Upper-Division Courses, Part I

100/2
Junior Seminar: Asian American Literature
Lye, Colleen
MW 1:30-3
305 Wheeler 

Areas of Concentration: 1E; 2; 3

Book List: Hagedorn, J.: Dogeaters; Kingston , M.H.: Tripmaster Monkey; Lee, C.R.: A Gesture Life; Lee, C.Y.: Flower Drum Song; Okada, J.: No-No Boy; Watanna, O.: Miss Numè of Japan; Truong, M.: The Book of Salt; Yamashita, K.T.: Tropic of Orange; and a course reader containing selected critical articles

Course Description: It is by now commonplace to describe Asian American identity as impossibly heterogeneous and hybrid. 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? What would it mean to think of ethnic experience as constituted through different protocols of narrative form? We will look at a variety of examples to see if we can develop an account of the novel from its realist to post-realist forms.

Be sure to read the paragraph starting on page 1 of this Announcement of Classes regarding enrollment in English 100!

100/3
Junior Seminar: Post-War American Detective Fiction
Fielding, John
note new time: MW 4-5:30
305 Wheeler

Areas of Concentration: 1E; 2; 3; 4; 6

Book List: The Little Sister (1949), by Raymond Chandler; The Golden Gizmo (1954), by Jim Thompson; For the Love of Imabelle (1958), by Chester Himes; The Quick Red Fox (1964), by John D. MacDonald; The Crying of Lot 49 (1966), by Thomas Pynchon; Mumbo Jumbo (1972), by Ishmael Reed; Like a Hole in the Head (1998), by Jen Banbury; Motherless Brooklyn (1999), by Jonathan Lethem; and a Course Reader

Course Description: In this survey of post-war American detective fiction we will examine one of the most popular, long-lasting and diverse literary genres of the modern canon. Beginning in the years immediately following the end of World War II, we will explore the high-point of hard-boiled narrative, an era which some critics claim to be the legitimization of the genre, marking its passage from pulp trash to an acceptable vehicle for serious literary endeavor. Here, the tales of private investigators traversing the shadowy areas inside and outside of the law, between equally corrupt official and criminal codes, present us with voyeuristic trips into a lurid underworld with safe, if jaded, guides whose dark humor is often employed toward critical socio-political commentary alternately revolutionary and reactionary. Through these novels we witness an analysis of immediate post-war concerns such as the challenge of traditional forms of masculinity and the safety and stability of domestic civilian life brought about by anxieties of and about the returning G.I.s. Concerns about race and feminism likewise swirl about this climate of paranoia and disillusion.

Such a notion of the detective genre as a reflection of the zeitgeist continues into the turbulent 60’s and early 70’s exemplified by the post-modern dismantlings and hijackings of the genre by Pynchon and Reed. Rounding off our tour, we will turn to two contemporary forays by Lethem and Banbury which, in turn, voice the concerns of a post-Cold War generation.

Throughout, we will examine the psychological, political, gender, and racial themes treated through tales of deviance and rectification, or crime and capture. The mass appeal and diversity of the genre will also be considered as we look into different readerships, publishing practices, critical assessments and varying attempts by these authors to break into, out of, or otherwise redefine the American literary canon through the vigilante impulse of the solitary crusader.

Be sure to read the paragraph starting on page 1 of this Announcement of Classes regarding enrollment in English 100!

100/4 This section has been cancelled.

100/5
Junior Seminar: The Metaphysicals
Picciotto, Joanna
MW 4-5:30
109 Wheeler

Areas of Concentration: 1B; 3

Book List: Helen Gardner, ed.: The Metaphysical Poets; a course reader of critical selections

Course Description: The term “the metaphysicals” originated in an insult: John Dryden faulted John Donne and the poets who fell under his influence for “affecting the metaphysics”; intent on perplexing their readers with “nice philosophical speculations,” they failed to “engage their hearts.” Samuel Johnson went further, asserting that the metaphysicals forfeited “their right to the name of poets, for they cannot be said to have imitated anything”; free of mimetic ambition, “their wish was only to say what they hoped had never been said before.” We’ll consider what stylistic features (and critical assumptions) provoked these initial responses and the epithet “metaphysical” and what, if anything, the poets it names—John Donne, George Herbert, Abraham Cowley, and Andrew Marvell, among others—have to do with each other. We’ll also consider the basis of their changed critical fortunes in the twentieth century. Students will produce a short paper analyzing a single poem, an evaluation of a critic’s treatment of one of the poets, and a longer final paper.

Be sure to read the paragraph starting on page 1 of this Announcement of Classes regarding enrollment in English 100!

100/6
Junior Seminar: Northern Irish Literature and “The Troubles”
Falci, Eric
MW 4-5:30
254 Dwinelle

Areas of Concentration: 1E; 2; 5

Book List: M. Beckett: Give Them Stones; C. Carson: Belfast Confetti; S. Deane: Reading in the Dark; B. Friel: Translations; S. Heaney: North; J. Johnston: Shadows on Our Skin; B. MacLaverty: Cal; J. Montague: The Rough Field (6 th edition); B. Moore: Lies of Silence; and a small course reader. [This book list is fairly solid, but you may want to come to the first class before you purchase all of these books.]

Course Description: This course will explore contemporary Northern Irish literature and its relationship to the political strife, social turmoil, and sectarian violencethat have characterized life in Northern Ireland since the late 1960’s, euphemistically known as “The Troubles.” We will gently immerse ourselves in the political and cultural forces in Northern Ireland , but our main focus will be on Northern Irish literature of the past thirty years. We will consider the relationship between art, violence, and terrorism, think through some of the particularities of Irish history and the role of Irish writers in that history, and approach larger theoretical questions about representation, narrativity, and form. While we will spend the bulk of our time on recent poetry and fiction, we will thicken our investigations by looking at additional cultural materials, such as films (probably The Crying Game, In the Name of the Father, and Bloody Sunday), paintings, photographs, maps, murals, and music. There will be two shorter papers (approx. 5 pages) and one longer paper (approx. 10-12 pages) assigned during the semester.

Be sure to read the paragraph starting on page 1 of this Announcement of Classes regarding enrollment in English 100!

100/7
Junior Seminar: Literature of the African Diaspora—Black Atlantic Culture and Modernity
Jones, Donna
TTh 9:30-11
109 Wheeler 

Areas of Concentration: 2; 3

Book List: Olaudah Equiano: The Interesting Narrative of Olaudah Equiano and Other Writings; Eduoard Glissant: The Fourth Century; Claude McKay: Banjo; Aimé Césaire: Notebooks of a Return to the Native Land; Maryse Condé: Heremakhonon; Ben Okri: The Famished Road; Paul Gilroy: The Black Atlantic; essays by Peter Linebaugh, Henry Louis Gates Jr., Frantz Fanon & others are either in course readers or class handouts

Course Description: In this course we will take a comparative look at the literature and cultural history of the African Diaspora, focusing on the area known as the Black Atlantic—North America, the Caribbean, and West Africa. This area comprises great cultural diversity, but is united by the common historical trauma of the Atlantic slave trade and colonization. Can we speak, however, of a unified culture for the African Diaspora? Where do the points in common arise and where do they diverge? We will look to this diverse selection of authors and intellectuals to answer this question and many more.

Expectations: This course offers a good deal of reading; part of your overall grade will be some demonstration of your preparedness. For this reason we will end each class with a brief student-led oral presentation and discussion. Attendance and class participation are vital.

Written Assignments: 1 mid-term paper 7-10 pg; final research paper 10 pg.

Be sure to read the paragraph starting on page 1 of this Announcement of Classes regarding enrollment in English 100!

100/8
Junior Seminar: Nineteenth-Century American Women Writers—Women and Style
Beam, Dorri
TTh 11-12:30
109 Wheeler 

Areas of Concentration: 1D; 3; 4

Book List: poetry by Osgood, Dickinson; Fern: Ruth Hall; Stowe: Uncle Tom’s Cabin; Keckley: Behind the Scenes; Fuller: Woman in the Nineteenth Century; Spofford: “The Amber Gods”; Oakes Smith: Bertha and Lily; Wharton: The House of Mirth; Gilman: The Yellow Wallpaper

Course Description: This course will focus on gender and style while covering a diverse range of texts. We will be interested in the way women writers styled themselves—in what manner they present themselves as authors and artists in the literary marketplace, how they encode textual self-presences, and the way women and art are represented in their texts. The course will also look at the way women’s texts are styled, and how those texts are positioned in relation to specific aesthetic, formal, and literary values, especially as these construct the feminine. All of the texts will confront issues of gender and style through the formal qualities of the work, and many will feature a central female figure who herself practices a literary, fine, domestic, plastic, or dramatic art. Attention will be paid to the larger cultural context and aesthetic debates that these arts reference, and especially to Stowe’s, Spofford’s, Wharton’s and Gilman’s books on decorative style.

Be sure to read the paragraph starting on page 1 of this Announcement of Classes regarding enrollment in English 100!

100/10 This section has been cancelled.

100/11
Junior Seminar: The Fictionalization of the American Sixties and Seventies
Richards, Diane
TTh 12:30-2
note new room: 242 Dwinelle

Areas of Concentration: 1E; 3; 5; 6

Book List: M. Atwood: The Handmaid’s Tale; D. DeLillo: Libra, Mao II; T. O’Brien: The Things They Carried; Tom Wolfe: The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Radical Chic and Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers; Tobias Wolff: In Pharaoh’s Army. There will also be a photocopied reader containing excerpts from the works of Joan Didion, Todd Gitlin, Ken Kesey, Alice Walker, John Wideman, Norman Mailer, Toni Morrison, and Walter Benjamin, among others; some theoretical material on the novel; and newspaper reportage from the sixties and seventies.

Course Description: In this course we will examine a number of fictionalized representations of the tumultuous liberal revolutions of the American sixties and the conservative counterrevolutions which brought them full circle by the 1980s. In comparing the ways in which the various texts for the course collapse the distinction between novel and history, we will consider to what degree the extreme nature of American culture of the times particularly lent itself to expression via the so-called non-fiction novel, a literary form which sprang into prominence during this period. In examining the various ways that writers reshaped novelistic form to accommodate their own historical perspectives of a time when fact was more fantastic than fiction, we will read a non-fiction novel, a novelistic dystopia grounded in the events of the sixties and seventies, and three novels which use actual historical events to provide the determinative background for the development of fictional characters. The readings for the course incorporate (to greater or lesser degree) aspects of major historical events, such as the assassination of John Kennedy, the Vietnam War, the hippie counterculture, the feminist and civil rights movements, and the explosion of cult movements which arose in the seventies in response to the liberal excesses of the sixties. We will view selected historical film footage and read from newspapers and magazines of the period. We will conclude the course by viewing Apocalypse Now, Francis Ford Coppola’s classic film on Vietnam , and Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse, Eleanor Coppola’s metacritical documentary of the process of creating Apocalypse Now. As we take a new look at the old question of the novel’s relation to history, we will locate the texts for the course in the tradition of post-modernism’s metafictional preoccupations and focus on the new role of the media, especially television news coverage, in creating history in a world of mass communications.

Note: If you are inclined to do any summer reading, I recommend that you begin with DeLillo’s Libra. It’s a fairly long, complex text about the Kennedy assassination and is a seminal work for this course, both historically and thematically.

Be sure to read the paragraph starting on page 1 of this Announcement of Classes regarding enrollment in English 100!

100/13
Junior Seminar: 19th-Century American Poetry
Shoptaw, John
TTh 12:30-2
221 Wheeler

Areas of Concentration: 1D; 2; 3; 4

Book List: E. Dickinson : The Poems of Emily Dickinson; W. Whitman: The Complete Poems; ed.W. Spengemann: Nineteenth-Century American Poetry

Course Description: While concentrating on the poetry of Whitman and Dickinson, we will consider the full sweep of nineteenth-century American poetry. We will read poets better known for their prose—Emerson, Thoreau, Poe, and Melville—poets popular in their time—Longfellow, Whittier , Holmes, and forgotten precursors to Modernism. We will also consider the emerging women and African-American poets. We will read these, among other poets, in relation to American, English, and European literary history, American painting and music, and the cultural upheavals of Abolition and the Civil War.

 Be sure to read the paragraph starting on page 1 of this Announcement of Classes regarding enrollment in English 100!

100/14
Junior Seminar: Herman Melville
Breitwieser, Mitchell
TTh 2-3:30
24 Wheeler

Areas of Concentration: 1D; 3

Book List: H. Melville: Typee; Redburn; Moby-Dick; Billy Budd and Other Stories ; Selected Poems; Pierre; The Confidence Man

Course Description: I will emphasize the developments and contradictions that occur over the course of Melville’s career, with special attention to his struggle with political and religious authority. But class discussion will be open to whatever is of interest to the members of the class. Attendance and participation in discussion are required, along with two ten -page essays.

Be sure to read the paragraph starting on page 1 of this Announcement of Classes regarding enrollment in English 100!

100/15
Junior Seminar: Arthurian Legends
Nolan, Maura
TTh 2-3:30
259 Dwinelle

Areas of Concentration: 1A; 3; 6

Book List: J. Wilhelm: Romance of Arthur, Arthurian Handbook; Chretien de Troyes: Arthurian Romances; M. Borroff, trans.: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight; T. Malory: Morte Darthur

Course Description: In this course, we will read, discuss, and write about the medieval Arthurian tradition, starting with its origins in Latin accounts of English history and continuing through the fifteenth century. We will also examine contemporary representations of King Arthur and the Round Table. Our goals will be threefold: first, to gain a knowledge of the most crucial Arthurian texts and to observe the way in which the tradition develops over time; second, to accumulate a body of writing about those texts which engages a series of critical questions; and third, to consider the relationship of literature to history and to culture. Why do people write and read stories like the Arthurian legends? Did people in the Middle Ages read them for the same reasons we do? What do the fantasy narratives of a society tell us about its culture, its values, its ideals, and its problems?

Be sure to read the paragraph starting on page 1 of this Announcement of Classes regarding enrollment in English 100!

100/16
Junior Seminar: Langston Hughes
Wagner, Bryan
TTh 2-3:30
221 Wheeler

Areas of Concentration: 1E; 2; 3

Book List: Langston Hughes: The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes ; Wallace Thurman, ed.: Fire!! A Quarterly Dedicated to the Younger Negro Artists; Langston Hughes: The Big Sea:An Autobiography; Isaac Julien, Dir.: Looking for Langston. There will also be a course reader with critical and biographical materials.

Course Description: This course offers the opportunity to spend an entire semester reading Langston Hughes, one of the most prolific and consistently exciting black writers of the twentieth century. Our focus will be on the poetry, and especially on its relation to its vernacular precedents, but we will also read at least one of Hughes’s autobiographies, some of his short fiction and journalism, as well as his writing for children. Hughes’s career is a convenient index to black literary history, and we will take the time to consider carefully its relation to the New Negro Renaissance, the Popular Front, and the Black Arts Movement in addition to Hughes’s important contributions as curator and anthologist.

Be sure to read the paragraph starting on page 1 of this Announcement of Classes regarding enrollment in English 100!

100 /17
Junior Seminar : The Holocaust and the Postmodern
Liu, Sarah
TTh 3:30-5
259 Dwinelle

Areas of Concentration: 1E; 5

Book List: Camus, Albert: The Plague; Delbo, Charlotte: Auschwitz and After; Levi, Primo: If This is a Man, The Drowned and the Saved; Levi, Neil and Michael Rothberg, ed.: The Holocaust: Theoretical Readings; Spiegelman, Art: Maus I and II; Wilkomirski, Binjamin: Fragments; and a course reader

Course Description: This course focuses on the deep interconnections between the Holocaust and Western culture and thought. Postmodernism begins as a response to the Holocaust, not rejecting rationality but acknowledging its limits, basing humanism on a sense of fundamentally fragile, corporeal existence, echoing the Shoah in traumatized, melancholy, mournfully elegiac discourses. Those ways of thinking offer new perspectives in our understanding of the historical event and its aftermath. We will study the relation between events of the Holocaust and the central issues of postmodernism: the “traumatic” nature of entry into language, the “trace” structure of inscription in relation to inaccessible presence, the danger of an aesthetics that valorizes the unrepresentable. How much freedom or poetic license does art have when dealing with events that are not dead or neutral ? How can art avoid a “redemptive” narrative, instead acknowledging the Shoah’s traumatic nature? How far can the Holocaust be understood and what might we take the human to be in its aftermath? Reading includes texts of testimony (Delbo and Levi), memory, postmemory, and identity (Spiegelman and Wilkomirski), Holocaust fiction (Camus and Schlink), and philosophical thought (Adorno, Levinas, Lyotard).

Be sure to read the paragraph starting on page 1 of this Announcement of Classes regarding enrollment in English 100!

100/18
Junior Seminar: Alfred Hitchcock
Bader, Julia

Seminars MW 5:30-7 P.M. in 203 Wheeler, plus film screenings Mondays 7-10 P.M. (also in 203 Wheeler)

Areas of Concentration: 1E; 3; 4; 5; 6

Book List: T. Modelski: The Women Who Knew Too Much; eds. M. Deutelbaum & L. Pogue: A Hitchcock Reader

Course Description: The course will focus on the Hitchcock oeuvre from the early British through the American period, with emphasis on analysis of cinematic representation of crime, victimhood, and the investigation of guilt. Our discussions and critical readings will consider socio-cultural backgrounds, gender problems, and psychological and Marxist readings as well as star studies.

Be sure to read the paragraph starting on page 1 of this Announcement of Classes regarding enrollment in English 100!

110
Medieval Literature: Love in the Middle Ages
Nolan, Maura
TTh 11-12:30
30 Wheeler

Area of Concentration: 1A

Book List: A. Dante: Vita Nuova; Marie de France: Lais; Chretien de Troyes: Arthurian Romances; A. Capellanus: Art of Courtly Love; G. Chaucer: Troilus and Criseyde; G. Boccaccio: Filostrato

Course Description: This course will focus on the literature of love in the medieval period, beginning with St. Paul ’s Letters to the Corinthians and culminating in Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde. In between, we will address a wide variety of questions about love and sexuality, including the role of marriage, the status of women, and the nature of femininity and masculinity, ideas about spiritual love and love of God, the legitimacy (or illegitimacy) of sexual desire, the relationship of love to violence, and others. Students will be encouraged to think critically about their own ideas about love in light of medieval concepts, and vice versa. We will discuss the relationship of self to community, of self to the divine, of individuals to others, of men to men, women to women, and women to men. We will seek to define the central cultural and ideological difficulties experienced by medieval people when they wrote about and talked about love, and we will also explore the relationship of the medieval literary tradition to love poetry and to the emergence of the vernacular as a privileged mode of written expression.

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

111    This class has been cancelled, but J. Miller will teach it in Spring 2007.  

112
Middle English Literature
Miller, Jennifer
TTh 12:30-2
Note new room:  88 Dwinelle

Area of Concentration: 1A

Book List and 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
Landreth, David
TTh 3:30-5
Note new room:  88 Dwinelle 

Areas of Concentration: 1B; 3

Book List: Fraser and Rabkin, eds.: Drama of the English Renaissance, v. 2: The Stuart Period

Course Description: The English theater was the first mass medium, an avowedly commercial, hyper-competitive, fad-driven industry of sound and spectacle, which both catered to and ruthlessly parodied the sophisticated, novelty-craving consumerism of the seventeenth century’s greatest boom-town: the sprawling, incomprehensible, luxurious, grotesque metropolis of London . The brilliance of the Jacobean and Caroline drama displays itself in the readiness—really, the need—of the players to go over the top, to push past the limits of realism (and to surpass their competitors’ plays) into the hyper-real experiences of satire and sensation, in order to represent to their audiences their own city and society. The rapid transformations of urban form, of social status, and of luxury consumption continually remade the lived spaces of London and of its theaters into new shapes of both intimate sensual delight and alien sensual decadence, at once more and less than real.  

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

117A
Shakespeare
Justice, Steven
Note new time:  MWF 11-12 
105 North Gate

Areas of Concentration: 1B; 3

Book List: S. Greenblatt, ed.: The Norton Shakespeare

Course Description: Close study of several of Shakespeare’s earlier works.

117J
Shakespeare
Booth, Stephen
TTh 5-6:30 P.M.
24 Wheeler

Areas of Concentration: 1B; 3

Book List: ONE--or, better--two OF THE FOLLOWING ONE-VOLUME SHAKESPEARES: William Shakespeare: The Complete Works, ed. Alfred Harbage et al. [The old Pelican Shakespeare] (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1969); The Complete Pelican Shakespeare, ed. S. Orgel and A.R. Branmuller [The New Pelican] (New York, 2002); The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. B. Evans et al. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974 (old edition) or 1998 (new edition); The Complete Works of Shakespeare, ed. David Bevington (new ed. Longmans) OR old (I don't remember who published it); The Complete Signet Classic Shakespeare, ed. Sylvan Barnet et al. (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1972) [Only the one-volume version of the Signet Shakespeare will be practical for classroom purposes. It’s out of print, but there should be second-hand copies around.]; The Norton Shakespeare, ed. Stephen Greenblatt et al. (New York: Norton, 1997); AND Russ McDonald: The Bedford Companion to Shakespeare (Boston: Bedford Books of St. Martin's Press, 1996 [2 nd edition, 2001])

I want you to read the McDonald book in such a way as to get a general sense of what kinds of things one needs to bear in mind when reading or seeing Shakespeare--needs to look up or look out for but need not commit to memory.

Course Description: I expect the course to do all the basic work of a Shakespeare survey and also to have seminar-like intellectual crossfire. I will take up all the topics that concern Shakespeare scholars, but I will not take them up systematically. I find that presenting a topic like "Establishing Shakespeare's Texts" causes people to try to memorize a lot of distinguished guesswork and understand nothing. Instead of organizing the communal and active ignorance of the last 300 years of scholarship, I will wait for particulars of classroom discussion to invite comment and background on printing-house practices, Shakespeare's stage, the composition of his audience, and stuff like that. If we work from stray particulars, you are less likely than you might otherwise be to come away with "knowledge" of matters about which we have--and have only evidence enough for--pure but immensely detailed guesses.

I don't yet know how I will want to use in-class time, but I will certainly concentrate on Shakespeare's language and on the plays as plays--experiences for audiences--and on what it is about them that has caused the western world and much of the eastern to value them so highly.

When I gave a small Shakespeare course I usually ask people to read Richard II, 1 Henry IV, 2 Henry IV, Henry V, Antony and Cleopatra, Julius Caesar, Love's Labor's Lost, All’s Well That Ends Well, Macbeth, The Merchant of Venice, Othello, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Romeo and Juliet, King Lear, The Tempest, Hamlet, Twelfth Night, and The Winter's Tale; the order given here will not be the--or much like the--order in which I will ask that you read the plays.

I will give spot passage quizzes daily--or almost daily. Their purpose will be to make certain that you keep up with the reading and that you understand the surface sense and the syntactic physics of all the sentences you read.

Three papers, each of a length determined by how much you have to say and how efficient you are in saying it. The third paper will be in lieu of a final examination.

Enrollment is limited and a written application is due BY 4:00 P.M. , TUESDAY, APRIL 18; be sure to read the paragraph on page 2 of this Announcement of Classes regarding enrollment in in English 117J (and 150)!

117S
Shakespeare
Altman, Joel
TTh 11-12:30
105 North Gate

Areas of Concentration: 1B; 3

Book List: Stephen Greenblatt, ed.: The Norton Shakespeare

Course Description: This course will foreground what we have always known--that Shakespeare’s plays were written to be performed, not simply read--so we’ll approach them with their performative aspects always in sight. This will make attention to the literary text more important than ever, since the printed words must be actively understood as expressions of thinking and feeling persons in motion. Our program will therefore be as follows: We will closely study the texts of about eight plays, with attention to diction and patterns of speech, theme, character, and plot--then imaginatively transfer the words on the page into space and action by conjecturally staging scenes, attending one or two live performances at the nearby California Shakespeare Festival, and seeing and critiquing filmed stage performances. The third dimension of our study will be to screen and analyze scenes from movie versions of our plays, recognizing that film adaptations have become a powerful medium for transmitting Shakespeare’s work to new audiences. What’s gained, what’s lost in the process will be part of our concerns. There will be two essays, two midterms, and a final exam.

118
Milton
Picciotto, Joanna
TTh 2-3:30
Note new room: 180 Tan  

Areas of Concentration: 1B or 1C

Book List: Merritt Hughes, ed.: Complete Poems and Major Prose (of John Milton)

Course Description: This survey will cover John Milton’s career, a life-long effort to unite intellectual, political, and artistic experimentation. There will be two short papers and a final exam.

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

122
This course has been cancelled.

125E
The Contemporary Novel
Bishop, John
TTh 3:30-5
159 Mulford

Areas of Concentration: 1E; 3

Book List: S. Beckett: Malone Dies; D. DeLillo: The Names; C. McCarthy: Child of God; Ian MsEwan: Atonement; D. Mitchell: Cloud Atlas; V. Nabokov: Pale Fire; E. O'Brien: Down by the River; T. Pynchon: V.; P. Roth: American Pastoral; M. Spark: The Driver's Seat 

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, and a final exam.

130C
American Literature: 1865-1900
Schweik, Susan
TTh 11-12:30
145 McCone  

Area of Concentration: 1D

Book List: Whitman, W.: Complete Poems; Dickinson, E.: Complete Poems; Twain, M.: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn; Twain, M.: Puddnhead Wilson; Howells, W.D.: A Hazard of New Fortunes; Dreiser, T.: Sister Carrie; James, H.: The Portrait of A Lady; James, H.: The Turn of The Screw and Other Short Fiction

Course Description: A survey of U.S. literature from 1865 to the beginning of the twentieth century. We’ll begin with the texts listed above; then together we’ll choose the reading and design the syllabus for the last weeks of the course. Two midterms and a final project which will involve both research and class participation.

132
American Novel
Porter, Carolyn
TTh 12:30-2
101 Barker

Areas of Concentration: 1D or 1E; 3

Book List: W. Faulkner: Absalom, Absalom; Gabriel Garcia Marquez: 100 Years of Solitude; Henry James: The Portrait of a Lady; Herman Melville: Moby-Dick; Mark Twain: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

Course Description: A course on five “great American novels.” One mid-term, one paper, one final. Much reading.

133A
African American Literature and Culture Before 1917
Wagner, Bryan
TTh 3:30-5
Note new room: 221 Wheeler

Areas of Concentration: 1D; 2; 3

Book List: Phillis Wheatley: Complete Writings; Olaudah Equiano: The Interesting Narrative and Other Writings; Thomas Gray: Confessions of Nat Turner; David Walker: Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World; Frederick Douglass: Narrative of the Life; Harriet Wilson: Our Nig; Harriet Jacobs: Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl; Frances Harper: Iola Leroy; Booker T. Washington: Up from Slavery; Charles Chesnutt: Marrow of Tradition; Paul Laurence Dunbar: Lyrics of Lowly Life

Course Description: A survey of major black writers in the context of slavery and its immediate aftermath. There will be weekly writing, a midterm, one essay, and a final exam.

134
Contemporary Literature
Falci, Eric
MWF 11-12
note new room: 159 Mulford

Areas of Concentration: 1E; 2

Book List: C. Churchill: Cloud 9; J.M. Coetzee: Waiting for the Barbarians; G. Greene: The End of the Affair; K. Ishiguro: The Remains of the Day; J. Ramazani, ed.: The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry (volume 2 only); A. Roy: The God of Small Things; Z. Smith: White Teeth; T. Stoppard: Arcadia. [While this book list is fairly solid, you may want to come to the first class before purchasing everything on the list, particularly the Ramazani anthology.]

Course Description: In this course we will sketch the field of contemporary British literature, closely reading some of the key post-1945 texts from Britain, the Commonwealth, and Ireland. In addition to paying careful attention to issues of poetic form and narrative style, we will think through the relevance of such a phrase as “British literature” in a globalizing world, especially in the aftermath of the British Empire and in the wake of several generations of scholarship that have focused on the colonial legacy of that empire in such places as India, Africa, the Caribbean, and Ireland. Students will be required to write two essays and a final exam during the semester.

135AC
Literature of American Cultures: Repression and Resistance
Gonzalez, Marcial
Note new room: 105 North Gate

Lectures MW 3-4 in 105 North Gate, plus one hour of discussion section per week (all sections F 3-4)

Areas of Concentration: 1E; 2; 3

Book List: G. Jones: Corregidora; O. Butler: Kindred; J.E. Wideman: Philadelphia Fire ; D. Allison: Bastard Out of Carolina ; C. Ozick: The Shawl; T. Olsen: Yonnondio: From the Thirties; H.M. Viramontes: Under the Feet of Jesus; R. Ruiz: Happy Birthday Jesus; D. Santiago : Famous All Over Town

Course Description: This course will focus on representations of repression and resistance in the fiction of three cultural groups: Chicanos, African Americans, and European Americans. We will examine various forms of repression (social, physical, and psychological) represented in these texts. Several questions inform the course theme: What solution, if any, do these works offer in response to the forms of repression they represent? Can the negative effects of repression be represented in such a way as to establish a positive conception of cultural identity? What are the formal aspects of a literature of repression and resistance? The comparative approach in this course will allow us to analyze the similarities and differences in the literatures of the three cultural groups. It will also provide us with a critical appreciation of the social significance of these literary works. Assignments will likely include two papers and two exams. This course includes discussion sections.

This course satisfies U.C. Berkeley’s American Cultures requirement.

C136 (cross-listed with American Studies C111E)
Topics in American Studies: The U.S. in the Progressive Era, 1890-1917
Hutson, Richard
MWF 10-11
Note new room:  123 Wheeler

Areas of Concentration: 1D or 1E; 6

Book List: J. Addams: Twenty Years at Hull House ; K. Chopin: The Awakening; Charles Eastman: From the Deep Woods to Civilization; E. Garvey: The Adman in the Parlor; W. Lippman: Drift and Mastery; G. Porter: The Rise of Big Business; U. Sinclair: The Moneychangers; F. Taylor: The Scientific Principles of Management; E. Wharton: The House of Mirth; R. Wiebe: The Search for Order

Course Description: This is an introduction to a number of cultural/political/economic/social issues from a “transitional” period of the United States between the rise of industrial capitalism (big corporate businesses and huge urban centers) in the late 19 th century and the beginnings of a modernist attempt to bring order to what was often felt to be the chaos of development. In addition to a variety of texts, there will be screenings of a number of films, mainly short films. Two midterms and a final exam.

139
The Cultures of English: Culture of the Great War—Art in the Age of Decline
Jones, Donna
TTh 12:30-2
24 Wheeler

Areas of Concentration: 1E; 2; 6

Book List: W. Lewis: Tarr; selected writings of Gertrude Stein; D. Pick: War Machine; A. Cesaire, A.: Notebooks on a Return to the Native Land; P. Fussel: The Great War and Modern Memory; A. Carpentier: The Lost Steps; A. Breton: Nadja; E. Junger: Storm of Steel; J. Toomer: Cane; W.E.B. DuBois: Dark Princess, 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.

141 This course has been cancelled (postponed till Spring 2007).

143A/1 This section of 143A has been cancelled.

143A/2
Short Fiction
Mukherjee, Bharati (a.k.a.: Blaise, B.)
TTh 2-3:30
301 Wheeler

Areas of Concentration: None

Book List: The Norton Anthology of Contemporary Fiction (eds.: R.V. Cassill and Joyce Carol Oates), 2 nd. Edition; B. Mukherjee: 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 and to submit written comments on peers' manuscripts.

To be considered for admission to this class, please submit photocopies of 15 pages of your fiction, along with an application form, to Professor Mukherjee’s mailbox in 322 Wheeler, BY 4:00 P.M., TUESDAY, APRIL 18, 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
O'Brien, Geoffrey
W 3-6
301 Wheeler

Areas of Concentration: None

Book List: A course reader

Course Description: The purpose of this class will be to produce an unfinished language in which to treat poetry. Writing your own poems will be a part of this task, but it will also require readings in contemporary poetry and essays in poetics, as well as some writing done under extreme formal constraints. In addition, there’ll be regular commentary on other students’ work and an informal review of a poetry reading.

To be considered for admission to this class, please submit 5 photocopied pages of your poems, along with an application form, to Professor O’Brien’s mailbox in 322 Wheeler, BY 4:00 P.M., TUESDAY, APRIL 18, 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 9:30-11
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 5 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 18, 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!

Newly added section:
143B/3
Verse: Transelation/Mistranslation
Robertson, Lisa
TTh 11-12:30
305 Wheeler

Areas of Concentration: None

Book List: Moure, Erin: Sheep’s Vigil by a Fervent Person

How might the writer use the various techniques and theories of translation, including mistranslation, as experimental tools to aid in the composition of new poems? Rather than approaching translation as the conventional transfer of meaning from one language to another, in this writing workshop we will take up this ancient practice as a varied and extensive set of open-ended compositional procedures and responses that bring new dictions, syntaxes, shapes and stances into the poem, devising ways of opening our various englishes to maximum interference from other language systems. Weekly reading, distributed in photocopy, will indicate some technical directions. This will include Celia and Louis Zukofsy’s Catullus, Erin Moure’s Pessoa in Sheep’s Vigil By a Fervent Person, Caroline Bergvall’s Dante, from “Via: 48 Dante Variations,” Catriona Strang’s Carmina Burana, from Low Fancy, Ted Byrne’s Louise Labe, and a sheaf of translators of Lucretius, including Basil Bunting, Lucy Hutchinson, and John Dryden. Testing the poem as a medium of response, students will translate their own, one another’s, and outside texts, from familiar and unknown tongues, both in the workshop and as assignments. Alongside this writing there will be considerable discussion on the inevitable political, linguistic, and theoretical questions that arise.

To be considered for admission to this class, please submit 5 photocopied pages of your poems, along with an application form (the latter obtainable from the racks outside the English Dept. office, 322 Wheeler Hall), to Prof. Robertson’s mailbox in 322 Wheeler, BY 4:00 P.M., THURSDAY, MAY 4, AT THE LATEST. (Since this section of 143B was added late, the deadline to apply for it is later than for other creative writing classes.)

After the instructor has selected her students, the class list will be posted on the bulletin board in the hall across from the English Department office by May 15; admitted students will obtain a class entry code from the instructor at the first class meeting and use it to actually enroll in the class on Tele-BEARS soon thereafter.

143N
Prose Non-fiction: The Personal Essay
Mukherjee, Bharati (a.k.a.: Blaise, B.)
TTh 11-12:30
301 Wheeler

Areas of Concentration: None

Book List: The Best American Essays of the Century (eds. Joyce Carol Oates & Robert Atwan)

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 to this course, please submit 10-12 photocopied pages of your creative non-fiction, along with an application form, to Professor Mukherjee’s mailbox in 322 Wheeler, BY 4:00 P.M., TUESDAY, APRIL 18, 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!

143T This class has been cancelled (replaced by 143B/3).

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Last modified: September 15, 2006