Instructions "pages 1-3"

Concentration Areas

Announcement of Classes

R1A/1B Courses

100/1
This section has been cancelled.

100/2
Junior Seminar: The Novel and its Theory/Theory and its Novels
D.A. Miller
MW 10-12
109 Wheeler

(Though the official time of this class is 10-12, on most days it may end by 11:30.)

Areas of Concentration: 1D; 3; 5; 6

Book List: Jane Austen, Emma; Mikhail Bahktin, The Dialogical Imagination; Honoré de Balzac, Père Goriot; Roland Barthes, S/Z; Pierre Bourdieu, The Rules of Art; Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment; Gustave Flaubert, Sentimental Education; E.M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel; Georg Lukács, Theory of the Novel; D.A. Miller, Jane Austen, or the Secret of Style; Course reader with texts by Bahktin, Barthes, Woloch, et al.

Course Description: The seminar undertakes to read four major novelists, each in conjunction with a theorist or critic who has based his account of the novel-form on this one particular practitioner. The pairings are: Balzac/Barthes, Flaubert/Bourdieu, Dostoevsky/Bahktin, and Austen/Miller. These accounts will also help us reflect on two ostensibly universal understandings of the novel, by Lukacs and Forster, and vice versa.

Requirements: As befits a seminar, attendance is required at every meeting, and the quality of your participation in class discussion will be no less important a factor in your final evaluation than your written work. The latter will consist of two papers and a final examination.

Students admitted to this section should submit, to the instructor’s mailbox in 322 Wheeler, by Friday, August 22, a statement indicating the interests they will bring to the seminar.

Be sure to read the paragraph starting on page 1 of this Announcement of Classes regarding enrollment in English 100!

100/3
C. Reyes
Junior Seminar: Text and Image in Contemporary Literature
MW 12-2
109 Wheeler

(Though the official time of this class is 12-2, on most days it may end by 1:30.)

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

Book List: To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf; This Is Not a Pipe, Michel Foucault; Ways of Seeing, John Berger; Blood Song, Eric Drooker, Autobiography of Red, Anne Carson; Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes; Running in the Family, Michael Ondaatje; The Emigrants, W.G. Sebald; , Scott McCloud; One HunUnderstanding Comicsdred Demons, Lynda Barry; Epileptic 1, David B.; Palestine, Joe Sacco

Films: Sunrise, F.W. Murnau; Memento, Christopher Nolan

Course Description: Novelists paint vivid scenes; poets use figures of speech to create word paintings; biographers draw portraits of their subjects; essayists illustrate their arguments; critics analyze imagery; and readers visualize characters and settings. In short, literature-and other verbal media-are saturated by images, figuratively as well as literally. In this course, we shall study the different ways that text and image interact in contemporary literature. Looking at a variety of works, from image-inspired but imageless texts like Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red, to graphic novels, where text and image carry equal weight, to textless image sequences like Eric Drooker’s Blood Song, which is nonetheless called a "novel," we shall investigate how images inspire, animate, intensify, challenge, complicate, and counterpoint text, and vice versa. We shall explore, in particular, the argument that, after a brief golden age of textuality marked by the growth of literacy, the spread of journalism, and the rise of the novel, the regime of the image has relentlessly been eclipsing the regime of the text.

Be sure to read the paragraph starting on page 1 of this Announcement of Classes regarding enrollment in English 100!

100/4 J. Shoptaw
Junior Seminar: Emily Dickinson
MW 2-4
109 Wheeler

(Though the official time of this class is 2-4, on most days it may end by 3:30.)

Areas of Concentration: 1D; 3

Book List: Dickinson, E.: The Poems of Emily Dickinson; Dickinson, E.: Selected Letters; Habegger, A.: My Wars are Laid Away in Books; Course Reader

Course Description: This is an intensive reading course in the poetry of Emily Dickinson. We will read her poems deeply but also broadly throughout her career. Topics include early poetry; musical poetics; figuration; definition and riddle; death, religion, and nature as topic and figure; love poetry and poetic seduction; fear and despair; gender and sexuality; self-definition; biography; manuscript poem packets; poems revisiting poems; letters and/as poems; contemporary history (e.g., Abolition, the Civil War); contemporary poetry (e.g., Emerson, E.B. Browning); late poetry; 20th-century influence. There will be 2 papers and a final-not an exam but a party-in which students may read their optional "Dickinson" poems.

Be sure to read the paragraph starting on page 1 of this Announcement of Classes regarding enrollment in English 100!

100/5 This course has been cancelled.

100/6
Junior Seminar: Nature and Wilderness in American Literature
J. Viveros
MW 4-5:30
109 Wheeler

Areas of Concentration: 3, 6

Book List: Thoreau, Henry David, Walden; Reader (available at Replica Copy on Oxford)

Recommended Texts: Hairston, Scott, Foresman Handbook for Writers; MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers; Cambridge International Dictionary of English (also on the web)

Course Description: How has the image of nature and the notion of wilderness informed American fiction and poetry from the colonial period through the late Twentieth Century? Our study begins with an early view of nature as encoding divine intention. We examine this providential sensibility as it has infused expansionist ideology and Transcendentalist sympathy. Early in our nationhood and to the present day, visions of nature as utopian space compete with America’s troubled gaze at the wilderness: its apparent swallowing up of historical crimes, its inscription of contemporary social and cultural violence, its incipient sterility. In the modernist and postmodernist eras, questions of authenticity arise: can the perceiving mind encounter in nature anything but its own projections?; in what ways is human life apart from or indistinguishable from nature? We consider as well the persistence of the pre-colonial sacred, its counter-narratives of history and of the natural world that is history’s field of action.

Be sure to read the paragraph starting on page 1 of this Announcement of Classes regarding enrollment in English 100!

100/7
Junior Seminar: Slave Narratives
A. JanMohamed
TTh 9:30-11
106 Wheeler

Areas of Concentration: 1D; 2; 3

Book List: William Andrews & H. L. Gates, eds., Slave Narratives; William Andrews, ed Six Women’s Slave Narratives; McLaurin, Melton, Celia, A Slave; Griffith, Mattie, Autobiography of A Slave

Course Description: Course will examine various kinds of slave narratives (one authored by a white woman) in order to plot the structures of coercion and resistance depicted in these narratives. Students will be required to present at least one oral report and write a series of short papers.

Be sure to read the paragraph starting on page 1 of this Announcement of Classes regarding enrollment in English 100!

100/8
This section has been cancelled.

100/9
Junior Seminar: Shades of Passing
A. Cheng
TTh 10-11:30
305 Wheeler

Areas of Concentration: 1E; 2; 4

Book List: Cain, J.: Three by Cain; Faulkner, F.: Light in August; Hwang, D. H.: M. Butterfly; Larsen, N.: Passing and Quicksand; Lee, C. R.: A Gesture Life; Louie, D. W.: Pangs of Love; Morrison, T.: The Bluest Eye; Willeford, C.: Pick U; Course Reader of secondary texts

Course Description: Recent critical and theoretical work have drawn attention to the increasing inadequacy of identity politics to address the complexity of racial dynamics and politics. What are some new models of thinking about social subjectivity in the wake of the critique of identity politics? This course approaches this question by way of studying a series of American narratives about passing. We will view passing as a phenomenon that dramatizes the inter- and intra-subjective crises already at work in any act of racial identification. Of special interest are questions such as: To what extent does the act of passing reinforce or unhinge seemingly natural categories of race, gender, and sexuality? To what extent does passing across one axis of difference unsettle another category of identity? How is passing related to other modes of assimilation? Along the way we will become acquainted with the works from the fields of critical race theory, postcolonial studies, and psychoanalysis that have contributed to revising identity as the basis for understanding subjectivity.

Be sure to read the paragraph starting on page 1 of this Announcement of Classes regarding enrollment in English 100!

100/10
Junior Seminar: Irish Writing in English 1900-1945
M. Rubenstein
TTh 11-12:30
109 Wheeler

Areas of Concentration: 1E, 2

Book List: Joyce, J.: Dubliners; Synge, J.M.: The Aran Islands; Yeats, W.B.: Selected Poems and Four Plays; O’Brien, F.: The Third Policeman; O’Flaherty, L.: The Informer; Gregory, A.: Selected Writings; a course reader, including selections from R. Casement, C. Tóibín, S. Deane, T. Eagleton, E. Said, and B. Anderson

Course Description: Irish writing in the period is almost invariably concerned with Irish national independence, which was often justified by way of arguments for Irish difference or Irish originality. We will explore the idea of Irishness through the writing of those, in the period of the struggle for independence and after, who defined it, defied it, debated it, and in some cases died for it. Is there, we might consider, some particularly Irish aesthetic born of the cultural and literary struggle for self-definition? What is it that makes Irish literature Irish? The course will introduce some key concepts of postcolonial theory and theories of nationalism.

Be sure to read the paragraph starting on page 1 of this Announcement of Classes regarding enrollment in English 100!

100/11
Junior Seminar: Jamaica Kincaid and Caryl Phillips
S. Hartman
TTh 11-12:30
106 Wheeler

Areas of Concentration: 1E; 2; 3

Book List: Jamaica Kincaid: At the Bottom of the River, Annie John, Lucy, The Autobiography of My Mother, A Small Place, Mr. Potter; Caryl Phillips: A Final Passag, Higher Ground, The European Tribe, Crossing the River, Cambridge, The Nature of Blood, The Atlantic Sound.

Course Description: This course examines the relation between dispossession and literary form by focusing on the work of Jamaica Kincaid and Caryl Phillips. In exploring the varieties of dispossession, which include enslavement, colonialism, abjection and exile, the class will focus on issues of injury and identity, violence and narrative fragmentation, and trauma and repetition. The questions to be considered are: What forms are utilized to represent unspeakable pasts? Can literature redress historical injuries? How does psychic injury illuminate the social?

Be sure to read the paragraph starting on page 1 of this Announcement of Classes regarding enrollment in English 100!

100/12
Junior Seminar: Graham Greene
M. Breitwieser
TTh 12:30-2
109 Wheeler

Areas of Concentration: 1E; 3

Book List: Greene, Graham, Brighton Rock, Stamboul Train, The Power and the Glory, The Third Man and the Fallen Idol, The Heart of the Matter, The End of the Affair, The Quiet American, A Burnt Out Case, Our Man in Havana, Travels With My Aunt.

Course Description: Over the course of a more-than-forty-year career, Graham Greene repeatedly addressed the question of the British Empire and its aftermath in a series of novels depicting stranded men and women caught up in the brutality of international politics. With distinctive individual lives in the foreground and the tectonic movement of power in the background, Greene’s novels persistently inquire into the manner in which history becomes personal destiny.

We will read these novels in the order of their publication, concentrating on Greene’s growing technical mastery of narrative technique, and considering the relation of formal questions to historical and political issues. Attendance and participation are required, along with two ten-page essays.

Be sure to read the paragraph starting on page 1 of this Announcement of Classes regarding enrollment in English 100!

100/13
This section has been cancelled.

100/14
Junior Seminar: Tragedy, Agony, Vision, and Death
J. Altman
TTh 2-3:30
24 Wheeler

Area of Concentration: 3

Book List: Aeschylus, Oresteia, trans. Lattimore; Beckett, Waiting for Godot; Euripides, Medea and Other Plays; Mamet, Glengarry Glen Ross; Marlowe, Doctor Faustus; O’Neill, Long Day’s Journey into Night; Shakespeare, Coriolanus; Sophocles, Sophocles I; Webster, The Duchess of Malfi; Course Reader (available at Copygrafik, 2282 Fulton St.).

Course Description: In this course, we will explore the dramatic genre of tragedy as it has manifested itself at three different times in history: Athens in the 5th century, B.C.; late 16th- and early 17th-century England, and 20th-century France and America. All the plays we’ll read represent human beings in extreme situations; several end in death, mutilation, or both; others, in a kind of psychic death or inertia. Some represent behavior that we recognize as "heroic" and leave us feeling reassured; some do not. All show the individual imaginatively engaged to social and metaphysical powers, and--more immediately--to the audience of spectators. Our project will be to try to understand how tragic drama functions in its various environments; what conditions encourage the writing of tragedy; which elements may be said to constitute "the tragic"; what lies behind tragic drama’s obsession with transgressive acts; what happens when there seems nothing left to violate; and whether and what manner of redemption is to be sought in tragedy, even in the twentieth century, when the possibility of tragedy was in doubt. Besides studying the plays, we’ll read and discuss theoretical and critical writings in a Course Reader that will help us pursue these questions. All seminar members are expected to participate actively and to write three essays and a final exam.

Be sure to read the paragraph starting on page 1 of this Announcement of Classes regarding enrollment in English 100!

100/15
Junior Seminar: Media Theory
C. Langan
TTh 2-3:30
203 Wheeler

Areas of Concentration: 1D or 1E; 5

Book List: Beckett, S., Krapp's Last Tape; Danielewski, M., House of Leaves; Goethe, W., The Sorrows of Young Werthe; Mann, E., Four Plays; Johnson, R., Radi Os; Phillips, Tom, A Humument; Stoker, B. Dracula; Williams, W.C., Paterson. Secondary reading: Bolter and Grusin, Remediations; Kittler, F., Gramophone Film Typewriter; McLuhan, M., Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man.

Course Description: This course will treat literature-its various genres, including novel, drama, poetry-from the point of view of media theory. Our particular interest will be in the status of the "document"-an historically real or ostensibly real document that is somehow presented, represented, or mediated by the art form in question. Using Marshall McLuhan’s dictum that "the content of one medium is always another medium" as a guiding concept, we will address two central issues. First: by comparing "documents" as they are mediated in both 19th- and 20th-century literary forms, we will try to assess the impact of other media, especially photography, film, and recorded sound, on literature’s "documentary" evidence. One question that may emerge, as we consider the history of mediation from Dracula to Danielewski’s House of Leaves and the CD Haunted (by Danielewski’s sister, Poe) is why mediation is so often registered an occult or gothic phenomenon. Second: by focusing on the different issues of mediation that emerge when the "document" in question is already literary (Johnson’s RADI OS corrosively rewrites paRADIse lOSt), we will attempt to theorize the kind of testimony, the kind of historical document, that literature is.

Be sure to read the paragraph starting on page 1 of this Announcement of Classes regarding enrollment in English 100!

100/16
Junior Seminar: New Versions of Old Epics
K. Hanson
TTh 3:30-5
109 Wheeler

Areas of Concentration: 1E, 3, 7

Book List: Heaney, S.: Beowulf; Pinsky, R: The Inferno of Dante; Walcott, D: Omeros

Course Description: The three book-length narrative poems we will study in this course represent the three major poetic traditions which have most influenced the modern English one: Old English, Romance, and Classical Greek and Latin. But they are works of contemporary poets who themselves represent not only certain shared poetic interests in the resultant modern English tradition, but also three distinct traditions of English in the world today: Irish, American and Caribbean. Collectively these poems thus afford an opportunity for not only accessible and enjoyable acquaintance with these various inheritances, but also exploration of a variety of linguistic and cultural issues of translation and adaptation, in particular the interplay of "tradition and the individual talent."

Be sure to read the paragraph starting on page 1 of this Announcement of Classes regarding enrollment in English 100!

100/17
Junior Seminar: Western American Literature
G. Starr
TTh 3:30-5
283 Dwinelle

Areas of Concentration: 1D or 1E; 6

Book List: Austin, M. The Land of Little Rain; Clemens, S L. Roughing It; Harte, B. The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Sketches; London, J. Martin Eden; Norris, F. McTeague; Stegner, W. The Angle of Repose. A course reader will contain selections from: Browne, J. R. A Peep at Washoe and Washoe Revisited; Muir, J. The Yosemite; Ridge, J. R. The Life and Adventures of Joaquin Murieta; Stevenson, R. L. The Silverado Squatters + Jeffers, R., Gunn, Th., Hass, R.

Course Description: Reading, discussion, and writing about fiction, poetry, memoirs and essays that have western settings, or that try to describe or account for western experience in "regional" terms-emphasizing, for example, the formative influence of the natural landscape, or of racial, economic, and social groups in distinctive, defining relationships with their surroundings (and with one another).

Be sure to read the paragraph starting on page 1 of this Announcement of Classes regarding enrollment in English 100!

100/19
This section has been cancelled.

C107
The English Bible as Literature
S. Goldsmith
TTh 3:30-5
100 Lewis

This course is cross-listed with Religious Studies C119.

Area of Concentration: 6

Book List: New Oxford Annotated Bible, College Edition; Oxford Dictionary of the Bible; Alter, R.; Genesis

Course Description: In this class, we will read a selection of biblical texts as literature; that is, we will read them as anything but divine revelation. We will take up traditional literary questions of form, style, and structure, but we will also learn how to ask historical, political, and theoretical questions of a text so thoroughly fissured and sedimented. Among other topics, we will pay special attention to how authority is established and contested in biblical texts; how biblical authors negotiate the ancient Hebrew prohibition against representing God in images; and how the gospels are socially and historically poised between the original Jesus movement that is their source and the institutionalization of the church that follows. Assignments will include at least a take-home midterm and a final, perhaps more.

110
Medieval Literature
A. Middleton
TTh 9:30-11
30 Wheeler

Area of Concentration: 1A

Book List:

REQUIRED (in order of use. Used copies widely available; all are in paperback.)
Except where noted below the publisher is PENGUIN.
Augustine. Confessions
Early Christian Lives
The Letters of Abelard and Heloise
The Book of Margery Kempe

INDIVIDUAL CHOICE: ONE of the the following (do not buy until 3rd week):
Self and Society in Medieval France: the Memoirs of Guibert of Nogent,
The Life of Christina of Markyate: A Twelfth-Century Recluse,
Suger, Abbot. The Deeds of Louis the Fat.
The Shewings of Julian of Norwich,

(NB: In addition to these, there will be a group of items on library reserve that can serve this function; at the time of this book-order I had not found any affordable copies of these for individual purchase. More on this in class the first week.)

Course Description: Life-writing, including autobiography, became one of the most innovative and influential literary and cultural forms of the European Middle Ages. Medieval life-stories diverged markedly from antique biography and rationales for narration, and in turn became models for construing both personal experience and prior literature; as "best-sellers" for many centuries they provided a durable repertoire of forms for individual conduct, introspection and cultural self-understanding. Our texts (to be read in English translation, where the original language of the work was not English) span more than a millennium, and record the lives of men and women who became saints and rulers, warriors and administrators, martyrs and mystics, rebels and eccentrics. We will examine the literary forms of medieval life-writing, their effects on other modes of medieval verbal and visual art, and on the institutions of their era and beyond.

Reading will be in a few paperback books REQUIRED for purchase (listed above), supplemented by a small course reader, available from Copy Central, for shorter works not readily available in print at modest cost. (There will also be a Moffitt reserve list, of secondary and primary readings.). One additional text, individually chosen from a short list will be the basis for the second short paper (see Individual Choice, below). Grades will be based on two short papers, a midterm, and a final exam.

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

114B
English Drama from 1603 to 1700
J. Altman
TTh 11-12:30
242 Hearst Gym

Areas of Concentration: 1B; 3

Book List: English Renaissance Drama, ed. David Bevington; Course Reader.

Course Description: In the first three decades of the seventeenth century, an extraordinary burst of energy and talent was visible and audible on the London stage. Socially aspiring dramatists satirized the pretensions of the upwardly mobile, revealed the tragic, sometimes grotesque implications of assigned gender behavior, explored the often quirky nature of sexual taste, dared to dabble in forbidden political commentary, and challenged and manipulated theatrical conventions by remarking self-reflexively on theatrical representation so obsessively that critics earlier in this century (including T.S. Eliot) thought their work decadent. This was very much a theater-on-demand, a competitive cultural institution to which people on many levels of society flocked to see their interests represented by brilliant, often idiosyncratic writers--among them John Marston, Ben Jonson, George Chapman, Thomas Middleton, John Webster, Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher, John Ford, and Philip Massinger--who were Shakespeare’s contemporaries and his professional competitors. Their work will shape our study of the role of theater amid the increasing social tensions that arose under the Jacobean and Caroline regimes. Requirements: two papers, a midterm, and final exam.

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

115A
The English Renaissance: Literature of the 16th century
S. Booth
TTh 2-3:30
155 Kroeber

Area of Concentration: 1B

Book List: Shakespeare’s Narrative poems; Marlowe’s Hero and Leander; Spenser’s Faerie Queene; An Anthology of Elizabethan Prose Fiction, ed., P. and M.R. Salzman

Course Description: This will be a survey course, but a highly selective one. Although I plan to look at the best and/or most interesting work of several lesser sixteenth-century writers for instance, some lyrics by Wyatt and some by Sidney, Surrey's blank verse, and some early fiction I mean to give over the bulk of class time to the verse of Spenser, Marlowe, and Shakespeare, particularly their narrative verse.

I think I can teach you more about the sixteenth-century works I don't discuss in class by looking in detail at a few works than I could by scurrying through a handful of anthologies or by generalizing at length about either the particular qualities of particular authors or schools or by focusing on the particular qualities that characterize the culture that sixteenth-century literature reflects. I'm not good at categorizing, and I deeply mistrust categorization as an intellectual tool.

Three papers, each of a length determined by how much you have to say and how efficient you are in saying it. The third paper will take the place of a final examination and will be due in my box in 322 Wheeler Hall any time between the last class meeting and 3:30 p.m. on the day assigned this course for a final exam.

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

117A
Shakespeare
L. Hutson
TTh 12:30-2
120 Latimer

Areas of Concentration: 1B, 3, 4

Book List: Shakespeare, W: The Riverside Shakespeare

Course Description: This course will look at Shakespeare’s early dramatic career and development as a playwright, concentrating on selected early comedies, history plays and tragedies. We’ll concentrate on developments in Shakespeare’s language, plotting and depiction of dramatic character, and there will be some attempt to locate the plays in the context of contemporary political and domestic ideologies.

117J
Shakespeare
S. Booth
TTh 5-6:30
109 Wheeler

Areas of Concentration: 1B; 3

Book List: ONE or, better two OF THE FOLLOWING ONE VOLUME SHAKESPEARES : William Shakespeare, The Complete Works; The Complete Pelican Shakespeare; The Riverside Shakespeare; The Complete Works of Shakespeare; The Complete Signet Classic Shakespeare; The Norton Shakespeare; AND Russ McDonald, The Bedford Companion to Shakespeare. I want you to read the McDonald book in such a way as to get a general sense of what kinds of things one needs to bear in mind when reading or seeing Shakespeare needs to look up or look out for but need not commit to memory.

Course Description: I expect the course to do all the basic work of a Shakespeare survey and also to have seminar like intellectual crossfire. I will take up all the topics that concern Shakespeare scholars, but I will not take them up systematically. I find that presenting a topic like "Establishing Shakespeare's Texts" causes people to try to memorize a lot of distinguished guesswork and understand nothing. Instead of organizing the communal and active ignorance of the last 300 years of scholarship, I will wait for particulars of classroom discussion to invite comment and background on printing house practices, Shakespeare's stage, the composition of his audience, and stuff like that. If we work from stray particulars, you are less likely than you might otherwise be to come away with "knowledge" of matters about which we have and have only evidence enough for pure but immensely detailed guesses.

I don't yet know how I will want to use in class time, but I will certainly concentrate on Shakespeare's language and on the plays as plays experiences for audiences and on what it is about them that has caused the western world and much of the eastern to value them so highly.

The last time I gave a small Shakespeare course I asked people to read Richard II, 1 Henry IV, 2 Henry IV, Henry V, Antony and Cleopatra, Julius Caesar, Love's Labor's Lost, All’s Well That Ends Well, Macbeth, The Merchant of Venice, Othello, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Romeo and Juliet, King Lear, The Tempest, Hamlet, Twelfth Night, and The Winter's Tale; The order given here will not be the-or much like the--order in which I will ask that you read the plays.

I will give spot passage quizzes daily or almost daily. Their purpose will be to make certain that you keep up with the reading and that you understand the surface sense and the syntactic physics of all the sentences you read.

Three papers, each of a length determined by how much you have to say and how efficient you are in saying it. The third paper will be in lieu of a final examination.

Enrollment is limited and a written application is due BY 4:00 P.M., TUESDAY, APRIL 22; be sure to read the paragraph on page 2 of this Announcement of Classes regarding enrollment in English (150 and) 117J!

117S
Shakespeare: Selected Plays
J. Knapp
TTh 11-12:30
A1 Hearst Annex

Areas of Concentration: 1B; 3

Book List: The Riverside Shakespeare (2nd ed.)

Course Description: This course is designed to give you a sense of the range of Shakespeare’s career. Lectures will focus on two related topics: first, the ways Shakespeare uses plot and character to think about literary, social, sexual, religious, political, and philosophical issues; second, Shakespeare’s defense of his life in the theater, when much of English society regarded the theater as a frivolous, debased, and vaguely criminal institution.

119
The Augustan Age
J. Turner
TTh 11-12:30
170 Barrows

Area of Concentration: 1C

Book List: The Norton Anthology of English Literature, 7th edition, Volume I; Wycherley, J.: The Country Wife; Defoe, D.: Robinson Crusoe; Course reader

Course Description: The period from the "Restoration" of Charles II (1660) to the death of Alexander Pope (1744) produced the last poems of Milton, the first English pornography and feminist polemic, the most devastating satires ever written, some of the most influential novels, the most amusing comedies, and the most outrageous obscenity. London (already the largest city in the world) burned to the ground -we will begin the course by reading contemporary accounts of this catastrophe -but within a few generations had developed all the benefits of modern civilization: a stock market, a scientific revolution, an insurance industry, a colonial empire based on slavery. This course will try to convey not only the abundance and brilliance of this period, but its contrasts and contradictions. Canonical figures like Milton, Hobbes, Dryden, Congreve, Pope and Swift will be juxtaposed to scandalous and/or marginal authors: women writers like Aphra Behn, Mary Astell and Mary Wortley Montagu, Puritan outlaws like John Bunyan, and renegade aristocrats like the Earl of Rochester. This stylish but realistic literature tackles fundamental questions: How can a culture restore its self-confidence after a devastating civil war? Is the success of society incompatible with morality? Does reason help us to lead a better life, or is it a cruel delusion? How can men and women live together in a civilized world? What resources are available for those who are excluded from this "civilization," especially the enslaved and the colonized? Is this "the best of all possible worlds"? If not, are irony and humor absolutely necessary to make existence bearable? Are babies tastier roasted or boiled?

Most of our readings come from the Norton Anthology, with additional poems by Rochester and others, plus Wycherley's sex-farce The Country Wife and Defoe's world-famous Robinson Crusoe.

The class will be a mixture of informal lectures and class discussions, normally on questions already assigned during the previous class; you should come prepared to participate as fully as possible, and I may sometimes give out small written assignments to help you prepare. You will be graded on class participation, the occasional quiz, a short essay (7-10 pages) due about mid term, and a final examination that will include passages to identify and another written essay.

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

125B
The English Novel: Dickens through Conrad
Note New Instructor: A. Jaffe
TTh 9:30-11
102 Wurster

Areas of Concentration: 1D, 3, 4

Book List: Dickens, C.: Oliver Twist and A Christmas Carol; Bronte, C.: Jane Eyre; Eliot, G.: Silas Marner; Collins, W.: The Woman in White; Hardy, T.: Tess of the d'Urbervilles; Conan Doyle, Sherlock Holmes: Complete Novels and Stories, vol. 1; Wilde, O.: The Picture of Dorian Gray.

The Victorian novel produced not just a series of memorable characters, but also, arguably, what modern culture has long understood as character itself, situating it within discourses about gender and sexuality; public and private life; family and law; race and nation. We will look at some of the well-known characters constructed by Victorian fiction, including the beggar, the miser, the detective, and the fallen woman, and will discuss the Victorian novel's articulations of textual character and readerly subjectivity.

125C
This class has been cancelled.

125E
The Contemporary Novel
J. Bishop

Lectures MW 3-4 in 390 Hearst Mining, plus one hour of discussion section per week (secs. 101-103: F 1-2; secs. 104-106: F 3-4)

Areas of Concentration: 1E; 3

Book List: Coetzee, J.M.: Disgrace; Crace, J.: Being Dead; DeLillo, D.: Mao II; Dick, P. K.: The Transmigration of Timothy Archer; Franzen, J.: The Corrections; Galloway, J.: The Trick Is To Keep Breathing: A Novel; Hynes, J.: The Lecturer's Tale; Markson, D.: Wittgenstein's Mistress; Nabokov, V.: Lolita; O'Brien, T.: The Things They Carried; Pynchon, T.: The Crying of Lot 49; Silko, L. M.: Ceremony

Course Description: An exploration of the novels listed above, all of them written in the second half of the twentieth century. The course will move through these texts inductively, without any particular preconceptions or thematic axes to grind, in an effort both to understand these writers on their own terms and to discover among them commonly shared concerns and practices. There will be two shorter papers, a midterm, a final paper, and a final exam.

130B
American Literature: 1800-1865
S. Otter
TTh 2-3:30
110 Barrows

Areas of Concentration: 1D, 3, 4

Book List: Lauter, P., ed.: The Heath Anthology Of American Literature (Vol. 1); Fern, F.: Ruth Hall; Jacobs, H.: Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl; Melville, H. Moby-Dick; Thoreau, H. Walden; course reader

Course Description: Reading Longfellow, Poe, Emerson, Thoreau, Douglass, Jacobs, Fern, Melville, Whitman, and Dickinson, we will pay particular attention to literary form and technique, to social and political context, and to the ideological formations and transformations of the antebellum period. We will be concerned with issues of "self" (the search for transcendence and the entanglement in relations); landscape; the Puritan legacy; the nature and role of the emotions; the efforts to reform the American character; the democratic experiment; and the struggles over the rights and roles of women, African Americans, and Native Americans in the expanding nation. Two midterms and one final examination will be required.

132
The American Novel
C. Porter
TTh 12:30-2
22 Warren

Area of Concentration: 3

Book List: Clemons, Samuel : The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn; Ellison, R : Invisible Man; Faulkner, W : Absalom,Absalom!; Fitzgerald, F : The Great Gatsby; Garcia Marquez, Gabriel, 100 Years of Solitude; James, H : The Portrait of a Lady; Melville, H : Moby-Dick; Wharton, E : The Age of Innocence

Course Description: A course on the "great american novel," assuming there is one.

133A
African American Literature and Culture Before 1917
S. Best
MW 10-12
30 Wheeler

(Though the official time of this class is 10-12, on most days it may end by 11:30.)

Areas of Concentration: 1D; 2

Book List: Equiano, O.: The Interesting Narrative of Olaudah Equiano; Douglass, F.: Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass; Brent, L.: Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl; Wilson, H.: Our Nig;; Prince. M.: The History of Mary Prince, A West Indian Slave; DuBois, W. E. B.: The Souls of Black Fol; Chesnutt, C.: The Conjure Woman; Washington, B. T.: Up from Slavery; Johnson, J.W.: The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man

Course Description: African American expressive culture has been driven by an affinity for the oral in the form of sermons, speeches, work songs, slave songs, spirituals, and the blues. At the same time, African American literary culture has displayed a manifest propensity toward autobiographical acts which augur a putatively authentic African American "self." In this survey we will attempt to bridge these oral and literary impulses in an exploration of selected works from the canon of African American literature. Running through this survey will be not only the concerns linking orality and literacy, but also debates over the power of language in politics and history: Why, instead of a teleological progression from orality to literacy, does one find in much African American literature a promiscuous coupling of the two? What is the relation of this literature’s recurrent, slippery orality to a codified, authenticating literary apparatus? How does speaking relate to subjectivity? What is the significance of various scenes of speaking, reading, and writing in the slave narrative tradition? What light does the study of African American literature shed upon categories such as "author," "literature," and "canon?" We will pursue our more discrete literary interests against the backdrop of American revolutionary debate, the abolitionist crusade, Reconstruction, and "Jim Crow" segregation.

Requirements: There will be one midterm, one paper, several unannounced quizzes, and a final exam.

133T
Topics in African American Literature and Culture: Black Anglophone Literature
S. Hartman
TTh 2-3:30
106 Wheeler

Areas of Concentration: 2; 6

Book List: Ottobah Cugoano, Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil of Slavery; Olaudah Equiano, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano; David Walker's Appeal & Henry Highland Garnet's Address; Martin Delaney, Blake; Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom; Moira Ferguson, ed. The History of Mary Prince; Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of A Slave Girl; Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Iola Leroy; Ida B. Wells, A Red Record; W.E.B. DuBois, The Souls of Black Folks; Nella Larsen, Passing; Jean Toomer, Cane

Course Description: This introductory course examines eighteenth, nineteenth and early twentieth- century literature from Africa, England and the Americas. The course is both a historical survey of black Anglophone literature and an extended engagement with questions of black letters and slavery, race and representation and the politics of literary form. The themes to be considered are literacy and black humanity, dissent and strategies of subversion in black letters, autobiography and the fashioning of a public self, the quicksand of racial and sexual representation in the writing of the Harlem Renaissance, modernism and vernacular expression, and the question of a black aesthetic. The course materials include slave narratives, political pamphlets, essays, novels, and autobiographies.

134
This course has been cancelled.

135AC
Literature of American Cultures: Historical Injury
S. Best

Lectures MW 2-3 in 2060 Valley LSB, plus one hour of discussion section per week (secs. 101 & 102: F 12-1; secs. 103-106: F 2-3; secs. 107 & 108: F 4-5)

Please note: Weekly film screenings have been added, Wednesdays 4-7 p.m., in 2060 Valley LSB. The course control number for the film screenings is 28837. When you enroll in this course on Telebears, you must enroll in the lecture, the lab (film screenings), and a discussion section.

Areas of Concentration: 2; 6

Book List: See below.

Course Description: A course on the ethical and conceptual problem of "historical injury" -- an exploration of some of the lineaments connecting the idea of an imperfect past (what Primo Levi called "the indecency of the irrevocable act") to late twentieth-century conceptions of ethnic identity. Our analysis will be largely comparativist in perspective, and focused specifically on American chattel slavery, the Holocaust, and Japanese internment as central concerns in recent calls for redress and reparation. We will also (in this same spirit of comparison) use the revenge plot as a lens through which to explore related and reworked forms of historical reversal (from the prophetic satire of Hugo Bettauer’s The City without Jews [1922] to the backward narration of Christopher Nolan’s Memento [2000]). A principal objective of this course will be to develop critical strategies for thinking about the relationship of narrative to history. To this end, we will focus on works of film and literature that espouse historiographical theories -- theories of the past -- in answer to the following questions: is it possible to undo an event in the past, particularly when the event is several generations removed?; can one achieve commensurability between an injury and its remedy?; what sorts of injuries are irreparable, and what events irreversible?; how do literature and film represent the irreparable, or that dimension of grief that resists consolation?; what is the relationship between memory and history, forgiveness and forgetting, justice and revenge, individualized harms and historical injuries?; who suffers from an historical injury -- just the individual historical victim, or his or her descendants as well? The overall purpose of this course is to place current fractures in the moral imagination of redress within the relevant genealogies of justice and vengeance in the Anglo-American literary and philosophical tradition.

Literary works will include: Beloved (Morrison), The City without Jews (Bettauer), The Drowned and the Saved (Levi), Farewell to Manzanar (Wakatsuki Houston), Kindred (Butler), Hamlet (Shakespeare), Higher Ground (Phillips), No-No Boy (Okada), Oedipus (Sophocles), The Periodic Table (Levi), Time’s Arrow (Amis).

Films may include: The Birth of a Nation (Griffith), The Godfather (I and II, Coppola), The Pawnbroker (Lumet), Schindler’s List (Spielberg), Snow Falling on Cedars (Hicks), Unforgiven (Eastwood).

This course satisfies U.C. Berkeley’s American Cultures requirement.

C136
Topics in American Studies: The U.S. in the Progressive Era
R. Hutson
TTh 9:30-11
155 Kroeber

This course is cross-listed with American Studies C111E.

Areas of Concentration: 1D; 3; 6

Book List: Adams and Adams, Chapters of Erie; Alger, Ragged Dick; Cashman, America in the Gilded Age; Howells, The Rise of Silas Lapham; Licht, Industrializing America; Phelps, The Silent Partner; Riis, How the Other Half Lives; Mark Twain, The Gilded Age; Veblen,The Theory of the Leisure Class

Course Description: Mark Twain and his co-author named the period after the Civil War the "Gilded Age," indicating the rise of corporate capitalism, the extreme division between the wealthy and the poor, and especially the constant taint of criminal conspiracies between businessmen and politicians. We will look at a number of different features of the period from the end of the Civil War (1865) to, roughly, 1900 to see what the response to massive economic, social and political transformations was for writers of the period. There will be two mid-terms and a final exam.

138
Studies in World Literature in English: Postcolonial Narratives
A. JanMohamed
TTh 3:30-5
56 Barrows

Areas of Concentration: 1E; 2; 3

Book List: Conrad, Joseph: Heart of Darkness; Gordimer, Nadine: Burger’s Daughter; Achebe, Chinua: Things Fall Apart; Dangaremba, Tsitsi: Nervous Conditions; Ghosh, Amitav: Shadow Lines;

Films: Xala, Battle of Algiers, Burn, Mississippi Masala, Sammy and Rosie Get Laid, The Harder They Come.

Course Description: An introduction to the theory and literature of the (post)colonial condition. The course will examine a series of important essays in the theoretical/critical debate about the nature of (post)colonialism and analyze European, African, and Indian novels and films.

139
This course has been cancelled.

143A/1
Short Fiction
B. Blaise (Mukherjee)
TTh 11-12:30
301 Wheeler

Areas of Concentration: None

Book List: Bailey, T.: On Writing Short Stories; Mukherjee, B.: The Middleman and Other Stories

Course Description: Students in this limited-enrollment workshop will concentrate on the form, theory and practice of fiction. Workshop participants are required to write approximately 45 pages of original fiction, to attend all workshop sessions, to participate in discussions and to submit written comments on peers' manuscripts.

To be considered for admission to this class, please submit 15 photocopied pages of your fiction (no poems, plays, or academic writing), along with an application form, to Professor Mukherjee’s mailbox in 322 Wheeler BY 4:00 P.M., TUESDAY, APRIL 22, AT THE LATEST.

Be sure to read the paragraph concerning creative writing courses on page 2 of this Announcement of Classes for further information regarding enrollment in such courses!

143A/2
This course has been cancelled.

143B/1
Verse
J. Shoptaw
MW 10:30-12
301 Wheeler

Areas of Concentration: None

Book List: Jahan Ramazani, ed.: The Norton Anthology of Modern & Contemporary Poetry, 2 vols.; Course Reader

Course Description: In this course you will conduct a progressive series of experiments in which you will explore the fundamental options for writing poetry today-aperture, partition, closure; rhythmic sound patterning; sentence & line; stanza; short & long-lined poems; image & figure; graphics & textual space; cultural translation; poetic forms (haibun, villanelle, sestina, pantoum, ghazal, etc.); the first, second, third, and no person (persona, address, drama, narrative, description); prose poetry. Our emphasis will be placed on recent possibilities, but with an eye & ear always to renovating traditions. I have no "house style" and only one precept: you can do anything, if you can do it. You will write a poem a week, and we’ll discuss six or so in rotation (I’ll respond to every poem you write). On alternate days, we’ll discuss pre-modern and modern exemplary poems drawn from the Norton Anthology and from our course reader. It will be delightful.

To be considered for admission to this class, please submit five photocopied pages of your poems, along with an application form, to Professor Shoptaw’s mailbox in 322 Wheeler, BY 4:00 P.M., TUESDAY, APRIL 22, 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
L. Hejinian
MW 5-6:30
301 Wheeler

Areas of Concentration: None

Book List: Same as list for Charles Altieri’s English 45C/2 class

Course Description: This seminar/workshop in the writing of poetry is intended primarily for students who are also enrolled in Professor Charles Altieri's English 45C (section 2) class. Students in this section of 143B will undertake writing projects in relation to techniques and/or ideas raised by the works of art (literary and otherwise) discussed by Prof. Altieri. The purpose will be to take up the challenge of modernism ("make it new") and to make literature of our own. This workshop is open to beginners as well as to students with some experience as poets; a maximum of 16 students will be admitted. The instructor asks only that the students remember that writing poetry is a rigorously demanding undertaking. Please note that if you have been selected for admittance to this 143B section but have not enrolled yourself into Prof. Altieri’s 45C/2 course by the time fall classes begin, your place in this 143B may be given to someone else.

To be considered for admission to this class, please submit five photocopied pages of your poems, along with an application form, to Professor Hejinian’s mailbox in 322 Wheeler BY 4:00 P.M., TUESDAY, APRIL 22, 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
G. O’Brien
TTh 2-3:30
301 Wheeler

Areas of Concentration: None

Book List: Attridge, Derek, Poetic Rhythm: An Introduction (required); Joris, Pierre and Rothenberg, Jerome, eds., Poems for the Millennium: The University of California Book of Modern & Postmodern Poetry (From Postwar to Millennium, Vol. 2.) (required)

Note: Texts will be available only through Cody’s Books (www.codysbooks.org), 2454 Telegraph Avenue, 510-845-7852.

Course Description: The purpose of this class will be to produce a mobile, surprising, unfinished language in which to treat poetry. Writing poems will be a part of this task, but only a part. There will also be a modest amount of critical writing, short written commentaries on other students’ work, a review of a poetry reading, and a semi-self-directed study of prosody; these efforts will all be gathered in a final portfolio of work to be handed in at semester’s end. Class participation will include memorization and recitation of other writers’ poems and discussion of material brought in by the instructor.

To be considered for admission to this class, please submit 5-8 of your poems (photocopies), along with an application form, to Professor O’Brien’s mailbox in 322 Wheeler BY 4:00 P. M., TUESDAY, APRIL 22, 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
R. Hass
TTh 9:30-11
301 Wheeler

Areas of Concentration: None

Book List: A course reader

Course Description: This is a workshop for the translation of poetry. Translators are expected to share their work and to participate in the criticism of the work of others. Discussion will range from the larger problems of the possibility of translation to the particular problems of a specific text in a specific language. Our task is to produce translations, but en route we will consider whether the "poetry" translates along with the "meaning"; the matter of music versus sense; the presence of the translator’s voice; intention; matters of form; the interplay of poet, translator, reader; and the like. Translators must work on poetry but may do so in any language.

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’ mailbox in 322 Wheeler, BY 4:00 P.M., TUESDAY, APRIL 22, 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!

C143V
Visual Autobiography
H. Sweet Wong
TTh 2-5
Room TBA

Areas of Concentration: 1E, 2, 3

Book List: McQuade, D. and McQuade, C.: Seeing and Writing; Momaday, N. S.: The Way to Rainy Mountain; Spiegelman, A.: Maus: A Survivor’s Tale. Part I: My Father Bleeds History. and Part II: . . . And Here My Troubles Began; Reader (available from Copy Central).

Course Description: Visual autobiography encompasses a wide range of self-representations and self-narrations: conventional books in which images are integral to the whole, rather than mere supplementation or illustration; pictographic (picture-writing) ledgerbooks; photo-biographies; artists' books (individually handmade textual art objects); narrative quilts; comic books; electronic personal narratives; and other visual forms. This course emphasizes practice. Student work will be presented and discussed regularly in in-class critiques; these will be supplemented with written assignments and exercises. Students will read a variety of primary and secondary materials; participate in class discussions, exercises, and critiques; keep a visual/verbal journal; produce three visual/verbal projects and a major final project. At the end of the semester, there will be a public showing/reading/performing of student work.

This course satisfies U.C. Berkeley’s American Cultures requirement.

To be considered for admission to this class, please submit the special application form for English C143V/Visual Studies C185A/American Studies C174/U.G.I.S. C135 (which is a DIFFERENT application form from the one for OTHER creative writing courses, and which is available from the racks outside the English Department office [322 Wheeler Hall]), to Professor Wong’s mailbox in 322 Wheeler, BY 4:00 P.M., TUESDAY, APRIL 22, AT THE LATEST. (No writing sample is required for this particular course—just the application form.)

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!

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