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Upper Division Courses

Spring 2006

150/1
Senior Seminar: Faulkner, Paredes, Garcia Marquez, and Morrison
Saldivar, Jose
MWF 1-2
Note New Room: 279 Dwinelle

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

Book List: Agee, T.: Let us Now Praise Famous Men; Dubois Shaw: Seeing the Unspeakable; Garcia Marquez, G.: Collected Stories, Living to Tell the Tale, One Hundred Years of Solitude; Faulkner, W.: Absalom, Absalom!, Go Down, Moses; Morrison, T.: Beloved, Playing in the Dark; Paredes, A.: George Washington Gomez

Course Description: A detailed trans-American study of William Faulkner, Americo Paredes, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and Toni Morrison's imaginative writings in the aesthetic and geopolitical contexts of the New South and the Global South. Topics include the significance of Faulkner's "The Bear" and Absalom, Absalom! for modern and post-contemporary writers from across the Americas. Readings also include Garcia Marquez's "Big Mama's Funeral," One Hundred Years of Solitude, and Living to Tell the Tale, Paredes' George Washington Gomez, and Morrison's Beloved and Playing in the Dark. Our seminar will also look at the photographs of the US South by Walker Evans and Russell Lee, and the Global South's paintings by Kara Walker, Luis Fonseca and Fernando Botero, among others. Throughout the seminar, we will grapple with the question--do the Americas have a common literature?

Enrollment is limited and a written application is due BY 4:00 P.M., TUESDAY, OCTOBER 25; be sure to read the paragraph on page 2 of this Announcement of Classes regarding enrollment in English 150!

150/2
Senior Seminar: Utopianism
Starr, George
MW 4-5:30
221 Wheeler

Areas of Concentration: 3; 6

Book List: More, T.: Utopia; Scott, S.: A Description of Millenium Hall; photocopied selections from Godwin, W.: Political Justice; Malthus, T. R.: Treatise on Population; Owen, R.: A New View of Society; Engels, F.: The Condition of the Working Class in England; Marx, K.: The Communist Manifesto; Butler, S.: Erewhon or Over the Range; Jefferies, R.: After London or Wild England; Bellamy, E.: Looking Backward; Morris, W.: News from Nowhere; Wells, H. G.: The Time Machine, When the Sleeper Wakes; Orwell, G.: 1984; Atwood, M.: The Handmaid’s Tale. Several films, such as Metropolis and Blade Runner, will also be used.

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

Note: Although this class will usually meet during the scheduled hours (4-5:30), students wishing to be admitted should know that in the latter part of the semester, films will sometimes be shown, such as “Metropolis,” that will run to or past 6 p.m.

150/3
Senior Seminar: Jane Austen (topic changed as of Jan. 5)
Miller, D. A.
MW 12:30-2
300 Wheeler

Areas of Concentration: 1D; 3

Book List: Chapman, R.W., ed.: The Oxford Illustrated Jane Austen (6 volumes); also a course reader

Course Description: While there is hardly a dearth of criticism on Jane Austen, it is rare to find her used, as Balzac, Flaubert, Dostoevsky, or Proust is used, as the basis for theorizing the Novel as a form. Classic continental novel theory ignores her, and even recent feminist historicism tends to do away with her originality as a creator of forms. Precisely this formal originality (to which we owe our very norms of impersonal narration, not to mention the virtual invention of free indirect style) will be the main object of our consideration in the seminar. We will also pursue some pertinent minor topics: the curiously popular genre of the Austen biography (so little life, so many lives!) and, on a broader scale, the late-twentieth-century transformation of Austen into that most unwriterly of things: an icon.

If you have learned about the new topic for this class and are interested in being admitted, you should attend class the first week; the students whom the instructor admits will be given class entry codes which will enable them to enroll on Tele-BEARS.

150/4
Senior Seminar: James Joyce
Bishop, John
MWF 3-4
79 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, Occasional, Critical, and Political Writing, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: Text & Criticism, Ulysses

Recommended Texts: 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 darkness 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.

150/5

This section has been cancelled.

150/6

This section has been cancelled.

150/7
Senior Seminar: American Beauty
Adams, Jessica
TTh 9:30-11
305 Wheeler

Areas of Concentration: 2; 4; 6

Book List (Required): Scanlon, J.: Gender and Consumer Culture; Blum, V.: Flesh Wounds: The Culture of Cosmetic Surgery; Banet-Weiser, S.: The Most Beautiful Girl in the World; Kaiken, E.: Venus Envy

Additional texts include (in a reader), in order of assignment: Advertisements for runaway slaves; Johnson, W.: from Soul by Soul: Life inside the Antebellum Slave Market; Banner, L.: from American Beauty; Cross, G.: from An All-Consuming Century; Hamlin, K.: from There She Is, Miss America: The Politics of Sex, Beauty, and Race in America’s Most Famous Pageant; Peiss, K.: from Hope in a Jar; Craig, M.: from Ain’t I a Beauty Queen?: Representing the Ideal Black Woman; Toomer, J.: “Portrait in Georgia”; Holloway, K.: from Passed On: African American Mourning Stories; Cheng, A.: from The Melancholy of Race; MacKinnon, C.: from Feminism Unmodified; Steinem, G.: “I Was a Playboy Bunny”; Sherman, C.: Film Stills; Pumping Iron II, dir. George Butler; Paris Is Burning, dir. Jennie Livingston “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy”; Halberstam, J.: from Female Masculinity

Course Description: When we think about what “beauty” means in America, we immediately confront issues of race, ethnicity, sexuality, femininity, faith, and class. Beauty, we discover, is a highly coded word, a concept that expresses desire entangled with history, aesthetics as a political platform, technology becoming intimate with flesh. Plastic surgery is a spectacle in reality TV shows like “The Swan” and “Extreme Makeover”; “The Swan” ends with a two-hour beauty pageant featuring surgically altered women as cultural ideals. And what happens when we read Paris Is Burning, Jennie Livingston’s film about Harlem drag balls, against pageants of plastic surgery?

Examining the notion of beauty also leads toward colonialism, slavery, immigration, and globalization. These histories have created contexts in which ideals of beauty shape social life. We encounter tragic mulattos and “fancy girls,” white-appearing “black” women who sold for high prices in the slave market; studies of prostitutes’ physiognomies, which concluded that the shapes of their faces betrayed moral turpitude; the phenomenon and/or stereotype of the manicure and grooming industry as staffed and run by Asian-American women. Throughout, the dominant group’s sense of aesthetics and social appropriateness has been enabled by the often un- or underpaid workers who have maintained these standards.

These kinds of considerations will help us to critique, expand, and shift our understandings of American national identity; cultural definitions of race and the effects of those definitions in people’s real lives; and the structure and role of gender within the national imaginary.

Requirements: 1) An oral presentation accompanied by a short paper (5-7 pages) about a text or phenomenon in popular or mainstream culture that expands on the issues covered in the course. Examples: the male cosmetic industry; the boundary between humans, robots, and cyborgs (e.g. in “The Bionic Woman” and “The Six Million Dollar Man”); professional bodybuilding; dress codes in Native American schools in the 1920s; hip-hop styles; fad diets; black debutante balls; child beauty pageants; the politics of hair; representations of Asian manicurists (e.g. in programs/films such as “Mad TV” and Legally Blonde); changing definitions of beauty in popular magazines such as Cosmopolitan; tattooing; piercing; brand names and sweatshop labor. 2) A seminar paper (as required in all English 150 sections).

150/8
Senior Seminar: Chicana/o Poetry Since 1967
Gonzalez, Marcial
TTh 11-12:30
Note New Room: 224 Wheeler

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

Book List: Lim?, J.: Mexican Ballads, Chicano Poems: History and Mexican American Social Poetry; S?chez, M.: Contemporary Chicana Poetry: A Critical Approach to an Emerging Literature; P?ez-Torres, R.: Movements in Chicano Poetry: Against Myths, Against Margins; Gonz?ez, R.: After Aztl?: Latino Poets of the Nineties; Rebolledo, T. & Rivero, E.: Infinite Divisions: An Anthology of Chicana Literature

Course Description: In this course, we will study the major movements and developments in Chicana and Chicano poetry since 1967. The thematic focus of the course will be broad. Thus, at a minimum, we will discuss and analyze the following topics: the Epic Corrido as a residual precursor to contemporary Chicana/o poetry; the emergent social poetry of the Chicano Movement; Chicana feminism; the Pinto poets; U.S. Latina/o poetry; the critique of nationalism; the New Mestizaje; the modern and the postmodern; Chicana/o poetry as postcolonial discourse; and the ideology of poetic form. All students enrolled in the seminar will be expected to attend class regularly, participate actively in classroom discussions, and complete all reading assignments. This course involves a lot of reading and a substantial amount of writing. Students will also be required to present at least one oral report in class as part of a group project and write a major research paper.

150/9
Senior Seminar: The Apocalyptic Imagination
Skinfill, Mauri
MW 3-4:30
305 Wheeler

Areas of Concentration: 1D or 1E; 3; 6

Book List: Cooper, J.: The Pioneers; Chesnutt, C.: The Marrow of Tradition; Poe, E.: The Short Fiction (selected works); Twain, M.: Connecticut Yankee In King Arthur's Court; Ellison, R.: Invisible Man; Faulkner, W.: "Barn Burning"; West, N.: Day of the Locust; Didion, J.: Slouching Toward Bethlehem; DeLillo, D.: White Noise; Pynchon, T.: The Crying of Lot 49; Birk, S.: In Smog and Thunder; a course reader

Film Viewings: George Romero, Night of the Living Dead; Michael Tolkin, The Rapture; Steve De Jarnatt, Miracle Mile; David Fincher, Fight Club; P.T. Anderson, Magnolia.

Visual Art: Sandow Birk, Prisonation (selected works); Chester Arnold, Entropic Landscape (and selected works); Sandow Birk, Inferno (and selected works); Marina Moevs, Across the Road (and selected works)

Course Description: When Lincoln's 1858 senate-race speech on The House Divided drew famously on biblical rhetoric to underscore the impending Union crisis over slavery, it offered one example of a peculiar American preoccupation—one now curiously shared by politicians, cultists, and Hollywood studios alike. Why does the idea of apocalypse figure so prominently in the fictions and practices of American culture? In a nation whose political discourse has consistently advanced the promise of the individual's paradise, how do we account for the hold that violent, apocalyptic endings have on the American imagination? This course will explore the history of American apocalyptic thinking as it is represented in a range of nineteenth- and twentieth-century texts, films and events. Specifically, we will consider the relation of apocalypse to the experiences of power and powerlessness, threat and revenge, purification and renewal. What roles do nationalism, technology and religious fanaticism play in the generation of particular apocalyptic scenarios? If apocalypse has emerged as a reoccurring trope in American art and culture, what social fantasies are satisfied by this particular form of what Frank Kermode has called "the sense of an ending"? Course readings will survey representative examples of the American doomsday scenario as well as critical theories of the apocalyptic imaginary.

150/10
Senior Seminar: Theories and Literatures of Globalization
Ray, Kasturi
TTh 12:30-2
Note New Room: 300 Wheeler

Areas of Concentration: 2; 4

Book List: Shakespeare, W.: The Tempest; Cesaire, A.: A Tempest; Edwards, P.: Equiano’s Travels; Haley, A.: The Autobiography of Malcolm X; Rhys, J.: Wide Sargasso Sea; Kincaid, J.: A Small Place; Hagedorn, J.: Dogeaters; Emecheta, B.: The Joys of Motherhood; Santiago, E.: America’s Dream; Ali, M.: Brick Lane

Course Description: Processes of globalization ostensibly have wrought economic interdependence, as well as mutual intelligibility, among a newly-integrated world citizenry. Literary studies has kept apace with this re-organization of people’s experiences by tracing previous cultural exchanges as well as commenting on the current, radically accelerated global flows of people, ideas, and commodities. The focus of this course is on particularly powerful and well-traveled ideas of freedom, as they have been imagined in key literary texts, which both critique as well as participate in global flows of communication. These texts have been selected for their canonical status as well as for their attempts to record, challenge, and/or re-imagine gendered, raced, and class struggles under increasingly globalized regimes of power. These texts “speak” not only to each other, but also to the stories otherwise silenced by official celebrations of globalization.

150/11
Senior Seminar: Henry James and the Invention of Novel Theory
Hale, Dorothy
TTh 2-3:30
103 Wheeler

Areas of Concentration: 1D or 1E; 3; 5

Book List: James, H.: The Spoils of Poynton, What Maisie Knew, The Turn of the Screw, The Ambassadors, selected short stories, essays, and literary criticism

Course Description: This course will focus on James as a foundational figure for twentieth-century novel theory. We will consider how James’s literary critical writing inspired later thinkers to think systematically about the novel as a high art form; and why James’s own novels are an enduring object of reference for novel theorists throughout the twentieth century. Theorists will include Percy Lubbock, Tzvetan Todorov, Wayne Booth, Seymour Chatman, Peter Brooks, Leo Bersani, Dorrit Cohn, J. Hillis Miller, Eve Sedgwick, and Fredric Jameson.

Our study of novel theory will be accompanied by the on-going research that students will conduct independently on a topic related to James. This research will culminate in a 15-20 page critical essay, due at the end of the term. A prospectus, bibliography and full rough draft of the essay will be required steps of the research and writing process. There is no midterm or final.

150/12 Senior Seminar: Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales
Nolan, Maura
TTh 3:30-5
287 Dwinelle

Areas of Concentration: 1A; 7

Book List: Mann, J., ed.: The Canterbury Tales; Davis, N., ed.: Chaucer Glossary; Miller, R., ed.: Chaucer: Sources and Backgrounds

Course Description: This seminar will focus on Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, one of the most complicated, funny, tragic, moral, irreverent and engaging texts written in English. Students will learn to read Middle English both silently and out loud, and will have the opportunity to perform Chaucer’s poetry if they so choose. We will focus on a series of questions about English literary history and its origins (or lack of origin) in Chaucer’s poetry; we will also learn about fourteenth-century history and culture, and the sources that Chaucer used to create his masterwork. The Canterbury Tales is a tour de force of genres, poetic modes, narratives and styles, making it an ideal text through which to explore the emergence of vernacular poetry in England, and from which to look forward to later developments in the English poetic tradition. We will focus on such topics as selfhood, gender, authorship, religiosity and politics, to name just a few of the categories of understanding that might be brought to bear on Chaucer’s great poem. Students will contribute to an online discussion and write a seminar paper in consultation with the professor.

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

150/13
Senior Seminar: Gender, Modernism, and Print Culture
Hollis, Catherine
TTh 3:30-5
Note New Room: 305 Wheeler

Areas of Concentration: 1E; 3; 4

Book List: Finkelstein and McCleery: An Introduction to Book History; Barnes, D.: Nightwood; Butts, M.: The Taverner Novels; Cooley, M.: The Archivist; Eliot, T.S.: The Waste Land: A Facsimile and Transcript of the Original Drafts; Joyce, J.: “Nausicaa” from Ulysses; Moore, M.: Poems; Rhys, J.: Voyage in the Dark; Woolf, V.: “Women and Fiction”; A Room of One’s Own; a Course Reader with additional materials, including Darnton: “What Is the History of Books?”; D.F. McKenzie: “The Book as an Expressive Form”; and supporting materials for the primary texts (excised passages from Nightwood; “Nausicaa” as it appeared in The Little Review; Moore’s “The Fish” as it appears in The Dial; mss. versions of A Room of One’s Own; and more

Course Description: Robert McAlmon famously observed that “it is some kind of commentary on the modern period that Joyce’s work and acclaim should have been fostered by high-minded ladies, rather than by men,” without going into detail about why gender matters in the publication of modernist texts. This course aims to produce that missing commentary by supplementing a discussion of gender and sexuality in modernist texts with an analysis of how these issues emerge in the circumstances of their production. Modernist print culture comprises the little magazines, small presses, and social networks that emerged to publish and promote Anglo-American modernist writing. These networks were especially the province of women and amateurs, non-professionals willing to risk censorship, poor financial returns, and canonical anonymity in service to their authors’ books. We will analyze famous case histories of modernist publication – Eliot’s Waste Land, Joyce’s Ulysses, Woolf’s self-publication – in addition to those less familiar – Barnes’s Nightwood, Rhys’s Voyage in the Dark, and Mary Butts’ Taverner Novels: whenever possible, we will consider these texts’ original publication formats through photocopies and archival samples. Throughout this course, we will examine the tensions between the formal complexity of modernist texts and the methods of their production, while asking whether (and how) publication circumstances influence how a text is read and interpreted. This seminar should give you an understanding of the instability of the material text by grounding you in the emerging scholarly fields of the history of the book and textual studies, which we will group together under the term “print culture.”

150/14
Senior Seminar: Romantic Versification
Hanson, Kristin
Thurs. 3:30-6:30
103 Wheeler

Areas of Concentration: 1C or 1D; 3; 7

Book List: Perkins, D.: English Romantic Writers; a Course Reader

Course Description: English Romantic poets issued a great many pronouncements about the language of poetry. In this course we will explore these views not so much through what they said as through what they did. Focusing specifically on those resources of poetry which are linguistic forms -- meter, rhyme, alliteration and syntactic parallelism -- we will consider what defines these forms; how they are developed in distinctive ways by various Romantic poets including Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Keats and Byron; and what they contribute to the emotional power and beauty of these poets' works.

150/15
Senior Seminar: Film Noir
Bader, Julia
Note New Room & Time:
Seminars Th 5:30-8:30 P.M. in 300 Wheeler, plus film screenings Th 8:30-10 P.M.(also in 300 Wheeler)

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

Book List: Naremore, J.: More Than Night; Telotte, J.: Voices in the Dark; Kaplan, E.: Women in Film Noir; Silver & Ursini, eds.: Film Noir Reader I; Krutnik, F.: In A Lonely Street; Modleski, T.: The Women Who Knew Too Much; Deutelbaum & Poague, eds.: A Hitchcock Reader; Pomerance, M.: An Eye for Hitchcock; Colurtney, S.: Hollywood Fantasies of Miscegenation; Gledhill & Williams, eds.: Reinventing Film Studies; Cohan, S.: Masked Men

Course Description: We will examine film noir’s relationship to “classical” Hollywood cinema, as well as its history, theory and generic markers, while analyzing in detail the major films in this area. The course will also be concerned with the social and cultural background of the 40's, the representation of femininity and masculinity, and the spread of Freudianism.

160
Methods and Materials of Literary Criticism
Banfield, Ann
TTh 11-12:30
109 Wheeler

Areas of Concentration: 1E; 3; 5; 7

Book List: Cohn, D.: Transparent Minds; Fillmore, C.: Lectures on Deixis; Flaubert, G.: Sentimental Education; Joyce, J.: Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man; Mansfield, K.: Stories; Woolf, V.: To the Lighthouse

Course Description: This course will attempt to define narrative fiction (the novel and short story) in terms of the linguistic properties of what Roland Barthes calls “the writing of the novel,” in particular, 1) its uses of narrative tenses to recount the past and 2) its development of the style for the representation of subjectivity or point of view known as “represented speech and thought” or “free indirect style.” (Barthes calls it “the third person of the novel.”) Maurice Blanchot would say that the mysterious institution of the epic divides in two; one part becomes the impersonal coherence of a story, a history, the real as objective; the other becomes the real as a constellation of individual lives, subjectivities. We will examine how writers differently exploit the possibilities of these two aspects of fictional style and differently conceive of their relation to one another. It will lead us to consider the novel’s connection to realism, to naturalism and to modernism.

165AC
Special Topics in American Cultures: Captivity in America
Beam, Dorri
TTh 11-12:30
140 Barrows

Areas of Concentration: 2; 3; 4

Book List: Rowlandson, M.: The Sovereignty and Goodness of God; Silko, L.: Yellow Woman; Spofford, H.: “Circumstance”; de Vaca, C.: Castaways; Capt. J. Smith; Disney’s Pocahontas; Apess, W.: A Son of the Forest; Zitkala-Sa: American Indian Stories; Equiano, O.: The Interesting Narrative of the Life Olaudah Equiano; Jacobs, H.: Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl; Turner, N.: The Confessions of Nat Turner; Wideman, J. E.: Brothers and Keepers; Indian Ledger Art

Course Description: This course considers the captivity narrative as a recurring form in American literature and asks why it should be so prevalent in a “land of freedom.” We will expand this category beyond its traditional focus on Puritan captivity (in which Indians are the captors) to encompass a myriad of responses to captivity in a variety of forms in colonial, eighteenth-, and nineteenth-century American texts. The condition of captivity will be treated as a particularized scene of writing, one often productive of a crisis of language. We will examine issues of cultural contact and containment, freedom and imprisonment, and national inclusion and exclusion in the narratives and stories of not only Puritans, but also captured Africans, Native Americans, and women in early America. Finally, how is the reader “captured” by captivity narratives? How might readers also be re-educated by removal from their own cultural location and exposure to another? How, as students of American literature, should we understand our point of contact with captivity narratives? This is a seminar requiring sustained and substantive class participation.

This course satisfies U.C. Berkeley’s American Cultures requirement. It is a seminar that is open to declared English majors only.

166/1
Special Topics: Theorizing Children’s Literature
Schweik, Susan
TTh 9:30-11
101 Moffitt

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

Book List: See course description below

Course Description: What is “children’s literature”? How do (real and imagined) children read? What do various texts in the canon of children’s literature (and texts that lie outside that tradition) reveal about our own culture’s, and other cultures,’ ideologies of childhood? Do most children’s books serve the needs of children facing the complex world they negotiate today? This course will allow students to engage theoretically with children’s literature as a generic category and with specific examples in the field, using those examples as springboards for exploring aspects of the history of childhood, developmental theory, pedagogy, debates about censorship, textual and bibliographical studies, American studies, gender and sexuality studies, critical theory, Holocaust studies, multiculturalism, and visual studies. This is a course with a heavy load of reading. Primary texts we’ll read together are Where the Wild Things Are,Huckleberry Finn, Little Women, Little House on the Prairie, The Birchbark House, The Education of Little Tree, Naomi’s Road, The Diary of Anne Frank, Briar Rose, Daniel’s Story, The Icarus Girl, and The Other Side of Truth. (I’m assuming that you’ve read some of the Harry Potter series, which we’ll be discussing occasionally.) Secondary readings will include selections from Vivian Paley’s The Boy Who Would be a Helicopter, Jacqueline Rose’s The Case of Peter Pan: Or, the Impossibility of Children’s Fiction, Peter Hunt’s An Introduction to Children’s Literature, and Frederick Crews’s Postmodern Pooh. There will be some opportunity to do creative projects and some discussion of how to write and publish “children’s books.” In addition, there will be two midterms and a final exam.

166/2
Special Topics: Readings for Writers
Mukherjee (Blaise), Bharati
TTh 11-12:30
100 Wheeler

Areas of Concentration: 1E; 3

Book List: Flaubert: Madame Bovary; Fitzgerald: The Great Gatsby; Ford Maddox Ford: The Good Soldier; Forster: Howards End; Gordimer: Burger’s Daughter; Rushdie: Shame; Mukherjee: The Tree Bride; Ondaatje: In the Skin of the Lion; Erdrich: Love Medicine; Marquez: The General in His Labyrinth

Course Description: Through close scrutiny of selected texts, students will explore forms and theories of the novel. The aim of the course is to discover the intimate connection between the authorial choices of narrative strategies and the construction of meaning. Particular attention will be paid to the authors’ representation of national culture or invention of national identity. Some of the written assignments will include creative writing options.

166/3
Special Topics: 1922
Blanton, Dan
TTh 3:30-5
Note New Room: 141 Giannini

Areas of Concentration: 1E; 5; 6

Book List: Armstrong, L.: Selections from the Hot Fives; Carter, H.: The Tomb of Tutankhamen; Eliot, T.: The Waste Land; Joyce, J.: Ulysses; Kafka, F.: The Castle; Lang, F.: Dr. Mabuse, the Gambler; Lawrence, D.: Fantasia of the Unconscious; McKay, C.: Harlem Shadows; Murnau, F.: Nosferatu; Ogden, C.: The Meaning of Meaning; Pound, E.: The Little Review Calendar, Malatesta Cantos; Schoenberg, A.: Suite for Piano op. 25; Stein, G.: Geography and Plays; Wittgenstein, L.: Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus; Woolf, V.: Jacob’s Room; Yeats, W.: Meditations in Time of Civil War

Course Description: The year 1922 (or Year 1, as Ezra Pound declared it) has long marked the central moment in histories of literary modernism: the date of Ulysses (published in February in Paris) and The Waste Land (published in October in London). But a number of other things happened in 1922: social, political, cultural, and intellectual events that would continue to reverberate globally for decades. This course will explore a few of those, seeking to grasp a literary moment and a historical moment simultaneously--and asking what (if anything) they have to do with each other. Along the way, we will read fiction, poetry, and some of the criticism that first accompanied each. We will also explore contemporaneous developments in other arts (music and painting, for example), trace the formal effects of new technologies and media (radio and film, most notably), and venture into the range of disciplines (anthropology, archaeology, economics, history, linguistics, philosophy, psychology, sociology) that conspire to shape a modernist annus mirabilis.

166/4
Special Topics: Vladimir Nabokov
Naiman, Eric
MWF 10-11
88 Dwinelle

This class is cross-listed with Slavic 134F.

Areas of Concentration: 1E; 3; 4

Book List: Nabokov, V.: The Defense, Laughter in the Dark, 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. The will be a midterm and a final examination.

166/5
Special Topics: Post-War Italian Cinema (1945-70)
Miller, D. A.
Lectures MW 3:30-5 in 300 Wheeler, plus film screenings Tues. 6-9 P.M. (also in 300 Wheeler)

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

Book List: T.B.A.

Course Description: Post-war Italian cinema became internationally famous for two things: first, for revitalizing a nineteenth-century realist aesthetic, and then, for developing the cinematic modernism that ran directly counter to this realism. It ought to have been famous for cultivating, in both phases, a religion of "the beautiful image." But this fact remained something of an open secret, as critics and directors tended to promote understanding in politico-intellectual terms that were impoverishingly antivisual. Our project, then, is to see what happens to an artistic program when the seduction of the image is no longer abstracted from the work of meaning. Directors to be studied: Rosselini, De Sica, Antonioni, Fellini, Visconti, Pasolini, Germi, and Bertolucci. Topics to be considered: neorealism, auteur culture, fascism-and-homosexuality, the Italian culture-wars, and Italian-American directors of the 1970s.

David Forgacs, Open City
Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, L'avventura
Sam Rohdie, Rocco and his brothers

171
Literature and Sexual Identity
Nealon, Christopher
TTh 12:30-2
Note New Room: 141 McCone

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

Areas of Concentration: 1E; 4; 6

Book List: Bannon: Beebo Brinker; Barthes: The Pleasure of the Text; Colapinto: As Nature Made Him; Foucault: The History of Sexuality, volume 1; Notley: The Descent of Alette

Course Description: This course will take up the complicated relationship between literature and sexuality by way of sexual science, the aesthetics of sexuality, and sociologies and histories of sexuality. Throughout the course we will ask what role literature has to play in these discourses – and, indeed, we will ask in what sense those discourses are themselves “literary.” Though the bulk of the course focuses on the period since 1960 in the United States, we will begin with a look at the late 19th century as a formative period for modern understandings of sexuality – and of literature – and pause briefly in the modernist period, too, so as to frame our discussion of the more contemporary materials that will make up the bulk of the course.

175
Literature and Disability
Schweik, Susan
TTh 12:30-2
110 Wheeler

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

Book List: See course description below

Course Description: What is disability? Rosemarie Garland Thomson has provisionally defined it as “first, a system for interpreting bodily variations; second, a relationship between bodies and their environments; third, a set of practices that produce both the able-bodied and the disabled; fourth, a way of describing the inherent instability of the embodied self; fifth, a category of scholarly analysis; and sixth, a political and historical community.” This course will explore disability as a representational system and discursive construction. We’ll focus on some key representations of disability in several different genres: theater (Philoctetes, Richard III, Children of a Lesser God, Sign Me Alice, Weights, and Storm Reading); poetry (poems by Josephine Miles, Adrienne Rich, Mark O’Brien, Jim Ferris and Leroy Moore); short fiction (stories by Stephen Crane, Sarah Orne Jewett, Toni Morrison, Anne Finger, and Jean Stewart); graphic novel (Palestine); and war film (The Best Years of Our Lives). Throughout, we’ll be thinking about disability and difference (e.g. race, gender, and different kinds of impairment). In a final section of the course we’ll focus on the representation of disability and (natural and unnatural) disaster, taking a new look at Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God to see what disability studies can bring to and learn from its representation of the novel’s representation of the 1928 hurricane that killed almost 2,000 poor black migrant workers in Florida.

180H
The Short Story
Chandra, Vikram
MWF 3-4
141 McCone

Areas of Concentration: 1E; 3

Book List and Course Description: For more information on this course, please email the professor at vikramchandra@calmail.berkeley.edu.

H195B/1
Honors Course
Bader, Julia
M 5:30-8:30 P.M.
300 Wheeler

Areas of Concentration: None

Book List: Kaplan, E.: Feminism and Film; Jenkins, C.: Culture; Thiroux, E.: The Critical Edge; Cuddon, J.: Dictionary of Literary Terms; Turner, G.: Film as Social Practice; Kuhn, A.: Women’s Pictures; Doane, M.: Femmes Fatales; Childers & Hentzi: Columbia Dictionary of Modern Literature; Mansfield, K.: Stories; Girgus, S.: The Films of Woody Allen; Halberstam, J.: Skin Shows; Gelder, K.: The Horror Reader; Kaplan, E.: Motherhood & Representation

Course Description: This is a continuation of section 1 of H195A, taught by J. Bader in Fall 2005. 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.

H195B/2
Honors Course
JanMohamed, Abdul
MWF 10-11
109 Wheeler

Areas of Concentration: None

Book List: T.B.A.

Course Description: This class will be run as a tutorial, enabling you to focus on the production of a 50-page honors thesis by the end of the semester.

This is a continuation of section 2 of H195A, taught by A. JanMohamed in Fall 2005. No new students will be admitted. No new application form needs to be filled out. Professor JanMohamed will give out CECs (class entry codes) in class in November.

H195B/3
Honors Course
Wong, Hertha Sweet
TTh 2-3:30
221 Wheeler

Areas of Concentration: None

Book List: T.B.A.

Course Description: This is a continuation of section 3 of H195A, taught by H. S. Wong in Fall 2005. No new students will be admitted. No new application form needs to be filled out. Professor Wong will give out CECs (class entry codes) in class in November.

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Last modified: Wednesday, 08-Feb-2006 14:28:54 PST

Upper Division Courses

Spring 2006

Courses: