"Ford, J., ?Tis Pity She?s a Whore
Jonson, B., Epicene
Lyly, J., Gallathea
McQuade, D. and C. McQuade, Seeing & Writing 2
Shakespeare, W., Othello
Shakespeare, W., Romeo and Juliet"
"A story of forbidden love can compel a reader through both sympathy and repulsion. We hope the frustrated lovers can somehow overcome the unjust exigencies preventing their happy union. We fear they will not demonstrate self-control if consummating their love would prove disastrous or horrific. Early modern authors capitalize on one or both of these potential reactions by depicting all manner of proscribed romantic relationships: two girls who each believe the other is a boy, two children of feuding families, a brother and a sister. There are more, of course, and we shall examine how each author crafts his language to produce in us the effects we register as we read his work.
In order to accomplish this sometimes daunting critical feat, students must develop their analytical instincts in order to articulate the intricacies of their observations in writing. To this end, students shall hone their observational skills by discussing the motivations and intentions behind some contemporary pieces suitable for critical examination?everything from an essay on shoelaces to a Coca-cola poster. Short weekly writing assignments chronicling the students? observations of these modern items will prepare them to write longer essays on the Renaissance texts. For these longer papers (4-5 pages), we will have thesis brainstorming sessions and peer editing workshops; students should expect to become very well acquainted with the writing of their peers. "
"Gary Snyder, Mountains and Rivers Without End
Eleni Sikelianos, The California Poem
Constance Hale, Sin and Syntax"
In this course we will explore the poetic representations of California?s wilderness. From the photography of A.P. Hill and Ansel Adams, to the letters, reports, and journal entries of Clarence King and John Muir, we will examine how an environmental consciousness grows out of the diverse poetic attitudes towards the wilderness and the wild. There will be three writing assignments in the class. First, you will write a literary interpretation of an individual poet or poem. Second, you will compile a nature-log, combining journal writing, poetry, photography, sketching, collage, etc. Third, drawing from your journal and our readings, you will compose an expository essay on an environmental issue or problem that California faces.
"Life and Times of Michael K. by J.M. Coetzee
Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro
A Gesture Life by Chang-rae Lee
Good Morning, Midnight by Jean Rhys
Tropic of Orange by Karen Tei Yamashita
A course reader of short stories and poems will be made available during the first week of class. "
"A nomad is typically understood as a wanderer, rootless and given to vagrancy. However, as suburbanization and over-inflated housing markets continue to override interests in creating and maintaining public spaces, it might be more fitting to consider the nomad in terms of stagnancy: where can a nomad wander to if there is nowhere to go? Indeed, it might be truer to consider a nomad as the figure whom no one can get rid of. In this course, we will begin to define what ?nomad? might mean through the various texts we will be reading. Who and what might be considered nomadic? How does the nomad relate to the concept of a community? Moreover, how does the idea of a nomad or nomadic ways of life structure our readings of fictional works?
Since this course is designed to foster critical writing, you will be required to write a number of short essays (2-4 typewritten pages) that will help hone your skills in critical analysis and argumentation. And because no paper is ever created in a day, this course will further emphasize writing as a process of revision. To that end, you will be writing an equal number of drafts and revisions of your essays so that, ultimately, you will be writing a minimum of 32 pages. Small exercises will be assigned occasionally to aid you in not only the intense process of writing, but also to help you understand that essays are creative acts. "
"(It is preferable that you use the specified editions, since line numbers and footnotes are different in different editions.)
Hamlet, Norton critical edition
Macbeth, Folger Shakespeare Library, 2004
King Lear, Folger Shakespeare Library, 2004"
"This is a writing course whose main objective is to turn you into competent writers of academic prose. However, since we need a subject to write about, I decided on one I am interested in and which, I hope, will be of interest to you: Shakespeare. I think, I can teach you more about the Shakespeare plays we won?t be reading in this class by looking closely at just three of his works: Hamlet, King Lear, and Macbeth. We?ll look at these plays so as both to enjoy them (at a reasonably leisurely pace) and try to determine what it is about these plays that has made them so popular with generations of readers and playgoers. In our discussions we?ll try to cover a broad array of subjects, and you will certainly enjoy great latitude in choosing your own topics. However, I will insist that you consider the plays, first and foremost, as works of art, pay particular attention to Shakespeare?s language, think about his stagecraft and your own experiences as readers or spectators. This course is not meant to do the work of a regular Shakespeare class: I?m not concerned with leaving you by the end of the semester with a jumble of facts that one is supposed to know about Shakespeare, although, understandably, in order to facilitate your understanding of the works you?re writing about, their frame of reference, I will from time to time take up certain issues of Shakespearean lore.
Much of our in-class time will be dedicated to discussing your writing, developing your skills of close and analytical reading, and learning how to be effective when sharing your insights with your readers. Other than the three tragedies, I will ask you to read some secondary materials?a few short scholarly essays. You will be also asked to see at least one film or television adaptation of each play. I will ask you for a short essay every week or two and give you a chance to revise some of them. You can expect some specific assignments aimed at polishing your grammar, improving you vocabulary, etc. We will conduct in-class writing assignments and peer-review exercises regularly. The assignments will insure that by the end of the semester you know what a solid academic essay looks like and can produce one of your own. "
"Frankenstein, Mary Shelley
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Robert Louis Stevenson
Dracula, Bram Stoker
The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Alan Moore
Geek Love, Katherine Dunn
A Writer?s Reference, Diana Hacker
Course reader"
"Who are our monsters, and why? This course will examine the idea of the monstrous in literature and culture, from the Romantic era to the present day. Through a variety of texts and other media, we will explore a wide range of issues: how the monstrous has been defined as both completely other and completely human (sometimes at the same time); what happens when a monstrous figure takes control of the narrative as a speaking subject; how different versions of monstrosity intersect with race, class, and gender; how, and why, portrayals of particular monstrous figures have shifted over time; and what makes these monstrous figures the objects of both fascination and repulsion. Taking the complex relationships between the ?freakish? and the ?normal,? the ?grotesque? and the ?beautiful,? the ?monstrous? and the ?good? as our basis, we will examine how monstrous bodies and minds disrupt attempts to read them and complicate the act of interpretation.
This course is aimed at developing reading and writing skills in a variety of genres. Students will learn and practice strategies for all stages of the writing process, from prewriting to revision, and also work on grammar, syntax, and style. Course assignments will include a minimum of 32 pages of writing divided among a number of short essays, at least three of which will be revised. This course fulfills the first half of the university?s R&C requirement. "
"Baldwin, James, Giovanni?s Room
James, Henry, Wings of the Dove
Nabakov, Vlamir, Lolita
Wharton, Edith, The House of Mirth
Wilde, Oscar, The Picture of Dorian Gray
A course reader containing critical writing on the topic of the course."
"Throughout this course, we will consider a broad range of aesthetic responses to the problem of representing sexuality in literature, with a particular focus on the role that secrets play in literary constructions of non-normative sexual desire. Beginning with Oscar Wilde?s The Picture of Dorian Gray, we will examine novels that represent and respond to cultural issues that are grounded in questions of sexual representation (for example, aestheticism, feminism, and homosexuality). We will also engage ourselves with the formal dimensions of the narratives that house sexuality by focusing on such techniques of secrecy as indirection, suggestion, and artifice. Along the way, we will ask ourselves a number of questions: Beyond signifying states of concealment and sexual repression, what larger work might sexual secrets perform in the modern novel? How might we describe the ?self? of the character who holds a sexual secret? What would it mean to read a novel from a sexual viewpoint?as opposed to, say, a political or a social one? Finally, what happens when sexuality is no longer a secret, but still remains represented as if it were one?
We will devote the majority of our time to developing our critical thinking and analytical writing skills. More specifically, we will practice applying our close reading skills of literary texts to the writing of solid analytical prose. Our journey through the world of ?exposition and argumentation? (two of the main foci of this course) will include visits at the following destinations: grammar; sentence and paragraph construction; essay structure; thesis development; proper use of evidence; and style.
Each student will be assigned five papers and a number of short take-home assignments. Class time will frequently be spent on group work and in-class writing. Three of the papers will involve a primary draft, a peer editing phase, and then the revision and resubmission of a final draft to the instructor for a grade. Students can expect to receive a substantial amount of commentary from the instructor on all five essays.
Regular attendance, frequent in-class participation, and dedication to the reading are required for this course. "
"Mary Rowlandson, A Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration...
Jan Martel, The Life of Pi
Diana Hacker, A Writer?s Reference
A course reader including selections from the following:
* Michel de Montaigne, ?Of Cannibals?
* Jonathan Swift, ?A Modest Proposal?
* Claude L?vi Strauss, The Raw and the Cooked
* Mary Douglass, Purity and Danger
* Eric Schlosser, Fast Food Nation
* Michael Pollan, The Omnivore?s Dilemma
"
"What we eat and how we eat it says a lot about our culture?our history, our politics, our religious beliefs, and our ways of relating to each other. Why are some foods distasteful, or even taboo? How can choosing what to have for lunch be a political statement? How does our food get to our tables? These are just some of the questions we will attempt to answer in this course. Two longer literary pieces?a colonial American woman?s account of her capture by native Americans, and a recent Canadian novel?will help us begin thinking about some of the symbolic significance of food and eating; but the majority of our reading will be in the form of shorter, nonfiction essays on topics ranging from cannibalism to fast food.
The primary aim of the course is to develop students? expertise in writing persuasively, clearly, and precisely. With this in mind, the readings are designed to help students form their own arguments about the cultural significance of food and eating. Students will learn effective strategies for constructing strong sentences and paragraphs, developing thesis statements, designing logical arguments, and expressing themselves with energy and style. In addition to essays of literary analysis, students will write argumentative, personal, and expository essays, developing skills that will apply to all types of college and professional writing. "
"Diana Hacker, Rules for Writers
Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Dictee
Tim O?Brien, Things They Carried
Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse 5
Course reader (with critical essays and some short fiction) "
"The blurb on the back of Robert Coover?s 1977 novel The Public Burning claims that the novel was the ?first major work of contemporary fiction ever to use living historical figures as characters.? But Coover?s novel certainly doesn?t read like history; it is narrated by both Richard Nixon and ?Uncle Sam? (a kind of ghoulish two-hundred-year-old demon who secretly runs America), and in this way it is at the same time rigorously historical and wildly and absurdly fictitious. How can a text so interested in history (and in these ?real historical figures?) so thoroughly undermine our traditional notions of what ?history? actually is?
In this course, we will read a selection of experimental texts from the last forty years that claim to be, in various ways, ?historical??fiction that is set in the context of real historical events, that investigates what it means to be a historiographer, or that claims to be itself (truly or falsely) a ?real? historical document. What happens in a narrative when history is stopped, reversed, or repeated? Are such narratives historical or ahistorical?reliable or unreliable? How might they use the very materials of history to question historical claims about experience, truth, and knowledge?
As we think through these questions alongside a strange and sometimes difficult (always interesting and maybe a little insane) set of contemporary novels, we will learn how to read and respond (and trust our responses) to the estrangement we experience from novels that don?t conform to our narrative expectations. In this way, we will also have the more general (and just-as-important) opportunity to investigate what ?postmodernism? itself might actually be. In addition to the literature, as well as a film or two, we will look briefly at more ?theoretical? accounts of postmodernism and history in order to investigate the interaction between the theoretical and the literary and highlight the role of argumentation in our own work. In bringing together our literary curiosity with more theoretical questions (about history, knowledge, reliability, and representation), this course will emphasize close reading, critical thinking, and critical writing (a lot of it). You will write a number of short essays (and a bunch of drafts) that will focus on both closely analyzing the texts and exploring more broadly the period and concepts of postmodernism as an artistic and cultural form. We will concentrate on crafting specific and sustained arguments that engage and synthesize the novels, the theory, and the history that we?ll be talking, thinking, and writing about. "
"Faulkner, W.: As I Lay Dying
Hacker, D.: Rules for Writers
Kafka, F.: The Metamorphosis
Kuper, P.: The Metamorphosis
Sexton, A.: Transformations
Stevenson, R. L.: The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
Woolf, V.: Orlando
Course reader, including selections from Ovid, Angela Carter, Sigmund Freud, and the Grimm Brothers"
"This course examines why metamorphosis has been such an enduring motif in literature and how its meanings change over time. Starting with classical myths and working through more modern fairy tales, poems, novels, and psychological case studies, we will ask what metamorphosis implies about voluntarism and the unconscious; nature, animality, and the demands of socialization; and the possibilities and limits of subjectivity. In each text, we will pay close attention to the kinds of language and narrative techniques used to express changes in form. We will also examine generic transformations, considering, for example, how Anne Sexton's poems revise the tales of Grimm, and how Hollywood films transform the story of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.
The theme of metamorphosis informs the primary goals of the course: becoming more critical readers and more effective writers. In class discussions, response papers, and short essays, we will focus on developing critical arguments from initial observations or questions about the texts, and we will practice revision strategies that transform essays from their first incarnations. "
"Caroll, Lewis, Alice?s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass (Modern Library Classics)
Christie, Agatha, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (Berkeley)
Murakami, Haruki, Hard-Boiled Wonderland (Vintage)
Leiber, Fritz, Our Lady of Darkness (Tor)
Diana Hacker, Rules for Writers (Fifth Edition)
Course Reader: Various poems, short stories and essays of literary criticism, including:
Atwood, Margaret, ?Homelanding?
Coleridge, S.T., ?The Rime of the Ancient Mariner?
Rossetti, Christina, ?Goblin Market?
Poe, ?Murders in the Rue Morgue?
Tolkien, J.R., ?Fantasy?
Todorov, T., ?Definition of the Fantastic? "
"In this course, you will focus on the craft of writing college essays?a vast process that includes everything from refining grammar and style to developing theses, engaging critical thinking, and structuring your arguments in logical and dynamic ways. You are required to produce 32 pages of writing for this course, consisting of several short assignments, drafts, and five essays. All the while, you will be introduced to techniques of literary analysis, which require you to read slowly, carefully, and many times over, in order to discover the ways in which formal and rhetorical practices (not confined to literary texts alone, but ones that you may also see in, say, a State of the Union address) convey multiple meanings.
As an extension of our simultaneous foray into analytical writing and reading, I?ve chosen a set of texts, from the genres of detective fiction and fantasy. These works provoke us to sort fact from fiction and, in so doing, demand that we consider our own ways of grasping the truth in what we see, hear, read and write. In various ways, these texts capitalize on questions that you (as burgeoning critical writers) will encounter in the course of your own work: how do we ?know? the truth about the world that we see before us?is it a process that requires rational deduction or does it demand imagination? Are our perceptions based on assumptions and/or desires? Or do they accurately register and comprehend the signs we encounter? "
"Thomas More, Utopia
Jonathan Swift, Gulliver?s Travels (selections)
H.G. Wells, The Time Machine
+ a course reader "
"The point of this class is to help you become better writers and critical thinkers, and we?ll approach that goal by discussing and writing about an enduring literary topic -- utopia. In its strictest sense ?utopia? doesn?t mean ?good place,? but simply ?no place.? A utopia, then, can also be what we usually call a ?dystopia,? and upon closer examination of works like Thomas Moore?s Utopia, which gave us the term, we might ask whether every utopia actually contains a dystopian seed.
We?ll be discussing and writing about the ways authors have created these other worlds to work through issues that can?t be easily resolved in this one. What do utopias gain from including dystopian elements, from acknowledging, in effect, that they are a kind of nonsense? What do their successes and failures tell us about their imagined worlds and our actual one? If the utopian project is about creating an imaginative space to examine vexing issues, how might we relate it to our own writing? We?ll make a point of discussing these issues from perspectives you might employ in your research papers -- in terms of historical context, rhetorical strategies, and formal characteristics.
You?ll notice that this description asks as many questions as it answers. That?s because I want to make clear that critical writing is as much about learning to ask good questions as about providing good answers. We will focus rigorously on those tasks as you improve your ability to produce longer, more complex papers. You?ll write responses to each week?s reading, try your hand at your own utopias, and submit drafts and revisions of a 7-9 page critical essay and an 8-10 page research paper. "
"Jane Austen, Persuasion
F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender is the Night
Graham Greene, The End of the Affair
Ernest Hemingway, To Have and Have Not
Andrea Lunsford, Easy Writer
Edith Wharton, Age of Innocence
Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway
Course reader
Michael Curtiz, Casablanca
Stanley Kubrick, Dr. Strangelove
Mel Stuart, Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory"
"This course continues your R1A training in the systematic practice of reading and writing, with the aim of developing your fluency through longer expository papers, and the incorporation of research into argumentation. You will be responsible for writing and revising 3 papers (each 5-8 pages in length), two in-class essays, three rounds of peer editing, and weekly responses to required reading.
The topic of this course, ?Trade-offs and Sacrifices,? says as much about the thematic concerns of the works we?ll be reading as it does about the practice of writing itself. While we strive for the perfect realization of all our arguments in well-wrought, cognitively sound prose, this course will help us recognize our striving as a ?tending toward,? valuing the imperfect effort as a stage in our life-long relationship to writing. We will focus our development as critical thinkers on the substance and style of the expository essay, and learn how to find and manage our weaknesses in the genre with practical techniques. "
"Assayas, Olivier: Irma Vep
Greene, Graham: The Quiet American
Herr, Michael: Dispatches
Le Minh Khue: selected stories
Liu Yi-chang: ?Intersection?
Maugham, W. Somerset: The Painted Veil
Toklas, Alice B.: The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook
Truong, Monique: The Book of Salt
Yu, Ronny: Fearless"
"This class will examine how the figure of the Asian horde functions in cultural texts about modernity and postmodernity. What historical contexts have given rise to particular ways of representing Asians as hordes? How have cultural exchanges across the Pacific impacted narrative visions of modernity and postmodernity? What social and political purchase have these representations had, both within and outside of the Asian context? From Hong Kong martial arts films to documentaries about post-war Vietnam, we will look at a range of genres produced in a variety of locations in our attempt to perform a comparative study of the selected works.
Our critical approach to the texts will interlace with our own critical approaches to writing. We will compose essays gradually, beginning with questions that emerge from our initial responses to the texts and working our way toward effective writing and argumentation. Students will extend their English 1A skills by focusing on how more complex ideas and research results can be refined and integrated into progressively longer essays. A series of in-class workshops will be held to assist students with discussing, drafting, and revising critical essays. (Please note: book list is subject to change.) "
"Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe
Charles Dickens, Great Expectations
George Eliot, Adam Bede
Diane Hacker, A Writer?s Reference 5th Edition (Bedford/St. Martin?s)
Course Reader, available at University Copy (on Channing Way) "
"In this class, we will be interested in the question ?what is realism?? and, specifically, in figuring out what makes a novel or a short story a ?realist text,? as opposed to something else (like a fable, romance, myth, or tale). We will focus our investigation on the 18th and 19th century essayists, novelists, and thinkers who shaped what we now (too confidently?) refer to as ?narrative realism,? spending much of our time in Victorian England, the site where ?the realist novel? is said to have flourished. Since this subject is vast and formidable, our reading selection will be highly-selective and representative, not exhaustive. We will read texts from across the genres, including the scientific, the theoretical, and of course, the fictional. Is realism a ?mirror held to nature?? Is it ?a mirror carried along a road?? We will attempt to answer these questions by reading, discussing, and writing about realist texts.
English R1B is intended to develop students? writing fluency and to introduce students to the principles of research. The assignments lead to an increasingly complex application of these skills. The focus is on exposition and argumentation, particularly with the use of research. In English 1B, readings are chosen to facilitate analysis and develop student-generated research projects. You will be writing every week: sometimes in short close reading assignments that you produce at home, and other times in small groups. In addition, you will write two short papers (4-5 pages) that lead into a larger research project (8-10 pages) of your own design. You will need to devote several hours to reading each week. You must also attend class regularly and participate in various in-class assignments, as attendance and participation will weigh substantially in the final grade. "
"Harper, Michael S., and Anthony Walton, eds., Every Shut Eye Ain?t Asleep: An Anthology of Poems by African Americans Since 1945
Lew, Walter K., ed., Premonitions. The Kaya Anthology Of New Asian North American Poetry
Keene, John, Annotations
Mullen, Harryette, Trimmings, S*perm**k*t, And Muse & Drudge
Cha, Theresa Hak-Kyung, Dictee
Yau, John, Radiant Silhouette: New and Selected Work, 1974-1988
Harvey, Michael, The Nuts And Bolts Guide To College Writing
A Course Reader"
"Within the traditions of contemporary African American and Asian American poetry, a category of self-identified ?experimental? writing has emerged recently. What is minority ?experimental? poetry? One of the primary aims of this course is to familiarize ourselves with some exemplary works along with the debates ignited by these new trends. Since this course is also meant to satisfy the R1B requirement, our other aim is to improve students? reading, writing and research skills. The potential anxiety students might feel about writing longer expository essays should be lessened by breaking up assignments into research, prewriting, outlining, drafting, and editing components.
Our readings will be guided by several overarching questions. First, how might we provisionally define ?experimental? writing in a minority context? Second, how are African American and Asian American versions of ?innovative? or ?experimental? writing conditioned by each group?s specific literary history? We will investigate arguments concerning identity politics, ?political correctness,? and contemporary poetry?s notorious opacity and ?difficulty.? We will also ask how poetry attempts to repress or engage the political.
This course will be geared toward sharpening students? ability to hone their responses to weekly readings into textually-supportable, tightly-organized critical arguments. Also, we?ll take time to focus on research skills, including compiling annotated bibliographies and using online resources. Along with journal responses to weekly readings, students will be expected to write two research papers (4-6 and 7-10 pages) that will be critiqued and revised over the course of the semester. "
"Harriet Jacobs, Incidents In The Life of a Slave Girl
Toni Morrison, Beloved
Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close : A Novel
Elie Wiesel, Night
Elie Wiesel, Day: A Novel
Cynthia Ozick, The Shawl
Paul Celan, selected poetry
A reader to include theoretical and historical articles. "
Trauma, in its essence, is paradoxical. On the one hand, it yearns to be inscribed, even broadcast; on the other, it often stubbornly refuses inscription. This course will examine how literature has grappled with this paradox of trauma. Why do trauma survivors have so much trouble putting their experience to words? What form does literature take when it is subject to this struggle? We will look at a wide array of texts associated with historical traumas in order to examine these questions. In particular, we will focus on literature that has emerged from slavery, the Holocaust, and 9/11. As we trace the development of trauma and literature, we will follow what it teaches us about nation, ethics and identity.
"Literature and the Environment: A Reader on Nature and Culture, ed. Lorraine Anderson, Scott Slovic, and John P. O?Grady
An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore
A Sand County Almanac, Aldo Leopold
Jokerman 8, Richard Melo
Rules for Writers, Diana Hacker, or The Everyday Writer, Andrea Lunsford
A course reader with critical essays, historical documents and literary works Several films"
"For many generations of authors, writing about the Earth and our human impact upon it has been an intriguing artistic challenge. In this course, we will explore the challenges of representing our natural environment and its human stewardship by considering an array of stories, essays, media commentary, films, and other materials. A primary goal will be to familiarize ourselves with a) the rhetorical devices used to fashion persuasive arguments, including ?spin?; b) current and historical narratives of how the world?s natural resources are endangered (or not) by human activity; and c) literary representations of the Earth and the possibility of its irrevocable decay. One of our primary inquiries will be, ?is the natural environment an artistic and cultural resource?and if so, what can literary representation do to preserve or renew it??
Our classroom will be both a writing workshop and a forum for discussing literature and environmental issues. No prior knowledge of environmental concepts is required. This class will expose you to a wide variety of literary styles, from naturalists? diaries to epic poetry, as well as pieces considered journalistic or scientific, rather than literary. In assessing the argumentative and narrative techniques of these materials, you will develop and hone your own researching, reading, and writing skills. Brief weekly writing assignments will help you digest and evaluate the required reading, and also give you the chance to select and comment upon some of the environmental news that pours in everyday. Finally, you will also write two argumentative essays of increasing length, projects for which you will research outside sources and develop a topic of personal interest. Your finished essays will emerge from a process we might think of as ?creative reuse??the process of extensive drafting, reviewing, and revising. "
"R.L. Stevenson, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway
William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying
Toni Morrison, Beloved
Faye Ng, Bone
Recommended Texts:
Diana Hacker, Rules for Writers 5th ed. "
"The texts we will read in this course will challenge us to think about how a story is constructed. We will enter the mind of a child who believes his dead mother is a fish, and a mentally unstable woman who sees another woman hiding in a wallpaper. We will be confronted by scattered pieces of narrative that will require the work of our hands and our minds to piece together. The skill of close reading will help us to see the pieces more clearly and how they might fit together; moreover, the way we think about a text will also help us to think about how we write.
I want us to think about writing as an ongoing discussion we have with ourselves and the ideas that others have had on the text. Our job is to understand how we can incorporate the research that we conduct with the ideas we have found through close reading. You will be asked to write two essays for the class. The first will be a critical essay of seven pages in length consisting of evidence you have gathered from the assigned readings. The second will be nine pages in length and consist of evidence you have gathered from outside sources. The practice of writing will be mediated by peer editing and one-on-one meetings with me. "
"In ?The Philosophy of Composition,? Edgar Allan Poe writes, ?the death . . . of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world.? A recurring focus of interest in Anglophone literature is the dead woman?literally dead, imaginary, slowly perishing of a mysterious spiritual affliction, or rendered ghostly by her social context. In this discussion-based course, we will interrogate the notion of the female-gendered cadaver: what does it mean to have gender if one is dead? What attributes does femininity lose?or gain?in spectrality?
This course fulfills the second half of the Reading and Composition requirement; therefore, it will emphasize expository writing and research skills. Two papers, a research proposal, an annotated bibliography, and supplementary exercises will be required. Readings will include Hawthorne?s The Blithedale Romance, Woolf?s A Room of One?s Own, Toomer?s Cane, and Morrison?s Beloved, as well as short prose by Irving, Poe, and James; poems by Wordsworth, Tennyson, and Dickinson; critical essays; and the writing of peers. "
"Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (Jonathan Safran Foer)
In the Shadow of No Towers (Art Spiegelman)
Rules for Writers, 5th edition (Diana Hacker)
A required course reader containing poems, short stories, essays and critical articles. "
"Responses to the events of September 11th, 2001 made surprisingly frequent reference to narrative: unable to describe the attacks any other way, we either noted their similarity to film or TV, or we described our shock by saying, as the title of this course puts it, ?If it had been a movie, I wouldn?t have believed it.? In this class, we?ll consider representations of and in the aftermath of September 11th as they appear in fiction, poetry, media, visual art and film. We?ll also read critical essays on issues such as the media and trauma, historical analogy, 9/11 and commerce, and memorialization. What are the available literary, narrative, or cultural forms for describing events we couldn?t imagine? What comes in the aftermath of national or personal trauma? Do we seek something different in literature after experiencing a ?nightmarish? reality? How do we properly memorialize national tragedies, and what political questions do these memorials raise?
And of course we?ll also be thinking about, talking about, and doing a lot of writing! The goal of R1B is to equip you with the skills needed to read, analyze, and write about literature and culture effectively, and to refine your skills in using research and evidence to construct persuasive expository essays. Throughout the semester you?ll work on a series of assignments designed to develop specific reading and writing skills. After getting your muscles stretched with these short assignments, we?ll shift to the long-distance running of longer and more argumentative expository papers, essays for which you?ll be free to develop both a topic and a set of research sources/primary texts according to your own interests and/or academic discipline. These essays will go through an extensive drafting process, both in peer workshop groups and in one-on-one meetings with me. "
"Bombal, M. L., House of Mist/The Shrouded Woman
C?saire, A., Notebook of a Return to the Native Land
Neruda, P., Canto General
A course reader"
"Literary movements described as ?modernist? are typically associated with the social phenomena of ?modernity?: urbanization, industrialization, and secularization, to name a few. But these social developments occurred at very different times, and in very different ways, in the various regions that were to produce experimental, ?modernist? literature. For example, it was after World War II, in the midst of growing nationalist sentiment in Iraq and Syria, that writers in these countries developed literary forms marked by free-verse composition, anti-traditionalist values, and allusions to pre-Islamic mythic systems. This is in marked contrast to Latin American modernism, which is classically defined by a much earlier sequence of periods: modernismo (1882-1896), postmodernismo (1905-1914), and ultramodernismo (1914-1932). In this class, we will investigate the cultural and geo-political circumstances out of which different ?modernist? movements arose in the Americas, Africa, Central Asia, and East Asia. We will examine the meaning and value that ?new,? non-traditional writing took on in these regions and the various political anxieties and commitments that experimental literature came to express in them. Of special importance will be the relationship of modernism to national liberation movements in the Global South. Students will be expected to conduct independent research into the cultures and political economies of the regions on which we focus, and write a research paper on their findings.
The first paper in the class should exhibit the student?s ability to employ close reading, literary analysis, and theoretical argumentation. The second paper should integrate these interpretive techniques with the research in history and political economy the students will conduct. "
"Sigmund Freud, ?Mourning and Melancholia?
Gwendolyn Brooks, In the Mecca
Alan Ball, Six Feet Under
Philip Levine, The Simple Truth
Robert Burton, Anatomy of Melancholy (selections)
Selected lyric poems by Ben Jonson; Katherine Philips; John Donne; Lucy Hutchinson; John Milton; Andrew Marvell; Emily Dickinson; Alfred, Lord Tennyson; Gwendolyn Brooks; and Elizabeth Bishop "
"What do we expect from a work of art that takes death as its subject? How do we expect it to make us feel? Do we read it differently than, say, a love poem, or a comedy ? and what happens when love, comedy, and death intermix? What can the disappointment or fulfillment of our expectations tell us about how we read, and how we write?
This course takes works of art commemorating death as the starting point for an investigation of literary form and critical reading practice. We will attend not only to the ideas and images of the texts we study, but also to the difference it makes that they come to us in the forms that they do ? whether as lyric poems, physical monuments, or TV shows.
Our study of how these texts work will illuminate not only how we read, but also how our expectations and assumptions shape us as writers. Writing assignments will include: a pr?cis of Freud?s ?Mourning and Melancholia;? a close reading of a lyric poem; writing an obituary; an analysis of a physical monument; two short argumentative papers; and an extended research paper. Short research assignments will entail exploring newspaper debates about the Vietnam Veterans? Memorial and the World Trade Center memorial, using online archives of early printed books, and comparing contemporary and later reviews of poems. The shorter assignments of the course build toward your final research project, teaching you to plan your research, evaluate sources, and incorporate the results into an argumentative paper, with appropriate drafting and revision. In all cases the goal will be clear, grammatical English prose that communicates effectively. "
"Bantock, Nick: Griffin and Sabine
O?Brien, Tim: The Lake in the Woods
McEwan, Ian: Atonement
Austen, Jane: Pride and Prejudice
Course Reader "
"What constitutes evidence? Epistemology is the study of the origin, nature, and methods of human knowledge, and in this course we will address in our reading, writing, and discussion such questions as: When should one trust one?s intuition? When and how should one seek validation? When should one trust others instead of one?s own instinct? How can one be fooled or misinterpret things? An essential aspect of analytical writing is finding and utilizing evidence to substantiate one?s points, and our interrogations into literary characters who must face their own conceptions and misconceptions about proof will inform our own strategies of writing and developing a convincing argument. R1B is a course that incorporates research into analytical writing, and part of our focus will be learning how to integrate the opinions of others into our own, whether as supplement or counterpoint.
There will be three required papers in this class: two short essays and a longer research paper, each of which will be revised and rewritten. There will also be a final exam. "
"Anton Chekhov, The Portable Chekhov
Charles Dickens, Great Expectations
Margaret Ferguson, Mary Jo Salter, Jon Stallworthy, eds., The Norton Anthology of Poetry
(e.g., at least one sonnet from Shakespeare, a couple songs from Ben Jonson?s plays, Blake?s ?The Tyger,? something by Keats, Frost?s ?Spring Pools,? Yeats?s ?The Wild Swans at Coole,? Roethke?s ?My Papa?s Waltz,? something by Philip Larkin, something by Robert Hass, etc.)
Joseph Gibaldi, MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers
A course reader "
"In this course we will read closely and write about markedly different kinds of literature ? a novel, verse, a couple short stories, and one play in two different translations ? with the aim of coming to some conclusions about what makes great literature great. The reading list is thus made up some of the war-horses of this culture?s literature. We will start with the presumption that these works are great and worth studying.
I?ve chosen not to organize this class around a single theme or what-have-you because I want students to resist the urge to compartmentalize experience. It?s common for people to like different sorts of literature, but uncommon for students and teachers to think about what, for example, the experience of little poems and big novels have in common. In this class we will try to make such connections, not only between the works on the reading list, but also between the works on the reading list and contemporary popular art forms like country song lyrics, television sitcoms (and so on).
This course is designed to help students write clearly and honestly about the experience of reading. Students will write weekly 1 page papers as well as two research papers totaling 16 pages. "
No course description is available at this time
No course description is available at this time
"Joanna Gavins and Gerard Steen,Cognitive Poetics in Practice.
Richard Gerrig, Experiencing Narrative Worlds: On the Psychological Activities of Reading.
Mark Johnson, The Body in the Mind: The Bodily Basis of Meaning, Imagination, and Reason.
Peter Stockwell, Cognitive Poetics: An Introduction.
Mark Turner, Reading Minds: The Study of English in the Age of Cognitive Poetics.
A course reader which will include essays, poems, and short stories."
"In this class, we will learn about a new and exciting approach to the study of literature called cognitive poetics. Cognitive poetics is not a homogeneous school of criticism, but a constellation of diverse assumptions about and practical techniques for analyzing how readers cognitively process the stylistic features of literary texts. It draws from many areas of cognitive science, including cognitive linguistics, cognitive psychology, discourse psychology, social psychology, and psycholinguistics. When studies in cognitive poetics appeared in the 1970s, 80s, and 90s, the majority of them were produced by scholars from literature departments in Europe and Israel, and went virtually unnoticed by their American counterparts. However, over the last decade, cognitive poetics has become increasingly accepted among American literary critics. This class will introduce students to its goals, methods, problems and possibilities.
We will consider cognitive poetics in relation to some of its methodological predecessors and think about their similarities and differences. How does it compare to formal, historical and cultural interpretations of literature? What are the advantages and disadvantages of a cognitive poetic approach? Adopting the principles of particular cognitive poetic frameworks--including prototype theory, possible worlds theory, research on figure and ground, cognitive grammar, and cognitive deixis--we will produce analyses of poems and short stories and think about how these analyses might relate to readings motivated by more conventional forms of literary criticism.
Students will explore these issues while learning to read critically, propose arguments, and perform research tasks. Over the course of the semester, students will produce approximately 32 pages of writing. This writing will be broken down into three essays which will increase in length as the term progresses. The final two papers will require students to use academic sources beyond those provided in class. "
"Jane Addams, Twenty Years at Hull House
Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward
Benjamin Disraeli, Sybil
Richard Wright, Native Son
Supplementary Texts:
Frederick Crews, The Random House Handbook, 6th ed.
Joseph Gibaldi, MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers, 6th ed.
William Strunk Jr., E.B. White, Roger Angell, The Elements of Style"
"What is social reform? What are the thought processes involved in defining a social problem? And how does this definition affect the manner and methods used to solve it? This course seeks to better understand the impulse to want to solve a problem perceived in society. Before they can be solved, problems are things that first must be imagined as solvable. The literature of social reform affords us the distinct opportunity to observe such imaginings.
This course is reading and writing intensive, and aims to develop in students fluency with the method and discourse of the analytical essay. Special emphasis shall be placed on the refinement of sentence construction, thesis development, and research methods. Additionally, systematic reasoning through close reading will be stressed both in class discussion and in the course?s various writing opportunities. This course fulfills the second half of the University Reading and Composition requirement. "
"Jamaica Kincaid, A Small Place
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, The Mistress of Spices
Arundhati Roy, The Cost of Living
Diana Hacker, Rules for Writers
A substantial course reader"
Often mentioned but rarely explained, the term ?globalization? provides one way of thinking about the economic, social, and cultural processes of recent years. For some, globalization promises a world at our fingertips, an exciting world free of boundaries and borders. For others, it means an intensification of suffering and inequality on a global scale. This course offers a user-friendly introduction to globalization?s often sharply opposed meanings. Class material will be drawn from a variety of sources, ranging from fiction and film to recent scholarly and political writing. While presenting important ideas and frameworks for thinking, these sources will also provide occasions to develop skills in reading, writing, and critical analysis. Assignments move from personal response papers to formal academic essays, culminating in a 10 pp. research paper and oral presentation at the end of term. Students can expect frequent exercises in peer-editing and revising. An area of special focus will be the elements of the research process, which we will target and practice in both in-class and out-of-class activities, including hands-on sessions in the library. No previous knowledge required.
"William Faulkner, Light in August (1932)
Boris Vian, I Spit on Your Graves (1946)
Chester Himes, A Rage in Harlem (1957)
Gene Wolfe, The Fifth Head of Cerberus (1972)
Films:
The Searchers (1956)
Sweet Sweetback?s Baadasssss Song (1971)
Rocky (1976) "
"As the title suggests, this course will consider the relationship between race, violence, and paranoia. Often when narratives (whether novels or films) explore racial difference, depictions of violence are not far removed. The texts I?ve assembled for this course identify paranoia as the fundamental link between race and violence. It will be our job to attempt to identify how and why these authors and filmmakers link race to violence through the lens of paranoia.
Additionally, almost all of these texts come from the US. The only exception is I Spit on Your Graves, which was written by a French author who claimed to have translated this novel from one written by an African-American. Hence, we will also consider the relevance of American culture to this intersection. Richard Hofstadter?s 1964 essay, ?The Paranoid Style of American Politics? presents us with a useful starting point: the paranoid ?does not see social conflict as something to be mediated and compromised . . . [W]hat is necessary is not compromise but the will to fight things out to a finish.? This sentiment and its relevance to American culture will be a guidepost for us throughout the semester.
Above all, this is a writing course, so your primary goal will be to refine and develop analytical writing skills. You will be expected to write a series of progressively longer and more complicated essays throughout the semester. In addition, this course carries a research component; you will learn basic research methods (library, internet, etc.) and apply them to your writing. You will also be required to purchase a course reader that includes literature and relevant literary criticism not listed below. "
"The Weather, Lisa Robertson (New Star Books, 2001);
Don?t Let Me Be Lonely, Claudia Rankine (Graywolf Press, 2004);
Somebody Blew Up America, Amiri Baraka (House of Nehesi, 2003);
Deer Head Nation, K. Silem Mohammed (Tougher Disguises, 2003);
My Way, Charles Bernstein (U of Chicago, 1999); and a reader of poems and essays. "
"There are several varieties of contemporary poetry: Lyric, L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, Post-Lang, ?mainstream?, slam, and flarf poets, as well as others who can?t or won?t be categorized. Major publishers, university presses, and dozens of small presses publish hundreds of poetry books every year. Nevertheless, you rarely ? if ever ? read about contemporary poetry in the paper, see it shelved in the bookstore, or learn it about it in the high school or college classroom. That may well be because it?s hard to know how to approach recent poetry, and critical methods like New Criticism, Deconstruction, and New Historicism offer conflicting models of interpretation.
In this course, we?ll put literary criticism and theory to the test by practicing it and applying it to works of recently published poetry. We?ll ask about contemporary poetry?s function, purpose, and responsibilities ? whether it?s any good, and whether it does any good. You?ll do a close reading of a poem, write your own evaluation of a work of criticism, and present your interpretation of a book of poetry to the class. Finally, you?ll research and write about a contemporary poet of your own choosing. This course will help you perfect your arguments by formulating and re-formulating critical questions and thesis statements; it will also help you learn the methods and protocols of literary research. "
No texts
The goal of this course is to help students to feel confident in talking about the arts and to take pleasure in that confidence, as well as to feel at home in the various venues that exhibit art and performance at Berkeley. We will discuss how best to look at and interpret works of visual arts exhibited at the Berkeley Art Museum; we will attend dance and theater events at Cal Performances, and we may include something in the City. Most weeks we will attend either the museum or a performance event on campus, then discuss that in class. The class usually gets 75% discounts for Cal Performance events. But they will have to pay in other ways by providing occasional one-page reviews that will be the basis for class discussion.
Thoreau, H.D.: Walden
"Course Description: We will read Thoreau's Walden in small chunks, probably about thirty pages per week. This will allow us time to dwell upon the complexities of a book that is much more mysterious than those who have read the book casually, or those who have only heard about it, realize. We will also try to work some with online versions of the book, using the wordsearch command to identify words such as ""woodchuck"" or ""root"" that reappear frequently, in order to speculate on patterns Thoreau is trying to establish. Regular attendance and participation, along with a loose five-page essay at the end, are required."
Lehman, D.: The Oxford Book of American Verse
This workshop will teach various approaches toward the writing of verse. In addition to weekly writing assignments, students will read a range of poetry and essays, and will be encouraged to attend local poetry readings.
Heaney S., trans.: Beowulf; Donaldson, E., trans.: Beowulf; Chaucer, G.: The Canterbury Tales; Marlowe, C.: Dr. Faustus; Spenser, E.: The Faerie Queene; Milton, J.: Paradise Lost
This course will focus on the central works of the early English literary tradition, beginning with Beowulf and ending with Paradise Lost. We will examine the texts in light of the cultures in which they were produced, asking ourselves why these works were written when they were written, and what the unfamiliar cultures of the Middle Ages and Renaissance have to say to us now. We will also focus on developing reading skills and on understanding the literary tradition as a set of interrelated texts and problems that recur over the course of centuries. We will examine these works as formal artifacts as well as historical documents. Students will work on close readings, on literary language, and on understanding generic distinctions as they functioned in the past and function now. Expect to write three papers, to take a midterm, and a final exam.
Chaucer, G.: Canterbury Tales; Spenser, E.: Edmund Spenser?s Poetry; Marlowe, C.: Doctor Faustus; Milton, J.: Paradise Lost
This class introduces students to the production of poetic narrative in English through the close study of major works in that tradition: the Canterbury Tales, The Faerie Queene, Doctor Faustus, and Paradise Lost. Each of these texts reflects differently on the ambition of national, epic poetry to enfold the range of a culture?s experience. We will focus particularly, therefore, on the relationships of different genres to different kinds of knowledge, to see how different ways of expressing things make possible new things to express, as English culture and English poetry transform each other from the fourteenth to the seventeenth centuries.
To be arranged
On the face of it, English 45B seems like a ?neither/nor? course; neither a course in the great English authors (Chaucer, Spenser, Milton) nor a course in ?modern? literature. It represents neither the supposed ?origin? nor the putative ?end? of literature in English; it?s only the middle, and a peculiarly defined middle at that: from the ?Glorious Revolution? that legitimated an extra-national monarch for Great Britain to the end of a Civil War in that former British colony, ?America.? But students electing to take this course will discover that the writers in this period defined or redefined?in their practices as well as in their prefaces?virtually every idea that governs our attitudes toward ?literature.? At once functioning as the expression of ?private? feelings and as a ?national? discourse, Anglophone literature of the 18th and 19th centuries also partly invented what we mean by the ?individual,? the literate subject. We?ll watch how Alexander Pope makes English into an artificial language that ?belongs? to no particular class; we?ll see how letters are the means by which former ?nobodies??women and slaves?exercise a measure of freedom and autonomy. But we?ll also see the supposedly liberatory, democratizing power of letters and of literature challenged?by Dickens, in Bleak House, and Melville, in ?Bartleby the Scrivener.? As we consider Wordsworth and Coleridge?s attempt to redefine poetry and Emerson?s and Thoreau?s attempt to write new kinds of prose, we?ll also ask a more general question: what constitutes the ?novelty? of literature, and?if novelty or ?originality? is a value, what is the point of reading literature of the past?
Bronte, Emily: Wuthering Heights; Dickens, Charles: Great Expectations; Douglass, Frederick: Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass; Franklin, Benjamin: Autobiography; Hawthorne, Nathaniel: Scarlet Letter; Thoreau, Henry: Walden; Wordsworth, William: Prelude; Course Reader
An introduction to literature in English from the eighteenth through the mid-nineteenth centuries, including works by Pope, Franklin, Wordsworth, Emily Bronte, Douglass, Hawthorne, Dickens, Browning, and Whitman. (It is strongly recommended that you take English 45A before enrolling in this course).
Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry; Wilde, O.: The Picture of Dorian Gray and Other Writings; James, H.: The Portrait of a Lady; Joyce, J.: Dubliners; Woolf, V.: To the Lighthouse; Faulkner, W.: The Sound and the Fury; Achebe, C.: Things Fall Apart; Welty, E.: Golden Apples
This course will provide a survey of major works and stylistic experiments that have come to characterize modernism in Anglo-American literature. We will try to understand the pressures to which the writers were responding and we will explore how their experiments can be said to make a difference in cultural life. Lectures will be devoted primarily to close reading, although there will be considerable concern for trends within the intellectual ferment of the period. There will be a mid-term and final as well as three five-page papers. The pace of this class will be intense and the discourse somewhat demanding.
Ellmann, R., R. O'Clair, and J. Ramazani: The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry, Vol. I; Faulkner, W: Absalom, Absalom!; Hemingway, E.: The Sun Also Rises; Nabokov, V.: Lolita; Toomer, J.: Cane; Woolf, V.: Mrs. Dalloway
"A survey of English and American literature from the late-nineteenth through the mid-twentieth century, with attention given both to conceptions of literature intrinsically claimed by the texts assigned and to the historical and cultural grounds out of which they emerged. The course will inevitably investigate the emergence and rise of modernism and also, in passing, the value and nature of such constructions as ""the author,"" ""literature,"" ""literary history,"" and ""period."" Active participation in discussion sections will be essential. There will be two short papers, a final exam, and possibly a midterm."
Melville, Benito Cereno; F. Scott Fitzgerald: The Great Gatsby; Gloria Anzaldua: Borderlands; Chang Rae-Lee, Native Speaker; a course reader including essays and short stories
"The American historian Frederick Jackson Turner argued in 1893 that the United States was essentially born on the frontier, that it had forged its unique national, legislative, social, and intellectual identity upon the ?hither edge of free land.? To study the frontier, Turner argued, was to study the ?really American part of our history.? We?ll start off the semester with Turner?s now famous essay and then borrow the questions it raises as launch points for our own investigations: What is ?really American? about America? What defines American character, American culture, American-ness? How does one ?study? America? Where and with whom does its meaning lie? Turner approached these questions as an historian, but the topic of ?America? has fueled the writings of travelers, poets, novelists, journalists and others. Our readings from these sources will be necessarily selective, and our goal not to settle the question of what defines ?America,? but rather to explore some of the different ways this country has been represented and theorized. Your project for the semester will be to immerse yourself in this debate, and to discover therein something that interests, inspires, disturbs, tickles, infuriates or otherwise affects you sufficiently to make you want to find out more about it!
Taking ?America? as our central point of reference, this course will serve as an introduction to the wide world of scholarly research and writing, as well as to the more specific realm of literary study. You will learn how to read texts critically, generate original questions out of these readings, develop these questions into research projects, seek out and assess relevant published essays and books, and make new contributions to a scholarly debate. If this all sounds overwhelming, don?t despair! We will break down the writing process into manageable steps, and much of our energy and attention will focus upon strategies for inspiring, crafting and delivering strong critical writing. The ultimate purpose of this class is less to bequeath you with a predetermined body of knowledge than to embolden you to generate and pursue your own ideas. Students who choose to enroll should therefore bring an open mind and a willingness to engage in class discussion.
Writing Requirements: Students will complete informal weekly assignments targeting specific reading, writing and research skills, and then apply these skills toward three formal essays of increasing length and complexity. The final project for the course will require students to generate their own topic and conduct independent library research. "
Fitzgerald, S.: The Great Gatsby; Ondaatje, M.: In the Skin of a Lion; James, H.: The American; Hacker, D.: Rules for Writers, Fifth Edition. A required course reader will contain shorter works and excerpts. Some films will also be shown.
"This course topic is meant to refigure, in more pedestrian terms, the intersection of sexual desire and socioeconomic status in the literary domain. In familiarizing those academic terms, we will chart the difference, if any, between ?love? and ?sexual desire? and between ?money? and ?class,? for our materials will employ all four terms. The texts for this course will represent both writers interested in capitalism?s effect on the affections of the heart and writers interested in the romantic possibilities of wealth and poverty. The course is intended to give a wide variety of materials for writing purposes, and will range from ?high literature? through popular culture and romantic comedies.
Our analyses will be performed in writing, and the primary goal of the class, beyond an appreciation for the material, is to teach the mechanics and technology of writing in college. To that end, students will write several short essays, three of which will be substantial revisions of prior work. "
Carver, R.: Where I?m Calling From; Silver & Ursini, eds.: Film Noir Reader 4
The course will focus on analyzing the films of the Coen brothers and earlier noir classics, and the stories of Carver in relation to issues of representation, genre and gender. We will make use of University Art Museum exhibits, Cal Performances and Pacific Film Archive films to extend our range of cultural experiences.
A Course Reader
This course will introduce students to the work currently being undertaken by both Berkeley faculty and local artists in issues of race and class, gender and ethnicity, and the formations of minority discourse. Each week a different scholar or writer will lecture on literary study that reflects cultural and racial concerns. Upper-division undergraduates will lead discussion groups focusing on the methods advocated in the lecture and on various readings. Attendance is required at both the one-hour lecture and the one-hour discussion. Discussion sections will be limited to 15 students. A six-to-ten-page term paper will be due the final week of class, and during the semester there will be regular, short, ungraded writing assignments in preparation for the term paper.
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.
Graduate students from other departments and exceptionally well-prepared undergraduates are welcome in English graduate courses (except for English 200 and 375) insofar as limitations of class size allow. Graduate courses are usually limited to 15 students; courses numbered 250 are usually limited to 10.
When demand for a graduate course exceeds the maximum enrollment limit, the instructor will determine priorities for enrollment and inform students of his/her decisions at the second class meeting. Prior enrollment does not guarantee a place in a graduate course that turns out to be oversubscribed on the first day of class; fortunately, this situation does not arise very often.
Auerbach, Erich: Mimesis; Beckett, Samuel: Nohow On, How It Is; Beowulf, Seamus Heaney, translator, Ang & Eng [dual language edition]; Foley, John Miles: The Theory of Oral Composition: History and Methodology, Joyce, James: Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man; Mansfield, Katherine: Stories (1956); McKeon, Michael: Theory of the Novel: A Historical Approach, A Critical Anthology; Lord, Albert: A Singer of Tales; Pinker, Steven: Word and Object; Radford, Andrew: Transformational Grammar: A First Course; Woolf, Virginia: To the Lighthouse
This course will explore the relations between syntax and literary form. We will begin by acquainting ourselves with grammatical theory and argumentation and then consider hypotheses about the language of literature that they seem to open up, beginning with the ?oral formulaic theory? of the epic, then turning to the syntax of time and point of view in the novel, specifically, represented speech and thought (?free indirect style?). This will lead to a contrast between the genres epic and novel. We will then consider recent theories of the lexicon as they suggest ways to analyze Samuel Beckett?s late style. Beckett?s ?revolution of the syntax? will be compared with Joyce?s ?revolution of the word? in Finnegans Wake. This will also raise the question of the nature of prose. What I hope will emerge in the course of the semester is how many interesting research projects can be defined starting from certain conclusions of syntactic theory and how few of them have been actually undertaken. No prior background in linguistics will be assumed.
Edgeworth, Maria: Castle Rackrent and Ennui; Scott, Walter: Waverley OR Old Mortality OR Ivanhoe; Austen, Jane: Persuasion; Shelley, Mary: Frankenstein; Hogg, James: Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner; Gaskell, Elizabeth: Mary Barton; Braddon, Mary: Lady Audley?s Secret; Collins, Wilkie: The Moonstone; Dickens, Charles: Little Dorrit; Eliot, George: Daniel Deronda; Hardy, Thomas: The Mayor of Casterbridge
A selection of major nineteenth-century British novels. We will bring some large questions to bear on one another: questions about the world, locality or society the novel aims to represent (region or province; nation; empire / ?the globe?; ?the condition of England?), looking at the function of history (personal and collective, with attention to the century?s shift from national history to natural history as authoritative discourses) and representative types or figures (including the alien, misfit, criminal, monster, scapegoat); questions about form, including narrative form (first-person memoir or confession; third-person modes of free indirect style and omniscient narration), genre (not only the different kinds of the novel in the period?regional, domestic, historical, industrial, sensation fiction, etc.?but the novel?s internal posing of itself in relation to other genres and modes, e.g. romance, history, allegory, lyric), and material form (publishing, format, institutions of production and reception).
Augusto Roa Bastos: I the Supreme; Achille Mbembe: On the Postcolony; Ben Okri: The Famished Road; Alejo Carpentier: Explosion in the Cathedral; Dipesh Chakravorty: Proventializing Europe; Hayden White: Metahistory; Michel-Rolph Trouillot: Silencing the Past; T. Adorno & M. Horkheimer: Dialectic of Enlightenment; Aim? C?saire: Discourse on Colonialism
This class will examine the question of history and the conceptualization of the modern in postcolonial literature and theory. It is only at death, when the possibility of future action for an individual is foreclosed, that we are able to begin to give final significance to what he has done in life. After the implosion of the West in the Great War, colonial intellectuals concluded that the history of the West could be finally written because it had come to an end not in the eternal present of the Hegelian triumph but in suicidal despair not in spite of but because of the very achievements of the Hegelian Geist. The key moments in Hegel?s triumphant narrative of the Geist in its advance to the Prussian state were also re-evaluated and different aspects of the past became important. Once explored at the margins of European literature in the period of pan-European pacifism, colonial violence for example proved itself altogether more fateful. Moreover, and perhaps most importantly, reason itself was revealed to be based on the partial assumptions of the technologist who aimed to master, control and use matter. Descartes became a key figure in the emergence of the Western ideology that had led to auto-destruction. Also coming under scrutiny was the dialectical theory of history which implied that past gains are preserved in the higher stages, so that no progress is lost, and progress is cumulative. Anything worth preserving is sublated. The crisis of the West then lead to a revaluation of what had to be negatively dismissed because it had not been preserved and intensive study of what had been ignored or stood outside the march of progress. The texts chosen for this course are both the classic articulations of the Western narratives of progress and postcolonial works which place the mechanics of progress under rigorous scrutiny.
Spenser, E.: The Faerie Queene; (the Yale U.P. edition of) The Shorter Poems of Edmund Spenser
Perhaps this course should be sub-titled Spenserian Recoveries and Explorations, or Wandering in the Spenserian Landscape. I take enormous pleasure in reading The Faerie Queene, but I think it?s hard for people to find that pleasure when it is crammed into a week or two of anxious reading for a course or for orals. A semester won?t really give us the all the time for wandering that we need, but I hope that we can nonetheless create a classroom atmosphere of wandering in which we can acknowledge that we don?t always know where we are going and can be prepared to be surprised?and at least sometimes delighted?by what we find. The wandering won?t be entirely unconstrained?we will read through The Faerie Queene accompanied by various of the shorter works as they seem appropriate and will bump into various critics (monsters? seductive temptresses? trustworthy guides?) along the way?but my hope is that you will find the Spenser most useful and pleasurable to you in the process. I want to leave specifications about class structure and writing requirements a little vague until I see who is actually in the class and what you want Spenser for, but my expectation is that the class will depend in part on group work and that the writing (which will amount to roughly 20 pages) will be configured differently for different students.
See below
This course will provide a basic introduction to the major meters of the modern English poetic tradition from the perspective of a specific theory of meter rooted in generative linguistics. Taking the strict iambic pentameter of Shakespeare's Sonnets, the looser iambic pentameter of Shakespeare's plays, and Hopkins' Sprung Rhythm pentameter as representatives of three distinct but overlapping meters, we will explore the structural properties of stress, syllable count and caesura placement in these forms, the range of variation they allow, their different manifestations in closely related forms and in the practice of other poets, their aesthetic effects in particular poems, their formal relationships to their Romance, Old English and Classical Latin and Greek influences, and their relationships to the rhythmic structure of language itself. No prior background in either metrics or linguistics is required. The principal text for the course will be a draft of a book I am writing as an introduction to the subject; we will use it and the poetry on which its claims are based to establish a common foundation from which each student will explore the metrical practice of a poet or poets of his or her own choosing.
Fuller, M.: The Essential Margaret Fuller; Beecher, C.: Treatise on Domestic Economy; Stowe, H.: Uncle Tom?s Cabin and Dred; Howe, J. W.: The Hermaphrodite; Sweat, M.: Ethel?s Love-Life; Lee, J.: Religious Experience and Journal; Hawthorne, N.: The Blithedale Romance; Wilson, H.: Our Nig; Stoddard, E.: The Morgesons; Oakes-Smith, E.: Bertha and Lily; Spofford, H.: The Amber Gods and Other Stories; Alcott, L.: Alternative Alcott; Gutjar, P.: Popular American Fiction of the Nineteenth Century; Walker, C.: American Women Poets of the Nineteenth Century
This course offers the opportunity to read a wide selection of fiction, essays, and poetry written by women prior to and during the Civil War. We will examine the history of recovery of nineteenth-century American women writers and the key debates around the politics, and more recently aesthetics, of sentimentality and domesticity. Yet we will also move beyond the small canon installed by this scholarship to read several newly republished (even some yet un-republished) works; to consider the mutual engagement of women writers and Poe, Hawthorne, and Melville (who we will also read), and to reconsider the role of feminism, literary experiment, and sexuality in women?s writing of this period. Along the way, we will query the politics of recovery, assess the possibility of comparative frameworks, and explore the use of gender as a lens of analysis. A portion of the semester will be reserved for the study of women?s poetry, an exciting area attracting new scholarly attention at the moment.
Chekhov, Anton: Selected Stories, The Complete Plays, The Island: A Journey to Sakhalin, Notebooks
This is a team-taught course, cross-listed with the Department of Journalism. The instructors are Robert Hass from the English Department and Mark Danner from Journalism. Danner is a staff writer for the New Yorker and the New York Review of Books, who has written extensively about political violence. The course will be an investigation of the procedures of Anton Chekhov, who reinvented the forms of the prose tale and the stage play in the last years of the nineteenth century. It will include a very demanding amount of reading, including almost all the stories of Chekhov, most of the major plays, his account of his visit to the prison island of Sakhalin, and relevant criticism of his work. The format will be seminar-style discussion. Written assignments will be developed based on student interest and the range of questions about Chekhov, the social life of Russia in the years before the revolution, the conventions of realism, and narrative theory. No reading knowledge of Russian is required.
Burrow and Turville-Petre, eds.: A Book of Middle English (3rd ed.); Pearsall, ed.: Piers Plowman: The C Version; other readings online or in a photocopied reader
"The course aims to introduce students to the Middle English, as a period both of the language and of literary history. There will be three main ""movements"" to the course. The first three weeks will introduce Middle English itself, offering a broad sense of its linguistic characteristics and the history of literary expression in it, with an emphasis on reading; during this time we will read short passages from a wide variety of works. In the three weeks or so to follow, we will do some rather more extended readings in Middle English poetry along with readings in contemporary scholarship, to get a rough sense of the present state of the field. The remainder of the semester will be spent discussing Langland's Piers Plowman. "
Milton, J.: The Riverside Milton
An intensive study of Milton?s major works.
The Norton Anthology of Contemporary Fiction; Flash Fiction: Very Short Stories
This limited-enrollment workshop course will concentrate on the form, theory and practice of fiction. Undergraduate students are welcome to apply for admission to this graduate workshop.
No required texts
"My chief concern as a student of literature is aesthetic. This therefore is probably not a serviceable course for students swatting up answers for doctor?s orals. This will be a survey course, but a highly selective one. Although I plan to look at the best and/or most interesting work of several lesser sixteenth-century writers?for instance, some lyrics by Wyatt and some by Sidney, and Surrey's blank verse?I mean to give over the bulk of class time to the verse of Spenser, Marlowe, and Shakespeare, particularly their narrative verse.
I will print out most of the short things we will talk about in class. Although there are no required texts for the course, these are recommendations for texts to use for the long narrative poems.
1. Shakespeare?s Narrative poems (use Either The Poems, ed., D. Bevington et al. [Bantam books] or The Narrative Poems, ed., J. Crewe [Penguin] or one of the one-volume complete Shakespeares assigned in English 117J or 117S or 117A or 117B).
2 Marlowe?s Hero and Leander (use Either Complete Poems and Translations, ed., S. Orgel [Penguin] or The Norton Anthology of English Lit, ed. Abrams et al., Volume 1 or The Norton Anthology of Poetry, ed., Ferguson et.al.).
3 Spenser?s Faerie Queene (use Either The Faerie Queene, ed., T. Roche [Penguin] or any other annotated, post-1970 edition that gives the whole poem). "
Readings are not yet finalized, but may include many of the following: Djuna Barnes: Nightwood; Willa Cather: Death Comes for the Archbishop; Joseph Conrad: The Secret Agent; Ford Madox Ford: The Good Soldier; Forster: A Passage to India; F. Scott Fitzgerald: The Great Gatsby; T. S. Eliot: The Waste Land; Nella Larsen: Passing; Gertrude Stein: The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas; Jean Toomer: Cane; Virginia Woolf: Mrs. Dalloway. There will also be a photocopied course reader containing poetry, essays, short fiction, and secondary theoretical and critical articles.
We will read widely in British and American literature of the first half of the twentieth century with an eye to the intersections between modernism and modernity. While attending closely to aesthetic and formal concerns, our discussions may also range among such topics as urbanism and regionalism; primitivism and cosmopolitanism; war, nationalism, and imperialism; immigration, migration, and expatriatism; coteries and collaboration; technology and the rise of celebrity culture; modern identity and its discontents; and the role of gender and race in the production of modern(ist) literature and culture. In addition to oral presentations and annotated bibliographies, students will be required to write two 10-12 page essays.
"Harriet Beecher Stowe: Uncle Tom?s Cabin; Helen Brown: John Freeman and His Family; John W. De Forest: Miss Ravenel?s Conversion from Secession to Loyalty; George W. Cable: The Grandissimes; Joel Chandler Harris: Uncle Remus: His Songs and His Sayings; Mark Twain: Huckleberry Finn; Frances Harper: Iola Leroy; Booker T. Washington: Up From Slavery; Thomas Nelson Page: Red Rock; Charles Chesnutt: The Marrow of Tradition; Ida B. Wells: Mob Rule in New Orleans; W. E. B. Du Bois: Black Reconstruction
There will also be a course reader with shorter works by Claude Bowers, Lydia Maria Child, Anna Julia Cooper, William Archibald Dunning, Rebecca Latimer Felton, Henry Grady, Albert Bushnell Hart, John R. Lynch, Kelly Miller, Mildred Thompson, Albion Tourg?e, Jared Bell Waterbury, Woodrow Wilson, and Carter G. Woodson.
Films include Birth of a Nation (D. W. Griffith), Within Our Gates (Oscar Micheaux), and Gone with the Wind (Victor Fleming). "
Among the revolutionary processes that transformed the nineteenth-century world, none was so dramatic in its human consequences or far-reaching in its social implications as the abolition of chattel slavery,? the historian Eric Foner has written. And nowhere was this revolutionary process more dramatic, more all-encompassing, than in the United States?the only society in the history of the world where ex-slaves were granted citizenship rights and meaningful political representation directly on the heels of emancipation. Reconstruction was an exceptional event in world history, to be sure, but one that swelled with the main currents of its time. It was an experiment in statecraft that tried to remake society all at once, turning a traditional situation where individuals were restricted by inherited relations of dependency into a modern scene based upon the liberty to contract. This course aims to grasp Reconstruction, in all its complexity, as a narrative problem. We will be thinking in the abstract about the nature of historical transition, and in particular about the role of violence in times of transition, while we look to some of the major works from the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries that turned Reconstruction into a story to be passed down. We will be interested in how these works sustain their most parochial commitments?blood, family, race, nation?by adapting the moral vocabulary of the marketplace, and we will try to understand how those commitments became variously inflected as romance, tragedy, and farce. We will pay close attention to the formal strategies (marriage plots, framing devices, analepses) that propel these narratives from slavery to freedom as well as to the developing conditions (the stratification of the book trade, the professionalization of historical research, the emergence of the cinema) that determined how those strategies could be employed.
Bennett, T: Formalism and Marxism; Creech, J: Closet Writing/Gay Reading: The Case of Melville?s Pierre; Culler, J: The Literary in Theory; Eagleton, T: The Ideology of the Aesthetic; James, C. L. R.: Mariners, Renegades, and Castaways: The Story of Herman Melville and the World We Live In; Kearney, R. and Rasmusen, D.: Continental Aesthetics: Romanticism to Postmodernism; Lemon, L. and M.J. Reis: Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays; Melville, H: Typee, Moby-Dick, Pierre, The Piazza Tales, The Confidence-Man, Poems, Billy Budd; Michaels, W: The Shape of the Signifier; Olson, C: Call Me Ishmael; Taylor, R. ed.: Aesthetics and Politics; photocopied cornucopia
"What do literary critics mean by an ?aesthetic turn? or a ?return to form?? (Have we ever left? If we are ?returning? to form, where have we been?) Are these reactionary moves, conjuring the specter of the New Criticism? The latest swing in the pendulum that oscillates between formalism and historicism? An effort to rethink the issues of literary difference and literary value? To rejuvenate the practice of close reading? To replace it? To develop modes of criticism that are attentive to aesthetic experience in the context of the theoretical insights that have been developed over the past thirty years?
One sees the terms everywhere, from special issues of the journals American Literature and MLQ to recent books with titles like The Politics of Aesthetics, The Radical Aesthetic, and Revenge of the Aesthetic. We will try to figure out what is happening out there (and in here) by considering the example of Melville. For reasons of canonicity and complexity, Melville has become a pivotal figure for literary critics who reflect upon their practice. We will examine the range of Melville?s career (prose and poetry) and the institutional reception of his work, including key essays in deconstruction, new historicism, and queer studies. We also will read classic and recent statements in aesthetic theory and major essays in twentieth-century formalism.
Requirements include an oral presentation (or two) and a 30-page research essay, written in stages across the semester. For those not drawn into Melville?s orbit, the research essay need not be limited to Melville?s texts. "
Benitez, S.: The Weight of All Things; Brainard, C. M.: When the Rainbow Goddess Wept; Silko, L. M.: Ceremony; Vea, A.: Gods Go Begging; Wideman, J. E.: The Lynchers
What would happen if we placed class at the center of U.S. ethnic literary studies? Is class analysis obsolete? Does the study of class in literature necessarily preclude the importance of theorizing the specificity of race and racism? How can we critique class consciousness in a literary work so as to enhance rather than limit the theorization of racial formations? In this course, we will be concerned with theorizing the relation between race and class in U.S. ethnic literature. We will begin with a careful examination of essays by Moishe Postone, whose Marxist analysis of anti-Semitism lays the foundation for a theory of race as a reified social form?or as an abstraction of social relations. We will also read selections from Frantz Fanon, W.E.B. Dubois, Barbara Fields, Rosaura S?nchez, Jinqi Ling, Stuart Hall, Paul Gilroy, Ian Haney L?pez, Carl Guti?rrez-Jones, Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Ernesto Laclau, Chantal Mouffe, Etienne Balibar and Theodore Allen, among others. The literary works we will read alongside the theoretical material represent to varying degrees the lives of racial subjects who strive to understand the historicized class character of their experiences. A research paper will be required.
"Ellmann, R.: James Joyce; Joyce, J.: Finnegans Wake, Ulysses; a Course Reader (criticism and theory)
Recommended Texts: Gifford, D.: 'Ulysses' Annotated; McHugh, R.: Annotations to 'Finnegans Wake'; Tindall, W. Y.: A Reader's Guide to 'Finnegans Wake'; Vico, G.: The New Science of Giambattista Vico (trans. Bergin and Fisch) "
"This course will explore Joyce's later work?focusing in its first nine or ten weeks on Ulysses, and then moving into an initiatory probe of Finnegans Wake. Though particular topics explored in the seminar will be determined by the research interests of its members, we will consider, in tandem with the course's core texts, the current state of Joyce (and author) studies and their relation to issues topically of interest across the profession as a whole. These will likely include: Joyce's manipulable status as representative modernist in debates about modernism/post-modernism and in aggregating accounts of the ethics, politics and ideology of modernism; his role, more generally, as paradigmatic touchstone or spoiler in theorizations of literature; his paradoxical status as a canonized colonial writer, and the growing body of work on Joyce, race, and national culture; Joyce and gender; the history of Joyce's canonization, not simply as it opens to view literature's embranglements with the law, but also as it illumines the nature of authorial reception in different academic, non-academic, and national milieus; Joyce's paradoxical resistance to and sanctioning of deauthorizing strategies; the new forms of literary study arising from the publication of Joyce's Archives and the ensuing development, especially in France, of ""pretextual"" and ""genetic criticism""; and Joyce's assimilation both of and in popular culture. Requirements will include one class presentation on the week's assigned reading; a free-form gloss of a passage from Finnegans Wake; and one long paper, due at the end of the term. "
" Meyer, E. and Smith, L.: The Practical Tutor
Recommended Text: Leki, I.: Understanding ESL Writers"
"Through seminars, discussions, and reading assignments, students are introduced to the language/writing/literacy needs of diverse college-age writers such as the developing, bi-dialectal, and non-native English-speaking (NNS) writer. The course will provide a theoretical and practical framework for tutoring and composition instruction.
The seminar will focus on various tutoring methodologies and the theories which underlie them. Students will become familiar with relevant terminology, approaches, and strategies in the fields of composition teaching and learning. New tutors will learn how to respond constructively to student writing, as well as develop and hone effective tutoring skills. By guiding others towards clarity and precision in prose, tutors will sharpen their own writing abilities. New tutors will tutor fellow Cal students in writing and/or literature courses. Tutoring occurs in the Cesar E. Chavez Student Center under the supervision of experienced writing program staff.
In order to enroll for the seminar, students must have at least sophomore standing and have completed their Reading and Composition R1A and R1B requirements.
Some requirements include: participating in a weekly training seminar and occasional workshops; reading assigned articles, videotaping a tutoring session, and becoming familiar with the resources available at the Student Learning Center; tutoring 4-6 hours per week; keeping a tutoring journal and writing a final paper; meeting periodically with both the tutor supervisor(s) and tutees' instructors. "