Skip to main content.Skip to menu of page links.

Upper-Division Courses, Part II

Fall 2006

150/3
Senior Seminar: Fictions of Los Angeles
Saul, Scott
MW 4-5:30
Note new room: 300 Wheeler

Areas of Concentration: 1E; 2; 6

Book List: N. West: Day of the Locust; C. Isherwood: A Single Man; T.C. Boyle: The Tortilla Curtain; K. Tei: Tropic of Orange ; L. Valdez: Zoot Suit; A.D. Smith: 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-19 th-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 18; be sure to read the paragraph on page 2 of this Announcement of Classes regarding enrollment in English 150!

150/4 This section has been cancelled.

150/5
Senior Seminar: Victorian Masculinities in Conflict
Chevalier, Antoinette
TTh 9:30-11
224 Wheeler

Areas of Concentration: 1D; 2; 3; 4; 5

Book List: George Gissing: New Grub Street; Robert Louis Stevenson: Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde; Arthur Conan Doyle: The Sign of Four; Bram Stoker: Dracula; Wilkie Collins: The Moonstone; E.M. Forster: Howards End

Course Description: In this class we will examine the varied and often conflicting forms of masculinity in the latter-half of the Victorian era. We will look at “hegemonic” masculinities (i.e., heterosexual, white, middle-upper class) alongside “other” masculinities and analyze the ways these are contested and negotiated in the literature. Masculinities are constructed within the domestic sphere, by work/profession, and through diverse experiences based upon race, class, and sexuality. Our objective is to better understand the gendered nature of Victorian culture, as well as the intersections between gender and other group-based identities in the late-nineteenth century. How are discourses surrounding the ideal “gentleman” and “manliness” problematized by poverty? How are particular masculinities sustained or re-created in the face of British imperialism and, conversely, by the “threat” of immigrant Others?

The fiction selected for this class will allow for a nuanced analysis of gender performance by the dandy, the class aspirant, the captains of industry, the empire builders, the servant class, the working poor, the racial/racialized other. Required texts will also include a course reader containing current literary and gender criticism along with non-fiction prose by nineteenth-century cultural critics.

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 English 150!

150/7
Senior Seminar: James Joyce
Bishop, John
TTh 11-12:30
note new room: 223 Wheeler

Areas of Concentration: 1E; 3

Book List: R. Ellmann: James Joyce; J. Joyce: Dubliners; Finnegans Wake; Occasional, Critical, and Political Writing; A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: Text & Criticism; Ulysses

Recommended Texts: H. Blamires: The New Bloomsday Book: A Guide through ‘Ulysses’; F. Budgen: James Joyce and the Making of 'Ulysses’; D. Gifford: Ulysses Annotated; S. Gilbert: James Joyce's 'Ulysses'

Course Description: A polytropically intensive examination of Joyce's fiction. We'll begin the semester with a rapid study of Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, focus lengthily on Ulysses over the major part of the term, and conclude with a brief gaze into the lucid darknesses of Finnegans Wake. Members of the seminar will be expected to work on a long seminar-paper during the semester and to participate in class discussions.

150/8
Senior Seminar: Classical and Renaissance Drama
Knapp, Jeffrey
TTh 11-12:30
103 Wheeler

Areas of Concentration: 1B; 3; 6

Book List: T.B.A.

Course Description: In a famous poem prefixed to the first edition (1623) of Shakespeare's collected works, Ben Jonson claimed that Shakespeare was at least the equal of ancient tragedians such as Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripedes, and Seneca, while for comedy Shakespeare surpassed “all that insolent Greece or haughty Rome” had produced. Jonson’s poem does not stop to consider the difficulties of comparing plays that derive from different eras, different cultures, and different conceptions of the theater. But this class will. At the same time, we will explore how Renaissance dramatists both imitated their classical precursors and strove to outdo them.

This section of English 150 satisfies the pre-1800 requirement for the English major.

150/10
Senior Seminar: Irish Writing in the 20th Century
Rubenstein, Michael
TTh 12:30-2
123 Wheeler

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

Book List (tentative): Yeats, W.B.: selected poetry and prose; Synge, J.M.: The Playboy of the Western World; Joyce, J.: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man; Bowen, E.: The Last September; Beckett, S.: First Love; O’Brien, F.: The Poor Mouth,The House of Splendid Isolation; Jordan, N.: The Crying Game; DeEmmony, A. and Lowney, D.: Father Ted; Doyle, R: A Star Called Henry; Sheeran, P.: Aqua; O’Neill, J.: At Swim Two Boys

Course Description: This course surveys some of the most popular Irish literature in the last one hundred years. Irish Writing in the early part of the 20th century was part of a cultural revolution that culminated in a political revolution, a war of independence and the foundation (in the south) of a free state . In this course, we’ll be looking at some of the key texts that influenced and were influenced by the cultural nationalist movement. Then we’ll look to later-century fictions, some of which look back to the revolutionary period, and some of which look, very deliberately, away from it. Along the way we’ll try to identify as many thematic and aesthetic continuities as we can in order to come up with a conception of what Irish literature is, or may be, in the 20th century. One medium-length essay, one final 15pp research paper, one in-class presentation required.

150/12
Senior Seminar: Is It Useless to Revolt?
Goldsmith, Steven
TTh 2-3:30
305 Wheeler

Areas of Concentration: 3; 5

Book List: A partial list of texts includes Delillo, D.: Mau II; Melville, H.: Billy Budd and Other Stories; Milton, J.: The Major Works; Oe, K.: Somersault; Shelley, P.: Shelley’s Poetry and Prose.

Course Description: “Is it useless to revolt?” Our seminar borrows its lead question from the title of an essay by Foucault on the Iranian Revolution of 1979. Foucault urges us to listen to the voices of revolt, even as they seem entangled in a history of inescapable, recurrent violence. Attracted and repulsed by the decisive violence of revolt, the authors in this course test Foucault’s proposition that, “While revolts take place in history, they also escape it in a certain manner.” The conjunction of religion, literature, and politics will also loom large in our discussions. Starting with Milton ’s Samson Agonistes, we will consider how religious convictions inform both political aspiration and a willingness to justify acts of violence. Such questions will lead us back to the foundational representations of revolt in the Bible (Exodus and Revelation), and they will lead us forward to contemporary questions about “terrorism.” (Since 9/11, a much publicized debate on Samson Agonistes has asked whether its protagonist is best described as a terrorist.) Other readings will range widely across historical periods and national cultures, and might include works by Blake, Kleist, Shelley, Melville, Nat Turner, and Yeats, as well as living writers such as Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish, Japanese novelist Kenzaburo Oe, and American novelist Don Delillo. On occasion, we will also take up theoretical writings on the subject of revolt, liberation, and violence by such authors as Kant, Benjamin, Arendt, Derrida, and—of course—Foucault.

150/14 This section has been cancelled.

150/15 This section has been cancelled.

150/16
Senior Seminar: Film Noir/Neo-Noir
Bader, Julia

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

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

Book List: L. Williams: The Erotic Thriller; M. Nicholls: Scorsese’s Men; M. Bould: Film Noir; R. Lang: Masculine Interest

Course Description: Our focus will be on the evolution of neo-noirs from classic noirs. We will follow the genre from early European and American examples to the 70's and onwards, and analyze gender presentations, popular narrative patterns, postmodern nostalgia, and questions of class, race and the psychological underpinnings of crime films.

165
Special Topics: Elegy, Mourning, and the Representation of the Holocaust
Goodman, Kevis
TTh 2-3:30
103 Wheeler

Area of Concentration: 3

Book List: Hamlet; Levi, P.: The Drowned and the Saved; Teichmann, M. and Leder, S., eds.: Truth and Lamentation: Stories and Poems on the Holocaust; Friedlander, S., ed.: Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the Final Solution; plus one or two Course Readers, containing poems by Milton, Wordsworth, Hardy, Yeats, Auden, Bishop, Plath, and others, as well as a number of theoretical and critical essays

Course Description: The German critic Theodor Adorno famously commented that it is “barbaric” to continue to write poetry after Auschwitz , that any attempt to convert such suffering into aesthetic images commits an injustice against the victims. Yet as Adorno also acknowledged, such writing has also seemed necessary, for the failure to represent or to transmit the event and its implications can constitute an injustice of another sort. The Holocaust has therefore presented an acute problem within the long history of literary mourning and the elegiac mode in particular, because the elegy, with its special relationship to the ritual of mourning, has negotiated the delicate balance between loss and art since its inception in Greek and Roman pastoral literature.

This seminar has two main parts. [1] We will first establish a background and vocabulary by reading elegiac texts (largely poetry) from different traditions and historical moments; readings in this part include selected pastoral elegies by Theocritus and Virgil, Shakespeare’s Hamlet, elegiac lyrics and narrative poems from the Renaissance to the present, and some psychoanalytic and cultural approaches to mourning. [2] We then move to problems in Holocaust representation and the theorization of trauma, examining short poems by Paul Celan, Dan Pagis, Nelly Sachs, Geoffrey Hill, Anthonty Hecht, and others; prose by Primo Levi, Aharon Appelfeld, and Ida Fink; and also the special genre of testimony, including videotestimony. Throughout this course, we will ask questions about the relationships between writing and loss, mourning and historiography (the writing of history), elegy and trauma, personal grief and communal expression.

Course requirements include regular attendance and informed class participation, plus 2 or 3 essays interpreting the primary literary texts and making use of theoretical texts where appropriate. There may be brief oral reports assigned as well.

165AC
Special Topics in American Cultures: Captivity in America
Beam, Dorri
TTh 2-3:30
243 Dwinelle

Areas of Concentration: 2; 3; 4

Book List: Rowlandson: The Sovereignty and Goodness of God; Silko: Yellow Woman; Spofford: “Circumstance”; Cabeza de Vaca: Castaways; Capt. J. Smith; Disney’s Pocahontas; Apess: A Son of the Forest; Zitkala-Sa: American Indian Stories; Equiano: The Interesting Narrative of the Life Olaudah Equiano; Jacobs: Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl; Turner: The Confessions of Nat Turner; Wideman: Brothers and Keepers; Indian Ledger Art

Course Description: This course considers the captivity narrative as a recurring form in American literature and asks why it should be so prevalent in a “land of freedom.” We will expand this category beyond its traditional focus on Puritan captivity (in which Indians are the captors) to encompass a myriad of responses to captivity in a variety of forms in colonial, eighteenth-, and nineteenth-century American texts. The condition of captivity will be treated as a particularized scene of writing, one often productive of a crisis of language. We will examine issues of cultural contact and containment, freedom and imprisonment, and national inclusion and exclusion in the narratives and stories of not only Puritans, but also captured Africans, Native Americans, and women in early America . Finally, how is the reader “captured” by captivity narratives? How, as students of American literature, should we understand our point of contact with captivity narratives? This is a seminar requiring sustained and substantive class participation.

This course satisfies U.C. Berkeley’s American Cultures requirement. It is a seminar that is open to declared English majors only.

166/1
Special Topics: Race and Performance in the 20th-Century U.S.
Saul, Scott
MWF 11-12
220 Wheeler

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

Book List: J.W. Johnson: The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man; J. Hagedorn: Dogeaters; W. Brown: Darktown Strutters; A. Davis: Blues Legacies and Black Feminism; A. D. Smith: Twilight Los Angeles

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.

166/2
Special Topics: The 20th-Century Epic in Prose
Rubenstein, Michael
TTh 9:30-11
Note new room: 110 Wheeler

Areas of Concentration: 1E; 2; 3

Book List (tentative): Joyce, J.: Ulysses (selections); Garcia-Marquez, G.: One Hundred Years of Solitude; Rushdie, S.: Satanic Verses; Chamoiseau, P.: Texaco

Course Description: Historically the epic has to do with heroes. The problem in the twentieth century, with the “coming of the state,” of rationalization and modernization, is that the age of heroes is, generally speaking, over. How does the novel, then, both preserve some epic functions and break with epic tradition? If heroes are dead, what emerges in their narrative place? Why does the traditional verse epic seem to mutate generically, by the 20th century, into the encyclopedic novel? If epics are traditionally attempts to tell a story about some sort of totality, like a nation or a people, what kinds of totalities does the 20th century epic imagine? Two medium-length papers and bi-weekly short writing assignments (counting as your participation grade) are required.

170
Literature and the Arts
Hanson, Kristin
MWF 1-2
24 Wheeler

Areas of Concentration, Book List, and Course Description: For more information on this class, please email the professor at khanson@berkeley.edu.

180A This course has been cancelled.

180E
The Epic
Altieri, Charles
TTh 12:30-2
30 Wheeler

Area of Concentration: 3

Book List: Homer: Iliad,Odyssey; Vergil: Aeneid; Dante: Inferno, Paradiso; Milton, J.: Paradise Lost ; Wordsworth, W.: Prelude (1850 Edition); Pound, Ezra: Selected Cantos

Course Description: I imagine this course as an introduction to the pleasure of reading and thinking about the major epics in Western Culture. We will look especially at changing definitions in what is meant by “culture.” And we will immerse ourselves in how writers build on and modify their predecessors as itself an exercise in interpreting what culture can be.

H195A/1
Honors Course
JanMohamed, Abdul
TTh 9:30-11
note new room: 101 Wheeler

Area of Concentration: 5

Book List: Rivkin, Julie and Ryan, Michael, eds.: Literary Theory: An Anthology; Morrison, Toni: The Bluest Eye

Course Description: The fall semester of this section of the honors course will be devoted to a rigorous examination of the theoretical paradigms that cast strong influences on contemporary critical practices. (Students averse to theory might not be happy in this section.) While the course will try to do justice to diverse theoretical approaches, my own theoretical preoccupation lies in the areas dealing with Minority Discourse, Postcolonialism, socio-political and psychoanalytic approaches to literature and culture. We will use Toni Morrison’s Bluest Eye as the single literary text on which to test various theoretical paradigms. During the fall 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. In this course students are entirely free to devise and complete a thesis of their own choosing . With the help of the instructor, students will be asked to define and frame their thesis topic by the end of the fall semester. The spring semester will then be conducted like a tutorial, in the course of which the students will complete their research and write their thesis.

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 18; 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
Langan, Celeste
TTh 12:30-2
305 Wheeler

Area of Concentration: 5

Book List: Auster, P.: City of Glass : The Graphic Novel ; Culler, J.: Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction; Guillory, J.: Cultural Capital; Muller, J., et al., eds.: The Purloined Poe; a Course Reader

Course Description: This course is designed to enable students to undertake a significant research project in the study of literature in English. In the fall semester, we will concentrate largely on two terms in that sentence: “significant” and “literature.” What makes a research question, problem, or project a “significant” one? Does it merely involve choosing to study a “significant” writer or text? (And what makes some writers/texts more significant than others?) Or do new issues and objects emerge as significant in response to different historical conjunctures and intellectual agendas? To what extent can the object itself—“literature”—be defined within or against these frames? Is literature a narrower or broader category than “writing”? For example, is “poetry” a subset of literature or its epitome? Or, as “spoken word,” does it not belong to the category of “literature” at all? Is it best to see literature itself as a subset of “media”? If so, what is being communicated—information or ideology, feeling or thought, truth or a lie?

Students applying for this class should read Culler’s Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction over the summer. They should also select—provisionally—a writer or text or issue for research. A useful strategy in this selection might be: what writer or text or subject matter has most challenged or cemented my ideas about what literature is and what happens when it is read?

During the fall semester, students will be required to keep a journal recording their responses to the weekly reading, and to participate in a group-designed class. By the end of the semester, students must submit a short essay (7-10 pages) outlining a research project and articulating its significance in relation to the category of “literature.” During the spring semester of this year-long course, students are expected to complete an honors thesis of 40+ pages. Those students working on related issues, periods, genres, or writers will form working groups, which will meet weekly to read each other’s drafts on a rotating basis. Each student will also meet regularly with me and a second faculty advisor with expertise in the student’s chosen area of research.

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 18; 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
Schweik, Susan
TTh 2-3:30
283 Dwinelle

Area of Concentration: 5

Book List: T.B.A.

Course Description: By the end of this year-long course you will have produced a substantive and polished piece of writing on a topic of your choosing. In the fall semester, we’ll work on developing your theoretical self-consciousness and honing your analytic skills as you begin the process of writing your honors thesis.

Students who satisfactorily complete H195A-B (the Honors Course) may choose to waive the 150 (Senior Seminar) requirement.

Return to top

Last modified: October 04, 2006

Upper-Division Courses, Part II

Fall 2006

Courses: