Upper-Division Courses, Part I
Fall 2007
ENGLISH MAJORS: The areas of concentration for each upper-division course are typed right above the book list for the class. In addition, please click on the Areas of Concentration for a list of all the courses that fall under each area of concentration, as well as a list of Fall 2006 courses that satisfy the pre-1800 requirement for the English major.
100/1
Junior Seminar: The Novel and Its Theory/Theory and Its Novels
Miller, D.A.
MW 11-12:30
300 Wheeler
Areas of Concentration: 1D; 3; 5
Book List: Austen, J.: Emma; Bakhtin, M.: The Dialogical Imagination; Balzac, H.: Pčre Goriot; Barthes, R.: S/Z; Bourdieu, P.: The Rules of Art; Dostoevsky, F.: Crime and Punishment; Flaubert, G.: Sentimental Education; Forster, E.M.: Aspects of the Novel; Lukács, G.: Theory of the Novel; Miller, D.A.: Jane Austen, or The Secret of Style
NB: Student are asked to use the editions ordered; this is particularly crucial in the matter of novels we will be reading in translation.
Course Description: The seminar undertakes to read four major novelists, each in conjunction with a theorist or critic who has based his account of the novel-form on this one particular practitioner. The pairings are: Balzac/Barthes, Flaubert/Bourdieu, Dostoevsky/Bakhtin, and Austen/Miller. These accounts will also help us reflect on two ostensibly universal understandings of the novel, by Lukács and Forster, and vice versa.
Be sure to read the paragraph on page 1 of this Announcement of Classes regarding enrollment in English 100!
100/2
Junior Seminar: The Harlem Renaissance
Hejinian, Lyn
MW 12-1:30
305 Wheeler
Areas of Concentration: 1E; 2; 6
Book List: Cullen, C., ed.: Caroling Dusk; DuBois, W.E.B.: The Souls of Black Folk; Hughes, L.: The Langston Hughes Reader; Hughes, L.: The Big Sea; Hurston, Z.: Their Eyes Were Watching God; Johnson, J.: Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man; Larsen, N.: Passing; Lewis, D., ed: The Portable Harlem Renaissance Reader; Locke, A., ed.: The New Negro; McKay, C.: Home to Harlem; Toomer, J.: Cane. In addition to these texts, a required reader will be available at Copy Central on Bancroft.
Course Description: This seminar will examine significant works of the extraordinary cultural unfolding that has come to be known as the Harlem Renaissance. Though we will concentrate on literary works, we will also examine some of the music and visual works from the period. As we attempt to understand the broader implications and contexts of this key moment in American cultural history, we will also consider its long trajectory and its lasting influence on American artistic invention. Topics for discussion will include questions pertaining to aesthetic identity (and aesthetic anxiety); race and nation; cultural forms, formations, and deformations; artistic thought and double-consciousness.
Be sure to read the paragraph on page 1 of this Announcement of Classes regarding enrollment in English 100!
100/3
Junior Seminar: Introduction to Narrative Theory
Hutson, Richard
MW 4-5:30
109 Wheeler
Areas of Concentration: 3; 5
Book List:
Aristotle: Poetics; Bakhtin, M.: The Dialogic Imagination; Barthes, R.: S/Z; Propp, V.: The Morphology of the Folktale; Sophocles I.: Three Tragedies
In addition to the booklist above, there is a class reader (Copy Central).
Course Description:
This is an introduction to some classics in the theory of narrative. We will look also at a number of, mainly, short narratives and analyze them closely, slowly. Theorists as early as Aristotle always used an exemplary narrative for their analyses, and so we shall have to read the narratives of the theorists along with the theories. We shall strive to listen to stories, to see or imagine how plots are composed, organized.
There will be a number of exercises, many of them ungraded but required. And I project that there will be required about five papers that will be graded.
Be sure to read the paragraph on page 1 of this Announcement of Classes regarding enrollment in English 100!
100/4
Junior Seminar: Literature of the Americas
Jones, Donna
MW 4-5:30
note new room: 130 Wheeler
Areas of Concentration: 2; 3; 5
Book List: Todorov, T.: The Conquest of America : The Question of the Other;Women's Indian Captivity Narratives; Conrad, J.: Nostromo ; Whitman, W.: Leaves of Grass ; Enrique, J.: Rodó Ariel ; Dreiser, T.: Sister Carrie ; Galeano, E.: Memory of Fire: Genesis
Course Description: This course takes a comparative look at the literature of North and South America , focusing on the construction of racial and regional identities in a comparative context. We shall also explore the question of method, through an examination of critical writings on the relation between historiography and literature. The story of the New World is often represented as discontinuous, fragmented—beginning with the histories of its indigenous people, interrupted by the multiple histories of conquest, pacification and migration. In our examination of literature and critical work which examines the historical events of conquest, slavery and modernization we shall address these questions: 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?
Be sure to read the paragraph on page 1 of this Announcement of Classes regarding enrollment in English 100!
100/5
Junior Seminar: Prison Literature
Fielding, John
MW 5-6:30
305 Wheeler
Areas of Concentration: 1E; 2
Book List: Vidocq, F.E.: Memoirs of Vidocq: Master of Crime ; Berkman., A.: Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist ; Black, J.: You Can’t Win ; Himes, C.: Yesterday Will Make You Cry ; Braly, M.: On the Yard ; Bunker, E.: Animal Factory ; Carr, J.: Bad ; Foucault, M.: Discipline and Punish ; Lopez, E.: They Call Me Mad Dog ; Course Reader: consisting of short stories, poetry, critical articles and other, shorter texts
Course Description: Because the percentage of the American population that has experienced incarceration is at an historical high and growing, particularly within the African American community, a study of the literature of incarceration has never been more timely. In this course we will lay both a critical and literary framework for what may be considered the long overlooked counterpart to more popular and studied memoirs of crime, novels of detection and police procedurals. While much critical attention has already been paid to these latter genres, we will explore this underside, or locked away consequence of the clash of crime and law through the study of some seminal, some overlooked, and some contemporary representations of life behind bars. Beginning with the trial and execution of Socrates, we will trace our way through two pioneering European and American works, before narrowing our focus to a number of twentieth-century American exemplars.
Complementing our study of these autobiographical novels--interesting, personal responses to brutally conformist institutions--we will use Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish , along with a number of articles in a course reader, as a critical foundation for understanding the themes raised by an aesthetics of confinement. Among other questions, we will consider the ways in which confinement might inform the private reading experience, or even the modern, subjugated condition in which everyone might be figured as prisoners in a police state assigning crimes, guilt and cells within a state-wide military industrial facility. Conversely, the escapist power of literature will also be considered insofar as these texts address the liberating potential, and in some cases ultimate failure, of literature as a means of transcending or otherwise transforming the modern police state’s imperative to discipline and punish.
We will also supplement our study through the analysis of some prison poetry and films, through which we will examine Hollywood ’s fascination with, even glorification of, prison life.
[Warning: Some of the texts of this course depict graphic and disturbing episodes of sexuality and violence.]
Be sure to read the paragraph on page 1 of this Announcement of Classes regarding enrollment in English 100!
100/7
Junior Seminar:
Women, Nationality, and Modernism
Hollis, Catherine
TTh 9:30-11
note new room: 223 Dwinelle
Areas of Concentration: 1E; 2; 3; 4
Book List: Sylvia Ashton Warner: Spinster; Bowen, E.: The Last September and The Heat of the Day; Butts, M.: The Taverner Novels; Mansfield, K.: Stories; Rhys, J.: Voyage in the Dark, Good Morning, Midnight , and Wide Sargasso Sea ; Sylvia Townsend Warner: Lolly Willowes; White, A.: Frost in May; Woolf, V.: Three Guineas
Course Description: In Three Guineas, Virginia Woolf’s critique of patriarchy and war, she claims: “As a woman, I have no country. As a woman, I want no country. As a woman, my country is the whole world.” In this seminar, we will read women’s modernist fiction—from both English and colonial writers—that addresses questions of British national identity and gender through modernist literary experimentation. At least half of these writers are colonial subjects ( Anglo-Irish , New Zealand , and Dominica ), allowing us to situate their articulation of hybrid national identity against the native English writers. The novels we read in this seminar focus on childhood, schooling, sexuality, maternity, and aging as sites for the inscription of identity. Although such themes would seem to situate these novels as “women’s domestic realism” (and certainly many of them have been marginalized from accounts of canonical modernist fiction), we will find that their use of modernist style resists the compartmentalization of genre. Modernist style elucidates the fissures in the domestic: it marks the place of resistance within the domestic to the interpellation of identity by cultural and national discourses.
Be sure to read the paragraph on page 1 of this Announcement of Classes regarding enrollment in English 100!
100/8
Junior Seminar: Herman Melville
Breitwieser, Mitchell
TTh 11-12:30
221 Wheeler
Areas of Concentration: 1D; 3
Book List: Melville, H.: Typee; Melville, H.: Redburn; Melville, H.: Moby-Dick; Melville, H.: Billy Budd and Other Stories; Melville, H.: Selected Poems; Melville, H.: Pierre
Course Description: A close reading of several of Melville’s works, emphasizing his recursiveness, the manner in which his writing returns repeatedly to several fundamental issues in order to explore more deeply the contradictions that launched his writing. Attendance and participation in discussion are required, along with two ten-page essays.
Be sure to read the paragraph on page 1 of this Announcement of Classes regarding enrollment in English 100!
100/9
Junior Seminar: Daniel Defoe
Starr, George
TTh 11-12:30
222 Wheeler
Areas of Concentration: 1C; 6
Book List: Landa (ed.): Journal of the Plague Year; Starr (ed.): Moll Flanders; Richetti (ed.): Robinson Crusoe; Blewett (ed.): Roxana; Furbank & Owens (ed.): True-Born Englishman & Other Writings (obtainable through ABEbooks). Other texts will be available electronically or photocopied.
Course Description: Reading and discussion of representative works in various genres, treating Defoe’s career and writings as of interest in themselves, and as offering direct (if slanted) access to all the major cultural issues of his day, political, economic, and religious as well as literary. Writings with less obvious claims on our attention than the prose fiction will figure prominently, although proportions can be adjusted as the course unfolds.
Be sure to read the paragraph on page 1 of this Announcement of Classes regarding enrollment in English 100!
100/12
Junior Seminar:
Narratives of Biographical Detection
Breitwieser, Mitchell
TTh 2-3:30
note new room: 109 Wheeler
Areas of Concentration: 1E; 3
Book List: Symons, A.J.A.: The Quest for Corvo; Faulkner, W.: Absalom, Absalom; Ambler, E.: A Coffin for Dimitrios; Welles, O.: Citizen Kane (film to be viewed in a special class session); Wolf, C.: The Quest for Christa T.; Byatt, A.S.: Possession; Roth, P.: American Pastoral
Course Description: Something about someone dead catches the attention of someone living. The person still living knows enough about the dead person to come to feel an urgent interest in the dead person’s story, but not enough to know why the story is so urgent. So the living person becomes an investigator, sifting through musty archives, anonymous legends and imperfect memories. The story of the investigator is as important as the story of the investigated: whence the interest? how does the investigation determine its own outcome? what does the investigation have to do with broader histories? Two ten-page essays will be required, along with regular attendance and participation.
Be sure to read the paragraph on page 1 of this Announcement of Classes regarding enrollment in English 100!
100/15
Junior Seminar: Literature and Media Theory
Langan, Celeste
TTh 3:30-5
259 Dwinelle
Areas of Concentration: 1D or 1E; 5
Book List: Beckett, S.: Krapp's Last Tape; Danielewski, M.: House of Leaves; Goethe, W.: The Sorrows of Young Werther; Mann, E.:, Four Plays; Johnson, R.: Radi Os; Phillips, Tom: A Humument; Stoker, B.: Dracula; Williams, W.C.: Paterson. Secondary reading: Bolter and Grusin: Remediations; Kittler, F.: Gramophone Film Typewriter; McLuhan, M.: Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man
Course Description: This course will treat literature—its various genres, including novel, drama, poetry—from the point of view of media theory. Our particular interest will be in the status of the "document”—an historically real or ostensibly real document that is somehow presented, represented, or mediated by the art form (or “platform”) in question. Using Marshall McLuhan’s dictum that "the content of one medium is always another medium" as a guiding concept, we will address two central issues. First: by comparing "documents" as they are mediated in both 19th- and 20th-century literary forms, we will try to assess the impact of other media, especially photography, film, and recorded sound, on literature’s "documentary" evidence. One question that may emerge, as we consider the history of mediation from Dracula to Danielewski’s House of Leaves and the CD Haunted (by Danielewski’s sister, Poe) is why mediation is so often registered an occult or gothic phenomenon. Second: by focusing on the different issues of mediation that emerge when the "document" in question is already literary (Johnson’s RADI OS corrosively rewrites paRADIse lOSt), we will attempt to theorize the kind of testimony, the kind of historical document, that literature is, especially for the so-called “new media.”
Be sure to read the paragraph on page 1 of this Announcement of Classes regarding enrollment in English 100!
100/19
Junior Seminar: Film Noir
Bader, Julia
Seminars TTh 5:30-7 P.M. in 220 Wheeler, plus film screenings Thursdays 7-10 P.M. (also in 220 Wheeler)
Areas of Concentration: 1E; 3; 4; 6
Book List: Telotte, J.: Voices in the Dark; Kaplan, E.: Women in Film Noir; Silver & Ursini, eds.: Film Noir Reader 4; Turner, G.: Film as Social Practice
Course Description: We will examine film noir’s relationship to “classical” Hollywood cinema, as well as its history, theory and generic markers, while analyzing in detail the major films in this area. The course will also be concerned with the social and cultural background of the 40's, the representation of femininity and masculinity, and the spread of Freudianism.
Be sure to read the paragraph on page 1 of this Announcement of Classes regarding enrollment in English 100!
102
Topics in the English Language
Banfield, Ann
MWF 11-12
385 Le Conte
Areas of Concentration: 7
Book List: Radford, A.: Transformational Grammar: A First Course
Course Description: An introduction to syntactic theory with a focus on English syntax.
105
Anglo-Saxon England
Nolan, Maura
TTh 12:30-2
note new room: 110 Barrows
Areas of Concentration: 1A
Book List: Bede: Ecclesiastical History of the English People; Campbell, J., ed.: The Anglo-Saxons; Crossley-Holland, K., ed.: The Anglo-Saxon World; Donoghue, D., ed. and Heaney, S., trans.: Beowulf: A Verse Translation; Howe, N., ed. and Donaldson, E., trans.: Beowulf: A Prose Translation; Keynes, S. and Lapidge, M., eds.: Alfred the Great; Webb, J. F. and Farmer, D. H., eds.: The Age of Bede
Course Description: In this course we will read a wide variety of writing ranging across the entire Anglo Saxon period, from chronicles to histories to saints’ lives to poetry, riddles, and charms. Our focus will be on the intersections among history, culture, art, and writing. We will ask ourselves how “ England ” came into being as a cultural and political idea, and how notions of “Englishness” affected the kinds of writing that people were likely to produce. We will explore the artwork of various groups, including burial artifacts, coins, manuscripts and other visual artifacts, and ask ourselves what such materials have to do with the development of a literary tradition. We will talk about cultural contact, colonization, and imperialism, especially in the context of pagan and Christian ideas about conversion and social change. You will have the opportunity to experiment with Anglo-Saxon modes of cultural production, particularly alliterative poetry, but also other forms of writing and art. Students need not have any prior knowledge of Old English or of Anglo-Saxon history; all texts will be in translation.
This course satisfies the pre-1800 requirement for the English major.
114A
English Drama to 1603
Miller, Jennifer
TTh 2-3:30
101 Wurster
Areas of Concentration: 1B; 3
Book List and Course Description: For more information on this course, please email the professor at j_miller@berkeley.edu.
This course satisfies the pre-1800 requirement for the English major.
115B
The English Renaissance (17th Century)
Picciotto, Joanna
TTh 3:30-5
note new room: 123 Wheeler
Areas of Concentration: 1B
Book List: Behn, A.: The Rover; Bunyan, J.: Grace Abounding; Donne, J.: Complete English Poems; Etherege, G.: The Man of Mode; Maclean, H.: Ben Jonson and the Cavalier Poets; Milton, J.: Samson Agonistes; Webster, J.: The Duchess of Malfi. There will also be a course reader, containing mostly poetry.
Course Description: A survey of England’s “century of revolution,” focusing on the relationship between literature, philosophy, and politics in the period.
This course satisfies the pre-1800 requirement for the English major.
117A
Shakespeare
Landreth, David
TTh 12:30-2
390 Hearst Mining
Areas of Concentration: 1B; 3
Book List: Marlowe, C.: The Jew of Malta; Shakespeare, W.: The Riverside Shakespeare
Course Description: This class studies the first half of Shakespeare's career, including his best-known comedies and history plays as well as his non-dramatic poetry. (Later plays—the major tragedies, the tragicomic romances—will be covered in depth in 117B next semester, and in survey in 117S). We will meet as a lecture, although we will look for opportunities to converse ensemble and in smaller project-centered groups. Our focus will be on Shakespeare's stunningly rapid development of his drama as an art form through his continual experimentation with the forms of theatrical genre.
117S
Shakespeare
Nelson, Alan
TTh 9:30-11
159 Mulford
Areas of Concentration: 1B; 3
Book List: Bevington, D., ed.: The Complete Works (of William Shakespeare)
Course Description: In this course, we will attempt to read as many Shakespeare plays as can be got through conveniently in fifteen weeks. In general we will try to cover one play per week, but along the way we will devote a week to an introduction of the author, his times, his poems, his plays, and his language; a week to the Sonnets; and we will take extra time for longer and more complex plays like Hamlet. So we will manage about a dozen plays, trying also to cover a range of genres including comedy, history, tragedy, and so-called romance. We will be thinking of plot, character, and action, but above all of dramatic poetry. Information will be posted before the class begins, and throughout the semester, on the instructor's website (see below). Students should anticipate writing three short papers, a midterm and a final exam, and possible quizzes. Students should also anticipate attending lecture regularly, reading the assignments carefully and in advance of lecture, and indeed participating fully in the work of the class.
Instructor's website: http://socrates.berkeley.edu/~ahnelson
117T
Shakespeare in the Theater
Booth, Stephen
Lectures TTh 3:30-5 in 20 Wheeler, plus rehearsals TTh 5-6:30 (also in 20 Wheeler)
Areas of Concentration: 1B; 3
Book List: Shakespeare, W.: Macbeth, ed Braunmuller (Pelican Shakespeare)
Course Description: Most of the energy in this course will go into producing a modest but strenuously rehearsed staging of Macbeth. The performances will probably be in mid-November (depending on the availability of a suitable indoor playing space). The course will meet Tuesdays and Thursdays from 3:30 to 6:30, but students—particularly cast members and most particularly cast members with large parts—can expect to be asked for several hours of additional rehearsal time every week That’s as precise as I can be so many months in advance.
NOTE: Because this course concentrates on one play only, it will not satisfy the Shakespeare requirement for English majors.
118
Milton
Goodman, Kevis
Lectures MW 3-4 in 101 Morgan (note new room), plus one hour of discussion section per week (all sections F 3-4)
Areas of Concentration: 1B or 1C
Book List: Milton, J.: Complete Poems and Major Prose (ed. Merritt Y. Hughes). There will probably also be a small Course Reader at a copy shop tba.
Course Description: The later poet William Blake imagined Milton “descending . . . clothed in black, severe and silent,” and too often that is the image that has descended upon us as well. This course will offer a very different poet and political figure. As we read Milton’s major poetry (Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, Samson Agonistes and shorter verse) and selections from his controversial prose, we will study the Milton who witnessed and participated in two revolutions (one political, the other scientific), the radical polemicist who wrote a tract justifying regicide plus several pamphlets justifying divorce and a famously vehement argument against government licensing of the press, and of course the magisterial poet who composed great epic, lyric, and dramatic verse. We will also think about Milton’s ambivalent stances toward classical myth and Renaissance literature, the place of his unorthodox theology in relation to his political and his proto-psychological theory, his writings on love, his prescient “media theory,” and his long preoccupation with vocation.
Course requirements will probably include two essays, a midterm, and final; they will certainly involve vigilant attendance of both lecture and section, combined with careful, timely preparation of the reading assignments.
This course satisfies the pre-1800 requirement for the English major.
125A
The English Novel (Defoe Through Scott)
Sorensen, Janet
MWF 10-11
2 LeConte
Areas of Concentration: 1C; 3
Book List: Haywood, E: Love in Excess; Defoe, D.: Roxana; Richardson, S.: Pamela; Fielding, H.: Shamela and Joseph Andrews; Lennox , C.: The Female Quixote; Walpole, H.: The Castle of Otranto; Austen, J.: Northanger Abbey; Scott, W.: The Bride of Lammermoor
Course Description: As we read a variety of novels from the period credited with the “rise of the novel,” we shall consider what it was that might have been new about this form of writing. We shall be especially interested in tracking what it was that some found quite dangerous about it. Like surfing the internet, novel reading wasn’t something you wanted the “impressionable”— from teenagers to women—to do alone, or maybe at all. Might the perceived threat have had something to do with early novels’ connection to romance and the erotic and then with what one critic calls the “narrative transvestitism” of the early novel—in which men write books featuring female heroines who will describe, in an innovative, frank prose style, how a woman really feels? Highly conscious of these debates, eighteenth-century writers responded to them in their texts, while an emerging set of women writers also negotiated the tricky new terrain of writing for a public market. Some of these texts suggest rhetorical and thematic means of legitimating novel writing, appealing to (and sometimes transforming) moral discourse, creating hybrids of new and classical writing, deploying authorized genres of writing, such as history. Yet all of them resist easy divisions between legitimate and illegitimate, offering instead complex new forms of writing and, some would argue, consciousness; our work will be to identify and analyze some of these.
Requirements include willingness to engage in discussion, reading quizzes, a mid-term, two long papers.
This course satisfies the pre-1800 requirement for the English major.
125D
The 20th-Century Novel
Jones, Donna
MWF 1-2
note new room: 60 Evans
Areas of Concentration: 1E; 3
Book List: Dreiser, T.: Sister Carrie ; Woolf, V.: The Waves ; Faulkner, W.: Absalom, Absalom! ; Mann, T.: Doctor Faustus ; Tutuola, A.: My Life in the Bush of Ghosts
Course Description: This course is a general survey of the 20th-century novel. The novel is the quintessential form of expression of modernity and modern subjectivity. In this survey of key works of the century, we will explore the novel form as it is framed by these three thematics, history, modernism and empire. Some questions we will address: how have the vicissitudes of modernity led to a re-direction of historical narration within the novel?; how have modernist aesthetic experimentations re-shaped the very form of the novel?; and lastly, how has the phenomenon of imperialism, the asymmetrical relations of power between center and periphery, widened the scope and influence of fictive milieu?
125E
The Contemporary Novel
Bishop, John
TTh 2-3:30
note new room: 105 North Gate
Areas of Concentration: 1E; 3
Book List: Carter, A.: The Bloody Chamber; Beckett, S.: Watt; DeLillo, D.: Libra; McCarthy, C.: The Road; Nabokov, V.: Pale Fire; Pynchon, T.: Against the Day; Silko, L.: Ceremony
Course Description: An exploration of the novels listed above, all of them published since 1960. 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.
127
Modern Poetry
Blanton, Dan
TTh 11-12:30
note new room: 4 LeConte
Areas of Concentration: 1E; 3
Book List: Auden, W.: Selected Poems; Eliot, T.: Four Quartets,Selected Poems; Moore , M.: Collected Poems; Pound, E.: A Draft of XXX Cantos; Silkin, J. (ed.): The Penguin Book of First World War Poetry; Stein, G.: Tender Buttons; Stevens, W.: Collected Poems; Williams, W.: Paterson; Yeats, W.: Collected Poems
Course Description: A survey of the modernist turn in poetry. This course will explore some of the more remarkable (and occasionally notorious) formal experiments of the twentieth century’s turbulent first half. We will contend with work from Britain , Ireland , and the United States , seeking to devise strategies with which to read texts that often seem impervious to reading and striving to account for the historical pressures that made such experiments seem necessary in the first place.
130A
American Literature: Before 1800
Donegan, Kathleen
MWF 12-1
30 Wheeler
Area of Concentration: 1C
Book List: Peter C. Mancall (ed.): Envisioning America; William Bradford: Of Plymouth Plantation; Mary Rowlandson: The Sovereignty and Goodness of God; Benjamin Franklin: The Autobiography and Other Writings; Olaudah Equiano: The Interesting Narrative; Thomas Jefferson: Notes on the State of Virginia; Hector St. John de Crevecoeur; Letters from an American Farmer; Charles Brockden Brown: Wieland, or The Transformation; Hannah Webster Foster: The Coquette
Course Description: This course will survey the literatures of early America, from the tracts that envisioned the triumphs of British colonization to the novels that measured the after-shocks of the American Revolution. Although our focus is on Anglophone texts, we will consider colonial America as a place of encounter – a place where diversity was a given, negotiation was a necessity, and transformation was inescapable. Cultures took shape through a dramatic series of contests, crises and consolidations, reflected in a literary record of h Lectures will explore the role of writing in contact and settlement; in captivity and slavery; in religious and social formations; in business and in justice; in approaching the natural world; in gauging the stakes of revolution; and in imagining a new republic. Throughout, we will pay special attention to how writing operated to forge new models of the self that could withstand and absorb the tumult of colonial life. Authors will include Bradford, Rowlandson, Franklin, Equiano, Jefferson, and the early American novelists Charles Brockden Brown and Hannah Webster Foster.
This course satisfies the pre-1800 requirement for the English major.
130D
American Literature: 1900-1945
Snyder, Katherine
MWF 12-1
note new room: 141 McCone
Areas of Concentration: 1E; 2; 3; 4
Book List: Readings for the course will include many, but not all, of the following (please wait until after the first class meeting to purchase your books):
Cahan, A.: The Rise of David Levinsky; Cather, W.: My Antonia; Faulkner, W.: The Sound and the Fury; Fitzgerald, F.S.: The Great Gatsby; Hughes, L: The Ways of White Folks; Johnson, J. W.: The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man; Larsen, N: Quicksand and Passing; Loos, A: Gentlemen Prefer Blondes; Wharton, E.: The House of Mirth; West, N: The Day of the Locust or Miss Lonelyhearts; plus a photocopied reader including shorter writings by many of the following: Mary Antin, Willa Cather, Countee Cullen, John Dos Passos, Theodore Dreiser, W.E.B. DuBois, Finley Peter Dunne, T.S. Eliot, Jessie Fauset, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Jacob Riis, Frank Norris, Jack London, Gertrude Stein, Sui Sin Far, Jean Toomer, Anzia Yezierska
Course Description: We will read a diverse selection of writing, predominantly prose fiction, published in the first four decades of the twentieth century, a period of rapid urbanization, industrialization, and (im)migration that gave rise to such new cultural figures as The New Negro, the New Woman, and the New Immigrant. We will focus on issues of social, economic, and geographic mobility during the Roaring Twenties and the Great Depression, as it affected a wide array of American authors and fictional characters, including those who immigrated to the U.S., those who moved from one region to another or between country and city, and those who took up residence abroad. We will explore the plot trajectories and narrative stances that these authors deployed to map their own cultural identities, as well as those of their fictional creations, in the new American century.
Requirements include: several 5-7 page essays; occasional pop quizzes; and possibly a midterm and a final exam. Please note that regular attendance at lectures is required.
133B
African American Literature and Culture Since 1917
JanMohamed, Abdul
TTh 9:30-11
note new room: 213 Wheeler
Areas of Concentration: 1E; 2; 3
Book List: Larsen, Nella: Quicksand and Passing; Wright, Richard: Native Son; Hurston, Zora Neale: Their Eyes Were Watching God; Ellison, Ralph: Invisible Man; Walker, Alice: The Third Life of Grange Copeland; Morrison, Toni: Beloved; Jones, Gayl: Corregidora; various: hip-hop lyrics re death (reader); screening of film: Thug Angel: Life of an Outlaw
Course Description: An examination of some of the major 20 th-century African American novels.
135AC
Literature of American Cultures:
Race, Ethnicity, and Disability in American Cultures
note new instructor: Saxton, Marsha
TTh 2-3:30
note new room: 2040 Valley LSB
Areas of Concentration: 1D or 1E; 2
Book List: Adams, M et al.: Readings for Diversity and Social Justice; Lai, H. et al.: Island: Poetry and History of Chinese Immigrants on Angel Island; Craft, W. and E.: Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom; Cable, G.W.: The Grandissimes; Morrison, T.: Sula; Dreger, A.: One of Us: Conjoined Twins and the Future of Normal; Dorris, M.: The Broken Cord; Fadiman, A.: The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down; Moraga, C.: Heroes and Saints and Other Plays
Course Description: This course will analyze the categories of “disability,” “race” and “ethnicity” critically. “Disability” as an identity category is always raced, whether we attend to that intersection or not, and people defined in racial terms are also always placed on axes of disability and ability, well and ill, normal and abnormal, malformed and well-formed. Much work on that ambiguous umbrella term “disability” treats disabled people as ungendered (that is, male), unraced (that is, white), without nationality (that is, native-born American but barely a citizen), and unsexualized (that is, heterosexual, but only in default). My aim in this course is to set up situations in which you can think about several of these categories simultaneously in the context of American cultures present and past.
To this end, we will take four historical examples as case studies. Each illustrates how racism and ableism have intertwined in American (dis)ability cultures. First we will examine immigration history (with some emphasis on Angel Island and Chinese immigration). Second, we will focus on how American writers have remembered two women of color who performed in freak shows and on how race, disability and gender issues intersect on the freak show (or today the talk show) stage. In the third unit, on slavery, we will begin to unearth a history of disability in American slavery and in the Jim Crow South. In the fourth module, we will discuss eugenics and the tight connections between race and disability in eugenic models of degeneration. The final section of the course will move into the present, first giving you some exposure to contemporary activist history that counters and undoes the dynamics we have been exploring, and then ending with three particular texts to anchor our analysis of the politics of representation of disability, gender, sexuality, class, race and ethnicity: Native American novelist Michael Dorris’s controversial memoir of raising his son who had Fetal Alcohol Syndrome, The Broken Cord, Anne Fadiman’s The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, and Chicana writer Cherrie Moraga’s play about farmworkers’organizing and the health effects of pesticides, Heroes and Saints.
A variety of guest speakers, including performance artists and disability movement activists, will visit us. We’ll view a series of films, including the silent eugenics film The Black Stork, or Are You Fit to Marry, a U.S. public health film on immigration from the 1930s, and several contemporary documentaries on subjects ranging from the medical separation of conjoined twins to contemporary disabled womens’ global organizing. Written requirements: two midterms, informal journal writing, and a final project that students can tailor to their own interests.
This course satisfies U.C. Berkeley’s American Cultures requirement.
C136/1 This class has been cancelled.
C136/2
Topics in American Studies: The Border
Co-taught by Gonzalez, Marcial and Lye, Colleen
TTh 11-12:30
213 Wheeler
This course is cross-listed with American Studies C111E section 2.
Areas of Concentration: 1E; 2; 3; 4; 6
Book List: Acosta, O. Z.: The Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo; Bulosan, C.: America is in the Heart; Castillo, A.: Sapogonia: An anti-romance in 3/8 meter; Gilb, D.: The Last Known Residence of Mickey Acuña; Kadohata, C.: The Floating World; Kingston, M. H.: The Woman Warrior; Ng, F. M.: Bone; Okada, J.: No-No Boy; Paredes, A.: George Washington Gómez; Viramontes, H.M.: Under the Feet of Jesus; Yamashita, K.: Tropic of Orange. A course reader consisting of contextual articles will also be assigned.
Course Description: Moving beyond the black-white binary that has long framed racial discourse in the U.S. , this course examines how the experiences of Latinos and Asians intersect in the formation of the United States. We will begin by exploring the political and economic processes that have racialized Asian Americans and U.S. Latinos as “illegal aliens” and security threats, and by looking at the historical contexts that transnationalized the U.S. labor market. What kinds of border cultures resulted from these processes? What kinds of national or non-national identities? What kinds of political consciousness? To answer these questions, the course will focus on literature written by Asians and Chicana/os, with a particular interest in the social perspective uniquely afforded by the novel form.
141/1
Modes of Writing - Fiction, Poetry, and Drama
Abrams, Melanie (a.k.a.: Chandra, M.J.)
MWF 11-12
220 Wheeler
Area of Concentration: 3
Book List: Albee, E.: The American Dream and Zoo Story; Reader available at Copy Central
Course Description: This course will introduce students to the study of creative writing – fiction, poetry, and drama. Students will learn to talk critically about these genres and begin to feel comfortable and confident with their own writing of them. Students will write in each of these genres and will partake in class workshops where their work will be edited and critiqued by other students in the class.
(No application is required for this course, but most, if not all, of the spaces in the class will need to be reserved for English majors.)
141/2
Modes of Writing -
Race, (Creative) Writing, and Difference
Giscombe, Cecil
TTh 11-12:30
100 Wheeler
Areas of Concentration: 2; 3
Book List: See below. The book list is tentative; students should come to class before buying books.
Course Description: This course is an inquiry into the ways that race is constructed in literary texts. We’ll read Toni Morrison’s Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, and we’ll read some of the books she discusses: Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, Cather’s Sapphira and the Slave Girl, Hemingway’s To Have and Have Not. We’ll also read Douglass’ Narrative, Octavia Butler’s Kindred, and short works by Baldwin, Tess Slesinger, Richard Ford, and others.
Writing assignments will be broad; that is, they will allow for a variety of responses.
(No application is required for this course, but most, if not all, of the spaces in the class may need to be reserved for English majors.)
143A/1
Short Fiction
Chandra, Vikram
TTh 12:30-2
301 Wheeler
Areas of Concentration: None
Book List: TBA
Course Description: A short fiction workshop. Over the course of the semester, each student will write and revise two stories. Each participant in the workshop will edit student-written stories, and will write a formal critique of each manuscript. Students are required to attend two literary readings over the course of the semester, and write a short report about each reading they attend. Students will also take part in online discussions about fiction. Class attendance is mandatory. Throughout the semester, we will read published stories from various sources, and also essays by working writers about fiction and the writing life. The intent of the course is to have the students engage with the problems faced by writers of fiction, and discover the techniques that enable writers to construct a convincing representation of reality on the page.
To be considered for admission to this class, please submit 10-15 photocopied pages of your fiction, along with an application form, to Professor Chandra’s mailbox in 322 Wheeler, BY 4:00 P.M., TUESDAY, APRIL 17, AT THE LATEST.
Be sure to read the paragraph concerning creative writing courses on page 2 of this Announcement of Classes for further information regarding enrollment in such courses!
143A/2
Short Fiction
Mukherjee, Bharati (a.k.a.: Blaise, B.)
TTh 2-3:30
301 Wheeler
Areas of Concentration: None
Book List: Bausch, R. and R.V. Cassill, eds.: Norton Anthology of Short Fiction, 7 th edition; Mukherjee, B: The Middleman and Other Stories
Course Description: This is a course on the form, theory and practice of short fiction. It is conducted as a workshop. Students are expected to write 45 pages of original fiction during the semester and to participate in workshop discussions.
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 17, 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
Giscombe, Cecil
TTh 3:30-5
301 Wheeler
Areas of Concentration: None
Book List: Texts may include Best American Poetry 2007, Michael Ondaatje’s Collected Works of Billy the Kid, Gwendolyn Brooks’ Selected Poems. This list is tentative. Students should come to class before buying books.
Course Description: The question is whether or not poetry can be more than a series of successful gestures, as F. Scott Fitzgerald put it rather long ago, or arrive at something other than the statement or restatement of an emotional truth or idea. Can poetry intervene? What’s the relationship of poetry to public iconography, to issues of the public representation of race and class and gender?
Can poetry challenge the way we look at culture and language? The argument of this course is that it can and must. (And who is this “we”?)
Workshop. Discussions. Weekly writing assignments. All students will participate in a public, out-of-class poetry as intervention project; the nature and scope of this project will depend on individual interests.
To be considered for admission to this class, please submit 5 photocopied pages of your poems, along with an application form, to Professor Giscombe’s mailbox in 322 Wheeler, BY 4:00 P.M., TUESDAY, APRIL 17, AT THE LATEST.
Be sure to read the paragraph concerning creative writing courses on page 2 of this Announcement of Classes for further information regarding enrollment in such courses!
143B/3
Verse
O'Brien, Geoffrey
W 3-6
301 Wheeler
Areas of Concentration: None
Book List: 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 17, AT THE LATEST.
Be sure to read the paragraph concerning creative writing courses on page 2 of this Announcement of Classes for further information regarding enrollment in such courses!
143N
Prose Non-fiction
Mukherjee, Bharati (a.k.a.: Blaise, B.)
TTh 11-12:30
301 Wheeler
Areas of Concentration: None
Book List: Atwan, R., ed.: The Best American Essays, 4 th edition
Course Description: This workshop 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 45 pages of non-fictional narrative.
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 17, 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!
C143V
Visual Autobiography
Wong, Hertha
TTh 9:30-12:30
300 Wheeler
Areas of Concentration: 1E, 2, 3
Book List: Momaday, N. S.: The Way to Rainy Mountain; Spiegelman, A.: Maus: Parts I and II; Reader (available from Copy Central).
Course Description: Visual autobiography encompasses a wide range of self-representations and self-narrations: conventional books in which images are integral to the whole, rather than mere supplementation or illustration; pictographic (picture-writing) ledgerbooks; photo-biographies; artists' books (individually handmade textual art objects); narrative quilts; comic books; electronic personal narratives; and other visual forms. This course emphasizes practice. Student work will be presented and discussed regularly in in-class critiques; these will be supplemented with written assignments and exercises. Students will read a variety of primary and secondary materials; participate in class discussions, exercises, and critiques; keep a visual/verbal journal; produce three visual/verbal projects and a major final project. At the end of the semester, there will be a public showing/reading/performing of student work.
This course satisfies U.C. Berkeley’s American Cultures requirement.
To be considered for admission to this class, please submit the special application form for English C143V/Visual Studies C185A/American Studies C174/U.G.I.S. C135 (which is a DIFFERENT application form from the one for OTHER creative writing courses, and which is available from the racks outside the English Department office [322 Wheeler Hall]), to Professor Wong’s mailbox in 322 Wheeler, BY 4:00 P.M., TUESDAY, APRIL 17, AT THE LATEST. (No writing sample is required for this particular course—just the application form.)
Be sure to read the paragraph concerning creative writing courses on page 2 of this Announcement of Classes for further information regarding enrollment in such courses!
Last modified: September 24, 2007