Dickens, C.: Sketches by Boz, Hard Times, Great Expectations; Gaskell, E.: Mary Barton, Cranford, North and South; course reader containing essays and excerpts from Victorian social, economic, and political texts
"In this course we will read novels by two of Victorian England's most brilliant writers of social fiction, Elizabeth Gaskell and Charles Dickens. Focusing on theme of work, we will discuss central questions of Victorian social, economic and political life such as class structure, industrialism, empire, reform, social mobility, utilitarianism, Marxism, and the debate over ""The Condition of England."" Looking at manual and domestic labor, clerical and professional work, work-houses and factories, we will examine the relationship between work and social class. We will ask whether and why a woman's work is never done; think about the role of work in capitalism; and consider the way the work of the individual relates to the identification of a national and imperial economy. Finally, discussing the writer as worker, we will move from an analysis of work in the novel to an inquiry into the work of the novel. Through a close study of the work of narration and story-telling we shall examine the how work goes beyond subject matter to influence the structure and form of the text. "
"Hughes, L. and Hurston, Z. N.: Mule Bone; Hurston, Z. N.: Folklore, Memoirs and Other Writings, Novels and Stories
Recommended Texts: Boyd, V.: Wrapped in Rainbows: The Life of Zora Neale Hurston; Davis, A.: Blues Legacies and Black Feminism; Hemenway, R. E.: Zora Neale Hurston: A Literary Biography; Kaplan, C. ed.: Zora Neale Hurston: A Life in Letters "
"The two-volume Library of America edition of Hurston's major works will provide the foundation for our exploration of one of the twentieth century's most brilliant, elusive and contradictory writers. Our goal will be to understand how Hurston used her talent and her training (""the spy-glass of Anthropology"") to give artistic form to the genius of African American culture. Drawing on recent criticism that takes seriously Hurston's initiation into voodoo practice, and theory that compares her purpose to that of blues singer Bessie Smith, we will consider the literary as well as the extra-literary dimensions of this project. We will begin with Hurston's earliest published stories and Mule Bone, the play she wrote with Langston Hughes in an effort both to capture the drama of the black vernacular and to transform American theater. These readings will prepare us for a sustained examination of Hurston's four novels, two collections of folklore, and her famously slippery autobiography.
Requirements: weekly written responses to the reading, a 10-15 minute presentation to be written up as a 4-5 page paper, and a 10-12 page seminar paper. "
All primary and secondary readings will be drawn from a Course Reader, which will include critical essays by Giorgio Agamben, Timothy Bahti, Lyn Hejinian, G.E. Lessing, I.A. Richards, Barbara Herrnstein Smith, and John Emil Vincent, among others, and poems by William Shakespeare, John Donne, George Herbert, John Milton, Christopher Smart, John Keats, Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, Wallace Stevens, Gertrude Stein, W.C. Williams, Jean Toomer, Louis Zukofsky, Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Duncan, Allen Ginsberg, John Ashbery, Michael Palmer, Harryette Mullen, Lisa Jarnot, Juliana Spahr, and Mark McMorris.
"This class addresses an inevitable feature of all poems, the last line: the position from which the poem's entire form is, for the first time, apprehended. This focus will require attention to all the formal and thematic principles by which a poem generates itself, deferring then delivering (or thwarting) the sense of an ending. In addition to the question I.A. Richards poses in his essay ""How Does a Poem Know When It is Finished?"" we'll ask some versions of the following: Can a poem end without ""finishing""? What comes after the last line of the poem? Why do so many poems close by recalling their beginnings? How have closural strategies in English poetry changed over time? We'll pair theoretical accounts of closure with test-cases from across the history of poetry in English, acquiring along the way some facility with its prosodies, its use of figures from classical rhetoric (especially figures of repetition), and its major and minor formal environments. "
Edwards, B.: The Practice of Diaspora; Gilroy, P.: The Black Atlantic; Diawara, M.: In Search of Africa; Chamoiseau, P.: Texaco; Kincaid, J.: The Autobiography of My Mother, Lucy: A Small Place (Course Reader); Phillips, C.: Crossing the River, Higher Ground, The Atlantic Sound; Glissant, E.: The Fourth Century, Caribbean Discourse; Danticat, E.: Breath, Eyes, Memory, The Dew Breaker; Conde, M.: Windward Heights; Naylor, G.: Mama Day; Nunez, E.: Beyond the Limbo Dance; Perez, L. M.: Geographies of Home
This course examines representations of the African diaspora in contemporary literature by black writers in the U.S., Africa and the Caribbean. Through an engagement with literature, film and theories of diaspora, the class will consider a range of questions about the nature of the identity, history, and displacement. Specifically, the course will explore issues of racial formation and national genealogies, narratives of dispersal and return, histories of slavery and colonialism, and the convergences and disputes that define the relations between black populations scattered throughout the Americas and Europe. Some of the questions to be considered are: What is the relation between dispossession and self-making in the diasporic imagination? What are the cultural and political linkages that connect the diaspora? What is the role of gender and sexuality in the construction of black identities? What is the role of memory in mobilizing political struggle? What is the role of literary and cultural production in redressing historical injury?
Marlowe, C.: complete plays (Dido, Queen of Carthage, Tamburlaine the Great, The Jew of Malta, Edward II, Doctor Faustus, The Massacre at Paris), Complete Poetry. Further readings may include Vergil: Aeneid (Books 1 and 4); Ovid: Heroides; Machiavelli: The Prince; Shakespeare: Titus Andronicus, Richard III, As You Like It; and a course reader.
"Marlowe invented the modern theater, unleashing a power of spectacle, dialogue, and oratory that instantly addicted much of the teeming city of London and horrified the rest. This seminar will use the unbounded, amoral ambition of Marlowe's staged protagonists to imagine the limitless possibility and indefinable dangers that attended upon the new institution of the theater in the early 1590s, and to understand the ways in which Marlowe himself came to be deemed a dangerous man: brawler, blasphemer, spy, counterfeiter, atheist, sodomite.
We will consider as contexts the classical materials that Marlowe made his own; the contemporary world of literary rivalry and of national and religious paranoia into which he inserted himself; and the afterlife that Marlowe's drama and his own memory enjoyed after his early and violent death--most of all in the work of Shakespeare, his greatest rival and successor. "
"Black, J.: You Can't Win; Burroughs, W.: Junkie; Thompson, J.: Savage Night; Carr, J.: Bad; Slim, I.: Trick Baby; Bunker, E.: No Beast So Fierce; Heard, N.: Howard Street; Brossard, C.: The Bold Saboteurs; course reader (consisting of critical treatments of crime and crime fiction), as well as a student-compiled course reader of songs, poems, tales
Films: ""White Heat""; ""Man Bites Dog""; ""Natural Born Killers""; ""Thelma and Louise""; ""Dead Presidents""; ""House of Games"" "
"This course will focus on a selection of twentieth-century American crime novels (as well as upon a few films). Throughout the course we will consider why America, a nation founded by puritan zealots and known infamously as the policeman of the world, is also a violent and crime-riddled country, and produces a steady stream of crime fiction gems. Why does the American outlaw draw more admiration than repugnance, or inspire a tendency to heroicize as much as vilify criminal behavior? As the course title suggests, the focus will be on the point of view of those living outside of the law, rather than the pursuits of those attempting to reign them in, on robbers rather than cops. Through such a perspective we will consider what it is about the American myth of individualism coupled with rapacious capitalism that fuels the criminal response. Specifically, we will explore the cultural, social, economic, existential and racial aspects of crime as they are artistically rendered in the texts listed. Thus, above all, we will explore the art of crime by analyzing the different aesthetic forms through which such deviance is represented.
Finally, because most, if not all, of the texts fall well outside the traditional academic canon, we will use this deviance to explore the parameters of high art from the outside. That is, we will inquire how these texts are both similar to and different from the paragons of American literature.
Be warned: Almost all of these texts depict a disturbing depravity in jarring violent and sexual detail. "
Austen, J.: Emma; Flaubert, G.: Madame Bovary; James, H.: The Portrait of a Lady; Zola, E.: L'Assommoir; course reader
Our topic is the curious relation of identification-and-dissociation between a novel's implied author and its given protagonist. We will concentrate on specific formal features that structure this relation: narration, focalization, and, most important, free indirect discourse, the technique by which the novel represents a character's thoughts in the third person past tense. In all the landmark cases of FID in the Novel, moreover, the authorial voice is being thrown not simply from one formal position to another--from narration to character--but also from one social status to another--from male to female, bourgeois to worker, single to married, writer to failed writer. It is the argument of the course that FID typically bespeaks a social relation along with the formal, literary one. We will read four examples of FID, all of which are particularly strong examples of such social ventriloquism: Jane Austen, Emma; Flaubert, Madame Bovary, Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady, and Emile Zola, L'Assommoir. If time remains, we will also try to identify the structure of free indirect discourse in film. (Examples, Claude Chabrol, L'Oeil de Vichy [The Eye of Vichy] and Federico Fellini, 8 1/2.) Course reader will include works by Banfield, Barthes, Bourdieu, Cohn, Genette, Sartre, Woloch.
Amery, J.: At the Mind's Limits; Borowski, T.: This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen; Clendinnen, I.: Reading the Holocaust; Delbo, C.: Auschwitz and After; Levi, P.: The Drowned and the Saved; Schiff, H. ed.: Holocaust Poetry; Schlink, B.: The Reader; Spiegelman, A.: Maus I and Maus II; course reader
The German philosopher Theodor Adorno made the famous comment that to write poetry after Auschwitz was barbaric--but not to produce it even more barbarous. In this class we will focus on how literary art responds to this paradoxical injunction. How can one depict the unimaginable in writing? What limits, if any, are there upon representation of the Shoah ? How does literature shape contemporary awareness of the event? We will focus on the tension between moral and artistic integrity, exploring how different narrative strategies and genres express or evade the moral issue inherent in the subject. The course material ranges from the testimonial to the comic book, poetry to propaganda, scholarship to bestseller.
The booklist for this class has not been finalized, but will include several of the following texts: Rhys, J.: Voyage in the Dark; Selvon, S.: The Lonely Londoners; Naipaul, V.S.: The Mimic Men; MacInnes, C.: City of Spades; Lessing, D.: In Pursuit of the English; Dunn, N.: Up the Junction; Emecheta, B.: Second-Class Citizen; Rushdie, S.: The Satanic Verses; Headley, V.: Yardie; Ali, M.: Brick Lane; and a course reader
"Throw away your A to Z Street Atlas--we'll find our way around London this semester with a different set of guides. Our reading will foreground a series of narratives of colonial and postcolonial figures at loose in twentieth-century London. We'll consider the prevalence of tropes of voyaging, exploration, and adventure in their texts, and ask what they reveal about the uses of the city: both as a site of self-making and self-mastery, and as an arena in which to discover and confront the imperial past. Alongside these texts we'll read the work of contemporary journalists and sociologists responding to the changing face of post-1945 London. The course reader will include work by poets (Fred D'Aguiar, Una Marson), urban sociologists (Georg Simmel, St. Clair Drake, Young and Wilmott, Michael Banton), insurgent intellectuals (Claudia Jones, A. Sivanandan), and literary and cultural critics (Franco Moretti, Elizabeth Wilson, Sukhdev Sandhu). Time permitting, we'll also view a handful of films (""Sapphire,"" ""Young Soul Rebels,"" and ""Dirty Pretty Things""). "
Readings will include works by Walter Benjamin, Leo Bersani, Peter Brooks, Soshana Felman, Sigmund Freud, Geoffrey Hartman, Neil Hertz, Barbara Johnson, Melanie Klein, Jacques Lacan, D. W. Winnicott, and others.
What do literature and psychoanalysis have in common? For one, both are usually about two or more of the following: sex, death, love, hate, work, jealousy, obsession, parents, children, anxiety, and loss. Seemingly made for each other, literature and psychoanalysis have been in a more or less close conversation since the latter's emergence at the end of the nineteenth century. In this course, we will consider the relationship between literature and psychoanalysis in a number of ways: we will look at Freud's own writing as literature in the context of psychoanalysis's early days as practice, institution, and scandal; we will consider historical and intellectual connections between Freudian and post-Freudian psychoanalysis and different kinds of literary interpretation; and we will work to derive from the language of psychoanalysis tools to help us cope with the considerable formal and thematic complexity of literary texts. The syllabus will include psychoanalytic writing by Freud, Lacan, Klein, Winnicott, and others as well as works by literary critics who derive some or all of their terms from psychoanalysis. We will also read some stories and watch some films along the way.
Austin, M.: The Land of Little Rain; Chandler, R.: The Big Sleep; Dick, P.: BladeRunner (Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?); Didion, J.: Slouching Toward Bethlehem; Harte, B.: Luck of Roaring Camp; Norris, F.: McTeague; Stegner, W.: Angle of Repose; Steinbeck, J.: East of Eden; Twain, M.: Roughing It; West, N.: Day of the Locust
"Reading, discussion , and writing about fiction, poetry, memoirs, and essays that have western settings, or that try to describe or account for western experience in ""regional"" terms--emphasizing, for example, the formative influence of the natural landscape, or of racial, economic, and social groups in distinctive, defining relationships with their surroundings (and with one another). "
Aeschylus: Oresteia; Beckett: Waiting for Godot; Euripides: Medea and Other Plays; Miller: Death of a Salesman; Marlowe: Doctor Faustus; O'Neill: Long Day's Journey into Night; Shakespeare: Coriolanus; Sophocles: Sophocles I; Webster: The Duchess of Malfi; Course Reader (available at Copygrafik, 2282 Fulton St.).
"In this course, we will explore the dramatic genre of tragedy as it has manifested itself at three different times in history: Athens in the 5th century, B.C.; late 16th- and early 17th-century England, and 20th-century France and America. All the plays we'll read represent human beings in extreme situations; several end in death, mutilation, or both; others, in a kind of psychic death or inertia. Some represent behavior that we recognize as ""heroic"" and leave us feeling reassured; some do not. All show the individual imaginatively engaged to social and metaphysical powers, and--more immediately--to the audience of spectators. Our project will be to try to understand how tragic drama functions in its various environments; what conditions encourage the writing of tragedy; which elements may be said to constitute ""the tragic""; what lies behind tragic drama's obsession with transgressive acts; what happens when there seems nothing left to violate; and whether and what manner of redemption is to be sought in tragedy, even in the twentieth century, when the possibility of tragedy was in doubt. Besides studying the plays, we'll read and discuss theoretical and critical writings in a Course Reader that will help us pursue these questions. All seminar members are expected to participate actively and to write three essays and a final exam. "
Barnes, D: Nightwood; Faulkner, W: The Sound and the Fury; Ford, F: The Good Soldier; Forster, E: A Passage to India; Freud, S: Dora; Larsen, N: Quicksand and Passing; James, H: The Turn of the Screw and Other Short Novels; Joyce, J: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man; Rhys, J: Wide Sargasso Sea; Wilde, O: The Picture of Dorian Gray and Other Writings; Woolf, V: Mrs. Dalloway
Gender norms and literary forms both exploded at the turn of the twentieth century. These paired crises in social and literary narratives were perceived on the one hand as the stuttering end of western culture's story, the drying up of libidinal fuel; and on the other as the freeing of desire from the burden of reproduction, and of language from the burden of reference. Sexual and literary experimentation went hand in hand, but their intersections varied considerably. At the end of the twentieth century, a different phase of the sexual revolution produced a set of intensive theoretical debates about the construction of gender and sexuality. In this course, we will read back and forth across the century to stage a series of encounters between the narratives and practices of literature and theory. Three 5-7 page papers will be required.
Williams, W.C.: The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams, Volumes I & II (ed. A. Walton Litz & Christopher MacGowan), In The American Grain, The Autobiography of William Carlos Williams, Yes, Mrs. Williams, Paterson; Mariani, P.: William Carlos Williams: A New World Naked; Breslin, J.: William Carlos Williams, An American Artist; a course reader containing selections from Williams's letters and criticism, plus a smattering of what I consider to be the most interesting critical approaches to Williams
"This course will introduce you to one of the most prolific, most daringly experimental, most influential, and most passionately autobiographical American writers of the 20th century. William Carlos Williams is primarily known, anthologized, and taught as a rigorously objective, unemotional, clear-eyed observer of the natural world, who wrote small, spare, jewel-like poems on prescription pads during breaks between patients in his busy pediatrics practice, and whose revolutionary line breaks and focus on the mundane inspired a generation of poets to break free from earlier formal strictures into ""free verse."" This is one facet of Williams, one truth about him. But this is not the Williams we should settle for. William Carlos Williams wrote small poems on prescription pads between patients, and then after a full day of work and family he disappeared into his study, where he wrote obsessively, in torrents, in every imaginable genre, into the wee hours. Far from being simply a dispassionate observer of the natural world, he splayed his passions, his torments, his questions, his theories about poetry and art, his family traumas, his agonized quest for an American literary identity, and his domestic joys and pains onto the page, leaving behind him a huge, sprawling, dizzyingly complex body of work. This semester we will dive into this body of work, leaving behind our presuppositions, and we will navigate its currents with the aid of some of the best Williams critics on record.
The essence of this course is discovery and communication. To that end, you will be expected to stay current with the reading, to find and actively share with your classmates each week your own anchor in the works, to write two small exploratory papers and one long final paper, and to present to your classmates at the end of the semester your own, newly discovered view of Williams. Expect to come away inspired.
Please read to page 48 in Mariani, and ""Asphodel That Greeny Flower"" (MacGowan, 310-337) in preparation for our first class. "
McMahon, A.: An Introduction to English Phonology
Phonology is the part of grammar which involves the structure of sound in language. It has three principal components: melody, the qualitative aspects of sounds which distinguish for example a [p] from an [f], or an [i] from a [u]; rhythm, the organization of sounds into syllables, stress groups, phrases, etc.; and tone and intonation, the grammatically significant structuring of pitch differences for grammatical purposes. This course will explore all three aspects of English phonology, seeking to answer basic descriptive questions of what speakers intuitively know about the organization of sound in English which distinguishes it from other languages, while also addressing theoretical questions of how sound is organized in language in general and where English fits in that universal picture. The focus will be on Present Day Standard American English, but dialectal and historical variation will also be explored. In addition to providing knowledge of this subject for its own sake, the course should be helpful preparation for exploring the phonological characteristics of literary texts, and for understanding ideas about language which have influenced twentieth-century literary theory. No previous background in linguistics is required, but exercises and assignments will span a variety of levels so as to also accommodate students who have already taken an upper-division phonology course and are particularly interested in exploring English further.
A course reader
For more information on this class, please email the professor at j_miller@berkeley.edu.
Fraser and Rabkin ed.: Drama of the English Renaissance II: The Stuart Period; course reader
In the first three decades of the seventeenth century, an extraordinary burst of energy and talent was visible and audible on the London stage. Socially aspiring dramatists satirized the pretensions of the upwardly mobile, revealed the tragic, sometimes grotesque implications of assigned gender behavior, explored the often quirky nature of sexual taste, dared to dabble in forbidden political commentary, and challenged and manipulated theatrical conventions by remarking self-reflexively on theatrical representation so obsessively that early 20th century critics (including T.S. Eliot) thought their work decadent. This was very much a theater-on-demand, a competitive cultural institution to which people on many levels of society flocked to see their interests represented by brilliant, often idiosyncratic writers--among them John Marston, Ben Jonson, George Chapman, Thomas Middleton, John Webster, Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher, John Ford, and Philip Massinger--who were Shakespeare's contemporaries and his professional competitors. Their work will shape our study of the role of theater amid the increasing social tensions that arose under the Jacobean and Caroline regimes.
Maus, K. E., ed.: Four Revenge Tragedies; Steane, J. B. ed.: Complete Plays by Christopher Marlowe; Greenblatt, S. J., ed.: The Norton Shakespeare; course reader
"We'll read six plays from the chronological first half of Shakespeare's output, considered loosely to allow us to end with a reading of Hamlet. Our approach will be to consider Shakespeare's plays as they shaped and were shaped by a lively theatrical tradition, in the context of which we will read The Spanish Tragedy, by Thomas Kyd, and Tamburlaine, by Christopher Marlowe. (That makes a total of 8 Elizabethan plays.) We'll also examine some of the historical and social issues put into ""play"" in the plays, including issues of the representation of subjectivity, gender, personal ambition, revenge, and the relationship of the stage (as a reflection, metaphor, microcosm, map, experiment) to the political, social and religious world which surrounds it. Further, we'll be conscious of Shakespeare as a cultural icon, specifically our critical sense that the chronological order of his plays represents a progression away from the very plays and poems that we'll spend most of the semester reading. Reading list: The following plays by Shakespeare: The Taming of the Shrew, Titus Andronicus, Richard III, Midsummer Night's Dream, 1 Henry IV, Hamlet, plus The Spanish Tragedy (Thomas Kyd) and Tamburlaine (Christopher Marlowe). "
Shakespeare, W.: The Norton Shakespeare
"In this course we will analyze a selection of Shakespeare's plays, arranged both by genre and chronologically, in order to explore not only what is peculiar to each play but also what links the plays to each other and to the culture and the psyche that produced them. In addition, we will think about the uses to which ""Shakespeare"" is put by our own culture/s. My lectures will tend to emphasize Shakespeare's reworkings of race, gender, sexuality, and the family in these plays, but I hope that the classroom will be a place of lively exchange, in which you feel free to challenge my ideas and to develop your own interests. In addition to a final exam, possibly a midterm exam, and several required papers of varying lengths (probably two or three very short papers, followed by an extended revision/amplification for a final paper), you will be asked to complete two ungraded acting exercises in small groups to help you understand some aspects of Shakespeare's verse and his theatrical medium. "
Milton, J.: Selected Prose, Paradise Lost, Complete Shorter Poems
An introduction to the poetry and prose of one of the greatest writers in English literature. Sexual radical, political revolutionary, and literary genius, Milton is a one-man introduction to the cultural ferment of the English Renaissance, the Reformation, and the English civil war. Readings include: Milton's early poems, his political treatises, Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, and Samson Agonistes.
Bront�, E.: Wuthering Heights; Darwin, C.: The Origin of the Species; Kipling, R.: Kim; Abrams et al., eds.: The Norton Anthology of English Literature Vol. 2 B: The Victorian Age; course reader
This course is an introduction to the literature and culture of the Victorian period. Victorian poets, novelists, and critics responded to rapid industrial growth, colonial expansion, and profound developments in science, technology, and social life with a mixture of exuberance, anxiety, and dismay. We will focus on the period's poetry and non-fiction prose in order to understand how particular texts represent and sometimes undermine particularly Victorian ideas about aesthetics, politics, progress, money, religion, gender, and science.
Austen, J.: Persuasion; Beckford, W.: Vathek; Behn, A.: Oroonoko; Burney, F.: Evelina; Defoe, D.: Moll Flanders; Godwin, W.: Caleb Williams; Richardson, S.: Pamela; Smollett, T.: Humphry Clinker
The English Novel, 1660-1800.
Dickens, C.: Oliver Twist; Balzac, H. de: P�re Goriot; Dostoevsky, F.: Crime and Punishment; Austen, J.: Emma; Flaubert, G.: Madame Bovary; Tolstoy, L.: Anna Karenina
Focusing on key texts from English, French, and Russian literatures, this course traces the development of the novel as a genre in 19th-century Europe. Our discussions will emphasize strategies of close reading and literary analysis and elements of the theory of the novel. The texts are grouped into two thematic units. First, as we read Oliver Twist, Old Goriot, and Crime and Punishment, we will examine the use of social discourse in narrative form; crime as a paradigm for a work of fiction; and the role of the city in structuring the modern novel. Second, as we read Emma, Madame Bovary, and Anna Karenina, we will examine the novel's involvement with family, marriage, and adultery; the representation of consciousness in narrative; and the construction of the self in a work of literature. In comparing novels from different national traditions, the course explores the interplay between genre and culture. All readings are in English. Workload (reading): 150-200 pages per week. Written work: short written assignments and quizzes, take-home midterm paper, final paper, in-class final exam (textual explication).
Conrad, J.: Heart of Darkness; Woolf, V.: Mrs. Dalloway; Robbe-Grillet, A.: Jealousy; Rushdie, S.: Satanic Verses; Amis, M.: Time's Arrow; Barker, P.: Regeneration; Dangarembga, T.: Nervous Conditions; Coetzee, J.M.: Disgrace; a course reader.
"Novels take a really long time to read, and they are filled with lies, or, more politely, fictions. Why write novels? Why read them? If you can ask these questions, and at the same time and without hesitation look forward to reading novels, then this is your class. What does the novel do for us that, say, poetry or anthropology or sociology or psychology or economics cannot? We'll look at a range of novels spanning the 20th century from Conrad to Coetzee, with a special focus on innovation and experimentation in narrative technique (after all, the word ""novel"" also means ""new,"" and the restless drive for novelty is one of the novel's central characteristics). Concurrently, we'll study a selection of criticism that aims to define and understand the novel as a generic, historical and sociological phenomenon. "
Beckett, S.: Company; Byatt, A.S.: Possession: A Romance; DeLillo, D.: White Noise; Markson, D.: Wittgenstein's Mistress; McCarthy, C.: Blood Meridian; Mitchell, D.: Cloud Atlas; Nabokov, V.: Pale Fire; Pynchon, T.: Mason & Dixon; Roth, P.: American Pastoral; Silko, L.M.: Ceremony
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, a final paper, and a final exam.
Conrad, J.: Lord Jim; Ford, F.M.: The Good Soldier; Forster, E.M.: Howard's End; Joyce, J.: Ulysses; Lawrence, D.H.: Women in Love; Lowry, M.: Under the Volcano; Rhys, J.: Good Morning, Midnight; Woolf, V.: To the Lighthouse; Wells, H.G.: Tono-Bungay; West, R.: The Return of the Soldier
A survey of early modern British literature, treating representative works of major figures (see book list) in their literary, historical, and cultural contexts. There will be two midterm papers and a final exam.
Auden, W.H.: Selected Poems; Eliot, T.S.: Selected Poems; Frost, R.: The Poetry of Robert Frost; Hardy, T.: Selected Poetry; Hughes, Langston: Selected Poems; Larkin, Philip: Collected Poems; Loy, M.: The Lost Lunar Baedeker; Moore, Marianne: Complete Poems; Pound, E.: A Draft of XXX Cantos; Silkin, J., ed.: Penguin Book of First World War Poetry; Stein, G.: Tender Buttons; Stevens, W.: Collected Poems; Williams, W.C.: Paterson; Yeats, William Butler.: Collected Poems
British and American poetry: 1860 to the present
Equiano, O.: The Interesting Narrative of Olaudah Equiano; Douglass, F.: Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass; Brent, L.: Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl; Wilson, H.: Our Nig; Prince. M.: The History of Mary Prince, A West Indian Slave; DuBois, W. E. B.: The Souls of Black Folk; Chesnutt, C.: The Conjure Woman; Washington, B. T.: Up from Slavery; Johnson, J.W.: The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man
"African American expressive culture has been driven by an affinity for the oral in the form of sermons, speeches, work songs, slave songs, spirituals, and the blues. At the same time, African American literary culture has displayed a manifest propensity toward autobiographical acts which augur a putatively authentic African American ""self."" In this survey we will attempt to bridge these oral and literary impulses in an exploration of selected works from the canon of African American literature. Running through this survey will be not only the concerns linking orality and literacy, but also debates over the power of language in politics and history: Why, instead of a teleological progression from orality to literacy, does one find in much African American literature a promiscuous coupling of the two? What is the relation of this literature's recurrent, slippery orality to a codified, authenticating literary apparatus? How does speaking relate to subjectivity? What is the significance of various scenes of speaking, reading, and writing in the slave narrative tradition? What light does the study of African American literature shed upon categories such as ""author,"" ""literature,"" and ""canon?"" We will pursue our more discrete literary interests against the backdrop of American revolutionary debate, the abolitionist crusade, Reconstruction, and ""Jim Crow"" segregation. "
Butler, O.: Kindred; Jones, G.: Corregidora; Olsen, T.: Yonnondio in 30s; Ozick, C.: The Shawl; Plath, S.: The Bell Jar; Ruiz, R.: Happy Birthday, Jesus; Santiago, D.: Famous All Over Town; Viramontes, H.M.: Under the Feet of Jesus; Wideman, J.E.: Philadelphia Fire
In this course we will analyze representations of repression and resistance in the fiction of three cultural groups: Chicanos, African Americans, and European Americans. We will seek answers to the following kinds of questions: What is the relation between the various forms or repression (political, economic and psychological) represented in these texts and the formation of cultural identities? What solution, if any, do the texts offer in response to the forms of repression they represent? The comparative approach in this course will allow us to analyze the particular experiences of each cultural group as part of a larger historical process. The purpose of this kind of analysis is to appreciate the deeply embedded social character of these literary works. Graded assignments will include two papers, quizzes, and a final exam.
Burroughs, W.: Naked Lunch; Ellison, R.: Invisible Man; Ginsberg, A.: Howl and Other Poems; Metalious, G.: Peyton Place; Salinger, J.D.: The Catcher in the Rye; Williams, T.: A Streetcar Named Desire
"This class will explore the American 1950's through a sampling of history, literature, movies, and the popular culture of the decade, trying to understand some of its concerns and its contradictions. A period of massive conformity (""The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit), it also produced prophets and rebels (Ginsberg, Williams, Burroughs); a time of repression and apartheid, it also produced the Civil Rights movement, Elvis Presley, and Brown vs. Board of Education. We will try to understand the kinds and the causes of the combination of nostalgia and paranoia that characterized this Cold War period. We will also try to understand and appreciate some of the cruel consequences of truly massive mass production and of the ""mass culture"" that developed at this time. We will try to appreciate how the experience of WWII -- its lessons and its traumas-- continued to affect Americans in the 1950's. The class will consist mostly of lectures, though we will watch some documentary videos. I'll make every effort to accommodate as much discussion as class size will allow.
Required Writing: Two short papers (6-8 pp) and a final exam. The two short papers, averaged together, will count for 50% of your final grade. The final exam will count for the remaining 50%. "
"Anzald�a, G.: Borderlands/La frontera; Cisneros, S.: Caramelo, The House On Mango Street, Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories, Loose Women; Paredes, A.: Between Two Worlds, George Washington G�mez, The Hammon and the Beans and Other Stories, The Shadow, ""With His Pistol in His Hand"": A Border Ballad and Its Hero "
This course will explore the invention of a Chicano and Chicana sense of place. How do imaginative writers such as Am�rico Paredes, Gloria Anzald�a, and Sandra Cisneros negotiate the tension between the national and transnational forces at work in the Americas measuredly and by design? Exposure to post-contemporary works in cultural criticism, border thinking, and theory will also be part of the semester's agenda.
Lewis, W.: Tarr; selected writings of Gertrude Stein; Pick, D.: War Machine; Cesaire, A.: Notebooks on a Return to the Native Land; Fussel, P.: The Great War and Modern Memory; Carpentier, A.: The Lost Steps; Breton, A.: Nadja; Junger, E.: Storm of Steel; Toomer, J.: Cane; DuBois, W.E.B.: Dark Pincess, 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. "
T.B.A.
T.B.A.
eds. Cassill, R.V. and J.C. Oates: The Norton Anthology of Contemporary Fiction; Mukherjee, B: 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 of peers' manuscripts.
Course reader
In this workshop/seminar, we will engage in hands-on investigations into a variety of possibilities inherent to poetic logic, and with an emphasis on inventions and experiments, we will attempt to employ those logics. Attention will also be paid to motivations, so that we may ask (and tentatively as well as variously answer) questions appropriate to the kind of undertaking that poetry-writing attempts.
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. "
Book List: Howe, S.: The Europe of Trusts; Palmer, M.: At Passages; Algarin, M., ed.: Aloud: Voices from the Nuyorican Poets Caf�; Bishop, E.: The Complete Poems, 1927-1979; Lorde, A.: The Marvelous Arithmetics of Distance; Ginsberg, A.: Howl; Mullen, H.: Sleeping with the Dictionary; Harper, M.: Dear John, Dear Coltrane; Hejinian, L.: Happily; Xerox packet/handouts
The advanced workshop in poetry will give students the opportunity to learn about their own capabilities as writers. We will stress poetry as an art of composition in language that differs from other uses of language (journal writing, letter writing, conversation, expository writing, etc.). We will try to engage and clarify elements of the art such as the word, line, field, rhythm, movement, the space of the page, �the voice,� language as unlooked-for capacity, etc. Each student will work towards the creation of a substantial portfolio of poetry by the end of the semester. On the assumption that this goal is best achieved through an immersion in poetry, this course will also ask students to read a syllabus of books of poetry, to write short focused assessments of these books, and to discuss their reading with other participants. Some attention will be given to hybrid forms such as visual poetry, the prose poem, etc. We will try to build a flexible vocabulary for discussing poetry in detail. Meetings in the workshop will be supplemented by individual conferences with the instructor.
eds. Oates, J. C. and R. Atwan: The Best American Essays of the Century
"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. "
Saramago, J.: History of the Seige of Lisbon; Todorov, T.: The Conquest of the Americas: The Question of the Other; Nabokov, P.: Native American Testimony, Women's Indian Captivity Narratives; Conrad, J.: Nostromo; Whitman, W.: Leaves of Grass; Rod�, J. E.: Ariel; Dreiser, T.: Sister Carrie; Galeano, E.: Memory of Fire: Genesis; Carpentier, A.: Explosion in the Cathedral; Delillo, D.: Libra
Examining a wide selection of texts from throughout the Americas, this class will look at the literary and historiographic methods of representing the discontinuous historical narratives of the New World. How does the way we narrate history influence our perception of past events? What role does fiction play in the construction of national or regional historical identities? What modes of emplotment are used to narrate history in the Americas: tragedy, comedy or romance, narratives of conquest, apocalypse or degeneration?
Woolf, V.: Mrs. Dalloway; Faulkner, W.: The Sound and the Fury and/or As I Lay Dying; Dos Passos: Manhattan Transfer or The Big Money; Toomer, J.: Cane; Larsen, N.: Passing; Nabokov, V.: Pale Fire; Cunningham, M.: The Hours; Pynchon, T.: The Crying of Lot 49; Delillo, D.: White Noise; Powers, R.: Galatea 2.2; Morrison, T.: Beloved; essays by 19th- and 20th-century critics and theorists of the (post)modern, possibly to include Flaubert, Poe, Lawrence, Benjamin, Simmel, Freud, Friedman, Baker, and McHale, Hutcheon, Hassan, among others.
We will read an array of 20th-century novels which will stand as test cases for a baggy, theoretical construction which sometimes lumps together the modern and the postmodern, and sometimes sets them apart from each other. Topics for discussion will include: what is/are the post/modern, post/modernity, post/modernism? How does post/modern fiction explore individual and collective consciousness? How do the modern metropolis and mass culture contribute to the stylistic innovations and subject matter of post/modernism? How do differences of gender, race, and class give shape to post/modernist narratives? Requirements for the course will include short written responses to readings, one or more library exercises, an oral report, all of which will culminate in a longer research paper on one modernist or postmodernist novel. I would encourage you, therefore, to start in on the reading list over the summer in order to widen your choice of texts on which to write your research paper.
Joyce, J.: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man; Woolf, V.: Mrs. Dalloway; Dangarembga, T.: Nervous Conditions; Ishiguro, K.: The Remains of the Day; Toer, P.A.: This Earth of Mankind; Chamoiseau, P.: Texaco; a course reader.
"Why does it seem so natural to study literary forms by breaking them up into distinct national literatures? Why do we persistently study ""American Literature"" or ""British Literature"" as opposed, say, to ""Literatures in English""? What is the curious hold of the national as a way of imagining belonging, identity, shared traditions, shared pasts and shared futures? ""Nation-ness,"" Benedict Anderson claims, ""is the most universally legitimate value in the political life of our time."" ""In the modern world,"" he goes on, ""everyone can, should and will 'have' a nationality, as he or she 'has' a gender."" This is the beginning of our inquiry into the literary forms and styles in which the nation is imagined. We'll read some novels, study some theories of nationality, and see several films (to be announced) that address themselves to the modern idea of the nation. "
Anand, M.R.: Untouchable; Cunningham, M.: The Hours; Forster, E.M.: Howard's End; Freud, S.: Civilization and its Discontents; Mansfield, K.: Stories; Strachey, L.: Eminent Victorians; Woolf, V.: Mrs Dalloway; Orlando, A Sketch of the Past, Three Guineas; course reader
"This course situates Virginia Woolf, the Bloomsbury Group, and British modernism within the social and historical context of the early 20th century, while also investigating ""Virginia Woolf"" and the ""Bloomsbury Group"" as categories still resonant in 21st-century culture. We'll begin the course by looking at the iconography of Virginia Woolf in contemporary popular and academic culture with a focus on Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway (1925) as read against Michael Cunningham's novel The Hours (1998) and the film adaptation of that novel. We'll move into an historical examination of Bloomsbury and its aesthetics, reading a variety of memoirs, E.M. Forster's Howard's End, and analyzing the art and design generated by Roger Fry's post-impressionist exhibit of 1910. The next section of the course will focus on Bloomsbury's politics -- pacificist, feminist, and anti-imperialist -- by reading Leonard Woolf on his experiences as a colonial administrator in Ceylon, Mulk Raj Anand's novel Untouchable, and Virginia Woolf's Three Guineas. Finally, we'll turn to Bloomsbury's practice of ""life writing"": the innovations that Lytton Strachey and Virginia Woolf brought to the practice of biography and autobiography, and the influence of Bloomsburian biography on life-writing today. "
For more information on this class, please email the professor at bobhass@berkeley.edu.
For more information on this class, please email the professor at bobhass@berkeley.edu.
Chu, L.: Eat a Bowl of Tea; Bulosan, C: America Is in the Heart; Hagedorn, J: Gangster of Love; Hayslip, L: When Heaven and Earth Changed Places; Kang, Y: East Goes West; Kingston, M.H.: Tripmaster Monkey; Lee, C.R.: Aloft; Okada, J: No-No Boy; Truong, M: The Book of Salt; Yamashita, K.T.: Tropic of Orange
"It is by now a commonplace to describe Asian American identity as impossibly heterogeneous and hybrid. At the same time, Asian American Studies is founded upon the strategic necessity of the pan-ethnic category. 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? Are there historical explanations for this? Literary explanations? In other words, what would it mean to think of ethnic experience as constituted through different protocols of narrative form? Why, for example, have so many contemporary Asian American authors been attracted to techniques of ""magical realism""? We will look at a variety of early and more recent examples from different ethnicities (Chinese American, Korean American, Vietnamese American, Japanese American), to see if we can develop an account of the novel from its realist to post-realist forms."
Dickinson, E.: The Poems of Emily Dickinson, Selected Letters; Habegger, A.: My Wars Are Laid Away in Books; Course reader
"This is an intensive course in the poetry of Emily Dickinson. We will read her poems, along with her letters and a biography, deeply but also broadly throughout her career. Topics include early poetry; musical poetics; figuration; definition and riddle; death, religion, and nature as topic and as figure; love poetry and poetic seduction; emotion and suspense; gender and sexuality; self-definition; biography; manuscript poem packets; poems revisiting poems; letters and/as poems; contemporary history (e.g., Civil War); contemporary poetry (e.g., Emerson, Robert & E.B. Browning); late poetry; 20th-century influence. There will be periodic exercises, and a final paper of around 20 pages. There will also be a final party, during which students are invited read their optional ""Dickinson"" poems. "
Required readings include novels by George Gissing and Wilkie Collins; short fiction of Thomas Hardy and Arthur Conan Doyle; poetry by Christina Rossetti, Elizabeth Barrett Browning; and a Course Reader.
"In this class we will explore the literature and culture surrounding Britain's poor, working classes, and racial outsiders in the Victorian era. Critical analysis of these marginalized classes and cultures will give us a more thorough and nuanced understanding of the diversified nature of Englishness in the nineteenth century.
We will read selections from some of the most famous social historians of the era--particularly Henry Mayhew and Charles Booth--as well as present-day analyses of nineteenth-century underclasses. We will spend a considerable amount of time on the culture of London's East End to begin our examination of connections between the geography of urban squalor, entrenched social problems of the London poor, and immigrant Others in England. "
Bersani, L.: Homos; Edelman., L.: No Future; Hocquenghem, G.: Homosexual Desire; Sartre, J.P.: Saint Genet; a course reader
"Under the assumption that male homosexual fantasy is not the peculiar coinage of a homosexual brain, but the common, even central daydream of the normal world, the course identifies three modes of broaching it in narrative cinema. In Hollywood classicism, this mode involves what Lee Edelman has called ""the invisible spectacle,"" the formation of a homosexual closet intended for general heterosexual use. In a later development, when this cinema treats homosexuality explicitly, the work of closeting becomes a minoritizing of ""the homosexual"" as an individual problem. A third kind of relation, on which this course will concentrate, is undertaken outside the Hollywood system, and in particular in the international ""art film."" It involves uncloseting not the homosexual, but homosexual fantasy itself in its radical potential to disrupt social and symbolic order. This (dark? utopian? at any rate intractable) vision is not necessarily compatible or even tolerable to liberal or gay politics, as we presently know them. Viewings will include: Almad�var, The Law of Desire, Bad Education; Fassbinder, In a Year of Thirteen Moons; Deardon, Victim; Fellini, La Dolce Vita; Genet, Chant d'amour; Hitchcock, Murder!, Rope, Strangers on a Train; Oshima, Taboo; Pasolini, Teorema; Visconti, Rocco and His Brothers."
"West, N.: Day of the Locust; Isherwood, C.: A Single Man; Boyle, T. C.: The Tortilla Curtain; Tei, K.: Tropic of Orange; Valdez, L.: Zoot Suit; Smith, A. D.: 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-19th-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. "
Modleski, T.: The Women Who Knew Too Much; Deutelbaum, M. and L. Poague, eds.: A Hitchcock Reader
"The course focuses on Hitchcock, ""auteur"" and consummate craftsman, with a remarkably long and varied career. We will view most of his films, discuss them from a variety of critical perspectives, and examine the key critical writings about them. "
"Johnson, J.W.: The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man; Hagedorn, J.: Dogeaters
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. "
"Abbott, E.C.: We Pointed Them North; Adams, Andy: The Log of a Cowboy; Bower, B.M.: Flying U Ranch; Cooper, J. F.: The Last of the Mohicans; Garrett, P.: The Authentic Life of Billy the Kid; Grey, Z.: Riders of the Purple Sage; Roosevelt, T.: Ranch Life and the Hunting Trail; Stewart, E. P.: Letters of a Woman Homesteader; Wister, O.: The Virginian
Films will include ""My Darling Clementine,"" ""Shane,"" ""High Noon,"" ""Hell's Hinges,"" ""The Virginian"" (1929), ""The Searchers,"" and others. "
In this course, I plan to get us all thinking about the popular genre of the Western and its cultural background. The films each week are an important and integral part of the course, and the films are required viewing. It is in the films that we see the clearest examples of the genre referred to as the Western, but the books provide a very general cultural discourse that gets crystallized in the films. Westerns have always seemed to be the clearest forms of an institutionalized narrative that gets called, eventually, a genre. The signs of genre tend to be clear: men in ten-gallon hats, six-shooters openly hanging from their belts, horses (often cows), in Western landscapes. The more interesting issues are: what is the meaning of these narratives for a culture? Are they simply entertaining, and if so, why? Or do they strive to offer commentaries on the culture of the time of their production?
Grandin, T.: Thinking in Pictures; Grealy, L.: Autobiography of a Face; Hathaway, K.: The Little Locksmith; Hockenberry, J.: Moving Violations; Keller, H.: The World I Live In; Laborit, E.: The Cry of the Gull; Michalko, R.: The Two-in-One: Walking with Smokie, Walking with Blindness; Mairs, N.: Waist-High in the World; plus a course packet of excerpts from other works
Autobiographies written by people with disabilities offer readers a glimpse into lives at the margins of mainstream culture, and thus can make disability seem less alien and frightening. Disability rights activists, however, often criticize these texts because they tend to reinforce the notion that disability is a personal tragedy that must be overcome through superhuman effort, rather than a set of cultural conditions that could be changed to accommodate a wide range of individuals with similar impairments. Are these texts agents for social change or merely another form of freak show? In this course, we will examine a diverse selection of disability memoirs and consider both what they reveal about cultural attitudes toward disability and what they have in common with other forms of autobiography. Requirements will include two 5-8 page papers and a take-home final exam.
Homer: The Odyssey; Beckett, S.: Company; Goethe: The Sorrows of Young Werther; Joyce, J.: Portrait of the Artist, Ulysses; Maupassant, Guy de: A Life ; Nabokov: Speak, Memory; Proust, M.: Swann's Way; Sebald, W. G.: Austerlitz; Woolf, V.: Mrs Dalloway; McKeon, M.: Theory of the Novel: An Historical Approach
"This course will consider the history and theory of the novel form, reading both novels and essays on the novel. (Theorists or critics of the novel may include Erich Auerbach, Mikhail Bakhtin, Roland Barthes, Walter Benjamin, Dorrit Cohn, Margaret Doody, Gerard Genette, Kate Hamburger, Georg Lukacs, Franco Moretti, Victor Shklovsky and Ian Watt.) We will begin by reading an epic, that genre which comes out of oral culture that is thought to be the parent of the novel. We will consider specific forms of novels, such as the epistolary novel, the historical novel and the Bildungsroman. We will discuss the relation between biography, including autobiography, and the novel and the related notion of ""a life."" We will look at the language the novel uses for the representation of point of view. The reading list is tentative, as book lists require much time for reflection. In particular, I will try to reduce this overly long list. Ulysses may be replaced by something shorter or I may eliminate something in order to retain Ulysses. "
Rice, P. and P. Waugh, eds. Modern Literary Theory; Lentricchia, F. and McLaughlin, eds. Critical Terms for Literary Study; Wharton, E. The House of Mirth; Guerin, L., et al., eds. A Handbook of Critical Approaches to Literature
"Applying major critical theories to a number of genres, the course will lay the foundation for the theses to follow.
Students who satisfactorily complete H195A-B (the Honors Course) may choose to waive the 150 (Senior Seminar) requirement. "
Barry, P.: Beginning Theory: An Introduction to Literary and Cultural Theory; Morrison, T.: Beloved; course reader of selected essays on theory
"The fall semester of this section of the honors course will be devoted to an examination of the theoretical paradigms that cast strong influences on contemporary critical practices. While the course will try to do justice to diverse theoretical approaches, my own theoretical preoccupation lies in the areas dealing with Minority Discourse, Postcoloniality, socio-political and psychoanalytic approaches to literature and culture. We will use Toni Morrison's Beloved as the single literary text on which to test various theoretical paradigms. During the fall semester 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. The fall semester will also include an introduction to research methods. In this course students are entirely free to devise and complete a thesis of their own choosing . The spring semester will be devoted to the research and writing of the ""honors thesis""; class meetings will turn into tutorials focused on writing the theses rather than on external readings and discussion.
Students who satisfactorily complete H195A-B (the Honors Course) may choose to waive the 150 (Senior Seminar) requirement. "
(tentative): Lodge, D.: Modern Criticism and Theory; Eagleton, T.: Literary Theory: An Introduction; Lentricchia, F. and T. McLaughlin: Critical Terms for Literary Study; Childers, J. and G. Hentzi, eds.: The Columbia Dictionary of Modern Literary and Cultural Criticism; Silko, L.M.: Almanac of the Dead
"In this honors seminar, we will become familiar with a wide range of theoretical approaches to literature. In addition, we�ll use Leslie Marmon Silko�s novel, Almanac of the Dead, to focus questions about literacy, history, memory, story, nation(alism), (post)colonialism, ethnicity, race, and culture.
Students who satisfactorily complete H195A-B (the Honors Course) may choose to waive the 150 (Senior Seminar) requirement. "