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Part I: Courses 100-143
ENGLISH MAJORS: The areas of concentration for each upper-division course are typed right above the book list for the class. In addition, see the page right after the description of English H195B/3 (the last undergraduate course) for a list of all the courses that fall under each area of concentration.
Junior Seminar: Captivity in
100/1 MW 10-12
Note to students: Though the official
time of this class is 10-12, on most days it may end by
Areas of Concentration: 1C or 1D; 2; 3; 4
Book List: Cabeza de Vaca, A.N.: Castaways; Smith, J.: A True Relation, Generale Historie; Rowlandson, M.: The Sovereignty and Goodness of God; Equiano, O.: Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano; The Confessions of Nat Turner; Zitkala-Sa: School Days of an Indian Girl; Apess, W.: A Son of the Forest; Silko, L.: Yellow Woman; Brown, C. B.: Edgar Huntly; Gilman, C. P.: The Yellow Wallpaper; Wideman, J. E.: Brothers and Keepers; and a variety of critical and historical articles
Course Description: This course considers the captivity narrative
as a recurring form in American literature and asks why it should be so prevalent
in a “land of freedom.” We
will expand this category beyond its traditional focus on Puritan captivity
(in which Indians are the captors) to encompass a myriad of responses to captivity
in a variety of forms in colonial, eighteenth-, and nineteenth-century American
texts. The condition of captivity will
be treated as a particularized scene of writing, one often productive of a crisis
of language. We will examine issues of
cultural contact and containment, freedom and imprisonment, and national inclusion
and exclusion in the narratives and stories of not only Puritans, but also captured
Africans, Native Americans, and women in early
Be sure to read the paragraph starting on page 1 of this Announcement of Classes regarding enrollment in English 100!
Junior Seminar: Introduction to Post-Colonial Literature and Theory
100/2 MW 10-12
Areas of Concentration: 1E; 2; 3; 6
Book List: Ashcroft, B., et al.,
eds.: The Post-Colonial Studies Reader; Forster, E. M.: A Passage
to India; Kipling, R.: Kim; Conrad, J.: Heart of Darkness;
Gordimer, N.: Burger’s Daughter; Achebe, C.: Things Fall Apart; Rushdie, S.:
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 eight novels by European, African, and Indian authors. Students will be required to present several oral reports 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!
Newly added section:
Junior Seminar: Modernism and the Aesthetics of (De)Composition
100/3 TTh 11-12:30
Course Control # 28684
Areas of Concentration: 1E; 5; 6
Book List: Joyce, J.: Dubliners; Woolf, V.: The Waves; Everdell, W.R.: The First Moderns; Zenith, R., ed.: Fernando Pessoa & Co.; Brainard, J.: I Remember; Sebald, W.G.: The Rings of Saturn; Carson, A.: Autobiography of Red; Markson, D.: This Is Not a Novel
Course Description: Reading modern and contemporary fiction, poetry, philosophy, and a memoir, we shall investigate aesthetic responses to the radical fragmentation of modern life. Surrounded by pervasive cultural and social decomposition, how do modern writers proceed with the work of composition? In particular, we shall study how formal compositional questions concerning novelistic and poetic structures move beyond pure aesthetics to engage with urgent psychological and social problems associated with the decompositions of modernity. These problems include the ravaging effects of colonialism, the collision of different cultures driven by economic and technological globalization, the destruction of traditional social bonds by capitalism, and the catastrophic repercussions of war. Throughout the course, our focus will repeatedly return to the specific ways in which writers strive to make sense out of the flotsam of everyday life. To put it another way, how do modernist literary experiments represent various attempts to synthesize distinctively modern ways of thinking and feeling from the shards of the explosion that we call modernity?
Be sure to read the paragraph starting on page 1 of this Announcement of Classes regarding enrollment in English 100!
Junior Seminar: British Fiction After World War II
100/4 TTh 9:30-11
Areas of Concentration: 1E; 3
Book List: Greene, G.: "The Destructors" (distributed
in xerox), The End of the Affair; Murdoch,
Course Description: We will consider the books assigned as explorations
of the aftermath and remainder of historical greatness, though my interest in
this literature is new and preliminary, so class meetings will be primarily
discussion of whatever arises in the course of your reading, rather than lectures
on topics that I consider of primary importance.
Be sure to read the paragraph starting on page 1 of this Announcement of Classes regarding enrollment in English 100!
Junior Seminar: Comedy, Carnival, and Folly
100/5 TTh 11-12:30
J. Altman 54 Barrows
Areas of Concentration: 1B; 3
Book List: Erasmus, D.: The Praise of Folly; Jonson, B.: Bartholomew Fair; Rabelais, F.: Gargantua and Pantagruel; Shakespeare, W.: Twelfth Night; a course reader
Course Description: “License”: what does it mean? It refers to permission, and the authority that grants it. It also refers to what one enjoys or indulges--one’s liberty--and hence to behavior that might become licentious or libertine, thereby threatening the authority of those who grant license in the first place. Is license then a social fiction--devised to maintain an imagined but necessary distinction between order and disorder, moral and immoral, rational and irrational--that always threatens to collapse and must always be renewed? Renaissance writers and institutions often seemed more willing to entertain this insight than we are, in their festivals celebrating the inversions of power, their licensed fools, their notions of holy folly, their provision of “liberties” where the subversive potential of theater enjoyed relatively free play. This central, ambiguous, proliferating term will govern our study of the rich intersections of classical comedy, humanist learning, folk ritual, and native traditions of folly, madness, and the grotesque in Renaissance culture and their relation to social stability. Planned readings include Erasmus’ The Praise of Folly, Rabelais’ Gargantua and Pantagruel, George Gascoigne’s The Supposes, the anonymous commedia dell’ arte play The Three Cuckolds, Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, Robert Armin’s Foole Upon Foole, Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair, and a selection of critical and theoretical essays in a course reader. Students are expected to participate actively in discussion 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!
Junior Seminar: Introduction to Narrative Theory
100/6 TTh 11-12:30
R. Hutson 221 Wheeler
Areas of Concentration: 3; 5
Book List: Aristotle: Poetics; Bakhtin, M.: The Dialogic Imagination; Barthes, R.: S/Z; Propp,
V.: Morphology of the Folktale;
Sophocles I: Three Tragedies;
Course Description: This is an introduction to some classics in the theory of narrative. We will look also at a number of, mainly, short narratives and analyze them closely, slowly. Theorists as early as Aristotle always used an exemplary narrative for their analyses, and so we shall have to read the narratives of the theorists along with the theories. We shall strive to listen to stories, to see how plots are composed, organized.
There will be a number of exercises, many of them ungraded but required. And I project that there will be required about five papers that will be graded.
Be sure to read the paragraph starting on page 1 of this Announcement of Classes regarding enrollment in English 100!
Junior Seminar: Implicit Tragedy and Potential Comedy—
The Shifting Border Between Shakespearean Comedy and Drama
100/7 TTh 11-12:30
Areas of Concentration: 1B; 3
Book List: Greenblatt, S.J., ed.: The Norton Shakespeare
Course Description: We will explore the relationship between the genres of comedy and tragedy in the practice of Shakespeare’s drama. A source of theoretical fascination since Plato, distinctions between the two genres collapse as often as they are constructed. Frequently Shakespeare’s tragedies contain, in the words of Northrop Frye, a “potential comedy” and the comedies teeter on the edge of “implicit tragedy.” How can we distinguish between the two genres when, in theatrical practice and even at the level of theoretical discussion, the two occur simultaneously? Can a play enact a successful mixture?
We will explore the parallels between Midsummer Night’s Dream and Romeo and Juliet, written apparently at the same time, and both using Ovid’s “Pryamus and Thisbe” story. We’ll consider the re-working of the “Aeneas and Dido” episode in Antony and Cleopatra. We’ll investigate the mixture of the two genres in late romances, The Tempest and The Winter’s Tale. We will also read selections from Aristotle, Plato, Northrop Frye, Frank Kermode, and Lawrence Danson.
Be sure to read the paragraph starting on page 1 of this Announcement of Classes regarding enrollment in English 100!
100/8 TTh 12:30-2
L. Kutchen 228 Dwinelle
Areas of Concentration: 1D; 2; 3
Book List: Melville, H.: Typee:
A Peep at Polynesian Life, Moby Dick; or, The
Whale, The Confidence Man: His Masquerade; McCall, D.M., ed.: Melville’s
Short Novels; a course reader, available from Copy Central,
Course Description: This seminar will be an intensive study of Melville’s
major works. Concerned with closely charting
the development of his aesthetics and his ideas, we will read major works from
the early, middle, and late phases of his forty-two year career, from Typee
(1846) to Billy Budd (c. 1888). Melville’s
writings were profoundly responsive to the challenges of what was perhaps the
most dynamic and traumatic period in
Be sure to read the paragraph starting on page 1 of this Announcement of Classes regarding enrollment in English 100!
Junior Seminar: Representing Consciousness—Modernism to Post-Modernism
100/9 TTh 3:30-5
D. Richards 243 Dwinelle
Areas of Concentration: 1E; 3
Book List: Cunningham, M.: The Hours; DeLillo, D.: Mao II; Faulkner, W.: As I Lay Dying; Gilman, C.P.: The Yellow Wallpaper; Nabokov, V.: Lolita; Woolf, V.: Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse. There will also be a photocopied reader containing short stories and critical and/or theoretical material.
Course Description: In this course we will consider a sampling of the twentieth century novel’s representation of consciousness as it evolves from its modernist inception in the first quarter of the century through its post-modern incarnation in the l950s to the 1990s. We will begin by sampling a few turn-of-the-century short stories containing the earliest examples of the representation of consciousness in modernist fiction and will go on to examine the relationship between the modern lyrical short story and the novel of consciousness. Through oral reports and short lectures, we will fill in the literary-historical backgrounds of the novel of consciousness, with particular focus on European modernism. Among other excursions into cultural contexts, we will devote two classes to viewing art history slides and to examining how the intellectual and aesthetic movements of cubism, expressionism, and Dadaism paralleled the new forms of subjectivity and literary voice in the novel. In the process of our explorations, we will work to come up with our own definitions of the rather vexed terms modernism and post-modernism. We will conclude with The Hours, Michael Cunningham’s revision of Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, a virtuoso performance which collapses the issues of modernism and post-modernism by representing the consciousness of Woolf as historical persona in the process of composing Mrs. Dalloway.
Requirements: regular attendance, freewrites, two mini-essays, and one longer paper.
Note: I highly recommend reading the selections for Woolf and Faulkner before the semester begins. These novels are particularly dense and complex texts which require rereading to be understood.
Be sure to read the paragraph starting on page 1 of this Announcement of Classes regarding enrollment in English 100!
100/10 This section has been cancelled.
Junior Seminar: History and Theory of the Novel
100/11 TTh 5-6:30
B. Freeman 215 Dwinelle
Areas of Concentration: 3; 5
Book List: Chopin, K.: The Awakening; Nabokov, V.: Pale Fire; Freud, S.: Dora: An Analysis of a Case of Hysteria; Bernheimer: In Dora’s Case; also a course reader
Course Description: This seminar focuses on issues that are central to understanding fiction and the genre of the novel. It is comprised of three sections: 1) History and Ideology; 2) The Question of the Author; and 3) The Construction of Genre. We will begin by investigating the historical contexts in which the novel emerged and read diverse accounts of its cultural missions and ideological functions. Next we will examine the recent history of debate regarding that nature and status of the "Author" and notions of authorial identity and intention. Finally, we will explore how changing climates of criticism and interpretation redefine not only what novels mean, but also what counts as a "novel."
Be sure to read the paragraph starting on page 1 of this Announcement of Classes regarding enrollment in English 100!
Junior Seminar: Women’s Films of the ‘40s and ‘50s
100/12
Seminars TTh 5-6:30 in 203 Wheeler, plus film
screenings Thurs.
Areas of Concentration: 1E; 3; 4; 6
Book List: Doane, M.: The Desire to Desire; Thorham, S.: Feminist Film Theory; Gledhill, C.: Home Is Where the Heart Is; Turner, G.: Film as Social Practice
Recommended: Mayne, J.: The Woman at the Keyhole; Stacey, J.: Star Gazing; Lawrence, A.: Echo and Narcissus; Doane, M.A.: Femmes Fatales; Kaplan, E. A.: Women and Film; Newman, K., ed.: Science Fiction/Horror; Polan, D.: Jane Campion; Wood, M.: Belle de Jour
Course Description: We will analyze the “woman’s film” genre in terms of its stylistic, historic, and social manifestations, and consider the feminist and other theoretical discourses which surround it. We will also critique some recent examples of weepies and chick flicks.
Be sure to read the paragraph starting on page 1 of this Announcement of Classes regarding enrollment in English 100!
Topics in the English Language
102 TTh 3:30-5
Area of Concentration: 7
Book List: Chomsky, N.: Language and
Mind; Pinker, S.: The Language Instinct; Radford, A.: Transformational
Grammar: A First Course
Course Description: This course will
focus on the structure of English. There will be a dual emphasis on a rich array
of constructions and on the grammatical theories proposed to account for them.
While the primary focus is on the grammar of spoken English, some attention
will be given to the theory of universal grammar and to the relation between
grammar and literary style.
Chaucer
Areas of Concentration: 1A; 3
Book List: Benson,
ed.: The
Course Description: Students in this course will read Chaucer’s Book of the Duchess, Troilus and Criseyde, and selected Canterbury Tales. It is expected that most students will have taken English 45A or the equivalent either in a prior semester or concurrently. Those without prior experience reading Middle English are very welcome, but must expect to put in extra time at the beginning of the semester to cope with Chaucer’s English—written over 600 years ago. Extra, voluntary sessions will be provided for this purpose. Written work for the semester will consist of quizzes, a midterm exam, several papers, and a final exam. Students will be expected to read Middle English aloud as the semester progresses, and to participate actively in class discussion.
This course satisfies the pre-1800 requirement for the English major.
English Drama to 1603
Areas of Concentration: 1B; 3
Book List: A course reader
Course Description: Intensive study of English drama to 1603
This course satisfies the pre-1800 requirement for the English major.
114B This course has been cancelled.
Shakespeare: Becoming Shakespeare—Twelfth Night to The Tempest
Areas of Concentration: 1B; 3
Book List: Greenblatt, S., ed.: The Norton Shakespeare
Course Description: In this course we will trace Shakespeare’s development as a professional dramatist from the rich comedy of his middle period to the “problem plays” and great Jacobean tragedies, then follow his turn to tragicomedy and romance toward the end of his career. We will devote two or three meetings to each play, so that we have time for discussion in class and for viewing scenes on videotape to compare the way different directors and actors have fashioned dramatic meanings from the texts. We will study some ten plays, including Troilus and Cressida, Othello, Measure for Measure, King Lear, Antony and Cleopatra, and The Winter’s Tale. We’ll also read sonnets that are related thematically and psychologically to the plays and offer glimpses of the writer—or of the speaker envisioned by the writer—as friend, lover, poet, and actor. The lectures will focus on the way Shakespeare experimented in a variety of dramatic forms to explore issues of sexual, familial, social, and racial identity that concerned his audiences, and will ask to what extent we can still sympathize with these concerns: are they very different from ours, or are they simply older framings of recognizable attitudes? We will also emphasize the theatrical dimensions of the texts, from the points of view of actor and audience. There will be two papers, two midterms, and a comprehensive final exam.
Shakespeare
Areas of Concentration: 1B; 3
Book List: McDonald, R.: The Bedford Companion to Shakespeare; your choice of one of the following Shakespeare anthologies: The Complete Works (Penguin edition), The Riverside Shakespeare, The Complete Works (Longmans edition), Signet Classic Shakespeare, or The Norton Shakespeare
Course Description: Some large percentage of everything said and written about literary works is not about those works but about their topics, about the moral, philosophic, or social issues those topics touch upon and, in the case of fictions, about the kinds of situations depicted in them. This course is about Shakespeare’s plays—the plays as plays, actions upon the understandings of their audiences.
I expect the course to do all the basic work of a Shakespeare survey. I plan to 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 particular plays and texts 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 for sure 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.
As I see the course now (September,
2002), I expect to spend more lecture time on three plays—Twelfth Night,
Macbeth, and The Winter’s Tale—than on the others.
I plan to look in less detail at eight others:
1 Henry IV, 2 Henry IV, The
Merchant of
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.
Note to students: Though the official time of this class is 12-2,
on most days it may end by
Areas of Concentration: 1B or 1C
Book
List: Milton, J.: Complete Shorter Poems,
Course Description: The later poet William Blake imagined
One of the most important requirements of the course will be attendance in the lectures. In addition, there will be one longer or two shorter papers and three reading tests during the term; the third reading test, after classes, may stand in lieu of a final exam.
This course satisfies the pre-1800 requirement for the English major.
119 This course has been cancelled.
The Romantic Period
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.” 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, as well as some popular prose fiction (Frankenstein, The Monk) of the same period.
The Victorian Period
Areas of Concentration: 1D; 3
Book List: Kemble, F.: Journals; Newman, J. H.: Apologia pro Vita Sua; Darwin, C.: The Autobiography of Charles Darwin; Mill, J. S.: The Autobiography of John Stuart Mill. (Somerville, Dodd, Besant, Cullwick, and Munby appear in a course reader.)
Course Description: This course examines the Victorian period through autobiographies. We study class, childhood, and coming of age narratives in Fanny Kemble’s Journals, J. S. Mill’s autobiography, and A Narrative of the Experiences and Sufferings of William Dodd, A Factory Cripple. We consider religion and politics in Cardinal John Henry Newman’s Apologia pro Vita Sua and Theosophist Annie Besant’s An Autobiography. We consider science through The Autobiography of Charles Darwin and the Personal Recollections of mathematician and astronomer Mary Somerville. Finally, we explore crossings of class and gender boundaries in The Diaries of Hannah Cullwick, Victorian Maidservant and the diaries of Arthur J. Munby, barrister, civil servant, minor poet, and amateur photographer.
125A This course has been cancelled.
The 20th-Century Novel
Areas of Concentration: 1E; 3
Book List: Proust, M.: Remembrance of Things Past (translated by Moncrieff and Kilmartin), in 3 volumes (Vintage/Random House paperbacks)
Course Description: By reading one of the most significant 20th-century novels in detail, the course will attempt to answer questions about the thematic concerns and formal techniques of modernism. The relationships between changing conceptions of language and desire, of the individual subject, and of the pressures of history, as these are figured in the particular rhetorics and structures of this paradigmatic novel, will provide the central axes of our investigation. Active in-class participation and a willingness to engage in both copious reading and regular dialogues are the only prerequisites for the course.
Please note that we will be reading all of Proust's novel, rather than, as is often the case, only the first and last chapters (volumes).
American Literature: Before 1800
Lectures MW 2-3 in 102 Moffitt, plus one hour of discussion section per week (sec. 101: F 12-1; secs. 102 and 103: F 2-3; sec. 104: F 4-5)
Areas of Concentration: 1C; 2; 3
Book List: Lauter, P., ed.: The Heath Anthology of American Literature, Volume I; Miller, P., ed.: The American Puritans: Their Prose and Poetry; Rowson, S.: Charlotte Temple; Brown, C. B.: Edgar Huntly; a xeroxed 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 Puritan versions of settlement; conversion, captivity,
and slave narratives; diaries and journals; eighteenth-century poetry by women;
Native American oratory; autobiography; letters, essays, and political debate;
and novels. Arching across this survey will be concerns
linking literature and history, language and politics. What are the "stories" of
This course satisfies the pre-1800 requirement for the English major.
American Literature: 1800-1865
Areas of Concentration: 1D; 2
Book List: Emerson, R.W.: various essays in xerox reader; Thoreau, H.D.: Walden and Civil Disobedience; Douglass, F. and H. Jacobs: Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave and Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl; Whitman, W.: Leaves of Grass: His Original Edition; Hawthorne, N.: The Scarlet Letter; Melville, H.: Moby-Dick; Poe, E.A.: several stories and essays in xerox reader; Beecher Stowe, H.: Uncle Tom's Cabin
Course Description: In the mid-nineteenth century, the
American Literature: 1865-1900
Areas of Concentration: 1D or 1E; 2; 3; 4
Book List: Twain, M.: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Pudd’nhead Wilson; Gates, H, ed.: Three Negro Classics; James, H.: The Turn of the Screw; Chopin, K.: The Awakening; Wharton, E.: The House of Mirth; Crane, S.: Maggie: A Girl of the Streets; plus a photocopied reader of shorter writings by Charles Chesnutt, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Pauline Hopkins, Jessie Fauset, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Jacob Riis, Theodore Dreiser, Willa Cather, Finley Peter Dunne, Bret Harte, Frank Norris, Jack London, and Sui Sin Far
Course Description: Topic: Making of Americans—
In addition to written essays, there will be frequent short quizzes testing knowledge of material from readings and lecture; regular attendance and active participation in discussions are required.
American Poetry
Areas of Concentration: 1E; 3
Book List: American Poetry: The 20th Century, Volume
I (Library of
Course Description: This course will focus on the development of American modernism in the first half of the twentieth century by looking at the early and then the late careers of Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, H.D., Marianne Moore, Wallace Stevens, and William Carlos Williams.
134 This course has been cancelled.
Literature of American Cultures: The Art of the Place
Note new instructor: L. Wardley
Lectures MW 2-3 in 2040 Valley LSB, plus one hour of discussion section on Fridays
Note to students: After the campus Schedule of Classes went to print, the format of this class was modified. On Fridays there will be discussion sections instead of lectures, at the following times; you must enroll in both the lecture and one of the discussion sections:
Sec. 101: F 12-1 204 Wheeler CC# 28780
Sec. 102: F 12-1 187 Dwinelle CC# 29276
Sec. 103: F 12-1 183 Dwinelle CC# 29279
Sec. 104: F 12-1 50 Barrows CC# 29282
Sec. 105: F 2-3 83 Dwinelle CC# 29285
Sec. 106: F 2-3 228 Dwinelle CC# 29288
Sec. 107: F 2-3 183 Dwinelle CC# 29291
Sec. 108: F 2-3 287 Dwinelle CC# 29294
Areas of Concentration: 1D or 1E; 2
Book List: Brown, C.B.: Wieland; Beecher Stowe, H.: Uncle Tom’s Cabin; Jacobs, H.: Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl; Morrison, T.: Beloved; Glaspell, S.: Selected Plays; Wharton, E.: The House of Mirth; Parks, S-L.: The America Play and Other Works; Valdez, L.: Early Works; Chopin, K.: The Awakening and Selected Stories; Islas, A.: The Rain God; a course reader including poetry, short stories, and essays. We will also view one film.
Course Description: How does the literature of African American, European American, and Latino(a)/Chicano(a) American cultures invoke, interrogate, memorialize, or produce an American place? How do characters and speakers draw identities, or distance themselves and us from, such places as the street, the battlefield, the ruin, the South, Nature, the past, the Gulf of Mexico, Harlem, the house, the fields, the Middle Passage, the desert, the border, or the space of a performance? How do fictions reveal the changing historical meanings (and contested definitions) of both “American” and “place,” from the early national period until today?
Requirements: Two papers (6-8 pages) and a final examination. The two papers will account for 50% of your final grade; the final examination will account for the remaining 50%
This course satisfies U.C. Berkeley’s American Cultures requirement.
American Studies: Turn of the Century—1890s into the 20th Century
This course is cross-listed with American Studies C111E.
Areas of Concentration: 1D or 1E; 3
Book List: Addams, J.: Twenty Years at Hull House; Brandeis, L.: Other People’s Money; Cather, W.: O Pioneers!; Howells, W.D.: Hazard of New Fortunes; Micheany, O.: The Conquest; Porter, G.: The Rise of Big Business; Riis, J.: How the Other Half Lives; Taylor, F.: Principles of Scientific Management; Wharton, E.; House of Mirth; Wiebe, R.: The Search for Order
Course Description: This is a course in turn-of-the-century
Areas of Concentration: None
Book List: No texts required
Course Description: A short fiction workshop presuming strong interest. Open to students from
any department. Each student will write two short stories. Each week, students will also turn in written critiques of the stories being workshopped as well as a 3-page journal entry. Class attendance: mandatory.
Students not admitted or late in applying to this section can come to office hours the first week of class to speak with Professor Farber or call 644-4193.
(Any students admitted who have worked with me before must contact me in November about bringing their first story, with xeroxes, to the first class meeting.)
To be considered for admission to this class, please submit 10-15 photocopied pages of your fiction, along with an application form, to Professor Farber’s mailbox in 322 Wheeler BY 4:00 P.M., TUESDAY, OCTOBER 29, 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!
Newly added section:
Short Fiction
Course Control # 28786
Areas of Concentration: None
Book List: No texts required
Course Description: A short fiction workshop presuming strong interest. Open to students from
any department. Each student will write two short stories. Each week, students will also turn in written critiques of the stories being workshopped as well as a 3-page journal entry. Class attendance: mandatory.
Students not admitted or late in applying to this section can come to office hours the first week of class to speak with Professor Farber or call 644-4193.
(Any students admitted who have worked with me before must contact me in November about bringing their first story, with xeroxes, to the first class meeting.)
To be considered for admission to this class, please submit 10-15 photocopied pages of your fiction, along with an application form, to Professor Farber’s mailbox in 322 Wheeler BY 4:00 P.M., TUESDAY, OCTOBER 29, 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!
Verse
143B/1 M 1-4
H. McHugh 301 Wheeler
Areas of Concentration: None
Book List: Crystal, D.:
Course Description: The workshop will require each student to submit one original poem each week. Over the course of the semester at least three of each student's poems will be discussed in class. The rest of our class time will be devoted to readings of the work of poets writing in English, as well as broader discussion of means and meanings from the point of view of the literary artist and designer of signs. Students are also expected, over the course of the semester, to attend (and submit written responses to) at least three public poetry readings.
To be considered for admission to this class, please submit photocopies of six of your poems, along with an application form, to Professor McHugh’s mailbox in 322 Wheeler BY 4:00 P.M., TUESDAY, OCTOBER 29, 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!
Verse
Areas of Concentration: None
Book List: No texts
Course Description: A workshop for writing poetry, and reading and discussing contemporary poetry and poetics.
To be considered for admission to this course, please submit five of your poems or eight pages of your poems (whichever is less, and photocopies, not originals), along with an application form, to Professor Hass’s mailbox in 322 Wheeler BY 4:00 P.M., TUESDAY, OCTOBER 29, 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!
Playwriting
Areas of Concentration: None
Book List: Parks, S-L.: Topdog/Underdog; McLaughlin, B.: The Playwright’s Process;
Stoppard, T.:
Course Description: In this course students learn and apply the
fundamentals of playwriting: structure,
premise, characterization, action, dialogue, relationship, and environment.
Students will write new work every week, hear
their work read, and participate in discussions and in-class exercises.
To be considered for admission to this class, please submit a photocopy of a 2-3 page play (or a 2-3 page excerpt of a longer play) that you wrote, along with an application form, to Professor Fisher’s mailbox in 322 Wheeler, BY 4:00 P.M., TUESDAY, OCTOBER 29, 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!
Prose Nonfiction: Memoir and Biography
Areas of Concentration: None
Book List: Alameddine, R.: I, The Divine--a novel; Aciman, A.: Out of Egypt--a memoir; Sims, P., ed.: Literary Nonfiction: Learning by Example--an anthology
Recommended: Goldman, E.: Living My Life--an autobiography; Falk, C.: Love, Anarchy, and Emma Goldman--a biography; Elms, A.C.: Uncovering Lives: The Uneasy Alliance of Biography and Psychology; Lightfoot, S.L.: Balm in Gilead--a memoir about her mother. An extensive list of other recommended works will be distributed in class, to be selected according to individual preference.
Course Description: While engaging in an in-depth study of the art of writing a life story, each student will work toward creating their own publishable narrative—anchored in time and place. Class assignments will enhance writing skills and increase analytic understanding of the varieties of biography and autobiography. Guest authors will offer their perspective on the task, and the professor—a biographer, editor, and scholar of the life and work of Emma Goldman, the advocate of freedom in all realms of life—will draw from her years of writing and editing experience and her historical research background to foster an awareness of the ways in which psychological, socio-political, ethnic, racial, class, gender, and historical elements combine to form the context of an individual narrative. Class work is designed to improve writing agility and promote insight into the varieties of individual experience. Although the class will begin with shared required reading, each student will tailor most of her or his reading to the subject and project of their choice—whether it be the telling of an aspect of one's own life or that of another. Several assignments will involve writing projects with other students in the class, reading each other's work, and learning how to prepare and submit writing for publication.
To be considered for admission to this class, please submit 2 to 5 photocopied pages of a writing sample (either a statement of what draws you to the subject/ or about your intended class project/ or something you consider to be a good general example of your writing), along with an application form, to Prof. Falk’s box in 322 Wheeler Hall BY 4:00 P.M., TUESDAY, OCTOBER 29, 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!