Oyeyemi, Helen: The Icarus Girl; Oyeyemi, Helen: White is for Witching
Atlantics (dir. Mati Diop). Short stories from Ben Okri’s collections Prayer for the Living, and Stars of the New Curfew.
Almost forty years ago, the pop star Madonna sang that “we are living in a material world, and I am a material girl.” But is this really a material world? And are we only material beings? While Madonna’s claim is a response to capitalism’s demand to accumulate material wealth, it also references the materialist philosophies and ‘evidence-based’ knowledge practices that are central to modern Euro-American common sense. But this materialist approach is not universal: throughout history, humans have claimed that reality includes spiritual or non-material dimensions whose existence cannot be accounted for by western science. This is true even in the west—consider the recent TikTok trend of 'reality shifting,' or the popularity of '5D consciousness'.
This course considers the entanglement of the spiritual and material realms in fiction from two contemporary Nigerian authors, Helen Oyeyemi and Ben Okri, whose work explores this entanglement in a modern world marked by migration and diasporic dislocation, cultural multiplicity, and the discrediting of indigenous knowledge and belief systems. We will be guided by Nigerian scholar Harry Garuba’s influential paper “Explorations in Animist Materialism: Notes on Reading/Writing African Literature, Culture, and Society,” which considers how African animist materialisms are compatible with other materialist philosophies, including the historical materialism of Marxist thought.
The course, whose title is taken from a short story by Ben Okri, will encourage us to think with—and not against—the alternative realities presented in animist texts from Africa and beyond. Our thinking will take place in class discussions and in writing. Students will submit short pieces and writing exercises as part of a portfolio, engage in peer review processes, and craft one centerpiece. Some class time will be reserved for writing and workshopping. Creative exploration in critical writing will be encouraged!
Adjei-Brenyah, Nana Kwame: Friday Black; Rooney, Sally: Normal People
Besides the books, we'll look with especial care at three particular millennial texts:
—a film: Frances Ha (Greta Gerwig/Noah Baumbach, 2013)
—a videogame: A Short Hike (Adam Robinson-Yu, 2019)
—an Internet text: 17776 (Jon Bois, 2017)
I'll make the film and Internet text easily available. The game has been published on essentially every platform, and it usually costs less than a used paperback. For those who cannot or do not want to play it, there exists a playthrough without commentary online for which I'll provide a link.
We'll also look at examples of journalism, cultural criticism, and texts from other aesthetic forms. I'll encourage everyone to bring examples of millennial narratives we'll use to build our own archive.
“how long can a culture persist without the new? What happens if the young are no longer capable of producing surprises?”
—Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism
“The air we breathe is toxic, the water we drink is full of microplastics, and our food is contaminated by cancerous Teflon chemicals. Our quality of life is in decline, and along with it, the quality of aesthetic experience available to us. ”
—Sally Rooney, Beautiful World, Where Are You?
Does "millennial" mean anything anymore? Has its significance been so thoroughly flattened by Our Cultural Discourse that it points not to a wobbily defined generation but to everything, and also to nothing? For our purposes, we'll consider "millennial" not as a demographic but as an aesthetic, a sensibility—a vibe. By looking closely at narratives that have been called, or seem somehow as, millennial—a novel, a collection of stories, a film, a videogame, and an Internet text (plus other, smaller things)—we'll ask a set of questions: what does it mean and feel like to be young (whatever that means) right now? How does the millennial aesthetic interact with identity categories like gender, race, sexuality, and age? How have contemporary narratives changed their form to respond to changes in American culture? How do these narratives address material problems (precarious capitalism, climate crises, structural identity inequities) alongside social, emotional, and spiritual anxieties (loneliness, alienation, anhedonia)?
Because this is an R1A course, our goals prioritize the development of your writing practice, in the sense of a creative, vocational, spiritual, or otherwise serious and expressive practice. Good writing does not occur when a prefabricated form has been mastered, when a set of repeatable moves have been memorized. Good writing, solid essays, strong voice, creative argumentation—all these come about through experimentation, failure, collaboration, a willingness to feel and stumble around inside the process of writing. In this course, you will always write for a reason, for a certain audience. You won’t just pretend to do writing that other people will see—you will literally do it.
In this course, we will be working critics. We will think and write together about recent texts and contemporary life.
Hagedorn (Editor), Jessica: Charlie Chan Is Dead: An Anthology of Contemporary Asian American Fiction; Kingston, Maxine Hong: China Men; Lee, Chang-Rae: Native Speaker; Nguyen, Viet Thanh: The Refugees
Who Killed Vincent Chin? (1987, dir. Christine Choy and Renee Tajima-Peñathat)
American Revolutionary: The Evolution of Grace Lee Boggs (2013, dir. Grace Lee)
This class intends to take a historical approach to studying the racial formation of Asians and Asian Americans in the United States since the late nineteenth century. Asian American historiography has often been concerned with delineating the contours of the Asiatic immigrant’s journey in this country from one position to another: from inadmissible and inassimilable alien associated with social and economic menace (the so-called “Yellow Peril” of the early 20th century) to a domesticated emblem of upward socioeconomic mobility (the so-called “Model Minority” emerging out of the 1960s).
This class seeks to identify the historical conditions, structures, and patterns underlying these hegemonic representational tropes and epistemological modes. This approach aims at unearthing continuities between the apparent transformations, oscillations, and idiosyncracies of Asiatic racial formation. It also aims at attending to the specificities of minority and marginalized representation – especially the “truth” or “evidence” of individual expression, experience, and agency – in order to discern the shared socio-cultural terrain, historical conditions, and representational tools and tropes that make these expressions possible and mediate our reception of them.
As an R1A course, this class is designed to help students cultivate skills in close and critical reading and in developing and articulating persuasive and elegant arguments about social, cultural, political, and aesthetic issues in writing.
Front Matter:
“Minorities, Yes; But Oppressed, No”: Asian American Racialization from "Yellow Peril" to the "Model Minority Myth" and Beyond; or, Racialization & Representation in the Construction of Asian American Identity
English R1A Section 4 (Fall 2022) ✵ MWF 12:10 – 1:00 ✵ Wheeler 122
GSI: Rumur Dowling
Email: rumur_dowling@berkeley.edu
OH: F 1:10 – 2:00 @ Sather's Cross Path Picnic Tables (North of Dwinelle Hall) or by Zoom Appointment
This Rhetoric and Composition course examines protest poetry in the United States as a social phenomenon and literary tradition from the nineteenth century to the present. We will explore and think critically about “protest poetics” in its various shapes and forms, from the spirituals of the enslaved to the chants of mass demonstrations, from popular poems circulated in newspapers to avant-garde head-scratchers. Alongside these poems, we’ll interact with contextual materials from a wide range of media: comic books, manifestos, commercials, folk songs, performance art, leaflets, documentary films, chapbooks, and more.
Because this is a Rhetoric and Composition course, our central priority will be to develop effective reading, note-taking, and composition skills for college writing. Half of our time will be spent examining and practicing the basic skills involved in the writing of thesis-driven essays, including summary, analysis, thesis construction, and text citation.
Miller, Madeline: Circe
“Humbling women seems to me a chief pastime of poets. As if there can be no story unless we crawl and weep.” --Madeline Miller, Circe
Although Madeline Miller’s 2018 novel, Circe, recently prompted new interest in the witch of Aeaea, Circe has been a source of creative inspiration for thousands of years. As we will explore throughout this semester, poets and painters, short story writers and novelists alike have interpreted the character from a variety of perspectives. In this course, we will use Circe and the numerous works she has inspired to explore how gender, agency, cruelty, and grief are represented and intersect across both historical periods and genres. We will progress in a roughly chronological manner, starting with Homer’s Odyssey and texts from the Middle Ages, then working our way through poetry and prose ranging from the 17th to 21st centuries, and concluding with the novel Circe.
This is a writing-intensive course whose ultimate objective is to cultivate students’ analytical thinking and writing skills. To this end, we will spend a significant amount of time discussing how to productively engage with texts and effectively express observations and arguments in our own writing. Additionally, through the peer review workshops and the process of moving from a draft to a final paper, we will practice how to give and receive feedback constructively.
Chopin, Kate: The Awakening; Larsen, Nella: Passing; Morrison, Toni: Beloved; Plath, Sylvia: The Bell Jar
Other readings will be made available on bCourses, including selected excerpts from Georges Canguilhem, Michel Foucault, Eve Sedgwick, Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubart, Christina Sharpe, Mariarosa Dalla Costa and Selma James, and Silvia Federici.
Madness often takes shape in literature as a kind of shattering, a disillusionment or awakening that leaves fragmented subjectivity in its wake. The figure of the madwoman in particular has been of vital importance to feminist thought in twentieth century literature and philosophy. Theorists from Foucault to Gilbert and Gubar have sought to understand the ways in which hysteria functions as an oppressively gendered category. In literature, writers like Kate Chopin, Nella Larsen, Sylvia Plath, and Toni Morrison have painted dazzling portraits of women whose complex, fractured subjectivity resists and complicates the tropes passed down from previous centuries. This course asks what happens when madness is gendered. We will use our time together to ask what limits are imposed on feminine subjectivity, how we might interrogate those demarcations, whether and when madness constitutes a threat to power. Our shared texts will span a range of twentieth century fiction with female protagonists who are frequently read as “mad,” either because they are driven to insanity by their circumstances or because their view of the world is out of step with normative expectations—or both. The syllabus includes secondary source material that will provide a critical lens to aid us in thinking through the figure of the hysterical woman in terms of race and class as well as gender. To that end, we will engage selected criticism from Marxism, Feminism, and Black Studies.
This is a writing-intensive course designed to familiarize you with the basic elements of critical reading and writing. Students will write, workshop, and revise papers throughout the semester, with a portion of class time devoted to the practical components of drafting an academic essay.
Austen, Jane: Emma; Chattopadhay, Bankim Chandra: Rajmohan's Wife; Ferrante, Elena: My Brilliant Friend; Woolf, Virginia: A Room of One's Own
Noah Baumbach, Frances Ha (2012 film), Vishal Bhardwaj, Dedh Ishqiya (2014 film), Ambai, Fish in a Dwindling Lake (2012)**(short story to be decided from this collection)
While popular media has commented on the recent emphasis on female friendship in literary fiction, the phenomenon has elided scholarly attention. In this course, we will both interrogate and think beyond the question of appeal: as a particular encounter with otherness and therefore a site of political negotiation, what are the literary and political implications of contemporary female friendship? Before we approach the precarious field of the “present” cultural moment, we will go back in time to examine how, over the long arc of literary history, female friendship appears, glimmers, or lurks beneath various modes of literary fiction. We will consider the implications of female friendship for the politics of gender, but also—given the ceaseless deployment of friendship and enmity in political discourse—for larger questions of political being. Simultaneously, we will explore female friendship as a formal category, examining how the verbal or visual language in which female friendship is expressed allows us to think about the narrative principles of the texts/films/paintings we will be looking at over the semester.
Huysmans: Là-Bas; Marlowe: Doctor Faustus
“The absence of myth is also a myth: the coldest, the purest, the only true myth.”
In a moment when digital covens cast binding spells on Trump, viral Tik Tok investors combine crypto trading with astrology, and Pew Research claims there are 1.5 million self-identified pagans in America, is it fair to characterize modernity as “secular”? To address this question, this course will investigate the active if subterranean influence of the much maligned phenomenon known as the occult, gently amending Max Weber’s famous thesis of die Entzauberung der Welt —the “de-magic-ing” of the world. Tracing the spectral persistence of esoteric currents within the ascendant Enlightenment paradigm of rationality, we will discover illicit liaisons between science, technology, psychology, statecraft, alchemy, thaumaturgy, and erotic magic. Disturbing the concept of a secular modernity, the course will provide students with tools to develop a thesis for how the occult simultaneously mediates and defines the boundaries of religion and science. In addition to this, the course will consider how historically the occult provided certain procedures and techniques that sought to enable interventions in the surrounding world. Finally, as a class we will theorize ritual--its structure, its uses and abuses--in contemporary contexts.
Anchored by two literary works, Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus and Huysmans’ Là-Bas, our class will also encounter Renaissance grimoires, Rosicrucian manuscripts, alchemical texts, and a broad range of secondary materials, including excerpts from The Secret Life of Puppets, Techgnosis, and Technology as Magic. We will virtually detour through Princeton’s Engineering Anomalies Research Lab and University of Virginia’s Center for Perceptual Studies and gaze into the scrying mirror of digital art.
Dickens, Charles: Bleak House (978-0141439723)
Adaptations and secondary readings to be uploaded on bCourses
This course teaches reading, writing, and researching skills by applying them to one big book, Charles Dickens’ Bleak House, which was not always one big book. Originally published in 20 monthly installments from 1852 to 1853, Bleak House has always posed to its readers a problem of scale and appetite—so we will also practice sustained attention to the “serial” as a form replicated in Bleak House’s radio and television adaptations. Students will practice formal analysis of those media and will enter the ongoing critical conversation about Dickens’ satirical novel by reading and responding to other scholars, who have so far used the novel to analyze such Victorian fantasies as the gender of empire, ecological catastrophe, and spontaneous combustion, among a wide array of others.
Students will write, peer-review, and rewrite a series of literary-critical essays, with the goal of fostering attentive reading and viewing, imaginative analysis, and bold writing. As this course fulfills the R1B requirement, we will focus on scaling progressively longer essays and understanding and responding to secondary scholarly sources.
Rivera, Tomás : And the Earth Did Not Devour Him; Viramontes, Helena: Under the Feet of Jesus
A course reader including writing by CherrÍe L. Morgan, Gloria Anzaldúa, Sandra Cisneros, Diana Garcia and others.
In this course, we’ll read some classic as well as more contemporary works of chicano/a/x literature focusing specifically on the lives and labors of agricultural, industrial and domestic workers. How are these different kinds of laboring–the work of the field, the factory and the home–represented in chicanx fiction, poetry, drama and film? And how might representing or providing an account of such laboring serve potentially emancipatory ends? Additional topics include immigration and migration; gendered labor; efforts for and against assimilation; political organization and resistance; and the artist’s relationship to their community.
Throughout this R1B course, you'll be cultivating your own reading and writing skills through class discussion, writing exercises, workshops and writing seminars. You’ll be asked not only to write about the material we read and discuss in class, but more importantly, to approach your own writing as something worth tending to.
Recommended: Barthes, Roland: A Lover's Discourse
Course materials will be available as PDFs, or, upon request, course readers.
What does it mean, in Taylor Swift's 2008 hit single “Love Story,” when the besotted speaker declares, “It's a love story, baby, just say, 'Yes'” -- and what, in this declaration, is the difference between the love story and love itself?
Along these lines of inquiry, this course will teach critical reading and writing skills through the "love story" as a literary genre and as a narrative mode which attempts to describe a particular social relationship. In our investigation of the love story, we will learn to analyze the relationship between genre and our experience of the world, and more broadly, to interrogate the work of literature in mediating reality. Our readings will draw from a variety of forms and media, including poetry, letters, short stories, and, potentially, reality television. We will also engage in critical conversations after reading some literary criticism and cultural theory, including Roland Barthes's A Lover's Discourse. Among others to be determined, texts for this course will include sonnets from Petrarch and Shakespeare, selected love letters from Franz Kafka to his translator, Milena Jesenská, and excerpts from Madame de Lafayette's The Princess of Cleves. Some further questions we might consider include: Can "the love story" be historicized? How can language be used to narrate a romance? What makes for a "good" love story? Why do we care to hear about other people's love stories?
The aim of this course will be to exercise our skills in reading and writing on literary texts, and to think critically about our analytic methods, as well as how, why, and to what end we might believe that they work. Students will write, peer-review, and rewrite a series of literary-critical essays, with the goal of fostering attentive reading and viewing, imaginative analysis, and bold writing. As this course fulfills the R1B requirement, we will focus on scaling progressively longer essays and incorporating research.
Do poems take up truths? Can a novel be a way of thinking about something? What can you learn—about yourself, about others, about the world—from a film? This course considers the ways that literature, art, and film are not only a part of our creative imaginations but also central sources of insight into what is real and actual. How do fictional and imaginative works touch what is worldbound? How do they help us see, hear, and understand our world?
All of the course readings will help us think about central philosophical questions—Who are we? How should we live? What do we know?—in compelling ways. We will read broadly across genres and forms. Texts will include poetry (William Wordsworth, Emily Dickinson, Wallace Stevens, Langston Hughes, Elizabeth Bishop), fiction (Jane Austen, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf), drama (Henrik Ibsen, Samuel Beckett), film (Alfred Hitchcock, Agnès Varda), and cultural theory and philosophy (Plato, Nietzsche, Roland Barthes, Toni Morrison).
As a course in the Reading and Composition sequence, this class will focus on developing your skills in critical thinking and clear, graceful, persuasive written expression in the form of the academic essay. We will practice writing and reflect on writing regularly and frequently. Students will write two formal papers, each with revisions, and a final research paper. Other requirements include attendance, engaged and active class participation, and informal writing assignments. All are welcome.
Book List:
Ford, John: ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore; Marlowe, Christopher: Edward II; Shakespeare, William: As You Like It.
Other Readings and Media:
Edward II (film), dir. Derek Jarman (1991)
Paris is Burning (film), dir. Jennie Livingston (1990).
Additional primary and secondary texts will be provided electronically, including works from Renaissance antitheatricalists like Philip Stubbes and Stephen Gosson, as well as modern theorists of gender and sexuality such as Michel Foucault and Judith Butler.
Description:
The drama of Shakespeare and his contemporaries offers a fascinating site for the analysis of gender and sexuality as historical and theoretical constructs, rather than as the timeless and universal ‘facts’ of human experience which they are often assumed to be. In a ‘transvestite theatre’ in which all roles, male and female, are played by boys and men, assumptions regarding the absolute and fixed nature of gender difference are called into question, while the fact that scenes of heterosexual desire are played out between men creates a space for the expression of homosexual and other transgressive desires. At the level of both form and content, the early modern theatre above all underlines the status of gender as performance. We will read a set of plays produced between the 1580s and 1630s which pose gender and sexuality as central problems, studying these in conjunction with a variety of both Renaissance and modern-day texts confronting these debates. We will seek to reflect upon the immense shaping power of the societal norms which govern sex and gender, and to locate those instances where non-normative identities and sexualities assert themselves.
The broader academic purpose of this course is to develop your critical reading and writing skills, whatever your major might be. You will write and revise three papers of increasing length over the semester, and work with peers to improve your writing and critical thinking
Heaney, Seamus (translator): Beowulf; Kafka, Franz: The Metamorphosis; Stevenson, Robert Louis: The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
All of the following will be posted to bCourses: selections from the Epic of Gilgamesh; Homer's Odyssey; the One Thousand and One Nights (also known as Arabian Nights); early medieval monster catalogues; the graphic novel The Walking Dead; short stories by Carmen Maria Machado and H.P. Lovecraft; short poems by Lewis Carroll and Carol Anne Duffy.
Films include Night of the Living Dead and The Cabin in the Woods. Selections from television include episodes of What We Do in the Shadows and Reservation Dogs. All films and TV episodes will be screened in class.
Undead hordes, bloodthirsty beasts, and uncanny human hybrids are nothing new to the human imagination. The literature and folklore of most (if not all) human cultures is full of tales that bring our imagined fears to life.
In this course, our readings will focus on depictions of many creatures that have been described as “monstrous,” some from media over four thousand years old and others as recent as last year. Our research will look to the ancient and the modern, with a focus on both the mythology and folklore that inspired modern monsters and contemporary criticism of monsters as figures of radical change and fearful stasis. Covering traditions from cultures indigenous to Asia, Europe, and North America, we will track how different monsters have evolved over time and space and how the definition of “monstrous” has been adapted for each age and place. We will confront that which is uncomfortable, strange, and humorous along the way, using our explorations to try to understand the literary fascination with these monstrous creations.
Our main goal in this class is to become better readers, writers, and researchers. To do this, we will develop the skill of “close reading” to better understand and analyze our subject matter. We will “close read” all the media we encounter in this class—even visual media such as comics and films—by paying close attention to detail, which will help us to improve our own writing by making it as clear, concise, and evidence-driven as possible.
Your work in this class will culminate in a research project that will be supported by other assignments across the semester. You will be tasked with analyzing a monstrous figure or genre from a chosen cultural, historical, or literary tradition in an argumentative essay bolstered by independent research.
The American city is an incredibly complex and dynamic organism—and the subject of a great body of literature—both fiction and non-fiction. This course will trace and critically engage how American urban development has been written about from the early twentieth century to today. We will follow how writers have addressed the dramatic changes that American urban spaces underwent from the progressive era, turn-of-the-century segregation and the experience of the Great Migration to redlining, white flight, and suburbanization in the wake of the New Deal. Studying metropolitan areas across the nation, from New York City to the Bay Area and from Chicago to New Orleans, this course asks students to write critically about urban development from the battles over “urban renewal” and the anti-eviction campaigns of the Civil Rights era to the impact of 1970s neoliberal policies, the “war on drugs” and militarized “broken windows” policing, and the urban uprisings of the early 1990s. We will end this semester by studying how writers address the impact that hyper-gentrification and climate chaos (from disaster capitalism to grassroots organizing) have on American cities today.
Building on the skills students acquired in R1A, this course will continue to develop reading, writing, and research skills with the aim to practice writing longer essays that are rhetorically aware and partake in relevant scholarly conversations. Over the course of this semester, students will submit two shorter essays, before concluding the course by submitting a research paper in which they will partake in a scholarly debate that they feel passionate about.
Course readings:
· Marshall, Paule. Brown Girl, Brownstones. Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2009 [1959]. ISBN-13: 978-0486468327.
· Yates, Richard. Revolutionary Road. New York: Vintage, 2000 [1961]. · Eggers, Dave. Zeitoun. New York: Vintage (Random House), 2010. ISBN-13: 978-0307387943.
· Lethem, Jonathan. The Fortress of Solitude. New York: Vintage, 2004 [2003]. ISBN-13: 978-0375724886.
· Mengestu, Dinaw. The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears. New York: Riverhead, 2008 [2007]. ISBN-13: 978-1594482854.
Selections from other fictional and non-fictional texts will be made available online. These will include texts by James Baldwin, Toni Cade Bambara, Marshall Berman, Mike Davis, Ashley Dawson, Amitav Ghosh, Jane Jacobs, Naomi Klein, Jonathan Lethem, Dawn Bohulano Mabalon, Jodi Melamed, Peter Moskowitz, Suleiman Osman, Nathaniel Rich, Richard Rothstein, Roy Scranton, Nayan Shah, Anna Deavere Smith, Rebecca Solnit, John Edgar Wideman, and Craig Wilder. Films include Spike Lee’s Do The Right Thing and Joe Talbot’s The Last Black Man in San Francisco.
Carson , Anne: Nox ; Gaiman , Neil : The Ocean at the End of the Lane ; Ishiguro, Kazuo : When We Were Orphans; Shakespeare, William : Sonnets ; Yamashita, Karen Tei: Letters to Memory
How and why do we remember? What does 'memory' mean to both an individual and a culture? How do fictional narrators construct their memorial landscapes? In this class we will explore the topic of memory as it appears in a wide variety of genres and styles from the 16th through the 21st century. We will consider memory as an expansive and rich literary territory. In doing so we will move from the science fiction of Ursula LeGuin to the sonnets of Thomas Wyatt and Shakespeare to the photographic diaries of Bernadette Mayer; from the visual memories of Anne Carson's Nox to the unreliable memories of Kazuo Ishiguro's narrators.
This course will involve the writing of essays along with regular peer review exercises. In addition to this, two creative-writing assignments will be pursued throughout the weeks of the session which will bind the process of reading about memory to that of writing about it. Throughout, the emphasis will be on honing our analytic skills in writing through processes of revision. As a fulfillment of the R1B component, we will focus on writing progressively longer essays and incorporating digital and bibliographic research techniques into our work.
Possible texts/authors include: The Prince by Niccolò Machiavelli; Hannah Arendt; Virginia Woolf; the Port Huron Statement; George Orwell; Zong! by M. NourbeSe Philip
When we think of politics, we probably picture politicians debating, people organizing, or some sort of voting process. But are there other ways of “doing” politics, other appropriate verbs? This course will think about how we can associate the verb (or noun) “writing” with political processes and actions. What is the relationship between writing/language and politics? What does writing do with regards to politics – represent, critique, persuade, legislate, inform, demand, inspire? Are there certain genres of writing more amenable to politics than others? Does it matter if politicians are good writers? I hope thinking about the relationship between writing and politics will allow us to investigate these categories that seem important in our lives but that we might take for granted and therefore not give a lot of thought to. By reflecting on what it means to be political and on what writing does in the world, we will aim to arrive at broader understandings of both types of activities with the ultimate goal of becoming more empowered writers.
The thinking we do in this course will take place in discussions and conversations in class, but it will also take place in writing that you do, both in and out of class. You will use writing to understand, analyze, and engage with the texts we read, and to come up with ideas in response to the course’s questions and theme. Our goal is to become writers who can: accurately write about other texts, communicate effectively with readers, and offer valuable ideas and insights. We will achieve this goal by completing a series of shorter assignments that develop specific writing skills. The series of shorter assignments will culminate in essays that you will write for this course.
Robert Finch & John Elder, eds.: The Norton Book of Nature Writing, College Edition
All other material will be provided on bCourses.
The perceived divide between humans and the natural world has been defined as one of the most important frameworks under which our thoughts and behaviors are constructed. This has unquestionably been the case in the English-speaking world, whose landscapes and all they contain, for at least the past two hundred years, have been primarily framed and utilized as raw resources for human enterprises. Yet English literature—from its earliest examples to today’s offerings—is filled with a rich diversity of depictions of the natural world and human-nature interactions. From romantic prose on the Eden-like existence of “pure” environments to sober reflections on a desert’s amoral dangers, English literature has witnessed not only wildly manifold and changing landscapes, but a wildly diverse body of writings on nature. In this course, we will examine but a few of the ways in which relationships between humans and nature are represented in English literature; what histories, perceptions, and biases inform such representations; and what the real-world consequences of particular representations may be. We will gain a sense of how writing can influence feelings about nature, open up a space to interrogate ingrained assumptions about nature, and even shape major political decisions regarding the natural world. A few broad questions we will consider during this class include: What precisely is nature? How have particular English-speaking cultures (or even particular individuals) opposed or embraced it, and why? And how have certain human identities and behaviors been elevated “above” nature, stigmatized as “unnatural,” or even denigrated because of their supposed closeness to nature?
With the goal of developing your writing and research skills, we will primarily devote class time to discussing the course reading, with the goal of fostering critical thinking through a combination of lecture material, question and answer, and group discussion. We will also spend time preparing for papers by building writing, editing, and research skills.
The American city is an incredibly complex and dynamic organism—and the subject of a great body of literature—both fiction and non-fiction. This course will trace and critically engage how American urban development has been written about from the early twentieth century to today. We will follow how writers have addressed the dramatic changes that American urban spaces underwent from the progressive era, turn-of-the-century segregation and the experience of the Great Migration to redlining, white flight, and suburbanization in the wake of the New Deal. Studying metropolitan areas across the nation, from New York City to the Bay Area and from Chicago to New Orleans, this course asks students to write critically about urban development from the battles over “urban renewal” and the anti-eviction campaigns of the Civil Rights era to the impact of 1970s neoliberal policies, the “war on drugs” and militarized “broken windows” policing, and the urban uprisings of the early 1990s. We will end this semester by studying how writers address the impact that hyper-gentrification and climate chaos (from disaster capitalism to grassroots organizing) have on American cities today.
Building on the skills students acquired in R1A, this course will continue to develop reading, writing, and research skills with the aim to practice writing longer essays that are rhetorically aware and partake in relevant scholarly conversations. Over the course of this semester, students will submit two shorter essays, before concluding the course by submitting a research paper in which they will partake in a scholarly debate that they feel passionate about.
Course readings:
· Marshall, Paule. Brown Girl, Brownstones. Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2009 [1959]. ISBN-13: 978-0486468327.
· Yates, Richard. Revolutionary Road. New York: Vintage, 2000 [1961]. · Eggers, Dave. Zeitoun. New York: Vintage (Random House), 2010. ISBN-13: 978-0307387943.
· Lethem, Jonathan. The Fortress of Solitude. New York: Vintage, 2004 [2003]. ISBN-13: 978-0375724886.
· Mengestu, Dinaw. The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears. New York: Riverhead, 2008 [2007]. ISBN-13: 978-1594482854.
Selections from other fictional and non-fictional texts will be made available online. These will include texts by James Baldwin, Toni Cade Bambara, Marshall Berman, Mike Davis, Ashley Dawson, Amitav Ghosh, Jane Jacobs, Naomi Klein, Jonathan Lethem, Dawn Bohulano Mabalon, Jodi Melamed, Peter Moskowitz, Suleiman Osman, Nathaniel Rich, Richard Rothstein, Roy Scranton, Nayan Shah, Anna Deavere Smith, Rebecca Solnit, John Edgar Wideman, and Craig Wilder. Films include Spike Lee’s Do The Right Thing and Joe Talbot’s The Last Black Man in San Francisco.
Sharif, Solmaz: Look; Woolf, Virginia: To the Lighthouse
All other readings will be included in a course reader. These readings will likely include: excerpted criticism and literary theory by IA Richards, Roland Barthes, Cleanth Brooks, Virginia Woolf, Frantz Fanon, Stuart Hall, John Berger, Terry Eagleton, Susan Sontag, Jia Tolentino, Teju Cole, Maggie Nelson; poetry by John Keats, William Carlos Williams, Solmaz Sharif, Layli Long Soldier; short or excerpted fiction by James Joyce, Henry James. We will also engage with examples of reality television, the sitcom, memes, and social media posts.
What is “criticism”? We wouldn’t be wrong to associate this word with disgruntled critics, snobs, and fault-finders looking for ways to put others down. As Raymond Williams notes, “criticism” comes from the Greek kritikos—“a judge.” “Criticism” also names the general process of interpreting, analyzing, and writing about art and literature. Historically, this aesthetic version of criticism has been associated with elitist taste-making and the valuation of some arts as “high art” and others as “low art.” However, for centuries, people have been finding ways to practice and reinvent “criticism” in ways that orient it towards social equity and democracy, as well as forge its relevance anew to life’s day-to-day joys and trials. In this course, we will take on this vibrant and ongoing project—what we might call the search for a “practical criticism.” We will explore, test, and reimagine ways of engaging with literary and other comparative media to answer the following question: how can criticism be useful as equipment for living? What is a “practical criticism” for today?
The course will take us through some of the major historical schools of thought and techniques of (mostly) Anglophone criticism over the past century—for example, New Criticism, “close reading,” structuralism, post-structuralism, Marxist criticism, and cultural studies. We will trace some of the underlying connections and contrasts between these movements, particularly their philosophical and political attitudes. All the while, we will be thinking about these different criticisms in relation to contemporary politics and culture, as well as contemporary and emergent genres of criticism like the YouTube video essay, the personal essay, and the book review. Though our primary focus will be on literary texts (poems, novels, plays), we will also consider visual art, film, television, advertising, and social media as key objects of criticism. Assignments will involve producing your own unique pieces of criticism, culminating in a longer research essay on a literary or art piece of your choosing.
This course will focus on canonical British texts that claim either to represent for a child or to represent to a child. As we track these texts’ supposed invention of a certain kind of British childhood—and with it a certain kind of British identity—we’ll grapple with some of the binaries many of them reinforce or defy: child/adult, center/periphery, home/abroad, inside/outside, belonging/alienation, character/narrator, fantasy/reality. In doing so, we will investigate the impact of the child-figure on British figurations of gender, political representation, and empire. We’ll analyze the development of a traditionalized and somewhat stable concept of “childhood” as a universalizing experience/signifier while emphasizing the singularity of the child in fiction and the isolation of each ‘childhood’ within its own social world and text. How do literary adults and children relate to one another? What lines are drawn to first separate and then connect them? How can one represent—let alone enter into—the experiential space of another? What, exactly, does re-presenting come to mean under these circumstances?
Texts will include: Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens, Winnie-the-Pooh, Wind in the Willows, and excerpts from Olaudah Equiano, Lyrical Ballads, Jane Eyre, Great Expectations, David Copperfield, Mill on the Floss, and To the Lighthouse. Other potentials include texts by E. Nesbit, Tove Ditlevsen, Elena Ferrante, Roald Dahl, Rudyard Kipling, and Robert Louis Stevenson. Many of these texts will be compiled into a course handbook (forthcoming)--and required editions for full texts will soon be found on CalCentral.
Donoghue, Daniel: Beowulf: A Verse Translation (Norton Critical Editions); Gardner, John: Grendel; Headley, Maria Dahvana: The Mere Wife; Rankine, Claudia: Citizen: An American Lyric
The 13th Warrior (1999); Beowulf (2007).
This is not a class about Beowulf. As a course in the university’s R&C program, this is primarily a class on writing; as an R1B, it’s also a class on the skills of careful research and forceful argument.
It is, though, a class that uses Beowulf, one of the earliest literary texts in English, to explore what it means to be a writer in 2022. What does “authorship” mean when discussing an anonymous text, or when putting your own voice as a writer in conversation with other scholars? What does it mean to translate and adapt a work from one language or medium to another, or to write in different genres for different audiences using different registers? What does a poem about a single hero in sixth century Scandinavia have to say to a twenty-first century poem on systemic racism in the United States? How can we speak to and learn from people very unlike ourselves, and from writing very unlike our own? And just what do blood feuds have to do with bibliographies?
We’ll read both the original poem (in several translations) and read (and watch) a range of its adaptations, not only paying close attention to the poem’s form and its treatment of violence, gender, law, monstrosity, and history, but also considering how paying that kind of close attention to writing of any kind can make us not only better readers, but better writers ourselves.
During this course we will read together, and write about, artists of all kinds who lived the majority of their life in obscurity--from familiar literary figures like Emily Dickinson, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and Lorine Niedecker, to the Swedish artist Hilma af Klint and folk singer-songwriter Sixto Rodriguez, among a host of others. We will ask questions about reception and audience, about non-affiliated and outsider art that receives public recognition only belatedly.
In the process, and one that might shed some reflective light on the hyper-visible publicity pertinent to much contemporary popular and social media, we will think about the ways in which significant bodies of work that remained obscure, as a result of the arist's idiosyncracies or the prejudice of institutions, can help us understand the flaws of canonicity and the historically contingent formation of our own reading practices.
Do poems take up truths? Can a novel be a way of thinking about something? What can you learn—about yourself, about others, about the world—from a film? This course considers the ways that literature, art, and film are not only a part of our creative imaginations but also central sources of insight into what is real and actual. How do fictional and imaginative works touch what is worldbound? How do they help us see, hear, and understand our world?
All of the course readings will help us think about central philosophical questions—Who are we? How should we live? What do we know?—in compelling ways. We will read broadly across genres and forms. Texts will include poetry (William Wordsworth, Emily Dickinson, Wallace Stevens, Langston Hughes, Elizabeth Bishop), fiction (Jane Austen, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf), drama (Henrik Ibsen, Samuel Beckett), film (Alfred Hitchcock, Agnès Varda), and cultural theory and philosophy (Plato, Nietzsche, Roland Barthes, Toni Morrison).
As a course in the Reading and Composition sequence, this class will focus on developing your skills in critical thinking and clear, graceful, persuasive written expression in the form of the academic essay. We will practice writing and reflect on writing regularly and frequently. Students will write two formal papers, each with revisions, and a final research paper. Other requirements include attendance, engaged and active class participation, and informal writing assignments. All are welcome.
Reproduction (literally, “bringing into existence again”) can refer to making copies of works of art or the creation of offspring. The focus of this class will be Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel Frankenstein and its adaptations in the 20th and 21st centuries. In addition to analyzing selected literary and cinematic rehearsals of Frankenstein, we will consult historical sources, literary/art criticism, and contemporary theories of labor, gender, and biological life not only to situate this novel’s interest in life and art within its Romantic-era milieu but also to ask about the novel's endurance and transmutation as a text.
As an R1B, a major focus of this class will be the development of research and writing skills. The class will guide you in the creation of your own academic texts through assignments focused on selecting and citing sources, drafting, and revision.
The American city is an incredibly complex and dynamic organism—and the subject of a great body of literature—both fiction and non-fiction. This course will trace and critically engage how American urban development has been written about from the early twentieth century to today. We will follow how writers have addressed the dramatic changes that American urban spaces underwent from the progressive era, turn-of-the-century segregation and the experience of the Great Migration to redlining, white flight, and suburbanization in the wake of the New Deal. Studying metropolitan areas across the nation, from New York City to the Bay Area and from Chicago to New Orleans, this course asks students to write critically about urban development from the battles over “urban renewal” and the anti-eviction campaigns of the Civil Rights era to the impact of 1970s neoliberal policies, the “war on drugs” and militarized “broken windows” policing, and the urban uprisings of the early 1990s. We will end this semester by studying how writers address the impact that hyper-gentrification and climate chaos (from disaster capitalism to grassroots organizing) have on American cities today.
Building on the skills students acquired in R1A, this course will continue to develop reading, writing, and research skills with the aim to practice writing longer essays that are rhetorically aware and partake in relevant scholarly conversations. Over the course of this semester, students will submit two shorter essays, before concluding the course by submitting a research paper in which they will partake in a scholarly debate that they feel passionate about.
Course readings:
· Marshall, Paule. Brown Girl, Brownstones. Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2009 [1959]. ISBN-13: 978-0486468327.
· Yates, Richard. Revolutionary Road. New York: Vintage, 2000 [1961]. · Eggers, Dave. Zeitoun. New York: Vintage (Random House), 2010. ISBN-13: 978-0307387943.
· Lethem, Jonathan. The Fortress of Solitude. New York: Vintage, 2004 [2003]. ISBN-13: 978-0375724886.
· Mengestu, Dinaw. The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears. New York: Riverhead, 2008 [2007]. ISBN-13: 978-1594482854.
Selections from other fictional and non-fictional texts will be made available online. These will include texts by James Baldwin, Toni Cade Bambara, Marshall Berman, Mike Davis, Ashley Dawson, Amitav Ghosh, Jane Jacobs, Naomi Klein, Jonathan Lethem, Dawn Bohulano Mabalon, Jodi Melamed, Peter Moskowitz, Suleiman Osman, Nathaniel Rich, Richard Rothstein, Roy Scranton, Nayan Shah, Anna Deavere Smith, Rebecca Solnit, John Edgar Wideman, and Craig Wilder. Films include Spike Lee’s Do The Right Thing and Joe Talbot’s The Last Black Man in San Francisco.
We are all silent at times. We keep quiet over dinner with our relatives or nod passively at work. Some people dislike silence, equating it with being alone and lonely, while others look forward to spending time with their thoughts, seeking out silence as a refuge from a chaotic, noisy world. In this class, we’ll think about how our personal, social, and political lives are shaped by silence and then read a few literary texts about silence. Silence has often been understood as a home for the creative mind and the writers on our syllabus all employ silence both as a literary technique and as a major theme in their work. We’ll read texts that engage silence not only as the absence of language but as a product of power relations and a response to the unknown, ineffable, aporetic aspects of existence. The class will also put these texts in dialogue with reflections on silence in queer theory, black studies and disability studies.
The class will provide opportunities for students to pose analytical questions, construct arguments supported by evidence and undertake scholarly research. Over the semester, students will complete assignments including annotated bibliographies, independent and collaborative close analysis, library visits, and a research paper on one of our texts. There might also be opportunities to respond to creative prompts that build on the key terms and concepts of the course, such as keeping a meditation journal.
Readings and screenings will include works by Samuel Beckett, John Cage, Toshio Mori, Toni Morrison and Kelly Reichardt.
Dick, Philip K.: Ubik; Ellison et al.: Dangerous Visions; Gibson, William: Neuromancer; Johnson, Denis: Fiskadoro; Le Guin, Ursula K. : The Dispossessed; Lem, Stanislaw: Solaris; Miller, Walter J. : A Canticle for Leibowitz; Strugatsky, Boris & Arkady: Roadside Picnic
Films and TV episodes: Stalker (dir. Andrei Tarkovsky), La Jetee (dir. Chris Marker), Blade Runner (dir. Ridley Scott), Star Trek Deep Space Nine, The Outer Limits
Short stories by Samuel Delany, Harlan Ellison, Philip K Dick, Theodore Sturgeon, JG Ballard, Kim Stanley Robinson, and others
“We have no need of other worlds. We need mirrors. We don't know what to do with other worlds. A single world, our own, suffices us; but we can't accept it for what it is.” -Stanislaw Lem, Solaris.
Science fiction, or speculative fiction as it's sometimes called, has often been referred to as a literature of ideas. This designation has both accentuated its philosophical character and set it apart from "real" literature. In this course, we will examine both aspects, and we will see how our texts, by imagining different futures, alien encounters, radical technologies, the apocalypse, utopias and dystopias, and any number of different worlds and fantastic situations, imagine not only what the future may hold, but also hold up a mirror to the present.
Rather than looking at the whole history of the genre, this course is primarily centered around texts from the 1960s through the 1980s, often referred to as "new wave" sci-fi. This period saw a transition away from the sci-fi of the first half of the 20th century, which primarily appeared in pulp magazines and was often aimed at children and young adults, to a new, more mature, ambitious, and daring literary sensibility. We will also be looking at some films and television shows, including some written by the authors we will be reading. Possible topics include utopia/dystopia, the interaction between humans and technology, cyclical history and religion, alien encounters, post-humanism, and political imaginaries.
In addition to cultivating your critical thinking and literary analysis skills, this course will help to strengthen your academic and analytic writing. Becoming a better writer requires practice; as such, you will be required to write several essays of increasing length as the semester progresses, as well as revising your writing heavily. We will also work on improving your writing through shorter assignments such as reflections, responses, and revisions. Moreover, since this course is R1B, we will focus on conducting original research, including finding sources and coming up with an original research topic. The class will culminate in a research paper on a topic of your choice.
Equiano, Olaudah: The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano; Melville, Herman: Benito Cereno; NourbeSe Philip, M.: Zong!
Fake News! Alternative Facts! In recent years, our political discourse has been polarized, each side accusing the other of fudging the facts. But just what is a fact? And what if the opposite of fact isn’t understood as lying, but rather as fiction? This course will examine transatlantic case studies from and about the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries--the period in which fiction came to be recognized and celebrated as a creative resource, rather than denigrated as mere deception. Accounts of the Atlantic slave trade will be of particular interest for thinking through the question of what fiction can do to challenge and subvert accepted “facts” about who deserves to have authority in a radically unequal society.
Questions of genre and authority will also be at the forefront of discussions of our own academic writing as we work toward the writing of a research essay. What are the conventions of academic writing and research? How is this “factual” form of writing distinguished from other genres? What are the linguistic and conceptual markers of facticity? Is there any place for generic experimentation in the writing of an academic paper? And finally, what does it mean to write with authority in the college classroom, and, more generally, in today’s socially and politically polarized landscape?