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.
A course reader
Approaches to literary study, including textual analysis, scholarly methodology and bibliography, critical theory and practice.
W. Empson: Seven Types of Ambiguity; J. Muller and W. Richardson , eds.: The Purloined Poe; The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism; a course reader
Approaches to literary study, including textual analysis, scholarly methodology and bibliography, critical theory and practice.
No Texts
This will be a hands-on writing workshop intended to facilitate and accelerate the transition from qualifying exams to prospectus conference, and from prospectus conference to the first dissertation chapter. Every week, students will submit some formulation of their project (however partial and provisional) to the group, which will offer constructive feedback and pose leading questions. We will also review a range of prospectuses from the past to demystify the genre and gain a better understanding of its form and function. We will embrace the inevitability of inchoate beginnings and support the process of refining these into well-defined critical questions and projects. The goal will be to insure that by the end of the semester, every member of the workshop will have submitted a prospectus or first chapter to his or her committee.
Hale, Dorothy, J., ed.: The Novel: An Anthology of Criticism and Theory 1900-2000; Barthes, Roland: S/Z; Genette, G�rard: Narrative Discourse
This course traces the development of novel theory in the twentieth century. Designed as an introduction to major arguments that have been--and still are--influential to literary studies generally, the course asks why so many different theoretical schools have made novels the privileged object of critical attention. Topics of discussion include the difference between narrative and the novel; the location of novelistic difference in the representation of time and space; the definition of subjectivity in terms of vision and voice; the valorization of grammatical structures; the search for a masterplot; the historicization of genre; the confusion of realism and reality; and the belief in a politics of form. Readings will be drawn from, but not limited to, works by H. James, Shklovsky, Luk�cs, Jameson, Barthes, Girard, Genette, Booth, Bakhtin, and Spivak. James's What Maisie Knew and Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God will serve as test cases. Two short papers will facilitate the work of theoretical analysis and discussion.
Anzaldua, G.: Borderlands/La Frontera; Burroughs, E.: Tarzan of the Apes; DuBois, W.E.B.: The Oxford W.E.B. DuBois Reader ; Gatewood, W.: �Smoked Yankees�; Goldman, F.: The Divine Husband; Iglesias, C.: Memoirs of Bernardo Vega; Harvey, D.: The New Imperialism; Linebaugh, P. & M. Rediker: The Many-Headed Hydra; Mart�, J.: Selected Writings; Montejo, E.: Biography of a Runaway Slave; Rizal, J.: Noli Me Tangere; Roosevelt, T.: The Rough Riders; Kaplan, A.: The Anarchy of Empire; Negri, A. & M. Hardt: Empire; Retamar, R.: Caliban and other Essays; Perez, L.: The War of 1898; Said, E.: Culture & Imperialism; Rowe, J.: Literary Culture and U.S. Imperialism; De Leon: Our Word Is Our Weapon: Selected Writings: Subcomandante Insurgente Marcos
This course has a double trajectory. One examines representations of U.S. imperialism in a variety of literary and nonliterary texts within a broad time frame, from the 1880s to the present. The second explores recent theoretical work about culture and imperialism, anarchy and empire, and sets them in dialogue with current efforts to remap the transnational and transmodernist dimensions of U.S. culture and society. Historically, we will discuss different forms of U.S. imperial expansion, from continental expansion to overseas acquisitions of territories as a result of the wars of 1898 to 21st-century forms of U.S. imperial domination. Depending upon the constituency and reading experience of members of the seminar, we may not read all of the books listed above. A supplementary reader of relevant essays will also be required.
T.B.A.
A survey of English drama from the sixteenth to the seventeenth centuries. We will consider the drama from a variety of perspectives: its roots in classical and medieval theater; its generic diversity and complexity; the business practices of the professional theater companies; the social status of actors and playwrights; contemporary literature for and against the theater; and recent critical controversy on the subject. (This is a reading course, which means that there will be plenty to read but less to write.)
The Riverside Shakespeare
"This class is an introduction to the criticism of Shakespeare at the graduate level. I've decided to perform that introduction this semester through following the development of Shakespeare criticism into a professional practice, tracing the reception history of the plays since their first performances. I'm particularly interested in how the amateur project of judging the plays aesthetically has apparently vanished in the canonization of Shakespeare at the summit of the English curriculum, yet tacitly recurs in the marginalization of about a third of Shakespeare's plays from the canon of critical study--plays which may have enjoyed theatrical and critical enthusiasm in the past. We'll be focusing on some plays that have generated the widest range of critical debate over the centuries--Merchant, Lear, et al--, as well as on some other plays that have met with the most deafening of recent critical silences, such as Merry Wives and King John. Each member of the class will be responsible for a particular play, and will present its critical fortunes to the group.
I have ordered the Riverside Shakespeare at the bookstore. You may use any scholarly edition of each play, however, as convenient to you (�scholarly�= has annotations and an introduction, and says who edited the text). We will refer to the original printings in on-line facsimile as well. "
A required reader will be available at Copy Central on Bancroft.
This workshop is for poets who already have a body of work (however large or small) and who are currently working on a project or collection. It presupposes two things: that poetry as a project is as rigorous an undertaking as more typically scholarly undertakings; and that participants have an interest in theoretical concerns and see certain philosophical and/or social issues as relevant to poetry and to the particular technical problems (praxis or craft) that poetry entails. Participants will be expected to engage with poetics as well as poetry.
Hammond , P., ed.: Restoration Literature: An Anthology; Rochester , J.: Complete Poems; Bunyan, J.: Grace Abounding; Behn, A.: Oroonoko and Other Writings; Lawrence , R., ed.: Restoration Plays; Swift, J.: Writings; Pope, A.: Selected Poetry;Defoe, D.: Robinson Crusoe
An exploration of the satire, devotional autobiography, prose fiction, letter-writing, diaries, heroic verse, drama, pornography, and feminist polemic produced in England between the Restoration of Charles II (1660) and 1725; these will include Behn�s Oroonoko, the earlier works of Pope (Rape of the Lock), selected letters of Mary Wortley Montagu describing her life in Turkey, and major writings by Swift (Tale of a Tub, Modest Proposal, Gulliver�s Travels). Canonical figures like Milton, Congreve, Pope, and Swift will be juxtaposed to scandalous and/or marginal authors: Bunyan, Behn, Rochester , and Astell. We will be particularly concerned with the representation of transgressive sexuality, the search for the heroic, the encounter with the alien, the resistance to �modernity,� and the change in the idea of the author as women enter the literary marketplace; many of our texts combine all of these themes.
Jane Austen: Persuasion; S.T. Coleridge: Biographia Literaria; Thomas De Quincey: Confessions of an English Opium-Eater; Friedrich Schiller: Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man; Mary Shelley: Frankenstein; Charlotte Smith: The Poems of Charlotte Smith ; Dorothy Wordsworth: The Journals of Dorothy Wordsworth; David Perkins, ed.: English Romantic Writers
This class is not a 203 or a 250 in disguise. We will read widely in and around Romanticism, taking up as many pertinent topics as we can, perhaps including: aesthetics, politics, and ideology; the performance of lyric subjectivity; the gendering of genre; historical trauma and political melancholy, especially in relation to the French Revolution; affect and agency; negotiations of a newly dominant print culture; poetry and social competence; the sublime and the avant-garde. We will also spend time tracing a genealogy of recent critical engagements, showing how deconstruction, historicism, and (for want of a better term) the new formalism have passed through the period, trying to make Romanticism their own.
Primary texts will be chosen from among Passing, The Long Dream, The Third Life of Grange Copeland, Bluest Eye, Beloved, A Lesson Before Dying, Corregidora, Dessa Rose, These Bones Are Not My Child, Kindred, and others.
Having recently completed a study of a paradigmatic instance of the production of the death-bound-subject in African-American literature, I am currently exploring the reproduction of that subject. Thus this course will focus predominantly on black feminist fiction that addresses what Marxists have described as the problematics of the �reproduction of the relations of production,� or, more specifically, the reproduction of the death-bound-subject from one generation to the next. The course will privilege a series of texts preoccupied by the aporetic implications of giving birth to death-bound subjects. Methodological emphasis in the course will be on the relevant aspects of Marxian, feminist, and psychoanalytic theories.
W. Faulkner: Absalom, Absalom, As I Lay Dying, Go Down, Moses, The Hamlet, If I Forget Thee O Jerusalem, Light in August, Sanctuary, The Sound and the Fury; David L. Minter: William Faulkner: His Life and Work
An intensive seminar on the major works of William Faulkner.
Derek Attridge and Thomas Carper: Meter and Meaning: Introduction to Rhythm in Poetry; Mary Kinzie: A Poet�s Guide to Poetry
"This course offers an introduction to the genre and theory of lyric poetry, as well as indirectly to the theory of genre itself. While weekly readings will be organized by topics rather than historically determined, we will address the following broad historical questions: In what ways is the �lyricization� of poetry�the reduction of poetry to �lyric��a part of the modern institutionalization of print literature as an academic discipline? What special relation does the �lyric� have to modernity as such? Tracing the development and recurrence of oxymoronic figures such as �unheard melodies,� abstract images, and speech-acts of non-address, we will look at the ways in which the lyric has historically been defined in terms of figures of voice, personhood, immediacy, interiority, compression and condensation, recursive temporalities, and withdrawal from social contexts and history. We will try not to separate our discussion of poetry�s so-called formal elements�time, meter and rhythm, rhyme, refrain, the line, line breaks, enjambment, and shape�from our probing of the figurative and theoretical work performed by terms such as musicality, beats and feet, turns and ends, disjunction, and �form� itself.
Primary readings will be drawn from poetry in English from the Renaissance to the twentieth century, and, occasionally, from the Greek, Latin, French, and German traditions. Room will also be given to students� interest in non-Western lyric traditions, such as haiku or Sufi love poetry, and students so inclined will have the opportunity to develop projects centering on these traditions within the framework of the class. Theoretical readings will include works by Adorno, Benjamin, Cameron, Culler, Hamburger, Hegel, Jackson , Johnson, Lacoue-Labarthe, Longenbach, Mill, Prins, Stewart, and others. Most readings will be available in a course reader. "
Kant. I. : Critique of Judgment; Adorno, T.: Aesthetic Theory; Nancy , Jean-Luc: The Muses; Hegel, G.W.: Phenomenology of Spirit; Badiou, A: Ethics; Wittgenstein, L.: Philosophical Investigations
This course will explore some of the ways that reading in philosophical texts can have an impact on literary studies and on the arts in general. I don�t want to call this either �theory� or �aesthetics,� because such choices obviously tilt the philosophical frameworks in ways that we might want to challenge. In general I want to extend this spirit of challenge by focusing on how philosophical interests might lead us to rely on models of inquiry that might not be the richest measure of the power of literary works. I am especially concerned with the limitations of what might call the ontology of texts, so I will try to make a case for the importance of models of agency for literary study. We will also be concerned with how we might the study of affect central to our work. As I envision it now, participants will be asked to explore the impact of the philosophical readings by presenting how they might be useful and also misleading in relation to selected literary texts or works of visual art.
For more information on this class, please email the professor at j_miller@berkeley.edu.
T.B. A.
"This course surveys the forms, traditions, and environments of lyric poetry in the European Middle Ages. It will read closely in examples from Latin and the vernacular languages, but it also hopes to ask some broader theoretical and cultural questions about the nature of genre, the material culture of medieval literacy, and the possibilities for literary criticism of past objects of aesthetic value. The course hopes to be responsive to student interest and expertise, but at the very least it hopes to survey in some detail the Middle English lyric, the work of the Troubadours and Trouveres, the Minnesang, and the ongoing production of Latin verse, from
the Carolngian period to the fifteenth century. In addition to exploring these literary traditions, we will examine ways of writing about them in the work of current literary critics. Finally, I hope to call attention to the manuscript environments of medieval lyric poetry: the anthologies that transmitted the poetry; the multi-lingual culture of medieval England; and the ways in which certain long poems (e.g., Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde) were read, copied, and reworked as assemblies of lyric expression.
Students will be expected to read widely in the assigned texts and
criticism; each student will be expected to deliver a brief oral report during a seminar meeting (in essence, open up the class discussion on a given topic); and each student will be required to write a final research paper keyed to the texts, themes, and concerns of the course. "
Still in the planning stages. For further updates, contact kgoodman@berkeley.edu or sakatz@berkeley.edu. Possibilities include Showalter, E.: Teaching Literature; Davis, B.: Tools for Teaching.
"This jointly taught course will introduce new English GSIs to the theory and practice of teaching in 45 A-B-C, R1A and R1B, and other classes they are likely to teach both at Berkeley and beyond. Designed as both a critical seminar and a hands-on practicum, it will explore effective strategies for leading discussion, modeling close reading, teaching the elements of composition, responding to and evaluating student writing, managing time, preparing future lectures, designing courses and syllabi, and other elements that make up the work of teaching here and elsewhere. The seminar component of the class will offer a space forsharing tips and advice, experimenting with various pedagogical styles and practices, and articulating individual teaching philosophies. In the practicum component, we hope to pair class participants with an experienced GSI teaching in R1A/R1B or with a faculty mentor, so that new teachers can observe several classes during the semester other than their own. In addition�and to some extent along the lines of the English 200 text�each member of the class will select a primary text that they are either currently teaching or are likely to teach in the future, using it to design assignments and teaching approaches for a variety of contexts and levels. There may also be a common teaching text for shared discussion of pedagogical issues.
The aim of this class is to be pertinent to the needs and concerns of GSIs within the English Department. To this end, future or prospective class members are invited to contact either of the instructors if there are issues or topics that you would especially like to see addressed this semester."
"Meyer, E. and L Smith: 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. "