Upper-Division Courses, Part I
Spring 2008
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 2008 courses that satisfy the pre-1800 requirement for the English major.
100/1
Junior Seminar: Chicano/a Novels and the Law
Gonzalez, Marcial
MW 9:30-11
305 Wheeler
Areas of Concentration: 1E; 2; 3
Book List: Gaspar de Alba, A.: Desert Blood: The Juarez Murders; Corpi, L.: Cactus Blood; Vea, A.: Gods Go Begging; Maya-Murray, Y.: Locas; Acosta, O. Z.: The Revolt of the Cockroach People and The Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo; Ruiz, R.: Happy Birthday Jesus and Big Bear; Villanueva, A. L.: Naked Ladies; López, I. H.: Racism on Trial: The Chicano Fight for Justice
Course Description: This course will examine representations of working-class characters and their encounters with the law in several Chicana and Chicano novels. Some of these novels were written by lawyers. Others are narrated from the perspective of a lawyer. All of them are about interpreting, challenging or breaking the law in one way or another. In this course, we will be concerned with the following questions: What is significant about the centrality of the law in these novels? What are the social and formal implications of novels narrated by a lawyer? What distinguishes the narratives of characters who are disciplined by the law from those who take defiant stances against the legal system? What do the representations of legal struggles reveal about history, class power and racialization? Do these novels represent realistic conditions, or do they reinforce stereotypes about Chicanos and the law? We will support our reading of the novels in this course with a fair amount of secondary reading. Assignments may include two papers, an exam, and an in-class presentation. A percentage of your grade will be based on participation.
Be sure to read the paragraph on page 1 of this Announcement of Classes regarding enrollment in English 100!
100/2 This class has been cancelled.
100/3 Junior Seminar : Novel Genealogies—Balzac, Eliot, and James
Puckett , Kent
MW 4-5:30
251 Dwinelle
Areas of Concentration: 1D; 3; 5
Book List: Balzac, H.: Père Goriot, Lost Illusions; Eliot, George: Middlemarch, Daniel Deronda; James, Henry: Roderick Hudson, The Portrait of a Lady, The Golden Bowl; a course reader with selections from Armstrong, Bourdieu, Foucault, Guillory, and others
Course Description: In an 1873 letter to Grace Norton, Henry James writes, “To produce some little exemplary works of art is my narrow and lowly dream. They are to have less ‘brain’ than Middlemarch; but (I boldly proclaim it) they are to have more form.” For the young Henry James, writing a novel meant writing something different, something better, something more than Middlemarch. To write, in other words, was to beat Middlemarch at its own game. In this course we’ll look closely at a handful of novels in order to understand the development of some of that genre’s signature techniques within the context of novelists reading and competing with other novelists. How does one novel revise, revisit, subvert, celebrate or abuse another? How might the so-called “rise” of the novel be understood as the effect of the static that results when one idea about the novel incorporates, bumps up against, or runs over another? We’ll read novels by Honoré de Balzac, George Eliot, and Henry James in order to think about some major concepts within the study of the novel: realism, the representation of the social, different forms of narration, character, plot, etc. We’ll also talk in broader terms (aesthetic, social, economic) about what these writers thought they were doing when they thought to write novels as opposed or in addition to plays, essays, poetry, etc.
Be sure to read the paragraph on page 1 of this Announcement of Classes regarding enrollment in English 100!
100/4
Junior Seminar: Representing the Holocaust—A Question of Genre
Liu, Sarah
MW 4-5:30
106 Wheeler
Areas of Concentration: 1E; 3; 6
Book List: Amery, Jean: At the Mind’s Limits; Delbo, Charlotte: Auschwitz and After; Lanzmann, Claude: Shoah; Levi, Primo: The Drowned and the Saved; Schlink, Bernard: The Reader; Spiegelman, Art: Maus I and II; Wiesel, Elie: Night
Films: Kramer, Stanley: Judgment at Nuremberg; Lanzmann, Claude: Shoah; Resnais, Alain: Nuit et Brouillard; Spielberg, Steven: Schindler’s List
Course Description: The German philosopher Theodor Adorno made the famous comment that to write poetry after Auschwitz was barbaric—but not to produce it even more barbarous. Of course, Adorno referred to “poetry” in the metaphorical sense, connoting artistic representation in general, but his remark does raise the question of genre: are some forms of representation more ethical, more effective, more enduring when trying to represent the “unrepresentable”? Does the camera succeed where the pen falters? Can the word cross boundaries that the visual cannot transgress? How do the verbal and visual compliment and complicate each other? The course material ranges from the documentary to the comic book, poetry to propaganda, memoir to Hollywood blockbuster.
Be sure to read the paragraph on page 1 of this Announcement of Classes regarding enrollment in English 100!
100/5
Junior Seminar: American Captivity Narratives
Donegan, Kathleen
TTh 9:30-11
129 Barrows
Areas of Concentration: 1C; 2; 3; 4
Book List: Derounian-Stodala, K.: Women’s Indian Captivity Narratives; Baepler, P.: White Slaves, African Masters; Gates, H. L.: The Classic Slave Narratives
Course Description: The captivity narrative is the first literary genre that might be called uniquely “American.” Although its standard protagonist was a white woman kidnapped by Indians, American captivity narratives also related the troubles of sailors and pirates at sea, Christians and Moslems on the Barbary Coast , and Africans enslaved and transported throughout the Atlantic world. We will study a range of Indian, pirate, and slave captivities, from the period of colonial settlement through the early nineteenth century. Secondary sources will help us think about how the phenomenon of captivity in American literature both concentrated and contained larger battles for cultural power. Quickened by crisis, intensified by danger, and driven by fantasies of destruction and deliverance, the plight of the captive came to stand in for a host of social contests. The captive’s position offers an exceptional opportunity to observe how race, gender, and religion functioned in the “no-man’s-land” of bondage. Students will write short papers throughout the semester.
Be sure to read the paragraph on page 1 of this Announcement of Classes regarding enrollment in English 100!
100/6
Junior Seminar: The Culture of Efficiency—Literature and Popular Culture in Early-Twentieth-Century America
McQuade, Don
TTh 9:30-11
New Location: 108 Wheeler
Areas of Concentration: 1E; 6
Book List: Frederick Winslow Taylor: Principles of Scientific Management; Mark Twain: A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court; Edward Bellamy: Looking Backward; Sinclair Lewis: Babbitt. A course reader will include selected prose from Thorsten Veblen; Henry Adams; John Dewey; John Dos Passos; as well as selections from Mary Pattison: The Business of Home Management; Henry Ford: My Philosophy of Industry; Michel Foucault: Discipline and Punish; Robert Herrick: Waste; and selected poetry and prose from William Carlos Williams; along with advertisements, paintings, and photographs.
Course Description: This course will examine the origins and, more specifically, the cultural consequences of America's fascination with efficiency, with what has been called "a secular Great Awakening, an outpouring of ideas and emotions in which a gospel of efficiency was preached without embarrassment" to writers, workers, corporate executives, doctors, "homemakers," teachers, as well as religious and political leaders. More particularly, we will study the impact of Frederick Winslow Taylor's principles of scientific management on early-twentieth-century American culture. Taylor 's principles, so influential in American corporate enterprise, also infiltrated the ways in which many Americans organized their domestic lives and managed their intellectual relations to the world around them. Such values as productivity, economy, immediacy, and functionalism were everywhere evident in American intellectual life and public discourse in the early decades of the twentieth century — from the debates over the first execution in the electric chair to the "death" of the essay as a literary form and its removal from the canon.
Our discussions will examine from theoretical perspectives the nature and the consequences of efficiency systems in everyday life — as reflected in, for example, product design, social behavior, and consumer affairs. We will also explore such issues as the creation of models of "perfected bodily adjustment" to "modern times" and the emergence of an "engineering aesthetics" in literature and literary criticism. We will also consider similar expressions in the arts, education, philosophy, and popular culture. In effect, the course will examine the ways in which a "culture of efficiency" emerged during the Progressive Era as Americans struggled to come to terms with what Harriet Monroe called "the confusion of modern immensities" and what William James described as "a teeming multiplicity of objects and relations."
Be sure to read the paragraph on page 1 of this Announcement of Classes regarding enrollment in English 100!
100/7
Junior Seminar: 19th-Century African-American Women Writers
Beam, Dorri
TTh 11-12:30
108 Wheeler (as of 2/12)
Areas of Concentration: 1D; 2; 4
Book List: Lee: Religious Experience; Stewart: Essays and Speeches; Jacobs: Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl; Forten-Grimke: Journals; Keckley: Behind the Scenes; Smith-Foster: A Brighter Coming Day; Harper: Iola Leroy; Hopkins: Magazine Fiction; Larsen: Quicksand
Course Description: This course surveys a variety of writing by early African-American women writers, both south and north, primarily of the nineteenth century. Readings include slave narrative, spiritual autobiography, memoir, journal writing, abolitionist and feminist addresses, poetry, a domestic novel, and a science-fiction novel. We will attend to the intersection of race and gender in relation to literary and social forms, the politics of voice and print, and varying historical and literary contexts of reception—not to formulate a unified "tradition," but to understand the variety and complexity of nineteenth-century black women's engagement in social and literary fields. Students will also be introduced to current critical debates in the field through relevant scholarly articles.
Be sure to read the paragraph on page 1 of this Announcement of Classes regarding enrollment in English 100!
100/9
Junior Seminar: Mark Twain
Starr, George
TTh 12:30-2
262 Dwinelle
Areas of Concentration: 1D; 3
Book List: Twain, M.: Innocents Abroad, Roughing It,Life on the Mississippi , Huckleberry Finn,A Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur’s Court,Pudd’nhead Wilson,Number 44 The Mysterious Stranger, Great Short Works; other material to be photocopied
Course Description: Reading , discussion, and writing about the works, life and times of Mark Twain. The primary texts will include a selection of short stories and sketches by Mark Twain and earlier humorists of the “Old Southwest” and the West; The Innocents Abroad; Roughing It; the first half of Life on the Mississippi; Huckleberry Finn; A Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur’s Court; Pudd’nhead Wilson; and Number 44 The Mysterious Stranger. Writing will normally consist of midterm and final essays of 6-8 pp. each, although under some circumstances a single term paper of 12-16 pages will be possible. 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.
Be sure to read the paragraph on page 1 of this Announcement of Classes regarding enrollment in English 100!
100/10
Junior Seminar: Emily Dickinson
Shoptaw, John
TTh 12:30-2
259 Dwinelle
Areas of Concentration: 1D; 3; 4
Book List: Dickinson, E.: The Poems of Emily Dickinson,Selected Letters; Habegger, A.: My Wars are Laid Away in Books; Course Reader
Course Description: This is an intensive course in the poetry of Emily Dickinson. We will learn how to read (to describe and interpret) her poems, along with her letters and a biography, deeply but also broadly throughout her career. Topics include early poetry; poetic rhythm; figuration; definition and riddle; death, religion, and nature as topic and as figure; love poetry and poetic seduction; emotion & suspense; gender and sexuality; self-definition; biography; manuscript poem packets; poems revisiting poems; letters and/as poems; contemporary history (e.g., Civil War); contemporary poetry (e.g., Emerson, Robert & E.B. Browning); late poetry; reception and influence. There will be a few exercises, a shorter and a longer paper.
Be sure to read the paragraph on page 1 of this Announcement of Classes regarding enrollment in English 100!
100/12
Junior Seminar: F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway
Snyder, Katie
TTh 2-3:30
122 Wheeler
Areas of Concentration: 1E; 3; 4
Book List (to be selected from among the following): Fitzgerald, F.S.: The Great Gatsby, Tender Is the Night, This Side of Paradise, selected short stories, and essays by and about Fitzgerald; Hemingway, E.: The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell to Arms, In Our Time, The Old Man and the Sea, The Garden of Eden, selected short stories, journalism, and essays by and about Hemingway.
Course Description: In this seminar, we will read extensively and intensively in the fiction of these two iconic American modernists. We will attend especially to the ways that issues of gender, both femininity and masculinity, inform Fitzgerald’s and Hemingway’s writings and their lives, and the ways these issues have shaped the continuing critical reception of these two figures. Our discussions and your writing for the course will, ideally, combine close attention to narrative form with cultural analysis. Topics for discussion may include modernist and popular authorship; travel, tourism, and expatriation; mass culture, celebrity, and conspicuous consumption; primitivism and technology; narrative technique and style; and the politics of literary canonization. Requirements for the course include 2 short essays (2-3 pages); 1 longer essay (8-10 pages); at least 1 in-class presentation; and regular attendance and active participation in all class meetings.
Be sure to read the paragraph on page 1 of this Announcement of Classes regarding enrollment in English 100!
100/14
Junior Seminar: Why Do We Cry? The Literature of Sorrow, Sympathy, and Indifference
Goldsmith, Steven
TTh 3:30-5
259 Dwinelle
Areas of Concentration: 1C or 1D; 3; 5
Book List: Norton Anthology of English Literature: The Romantic Period, Vol. C; Austen, J.: Sense and Sensibility; Douglass, F. & H. Jacobs: Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave & Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl; Mackenzie, H.: The Man of Feeling; Solomon, R.: What Is an Emotion?; Sterne, L.: Sentimental Journey
Course Description: “Why do we cry?” asks Jerome Neu. “My short answer is: because we think.” Neu, like many other philosophers, believes emotions express intelligence rather than physiology. In this class, we will test Neu’s proposition, first by considering some prominent texts from the philosophy of emotion (from Adam Smith, William James, and Freud to recent authors such as Nussbaum and Fisher), then by discussing the literary representation of emotion between 1750 and 1850, a period in which poets and novelists responded to the ever-increasing rationalism 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: What do emotions tell us about 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? How do literary representations of emotion act on the emotions of readers? Is it possible (or desirable) not to feel emotions? To get at these questions, we will read many lyric poems (by Gray, Collins, More, Charlotte Smith, Blake, Wordsworth and others) and a few novels (by Mackenzie, Sterne, and Austen), focusing on the scenes of sorrow, loss, and sympathy that dominated this period.
Be sure to read the paragraph on page 1 of this Announcement of Classes regarding enrollment in English 100!
100/15
Junior Seminar : Nonsense
Hanson, Kristin
TTh 3:30-5
247 Dwinelle (As of 2/12)
Areas of Concentration: 1D; 3; 7
Book List: Carroll, L.: Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass; Lear, E.: A Book of Nonsense, Nonsense Songs and Stories, The Owl and the Pussycat, The Quangle Wangle's Hat; Dr. Seuss: And to Think that I Saw it on Mulberry Street!, Horton Hears A Who, Horton Hatches an Egg, If I Ran the Zoo, The Lorax, Yertle the Turtle, Oh! The Places You'll Go, Oh, Say Can You Say?Oh, The Thinks You Can Think! and You're Only Old Once
Course Description: This course will justify the indulgence of re-reading of favorite children's books by exploring two dimensions of nonsense literature in general. One is its extreme foregrounding of linguistic structure, including verse structure, a characteristic shared with language games and of particular interest to children learning language. Another is the correlative backgrounding of overt claims about the actual world, allowing covert critiques of educational practices, social inequality, imperialism, capitalism, the American health care system and even philology.
Requirements: Three or four papers and one or two presentations.
Be sure to read the paragraph on page 1 of this Announcement of Classes regarding enrollment in English 100!
100/16
Junior Seminar : Chicano Narrative—New Mexico/California
Padilla, Genaro
TTh 3:30-5
2032 Valley LSB
Areas of Concentration: 2; 3; 5
Book List: Among the narratives we will read are, for New Mexico, selections from Historia de la Nueva Mexico (Perez de Villagra,1610), “Pastorelas” plays, Fray Angelico Chavez’s Short Stories, Anaya’s Bless Me, Ultima, Castillo’s So Far From God, Baca’s Martin and Meditations on the South Valley, and Denise Chavez’s Loving Pedro Infante; for California, selections from Ruiz de Burton’s The Squatter and the Don, Morales’ The Brick People, Villarreal’s Pocho, Viramonte’s Under the Feet of Jesus, and essays from Richard Rodriguez, Cherrie Moraga, and Gloria Anzaldua.
Course Description: This course will study the historical and ideological formation of Chicano narrative in two regions. Chicano narrative in New Mexico is suffused with the iconography of Spanish colonial history, religious imagery and ritual, open and communal space ruptured by American encroachment, and by nostalgia for the loss of traditional cultural practices. California narrative also expresses chagrin at the loss of land possession after the American invasion of 1846, but very soon after 1900 turns to narrative about Mexican immigrant presence, labor exploitation, urban experience, and, often, longing for Mexico rather than an earlier California.
The major theoretical and critical method here will be to historicize our readings; to that end I will also assign some historical overviews, literary history, and some literary criticism that studies the formations of Chicano narrative
Be sure to read the paragraph on page 1 of this Announcement of Classes regarding enrollment in English 100!
100/17
Junior Seminar: Asian American Melodrama
Oyama, Misa
MW 4-5:30
2070 Valley LSB
Areas of Concentration: 1E; 2; 3; 6
Book List: Watanna, O.: “A Half Caste” and Other Writings; Sui Sin Far: Mrs. Spring Fragrance and Other Writings; Gotanda, P.K.: No More Cherry Blossoms: Sisters Matsumoto and Other Plays; Law-Yone, W.: The Coffin Tree; Ishiguro, K.: When We Were Orphans; Kim, S.: The Interpreter; Tan, A.: The Opposite of Fate; Yee, J.: For God and Country; Course Reader of selected articles
Film List: DeMille, C.B.: The Cheat; Dupont, E.A.: Piccadilly; Douglas, G.: First Yank Into Tokyo ; Ivory, J.: The White Countess; Lee, A.: Brokeback Mountain ; Eastwood, C.: Letters from Iwo Jima
Course Description: This course examines melodrama’s role in dramatizing Asians in American literature, theater, and film. Since Madame Butterfly and Fu Manchu, melodrama has been the most popular mode for casting Asians as victims and villains, but it has also been a way for Asian American writers (and more recently directors) to dramatize the heightened emotions of their protagonists and appeal to a wide readership. How has melodrama shaped American cultural ideas about Asians, and how have Asian Americans worked within and against this framework? Students will write two papers for the course: the first on one of the assigned texts or films, the second on their own research topic involving the relationship between racial representation and melodrama. Films will be screened outside of class in the late afternoon or evening; students who cannot make the screening can see the films on their own at the Media Center in Moffitt.
Be sure to read the paragraph on page 1 of this Announcement of Classes regarding enrollment in English 100!
100 /18
Junior Seminar: Film Melodrama
Bader, Julia
Seminars MW 5:30-7 P.M. plus weekly film screenings
M 7-10 P.M., both in 221 Wheeler (note new location)
Areas of Concentration: 1E; 3; 4; 6
Book List: Bratton, Cook, Gledhill, eds.: Melodrama: Stage, Picture, Screen; Byars, J.: All That Hollywood Allows ; Cook, P.: Screening the Past; Klinger, B.: Melodrama and Meaning; Landy, M.: Imitations of Life
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.
Be sure to read the paragraph on page 1 of this Announcement of Classes regarding enrollment in English 100!
110 This course has been canceled.
112
Middle English Literature
Nolan, Maura
MWF 2-3
166 Barrows
Areas of Concentration: 1A; 7
Book List: Burrow, J. and T. Turville-Petre: A Book of Middle English; Burrow, J.: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight; Borroff, M.: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Patience, Pearl : Verse Translations
Course Description: This course will survey Middle English literature, excluding Chaucer, beginning with the earliest Middle English texts and ending with Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. We will focus on language, translation, and close reading to start, leading up to a broader consideration of the Middle English literary tradition and its role in the creation of English literature as we now know it. Students will have a variety of options for written work.
This course satisfies the pre-1800 requirement for the English major.
117B
Shakespeare
Nishimura, Kimiko
TTh 11-12:30
20 Barrows
Areas of Concentration: 1B; 3
Book List: Shakespeare, W.: The Riverside Shakespeare
Course Description: This course treats the second half of Shakespeare’s career, focusing on the major tragedies, the so-called “problem plays” and romances. Our general approach will be to read each text closely and with attention to the socio-historical issues at play. Although largely a lecture course, discussion is warmly welcomed. There will be a number of writing assignments of different types, and, time permitting, some films that may give us an opportunity to explore more contemporary interpretations of Shakespeare.
117S
Shakespeare
Altieri, Charles
TTh 12:30-2
159 Mulford
Areas of Concentration: 1B; 3
Book List: Shakespeare, W.: Richard II, Midsummer Night’s Dream, As You Like It, Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth, All’s Well That Ends Well, Antony and Cleopatra, A Winter’s Tale, The Tempest; Shakespeare and Theory (a collection of critical essays)
Course Description: This course will be a survey of selected Shakespeare plays covering all his main genres and periods. We will concentrate on close-reading the plays, and some attention will be paid to acting—either as commentary on performances or as students putting on scenes. Two papers, mid-term and final.
118
Milton
Picciotto, Joanna
MWF 12-1
213 Wheeler
Areas of Concentration: 1B or 1C
Book List: Milton, J.: Complete Poems and Major Prose
Course Description: A survey of John Milton’s career, a life-long effort to unite intellectual, political, and artistic experimentation. There will be two short papers and a final exam.
This course satisfies the pre-1800 requirement for the English major.
120
Scotland in the Eighteenth Century
Note new instructor: Sorensen, Janet
TTh 2-3:30
123 Wheeler
Areas of Concentration: 1C; 6
Book List: Broadie, A., ed.: The Scottish Enlightenment: An Anthology; Hume, D.: An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding; Johnson, S. & J. Boswell.: A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland / Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides; Mackenzie, H.: The Man of Feeling; Smollett, T.: The Expedition of Humphry Clinker; Burns, R.: Selected Poems; Baillie, J.: Plays on the Passions; Ferrier, S.: Marriage; Scott, W.: Rob Roy; Hogg, J., Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner; in addition to the books listed, we will be working from a course reader.
Course Description: The official title for this course is “The Age of Johnson.” Although we’ll be reading Samuel Johnson’s masterpiece of philosophical tourism, A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland, this is not a course on “the age of Johnson” but on writing in Scotland in the second half of the long eighteenth century—the Age of Hume, of Burns, and of Scott, if it has to be called the age of anyone, which it probably shouldn’t. The course encompasses the so-called Scottish Enlightenment, a major European movement (1740-1795) of literary and scientific modernization based in the university towns of Lowland Scotland, as well as the post-Enlightenment boom of commercial publishing in Edinburgh (1800-1830), with innovations in periodicals and fiction that defined the nineteenth-century public sphere. The Scots may not have “invented the modern world” (as one book title boasts), but they invented some of the key discourses for imagining it, from political economy to historical romance. We will be reading works from the mainstream genres of the Scottish Enlightenment, in moral philosophy and the human sciences, by David Hume, Adam Smith, Adam Ferguson, and others, alongside the eighteenth-century projects of Scottish poetry that founded a European and North Atlantic Romanticism, including James Macpherson’s scandalous invention of ancient Highland epic and Robert Burns’s poetic synthesis of a “language really spoken by men.” And we’ll consider the rise of the Scottish novel in the period, from satirical Smollett and sentimental Mackenzie to national and historical fiction by Scott and his rivals looking back across Scotland ’s century of modernization.
This course satisfies the pre-1800 requirement for the English major.
121
The Romantic Period
Langan, Celeste
MWF 11-12
166 Barrows
Areas of Concentration: 1C or 1D; 3
Book List: Perkins, D.: English Romantic Writers; Shelley, M.: Frankenstein; Shelley, P.B.: The Cenci; a Course Reader
Course Description: In 1796, Samuel Taylor Coleridge published a poem in the Monthly Magazine with an odd subtitle: "A Poem which affects not to be Poetry." Why write a poem that doesn’t want to seem like a poem? Literature since that time has been in conversation with the experimental poetry of Coleridge and of the Romantic period. This course will focus on key Romantic writers and their experiments, to give some historical shape to the contested terms "poem" and "Poetry." Is a poem merely a peculiar form of information storage, as in "thirty days hath September"? Or (as Shelley put it) "the very image of life expressed in its eternal truth"? Why do so many writers of the period assign greater value to poetry, despite the increasing popularity of prose fiction? In what ways are their poetical experiments related to the "great national events”—the American and French Revolutions, and the rise both of industrial manufacture and global capital—that were transforming social relations? To answer these and other questions we will read the work of the six "major" poets (Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, Keats), as well as some popular prose fiction ( Frankenstein, The Monk) of the same period.
122
The Victorian Period
Puckett , Kent
MWF 12-1
110 Barrows
Areas of Concentration: 1D; 4
Book List: Darwin, C.: The Origin of Species; Dickens, C.: Great Expectations; Abrams et al., eds.: The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol. B: The Victorian Age; a Course Reader
Course Description: This course is an introduction to the literature and culture of the Victorian period. Victorian poets, novelists, and critics responded to rapid industrial growth, colonial expansion, and profound developments in science, technology, and social life with a mixture of exuberance, anxiety, and dismay. We will focus on the period's poetry and non-fiction prose in order to understand how particular texts represent and sometimes undermine particularly Victorian ideas about aesthetics, politics, progress, money, religion, gender, and science.
125C
The European Novel: History and the Novel
Golburt, Luba
TTh 9:30-11
20 Barrows
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; Pushkin, A .: The Captain’s Daughter; 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 5 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, 2 short papers, a longer final paper, a midterm and a final exam.
125D
The Twentieth -Century Novel
Bernstein, Michael
TTh 12:30-2
213 Wheeler
Areas of Concentration: 1E; 3
Book List: Proust, M.: In Search of Lost Time
Course Description: By reading one of the most significant 20 th-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
Otter, Sam
TTh 3:30-5
110 Barrows
Areas of Concentration: 1C; 2
Book List: Lauter, P., ed.: The Heath Anthology of American Literature, Volume A: Colonial Period to 1800; Miller, P., ed.: The American Puritans: Their Prose and Poetry; Rowson, S.: Charlotte Temple; Brown, C. B.: Edgar Huntly; photocopied Course Reader
Course Description: This course will offer a survey of the literature produced in North America before 1800: European accounts of "discovery" and exploration; competing British versions of settlement; Puritan history, sermons, and poetry; conversion, captivity, and slave narratives; diaries and journals; eighteenth-century poetry by women; Native American oratory; autobiography; letters, essays, and political debate; and novels. Two midterms and one final examination will be required.
This course satisfies the pre-1800 requirement for the English major.
130C
American Literature: 1865-1900
Note New Instructor: Fielding, John
TTh 2-3:30
110 Barrows
Areas of Concentration: 1D or 1E; 2; 4
Book List: Jacobs, H.: Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl; Twain, M.: A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court; Gilman, C. P.: The Yellow Wallpaper; Crane, S.: Maggie, a Girl of the Streets; Jewett, S.O.: The County of the Pointed Firs; James, H.: The Turn of the Screw; Chopin, K.: The Awakening; Norris, F.: McTeague; Chesnutt, C.: The Marrow of Tradition; Berkman, A.: Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist; Course Reader (consisting of works by Louisa May Alcott and Walt Whitman)
Course Description: American Literature Between the Wars (Civil and World War One). This course will survey American Literature from the Civil War into the early twentieth century in order to explore the ways in which changes wrought on the American landscape by war, urbanization, industrialization and immigration are reflected in the evolution of American poetry and prose in both style and content. Beginning with slavery and the Reconstruction, we will trace the shifting contours of American identity into the Gilded Age and beyond as it is altered by competing notions of race, gender and politics Such literary movements as Realism and “local color” will also occupy our attention.
There will be two out-of-class essays as well as an in-class midterm and final examination. Although this is primarily a lecture course, be prepared also to participate in open discussion and for the occasional reading quiz.
131
American Poetry
Hass, Robert
TTh 9:30-11
101 Morgan
Areas of Concentration: ID or IE; 3
Book List: Lehman, David, ed.: The Oxford Book of American Poetry
Course Description: This is a survey of American poetry from its beginnings to the present. We
will spend particular time on Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, the modernist poets of the first half of the 20th century, the Harlem Renaissance, the Beat Generation and the Poets of the New York as they emerged in the post-war years, and we will try to spend some time on the poets of the last twenty years and some young poets of the present moment. There will be essays to write and a final exam.
134
Contemporary Literature
Falci, Eric
Lectures MW 3-4 in 2060 Valley LSB, plus one hour of discussion section per week (all sections F 3-4)
Areas of Concentration: 1E; 2
Book List: Coetzee, J.M.: Waiting for the Barbarians; Greene, G.: The End of the Affair; Ishiguro, K.: The Remains of the Day; Roy, A.: The God of Small Things; Smith, Z.: White Teeth; Stoppard, T.: Arcadia; a Course Reader including poems by Philip Larkin, Basil Bunting, Ted Hughes, Roy Fisher, Christopher Okigbo, Derek Walcott, Kamau Brathwaite, Seamus Heaney, Derek Mahon, Medbh McGuckian, Paul Muldoon, Lorna Goodison, Carol Ann Duffy, David Dabydeen, Maggie O’Sullivan, Linton Kwesi Johnson, Geraldine Monk, and Caroline Bergvall
Course Description: We will sketch the far-flung field of contemporary British literature, closely reading some key texts written since the end of World War II. In addition to paying careful attention to varieties of poetic form and narrative style, we will think through the continuing utility of such a phrase as “British literature” in a globalizing world, especially as we focus on the aftermath of the British Empire and the colonial legacy of that empire in such places as India , Africa , the Caribbean , and Ireland . Course requirements include two essays and a final exam.
135AC
Literature of American Cultures: Native American, African American, and European American Literature, 1865-1917
Hutson, Richard
MWF 10-11
390 Hearst Mining
Areas of Concentration: 1D or 1E; 2; 3; 6
Book List: Callahan, A.: Wynema; Chesnutt, C.: The House Behind the Cedars; Chopin, K: The Awakening; Crane, S.: Maggie; Eastman, C.: From the Deep Woods to Civilization; Harper, F.: Iola Leroy; Hopkins, S.: Life Among the Piutes; James, H.: Daisy Miller; Washington, B.: Up From Slavery
Course Description: This is a course on Native American, African American and European American writers in the Gilded Age, roughly from the end of the Civil War to the beginning of World War I. I am especially interested in these writers’ responses to the extensive and pervasive economic, political and cultural transformations of the period, a period of massive dislocation and disorientation for almost any ethnic group. I am going to present these authors chronologically rather than thematically or as ethnic groups, so that there will be constant interweaving of themes and ideas. I am planning on two in-class midterms and a final exam.
This course satisfies UC Berkeley’s American Cultures requirement.
C136
Topics in American Studies: The U.S. in the Progressive Era, 1890-1917
Hutson, Richard
MWF 2-3
100 Wheeler
This course is cross-listed with American Studies C111E.
Areas of Concentration: 1D or 1E; 6
Book List: Addams, J.: Twenty Years at Hull House; Chopin, K.: The Awakening; Eastman, C.: From the Deep Woods to Civilization; Garvey, E.: The Adman in the Parlor; Lippman, W.: Drift and Mastery; Porter, G.: The Rise of Big Business; Sinclair, U.: The Moneychangers; Taylor, F.: The Scientific Principles of Management; Wharton, E.: The House of Mirth; Wiebe, R.: The Search for Order
Course Description: This is an introduction to a number of cultural/political/economic/social issues from a “transitional” period of the United States between the rise of industrial capitalism (big corporate businesses and huge urban centers) in the late-19 th century and the beginnings of a modernist attempt to bring order to what was often felt to be the chaos of development. In addition to a variety of texts, there will be screenings of a number of films, mainly short films. Two midterms and a final exam.
138
Studies in World Literature in English: Postcolonial Narrative
Premnath, Gautam
TTh 11-12:30
123 Wheeler
Areas of Concentration: 1E; 2
Probable Book List: Sembène, O.: God’s Bits of Wood; Doyle, R.: A Star Called Henry; Munif, A.: Cities of Salt; Cliff, M.: Abeng; Roy, A.: The God of Small Things; Adichie, C.: Half of a Yellow Sun; Tyrewala, A.: No God in Sight; Ghosh, A.: In An Antique Land; and a small Course Reader
Course Description: At the midpoint of the twentieth century much of the world was still ruled by a handful of European colonial powers. Today nearly all the world is comprised of formally independent nations. This course will consider the literature that has arisen as part of, or in response to, this tremendous historical shift. Our readings will include a selection of prose works drawn from a variety of fictional and non-fictional genres, including the novel, bildungsroman, testimonial narrative, polemic, and the traveler’s tale. We’ll explore the varied roles that literature has played in processes of political and imaginative decolonization, and consider the complexly ambivalent response that currently prevails toward the legacies of independence.
139
The Cultures of English: The African Novel
Jones, Donna
TTh 2-3:30
200 Wheeler
Areas of Concentration: 1E; 2; 6
Book List: Chinua Achebe: Things Fall Apart; Amos Tutuola: My Life in the Bush of Ghosts; Ben Okri: The Famished Road; Moses Isegawa: Snakepit; Helon Habila: Waiting for an Angel; Tsitsi Dangaremba: Nervous Condition; Ahmadou Korouma: Waiting for the Vote of the Wild Animals; Frantz Fanon: Wretched of the Earth
Course Description: In this course we will examine the history of the African novel, from narratives of exploration, colonial dominance, and ethnographic encounter to the reassertion of tribal, ancestral, linguistic legitimacy in the late- and post-colonial novel. We will be examining the ways in which the European encounter with Africa takes the form of various kinds of enchantment, and the complex ways in which African writers have narrated both the disenchantment of colonialism and the reinvention of an enchanted world, the reimagined spirits of history, the novel, and Africa. Perhaps more than any other location, Africa has labored beneath a mountain of misconception. Labeled the ‘dark continent,’ it has become the field onto which the anxieties of modernity have been fixed—its fears of the so-called primitive and the irrational. This course shall focus on the question of African modernity. Naturally, the social and political context of de-colonization and postcoloniality shall be central, yet we shall also spend considerable time on the question of aesthetics. The contemporary African novel has moved a considerable distance from the modernizing directives of the realist novel; radical experimentation in the form of the folkloric and ludic are deployed to express the often horrific and chaotic realities of life in the postcolony.
143A
Short Fiction
Chandra, Vikram
MW 1:30-3
301 Wheeler
Areas of Concentration: None
Book List: King, Stephen & Heidi Pitlor, eds.: The Best American Short Stories, 2007
Course Description: A short fiction workshop. Over the course of the semester, each student will write and revise two stories. Each participant in the workshop will edit student-written stories, and will write a formal critique of each manuscript. Students are required to attend two literary readings over the course of the semester, and write a short report about each reading they attend. Students will also take part in online discussions about fiction. Class attendance is mandatory.
Throughout the semester, we will read published stories from various sources, and also essays by working writers about fiction and the writing life. The intent of the course is to have the students engage with the problems faced by writers of fiction, and discover the techniques that enable writers to construct a convincing representation of reality on the page.
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 Chandra’s mailbox in 322 Wheeler, BY 4:00 P.M., TUESDAY, OCTOBER 30, 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
TTh 9:30-11
301 Wheeler
Areas of Concentration: None
Tentative 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 30, 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
TTh 3:30-5
305 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 a brief critical consideration of a recent volume of poetry.
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 30, 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/3
Verse: Docents of the Expanded Field
Shaw, Lytle
W 3-6
301 Wheeler
Areas of Concentration: None
Book List: Robertson, L.: Occasional Work and Seven Walks from the Office for Soft Architecture; Mayer, B. and Clark Coolidge: The Cave; Smithson, R.: The Collected Writings (of Robert Smithson); Fitterman, R: Metropolis XXX; Weschler, L.: Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonder
Course Description: This class will mine site-specific writing and post-conceptual art. Collectively we’ll develop a critical vocabulary through readings; individually students will pursue forms of experimental research that will inform their own projects. Our readings will be organized around historic models of the writer as self-appointed, alternative guide or explicator, often moving (wandering in cities or sublime landscapes, leading official or unofficial tours) and just as often poaching from a range of non-poetic fields including anthropology, art history, science fiction, travel literature, philosophy, history, and science. Our precedents will include Restif de la Bretonne, Edmund and Jules de Goncourt, Francis Ponge, Bernadette Mayer, Robert Smithson, The Museum of Jurassic Technology, Mark Dion, Lisa Robertson, Rob Fitterman, The Chadwicks, and The Center for Land Use Interpretation.
To be considered for admission to this class, please submit 5 photocopied pages of your poems, along with an application form, to Professor Shaw’s mailbox in 322 Wheeler, BY 4:00 P.M., TUESDAY, OCTOBER 30, 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: Traveling, Thinking, Writing
Giscombe, Cecil
TTh 9:30-11
305 Wheeler
Areas of Concentration: None
Book List: Students should come to class before buying texts. The list below is tentative. But, that said, it will likely include most of the following books: Joseph Conrad: Heart of Darkness; Eddy Harris: Mississippi Solo; Jack Kerouac: Dharma Bums; Linda Niemann: Boomer. We’ll also read excerpts from Travel Writing: 1700-1830 (Ian Duncan and Elizabeth Bohls); Paul Fussell’s Norton Anthology of Travel Writing; Stranger in the Village: Two Centuries of African-American Travel Writing (Farrah Griffin and Cheryl Fish); and items from the popular press.
Course Description: Much of American literature has had to do with a sense of motion. Note the journeys, e.g., in the best known texts of Melville and Twain. But note also that Harlemite Langston Hughes’ autobiography, The Big Sea, begins on a boat and details his adventures in Europe and Africa; Canadian writer Gladys Hindmarch takes on Melville with her Watery Part of the World and Zora Neale Hurston travels to Haiti in Tell My Horse and through the American south in Mules and Men.
The point of this course is multiple and full of inquiry. Judith Thurman, reviewing Catherine Millet’s
instantly notorious autobiography, The Sexual Life of Catherine M., for the New Yorker: Lust is a great and inexhaustible literary subject, but writing graphically about what excites one isn’t literature. The same stupid things excite everybody.
Substitute “travel” for “lust” and you have one of the fields of inquiry here this spring semester. The
familiar question, “Is this trip necessary?”, is joined to “What makes this trip important enough to
celebrate?”
Another field is the role of Americans and/ or Westerners—“subjectivity” in the vernacular—as travelers in the world. (I’d note that the world is both within and beyond our national boundaries.) What things are we heir to? What are our responsibilities and blindnesses? What’s the relation between the imperial West (of Conrad’s writing) and our current situation? The point in this—and any writing—is to write consciously and to be mindful of the political import of our writing.
A third field is the defining of the relation between travel and place (and imagination). Place is “hot”
right now, as a topic. What are the elements of the sentimental here and what assumptions?
We’ll read and write about travel. The writing vehicle will be, for the greatest part, the personal essay.
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 Giscombe’s mailbox in 322 Wheeler, BY 4:00 P.M., TUESDAY, OCTOBER 30, 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
Mukherjee, Bharati (a.k.a. Blaise, B.)
TTh 12:30-2:00
305 Wheeler
Areas of Concentration: None
Book List: Atwan, R., ed.: The Best American Essays, 5 th edition
Course Description: This workshop course concentrates on the form, theory and practice of creative nonfiction, particularly on the writing of the personal essay. Students are required to fulfill specific assignments and to write 45 pages of nonfictional narrative.
To be considered for admission to this class, please submit 8-10 photocopied pages of your creative nonfiction (no poems or academic writing), along with an application form, to Professor Mukherjee’s mailbox in 322 Wheeler, BY 4:00 P.M., TUESDAY, OCTOBER 30, 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/3
Prose Nonfiction: The Personal Essay
Kleege , Georgia
M 3-6
301 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 three 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 in this course, 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 30, 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!
143T
Poetry Translation Workshop
Hass, Robert
TTh 12:30-2
301 Wheeler
Areas of Concentration: None
Book List: Course Reader
Course Description: The purpose of the class is to give students a chance to work on verse translation, to share translations and give and receive feedback on their work, to read about the theory and practice of translation, and perhaps to try out different practices and techniques. Participants must have some competence in a language they want to translate from and develop a project in that language. For each workshop students will provide original texts, word-for-word versions, and a draft of a translation which the class can then discuss. It makes for an interesting way to study poetry and verse technique—to see how one goes about making poetry in one language come alive in another.
Admission will be by permission of the instructor, based on (1) three pages of your own translations of poems into English, as well as the corresponding pages in the original language, (2) a one-paragraph statement of your interest in translation, and (3) an application form; all of the above is to be submitted to Professor Hass’s mailbox in 322 Wheeler, BY 4:00 P.M., TUESDAY, OCTOBER 30, 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: February 05, 2008