Austen, J.: Emma; Barthes, R.: S/Z; Brown, D.: The Da Vinci Code; Doyle, A.C.: Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
"It may be argued that close reading is literary criticism. Certainly, it is its only technique and its most widely shared belief. If close reading is central to literary criticism, however, it has been made marginal almost everywhere else, with exceptions to be duly noted. Like other marginalized phenomena, it is selectively lionized and massively stigmatized; here, its mythic heroes such as Sherlock Holmes and, more recently, Robert Langdon; there, its regular demons, who are usually us. The aim of this course is not to teach students how to close-read, but to bring them to a more conscious (and self-conscious) understanding of what may be at stake in both the practice and the resistance to it. Accordingly, we will be both ?doing? close reading and engaging in assisted reflection on what it means, entails, or implies.
Our objects comprise a poem by Keats, a novel by Austen, and a film by Hitchcock, all of which spectacularly lend themselves to close reading, and some mass culture artifacts that categorically do not, but will receive it nonetheless (for the course harbors a certain desire to take close-reading out of the closet of English Literature into the streets of cultural analysis). Our topics include: the institutionalization of close reading, its past, present, and utopian rationales, historicist and other attacks on it, its rules-of-the-game, the problematic of ?getting close? (or, the critic?s ?intimacy issues?), and, not least, the pleasures of the text.
We start in medias res; I assume that the seminar members already have an experience of close reading that they wish to extend, and an ability in it that they are working to hone. Any student in doubt on the question of his or her qualifications for the seminar may self-administer the following test: Are you fond of asking your English teacher the question, ?Did the author really mean that?? If so, it is safe to assume that you are in a bad relation to close reading; I don?t recommend coming any closer. "
Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol. 2; Austen, J.: Sense and Sensibility; Mackenzie, H.: The Man of Feeling; Solomon, R.: What Is An Emotion?; Sterne, L.: Sentimental Journey; Stowe, H.: Uncle Tom?s Cabin
?Why do we cry?? asks the philosopher, Jerome Neu. ?My short answer is: because we think.? Neu belongs with those who believe emotions manifest intelligence rather than physiology. In this class, we will test Neu?s proposition, first by considering the philosophy of emotion (from Aristotle, Descartes, Adam Smith, Darwin, and Freud to recent authors such as Nussbaum, Fisher, and Terada), then by discussing the literary representation of emotion between 1750 and 1850, a century in which poets and novelists responded to the ever-increasing rationality and instrumentalism driving modern life. To get at the high stakes of emotion then (and still today), we will take up a number of questions: How do the emotions affect our understanding of the relationship between mind and body? What are the social functions of emotion? Are emotions biological constants or are they culturally and historically variable? Is it possible to distinguish between authentic and inauthentic emotions? Is there a difference between emotion and sentimentality? How do literary representations of emotion act on the emotions of readers? Is it possible (or desirable) not to feel? To get at these questions, we will read many lyric poems (by Gray, Collins, Charlotte Smith, Blake, Wordsworth, Keats, Poe, and others) and a few novels (by Mackenzie, Sterne, and Austen), focusing on the scenes of sorrow, loss, and sympathy that dominate this period. If time allows, we may finish with Stowe?s Uncle Tom?s Cabin.
Elizabeth I, Queen of England: Collected Works; Spenser, E.: Edmund Spenser?s Poetry; Sidney, P.: Major Works; Shakespeare, W.: Richard II, The Merry Wives of Windsor; Brigden, S.: New Worlds, Lost Worlds: the Rule of the Tudors, 1485-1603;and a course reader
At the crossing of historiography, poetry, and the visual arts in sixteenth-century England stands the enigmatic and paradoxical figure of Elizabeth Tudor, the sovereign Queen of a patriarchal society. Elizabeth crafted her power through a complex and contradictory persona in multiple media, shaping her virgin sexuality into an idol for the devotion of her court, and the fury of her enemies. This seminar will use an interdisciplinary strategy to examine the representational means and methods by which poets, painters, and the Queen herself sought to express, to justify, or to rail against the nearly unimaginable paradox of feminine rule?and to consider the lens that the prominence of Elizabeth affords us to look into the already-contradictory roles of everyday English women.
Petronius: The Satyricon; Etherege, G.: The Man of Mode; Addison J. and R. Steele: The Spectator; Haywood, E.: The Female Spectator; Pope, A.: The Poems of Alexander Pope; Swift, J.: The Writings of Jonathan Swift; Gay, J.: The Beggar's Opera; Scriblerus, M.: Memoirs; Hogarth, W.: Engravings of Hogarth; Rees, D.: Get Your War On. Along with secondary literature, course reader will include writings by Horace, Juvenal, Mary Wortley Montagu, Kevin Davies, and others.
"We will explore England?s ""age of satire"" and the secondary literature on its generative tropes: discovery, exposure, magnification, correction. In the final two weeks of the semester, we?ll investigate contemporary experiments in satire. Students will write one short essay and a final paper. "
Mulk Raj Anand: Untouchable; Mary Butts: The Taverner Novels; Michael Cunningham: The Hours; E.M. Forster: Howard's End; Sigmund Freud: Civilization and its Discontents; Katherine Mansfield: Stories; Lytton Strachey: Eminent Victorians; Virginia Woolf: Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse. A course reader will include primary texts from Clive Bell, Roger Fry, J.M. Keynes, Bertrand Russell, and Leonard Woolf, as well as critical essays. Art and design by Vanessa Bell, Duncan Grant, and the Omega Workshop will be viewed in class.
"This course places Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Group in context with larger developments in British modernism. Bloomsbury is a neighborhood in London that includes Russell Square, the British Museum, and University College London. But Bloomsbury also refers to the early 20th -century group of novelists, painters, publishers, economists, and philosophers who have become identified with the neighborhood in which they lived: Virginia Woolf, E.M. Forster, Roger Fry, Vanessa Bell, Lytton Strachey, J.M. Keynes, and Bertrand Russell, among others, friends and relations who challenged conventions in art, literature, and philosophy.
The Bloomsbury group also challenged social conventions in their private lives, through the choices they made about families, marriages, sexual partners, and home d?cor. ?On or about December 1910 human character changed?: so wrote Virginia Woolf in her 1924 essay, ?Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown,? raising a variety of questions that we will be exploring in this course. What kinds of shifts in ?human relations? were occurring in the early decades of the 20th century and how were these shifts represented in art and literature? What role did Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury group play in the modernization of art and life? In the emerging new sexualities of inter-war modernist culture? What influence does the collaborative nature of the group have on their visual and literary art, aesthetic and philosophical theories, political and social commitments? Finally, what role does ?Virginia Woolf? and the ?Bloomsbury Group? perform in our own 21st-century culture? "
Mark Twain: The Innocents Abroad, Roughing It, Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur?s Court, Puddnhead Wilson, and Tales, Speeches, Essays and Sketches
Close readings of Twain?s major works, emphasizing the development of his career. I am particularly interested in the interplay of humor and bitterness in Twain?s social and political thought, but class discussion will be open for any aspect of Twain?s writing that the students wish to bring up. Regular attendance and participation, along with two ten-page essays, will be required.
Clemens, Samuel L. (Mark Twain): Roughing It; Austin, Mary: The Land of Little Rain; Norris, Frank: McTeague; London, Jack: The Valley of the Moon; West, Nathanael: The Day of the Locust; Chandler, Raymond: The Big Sleep; Stegner, Wallace: The Angle of Repose; Dick, Philip K.: Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?; Didion, Joan: Slouching toward Bethlehem. Other assigned reading will be available either online or photocopied.
Reading, discussion , and writing about fiction, poetry, memoirs, and essays that have western settings, or that try to describe or account for western experience in ?regional? terms?emphasizing, for example, the formative influence of the natural landscape, or of racial, economic, and social groups in distinctive, defining relationships with their surroundings (and with one another).
De Quincey, T.: Confessions of an English Opium-Eater and Other Writings and Recollections of the Lakes and the Lake Poets; Coleridge, S.T.: The Major Works; Wordsworth, D.: The Grasmere and Alfoxden Journals; Wordsworth, W. & S.T. Coleridge: Lyrical Ballads; Wordsworth, W.: The Prelude 1799, 1805, 1850
This class presents an intensive study of a group of writers and circle of friends: William Wordsworth, Dorothy Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Thomas de Quincey. As we read these writers? poetry, journals, letters, essays, and memoirs, we will use the metaphor of the ?circle? and its sometimes vicious variants?circularity, circulation, cycles, revolutions, rings, enclosures, ?spots of time??to examine the relation between literary and social experimentation during an age of national reform, international revolution, industrialization and rural dislocation, Napoleonic wars, and the rise of the British Empire. If this course advertisement were a trailer for Julien Temple?s 2001 Pandemonium (which we will view), now I might name ?hot? topics like brother-sister incest, French affairs, love triangles, and opium addiction, and then rattle off the following character blurbs: the stuffy once-revolutionary-turned-establishment poet (the villain); his long-suffering, nature-loving sister condemned to live in his shadow and whose journals he plundered for poems (the girl); their wild, drug-addicted friend who ?failed? the more the established poet succeeded (the hero) and the younger writer/opium-eater who took notes on them all (the film-maker himself). Ok, so it?s not that good a trailer, but my hope is that our discussions will be more exciting because more complex. We will address the nature of conversations, collaborations and competitions between writers, questions of literary property, theft and echo, the dynamics of inclusion, exclusion and betrayal, the rhythms of hope and disappointment, and figures of ?borderers? living on the ?edges? (whether between ?animal? and ?human,? ?nature? and non-nature, intoxication and ?reason,? or pre- and post-modern ways of life), as these topics inform what should interest us most about these writers?what they did with words.
Readings will include works by Walter Benjamin, Leo Bersani, Peter Brooks, Soshana Felman, Sigmund Freud, Geoffrey Hartman, Neil Hertz, Barbara Johnson, Melanie Klein, Jacques Lacan, D. W. Winnicott, and others.
What do literature and psychoanalysis have in common? For one, both are usually about two or more of the following: sex, death, love, hate, work, jealousy, obsession, parents, children, anxiety, and loss. Seemingly made for each other, literature and psychoanalysis have been in a more or less close conversation since the latter's emergence at the end of the nineteenth century. In this course, we will consider the relationship between literature and psychoanalysis in a number of ways: we will look at Freud's own writing as literature in the context of psychoanalysis's early days as practice, institution, and scandal; we will consider historical and intellectual connections between Freudian and post-Freudian psychoanalysis and different kinds of literary interpretation; and we will work to derive from the language of psychoanalysis tools to help us cope with the considerable formal and thematic complexity of literary texts. The syllabus will include psychoanalytic writing by Freud, Lacan, Klein, Winnicott, and others as well as works by literary critics who derive some or all of their terms from psychoanalysis. We will also read some stories and watch some films along the way.
Gledhill, C.: Home Is Where the Heart Is; Doane, M.: The Desire to Desire; Kaplan, E. A.: Motherhood and Representation
In this course we will examine a range of examples of the genre ?the woman?s film? of the 40's and 50's, emphasizing maternal, paranoid, romantic and medical discourses, issues of spectatorship, consumerism, and various ?female? problems and fantasies. We will also look at feminist film theory and its conceptualization of subjectivity and desire in the cinematic apparatus.
Algeo, J. and T. Pyles: The Origins and Development of the English Language, 5th ed.
This course surveys the history of the English language from its Indo-European roots, through its Old, Middle and Early Modern periods, to its different forms in use throughout the world today. Topics include changes in the core grammatical systems of phonology (sound structure), morphology (word structure) and syntax (sentence structure); in vocabulary; in writing and literary forms; and in the social position of English and its dialects.
New Oxford Annotated Bible, College Edition; Oxford Dictionary of the Bible; Alter, R.: Genesis
In this class, we will read a selection of biblical texts as literature; that is, we will read them as anything but 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 historically sedimented. 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 at least a take-home midterm and a final, perhaps more.
For more information on this course, please email the professor at j_miller@berkeley.edu.
For more information on this course, please email the professor at j_miller@berkeley.edu.
Bacon, F.: The Essays; Bunyan, J.: Pilgrim's Progress; Di Cesare, ed.: George Herbert & the ... Religious Poets; Donne, J.: Complete English Poems; Maclean, H, ed.: Ben Jonson and the Cavalier Poets; Marvell, A.: Complete Poems; Milton, J.: Paradise Lost
"Although I am putting a history book (A Century of Revolution by Christopher Hill) on the recommended list sent to the bookstores, this will be a course on works written in the first three quarters of the seventeenth century, not a course on the century itself.
I think I can teach you more about the seventeenth-century works I don't discuss in class by looking in detail at a few works than I could by scurrying through a handful of anthologies or by generalizing at length about either the particular qualities of particular authors or schools or by focusing on the particular qualities that characterize the culture that seventeenth-century literature reflects. I'm not good at categorizing, and I deeply mistrust categorization as an intellectual tool.
I will spend most of my time?nearly all of it, in fact?on verse. That's mainly because verse was what the seventeenth century did best, but also because I don't have much that is worth listening to to say about much seventeenth-century prose. I will talk about Pilgrim?s Progress, and I may talk about one or two of Francis Bacon's essays, but the reading will otherwise be of verse by Donne, Jonson, Herrick, George Herbert, Waller, Milton, Suckling, Lovelace, and Marvell. I want particularly to talk about things that most English majors have dealt with before?notably the most often assigned poems of Donne and Herbert and, most notably, Paradise Lost. (I realize that Paradise Lost might put some people off taking the course. Such people have probably tried, or been asked to try, to read Paradise Lost as if it got the stock Sunday-school responses it sounds as if it's trying to get. Given a chance to read the poem as something other than a failed effort to versify its editors' footnotes, such people are likely to see how beautiful Paradise Lost is and to wish it longer.)
Three papers, each of a length determined by how much you have to say and how efficient you are in saying it. The third paper will take the place of a final examination and will be due in my box in 322 Wheeler Hall any time between the last class meeting and 3:30 p.m. on whatever day is assigned this course for a final exam. "
Shakespeare, W.: The Norton Shakespeare
In this course we will read all the plays conventionally attributed to the second half of Shakespeare?s career, beginning with Hamlet and ending with The Tempest. This period includes all the so-called great tragedies (Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth) and some others that are sometimes considered not quite tragedies or not quite great (Timon of Athens, Antony and Cleopatra, Coriolanus), the so-called problem plays (Troilus and Cressida, All?s Well That Ends Well, Measure for Measure) and the so-called late romances (Pericles, Cymbeline, The Winter?s Tale, The Tempest); it does not include Romeo and Juliet, the history plays, and the comedies (for those you need 117A or 117S). My lectures will tend to emphasize Shakespeare?s reworking of race, gender, sexuality, and the family in these plays, but I hope that the classroom will be a place of lively exchange, in which you feel free to challenge my ideas and to develop your own interests. In addition to a final exam and several required papers of varying lengths, you may be asked to work on a speech and a short scene in small groups to help you understand some aspects of Shakespeare?s verse and his theatrical medium.
Bevington, D., ed.: The Complete Works (of William Shakespeare)
In this course, we will attempt to read as many Shakespeare plays as can be got through conveniently in fifteen weeks. In general we will try to cover one play per week, but along the way we will devote a week to an introduction of the author, his times, his poems, his plays, and his language; a week to the Sonnets; and we will take extra time for longer and more complex plays like Hamlet. So we will manage about a dozen plays, trying also to cover a range of genres including comedy, history, tragedy, and so-called romance. We will be thinking of plot, character, and action, but above all of dramatic poetry. Information will be posted before the class begins, and throughout the semester, on the instructor's website (see below). Students should anticipate writing three short papers, a midterm and a final exam, and possible quizzes. Students should also anticipate attending lecture regularly, reading the assignments carefully and in advance of lecture, and indeed participating fully in the work of the class.
John Milton: Complete Poems and Major Prose, ed. Merritt Y. Hughes
An introduction to the poetry and prose of one of the greatest writers in English literature. Sexual radical, political revolutionary, and literary genius, Milton is a one-man introduction to the cultural ferment of the English Renaissance, the Reformation, and the English civil war. Readings include: Milton?s early poems, his political treatises, Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, and Samson Agonistes.
Scott, W.: Waverley, or ?Tis Sixty Years Since; Hugo, V.: Notre Dame de Paris; Dickens, C.: A Tale of Two Cities; Tolstoy, L.: War and Peace
Focusing on key texts from English, French, and Russian traditions, this course examines how the genre of the novel approaches and appropriates historical material as well as reflects its own particular historical contexts. We will consider four major European novels from the nineteenth century, a ?golden age? of the novel in Europe and a period in which history and historical writing also came to dominate European intellectual discussions. The course encourages a range of critical approaches, from close reading, the theory of the novel and genre theory, to historicist and biographical inquiry. Course requirements include reading 150-200 pages per week, attending occasional film screenings, 3 short response papers, a longer final paper, a midterm and a final exam.
Proust, M.: Remembrance of Things Past, Volumes 1-3 (translated by Moncrieff and Kilmartin)
"By reading one of the most significant 20th-century novels in detail, the course will attempt to answer questions about the thematic concerns and formal techniques of modernism. The relationships between changing conceptions of language and desire, of the individual subject, and of the pressures of history, as these are figured in the particular rhetorics and structures of this paradigmatic novel, will provide the central axes of our investigation. Active in-class participation and a willingness to engage in both copious reading and regular dialogues are the only prerequisites for the course.
Please note that we will be reading all of Proust's novel, rather than, as is often the case, only the first and last chapters (volumes). "
William Bradford: Of Plymouth Plantation; Mary White Rowlandson: The Sovereignty and Goodness of God; Jonathan Edwards: A Jonathan Edwards Reader; Thomas Jefferson: Notes on the State of Virginia; Benjamin Franklin: The Autobiography; Olaudah Equiano: The Interesting Life and Other Writings; Stephen Burroughs: Memoirs; some Xeroxed poems
I will lecture on the struggle to alter traditional modes of cultural understanding to account for the extraordinary circumstances of New World life as it is reflected and expressed in these books, together with the gradual emergence of novel social and political paradigms and linked transformations in the conception of personal identity. Two seven-page midterm essays and a final exam will be required.
Lauter, P., ed.: The Heath Anthology of American Literature, Vol. I; Fern, F.: Ruth Hall; Jacobs, H.: Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl; Melville, H.: Moby-Dick; Thoreau, H.: Walden; course reader
"Reading Poe, Longfellow, Emerson, Thoreau, Douglass, Jacobs, Fern, Melville, Whitman, and Dickinson, we will pay particular attention to literary form and technique, to social and political context, and to the ideological formations and transformations during the antebellum period. We will be concerned with issues of ""self"" (the search for transcendence and the entanglement in relations); sexuality; landscape; the Puritan legacy; the nature and role of the emotions; the efforts to reform the American character; the democratic experiment; and the struggles over the rights and roles of women, African Americans, and Native Americans in the expanding nation. Two midterms and one final examination will be required. "
Harriet Beecher Stowe: Uncle Tom?s Cabin; Walt Whitman: Complete Poems; Rebecca Harding Davis: Life in the Iron-Mills; Emily Dickinson: Complete Poems; Mark Twain: Huckleberry Finn; William Dean Howells: Hazard of New Fortunes; Charles Chesnutt: Marrow of Tradition; Kate Chopin: The Awakening; Stephen Crane: Great Short Works. There will also be a course reader of poetry, short stories, and journalism.
A survey in United States literature from the Civil War to the beginning of the twentieth century. The course pays special attention to matters of violence, urban life, and social reform as they were refracted within an increasingly stratified public sphere. There will be one midterm, one final exam, and two short papers.
Kinnell, Galway, ed.: The Essential Whitman; Hillman, Brenda, ed.: Poems of Emily Dickinson; Hass, Robert, et al., ed: American Poetry: The Twentieth Century, Vol. I; Plath, Sylvia: Selected Poems; Ashbery, John: Selected Poems; Marvin, Kate: Legitimate Dangers: American Poets of the New Century
This is a lecture course that surveys American poetry from Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson to the present. There will be some attention to modernism, Poets of the 1930?s, postwar poetry, and to very recent developments.
Morrison, T: The Bluest Eye, Sula, Song of Solomon, Tar Baby, Beloved, Jazz, Paradise, Love, and Playing in the Dark
An examination of the development of various themes in Toni Morrison's fiction and the aesthetic rendition of these themes.
Adams, M et al.: Readings for Diversity and Social Justice; Lai, H. et al.: Island: Poetry and History of Chinese Immigrants on Angel Island; Craft, W. and E.: Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom; Cable, G.W.: The Grandissimes; Morrison, T.: Sula; Dreger, A.: One of Us: Conjoined Twins and the Future of Normal; Dorris, M.: The Broken Cord; Fadiman, A.: The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down; Moraga, C.: Heroes and Saints and Other Plays
"This course will analyze the categories of ?disability,? ?race? and ?ethnicity? critically. ?Disability? as an identity category is always raced, whether we attend to that intersection or not, and people defined in racial terms are also always placed on axes of disability and ability, well and ill, normal and abnormal, malformed and well-formed. Much work on that ambiguous umbrella term ?disability? treats disabled people as ungendered (that is, male), unraced (that is, white), without nationality (that is, native-born American but barely a citizen), and unsexualized (that is, heterosexual, but only in default). My aim in this course is to set up situations in which you can think about several of these categories simultaneously in the context of American cultures present and past.
To this end, we will take four historical examples as case studies. Each illustrates how racism and ableism have intertwined in American (dis)ability cultures. First we will examine immigration history (with some emphasis on Angel Island and Chinese immigration). Second, we will focus on how American writers have remembered two women of color who performed in freak shows and on how race, disability and gender issues intersect on the freak show (or today the talk show) stage. In the third unit, on slavery, we will begin to unearth a history of disability in American slavery and in the Jim Crow South. In the fourth module, we will discuss eugenics and the tight connections between race and disability in eugenic models of degeneration. The final section of the course will move into the present, first giving you some exposure to contemporary activist history that counters and undoes the dynamics we have been exploring, and then ending with three particular texts to anchor our analysis of the politics of representation of disability, gender, sexuality, class, race and ethnicity: Native American novelist Michael Dorris?s controversial memoir of raising his son who had Fetal Alcohol Syndrome, The Broken Cord, Anne Fadiman?s The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, and Chicana writer Cherrie Moraga?s play about farmworkers?organizing and the health effects of pesticides, Heroes and Saints.
A variety of guest speakers, including performance artists and disability movement activists, will visit us. We?ll view a series of films, including the silent eugenics film The Black Stork, or Are You Fit to Marry, a U.S. public health film on immigration from the 1930s, and several contemporary documentaries on subjects ranging from the medical separation of conjoined twins to contemporary disabled womens? global organizing. Written requirements: two midterms, informal journal writing, and a final project that students can tailor to their own interests. "
Aldrich, Thomas Bailey: The Story of a Bad Boy; Alcott, Louisa May: Little Women; Alger, Horatio: Ragged Dick and Mark the Match Boy; James, Henry: The Turn of the Screw and Other Short Novels, What Maisie Knew; Twain, Mark: The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn; Wiggin, Kate D.: Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm
"Historians often define the era after the Civil War and especially from 1880 to ca. 1915 as the ""era of the child."" Children became the heroes of popular culture as well as major subjects for painters and intellectuals and cultural observers. This is a period in which ordinary citizens felt that an economic and social revolution was taking place with the rise of industrial capitalism and urban transformations, creating a crisis of major cultural/political/economic rapid change. Such a historical trauma seemed to demand difficult and painful reconsiderations and redefinitions. Just as there developed an issue of defining masculinity and femininity in the period, there developed a problem about children and adolescents. Questions about boys and girls might be not only about gender definitions but also about the development of an ethical consciousness, what might be called everyday ethical coping. Children seemed to represent the last vestige of a world that was being lost. In the aftermath of the elevation of the importance of children in the Romantic era earlier in the century, in the U.S., the narratives of boys and girls gave artists the opportunity to observe, scrutinize, critique, and entertain."
Agee, T.: Let us Now Praise Famous Men; Cisneros, Sandra: Caramelo or Puro Cuento; Dubois Shaw: Seeing the Unspeakable; Garcia Marquez, G.: Collected Stories, Living to Tell the Tale, One Hundred Years of Solitude; Faulkner, W.: Absalom, Absalom!, Go Down, Moses; Morrison, T.: Beloved, Playing in the Dark
"A detailed trans-American study of William Faulkner, Sandra Cisneros, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and Toni Morrison's imaginative writings in the aesthetic and geopolitical contexts of the New South and the Global South. Topics include the significance of Faulkner's ""The Bear"" and Absalom, Absalom! for modern and post-contemporary writers from across the Americas. Readings also include Sandra Cisneros? Caramelo or Puro Cuento, Garcia Marquez's ""Big Mama's Funeral,"" One Hundred Years of Solitude, and Living to Tell the Tale, and Morrison's Beloved and Playing in the Dark. Our special topics course will also look at the photographs of the U.S. South by Walker Evans and Russell Lee, and the Global South's paintings by Kara Walker and Fernando Botero, among others. Throughout this comparative special topics course, we will grapple with the question--do the Americas have a common literature? "
Coetzee, J.M.: Disgrace; T?ib?n, C.: The Story of the Night; Roy, Arundati: The God of Small Things; Achebe, C.: Things Fall Apart; Cliff, M.: No Telephone to Heaven; Smith, Z.: White Teeth
The texts in this course bear a troubled relationship to the language, English, in which and about which they write. Questions of cultural, ethnic, gendered and national identity suffuse both their content and their form. We?ll be trying to understand some of the causes and consequences of the spread of English as a literary medium, from the age of imperialism to the age of so-called globalization. One short and one longer paper, alongside active and regular class participation, are required.
Albee, E.: The American Dream and Zoo Story; a Course Reader, available at Copy Central
This course will introduce students to the study of creative writing?fiction, poetry, drama, and memoir. Students will learn to talk critically about these genres and begin to feel comfortable and confident with their own writing of them. Students will write in each of these genres and will partake in class workshops where their work will be edited and critiqued by other students in the class. Students will also be required to attend and review two outside readings or plays. Attendance is mandatory.
Reader, available at Copy Central
The aim of this course is to explore the genre of short fiction?to discuss the elements that make up the short story, to talk critically about short stories, and to become comfortable and confident with the writing of them. Students will write two short stories, a number of shorter exercises, weekly critiques of their peers? work, and be required to attend and review two fiction readings. The course will be organized as a workshop and attendance is mandatory. All student stories will be edited and critiqued by the instructor and by other students in the class.
None
"A short fiction workshop open to students from any department. Students will write three short stories, generally 10-20 pages in length. Each week, students will also turn in one-page written critiques of each of the three student stories being workshopped as well as a 2-page journal entry.
Probable semester total of written pages, including critiques: 75-80. Class attendance mandatory. "
Jahan Ramazani, ed.: The Norton Anthology of Modern & Contemporary Poetry, 2 vols.; Course reader
In this course you will conduct a progressive series of experiments in which you will explore the fundamental options for writing poetry today?aperture, partition, closure; rhythmic sound patterning; sentence & line; stanza; short & long-lined poems; image & figure; graphics & textual space; cultural translation; poetic forms (haibun, villanelle, sestina, pantoum, ghazal, etc.); the first, second, third, and no person (persona, address, drama, narrative, description); prose poetry. Our emphasis will be placed on recent possibilities, but with an eye & ear always to renovating traditions. I have no ?house style? and only one precept: you can do anything, if you can do it. You will write a poem a week, and we?ll discuss six or so in rotation (I?ll respond to every poem you write). On alternate days, we?ll discuss pre-modern and modern exemplary poems drawn from the Norton Anthology and from our course reader. It will be delightful.
Reader
The purpose of this class will be to produce an unfinished language in which to treat poetry. Writing your own poems will be a part of this task, but it will also require readings in contemporary poetry and essays in poetics, as well as some writing done under extreme formal constraints. In addition, there?ll be regular commentary on other students? work and an informal review of a poetry reading.
None
Rooms and Lives: a creative nonfiction workshop open to students from any department. Drawing on narrative strategies found in memoir, the diary, travel writing, and fiction, students will have workshopped in class three 10-20 page pieces. Each will take as point of departure detailed description of a real room one knows well, the piece then expanding out from place to its occupants, past or present, including the authorial self. Each week, students will also turn in one-page critiques of the three student pieces being workshopped as well as a 2-page journal entry (these entries may comprise part of the longer pieces). Probable semester total of written pages, including critiques: 70-80. Class attendance mandatory.
Lopate, P. ed.: The Art of the Personal Essay
This class will be conducted as a writing workshop to explore the art and craft of the personal essay. We will closely examine the essays in Phillip Lopate?s anthology, as well as students? exercises and essays. Writing assignments will include 3 short writing exercises (2 pages each) and two new essays (8-15 pages each). Since the class meets only once a week, attendance is mandatory.
Stevens, W.: Collected Poetry and Prose; Stevens, H., ed.: Letters of Wallace Stevens; a reader at Copy Central.
We will go through Wallace Stevens? career in an effort to interpret his poems as fully as possible and to appreciate his changes in thought and style. Some attention will be paid to related modernist writing and painting that best put his work in context.
Homer: The Iliad; Virgil: The Aeneid; Boccaccio, G.: Filostrato; Chaucer, G.: Troilus and Criseyde; Henryson, R.: Testament of Cresseid; Shakespeare, W.: Troilus and Cressida; H. D.: Helen of Troy; Wood, M.: In Search of the Trojan War
This seminar focuses on one of the most enduring historical legends in human history, the story of Troy and its fall. We will begin with Homer?s Iliad and move on to Virgil?s Aeneid, exploring the epic representations of cities and their destruction that inspired later writers, dramatists, archaeologists and even filmmakers to imagine and construct stories about various characters living in the shadows of Troy or with the legacy of its fall. We will then move on to three of the many medieval versions of the story: Boccaccio?s Filostrato, Chaucer?s Troilus and Criseyde and Henryson?s Testament of Cresseid. These texts focus on two characters hardly mentioned by Homer?Troilus and Criseyde?and their doomed love relationship over the course of the war. We will then turn to Shakespeare?s very different vision of Cressida before moving on to the modernist poet H. D. and her version of the Trojan legends in Helen of Troy. To conclude the course, we will examine 19th, 20th, and 21st century attempts to find the historical Troy, beginning with Heinrich Schliemann?s claim in the late 19th century to have found its remains and ending with current excavations. We will ask what, if anything, these excavations have to do with the literary tradition of Troy, and indeed, what literature can contribute to history. Reading the legends of Troy is a way of examining a literary tradition from its inception to the present; we will question, investigate, and excavate the very idea of ?tradition? over the course of the semester, asking ourselves how and why literary ideas and stories come into being, and under what circumstances they might, like Troy, disappear.
Required texts include Virginia Woolf?s Between the Acts, Jacob?s Room, Moments of Being, Orlando, Mrs. Dalloway, A Room of One?s Own, Three Guineas, To the Lighthouse, The Voyage Out, The Waves, A Writer?s Diary, The Years, and critical essays included in a course reader. A wide range of secondary materials will be placed on reserve.
This seminar will be devoted to an intensive and extensive reading of Virginia Woolf?s literary career, focusing on her fiction, but also taking into account her essays, diaries, and letters. We will trace the evolution of Woolf?s narrative strategies and subjects, representations of consciousness, engagements with history and politics, and refashioning into a contemporary cultural icon. We will also assess her contributions to modernist aesthetics and to gender theory. In preparation for writing the senior thesis, we will explore a range of critical approaches to Woolf?s fiction?psychoanalytic, formalist, historical, feminist, postcolonialist, philosophical, biographical?and consult recently published scholarly editions and holograph manuscripts. The seminar will culminate in a twenty-page thesis on a topic of your choice.
(subject to change) Fuller, M.: The Essential Margaret Fuller; Freedman and D?Emilio, eds.: Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America; Howe, J. W.: The Hermaphrodite; Sweat, M.: Ethel?s Love-Life; Hawthorne, N.: The Blithedale Romance; Stoddard, E.: The Morgesons; Spofford, H.: The Amber Gods and Other Stories; Alcott, L.: Alternative Alcott; Walker, C.: American Women Poets of the Nineteenth-Century; Gaul, T., ed.: To Marry an Indian; Dickinson, A.: What Answer?; Fogarty, R., ed.: Desire and Duty at Oneida: Tirzah Miller?s Intimate Memoir
This course will look at a wide variety of materials and topics with an emphasis on nineteenth-century American women?s literary and political treatments of chastity, autoeroticism, marriage, interracial sex, sexual identity, and ?romantic friendship.? We will examine the role of women in creating, contesting, and sustaining sexual ideologies through literary representation, voice, and style. Along with contemporary theory on the history of sexuality, we?ll look at antebellum hygienic tracts and medical theories of reproduction and sex, sensation literature by women, feminist utopian fiction and the diaries of women in utopian communities, an unpublished novel manuscript with a hermaphrodite narrator, fictional and medical treatments of dreams, and fictional and epistolary treatments of interracial marriage. At times, we?ll look comparatively at treatments of sexuality, women?s rights, and marriage in selected men?s writing, including the textual courtships of Poe with women poets.
Carroll, L: Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass (Norton Critical Edition); a Course Reader consisting of biographical material, criticism, and alternate Alices. Also various cinematic adaptations of Alice.
The central aim of this course is to understand the Alice books as a cultural phenomenon rather than as isolate texts themselves. Thus, we will begin by surveying a number of seminal critical responses to Carroll?s tales, including competing Freudian and Lacanian interpretations, philosophical approaches such as Deleueze?s in The Logic of Sense, political studies (which alternately read Alice as a post-colonial revolutionary and as a colonizing imperialist), a few linguistic and logic-based takes, some forays into mathematical, particularly non-Euclidean, analyses, and rounding things off with some biographical and source-based material. This final critical strategy will then lead to our investigation of various documented, and a few yet-to-be-authenticated, sources for the poetic parodies peppering each text as well as some overall models from which Carroll drew inspiration or even direction. Finally, we will reverse the trajectory of this historical genealogy into the future to study a number of permutations of the Alice books which followed their original publication. These spin-offs will range from Carroll?s own Nursery Alice, and Alice on Stage and various merchandising items to what Carolyn Sigler terms, in her useful anthology of the same name, ?alternate Alices,? which documents the evolution of Carroll?s tale in the decades following their initial popularity. We will conclude by studying a few radically different cinematic adaptations of the books, ranging from Disney?s animated version to Jan Svankmajer?s unsettling Alice, with brief considerations of such underground oddities as Alice in Acidland.
Amis, Kingsley: The Alteration; Borges, Jorge Luis: Labyrinths: Selected Stories & Other Writings; Butler, Octavia: Kindred; Cowley, Robert (ed.): What Ifs? Of American History; Dick, Philip K.: The Man in the High Castle; Greenberg, Martin (ed.): The Best Alternate History Stories of the 20th Century; Kantor, MacKinlay: If the South Had Won the Civil War; Macksey, Kenneth: Invasion; Roth, Philip: The Plot Against America
This course aims to increase awareness of a widespread intellectual trend?the popularity of alternate history in numerous fields?while also learning to discern its variations across the cultural landscape. We will intensively explore the logic, formal traits, and varieties of alternate-history writing as it has been practiced over the last seventy years by avant-garde, mainstream, and science fiction writers, as well as by amateur and professional historians. One of our tasks will be to distinguish between ?counterfactual? history and outright fiction, discovering the inherent differences between their narrative forms as well as examples of merged form. We will also pursue alternate history?s links to: theoretical speculations in physics, political movements for redress, innovations in statistical analysis, military training, legal proceedings, historical regret, digital technology, and literary experimentation.
"Conrad, J.: Heart of Darkness; Joyce, J.: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man; Salih, T.: Season of Migration to the North; Chamoiseau, P.: Texaco; Dangarembga, T.: Nervous Conditions; a course reader
Films: Black, S.: Life and Debt; J. Furtado: Ilha das Flores; Denis, C: Beau Travail; G. Pontecorvo: Quemada!; Ratnam, M.: Dil Se"
"A major aspect of this survey will be to question the category of the ""postcolonial"" through readings of the novels and films, and through a critical/theoretical reader that will accompany the readings. We will want to articulate, along with these texts, the connections between the condition of ""postcoloniality"" on the one hand and the ongoing processes of ""globalization"" on the other. Active and regular class participation are required."
James, H.: Tales of Henry James; Joyce, J.: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man; Ford, F.M.: The Good Soldier; Woolf, V.: Mrs. Dalloway and The Waves; Faulkner, W.: The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying; Robbe-Grillet, A.: Jealousy and For a New Novel
" The representation of consciousness is as old as the novel itself?but new beliefs about the nature of the mind convinced many twentieth-century writers that the novel as a genre required reinvention. In this senior seminar, we will ask why for modernists such as James, Woolf, Joyce, and Faulkner the perfection of the novel as a genre lay in the representation of characterological consciousness, and why the task of representing consciousness demanded radical technical innovation. Most of our attention will be given to the careful reading of difficult experimental novels. We will consult key philosophers and psychologists?particularly Freud, Bergson, and W. James?to consider the relation between contemporary theories of the mind and the fictionalized consciousnesses they inspired. We will also consider how the call for a new novel, issued by the novelists themselves in aesthetic manifestoes, relates to recent narratological and sociological analyses of this experimental genre.
Our course reading will be the jumping-off point for the research paper (15-20 pages) that is due at the end of the term. Other required assignments include a prospectus, bibliography, and full rough draft of the final essay. "
See below; the instructor will discuss the exact list at the first class meeting, so please do not buy any texts until then.
The seminar will read a generous selection of Mark Twain?s most important published writings. We will work our way chronologically through his life and career, beginning with his earliest extant writings and ending with Mysterious Stranger (which he left unpublished). The class will have ready access to the Mark Twain Papers, whose extensive primary and secondary resources students are encouraged to take advantage of for their research. One brief oral report (as the basis for class discussion) and one research paper, due at the end of the term.
Chesnutt: The House Behind the Cedars; Chopin: The Awakening; Crane: Maggie; Dreiser: Sister Carrie; Howells: The Rise of Silas Lapham; James: Daisy Miller, The Wings of the Dove; Wharton: The House of Mirth
"The term ""realism"" refers to a certain historical period and a certain practice (or theory) of fiction writing. A number of American writers, led by James and Howells, participated in this general movement (which included British and European writers also). What we have to consider here are some major American examples. According to a recent scholar/critic, Amy Kaplan, ""Rather than as a monolithic and fully formed theory, realism can be examined as a multifaceted and unfinished debate re-enacted in the arena of each novel and essay."" (The Social Construction of American Realism, p.15). I am interested in the way in which each writer endorses what James calls the ""realist faith."" Student obligation in this course will be to participate in class discussion and to write a longish paper (15-25 pp.) on these materials."
Benjamin Franklin: The Autobiography; Frederick Douglas: Narrative of the Life; Edgar Allen Poe: selected works: ?Hopfrog,? ?The Cask of Amontillado,? ?Masque of the Red Death?; Harriet Jacobs: Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl; Herman Melville, ?Benito Cereno?; Mark Twain: Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur?s Court; Edith Wharton: The House of Mirth; William Faulkner: Absalom, Absalom; F. Scott Fitzgerald: The Great Gatsby; Richard Wright: Native Son; Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye
From the enlightenment through modernism and beyond, American literature is replete with scenarios of class antagonism and rebellion. But consider the bad ends to which the vast majority of American rebels?Lily Bart, Jay Gatsby, Thomas Sutpen, Bigger Thomas?seem to invariably come. Beginning with the foundational claims of American self-determination represented in Benjamin Franklin's enlightenment thinking, this course will explore a narrative tradition that responds to the promises of American democracy with representations of social violence and constraint. We will consider, for example, how key texts of the American Renaissance illuminate the conflict between American democratic ideals and the practices of slavery and industrial capitalism. Among modernism's abundant narratives of social decline, we will explore the conflict between democratic idealism and enduring class prohibitions. Ultimately, our readings will serve to explore a series of questions: what is at stake in these critical portraits of American social democracy? To what extent can American literature be figured as a sustained tradition of protest against the various failures of enlightenment principles? Why, in the view of this rich narrative tradition, is the American model of social democracy so impossible to achieve? This course aims to find out.
More, Thomas: Utopia; Swift, Jonathan: Gulliver?s Travels; Scott, Sarah: A Description of Millenium Hall; Bellamy, Edward: Looking Backward; Morris, William: News from Nowhere; Wells, H. G.: The Time Machine and When the Sleeper Wakes; Zamiatin, Eugene: We; Huxley, Aldous: Brave New World; Orwell, George: 1984; Atwood, Margaret: The Handmaid?s Tale
"Most Utopian authors are more concerned with selling readers on the social or political merits of their schemes than with the ""merely"" literary qualities of their writing. Although some Utopian writing has succeeded in the sense of making converts, and inspiring some readers to try to realize the ideal society, most has had limited practical impact, yet has managed to provoke readers in various ways?for instance, as a kind of imaginative fiction that comments on ""things as they are"" only indirectly, with fantasy and satire in varying doses. Among the critical questions posed by such material are the problematic status of fiction that is not primarily mimetic, but written in the service of some ulterior purpose; the shifting relationships between what is and what authors think might be or ought to be; how to create the new and strange other than by recombining the old and familiar; and so on. The reading list will certainly include anti-Utopian as well as Utopian works, and may include some writings by Malthus, Owen, Engels and Marx that do not present themselves as flights of fancy. Required writing will consist of a single 15-20-page term paper. Depending on enrollment, each student will be responsible for organizing and leading class discussion (probably teamed with another student) once during the semester. There will be no quizzes or exams, but seminar attendance and participation will be expected, and will affect grades."
(This is a partial book list; it will be expanded. Please attend the first class meeting before you buy these books.) Finkelstein and McCleery: An Introduction to Book History; Djuna Barnes: Nightwood; Borges: Ficciones; Aaron Cometbus: Despite Everything: A Cometbus Omnibus; Martha Cooley: The Archivist; T.S. Eliot: The Waste Land: A Facsimile and Transcript of the Original Drafts; Virginia Woolf: A Room of One?s Own; Yeats: Collected Poems. Some of the texts for this course will be available in a course reader, which will include recent journalism on the print vs. digital debate, short stories and poems that foreground ?the book,? and facsimile representations of original publication formats.
" We are living in a time of technological revolution that may be changing the way we read. Digital media?blogs, magazines, hypertext fiction, e-books?place the continued existence of the paper-based book into question, generating debates and jeremiads about these competing technologies. Meanwhile, the ?history of the book? is a growing academic discipline and ?book arts? (as taught in the San Francisco Center for the Book) attracts a growing number of practitioners. Is the book as object or technology in any danger of extinction? This course proposes to examine contemporary debates about the status of the book by placing them in context with a history of 20th-century print culture. Because digital media is often seen as a democratic alternative to conventional methods of publication, our historical survey will focus on previous examples of alternatives to commercial publication practices.
Accordingly, we will initially concentrate on modernist print culture: the little magazines, small presses, and social networks that emerged to publish and promote Anglo-American modernism. We will analyze famous case histories of modernist publication?Eliot?s Waste Land, Joyce?s Ulysses, Yeats? and Woolf?s self-publication?in addition to those less familiar. From this foundation, we will move on to alternative print cultures in the later 20th century by examining productions from the small presses associated with the feminist movement, with experimental poetry, and with punk culture. Whenever possible, we will consider these texts? original publication formats through photocopies and archival samples. Throughout this course, we will ask ourselves whether the mode of publication influences how we read and interpret texts, whether we?re reading a facsimile of the typescript to The Waste Land or downloading Gertrude Stein?s Tender Buttons from Project Gutenberg. "
Landy, M.: Imitation of Life; Klinger, B.: Melodrama and Meaning; Bratton, I., ed.: Melodrama
We will focus on a range of film melodramas from early silents to contemporary examples, analyzing melodrama?s relationship to the body, the family, gender roles, excess and spectacle. We will be interested in melodrama and modernity, and in the genre?s position vis a vis politics and culture.
Barthes, R.: Mythologies; Lodge, D., ed.: Modern Criticism and Theory: A Reader; a course reader containing essays by Derrida, de Man, Marx, Adorno, Butler, Foucault, Freud, Lacan, Spivak, and others
This course will serve as an introduction to literary and cultural theory. We will read closely a number of important (and difficult) theoretical texts while thinking about what relations exist between the different intellectual projects that we call theory (structuralism, poststructuralism, psychoanalysis, and gender studies are only a few). We will also ask and ask again the more general question: what is theory anyway?
A Course Reader
Our topic will be the theory and practice of mass entertainment in 1930?s Hollywood. The films we will watch include: The Jazz Singer, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Public Enemy, Footlight Parade, Lady Killer, Baby Face, The Lady Eve, City Westerner, His Girl Friday, Meet John Doe, Citizen Kane, and The Philadelphia Story.
Flaubert, G.: Madame Bovary; Fitzgerald, F. S.: The Great Gatsby; Morrison, T.: Beloved; Erdrich, L.: Love Medicine; Mukherjee, B.: Jasmine; Forster, E.M.: Howards End; Gordimer, N.: July?s People; Naipaul, V.S.: A Bend in the River; Ondaatje, M.: In the Skin of the Lion
This course will focus on each author?s representation or invention of foundational national myths. Students will explore the intimate connection between narrative strategy and construction of meaning.
Rothman, W.: The Murderous Gaze; Truffaut, F.: Hitchcock
"She really got under your skin, didn?t she???said to the protagonist of North by Northwest
The corpus: This course is divided in its attention between an auteur and a genre. In one sense, the division is a superficial one, since there is hardly any element of the ?thriller? that has not been developed?and developed profoundly?in Hitchcock?s oeuvre. Accordingly, it will furnish us our main example. In another sense, however, this oeuvre is a legacy that, as such, belongs to the history of the thriller. Two living Europrean artists, Claude Chabrol and Michael Haneke, inherit the Hitchcockian legacy in particularly significant ways, and will play a key part in our understanding of the form. Less centrally, we will also look at American films by De Palma, Minghella, and Polanski.
The thesis: Central to the thriller is the ?event? of psychic transference. Something passes under the skin of the protagonist. ?Skin? is taken in a psychanalytic sense, as boundary, container, and foundation of the sense of self.
What is transferred under it can be almost anything: an idea, an object, a word. The transference does not occur ?on purpose?; on the contrary, it is an accident, the result of chance or coincidence; but once that accident has occurred, it instantaneously becomes a fate, terrifying sign of a world in which ?there are no accidents? (The Man Who Knew Too Much, 1956). That fate drives both the protagonist and his story forward to?but to what end? To expel the transference? To project it onto another? To embrace it madly? In varying degrees of modification, the protagonist?s experience is continuous with the spectator?s own, and takes the transference event into another dimension. "
For more information on this course, please email the professor at j_miller@berkeley.edu.
For more information on this course, please email the professor at j_miller@berkeley.edu.
Lord, A.: A Singer of Tales; Fabb, N.: Linguistics and Literature; Foley, J. M.: The Theory of Oral Composition: History and Methodology; Beckett, S.: Nohow On; Beowulf, dual language edition, Heaney, S. translator; Mansfield, K.: Stories; Woolf, V.: To the Lighthouse
This course will examine the linguistic features which mark a specifically ?poetic? or ?literary? use of language from those uses of language which are not literary. The topics covered will include meter, rhyme, repetitions, or grammatical patterns as well as the ?oral formulaic theory? of the epic, all specific to poetry, and the uses of pronouns, tenses and subjective features of language particular to written prose narratives, especially the novel and the novelistic style known as ?free indirect style? or ?represented speech and thought?. We will also discuss Samuel Beckett?s late style. Some questions to be raised are: Can we define genres (novel, lyric, etc.) linguistically? Are there differences between the linguistics of writing as opposed to that of oral forms? But the course also aims to give you methods for analyzing literary texts that can be the first step to interpretation. No knowledge of linguistics will be presupposed, but linguistic concepts will be introduced and explained.
A course reader will contain many of the poems (including, tentatively, Ammons, Berryman, Bidart, Creeley, Dove, Duffy, Ginsberg, Hejinian, Hill, Howe, Graham, Larkin, Lowell, Mackey, Merrill, Muldoon, O�Hara, Oppen, Rich, Snyder, Walcott) and all of the critical readings (most likely pieces by Adorno, Altieri, Bernstein, Brooks, de Man, Heidegger, Olson, Perloff, Ramazani, Vendler, Wimsatt). In addition to the poems and texts in the course reader, we will be reading several full volumes of poetry: Ashbery, J.: Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror; Bishop, E.: Geography III; Brathwaite, K.: Middle Passages; Carson, A.: Men in the Off Hours; Heaney, S.: Field Work; Plath, S.: Ariel
We will begin the semester with a brief history of lyric poetry as an act, a genre, and a form. We will then go on to examine the ways in which poetry, and lyric poetry specifically, was constructed and framed within mid- and late-20 th century critical idioms. After we have set these two paths, we will spend the bulk of the semester closely reading lyric poetry written after World War II, especially poetry of the last 30 years. Enrollment will be necessarily limited, and so the whole course will be run as a seminar. Course requirements: one (very short) informal response paper, one short essay (3-5 pages), and one longer essay (7-10 pages) that may be critical, historical, or a hybrid critical-creative work (this final paper will be in lieu of a final exam).
T.B.A.
This is a continuation of section 1 of H195A, taught by A. JanMohamed in Fall 2006. No new students will be admitted. No new application form needs to be filled out. Professor JanMohamed will give out CECs (class entry codes) in class in November.
T.B.A.
This is a continuation of section 2 of H195A, taught by C. Langan in Fall 2006. No new students will be admitted. No new application form needs to be filled out. Professor Langan will give out CECs (class entry codes) in class in November.
No texts
This is a continuation of section 3 of H195A, taught by S. Schweik in Fall 2006. No new students will be admitted. No new application form needs to be filled out. Professor Schweik will give out CECs (class entry codes) in class in November.