost Lunar Baedeker; Moore, Marianne: Complete Poems; Pound, E.: A Draft of XXX Cantos; Silkin, J., ed.: Penguin Book of First World War Poetry; Stein, G.: Tender Buttons; Stevens, W.: Collected Poems; Williams, W.C.: Paterson; Yeats, William Butler.: Collected Poems
Course Description: British and American poetry: 1860 to the present
130A
This course has been cancelled.
133A
African American Literature and Culture Before 1917
Best, Stephen
TTh 2-3:30
106 Wheeler
Areas of Concentration: 1D; 2
Book List: Equiano, O.: The Interesting Narrative of Olaudah Equiano; Douglass, F.: Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass; Brent, L.: Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl; Wilson, H.: Our Nig; Prince. M.: The History of Mary Prince, A West Indian Slave; DuBois, W. E. B.: The Souls of Black Folk; Chesnutt, C.: The Conjure Woman; Washington, B. T.: Up from Slavery; Johnson, J.W.: The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man
Course Description: African American expressive culture has been driven by an affinity for the oral in the form of sermons, speeches, work songs, slave songs, spirituals, and the blues. At the same time, African American literary culture has displayed a manifest propensity toward autobiographical acts which augur a putatively authentic African American "self." In this survey we will attempt to bridge these oral and literary impulses in an exploration of selected works from the canon of African American literature. Running through this survey will be not only the concerns linking orality and literacy, but also debates over the power of language in politics and history: Why, instead of a teleological progression from orality to literacy, does one find in much African American literature a promiscuous coupling of the two? What is the relation of this literature's recurrent, slippery orality to a codified, authenticating literary apparatus? How does speaking relate to subjectivity? What is the significance of various scenes of speaking, reading, and writing in the slave narrative tradition? What light does the study of African American literature shed upon categories such as "author," "literature," and "canon?" We will pursue our more discrete literary interests against the backdrop of American revolutionary debate, the abolitionist crusade, Reconstruction, and "Jim Crow" segregation.
Requirements: There will be one midterm, one paper, several unannounced quizzes, and a final exam.
135AC
Literature of American Cultures: Literature of Resistance and Repression
Gonzalez, Marcial
MWF 11-12
120 Latimer
Areas of Concentration: 1E; 2; 3; 4
Book List: Butler, O.: Kindred; Jones, G.: Corregidora; Olsen, T.: Yonnondio in 30s; Ozick, C.: The Shawl; Plath, S.: The Bell Jar; Ruiz, R.: Happy Birthday, Jesus; Santiago, D.: Famous All Over Town; Viramontes, H.M.: Under the Feet of Jesus; Wideman, J.E.: Philadelphia Fire
This course satisfies U.C. Berkeley's American Cultures requirement.
Course Description: In this course we will analyze representations of repression and resistance in the fiction of three cultural groups: Chicanos, African Americans, and European Americans. We will seek answers to the following kinds of questions: What is the relation between the various forms or repression (political, economic and psychological) represented in these texts and the formation of cultural identities? What solution, if any, do the texts offer in response to the forms of repression they represent? The comparative approach in this course will allow us to analyze the particular experiences of each cultural group as part of a larger historical process. The purpose of this kind of analysis is to appreciate the deeply embedded social character of these literary works. Graded assignments will include two papers, quizzes, and a final exam.
C136
Topics in American Studies: The 1950's
Loewinsohn, Ron
TTh 2-3:30
100 GPB
This class is cross-listed with American Studies C111E/1.
Areas of Concentration: 1E; 6
Book List: Burroughs, W.: Naked Lunch; Ellison, R.: Invisible Man; Ginsberg, A.: Howl and Other Poems; Metalious, G.: Peyton Place; Salinger, J.D.: The Catcher in the Rye; Williams, T.: A Streetcar Named Desire
Required Movies: "The Invasion of the Body Snatchers"; "The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit"; "Pleasantville"; "A Streetcar Named Desire"; "The Searchers"; "Rebel Without a Cause"
Course Description: This class will explore the American 1950's through a sampling of history, literature, movies, and the popular culture of the decade, trying to understand some of its concerns and its contradictions. A period of massive conformity ("The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit), it also produced prophets and rebels (Ginsberg, Williams, Burroughs); a time of repression and apartheid, it also produced the Civil Rights movement, Elvis Presley, and Brown vs. Board of Education. We will try to understand the kinds and the causes of the combination of nostalgia and paranoia that characterized this Cold War period. We will also try to understand and appreciate some of the cruel consequences of truly massive mass production and of the "mass culture" that developed at this time. We will try to appreciate how the experience of WWII -- its lessons and its traumas-- continued to affect Americans in the 1950's. The class will consist mostly of lectures, though we will watch some documentary videos. I'll make every effort to accommodate as much discussion as class size will allow.
Required Writing: Two short papers (6-8 pp) and a final exam. The two short papers, averaged together, will count for 50% of your final grade. The final exam will count for the remaining 50%.
137T
Topics in Chicana/o Literature and Culture:
The Borderlands of Chicano/a Literature
Saldivar, Jose
TTh 9:30-11
141 Giannini
Areas of Concentration: 1E; 2; 3
Book List: Anzaldúa, G.: Borderlands/La frontera; Cisneros, S.: Caramelo, The House On Mango Street, Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories, Loose Women; Paredes, A.: Between Two Worlds, George Washington Gómez, The Hammon and the Beans and Other Stories, The Shadow, "With His Pistol in His Hand": A Border Ballad and Its Hero
Course Description: This course will explore the invention of a Chicano and Chicana sense of place. How do imaginative writers such as Américo Paredes, Gloria Anzaldúa, and Sandra Cisneros negotiate the tension between the national and transnational forces at work in the Americas measuredly and by design? Exposure to post-contemporary works in cultural criticism, border thinking, and theory will also be part of the semester's agenda.
139
The Cultures of English:
Culture of the Great War--Art in the Age of Decline
Jones, Donna
MWF 11-12
126 Barrows
Areas of Concentration: 1E; 2; 6
Book List: Lewis, W.: Tarr; selected writings of Gertrude Stein; Pick, D.: War Machine; Cesaire, A.: Notebooks on a Return to the Native Land; Fussel, P.: The Great War and Modern Memory; Carpentier, A.: The Lost Steps; Breton, A.: Nadja; Junger, E.: Storm of Steel; Toomer, J.: Cane; DuBois, W.E.B.: Dark Pincess, Manifestos: A Century of Isms
Course Description: The Great War set loose on the world an heretofore unimaginable scale of violence and destruction. In this five-year conflict 8.5 million people were killed and 20 million wounded--making a mockery of the now jejune anxieties of social degeneration and solar death. Leaving not only catastrophic economic and physical destruction in its wake, the Great War succeeded in toppling the stability of virtually every foundational concept of late-nineteenth-century Europe. The violently disfigured body of the foot-soldier shattered the image of the human-motor; the fragmented consciousness of the shell-shocked undermined the understanding of the mind as a mere "chemical machine" for the processing of sensory input; the devastated political and economic infrastructures of the "Great Powers" disabused positivist history of its faith in the necessity of progress, expansion and development; and at last, on the colonial front, the participation of black and brown combatants along with the carnage inflicted by one European nation on another tore apart the thin façade of "European prestige," the ideological pillar essential to the maintenance of imperial authority. This course will examine the literary and visual culture of the interwar years in light of social crisis. As the Great War was the first global conflict, the readings will move beyond the traditional Anglo-American response and include the works of intellectuals of continental Europe and the colonized world.
143A/1
Short Fiction
Chandra, Vikram
TTh 9:30-11
301 Wheeler
Areas of Concentration: None
Book List: T.B.A.
Course Description: This is a seminar in writing short stories, conducted as a workshop.
To be considered for admission to this class, please submit 10 photocopied pages of your fiction (prose fiction only, please), along with an application form, to the box labeled "submissions for English 143A section 1"in 322 Wheeler, BY 4:00 P.M., TUESDAY, APRIL 19, 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!
143A/2
Short Fiction
Blaise (Mukherjee), Bharati
TTh 12:30-2
305 Wheeler
Areas of Concentration: None
Book List: eds. Cassill, R.V. and J.C. Oates: The Norton Anthology of Contemporary Fiction; Mukherjee, B: The Middleman and Other Stories
Course Description: This is a course on the form, theory and practice of short fiction. It will be conducted as a workshop. Students are required to fulfill assignments on specific aspects of craft, to analyze aesthetic strategies in selected short stories by published authors, and to write approximately 45 pages of original fiction. Students are also required to participate in workshop discussions of peers' manuscripts.
To be considered for admission to this class, please submit 10 photocopied pages of your fiction (prose fiction only, please), along with an application form, to Professor Mukherjee's mailbox in 322 Wheeler BY 4:00 P.M., TUESDAY, APRIL 19, 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!
143B/1
Verse
Hejinian, Lyn
TTh 12:30-2
301 Wheeler
Areas of Concentration: None
Book List: Course reader
Course Description: In this workshop/seminar, we will engage in hands-on investigations into a variety of possibilities inherent to poetic logic, and with an emphasis on inventions and experiments, we will attempt to employ those logics. Attention will also be paid to motivations, so that we may ask (and tentatively as well as variously answer) questions appropriate to the kind of undertaking that poetry-writing attempts.
To be considered for admission to this class, please submit five photocopied pages of your poems, along with an application form, to Professor Hejinian's mailbox in 322 Wheeler BY 4:00 P.M., TUESDAY, APRIL 19, 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!
143B/2
Verse
Shoptaw, John
TTh 2-3:30
301 Wheeler
Areas of Concentration: None
Book List: Jahan Ramazani, ed.: The Norton Anthology of Modern & Contemporary Poetry, 2 vols.; Course reader
Course Description: In this course you will conduct a progressive series of experiments in which you will explore the fundamental options for writing poetry today--aperture, partition, closure; rhythmic sound patterning; sentence & line; stanza; short & long-lined poems; image & figure; graphics & textual space; cultural translation; poetic forms (haibun, villanelle, sestina, pantoum, ghazal, etc.); the first, second, third, and no person (persona, address, drama, narrative, description); prose poetry. Our emphasis will be placed on recent possibilities, but with an eye & ear always to renovating traditions. I have no "house style" and only one precept: you can do anything, if you can do it. You will write a poem a week, and we'll discuss six or so in rotation (I'll respond to every poem you write). On alternate days, we'll discuss pre-modern and modern exemplary poems drawn from the Norton Anthology and from our course reader. It will be delightful.
To be considered for admission to this class, please submit five photocopied pages of your poems, along with an application form, to Professor Shoptaw's mailbox in 322 Wheeler BY 4:00 P.M., TUESDAY, APRIL 19, 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!
143B/3
Verse
McMorris, Mark
Tues. 3:30-6:30
305 Wheeler
Areas of Concentration: None
Book List: Book List: Howe, S.: The Europe of Trusts; Palmer, M.: At Passages; Algarin, M., ed.: Aloud: Voices from the Nuyorican Poets Café; Bishop, E.: The Complete Poems, 1927-1979; Lorde, A.: The Marvelous Arithmetics of Distance; Ginsberg, A.: Howl; Mullen, H.: Sleeping with the Dictionary; Harper, M.: Dear John, Dear Coltrane; Hejinian, L.: Happily; Xerox packet/handouts
Course Description: The advanced workshop in poetry will give students the opportunity to learn about their own capabilities as writers. We will stress poetry as an art of composition in language that differs from other uses of language (journal writing, letter writing, conversation, expository writing, etc.). We will try to engage and clarify elements of the art such as the word, line, field, rhythm, movement, the space of the page, “the voice,” language as unlooked-for capacity, etc. Each student will work towards the creation of a substantial portfolio of poetry by the end of the semester. On the assumption that this goal is best achieved through an immersion in poetry, this course will also ask students to read a syllabus of books of poetry, to write short focused assessments of these books, and to discuss their reading with other participants. Some attention will be given to hybrid forms such as visual poetry, the prose poem, etc. We will try to build a flexible vocabulary for discussing poetry in detail. Meetings in the workshop will be supplemented by individual conferences with the instructor.
To be considered for admission to this class, please submit five photocopied pages of your poems, along with an application form, to Professor McMorris' mailbox in 322 Wheeler BY 4:00 P.M., TUESDAY, APRIL 19, 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!
143N
Prose Nonfiction
Blaise (Mukherjee), Bharati
TTh 3:30-5
301 Wheeler
Areas of Concentration: None
Book List: eds. Oates, J. C. and R. Atwan: The Best American Essays of the Century
Course Description: This course concentrates on the practice of creative non-fiction, particularly on the writing of the personal essay. Students are required to fulfill specific assignments and to write approximately 45 pages of non-fictional narrative.
Format of course: workshop. Participation in the twice-weekly workshops is mandatory.
To be considered for admission in this course, please submit 15 photocopied pages of your creative nonfiction (no fiction, poetry, plays, or academic writing), along with an application form, to Professor Mukherjee's mailbox in 322 Wheeler BY 4:00 P.M., TUESDAY, APRIL 19, 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!
Last modified: Monday, 18-Jul-2005 11:51:03 PDT