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Note to students: Though the official time of this class is 10-12, on most days it may end by 11:30.
Areas of Concentration: 1E; 2; 6
Book List: Salih, T.: Season of Migration to the North; Chamoiseau, P.: Texaco; Dangarembga, T.: Nervous Conditions; Toibin, C.: The Story of the Night; Kincaid, J.: A Small Place; Smith, Z.: White Teeth; a course reader
Films: Tentative titles include Black, S: Life and Debt; J. Furtado: Ilha das Flores; Denis, C: No Fear No Die; G. Pontecorvo: Quemada!
Course Description: A major aspect of this survey will be to question the category of the "postcolonial" through readings of the novels, and through a critical/theoretical reader that will accompany the readings. We will want to articulate, along with these authors, the connections between the condition of "postcoloniality" on the one hand and the ongoing processes of "globalization" on the other. Two papers of medium length are required, alongside active and regular class participation.
Enrollment is limited and a written application is due BY 4:00 P.M., TUESDAY, OCTOBER 28; be sure to read the paragraph starting on page 2 of this Announcement of Classes regarding enrollment in English 150!
150/2
Senior Seminar: Negotiating Death in Slavery, Holocaust, and Other Contexts
A. JanMohamed
MW 12-2
103 Wheeler
Note to students: Though the official time of this class is 12-2, on most days it may end by 1:30.
Areas of Concentration: 2; 3
Book List: Douglass, Frederick: Narrative; Jacobs, Harriet: Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl; Wright, Richard: Uncle Tom’s Children; Smith, Lillian: Strange Fruit; Walker, Alice: Third Life of Grange Copeland; Morrison, Toni: Beloved; Wideman, John Edgar: The Lynchers; Levi, Primo: Survival in Auschwitz.; Levi, Primo: If Not Now, When?; Death Row Records, selected lyrics
Course Description: An examination of the threat of death as a form of coercion in diverse historical and cultural contexts. The course will focus primarily on the effect of the threat of death on the formation of subjectivity. We will scrutinize African-American slave narratives, novels and stories about lynching in Jim Crow society, Holocaust literature, contemporary neo-slave narratives, and some lyrics from Death Row Records.
Enrollment is limited and a written application is due BY 4:00 P.M., TUESDAY, OCTOBER 28; be sure to read the paragraph starting on page 2 of this Announcement of Classes regarding enrollment in English 150!
150/3
Senior Seminar: William Faulkner
C. Porter
MW 12-2
204 Wheeler
Note to students: 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: Faulkner, W.: Absalom, Absalom!, As I Lay Dying, Go Down, Moses, The Hamlet, If I Forget Thee O Jerusalem (The Wild Palms), Light in August, The Sound and the Fury; Minter, D.: William Faulkner: His Life and Work
Course Description: A seminar on the major novels of William Faulkner. 2 short papers, 1 long one.
Enrollment is limited and a written application is due BY 4:00 P.M., TUESDAY, OCTOBER 28; be sure to read the paragraph starting on page 2 of this Announcement of Classes regarding enrollment in English 150!
150/4
Senior Seminar: Cities, Memories, and Other Mappings
A. Cheng
MW 2-4
103 Wheeler
Note to students: Though the official time of this class is 2-4, on most days it may end by 3:30.
Areas of Concentration: 1E; 6
Book List: Austor, P.: The New York Trilogy: City of Glass, Ghosts, the Locked Room; Benjamin, W. : The Arcades Project; Herron, C.: Thereafter Johnnie; Wharton, E. The House of Mirth; Whitehead, C.: The Intuitionist
Films: Hitchcock, A.: Vertigo; Lee, S.: 25th Hour; Rodgers and Hammerstein, Flower Drum Song; Wang, W.: Chan Is Missing; Welles, O.: Lady from Shanghai; Wise, R.: The Day the Earth Stood Still
Course Description: This course focuses on the roles that three major U.S. cities play in the public and private imaginaries of its citizens: San Francisco, New York, and Washington DC. More than providing mere backdrops, these cities occupy a central presence (either materially or symbolically) in the novels and film that we will be studying. In particular, we concentrate on the relationship between city and memory, the convergence of public and private maps. For example, in one of the novels we will be studying, Carolivia Herron’s Thereafter Johnnie, the city of Washington DC can almost be seen as a character in this drama about race and incest. The novel makes the insistent yet rather mysterious claim that its tale of race and familial trauma is directly bound to the city as geography and as the symbolic center of the nation. Our task in this case will be to unpack this connection between public and private memories. Another example is the disturbing role that a post 9-11 Manhattan plays in 25th Hour, Spike Lee’s film about regret and the failure of the languages of citizenship and private desire. For San Francisco, we will turn to a central yet denied part of Californian history, encapsulated in Chinatown. Through literary and filmic representations of Chinatown, we will explore the racial and gender fantasies that both haunted and constructed this city within a city.
From Edith Wharton to Alfred Hitchcock to the science fiction parable of Robert Wise, the wide range of texts in this course have one thing in common: the centrality of the city in their narrative method and imagination. Our study of this "city" fascination will provide a departure point from which we can chart intersecting lines of cultural formation: historical, temporal, corporeal, psychical, and political. In short, we will be tracing the mappings of citizenship and of desire.
NOTE: Due to the film contents of this course, you are expected to commit hours in addition to class times for film screening, to be arranged.
Enrollment is limited and a written application is due BY 4:00 P.M., TUESDAY, OCTOBER 28; be sure to read the paragraph starting on page 2 of this Announcement of Classes regarding enrollment in English 150!
150/5
Senior Seminar: Homocinema
D.A. Miller
MW 3:30-5
188 Dwinelle
Areas of Concentration: 1E; 4; 6
Book List: Bersani, L: Homos; Edelman, L: No Future; Hocquenghem, G: Homosexual Desire; Sartre, J.P.: Saint Genet; Shaviro, S: The Cinematic Body; plus course reader
Course Description: Under the assumption that male homosexual fantasy is not the peculiar coinage of a homosexual brain, but the common, even central daydream of the normal world, the course identifies three modes of broaching it in narrative cinema. In Hollywood classicism, this mode involves what Lee Edelman has called "the invisible spectacle," the formation of a homosexual closet intended for general heterosexual use. In a later development, when this cinema treats homosexuality explicitly, the work of closeting becomes a minoritizing of "the homosexual" as a individual problem. A third kind of relation, on which this course will concentrate, is undertaken outside the Hollywood system, and in particular in the international "art film." It involves uncloseting not the homosexual, but homosexual fantasy itself in its radical potential to disrupt social and symbolic order. This (dark? utopian? at any rate intractable) vision is not necessarily compatible or even tolerable to liberal or gay politics, as we presently know them. Viewings will include: Almadóvar, The Law of Desire, All About My Mother; Deardon, Victim, Fassbinder, In a Year of Thirteen Moons; Fellini, La Dolce Vita, Genet, Chant d’amour; Hitchcock, Murder!, Rope, Strangers on a Train; Oshima, Taboo; Pasolini, Teorema, Visconti, Rocco and His Brothers.
Trusting that the topic of the course is sufficiently indicated, I welcome any student who feels it will draw out his or her energies for thinking about culture and about cinema.
Enrollment is limited and a written application is due BY 4:00 P.M., TUESDAY, OCTOBER 28; be sure to read the paragraph starting on page 2 of this Announcement of Classes regarding enrollment in English 150!
150/6
Senior Seminar: Shakespeare's Versification
K. Hanson
MW 4-5:30
103 Wheeler
Areas of Concentration: 1B; 3; 7
Book List: Shakespeare, W.: The Riverside Shakespeare
Course Description: This course will explore Shakespeare's artistic use of the formal resources of verse: meter, rhyme, alliteration and syntactic parallelism. We will consider what defines these forms; how they vary across lyric, narrative and dramatic genres; where they come from and how they develop in the course of his practice; and most of all, what they contribute to the emotional power and beauty of his works.
Requirements: Two short papers and some oral presentations, all leading to one long paper.
Enrollment is limited and a written application is due BY 4:00 P.M., TUESDAY, OCTOBER 28; be sure to read the paragraph starting on page 2 of this Announcement of Classes regarding enrollment in English 150!
150/7
Senior Seminar: Novels at the Millennium: The Act of Reading
C. Langan
MW 4-5:30
204 Wheeler
Areas of Concentration: 1E; 3; 5
Book List: Sebald, W.G.: Vertigo, The Emigrants, The Rings of Saturn, Austerlitz; Calasso, R.: The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony, The Ruin of Kasch; a course reader.
Course Description: This seminar will focus on two European writers, W.G. Sebald and Roberto Calasso, for whom memory and imagination—the two “actions” their “novels” chiefly represent—are indistinguishable from the act of reading. The footnotes to Calasso’s The Ruin of Kasch, for example, identify over a hundred “sources” for its grand narrative—from Napoleon’s foreign minister Talleyrand to the Satapatha Brahmana; from Marx and Ricardo to Carl Schmitt and Walter Benjamin. The narrator of Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn traces a journey not only along the coast of East Anglia but also through a series of “texts”—from photographs and newspaper clippings to Thomas Browne’s Urn Burial and Edward Fitzgerald’s translation of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. The act of reading is implicitly linked to the rewriting of history and futurity, those correlates of memory and imagination. Our project will be to understand how each writer theorizes the act of reading: are the associative triggers encyclopedic or hypertextual in character? Subjective or overdetermined? Does one read fiction, history, and myth differently? Are there occidental and oriental ways of reading? Can one read material objects—skulls, landscapes, clothing, passports—in the same way one reads a page? Finally, we will address the question: do these genre-bending texts, certainly “literary” but not conventionally fictional, all written near the end of the 20th century, represent the afterlife of the novel?
Students will do some independent research, to be presented in class, on one or more of the source texts (or objects), or on a theory of reading. A long paper of 15-20 pages, to be worked on over the course of the semester, is also required.
Enrollment is limited and a written application is due BY 4:00 P.M., TUESDAY, OCTOBER 28; be sure to read the paragraph starting on page 2 of this Announcement of Classes regarding enrollment in English 150!
150/8 This section has been cancelled.
Newly Added Section:
150/9
Senior Seminar: Ulysses and the Epic in Modernity
K. Attell
MW 12-1:30
305 Wheeler
Course Control #: 28888
Areas of Concentration: 1E; 3; 5
Book List: Joyce, J.: Ulysses; Bakhtin, M. M.: The Dialogic Imagination*; Bersani, L.: The Culture of Redemption*; Eco, U.: The Open Work* and The Aesthetics of Chaosmos; Frye, N.: Anatomy of Criticism; Gilbert, S.: James Joyce’s Ulysses; Lukács, G.: Theory of the Novel; Moretti, F.: Modern Epic (*relevant chapters in photocopied reader)
Course Description: Is there an "epic" literature in modernity? We know that historically the epic is a centrally important literary genre and we know its great exemplars: the Iliad, the Aeneid, Paradise Lost all come quickly to mind. Yet when we ask about the fortunes of the epic in the modern era we seem to be much less certain; indeed, the epic often seems precisely to be a "form of the past." What has become of the epic? Or perhaps it would be better to ask: what has the epic become? This course will consider that fraught question by examining the ways the question of modern epic literature has been taken up by several key theorists over the course of the twentieth century. Our readings will include examples of several important critical methodologies as they address this problem: narrative theory, semiotics, psychoanalysis, Marxism, and others.
As for the modern epic text itself, the class will take James Joyce’s Ulysses as the test case, not least because most of the theorists we will read also take it as such. Thus, this will also be a course on Ulysses, which we will read with particular attention to its function as the epic of modernity.
Enrollment is limited and a written application is due BY 4:00 P.M., TUESDAY, OCTOBER 28; be sure to read the paragraph starting on page 2 of this Announcement of Classes regarding enrollment in English 150!
150/10
Senior Seminar: Darwin and Culture
I. Duncan
TTh 11-12:30
204 Wheeler
Areas of Concentration: 1D; 6
Book List: Darwin, C.: Autobiography, Journal of Researches (Voyage of the Beagle), On the Origin of Species, The Descent of Man; Hardy, T.: Tess of the d’Urbervilles; Hume, D.: Dialogues on Natural Religion
Course Description: While Marx and Freud appear to have lost much of their scientific prestige in recent decades, Darwin’s stock has never been higher. The flood of Darwin-related publications, extending the theory of evolution by natural selection across all domains of life, shows no signs of abating. Applications of Darwin's theory to the field of culture -- and claims of explanatory authority over the humanities and social sciences -- remain controversial, however, if not scandalous. We will read Darwin as the radical thinker in a British tradition of empiricist and materialist philosophy whose major works, addressed to a general public rather than to specialists, constitute a literary career as much as they do a scientific one. We will study the intellectual contexts of the career, and the theory’s vexed relations with the humanist and anthropological domains of "culture" both in Darwin’s time and ours. Readings: Darwin’s major works, selections from Enlightenment natural theology and natural philosophy, Victorian anthropology and sociology, the Victorian "Literature and Science" debate, and a novel (Tess of the d’Urbervilles) that takes these issues seriously. We will also look at current arguments about the philosophical and political implications of Darwin’s theory and the boundaries of nature, culture, the human, and life itself.
Enrollment is limited and a written application is due BY 4:00 P.M., TUESDAY, OCTOBER 28; be sure to read the paragraph starting on page 2 of this Announcement of Classes regarding enrollment in English 150!
150/11
Senior Seminar: Anti-Jewish Diatribe in Medieval England
J. Miller
TTh 12:30-2
103 Wheeler
Areas of Concentration: 1A (at least)
Book List and Course Description: For more information on this course, please email the professor at j_miller@uclink4.berkeley.edu
This course satisfies the pre-1800 course for the English major.
Enrollment is limited and a written application is due BY 4:00 P.M., TUESDAY, OCTOBER 28; be sure to read the paragraph starting on page 2 of this Announcement of Classes regarding enrollment in English 150!
150/12
Senior Seminar: Mark Twain
R. Hirst
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). Class will meet in the Stone Room of the Bancroft Library, just one floor down from 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.
Enrollment is limited and a written application is due BY 4:00 P.M., TUESDAY, OCTOBER 28; be sure to read the paragraph starting on page 2 of this Announcement of Classes regarding enrollment in English 150!
150/13 This section has been cancelled.
150/15
Senior Seminar: Film Noir/Neo-Noir
J. Bader
Seminars TTh 5-6:30 in 203 Wheeler, plus film screenings Thurs. 7-10 P.M. in 210 Wheeler (Note room change for the film screenings)
Areas of Concentration: 1E; 3; 4; 6
Book List: Krutnik, F.: In A Lonely Street; Telotte, J.P.: Voices in the Dark; Silver & Ursini: Film Noir Reader 2; Kaplan, E.A.: Women in Film Noir; Turner, G.: Film As Social Practice
Recommended Texts: Silver & Ursini: Film Noir Reader 1; Cohan, S.: Masked Men; Copjec, J.: Shades of Noir; Naremore, J.: More Than Night; Oliver & Trigo: Noir Anxiety; Thornham, S., ed.: Feminist Film Theory; White, P.: Uninvited; Klinger, B.: Melodrama and Meaning; Neale, S.: Genre and Hollywood
Course Description: Applying feminist, deconstructive and psychoanalytic theory to traditional noir films and the "neo-noirs" of the ‘70’s, ‘80’s, and ‘90’s, we will examine the ambiguities, anxieties and desires expressed by the stylistic and narrative elements of these films. (See the list of required and recommended books.)
Enrollment is limited and a written application is due BY 4:00 P.M., TUESDAY, OCTOBER 28; be sure to read the paragraph starting on page 2 of this Announcement of Classes regarding enrollment in English 150!
166/1
Special Topics: Vladimir Nabokov
E. Naiman
MWF 11-12
213 Wheeler
This section is cross-listed with Slavic 134F.
Areas of Concentration: 1E; 3; 4
Book List: Nabokov, V.: King, Queen, Knave, The Defense, The Gift, Bend Sinister, Lolita, Pnin, Pale Fire
Course Description: We will study the work of Nabokov as a novelist on two continents over a period of nearly sixty years. The course will be structured (more or less) chronologically and evenly divided between novels translated from Russian and written in English. After beginning with Nabokov’s second novel and two short stories, we will examine the major fiction of his European period, which culminates with the publication in Paris of (most of) The Gift. Competing interpretations of Nabokov will be considered, but our emphasis will be on metafiction, the theme of perversity and Nabokov's cultivation of a perverse reader.
Since Nabokov was prolific and this course is comprehensive, students should expect to devote a considerable amount of time to reading and should come to class prepared to discuss the assigned texts. Participants in the class should anticipate reading 200 pages per week. Written work will consist of two papers (5 to 10 pages) on topics to be chosen in consultation with the professor. Penalties will be assessed for late papers. There will be a midterm and a final examination.
166/2
Special Topics: Gothic
I. Duncan
TTh 2-3:30
88 Dwinelle
Areas of Concentration: 3; 4; 6
Book List: Walpole, H.: The Castle of Otranto; Radcliffe, A.: The Mysteries of Udolpho; Lewis, M.: The Monk; Dacre, C.: Zofloya; Brontë, C.: Villette; Hawthorne, N.: The Marble Faun; Braddon, E.: Lady Audley’s Secret; Dickens, C.: The Mystery of Edwin Drood; James, H.: The Turn of the Screw
Films: Powell, M., & Pressburger, E.: Black Narcissus; Hitchcock, A.: Vertigo; Resnais, A.: L’Année dernière à Marienbad
Course Description: Gothic arose in eighteenth-century England as the antithetical term of a dialectic of Enlightenment which allowed readers to think the unthinkable about modernity through a fantasy of the past. By now Gothic has become so culturally pervasive as to stand for just about anything -- or to designate, at any rate, a normative aesthetic complex of mystification, perversity, irony and dread. We will stick to a fairly conservative definition yielded by the "classic Gothic" of eighteenth-century English fiction: in which the material architecture of a pre-modern, officially disowned regime is the setting for an uncanny return of its politics, introjected into -- and totalized upon -- the privatized arena of sexual life. We will read Walpole’s Castle of Otranto and its Revolution-era British spinoffs; some variants in Victorian British and North American fiction; theoretical declensions of Gothic (e.g. in Freudian psychoanalysis, postmodernist "biopolitics"); and some of the more subtle cinematic versions (Black Narcissus, Vertigo, Last Year at Marienbad), although we may look at some trashy ones as well (Jacob’s Ladder).
166/3 This section has been cancelled. (Prof. Kingston is retiring as of the end of fall 2003.)
166/4
Special Topics: Fellini Style
D.A. Miller
Lectures MW 12-1:30 in 142 Dwinelle, plus film screenings M 5:30-7:30 P.M. in 142 Dwinelle.
This section is cross-listed with Film 151, section 1.
Areas of Concentration: 1E; 4; 6
Book List: Affron, C.: 8 ½; Bondanella, P.: The Cinema of Federico Fellini; Costantini, C.: Conversations with Fellini; Fellini, F.: Fellini on Fellini, 8 1/2 (Criterion Collection); Rohdie, S.: Fellini Lexicon; plus course reader
Course Description: The course, which satisfies the "auteur" requirement in the Film Program, centers on Federico Fellini, a figure who was at once the most spectacular auteur in the heyday of auteurs and, in one important sense, the most peculiar. His work-most explicitly, in that phase of it that produced La Dolce Vita and 8 1/2-takes up the very problem of "auteurship," a problem induced, internally at any rate, when the auteur, no longer the veiled god behind his work, portrays himself as its depressed main character, depressed because, as a character, he can never be central enough. If the auteur always had "something to say" (e.g., in La Dolce Vita), the auteur as character has nothing to say, or at any rate nothing that could make a work whole (8 1/2). Fellini’s famous virtuosity-the spectacle of style "working it up"-would remedy this personal inadequacy, and render irrelevant the filmmaker’s failed self-positioning in the Marxist/Catholic/existentialist matrix that forms his social-intellectual field. Though we shall view Fellini’s entire oeuvre-as well as some films by his cohort (Antonioni, Visconti, Olmi, Pasolini)-we will concentrate on the dialogue between the two films mentioned above, as lying at the heart of his originality. Students must be able to attend the evening screenings (M 5:30-7:30) or they cannot be admitted to the course. -DAM
Note from the English Department: Owing to limited space, the English 166 portion of this class will be open only to declared English majors, while the Film 151 portion will be open only to Film majors.
171
Literature and Sexual Identity
C. Nealon
TTh 3:30-5
Note new location: 2 LeConte
This section is cross-listed with Women’s Studies C145 and U.G.I.S. C145.
Areas of Concentration: 1E; 4; 6
Book List: Colapinto, J.: As Nature Made Him: The Boy Who Was Raised As a Girl; Bloom, A.: Normal: Transsexual CEOs, Crossdressing Cops, and Hermaphrodites with Attitude; Pipher, M.: Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls; Pollack, W.: Real Boys: Rescuing Our Sons from the Myths of Boyhood; Murray, S.: Homosexualities; Merlis, M.: American Studies; Bannon, A.: Beebo Brinker
Course Description: This course will examine the relationship between literature and sexuality in US culture since the 1960’s. We will read literary fiction, pulp novels, autobiography, popular sociology-and watch a few films-with the aim of understanding what kinds of narratives people produce about sexuality in this period. We will focus in particular on the idea of sexual "inversion" - of being a man trapped in a woman’s body, or vice versa-as a recurring resource for stories by and about lesbians, gay men, transgendered people, and intersex people.
Requirements: three 5-7 page papers.
173
The Language and Literature of Films: Introduction to Silent Film
S. Best
Lectures TTh 9:30-11 in 155 Kroeber, plus film screenings Tues. 6-9 P.M. in 110 Barrows
Areas of Concentration: 1E; 6
Book List: T. Elsaesser, ed.: Early Cinema: Space, Frame, Narrative,: R. Abel, ed.: Silent Film
Course Description: This course is designed for advanced students of literature and film who are interested in the history and structure of early cinema. We will try to identify some basic aesthetic elements shared by turn-of-the-century experimental and entertainment film - especially the films of D. W. Griffith, Eadweard Muybridge, Thomas Edison, the Lumière brothers, Oscar Micheaux, and the Biograph and Vitagraph companies. Topics to be considered include: the relation of written text to visual iconography; mass culture and mass publicity; epic literary genre and emergent film form; shifts and transformations in communications media; and spectacle and spectatorship. We will expand our discussion of early film aesthetics to include classic Hollywood film of the silent era (The Birth of a Nation, The Jazz Singer, Greed, Uncle Tom’s Cabin), German Expressionist film (Lang’s Metropolis), and Avant-Garde and modern film (Ozu’s I Was Born, But. . .).
Course Requirements: Attendance at class lectures and film screenings is mandatory. Written assignments will include one paper, a midterm, and a comprehensive final exam.
175
Literature and Disability: Disability and Medieval Ethnography
J. Miller
TTh 3:30-5
24 Wheeler
Areas of Concentration: 2 (at least)
Book List and Course Description: For more information on this course, please email the professor at j_miller@uclink4.berkeley.edu
This course satisfies the pre-1800 requirement for the English major.
177
Literature and Philosophy
A. Banfield
TTh 11-12:30
242 Hearst Gym
Book List: Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz: The Rationalists; Descartes, R.: Discourse on the Method and The Meditations; Russell, B.: The Problems of Philosophy; Faulkner, W.: Absalom, Absalom!; Woolf., V.: To the Lighthouse; James, H.: The Aspern Papers and The Turn of the Screw, The Figure in the Carpet and Other Stories; Beckett, S.: Company or Nohow On; Plato: The Republic; Hume, D.: A Treatise on Human Nature
Areas of Concentration, and Course Description: For more information on this course, please email the professor at banfield@uclink4.berkeley.edu
178
British and American Folklore
J. Niles
TTh 11-12:30
220 Wheeler
Areas of Concentration: 3; 6
Book List: Ford, P.: The Mabinogi and Other Welsh Tales; Winney, J.: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight; Malory, T.: King Arthur and His Knights, ed. E. Vinaver; Opie, I & P.: The Classic Fairy Tales; Williamson, D.: Don’t Look Back, Jack; Chase, R.: The Jack Tales; Lyle, E.: Scottish Ballads; Ritchie, J.: Singing Family of the Cumberlands
Course Description: In spring 2004, this course will begin with select readings relating to the earlier folklore and mythology of the British Isles; these will include tales from the Middle Welsh Mabinogi, tales from Sir Thomas Malory’s Morte Darthur, and the Middle English poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. We will then turn to a study of two major genres of folk narrative, the folktale and the ballad, with attention both to European connections and to the continuity of English-language traditions from the British Isles to North America. Close attention will be paid to the interplay of oral and literary modes of production, as well as to the nature and influence of cheap print and other popular media. Two talented individual tradition-bearers will be studied as representatives of their respective traditions: the Scottish storyteller Duncan Williamson and the American ballad-singer Jean Ritchie. In addition to introducing students to some interesting literature dating from the Middle Ages to the present day, the course will serve as an introduction to basic concepts and methods relating to the study of folk narrative.
Regular attendance will be expected. There will be two short take-home essays, a midterm exam, and a final exam.
H195B/1
Honors Course
K. Puckett
TTh 3:30-5
109 Wheeler
Areas of Concentration: None
Book List: There are no new texts for this class.
Course Description: This is a continuation of section 1 of H195A, taught by K. Puckett in Fall 2003. No new students will be admitted. No new application form needs to be filled out. Professor Puckett will give out CECs (class entry codes) in class in November.
H195B/2
Honors Course
D. Hale
MW 10-12
109 Wheeler
Note to students: Though the official time of this class is 10-12, on most days it may end by 11:30.
Areas of Concentration: None
Book List: There are no new texts for this class.
Course Description: This is a continuation of section 2 of H195A, taught by D. Hale in Fall 2003. No new students will be admitted. No new application form needs to be filled out. Professor Hale will give out CECs (class entry codes) in class in November.
H195B/3
Honors Course
J. Bader
Tues. 6:30-9:30 P.M.
305 Wheeler
Areas of Concentration: None
Recommended Texts: Wallace, D.F.: Infinite Jes; Anderson, B.: Imagined Communities; Michaels, A.: Fugitive Pieces; Pramoedya, A.: The Earth of Mankind; Forster, E.M.: Maurice; Davis, K.: Hell; Lahiri, J.: Interpreter of Maladies; Lovecraft, H.P.: The Call of Cthulhu; Gaskell, E.: Gothic Tales; Lodge, D.: Souls and Bodies, Paradise News, Out of the Shelter
Course Description: This is a continuation of section 3 of H195A, taught by J. Bader in Fall 2003. No new students will be admitted. No new application form needs to be filled out. Professor Bader will give out CECs (class entry codes) in class in November. [an error occurred while processing this directive]