Berkeley English: Courses: Upper Division
Fall 2005
150/1
Senior Seminar: Literature of the Americas--History, Narrative and Event
Jones, Donna
MW 1:30-3
305 Wheeler
Areas of Concentration: 2; 5
Book List: Saramago, J.: History of the Seige of Lisbon; Todorov, T.: The Conquest of the Americas: The Question of the Other; Nabokov, P.: Native American Testimony, Women's Indian Captivity Narratives; Conrad, J.: Nostromo; Whitman, W.: Leaves of Grass; Rodó, J. E.: Ariel; Dreiser, T.: Sister Carrie; Galeano, E.: Memory of Fire: Genesis; Carpentier, A.: Explosion in the Cathedral; Delillo, D.: Libra
Examining a wide selection of texts from throughout the Americas, this class will look at the literary and historiographic methods of representing the discontinuous historical narratives of the New World. How does the way we narrate history influence our perception of past events? What role does fiction play in the construction of national or regional historical identities? What modes of emplotment are used to narrate history in the Americas: tragedy, comedy or romance, narratives of conquest, apocalypse or degeneration?
Enrollment is limited and a written application is due BY 4:00 P.M., TUESDAY, APRIL 19; be sure to read the paragraph on page 2 of this Announcement of Classes regarding enrollment in English 150!
150/2
Senior Seminar: Modernism/Postmodernism
Snyder, Katherine
W 2-5
103 Wheeler
Areas of Concentration: 1E; 3
Book List: Woolf, V.: Mrs. Dalloway; Faulkner, W.: The Sound and the Fury and/or As I Lay Dying; Dos Passos: Manhattan Transfer or The Big Money; Toomer, J.: Cane; Larsen, N.: Passing; Nabokov, V.: Pale Fire; Cunningham, M.: The Hours; Pynchon, T.: The Crying of Lot 49; Delillo, D.: White Noise; Powers, R.: Galatea 2.2; Morrison, T.: Beloved; essays by 19th- and 20th-century critics and theorists of the (post)modern, possibly to include Flaubert, Poe, Lawrence, Benjamin, Simmel, Freud, Friedman, Baker, and McHale, Hutcheon, Hassan, among others.
Course Description: We will read an array of 20th-century novels which will stand as test cases for a baggy, theoretical construction which sometimes lumps together the modern and the postmodern, and sometimes sets them apart from each other. Topics for discussion will include: what is/are the post/modern, post/modernity, post/modernism? How does post/modern fiction explore individual and collective consciousness? How do the modern metropolis and mass culture contribute to the stylistic innovations and subject matter of post/modernism? How do differences of gender, race, and class give shape to post/modernist narratives? Requirements for the course will include short written responses to readings, one or more library exercises, an oral report, all of which will culminate in a longer research paper on one modernist or postmodernist novel. I would encourage you, therefore, to start in on the reading list over the summer in order to widen your choice of texts on which to write your research paper.
Enrollment is limited and a written application is due BY 4:00 P.M., TUESDAY, APRIL 19; be sure to read the paragraph on page 2 of this Announcement of Classes regarding enrollment in English 150!
150/3
Senior Seminar: Nation and Narration
Rubenstein, Michael
MW 3-4:30
300 Wheeler
Areas of Concentration: 1E; 2; 6
Book List: Joyce, J.: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man; Woolf, V.: Mrs. Dalloway; Dangarembga, T.: Nervous Conditions; Ishiguro, K.: The Remains of the Day; Toer, P.A.: This Earth of Mankind; Chamoiseau, P.: Texaco; a course reader.
Course Description: Why does it seem so natural to study literary forms by breaking them up into distinct national literatures? Why do we persistently study "American Literature" or "British Literature" as opposed, say, to "Literatures in English"? What is the curious hold of the national as a way of imagining belonging, identity, shared traditions, shared pasts and shared futures? "Nation-ness," Benedict Anderson claims, "is the most universally legitimate value in the political life of our time." "In the modern world," he goes on, "everyone can, should and will 'have' a nationality, as he or she 'has' a gender." This is the beginning of our inquiry into the literary forms and styles in which the nation is imagined. We'll read some novels, study some theories of nationality, and see several films (to be announced) that address themselves to the modern idea of the nation.
Enrollment is limited and a written application is due BY 4:00 P.M., TUESDAY, APRIL 19; be sure to read the paragraph on page 2 of this Announcement of Classes regarding enrollment in English 150!
150/4
Senior Seminar: Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Group
Hollis, Catherine
MW 4-5:30
204 Wheeler
Areas of Concentration: 1E; 3; 4
Book List: Anand, M.R.: Untouchable; Cunningham, M.: The Hours; Forster, E.M.: Howard's End; Freud, S.: Civilization and its Discontents; Mansfield, K.: Stories; Strachey, L.: Eminent Victorians; Woolf, V.: Mrs Dalloway; Orlando, A Sketch of the Past, Three Guineas; course reader
Course Description: This course situates Virginia Woolf, the Bloomsbury Group, and British modernism within the social and historical context of the early 20th century, while also investigating "Virginia Woolf" and the "Bloomsbury Group" as categories still resonant in 21st-century culture. We'll begin the course by looking at the iconography of Virginia Woolf in contemporary popular and academic culture with a focus on Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway (1925) as read against Michael Cunningham's novel The Hours (1998) and the film adaptation of that novel. We'll move into an historical examination of Bloomsbury and its aesthetics, reading a variety of memoirs, E.M. Forster's Howard's End, and analyzing the art and design generated by Roger Fry's post-impressionist exhibit of 1910. The next section of the course will focus on Bloomsbury's politics -- pacificist, feminist, and anti-imperialist -- by reading Leonard Woolf on his experiences as a colonial administrator in Ceylon, Mulk Raj Anand's novel Untouchable, and Virginia Woolf's Three Guineas. Finally, we'll turn to Bloomsbury's practice of "life writing": the innovations that Lytton Strachey and Virginia Woolf brought to the practice of biography and autobiography, and the influence of Bloomsburian biography on life-writing today.
Enrollment is limited and a written application is due BY 4:00 P.M., TUESDAY, APRIL 19; be sure to read the paragraph on page 2 of this Announcement of Classes regarding enrollment in English 150!
150/5
Senior Seminar: The Short Poem--Wyatt to the Present
Hass, Robert
TTh 9:30-11
155 Barrows
Area of Concentration: 3
Enrollment is limited and a written application is due BY 4:00 P.M., TUESDAY, APRIL 19; be sure to read the paragraph on page 2 of this Announcement of Classes regarding enrollment in English 150!
Book List and Course Description: For more information on this class, please email the professor at bobhass@berkeley.edu.
Newly added section:
150/6
Senior Seminar: Asian American Novel
Lye, Colleen
TTh 11-12:30
243 Dwinelle
Areas of Concentration: 1E; 2; 3
Book List: Chu, L.: Eat a Bowl of Tea; Bulosan, C: America Is in the Heart; Hagedorn, J: Gangster of Love; Hayslip, L: When Heaven and Earth Changed Places; Kang, Y: East Goes West; Kingston, M.H.: Tripmaster Monkey; Lee, C.R.: Aloft; Okada, J: No-No Boy; Truong, M: The Book of Salt; Yamashita, K.T.: Tropic of Orange
Course Description: It is by now a commonplace to describe Asian American identity as impossibly heterogeneous and hybrid. At the same time, Asian American Studies is founded upon the strategic necessity of the pan-ethnic category. Can there be a textual basis for Asian American identity? In particular, is there such a thing as an Asian American novel, and if so, what are its ideal characteristics? To what extent are certain ethnic experiences more assimilable to that ideal narrative form than others? Are there historical explanations for this? Literary explanations? In other words, what would it mean to think of ethnic experience as constituted through different protocols of narrative form? Why, for example, have so many contemporary Asian American authors been attracted to techniques of "magical realism"? We will look at a variety of early and more recent examples from different ethnicities (Chinese American, Korean American, Vietnamese American, Japanese American), to see if we can develop an account of the novel from its realist to post-realist forms.
Enrollment is limited and a written application is due BY 4:00 P.M., TUESDAY, APRIL 19; be sure to read the paragraph on page 2 of this Announcement of Classes regarding enrollment in English 150!
150/8
This class has been cancelled.
150/9
Senior Seminar: Emily Dickinson
Shoptaw, John
TTh 11-12:30
305 Wheeler
Areas of Concentration: 1D; 3
Book List: Dickinson, E.: The Poems of Emily Dickinson, Selected Letters; Habegger, A.: My Wars Are Laid Away in Books; Course reader
Course Description: This is an intensive course in the poetry of Emily Dickinson. We will read her poems, along with her letters and a biography, deeply but also broadly throughout her career. Topics include early poetry; musical poetics; figuration; definition and riddle; death, religion, and nature as topic and as figure; love poetry and poetic seduction; emotion and suspense; gender and sexuality; self-definition; biography; manuscript poem packets; poems revisiting poems; letters and/as poems; contemporary history (e.g., Civil War); contemporary poetry (e.g., Emerson, Robert & E.B. Browning); late poetry; 20th-century influence. There will be periodic exercises, and a final paper of around 20 pages. There will also be a final party, during which students are invited read their optional "Dickinson" poems.
Enrollment is limited and a written application is due BY 4:00 P.M., TUESDAY, APRIL 19; 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.
150/12
Senior Seminar: Underbelly-- Other Classes, Other Cultures in Victorian England
Chevalier, Antoinette
TTh 12:30-2
78 Barrows
Areas of Concentration: 1D; 2; 4; 6
Book List: Required readings include novels by George Gissing and Wilkie Collins; short fiction of Thomas Hardy and Arthur Conan Doyle; poetry by Christina Rossetti, Elizabeth Barrett Browning; and a Course Reader.
Course Description: In this class we will explore the literature and culture surrounding Britain's poor, working classes, and racial outsiders in the Victorian era. Critical analysis of these marginalized classes and cultures will give us a more thorough and nuanced understanding of the diversified nature of Englishness in the nineteenth century.
We will read selections from some of the most famous social historians of the era--particularly Henry Mayhew and Charles Booth--as well as present-day analyses of nineteenth-century underclasses. We will spend a considerable amount of time on the culture of London's East End to begin our examination of connections between the geography of urban squalor, entrenched social problems of the London poor, and immigrant Others in England.
Enrollment is limited and a written application is due BY 4:00 P.M., TUESDAY, APRIL 19; be sure to read the paragraph on page 2 of this Announcement of Classes regarding enrollment in English 150!
150/15
Senior Seminar: Homocinema
Miller, D. A.
TTh 2-3:30
300 Wheeler
Areas of Concentration: 1E; 4; 6
Book List: Bersani, L.: Homos; Edelman., L.: No Future; Hocquenghem, G.: Homosexual Desire; Sartre, J.P.: Saint Genet; a course reader
Course Description: Under the assumption that male homosexual fantasy is not the peculiar coinage of a homosexual brain, but the common, even central daydream of the normal world, the course identifies three modes of broaching it in narrative cinema. In Hollywood classicism, this mode involves what Lee Edelman has called "the invisible spectacle," the formation of a homosexual closet intended for general heterosexual use. In a later development, when this cinema treats homosexuality explicitly, the work of closeting becomes a minoritizing of "the homosexual" as an individual problem. A third kind of relation, on which this course will concentrate, is undertaken outside the Hollywood system, and in particular in the international "art film." It involves uncloseting not the homosexual, but homosexual fantasy itself in its radical potential to disrupt social and symbolic order. This (dark? utopian? at any rate intractable) vision is not necessarily compatible or even tolerable to liberal or gay politics, as we presently know them. Viewings will include: Almadóvar, The Law of Desire, Bad Education; Fassbinder, In a Year of Thirteen Moons; Deardon, Victim; Fellini, La Dolce Vita; Genet, Chant d'amour; Hitchcock, Murder!, Rope, Strangers on a Train; Oshima, Taboo; Pasolini, Teorema; Visconti, Rocco and His Brothers.
Trusting that the topic of the course is sufficiently indicated, I welcome any student who feels it will draw out his or her energies for thinking about culture and about cinema.
Enrollment is limited and a written application is due BY 4:00 P.M., TUESDAY, APRIL 19; be sure to read the paragraph on page 2 of this Announcement of Classes regarding enrollment in English 150!
150/17
Senior Seminar: Fictions of Los Angeles
Saul, Scott
TTh 3:30-5
39 Evans
Areas of Concentration: 1E; 2; 6
Book List: West, N.: Day of the Locust; Isherwood, C.: A Single Man; Boyle, T. C.: The Tortilla Curtain; Tei, K.: Tropic of Orange; Valdez, L.: Zoot Suit; Smith, A. D.: Twilight
Films: "Double Indemnity"; "In a Lonely Place"; "Rebel Without a Cause"; "Chinatown"; and "Blade Runner"
Course Description: Los Angeles has been described, variously, as a "circus without a tent" (Carey McWilliams), "seventy-two suburbs in search of a city" (Dorothy Parker), "the capital of the Third World" (David Rieff), and "the only place for me that never rains in the sun" (Tupac Shakur). This class will investigate these and other ways that Los Angeles has been understood over the last century--as a city-in-a-garden, a dream factory, a noirish labyrinth, a homeowner's paradise, a zone of libidinal liberation, and a powder keg of ethnic and racial violence, to name but a few. We will trace the rise of Los Angeles from its origins as a small city, built on a late-19th-century real estate boom sponsored by railroad companies, into the sprawling megacity that has often been taken as a prototype of postmodern urban development; and we will do so primarily by looking at the fiction, film, drama, and music that the city has produced.
Enrollment is limited and a written application is due BY 4:00 P.M., TUESDAY, APRIL 19; be sure to read the paragraph on page 2 of this Announcement of Classes regarding enrollment in English 150!
150/18
Senior Seminar: Alfred Hitchcock
Bader, Julia
Seminar TTh 5:30-7 P.M. in 140 Barrows, plus film screenings Thursdays 7-10 P.M. in 140 Barrows
Areas of Concentration: 1E; 3; 4; 5; 6
Booklist: Modleski, T.: The Women Who Knew Too Much; Deutelbaum, M. and L. Poague, eds.: A Hitchcock Reader
Course Description: The course focuses on Hitchcock, "auteur" and consummate craftsman, with a remarkably long and varied career. We will view most of his films, discuss them from a variety of critical perspectives, and examine the key critical writings about them.
Enrollment is limited and a written application is due BY 4:00 P.M., TUESDAY, APRIL 19; be sure to read the paragraph on page 2 of this Announcement of Classes regarding enrollment in English 150!
166
Special Topics: Race and Performance in the 20th-Century U.S.
Scott, Saul
TTh 11-12:30
101 LSA
Areas of Concentration: 1E; 2; 4; 6
Book List: Johnson, J.W.: The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man; Hagedorn, J.: Dogeaters
Films: "The Jazz Singer"; "Little Big Man"
Course Description: This course takes as its point of departure an observation made by writer James Baldwin in 1953: "The time has come to realize that the interracial drama acted out on the American continent has not only created a new black man, it has created a new white man, too."
In this class, we will not limit ourselves to the identities of the "black man" and the "white man," but we will think seriously about how the American experience has produced new senses of racial, ethnic, and sexual identity, and new visions of community to go along with them. While not limiting ourselves to the discussion of race in American life, we will be considering how and why many of the most compelling works of 20th-century American culture turn on questions of racial affiliation or disaffiliation, questions that tend to take the form of what critic Linda Williams has called "melodramas of black and white."
We will address these issues by looking at a wide variety of cultural forms: music from the blues of Bessie Smith to the rock 'n' roll of Elvis and Chuck Berry; theater from blackface minstrelsy to avant-garde performance art.
176
Literature and Popular Culture: The Western in Fiction and Film
Hutson, Richard
Seminars MWF 2-3. in 120 Latimer, plus film screenings Wednesdays 5-8 P.M. in 105 North Gate
Areas of Concentration: 1D or 1E; 3; 6
Book List: Abbott, E.C.: We Pointed Them North; Adams, Andy: The Log of a Cowboy; Bower, B.M.: Flying U Ranch; Cooper, J. F.: The Last of the Mohicans; Garrett, P.: The Authentic Life of Billy the Kid; Grey, Z.: Riders of the Purple Sage; Roosevelt, T.: Ranch Life and the Hunting Trail; Stewart, E. P.: Letters of a Woman Homesteader; Wister, O.: The Virginian
Films will include "My Darling Clementine," "Shane," "High Noon," "Hell's Hinges," "The Virginian" (1929), "The Searchers," and others.
Course Description: In this course, I plan to get us all thinking about the popular genre of the Western and its cultural background. The films each week are an important and integral part of the course, and the films are required viewing. It is in the films that we see the clearest examples of the genre referred to as the Western, but the books provide a very general cultural discourse that gets crystallized in the films. Westerns have always seemed to be the clearest forms of an institutionalized narrative that gets called, eventually, a genre. The signs of genre tend to be clear: men in ten-gallon hats, six-shooters openly hanging from their belts, horses (often cows), in Western landscapes. The more interesting issues are: what is the meaning of these narratives for a culture? Are they simply entertaining, and if so, why? Or do they strive to offer commentaries on the culture of the time of their production?
180A
Disability Autobiography
Kleege, Georgina
MWF 12-1
130 Wheeler
Areas of Concentration: 1E; 2; 3
Book List: Grandin, T.: Thinking in Pictures; Grealy, L.: Autobiography of a Face; Hathaway, K.: The Little Locksmith; Hockenberry, J.: Moving Violations; Keller, H.: The World I Live In; Laborit, E.: The Cry of the Gull; Michalko, R.: The Two-in-One: Walking with Smokie, Walking with Blindness; Mairs, N.: Waist-High in the World; plus a course packet of excerpts from other works
Course Description: Autobiographies written by people with disabilities offer readers a glimpse into lives at the margins of mainstream culture, and thus can make disability seem less alien and frightening. Disability rights activists, however, often criticize these texts because they tend to reinforce the notion that disability is a personal tragedy that must be overcome through superhuman effort, rather than a set of cultural conditions that could be changed to accommodate a wide range of individuals with similar impairments. Are these texts agents for social change or merely another form of freak show? In this course, we will examine a diverse selection of disability memoirs and consider both what they reveal about cultural attitudes toward disability and what they have in common with other forms of autobiography. Requirements will include two 5-8 page papers and a take-home final exam.
180N
The Novel
Banfield, Ann
MWF 11-12
155 Donner Lab
Areas of Concentration: 3; 5
Book List: Homer: The Odyssey; Beckett, S.: Company; Goethe: The Sorrows of Young Werther; Joyce, J.: Portrait of the Artist, Ulysses; Maupassant, Guy de: A Life ; Nabokov: Speak, Memory; Proust, M.: Swann's Way; Sebald, W. G.: Austerlitz; Woolf, V.: Mrs Dalloway; McKeon, M.: Theory of the Novel: An Historical Approach
Course Description: This course will consider the history and theory of the novel form, reading both novels and essays on the novel. (Theorists or critics of the novel may include Erich Auerbach, Mikhail Bakhtin, Roland Barthes, Walter Benjamin, Dorrit Cohn, Margaret Doody, Gerard Genette, Kate Hamburger, Georg Lukacs, Franco Moretti, Victor Shklovsky and Ian Watt.) We will begin by reading an epic, that genre which comes out of oral culture that is thought to be the parent of the novel. We will consider specific forms of novels, such as the epistolary novel, the historical novel and the Bildungsroman. We will discuss the relation between biography, including autobiography, and the novel and the related notion of "a life." We will look at the language the novel uses for the representation of point of view. The reading list is tentative, as book lists require much time for reflection. In particular, I will try to reduce this overly long list. Ulysses may be replaced by something shorter or I may eliminate something in order to retain Ulysses.
H195A/1
Honors Course
Bader, Julia
M 5:30-8:30 P.M.
300 Wheeler
Note: In this section of English H195A, there will be film screenings on a few Monday nights after class (8:30-10 P.M., in 300 Wheeler).
Area of Concentration: 5
Book List: Rice, P. and P. Waugh, eds. Modern Literary Theory; Lentricchia, F. and McLaughlin, eds. Critical Terms for Literary Study; Wharton, E. The House of Mirth; Guerin, L., et al., eds. A Handbook of Critical Approaches to Literature
Course Description: Applying major critical theories to a number of genres, the course will lay the foundation for the theses to follow.
Students who satisfactorily complete H195A-B (the Honors Course) 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 19; be sure to read the paragraph beginning on page 2 of this Announcement of Classes regarding enrollment in the Honors Course!
H195A/2
Honors Course
JanMohamed, Abdul
TTh 9:30-11
C335 Cheit
Area of Concentration: 5
Book List: Barry, P.: Beginning Theory: An Introduction to Literary and Cultural Theory; Morrison, T.: Beloved; course reader of selected essays on theory
Course Description: The fall semester of this section of the honors course will be devoted to an examination of the theoretical paradigms that cast strong influences on contemporary critical practices. While the course will try to do justice to diverse theoretical approaches, my own theoretical preoccupation lies in the areas dealing with Minority Discourse, Postcoloniality, socio-political and psychoanalytic approaches to literature and culture. We will use Toni Morrison's Beloved as the single literary text on which to test various theoretical paradigms. During the fall semester each student will be expected to present a series of oral reports on the theoretical readings and to write three short papers designed to define his/her thesis topic with progressive clarity and precision. The fall semester will also include an introduction to research methods. In this course students are entirely free to devise and complete a thesis of their own choosing . The spring semester will be devoted to the research and writing of the "honors thesis"; class meetings will turn into tutorials focused on writing the theses rather than on external readings and discussion.
Students who satisfactorily complete H195A-B (the Honors Course) 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 19; be sure to read the paragraph beginning on page 2 of this Announcement of Classes regarding enrollment in the Honors Course!
H195A/3
Honors Course
Note new instructor: Wong, Hertha Sweet
Note new time: MWF 12-1
Note new classroom: 121 Wheeler
Area of Concentration: 5
Book List (tentative): Lodge, D.: Modern Criticism and Theory; Eagleton, T.: Literary Theory: An Introduction; Lentricchia, F. and T. McLaughlin: Critical Terms for Literary Study; Childers, J. and G. Hentzi, eds.: The Columbia Dictionary of Modern Literary and Cultural Criticism; Silko, L.M.: Almanac of the Dead
Course Description: In this honors seminar, we will become familiar with a wide range of theoretical approaches to literature. In addition, we’ll use Leslie Marmon Silko’s novel, Almanac of the Dead, to focus questions about literacy, history, memory, story, nation(alism), (post)colonialism, ethnicity, race, and culture.
Students who satisfactorily complete H195A-B (the Honors Course) 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 19; be sure to read the paragraph beginning on page 2 of this Announcement of Classes regarding enrollment in the Honors Course!
Last modified: Tuesday, 26-Jul-2005 10:30:04 PDT