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.
"Harner, J.: Literary Research Guide; Eagleton, T.: Literary Theory: An Introduction; McGann, J.: A Critique of Modern Textual Criticism; Williams, R.: Marxism and Literature; Said, E.: Culture and Imperialism; Empson, W.: Seven Types of Ambiguity; Muller, J. P. and William J. Richardson, eds.: The Purloined Poe: Lacan, Derrida, and Psychoanalytic Reading; Bakhtin, M. M: The Dialogic Imagination; Miller, D. A: The Novel and the Police; Gates, H. L.: The Signifying Monkey; Tompkins, J.: Sentimental Designs; Course reader.
Recommended Texts: Becker, H. S: Tricks of the Trade; Lentricchia, Frank and Thomas McLaughlin, eds.: Critical Terms for Literary Study; Felman, S.: Jacques Lacan and the Adventure of Insight; Simpson, D.: The Academic Postmodern. "
Approaches to literary study, including textual analysis, scholarly methodology and bibliography, critical theory and practice.
Please contact Professor Hanson at khanson@socrates.berkeley.edu.
Approaches to literary study, including textual analysis, scholarly methodology and bibliography, critical theory and practice.
No texts
Dissertation prospectus writing workshop
Course reader
This course will trace the emergence and vicissitudes of feminist theory, struggle, and literature in moments of national crisis--particularly decolonization and globalization. The focus of our work will be conversations and contestations among feminists from nineteenth- and twentieth-century American, South Asian, Middle Eastern, and African contexts. Themes will include the relationships between racialized women and work, anti-colonial nationalism and militant feminism, and sodomy and panic. Your work for the course will culminate in a term paper of publishable quality.
(texts will be chosen from among the following): Wright, R.: Eight Men, The Long Dream; Walker, A.: Third Life of Grange Copeland; Morrison, T: Beloved, Jazz; Paradise; Jones, G.: Corrigedora; Gaines, E.: A Lesson Before Dying ; Wideman, J. E.: The Lynchers; Beaty, P.: White Boy Shuffle; course reader (Hip-Hop; Death Row records)
"Lying precisely at the intersection of hegemonic and violent forms of coercion as well as at the intersection of absolute power and absolute powerlessness, the threat of death (lynching, etc.) is arguably the most fundamental mode of coercion. The deployment of this mode of coercion throughout slavery and Jim Crow society has produced an anomaly: while African American literature is replete with meditations on the political economy of death, the criticism of this literature has tended on the whole to ignore these meditations. This course will examine 1) the effects of the threat of death on the formation of black subjectivity in 20th-century African-American fiction ; 2) the political economy of that threat; and 3) the different strategies for resisting this threat. The course will be particularly interested in exploring the role of death in what marxian jargon refers to as ""reproduction of the relations of production."" Students will be asked to present several oral reports and write a series of papers totaling about 20 pages. For the oral reports, students will be expected to read widely in various theoretical areas pertinent to different registers on which the threat of death can be analyzed; this reading will be available in class readers and material placed on reserve. "
Hawthorne, N.: The Scarlet Letter; Melville, H. L.: The Confidence Man; Lombroso, C.: Criminal Woman, the Prostitute, and the Normal Woman; Riis, J.: How the Other Half Lives; Sinclair, U.: The Jungle; Faulkner, W.: The Sound and the Fury; Heyward, DuBose, Porgy; Longmore, P. and L. Umansky, eds.: The New Disability History; Snyder, S., et al.: Enabling the Humanities; Moya, P. and M. Hames-Garcia: Reclaiming Identity; Cresswell, T.: The Tramp in America; Johnson, E.P.: Appropriating Blackness: Performance and the Politics of Authenticity; course reader
"""It is hereby prohibited for any person, who is diseased, maimed, mutilated or deformed in any way, so as to be an unsightly or disgusting object, to expose himself to public view."" Between 1881 and the First World War, cities around the U.S. passed or attempted to pass versions of this ordinance, which was commonly known as the ""ugly law."" (San Francisco, for instance, enacted the law in 1903.) The last known arrest, astonishingly, took place in 1974. In this course we will take a multirepresentational approach to selected moments in American culture(s), exploring some of what lay behind, proceeded from, surrounded and constituted the texture of this ordinance, and more broadly considering when and how, for what ends and with what effects, American literature has ""exposed"" the ""unsightly"" to public view. This is not a course ""about"" the ugly law but rather a course that takes off from the text of the ordinance to explore a range of issues for American studies: historical (such as histories of disability, vagrancy, ""the veteran"" and Progressive-era reform), literary historical (how, for instance, literary movements--naturalism, modernism, disability arts--place themselves in relation to the ""diseased, maimed, mutilated"" and the ""ugly""); cultural (we will examine a variety of performance modes and venues--vaudeville, blues, Chautauqua, freak show, silent film and contemporary theater) and theoretical (we'll think about potential intersections between recent work in disability theory and work in queer theory, gender theory, post-colonial theory, critical race theory, urban studies and legal studies). I intend the course to function as a ranging, eccentric survey of American literature as well as a graduate-level introduction to disability studies broadly construed. ""Disability is everywhere in history, once you begin looking for it,"" Douglas Baynton has written, ""but conspicuously absent in the histories we write."" Bring your own Americanist interests to this seminar and together we will make ""disability"" (what is that?) present within them. Your papers need not be limited to disability studies topics, though I expect that seminar participants will leave the course alert to disability as--in Baynton's words--""a fundamental element in cultural signification."" "
"Coolidge, C.: The Crystal Text; Mackey, N.: Whatsaid Serif; Mayer, B.: Midwinter Day; Robertson, L.: The Weather; Scalapino, L.: Zither & Autobiography; Silliman, R.: Tjanting; Watten, B.: Progress/Under Erasure; Course reader
Recommended Readings: Alexander, W.: Exobiology as Goddess; ; Ashbery, J.: Girls on the Run; Spahr, J.: This Connection of Everyone with Lungs "
"It is often said that the fragmentation and disjuncture characteristic of postmodern poetry is a reflection (or symptom) of contemporary life--a speedy life of multiple distractions, constant interruptions, unconnected events. How then do we account for the recent proliferation of long poems by contemporary experimental writers?
In this seminar we will examine an array of recent book-length poems so as to query the nature of the epic (and historical) and the extended lyric (or metaphysical) poem in our time. Attention will be paid to contextual frame, textual structure, compositional procedure, etc., as well as to questions regarding the nature of the ""project"" that each of the works represents. "
The book for the course is the Riverside Chaucer, along with R. Gordon�s Story of Troilus, the Loeb translation of Boethius, and various articles. Feel free to go to Amazon.co.uk and buy the paperback edition of the Riverside ; it�s much cheaper and more portable.
This course will focus on Chaucer�s poetry, excluding the Canterbury Tales, and on its sources and intertexts. We will also be exploring the various critical approaches to Chaucer that have emerged in the last thirty years or so. Students will be responsible for a major presentation, an annotated bibliography, and a conference-length paper (10 pages). We will also work on Middle English language intensively from time to time, and students will be asked to do brief translation exercises. The course will culminate in a �mini-conference,� in which students will read their short papers to the class (and any guests they would like to invite!) and answer questions.
A course reader, available at cost.
This is a graduate level workshop course in writing fiction, intended for students who have already achieved the basic skills of characterization, plotting, etc. Qualified undergrad-uates will be eligible. This course has no prerequisites, but I'll expect members of the class to be familiar with the tools and devices of fiction and with the critical vocabulary used in analyzing and evaluating it. Each student will have two of his/her stories discussed by the class. All students are required to attend class regularly and to participate actively in the class discussions. Each student is required to submit a one-page critique of every story discussed in class. Each student will submit a term project, due at the last class meeting. This project will consist of a new story, written since the beginning of the fall, 05 term, that illustrates what you?ve learned from the class, accompanied by an essay (6-10pp, double-spaced) in which you articulate what you've learned and how this story illustrates those gains.
Bacon, F.: The Essays; Di Cesare, ed. George Herbert and the 17th-Century Religious Poets; Donne, J.: Complete English Poems; Hill, C. A Century of Revolution, 1603-1714; Maclean, H, ed.: Ben Jonson and the Cavalier Poets; Marvell, A. Complete Poems; Milton, J. Paradise Lost
"Aside from Bacon's essays and, perhaps, Pilgrim's Progress, the course will concentrate on verse (because verse is what the seventeenth century did best and because I'm not worth listening to about seventeenth-century prose). We will read as much as is convenient of the verse of Donne, Jonson, Herrick, George Herbert, Carew, Waller, Milton, Suckling, Lovelace, and Marvell. I will concentrate in class on the poems that, in the judgment of later centuries, are the best. That includes Paradise Lost.
My chief concern as a student of literature is aesthetic, and I will inevitably ask what it is that this or that literary warhorse does for its clients that has made so many readers value it so highly and for so long. "
Brown, W.: Clotel; Chesnutt, C: The Marrow of Tradition; Douglass, F. 1845 Narrative; Hawthorne, N.: The Scarlet Letter; Jacobs, H. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl; James, H.: The Golden Bowl; Norris, F. McTeague; Stowe, H.: Uncle Tom's Cabin; Twain, M. Pudd'nhead Wilson. Short fiction, essays, and contextual material will be drawn from such writers as Henry Adams, Henry Ward Beecher, William Jennings Bryan, George Washington Cable, John C. Calhoun, Lydia Maria Child, John Dewey, W. E. B. DuBois, Ralph Waldo Emerson, George Fitzhugh, William Lloyd Garrison, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Henry Grady, Nicholas St. John Green, Oliver Wendell Holmes (Sr. and Jr.), William James, Francis Lieber, Abraham Lincoln, Karl Marx, Herman Melville, S. Weir Mitchell, Charles Sanders Pierce, Josiah Royce, Georg Simmel, Joseph Story, Henry David Thoreau, Albion Tourg�e, Mark Twain, Booker T. Washington and Daniel Webster.
"In his 1987 ""Bicentennial Speech"" Justice Thurgood Marshall scandalized his audience (and much of the nation) when he proposed that ""[w]hile the Union survived the civil war, the Constitution did not""; the latter, he added, had been superceded by the Fourteenth Amendment--""a new, more promising basis for justice and equality."" This course will explore American prose fiction, autobiography, popular culture, political and literary essays from around the time of the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law (1850) to the end of the nineteenth century, keeping Justice Marshall's rebirth of the nation ever present to mind. We will try to draw connections between some late stages in the debate over slavery and the rise of antiestablishment, antifoundational, and skeptical styles of thought. The course will emphasize, as a literary and theoretical matter, the emergent emphasis in American letters on problems of interpretation and reference--on the interpretive postures of ""positivism"" and ""pragmatism"" as well as the literary styles of romance and realism. While the course will address some of the standard concerns of this period in American thought (i.e., the relation between intention (""original intent"") and institutions, rhetoric and consent, causation and history), it will also take up some of the terms that animate more recent scholarship on the American state (i.e., the genealogy of state form; the question of sovereignty; secularization and belief). We will be particularly concerned with the conception of ""nation"" as a hermeneutic - with a literature and criticism focused on interpretation (as opposed to either custom or sovereignty) as the foundation of both national institutions and national identity."
Anand: Untouchable; Beckett, S.: The Unnamable, Company ; Conrad, J.: Heart of Darkness; Faulkner, W. Absalom, Absalom!; Joyce, J.: Portrait of the Artist, Ulysses; Lawrence, D. H.: Collected Stories, vol. 1; Mansfield, K.: Stories; Proust, M.: Swann's Way; Richardson, D.: Pilgrimage;, v. 1; Woolf, V.: To the Lighthouse; The Waves
"This course will examine the modernist novel and short story (or fiction in general) as perhaps the modernist genres par excellence. We will look at alternative views of ""modern fiction"" (to use Virginia Woolf's term) in its relation to nineteenth-century ""realism"", a literary style intimately connected with the novel. One view sees modern fiction as one development of realism (Luk�cs considered Joyce a naturalist) and another sees it is a revolt against realism. This will lead us to examine the relation between Impressionism and the preoccupation of some modernist novels and stories with sense experience. We will consider questions of formal experiment and language, particularly the language for the representation of point of view. Finally we will analyze different methods for dealing with time, memory and history. The reading list is tentative. We will also read a number of essays on the novel. "
Erdman, D., ed.: The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake; Ackroyd, P.: Blake: A Biography; Oe, K.: Rouse Up O Young Men of the New Age
" For in this Period the Poets Work is Done: and all the Great Events of Time start forth & are conceived in such a Period-- Within a Moment: a Pulsation of the Artery.
What does Blake mean by ""the Poets Work,"" achieved ""Within a Moment"" that is also a ""Period""? To take up this question, we will read enough of Blake's poetry to let us grapple with one or both of his late illuminated epics: Milton and Jerusalem. But we will also use our study of Blake to interrogate the relationship between poetic and other forms of labor, especially artisanal and political labor. We will try to set Blake's singular aesthetic practices within two relevant contexts: his own (1790s radicalism, 18th-century religious dissent, Romantic era economies of book and print production) and ours, where Blake has come to stand for critical agency itself and thus for the political potential of poetry. Attention to the posthumous work of poetry--what Derrida generally calls teleiopoesis--will lead us to ask why Blake matters to new historicists and new formalists alike or how Japanese novelist Kenzaburo Oe challenges our understanding of literary history when he makes reading Blake the organizing activity of : Rouse Up O Young Men of the New Age, the title of which, like my epigraph above on poetic labor and time, comes from Blake's : Milton. "
T.B.A. (see course description for a close approximation).
This course will be concerned with the implications of recent research in racialization theory --in particular, historical/materialist approaches to conceptualizing race, racism, and racialization-- for how we might go about reconceptualizing what is ethnic literature. That is to say, while we have become ever more aware of the social constructedness of race, it has proved exceedingly difficult to redraw the boundaries of ethnic literature along post-essentialist lines or to ask political questions of ethnic literature that are not predicated upon such reified dualisms as majority/minority, domination/resistance. Why? This course can be thought of as a working group whose aim will be to examine the possibilities for developing new approaches to ethnic literature from the at present under-considered resources afforded by marxist theory. Ultimately, we will be interested in asking: what does literature have to contribute to an understanding of ethnicity as a social relation and a historically dynamic process? What alternative political grounds might be discovered for ethnic literature? The course will be divided into two major movements. For the most part, we will be immersing ourselves in varieties of (what I wish us to consider as) historical/materialist approaches to race and racism. Our readings here will have four areas of concentration: writings on anti-semitism and the Jewish Question (Marx, Postone, Arendt, Sartre); on debates in black marxism and on the wages of whiteness (Cedric Robinson, David Roediger, Barbara Fields, Dubois, Theodore Allen, Robin D. G. Kelly, C.L.R. James); on theories of race in the context of imperialism and colonialism (Fanon, Hall, Gilroy, Balibar, Foucault); on the problem of Asian American identity as its focalizes debates in ethnicity theory versus racial formation, ethnic studies versus diaspora studies (Robert Park, Omi and Winant, Henry Yu, Alexander Saxton, Lisa Lowe, and others). In the latter part of the course, we will research the construction of ethnic canons and generate accounts of the prevailing methodological assumptions that structure them.
The booklist for this class has not been finalized, but will include several of the following texts: James, C.L.R.: The Black Jacobins; Scott, D.: Conscripts of Modernity; Williams, R.: Modern Tragedy; Benjamin, W.: The Origins of German Tragic Drama; Naipaul, V.S.: The Mimic Men; C�saire, A.: The Tragedy of King Christophe; Collins, M.: Angel; Cliff, M.: No Telephone to Heaven; Devi, M.: Chotti Munda and His Arrow; Ghosh, A.: The Shadow Lines; and a substantial course reader.
This course will explore tragedy as a key site for coming to terms with the consequences of revolutionary politics in modernity. We'll focus in particular on the renewed interest in tragic modes among postcolonial literary practitioners and theorists, asking what relation it bears to the straitened circumstances of postcolonial politics in our contemporary historical moment. At a time when grand projects of nation-building, development, and reconstruction appear to be in terminal crisis, tragedy's emphasis on intransigence, intractability, and unanswerability has a peculiar and troubling salience. At the heart of our reading will be the classic inquiry into the tragic dimensions of anti-colonial struggle, C.L.R. James's The Black Jacobins. Alongside it we'll read a series of literary works, primarily from the Caribbean and South Asia, that either extend or problematize James's reading of postcolonial history in tragic terms. We'll also read widely in theoretical work by the likes of David Scott, Raymond Williams, C.L.R. James (again), Walter Benjamin, Ranjana Khanna, Frantz Fanon, Lewis Gordon, Paul Gilroy, Judith Butler, and George Steiner. The course will conclude by counterposing tragedy with melancholia as alternative frames of reference for inquiring into and moving past the present impasses of postcolonial politics.
"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. "