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Upper Division Courses

Spring 2005

150/1
This course has been cancelled (10/25/04).

150/2
Premnath, Gautam
Senior Seminar: The Contemporary Indian Novel in English
MW 12-2
103 Wheeler

(Though the official time of this class is 12-2, on most days it may not start till 12:30.)

Areas of Concentration: 1E; 2

Book List: Chaudhuri, A: The Vintage Book of Modern Indian Literature; Markandaya, K: Nectar in a Sieve; Rushdie, S: Midnight's Children; Ghosh, A: The Shadow Lines; Roy, A: The God of Small Things; Mistry, R: Family Matters; Chandra, V: Love and Longing in Bombay; Chaudhuri, A: Freedom Song

Course Description: Over the last twenty-five years Indian novelists writing in English have achieved extraordinary prominence in the global literary marketplace. Their success has coincided with a protracted and profound crisis of the Indian nation-state, which has manifested itself in tremendous political, social, and economic upheaval. This course will examine the relationship between these two coeval developments. Our readings and discussions will trace a decisive shift in the trajectory of the Indian novel in English: from a time when it shared with so-called 'vernacular' writing a vocation to serve as a mirror of nation-formation, to a more recent tendency to cultivate an edgy, often antagonistic relationship with the nation-state. Along the way we'll ask why this new orientation has resonated so powerfully with readers within and beyond India. Apart from a series of challenging (and rewarding) novels, our reading will include work in literary criticism, cultural theory, history, and politics. Your work for the course will culminate in a paper of approximately 20 pages. While the syllabus will focus closely on Indian texts and issues, you are encouraged to pursue comparative projects in your final papers.

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!

150/3
Bishop, John
Senior Seminar: James Joyce
MW 4-5:30
206 Dwinelle

Areas of Concentration: 1E; 3

Book List: Ellmann, R.: James Joyce; Jackson, J. W., and McGinley, B., eds.: James Joyce's Dubliners: An Illustrated Edition with Annotations; Joyce, J.: Finnegans Wake; Joyce, J.: Occasional, Critical, and Political Writing; Joyce, J.: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: Text & Criticism; Joyce, J.: Ulysses

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

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

150/4
Picciotto, Joanna
Senior Seminar: Early Modern Women Writers
M 3-6
247 Dwinelle

Areas of Concentration: 1B or 1C; 5

Book List: Behn, A: The Rover; Bradstreet, A: Works of Anne Bradstreet; Burney, F: Evelina; Cavendish, M: The Blazing World; Fielding, S: History of Ophelia; Haywood, E: The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless; Kempe, M: Book of Margery Kempe; Lennox, C: The Female Quixote; Messenger, A: Gender at Work: Four Women Writers of the Eighteenth Century; a course reader with theoretical and historical readings

Course Description: Reading works written or dictated by women in England from the fourteenth through the eighteenth centuries, we will explore how exclusion from the priesthood prompted women to style themselves as religious authorities outside the pulpit, how the English civil war spilled into a print battle between the sexes, and how women were refining the art of prose fiction long before Jane Austen was born. The course will be heavily weighted towards the eighteenth-century novel, an upstart literary form produced primarily by and for women.

Students will keep a reading journal and hand in a final paper.

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, OCTOBER 26; be sure to read the paragraph on page 2 of this Announcement of Classes regarding enrollment in English 150!

150/5
Altman, Joel
Senior Seminar: Shakespearean and Postmodern Sensibilities
TTh 9:30-11
103 Wheeler

Areas of Concentration: 1B; 3; 5

Book List: Greenblatt, Stephen, ed.: The Norton Shakespeare; Course Reader

Course Description: While 'Shakespeare' has been an important presence in western culture since the seventeenth century, that presence has never been self-identical. Shakespeare the man began turning himself into 'Shakespeare' in his own lifetime, as he revised his plays to match mind, moment, and circumstance, becoming the theme of honor's tongue, and after his death others took up the task through criticism and performance, in varying modes of deliberate and unconscious activity that accommodated different personal, aesthetic, and ideological urgings. How stand we then, to whom 'Shakespeare' seems so meaningful, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, when ways of thinking about ourselves, our world, and what it is to be human are so different from the ways in which 'Shakespeare, 1564-1616' must have thought? Or are they? (I use quotation marks to remind us that even the most scrupulous historical account of Shakespeare the man and his work is an interpretive product.) This seminar will explore the sturdy, the attenuated, and the broken connections between Shakespearean and Postmodern Sensibilities by attempting to define what we might mean by 'Shakespearean' and by 'Postmodern,' and by studying Renaissance playwriting and staging and a small number of exemplary Shakespeare plays in relation to some of the largely deconstructive theories and habits of thought that have come to dwell, sometimes unremarked, among the traditional humanist assumptions of consciousness, agency, moral goodness, responsibility, and justice by which we largely live. If you enroll, you should (1) have a wide knowledge of the Shakespeare canon, so you can bring it to bear on our selected plays, (2) be willing to scrutinize seriously the ideologies to which we often give lip-service--including the anti-ideological ideologies in which we often revel, and (3) savor the challenges of mind-bending concepts and language. Regular attendance will be required, one or two oral presentations, and two papers, one short, one long.

150/6
Lye, Colleen
Senior Seminar: Maxine Hong Kingston and 'Postmodern Ethnicity'
TTh 9:30-11
204 Wheeler

Areas of Concentration: 1E; 2; 3; 4; 5; 6

Book List: Kingston, M. H.: China Men, The Fifth Book of Peace, To Be the Poet, Tripmaster Monkey, The Woman Warrior; a course reader

Course Description: We will examine writings by this major figure of Asian American letters and consider the ways in which she has been taken up in the academy and by a wider public. Kingston's experimentation with different forms of writing will be used as a lens through which we will entertain the following questions: what is the difference between modernism and postmodernism? Why does there appear to be an affiliation between postmodernism and minority writing? How do we periodize the emergence of Asian American literature and its relationship to other kinds of U.S. and world literature? Is there an Asian American magical realism, and if so, what are its social conditions? What are the gender and sexual politics of U.S. immigration narrative? We will spend half the semester close-reading Kingston's works and the other half familiarizing ourselves with the literary and cultural theory that will help us frame them.

150/7
Snyder, Katherine
Senior Seminar: Reading New Orleans
TTh 9:30-11
61 Evans

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

Book List: A hefty photocopied course reader is required, as are some of the following books (please consult the course syllabus at the beginning of the semester before buying books for this class!): Berry, J.,et. al.: Up From the Cradle of Jazz; Buerkle, J. and Barker, D.: Bourbon Street Black; Cable, G.W.: Old Creole Days or The Grandissimes; Heard, M.: French Quarter Manual; Hearn, L.: Inventing New Orleans: Writings of Lafcadio Hearn; Johnson, W.: Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market ; Lewis, P.: New Orleans: the Making of an Urban Landscape; Marquis, Donald M.: In Search of Buddy Bolden; Saxon, L.: Fabulous New Orleans; Smith, M.: Spirit World; Rose, A.: Storyville, New Orleans

Course Description: The Big Easy, the City that Care Forgot, The Most Interesting City in the World, the Great Southern Babylon....what has New Orleans done to earn these sobriquets? In what ways has New Orleans been imagined by those who have lived or visited there? What can the literature and culture of New Orleans tell us about the inventions and reinventions that have emerged from its mixture of peoples, memories, and histories? An intersection of African diasporic, European, and Native cultures that first began to develop out of colonization and the slave trade, New Orleans is a particularly, and peculiarly, American place, not so much a melting pot as a gumbo of cultural differences and convergences. We will read a wide array of historical, theoretical, cultural, and literary texts to inform our understanding of New Orleans's unique geographical, urban, and architectural spaces; its distinctive cuisines and music; its spiritual traditions and carnival (Mardi Gras!); and its historical and contemporary association with sexual license. Students will do several short written exercises and essays, a collaborative project, an oral presentation of independent research, and a longer research-based essay on a New Orleans literary text or cultural phenomenon. Regular attendance, active participation, and on-time submission of written work are required.

150/8
Loewinsohn, Ron
Senior Seminar: William S. Burroughs and the Beat Generation
TTh 11-12:30
103 Wheeler

Areas of Concentration: 1E; 6

Book List: Burroughs, William S: Queer, Naked Lunch, Junky, The Wild Boys, Cities of the Red Night, The Place of Dead Roads, The Western Lands; Harris, Oliver (ed.): The Letters of William S. Burroughs; Kerouac, Jack: On the Road; Lotringer, Sylvere: Burroughs Live: Collected Interviews of WSB

Course Description: This class will examine the work of William S. Burroughs within the context of the Beat Generation, concentrating on the work of Burroughs' two closest friends and mutual influences, Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg. We will spend some time on the historical and literary historical background of the 1950's, when the three first came to prominence. But I want us to work our way up to what I take to be Burroughs' most important (and most challenging) work, Naked Lunch, by first looking at some of his earlier work (Junky & Queer) and then at some of his later work, including the trilogy that ends with The Western Lands (1987), along with interviews and letters. Once we've familiarized ourselves with the complex and contradictory topography of Burroughs' world we'll be in a better position to understand and appreciate Naked Lunch.

150/9
Gallagher, Catherine
Senior Seminar: Charles Dickens
TTh 12:30-2
203 Wheeler

Areas of Concentration: 1D; 3

Book List: Dickens, C.: Bleak House, David Copperfield, Great Expectations, Oliver Twist, Our Mutual Friend

Course Description: This course will trace the career of the nineteenth century's most exuberantly creative novelist. We will pay special attention to the idea of 'character' in the novels, to their innovative narrative techniques and to their role in creating the Victorian social imagination. These novels will give you abundant opportunities for learning about and practicing literary criticism, which is the main goal of the course. You will also be introduced to the craft of research and asked to use it in writing your seminar paper.

150/10
Hirst, Robert
Senior Seminar: Mark Twain
TTh 2-3:30
360 Bancroft Library (Stone Room)

Areas of Concentration: 1D; 3; 6

Book List: See below; the instructor will discuss the exact list at the first class meeting, so please do not buy any texts until then.

Course Description: The seminar will read a generous selection of Mark Twain's most important published writings. We will work our way chronologically through his life and career, beginning with his earliest extant writings and ending with Mysterious Stranger (which he left unpublished). The class will have ready access to the Mark Twain Papers, whose extensive primary and secondary resources students are encouraged to take advantage of for their research. One brief oral report (as the basis for class discussion) and one research paper, due at the end of the term.

150/11
Middleton, Anne
Senior Seminar: Chaucer and the Traditions of Amatory Verse
TTh 2-3:30
305 Wheeler

Areas of Concentration: 1A; 3

Book List: Benson, Larry, et al., eds.: The Riverside Chaucer

Strongly recommended for purchase; also viewable (but not printable or downloadable) online: Gower, John. Confessio Amantis

Recommended: Evans, Ruth, et al.: The Idea of the Vernacular: An Anthology of Middle English Literary Theory, 1280-1520

Course Description: This seminar will examine Chaucer's varied use of traditions of verse about love and lovers, and the sentiments and values attached to amatory experience in relation to other discursive and ideational registers of fictive and philosophical writing, since (contrary to common belief) this topic/theme has very little attention in Middle English before the last two decades of the 14C. Our reading will be in Middle English (and presupposes some minimal exposure to the language, if only in English 45A), and will range well beyond the Canterbury Tales, to writings of some of his contemporaries and successors. The chief written work of the course is a paper of ~15 20 pages, to be developed in stages through the semester, including bibliography, language analysis, summary of critical arguments, etc; there is no final exam, and the paper is due on the first day of the final exam period.

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

150/12
Adelman, Janet
Senior Seminar: The Poetry of Edmund Spenser
TTh 3:30-5
305 Wheeler

Area of Concentration: 1B; 3

Book List: Spenser, E.: The Faerie Queene, Shorter Poems of Edmund Spenser

Course Description: I am offering this course because I am frustrated by the constraints of 45A. I have always found reading Spenser's work to be not only an intellectually enlivening and emotionally enriching experience but also a delight, and I am convinced that reading The Faerie Queene with pleasure requires more time and mental expansiveness than is available in a survey course. My hope for this course is that we will be able to take the time to discover not only why Milton considered Spenser a 'sage and serious' poet from whom one could learn more than from the philosophers but also why so many poets in the past have considered him a 'poet's poet,' a kind of storehouse of images, episodes, and narrative and poetic techniques from which they can borrow. In addition to the final twenty-page research paper and a set of exercises designed to facilitate the writing of that paper, the course will include opportunities both for group work and for creative responses to Spenser's work. (A word on 45A: though 45A is not technically a pre-requisite for the course, some prior acquaintance with Spenser will make your life easier, at least in the first few weeks.)

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

150/13
Otter, Sam
Senior Seminar: Poe, and More
TTh 3:30-5
61 Evans

Areas of Concentration: 1D or 1E

Book List: Hayes, K. ed.: The Cambridge Companion to Edgar Allan Poe; Kennedy, J. G. and L. Weissberg, eds.: Romancing the Shadow: Poe and Race; Nabokov, V.: Lolita; Poe. E. A.: Poetry, Tales, and Selected Essays; Poe, E. A.: The Selected Writings of Edgar Allan Poe; Quinn, A. H.: Edgar Allan Poe: A Critical Biography; Rosenheim, S. and S. Rachman, eds.: The American Face of Edgar Allan Poe; photocopied course reader, available at Copy Central, 2560 Bancroft Way

Course Description: We will immerse ourselves in Edgar Allan Poe's career: poetry, tales, comic satires and grotesques, essays, and reviews. We will discuss issues of aesthetics, style, genre, humor, politics, authorship, gender, sexuality, and race. We will consider Poe in the context of his contemporaries: fiction by Nathaniel Hawthorne, George Lippard, Herman Melville, and Harriet Prescott Spofford; poetry by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Sarah Helen Whitman, and Emily Dickinson. We will chart Poe's legacy in poetry by Hart Crane; fiction by Arthur Conan Doyle, Charles Chesnutt, Vladimir Nabokov, and Jorge Luis Borges; and films by Alfred Hitchcock and Roger Corman. Course requirements include an oral presentation and a substantial research essay to be written in stages across the semester.

150/14
Abel, Elizabeth
Senior Seminar: Virginia Woolf
TTh 11-12:30
109 Wheeler

Areas of Concentration: 1E; 3; 4

Book List: Cunningham, M: The Hours; Lee, H: Virginia Woolf; Woolf, V: Between the Acts, Jacob's Room, Moments of Being, Orlando, Mrs. Dalloway, A Room of One's Own, Three Guineas, To the Lighthouse, The Waves, A Writer's Diary, The Years

Course Description: The semester will be devoted to an intensive and extensive reading of Virginia Woolf's literary career, focusing on her fiction but also taking into account her essays, diaries, and letters. We will trace the evolution of Woolf's narrative strategies and subjects, representation of consciousness, engagement with history and politics, and remaking into a contemporary icon. We will also assess her contributions to modernist aesthetics and gender theory. In preparation for writing the senior thesis, students will explore a explore a range of recent critical approaches to Woolf -- psychoanalytic, materialist, feminist, and biographical -- and examine some of the recently published holograph manuscripts. Short writing assignments will culminate in an approximately twenty-page essay.

150/15
Bader, Julia
Senior Seminar: Film Noir and Neo-Noir

Seminars TTh 5:30-7 P.M. in 210 Wheeler, plus film screenings Thursdays 7-10 P.M. in 210 Wheeler

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

Book List: Silver & Ursini: Film Noir Reader 1; Kaplan: Women in Film Noir; Telotte: Voices in the Dark; Krutnik: In a Lonely Street

Course Description: We will analyze the cinematic texts and social/theoretical contexts of a variety of post-WWII film noirs, using a range of critical approaches, focusing on spectatorship, the femme fatale, the noir hero and techniques of narration.

161
Nealon, Christopher
Introduction to Literary Theory
TTh 3:30-5
141 Giannini

Area of Concentration: 5

Book List: Leitch, Vincent B., ed.: The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism; and a course reader.

Course Description: Origins of Literary Theory. Before there was "literary theory," there was "aesthetics"; and before that, there was "rhetoric." This course is designed to serve as a kind of prequel to the story of modern literary theory: during the first two thirds of the course, we will read from classical, medieval, renaissance, and enlightenment aesthetic and rhetorical theory, with an eye to how their arguments point forward into modern dilemmas. In the last third of the class, we will read a few key texts in modern literary theory, and consider some of the ways contemporary theory re-works older questions about aesthetic experience, the nature of language, and the relationship between literature and social existence.

Requirements: three 5-7 page papers.

165/1
Knapp, Jeffrey
Special Topics: Hollywood Film of the 1930s
MW 2-4
203 Wheeler

(Though the official time of this class is 2-4, on most days it may end by 3:30.)

Areas of Concentration: 1E; 3; 6

Book List: TBA

Course Description: Our topic will be the theory and practice of mass entertainment in 1930s Hollywood.

This course is open to declared English majors only.

165/2
Saul, Scott
Special Topics: Fictions of Los Angeles
MW 4-5:30
258 Dwinelle

Areas of Concentration: 1E; 2; 6

Book List: Texts will include fiction by Mary Austin, Nathanael West, Raymond Chandler, Chester Himes, T. Coraghessen Boyle, and Karen Tei Yamashita; plays by Luis Valdez and Anna Deavere Smith; and the films In a Lonely Place, Rebel Without a Cause, Chinatown, and Blade Runner.

Course Description: Los Angeles has been described, variously, as a "circus without a tent" (Carey McWilliams), "seventy-two suburbs in search of a city" (Dorothy Parker), "the capital of the Third World" (David Rieff), and "the only place for me that never rains in the sun" (Tupac Shakur). This class will investigate these and other ways that Los Angeles has been understood over the last century as a city-in-a-garden, a dream factory, a noirish labyrinth, a homeowner's paradise, a zone of libidinal liberation, and a powderkeg of ethnic and racial violence, to name but a few. We will trace the rise of Los Angeles from its origins as a small city, built on a late-19th-century real estate boom, into the sprawling megacity that has often been taken as a prototype of postmodern urban development; and we will do so primarily by looking at the fiction, film and music that the city has produced.

This course is open to declared English majors only.

166/1
Buelens, Geert
Special Topics: In Flanders Field--The Great War in European Literature
TTh 3:30-5
102 Wurster

This course is cross-listed with Dutch 170 section 2 and Comparative Literature 155 section 2

Areas of Concentration: 1E; 6

Book List: Barbusse, H.: Under Fire; Bridgwater, P.: The German Poets of the First World War; Cross, T., ed.: The Lost Voices of World War I: An International Anthology of Writers, Poets, and Playwrights; Junger, E.: Storm of Steel; Roberts, D., ed.: Minds at War; Silkin, J., ed.: The Penguin Book of First World War Poetry; van Ostaijen, P.: Feasts of Fear and Agony, Patriotism, Inc. and Other Tales, Verzamelde Gedichten

Recommended Texts: Calhoun, C.: Nationalism; Fussell, P.: The Great War and Modern Memory; Marsland, E. A.: The Nation's Cause: French, English, and German Poetry of the First World War; Winter, J.: Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History

Course Description: This course is first of all devoted to the very different ways in which the First World War is represented in European literature. British poets like Owen, Sassoon, Rosenberg, Brooke, and Graves are internationally known for their work--they are The War Poets. But in other languages as well, the Great War has produced important work--novels like Le Feu (Under Fire), by Henri Barbusse, or memoirs like Storm of Steel (In Stahlgewittern), by Ernst Junger. Or poetry (by Mayakovsky, Ungaretti, Apollinaire, Cendrars, Stramm, Trakl) that is not only remarkably modernist on a formal level--influenced as it was by the avant-garde movements that boomed in this very period--but also far less elegiac and nostalgic than their English counterparts. This course tries to account for these differences, focussing on the different political and cultural contexts in which these works were written. Special attention will be devoted to the WWI poetry and grotesque stories of the Flemish (Belgian) poet Paul van Ostaijen. His Occupied City (1921) is not only a unique dada-influenced collage-type account of the German occupation of his native Antwerp, but it also reflects on the intricate relationship of the Flemish nationalists whose main enemy turned out to be the Belgian State (and not the German occupier).

166/2
Miller, D.A.
Special Topics: Hitchcock and His Artistic Children

Lectures MW 11-12:30 in 300 Wheeler, plus film screenings Mondays 5-8 P.M. in 300 Wheeler

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

Book List: Gianetti, L.: Understanding Movies; Rothman, W.: Hitchcock: The Murderous Gaze; Spoto, D.: The Art of Alfred Hitchcock; Truffaut, F.: Hitchcock; plus course reader including texts by Bellour, Bonitzer, Edelman, Miller, Modleski, Mulvey, and Rose

Course Description: Unique among Hollywood directors, Hitchcock played on two boards. As a master of entertainment who had nothing to say, he produced work as thoroughly trivial as it was utterly compelling. But thanks to the French reception of his work in the 1950s, Hitchcock also came to be considered a master of art, the Auteur par excellence. If his films had nothing to say, they hardly needed to; in their unparalleled formal originality, they distilled the pure essence of cinema itself. The course will focus on this dialectic between entertainment and art, between saying nothing and being everything, from two vantage-points: (1) from within Hitchcock's own body of work, and (2) from in-between that body and certain art films engendered by it. Within Hitchcock's work, we shall pay particular attention to a Style that is, on the one hand, commodified as a 'touch' that all can recognize, and, on the other, recessed in strange, inconsequential, gibberish-making details that, far from courting recognition, seem to defy it. Among Hitchcock's 'artistic children,' we will focus most on Claude Chabrol, the still-working director in whom (the instructor is mystical enough to think) Hitchcock remains thrillingly alive.

Attendance at screenings is mandatory, a knowledge of French desirable.

This course is open to declared English majors only.

166AC
Lye, Colleen
Special Topics in American Cultures: Racial Modernity
TTh 12:30-2
56 Barrows

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

Book List: Chin, F.: Chickencoop Chinaman and Year of the Dragon; Bulosan, C.: America is in the Heart; Dubois, W.E.B.: Dark Princess, The Souls of Black Folk; James, C.L.R.: The Black Jacobins; Steinbeck, J.: Of Mice and Men; Wright, R.: Native Son; Yoneda, K.: Ganbatte

Course Description: It is by now something of a truism that the reason why there is no socialism in the United States is because in this country race matters more than class. Nevertheless, this course will take up as its challenge a serious revisitation of this question. We will do so by situating U.S. race and class relations within an international context of modernization and industrial capitalism. How does U.S. racial formation relate to examples of twentieth-century anti-colonial nationalism around the world? Can an alternative genealogy of Afro-Asian solidarity or Third Worldist thinking be found among U.S. minority writers? What are the legacies left by slavery and colonialism on twentieth-century U.S. culture? How have African American and Asian American writers theorized oppression and imagined emancipation? We will place African American and Asian American writing in critical dialogue with each other, with standard works of Western Marxism, and with postcolonial theory. Our project will be both to consider the theoretical power of U.S. minority contributions to a world canon on revolution and to gain a more comparative understanding of the making of the U.S. working class.

This course satisfies U.C. Berkeley's American Cultures requirement; English majors will have priority for admission.

173
Merritt, Russell
The Language and Literature of Films: Fantasy Film and Realms of Enchantment

Lectures TTh 11-12:30 in 22 Warren, plus film screenings Tues. 5-8 P.M. in 2040 Valley LSB

Areas of Concentration: 1E; 3; 6

Book List: Baum, L. Frank: The Wonderful Wizard of Oz; Carter, Angela: The Bloody Chamber; Collodi, C.: The Adventures of Pinocchio: Story of a Puppet; Moore, Alan and Dave Gibbons: Watchmen; a Course Reader

Course Description: Fantasy is an unusually elastic cinematic category that encompasses horror films, animation, science fiction, Arabian Nights adventures, fairy tales, religious epics, and even musicals. Its roots are labyrinthine and very old; we will try to fashion a workable model of the genre drawing mainly on Todorov and Freud, but also working from literary and film sources as varied as Propp and Marina Warner.

We will be particularly interested in exploring the connection between the cinema and the world of fairy tales, studying the oddly parallel movements in fairy tale lore and film narrative. We will trace the psychic and social resonance of certain themes found in classic fairy tales and Arabian Nights as interpreted by filmmakers that include Georges Méliès, Jean Cocteau, Mizoguchi, Alexander Korda, and Jean-Pierre Jeunnet.

The course then spirals out from these stories to examine related developments of fantasy: notably the occult tale [exemplified by E.T.A Hoffman and Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari], American wonder tales [The Wizard of Oz, Winsor McCay's "Little Nemo in Slumberland,' Disney's reworking of Pinocchio], carnevale and the tradition of commedia dell'arte, and the dystopic visions of contemporary fantasists Jan Svankmajer, Dennis Potter, and Angela Carter. What happens when modernists make beloved childhood icons strange, morbid, and altogether terrifying? Where human likeness itself, especially in the form of the child, becomes appalling? We end with the Alan Moore/ Dave Gibbons graphic novel, Watchmen.

175
Kleege, Georgina
Representations of Disability in Literature
TTh 9:30-11
106 Wheeler

Areas of Concentration: 2; 6

Book List: Barker, P: Regeneration; de la Mare, W: Memoirs of a Midget; Hathaway, K: The Little Locksmith; Joyce, J: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man; McCullers, C: The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter; Medoff, M: Children of a Lesser God; Shakespeare, W: Richard III; plus a course packet of short fiction and excerpts from other works.

Course Description: We will examine the ways disability is portrayed in a variety of works of fiction, autobiography and drama. We will also screen some film versions of these texts. Writing assignments will include two short (5-8 page) critical essays and a take-home final examination.

180A
Sweet Wong, Hertha
Auto/bio/graphy
TTh 11-12:30
200 Wheeler

Areas of Concentration: 1E; 2; 3

Book List: Baca, J. S.: Martín and Meditations on the South Valley; Cantú, N.: Canícula: Snapshots of a Girlhood en la Frontera; Cha, T. H. K.: Dictée; Eggers, D.: A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius; Endrezze, A.: Throwing Fire at the Sun, Water at the Moon; Hoffman, E.: Lost in Translation: A Life in a New Language; Kingston, M. H.: The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts; Momaday, N. S.: The Way to Rainy Mountain; Spiegelman, A: Maus: A Survivor's Tale, Part I: My Father Bleeds History, and Part II: And Here My Troubles Began

Course Description: In 1909 William Dean Howells called autobiography, 'the most democratic province in the republic of letters.' Acknowledging autobiography as a 'characteristically American mode of storytelling,' contemporary scholars tend to celebrate the liberatory possibilities of self-narration or condemn its patriarchal, colonizing tendencies. In addition to reading a select number of contemporary autobiographies with this in mind, we will read widely in autobiography theory--examining notions of subjectivity, individual identity, community, representation, memory and literacy and the historical-cultural contexts in which they are formulated. We will focus not only on written forms of self-narration, but on those that experiment formally (especially those that incorporate multimedia into their written texts or those that rethink the relationship between image and text) as well as challenge conventional definitions of life writing.

180L
Booth, Stephen
Lyric Verse
TTh 2-3:30
106 Wheeler

Area of Concentration: 3

Book List: Eastman, et al., eds.: The Norton Anthology of Poetry (long version [out of print, but cheap second-hand]) or Ferguson, et al., eds.: The Norton Anthology of Poetry

Course Description: This course will try for answers to the following questions (and questions like them). What is the essential thing about verse that causes us to distinguish it from prose? What value has verse that makes it any more worth readers' time than a paraphrase of it? What is valuable about "sounding good"? Why do people who like verse (as opposed not only to those who don't but also to those who, for reasons I cannot fathom, pretend to like verse) like it? Why do some particular poems persist in the culture while others--including others that say similar things in apparently similar ways--get lots of attention for a while and then get forgotten?
We will read as many as possible of the lyric war horses of English and American verse and see what, if anything, they have that other poems that say similar things in comparable ways do not. I hope to show you that one can study a poem without "interpreting" it (by "interpreting" I mean stepping between a work and its readers to say that the work says something that, as one's presence as interpreter testifies loudly, it does not say).
Three papers, each of a length determined by how much you have to say and how efficient you are in saying it. The third essay will be in lieu of a final exam.

H195B/1
Goldsmith, Steven
Honors Course
TTh 2-3:30
109 Wheeler

Areas of Concentration: None

Book List: None

Course Description: This is a continuation of section 1 of H195A, taught by S. Goldsmith in Fall 2004. No new students will be admitted. No new application form needs to be filled out. Professor Goldsmith will give out CECs (class entry codes) in class in November.

H195B/2
Porter, Carolyn
Honors Course
MW 12-2
Note New Room: 160 Dwinelle

(Though the official time of this class is 12-2, on most days it may end by 1:30.)

Areas of Concentration: None

Book List: None

Course Description: This is a continuation of section 2 of H195A, taught by C. Porter in Fall 2004. No new students will be admitted. No new application form needs to be filled out. Professor Porter will give out CECs (class entry codes) in class in November.

H195B/3
Miller, D.A.
Honors Course
MW 2-3:30
305 Wheeler

Areas of Concentration: None

Book List: None

Course Description: This is a continuation of section 3 of H195A, taught by D.A. Miller in Fall 2004. No new students will be admitted. No new application form needs to be filled out. Professor Miller will give out CECs (class entry codes) in class in November.

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Last modified: Tuesday, 25-Jan-2005 12:18:07 PST

Upper Division Courses

Spring 2005

Courses: