"Nina Baym, ed., The Norton Anthology of American Literature: Between the Wars 1914-1945, Vol. D, Sixth Ed.
Donald McQuade and Christine McQuade, eds., Seeing & Writing 2
William Strunk, Jr., E.B. White, and Maira Kalman (illustrator), The Elements of Style Illustrated
James Joyce, Dubliners
Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse
Dave Eggers and Chris Ware, eds., McSweeney�s Quarterly Concern, Issue No. 13."
"This course will introduce students to the process and practice of critical reading and writing, through examining a selection of twentieth century literary texts, examples of visual art, and works that combine elements of both textual and visual art forms. A central theme for the course will be the interplay of visual signs and textual codes in literature and in our contemporary cultural context. Despite the wide range and types of works we will study � from the novel and short story to print advertisements, graphic novels, paintings and photographs � our critical approach will be the same: training ourselves as readers of structure, perspective, theme, content and context, whether we�re considering a short poem by H.D., a passage from Virginia Woolf�s To The Lighthouse, or still photography by Cindy Sherman.
We�ll engage with these works in a variety of ways: through class discussion, close-reading and group work, personal response papers and longer, expository essays. Our emphasis on the process of composition will entail peer-editing, in-class writing, research and revision exercises, as well as drafting assignments and office hour conferences. Our goal will be to become as comfortable with performing critical readings of these texts, as we are with supporting and conveying these ideas in writing and in group discussion."
"Caroll, Lewis. Alice �s Adventures in Wonderland
Christie, Agatha. The Murder of Roger Ackroyd
Murakami, Haruki. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
Diana Hacker, Rules for Writers
Course Reader, including:
Dick, Philip K. �I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon�
Poe, Edgar Allen. �The Purloined Letter�
plus poems by Coleridge, and some essays of literary criticism
Film:
Scott, Ridley. Bladerunner"
"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 weekly response papers, several short essays (2-3 pages), drafts, and revisions. 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 that 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? The theme of this course is also inspired by the most popular answer I get when, in the first week of class, I ask R&C students to name their favorite authors or genres; ninety percent of the time, the answer is �Mystery and Fantasy.� In taking my past students� interests seriously enough to construct this course, I�ve also formed an odd literary couple�for the genres of �mystery� and �fantasy� feature widely divergent plot lines, characters, and themes. The literary detective is a highly rational and perceptive creature, while the characters in a fantasy book are often forced to overcome their rationality and other accepted modes of knowledge. The pleasure of investigating this clashing literary twosome will involve seeing what happens in stories about weaving together �facts�; in stories that present an alternate universe in which �facts� and preconceived truths become questionable; and in stories that bring both �fact� and �fantasy� into productive tension. "
"Julian Barnes, The History of the World in 10� Chapters
Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward
David Bradley, The Chaneysville Incident
Octavia Butler, Kindred
Supplementary Texts:
Frederick Crews, The Random House Handbook, 6 th 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 history? What effect does it have on our projects in the present? And on our future projects? This course is interested in exploring what role the way in which we imagine past events has in shaping our understanding of what�s possible and impossible, now or later. We will be reading texts which self-consciously take up the issue of history in a variety of ways � some do this by returning imaginatively to moments of historic significance, and some by imagining what happened in the past from the standpoint of the �present,� while others imagine the present as the past of some future time, all challenging us to consider history as an imaginative act with consequences.
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 first half of the University Reading and Composition requirement."
"Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Yellow Wallpaper
Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness
Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises
Diana Hacker, Rules for Writers
* Course Reader including writings by George Orwell, Sui Sin Far, Toni Morrison, Edgar Allan Poe, and others. "
"This course is an introduction to the mechanics and pleasures of critical reading and writing. If you�re not sure how critical reading and writing differ from other kinds of reading and writing, don�t despair! That�s precisely what we�re here to figure out. We will begin by abandoning the idea that writing�creative or critical�just happens, and instead approach it as a series of careful and strategic choices. Thus, with respect to both the texts we read (see list below) and the texts you write (see writing requirement below), we will think very carefully about how little decisions such as word choice, verb tense, or the ordering of events/ideas, can influence the overall meaning and effect of a sentence, paragraph or even an entire work. By becoming more conscious of words as active creators of meaning rather than passive transmitters of information, you will become more perceptive readers and more skillful writers by the end of the semester.
The thematic focus of this course overlaps with the practical focus described above. We will read short stories and novels, supplemented by autobiographical sketches and essays, all of which are centrally concerned with the acts of reading and writing. In its simplest sense, this means that we will read stories that are about writers: journalists, diarists, and note-pad toting spies will all make an appearance this semester. Many of our characters are also readers, but not simply in the bookish sense, and this is where the true crux of our course lies. For the authors of the works we will read this semester, �interpretation� is not an activity reserved solely for English class, nor is it simply about making sense of texts. Rather, interpretation emerges as a strategy for making sense of the world, for organizing the raw material of experience into meaning. The characters in their fiction thus emerge as �readers� of people, events, history and culture, all of which emerge as �texts� demanding interpretation. Freed from the page, the act of reading assumes unexpected and often bizarre forms: a nasty wallpaper design, a spouse�s perfectly white teeth, and a decapitated head each emerge as ciphers which we, along with the characters, are asked to render meaningful. To read these stories and novels is to participate in their construction of meaning, whether by joining a character in his/her search for a �truth� which lies beneath the surface of things, or by reading between the lines of a character who seeks to hide something from others or from him/herself. Our project this semester will be to read our way into these linguistic worlds and then, by constructing our own understandings of the texts� meaning, to write our way back out. Students who enroll should come prepared to read constantly, write furiously, and participate earnestly in class discussion! "
"Jane Austen, Mansfield Park
Frances Burney, Evelina
Charles Dickens, David Copperfield
William Makepeace Thackeray, Vanity Fair
Robert Louis Stevenson, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
A short course reader containing several short stories and other material related to course topic. "
"In 1913, the social philosopher George Mead declared, �It is fair to say that the modern western world has lately done much of its thinking in the form of the novel.� For Mead, it seems, novels had not only begun to test and represent developments in social theory, but also they had created a �space� of private reading in which �the social��that is, the concept of society�had begun to be evaluated and influenced by novel reading itself. Mead anticipated what in current literary studies is often referred to as the �social imaginary,� or the imagined interplay between personal identity and society that takes place when we read novels. We will begin with a focus on the term itself by asking: What does it mean to say that there is an imaginary dimension to the social? This course is designed to trace the development of the �social imaginary� in English literature during the period that has been referred to as the �rise of the English novel��beginning in the late eighteenth century and concluding with the end of the Victorian period (roughly 1778-1900). Since �the social� includes both writers and readers, our focus will be twofold: on the one hand, we will consider the development of the novel as a literary form that became capable of representing the social; on the other, we will think about the changing conceptions of novel reading itself, and or of what it meant to be a novel reader.
Each of the texts we will read is engaged by conflicts between traditional social forms (for example, class, gender, and marriage) and new forms of personal mobility, self-determination, and individuality. We will pay particular attention to the novel�s capacity to evoke both literal and figurative representations of the social. For example, we will spend time thinking about novelistic techniques such as satire, parody, irony, and imitation, all of which depend on a symbolic interaction with a reader. In addition, we will consider literary representations of social issues such as publicity and privacy, the role of gender and sexuality in society, and the relationship between the author and her or his text.
Our dual focus on writers and readers will lead us to consider how the novel not only offered escape and entertainment to those who read them, but also proved to be a flexible and expansive medium of social intervention and commentary. Along the way, we will take into account various questions that emerged in society about the concept of novel reading itself: for example, do novels educate and improve their readers, or do they distract and corrupt them? By tracing the �social imaginary� during the rise of the novel, we will see how the novel acquired new powers and provoked new debates and relations among both readers and writers.
In this course, we will be concerned with developing 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. The majority of class time will revolve around class discussions and in-class workshops that will allow us to practice and build upon our close reading skills, and then work to �translate� these skills into writing.
Over the course of the semester, 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.
Constant attendance, frequent in-class participation, and dedication to the reading are required for this course. "
"Faulkner, W.: As I Lay Dying
Hacker, D.: Rules for Writers
Kafka, F.: 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, Gilles Deleuze, Sigmund Freud, and the Grimm Brothers "
"This course examines why human metamorphosis has been such an enduring motif in literature and how the meanings of literary metamorphoses have themselves changed over time. Starting with classical myth and working through more modern fairy tales, poems, novels, and psychological case studies, we will ask what metamorphosis implies about voluntarism, repression, animality, the demands of socialization, and the possibilities and limits of subjectivity. We will also pay careful attention to the kinds of language used to express changes in form, asking how literature enforces metamorphosis and how it is adequate to the task of its representation.
The theme of metamorphosis informs the primary goals of the course: becoming more critical readers and more effective writers. In class discussions and in a number of 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. "
"Diana Hacker. Rules for Writers. Available online: http://www.dianahacker.com/rules/
Strunk and White. Elements of Style. Available online: http://www.bartleby.com/141/
Primary Texts: (chronological by date of composition and order of in-class lection)
Augustine, Confessions (5th century) Available online: www.ccel.org/a/augustine/confessions/confessions.html Excerpts.
Peter Abelard, Story of my Misfortunes (11th century) http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/basis/abelard-histcal.html
Abelard and Heloise, The Letters of Abelard and Heloise. (11th century) Trans. Betty Radice. Penguin Books, 2003. Excerpts.
Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love, long version and short version (14 th century). Trans. Elizabeth Spearing. Intro A. C. Spearing. Penguin Classics, 1998.
Margery Kempe The Book of Margery Kempe. (14th century) Trans. Barry Windeatt. Penguin Classics, 1994.
Giorgio Vasari, Lives of the Artists (16th century) Trans. George Bull. Penguin, 1971. Excerpts.
Benvenuto Cellini, Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini (16th century) Trans. George Bull. Penguin, 1998. Excerpts.
Samuel Pepys, The Diary of Pepys (17th century) Available online: pepysdiary.com. Excerpts.
Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams (19th century) Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1973. Excerpts.
James Joyce, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (early 20th) Penguin, 2003, 1992.
Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar (20th) Harper Collins, 1996.
Peter Balakian, Black Dog of Fate (late 20th) New York: Basic Books, 1997.
Orhan Pamuk, Istanbul (21st) New York: Knopf, 2005."
"In the fifth century, Augustine of Hippo wrote his Confessions, arguably the most significant and foundational autobiography in the Western tradition. In this work, he represents the act of making an autobiography as a quest for self and a quest for God: �Search for your true self; he who seeks shall find himself in God.� Confession, Augustine suggests, is all about the self and its relationship to God. To search oneself and make a narrative of one�s own life is a revelatory process: seek thy story, and ye shall find truth and God.
But written confession, such as Augustine�s own Confessions, evidently goes beyond this private, revelatory, sacred act of self-examination. Augustine�s text, after all, was written in part as an exemplary text, meant to inspire and instruct others in how they should make their own confessional narratives. The notion of the private, confessional, or revelatory autobiography is exposed as, in part, a rhetorical device.
So, what is autobiography�fact, fiction, truth, rhetoric, or somewhere in between? Put otherwise, are autobiographies art or history? What does it mean �to write the self?� When we read autobiographies, do we achieve the kind of intimacy with a text and its creator that the idea of �the intentional fallacy� warns us we must not hope for? Are autobiographies simply �life stories,� or are they, at the very least, recreations and reimaginations of a past era? To answer these questions, we will scrutinize the forms and themes of autobiographies, assessing not only what past they choose to represent (and what they might be omitting) but also how they choose to represent that past. Do they integrate history and politics, or exclude them?
In addition, we will assess how the genre of autobiography has changed across a dozen or so centuries and several continents. We will assess whether it is useful to think of autobiography in discrete sub-genres�confession, polemic, exemplary text, history of a place, archival record, artistic manifesto, or story�whether there is some common impulse in all autobiographies, or whether there are general trends in the genre, shifts over time.
We will gain traction in this diachronic and pan-Western wash of self-writings in part by examining autobiographies in self-forming groups. For example, to situate philosopher Peter Abelard�s autobiography, we will read not only Story of my Misfortunes, but also the letters exchanged between him and the woman he identifies as the source of his �misfortunes,� and some of the more heated correspondences he had with contemporary philosophers.
Later we will read Julian of Norwich�s earlier, shorter retelling of her mystical Visions, and then compare that with her massive revision and elaboration of them, undertaken 30 years later. We will then turn to read Margery of Kempe�s story of her own mystical experiences, including an homage to an earlier female mystic autobiographer, none other than Julian herself.
Turning toward the visual arts, we will then read two quasi-archival, quasi-autobiographical accounts of the great flourishing of art in Renaissance Italy, to examine how each author chooses to situate himself in his narrative practice, as well as in the �real-time history� that he narrates. From the Renaissance, we will move into more �modern� feeling texts, and analyze how they embody and/or problematize autobiographical conventions we have encountered in our earlier texts.
Since writing is always in part a conscious self-representation, I wanted to orient this class around texts that bring that reality to the foreground. As we practice our literary critical thinking on these texts, and transform those critical thoughts into writing, I want to keep a partial focus on how any textual production�including a critical paper written for an English class�includes an element of self-representation, conscious authorial self-positioning, or claims for personal authority. I want to use our observations about autobiographies� awareness of their audiences, historical circumstances, narrative goals, and rhetorical objectives to inform and complicate our own understanding of our writerly identities, as well as our sense of exactly what �self-writing� is about in literary history.
Writing assignments for the course will consist of weekly short papers from 2-4 pages in length, based upon close readings of the primary text we�re examining for the week. Each student must select three of those papers to revise, and must come to see me in office hours before undertaking each revision. The papers need not always (though most should) be literary critical papers; it is also acceptable to write creative responses to the pieces we read for class (we will talk more about this at the beginning of the semester.) From these writing exercises, we will learn how to respond critically to literary texts, how to formulate theses, how to develop arguments, and how to begin the process of developing writerly style. "
"Diana Hacker. Rules for Writers. Available online: http://www.dianahacker.com/rules/
Strunk and White. Elements of Style. Available online: http://www.bartleby.com/141/
Primary Texts: (chronological by date of composition and order of in-class lection)
Augustine, Confessions (5th century) Available online: www.ccel.org/a/augustine/confessions/confessions.html Excerpts.
Peter Abelard, Story of my Misfortunes (11th century) http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/basis/abelard-histcal.html
Abelard and Heloise, The Letters of Abelard and Heloise. (11th century) Trans. Betty Radice. Penguin Books, 2003. Excerpts.
Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love, long version and short version (14 th century). Trans. Elizabeth Spearing. Intro A. C. Spearing. Penguin Classics, 1998.
Margery Kempe The Book of Margery Kempe. (14th century) Trans. Barry Windeatt. Penguin Classics, 1994.
Giorgio Vasari, Lives of the Artists (16th century) Trans. George Bull. Penguin, 1971. Excerpts.
Benvenuto Cellini, Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini (16th century) Trans. George Bull. Penguin, 1998. Excerpts.
Samuel Pepys, The Diary of Pepys (17th century) Available online: pepysdiary.com. Excerpts.
Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams (19th century) Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1973. Excerpts.
James Joyce, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (early 20th) Penguin, 2003, 1992.
Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar (20th) Harper Collins, 1996.
Peter Balakian, Black Dog of Fate (late 20th) New York: Basic Books, 1997.
Orhan Pamuk, Istanbul (21st) New York: Knopf, 2005."
"In the fifth century, Augustine of Hippo wrote his Confessions, arguably the most significant and foundational autobiography in the Western tradition. In this work, he represents the act of making an autobiography as a quest for self and a quest for God: �Search for your true self; he who seeks shall find himself in God.� Confession, Augustine suggests, is all about the self and its relationship to God. To search oneself and make a narrative of one�s own life is a revelatory process: seek thy story, and ye shall find truth and God.
But written confession, such as Augustine�s own Confessions, evidently goes beyond this private, revelatory, sacred act of self-examination. Augustine�s text, after all, was written in part as an exemplary text, meant to inspire and instruct others in how they should make their own confessional narratives. The notion of the private, confessional, or revelatory autobiography is exposed as, in part, a rhetorical device.
So, what is autobiography�fact, fiction, truth, rhetoric, or somewhere in between? Put otherwise, are autobiographies art or history? What does it mean �to write the self?� When we read autobiographies, do we achieve the kind of intimacy with a text and its creator that the idea of �the intentional fallacy� warns us we must not hope for? Are autobiographies simply �life stories,� or are they, at the very least, recreations and reimaginations of a past era? To answer these questions, we will scrutinize the forms and themes of autobiographies, assessing not only what past they choose to represent (and what they might be omitting) but also how they choose to represent that past. Do they integrate history and politics, or exclude them?
In addition, we will assess how the genre of autobiography has changed across a dozen or so centuries and several continents. We will assess whether it is useful to think of autobiography in discrete sub-genres�confession, polemic, exemplary text, history of a place, archival record, artistic manifesto, or story�whether there is some common impulse in all autobiographies, or whether there are general trends in the genre, shifts over time.
We will gain traction in this diachronic and pan-Western wash of self-writings in part by examining autobiographies in self-forming groups. For example, to situate philosopher Peter Abelard�s autobiography, we will read not only Story of my Misfortunes, but also the letters exchanged between him and the woman he identifies as the source of his �misfortunes,� and some of the more heated correspondences he had with contemporary philosophers.
Later we will read Julian of Norwich�s earlier, shorter retelling of her mystical Visions, and then compare that with her massive revision and elaboration of them, undertaken 30 years later. We will then turn to read Margery of Kempe�s story of her own mystical experiences, including an homage to an earlier female mystic autobiographer, none other than Julian herself.
Turning toward the visual arts, we will then read two quasi-archival, quasi-autobiographical accounts of the great flourishing of art in Renaissance Italy, to examine how each author chooses to situate himself in his narrative practice, as well as in the �real-time history� that he narrates. From the Renaissance, we will move into more �modern� feeling texts, and analyze how they embody and/or problematize autobiographical conventions we have encountered in our earlier texts.
Since writing is always in part a conscious self-representation, I wanted to orient this class around texts that bring that reality to the foreground. As we practice our literary critical thinking on these texts, and transform those critical thoughts into writing, I want to keep a partial focus on how any textual production�including a critical paper written for an English class�includes an element of self-representation, conscious authorial self-positioning, or claims for personal authority. I want to use our observations about autobiographies� awareness of their audiences, historical circumstances, narrative goals, and rhetorical objectives to inform and complicate our own understanding of our writerly identities, as well as our sense of exactly what �self-writing� is about in literary history.
Writing assignments for the course will consist of weekly short papers from 2-4 pages in length, based upon close readings of the primary text we�re examining for the week. Each student must select three of those papers to revise, and must come to see me in office hours before undertaking each revision. The papers need not always (though most should) be literary critical papers; it is also acceptable to write creative responses to the pieces we read for class (we will talk more about this at the beginning of the semester.) From these writing exercises, we will learn how to respond critically to literary texts, how to formulate theses, how to develop arguments, and how to begin the process of developing writerly style. "
"Herman Melville, The Confidence Man
Albert Camus, The Stranger
Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita
Philip K. Dick, Valis
Diana Hacker, Rules for Writers
Films:
2001: A Space Odyssey
Memento"
"For this course, we will consider the relationship between modern understandings of character (in film and literature) and the development of psychopathology in the 19 th and 20 th centuries. While we will borrow some terms and ideas from psychoanalysis, our primary focus is on literary and cinematic responses to that discipline and its relationship to our idea of �character.� We will begin with a few short pieces of 19 th century fiction (included in a course reader) and will then examine a handful of longer 19 th and 20 th century novels and films (see below) which variously incorporate and/or react against the pathologizing of the psyche.
This course aims to develop students' practical fluency with sentence, paragraph, and thesis-development skills with increasingly complex applications. A short essay is normally assigned at the beginning of the semester to assess the students' writing skills. Students will be assigned a minimum of 32 pages of writing, to be divided among a number of short essays (2-4 typewritten pages), and will be required to revise at least three of these essays. Since this is a writing course, be prepared to write (and revise) in abundance; however, it is my firm belief that good writing stems first from good reading, so you will also be expected to read much.
NOTE: We will be viewing two films for this course, so we will arrange screening times outside of regular class time; those of you unable to attend the arranged times will be expected to view assigned films on your own time (in Media Resources or at your own expense from a rental outlet). A course reader including additional readings and materials not listed below will also be made available."
"Olivier Assayas, Irma Vep
Pearl Buck, The Good Earth
Cecil B. DeMille, The Cheat
Graham Greene, The Quiet American
Andrew X. Pham, Catfish and Mandala
Sebastiao Salgado, Migrations: Humanity in Transition
Sara Suleri, Meatless Days
Zhang Yimou To Live"
"This class will examine representations of the Asian masses in selected works of literature and film. What historical contexts have given rise to particular ways of representing Asians as masses or hordes? How can we think about the Asian masses as both cultural content and cultural form? 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. A series of in-class workshops will be held to assist students with brainstorming ideas, developing theses, and drafting and revising critical essays. Students will also exchange drafts of their essays in order to offer and receive feedback. (Please note: book list is subject to change.)"
"Ccourse reader: Genesis, the story of Abraham and Isaac (in KJV translation)
Lucy Hutchinson, Order and Disorder, Canto 15
selected essays
John Milton, Samson Agonistes
Sophocles, Antigone
Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (selections)
Cesare Pavese, The House on the Hill
Dai Sijie, Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress
Tony Kushner, Angels in America
Diana Hacker, Rules for Writers (5e) "
"John Milton, arguing against the governmental oversight of book printing in Areopagitica, tells us that �reason is but choosing.� He also tells us, famously, of another choice: that �from out the rind of one apple tasted, . . . the knowledge of good and evill as two twins cleaving together leapt forth into the World.� The wonderful duality of that word �cleaving� � to come together, to rend asunder � shows us that even choices we consider absolute carry the specter of the unchosen option with them. In this course, we will consider ethical dilemmas in two forms: firstly the choice to act, often violently, and its consequences; secondly the legal stipulation that �not doing is no trespass� and whether inaction frees us from blame.
Writing is one of the best ways of coming to terms with the ideas and forms of literary texts; consequently, the course will require frequent writing, in a variety of styles, designed both to help you develop your ideas about the texts and to convey those ideas in writing. As a seminar on the consequences of persuasion and choice, many of these assignments will take the form of short position papers asking you to argue on one side or the other of a question. These assignments aim to develop your argumentative writing skills by suiting different forms of persuasive speech to different occasions, preparing you to write in a wide variety of situations, though focusing primarily on the academic essay. You will be writing and rewriting every week, both in class and out. To that end, a portion of each class period will focus on grammar, using Diana Hacker�s Rules for Writers, with additional online exercises. "
"Anton Chekhov,�Uncle Vanya.�
Frederick Crews, The Random House Handbook
Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities
Herman Melville, �Bartleby the Scrivener.�
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.) "
"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 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 all 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). The history of English literature is largely the history of popular English literature�a fact that will help us speculate about what kinds of things from the present are likely be taught in courses like this one years from now.
This course is designed to help students write clearly and honestly about the experience of reading. Students will write weekly 1 page papers and three longer essays of 4-6 pages. "
"Brett Easton Ellis, American Psycho (1991)
Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant, The Office (2001-03)
Henry James, The Awkward Age (1899)
Andrea Lunsford, Easy Writer (2005)
Herman Melville, The Confidence Man (1857)
Vladimir Nabokov, Despair (1966)
Nicholas Ray, Rebel Without a Cause (1955)
Gertrude Stein, Three Lives (1909)"
"""I enjoy seeing the lengths to which bad managements go to preserve what they call their independence�which really just means their jobs."" Donald Trump, The Art of the Deal (1987)
""To cast in my lot with Jekyll was to die to those appetites which I had long secretly indulged and had of late begun to pamper. To cast it in with Hyde was to die to a thousand interests and aspirations, and to become, at a blow and for ever, despised and friendless."" Robert Louis Stevenson, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886)
One of the most striking absences in this Stevenson epigraph is the identity of its �I,� for as even a casual familiarity with the story tells us, Jekyll and Hyde are the same person. In order to cast in my lot with one or the other I�d have to transcend them both, making the decision as pointless as the novel would be without its drama. This course will begin with the assumption that stories about self-management (including the stories we tell to and about ourselves) are driven by this kind of foreclosure, a friction that develops after we already know what we are. Donald Trump, no stranger to the kinds of management-speak that means �jobs� when it says �independence,� wouldn�t be wrong to think of Jekyll and Hyde as a kind of corporation, a body with bodies inside. For just as euphemisms do two kinds of work�syntactically using words like �independence� to stand in for a group of correlated interests while pragmatically clueing us into the vulnerable �jobs� beneath them�the logic of incorporation puts its bodies to work in unequal and often unrewarding roles. If the choice of becoming-Jekyll or becoming-Hyde requires incompatible costs, we know they aren�t equivalent, and that it�s only after one incorporates the other that it becomes impossible to be both.
Each of the novels we�ll be reading this semester dramatizes the negotiation that takes place once its roles have been assigned, and looks for new ways to talk about maintaining them: Ellis�s psycho leads a double life, Nabokov�s Hermann plots his own murder, the confidence man could be anyone, and Dean�s rebel is everyone. Theirs is a perspective with real costs: the ethics of personal and social relationships, identities, and obligations are clearly at stake, so while we will never see the successful transgression that the illusion of �I� (or its �independence�) promises, we will always feel its corporate weight. A closer look at these �bad managements� will reveal all the friction there is in a done deal, giving us cause to review the knotty organization of our own self-expression, and the energy to be found in a foreclosed place.
I will assign five short (2-4 page) papers in this course (at least three of which will require revision), two in-class essays, four rounds of peer editing, and weekly blog responses to required reading. The 1A course is intended to develop your practical fluency with sentence, paragraph, and thesis-development skills; we�ll work on your ability to analyze difficult work, and to use that analysis to produce credible arguments. My hope is that a topic like �Bad Managements,� with its stress on the forms that we use to contain and express ourselves, will bring us close to the compromises of and in our own writing. "
"Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Yellow Wall-Paper
Henry James, The Turn of the Screw
Sigmund Freud, Dora: Fragments of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria
Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House
Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar
Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea
Diana Hacker, A Writer�s Reference (5 th ed.)
Course reader containing additional primary and secondary sources"
"How have mad women been represented in literature? This course will explore a variety of overlapping approaches (including Gothic, medical, psychoanalytic, and autobiographical) appearing in literary representations of female insanity. Through several texts from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, we will examine the changing ways in which madness and its treatments intersect with cultural notions about the female mind and the female body. We will pay particular attention to portrayals of the act of writing and of female authorship in these texts, and their relationship to an often male-identified medical and psychological discourse. The representation of female madness and mad females in these texts will also provide a critical perspective from which to question the ideas of female health, sanity, and normality against which insanity is defined.
This course is aimed at developing reading, writing, and research skills that are applicable beyond the specific field of literature. The primary focus will be on how to find, evaluate, and make effective use of research tools and resources. Writing assignments will include three progressively longer papers (2-3 pages, 5-6 pages, 10-12 pages), combining analysis of primary texts with research from secondary sources. Strategies for revision will form another major focus of the course, and the second and third papers will include substantial work (and feedback) at the prewriting and draft stages of composition. This course fulfills the second half of the university�s Reading and Composition requirement."
"Desiderius Erasmus, On Copia of Words and Ideas
Harryette Mullen, Sleeping with the Dictionary
Lewis Carroll, Jabberwocky, and more nonsense
William Shakespeare, Sonnets
Juliana Spahr, Fuck You-Aloha-I Love You
Gertrude Stein, Tender Buttons
William Struck Jr. and E.B. White, The Elements of Style
Sundry short items including Martin Luther King Jr.�s �I Have a Dream,� The Rhyming Poem, Ezra Pound�s translations of Arnaut Daniel, an essay on the color blue from Alexander Thoreaux�s Primary Colours, Gertrude Stein�s Portraits and Repetition and excerpts from How to Write and Stephen Pinker�s The Language Instinct, rhetorical manuals, and new media."
"Roman Jakobson argues that babies first begin to make meaning when they begin to repeat phonemes: ba-ba, da-da, etc. Like Chomsky�s notion of Universal Grammar, repetition is embedded in the structure of language and has aesthetic, rhetorical, performative and political purposes. Rhymes occur in 5 th century Celtic inscriptions and presidential speeches, repetitive gestures occur in ceremonial dance, repetition is seen to have a kind of power in chants, incantations, prayers and songs. In this class, we will be examining the persuasive power of rhetoric as manifested in a variety of texts that use syntactic parallelism, refrain, alliteration, assonance, rhyme (phonetic and ideational). Why is the repetition of like sounds such a powerful and �convincing� device, from selling cars to seducing a lover? We will be looking at various rhetorical and poetical arguments (Shakespeare�s attempt to get a young man to marry, Stein�s claim that she never repeats she only �insists,� Erasmus�s plea for stylistic �copia�) in order to refine our own abilities to
Use persuasive strategies that frame an argument around a central thesis
Become fluent writers of progressively longer, more elaborate arguments
Become proficient researchers by utilizing our vast resources
Utilize certain conventions for citing sources
Imitate and innovate
Draft and re-draft
Respond critically to a wide variety of texts
Develop editing skills
Use writing as a tool to teach and to delight "
"James Hogg, Confessions of a Justified Sinner
Herman Hesse, Siddhartha
Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness
Diana Hacker, Rules for Writers
Strunk and White, Elements of Style.
A Course Reader will include shorter works and excerpts. Some films will also be shown."
"The topic of this course examines literary portrayals of faith and doubt. By looking at texts which explore both the human need for belief without proof and the tendency of reason toward skepticism, we will chart a literary history of personal religious doubt. Our �faiths� will be varied: given the nature of English literature, many of the works will concern Christian faith, but other faiths, such as in self-reliance, in democracy, in jihad, in atheism, and in science will also be discussed. In the ambiguous space of religious faith, where truth cannot be verified by experience, we find a topical analog for the strangeness of literature, where fiction is neither truth nor falsity. Religious crisis has a habit of veering from the extremely personal to the outwardly social, and we will look at how different writers depict the origins of personal religious crises as well as their consequences in the social and global spheres.
The materials for the course are arranged to provide many avenues for honing students� research and writing skills. In keeping with the R&C requirements, students will write two research papers totaling 16 pages, with at least an equal number of pages and preliminary drafting and revising."
"Course reader
Rise Axelrod, Reading Critically, Writing Well: A Reader and Guide
James Monaco, How to Read a Film
George Orwell, 1984
Graham Greene, The Quiet American
Arthur Miller, The Crucible
Gwendolyn Brooks, Blacks
A.R. Ammons, Tape for the Turn of the Year,
The Manchurian Candidate (1962)
Dr. Strangelove (1964)
Theresa Hak Kyun Cha, Dict�e
The Atomic Caf� (1982)
The Fog of War (2003)
Munich (2005)"
"This course looks at what was happening in culture at large from the mid- twentieth century until the end of the Cold War. We will immerse ourselves in the popular and political culture of the time�literature, poetry, film, television, advertising, and so on�in order to frame our readings and to see what response artists were making to that milieu. The �tranquilized fifties,� as Robert Lowell called the period, were in fact a period of world-wide instability, fear, and crisis�a situation that ironically accounts for the domestic traditionalism we associate with American society of the time.
The approaches we learn through critical writing can be applied to cultural products of all levels, not only the �high� culture of the sonnet or the literary novel, but also, as numerous books and articles have demonstrated, the �pulp� fiction of popular romance and detective stories; popular music of all varieties; and the most popular art form of the twentieth century, the fiction film. In this course we will read a variety of American cultural artifacts of the last half of the twentieth-century to understand their themes, their style, their techniques and perhaps particularly their social and political content, often expressed in allegory and representing the anxieties, hopes, and values of the period.
This will be a writing process oriented course with a research component. We will improve upon their current university level writing skill by developing an awareness of English grammar and rhetoric through exercises and demonstrated during journal free writing. Analytic reading skills will be practiced and executed through constructed response assignments, culminating with extensive peer and instructor drafting of three 5-7 pages critical papers, and a final research-based critical analysis.
Course requirements: one assessment essay, two 5-6 page critical papers, one 7-10 page research paper, drafting assignments, class presentation, constructed response assignments, grammar and writing exercises, group journals."
"Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
Art Spiegelman, In the Shadow of No Towers
Diana Hacker, Rules for Writers 5th edition
25th Hour (film directed by Spike Lee; to be screened in class)
And a required course reader containing Joyce Carol Oates� �The Mutant�, David Foster Wallace�s �The Suffering Channel�, speeches by President Bush and former New York Mayor Rudolph Guilliani, newspaper clippings, and selections from some of the following texts: An Eye for an Eye: Poets on 9/11 (Parenti); After: How America Confronted the September 12 Era (Brill); As the Towers Fell: Stories of Unshakeable Faith on 9/11 (Chilson-Rose); Moral Philosophy After 9/11 (Margolis); After 9/11: A Korean Girl�s Sexual Journey (Cha); 9/11: Artists Respond (Eisner); Portraits 9/11/01: The Collected New York Times �Portraits of Grief� (Raines, ed.); The 9/11 Commission Report (9/11 Commission); 9/11 Ashes to Ashes Dust to DNA (Flowers); Film and Television After 9/11 (Dixon); Lamentation 9/11 (Doctorow); Above Hallowed Ground: A Photographic Record of September 11, 2001."
"Individual responses to the events of September 11th, 2001 made surprisingly frequent reference to film and narrative: unable to describe the attacks any other way, we either noted their similarity to particular films, 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.� We�ll begin this class by looking at a few pre-9/11 films that seem to weirdly �predict� the attacks, and then look at the immediate responses to 9/11, especially the way the attacks were mobilized in political rhetoric. We�ll then be prepared to consider representations of and in the aftermath of September 11 th in fiction, poetry, essays, photography and film, as well as in public discourse (such as the controversy surrounding the WTC memorials). 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. We�ll begin with a series of short, informal or creative in-class writing exercises designed to develop close-reading and critical thinking skills. After getting our muscles stretched with these shorter papers, 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. (Sample topics could include controversies over memorialization; 9/11 and the Iraq war in political discourse; WTC insurance battles; historic responses to other national crises in the U.S. ; international reaction; 9/11 and the internet; conspiracy theories and much, much more!) These essays will go through an extensive drafting process, both in peer workshop groups and in one-on-one meetings with me. "
"I. Allende, The House of the Spirits
A. Roy, The God of Small Things
B.Okri, The Famished Road
A course reader"
"The term �magic realism� can be used to describe any work of fiction that combines fantastic or otherworldly forms of narrative with those that belong to more traditional realist methods. But the aesthetic and social significance of magic realist devices varies greatly in works that originate from different socio-political contexts. In this class, we will read novels by authors from Chile, India, and Nigeria in order to explore the various artistic and political functions that magic realism serves in these cultural contexts. At the same time, we will examine criticism that asks whether and to what extent the idea of �national allegory� is an adequate critical frame for works of so-called third-world literature. Do magic realist techniques have a greater tendency to be enlisted in the service of narratives of emergent national identity? If so, how do we account for the socially symbolic character of these stylistic devices? If not, what is it about magic realism that causes it to exceed the critical frameworks devised by proponents of �national allegory�?
Students will be expected to write two essays. The first should exibit the students� ability to employ close reading, literary analysis and theoretical argumentation. The second should integrate these interpretive techniques with more formal critical analysis, based on individual research."
"a course reader
George Orwell, 1984
Don DeLillo, White Noise
Joseph Gibaldi, MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers"
"George Orwell�s 1984 envisions a world where language, thought, and information are controlled by the ruling Party. Reading 1984 as a primer of media and information control, this class will examine the new challenges that mass media and the internet present in the so-called �information age.� Although we will engage the issues of access, the democratization of information, and the credibility of sources, we will primarily focus on the problems that arise when journalists, researchers, and students limit their information to that which is �googleable.�
To examine the limits of search engines such as google, and promote the research orientation of this class, students will design and undertake individual research projects that will span the course of the semester. Students will begin by proposing a set of related topics, compiling bibliographies, and composing a research prospectus. Student research will culminate in a final expository essay of 7-10 pages. These essays will undergo at least two revisions; in the revision process, a strong emphasis will be placed on feedback and self-evaluation. We will dedicate a number of class periods to visiting the numerous campus libraries, and exploring the various campus collections and research material-- including scholarly journals, digital libraries, microfiche, etc. "
"A Course Reader
English Renaissance Drama
A Companion to Shakespeare
The Elements of Style"
We will hone the skills of composition, argumentation, and research as we journey through the glory days of the early English stage. The �stage� here not only refers to the plays that we have come to accept as masterpieces of the English literary cannon�Dr. Faustus, Hamlet, King Lear, etc.�but it also directly implicates the material realities of dramatic performance, the social trends, economics, technologies, laws, and people enabled the English drama to thrive and endure. We will read a selection of plays within the available contexts of actual dramatic performance in the period; while the readings will certainly include Shakespeare, they will also embrace an array of lesser known dramatists. Readings will also include a selection of critical and historical essays. We will learn to appreciate the unstable essence of dramatic texts, working to mediate the distance between the play-as-book and the play-as-performance. We will visit the Bancroft library to examine authentic early printed versions of plays�such as the 1623 Shakespeare First Folio�but we will also study film and stage performances to earn richer understanding of these works. Students will attend regular writing sessions, working with the instructor to develop a number of short essays based on class readings. The semester will culminate in a research-intensive project (approx. 8 pages) that will challenge students to imagine how they would stage a scene from a Renaissance play; research will include a primary text (the play itself), critical essays, light historical research, film, and perhaps an interview (these are just a few examples). At least one of the research lessons will involve an amusing experiment in hands-on learning. There may also be opportunities for one or more optional fieldtrips outside of class hours.
"Octavia E. Butler, Kindred
Raymond Chandler, The High Window
Lucia Corpi, Eulogy for a Brown Angel
Chester Himes, If He Hollers Let Him Go
Cynthia Kadohata, In the Heart of the Valley of Love
Nathanael West, The Day of the Locust
Karen Tei Yamashita, Tropic of Orange
Recommended Texts:
Mike Davis, The Ecology of Fear
Diana Hacker, Rules for Writers (5th ed.)
Additional reading materials will be collected in a course reader that will be made available during the first week of class. We will also be referring to the website LEO: Literacy Education Online/The Write Place for writing and research guidance. Films may be shown, depending on the technological capabilities of our classroom. "
"The inspiration for this course came first from the sprawling geography of Los Angeles and the popularly accepted notion that L.A. has no center. Often viewed as a contemporary wasteland, the idea that L.A. has no center has also led people to consider the city as an evil prototype for the mass suburbanization of contemporary America. At the same time, L.A. has been further seen, perhaps contradictorily, as a center for racial strife. Fictional works and their various depictions of L.A. have been used as almost historical proof to establish these overriding and, at times, conflicting cultural perceptions of L.A.
Rather than accept these views of L.A. as givens, my hope is that the books we read will lead us to review our assumptions about, not just L.A. and the makeup of geographical spaces, but also our methods of interpreting fictional works. How might these works be shaping our imagination of the contemporary city? Or, to be more specific, how do certain genres (for example, the detective novel/noir fiction, science-fiction) rework our understanding of L.A.? In order to approach these questions, the books in this course have been chosen to give both a sense of the literary history of L.A. up until the contemporary period as well as its changing geographical scope.
Like English R1A, this course is structured to enhance your skills in critical analysis and argumentation through the mode of writing. Unlike English R1A, this course will be research-oriented. Thus, you will be exposed to research materials and methods while writing your papers, which will range from 4-6 pages in length to 8-10 pages in length. There will also be a number of drafts and revisions of your papers in order to help you understand that the process of writing is a process of rewriting. Ultimately, you should be prepared to write a minimum of 32 pages in addition to completing the required reading for this course."
"Selections from Geoffrey of Monmouth, History of the Kings of Britain. Ca. 1134. Ed., trans. Lewis Thorpe. London: Penguin Books, 1966. Repr. 1977.
Malory, Thomas. Le Morte D�Arthur: The Winchester Manuscript. Ed., abridged by Helen Cooper. Oxford World�s Classics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998.
Alfred, Lord Tennyson. Idylls of the King. 1859-1885. Ed. J. M. Gray. Penguin Classics, 1989.
Mark Twain. A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur�s Court. 1889. Ed. Bernard L. Stein. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1979.
T. H. White. The Sword in the Stone. In The Once and Future King. 1958. Ace, 1987.
Mary Stewart. The Crystal Cave. 1970. New York: HarperCollins, 2003.
Selections from Marion Zimmer Bradley, The Mists of Avalon. 1982. Del Rey. Repr. 2001.
Joseph Gibaldi, MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers. Sixth edition. New York: Modern Language Association of America, 2003."
"Certain narratives, endlessly told and retold, altered and reshaped, have kept audiences fascinated for a very long time. The story of the sixth-century British warrior-king Arthur has been enormously popular for at least eight hundred years, if not longer. In every successive version of the Arthurian narrative, Arthur has changed in accordance with the society that wrote and read about him. As a class, we will be investigating how and why these changes progressed.
This class will begin with two of the most influential medieval and early modern Arthurian texts, Geoffrey of Monmouth�s twelfth-century History of the Kings of Britain and Thomas Malory�s fifteenth-century Le Morte D�Arthur, and then move to nineteenth- and twentieth-century portrayals of Arthur and his kingdom. We will consider the following questions, among others: How are individual treatments of the Arthurian narrative in dialogue with each other? How does each variant respond to cultural stresses from the time and place in which it was produced? What is it that makes Arthur and his kingdom so compelling?
This is a reading and composition course, and as such will involve a substantial amount of writing work. Along with weekly short writing assignments and writing exercises, there will be two longer research papers (5-6 pages and 8-10 pages) which students will write and revise over the course of the class. The first paper will focus mainly on primary texts, while the second paper will involve at least three secondary sources. Students, in consultation with me, will choose their own paper topics. "
"Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl
Edgar Allan Poe,�The Fall of the House of Usher,� and other tales
William Faulkner, Light in August
Dorothy Allison, Bastard out of Carolina
Oscar Zeta Acosta, The Revolt of the Cockroach People
Diana Hacker, A Writer�s Reference
A course reader
Required viewing:
Carrie (dir. Brian De Palma, 1977) "
"In this course we will be exploring the converse of the American dream of �life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.� In texts spanning from the antebellum period to the 1980s, we�ll follow stories of death, captivity, and pursuit by misery. Julia Kristeva�s essay on abjection and Judith Butler�s work on subjection and subjectivity will provide a theoretical framework for our literary studies. Further readings from leaders in American movements for civil rights will provide a pragmatic orientation.
The primary goal of this course is to teach you how to conduct and present research in a clear and compelling way. With this in mind, the readings are designed to guide students in their own research about American experiences of captivity, shame, starvation, sexual violation, and racial hatred. Your final project will be a literary research paper on a topic of your own design. We will devote a considerable amount of class time to learning about the basic tools and techniques for writing a college research paper. "
We will read some of the best writers on childhood and adolescence: Sandra Cisnero�s House on Mango Street and stories from Woman Hollering Creek, Gary Soto�s Living Up the Street, and other material I will either copy or order before the term opens. We will also discuss the films �and the earth did not devour him,� based on the story by Tomas Rivera, �Mi Vida Loca,� directed by Allison Anders, �Real Women Have Curves,� and possibly �Mi Familia,� directed by Gregory Nava.
We will read a small group of narratives about growing up Chicano/Latino. I believe that this is a particularly difficult time for all children as they face sexual pressure, violence, discouraging schools. By focusing on Chicano youth we will glimpse their experience as they come into sexuality and gender identity, the early formations of social identity, as they work through personal aspirations over against familial expectations and peer pressure, and how they see themselves coming into their own lives.
T.B.A.
In addition to the novels for which she is most famous, Virginia Woolf produced a voluminous body of short prose, with more than 500 essays and reviews on a dazzling array of topics, including, but far from limited to, peace and war, consciousness and selfhood, modernity and urban experience, national and class identity, Shakespeare, and women writers. In this class, we will take the opportunity to read slowly and with great attention to stylistic and rhetorical detail, some of Woolf's most brilliant and influential essays, in order to understand more not only about the author's own views and experiences, but also how she crafted her luminous and compelling prose. Assigned work will include in-class presentations of selected passages and short written responses to the readings, and will culminate with an attempt at a short essay of your own, with revision guided by a peer-group writing workshop.
Joyce, J.: Dubliners
James Joyce�s Dubliners (1914) is a collection of short stories about the inhabitants of his native city. Joyce helps invent the modern short story as he tries to evoke the mood or atmosphere of Dublin as it manifests itself in the behavior of Dublin men and women. When Joyce wrote, Ireland was still ruled from London both politically and culturally. Joyce�s book is a declaration of cultural independence, as he makes his subject matter the muted lives of middle class Dubliners. His characters are protagonists of their own dramas, but at the same time are shaped by their environment and so part of the larger Dublin story.
Because we�ll be examining a number of passages closely each time, going quickly form passage to passage, we�ll need to locate these quickly by page number. For that reason it�s important that everyone have the same text of the two novels. I have chosen two paperback editions that are well-edited and easily available: Pride and Prejudice and Northanger Abbey (both Oxford World�s Classics editions).
"This seminar is meant to be an interesting and pleasant introduction to the study of a great novelist: Jane Austen. We�ll read and discuss two novels: Pride and Prejudice and Northanger Abbey. We�ll approach the novels from a number of different perspectives, including (but not limited to): the roles of class and gender, Austen�s language, plot structure, �point of view,� the thematization of moral concerns, and the interplay of her fiction and the history of her time. We�ll also discuss various critical approaches to these two works.
Your responsibilities will be 1) to attend regularly, bringing with you the assigned texts (see the note about the specific editions, above); 2) to participate in discussion; 3) to make a 15-minute (not longer) presentation; and 4) to write a short essay (about 1500 words, 7-8 double-spaced pages) on a subject of your own choice, due at the last seminar meeting. I�ll be glad to read rough drafts of your essays in advance.
At our first meeting we�ll consider a number of possible presentation subjects for you to choose from, and of course you may also suggest your own. Each of you will have a meeting with me during my office hours to help prepare for this. Some of you may wish to collaborate on presentations. In the latter part of the term, conferences on choosing an essay topic will be encouraged.
I�ll begin by providing an introduction to the early Austen, using some passages from her early prose works, and we�ll talk about Pride and Prejudice. Please bring your copy of the Oxford World�s Classics edition and be prepared to discuss the first 100 or so pages."
W. Shakespeare: Twelfth Night
Our seminar will concentrate on one of Shakespeare's best and most beloved comedies, Twelfth Night. We will read every word of the play as a group, and do trial readings and enactments of various scenes. Members of the seminar will give at least two oral reports each, covering various aspects of plot, character, action, gender representation (and confusion) and, most particularly, language and poetry.
T.B.A.
This is a seminar in writing poetry, conducted as a workshop and intended for lower-division students.
Chaucer, W.: The Canterbury Tales; Marlowe, C.: Dr. Faustus; Milton, J.: Paradise Lost; Spenser, E.: Edmund Spenser�s Poetry
This course is an introduction to major works by Chaucer, Spenser, Marlowe, and Milton, with supplemental poetry from a class reader. In each case I will ask you to consider both the strangeness and the odd familiarity of these works, so far away from us in time and yet so close to many of our contemporary concerns. I am particularly interested in the power of representational resources available to these authors and now lost to us. My general approach to literature is feminist and psychoanalytic; I hope that you will be able to develop your own approach to these texts in your section meetings and on your papers. Requirements for the course include the writing of three papers, possibly a mid-term exam, and definitely a final exam, as well as participation in section meetings.
Chaucer, G.: Canterbury Tales; Spenser, E.: The Faerie Queen; Milton, J.: Paradise Lost; Donne, J.: John Donne's Poetry
An introduction to English literary history from the fourteenth through the seventeenth centuries. Canterbury Tales, The Faerie Queene, and Paradise Lost will dominate the semester, as objects of study in themselves, of course, but also as occasions for considering issues of linguistic and cultural change, and of literary language, form, and innovation.
J. Austen: Pride and Prejudice; F. Douglass: The Narrative of the Life of FrederickDouglass; B. Franklin: The Autobiography and Other Writings; N. Hawthorne: The Scarlet Letter; W. Irving: The Sketch-Book; A. Pope: Selected Poetry and Prose; M. Rowlandson: The Sovereignty and Goodness of God; C. Sedgwick: A New England Tale; J. Swift: Gulliver�s Travels; H. Walpole: The Castle of Otranto; W. Wordsworth: The Five-Book Prelude
This is a course in a few major works of English and American literature from the end of the 17 th century through the first half of the 19 th century. We will work our way from Puritanism through the Enlightenment and into Romanticism. There are some major intellectual transformations taking place in the course of this century and a half.
The list may include The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol. II; J. Austen: Pride and Prejudice; B. Franklin: Autobiography; H. Gates: Classic Slave Narratives; H. Melville: Bartleby and Benito Cereno; L. Sterne: A Sentimental Journey
This course is an introduction to British and American literature from the eighteenth through the mid-nineteenth century. We'll read works from that period (by Pope, Sterne, Franklin, Equiano, Wordsworth, Austen, Melville, Dickinson, Whitman, and others) and think about how politics, the everyday, race, gender, and identity all find expression in a number of different literary forms. We'll especially consider the material and symbolic roles played by the idea and practice of revolution in the period.
(Please attend first day of class before purchasing): J.M. Coetzee: Disgrace; J. Conrad: Lord Jim; WEB Dubois: The Souls of Black Folk; W. Faulkner: Absalom! Absalom!; H. James: Portrait of a Lady; M.H. Kingston: The Woman Warrior; V.S. Naipul: The Mimic Men; T. Morrison: Beloved; M. Ondaatje: The English Patient; V. Woolf: To the Lighthouse. There will also be a course reader containing selected poetry, essays, and short stories.
This course is an introduction to literature written in English mainly between the late 19 th century and the late 20 th century. There will be two kinds of emphases running through the course�one paid to the formal innovations credited to the significant authors of this period, the other paid to the socio-political conditions surrounding their aesthetic achievements. In particular, we will consider the development of English literature in the context of competing British and American empires and the globalization of English.
Ramazani, J., et al: The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry (2 volumes); Stein, G.: Three Lives and Q.E.D; James, H.: Turn of the Screw; Freud, S.: Dora: An Analysis of a Case of Hysteria; Williams, W. C: Imaginations; Woolf, V.: Mrs. Dalloway; Shklovsky, V.: Third Factory; Mullen, H.: Sleeping with the Dictionary; Ngugi Wa Thiong�o: The River Between; Locke, A.., ed.: The New Negro. In addition to these texts, a required reader will be available at Copy Central on Bancroft.
Intended as a general survey of imaginative responses to the not always positive progress of modernity, this course will examine works produced by an array of prominent figures and representative of some of the principal Modernist and Postmodern movements and/or events. We will begin with the rise of Realism in the mid-19 th century and finish the course with works in experimental modes of the almost immediate present. The Armory Show, Imagism, Russian Formalism, Surrealism, the Harlem Renaissance, the Beat Movement, the Black Arts Movement, and Language Writing are among the cultural moments we will experience along the way.
J. Lahiri: Interpreter of Maladies; W. Helsby: Understanding Representation
The course will focus on films of the Coen Brothers and other contemporary directors (Lynch, Kieslovski, Wong Kar-Wai) and the stories of Lakiri in order to observe how cinematic/literary representations function. We will make use of UAM exhibits, Cal Performance shows, and PFA films to amplify our experience of the cultural context.
The assigned texts are Four Texts on Socrates and Plato�s Phaedo; these will be supplemented by a reader illustrating various historical interpretations of �know thyself� etc. and by e-mail attachments on occasion.
Socrates has often been compared to Jesus, an enigmatic yet somehow unmistakable figure who left nothing in writing yet decisively influenced the mind of his own and later ages. We will read the principal contemporary representations of Socrates�Aristophanes� comic send-up in Clouds and the Platonic dialogues purporting to tell the story of Socrates� trial and death�attempting to discern the historical Socrates and trace the construction of the Icon. Students will be asked to keep a journal assessing the relevance of issues which the trial and death of Socrates bring into focus to ones involved in our contemporary �culture wars,� e.g.:
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.
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. "