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Upper-Division Courses, Part II

Spring 2008

150/1
Senior Seminar: Irish Poetry After Yeats
Falci, Eric
MW 11-12:30
305 Wheeler

Areas of Concentration: 1E; 3; 6

Book List: Carson, C.: Belfast Confetti; Heaney, S.: Station Island; Ní Chuilleanáin, E.: The Girl Who Married the Reindeer; Walsh, C.: City West; and a course reader containing poems by W.B. Yeats, Samuel Beckett, Denis Devlin, Patrick Kavanagh, Louis MacNeice, John Hewitt, Thomas Kinsella, John Montague, Derek Mahon, Michael Longley, Paul Muldoon, Eavan Boland, Medbh McGuckian, Paula Meehan, Michael Hartnett, Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, Cathal Ó Searcaigh, Trevor Joyce, Tom French, Sinéad Morrissey, and Caitríona O’Reilly, as well as a few essays and articles

Course Description: Ireland is a famously anomalous site in literary and cultural studies: it is sort of postcolonial, somewhat colonial, partly British, and always has one eye trained across the Atlantic and the other across the Irish Sea . Beginning with the late poetry of W.B. Yeats and alternate varieties of Irish modernism in the 1930s, we will closely examine some of the more intriguing Irish poetry written in the second half of the 20 th century, attempting a series of theoretical gazes so as to construct a rich array of critical readings. Course requirements: a 15-25 page research paper.

Enrollment is limited and a written application is due BY 4:00 P.M., TUESDAY, OCTOBER 30; be sure to read the paragraph on page 2 of this Announcement of Classes regarding enrollment in English 150!

150/2
Senior Seminar: The Frankfurt School and Anglo-American Modernism
Sumner, Charles
MW 2-3:30
305 Wheeler

Areas of Concentration: 1E; 5; 6

Book List: V. Woolf: Mrs. Dalloway; E. Hemingway: The Sun Also Rises; T.S. Eliot: Selected Poems; Wyndham Lewis: Collected Poems and Plays; Samuel Beckett: Endgame; Don DeLillo: Mao II; Theodor Adorno, et al.: Aesthetics and Politics. There will also be a reader with works by Adorno and Horkheimer, Ernst Bloch, Walter Benjamin, Herbert Marcuse, Lucien Goldmann, Karl Marx, and Andrew Gibson.

Course Description: In this class, we will focus on how the Frankfurt School helps to understand the relationship between British and American modernism and the social and political context which shapes it. The Frankfurt School is the name given to a group of philosophers associated with the Institute for Social Research, initially located at the University of Frankfurt am Main , in Germany . They developed a mode of thought known loosely as critical theory, which recognizes the socio-political dynamics in which literature is enmeshed while still focusing on the particular aesthetic qualities that separate it from more discursive modes of discourse. This approach is particularly important for the study of literary modernism, which is self-conscious about its status as art and the particular modes of social criticism available to it alone. Therefore, we will use the lens of critical theory to explore modernist texts from a variety of genres, including novels by Hemingway (The Sun Also Rises) and Woolf (Mrs. Dalloway), poems by Eliot (“Preludes” and The Waste Land), and plays by Wyndham Lewis (The Enemy of the Stars) and Samuel Beckett (Endgame). In addition to literary examples of modernism, we will also use the Frankfurt School to examine Charlie Chaplin’s film “Modern Times.” Specifically, we will focus on why Walter Benjamin believed that cinema could incite revolutionary political consciousness, and Theodor Adorno did not.

Toward the end of the semester, we will ask ourselves what relevance the Frankfurt School holds for understanding contemporary culture. Specifically, we will compare Alain Badiou’s reading of Endgame to that of Adorno, looking for ways to derive a positive set of moral and political values from the play where Adorno sees only negative and critical ones. We will also focus on Marcuse’s support for the American student protests and the New Left movement in the 1960s, paying particular attention to how artists and intellectuals can intervene in contemporary political culture. Finally, we will end with Don DeLillo’s novel Mao II. DeLillo takes up some very high modernist themes, such as the role of the individual in relation to society, and he tries to imagine how an individual may impact the political landscape during an age when the unified individual, or subject, is deemed no longer to exist. In short, we will examine DeLillo’s novel because it brings the major themes of modernism and Frankfurt School philosophy into the postmodern present.

Enrollment is limited and a written application is due BY 4:00 P.M., TUESDAY, OCTOBER 30; be sure to read the paragraph on page 2 of this Announcement of Classes regarding enrollment in English 150!

150/3
Senior Seminar: James Joyce
Bishop, John
MWF 3-4
179 Dwinelle

Areas of Concentration: 1E; 3

Book List: Joyce, J.: Dubliners, Finnegans Wake , A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man,Ulysses, Occasional, Critical, and Political Writing; Ellmann, R: James Joyce

Recommended: Blamires, H.: The New Bloomsday Book: A Guide through ‘Ulysses’; Gifford, D.: Ulysses Annotated; Gilbert, S.: James Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’

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

150/4
Senior Seminar: T. S. Eliot
Blanton, Dan
MW 4-5:30
221 Wheeler

Areas of Concentration: 1E; 3

Book List: Eliot, T.: Christianity and Culture, Complete Poems and Plays, 1909-1950, Selected Prose

Course Description: An intensive seminar in the work of one of the twentieth century’s most decisively important but enduringly elusive figures, one who still seems to shape and haunt many of the ways in which we read. We will encounter almost all of Eliot’s poetry, most of his drama, a fair amount of his literary and cultural criticism, and some of his editorial work, attempting throughout to account for his distinctive poetic voice, his idiosyncratic historical imagination, his often contradictory philosophical and theological projects, and his continuing critical effect.

150/5
Senior Seminar: Autobiography
Picciotto, Joanna
MW 4-5:30
263 Dwinelle

Areas of Concentration: 3; 5

Book List: Augustine: Confessions; Kempe, M.: The Book of Margery Kempe; Bunyan, J.: Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners; Fox, G.: Journal; Dunton, J.: Life and Errors; Gibbon, E.: Memoirs of My Life and Writings; Gates, H.: Classic Slave Narratives; Rousseau, J.: Confessions; Stein, G.: The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas; Malcolm X: The Autobiography of Malcolm X. There will be a Course Reader containing criticism, philosophy, and some psychoanalytic literature, along with specimens of related genres such as hagiography and the essay.

Course Description: In undertaking to write the autobiography of someone else, Gertrude Stein laid bare the defining condition of the genre: a disparity between the “I” who writes and the subject whose experience is narrated. The relationship between these two first persons will be the central concern of this class. Tracking the interaction of teleology, digression, repetition, and omission in the plotting of a life, we will also consider how the concepts of trial and conversion, along with other literary genres, shape the life story. Students will hand in several short analyses and a 20-page thesis.

150/7
Senior Seminar: Fictions of Los Angeles
Saul, Scott
MW 4-5:30
206 Wheeler

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

Book List: Anna Deavere Smith: Twilight: Los Angeles ; T. Coraghessen Boyle: The Tortilla Curtain; Nathanael West: Day of the Locust; Christopher Isherwood: A Single Man; Walter Mosley: Little Scarlet; Scott Bukatman: Blade Runner; Karen Tei Yamashita: Tropic of Orange

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

Note: We anticipate that this section of English 150 will be approved as a class that will satisfy UC Berkeley’s American Cultures requirement. Once this is finalized, its course number will be changed to 150AC, and it will satisfy both that requirement and the Senior Seminar requirement for the English major.

150/8
Senior Seminar: Dirty Victorians—Filth, Imperial Residuum, and Sexual Transgression in the Late-Nineteenth Century
Chevalier, Antoinette
TTh 2-3:30
301 Wheeler

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

Book List: Charles Dickens: Our Mutual Friend; Oscar Wilde: Picture of Dorian Grey; Bram Stoker: Dracula; Arthur Conan Doyle: The Sign of Four; Wilkie Collins: The Moonstone; Joseph Conrad: Heart of Darkness. In addition to the novels noted, required texts will also include a course reader containing current literary and cultural criticism on sexual identity, urban filth, and contagion along with non-fiction prose by nineteenth-century social historians such as Henry Mayhew, Charles Booth, and John Hollingshead.

Course Description: In this class we look at representations of sexual “deviance,” at so-called degenerate femininity (immorality, madness, the “fallen” woman), and at how tropes of homosexuality and prostitution were used to police unruly bodies in the Victorian era. We will also examine the material conditions implicit in such labeling—slums, sanitation, filth, squalor—and nineteenth-century attempts to map and therein control disease and contagion. Our analysis of empire—and therein the black bodies, drug matter, and dis(ease) seen as emanating from these “other” spaces and into the London metropole—will inform our discussion of foreign “pollution,” the dissolution of the colonial body, and the degenerate male imperialist. More generally, we will look at late-nineteenth-century anxiety over infection, over the continuities between class, filth, and criminality, at efforts to contain the black/foreign body, and at links between sexual and sanitary regulation.

150/9
Senior Seminar: Speculative Fiction and Dystopias
Jones, Donna
TTh 11-12:30
305 Wheeler

Areas of Concentration: 1E; 3; 6

Book List: H.G. Wells: The Island of Doctor Moreau; Villiers de l’Isle-Adam: The Future Eve; Kazuo Ishiguro: Never Let Me Go; China Mielville: Perdido Street Station ; Jean-Michel Truong: Eternity Express; Philip K. Dick: Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Bladerunner, Gattaca,Children of Men; Eugene Thacker: The Global Genome

Course Description: This course will examine in depth the history of speculative fiction and its engagement with the thematics and topoi of the new life sciences—representation of cloning, ecological dystopias, hybrid life-forms, genetic engineering dystopias. While science is the thematic point of departure of speculative fiction, the concerns of this course will be the literary. How does literature’s encounter with the projected realities of the new biology revise our conceptions of the subject? Could there be a Leopold Bloom of the genetically engineered, a subject whose interior voice is the free-flowing expression of experience? Behind the endless removes of social, material and technological mediation lies the construction of a flesh and blood body, separated from itself through the workings of consciousness. If indeed the post/modern subject requires a psychic space shaped by the authenticity of ‘being,’ a consciousness deeply rooted in the human experience, then how do we represent that being whose point of origin is the artificial, the inauthentic? These are some of the questions to be addressed in this course. You may of course bring others.

150/10
Senior Seminar: Is It Useless To Revolt?
Goldsmith, Steven
TTh 12:30-2
2519 Tolman

Areas of Concentration: 3; 5

Book List: Delillo, D.: Mau II; James, H.: The Princess Casimassima; Melville, H.: Benito Cereno; Milton, J.: The Major Works; Parsipur, S.: Women Without Men; Shelley, P.: Shelley’s Poetry and Prose

Course Description: “Is it useless to revolt?” Our seminar borrows its lead question from the title of an essay by Foucault on the Iranian Revolution of 1979. Foucault urges us to listen to the voices of revolt, even as they seem entangled in a history of inescapable, recurrent violence. Attracted and repulsed by the decisive violence of revolt, the authors in this course test Foucault’s proposition that, “While revolts take place in history, they also escape it in a certain manner.” Starting with Milton ’s Samson Agonistes, we will consider how religious convictions inform both political aspiration and a willingness to justify acts of violence. Such questions will lead us back to the foundational representations of revolt in the Bible (Exodus and Revelation) and forward to contemporary questions about “terrorism.” Since 9/11, for instance, critics have debated whether the protagonist of Samson Agonistes ought to be considered a terrorist. Other readings will range widely across historical periods and national cultures, and might include works by Blake, Kleist, Shelley, Melville, Nat Turner, James, and Yeats, as well as living writers such as Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish, Japanese novelist Kenzaburo Oe, American novelist Don DeLillo, and Iranian novelist Shahrnush Parsipur. On occasion, we will also take up theoretical writings on the subject of revolt, liberation, and violence by such authors as Kant, Benjamin, Arendt, Derrida, and—of course—Foucault.

150/11
Senior Seminar: Literature of California and the West
Starr, George
TTh 3:30-5
243 Dwinelle

Note: Students applying for this section will need to keep their spring schedules free on Tuesdays from 5:00 to 6:30 P.M., as some weeks (when films are shown) the class will meet on Tuesday 3:30 to 6:30 (instead of both Tuesday and Thursday for an hour and a half).

Areas of Concentration: 1D or 1E; 6

Book List: In addition to the books that follow, there will be photocopied readings, e.g. poetry by Jeffers, Gunn and Hass, prose by Harte, Stevenson and Steinbeck. Austin , M.: The Land of Little Rain; Chandler , R.: The Big Sleep; Dick, P.: Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? ; Didion, J.: Slouching toward Bethlehem ; Norris, F.: McTeague; Stegner, W.: The Angle of Repose; Twain, M.: Roughing It ; West, N.: The Day of the Locust

Course Description: Besides reading and discussing fiction and poetry with Western settings, and essays attempting to identify or explain distinctive regional characteristics, this course will include consideration of some movies shaped by and shaping conceptions of California . Writing will consist of a term paper of 16-20 pages. 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.

150/12
Senior Seminar: Mark Twain
Hirst, Robert
TTh 2-3:30
2195 Hearst St., Suite 330C Note: This is near the intersection of Hearst and Oxford Streets.

Areas of Concentration: 1D; 3; 6

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

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

150/13
Senior Seminar: Utopia and Paradise , Renaissance to Enlightenment
Turner, James
TTh 5-6:30
115 Barrows

Areas of Concentration: 1B or 1C; 3; 6

Book List: T. More: Utopia (translated from Latin); J. Milton: Paradise Lost; J. Swift: Gulliver's Travels

Course Description: These three fictions—among the most influential works ever written—imagine another world and bring it into collision with the author's own society. Each in its different way combines mythology, travel fantasy, satire, philosophy and theology, searching into the origins and potential of humanity, the longing for perfection and the depth of corruption. As we read in detail three texts that are often rushed through in surveys, or separated by period and genre, I hope we will discover fresh perspectives that each work brings to the other. How does each author re-imagine the social and ecological environment? How do Milton and Swift rework Sir Thomas More's original pun on "Utopia," which in Greek means "No-place" or "Nowhere" but which sounds like Eutopia, the good place? What does it mean to situate Milton 's Biblical epic between fantasy and satire? Do the improbable characters and events, the hallucinating narrator, and the experimental form undermine the attempt to conceive a new, improved "paradise within"? Can every Utopia be interpreted as a Dystopia, and vice versa?

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

150/14
This section has been cancelled.

150/15
Senior Seminar: The Medieval Bible
Miller, Jennifer
TTh 3:30-5
206 Wheeler (as of 2/12)

Areas of Concentration: 1A; 6

Book List and Course Description: Casting a skeptical eye on the notion of the Middle Ages as a monolithically Christian culture, we will examine the different versions of the Bible that circulated in the period – attending to differences of canon, language, translation, interpretation – as well as the range of responses to it in various genres of sacred and secular writing: explanations, imitations, extensions, samplings, revisions, parodies, subversions. We will also be thinking about the limits and interstices of Judeo-Christian mythology in Medieval writing, from traces and survivals of Pagan prehistory (if that is what they are) to all-too-modern heterodoxies and heresies. If you ever wondered what a Lollard was, this is your chance to find out!

For more information on this course, please email the professor at j_miller@berkeley.edu.

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

150/16
This section has been cancelled

150/17
Senior Seminar: The Woman’s Film of the 40's and 50's
Bader, Julia
Seminars TTh 5:30-7 P.M., plus weekly film screenings Thurs 7-10 P.M., both in 221 Wheeler

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

Book List: Aaron, M.: Spectatorship; Chow, R.: Sentimental Fabulations; Doane, M.: The Desire to Desire; Kaplan, E. A.: Motherhood and Representation; Lawrence, A.: Echo & Narcissus; Sitney, P.: Visionary Film; Sjogren, B.: Into the Vortex; Wexman, V. & K. Hollinger: Letter from an Unknown Woman

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.

152
Women Writers: Early American Women Writers
Donegan, Kathleen
TTh 12:30-2
156 Dwinelle

Areas of Concentration: 1C; 4

Book List: Berkin, C.: First Generations: Women in Colonial America ; Andrews, W.: Journeys in New Worlds; Foster, H.: The Coquette; Prince, M.: The History of Mary Prince; Sedgewick, C.: Hope Leslie

Course Description: In this seminar, we will study the writing of American women from the narratives of colonial settlement through the novels of the early republic. In this period, American women authors not only wrote immensely popular works, they also developed major literary traditions. Yet even as people clamored for their books, society looked upon women’s public speech with distaste or suspicion. In light of this contradiction, we will look at the relationship between writing and gender roles. How did women negotiate the boundaries between anonymity, authority, and spectacle? Why do we encounter certain figures or cultural forms (the captive, the traveler, the mourner, the innocent) over and over again? How do the roles of daughter, wife or mother extend to, or clash with, the creation of written works? How do questions of class and ethnicity complicate the story of “women’s writing”? Students will write a 20-page critical essay, with the support of in-class research/writing workshops.

This course satisfies the pre-1800 requirement for the English major.

160
Methods and Materials of Literary Criticism: The Syntax of the Novel
Banfield, Ann
TTh 3:30-5
79 Dwinelle

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

Book List: Cohn, D.: Transparent Minds; Fillmore, C.: Lectures on Deixis; Genette, G.: Literary Discourse; Flaubert, G.: Sentimental Education; Joyce, J.: Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man; Mansfield, K.: Stories ; Proust, M.: Swann’s Way; 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.

165
Special Topics: Critical Influences in Contemporary Culture
Campion, John
MWF 11-12
20 Wheeler

Areas of Concentration: 1E: 5, 6

Book List: Reich, Wilhelm: The Mass Psychology of Fascism; Chomsky, Noam: Necessary Illusions: Thought Control in Democratic Societies; Beaudrillard, Jean: Simulacra and Simulation; Foucault, Michel: Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison

Course Description: The lectures, class discussions, readings, and writing assignments of this course are intended to develop students’ ability to analyze, understand, and evaluate a number of difficult and important texts concerning the concepts of freedom, knowledge, and political practices in contemporary democratic societies. Along the way, the course will introduce a number of critical issues connected to these themes, including: psychotherapy, economics, gender, and literary theory.

Note: This course is open to English majors only.

166/1
Special Topics: Empire’s “Natives”
Fajardo, Margaret
TTh 2-3:30
206 Wheeler

Areas of Concentration: 1E; 2; 3

Tentative Book List: S. Alexie: Indian Killer; R. Barclay: Melal; C. Bulosan: All the Conspirators; J. Hagedorn: Dream Jungle; S. Huhndorf: Going Native; R. Menchu: I, Rigoberta Menchu; L. Marmon: Silko, Almanac of the Dead; H. Tobar: The Tattooed Soldier; H. Trask: From a Native Daughter

Course Description: This course examines the dominant construction of "Indians" within a U.S. context and how this particular construction impacts Native Americans as well as indigenous peoples outside of the continental U.S. The course emphasizes 20 th-century works by authors of color whose communities have been shaped by the dominant discourse of “natives,” “Indians,” and “savages”. We will therefore look at the ways in which communities such as Native Americans, Filipino Americans, Indigenous Mayans, and Pacific Islanders have been constituted through and against notions of “savagery” and “civilization”. Among the keywords that we will examine are: war, genocide, education, and race.

166/2
Special Topics: Readings for Fiction Writers
Mukherjee, Bharati (a.k.a. Blaise, B.)
TTh 3:30-5
130 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.: Burger’s Daughter; Naipaul, V.S.: A Bend in the River; Malouf, D.: Remembering Babylon

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.

166/3
Special Topics: Federico Fellini
Miller, D.A.
Lectures TTh 12:30-2 in 142 Dwinelle, plus film screenings Wednesdays 4-7, also in 142 Dwinelle

This class is cross-listed with Film 151, section 2.

Areas of Concentration: 1E; 3

Book List: T.B.A.

Course Description: The course, which satisfies the “auteur” requirement in the Film Program, centers on Federico Fellini, a figure who was at once the most spectacular auteur in the heyday of auteurs and, in one important sense, the most peculiar. His work—most explicitly, in that phase of it that produced La Dolce Vita and
8 1/2;takes up the very problem of “auteurship,” a problem induced, internally at any rate, when the auteur, no longer the veiled god behind his work, portrays himself as its depressed main character, depressed because, as a character, he can never be central enough. If the auteur-as-god always had “something to say” (La Dolce Vita, for example, threw a whole nation into debate over its message), the auteur-as-character has nothing to say, or at any rate nothing that could give his work the conceptual wholeness of a “masterpiece”
(8 1/2). Fellini’s famous virtuosity—the spectacle of style “working it up”—would remedy this personal inadequacy, and render irrelevant the filmmaker’s failed self-positioning in the Marxist/Catholic/existentialist matrix that forms his social-intellectual field.

166/4
Special Topics: The Elizabethan Renaissance
Honig, Elizabeth
Lectures TTh 12:30-2 in 101 Moffitt, plus one hour of discussion section per week in 104 Moffitt (sec. 401: Tues. 2-3; sec. 402: Tues. 3-4; sec. 403: Tues 4-5)

This course is cross-listed with History of Art 190D.

Areas of Concentration: 1B; 5; 6

Book List: See below

Course Description: Queen Elizabeth I presided over a marvelous but quirky flowering of the arts in England . Her unique position as a female monarch surrounded by male courtiers produced a dynamic in which all artistic production seemed to reflect back upon her, the powerful focus of men’s desires and aspirations. From the building of stately houses to the writing of poetry, a rhetoric of courtship, persuasion, and double-meaning underlay Elizabeth ’s renaissance. Following on a long period of state-sponsored iconoclasm, the relationship between the visual and verbal arts had to be redefined as well. This course will consider the Elizabethan period in relation to culture under Elizabeth ’s father, Henry VIII, her brother and sister, and her Stuart heir James I. We will treat poetry, painting, and pageantry; rhetoric, architecture and urban development. Some of the writers and artists we will discuss will be Holbein, More, Hilliard, Sidney, Smythson, Jones, Jonson, Van Dyck and Rubens.

NOTE: This course involves interdisciplinary, research-based learning. The evaluation of your work will be based not on examinations but on a multi-part project, on which you will have ample, planned guidance from the professor, the GSI, and the library staff. All students will write an original research paper using primary sources available online.

This course does NOT satisfy the pre-1800 requirement for the English major.

166AC
Special Topics in American Culture: Captivity in America
Beam, Dorri
TTh 2-3:30
3 Evans

Areas of Concentration: 1C or 1D; 2; 3; 4

Book List: Rowlandson: The Sovereignty and Goodness of God; versions of the Pocahontas story; Silko: Yellow Woman; Cabeza de Vaca: Castaways; Zitkala-Sa: American Indian Stories; Equiano: The Interesting Narrative; Jacobs: Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl; Turner: The Confessions of Nat Turner; Wideman: Brothers and Keepers

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 as well as a couple twentieth-century engagements with the form. 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 . We will also ask ourselves how the reader is "captured" by captivity narratives, and how, as students of American literature, we should understand our own point of contact with captivity narratives.

This course satisfies UC Berkeley’s American Cultures requirement.

174
Literature and History
Miller, Jennifer
TTh 11-12:30
106 Wheeler

Areas of Concentration: (possibly) 1A; 6

Book List and Course Description: Until the Romantic period, “history” was considered as part of “literature” in English, where literature was understood to include all kinds of written discourse, although tensions between history-writing and fiction existed long before literature was redefined to mean the forms of imaginative writing. This course examines the tensions and contradictions between history and imaginative writing at various moments in British literary history, as well as moments when the two happily merge. We will also consider critical debates about the relation between literature and history, ranging from those approaches that set literature outside or above history to those that view literature as the most history-saturated of all cultural objects.

For more information on this course, please email the professor at j_miller@berkeley.edu.

175
Literature and Disability: Representations of Disability in Literature
Kleege , Georgia
MWF 1-2
170 Barrows

Areas of Concentration: 2; 6

Book List: Barker, P.: Regeneration; Dunn, K.: Geek Love; Green, H.: Blindness; Lewis, V. A., ed.: Beyond Victims and Villains: Contemporary Plays by Disabled Playwrights; McCullers, C.: The Heart is a Lonely Hunter; Medoff, M.: Children of a Lesser God; Shakespeare, W.: Richard III; plus a course packet of short fiction

Course Description: We will examine the ways disability is portrayed in a variety of works of fiction and drama. We will also screen some film versions of these texts. Assignments will include two short (5-8 page) critical essays, a take-home final examination and a group presentation or staged reading from one of the plays.

179
Literature and Linguistics
Banfield, Ann
TTh 11-12:30
104 Barrows

Areas of Concentration: 3; 5; 7

Book List: Benveniste, E.: Problems in General Linguistics; Lord, A.: A Singer of Tales ; 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.

H195B/1
Honors Course
Premnath, Gautam
TTh 2-3:30
305 Wheeler

Areas of Concentration: None

Booklist: No texts

Course Description: This is a continuation of section 1 of H195A, taught by Gautam Premnath in Fall 2007. No new students will be admitted. No new application form needs to be filled out. Professor Premnath will give out CECs (class entry codes) in class in November.

H195B/2
Honors Course
Bishop, John
MWF 1-2
221 Wheeler

Areas of Concentration: None

Book List: T.B.A.

Course Description: This is a continuation of section 2 of H195A, taught by John Bishop in Fall 2007. No new students will be admitted. No new application form needs to be filled out. Professor Bishop will give out CECs (class entry codes) in class in November.

H195B/3
Honors Course
Best, Stephen
TTh 12:30-2
54 Barrows

Areas of Concentration: None

Book List: T.B.A.

Course Description: This is a continuation of section 3 of H195A, taught by Stephen Best in Fall 2007. No new students will be admitted. No new application form needs to be filled out. Professor Best will give out CECs (class entry codes) in class in November.

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Last modified: June 10, 2008

Upper-Division Courses, Part II

Spring 2008

Courses: