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Courses 150-199
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.
150/1 This section has been cancelled.
Senior Seminar: Theoretical Approaches to Lyric
150/2 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: 1E; 3; 5
Book List: A course reader (essays) only
Course Description: Focusing on twentieth-century writing, this course will introduce and discuss the state of critical theories of lyric poetry. We will explore social functions and psychological processes engaged by accounts of lyric voice, fragment, figure, allusion, meter, and image. The course will investigate the motives for lyric obsession with mnemonics, repetition, and verbal density; lyric's double evocation of individual interiority and communal thoughts and feelings; lyric's recursiveness and intertextuality, or its tendency to be about poetic tradition or to be built out of fragments; the feminization of lyric features; and the perceived antipathy between literary theory and poetry as ways of thinking. Requirements: seminar paper written in stages, seminar presentations.
Enrollment is limited and a
written application is due BY
Senior Seminar: James Joyce
150/3 MW 12-2
Note to students: Though the official
time of this class is 12-2, on most days it may end by
Areas of Concentration: 1E; 3
Book List: Ellmann, R.: James Joyce (rev. ed.); Joyce, J.: Dubliners: Text and Criticism, Finnegans Wake, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: Text and Criticism, Ulysses
Recommended: Blamires, H.: The New Bloomsday Book: A Guide Through "Ulysses"; Gifford, D.: "Ulysses" Annotated; Gilbert, S.: James Joyce's "Ulysses"
Course Description: A polytropically intensive examination of Joyce's fiction. We'll begin the semester with a rapid study of Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, focus lengthily on Ulysses over the major part of the term, and conclude with a brief gaze into the lucid darknesses of Finnegans Wake. Members of the seminar will be expected to work on a long seminar-paper during the semester and to participate in class discussions.
Enrollment is limited and a
written application is due BY
Senior Seminar: Eliot, Thackeray, and the Forms of Convention
150/4 MW 2-4
Note to students: Though the official time of this class is 2-4,
on most days it may end by
Areas of Concentration: 1D; 3; 5
Book List: Eliot, G.: Adam Bede, The Mill on the Floss, Felix Holt, the Radical, Middlemarch; Thackeray, W.M.: Barry Lyndon, Vanity Fair, The History of Henry Esmond, The Book of Snobs; a course reader
Course Description: We will in this course consider possible relations between literary and social convention in works by George Eliot and W. M. Thackeray, a pair of writers who share a particularly Victorian ambivalence about the value of a received idea. While engaging in close and comparative stylistic analyses of several novels by each, we will consider how social anxieties about clichés, conventions, and being boring not only surface in the content of works that are often about the tyranny of social convention but also find expression in the very form of the traditional realist novel. Because we will be thinking as much about narrative form as about the world of Victorian convention (a world which we will look for in the period’s literary criticism, political theory, and writing on etiquette and which we will necessarily consider in terms of problematic ways in which it worked to manage gender, class, and sexuality), this course will also serve as an introduction to some key ideas in narrative theory.
Enrollment is limited and a
written application is due BY
Senior Seminar: Henry James
150/5 MW 4-5:30
Areas of Concentration: 1D or 1E; 3; 4; 5
Book List:
Course Description: Not only objects, monetary fortunes, and letters, but people, desires, images, and perspectives circulate like hot potatoes in James’s fiction. We will consider both the formal and thematic aspects of James’ engagement with the limits of representation: how are his novels and tales able to put into circulation--without representing--hidden truths, forbidden desires, unspoken knowledges, transgressive or absent sexual relations, and open secrets? We will use The Turn of the Screw, in particular, to focus on James’s understanding of the violence of interpretive mastery and of the high stakes (redemptive and deadly) of representing and transmitting knowledge. Focus will also be on the relationship between narrative styles and perspectives (first-person narration and free indirect discourse) and the recurring plot of renunciation whereby Jamesean narrators and protagonists choose NOT to exercise different types of authority—sexual, moral, social, narrative, figurative, and interpretive—over one another. We will seek to understand the increasing complexity and narrative density of James’s late style as part of this “undoing” of plot in the double sense of narrative design and illicit or criminal intent.
Requirements: active participation in seminar discussion; frequent short responses to the readings; an in-class presentation on a critical perspective; and a longer (25-30 pg.), critically researched essay.
Enrollment is limited and a
written application is due BY
Senior Seminar: 20th-Century
Novels about 19th-Century
150/6 TTh 9:30-11
Areas of Concentration: 1E; 3; 5
Book List: Adams, H.: Education of Henry Adams; Wharton, E.: The Age of Innocence; Cather, W.: Death Comes for the Archbishop; Faulkner, W.: Absalom, Absalom!; Styron, W.: Confessions of Nat Turner; McCarthy, C.: Outer Dark; Fuentes, C.: The Old Gringo; Morrison, T.: Beloved; a course reader
Course Description: This seminar will try out two ideas about the literary imagination in America: 1) that historical novels can be seen as reconstructing the past in an effort to understand the present in a new way, and that the impulses informing these two different constructions can be distinguished from each other; 2) that the fate of the novel in the twentieth century is particularly revealed as it seeks to treat subjects from the novel’s golden age, the nineteenth century. Student research will involve attention to the novel as a genre. It may also involve historical, theoretical, or aesthetic questions.
Enrollment is limited and a
written application is due BY
Senior Seminar: Writing
150/7 TTh 9:30-11
A. Hurley 31 Evans
Areas of Concentration: 1C or 1D; 2; 6
Book List: Austen, J.:
Course Description:
The reading for each segment of this class will consist of a central novel, a selection of verse and supplemental texts (e.g. political treatises, travel journals, autobiography, drama). In addition to the books listed there will be an extensive course reader.
This course may satisfy the department’s pre-1800 requirement as long as the majority of the student’s written work addresses texts written before 1800.
Enrollment is limited and a
written application is due BY
Senior Seminar: Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Group
150/8 TTh 11-12:30
A. Banfield 204 Wheeler
Areas of Concentration: 1E; 3
Book List: Woolf, V.: Jacob's
Room, Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, The
Waves, Three
Recommended: Woolf, V.: The Common
Reader, Roger Fry: A Biography; Woolf,
L.: Beginning Again, Sowing, The
Wise Virgins, The League and
Course Description: This course will read Virginia Woolf in her intellectual, aesthetic, and political milieu.
Enrollment is limited and a
written application is due BY
150/9 This section has been cancelled.
150/10 Note new time!: MW 3-4:30
Areas of Concentration: 2; 6
Book List: Behn, A.: Oroonoko; Greenberg, K., ed.: Confessions of Nat Turner; Walker, D.: Appeal; Delany, M.: Blake; Melville, H.: Benito Cereno; Bontemps, A.: Black Thunder; James, C.L.R.: Black Jacobins; Carpentier, A.: Kingdom of This World; Styron, W.: Confessions of Nat Turner; Williams, S.A.: Dessa Rose; a course reader containing additional material by writers such as Cedric Robinson, Frantz Fanon, Joan Dayan, Victor Séjour, Thomas Jefferson, Harriet Jacobs, J. Stedman, Lydia Maria Child, Jose Martí, Aimé Césaire, Eric Hobsbawm, Herbert Aptheker, and Walter Benjamin
Course Description: This course will explore literary and historical
accounts of slave uprisings in the
Enrollment is limited and a
written application is due BY
150/11 This section has been cancelled.
Senior Seminar: Mark Twain
150/12 TTh 2-3:30
R. Hirst 360 Bancroft Library (Stone Room)
Areas of Concentration: 1D; 3, 6
Book List: See below; the instructor will discuss the exact list at the first class meeting, so please do not buy any texts until then.
Course Description: The seminar will read a generous selection of Mark Twain’s most important published writings. We will work our way chronologically through his life and career, beginning with his earliest extant writings and ending with Mysterious Stranger (which he left unpublished). Class will meet in the Stone Room of the Bancroft Library, just one floor down from the Mark Twain Papers, whose extensive primary and secondary resources students are encouraged to take advantage of for their research. One brief oral report (as the basis for class discussion) and one research paper, due at the end of the term.
Enrollment is limited and a
written application is due BY
150/13 TTh 2-3:30
Areas of Concentration: 1D or 1E; 6
Book List: Austin, M.: The Land of Little Rain; Browne, J.R.: A Peep at Washoe and Washoe Revisited (selections in course reader); Clemens, S.L.: Roughing It; Dana, R.H.: Two Years Before the Mast (selections in course reader); Farnham, E. and M.G. Vallejo (memoirs in course reader); Harte, B.: “The Luck of Roaring Camp” &c. (in course reader); Jackson, H. H.: Ramona; Jeffers, R.,
T. Gunn, and R. Hass, et al. (poems in course reader); Muir, J.: The Yosemite (selections in course reader); Norris, F.: McTeague; Ridge, J.R.: The Life and Adventures of Joaquin Murieta (in course reader); Steinbeck, J.: The Grapes of Wrath; Stevenson, R. L.: The Silverado Squatters (selections in course reader)
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).
Enrollment is limited and a
written application is due BY
150/14 TTh
Areas of Concentration: 1D; 4
Book List: Lamb, C. and M.: Tales from Shakespeare; Wordsworth, D.: The Grasmere Journals; Wordsworth, W.: Selected Poems; Brontë, A.: Agnes Grey; Brontë, C.: Jane Eyre; Brontë, E.: Wuthering Heights; Rossetti, C.: Goblin Market and Other Poems; and a course reader, containing essays, letters, and children’s literature by the Lambs; juvenilia and poems by the four Brontës (including Branwell); and poetry and nonfiction prose by Maria, William, and Dante Gabriel Rossetti
Course Description: We study writings by and about the Wordsworth, Lamb, Brontë, and Rossetti siblings, considering such issues as dead siblings and literary inspiration, incest and intertextuality, gender and genre, collaborative authorship, juvenilia and matricide, brotherhoods and sisterhoods. By mid-semester, each student will select one family of siblings to research independently, with a view to a substantial final paper (15 pages).
Enrollment is limited and a
written application is due BY
150/15 TTh
Areas of Concentration: 1E; 6
Book List: Burroughs, W.S.: Junky, Naked Lunch; Ginsberg, A.: Howl and Other Poems, Kaddish; Kerouac, J.: On the Road, Visions of Cody; Snyder, G.: No Nature, Earth House Hold; a course reader,
which can be purchased at Copy Central,
Course Description: This seminar will examine some of the important major work (mostly the early stuff) by the four central figures of the “Beat Generation”—Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs, and Gary Snyder. We’ll spend the first two weeks surveying the historical and literary-historical context in which these writers and poets formed themselves, their visions and their styles. We’ll examine some of the ways in which they continue important traditions in both American and world literatures, even while they rebel against traditions and conventions. The following weeks will be spent on the work of the Beats themselves, approximately six class meetings per Beat writer/poet. Throughout the course we will pay close attention to the differences as well as the similarities between these four, and to the outside influences that helped to shape them, as well as the influences they exerted on each other. We will spend some time on the theoretical assumptions that underlie the creation of some of this work—notions about spontaneity, and authenticity, the rejection of traditional forms and conventions, and the adaptation of forms and values from cultures other than mainstream white American. And we’ll also examine some of the critical assumptions that affected the reception of this work when it first appeared, and that still affect the way we read it now. Having said all that, I’d still like us to concentrate on the work itself.
Class requirements: two short papers (6—8pp); a prospectus (a description, outline, etc.) of the long paper; a long seminar paper (20-25pp). Students will have the option of substituting an oral report for one of the two short papers. The two short papers taken together, or the one short paper and the oral report, will count for 40% of your grade in the course. The prospectus will count for 10% of your grade. The long seminar paper will count for the remaining 50% of your grade. It may incorporate revised versions of the short papers (or oral report) you wrote earlier in the term.
Enrollment is limited and a
written application is due BY
150/16 TTh 5-7
Areas of Concentration: 1E; 5; 7
Book List: Beckett, S.: Collected Shorter Plays, The Complete Short Prose, Endgame, How It Is, Three Novels (Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable), Murphy, Nohow On, Waiting for Godot, Watt
Recommended: Happy Days
Course Description: Relentlessly probing the legacy of Western cultural forms, the limits of language, and the grounds of being human, Samuel Beckett transformed the economy of the literary arts. This seminar will follow, step by step, Beckett’s career, from his involvement in high modernism to the solitary and luminous minimalism of his late work. We’ll study works for the page (novels, short fiction, and poems), as well as stage plays and scripts for TV, radio, and film. Our analytical focus will be on Beckett’s experimentation with genre and medium; and our ultimate goal will be to understand Beckett not only as an Anglo-Irish writer but as the last classic of European letters.
Requirements: This seminar involves watching and/or listening to unique video and audio materials, so attendance is absolutely essential. There will be weekly pensums and one standard research paper (15 pages, or shorter if warranted by wit). Please note: in order to have enough time for all the taped performances and for discussion, all meetings will last 120 minutes.
Enrollment is limited and a
written application is due BY
Senior Seminar: Film Noir
150/17
Seminars TTh 3:30-5 in 121 Wheeler, plus film
screenings Tues.
Areas of Concentration: 1E; 3; 4; 6
Book List: Kaplan, E. A., ed.: Women in Film Noir; Krutnik, F.: In a Lonely Street; Telotte, J. P.: Voices in the Dark; Turner, G.: Film as Social Practice; Silver, A. and J. Ursini, eds.: Film Noir Reader, Vol. I
Recommended: Copjec, J,. ed.: Shades of Noir; Silver, A. and J. Ursini, eds.: Film Noir Reader, Vol. II; Naremore, J.: More Than Night; Penz, F. and M. Thomas, eds.: Cinema and Architecture; Phillips, P.: Understanding Film Texts; Cook, P. and M. Bernink: The Cinema Book; Durgnat, R.: A Long Hard Look at Psycho; Cohan, S.: Masked Men; MacCabe, C.: The Eloquence of the Vulgar; Altman, R.: Film/Genre; Allen, R. and S. Gonzalez, eds.: Alfred Hitchcock; Smith, S.: Hitchcock; Gunning, T.: The Films of Fritz Lang; Barr, C.: Vertigo; Kaes, A.: M; Paglia, C.: The Birds; Taubin, A.: Taxi Driver; Friedman, L.: Bonnie and Clyde; Dick, P.: Blade Runner
Course Description: Whether seen as a genre, a movement, a cycle, or a historic period, film noir has exerted a lasting and disturbing influence. We will look at some early Expressionist examples and recent neo-noirs, as well as the classic noirs of despair, vulnerability, and deception. The course requires one or two oral reports and a long final paper of 15-20 pp.
Enrollment is limited and a
written application is due BY
Introduction to Literary Theory
161 MWF 11-12
Areas of Concentration: 5; 6
Book List: Barthes, R.: Mythologies; Lodge, D., ed.: Modern Criticism and Theory: A Reader; a course reader containing essays by Derrida, de Man, Marx, Adorno, Butler, Foucault, Freud, Lacan, Spivak, and others
Course Description: This course will serve as an introduction to literary and cultural theory. We will read closely a number of important (and difficult) theoretical texts while thinking about what relations exist between the different intellectual projects that we call theory (poststructuralism, psychoanalysis, new historicism, and gender studies are only a few). We will also ask and ask again the more general question: what is theory, anyway?
Special Topics: Vladimir Nabokov
166/1 MWF 10-11
This section is cross-listed with Slavic 134F.
Areas of Concentration: 1E; 3; 4; 5
Book List: Nabokov, V.: King, Queen, Knave, The Defense, Invitation to a Beheading, Bend Sinister, The Gift, The Annotated Lolita, Pnin, Pale Fire
Recommended: Boyd, B.: Nabokov’s Pale Fire
Course Description: We will study the work of Nabokov as a novelist on two continents over a period of nearly sixty years. The course will be structured chronologically and evenly divided between novels translated from Russian and written in English. After beginning with Nabokov’s second novel and two short stories, we will examine the major fiction of his European period, which culminates with the publication in Paris of (most of) The Gift. We will devote a substantial part of the course to a close reading of Lolita. Competing interpretations of Nabokov will be considered, but our emphasis will be on metafiction, the theme of perversity and Nabokov's cultivation of a perverse reader.
Since Nabokov was prolific and this course attempts to encompass nearly all phases of his career as a novelist, students should expect to devote a considerable amount of time to reading and should come to class prepared to discuss the assigned texts. Participants in the class should anticipate reading 300 pages per week. Written work will consist of two papers (5 to 10 pages) on topics to be chosen in consultation with the professor. Penalties will be assessed for late papers. There will be a midterm and a final examination.
Special Topics:
166/2 MW 4-5:30
Areas of Concentration: 1E; 2; 6
Book List: Acosta, O.: The Revolt of the Cockroach People; Bulosan, C.: America Is in the Heart; Chan, S.C. and S. Olin: Major Problems in California History; Davis, M.: City of Quartz; de Burton, R.: The Squatter and the Don; Kerouac, J.: On the Road; Kingston, M. H.: China Men; McWilliams, C.: California, The Great Exception; Norris, F.: The Octopus; Ruiz, R.: Happy Birthday, Jesus; Steinbeck, J.: Grapes of Wrath; West, N.: The Day of the Locust; a course reader containing additional primary and secondary materials
Course Description: This course will explore and problematize the notion of
Special Topics: Russian, French, and American Novels of Adultery
166/3 TTh 9:30-11
This section is cross-listed with Slavic 133.
Areas of Concentration: 1D; 3; 4
Book List:
Course Description: We will read Russian, French, and American novels and novellas that focus on adultery. The works read depict heroines and heroes who transgress familial, societal, sexual, and religious norms. The problem of adultery provides the driving force of these narratives. As we study the nineteenth-century novels that define the novel of adultery as a literary category, as well as some precursors and later offshoots, we will attempt to outline a morphology of the novel of adultery. We will also examine the narrative techniques used in these novels to represent the consciousness of the protagonists, in an effort to determine how the subject matter and the poetics of the novel of adultery interact.
For one of the papers, students will read an additional novel of adultery (chosen from a list) and write about it in relation to the material discussed in class. The workload includes: the reading of assigned texts and of an additional novel of adultery, various short written assignments, two papers (3 pages and 8 pages), and a final exam.
Special Topics:
166/4 TTh 3:30-5
Areas of Concentration: 1E; 2; 3
Book
List: Fitzgerald, S.: The Great Gatsby;
Ford, F.M.: The Good Soldier; Garcia Marquez, G.: The General in His
Labyrinth; Ondaatje, M.: In the Skin of the Lion; Mukherjee, B.: The Holder of the World; Melville, H.:
Bartleby and Benito Cereno; Morrison, T.:
Course Description: Through close scrutiny of selected texts, students will explore the forms and theories of the novel, the novella, the recit, the short story, the short-short story and "sudden" fiction. Particular attention will be paid to modes of representation of history/social commentary/politics in fiction. Students will concentrate on the intimate connection between choice of aesthetic strategies and the construction of meaning.
Literature and Psychology
172 TTh 2-3:30
Areas of Concentration: 3; 4; 5
Book List: James, H.: The Turn of the Screw; Felman: Literature and Psychoanalysis; Freud, S.: Dora: An Analysis of a Case of Hysteria; Winnicott, D.W.: The Piggle; Bernheimer: In Dora’s Case; Nabokov, V.: Pale Fire; a course reader
Course Description: This course will not apply psychological approaches to literature in order to discover what a particular text might mean. Rather, it will examine some of the relationships between literature and psychoanalysis. We will explore the literary dimensions of psychoanalysis and, in turn, investigate the ways in which psychoanalytic concepts and practices contribute to the interpretation of literary texts. Topics include: the case-history as a literary genre; what is a "psychoanalytic reading"?; transference and "play"; narrative strategies. Authors: Freud, Felman, James, Lacan, Nabokov, Winnicott.
Literature and Disability
175 TTh 9:30-11
Areas of Concentration: 2; 5; 6
Book List: Diderot, D.: Letter on the Blind for the Benefit of Those Who See, Letter on the Deaf and Dumb; Rousseau, J.J.: Essay on the Origin of Languages: Wordsworth, W. and S.T. Coleridge: Lyrical Ballads; Kittler, F.: “Gramophone Film Typewriter”; Keller, H.: The Story of My Life; Melville, H.: Billy Budd; Shields, D.: Dead Languages; Faulkner, W.: The Sound and the Fury; Oe, K.: A Quiet Life; a course reader.
Course Description:
“Media that make us see, hear, and speak better were developed by and for those who heard, saw, and spoke less.”
Geoffrey Winthrop-Young, “Kittler’s Media Theory”
This course will ask the unusual question: is literature a disabled medium? In the absence of a consensus definition, “literature” sometimes appears to people only as an unusually demanding, difficult, narcissistic, or boring art form, especially when compared to other media/arts, like film and recorded music, which seem to deliver audiovisual information in ways that afford greater sensory pleasure. Even before the development of new media, literature was in competition with other arts, and it has never been clear which of the “senses” literature serves. Literacy itself seems to demand such a concentration on the written or printed word that readers must become “insensitive” to surrounding impressions. The production of a literary aesthetic, in other words, appears to require a certain anesthesia in the reader. Does the fear that literature might be surpassed by other technologies of representation explain the frequency with which writers imagine from the point of view (so to speak) of the disabled subject?
The course will have several components. An introductory section will provide students with a grounding in disability theory, with special attention to the attempt to provide a common theory of disability categories (sensory, cognitive, motor; illness/injury; ugliness/fatness/queerness; race/gender/class). We will then shift to an examination of literature in relation to other media and to media theory. Beginning with Enlightenment accounts of the role of sensation in human cognition, we will focus particularly on the connection between attempts to teach language to the deaf, dumb, and blind and the “humanization” of disability. A section on the “distressed genre” of poetry will generate a debate on the nature of poetry’s medium by contrasting the Romantic nostalgia for orality with sign language poetry. Two short novels that “speak” of the protagonist’s incapacity to speak (Melville’s Billy Budd and Shields’ Dead Languages) will be framed by our screening of two films—one silent (to be determined), one “blind” (Majid Majidi’s The Color of Paradise [1999]). We will conclude by reading novels by Kenzaburo Oe and William Faulkner that focus on cognitive impairment, and by screening Lars von Trier’s controversial Idiots (2000).
Literature and Popular Culture
176
Lectures MW 1-2 in 2040 Valley LSB, plus one hour of discussion section per week (secs. 101-104: F 1-2; secs. 105-108: F 3-4)
Areas of Concentration: 1E; 6
Book List: For theories of literature and popular culture, we will read Raymond Williams, Homi Bhabha, Stuart Hall, Laura Mulvey, and others; literary texts will include Beowulf; Gawain and the Green Knight; Henry IV, Part I; Jane Austen’s Persuasion; and Don DeLillo’s White Noise. Film and video will include Aliens; The Matrix; Titanic; and episodes of The Simpsons.
Course Description: This course will examine relationships between literature and popular culture, including how those two terms define each other—and how they change, depending on our historical, or political, or theoretical vantage point. I will generally pair a literary text with a popular one for a week or so at a time, and use the pairing to help us understand some of the theoretical terms that have been most important to thinking about the literary and the popular. There will be several film screenings. Writing and exam requirements TBA.
Lyric Verse
Area of Concentration: 3
Book List: Eastman,
et al., eds.: The Norton Anthology of Poetry (long version) or
Course Description: This course will try for answers to the following questions (and questions like them). What is the essential thing about verse that causes us to distinguish it from prose? What value has verse that makes it any more worth readers’ time than a paraphrase of it? What is valuable about “sounding good”? Why do people who like verse (as opposed not only to those who don’t but also to those who, for reasons I cannot fathom, pretend to like verse) like it? Why do some particular poems persist in the culture while others—including others that say similar things in apparently similar ways—get lots of attention for a while and then get forgotten?
We will read as many as possible of the lyric war horses of English and American verse and see what, if anything, they have that other poems that say similar things in comparable ways do not. I hope to show you that one can study a poem without “interpreting” it (by “interpreting” I mean stepping between a work and its readers to say that the work says something that, as one’s presence as interpreter testifies loudly, it does not say).
Two or three papers, each of a length determined by how much you have to say and how efficient you are in saying it.
The Novel
Areas of Concentration: 3; 5
Book List: Anon.: Lazarillo de Tormes; Beckett, S.: Company; Defoe, D.: Robinson Crusoe; Dostoevsky, F.: Demons; Edgeworth, M.: Castle Rackrent; Flaubert, G.:Madame Bovary; Goethe, J.: The Sorrows of Young Werther; Joyce, J.: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man; Kundera, M.: The Unbearable Lightness of Being; Nabokov, V.: Pale Fire; Petronius: the Satyricon; Sterne, L.: Tristram Shandy; Woolf, V.: Mrs. Dalloway.
Course Description: This seminar will study the novel as a genre. The reading list includes a wide range of novels by English and continental European authors (in translation), from the pre-history of the modern novel to the late twentieth century. The aim is to orient students critically with regard to the protean poetics of the novel, “the most independent, most elastic, most prodigious of literary forms” (Henry James).
There will be a brief assignment on each novel and two 7-page papers (30% and 40% of the final grade, respectively); weekly assignments, quizzes, and participation in class count as 30% of the final grade. (You can find very cheap used copies of most items on the reading list; in cases of more than one translation of the same novel, look for the edition ordered through the Student Store.)
Honors Course
Book List: There are no new texts for this class.
Course Description: This is a continuation of section 1 of H195A, taught by E. Abel in Fall 2002. No new students will be admitted. No new application form needs to be filled out. Professor Abel will give out CECs (class entry codes) in class in November.
Honors Course
Book List: There are no new texts for this class.
Course Description: This is a continuation of section 2 of H195A, taught by C. Lye in Fall 2002. No new students will be admitted. No new application form needs to be filled out. Professor Lye will give out CECs (class entry codes) in class in November.
Honors Course
Book List: There are no new texts for this class.
Course Description: This is a continuation of section 3 of H195A, taught by K. Snyder in Fall 2002. No new students will be admitted. No new application form needs to be filled out. Professor Snyder will give out CECs (class entry codes) in class in November.
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