150/1
Senior Seminar: Wallace Stevens
Altieri, Charles
MW 4-5:30
204 Wheeler
Areas of Concentration: 1E; 3
Book List: Stevens, W.: Collected Poetry and Prose; Stevens, H., ed.: Letters of Wallace Stevens; a reader at Copy Central.
Course Description: We will go through Wallace Stevens’ career in an effort to interpret his poems as fully as possible and to appreciate his changes in thought and style. Some attention will be paid to related modernist writing and painting that best put his work in context.
Enrollment is limited and a written application is due BY 4:00 P.M., TUESDAY, OCTOBER 31; be sure to read the paragraph on page 2 of this Announcement of Classes regarding enrollment in English 150!
150/2
Senior Seminar: Troy—Ancient to Modern
Nolan, Maura
MW 4-5:30
206 Dwinelle
Area of Concentration: 6
Book List: Homer: The Iliad; Virgil: The Aeneid; Boccaccio, G.: Filostrato; Chaucer, G.: Troilus and Criseyde; Henryson, R.: Testament of Cresseid; Shakespeare, W.: Troilus and Cressida; H. D.: Helen of Troy; Wood, M.: In Search of the Trojan War
Course Description: This seminar focuses on one of the most enduring historical legends in human history, the story of Troy and its fall. We will begin with Homer’s Iliad and move on to Virgil’s Aeneid, exploring the epic representations of cities and their destruction that inspired later writers, dramatists, archaeologists and even filmmakers to imagine and construct stories about various characters living in the shadows of Troy or with the legacy of its fall. We will then move on to three of the many medieval versions of the story: Boccaccio’s Filostrato, Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde and Henryson’s Testament of Cresseid. These texts focus on two characters hardly mentioned by Homer—Troilus and Criseyde—and their doomed love relationship over the course of the war. We will then turn to Shakespeare’s very different vision of Cressida before moving on to the modernist poet H. D. and her version of the Trojan legends in Helen of Troy. To conclude the course, we will examine 19th, 20th, and 21st century attempts to find the historical Troy, beginning with Heinrich Schliemann’s claim in the late 19th century to have found its remains and ending with current excavations. We will ask what, if anything, these excavations have to do with the literary tradition of Troy, and indeed, what literature can contribute to history. Reading the legends of Troy is a way of examining a literary tradition from its inception to the present; we will question, investigate, and excavate the very idea of “tradition” over the course of the semester, asking ourselves how and why literary ideas and stories come into being, and under what circumstances they might, like Troy, disappear.
Enrollment is limited and a written application is due BY 4:00 P.M., TUESDAY, OCTOBER 31; be sure to read the paragraph on page 2 of this Announcement of Classes regarding enrollment in English 150!
150/3
Senior Seminar: Virginia Woolf
Abel, Elizabeth
TTh 9:30-11
106 Wheeler
Areas of Concentration: 1E; 3; 4
Book List: Required texts include Virginia Woolf’s Between the Acts, Jacob’s Room, Moments of Being, Orlando, Mrs. Dalloway, A Room of One’s Own, Three Guineas, To the Lighthouse, The Voyage Out, The Waves, A Writer’s Diary, The Years, and critical essays included in a course reader. A wide range of secondary materials will be placed on reserve.
Course Description: This seminar will be devoted to an intensive and extensive reading of Virginia Woolf’s literary career, focusing on her fiction, but also taking into account her essays, diaries, and letters. We will trace the evolution of Woolf’s narrative strategies and subjects, representations of consciousness, engagements with history and politics, and refashioning into a contemporary cultural icon. We will also assess her contributions to modernist aesthetics and to gender theory. In preparation for writing the senior thesis, we will explore a range of critical approaches to Woolf’s fiction—psychoanalytic, formalist, historical, feminist, postcolonialist, philosophical, biographical—and consult recently published scholarly editions and holograph manuscripts. The seminar will culminate in a twenty-page thesis on a topic of your choice.
Enrollment is limited and a written application is due BY 4:00 P.M., TUESDAY, OCTOBER 31; be sure to read the paragraph on page 2 of this Announcement of Classes regarding enrollment in English 150!
150/6
Senior Seminar: Sexuality and Antebellum Women’s Writing
Beam, Dorri
TTh 11-12:30
204 Wheeler
Areas of Concentration: 1D; 2; 4; 6
Book List: (subject to change) Fuller, M.: The Essential Margaret Fuller; Freedman and D’Emilio, eds.: Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America; Howe, J. W.: The Hermaphrodite; Sweat, M.: Ethel’s Love-Life; Hawthorne, N.: The Blithedale Romance; Stoddard, E.: The Morgesons; Spofford, H.: The Amber Gods and Other Stories; Alcott, L.: Alternative Alcott; Walker, C.: American Women Poets of the Nineteenth-Century; Gaul, T., ed.: To Marry an Indian; Dickinson, A.: What Answer?; Fogarty, R., ed.: Desire and Duty at Oneida: Tirzah Miller’s Intimate Memoir
Course Description: This course will look at a wide variety of materials and topics with an emphasis on nineteenth-century American women’s literary and political treatments of chastity, autoeroticism, marriage, interracial sex, sexual identity, and “romantic friendship.” We will examine the role of women in creating, contesting, and sustaining sexual ideologies through literary representation, voice, and style. Along with contemporary theory on the history of sexuality, we’ll look at antebellum hygienic tracts and medical theories of reproduction and sex, sensation literature by women, feminist utopian fiction and the diaries of women in utopian communities, an unpublished novel manuscript with a hermaphrodite narrator, fictional and medical treatments of dreams, and fictional and epistolary treatments of interracial marriage. At times, we’ll look comparatively at treatments of sexuality, women’s rights, and marriage in selected men’s writing, including the textual courtships of Poe with women poets.
Enrollment is limited and a written application is due BY 4:00 P.M., TUESDAY, OCTOBER 31; be sure to read the paragraph on page 2 of this Announcement of Classes regarding enrollment in English 150!
150/8
Senior Seminar: Lewis Carroll’s Alice Books and Industry
Fielding, John
TTh 11-12:30
Note new location: 122 Barrows
Areas of Concentration: 1D; 3; 5; 6; 7
Book List: Carroll, L: Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass (Norton Critical Edition); a Course Reader consisting of biographical material, criticism, and alternate Alices. Also various cinematic adaptations of Alice.
Course Description: The central aim of this course is to understand the Alice books as a cultural phenomenon rather than as isolate texts themselves. Thus, we will begin by surveying a number of seminal critical responses to Carroll’s tales, including competing Freudian and Lacanian interpretations, philosophical approaches such as Deleueze’s in The Logic of Sense, political studies (which alternately read Alice as a post-colonial revolutionary and as a colonizing imperialist), a few linguistic and logic-based takes, some forays into mathematical, particularly non-Euclidean, analyses, and rounding things off with some biographical and source-based material. This final critical strategy will then lead to our investigation of various documented, and a few yet-to-be-authenticated, sources for the poetic parodies peppering each text as well as some overall models from which Carroll drew inspiration or even direction. Finally, we will reverse the trajectory of this historical genealogy into the future to study a number of permutations of the Alice books which followed their original publication. These spin-offs will range from Carroll’s own Nursery Alice, and Alice on Stage and various merchandising items to what Carolyn Sigler terms, in her useful anthology of the same name, “alternate Alices,” which documents the evolution of Carroll’s tale in the decades following their initial popularity. We will conclude by studying a few radically different cinematic adaptations of the books, ranging from Disney’s animated version to Jan Svankmajer’s unsettling Alice, with brief considerations of such underground oddities as Alice in Acidland.
Enrollment is limited and a written application is due BY 4:00 P.M., TUESDAY, OCTOBER 31; be sure to read the paragraph on page 2 of this Announcement of Classes regarding enrollment in English 150!
150/9
Senior Seminar: Alternate Histories - Counterfacts and Fictions
Gallagher, Catherine
TTh 12:30-2
note new room: 210 Dwinelle (as of Feb. 1)
Areas of Concentration: 1E; 3; 5
Book List: Amis, Kingsley: The Alteration; Borges, Jorge Luis: Labyrinths: Selected Stories & Other Writings; Butler, Octavia: Kindred; Cowley, Robert (ed.): What Ifs? Of American History; Dick, Philip K.: The Man in the High Castle; Greenberg, Martin (ed.): The Best Alternate History Stories of the 20th Century; Kantor, MacKinlay: If the South Had Won the Civil War; Macksey, Kenneth: Invasion; Roth, Philip: The Plot Against America
Course Description: This course aims to increase awareness of a widespread intellectual trend—the popularity of alternate history in numerous fields—while also learning to discern its variations across the cultural landscape. We will intensively explore the logic, formal traits, and varieties of alternate-history writing as it has been practiced over the last seventy years by avant-garde, mainstream, and science fiction writers, as well as by amateur and professional historians. One of our tasks will be to distinguish between “counterfactual” history and outright fiction, discovering the inherent differences between their narrative forms as well as examples of merged form. We will also pursue alternate history’s links to: theoretical speculations in physics, political movements for redress, innovations in statistical analysis, military training, legal proceedings, historical regret, digital technology, and literary experimentation.
Enrollment is limited and a written application is due BY 4:00 P.M., TUESDAY, OCTOBER 31; be sure to read the paragraph on page 2 of this Announcement of Classes regarding enrollment in English 150!
150/10
Senior Seminar: Postcolonial Writing
Rubenstein, Michael
TTh 12:30-2
209 Dwinelle
Areas of Concentration: 1E; 2; 4; 6
Book List: Conrad, J.: Heart of Darkness; Joyce, J.: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man; Salih, T.: Season of Migration to the North; Chamoiseau, P.: Texaco; Dangarembga, T.: Nervous Conditions; a course reader
Films: Black, S.: Life and Debt; J. Furtado: Ilha das Flores; Denis, C: Beau Travail; G. Pontecorvo: Quemada!; Ratnam, M.: Dil Se
Course Description: A major aspect of this survey will be to question the category of the "postcolonial" through readings of the novels and films, and through a critical/theoretical reader that will accompany the readings. We will want to articulate, along with these texts, the connections between the condition of "postcoloniality" on the one hand and the ongoing processes of "globalization" on the other. Active and regular class participation are required.
Enrollment is limited and a written application is due BY 4:00 P.M., TUESDAY, OCTOBER 31; be sure to read the paragraph on page 2 of this Announcement of Classes regarding enrollment in English 150!
150/11
Senior Seminar: The Modern Novel of Consciousness
Hale, Dorothy
TTh 2-3:30
305 Wheeler
Areas of Concentration: 1E; 3
Book List: James, H.: Tales of Henry James; Joyce, J.: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man; Ford, F.M.: The Good Soldier; Woolf, V.: Mrs. Dalloway and The Waves; Faulkner, W.: The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying; Robbe-Grillet, A.: Jealousy and For a New Novel
Course Description: The representation of consciousness is as old as the novel itself—but new beliefs about the nature of the mind convinced many twentieth-century writers that the novel as a genre required reinvention. In this senior seminar, we will ask why for modernists such as James, Woolf, Joyce, and Faulkner the perfection of the novel as a genre lay in the representation of characterological consciousness, and why the task of representing consciousness demanded radical technical innovation. Most of our attention will be given to the careful reading of difficult experimental novels. We will consult key philosophers and psychologists—particularly Freud, Bergson, and W. James—to consider the relation between contemporary theories of the mind and the fictionalized consciousnesses they inspired. We will also consider how the call for a new novel, issued by the novelists themselves in aesthetic manifestoes, relates to recent narratological and sociological analyses of this experimental genre.
Our course reading will be the jumping-off point for the research paper (15-20 pages) that is due at the end of the term. Other required assignments include a prospectus, bibliography, and full rough draft of the final essay.
Enrollment is limited and a written application is due BY 4:00 P.M., TUESDAY, OCTOBER 31; be sure to read the paragraph on page 2 of this Announcement of Classes regarding enrollment in English 150!
150/12
Senior Seminar: Mark Twain
Hirst, Robert
TTh 2-3:30
room 330C, 2195 Hearst Street
Areas of Concentration: 1D; 3; 6
Book List: See below; the instructor will discuss the exact list at the first class meeting, so please do not buy any texts until then.
Course Description: The seminar will read a generous selection of Mark Twain’s most important published writings. We will work our way chronologically through his life and career, beginning with his earliest extant writings and ending with Mysterious Stranger (which he left unpublished). The class will have ready access to the Mark Twain Papers, whose extensive primary and secondary resources students are encouraged to take advantage of for their research. One brief oral report (as the basis for class discussion) and one research paper, due at the end of the term.
Enrollment is limited and a written application is due BY 4:00 P.M., TUESDAY, OCTOBER 31; be sure to read the paragraph on page 2 of this Announcement of Classes regarding enrollment in English 150!
150/13
Senior Seminar: American Realism
Hutson, Richard
TTh 2-3:30
204 Wheeler
Areas of Concentration: 1D or 1E; 3
Book List: Chesnutt: The House Behind the Cedars; Chopin: The Awakening; Crane: Maggie; Dreiser: Sister Carrie; Howells: The Rise of Silas Lapham; James: Daisy Miller, The Wings of the Dove; Wharton: The House of Mirth
Course Description: The term "realism" refers to a certain historical period and a certain practice (or theory) of fiction writing. A number of American writers, led by James and Howells, participated in this general movement (which included British and European writers also). What we have to consider here are some major American examples. According to a recent scholar/critic, Amy Kaplan, "Rather than as a monolithic and fully formed theory, realism can be examined as a multifaceted and unfinished debate re-enacted in the arena of each novel and essay." (The Social Construction of American Realism, p.15). I am interested in the way in which each writer endorses what James calls the "realist faith." Student obligation in this course will be to participate in class discussion and to write a longish paper (15-25 pp.) on these materials.
Enrollment is limited and a written application is due BY 4:00 P.M., TUESDAY, OCTOBER 31; be sure to read the paragraph on page 2 of this Announcement of Classes regarding enrollment in English 150!
150/14
Senior Seminar: Democracy and Rebellion in American Literature
Skinfill, Mauri
TTh 2-3:30
Note new location: 206 Wheeler
Areas of Concentration: 3; 6
Book List: Benjamin Franklin: The Autobiography; Frederick Douglas: Narrative of the Life; Edgar Allen Poe: selected works: “Hopfrog,” “The Cask of Amontillado,” “Masque of the Red Death”; Harriet Jacobs: Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl; Herman Melville, “Benito Cereno”; Mark Twain: Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court; Edith Wharton: The House of Mirth; William Faulkner: Absalom, Absalom; F. Scott Fitzgerald: The Great Gatsby; Richard Wright: Native Son; Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye
Course Description: From the enlightenment through modernism and beyond, American literature is replete with scenarios of class antagonism and rebellion. But consider the bad ends to which the vast majority of American rebels—Lily Bart, Jay Gatsby, Thomas Sutpen, Bigger Thomas—seem to invariably come. Beginning with the foundational claims of American self-determination represented in Benjamin Franklin's enlightenment thinking, this course will explore a narrative tradition that responds to the promises of American democracy with representations of social violence and constraint. We will consider, for example, how key texts of the American Renaissance illuminate the conflict between American democratic ideals and the practices of slavery and industrial capitalism. Among modernism's abundant narratives of social decline, we will explore the conflict between democratic idealism and enduring class prohibitions. Ultimately, our readings will serve to explore a series of questions: what is at stake in these critical portraits of American social democracy? To what extent can American literature be figured as a sustained tradition of protest against the various failures of enlightenment principles? Why, in the view of this rich narrative tradition, is the American model of social democracy so impossible to achieve? This course aims to find out.
Enrollment is limited and a written application is due BY 4:00 P.M., TUESDAY, OCTOBER 31; be sure to read the paragraph on page 2 of this Announcement of Classes regarding enrollment in English 150!
150/15
Senior Seminar: Utopianism
Starr, George
TTh 3:30-5
204 Wheeler
Areas of Concentration: 3; 6
Book List: More, Thomas: Utopia; Swift, Jonathan: Gulliver’s Travels; Scott, Sarah: A Description of Millenium Hall; Bellamy, Edward: Looking Backward; Morris, William: News from Nowhere; Wells, H. G.: The Time Machine and When the Sleeper Wakes; Zamiatin, Eugene: We; Huxley, Aldous: Brave New World; Orwell, George: 1984; Atwood, Margaret: The Handmaid’s Tale
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.
Enrollment is limited and a written application is due BY 4:00 P.M., TUESDAY, OCTOBER 31; be sure to read the paragraph on page 2 of this Announcement of Classes regarding enrollment in English 150!
150/16
Senior Seminar: Books and Blogs: 20th- Century Print Culture
Hollis, Catherine
TTh 3:30-5
Note new location: 205 Wheeler
Areas of Concentration: 1E; 6
Book List: (This is a partial book list; it will be expanded. Please attend the first class meeting before you buy these books.) Finkelstein and McCleery: An Introduction to Book History; Djuna Barnes: Nightwood; Borges: Ficciones; Aaron Cometbus: Despite Everything: A Cometbus Omnibus; Martha Cooley: The Archivist; T.S. Eliot: The Waste Land: A Facsimile and Transcript of the Original Drafts; Virginia Woolf: A Room of One’s Own; Yeats: Collected Poems. Some of the texts for this course will be available in a course reader, which will include recent journalism on the print vs. digital debate, short stories and poems that foreground “the book,” and facsimile representations of original publication formats.
Course Description: We are living in a time of technological revolution that may be changing the way we read. Digital media—blogs, magazines, hypertext fiction, e-books—place the continued existence of the paper-based book into question, generating debates and jeremiads about these competing technologies. Meanwhile, the “history of the book” is a growing academic discipline and “book arts” (as taught in the San Francisco Center for the Book) attracts a growing number of practitioners. Is the book as object or technology in any danger of extinction? This course proposes to examine contemporary debates about the status of the book by placing them in context with a history of 20th-century print culture. Because digital media is often seen as a democratic alternative to conventional methods of publication, our historical survey will focus on previous examples of alternatives to commercial publication practices.
Accordingly, we will initially concentrate on modernist print culture: the little magazines, small presses, and social networks that emerged to publish and promote Anglo-American modernism. We will analyze famous case histories of modernist publication—Eliot’s Waste Land, Joyce’s Ulysses, Yeats’ and Woolf’s self-publication—in addition to those less familiar. From this foundation, we will move on to alternative print cultures in the later 20th century by examining productions from the small presses associated with the feminist movement, with experimental poetry, and with punk culture. Whenever possible, we will consider these texts’ original publication formats through photocopies and archival samples. Throughout this course, we will ask ourselves whether the mode of publication influences how we read and interpret texts, whether we’re reading a facsimile of the typescript to The Waste Land or downloading Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons from Project Gutenberg.
Enrollment is limited and a written application is due BY 4:00 P.M., TUESDAY, OCTOBER 31; be sure to read the paragraph on page 2 of this Announcement of Classes regarding enrollment in English 150!
150/17
Senior Seminar: Film Melodrama
Bader, Julia
Seminars MW 5:30-7 P.M. in 121 Wheeler, plus film screenings Mondays 7-10 P.M., also in 121 Wheeler
Areas of Concentration: 1E; 3; 4; 6
Book List: Landy, M.: Imitation of Life; Klinger, B.: Melodrama and Meaning; Bratton, I., ed.: Melodrama
Course Description: We will focus on a range of film melodramas from early silents to contemporary examples, analyzing melodrama’s relationship to the body, the family, gender roles, excess and spectacle. We will be interested in melodrama and modernity, and in the genre’s position vis a vis politics and culture.
Enrollment is limited and a written application is due BY 4:00 P.M., TUESDAY, OCTOBER 31; be sure to read the paragraph on page 2 of this Announcement of Classes regarding enrollment in English 150!
161
Introduction to Literary Theory
Puckett, Kent
TTh 12:30-2
note new room: 3 LeConte
Areas of Concentration: 1E; 5; 6
Book List: Barthes, R.: Mythologies; Lodge, D., ed.: Modern Criticism and Theory: A Reader; a course reader containing essays by Derrida, de Man, Marx, Adorno, Butler, Foucault, Freud, Lacan, Spivak, and others
Course Description: This course will serve as an introduction to literary and cultural theory. We will read closely a number of important (and difficult) theoretical texts while thinking about what relations exist between the different intellectual projects that we call theory (structuralism, poststructuralism, psychoanalysis, and gender studies are only a few). We will also ask and ask again the more general question: what is theory anyway?
165
Special Topics: Hollywood Talkies to World War II
Knapp, Jeffrey
Seminars MW 2-3:30 in 300 Wheeler, plus film screenings Mondays 3:30-6:30, also in 300 Wheeler
Areas of Concentration: 1E; 3; 6
Book List: A Course Reader
Course Description: Our topic will be the theory and practice of mass entertainment in 1930’s Hollywood. The films we will watch include: The Jazz Singer, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Public Enemy, Footlight Parade, Lady Killer, Baby Face, The Lady Eve, City Westerner, His Girl Friday, Meet John Doe, Citizen Kane, and The Philadelphia Story.
166/1
Special Topics: Readings for Writers/Narrating the Nation
Mukherjee (Blaise), Bharati
TTh 11-12:30
110 Wheeler
Areas of Concentration: 1E; 2; 3
Book List: Flaubert, G.: Madame Bovary; Fitzgerald, F. S.: The Great Gatsby; Morrison, T.: Beloved; Erdrich, L.: Love Medicine; Mukherjee, B.: Jasmine; Forster, E.M.: Howards End; Gordimer, N.: July’s People; Naipaul, V.S.: A Bend in the River; Ondaatje, M.: In the Skin of the Lion
Course Description: This course will focus on each author’s representation or invention of foundational national myths. Students will explore the intimate connection between narrative strategy and construction of meaning.
166/2
Special Topics: Hitchcock’s Skin (or, A Theory of the Thriller)
Miller, D.A.
Lectures MW 12:30-2 in 300 Wheeler, plus film screenings Tuesdays 6-9 P.M., also in 300 Wheeler (no film screening Tues., Jan. 16)
Areas of Concentration: 1E; 3; 6
Book List: Rothman, W.: The Murderous Gaze; Truffaut, F.: Hitchcock
Course Description:
“She really got under your skin, didn’t she?”—said to the protagonist of North by Northwest
The corpus: This course is divided in its attention between an auteur and a genre. In one sense, the division is a superficial one, since there is hardly any element of the “thriller” that has not been developed—and developed profoundly—in Hitchcock’s oeuvre. Accordingly, it will furnish us our main example. In another sense, however, this oeuvre is a legacy that, as such, belongs to the history of the thriller. Two living Europrean artists, Claude Chabrol and Michael Haneke, inherit the Hitchcockian legacy in particularly significant ways, and will play a key part in our understanding of the form. Less centrally, we will also look at American films by De Palma, Minghella, and Polanski.
The thesis: Central to the thriller is the “event” of psychic transference. Something passes under the skin of the protagonist. “Skin” is taken in a psychanalytic sense, as boundary, container, and foundation of the sense of self.
What is transferred under it can be almost anything: an idea, an object, a word. The transference does not occur “on purpose”; on the contrary, it is an accident, the result of chance or coincidence; but once that accident has occurred, it instantaneously becomes a fate, terrifying sign of a world in which “there are no accidents” (The Man Who Knew Too Much, 1956). That fate drives both the protagonist and his story forward to—but to what end? To expel the transference? To project it onto another? To embrace it madly? In varying degrees of modification, the protagonist’s experience is continuous with the spectator’s own, and takes the transference event into another dimension.
175
Literature and Disability
Miller, Jennifer
MWF 10-11
110 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@berkeley.edu.
This semester (only), this course satisfies the pre-1800 requirement for the English major (because it focuses on medieval texts).
179
Literature and Linguistics
Banfield, Ann
TTh 3:30-5
340 Moffitt
Areas of Concentration: 5; 7
Book List: Lord, A.: A Singer of Tales; Fabb, N.: Linguistics and Literature; Foley, J. M.: The Theory of Oral Composition: History and Methodology; Beckett, S.: Nohow On; Beowulf, dual language edition, Heaney, S. translator; Mansfield, K.: Stories; Woolf, V.: To the Lighthouse
Course Description: This course will examine the linguistic features which mark a specifically “poetic” or “literary” use of language from those uses of language which are not literary. The topics covered will include meter, rhyme, repetitions, or grammatical patterns as well as the “oral formulaic theory” of the epic, all specific to poetry, and the uses of pronouns, tenses and subjective features of language particular to written prose narratives, especially the novel and the novelistic style known as “free indirect style” or “represented speech and thought”. We will also discuss Samuel Beckett’s late style. Some questions to be raised are: Can we define genres (novel, lyric, etc.) linguistically? Are there differences between the linguistics of writing as opposed to that of oral forms? But the course also aims to give you methods for analyzing literary texts that can be the first step to interpretation. No knowledge of linguistics will be presupposed, but linguistic concepts will be introduced and explained.
Newly added course:
180L
Lyric Verse
Falci, Eric
TTh 9:30-11
Note new location: 215 Dwinelle
Areas of concentration: 1E; 2; 3
Book List: A course reader will contain many of the poems (including, tentatively, Ammons, Berryman, Bidart, Creeley, Dove, Duffy, Ginsberg, Hejinian, Hill, Howe, Graham, Larkin, Lowell, Mackey, Merrill, Muldoon, O’Hara, Oppen, Rich, Snyder, Walcott) and all of the critical readings (most likely pieces by Adorno, Altieri, Bernstein, Brooks, de Man, Heidegger, Olson, Perloff, Ramazani, Vendler, Wimsatt). In addition to the poems and texts in the course reader, we will be reading several full volumes of poetry: Ashbery, J.: Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror; Bishop, E.: Geography III; Brathwaite, K.: Middle Passages; Carson, A.: Men in the Off Hours; Heaney, S.: Field Work; Plath, S.: Ariel
Course Description: We will begin the semester with a brief history of lyric poetry as an act, a genre, and a form. We will then go on to examine the ways in which poetry, and lyric poetry specifically, was constructed and framed within mid- and late-20 th century critical idioms. After we have set these two paths, we will spend the bulk of the semester closely reading lyric poetry written after World War II, especially poetry of the last 30 years. Enrollment will be necessarily limited, and so the whole course will be run as a seminar. Course requirements: one (very short) informal response paper, one short essay (3-5 pages), and one longer essay (7-10 pages) that may be critical, historical, or a hybrid critical-creative work (this final paper will be in lieu of a final exam).
H195B/1
Honors Course
JanMohamed, Abdul
TTh 11-12:30
305 Wheeler
Areas of Concentration: None
Book List: T.B.A.
Course Description: This is a continuation of section 1 of H195A, taught by A. JanMohamed in Fall 2006. 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/2
Honors Course
Langan, Celeste
MW 8-9:30
305 Wheeler
Areas of Concentration: None
Book List: T.B.A.
Course Description: This is a continuation of section 2 of H195A, taught by C. Langan in Fall 2006. No new students will be admitted. No new application form needs to be filled out. Professor Langan will give out CECs (class entry codes) in class in November.
H195B/3
Honors Course
Schweik, Susan
MWF 10-11
109 Wheeler
Areas of Concentration: None
Book List: No texts
Course Description: This is a continuation of section 3 of H195A, taught by S. Schweik in Fall 2006. No new students will be admitted. No new application form needs to be filled out. Professor Schweik will give out CECs (class entry codes) in class in November.
Last modified: January 26, 2007