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Upper-Division Courses, Part II

Fall 2007

150/1
Senior Seminar: Plotting in Secret—Conspiracy and Identity in Contemporary Fiction
Pedretti, Mark
MW 4-5:30
note new room: 206 Wheeler

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

Tentative Book List (may include several of the following): Lyotard, J.-F.: The Postmodern Condition; Pynchon, T.: Gravity’s Rainbow; Weisenberger, S.: A Gravity’s Rainbow Companion; Ellison, R.: Invisible Man; Reed, I. : Mumbo Jumbo; Acker, K.: Blood and Guts in High School; Atwood, M.: The Handmaid’s Tale; DeLillo, D.: Libra; Lee, C.-R.: Native Speaker; Rushdie, S.: The Satanic Verses; a course reader; Michael Moore’s film Fahrenheit 9/11

Course Description: Jean-François Lyotard contends that “the postmodern condition” is marked by the disintegration of “metanarratives” that previously provided structure to the discourses of history, philosophy, and literature. Instead of a grand vision of singular and rational history, we have multiple, disparate “histories”; instead of narrative teleology, we have diffused and irresolvable modes of storytelling. While this development has created the opportunity for marginalized groups to contribute their voices to the narrative of history, it has simultaneously undermined the epistemic privilege that those voices might otherwise be afforded. The discourse of the conspiracy theory — from the JFK assassination to 9/11 — is a symptom of this epistemological double-bind, at once an attempt to recuperate the authority of historical metanarrative while leaving open a space for multiple and contradictory subjective experiences. This course will examine the functions that the conspiratorial mode serves in articulating and problematizing concepts of history, politics, and racialized and gendered identity. What Timothy Melley describes as “agency panic,” the sense that the individual is powerless in the face of secretive, monolithic political forces, finds its natural corollary in what Richard Hofstadter calls “the paranoid style.” We will consider how conspiracy emerges as a distinct rhetorical mode that serves both to diagnose the situation of individual consciousness in the contemporary socio-political world, while also suggesting strategies of resistance that capitalize on a performative flexibility that develops around oppressive conditions. We will also consider the effects that this discourse has on the experience of reading and the production of narrative form. We will attempt to contextualize our readings in their historical moment (the Cold War, the post-Cold War, the “War on Terror”) to ask how concepts of nation and citizenship are equally implicated by this hermeneutic. And we will examine other ways that the conspiratorial mode has entered the realm of public and political discourse.

Enrollment is limited and a written application is due BY 4:00 P.M., TUESDAY, APRIL 17; be sure to read the paragraph on page 2 of this Announcement of Classes regarding enrollment in English 150!

150/2
Senior Seminar: Victorian Madness and Mayhem - Constructions of Insanity in the Late-Nineteenth Century
Chevalier, Antoinette
TTh 9:30-11
101 Wheeler

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

Book List: Braddon, M. E.: Lady Audley’s Secret; Stevenson, R.L.: Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde; Stoker, B.: Dracula; Doyle, A.C.: The Sign of Four; Collins, W.: The Moonstone; Gissing, G.: New Grub Street

Course Description: In this class we will analyze how “madness” has been represented in fiction and culture of the late-Victorian era. We will examine mad scientists/doctors, monomaniacal detectives, women on the verge, writers stuck in creative quagmires, and—more generally—the excessive violence that so often accompanies constructions of “insanity” that are racialized, feminized, nationally constituted and, as we shall see, often class-based. We will look particularly at the increasing “medicalization” of insanity in the late-nineteenth century: How is madness diagnosed? What are its “signs” and how are these socially read? How does the spectacle of the “madhouse” affect the performance of gender roles and normative sexuality? The late-nineteenth century is often termed the “Age of Empire” in Britain , and thus we will analyze how the anxiety generated by the increasing immigration of “other” bodies to the metropole intersects with and problematizes England ’s seemingly eager consumption of imperial commodities: How is madness used to define otherness? How is the proliferation of opium, cocaine, oriental art, exotic kitsch, and so forth represented as both cultural and bodily invasion and therein a corruption of Englishness? How is the porosity of English borders constructed as an invitation to madness?

In addition to the novels noted above, required texts will also include a course reader containing current literary criticism along with non-fiction prose by nineteenth-century cultural critics.

150/3
Senior Seminar: William Faulkner
Liu, Sarah
TTh 11-12:30
note new room: 206 Wheeler

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

Book List: Faulkner, W.: Absalom, Absalom, As I Lay Dying, Go Down, Moses, Intruder in the Dust, Light in August, Sanctuary, The Sound and the Fury; Course reader

Course Description: Faulkner was a writer deeply rooted in the American South, using Southern themes, attitudes, and atmosphere to create his own mythical world of Yoknapatawpha County. Yet this world also examined the tragedy of the Civil War, racial violence, betrayal of human sympathies, and pressures for social change. How does Faulkner represent the traditional South as it enters into a changing, modern world? How does he use the woman, the poor white, the neurotic, the perennial stoic to both resist and transform society? How do alternative models of writing bring new expressions of humor and love, anxiety and tragedy? Through close readings of his major novels, supplemented by his short stories, essays, interviews, and letters, this class will focus on issues of race, class, and gender, considering Faulkner’s achievement as Modernist, political writer, humorist, and cultural critic.

Course Requirements:
-regular and informed class participation
-a class presentation
-a final seminar paper (15-20 pages)

150/4
Senior Seminar: The Fiction of Toni Morrison
JanMohamed, Abdul
TTh 12:30-2
225 Wheeler

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

Book List: Morrison, T.: The Bluest Eye, Sula, Song of Solomon, Tar Baby, Beloved, Jazz, Paradise, Love, Playing in the Dark

Course Description: An examination of the development of various themes in Toni Morrison’s fiction and the aesthetic rendition of these themes.

150/5
Senior Seminar: British Cinema
Puckett, Kent
TTh 12:30-2
103 Wheeler

Weekly film screenings are required (Mondays 7-10 P.M. in 300 Wheeler); the films will also be on reserve in Moffitt Library.

Areas of Concentration: 1E; 3; 6

Book List: A course reader; although I haven't finalized the list of films we'll watch, some of those listed below will be included along with some others.

Course Description: This course will look at the British cinema from the 1930s to the present from a number of different angles. First, we will consider British cinema as a national industry and ask how the economic and social conditions under which British films have been made, distributed, and received have affected their form, their content, and their relation to other national cinemas. What, if anything, makes British films different from what was and is happening, for instance, in Hollywood ? In order to answer these questions we will pay special attention to genre films: the war film (Henry V in 1945 and Lawrence of Arabia in 1962), the romance (Brief Encounter in 1945 and Bridget Jones's Diary in 2001), the spy film (The Man Who Knew Too Much in 1934 and Dr. No in 1962) , the gangster film (Get Carter in 1971 and Sexy Beast in 2000), etc. Second, we will look at different ways (both kind and unkind) in which the British cinema has represented Britishness at home and abroad. How does a national cinema respond to, help, or hinder shifts in the way national identity is understood and experienced? We'll look at films about the preservation of Britishness as a form of heritage, nostalgia about the passing of Britishness "as it was," and the presentation of other stories about Britishness that run against the grain of the first two. Finally, we will treat these British films as films and look very closely at them in order to develop a critical vocabulary with which to analyze and describe film at the level of form and content.

150/6
Senior Seminar: Asian American Novel
Lye, Colleen
TTh 2-3:30
305 Wheeler

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

Book List: Kingston, M. H.: China Men, Tripmaster Monkey, The Woman Warrior; Lee, C. R.: Aloft, A Gesture Life, Native Speaker; Okada, J.: No-No Boy; Wong, J.S.: Fifth Chinese Daughter; a Course Reader containing articles on Asian American history, ethnic and racial theory, and literary theory

Course Description: What is Asian American about the “Asian American” novel? To what extent is the Asian American a fictional subject and Asian American reality a literary effect? What are the stakes of thinking of Asian American subject matter in this way? In this course, we will explore these questions through a focus on the works of two major authors of Asian American fiction—Maxine Hong Kingston and Chang Rae Lee—whom we will also consider for their gendered approaches to the task of representing “Asian American reality.” Rather than taking for granted that an Asian American identity exists, we will examine how novels actively construct Asian American identity, as distinct from the way autobiographies or historical narratives do. This course is appropriate for anyone interested in theorizing ethnic literature in general, though participants will be expected to produce a senior thesis focusing on one or both of the major authors studied in the course.

Enrollment is limited and a written application is due BY 4:00 P.M., TUESDAY, APRIL 17; be sure to read the paragraph on page 2 of this Announcement of Classes regarding enrollment in English 150!

150/7
Senior Seminar: Utopian Literature
Starr, George
TTh 2-3:30
121 Wheeler

Areas of Concentration: 3; 6

Book List: More, Thomas: Utopia ; Swift, Jonathan: Gulliver’s Travels (1726); Scott, Sarah: Millenium Hall (1762); Bellamy, Edward: Looking Backward (1888); Morris, William: News from Nowhere (1892); Wells, H.G.: The Time Machine (1898) and When the Sleeper Wakes (1899), in Three Prophetic Science Fiction Novels ; Gilman, Charlotte P.: Herland (1915); Zamiatin, Eugene: We (1921); Orwell, George: 1984 (1949); Atwood, Margaret: Oryx and Crake (2003)

Course Description: Most Utopian authors are more concerned with selling readers on the social or political merits of their schemes than with the "merely" literary qualities of their writing. Although some Utopian writing has succeeded in the sense of making converts, and inspiring some readers to try to realize the ideal society, most has had limited practical impact, yet has managed to provoke readers in various ways—for instance, as a kind of imaginative fiction that comments on "things as they are" only indirectly, with fantasy and satire in varying doses. Among the critical questions posed by such material are the problematic status of fiction that is not primarily mimetic, but written in the service of some ulterior purpose; the shifting relationships between what is and what authors think might be or ought to be; how to create the new and strange other than by recombining the old and familiar; and so on. The reading list will include anti-Utopian as well as Utopian works, and possibly some writings by Malthus, Owen, Engels and Marx that do not present themselves as flights of fancy. Several films will be assigned (based on holdings in the Moffitt Library AVMC) and discussed (but not shown) in class, e.g. Lang’s Metropolis, Chaplin’s Modern Times, Gilliam’s Brazil and the like. Required writing will consist of a single 15-20-page term paper. Depending on enrollment, each student will be responsible for organizing and leading class discussion (probably teamed with another student) once during the semester. There will be no quizzes or exams, but seminar attendance and participation will be expected, and will affect grades.

Enrollment is limited and a written application is due BY 4:00 P.M., TUESDAY, APRIL 17 ; be sure to read the paragraph on page 2 of this Announcement of Classes regarding enrollment in English 150!

150/8
Senior Seminar: Edmund Spenser
Landreth, David
TTh 3:30-5
225 Wheeler

Areas of Concentration: 1B; 3

Book List (tenative): Ariosto, L.: Orlando Furioso; Ovid: Metamorphoses; Sidney, P.: Major Works; Spenser, E.: The Faerie Queene, ed. Hamilton; Spenser, E.: Shorter Poems, A View of the Present State of Ireland; Virgil: Aeneid, Eclogues

Course Description: This seminar will examine Spenser's career as itself a poetical object: an exquisitely-crafted imaginary travelogue for his poetic voice from the sunny fields of pastoral, to the erotic excitement and worldly disappointment of Elizabeth's court, to the shaping of a new and old world in the epic mirror of The Faerie Queene. We will consider this artful career as shaped by Spenser's individual ambition, on the one hand, and by his engagement with his classical forbears and modern rivals, on the other, in the productive dialectic that he stages again and again in his poetry between art and nature, poetics and experience, purpose and chance. Nor will we shy away from the question of the remaking of the world through empire in relation to Spenser's dismaying—and ultimately tragic—engagement in the Elizabethan colonization of Ireland . Our readings will alternate between books of The Faerie Queene, which will take up about half the semester's reading, and the range of Spenser's shorter poems, his most pressing influences from poets ancient and modern, and contemporary critical approaches that can guide students in their own research.

Students entering the class should have completed English 45A or an equivalent.

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

Enrollment is limited and a written application is due BY 4:00 P.M., TUESDAY, APRIL 17 ; be sure to read the paragraph on page 2 of this Announcement of Classes regarding enrollment in English 150!

150/9
Senior Seminar: The Canterbury Tales
Nolan, Maura
TTh 3:30-5
305 Wheeler

Areas of Concentration: 1A; 3; 7

Book List: Chaucer, G. (Mann, J, ed.): The Canterbury Tales

Course Description: In this senior seminar, we will read the entire Canterbury Tales. We’ll focus on questions about the emergence of vernacular poetry in English, Chaucer’s career and audience, literary style and form, the late-14 th-century context in which the Tales were written, and the sources and analogues that influenced Chaucer along the way. We will work on the Middle English language and on translation at the beginning of the semester, so all ability levels are welcome. Your final paper will be written in close consultation with the professor over several weeks and will require library research.

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

150/10
Senior Seminar: Alfred Hitchcock
Bader, Julia

Seminars MW 5:30-7 P.M. in 220 Wheeler, plus film screenings Mondays 7-10 P.M. (also in 220 Wheeler)

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

Book List: Modleski, T.: The Women Who Knew Too Much; Deutelbaum, M. & Pogue, L., eds.: A Hitchcock Reader; Turner, G.: Film as Social Practice

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.

newly added course:

165AC
Special Topics in Literature of American Cultures: Cultures of U.S. “Intervention”
Fajardo, Margaret
MWF 2-3
109 Wheeler

Areas of Concentration: 1E; 2; 3

Book List: Benitez, S.: The Weight of All Things; Cao, L.: Monkey Bridge; Hagedorn, J.: Dream Jungle; Le, T.: The Gangster We Are All Looking For; Lederer, W.: The Ugly American; Rosca, N.: State of War; Tobar, H.: The Tattooed Soldier; Vidal, G.: Dark Green, Bright Red

Films (to be viewed outside of class): Apocalypse Now (dir. Francis Ford Coppola); Back to Bataan (dir. Edward Dmytryk); Black Mama, White Mama (dir. Eddie Romero); The Big Bird Cage (dir. Jack Hill); El Norte (dir. Gregory Nava); Hearts of Darkness (dir. Eleanor Coppola); Men With Guns (dir. John Sayles); The Quiet American (dir. Philip Noyce); Salvador (dir. Oliver Stone)

Course Description: This course will examine the term “intervention” in relation to U.S. history, global policy, and its specific resonances within U.S.-based cultural works. We will look at the way “intervention” generates various and competing meanings, particularly with regards to U.S. involvement in Southeast Asia and Central America in the mid-late twentieth century. We will pay particular attention to the work of European Americans, Asian Americans, and Latinos. Some of the questions that this course seeks to ask are: What are popular notions of “intervention”? What social and structural processes does “intervention” involve? What does the use of the term “intervention” allow and/or obscure? How do representations of U.S. involvement in Southeast Asia and Central America contribute to ideas of “intervention”?

This course satisfies U.C. Berkeley's American Cultures requirement. Enrollment is normally restricted to English majors.

171
Literature and Sexual Identity: Male Homosexual Desire before and after Liberation
Miller, D.A.
MW 2-3:30
300 Wheeler

This course is cross-listed with L.G.B.T. 145.

Areas of Concentration: 1E; 4

Book List: Crowley , M.: The Band Plays; Genet, J.: Our Lady of the Flowers; Hocquenghem, G.: Homosexual Desire; Holleran, A.: Dancer from the Dance; Kushner, T.: Angels in America; Laurents, A.: Gypsy; McNally, T.: Love! Valor! Compassion!; Williams, T.: The Theatre of Tennessee Williams, vols. 1 and 3; Vidal, G.: The City and the Pillar

Course Description: This course puts two successive periods of American culture in relation to the question of gay male representation. One is the post-war period, which we will call the Homosexual Closet, the other from 1969 forward, which we will name the Gay Liberation. We will be interested in a project common to both these periods, that of producing a ghettoizable image (variously sad, jubilant, banal) of homosexual desire. We will look at pairs of examples from four varieties of popular culture: the theatre, the Broadway musical, the Hollywood film, the best-selling novel, and the ethnographical essay. Some theoretical orientation will be provided by Proust, Freud, Sartre, and Hocquenghem. A course reader will include out-of-print materials.

180A
Autobiography: Disability Memoir
Kleege, Georgina
TTh 2-3:30
note new room: 101 Wheeler

Areas of Concentration: 1E; 2; 3

Book List: Berubé, M.: Life as We Know It; Grandin, T.: Thinking in Pictures; Grealy, L.: Autobiography of A Face; Hathaway, K.: The Little Locksmith; Hockenberry, J.: Moving Violations; Keller, H.: The World I Live In; Laborit, E.: The Cry of the Gull; Skloot, F.: In the Shadow of Memory

Course Description: Autobiographies written by people with disabilities offer readers a glimpse into lives at the margins of mainstream culture, and thus can make disability seem less alien and frightening. Disability rights activists, however, often criticize these texts because they tend to reinforce the notion that disability is a personal tragedy that must be overcome through superhuman effort, rather than a set of cultural conditions that could be changed to benefit a wide range of individuals with similar impairments. Are these texts agents for social change or merely another form of freak show? In this course, we will examine a diverse selection of disability memoirs and consider both what they reveal about cultural attitudes toward disability and what they have in common with other forms of autobiography. Requirements will include two 5-8 page papers a group research presentation, and a take-home final exam.

180H
The Short Story
Chandra, Vikram
TTh 3:30-5
note new room: 56 Barrows

Area of Concentration: 3

Book List: T.B.A.

Course Description:
"The lyf so short, the crafte so longe to lerne."
—Chaucer
This will be a course about how authors craft stories, so that both non-writers and writers may gain a new perspective on reading stories. In thinking of short stories as artifacts produced by human selves, we will consider—without any assertions of certainty—how those selves may have experienced themselves and their world, and how history and culture may have participated in the making of these stories. So, in this course we will explore the making, purposes, and pleasures of the short story form. We will read—widely, actively and carefully—many published stories from various countries in order to begin to understand the conventions of the form, and how this form may function in diverse cultures. Students will write short stories; engaging with a short story as a writer will aid them in their investigations as readers and critics. They will also write analyses of the stories they read, of the psychological, emotional, and political effects these fictions produce.

H195A/1
Honors Course
Premnath, Gautam
MWF 1-2
103 Wheeler

Area of Concentration: 5

Book List (probable): Felski, R.: Literature after Feminism; Leitch, V., ed.: The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism; course reader of supplementary literary and critical texts

Recommended Texts: Gibaldi, J.: MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers, Theses, and Dissertations; Macey, D.: The Penguin Dictionary of Critical Theory

Course Description: By the end of the two-semester H195 sequence you will have conceived, designed, and executed a substantial piece of original literary scholarship. The fall semester of the course will serve as a staging ground for this task. We will read widely in prominent works of contemporary literary theory, chosen largely from the Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. The goal here is not simply to offer a tasting menu of different approaches. Rather, our readings will provide a series of occasions for considering how particular theoretical premises, investments, and agendas shape and direct the interpretation of literary texts and transform the categories of literary-critical analysis. We will use Rita Felski’s book to initiate this line of inquiry in relation to a particular theoretical project—that of feminism—and subsequently turn our attention to other theoretical approaches, movements, and schools. In the latter half of the course several of our class sessions will be devoted to readings chosen from the Norton Anthology by student groups, who will also take responsibility for leading class discussion on those days.

Alongside our collective conversation on theoretical matters, each student will move through a sequence of writing exercises intended to develop and hone their plans for the honors thesis, culminating in a prospectus and annotated bibliography due at the end of the fall term. In the spring students will meet regularly in small groups to provide each other with feedback, advice, and encouragement as they move forward with their individual research projects.

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 17 ; be sure to read the paragraph on page 2 of this Announcement of Classes regarding enrollment in the Honors Course!

H195A/2
Honors Course
Bishop, John
TTh 11-12:30
305 Wheeler

Area of Concentration: 5

Book List: Eagleton, T.: Literary Theory: An Introduction; Lentricchia, F. and T. McLaughlin, eds.: Critical Terms of Literary Study; Lodge, D.: Modern Criticism and Theory; a course reader

Recommended Text: Gibaldi, J.: MLA Style Manual

Course Description: This course is open to qualified senior English majors intending to write an honors thesis of about fifty pages over the course of the academic year. In the fall semester, while individually formulating plans for the writing of the thesis, members of the seminar will study research methods and explore in common a range of works of literary and cultural theory intended to illustrate kinds of practice that have been applied to the study of literature since the inception of English studies; we will be adopting Conrad's Heart of Darkness as a core text on which to test and apply these practices and approaches. In the fall, students will be required to give one oral report based on the course's readings, and also to develop a prospectus and annotated bibliography for the thesis they plan to write in the spring. In the spring, members of the seminar will organize into discrete writing groups based on shared interests and will meet regularly to help each other in advancing their projects.

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 17 ; be sure to read the paragraph on page 2 of this Announcement of Classes regarding enrollment in the Honors Course!

H195A/3
Honors Course
Best, Stephen
TTh 12:30-2
note new room: 206 Wheeler

Area of Concentration: 5

Book List: Gibaldi, J.: MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers, Theses, and Dissertations; Abrams, M.H.: A Glossary of Literary Terms

Course Description: The goals of this section of the honors seminar are no different than the others; however, I think this class will appeal most to students who are interested in American literature and in bringing a diversity of materials to bear on their thesis.

For the first half of the fall semester we will read a great deal of recent literary and cultural criticism. Rather than attempt exhaustively to cover the many “schools” of theory, we will focus on the work of scholars that is to my mind sufficiently complex in terms of its reading practice, rich in terms of its archive, and seductive in terms of its style. The goal is not simply to communicate a sense of what I think of as “good scholarship” (though I can’t imagine there’s any harm in that), but to provide a sense of the materials, intuitions, and critical inclinations that feed the development of substantial and interesting research projects. Some of the questions we will consider: what are the distinct characteristics of various practices of interpretation?; how does the critic structure his or her argument, and how is that structure to be distinguished from what the critic is trying to say?; what counts as evidence, and how is it introduced?

During the second half of the semester, we will focus on the process of developing a thesis project. Students will be responsible for writing a prospectus and an annotated bibliography.

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 17; be sure to read the paragraph on page 2 of this Announcement of Classes regarding enrollment in the Honors Course!

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Last modified: June 28, 2007

Upper-Division Courses, Part II

Fall 2007

Courses: