Berkeley English: Courses: Upper Division
Spring 2005
ENGLISH MAJORS: The areas of concentration for each upper-division course are typed right above the book list for the class. In addition, see the page right after the description of English H195B/3 (the last undergraduate course) for a list of all the courses that fall under each area of concentration; a list of Spring 2005 courses that satisfy the pre-1800 requirement for the English major is listed there, as well.
100/1
Junior Seminar: Colonialism and Its Dissed Contents: An Introduction to Postcolonial Theory
Joshi, Priya
MW 11-12:30
305 Wheeler
Areas of Concentration: 1D or 1E; 2; 5
Book List: Haggard, H. R.: King Solomon's Mines (1885); Kipling, R.: Kim (1901); Joyce, J.: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916); Césaire, A.: A Notebook of a Return to the Native Land (1939); Rushdie, S.: East, West (1995); Said, E.: Orientalism; Culture and Imperialism; Nandy, A.: The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self Under Colonialism; Fanon, F.: Black Skins, White Masks, The Wretched of the Earth; Césaire, A.: Discourse on Colonialism
A reader including short pieces by the following scholars will also be required: Jean and John L. Comaroff, Homi Bhabha, Bernard Cohn, Eric Hobsbawm, John MacKenzie, Anne McClintock, Ngugi wa Thiong'o, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Benita Parry, Terry Eagleton, and Gayatri Spivak.
Course Description: This is a research intensive junior seminar in which we will explore the theories and fictions that have characterized the encounter between the European metropolis and its colonial peripheries during the very long nineteenth century that has somehow lingered into the twentieth. The literary works we will read from England, Ireland, Martinique, and India come from metropolitan novelists writing empire as well as figures from the former colonies writing back to the center. These literary readings comprise approximately half of our course. They will frame our inquiry by providing the case studies to help us scrutinize and evaluate postcolonial theory, that critical impulse that has had such a profound impact on literary studies in the last quarter century. The theoretical and historical readings on our list come from a number of foundational texts in the field that will help us understand and complicate the following topics: the politics of culture; the psychology of colonialism; imperialism and popular representation; refusing and resisting empire; narrating territories; aestheticizing empire; inventing the Other; imagining nationalism. In no way do these readings claim to survey postcolonial theory: rather, their selection and organization (into six thematic modules) is intended as an introduction to the methods and approaches that this area of inquiry has made available to literary and cultural studies.
In keeping with the research and methods requirements of English 100, we will make several class trips to the library (both Main and Bancroft) to see what discoveries we can make together of imperialism and its textual legacies among Berkeley's collections. Course requirements include attendance and active participation in all meetings, 1 graded oral presentation, 2 short papers, and a longer (15 page) research paper. There will be no midterm or final exam.
Note: Students are required to have completed at least two courses from the 45A-B-C sequence prior to enrolling in this seminar.
Be sure to read the paragraph starting on page 1 of this Announcement of Classes regarding enrollment in English 100!
100/2
Junior Seminar: Science Fiction
Breitwieser, Mitchell
MW 12-2
221 Wheeler
(Though the official time of this class is 12-2, on most days it may end by 1:30.)
Areas of Concentration: 1E; 3
Book List: Clarke, Arthur C.: Childhood's End; Heinlein, Robert A.: The Moon is a Harsh Mistress; Le Guin, Ursula: Left Hand of Darkness; Ballard , J.G.: The Drowned World; Herbert, Frank: Dune; Lem, Stanislaw: Solaris; Butler, Octavia: Dawn; Aldiss, Brain: Helliconia Spring; Gibson, William: Neuromancer; Stross, Charles: Singularity Sky
Course Description: 'Escapism' is effective when it is intricately and intensely related to the world from which the reader escapes, and we are therefore entitled to try to read back from the work to the longing it addresses, especially in the case of works such as these, which emphasize unanticipated transformations of history-as-usual. Two ten-page essays will be required, along with regular attendance and participation in class discussion.
Be sure to read the paragraph starting on page 1 of this Announcement of Classes regarding enrollment in English 100!
100/3
Junior Seminar: Western American Literature
Starr, George
MW 12-2
106 Wheeler
(Though the official time of this class is 12-2, on most days it may end by 1:30.)
Areas of Concentration: 1D or 1E; 6
Book List: Austin, M.: Land of Little Rain; Norris, F.: McTeague; Stegner, W.: Angle of Repose; Twain, M.: Roughing It; West, N.: Miss Lonelyhearts and Day of the Locust; Chandler, R.: Farewell, My Lovely; a course reader will contain selections from: Browne, J.R.: A Peep at Washoe and Washoe Revisited; Muir, J.: The Yosemite; Ridge, J.R.: The Life and Adventures of Joaquin Murieta; Stevenson, R.L.: The Silverado Squatters; + Jeffers, R.; Gunn, Th.; Hass, R.
Course Description: Reading, discussion , and writing about fiction, poetry, memoirs, and essays that have western settings, or that try to describe or account for western experience in 'regional' terms -- emphasizing, for example, the formative influence of the natural landscape, or of racial, economic, and social groups in distinctive, defining relationships with their surroundings (and with one another).
Be sure to read the paragraph starting on page 1 of this Announcement of Classes regarding enrollment in English 100!
100/4
Junior Seminar: Irish Writing in English, 1900-45
Rubenstein, Michael
MW 2-4
109 Wheeler
(Though the official time of this class is 2-4, on most days it may end by 3:30.)
Areas of Concentration: 1E; 2; 6
Book List: Joyce, J.: Dubliners; Synge, J.M.: The Aran Islands; Yeats, W.B.: Selected Poems and Four Plays; O'Brien, F.: The Third Policeman; O'Flaherty, L.: The Informer; Gregory, A.: Selected Writings; a course reader, including selections from R. Casement, C. Toibin, S. Deane, T. Eagleton, E. Said, and B. Anderson
Course Description: Irish writing in the period is almost invariably concerned with Irish national independence, which was often justified by way of arguments for Irish difference or Irish originality. We will explore the idea of Irishness through the writing of those, in the period of the struggle for independence and after, who defined it, defied it, debated it, and in some cases died for it. Is there, we might consider, some particularly Irish aesthetic born of the cultural and literary struggle for self-definition? What is it that makes Irish literature Irish? The course will introduce some key concepts of postcolonial theory and theories of nationalism.
Be sure to read the paragraph starting on page 1 of this Announcement of Classes regarding enrollment in English 100!
100/5
Junior Seminar: Men, Women and Texts
Turner, James
TTh 3:30-5
221 Wheeler
Areas of Concentration: 1C; 4
Book List: Woolf, V.: A Room of One's Own; The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Seventh Edition, vol. I; Behn, A: Oroonoko, The Rover, and Other Works; Paper Bodies: A Margaret Cavendish Reader; a course reader
Course Description: The Junior Seminar is intended to introduce English majors to "intensive study of critical and methodological problems in the study of literature." Ever since Virginia Woolf's classic A Room of One's Own (1929) issues of gender have been central to this study. Feminist criticism has rediscovered women writers and reinterpreted the male authors who used to monopolize the canon. Every new edition of the Norton Anthology, a good measure of what is considered truly "English Literature," contains proportionally more women authors; when I first taught this course, most of the women's texts had to be supplied on a xerox handout, and now most of them are in the Anthology. Theorists now ask different questions about the author: does the sex of the author matter, and if so why? is writing intrinsically gendered, and if so is it male or female? Historians ask, what difference does it make to literature when women begin to publish?
This course is designed to land you in the middle of these important issues, first by discussing Woolf's influential text, and then by studying some of the women authors she herself mentions as pioneers or victims in their own time. We will compare selected, paired works by men and women authors of the Restoration and 18th century: the worldly Aphra Behn and the notoriously obscene Earl of Rochester; the eccentric fantasy of Margaret Cavendish and the devastating satire of Jonathan Swift; amusing, painful and brilliant poetry by Anne Finch, Alexander Pope and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu.
Requirements: class attendance and participation; one short and two longer papers; professionally correct presentation, including all quotations and references. No final examination.
Be sure to read the paragraph starting on page 1 of this Announcement of Classes regarding enrollment in English 100!
100/6
Junior Seminar: Emily Dickinson and Her Legacies
Francois, Anne-Lise
MW 4-5:30
221 Wheeler
Areas of Concentration: 1D; 1E; 3; 4
Book List: L. Bogan, Blue Estuaries; E. Dickinson, Complete Poems, Selected Letters, Open Me Carefully; S. Howe, My Emily Dickinson; Course Reader
Course Description: This course presents a study of Dickinson's poetry, with an eye to writers who inherited and re-interpreted her legacies in the twentieth century. Taking as our starting point the coincidence between the publication of 'serious' critical editions of Dickinson's poetry in the early part of the twentieth century and the beginnings of American modernism, we will explore Dickinson's impact on modernist and post-modernist writers such as Hart Crane, Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, Louise Bogan, Elizabeth Bishop, Paul Celan, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Adrienne Rich, Robert Creeley, Susan Howe, and Anne Carson.
We will give special attention to the negatives of Dickinson's speakers, as they say 'NO' to conventional marriage, organized religion, and print publication. During her lifetime, Dickinson refused to see more than a handful of her poems in print, but she circulated many in letters to select group of friends, and wove hundreds into hand-made books called 'fascicles.' The story of Dickinson's refusal to publish and of her own form of bookmaking and transmission will serve as an occasion for discussing the relations between poet and public, poetry and history, and gender and canon-making.
Be sure to read the paragraph starting on page 1 of this Announcement of Classes regarding enrollment in English 100!
100/7
Wagner, Bryan
Junior Seminar: Black Experimental Writing
MW 4-5:30
109 Wheeler
Areas of Concentration: 1E; 2; 6; 7
Book List: Readings for this course have not been determined but will include works by Will Alexander, Octavia Butler, Samuel Delany, Cornelius Eady, Renee Gladman, Erica Hunt, Nathaniel Mackey, Fred Moten, Harryette Mullen, Julie Patton, Ed Roberson, Jean Toomer, Lorenzo Thomas, Melvin Tolson, Tyrone Williams, and Kevin Young.
Course Description: African American literature arrived, at its inception, as the self-acknowledged antidote to a longstanding tradition that relegated black expression to the status of noise. Whether cast as the malapropism of the urban parvenu or the stuttering of the plantation slave, the moan of the cotton chopper or the mute stoicism of the suffering bondsman, black language was typically pushed at the point of its transcription toward the guttural, the comical, and the lewd -- a reduction that was, in a complex sense, not wholly untrue to the spirit of black expression under slavery which often relied upon asemantic sounds, gestures, and other non-speech acts to convey meaning. In the twentieth century, black writers would develop a hermeneutic attuned to this special condition of their literature, employing metaphors of psychic doubling, masks, veils, and tricksterism to restore the hidden denotations of black expression. Building upon even as it breaks with this mode of interpretation, this course investigates a tradition of black writing where the line connecting surface to depth, or language to intention, is unceremoniously dropped. Language that approaches nonsense, in this tradition, is no longer a sure sign of indirection or concealed significance. It is, rather, a sign of persistent interest in words that have become disconnected from their original negation. In addition to the black avant-garde writers who are our primary focus of concern, we will also be reading critics engaged with questions of literary form, the black voice, and non-standard language -- beginning with the epoch-marking essay by anthropologist Franz Boas, 'On Alternating Sounds' (1889).
Be sure to read the paragraph starting on page 1 of this Announcement of Classes regarding enrollment in English 100!
100/8
Gallagher, Catherine
Junior Seminar: Jane Austen
TTh 9:30-11
203 Wheeler
Areas of Concentration: 1D; 3
Book List: Austen, J.: Complete Novels
Course Description: We will read the complete works of Jane Austen, an author who thoughtfully wrote exactly one semester's worth of novels, stories, and letters. In class we will examine Austen's contributions to the novel as a form, including her revision of its style, its thematic concerns, its technical properties, and its ironic tone. We will also explore her historical moment, tracing the strands of literary, political, and social history that intersect in her work. Attending to the many recent adapations of her novels, we'll try to analyze why our contemporaries find them appealing and how they lend themselves to visual translation.
Be sure to read the paragraph starting on page 1 of this Announcement of Classes regarding enrollment in English 100!
100/9
Ray, Kasturi
Junior Seminar: Gender and Asian/Pacific America
TTh 2-3:30
203 Wheeler
Areas of Concentration: 1E; 2; 4
Book List: Hwang, D: M.Butterfly; Murayama, M: All I Asking for is My Body; Hara, M: Bananaheart and Other Stories; Okada, J: No-No Boy; Kogawa, J: Obasan; Chin, F: Chicken Coop Chinaman; Yamanaka, L-A: Saturday Night at the Pahala Theatre; Lee, C-R: Native Speaker; J.Hagedorn: Charlie Chan is Dead 2: A Home in the World
Course Description: In this course we will explore how different Asian/Pacific American writers, over time, have mapped out the pitfalls and possibilities of both normative and transgressive gender roles for Asian/Pacific Americans. There are two main goals for this semester: 1) to understand this literary history, wherein different writers and theorists imagine new identities as well as record persistent ones; and 2) to understand the context and stakes of their work, by gaining a sense of the social and political struggles with which they actively or implicitly engage. This is primarily a literature course, but we will read selected texts from the fields of media studies, sociology, economics, and political theory. Topics include the history and current representations of Asian/Pacific Americans in different institutions, including the media and the law; strategies and imperatives for gender transformations; sexual practices and their perceived relationship to ethnic loyalty; and possible links between gender norms and labor hierarchies. Required texts include those listed above as well as those made available in a course reader.
Be sure to read the paragraph starting on page 1 of this Announcement of Classes regarding enrollment in English 100!
100/10
Snyder, Katherine
Junior Seminar: Modernism and the City
TTh 12:30-2
106 Wheeler
Areas of Concentration: 1E; 2; 3; 4
Book List: A photocopied course reader including poetry and essays, plus some of the following books (consult the course syllabus, available at the first class, before buying your books!): Dos Passos, J.: The Big Money; Fitzgerald, F.S.: The Great Gatsby; Eliot, T.S.: The Waste Land; Hughes, L.: Selected Poems; Joyce, J.: Dubliners Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man; Larsen, N.: Passing; Stein, G.: The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas; Toomer, J.: Cane; Woolf, V.: Mrs. Dalloway. If time permits, we will also view and discuss Fritz Lang's Metropolis and Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times.
Course Description: Skyscrapers and subways, crowds and solitary strollers, cacophony and kaleidoscope -- the modern city provoked, both urged onward and challenged, the makers of literary modernism. We will investigate how a handful of modernist writers of the 1920s and 30s responded to the urbanism associated with twentieth-century life. What plots and themes, what narrative forms and rhetorical devices, what stylistic experiments and formal innovations were employed to 'make it new' in the modern city? We will consider representations of a number of key modern cities including London, Paris, Dublin, and New York, especially the Bohemian enclaves within these cities--Bloomsbury, the Left Bank, Greenwich Village, and Harlem--that were so crucial to the making of modernism. We will also read theoretical and literary critical essays to buttress our understanding of urbanism, the figure of the flaneur, modernity and modernism, private and public spaces, coteries and salons, cosmopolitanism and nationalism, immigration and migration, and the role of gender and race in the production of modernist literature and culture. Requirements: several ungraded writing exercises; three short essays with required revision(s); regular attendance and active participation in all class meetings.
Be sure to read the paragraph starting on page 1 of this Announcement of Classes regarding enrollment in English 100!
100/11
Hanson, Kristin
Junior Seminar: Victorian Prosody
TTh 3:30-5
109 Wheeler
Areas of Concentration: 1D; 3; 7
Book List: Houghton, W.: Victorian Poetry and Poetics
Course Description: The age of Victorian poetry was an age of great metrical experimentation and achievement. From Tennyson's renowned 'exquisite' versifying through Browning's innovative dramatic iambic pentameter to Hopkins' 'Sprung Rhythm' which so transformed the modern poetic landscape, the period also saw experiments in dialect poetry, the first tentative interest in the Anglo-Saxon poetic heritage, resurgent interest in the possibility of reconstructing Classical meters in English, the 'dangerously sensual' practice of Swinburne and his interest in Continental poets, a new recognition of women poets, and the development of a flourishing curious subculture of eccentric metrists like Saintsbury and of verse parodists like Lear and Carroll. In this course we will study closely the metrical technique of four major poets of the period -- Tennyson, Browning, Swinburne, and Hopkins -- and consider how their metrical practice relates to broader cultural questions of the period of the role of the poet in society and of English in the world. No background in metrics is required -- we will begin with an introduction to meter and to the tradition which these poets inherited.
Requirements: Regular exercises in scansion, class presentations, and three papers.
Be sure to read the paragraph starting on page 1 of this Announcement of Classes regarding enrollment in English 100!
100/12
Bader, Julia
Junior Seminar: Women's Films of the 40's and 50's
Seminars MW 5:30-7 P.M. in 140 Barrows, plus film screenings M 7-10 P.M. in 140 Barrows
Areas of Concentration: 1E; 3; 4; 5; 6
Book List: Gledhill: Home is Where the Heart Is; Doane: The Desire to Desire; Thornham: Feminist Film Theory; Turner: Film as Social Practice
Course Description: We will examine women's films of the 40's and 50's from historical, structural, thematic, psychoanalytic and feminist perspectives. Issues of gender, race and the gaze as well as cinematic techniques and theories will be considered in our analyses, as we discuss the relationship of these films to realism, melodrama and modernism.
Be sure to read the paragraph starting on page 1 of this Announcement of Classes regarding enrollment in English 100!
Newly added class (1/20/05):
100/14
Starr, George
Junior Seminar: Mark Twain
MW 3:30-5
305 Wheeler
Course Control #: 28747
Areas of Concentration: 1D; 3; 6
Book List: TBA (works of Mark Twain)
Course Description: Students interested in this newly added section should attend the class; the instructor will give out class entry codes to the students he admits to enable them to enroll in the class on Tele-BEARS. It is possible that some non-majors and students of various class levels will be admitted to this section, subject to the professor's approval.
Be sure to read the paragraph starting on page 1 of this Announcement of Classes regarding enrollment in English 100!
101
Hanson, Kristin
History of the English Language
TTh 11-12:30
30 Wheeler
Area of Concentration: 7
Book List: Millward, C.: A Biography of the English Language, 2nd ed.
Recommended Texts: Pinker, S.: The Language Instinct; Crystal, D.: The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language
Course Description: This course surveys the history of the English language from its Indo-European roots, through its Old, Middle, and Early Modern periods, to its different forms in use throughout the world today. Topics include changes in the core grammatical systems of phonology (sound structure), morphology (word structure), and syntax (sentence structure); in vocabulary; in writing and literary forms; and in the social position of English and its dialects.
Requirements: Three short research assignments, two midterm tests, a short paper, and a final exam.
111
Middleton, Anne
Chaucer
TTh 9:30-11
242 Hearst Gym
Areas of Concentration: 1A; 3
Book List: Benson, Larry et al., eds.: The Riverside Chaucer
Recommended Text: Evans, Ruth, et al.: The Idea of the Vernacular: An Anthology of Middle English Literary Theory, 1280-1520
Course Description: In this lecture course on Chaucer's major works, we will read some short poems and prose selections, including Hous of Fame, Troilus, and possibly Parlement of Foules, then turn to a selection of Canterbury Tales, emphasizing portions of this work not often read in such lower-division surveys as 45A, though we will also (re)read some of the best-known tales. Our central orientation will be to the stylistic range and generic repertory of these texts as vernacular literary works, written in a century when this became solidly established as a viable category of thought, practice, and theory.
All readings will be in Middle English; translations and "trots" will not help you gain facility at this, or enable you to do well on quizzes, midterm, and final. Works of Chaucer in the assigned complete-works text may be supplemented occasionally by Middle English readings available online. There will be 2 quizzes early on, a midterm, final, and two short papers (~6 pp each), the first on a topic from an assigned list on the readings through midterm, the second on your choice of topics on CTales; all written work except the final will be due by the last class week of term.
This course satisfies the pre-1800 requirement for the English major.
112
Miller, Jennifer
Middle English Literature
TTh 11-12:30
20 Barrows
Areas of Concentration: 1A; 3; 6; 7
This course satisfies the pre-1800 requirement for the English major.
Book List and Course Description: For more information on this class, please email the professor at j_miller@berkeley.edu .
115A
Nelson, Alan
The English Renaissance through the 16th Century
TTh 9:30-11
110 Barrows
Area of Concentration: 1B
Book List: Norton Anthology of English Literature, Volume I; Cavendish, G. and W. Roper: Two Early Tudor Lives; Duncan Jones, K., ed: Sir Philip Sidney: The Major Works; More, T.: Utopia
Recommended Text: Abrams, M.H.: A Glossary of Literary Terms
Course Description: This is a course on genres of English literature, excluding drama, as they developed over the course of the sixteenth century. In particular, we will attempt to understand how English authors created what in retrospect seems a quintessentially national literature by imitating foreign literatures, particularly the literatures of classical Rome and Renaissance Italy. We will also attempt to understand how this new literature made its first appearance, whether in manuscript or in print. The readings are designed to complement rather than duplicate literature normally covered in English 45A.
Two or three papers (wait for announcement in the first week of class), midterm, and final examination.
This course satisfies the pre 1800 requirement for the English major.
117B
Adelman, Janet
Shakespeare
TTh 11-12:30
141 McCone
Areas of Concentration: 1B; 3; 4
Book List: Greenblatt, S., ed.: The Norton Shakespeare
Course Description: In this course we will read all the plays conventionally attributed to the second half of Shakespeare's career, beginning with Hamlet and ending with The Tempest. This period includes all the so-called great tragedies (Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth) and some others that are sometimes considered not quite tragedies or not quite great (Timon of Athens, Antony and Cleopatra, Coriolanus), the so-called problem plays (Troilus and Cressida, All's Well That Ends Well, Measure for Measure) and the so-called late romances (Pericles, Cymbeline, The Winter's Tale, The Tempest); it does not include Romeo and Juliet, the history plays, and the comedies (for those you need 117A or 117S). My lectures will tend to emphasize Shakespeare's reworking of race, gender, sexuality, and the family in these plays, but I hope that the classroom will be a place of lively exchange, in which you feel free to challenge my ideas and to develop your own interests. In addition to a final exam and several required papers of varying lengths, you will be required to work on a speech and a short scene in small groups to help you understand some aspects of Shakespeare's verse and his theatrical medium.
117J
Booth, Stephen
Shakespeare
TTh 5-6:30
109 Wheeler
Areas of Concentration: 1B; 3
Book List: One - or, better - two OF THE FOLLOWING ONE-VOLUME SHAKESPEARES: William Shakespeare (ed.
Alfred
Harbage, et al.):
The Complete Works
[the old Pelican Shakespeare]; Orgel, S. and A. R. Branmuller, eds.:
The Complete Pelican Shakespeare; Evans, G.B., ed.:
The Riverside Shakespeare; Bevington, David, ed.:
The Complete Works of Shakespeare; Barnet, Sylvan, ed.:
The Complete Signet Classic Shakespeare; [only the one-volume version of the Signet Shakespeare will be practical for classroom purposes. It's out of print, I think, but there should be second-hand copies around.]; Greenblatt, Stephen, ed.:
The Norton Shakespeare; McDonald, Russ:
The Bedford Companion to Shakespeare
I want you to read the McDonald book in such a way as to get a general sense of what kinds of things one needs to bear in mind when reading or seeing Shakespeare--needs to look up or look out for but need not commit to memory.
Course Description: I expect the course to do all the basic work of a Shakespeare survey and also to have seminar-like intellectual crossfire. I will take up all the topics that concern Shakespeare scholars, but I will not take them up systematically. I find that presenting a topic like "Establishing Shakespeare's Texts" causes people to try to memorize a lot of distinguished guesswork and understand nothing. Instead of organizing the communal and active ignorance of the last 300 years of scholarship, I will wait for particulars of classroom discussion to invite comment and background on printing-house practices, Shakespeare's stage, the composition of his audience, and stuff like that. If we work from stray particulars, you are less likely than you might otherwise be to come away with "knowledge" of matters about which we have--and have only evidence enough for--pure but immensely detailed guesses.
I don't yet know how I will want to use in-class time, but I will certainly concentrate on Shakespeare's language and on the plays as plays--experiences for audiences--and on what it is about them that has caused the western world and much of the eastern to value them so highly. The last time I gave a small Shakespeare course I asked people to read
Richard II,
1 Henry IV,
2 Henry IV,
Henry V,
Antony and Cleopatra,
Julius Caesar,
Love's Labor's Lost,
All's Well That Ends Well,
Macbeth,
The Merchant of Venice,
Othello,
A Midsummer Night's Dream,
Romeo and Juliet,
King Lear,
The Tempest,
Hamlet,
Twelfth Night, and
The Winter's Tale; the order given here will not be the--or much like the--order in which I will ask that you read the plays. Moreover, I may substitute one or another play for something in the old list; for instance, I am currently--for the first time in my life--interested in
The Taming of the Shrew
and will add that if my interest holds up. I'm also thinking some about
Measure for Measure.
I will give spot passage quizzes daily--or almost daily. Their purpose will be to make certain that you keep up with the reading and that you understand the surface sense and the syntactic physics of all the sentences you read.
Three papers, each of a length determined by how much you have to say and how efficient you are in saying it. The third paper will be in lieu of a final examination.
Enrollment is limited and a written application is due BY 4:00 P.M., TUESDAY, OCTOBER 26; be sure to read the paragraph on page 2 of this Announcement of Classes regarding enrollment in English (150 and) 117J!
117S
Altman, Joel
Shakespeare, the Self and the Theater
TTh 2-3:30
2060 Valley LSB
Areas of Concentration: 1B; 3
Book List: Greenblatt, S., ed.: The Norton Shakespeare
Course Description: In this course we'll be studying Shakespeare's richest work in the London theater from early in his career to his retirement from the stage. We'll also read many of his sonnets, which are often linked thematically to the plays and offer tantalizing glimpses of Shakespeare imagining himself as friend, lover, poet, and actor. The lectures will focus on the way Shakespeare experimented in a variety of dramatic forms to explore issues of sexual, familial, political, social, and racial identity, and how staging and performance inflected those issues. To help visualize both the possibilities and problems of interpreting Shakespeare's texts, we'll view scenes on videotape as often as is practicable--and we'll try to leave time for some interactive conversation in class. There will be two papers, two midterms, and a final exam.
118
Goodman, Kevis
Milton
TTh 2-3:30
3 LeConte
Areas of Concentration: 1B or 1C
Book List: Carey, ed.: Complete Shorter Poems; Hughes, ed.: Paradise Lost; Patrides, ed.: Selected Prose; there may also be a small Course Reader
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, several pamphlets justifying divorce, and a famously vehement argument against government licensing of the press; the magisterial poet who composed great epic, lyric, and dramatic verse. We will also think about Milton's ambivalent relation to classical myth and Renaissance literature, the place of his unorthodox theology in relation to early forms of moral philosophy or psychology, his writings on love, and his self-production as an major author.
While the exact proportion of essays to exams will depend in part on class size, students should be aware that attendance and careful, timely preparation of the reading assignments are both musts.
This course satisfies the pre-1800 requirement for the English major.
120
Turner, James
The Age of Johnson
TTh 11-12:30
9 Lewis
Area of Concentration: 1C
Book List: Pope, A.: The Dunciad; Haywood, E.: Fantomina; Richardson, S.: Pamela; Fielding, H.: Shamela, Joseph Andrews; Johnson, S.: Rasselas; Boswell, J.: London Journal; Gray, T.: Elegy; Goldsmith, O.: She Stoops to Conquer, Deserted Village; Wheatley, P.: selected poems; Sterne, L.: Sentimental Journey; Jefferson, T.: Declaration of Independence; Crabbe, G.: The Village; Equiano, O.: Life of Gustavus Vassa; Wollstonecraft, M.: Vindication of the Rights of Woman; Blake, W.: The Marriage of Heaven and Hell; Shorter texts available in a reader or the Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol. I
Course Description: A sampling of writings in English from the doom-filled last years of Pope to the stirrings of Revolution and abolitionism. Texts have been included from the Irish, Scots, African, and English diasporas, and from verse satire, drama, criticism, autobiography, and novels both epistolary and narrative. Central issues are gender, slavery, the country and the city, and the relationship of "high" and "low" in literature and culture. Key texts include Samuel Richardson's controversial best-seller Pamela, Laurence Sterne's experimental Sentimental Journey, the Declaration of Independence by Thomas Jefferson (his original version, not the one adopted by the USA), and the autobiography of Olaudah Equiano, an African prince tricked into slavery. The course will climax with the radical feminist Mary Wollstonecraft and the mystic revolutionary William Blake, in full color.
Requirements: class participation, one substantial paper, quizzes, final exam with written essay assignments.
This course satisfies the pre-1800 requirement for the English major.
121
Langan, Celeste
The Romantic Period
MWF 1-2
170 Barrows
Areas of Concentration: 1C or 1D; 3
Book List: Perkins, D.: English Romantic Writers; Shelley, M.: Frankenstein; Shelley, P.B.: The Cenci; a course reader
Course Description: In 1796, Samuel Taylor Coleridge published a poem in the Monthly Magazine with an odd subtitle: "A Poem which affects not to be Poetry." Literature since that time has been in conversation with the experimental poetry of Coleridge and of the Romantic period. This course will focus on key Romantic writers and their experiments, to give some historical shape to the contested terms "poem" and "Poetry." Is a poem merely a peculiar form of information storage, as in "thirty days hath September"? Or (as Shelley put it) "the very image of life expressed in its eternal truth"? Why do so many writers of the period assign greater value to poetry, despite the increasing popularity of prose fiction? In what ways are their poetical experiments related to the "great national events"-the American and French Revolutions, and the rise both of industrial manufacture and global capital-that were transforming social relations? To answer these and other questions we will read the work of the six "major" poets (Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, Keats), as well as some popular prose fiction (Frankenstein, The Monk) of the same period.
125D
Bernstein, Michael
The 20th-Century Novel
TTh 12:30-2
20 Barrows
Areas of Concentration: 1E; 3
Book List: Proust, Marcel: Remembrance of Things Past, (translated by Moncrieff and Kilmartin), 3 volumes; Random House/Vintage paperbacks
Course Description: By reading one of the most significant 20th-century novels in detail, the course will attempt to answer questions about the thematic concerns and formal techniques of modernism. The relationships between changing conceptions of language and desire, of the individual subject, and of the pressures of history, as these are figured in the particular rhetorics and structures of this paradigmatic novel, will provide the central axes of our investigation. Active in-class participation and a willingness to engage in both copious reading and regular dialogues are the only prerequisites for the course.
Please note that we will be reading all of Proust's novel, rather than, as is often the case, only the first and last chapters (volumes).
127
Altieri, Charles
Modern Poetry
TTh 3:30-5
2 LeConte
Areas of Concentration: 1E; 3
Book List: The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry
Course Description: This course will be a survey of major British and American poetry between 1912 and 1950. We will rely on an anthology buttressed by a reader. Close-reading will be emphasized, along with the intellectual commitments that seem to be driving how poets experiment with modernist styles.
130D
Best, Stephen
American Literature: 1900-1945
TTh 11-12:30
180 Tan
Areas of Concentration: 1E; 3
Book List: Chesnutt, C.: The Conjure Woman; Dreiser, T.: Sister Carrie; Faulkner. W.: The Sound and the Fury; Fitzgerald, F.: The Great Gatsby; James, H.: The Golden Bowl; Johnson, J. W.: The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man; Norris, F.: McTeague; Wright, R.: Native Son
Course Description: This course will survey a range of significant works of American literature from the first half of the twentieth century. The course will emphasize the shifting economic, social, and political circumstances of the Gilded Age and the Great Depression. Requirements will include a midterm, a paper, numerous quizzes, and a final.
131
Hass, Robert
American Poetry
TTh 12:30-2
50 Birge
Areas of Concentration: 1D or 1E; 3
Book List: Whitman, Walt, Leaves of Grass; Dickinson, Emily, Selected Poems; American Poetry: The Twentieth Century, Vols. I-II; plus a course reader
Course Description: American Poetry is a lecture course that surveys the history of American poetry from its beginnings to the present. The course has different emphases in different years. This course will focus for the first third of the semester on Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson, for the second third on the modernist poets of the first half of the century, probably Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens, and Marianne Moore, and for the last third on poets from the Beat Generation to the present. Written work for the course includes three critical essays and a final examination.
132
Loewinsohn, Ron
American Novel
TTh 2-3:30
60 Evans
Area of Concentration: 3
Book List: Hawthorne, N: The Scarlet Letter; Melville, H: Moby Dick; Twain, M: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn; James, H: The Portrait of a Lady; Hemingway, E: The Sun Also Rises; Barnes, D: Nightwood; Faulkner, W: Light in August; Ellison, R: Invisible Man
Course Description: This will be a quick survey of eight major American novels and their authors, from Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter to Ellison's Invisible Man, paying some attention to the development of the novel as a form, from its origins in Europe through its American permutations. The course will consist mostly of lectures, though I'll try to accommodate as much discussion as class size will allow.
Required Writing: Two short papers (8-10pp) and a final exam. Suggested paper topics will be distributed in the second week of the course. These will be only suggestions, and you will be free to invent your own paper topic. You are strongly encouraged to consult with the instructor or reader before committing yourself to a paper topic. The final exam will require you to write three essays, each one comparing two novels from our reading list, one from the 19th century and one from the 20th. Your two term papers, averaged together, will count for 60% of your grade, the final exam for the remaining 40%.
133B
Nanda, Aparajita
African American Literature and Culture Since 1917: Voice/s of Autobiography
MWF 2-3
30 Wheeler
Areas of Concentration: 1E; 2; 3; 4; 5
Book List: Hurston, Zora Neale: Their Eyes Were Watching God; Ellison, Ralph : Invisible Man; Morrison, Toni : Beloved; Bradley, David : The Chaneysville Incident; Naylor, Gloria : Mama Day; Butler, Octavia : Bloodchild and Other Stories
Course Reader: Selections from writings of Toni Morrison, Audre Lorde, Adrienne Rich, bell hooks, Alice Walker, Henry L. Gates, Houston Baker
Course Description: This course attempts to read identity politics through the lens of autobiography that has become, to quote Roland Barthes "an exchange, an interpenetration" where "the writers themselves practice criticism [and] their work articulates the conditions of its own birth or even its own absence." The art and practices of autobiographical writings are not a mere retrieval of one's past but an investigation into the many "selves" [the "others"] of the writing "I." It involves "voice" as an activity by which the text's positioning is revealed. Selected African-American writings explore this creative aspect of self-narration that involves the specter of enslavement, ancestral myths and practices while taking into cognizance origin, movement, gender, class and race. By playing on the oral and aural implications of the story the writer problematizes the indeterminate borderlines of identity politics and gendered subjectivity and its role in the production of meaning.
133T
Hartman, Saidiya
Topics in African American Literature and Culture
TTh 11-12:30
106 Wheeler
Areas of Concentration: 2; 6
Book List and Course Description: For more information on this class, please email the professor at saidiyah@berkeley.edu.
135AC
Wardley, Lynn
Literature of American Cultures: American Fictions of Self-Formation
TTh 12:30-2
22 Warren
Areas of Concentration: 1D or 1E; 2; 4; 6
Book List: Brown, C.B.: Wieland, or, The Transformation; Hawthorne, N.: The Scarlet Letter; DuBois, W.E.B.: Souls of Black Folk; Chopin, K.: The Awakening; Larsen, N.: Quicksand; Wharton, E.: The Age of Innocence; Glaspell, S.: Plays by Susan Glaspell; Gilman, C. P.: The Yellow Wallpaper; Treadwell, S.: Machinal; Islas, A.: The Rain God; Paredes, A.: The Hammon and the Beans
Course Description: We will read a variety of American novels, short stories and plays, exploring how specific biological, evolutionary, mythic, psychological and philosophical accounts of the human individual shape the author's vision of a self's formation in relation to history, the family, the race, the crowd, Nature, the unconscious, the nation, la frontera, technology, houses and rooms. Authors include Walt Whitman, Charles Brockden Brown, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, W. E. B. Du Bois, Nella Larsen, Susan Glaspell, Edith Wharton, Sophie Treadwell, Kate Chopin, Americo Paredes, Maria Helena Viramontes and Arturo Islas.
This course satisfies U.C. Berkeley's American Cultures requirement.
C136/1
Sam Otter and David Henkin
Topics in American Studies: New York and Philadelphia
Lectures TTh 12:30-2 in 2040 Valley LSB, plus one hour of discussion section per week (sec. 101: Tues. 2-3 in 254 Dwinelle; sec. 102: Tues. 3-4 in 247 Dwinelle; sec. 103: W 9-10 in 2301 Tolman; sec. 104: W 3-4 in 255 Dwinelle; sec. 105: Thurs. 11-12 in 109 Dwinelle; sec. 106: Thurs. 4-5 in 246 Dwinelle)
Note: This class is cross-listed with American Studies C111E section l and History 100 section 1.
Areas of Concentration: 1D or 1E
Book List: Brown, C. B.: Arthur Mervyn; Cahan, A.: Rise of David Levinsky; Foster, G.: New York By Gas-Light; Franklin, B.: Autobiography; Howells, W. D.: A Hazard of New Fortunes; Melville, H.: Great Short Works; Riis, J. A.: How the Other Half Lives; Webb, F. J.: The Garies and Their Friends; Wideman, J.: The Cattle Killing; Willson, J.: The Elite of Our People; Wister, O.: Romney
Course Description: This course offers an interdisciplinary examination of the literature and history of these two American cities in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. We will read fiction, poetry, urban sketches, diaries, and autobiographies by writers such as Benjamin Franklin, Charles Brockden Brown, George Lippard, Edgar Allan Poe, Frank J. Webb, Charles Dickens, Lydia Maria Child, Fanny Fern, Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, William Dean Howells, Henry James, Jacob Riis, Abraham Cahan, Hart Crane, and John Wideman. Films will include West Side Story, Twelve Monkeys, and The Gangs of New York. We will focus on issues of place, space, character, and narrative, and we will consider how historians and literary critics do what they do (and how these practices overlap and differ), as we unfold the stories of our two cities.
C136/2
Saldivar, Jose
Topics in American Studies: The War of 1898 and the Cultures of US Imperialism
MWF 10-11
110 Wheeler
Note: This class is cross-listed with American Studies C111E section 2.
Areas of Concentration: 1E; 6
Book List: Allen, E. ed.: José Martí: Selected Writings; Barnet, M.: Biography of a Runaway Slave; Burroughs, E.R.: Tarzan of the Apes; Fernéndez Retamar, R.: Caliban and Other Essays; Gatewood, W. ed.: Smoked Yankees and the Struggle for Empire; Goldman, F.: The Divine Husband; Iglesias, C. ed.: Memoirs of Bernardo Vega; Leonard, E.: Cuba Libre; Perez, L.: The War of 1898; Roosevelt, T.: The Rough Riders; Rizal, J.: Noli Me Tangere; Sundquist, E. ed.: The Oxford W.E. B. Du Bois Reader
Course Description: This survey course explores the narratives (memoirs, essays, novels, paintings, testimonies, letters) and history of the Cultures of United States Imperialism. We will start by considering the multiple meanings of US imperialism and anti-imperialism, and the frontiers of US empire. We will then examine the 100 year meaning of the war of 1898. Was 1898 a date and space of historical beginning and/or a date of historical rupture? Why was the War of 1898 termed a 'splendid little war'? But we will move beyond the reification of 1898 by considering other transnational configurations such as José Martí's 'Latinamericanism' and W.E. B. Du Bois's 'Pan-Africanism.' Additionally, we will explore how US imperialism maps the relations of the 'domestic' and the 'foreign' in gendered and ethno-racial terms.
Requirements include one paper, one mid-term, and a final exam. Exposure to trans-American postcolonial criticism will also be part of the semester's agenda.
143A
Farber, Thomas
Short Fiction
W 3-6
301 Wheeler
Areas of Concentration: None
Recommended Text: Farber, T.: A Lover's Question: Selected Stories
Course Description: A short fiction workshop open to students from any department. Students will write three short stories, 10-20 pages in length. Each week, students will also turn in one-page written critiques of student stories being workshopped as well as a 2-page journal entry. Probable semester total of written pages, including critiques: 70-80. Class attendance mandatory.
Students not admitted or late in applying can come to office hours the first week of class to speak with Professor Farber or email tfar@uclink4.berkeley.edu.
(Any students admitted who have worked with me before must contact me in November about bringing their first new story, with xeroxes, to the first class meeting.)
To be considered for admission to this class, please submit photocopies of 10-15 pages of your fiction, along with an application form, to Professor Farber's mailbox in 322 Wheeler BY 4:00 P.M., TUESDAY, OCTOBER 26, AT THE LATEST.
Be sure to read the paragraph concerning creative writing courses on page 2 of this Announcement of Classes for further information regarding enrollment in such courses!
143B/1
This course has been cancelled (10/25/04).
143B/2
Shoptaw, John
Verse
TTh 11-12:30
305 Wheeler
Areas of Concentration: None
Book List: Jahan Ramazani, ed.: The Norton Anthology of Modern & Contemporary Poetry, 2 vols.; Course Reader
Course Description: In this course you will conduct a progressive series of experiments in which you will explore the fundamental options for writing poetry today -- aperture, partition, closure; rhythmic sound patterning; sentence & line; stanza; short & long-lined poems; image & figure; graphics & textual space; cultural translation; poetic forms (haibun, villanelle, sestina, pantoum, ghazal, etc.); the first, second, third, and no person (persona, address, drama, narrative, description); prose poetry. Our emphasis will be placed on recent possibilities, but with an eye & ear always to renovating traditions. I have no 'house style' and only one precept: you can do anything, if you can do it. You will write a poem a week, and we'll discuss six or so in rotation (I'll respond to every poem you write). On alternate days, we'll discuss pre-modern and modern exemplary poems drawn from the Norton Anthology and from our course reader. It will be delightful.
To be considered for admission to this class, please submit five photocopied pages of your poetry, along with an application form, to Professor Shoptaw's mailbox in 322 Wheeler BY 4:00 P.M., TUESDAY, OCTOBER 26, 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!
Last modified: Tuesday, 25-Jan-2005 12:56:21 PST