Graduate students from other departments and exceptionally well-prepared undergraduates are welcome in English graduate courses (except for English 200 and 375) insofar as limitations of class size allow. Graduate courses are usually limited to 15 students; courses numbered 250 are usually limited to 10.
When demand for a graduate course exceeds the maximum enrollment limit, the instructor will determine priorities for enrollment and inform students of his/her decisions at the second class meeting. Prior enrollment does not guarantee a place in a graduate course that turns out to be oversubscribed on the first day of class; fortunately, this situation does not arise very often.
Readings will be made available online.
This seminar introduces students to the practices of professional literary study. Our focus will be three of our discipline's most fundamental concerns: textual criticism and editing; the production, circulation, and reception of texts; and theories of interpretation. We will not only examine the methods entailed by these modes of inquiry—asking what makes a particular approach meaningful and why—but also put such methods into practice. Students will write papers that speak to these different critical modes as well as a culminating final paper. These final papers will be presented to the department at a day-long symposium at the end of the semester.
Enrollment is limited to first-year students in the English department's doctoral program. No auditors will be permitted.
Booth (ed), Stephen : Shakespeare's Sonnets
For primary texts, the one required book will be Booth's edition of Shakespeare’s Sonnets above. Other poems we’ll look at together will be made available on bCourses. For students’ own projects, good print editions of the relevant texts will be needed.
For secondary texts, we’ll start with my own “An Art that Nature Makes”: A Linguistic Perspective on a Meter in English, which will be made available on bCourses. Other readings will also be made available on bCourses as they come up.
This course offers an introduction to meter from the perspective of theoretical linguistics. Fundamental to this approach is the assumption that any meter is shaped, sometimes consciously and sometimes not, not only by the meter’s own language(s), but also by the human mind’s capacity for language in general, particularly as it pertains to rhythm.
We will begin by considering what is probably the most influential and thoroughly studied meter in modern English, the iambic pentameter of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, formalizing its constraints on syllables, stress, and phrasing, its range of variation, and its artistic possibilities. From there, depending on students’ interests, we will turn to some of its predecessors in French, Italian, Old English and Latin, and to some of its companions and successors in modern English, such as looser forms of iambic pentameter (including some of Shakespeare in other genres), and so-called “strong-stress” meters such as the influential and challenging “Sprung Rhythm” of Hopkins. Finally, if time permits, we will consider some aspects of how meter in poetry is like and unlike rhythmic forms in music.
Throughout, the focus will be on helping students conceptualize and contextualize meter(s) of poet(s) they themselves are studying. A sequence of assignments designed to support that will be the principal requirement of the course, leading to a short final paper.
No prior training in linguistics or metrics is required.
The course will trace genealogies of American thought from transcendentalism through pragmatism. In the first half, we will focus on the life in letters of Ralph Waldo Emerson and on Emerson’s relationship to the intellectual and social history of the movement he defined. Reading Emerson alongside Henry David Thoreau and others, we’ll look at transcendentalism as a program for abolition, for labor reform, for public intellectualism, for education, for environmentalism, and for new experiments in reading, writing, and living. We will keep in mind efforts to define and detract from transcendentalism on religious grounds and also efforts to see the movement as engaged with Kant, Coleridge, and Carlyle (and as engaging Nietzsche) on ideas of perception, consciousness, and experience, and as an American answer to philosophical thinking. In the second half of the seminar, we will try to understand what pragmatism takes from transcendentalism—to see where the histories of these ideas converge and depart—while also putting transcendentalists into conversation with process philosophers and phenomenologists a century later. Our discussions will focus on William James primarily, but also works by John Dewey, Alain Locke, and Alfred North Whitehead.
Recommended: Hayot, Eric: The Elements of Academic Style; Hayot, Eric: The Elements of Academic Style
This will be a hands-on writing workshop intended to facilitate and accelerate the transition from qualifying exams to prospectus conference, from prospectus conference to first dissertation chapter, and from the status of student to that of independent scholar. The workshop provides a collaborative critical community in which to try out successive versions of your dissertation project and to learn how your peers are constructing theirs. We will review a range of prospectuses from the past to demystify the genre and to gain a better understanding of its form and function.
Writing assignments are designed to structure points of entry into the prospectus: although some of the early assignments may be more immediately relevant to certain projects than to others, they all have the benefit of facilitating the passage from concepts to writing according to a series of deadlines. Beginning with exercises to galvanize your thinking, the assignments will map increasingly onto the specific components of the prospectus as the semester proceeds. The goal is to insure that by the end of the semester, every member of the workshop will have submitted a prospectus to his or her committee.
A series of works in the last twenty years has complicated the notion that modernism is characterized by a preoccupation with interiority, arguing for public culture as a crucial space for the construction of modernism. This course asks how modernist interiority and technologies of dissemination affect one another and how this changes our understanding of the politics of the movement. We will consider modernist works with Jürgen Habermas’s concept of the public sphere, in which multiple registers and perspectives encounter one another in an open and democratic realm of discourse. How can an investigation of modernists’ staging and undermining of normative or ideal speech situations inform our understanding of modernist language and of the political capacities of the movement? Our discussion will address novels, plays, poems, manifestos, little magazines, newspaper columns, radio plays and addresses, cartoons, and films by figures including Samuel Beckett, André Breton, Alfred Jarry, James Joyce, Wyndham Lewis, Flann O’Brien, Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, Virginia Woolf, H. G. Wells, and W. B. Yeats.
In the late fourteenth century, Geoffrey Chaucer created a fictional pilgrimage in which travelers competed with one another to tell a tale “of best sentence and moost solaas”—meaning, a tale that best combines moral seriousness with pleasure. The resulting collection of stories, the Canterbury Tales, will provide our text for this class. Chaucer experimented with a wide range of genres and styles in the Tales; you will encounter medieval romance, fabliau (a kind of bawdy comic story), saints' lives, beast fables, autobiographical prologues, and more. In the midst of this formal diversity, we find themes that tie the story collection together: the role of women in literature and the world; the nature and meaning of vernacular poetry; the psychology of religious experience; the effect of power on human relationships; the place of art in society; the nature of causality and human free will; and more. We will read the Canterbury Tales from start to finish, focusing on close reading in order to address these themes. You will work in groups as well as individually as you learn to read Middle English (no prior experience necessary). And we will read the Tales out loud as much as we can!
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.
English 211 will be taught in tandem with English 111. Graduate students will attend the English 111 lectures, but will also be responsible for joining a once-a-week discussion section, for additional primary and secondary readings, a class presentation, and two medium-length essays.
Coultas, Brenda: Marvelous Bones of Time; Field, Thalia: Bird Lovers, Backyard; Taylor, Catherine: Apart; Trethewey, Natasha: Native Guard
This fall I’m going to ask that poetry workshop members join me in reading and thinking about location as an active process and about cross-genre writing as a response to and engagement with that process. Those are my particular—though by no means exclusive—interests for the fall and workshop people will be encouraged to work out of their own necessities. The booklist: The Marvelous Bones of Time, by Brenda Coultas; Bird Lovers, Backyard, by Thalia Field; Apart, by Catherine Taylor; and Native Guard, by Natasha Trethewey. Writing prompts, field trips, "worshopping," much conversation.
Workshop participants will be asked to keep a dream journal.
According to one of the most influential, and contested, theories of modernity, our life in capitalism and bureaucratic rationality began in the early modern period “when asceticism was carried out of monastic cells into everyday life, and began to dominate worldly morality.” In this course, we ask how or indeed whether 16th-century literature fits in with Max Weber’s theory of the Protestant Reformation bringing about the disenchantment of the world. Did the worldly poetry of Thomas Wyatt or Philip Sidney precipitate the secularization Weber talks about? Should we read the psalm translations of Anne Locke or Mary Sidney as some of the earliest attempts at re-enchantment by literature? Or do the literary cultures that emerged between Thomas More’s Utopia and his great-grandnephew John Donne’s satires tell an altogether different story?
The plan of the course is to consider a little bit of prose and drama but keep our main focus on poetry; however, the reading schedule will have the flexibility to accommodate texts students would like to read in the context of the course.
In this course, we will read (most of) the works of Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis, and little else. This will mean studying the changing models of consciousness; theories of dream interpretation, parapraxis, and libido; accounts of analytic technique and clinical practice; critical papers on literature, drama, music, and art; forays into ethnography, Biblical exegesis, and theology; case studies of neurosis, phobia, hysteria, and psychosis; and portions of Freud’s voluminous correspondence. Readings will be conducted in English; the class is designed for those who wish to read Freud as humanists—which is to say for its literary, conceptual, and philosophical dimensions—but we will welcome clinicians and psychologists should any wish to attend.
Co-taught by a faculty member and a graduate student instructor (the department's R & C Assistant Coordinator), this course introduces new English GSIs to the practice and theory of teaching literature and writing at UC Berkeley in sections linked to English 45 and select upper-division courses, as well in R1A and R1B, and beyond. At once a seminar and a hands-on practicum, the class will cover topics such as strategies for leading discussion, teaching critical reading skills and the elements of composition, responding to and evaluating student writing, developing paper topics and other exercises, and approaching the other responsibilities that make up the work of teaching here and elsewhere.