Brodber, Erna: Louisiana; Bronte, Charlotte: Jane Eyre; Carby, Hazel: Imperial Intimacies; Hartman, Saidiya: Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments; Morrison, Toni: Beloved; Morrison, Toni: Playing in the Dark; Rhys, Jean: Wide Sargasso Sea; Scott, Dennis: An Echo in the Bone
Films will include Atlantics, dir. Mati Diop; Passing, dir. Rebecca Hall.
*Please do not purchase texts before consulting the instructor.
An introduction to black diasporic criticism, this seminar uses various angles of approach toward the notion of the spirit, the haunt, and the possession in order to trace a tradition of black presence English literatures and cultures. We will study fiction, artifacts from the visual and anthropological archive, contemporary poetry, and examples from popular culture--a range of genres that represents the multi-modal techniques of black literary studies. Key interlocuters will include: Toni Morrison, Saidiya Hartman, Christina Sharpe, Roberto Strongman, Omise'eke Natasha Tinsley, and Hazel Carby. Assignments will be geared towards developing a working knowledge of important concepts, debates, and interventions in the field -- and will range from the brief and experimental to a substantial immersion in a key text.
Als, Hilton: The Women; Baldwin, James: Collected Essays; Rankine, Claudia: Citizen: An American Lyric
Readers of James Baldwin, W. E. B. DuBois, Ralph Ellison, Zora Neale Hurston, and other black writers have often turned to their essays with a goal of better understanding their literary work. In this course we will consider the African-American essay as a literary form in its own right, one that rewards close formal analysis. The essay (from Old French essai, “attempt”) is a sort of rhetorical trial balloon, implying firstness, a want of finish, and a rigorous nonsystematicity. We will consider the matter of incompletion in two respects -- the essay as it engages the topic of the incomplete project of black freedom, and the essay as ongoing experiment in form – with a goal of puzzling out how the two are related.
Satire is a corrosive and uncomfortable mode, designed to lacerate, to excoriate, to deplore, scorn, and disdain. But it selects its objects carefully and measures them precisely. Satire does not usually undertake to represent the world accurately; but it does seek to represent its world truthfully.
That difference between truth and accuracy will guide much of our exploration of this strange mode, of the attitudes that it makes possible and the cold world that requires such chilling attitudes. That world tends, historically speaking, to be a ‘society’ rather than a ‘community’, urban and urbane, with all the shallow anonymity and public posturing, even decadence, that such an ‘advanced’ or abstract social order enables and implies. Satire is a late form. Even its ancient origins are late ones, dating to the early decades and centuries of imperial Roman power, with its steady concentration of wealth and a cynically brutal avarice, after the collapse of classical republicanism. From the beginning, satire is both a critical and an oppositional mode.
This course, then, is an examination of the logic of satire: both its social logic (the ways in which it strives to cast a larger social reality in a recognizable symbolic shape) and its formal logic (the ways in which it goes about securing the truthfulness of its representations). We will explore satire’s historical origins as a distinct figural mode and critical problem, scanning the gentler moral inflections of poets like Horace and Persius alongside the more contemptuous tones of writers like Juvenal and Petronius. But we will then spend more of our attention on the two eras in which satire flowered most powerfully and (sometimes) most poisonously in English letters, in London in particular.
The first of these emerges (roughly) through the first half of the eighteenth century, with the work of (among others) John Dryden, Jonathan Swift, Alexander Pope, John Gay, and Samuel Johnson. The second comprises the interwar decades of the twentieth and includes writers ranging from T. S. Eliot and Wyndham Lewis, Mina Loy and W. H. Auden, to Henry Green and Evelyn Waugh.
Throughout, we will be concerned with both the critical problem of satire and satire’s own practice of criticism.
Austen, Jane: Emma; Austen, Jane: Lady Susan/The Watsons/Sanditon; Wilde, Oscar: De Profundis and Other Prison Writings; Wilde, Oscar: The Major Works
Jane Austen and Oscar Wilde are nineteenth century style icons. Wilde was a celebrity in his own time and Austen has had avid fans, imitators, and adaptors for centuries. But what exactly are the styles of Austen and Wilde? What is style? Using Austen and Wilde as case studies, this seminar will ask students to engage in different methods and theories around style as a critical object. “Style” has been a productive literary term due to its application at multiple scales (individual, group, period, national styles) and in relation to different categories of value (moral, social, aesthetic). To study style is to already have defined it – but these definitions, and their ideological freight, can often be obscured. To uncover these implications, we will frame our primary texts with criticism that approaches Austen and Wilde's styles through classical rhetoric, nineteenth century reviews, sociology, and queer theory. In early assignments, students will practice their own “stylistics," which might include extrapolating descriptions of Austenian and/or Wildean style through close reading, as well as testing those accounts on the authors’ more unusual works and against other critics' descriptions (~10 pages of writing across a few short exercises). The class will culminate in a more formal 8-10 final essay that engages with other scholars.
Braddon, Mary E.: Aurora Floyd; Bronte, Charlotte: Jane Eyre; Dickens, Charles: Hard Times; Stoker, Bram: Dracula
Focusing on the Victorian novel, this course will examine why it emerged as the dominant literary form in nineteenth-century Britain. What made the novel so popular, and in what ways did the novel shape—and was shaped in turn—by the prevailing social, political, and aesthetic preoccupations of the time? What accounts for the Victorian novel’s abiding hold on us today? In addressing these questions, we will read different genres of the Victorian novel, the bildungsroman, the “industrial” novel, the sensation novel, and the fin de siècle gothic. In doing so, we will also focus on enhancing our analytical skills: close reading, developing a thesis, and structuring an argument. Course assignments will include a couple of short assignments culminating in a final paper that will be due at the end of the semester. Readings include the novels listed above and materials in bCourses.
This course is a study in the history of romance as a mode, genre, and concept from the Middle Ages to the nineteenth century, with an emphasis on the period to which romance eventually lent its name: Romanticism. We will attend closely to the formal and thematic characteristics of romance in its initial phases, including its origins as a form of vernacular storytelling, as well as the extent to which those characteristics are thought to shape innovative poetry and prose fiction of the early modern period and beyond. This course will also pay special attention to the political contexts in which romance develops and to which it imaginatively responds; we will ask what role romance plays in the formation of ideologies of empire, race, and religious otherness, both within Europe and between Europe and the Middle East. A major focus in this regard will be on histories of (settler) colonialism.
As a seminar in criticism, this course will also use romance to broadly trace developments in English literary criticism, from its origins as an institutional practice, to major developments in twentieth and twenty-first century theory, including genre theory, Marxism, New Historicism, queer theory, and post- and settler colonial theory.
Requirements for this course include leading class discussion and two essays (5-7 pp and 8-10 pp).
The following is a list of potential primary texts; note those with asterisks will be abridged:
Chrétien de Troyes, Lancelot: The Knight of the Cart
*Wace, Roman de Brut
Anon., Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
*Ludovico Ariosto, Orlando Furioso*
Torquato Tasso, Gerusalemme Liberata
Charlotte Lennox, The Female Quixote
Keats, selected poems
Percy Shelley, selected poems
Lord Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage
*Herman Melville, Mardi
This course is aimed at beginners, whether graduate* or undergraduate, familiarizing them with the principles and practice of linguistic decoding in relation to both medieval manuscripts and modern editions, as well as with the grammar and vocabulary of, primarily, Old English prose: historiographical (histories), hagiographical (saints’ lives) and homiletic (sermons). By the end of the semester, you will be competent, if not virtuosic, readers/interpreters of Old English prose, and know a decent amount about the culture that produced the books in which it survives.
*graduates, please contact me for enrollment information and a review of the requirements
New Oxford Annotated Bible, New Revised Standard Version (Fifth Edition); Alter, Robert: Genesis: Translation and Commentary; Browning, W.R.F.: Oxford Dictionary of the Bible
In this class, we will read a selection of biblical texts as literature; that is, we will read them in many ways but not as 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 that is multi-authored, thoroughly fissured, and complexly sedimented in its historical layers. 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 a midterm exam, a paper, and a final exam.
Please note that the text for this class, Jill Mann’s edition of the Canterbury Tales, published by Penguin, is also available as an e-book from Amazon. HOWEVER, when you look up the book on Amazon, the Kindle book linked to the Mann edition is NOT the actual ebook. You must search for “penguin canterbury tales kindle”; the edition then appears, and it costs approximately $15. If the ebook you are buying is free, or only a few dollars, it is NOT the edition you should buy. Feel free to email me if you are having trouble finding the proper ebook.
This class satisfies the pre-1800 requirement for the English major.
Greenblatt, Stephen: The Norton Anthology of English Literature, volume B: The Sixteenth and the Early Seventeenth Centuries
In this course, we follow how English authors from Thomas More to John Donne participated in the grand cultural project of the Renaissance, defined by the belief that consuming and producing culture would elevate human beings above their natural state. Many of our authors supported the project; some opposed it fervently. But willingly or not, everyone we read during the semester contributed to it, if only by virtue of recording their thoughts and feelings, impressions and fancies in writing. Our aim in the course is to understand both the project of the Renaissance and the beliefs behind it by looking at the works of Francis Petrarch, Thomas Wyatt, Anne Locke, William Shakespeare, Mary Sidney, and John Donne, among others.
Text: Greenblatt, ed., The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Volume B: The Sixteenth and the Early Seventeenth Century; additional readings will be available on BCourses.
“We seem,” writes A. C. Bradley in his Shakespearean Tragedy, “to have before us a type of the mystery of the whole world, the tragic fact which extends far beyond the limits of tragedy. Everywhere, from the crushed rocks beneath our feet to the soul of man, we see power, intelligence, life and glory, which astound us and seem to call for our worship. And everywhere we see them perishing, devouring one another and destroying themselves, often with dreadful pain, as though they came into being for no other end.” We’ll read and discuss many of Shakespeare’s tragedies—early, middle, and late—both to see how they work as aesthetic objects and to relate them to theories of and ideas about the nature of tragedy from Aristotle to Hegel, Nietzsche, Freud, Arendt, and others. We’ll want both to understand Shakespeare's sense of the tragic as a response to his time and to see how Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth, and other plays might help us to understand what remains true about the experience of the tragic in literature, history, and life.
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, influential novels like Robinson Crusoe and Gulliver’s Travels, the most amusing comedies, and the most outrageous obscenity. London (already the largest city in the world) was shut down by a deadly plague, then burned to the ground – does this sound familiar? We will begin by reading and analyzing contemporary accounts of this catastrophe. Yet within a few generations London bounced back, for better or worse: this period invented great literature, architecture and music, the scientific revolution, insurance and paper money, but also the stock market and the colonial empire based on slavery. We will explore the contrasts and contradictions as well as the abundance and brilliance. Canonical figures like 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. Dominant themes, always treated with devastating wit and skeptical realism, include sexuality and identity, the politics of gender as well as nation, and the representation of “other” cultures (Surinam, West Africa, Ireland, Ottoman Turkey, cannibals, giants, talking horses).
All our readings will be available to download.
This class satisfies the pre-1800 requirement for the English major.
A survey of major works of U.S. literature after the Civil War, with special attention to artistic experimentation in these years and to the rise of "realism" in literature. The "Gilded Age" put unprecedented faith in ideals of progress and individualism, in economic expansion and big business. It also was marked by all the problems of Reconstruction, by racial injustice and the rise of Jim Crow laws, by deep poverty, and by unresolved debates about the role of the federal government in social welfare. Writers responded to this moment in a variety of surprising ways that also reflected on literature’s uncertain status as a medium of social protest or else as a separate realm outside the new social realities that were made visible to readers like never before. Our authors will include Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Stephen Crane, William Dean Howells, Charles Chesnutt, Mark Twain, Jacob Riis, Henry James, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Edith Wharton.
Gyasi, Yaa: Homegoing; Hartman, Saidiya: Lose Your Mother; Hurston, Zora Neale: Their Eyes Were Watching God; McKay, Claude: Home to Harlem
Films will include Daughters of the Dust (dir. Julie Dash); Moonlight (dir. Barry Jenkins); and Atlantique (dir. Mati Diop).
Music will include works by Nina Simone, Burning Spear, and Beyoncé.
Shorter readings and excerpts will include works by W. E. B. Du Bois, Alain Locke, Marcus Garvey, Katherine Dunham, James Baldwin, Christina Sharpe, and C. Riley Snorton.
*Please consult the instructor before purchasing course texts.
The black diaspora is, amongst other things, a literary tradition: a complex, cross-generic set of texts produced by black writers located in almost every nation across the globe, equal in complexity and variation to the modern concept of race that is inextricably tied to its formation. But how can one conceptual framework possibly contain such a dazzlingly various canon? In this class we’ll read novels, watch films, listen to music, and look at art to begin to answer that question. We'll read critics and thinkers to understand the history of black diaspora, the political implications of its formations, and the theories underwriting its vibrant and varied aesthetics. We will move through a broad sweep of the twentieth century and into the contemporary moment, and we'll cover a wide variety of contexts and genres. This variety and breadth is crucial to laying a foundation in the field and to opening up the issue of identity-across-difference that is fundamental in black diasporic culture.
This course will introduce students to the study of creative writing—fiction and poetry. Students will learn to talk critically about these forms and begin to feel comfortable and confident writing within these genres. Students will write a variety of exercises and more formal pieces. In weekly discussion sections, students will participate in class workshops where their work will be edited and critiqued by other students in the class.
All readings will be available online.
A short fiction workshop with a focus on the craft of writing. In this course, we will be readers, writers, and editors of short fiction. We'll read a range of published short stories in order to explore the technical ways in which a short story is crafted, discussing topics like structure, point of view, conflict, detail, and dialogue. Each student will write and revise one significant story over the course of the semester. Students will read and edit each other's stories, write formal responses, and workshop the stories in class. Alongside these workshops, we'll discuss revision, publication, process, and practice. A course reader will be available for purchase.
Please note that access to this class is by application only.
To apply, submit a 7-15 page (double spaced) sample of your fiction. Complete stories preferred, but not required.
There’ll be writing prompts and there’ll be experiments involving old forms—the sonnet, the ghazal, the haibun, varieties of orature (including song).
Old forms? From an essay: “I find [form] interesting as a site, as a point of disembarkation for talking about that other stuff, for the ongoing work of investigation and experiment. Sonnets can be navigated but the point, in all my classes, is not to get it right but to see how it feels to get involved in it, that and to look at what the poem (or the essay or joke or speech) does and at the ways the world presses on it, and at how it presses back on the world….. Of course it’s the wrestling [with the form] that’s important, the labor there, not the form so much. The form allows us to talk in class about the wrestling; it’s a thing, a topic, a place or place-holder in the never-ending conversation.”
Reading, weekly writing expectations, interrogation, argument, possible field trips and public events, "workshopping," "woodshedding," etc. Students will be responsible for leading discussions on the work of the fall Holloway poets (Rae Armantrout, Harmony Holiday, Feliz Lucia Molina, and Mona Lisa Saloy) and the book-list will include titles (TBA) by those poets.
Workshop participants will be asked to keep a dream journal.
Musician and poet Sun Ra once noted, after writing a requiem for a former band member this is the first time a black man received his very own requiem. We’ll be reading and writing and close listening to music with the elegiac in mind, studying comparative versions of elegies and requiem and odes. How does the human need to commemorate life and death and the glories and atrocities in between construct a poetics and a poet’s approach to language? We’ll read Fred Moten, Frank O’Hara, Lucie Brock-Boido, Kamau Brathwaite, Michael Harper, Gwendolyn Brooks, Amiri Baraka, and many others. We’ll close-listen to albums by Sun Ra, Miles Davis, Kendrick Lamar, Abbey Lincoln, Mary Lou Williams, Duke Ellington and others. We’ll try and unpack the idea that elegies are for the living, are documents aimed at resurrection as much as homage. We’ll examine how we constantly search for language that helps us say goodbye to the present and renew ourselves.
This course is for students who are interested in writing, or are already working on, a novel or novella. Through creative writing exercises, discussion and reading, we’ll generate ideas and explore how a novel is made; through workshops, you’ll share the beginning of your own project. By the end of the semester, you will have the first chapter or two of a novel- or novella-in-progress, and a sense of where to take your work next. Reading to be confirmed.
Please note that access to this class is by application only.
To apply, submit a 10-20 page (double spaced) sample of your fiction. This need not be a novel excerpt.
Short readings and other materials available on bCourses.
Book List to come.
This course explores a wide range of literary production by Native American/Indigenous writers from the nineteenth century to present, drawing out the various linguistic and literary influences present in the works. The course is organized thematically around concepts such as language, protest, genre, animacy, and story to show both continuity and invention across time. The foundations of Indigenous languages, literacies, and forms will be emphasized, while also analyzing how Native American writers have consistently appropriated Western literary forms and styles to express a distinctive aesthetic. Course materials will include traditional stories in their own languages (with translation), poems, sermons, novels, short stories, plays, and speculative fiction.
Evaluation will be based on short papers and exams and a final research paper.
Kingston, Maxine Hong: The Woman Warrior; LeGuin, Ursula: The Dispossessed; Morrison, Toni: Song of Solomon
The vast majority of readings for this course will be found in the course reader (to be purchased separately). In addition, we will be viewing a handful of television programs (e.g an episode of All in the Family) as well as the following films: Medium Cool (dir. Haskell Wexler, 1969);Taxi Driver (dir. Martin Scorcese, 1976); Network (dir. Sidney Lumet, 1976); and Saturday Night Fever (dir. John Badham, 1977).
As one writer quipped, it was the worst of times, it was the worst of times. “The Seventies” routinely come in for mockery as an era of bad taste — an era when enormous sideburns, leisure suits, extra-wide bell bottoms, pet rocks, and “diet” mackerel pudding made sense to all too many Americans. Even at the time, the 1970s were known as the decade when “it seemed like nothing happened.”
Yet we can see now that the ’70s was a time of great cultural renaissance and political ferment. It gave us the New Hollywood of Scorcese, Coppola and others; the “New Journalism” of Michael Herr, Joan Didion, and others; the music of funk, disco, punk and New Wave; the postmodern comedy of Saturday Night Live and the postmodern drama of Off-Off-Broadway; and a great range of literary fiction written by women authors from Ursula LeGuin and Margaret Atwood to Toni Morrison and Maxine Hong Kingston.
Rather than simply being a transitional period between the “liberal” 1960s and “conservative” 1980s, it was in fact a period of intense political realignment, with the United States roiled by the oil crisis, the fall of Nixon and the fall of Saigon; by the advent of women’s liberation, gay liberation, and environmentalism as mass grassroots movements; and by the rise of the Sunbelt and the dawning of the conservative revolution. One might even say that the ’70s were the most interesting decade of the post-WWII era — the period when the dreams of the ‘60s were most intensely, if achingly, fulfilled.
Lastly, the ’70s may be the decade closest to our own contemporary moment. We will consider how the roots of our current predicament lie in the earlier decade — with its backlash against movements for racial justice and gender equality, its gun culture, its corruption of the political process, its transition to a postindustrial economy, its widening inequality, its fetish for self-fulfillment, and its fascination with the appeal of instant celebrity. We will, in turn, reflect on how Americans in the ’70s struggled with many of the dilemmas that we face now.
Coetzee, J.M.: Slow Man; Haddon, Mark: Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time; Kaminsky, Ilya: Deaf Republic; Keller, Helen: Story of My Life; Kleege, Georgina: Blind Rage; Melville, Herman: Billy Budd, Bartleby, and Other Stories; Oe, Kenzaburo: A Quiet Life; Rankine, Claudia: Don't Let Me Be Lonely
Richard Loncraine, Richard III (1995 film); excerpts from: Douglas C. Baynton, Defectives in the Land: Immigration in the Age of Eugenics; Jennifer Bartlett et al., eds., Beauty Is a Verb: The New Poetics of Disability; Jonathan Crary, 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep; Temple Grandin, Thinking in Pictures; Jasbir Puar, The Right to Maim; Susan Schweik, The Ugly Laws: Disability in Public.
From the blind poet to the fat detective to the “twisted” villain, literature often foregrounds bodily difference as an exceptional condition. What are the stakes and effects of literature’s interest in the exception—and in implied or engendered norms? What correspondences might there between different kinds of the atypical: between “beauty” and “deformity” (Adam calls Eve a “fair defect” in Paradise Lost), poetry and disfluency, over- and under-achievement? To address these and other questions, we’ll read a selection of texts that work at once to represent disability and to "crip" norms of representation. We’ll also consider disability in relation to disablement: the effects of impaired and impairing environments on the capacity to flourish.
Assignments will include two essays, a group or individual presentation project, and regular, thoughtful discussion posts. There will be no final exam, but regular attendance and participation are required. This is a core course for the disability studies minor.
We are fascinated by cults. What is it about communities and groups that promise total belief and total enthrallment that so captures the imagination?
This course will look at a range of representations of cults in popular culture—from the documentary Wild Wild Country to novels, journalistic exposés, and films—to consider what cults might tell us about society, politics, religion, and our sense of self. This class hopes to invite students who are ready to be themselves fascinated, enthralled, and perhaps entranced. One of the tasks before us will be to learn how to think critically in the face of that fascination. Engaging theories of psychology, sociology, and religion, we will examine how cults and their representation in popular culture reveal questions of desire, belonging, and self-effacement.
Students will also be asked to be ready to work collaboratively with one another over the course of the semester, building their own intentional community of sorts.
Films and readings may include Wild Wild Country, Holy Smokes: My Childhood in Orange, and Freud's Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego
This year marks the centenary of James Joyce’s Ulysses, widely considered the most important novel of the twentieth century. We will consider the book at a variety of scales: word, sentence, narrative strategy, and organizational structure. We will also consider it from a variety of perspectives: as an expression of the historical and political context of 1904 and of the years leading up to its publication in 1922, as a primary force in the ruptures and inventions of literary modernism, as a mirror and a harbinger of transformations in the social understanding of gender, sex, and the individual, and as the focus of evolving literary critical responses over the past hundred years,
Please click here for more information about enrollment in English 190.
Douglass, Frederick: The Heroic Slave; Jewett, Sarah Orne: The Country of the Pointed Firs; Stoddard, Elizabeth: The Morgesons; Thaxter, Celia: Among the Shoals; Thoreau, Henry David: Walden; or, Life in the Woods
Additional short readings will be made available via a course reader and/or on bCourses. See below.
Additional film/media (to be made available via a class screening or online): Daughters of the Dust (dir. Julie Dash)
Apart from the books listed above, shorter readings will include work by Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Emily Dickinson, Charles Chesnutt, and Zitkala-Sa, as well as critical essays and scholarship by Timothy Morton, Ursula K. Heise, Juliana Chow, Michelle Neely, Branka Arsić, Elise Lemire, Monique Allewaert, Sylviane A. Diouf, Dana Luciano, Robin Wall Kimmerer, and Ross Gay.
What did “nature” mean in nineteenth-century America? How did writers, artists, and activists from the period represent and interact with the natural world around them? In this research seminar, we will approach these questions through the lens of what eco-critic Timothy Morton has termed “ecological thinking”: a recognition and thinking through of our interconnectness with the non-human environment. We will consider versions of “ecological thinking” from a diversity of nineteenth-century perspectives in order to test out its political, aesthetic, and ethical possibilities. Together, we will dig through the rich soil of nineteenth-century American ecological writing and ask what fruit it bears for thinking about the environmental crises of our contemporary moment.
Please click here for more information about enrollment in English 190.
This single author seminar will explore and compare the different kinds of textual materiality—manuscript, print, digital, and aural—in which Emily Dickinson’s writings have circulated. Questions will include: what are the ecological aspects of Dickinson’s poetry? What is Dickinson’s relation to translation? What role does meter play in distinguishing the poems from the letters in which they are embedded?
Please click here for more information about enrollment in English 190.
At the end of October 1921 (on his own birthday), writing in the small avant-garde magazine The Little Review, Ezra Pound declared a new calendar, celebrating the dawn of a new ‘Year 1’. This new calendar, he suggested, would be dated ‘p.s.U’, post scriptem Ulysses, from the completion of a work that had been appearing in serial form for several months, James Joyce’s Ulysses. In February 1922, Ulysses would be published in Paris, by Sylvia Beach at Shakespeare & Co., a book-shop on the Left Bank (on Joyce’s birthday). That event a century ago has stood as a landmark ever since, the most visible sign of a cultural annus mirabilis.
This course is about that year. But instead of reading Ulysses (students interested in doing so are directed to the parallel seminar being taught by Professor Catherine Flynn), we will attend to everything else that was happening in 1922, or at least as much of it as can be reasonably managed.
This includes some of the decisive events that would shape the interwar era. In January, the ratification of the Anglo-Irish Treaty triggered a civil war and laid the groundwork for what would become the Irish Free State. In February, Egypt claimed limited autonomy from the British Empire as well, but in March, Mohandas Gandhi was imprisoned for sedition in India.
In April, Joseph Stalin became the General Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party’s Central Committee; in December, Russia joined with Ukraine, Belarus, and several other republics to form the USSR (while Lenin wrote a will and urged that Stalin be removed from his post). Also in April, the Soviet government reached an agreement with the German Weimar Republic, in the Treaty of Rapallo, to renormalize diplomatic and economic relations. In June, Walter Rathenau, the German Foreign Minister who negotiated the agreement, was assasinated in Berlin by early fascist paramilitaries (a year later, associated groups would stage a failed putsch in Munich). In October, the Italian Fascist Party led the March on Rome and installed Benito Mussolini as prime minister.
Also in October, T. S. Eliot published The Waste Land, in the first number of a new review he called The Criterion. A month later, the British Broadcasting Corporation went on the air, Howard Carter opened the Tomb of Tutankhamen in Egypt, the Ottoman Empire was abolished, the Labour Party eclipsed the Liberal Party as the chief opposition in the British Parliament, and Marcel Proust died in Paris. Virginia Woolf published Jacob’s Room, her first novel in an incipiently experimental style, at the Hogarth Press. Ludwig Wittgenstein published the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, and Bronislaw Malinowski published Argonauts of the Western Pacific.
Elsewhere, Gertrude Stein collected a series of her experimental writings as Geography and Plays. Jean Cocteau debuted a ‘contraction’ of Antigone, with sets designed by Pablo Picasso and starring Antonin Artaud. Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky joined the Bauhaus and its first full exhibition, where the remnants of Dada staged its funeral (before joining André Breton and Francis Picabia to formulate what would soon become Surrealism). Franz Kafka began The Castle, a book he would not finish. Pound himself moved to Italy and wrote the Malatesta Cantos; W. B. Yeats took a seat in the Irish Senate. Le Corbusier published a series of magazine articles that would lay the groundwork for the International Style. Arnold Schoenberg completed his ‘Suite for Piano’ (op. 25), the first piece composed entirely according to a serial system of twelve tones; his student Alban Berg completed Wozzeck, the first opera composed according to the same principle. F. W. Murnau released Nosferatu, Fritz Lang released Dr. Mabuse, Buster Keaton released Cops, and Robert J. Flaherty released Nanook of the North; meanwhile, Dziga Vertov developed a theory of ‘film-truth’ (Kino-Pravda) and Sergei Eisenstein formulated a theory of montage.
And so on. One could go on and still leave much out. We will not manage to account for all of it, nor will we try. But we will explore as much of it as we can: poetry, fiction, theater, painting, design, music, performance, architecture, film, philosophy, and more. That exploration will culminate in a final research project, in which students are encouraged to discover their own ways into modernism’s Year 1.
Please click here for more information about enrollment in English 190.
Doctorow, E.L.: The Book of Daniel; Ma, Ling: Severance; West, Nathanael: The Day of the Locust; Wright, Richard: Native Son
This research seminar will explore the impact of economic crisis and systemic transformation on symbolic authority and cultural production. To what extent is culture determined by economic forces, and to what extent is it separate from these forces? How do moments of crisis open new ways of theorizing culture—expanding or delimiting what we expect culture to accomplish in the world? To answer these questions, the seminar will focus on the last three major worldwide economic crises—the 1930s, the 1970s, and that which began in 2008 and continues to shape our lives. We will see how the 1930s witnessed what has been called the “laboring” of American culture, but also the emergence of cultural forms that advanced fascism in Europe. We will see how the 1970s witnessed the emergence of an ostensibly depoliticized “postmodern” culture, but also radical advances in cultural studies and critical race theory. Finally, we will explore the possibilities and limitations delivered by the most recent crisis and heightened by the pandemic.
Please click here for more information about enrollment in English 190.
Contact Jennifer Miller at j_miller@berkeley.edu for more information about this class.
Please click here for more information about enrollment in English 190.
Le Guin, Ursula: The Dispossessed; Le Guin, Ursula: The Lathe of Heaven; Le Guin, Ursula: The Left Hand of Darkness; Le Guin, Ursula: The Unreal and the Real: The Selected Short Stories of Ursula LeGuin; Le Guin, Ursula: The Word for World is Forest; Le Guin, Ursula: Worlds of Exile and Illusion: Three Complete Novels of the Hainish Series in One Volume
“Science Fiction is often described, and even defined, as extrapolative. The science fiction writer is supposed to take a trend or phenomenon of the here-and-now, purify and intensify it for dramatic effect, and extend it into the future. “If this goes on, this is what will happen.” A prediction is made. … The outcome seems almost inevitably to be cancer. … Strictly extrapolative works of science fiction generally arrive about where the Club of Rome arrives: somewhere between human liberty and the total extinction of terrestrial life.”
This course will serve as a deep dive into the fantasy/science fiction work of Berkeley native Ursula LeGuin. As the quote conveys, LeGuin eschewed her peers' and contemporaries' extrapolative narratives and technological determinism. Her fantasies and science fiction dwelt on our imaginative capacity to make and undo the world through culture, custom, language, and technology. But foremost in her extensive oeuvre is the social. We will read a wide selection of LeGuin's novels, short stories, essays, and adaptations of LeGuin's fiction in film and other media. We will also address LeGuin's critics and interlocutors in an attempt to trace the long arc of her influence on genre fiction, traditional narrative fiction, and futurist writings.
Please click here for more information about enrollment in English 190.
Chandler, R.: The Big Sleep; Didion, J. : Slouching toward Bethlehem.; Steinbeck, J.: The Long Valley; Steinbeck, J.: The Pastures of Heaven
Besides reading and discussing fiction and essays attempting to identify or explain distinctive regional characteristics, this course will include consideration of some movies shaped by and shaping conceptions of California. Writing will consist of a term paper of 16-20 pages. There will be no quizzes or exams, but seminar attendance and participation will be expected, and will affect grades.
Please click here for more information about enrollment in English 190.
H195 is a two-semester course that gives students the training they need to conduct original research and develop their findings into a successful scholarly essay, 40-60 pages in length.
Crucial to this enterprise is an understanding of interpretative methods. What kind of criticism will you practice? Which scholarly conversation will you seek to join? In the fall semester, students will learn about the theoretical frameworks that have helped shape literary study as it is now conducted. Since many of the assigned critical essays are also superb examples of effective argumentation, our consideration of method will also extend to writerly practices such as thesis construction, rhetorical techniques and uses of evidence.
The most important requirement for the course is curiosity. What would you like to know more about? What author, issue, or era would you like to spend a year thinking about? Some students begin the class with a strong intuition about what they might like to do; others are wrestling with two or three research ideas. These are happy problems and can be sorted out in consultation with the professor. But do not sign up for the Honors course if you can’t imagine immersing yourself in a topic of your own choosing for a full year.
By the beginning of October, research topics should be in place. You will be expected to work closely with the Humanities Librarian to develop expertise in navigating scholarly resources. A prospectus and bibliography are required by the end of the fall term.
Students who have completed the fall course requirements satisfactorily will receive the grade of IP for the fall term. Written work includes a short analysis of one of the assigned works of criticism. All written work for the fall will be graded.
In the spring semester, students organize into writing groups and meet regularly to help one another with their independent research. There are a few required meetings of the class as a whole, a modest amount of assigned reading, and no written work other than the Honors thesis. A complete draft of the thesis is due before spring break.
Students admitted to this section of the Honors Course should read over the summer How to Write a BA Thesis, 2nd Edition, by Charles Lipson (Chicago UP). I will notify you when additional books have been ordered for the course.
Booth, Wayne: The Craft of Research; Booth, Wayne: The Craft of Research; Booth, Wayne: The Craft of Research; Booth, Wayne: The Craft of Research; Booth, Wayne: The Craft of Research; Booth, Wayne: The Craft of Research
Most of the readings for this class will be essays, short fiction, and poetry available on our bCourses site.
H195A/B is a two-semester seminar that lays the groundwork for and guides you through the completion a 40-60 page Honors thesis on a subject of your choice. The first semester offers an inquiry into critical approaches, research methods, and theoretical frameworks. We will engage with some of the key theoretical movements and debates of the twentieth century (e.g., New Criticism, post-structuralism, psychoanalysis, materialism[s], feminism, postcolonial and critical race theory, affect theory). We will ground our collective inquiry in readings of a few primary texts that highlight the questions posed by specific genres. The goal is to help you to define a compelling research project that will sustain your interest over several months, to conceptualize and contextualize the critical questions that enlist your keenest curiosity, to engage with secondary materials productively, to articulate the stakes of your inquiry, and to develop a persuasive critical voice and argument.
I encourage you to think about potential thesis projects over the summer. Ideally, you will have narrowed the field to a couple of options by the start of fall semester. In addition to the assigned readings, the work for that semester will entail some preliminary research, thinking, and writing that will culminate in a thesis proposal and annotated bibliography by the semester’s end.
During the spring semester students will meet with me in individual conferences and share preliminary drafts in working groups. Portions of the thesis will be submitted for feedback at regular intervals. A draft of the entire thesis will be due in early April; the final version will be due in early May.