Hagedorn, J.: Dogeaters; Kingston , M.H.: Tripmaster Monkey; Lee, C.R.: A Gesture Life; Lee, C.Y.: Flower Drum Song; Okada, J.: No-No Boy; Watanna, O.: Miss Num� of Japan; Truong, M.: The Book of Salt; Yamashita, K.T.: Tropic of Orange; and a course reader containing selected critical articles
It is by now commonplace to describe Asian American identity as impossibly heterogeneous and hybrid. Can there be a textual basis for Asian American identity? In particular, is there such a thing as an Asian American novel, and if so, what are its ideal characteristics? To what extent are certain ethnic experiences more assimilable to that ideal narrative form than others? What would it mean to think of ethnic experience as constituted through different protocols of narrative form? We will look at a variety of examples to see if we can develop an account of the novel from its realist to post-realist forms.
The Little Sister (1949), by Raymond Chandler; The Golden Gizmo (1954), by Jim Thompson; For the Love of Imabelle (1958), by Chester Himes; The Quick Red Fox (1964), by John D. MacDonald; The Crying of Lot 49 (1966), by Thomas Pynchon; Mumbo Jumbo (1972), by Ishmael Reed; Like a Hole in the Head (1998), by Jen Banbury; Motherless Brooklyn (1999), by Jonathan Lethem; and a Course Reader
"In this survey of post-war American detective fiction we will examine one of the most popular, long-lasting and diverse literary genres of the modern canon. Beginning in the years immediately following the end of World War II, we will explore the high-point of hard-boiled narrative, an era which some critics claim to be the legitimization of the genre, marking its passage from pulp trash to an acceptable vehicle for serious literary endeavor. Here, the tales of private investigators traversing the shadowy areas inside and outside of the law, between equally corrupt official and criminal codes, present us with voyeuristic trips into a lurid underworld with safe, if jaded, guides whose dark humor is often employed toward critical socio-political commentary alternately revolutionary and reactionary. Through these novels we witness an analysis of immediate post-war concerns such as the challenge of traditional forms of masculinity and the safety and stability of domestic civilian life brought about by anxieties of and about the returning G.I.s. Concerns about race and feminism likewise swirl about this climate of paranoia and disillusion.
Such a notion of the detective genre as a reflection of the zeitgeist continues into the turbulent 60�s and early 70�s exemplified by the post-modern dismantlings and hijackings of the genre by Pynchon and Reed. Rounding off our tour, we will turn to two contemporary forays by Lethem and Banbury which, in turn, voice the concerns of a post-Cold War generation.
Throughout, we will examine the psychological, political, gender, and racial themes treated through tales of deviance and rectification, or crime and capture. The mass appeal and diversity of the genre will also be considered as we look into different readerships, publishing practices, critical assessments and varying attempts by these authors to break into, out of, or otherwise redefine the American literary canon through the vigilante impulse of the solitary crusader. "
Helen Gardner, ed.: The Metaphysical Poets; a course reader of critical selections
The term �the metaphysicals� originated in an insult: John Dryden faulted John Donne and the poets who fell under his influence for �affecting the metaphysics�; intent on perplexing their readers with �nice philosophical speculations,� they failed to �engage their hearts.� Samuel Johnson went further, asserting that the metaphysicals forfeited �their right to the name of poets, for they cannot be said to have imitated anything�; free of mimetic ambition, �their wish was only to say what they hoped had never been said before.� We�ll consider what stylistic features (and critical assumptions) provoked these initial responses and the epithet �metaphysical� and what, if anything, the poets it names�John Donne, George Herbert, Abraham Cowley, and Andrew Marvell, among others�have to do with each other. We�ll also consider the basis of their changed critical fortunes in the twentieth century. Students will produce a short paper analyzing a single poem, an evaluation of a critic�s treatment of one of the poets, and a longer final paper.
M. Beckett: Give Them Stones; C. Carson: Belfast Confetti; S. Deane: Reading in the Dark; B. Friel: Translations; S. Heaney: North; J. Johnston: Shadows on Our Skin; B. MacLaverty: Cal; J. Montague: The Rough Field (6 th edition); B. Moore: Lies of Silence; and a small course reader. [This book list is fairly solid, but you may want to come to the first class before you purchase all of these books.]
This course will explore contemporary Northern Irish literature and its relationship to the political strife, social turmoil, and sectarian violencethat have characterized life in Northern Ireland since the late 1960�s, euphemistically known as �The Troubles.� We will gently immerse ourselves in the political and cultural forces in Northern Ireland , but our main focus will be on Northern Irish literature of the past thirty years. We will consider the relationship between art, violence, and terrorism, think through some of the particularities of Irish history and the role of Irish writers in that history, and approach larger theoretical questions about representation, narrativity, and form. While we will spend the bulk of our time on recent poetry and fiction, we will thicken our investigations by looking at additional cultural materials, such as films (probably The Crying Game, In the Name of the Father, and Bloody Sunday), paintings, photographs, maps, murals, and music. There will be two shorter papers (approx. 5 pages) and one longer paper (approx. 10-12 pages) assigned during the semester.
Olaudah Equiano: The Interesting Narrative of Olaudah Equiano and Other Writings; Eduoard Glissant: The Fourth Century; Claude McKay: Banjo; Aim� C�saire: Notebooks of a Return to the Native Land; Maryse Cond�: Heremakhonon; Ben Okri: The Famished Road; Paul Gilroy: The Black Atlantic; essays by Peter Linebaugh, Henry Louis Gates Jr., Frantz Fanon & others are either in course readers or class handouts
"In this course we will take a comparative look at the literature and cultural history of the African Diaspora, focusing on the area known as the Black Atlantic�North America, the Caribbean, and West Africa. This area comprises great cultural diversity, but is united by the common historical trauma of the Atlantic slave trade and colonization. Can we speak, however, of a unified culture for the African Diaspora? Where do the points in common arise and where do they diverge? We will look to this diverse selection of authors and intellectuals to answer this question and many more.
Expectations: This course offers a good deal of reading; part of your overall grade will be some demonstration of your preparedness. For this reason we will end each class with a brief student-led oral presentation and discussion. Attendance and class participation are vital."
poetry by Osgood, Dickinson; Fern: Ruth Hall; Stowe: Uncle Tom�s Cabin; Keckley: Behind the Scenes; Fuller: Woman in the Nineteenth Century; Spofford: �The Amber Gods�; Oakes Smith: Bertha and Lily; Wharton: The House of Mirth; Gilman: The Yellow Wallpaper
This course will focus on gender and style while covering a diverse range of texts. We will be interested in the way women writers styled themselves�in what manner they present themselves as authors and artists in the literary marketplace, how they encode textual self-presences, and the way women and art are represented in their texts. The course will also look at the way women�s texts are styled, and how those texts are positioned in relation to specific aesthetic, formal, and literary values, especially as these construct the feminine. All of the texts will confront issues of gender and style through the formal qualities of the work, and many will feature a central female figure who herself practices a literary, fine, domestic, plastic, or dramatic art. Attention will be paid to the larger cultural context and aesthetic debates that these arts reference, and especially to Stowe�s, Spofford�s, Wharton�s and Gilman�s books on decorative style.
M. Atwood: The Handmaid�s Tale; D. DeLillo: Libra, Mao II; T. O�Brien: The Things They Carried; Tom Wolfe: The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Radical Chic and Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers; Tobias Wolff: In Pharaoh�s Army. There will also be a photocopied reader containing excerpts from the works of Joan Didion, Todd Gitlin, Ken Kesey, Alice Walker, John Wideman, Norman Mailer, Toni Morrison, and Walter Benjamin, among others; some theoretical material on the novel; and newspaper reportage from the sixties and seventies.
In this course we will examine a number of fictionalized representations of the tumultuous liberal revolutions of the American sixties and the conservative counterrevolutions which brought them full circle by the 1980s. In comparing the ways in which the various texts for the course collapse the distinction between novel and history, we will consider to what degree the extreme nature of American culture of the times particularly lent itself to expression via the so-called non-fiction novel, a literary form which sprang into prominence during this period. In examining the various ways that writers reshaped novelistic form to accommodate their own historical perspectives of a time when fact was more fantastic than fiction, we will read a non-fiction novel, a novelistic dystopia grounded in the events of the sixties and seventies, and three novels which use actual historical events to provide the determinative background for the development of fictional characters. The readings for the course incorporate (to greater or lesser degree) aspects of major historical events, such as the assassination of John Kennedy, the Vietnam War, the hippie counterculture, the feminist and civil rights movements, and the explosion of cult movements which arose in the seventies in response to the liberal excesses of the sixties. We will view selected historical film footage and read from newspapers and magazines of the period. We will conclude the course by viewing Apocalypse Now, Francis Ford Coppola�s classic film on Vietnam , and Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker�s Apocalypse, Eleanor Coppola�s metacritical documentary of the process of creating Apocalypse Now. As we take a new look at the old question of the novel�s relation to history, we will locate the texts for the course in the tradition of post-modernism�s metafictional preoccupations and focus on the new role of the media, especially television news coverage, in creating history in a world of mass communications.
E. Dickinson : The Poems of Emily Dickinson; W. Whitman: The Complete Poems; ed.W. Spengemann: Nineteenth-Century American Poetry
While concentrating on the poetry of Whitman and Dickinson, we will consider the full sweep of nineteenth-century American poetry. We will read poets better known for their prose�Emerson, Thoreau, Poe, and Melville�poets popular in their time�Longfellow, Whittier , Holmes, and forgotten precursors to Modernism. We will also consider the emerging women and African-American poets. We will read these, among other poets, in relation to American, English, and European literary history, American painting and music, and the cultural upheavals of Abolition and the Civil War.
H. Melville: Typee; Redburn; Moby-Dick; Billy Budd and Other Stories ; Selected Poems; Pierre; The Confidence Man
I will emphasize the developments and contradictions that occur over the course of Melville�s career, with special attention to his struggle with political and religious authority. But class discussion will be open to whatever is of interest to the members of the class. Attendance and participation in discussion are required, along with two ten -page essays.
J. Wilhelm: Romance of Arthur, Arthurian Handbook; Chretien de Troyes: Arthurian Romances; M. Borroff, trans.: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight; T. Malory: Morte Darthur
In this course, we will read, discuss, and write about the medieval Arthurian tradition, starting with its origins in Latin accounts of English history and continuing through the fifteenth century. We will also examine contemporary representations of King Arthur and the Round Table. Our goals will be threefold: first, to gain a knowledge of the most crucial Arthurian texts and to observe the way in which the tradition develops over time; second, to accumulate a body of writing about those texts which engages a series of critical questions; and third, to consider the relationship of literature to history and to culture. Why do people write and read stories like the Arthurian legends? Did people in the Middle Ages read them for the same reasons we do? What do the fantasy narratives of a society tell us about its culture, its values, its ideals, and its problems?
Langston Hughes: The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes ; Wallace Thurman, ed.: Fire!! A Quarterly Dedicated to the Younger Negro Artists; Langston Hughes: The Big Sea:An Autobiography; Isaac Julien, Dir.: Looking for Langston. There will also be a course reader with critical and biographical materials.
This course offers the opportunity to spend an entire semester reading Langston Hughes, one of the most prolific and consistently exciting black writers of the twentieth century. Our focus will be on the poetry, and especially on its relation to its vernacular precedents, but we will also read at least one of Hughes�s autobiographies, some of his short fiction and journalism, as well as his writing for children. Hughes�s career is a convenient index to black literary history, and we will take the time to consider carefully its relation to the New Negro Renaissance, the Popular Front, and the Black Arts Movement in addition to Hughes�s important contributions as curator and anthologist.
Camus, Albert: The Plague; Delbo, Charlotte: Auschwitz and After; Levi, Primo: If This is a Man, The Drowned and the Saved; Levi, Neil and Michael Rothberg, ed.: The Holocaust: Theoretical Readings; Spiegelman, Art: Maus I and II; Wilkomirski, Binjamin: Fragments; and a course reader
This course focuses on the deep interconnections between the Holocaust and Western culture and thought. Postmodernism begins as a response to the Holocaust, not rejecting rationality but acknowledging its limits, basing humanism on a sense of fundamentally fragile, corporeal existence, echoing the Shoah in traumatized, melancholy, mournfully elegiac discourses. Those ways of thinking offer new perspectives in our understanding of the historical event and its aftermath. We will study the relation between events of the Holocaust and the central issues of postmodernism: the �traumatic� nature of entry into language, the �trace� structure of inscription in relation to inaccessible presence, the danger of an aesthetics that valorizes the unrepresentable. How much freedom or poetic license does art have when dealing with events that are not dead or neutral ? How can art avoid a �redemptive� narrative, instead acknowledging the Shoah�s traumatic nature? How far can the Holocaust be understood and what might we take the human to be in its aftermath? Reading includes texts of testimony (Delbo and Levi), memory, postmemory, and identity (Spiegelman and Wilkomirski), Holocaust fiction (Camus and Schlink), and philosophical thought (Adorno, Levinas, Lyotard).
The Women Who Knew Too Much; eds. M. Deutelbaum & L. Pogue: A Hitchcock Reader
The course will focus on the Hitchcock oeuvre from the early British through the American period, with emphasis on analysis of cinematic representation of crime, victimhood, and the investigation of guilt. Our discussions and critical readings will consider socio-cultural backgrounds, gender problems, and psychological and Marxist readings as well as star studies.
A. Dante: Vita Nuova; Marie de France: Lais; Chretien de Troyes: Arthurian Romances; A. Capellanus: Art of Courtly Love; G. Chaucer: Troilus and Criseyde; G. Boccaccio: Filostrato
This course will focus on the literature of love in the medieval period, beginning with St. Paul �s Letters to the Corinthians and culminating in Chaucer�s Troilus and Criseyde. In between, we will address a wide variety of questions about love and sexuality, including the role of marriage, the status of women, and the nature of femininity and masculinity, ideas about spiritual love and love of God, the legitimacy (or illegitimacy) of sexual desire, the relationship of love to violence, and others. Students will be encouraged to think critically about their own ideas about love in light of medieval concepts, and vice versa. We will discuss the relationship of self to community, of self to the divine, of individuals to others, of men to men, women to women, and women to men. We will seek to define the central cultural and ideological difficulties experienced by medieval people when they wrote about and talked about love, and we will also explore the relationship of the medieval literary tradition to love poetry and to the emergence of the vernacular as a privileged mode of written expression.
For more information on this class, please email the professor at j_miller@berkeley.edu
For more information on this class, please email the professor at j_miller@berkeley.edu
Fraser and Rabkin, eds.: Drama of the English Renaissance, v. 2: The Stuart Period
The English theater was the first mass medium, an avowedly commercial, hyper-competitive, fad-driven industry of sound and spectacle, which both catered to and ruthlessly parodied the sophisticated, novelty-craving consumerism of the seventeenth century�s greatest boom-town: the sprawling, incomprehensible, luxurious, grotesque metropolis of London . The brilliance of the Jacobean and Caroline drama displays itself in the readiness�really, the need�of the players to go over the top, to push past the limits of realism (and to surpass their competitors� plays) into the hyper-real experiences of satire and sensation, in order to represent to their audiences their own city and society. The rapid transformations of urban form, of social status, and of luxury consumption continually remade the lived spaces of London and of its theaters into new shapes of both intimate sensual delight and alien sensual decadence, at once more and less than real.
S. Greenblatt, ed.: The Norton Shakespeare
Close study of several of Shakespeare�s earlier works.
"ONE--or, better--two OF THE FOLLOWING ONE-VOLUME SHAKESPEARES: William Shakespeare: The Complete Works, ed. Alfred Harbage et al. [The old Pelican Shakespeare] (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1969); The Complete Pelican Shakespeare, ed. S. Orgel and A.R. Branmuller [The New Pelican] (New York, 2002); The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. B. Evans et al. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974 (old edition) or 1998 (new edition); The Complete Works of Shakespeare, ed. David Bevington (new ed. Longmans) OR old (I don't remember who published it); The Complete Signet Classic Shakespeare, ed. Sylvan Barnet et al. (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1972) [Only the one-volume version of the Signet Shakespeare will be practical for classroom purposes. It�s out of print, but there should be second-hand copies around.]; The Norton Shakespeare, ed. Stephen Greenblatt et al. (New York: Norton, 1997); AND Russ McDonald: The Bedford Companion to Shakespeare (Boston: Bedford Books of St. Martin's Press, 1996 [2 nd edition, 2001])
I want you to read the McDonald book in such a way as to get a general sense of what kinds of things one needs to bear in mind when reading or seeing Shakespeare--needs to look up or look out for but need not commit to memory."
"I expect the course to do all the basic work of a Shakespeare survey and also to have seminar-like intellectual crossfire. I will take up all the topics that concern Shakespeare scholars, but I will not take them up systematically. I find that presenting a topic like ""Establishing Shakespeare's Texts"" causes people to try to memorize a lot of distinguished guesswork and understand nothing. Instead of organizing the communal and active ignorance of the last 300 years of scholarship, I will wait for particulars of classroom discussion to invite comment and background on printing-house practices, Shakespeare's stage, the composition of his audience, and stuff like that. If we work from stray particulars, you are less likely than you might otherwise be to come away with ""knowledge"" of matters about which we have--and have only evidence enough for--pure but immensely detailed guesses.
I don't yet know how I will want to use in-class time, but I will certainly concentrate on Shakespeare's language and on the plays as plays--experiences for audiences--and on what it is about them that has caused the western world and much of the eastern to value them so highly.
When I gave a small Shakespeare course I usually ask people to read Richard II, 1 Henry IV, 2 Henry IV, Henry V, Antony and Cleopatra, Julius Caesar, Love's Labor's Lost, All�s Well That Ends Well, Macbeth, The Merchant of Venice, Othello, A Midsummer Night�s Dream, Romeo and Juliet, King Lear, The Tempest, Hamlet, Twelfth Night, and The Winter's Tale; the order given here will not be the--or much like the--order in which I will ask that you read the plays.
I will give spot passage quizzes daily--or almost daily. Their purpose will be to make certain that you keep up with the reading and that you understand the surface sense and the syntactic physics of all the sentences you read.
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 be in lieu of a final examination."
Stephen Greenblatt, ed.: The Norton Shakespeare
This course will foreground what we have always known--that Shakespeare�s plays were written to be performed, not simply read--so we�ll approach them with their performative aspects always in sight. This will make attention to the literary text more important than ever, since the printed words must be actively understood as expressions of thinking and feeling persons in motion. Our program will therefore be as follows: We will closely study the texts of about eight plays, with attention to diction and patterns of speech, theme, character, and plot--then imaginatively transfer the words on the page into space and action by conjecturally staging scenes, attending one or two live performances at the nearby California Shakespeare Festival, and seeing and critiquing filmed stage performances. The third dimension of our study will be to screen and analyze scenes from movie versions of our plays, recognizing that film adaptations have become a powerful medium for transmitting Shakespeare�s work to new audiences. What�s gained, what�s lost in the process will be part of our concerns. There will be two essays, two midterms, and a final exam.
Merritt Hughes, ed.: Complete Poems and Major Prose (of John Milton)
This survey will cover John Milton�s career, a life-long effort to unite intellectual, political, and artistic experimentation. There will be two short papers and a final exam.
S. Beckett: Malone Dies; D. DeLillo: The Names; C. McCarthy: Child of God; Ian MsEwan: Atonement; D. Mitchell: Cloud Atlas; V. Nabokov: Pale Fire; E. O'Brien: Down by the River; T. Pynchon: V.; P. Roth: American Pastoral; M. Spark: The Driver's Seat
An exploration of the novels listed above, all of them written in the second half of the twentieth century. The course will move through these texts inductively, without any particular preconceptions or thematic axes to grind, in an effort both to understand these writers on their own terms and to discover among them commonly shared concerns and practices. There will be two shorter papers, a midterm, and a final exam.
Whitman, W.: Complete Poems; Dickinson, E.: Complete Poems; Twain, M.: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn; Twain, M.: Puddnhead Wilson; Howells, W.D.: A Hazard of New Fortunes; Dreiser, T.: Sister Carrie; James, H.: The Portrait of A Lady; James, H.: The Turn of The Screw and Other Short Fiction
A survey of U.S. literature from 1865 to the beginning of the twentieth century. We�ll begin with the texts listed above; then together we�ll choose the reading and design the syllabus for the last weeks of the course. Two midterms and a final project which will involve both research and class participation.
W. Faulkner: Absalom, Absalom; Gabriel Garcia Marquez: 100 Years of Solitude; Henry James: The Portrait of a Lady; Herman Melville: Moby-Dick; Mark Twain: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
A course on five �great American novels.� One mid-term, one paper, one final. Much reading.
Phillis Wheatley: Complete Writings; Olaudah Equiano: The Interesting Narrative and Other Writings; Thomas Gray: Confessions of Nat Turner; David Walker: Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World; Frederick Douglass: Narrative of the Life; Harriet Wilson: Our Nig; Harriet Jacobs: Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl; Frances Harper: Iola Leroy; Booker T. Washington: Up from Slavery; Charles Chesnutt: Marrow of Tradition; Paul Laurence Dunbar: Lyrics of Lowly Life
A survey of major black writers in the context of slavery and its immediate aftermath. There will be weekly writing, a midterm, one essay, and a final exam.
C. Churchill: Cloud 9; J.M. Coetzee: Waiting for the Barbarians; G. Greene: The End of the Affair; K. Ishiguro: The Remains of the Day; J. Ramazani, ed.: The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry (volume 2 only); A. Roy: The God of Small Things; Z. Smith: White Teeth; T. Stoppard: Arcadia. [While this book list is fairly solid, you may want to come to the first class before purchasing everything on the list, particularly the Ramazani anthology.]
In this course we will sketch the field of contemporary British literature, closely reading some of the key post-1945 texts from Britain, the Commonwealth, and Ireland. In addition to paying careful attention to issues of poetic form and narrative style, we will think through the relevance of such a phrase as �British literature� in a globalizing world, especially in the aftermath of the British Empire and in the wake of several generations of scholarship that have focused on the colonial legacy of that empire in such places as India, Africa, the Caribbean, and Ireland. Students will be required to write two essays and a final exam during the semester.
G. Jones: Corregidora; O. Butler: Kindred; J.E. Wideman: Philadelphia Fire ; D. Allison: Bastard Out of Carolina ; C. Ozick: The Shawl; T. Olsen: Yonnondio: From the Thirties; H.M. Viramontes: Under the Feet of Jesus; R. Ruiz: Happy Birthday Jesus; D. Santiago : Famous All Over Town
This course will focus on representations of repression and resistance in the fiction of three cultural groups: Chicanos, African Americans, and European Americans. We will examine various forms of repression (social, physical, and psychological) represented in these texts. Several questions inform the course theme: What solution, if any, do these works offer in response to the forms of repression they represent? Can the negative effects of repression be represented in such a way as to establish a positive conception of cultural identity? What are the formal aspects of a literature of repression and resistance? The comparative approach in this course will allow us to analyze the similarities and differences in the literatures of the three cultural groups. It will also provide us with a critical appreciation of the social significance of these literary works. Assignments will likely include two papers and two exams. This course includes discussion sections.
J. Addams: Twenty Years at Hull House ; K. Chopin: The Awakening; Charles Eastman: From the Deep Woods to Civilization; E. Garvey: The Adman in the Parlor; W. Lippman: Drift and Mastery; G. Porter: The Rise of Big Business; U. Sinclair: The Moneychangers; F. Taylor: The Scientific Principles of Management; E. Wharton: The House of Mirth; R. Wiebe: The Search for Order
This is an introduction to a number of cultural/political/economic/social issues from a �transitional� period of the United States between the rise of industrial capitalism (big corporate businesses and huge urban centers) in the late 19 th century and the beginnings of a modernist attempt to bring order to what was often felt to be the chaos of development. In addition to a variety of texts, there will be screenings of a number of films, mainly short films. Two midterms and a final exam.
W. Lewis: Tarr; selected writings of Gertrude Stein; D. Pick: War Machine; A. Cesaire, A.: Notebooks on a Return to the Native Land; P. Fussel: The Great War and Modern Memory; A. Carpentier: The Lost Steps; A. Breton: Nadja; E. Junger: Storm of Steel; J. Toomer: Cane; W.E.B. DuBois: Dark Princess, Manifestos: A Century of Isms
"The Great War set loose on the world an heretofore unimaginable scale of violence and destruction. In this five-year conflict 8.5 million people were killed and 20 million wounded�making a mockery of the now jejune anxieties of social degeneration and solar death.Leaving not only catastrophic economic and physical destruction in its wake, the Great War succeeded in toppling the stability of virtually every foundational concept of late-nineteenth-century Europe.The violently disfigured body of the foot-soldier shattered the image of the human-motor; the fragmented consciousness of the shell-shocked undermined the understanding of the mind as a mere �chemical machine� for the processing of sensory input; the devastated political and economic infrastructures of the �Great Powers� disabused positivist history of its faith in the necessity of progress, expansion and development; and at last, on the colonial front, the participation of black and brown combatants along with the carnage inflicted by one European nation on another tore apart the thin fa�ade of �European prestige,"" the ideological pillar essential to the maintenance of imperial authority. This course will examine the literary and visual culture of the interwar years in light of social crisis. As the Great War was the first global conflict, the readings will move beyond the traditional Anglo-American response and include the works of intellectuals of continental Europe and the colonized world. "
The Norton Anthology of Contemporary Fiction (eds.: R.V. Cassill and Joyce Carol Oates), 2 nd. Edition; B. Mukherjee: The Middleman and Other Stories
This is a course on the form, theory and practice of short fiction. It will be conducted as a workshop. Students are required to fulfill assignments on specific aspects of craft, to analyze aesthetic strategies in selected short stories by published authors, and to write approximately 45 pages of original fiction. Students are also required to participate in workshop discussions and to submit written comments on peers' manuscripts.
A course 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.
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.
Moure, Erin: Sheep�s Vigil by a Fervent Person
How might the writer use the various techniques and theories of translation, including mistranslation, as experimental tools to aid in the composition of new poems? Rather than approaching translation as the conventional transfer of meaning from one language to another, in this writing workshop we will take up this ancient practice as a varied and extensive set of open-ended compositional procedures and responses that bring new dictions, syntaxes, shapes and stances into the poem, devising ways of opening our various englishes to maximum interference from other language systems. Weekly reading, distributed in photocopy, will indicate some technical directions. This will include Celia and Louis Zukofsy�s Catullus, Erin Moure�s Pessoa in Sheep�s Vigil By a Fervent Person, Caroline Bergvall�s Dante, from �Via: 48 Dante Variations,� Catriona Strang�s Carmina Burana, from Low Fancy, Ted Byrne�s Louise Labe, and a sheaf of translators of Lucretius, including Basil Bunting, Lucy Hutchinson, and John Dryden. Testing the poem as a medium of response, students will translate their own, one another�s, and outside texts, from familiar and unknown tongues, both in the workshop and as assignments. Alongside this writing there will be considerable discussion on the inevitable political, linguistic, and theoretical questions that arise.
The Best American Essays of the Century (eds. Joyce Carol Oates & Robert Atwan)
This course concentrates on the practice of creative non-fiction, particularly on the writing of the personal essay. Students are required to fulfill specific assignments and to write approximately 45 pages of non-fictional narrative. Format of course: workshop. Participation in the twice-weekly workshops is mandatory.
N. West: Day of the Locust; C. Isherwood: A Single Man; T.C. Boyle: The Tortilla Curtain; K. Tei: Tropic of Orange ; L. Valdez: Zoot Suit; A.D. Smith: Twilight, Films: �Double Indemnity�; �In a Lonely Place�; �Rebel Without a Cause�; � Chinatown �; and �Blade Runner�
"Los Angeles has been described, variously, as a ""circus without a tent"" (Carey McWilliams), ""seventy-two suburbs in search of a city"" (Dorothy Parker), ""the capital of the Third World "" (David Rieff), and ""the only place for me that never rains in the sun"" (Tupac Shakur). This class will investigate these and other ways that Los Angeles has been understood over the last century�as a city-in-a-garden, a dream factory, a noirish labyrinth, a homeowner's paradise, a zone of libidinal liberation, and a powder keg of ethnic and racial violence, to name but a few. We will trace the rise of Los Angeles from its origins as a small city, built on a late-19 th-century real estate boom sponsored by railroad companies, into the sprawling megacity that has often been taken as a prototype of postmodern urban development; and we will do so primarily by looking at the fiction, film, drama, and music that the city has produced. "
George Gissing: New Grub Street; Robert Louis Stevenson: Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde; Arthur Conan Doyle: The Sign of Four; Bram Stoker: Dracula; Wilkie Collins: The Moonstone; E.M. Forster: Howards End
"In this class we will examine the varied and often conflicting forms of masculinity in the latter-half of the Victorian era. We will look at �hegemonic� masculinities (i.e., heterosexual, white, middle-upper class) alongside �other� masculinities and analyze the ways these are contested and negotiated in the literature. Masculinities are constructed within the domestic sphere, by work/profession, and through diverse experiences based upon race, class, and sexuality. Our objective is to better understand the gendered nature of Victorian culture, as well as the intersections between gender and other group-based identities in the late-nineteenth century. How are discourses surrounding the ideal �gentleman� and �manliness� problematized by poverty? How are particular masculinities sustained or re-created in the face of British imperialism and, conversely, by the �threat� of immigrant Others?
The fiction selected for this class will allow for a nuanced analysis of gender performance by the dandy, the class aspirant, the captains of industry, the empire builders, the servant class, the working poor, the racial/racialized other. Required texts will also include a course reader containing current literary and gender criticism along with non-fiction prose by nineteenth-century cultural critics. "
"R. Ellmann: James Joyce; J. Joyce: Dubliners; Finnegans Wake; Occasional, Critical, and Political Writing; A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: Text & Criticism; Ulysses
Recommended Texts: H. Blamires: The New Bloomsday Book: A Guide through �Ulysses�; F. Budgen: James Joyce and the Making of 'Ulysses�; D. Gifford: Ulysses Annotated; S. Gilbert: James Joyce's 'Ulysses'"
A polytropically intensive examination of Joyce's fiction. We'll begin the semester with a rapid study of Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, focus lengthily on Ulysses over the major part of the term, and conclude with a brief gaze into the lucid darknesses of Finnegans Wake. Members of the seminar will be expected to work on a long seminar-paper during the semester and to participate in class discussions.
T.B.A.
In a famous poem prefixed to the first edition (1623) of Shakespeare's collected works, Ben Jonson claimed that Shakespeare was at least the equal of ancient tragedians such as Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripedes, and Seneca, while for comedy Shakespeare surpassed �all that insolent Greece or haughty Rome� had produced. Jonson�s poem does not stop to consider the difficulties of comparing plays that derive from different eras, different cultures, and different conceptions of the theater. But this class will. At the same time, we will explore how Renaissance dramatists both imitated their classical precursors and strove to outdo them.
Yeats, W.B.: selected poetry and prose; Synge, J.M.: The Playboy of the Western World; Joyce, J.: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man; Bowen, E.: The Last September; Beckett, S.: First Love; O�Brien, F.: The Poor Mouth,The House of Splendid Isolation; Jordan, N.: The Crying Game; DeEmmony, A. and Lowney, D.: Father Ted; Doyle, R: A Star Called Henry; Sheeran, P.: Aqua; O�Neill, J.: At Swim Two Boys
This course surveys some of the most popular Irish literature in the last one hundred years. Irish Writing in the early part of the 20th century was part of a cultural revolution that culminated in a political revolution, a war of independence and the foundation (in the south) of a free state . In this course, we�ll be looking at some of the key texts that influenced and were influenced by the cultural nationalist movement. Then we�ll look to later-century fictions, some of which look back to the revolutionary period, and some of which look, very deliberately, away from it. Along the way we�ll try to identify as many thematic and aesthetic continuities as we can in order to come up with a conception of what Irish literature is, or may be, in the 20th century. One medium-length essay, one final 15pp research paper, one in-class presentation required.
A partial list of texts includes Delillo, D.: Mau II; Melville, H.: Billy Budd and Other Stories; Milton, J.: The Major Works; Oe, K.: Somersault; Shelley, P.: Shelley�s Poetry and Prose.
�Is it useless to revolt?� Our seminar borrows its lead question from the title of an essay by Foucault on the Iranian Revolution of 1979. Foucault urges us to listen to the voices of revolt, even as they seem entangled in a history of inescapable, recurrent violence. Attracted and repulsed by the decisive violence of revolt, the authors in this course test Foucault�s proposition that, �While revolts take place in history, they also escape it in a certain manner.� The conjunction of religion, literature, and politics will also loom large in our discussions. Starting with Milton �s Samson Agonistes, we will consider how religious convictions inform both political aspiration and a willingness to justify acts of violence. Such questions will lead us back to the foundational representations of revolt in the Bible (Exodus and Revelation), and they will lead us forward to contemporary questions about �terrorism.� (Since 9/11, a much publicized debate on Samson Agonistes has asked whether its protagonist is best described as a terrorist.) Other readings will range widely across historical periods and national cultures, and might include works by Blake, Kleist, Shelley, Melville, Nat Turner, and Yeats, as well as living writers such as Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish, Japanese novelist Kenzaburo Oe, and American novelist Don Delillo. On occasion, we will also take up theoretical writings on the subject of revolt, liberation, and violence by such authors as Kant, Benjamin, Arendt, Derrida, and�of course�Foucault.
L. Williams: The Erotic Thriller; M. Nicholls: Scorsese�s Men; M. Bould: Film Noir; R. Lang: Masculine Interest
Our focus will be on the evolution of neo-noirs from classic noirs. We will follow the genre from early European and American examples to the 70's and onwards, and analyze gender presentations, popular narrative patterns, postmodern nostalgia, and questions of class, race and the psychological underpinnings of crime films.
Hamlet; Levi, P.: The Drowned and the Saved; Teichmann, M. and Leder, S., eds.: Truth and Lamentation: Stories and Poems on the Holocaust; Friedlander, S., ed.: Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the Final Solution; plus one or two Course Readers, containing poems by Milton, Wordsworth, Hardy, Yeats, Auden, Bishop, Plath, and others, as well as a number of theoretical and critical essays
"The German critic Theodor Adorno famously commented that it is �barbaric� to continue to write poetry after Auschwitz , that any attempt to convert such suffering into aesthetic images commits an injustice against the victims. Yet as Adorno also acknowledged, such writing has also seemed necessary, for the failure to represent or to transmit the event and its implications can constitute an injustice of another sort. The Holocaust has therefore presented an acute problem within the long history of literary mourning and the elegiac mode in particular, because the elegy, with its special relationship to the ritual of mourning, has negotiated the delicate balance between loss and art since its inception in Greek and Roman pastoral literature.
This seminar has two main parts. [1] We will first establish a background and vocabulary by reading elegiac texts (largely poetry) from different traditions and historical moments; readings in this part include selected pastoral elegies by Theocritus and Virgil, Shakespeare�s Hamlet, elegiac lyrics and narrative poems from the Renaissance to the present, and some psychoanalytic and cultural approaches to mourning. [2] We then move to problems in Holocaust representation and the theorization of trauma, examining short poems by Paul Celan, Dan Pagis, Nelly Sachs, Geoffrey Hill, Anthonty Hecht, and others; prose by Primo Levi, Aharon Appelfeld, and Ida Fink; and also the special genre of testimony, including videotestimony. Throughout this course, we will ask questions about the relationships between writing and loss, mourning and historiography (the writing of history), elegy and trauma, personal grief and communal expression.
Course requirements include regular attendance and informed class participation, plus 2 or 3 essays interpreting the primary literary texts and making use of theoretical texts where appropriate. There may be brief oral reports assigned as well."
Rowlandson: The Sovereignty and Goodness of God; Silko: Yellow Woman; Spofford: �Circumstance�; Cabeza de Vaca: Castaways; Capt. J. Smith; Disney�s Pocahontas; Apess: A Son of the Forest; Zitkala-Sa: American Indian Stories; Equiano: The Interesting Narrative of the Life Olaudah Equiano; Jacobs: Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl; Turner: The Confessions of Nat Turner; Wideman: Brothers and Keepers; Indian Ledger Art
This course considers the captivity narrative as a recurring form in American literature and asks why it should be so prevalent in a �land of freedom.� We will expand this category beyond its traditional focus on Puritan captivity (in which Indians are the captors) to encompass a myriad of responses to captivity in a variety of forms in colonial, eighteenth-, and nineteenth-century American texts. The condition of captivity will be treated as a particularized scene of writing, one often productive of a crisis of language. We will examine issues of cultural contact and containment, freedom and imprisonment, and national inclusion and exclusion in the narratives and stories of not only Puritans, but also captured Africans, Native Americans, and women in early America . Finally, how is the reader �captured� by captivity narratives? How, as students of American literature, should we understand our point of contact with captivity narratives? This is a seminar requiring sustained and substantive class participation.
"J.W. Johnson: The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man; J. Hagedorn: Dogeaters; W. Brown: Darktown Strutters; A. Davis: Blues Legacies and Black Feminism; A. D. Smith: Twilight Los Angeles
Films: � The Jazz Singer�; �Little Big Man� "
"This course takes as its point of departure an observation made by writer James Baldwin in 1953: ""The time has come to realize that the interracial drama acted out on the American continent has not only created a new black man, it has created a new white man, too.""
In this class, we will not limit ourselves to the identities of the �black man� and the �white man,� but we will think seriously about how the American experience has produced new senses of racial, ethnic, and sexual identity, and new visions of community to go along with them. While not limiting ourselves to the discussion of race in American life, we will be considering how and why many of the most compelling works of 20th-century American culture turn on questions of racial affiliation or disaffiliation, questions that tend to take the form of what critic Linda Williams has called �melodramas of black and white.�
We will address these issues by looking at a wide variety of cultural forms: music from the blues of Bessie Smith to the rock �n� roll of Elvis and Chuck Berry; theater from blackface minstrelsy to avant-garde performance art. "
Joyce, J.: Ulysses (selections); Garcia-Marquez, G.: One Hundred Years of Solitude; Rushdie, S.: Satanic Verses; Chamoiseau, P.: Texaco
Historically the epic has to do with heroes. The problem in the twentieth century, with the �coming of the state,� of rationalization and modernization, is that the age of heroes is, generally speaking, over. How does the novel, then, both preserve some epic functions and break with epic tradition? If heroes are dead, what emerges in their narrative place? Why does the traditional verse epic seem to mutate generically, by the 20th century, into the encyclopedic novel? If epics are traditionally attempts to tell a story about some sort of totality, like a nation or a people, what kinds of totalities does the 20th century epic imagine? Two medium-length papers and bi-weekly short writing assignments (counting as your participation grade) are required.
Areas of Concentration, Book List, and Course Description: For more information on this class, please email the professor at khanson@berkeley.edu.
Areas of Concentration, Book List, and Course Description: For more information on this class, please email the professor at khanson@berkeley.edu.
Homer: Iliad,Odyssey; Vergil: Aeneid; Dante: Inferno, Paradiso; Milton, J.: Paradise Lost ; Wordsworth, W.: Prelude (1850 Edition); Pound, Ezra: Selected Cantos
I imagine this course as an introduction to the pleasure of reading and thinking about the major epics in Western Culture. We will look especially at changing definitions in what is meant by �culture.� And we will immerse ourselves in how writers build on and modify their predecessors as itself an exercise in interpreting what culture can be.
Rivkin, Julie and Ryan, Michael, eds.: Literary Theory: An Anthology; Morrison, Toni: The Bluest Eye
The fall semester of this section of the honors course will be devoted to a rigorous examination of the theoretical paradigms that cast strong influences on contemporary critical practices. (Students averse to theory might not be happy in this section.) While the course will try to do justice to diverse theoretical approaches, my own theoretical preoccupation lies in the areas dealing with Minority Discourse, Postcolonialism, socio-political and psychoanalytic approaches to literature and culture. We will use Toni Morrison�s Bluest Eye as the single literary text on which to test various theoretical paradigms. During the fall each student will be expected to present a series of oral reports on the theoretical readings and to write three short papers designed to define his/her thesis topic with progressive clarity and precision. In this course students are entirely free to devise and complete a thesis of their own choosing . With the help of the instructor, students will be asked to define and frame their thesis topic by the end of the fall semester. The spring semester will then be conducted like a tutorial, in the course of which the students will complete their research and write their thesis.
Auster, P.: City of Glass : The Graphic Novel ; Culler, J.: Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction; Guillory, J.: Cultural Capital; Muller, J., et al., eds.: The Purloined Poe; a Course Reader
"This course is designed to enable students to undertake a significant research project in the study of literature in English. In the fall semester, we will concentrate largely on two terms in that sentence: �significant� and �literature.� What makes a research question, problem, or project a �significant� one? Does it merely involve choosing to study a �significant� writer or text? (And what makes some writers/texts more significant than others?) Or do new issues and objects emerge as significant in response to different historical conjunctures and intellectual agendas? To what extent can the object itself��literature��be defined within or against these frames? Is literature a narrower or broader category than �writing�? For example, is �poetry� a subset of literature or its epitome? Or, as �spoken word,� does it not belong to the category of �literature� at all? Is it best to see literature itself as a subset of �media�? If so, what is being communicated�information or ideology, feeling or thought, truth or a lie?
Students applying for this class should read Culler�s Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction over the summer. They should also select�provisionally�a writer or text or issue for research. A useful strategy in this selection might be: what writer or text or subject matter has most challenged or cemented my ideas about what literature is and what happens when it is read?
During the fall semester, students will be required to keep a journal recording their responses to the weekly reading, and to participate in a group-designed class. By the end of the semester, students must submit a short essay (7-10 pages) outlining a research project and articulating its significance in relation to the category of �literature.� During the spring semester of this year-long course, students are expected to complete an honors thesis of 40+ pages. Those students working on related issues, periods, genres, or writers will form working groups, which will meet weekly to read each other�s drafts on a rotating basis. Each student will also meet regularly with me and a second faculty advisor with expertise in the student�s chosen area of research. "
T.B.A.
By the end of this year-long course you will have produced a substantive and polished piece of writing on a topic of your choosing. In the fall semester, we�ll work on developing your theoretical self-consciousness and honing your analytic skills as you begin the process of writing your honors thesis.