Upper-Division Courses, Part I
Spring 2007
ENGLISH MAJORS: The areas of concentration for each upper-division course are typed right above the book list for the class. In addition, please click on the Areas of Concentration for a list of all the courses that fall under each area of concentration, as well as a list of Spring 2007 courses that satisfy the pre-1800 requirement for the English major.
100/1
Junior Seminar: Close Reading—Theory, Practice, Ideology, Pleasure
Miller, D.A.
MW 10-11:30
300 Wheeler
Areas of Concentration: 3; 5
Book List: Austen, J.: Emma; Barthes, R.: S/Z; Brown, D.: The Da Vinci Code; Doyle, A.C.: Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
Course Description: It may be argued that close reading is literary criticism. Certainly, it is its only technique and its most widely shared belief. If close reading is central to literary criticism, however, it has been made marginal almost everywhere else, with exceptions to be duly noted. Like other marginalized phenomena, it is selectively lionized and massively stigmatized; here, its mythic heroes such as Sherlock Holmes and, more recently, Robert Langdon; there, its regular demons, who are usually us. The aim of this course is not to teach students how to close-read, but to bring them to a more conscious (and self-conscious) understanding of what may be at stake in both the practice and the resistance to it. Accordingly, we will be both “doing” close reading and engaging in assisted reflection on what it means, entails, or implies.
Our objects comprise a poem by Keats, a novel by Austen, and a film by Hitchcock, all of which spectacularly lend themselves to close reading, and some mass culture artifacts that categorically do not, but will receive it nonetheless (for the course harbors a certain desire to take close-reading out of the closet of English Literature into the streets of cultural analysis). Our topics include: the institutionalization of close reading, its past, present, and utopian rationales, historicist and other attacks on it, its rules-of-the-game, the problematic of “getting close” (or, the critic’s “intimacy issues”), and, not least, the pleasures of the text.
We start in medias res; I assume that the seminar members already have an experience of close reading that they wish to extend, and an ability in it that they are working to hone. Any student in doubt on the question of his or her qualifications for the seminar may self-administer the following test: Are you fond of asking your English teacher the question, “Did the author really mean that?” If so, it is safe to assume that you are in a bad relation to close reading; I don’t recommend coming any closer.
Be sure to read the paragraph on page 1 of this Announcement of Classes regarding enrollment in English 100!
100/2
Goldsmith, Steven
Junior Seminar: Why Do We Cry? The Literature of Sorrow, Sympathy, and Indifference
MW 4-5:30
221 Wheeler
Areas of Concentration: 1C or 1D; 3; 5
Book List: Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol. 2; Austen, J.: Sense and Sensibility; Mackenzie, H.: The Man of Feeling; Solomon, R.: What Is An Emotion?; Sterne, L.: Sentimental Journey; Stowe, H.: Uncle Tom’s Cabin
Course Description: “Why do we cry?” asks the philosopher, Jerome Neu. “My short answer is: because we think.” Neu belongs with those who believe emotions manifest intelligence rather than physiology. In this class, we will test Neu’s proposition, first by considering the philosophy of emotion (from Aristotle, Descartes, Adam Smith, Darwin, and Freud to recent authors such as Nussbaum, Fisher, and Terada), then by discussing the literary representation of emotion between 1750 and 1850, a century in which poets and novelists responded to the ever-increasing rationality and instrumentalism driving modern life. To get at the high stakes of emotion then (and still today), we will take up a number of questions: How do the emotions affect our understanding of the relationship between mind and body? What are the social functions of emotion? Are emotions biological constants or are they culturally and historically variable? Is it possible to distinguish between authentic and inauthentic emotions? Is there a difference between emotion and sentimentality? How do literary representations of emotion act on the emotions of readers? Is it possible (or desirable) not to feel? To get at these questions, we will read many lyric poems (by Gray, Collins, Charlotte Smith, Blake, Wordsworth, Keats, Poe, and others) and a few novels (by Mackenzie, Sterne, and Austen), focusing on the scenes of sorrow, loss, and sympathy that dominate this period. If time allows, we may finish with Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin.
Be sure to read the paragraph on page 1 of this Announcement of Classes regarding enrollment in English 100!
100/3
Junior Seminar: Representing Elizabeth I—Feminine Sovereignty in Poetry and Painting
Landreth, David
MW 4-5:30
121 Wheeler
Areas of Concentration: 1B; 4
Book List (tentative): Elizabeth I, Queen of England: Collected Works; Spenser, E.: Edmund Spenser’s Poetry; Sidney, P.: Major Works; Shakespeare, W.: Richard II, The Merry Wives of Windsor; Brigden, S.: New Worlds, Lost Worlds: the Rule of the Tudors, 1485-1603;and a course reader
Course Description: At the crossing of historiography, poetry, and the visual arts in sixteenth-century England stands the enigmatic and paradoxical figure of Elizabeth Tudor, the sovereign Queen of a patriarchal society. Elizabeth crafted her power through a complex and contradictory persona in multiple media, shaping her virgin sexuality into an idol for the devotion of her court, and the fury of her enemies. This seminar will use an interdisciplinary strategy to examine the representational means and methods by which poets, painters, and the Queen herself sought to express, to justify, or to rail against the nearly unimaginable paradox of feminine rule—and to consider the lens that the prominence of Elizabeth affords us to look into the already-contradictory roles of everyday English women.
Be sure to read the paragraph on page 1 of this Announcement of Classes regarding enrollment in English 100!
100/5
Junior Seminar: Satire
Picciotto, Joanna
MW 4-5:30
109 Wheeler
Areas of Concentration: 1C; 3
Book List: Petronius: The Satyricon; Etherege, G.: The Man of Mode; Addison J. and R. Steele: The Spectator; Haywood, E.: The Female Spectator; Pope, A.: The Poems of Alexander Pope; Swift, J.: The Writings of Jonathan Swift; Gay, J.: The Beggar's Opera; Scriblerus, M.: Memoirs; Hogarth, W.: Engravings of Hogarth; Rees, D.: Get Your War On. Along with secondary literature, course reader will include writings by Horace, Juvenal, Mary Wortley Montagu, Kevin Davies, and others.
Course Description: We will explore England’s "age of satire" and the secondary literature on its generative tropes: discovery, exposure, magnification, correction. In the final two weeks of the semester, we’ll investigate contemporary experiments in satire. Students will write one short essay and a final paper.
Be sure to read the paragraph on page 1 of this Announcement of Classes regarding enrollment in English 100!
100/9
Junior Seminar: The Bloomsbury Group and British Modernism
Hollis, Catherine
TTh 11-12:30
109 Wheeler
Areas of Concentration: 1E; 3; 4; 6
Book List: Mulk Raj Anand: Untouchable; Mary Butts: The Taverner Novels; Michael Cunningham: The Hours; E.M. Forster: Howard's End; Sigmund Freud: Civilization and its Discontents; Katherine Mansfield: Stories; Lytton Strachey: Eminent Victorians; Virginia Woolf: Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse. A course reader will include primary texts from Clive Bell, Roger Fry, J.M. Keynes, Bertrand Russell, and Leonard Woolf, as well as critical essays. Art and design by Vanessa Bell, Duncan Grant, and the Omega Workshop will be viewed in class.
Course Description: This course places Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Group in context with larger developments in British modernism. Bloomsbury is a neighborhood in London that includes Russell Square, the British Museum, and University College London. But Bloomsbury also refers to the early 20th -century group of novelists, painters, publishers, economists, and philosophers who have become identified with the neighborhood in which they lived: Virginia Woolf, E.M. Forster, Roger Fry, Vanessa Bell, Lytton Strachey, J.M. Keynes, and Bertrand Russell, among others, friends and relations who challenged conventions in art, literature, and philosophy.
The Bloomsbury group also challenged social conventions in their private lives, through the choices they made about families, marriages, sexual partners, and home décor. “On or about December 1910 human character changed”: so wrote Virginia Woolf in her 1924 essay, “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown,” raising a variety of questions that we will be exploring in this course. What kinds of shifts in “human relations” were occurring in the early decades of the 20th century and how were these shifts represented in art and literature? What role did Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury group play in the modernization of art and life? In the emerging new sexualities of inter-war modernist culture? What influence does the collaborative nature of the group have on their visual and literary art, aesthetic and philosophical theories, political and social commitments? Finally, what role does “Virginia Woolf” and the “Bloomsbury Group” perform in our own 21st-century culture?
Be sure to read the paragraph on page 1 of this Announcement of Classes regarding enrollment in English 100!
100/10
Junior Seminar: Mark Twain
Breitwieser, Mitchell
TTh 12:30-2
109 Wheeler
Areas of Concentration: 1D; 3
Book List: Mark Twain: The Innocents Abroad, Roughing It, Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, Puddnhead Wilson, and Tales, Speeches, Essays and Sketches
Course Description: Close readings of Twain’s major works, emphasizing the development of his career. I am particularly interested in the interplay of humor and bitterness in Twain’s social and political thought, but class discussion will be open for any aspect of Twain’s writing that the students wish to bring up. Regular attendance and participation, along with two ten-page essays, will be required.
Be sure to read the paragraph on page 1 of this Announcement of Classes regarding enrollment in English 100!
100/11 This section has been cancelled.
100/12
Junior Seminar: Western American Literature
Starr, George
TTh 2-3:30
109 Wheeler
Areas of Concentration: 1D or 1E; 6
Book List: Clemens, Samuel L. (Mark Twain): Roughing It; Austin, Mary: The Land of Little Rain; Norris, Frank: McTeague; London, Jack: The Valley of the Moon; West, Nathanael: The Day of the Locust; Chandler, Raymond: The Big Sleep; Stegner, Wallace: The Angle of Repose; Dick, Philip K.: Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?; Didion, Joan: Slouching toward Bethlehem. Other assigned reading will be available either online or photocopied.
Course Description: Reading, discussion , and writing about fiction, poetry, memoirs, and essays that have western settings, or that try to describe or account for western experience in “regional” terms—emphasizing, for example, the formative influence of the natural landscape, or of racial, economic, and social groups in distinctive, defining relationships with their surroundings (and with one another).
Be sure to read the paragraph on page 1 of this Announcement of Classes regarding enrollment in English 100!
100/13
Junior Seminar: Wordsworth Circle
Francois, Anne-Lise
TTh 3:30-5
106 Wheeler
Areas of Concentration: 1C or 1D; 3; 4
Book List: De Quincey, T.: Confessions of an English Opium-Eater and Other Writings and Recollections of the Lakes and the Lake Poets; Coleridge, S.T.: The Major Works; Wordsworth, D.: The Grasmere and Alfoxden Journals; Wordsworth, W. & S.T. Coleridge: Lyrical Ballads; Wordsworth, W.: The Prelude 1799, 1805, 1850
Course Description: This class presents an intensive study of a group of writers and circle of friends: William Wordsworth, Dorothy Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Thomas de Quincey. As we read these writers’ poetry, journals, letters, essays, and memoirs, we will use the metaphor of the “circle” and its sometimes vicious variants—circularity, circulation, cycles, revolutions, rings, enclosures, “spots of time”—to examine the relation between literary and social experimentation during an age of national reform, international revolution, industrialization and rural dislocation, Napoleonic wars, and the rise of the British Empire. If this course advertisement were a trailer for Julien Temple’s 2001 Pandemonium (which we will view), now I might name “hot” topics like brother-sister incest, French affairs, love triangles, and opium addiction, and then rattle off the following character blurbs: the stuffy once-revolutionary-turned-establishment poet (the villain); his long-suffering, nature-loving sister condemned to live in his shadow and whose journals he plundered for poems (the girl); their wild, drug-addicted friend who “failed” the more the established poet succeeded (the hero) and the younger writer/opium-eater who took notes on them all (the film-maker himself). Ok, so it’s not that good a trailer, but my hope is that our discussions will be more exciting because more complex. We will address the nature of conversations, collaborations and competitions between writers, questions of literary property, theft and echo, the dynamics of inclusion, exclusion and betrayal, the rhythms of hope and disappointment, and figures of “borderers” living on the “edges” (whether between “animal” and “human,” “nature” and non-nature, intoxication and “reason,” or pre- and post-modern ways of life), as these topics inform what should interest us most about these writers—what they did with words.
Be sure to read the paragraph on page 1 of this Announcement of Classes regarding enrollment in English 100!
100/14
Junior Seminar: Literature and Psychoanalysis
Puckett, Kent
TTh 3:30-5
221 Wheeler
Areas of Concentration: 1E; 4; 5; 6
Book List: Readings will include works by Walter Benjamin, Leo Bersani, Peter Brooks, Soshana Felman, Sigmund Freud, Geoffrey Hartman, Neil Hertz, Barbara Johnson, Melanie Klein, Jacques Lacan, D. W. Winnicott, and others.
Course Description: What do literature and psychoanalysis have in common? For one, both are usually about two or more of the following: sex, death, love, hate, work, jealousy, obsession, parents, children, anxiety, and loss. Seemingly made for each other, literature and psychoanalysis have been in a more or less close conversation since the latter's emergence at the end of the nineteenth century. In this course, we will consider the relationship between literature and psychoanalysis in a number of ways: we will look at Freud's own writing as literature in the context of psychoanalysis's early days as practice, institution, and scandal; we will consider historical and intellectual connections between Freudian and post-Freudian psychoanalysis and different kinds of literary interpretation; and we will work to derive from the language of psychoanalysis tools to help us cope with the considerable formal and thematic complexity of literary texts. The syllabus will include psychoanalytic writing by Freud, Lacan, Klein, Winnicott, and others as well as works by literary critics who derive some or all of their terms from psychoanalysis. We will also read some stories and watch some films along the way.
Be sure to read the paragraph on page 1 of this Announcement of Classes regarding enrollment in English 100!
100/15
Junior Seminar: Women’s Films of the ‘40s and ‘50s
Bader, Julia
Lectures TTh 5:30-7 in 279 Dwinelle, plus films Thurs. 7-10 P.M., also in 279 Dwinelle
Areas of Concentration: 1E; 3; 4; 6
Book List: Gledhill, C.: Home Is Where the Heart Is; Doane, M.: The Desire to Desire; Kaplan, E. A.: Motherhood and Representation
Course Description: In this course we will examine a range of examples of the genre “the woman’s film” of the 40's and 50's, emphasizing maternal, paranoid, romantic and medical discourses, issues of spectatorship, consumerism, and various “female” problems and fantasies. We will also look at feminist film theory and its conceptualization of subjectivity and desire in the cinematic apparatus.
Be sure to read the paragraph on page 1 of this Announcement of Classes regarding enrollment in English 100!
101
History of the English Language
Hanson, Kristin
TTh 5-6:30
220 Wheeler
Area of Concentration: 7
Book List: Algeo, J. and T. Pyles: The Origins and Development of the English Language, 5th ed.
Course Description: This course surveys the history of the English language from its Indo-European roots, through its Old, Middle and Early Modern periods, to its different forms in use throughout the world today. Topics include changes in the core grammatical systems of phonology (sound structure), morphology (word structure) and syntax (sentence structure); in vocabulary; in writing and literary forms; and in the social position of English and its dialects.
C107
The Bible as Literature
Goldsmith, Steven
MWF 1-2
4 Le Conte
This course is cross-listed with Religious Studies C119.
Area of Concentration: 6
Book List: New Oxford Annotated Bible, College Edition; Oxford Dictionary of the Bible; Alter, R.: Genesis
Course Description: In this class, we will read a selection of biblical texts as literature; that is, we will read them as anything but divine revelation. We will take up traditional literary questions of form, style, and structure, but we will also learn how to ask historical, political, and theoretical questions of a text that is multi-authored, thoroughly fissured, and historically sedimented. Among other topics, we will pay special attention to how authority is established and contested in biblical texts; how biblical authors negotiate the ancient Hebrew prohibition against representing God in images; and how the gospels are socially and historically poised between the original Jesus movement that is their source and the institutionalization of the church that follows. Assignments will include at least a take-home midterm and a final, perhaps more.
111
Chaucer
Miller, Jennifer
MWF 1-2
213 Wheeler
Areas of Concentration: 1A; 7
Book List and Course Description: For more information on this course, please email the professor at j_miller@berkeley.edu.
This course satisfies the pre-1800 requirement for the English major.
115B
The English Renaissance: Literature of the 17th Century
Booth, Stephen
TTh 2-3:30
213 Wheeler
Areas of Concentration: 1B; 3
Book List: Bacon, F.: The Essays; Bunyan, J.: Pilgrim's Progress; Di Cesare, ed.: George Herbert & the ... Religious Poets; Donne, J.: Complete English Poems; Maclean, H, ed.: Ben Jonson and the Cavalier Poets; Marvell, A.: Complete Poems; Milton, J.: Paradise Lost
Course Description: Although I am putting a history book (A Century of Revolution by Christopher Hill) on the recommended list sent to the bookstores, this will be a course on works written in the first three quarters of the seventeenth century, not a course on the century itself.
I think I can teach you more about the seventeenth-century works I don't discuss in class by looking in detail at a few works than I could by scurrying through a handful of anthologies or by generalizing at length about either the particular qualities of particular authors or schools or by focusing on the particular qualities that characterize the culture that seventeenth-century literature reflects. I'm not good at categorizing, and I deeply mistrust categorization as an intellectual tool.
I will spend most of my time–nearly all of it, in fact—on verse. That's mainly because verse was what the seventeenth century did best, but also because I don't have much that is worth listening to to say about much seventeenth-century prose. I will talk about Pilgrim’s Progress, and I may talk about one or two of Francis Bacon's essays, but the reading will otherwise be of verse by Donne, Jonson, Herrick, George Herbert, Waller, Milton, Suckling, Lovelace, and Marvell. I want particularly to talk about things that most English majors have dealt with before—notably the most often assigned poems of Donne and Herbert and, most notably, Paradise Lost. (I realize that Paradise Lost might put some people off taking the course. Such people have probably tried, or been asked to try, to read Paradise Lost as if it got the stock Sunday-school responses it sounds as if it's trying to get. Given a chance to read the poem as something other than a failed effort to versify its editors' footnotes, such people are likely to see how beautiful Paradise Lost is and to wish it longer.)
Three papers, each of a length determined by how much you have to say and how efficient you are in saying it. The third paper will take the place of a final examination and will be due in my box in 322 Wheeler Hall any time between the last class meeting and 3:30 p.m. on whatever day is assigned this course for a final exam.
This course satisfies the pre-1800 requirement for the English major.
117B
Shakespeare
Adelman, Janet
TTh 2-3:30
101 Barker
Areas of Concentration: 1B; 3; 4
Book List: Shakespeare, W.: The Norton Shakespeare
Course Description: In this course we will read all the plays conventionally attributed to the second half of Shakespeare’s career, beginning with Hamlet and ending with The Tempest. This period includes all the so-called great tragedies (Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth) and some others that are sometimes considered not quite tragedies or not quite great (Timon of Athens, Antony and Cleopatra, Coriolanus), the so-called problem plays (Troilus and Cressida, All’s Well That Ends Well, Measure for Measure) and the so-called late romances (Pericles, Cymbeline, The Winter’s Tale, The Tempest); it does not include Romeo and Juliet, the history plays, and the comedies (for those you need 117A or 117S). My lectures will tend to emphasize Shakespeare’s reworking of race, gender, sexuality, and the family in these plays, but I hope that the classroom will be a place of lively exchange, in which you feel free to challenge my ideas and to develop your own interests. In addition to a final exam and several required papers of varying lengths, you may be asked to work on a speech and a short scene in small groups to help you understand some aspects of Shakespeare’s verse and his theatrical medium.
117S
Shakespeare
Nelson, Alan
TTh 9:30-11
105 North Gate
Areas of Concentration: 1B; 3
Book List: Bevington, D., ed.: The Complete Works (of William Shakespeare)
Course Description: In this course, we will attempt to read as many Shakespeare plays as can be got through conveniently in fifteen weeks. In general we will try to cover one play per week, but along the way we will devote a week to an introduction of the author, his times, his poems, his plays, and his language; a week to the Sonnets; and we will take extra time for longer and more complex plays like Hamlet. So we will manage about a dozen plays, trying also to cover a range of genres including comedy, history, tragedy, and so-called romance. We will be thinking of plot, character, and action, but above all of dramatic poetry. Information will be posted before the class begins, and throughout the semester, on the instructor's website (see below). Students should anticipate writing three short papers, a midterm and a final exam, and possible quizzes. Students should also anticipate attending lecture regularly, reading the assignments carefully and in advance of lecture, and indeed participating fully in the work of the class.
Instructor's website: http://socrates.berkeley.edu/~ahnelson
118
Milton
Kahn, Victoria
TTh 11-12:30
note new room: 180 Tan
Areas of Concentration: 1B or 1C
Book List: John Milton: Complete Poems and Major Prose, ed. Merritt Y. Hughes
Course Description: An introduction to the poetry and prose of one of the greatest writers in English literature. Sexual radical, political revolutionary, and literary genius, Milton is a one-man introduction to the cultural ferment of the English Renaissance, the Reformation, and the English civil war. Readings include: Milton’s early poems, his political treatises, Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, and Samson Agonistes.
This course satisfies the pre-1800 requirement for the English major.
125C
European Novel: History and the Novel
Golburt, Lyubov
TTh 9:30-11
160 Dwinelle
This course is cross-listed with Slavic 133.
Areas of Concentration: 1D; 3
Book List: Scott, W.: Waverley, or ‘Tis Sixty Years Since; Hugo, V.: Notre Dame de Paris; Dickens, C.: A Tale of Two Cities; Tolstoy, L.: War and Peace
Course Description: Focusing on key texts from English, French, and Russian traditions, this course examines how the genre of the novel approaches and appropriates historical material as well as reflects its own particular historical contexts. We will consider four major European novels from the nineteenth century, a “golden age” of the novel in Europe and a period in which history and historical writing also came to dominate European intellectual discussions. The course encourages a range of critical approaches, from close reading, the theory of the novel and genre theory, to historicist and biographical inquiry. Course requirements include reading 150-200 pages per week, attending occasional film screenings, 3 short response papers, a longer final paper, a midterm and a final exam.
125D
The 20th-Century Novel
Bernstein, Michael
TTh 12:30-2
213 Wheeler
Areas of Concentration: 1E; 3
Book List: Proust, M.: Remembrance of Things Past, Volumes 1-3 (translated by Moncrieff and Kilmartin)
Course Description: By reading one of the most significant 20th-century novels in detail, the course will attempt to answer questions about the thematic concerns and formal techniques of modernism. The relationships between changing conceptions of language and desire, of the individual subject, and of the pressures of history, as these are figured in the particular rhetorics and structures of this paradigmatic novel, will provide the central axes of our investigation. Active in-class participation and a willingness to engage in both copious reading and regular dialogues are the only prerequisites for the course.
Please note that we will be reading all of Proust's novel, rather than, as is often the case, only the first and last chapters (volumes).
130A
American Literature: Before 1800
Breitwieser, Mitchell
TTh 9:30-11
50 Birge
Areas of Concentration: 1C; 3
Book List: William Bradford: Of Plymouth Plantation; Mary White Rowlandson: The Sovereignty and Goodness of God; Jonathan Edwards: A Jonathan Edwards Reader; Thomas Jefferson: Notes on the State of Virginia; Benjamin Franklin: The Autobiography; Olaudah Equiano: The Interesting Life and Other Writings; Stephen Burroughs: Memoirs; some Xeroxed poems
Course Description: I will lecture on the struggle to alter traditional modes of cultural understanding to account for the extraordinary circumstances of New World life as it is reflected and expressed in these books, together with the gradual emergence of novel social and political paradigms and linked transformations in the conception of personal identity. Two seven-page midterm essays and a final exam will be required.
This course satisfies the pre-1800 requirement for the English major.
130B
American Literature: 1800-1865
Otter, Samuel
TTh 11-12:30
70 Evans
Areas of Concentration: 1D; 2; 4
Book List: Lauter, P., ed.: The Heath Anthology of American Literature, Vol. I; Fern, F.: Ruth Hall; Jacobs, H.: Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl; Melville, H.: Moby-Dick; Thoreau, H.: Walden; course reader
Course Description: Reading Poe, Longfellow, Emerson, Thoreau, Douglass, Jacobs, Fern, Melville, Whitman, and Dickinson, we will pay particular attention to literary form and technique, to social and political context, and to the ideological formations and transformations during the antebellum period. We will be concerned with issues of "self" (the search for transcendence and the entanglement in relations); sexuality; landscape; the Puritan legacy; the nature and role of the emotions; the efforts to reform the American character; the democratic experiment; and the struggles over the rights and roles of women, African Americans, and Native Americans in the expanding nation. Two midterms and one final examination will be required.
130C
American Literature: 1865-1900
Wagner, Bryan
note new time: MW 3-4:30
note new location: 305 Wheeler
Note that the Friday discussion sections for this course have been cancelled, and, instead, the lecture portion of the class will meet a half an hour longer on Mondays and Wednesdays than previously scheduled, as indicated above; please note the new location, as well.
Areas of Concentration: 1D; 2
Book List: Harriet Beecher Stowe: Uncle Tom’s Cabin; Walt Whitman: Complete Poems; Rebecca Harding Davis: Life in the Iron-Mills; Emily Dickinson: Complete Poems; Mark Twain: Huckleberry Finn; William Dean Howells: Hazard of New Fortunes; Charles Chesnutt: Marrow of Tradition; Kate Chopin: The Awakening; Stephen Crane: Great Short Works. There will also be a course reader of poetry, short stories, and journalism.
Course Description: A survey in United States literature from the Civil War to the beginning of the twentieth century. The course pays special attention to matters of violence, urban life, and social reform as they were refracted within an increasingly stratified public sphere. There will be one midterm, one final exam, and two short papers.
131
American Poetry
Hass, Robert
TTh 12:30-2
10 Evans
Areas of Concentration: 3; 4
Book List: Kinnell, Galway, ed.: The Essential Whitman; Hillman, Brenda, ed.: Poems of Emily Dickinson; Hass, Robert, et al., ed: American Poetry: The Twentieth Century, Vol. I; Plath, Sylvia: Selected Poems; Ashbery, John: Selected Poems; Marvin, Kate: Legitimate Dangers: American Poets of the New Century
Course Description: This is a lecture course that surveys American poetry from Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson to the present. There will be some attention to modernism, Poets of the 1930’s, postwar poetry, and to very recent developments.
133T
Topics in African American Literature and Culture: Toni Morrison
JanMohamed, Abdul
TTh 2-3:30
Note new location: 155 Kroeber
Areas of Concentration: 1E; 2; 3; 4
Book List: Morrison, T: The Bluest Eye, Sula, Song of Solomon, Tar Baby, Beloved, Jazz, Paradise, Love, and Playing in the Dark
Course Description: An examination of the development of various themes in Toni Morrison's fiction and the aesthetic rendition of these themes.
135AC
Literature of American Cultures: Race, Ethnicity, and Disability in American Cultures
Schweik, Susan
MWF 1-2
2040 Valley LSB
Areas of Concentration: 1D or 1E; 2
Book List: Adams, M et al.: Readings for Diversity and Social Justice; Lai, H. et al.: Island: Poetry and History of Chinese Immigrants on Angel Island; Craft, W. and E.: Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom; Cable, G.W.: The Grandissimes; Morrison, T.: Sula; Dreger, A.: One of Us: Conjoined Twins and the Future of Normal; Dorris, M.: The Broken Cord; Fadiman, A.: The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down; Moraga, C.: Heroes and Saints and Other Plays
Course Description: This course will analyze the categories of “disability,” “race” and “ethnicity” critically. “Disability” as an identity category is always raced, whether we attend to that intersection or not, and people defined in racial terms are also always placed on axes of disability and ability, well and ill, normal and abnormal, malformed and well-formed. Much work on that ambiguous umbrella term “disability” treats disabled people as ungendered (that is, male), unraced (that is, white), without nationality (that is, native-born American but barely a citizen), and unsexualized (that is, heterosexual, but only in default). My aim in this course is to set up situations in which you can think about several of these categories simultaneously in the context of American cultures present and past.
To this end, we will take four historical examples as case studies. Each illustrates how racism and ableism have intertwined in American (dis)ability cultures. First we will examine immigration history (with some emphasis on Angel Island and Chinese immigration). Second, we will focus on how American writers have remembered two women of color who performed in freak shows and on how race, disability and gender issues intersect on the freak show (or today the talk show) stage. In the third unit, on slavery, we will begin to unearth a history of disability in American slavery and in the Jim Crow South. In the fourth module, we will discuss eugenics and the tight connections between race and disability in eugenic models of degeneration. The final section of the course will move into the present, first giving you some exposure to contemporary activist history that counters and undoes the dynamics we have been exploring, and then ending with three particular texts to anchor our analysis of the politics of representation of disability, gender, sexuality, class, race and ethnicity: Native American novelist Michael Dorris’s controversial memoir of raising his son who had Fetal Alcohol Syndrome, The Broken Cord, Anne Fadiman’s The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, and Chicana writer Cherrie Moraga’s play about farmworkers’organizing and the health effects of pesticides, Heroes and Saints.
A variety of guest speakers, including performance artists and disability movement activists, will visit us. We’ll view a series of films, including the silent eugenics film The Black Stork, or Are You Fit to Marry, a U.S. public health film on immigration from the 1930s, and several contemporary documentaries on subjects ranging from the medical separation of conjoined twins to contemporary disabled womens’ global organizing. Written requirements: two midterms, informal journal writing, and a final project that students can tailor to their own interests.
This course satisfies U.C. Berkeley’s American Cultures requirement.
Newly added course:
C136
Topics in American Studies: The Era of the Child--The U.S. 1865-1900
Hutson, Richard
TTh 9:30-11
305 Wheeler
This class is cross-listed with American Studies C111E.
Areas of Concentration: 1D; 4; 6
Book List: Aldrich, Thomas Bailey: The Story of a Bad Boy; Alcott, Louisa May: Little Women; Alger, Horatio: Ragged Dick and Mark the Match Boy; James, Henry: The Turn of the Screw and Other Short Novels, What Maisie Knew; Twain, Mark: The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn; Wiggin, Kate D.: Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm
Course Description: Historians often define the era after the Civil War and especially from 1880 to ca. 1915 as the "era of the child." Children became the heroes of popular culture as well as major subjects for painters and intellectuals and cultural observers. This is a period in which ordinary citizens felt that an economic and social revolution was taking place with the rise of industrial capitalism and urban transformations, creating a crisis of major cultural/political/economic rapid change. Such a historical trauma seemed to demand difficult and painful reconsiderations and redefinitions. Just as there developed an issue of defining masculinity and femininity in the period, there developed a problem about children and adolescents. Questions about boys and girls might be not only about gender definitions but also about the development of an ethical consciousness, what might be called everyday ethical coping. Children seemed to represent the last vestige of a world that was being lost. In the aftermath of the elevation of the importance of children in the Romantic era earlier in the century, in the U.S., the narratives of boys and girls gave artists the opportunity to observe, scrutinize, critique, and entertain.
There will be two papers and a final exam.
137T
Topics in Latina/o Literature and Culture: The Trans-American Novel— Faulkner, Garcia Marquez, Morrison, and Cisneros
Saldivar, Jose
MWF 1-2
130 Wheeler
Areas of Concentration: 1E; 2; 3; 4; 6
Book List: Agee, T.: Let us Now Praise Famous Men; Cisneros, Sandra: Caramelo or Puro Cuento; 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
Course Description: A detailed trans-American study of William Faulkner, Sandra Cisneros, 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 Sandra Cisneros’ Caramelo or Puro Cuento, Garcia Marquez's "Big Mama's Funeral," One Hundred Years of Solitude, and Living to Tell the Tale, and Morrison's Beloved and Playing in the Dark. Our special topics course will also look at the photographs of the U.S. South by Walker Evans and Russell Lee, and the Global South's paintings by Kara Walker and Fernando Botero, among others. Throughout this comparative special topics course, we will grapple with the question--do the Americas have a common literature?
138
Studies in World Literature in English: Empire and Global English Literature
Rubenstein, Michael
TTh 9:30-11
229 Dwinelle
Areas of Concentration: 1E; 2; 4; 7
Book List: Coetzee, J.M.: Disgrace; Tóibín, C.: The Story of the Night; Roy, Arundati: The God of Small Things; Achebe, C.: Things Fall Apart; Cliff, M.: No Telephone to Heaven; Smith, Z.: White Teeth
Course Description: The texts in this course bear a troubled relationship to the language, English, in which and about which they write. Questions of cultural, ethnic, gendered and national identity suffuse both their content and their form. We’ll be trying to understand some of the causes and consequences of the spread of English as a literary medium, from the age of imperialism to the age of so-called globalization. One short and one longer paper, alongside active and regular class participation, are required.
141
Modes of Writing (Exposition, Fiction, Verse, etc.)
Abrams, Melanie (a.k.a. Chandra, M.J.)
MW 4-5:30
110 Wheeler
Area of Concentration: 3
Book List: Albee, E.: The American Dream and Zoo Story; a Course Reader, available at Copy Central
Course Description: This course will introduce students to the study of creative writing—fiction, poetry, drama, and memoir. Students will learn to talk critically about these genres and begin to feel comfortable and confident with their own writing of them. Students will write in each of these genres and will partake in class workshops where their work will be edited and critiqued by other students in the class. Students will also be required to attend and review two outside readings or plays. Attendance is mandatory.
No application is required for this course, but (due to space limitations) most—if not all—of the seats in the class will need to be reserved for declared English majors.
143A/1
Short Fiction
Abrams, Melanie (a.k.a. Chandra, M.J.)
MW 1:30-3
301 Wheeler
Areas of Concentration: None
Book List: Reader, available at Copy Central
Course Description: The aim of this course is to explore the genre of short fiction—to discuss the elements that make up the short story, to talk critically about short stories, and to become comfortable and confident with the writing of them. Students will write two short stories, a number of shorter exercises, weekly critiques of their peers’ work, and be required to attend and review two fiction readings. The course will be organized as a workshop and attendance is mandatory. All student stories will be edited and critiqued by the instructor and by other students in the class.
To be considered for admission to this class, please submit photocopies of 10-15 pages of your fiction, along with an application form, to Professor Abrams’ mailbox in 322 Wheeler, BY 4:00 P.M., TUESDAY, OCTOBER 31, AT THE LATEST.
Be sure to read the paragraph concerning creative writing courses on page 2 of this Announcement of Classes for further information regarding enrollment in such courses!
143A/2
Short Fiction
Farber, Thomas
W 3-6
301 Wheeler
Areas of Concentration: None
Book List: None
Course Description: A short fiction workshop open to students from any department. Students will write three short stories, generally 10-20 pages in length. Each week, students will also turn in one-page written critiques of each of the three student stories being workshopped as well as a 2-page journal entry.
Probable semester total of written pages, including critiques: 75-80. Class attendance mandatory.
Students not admitted or late in applying can come to office hours the first week of class to speak with Professor Farber or email tfar@uclink.4
(Any students admitted who have worked with me before must contact me in November about bringing their first new story, with xeroxes, to the first class meeting.)
To be considered for admission to this class, please submit photocopies of 10-15 pages of your fiction, along with an application form, to Professor Farber’s mailbox in 322 Wheeler, BY 4:00 P.M., TUESDAY, OCTOBER 31, AT THE LATEST.
Be sure to read the paragraph concerning creative writing courses on page 2 of this Announcement of Classes for further information regarding enrollment in such courses!
143B/1
Verse
Shoptaw, John
MW 10-11:30
301 Wheeler
Areas of Concentration: None
Book List: Jahan Ramazani, ed.: The Norton Anthology of Modern & Contemporary Poetry, 2 vols.; Course reader
Course Description: In this course you will conduct a progressive series of experiments in which you will explore the fundamental options for writing poetry today—aperture, partition, closure; rhythmic sound patterning; sentence & line; stanza; short & long-lined poems; image & figure; graphics & textual space; cultural translation; poetic forms (haibun, villanelle, sestina, pantoum, ghazal, etc.); the first, second, third, and no person (persona, address, drama, narrative, description); prose poetry. Our emphasis will be placed on recent possibilities, but with an eye & ear always to renovating traditions. I have no “house style” and only one precept: you can do anything, if you can do it. You will write a poem a week, and we’ll discuss six or so in rotation (I’ll respond to every poem you write). On alternate days, we’ll discuss pre-modern and modern exemplary poems drawn from the Norton Anthology and from our course reader. It will be delightful.
To be considered for admission to this class, please submit 5 photocopied pages of your poems, along with an application form, to Professor Shoptaw’s mailbox in 322 Wheeler, BY 4:00 P.M., TUESDAY, OCTOBER 31, AT THE LATEST.
Be sure to read the paragraph concerning creative writing courses on page 2 of this Announcement of Classes for further information regarding enrollment in such courses!
143B/2
Verse
O’Brien, Geoffrey
Thurs. 3:30-6:30
301 Wheeler
Areas of Concentration: None
Book List: Course Reader
Course Description: The purpose of this class will be to produce an unfinished language in which to treat poetry. Writing your own poems will be a part of this task, but it will also require readings in contemporary poetry and essays in poetics, as well as some writing done under extreme formal constraints. In addition, there’ll be regular commentary on other students’ work and an informal review of a poetry reading.
To be considered for admission to this class, please submit 5 photocopied pages of your poems, along with an application form, to Professor O’Brien’s mailbox in 322 Wheeler, BY 4:00 P.M., TUESDAY, OCTOBER 31, AT THE LATEST.
Be sure to read the paragraph concerning creative writing courses on page 2 of this Announcement of Classes for further information regarding enrollment in such courses!
143N/1
Prose Nonfiction
Farber, Thomas
Tues. 3:30-6:30
305 Wheeler
Areas of Concentration: None
Book List: None
Course Description: Rooms and Lives: a creative nonfiction workshop open to students from any department. Drawing on narrative strategies found in memoir, the diary, travel writing, and fiction, students will have workshopped in class three 10-20 page pieces. Each will take as point of departure detailed description of a real room one knows well, the piece then expanding out from place to its occupants, past or present, including the authorial self. Each week, students will also turn in one-page critiques of the three student pieces being workshopped as well as a 2-page journal entry (these entries may comprise part of the longer pieces). Probable semester total of written pages, including critiques: 70-80. Class attendance mandatory.
Students not admitted or late in applying can come to office hours the first week of class to speak with Professor Farber or email tfar@uclink.4
(Any students admitted who have worked with me before must contact me in November about bringing their first new story, with xeroxes, to the first class meeting.)
To be considered for admission to this class, please submit photocopies of 10-15 pages of your nonfiction or fiction, along with an application form, to Professor Farber’s mailbox in 322 Wheeler, BY 4:00 P.M., TUESDAY, OCTOBER 31, AT THE LATEST.
Be sure to read the paragraph concerning creative writing courses on page 2 of this Announcement of Classes for further information regarding enrollment in such courses!
143N/2
Prose Nonfiction: The Personal Essay
Kleege, Georgina
Thurs. 3:30-6:30
305 Wheeler
Areas of Concentration: None
Book List: Lopate, P. ed.: The Art of the Personal Essay
Course Description: This class will be conducted as a writing workshop to explore the art and craft of the personal essay. We will closely examine the essays in Phillip Lopate’s anthology, as well as students’ exercises and essays. Writing assignments will include 3 short writing exercises (2 pages each) and two new essays (8-15 pages each). Since the class meets only once a week, attendance is mandatory.
To be considered for admission to this class, please submit 5-10 photocopied pages of your creative nonfiction (no poetry, or academic writing), along with an application form, to Professor Kleege’s mailbox in 322 Wheeler, BY 4:00 P.M., TUESDAY, OCTOBER 31, AT THE LATEST.
Be sure to read the paragraph concerning creative writing courses on page 2 of this Announcement of Classes for further information regarding enrollment in such courses!
Last modified: January 22, 2007