"Carroll, L.: Through the Looking Glass
Melville, H.: Moby-Dick
Hacker, D.: Rules for Writers
Course Reader includes (subject to change):
Borges, Jorge: ?The Garden of Forking Paths?
Carlyle, Thomas: Sartor Resartus (selections)
Dickinson, Emily (selections)
Donne, John (selections)
Emerson, Ralph Waldo (selections)
Herbert, George (selections)
Kafka, Franz: ?The Metamorphosis?
Plato (selections)
Stoppard, Tom: Dogg?s Hamlet,Cahoot?s Macbeth
Taylor, Edward (selections)
Thoreau, Henry David (selections) "
"Many works in literature have been said to have a ?metaphysical? quality; in this class we will examine some of those works, paying special attention to the claims of imaginative literature upon philosophy. During the course of the semester, our reading will be by turns fantastic, terrifying, frustrating, beautiful, sardonic and whimsical. By investigating how words are used and manipulated to press our assumptions about the physical world, we will discover the unique appeal of the literary approach to enduring questions about the nature of self and world.
As the authors we will read stress and attenuate the possibilities of language to achieve their effects, we will study the intricacies of the language not only to understand their works but also to refine our own writing. Students will learn to write clearly and succinctly about complex and difficult subjects, and they will experiment with their own expository voice. Students will write several short essays, at least three of which will be substantial revisions of previous essays. "
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"Baldwin, J.: Go Tell it on the Mountain
Okada, J.: No-No Boy
Morrison, T.: Beloved
Lee, C.: A Gesture Life
Danticat, E.: The Farming of Bones
Yamanaka, L.: Wild Meat and the Bully Burgers"
"This course will examine Asian American and African American literature and ask what might be gained in a comparative approach to ethnic literature. While texts produced by a specific ethnic group are usually read apart from both the dominant white European-American canon as well as from other minority literature, a comparative analysis allows us an integrative approach that not only fills in the gaps left by the exclusion of ethnic literature from the literary canon but also will, I hope, create new ways of interpreting texts.
We will begin with a series of short two-page essays and work up to two five-page essays. The course aims at continuing to develop the students' practical fluency with sentence, paragraph and thesis-development skills but with increasingly complex applications. "
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"Ellison, R.: Invisible Man
Ellison, R.: Juneteenth
A course reader"
"In this class we will read Ralph Ellison?s two novels, Invisible Man and the recently compiled reader?s edition of his magisterial forty-year work-in-progress, Juneteenth. We will also read sizable excerpts from his collection of essays, Shadow and Act, and from the works of cultural theorists such as W. E. B. Du Bois, C. L. R. James and Frantz Fanon. One of the ultimate goals of the class will be for students to integrate the theoretical concepts elaborated in works such as these into argumentative essays on Ellison?s literary work. For example, W. E. B. Du Bois understands African Americans to be possessed of a ?double-consciousness,? a ?sense of always looking at one?s self through the eyes of others,? a condition that is simultaneously alienating and generative of a valuable kind of ?second-sight.? This concept will help orientate our approach to the models of consciousness explored in Ellison?s literary work, as well as the later Marxist and psychoanalytic models of consciousness we will explore.
Students will be expected to write numerous short essays, with increasing emphasis being placed on close reading, literary analysis and theoretical argumentation. "
"Ford, J.: ?Tis Pity She?s a Whore
Gascoigne, G.: The Adventures of Master F. J.
Lyly, J.: Gallathea
McQuade, D. and C. McQuade.: Seeing & Writing 2
Shakespeare, W.: Othello, Romeo and Juliet, Venus and Adonis"
"A story of forbidden love can compel a reader through both sympathy and repulsion. We hope the frustrated lovers can somehow overcome the unjust exigencies preventing their happy union. We fear they will not demonstrate self-control if consummating their love would prove disastrous or horrific. Early modern authors capitalize on one or both of these potential reactions by depicting all manner of proscribed romantic relationships: two girls who each believe the other is a boy, two children of feuding families, a brother and a sister. There are more, of course, and we shall examine how each author crafts his language to produce in us the effects we register as we read his work.
In order to accomplish this sometimes daunting critical feat, students must develop their analytical instincts in order to articulate the intricacies of their observations in writing. To this end, students shall hone their observational skills by discussing the motivations and intentions behind some contemporary pieces suitable for critical examination?everything from an essay on shoelaces to a Coca-cola poster. Short weekly writing assignments chronicling the students? observations of these modern items will prepare them to write longer essays on the Renaissance texts. For these longer papers (4-5 pages), we will have thesis brainstorming sessions and peer editing workshops; students should expect to become very well acquainted with the writing of their peers. "
"Beaumont, F.: The Knight of the Burning Pestle
Chapman, G., B. Jonson, and J. Marston: Eastward Ho
Jonson, B.: The Alchemist, Bartholmew Fair
Marlowe, C.: Doctor Faustus
Shakespeare, W.: Hamlet, Julius Caesar
Crews, F.: The Random House Handbook
Course Reader "
Theater historians of Shakespeare?s London often observe the intense demand for innovation and novelty a diverse but sophisticated playgoing public exerted on rival theater companies vying for its interest. Confined to the frontier zone of the suburbs along with bear- and bull-baiting sports arenas, public playhouses were also regarded by authorities as dangerous and potentially subversive forms of popular entertainment. In this course, students will be exposed to some of the range and diversity of early modern London plays produced within and reflective of this theatergoing atmosphere of novelties, thrills, spectacles, and dangerous attractions. Although something of a loose collection, the plays we will read all in some manner self-referentially stage the act of looking, and thus acknowledge the beholder?s presence within a context of visual curiosity and fascination with seeing. By thus confronting the spectator with his or her own image, these plays-as-attractions pose a variety of modes of spectatorship, from the totally gullible to the ultra-sophisticated and cynical. This course is similarly designed to teach you how critically to reflect on these plays as texts. To this end, this course will teach you how to work with principal modes of academic rhetoric?description, analysis, and argument. Students will be required to write a short diagnostic essay and two formal essays, both of which they will substantially revise.
"Bronte, C.: Jane Eyre
Defoe, D.: Robinson Crusoe
Dickens, C.: A Tale of Two Cities
Gaskell, E.: Mary Barton
Shelley, M.: Frankenstein
Course Reader
Recommended:
Crews, F.: The Random House Handbook 6th edition "
"In this course we will consider the relationship between two phenomena closely associated with modernity: the novel and political revolution. How do novels represent?or fail to represent?the revolutionary event? In what ways do they seek to promulgate, redirect, and/or contain revolutionary ideas and energies? Are there meaningful connections between the revolutionary desire to renovate society and the aesthetic and economic ambitions of novelists writings during the genre?s famous ?rise? to literary predominance?
In addition to reading novels, we will take up several short pieces?historical, philosophical, and literary?designed to contextualize our discussion. Although we will focus on the British case in order to insure the cohesion of the class, students are encouraged to work on the (many) novels relevant to the course rubric from other traditions?Latin American, Western and Eastern European, Asian?for their final paper.
The authors we will read are writers of the highest merit; they are thus perfect aids to the process of learning to write sophisticated and convincing analytic and expository prose. We will focus on improving your ability to develop and defend a thesis, present and analyze evidence to support your claims, and edit your own work and the work of others through a variety of assignments and in-class exercises. Students will be responsible for writing and revising four or five essays over the course of the semester. "
"Austen, J.: Pride and Prejudice
Bronte, C.: Jane Eyre
Dickens, C.: A Christmas Carol
Required Films:
Pride and Prejudice (Leonard, 1940)
Pride and Prejudice (Langton, 1995)
Bridget Jones?s Diary (Maguire, 2001)
Bride and Prejudice (Chadha, 2004) and/or Pride and Prejudice (Wright, 2005)
Rebecca (Hitchcock, 1940)
Jane Eyre (Stevenson, 1944)
Jane Eyre (Young, 1997)
A Christmas Carol (Hurst, 1951)
A Christmas Carol (C. Donner, 1984)
Scrooged (R. Donner, 1988) "
This course seeks to refine composition skills (thesis building, argumentation, processes of analysis, use of evidence, and mechanics) while also introducing students to the discipline of literary study. Students will be responsible for 32 pages of written work, consisting of short essay drafts and revisions. Coursework will culminate in a 4-5 page essay on a course-related topic of the student?s choosing. The focus of this course is twentieth- and twenty-first century adaptations of nineteenth-century texts. We will explore the ways in which ?modern? cultural dispensations coopt and recreate certain hoary classics of nineteenth-century literary canon, investigating the tangle of nostalgia, revision, longing, and repudiation that is adaptation. In addition to the required texts and films below, there will be an assigned reader including (but not limited to) excerpts from Jean Rhys? The Wide Sargasso Sea, Daphne Du Maurier?s Rebecca, Helen Fielding?s Bridget Jones?s Diary, and relevant critical articles.
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"Hwang, D. H.: M. Butterfly
Wilde, O.: The Picture of Dorian Gray
Marlowe, C.: Doctor Faustus
Kyd, T.: The Spanish Tragedy
Shakespeare, W.: The Winter's Tale
Strunk Jr., W. and E. B. White: Elements of Style
A course reader
Recommended Text:
Hacker, D.: A Writer's Reference "
"In Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale, Leontes, astonished by the seemingly lifelike rendering of his wife, exclaims, ?The fixure of her eye has motion in 't, / As we are mocked with art? (V.iii.67). Leontes's words provide the thematic prompt for our course. He expresses our enduring fascination with the ways in which art challenges our powers of perception, uncannily mirrors our lives, and vivifies static forms. This course is an introduction to critical reading and writing as a kind of art?an art of interpretation which at times seems to taunt us, provoke or perhaps frustrate even as it entrances and delights. Through our readings of texts which depict characters in uncomfortable confrontations with art, we will approach writing with a corresponding awareness that essays are not spontaneous nor entirely natural forms but are carefully wrought revisions of our own engagement with these works.
The aim of this course is to develop critical readers who are able to present rigorous argumentation in lively, clear prose. We will begin with shorter exercises and writing assignments to focus on close reading, smooth incorporation of evidence, sentence construction, and paragraph development. We will also work on developing a thesis, structuring your argument, drafting, and revising of your work. Over the course of the semester, you will produce about 30 pages of writing in the form of a three-page diagnostic essay, informal reading responses, and about five formal essays of increasing length. At least three of the formal essays will undergo revision. "
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"Shakespeare, W.: Hamlet, Macbeth
The Norton Anthology of Poetry, 4th edition
MLA Handbook "
"Literature as art and, more specifically, poetry and poetic drama as art will be our main concern in this class. We will be reading some of the most famous plays and poems in the language and talking about the ways they give their readers the experiences of poetic richness. Poetic richness is a very broad term I am using to describe the multiple harmonies of sound and meaning that constitute the aesthetics of poetry. Apart from savoring the works on the reading list, we will consider them critically: we will ponder the ways such things as irony, ambiguity, paradox, to name a few, create layers of coherence and complexity that often escape conscious attention of casual readers. Ultimately, we will be concerned with what it is that makes these works beautiful, and what impact they make upon the minds of their readers. In many ways this course is meant to be an accessible college-level introduction to poetry and poetic drama and to provide you with the tools for critical observation that will come in handy in a variety of majors.
Since this is an R1B course, my main objective is to make you able to construct complex academic arguments based on sound research. The reading load of primary texts for this course is light. Therefore you will spend a good deal of time exploring secondary sources, first under my guidance and then on your own. You will undertake several small research projects. For instance, when dealing with Hamlet, you may be asked to ground your account of this work in the responses of professional scholars or casual spectators of a given historical period.
Or, I may ask you to consider a film or a TV adaptation of Macbeth in the light of your own understanding of that play. You can expect some work with electronic resources: for instance, with online journal databases and the Oxford English Dictionary. By the end of the semester you will know what a solid academic essay looks like and will be able to produce one of your own. In fact, for this class you will produce two: a medium-length paper in lieu of the mid-term and a longer one (10-12 pages). These will be, to a large extent, thoughtful revisions and compilations of your small research projects, as well as culminations of your written work in this class. You can also expect some peer editing and group work. "
"Course Reader
The Norton Anthology of English Literature: Volume I
Outkast: The Love Below [If students cannot purchase this CD individually, I will make arrangements so that it will be available to all.] "
"What relationships can we discover between the Elizabethan sonnet sequence and the contemporary hip-hop record? How have debates about marriage and the domestic scene been transformed and re-shaped into debates about homosexuality and the ?sanctity? of marriage? How does the language of the sexual become influenced, constrained, and directed through social and political pressures? These are just some of the questions that we will address in our examination of Early Modern (defined as sixteenth- and seventeenth-century British) literature and contemporary texts.
We will broaden our conception of ?text? by analyzing, among other things, contemporary newspaper and magazine articles, music, film, and the Internet. Just as the printed text became the medium par excellence of the Early Modern period, a number of entrenched and emergent media forms have radically transformed our sense of the literary, as well as of cultural transmission itself. To focus our examination and to render it all the more relevant to our society, we will specifically scrutinize these texts through the lens of the ?erotic? or ?sexual.? We might understand sexuality as a human universal, but we will work to discover and interpret how eroticism and sexuality have undergone (and continue to undergo) encoding or transformation through forms of ?textual? expression.
In addition to the goal of reading, analyzing, and reflecting upon texts that bestride a four-hundred year period marking the emergence of our modern, post-modern, ?globalized? civilization, we will pursue this examination for the sake of developing the compositional tools necessary for dealing with complex thoughts about complex relationships among rather complex texts. While students will be asked to perform some comparative work, drawing from contemporary, non-canonical materials, they will also be required to discuss Early Modern (16th and 17th C.) texts in each of the essays. We will develop these skills through occasional writing sessions, written assignments, and office hours. This course will also be geared toward refining research skills, and students will complete a longer research-based paper. "
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"Cather, W.: My Antonia
Marquez, G.: One Hundred Years of Solitude
Burroughs, W. S.: Cities of the Red Night
Films:
The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
The House of Flying Daggers "
"In this course, we will examine the works of a handful of authors and filmmakers who utilize myth in the 20th century. ?Myth? is difficult to define convincingly, but the assumption for this course will be that myths tell us how to think about ourselves historically?that is, how we understand ourselves in relation to the past, present, and future. Often, it is the history of something we define as a ?nation,? a ?culture,? a ?people,? etc. This course will look closely at a few examples of this process at work. As an alternative to or extension of this concept of myth, we will also look at 20th century examples of fable writing. Because these two narrative types transcend literature, we will expand our material to include film and other visual media.
The primary focus of this course is a rigorous development of your writing and research skills. Expect highly focused written assignments, research projects, extensive revision, and informed engagement with the course texts. In addition to the novels and films listed below, I will also make available a course reader including short selections from Franz Kafka, W.B. Yeats, Jorge Luis Borges, Italo Calvino, and William Carlos Williams. "
"Frayn: Copenhagen
Friel: Translations
Patchett: Bel Canto
Woolf: To the Lighthouse
Course Reader "
"This course brings together a series of literary texts which focus around acts of translation or interpretation in some fashion. We will begin the course thinking about linguistic translation and will use that as a foundation for discussion of other varieties of mediation: cultural, generational, personal, disciplinary. Throughout the semester we will consider the figure of the go-between, that individual who is responsible for negotiating between two people or groups. We will consider the problematics of this role (what are the moral obligations of such a liminal position? what are the duties and loyalties one has to each group? how does intention and bias affect one?s ability to interpret?) in the hopes of determining what is lost?and gained?in the act of translation.
It is my hope that thinking about the act of interpretation will make us more critical writers and readers. The primary focus of this course is the development of your writing and research skills. Expect frequent writing assignments, short essays, and a longer research essay. You will also be required to revise everything you write, and to peer-edit the work of your classmates. "
"Defoe, D.: Robinson Crusoe
Shakespeare, W.: The Tempest
Walcott, D.: Pantomine
Lamming, G.: The Pleasures of Exile
Coetzee, J.M.: Foe
Strunk and White: Elements of Style
Course Reader "
"Two of the most famous survival stories are Shakespeare?s The Tempest and Daniel Defoe?s Robinson Crusoe. However, these are not just simply grand adventure stories. These narratives, which celebrate the self-made (English) man, demonstrate that his survival critically depends on the suppression of the ?native savage?: the savages encountered on the island must be brought under English authority. Such narratives conceal the violence of such takeovers and naturalize the process by portraying the native as uncivilized and barbaric, one which must be subdued and controlled for his/her own benefit. Thus, the English subject is vindicated of any immorality and is celebrated for bringing civilization and morality to these backward societies.
As colonies began to declare independence in the twentieth century, such representations of the colonial as moral and the native as barbaric have come to be questioned and criticized. Writers from these former colonies have rewritten these survival stories in order to expose the true violence of colonialism. We will begin the course with these two canonical texts and then move to these ?new? stories. By reading these texts in conjunction with each other, we will explore how identities become constructed and circulated and how they can be contested. In analyzing how literature reflects the larger socio-political world, we can become critical of the various assumptions that such works make and the wider implications they have in representing the world.
This course will focus on developing argumentative and expository skills as well as refining analytic and research skills. There will be a short essay (3 pages) assigned at the beginning as well as one short essay (5 pages) and one long essay (10 pages). This last essay will involve a substantive research component and will help you synthesize secondary sources and research into your analysis of a primary work. "
"Mather, C.: ?Memorable Providences, Relating to Witchcrafts and Possessions?
Shakespeare, W.: Macbeth
Wertham, F.: excerpts from The Seduction of the Innocent
Watson, L.: excerpts from Dark Nature: A Natural History of Evil
Milton , J.: Paradise Lost (Books I, IV, IX)
Dostoevsky, F.: Brothers Karamozov, ?The Grand Inquisitor?
Singer, I. B.: Satan and Goray
Sartre, J.: ?Flies?
Required Films:
Fire Walk with Me, (Lynch)
Mulholland Drive, (Lynch)"
"Evil is a shifting, nebulous notion. The conception of it has differed between time periods, cultures and nationalities. And, of course, its conception can differ between contemporaneous social and political groups ? that the phrase ?Axis of Evil? can be a moral directive for one political party and an object of mockery for another makes this evident. In this course we will study the ways in which Evil is conceived and represented. Our sources will combine traditional literary genres ? poetry, novel, film ? with a few historically situated essays that significantly influenced how Evil has come to be understood and depicted.
As with R1A, the highest priority of this class is to improve students? reading and writing, so weekly writing assignments will be required, as will projects involving student revision and peer editing. However, R1B has the added goal of developing students? research skills as well. To that end, an extensive directed research project will be assigned in the later half of the semester. As per course requirement, completed student papers will total to at least 16 pages, with at least an equal number of pages of devoted to draft and revision. "
"Texts Austen, J.: Northanger Abbey
Bront?, C.: Jane Eyre
Harris, T.: The Silence of the Lambs
Radcliffe, A.: The Mysteries of Udolpho (selections only, in the Reader)
Carter, A.: The Bloody Chamber (selections only, in the Reader)
Course Reader
Required Films:
Rosemary?s Baby (Polanski)
The Silence of the Lambs (Demme)
Hannibal (Scott)
Rebecca(Hitchcock)"
"This class is designed to help you develop your essay writing skills as we read and view our way through some classics of the Female Gothic genre. The most famous canonical text in this genre is Charlotte Bront?s Jane Eyre, while non-canonical examples would be all those women-in-peril thrillers found in supermarkets. The Female Gothic can be said to begin with Ann Radcliffe and to continue into present day horror novels and films. We will look at a variety of texts, including novels, short stories, films, paintings, and criticism, and we will explore the way this genre portrays female psychology, especially female fantasies and female fears. What makes a work a Female Gothic text? What is it about these texts that make them so popular with women? We start out with a well-known modern work, The Silence of the Lambs, so as to establish what we mean by the Female Gothic. We then go back to the beginnings of the genre (in the 1790s) with Ann Radcliffe, and try to figure out how it works and how it evolves.
This is a writing intensive course: you will be writing several essays of various lengths (from 3 to 8 pages) and revising these essays. The focus will be on developing ease in writing longer argumentative essays, on improving your research skills, and on learning how to incorporate research into your writing. We will discuss writing and research strategies throughout the semester, and we will use peer review extensively.
Note: There will be film screenings outside of class. Attending these screenings is not mandatory, but seeing the films is, so they will also be available at the Media Center for you to view on your own. "
"Stein, G.: Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas
James, H.: Daisy Miller
Melville, H.: Benito Cereno
Mura, D.: Turning Japanese
Pham, A.: Catfish and Mandala
Trask, H.: Light in the Crevice Never Seen
Hemingway, E.: The Sun Also Rises
Hacker, D.: Rules for Writers
Course Reader
Required Film:
Lost in Translation "
"Ralph Waldo Emerson described traveling as ?a fool?s paradise.? In this course, we will work on refining critical reading and writing skills by examining and discussing the role of travel in literature, particularly in what Gertrude Stein called ?the making of Americans.? How does travel challenge or heighten American identity? What is the impact of travel and mobility on the social and psychic construction of American belonging and citizenship? Why would Emerson characterize travel in this way? Who gets to travel and then write about it? What, for example, happens to literary form and content when the American abroad shifts from Henry James to W.E.B. DuBois, Herman Melville to David Mura? These questions constitute starting points; your expected participation in discussion will raise new or overlapping concerns. Since travel does not happen in a vacuum, we will also examine the encounters among Americans, settlers, locals, and the indigenous in a framework that considers the relationships between historical events and the routes of travel, allowing us to interrogate the nature and condition of travel with and against such terms as the global and the local, the rural and the urban.
The course will build upon your current writing and research skills through frequent revisions and stage-based writing exercises to fulfill the course requirements of producing at least 32 pages (one short essay early in the semester and at least two longer essays) and to provide methodological and evaluative tools for using research results here and elsewhere. Through our object of inquiry, travel, we will, in a sense, take on the role of the traveler and become familiar with what may be unfamiliar, the academic library, in order to absorb and appraise the numerous sources that will inform and supplement the writings that you will be exploring and producing this semester and beyond. "
"Bulosan, C.: America Is In the Heart
Eaton, E. [Sui Sin Far]: Mrs. Spring Fragance, ""Leaves from the Mental Portfolio of an Eurasian?
Hagedorn, J.: Dogeaters
Kingston, M. H.: The Woman Warrior
Okada, J.: No-No Boy
Course Reader "
"In recent years, Asian American studies has been influenced by postcolonial critiques of nationalism and the New American Studies? focus on American imperialism. This course is, in part, a comparative study of the framings of nation and transnation in Asian American literature before and after the Civil Rights Era. We will consider the following lines of inquiry: In what ways have early and post-1965 Asian American literature negotiated between the national and international protests of American capitalism and imperialism? How does the literature challenge and reflect the legal, cultural, economic, and social exclusion of Asian American groups? Can Robert Blauner?s concept of internal colonialism be used to describe the historical dynamics between white America and Asian America? We will also read these texts alongside their contemporary literary movements of realism, modernism and postmodernism. In doing so, we will attempt to determine the ways in which the interplay between the experimental and realist elements in each work delineates ideas about the Asian American self.
Writing Requirements: Regular attendance and participation are mandatory. This course will acquaint you with the practice of close reading, expository writing, and research. You will be expected write and revise two longer, research-based essays (each 8 pages), write in-class essays, and participate in peer-editing. "
"Pope, A.: Rape of the Lock
Shakespeare, W.: Hamlet
Coleridge, S. T.: Rime of the Ancient Mariner
James, H.: The Beast in the Jungle, The Turn of the Screw
Nabokov, V.: Lolita
Course Reade includes:
Chaucer, G.: ""The Canon's Yeoman's Prologue and Tale,"" from The Canterbury Tales
The Pearl-Poet
Greenblatt, S.: ?Remember Me?
Milton, J.: Lycidas
Jonson, S.: ?Lycidas?
Freud, S.: ?Notes Upon a Case of Obsessional Neurosis?
Sedgwick, E. K.: ?The Beast in the Closet?
Required Films:
Fast, Cheap and Out of Control, (Morris and Hoover)
Trekkies, (Nygard)
Recommended:
Strunk and White: Strunk and White?s Manual of Style
Hacker, D.: A Writer?s Reference "
"This course will focus on literature and the craft of critical writing through an exploration of obsession as a principle of narration. We will begin in the late Middle Ages with selections from Chaucer and will finish off over 600 years later with Nabokov's Lolita and the documentaries Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control and Trekkies.
We will think through the problem of genre in obsessive texts?are they generally tragic? Can they be comic? What happens to the audience's emotions in reading an obsessive text? What about the emotions of the narrator? We will also explore the various thematics of obsession in these works, asking what kinds of obsessions (self, work, past, love object, etc.) tend to become the object of literary inquiry. And, finally, we will pay special attention to the forms and devices that authors use to express obsession, asking how (lists, repetitions, exclamations, exaggerations, etc.) these texts represent obsession.
In addition to our focus on literary analysis in class, each week we will approach a problem or strategy of writing: thesis construction, amassing proof in an argument, grammatical structures, rhetorical strategies, close readings, etc.
The writing you will produce in this class will require close reading of individual texts, as well as synthetic analysis across works. Your first essay will be a short diagnostic essay, and there will be two further essays assigned during term (one 6-8 pages and one 10-12 pages in length). These papers will be designed to emphasize outlining, drafting, writing, revising, and rewriting. The third paper will include a research component, oriented around the topic of the course. You will develop a more specific area of inquiry in consultation with me, and you will be required to bring in secondary material in your analysis. We will tour the library and explore its research resources prior to your undertaking your research project.
Grades will also be determined by active participation in class, peer reviewing of papers, and one brief oral presentation.
Toward the end of term, we will screen two films in the evening, at a time when most students can attend. Those who cannot attend will be responsible for renting the movies and screening them independently. "
Waters, M., ed.: Bigger Than the Sky: Disabled Women on Parenting; course reader
This course will explore how disability, gender and race intersect in the lives of people with disabilities across the early lifespan (from birth to age 18), primarily in the United States. The questions we'll address are fundamental disability issues: What is the value of a disabled life? Do children with disabilities belong in the mainstream world of schools and communities? Who, under what circumstances, should make decisions that concern young adults with disabilities? Through the lens of families we will examine important and cutting-edge topics such as prenatal testing, issues concerning disabled babies and disabled parents, mainstreaming, personal assistance services, and playground politics. Class speakers will include disabled teens, parents of disabled children, parents who chose to have a disabled child (both biological and adoptive parents), educators, and artists. This class is geared to freshmen who want a small, interactive experience of exploring disability from both nondisabled and disabled perspectives while building an academic base in disability studies. Frequent informal short assignments, many of which will take you outside of the classroom into the worlds of children, families and advocates dealing with disability. The class will be co-taught by two instructors. Corbett Joan O'Toole, a longtime, internationally influential disability rights activist, is a writer, a filmmaker and director of the Disabled Women's Alliance, an organization that focuses on networking and advocacy for women with disabilities around the world. Susan Schweik is associate professor of English and co-coordinator of the disability studies minor at Berkeley.
Momaday, N.S.: The Way to Rainy Mountain; Speigelman, A.: Maus I and II
"Visual culture is not just about pictures, but the (post)""modern tendency to picture or visualize experience""--what W.J.T. Mitchell calls ""the pictorial turn."" Not surprisingly, as contemporary writers and artists struggle to find forms that convey postmodern individual identities in multicultural, often urban, social landscapes, they experiment with visual/verbal forms of self-representation and self-narration: story quilts, family photo albums, letters, comic books (co-mix), artists' books, photo-biographies, video and film, performance art, home pages, ""zines,"" and more. Course requirements include attendance, participation, completion of in-class activities, and a short course journal. "
"We will read some of the best writers on childhood and adolescence: Sandra Cisneros'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.
Because we'll be examining a number of passages closely each time, going quickly from 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: Austen, J: Sense and Sensibility (ed. James Kinsley, Oxford World' Classics edition) and Emma (ed. R. Blythe, Penguin Classics edition).
"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: : Sense and Sensibility and Emma a. 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 Sense and Sensibility. Please bring your copy of the Oxford World's Classics edition and be prepared to discuss pp. 1-94. "
Lanthem, E.C., ed.: Poetry of Robert Frost
"In a letter to a publisher friend, Robert Frost offered the following engaging definition of poetry: �A poem starts with a lump in the throat, a homesickness or a lovesickness. It is a reaching out toward expression, an effort to find fulfillment. A complete poem is one where an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found the words� My definition of poetry (if I were forced to give one) would be this: words that have become deeds.
This course will explore the satisfactions and the challenges of reading�carefully and pleasurably�selected poems and essays by Robert Frost, one of America�s most widely read and least understood and appreciated poets. He was widely regarded for decades as America�s most popular representative of poetry, and Frost deliberately cultivated his public image as a �rustic sage� and a rural wit in his numerous public readings and in his role as a good will ambassador. Frost was a poet who promoted an aura of bucolic dignity in his work and in his readings, and the surface features of his poems often lull readers into thinking they understand his work. Yet reading Frost�s poetry more carefully�to read him, as he says, with our �hearing imagination,� listening for �sentence sounds��reveals a tough-minded and often skeptical attitude towards experience.
Students will be expected to write two short analytical essays (2-3 pages each) or�for those who are venturesome�perhaps a few poems. In addition, regular attendance and participation in class discussions will be required to pass the course."
Friel, B.: Selected Plays (of Brian Friel), Dancing at Lughnasa
Brian Friel (b. 1928) is the most prominent playwright of the contemporary Irish theater, best known for Translations and Dancing at Lughnasa. In a series of innovative plays, he has examined some of the stories the Irish tell themselves about their past and present. He uses the theater to examine issues of role-playing, story-telling, and self-delusion, that is, the nature of theatricality. While he explores Ireland's national and personal myths, Friel is saying something about us all and the parts we cast ourselves in when rehearsing our own dramas. This is a seminar, not a lecture course, so I will expect you all to contribute to discussions. Students will also be paired to lead discussions.
Thoreau, H. D.: Walden
"We will read Thoreau's Walden in small chunks, probably about thirty pages per week. This will allow us time to dwell upon the complexities of a book that is much more mysterious than those who have read the book casually, or those who have only heard about it, realize. We will also try to work some with online versions of the book, using the wordsearch command to identify words such as ""woodchuck"" or ""root"" that reappear frequently, in order to speculate on patterns Thoreau is trying to establish. "
Burroway, J.: Writing Fiction
In this course, students will learn the basic elements of fiction writing. Students will be expected to write two short stories during the semester. The course will be organized as a workshop. All stories will be edited and critiqued by the instructor and by other students in the class. We will also read and discuss selected short stories.
T.B.A.
This is a workshop course intended for students who have recently begun to write fiction or who have not previously taken a course in creative writing.
"Gioia, Mason, Schoerke, eds.: Twentieth-Century American Poetics: Poets on the Art of Poetry; a reader containing further essays and poems.
Note: The required text will be available only through Cody's Books (www.codysbooks.org)
2454 Telegraph Avenue
510-845-7852 "
The purpose of this class will be to produce a mobile, surprising, unfinished language in which to treat poetry. Writing poems will be a part of this task, but only a part. There will also be a modest amount of critical writing and reading, short written commentaries on other students' work, and a review of a poetry reading; these efforts will all be gathered in a final portfolio of revised work to be handed in at semester's end. In addition to regular discussion, class participation will include memorization and recitation of other writers' poems.
A course reader
For more information on this section of English 45A, please email the professor at j_miller@berkeley.edu.
Chaucer, W.: The Canterbury Tales; Milton, J.: Paradise Lost; Spenser, E.: Edmund Spenser's Poetry
This course is an introduction to major works by Chaucer, Spenser, and Milton, with occasional supplements 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.
Rowlandson, M.: Sovereignty and Goodness of God; Franklin, B.: Autobiography;;Defoe, D.: Robinson Crusoe;; Austen, J.: Emma; ; Wordsworth, W. and S.T. Coleridge: Lyrical Ballads and Related Writings;; Bronte, E.: Wuthering Heights;; Whitman, W.: Leaves of Grass: His Original Edition;; Douglass, F. and H. Jacobs: Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave;, and Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl;
I will lecture on the cataclysmic rise of bourgeois modernity as it registers in English and American literature during the period 1660-1860. I will emphasize the mixture of euphoria, wonder, deprivation, and anxiety that this transformation provokes, and I will concentrate on the Enlightenment and Romanticism as attempts to exploit historical opportunity while compensating for history's deficiencies. Two five-page essays, a final exam, and regular participation in lecture and discussion section will be required.
Sayre, G., ed.: American Captivity Narratives;; Behn, A.: Oroonoko;; Swift, J.: Gulliver's Travels;; Defoe, D.: Robinson Crusoe;; Austen, J.: Persuasion;; Hogg, J.: Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner;; Bronte, E.: Wuthering Heights;; Melville, H.: Benito Cereno; course reader will contain selected poems and short fiction
Readings in English, Scottish, Irish and American literature from 1688 through 1848: a century and a half that sees the formation of a new, multinational British state, with the political incorporation of Scotland and Ireland; the massive expansion of an overseas empire; and the revolt of the American colonies. Our readings will explore the relations between home and the world in writings preoccupied with journeys outward and back--not all of which are undertaken voluntarily. Authors include Rowlandson, Behn, Defoe, Swift, Pope, Macpherson, Collins, Gray, Equiano, Burns, Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Austen, Scott, Hogg, Poe, Hawthorne, Melville.
"Gilman, C. P.: ""The Yellow Wallpaper""; James, H.: ""The Figure in the Carpet""; Conrad, J.: ""The Secret Sharer""; Faulkner, W.: The Sound and the Fury; Larsen, N.: Passing; Woolf, V.: Mrs. Dalloway; Dos Passos, J.: Manhattan Transfer;; DeLillo, D.: White Noise; as well as a course reader containing selected poetry, essays, and literary criticism by M. Arnold, Hecht, Pater, Wilde, Pound, H.D., Williams, Koch, T.S. Eliot, Hopkins, Frost, Macleish, Millay, cummings, G. Brooks, Cullen, H. Johnson, McKay, DuBois, G. Schuyler, and Langston Hughes, among others. "
"In this course we will begin with a Victorian text and end with a postmodern one, but we will focus primarily on the intervening period of literary modernism. Topics for discussion will include the status of high art and artists in an era of mass culture; the interplay between formal innovation and ideological stance (is there any connection between ""radical"" stylistic experimentation and ""radical"" politics?); the rejection and/or acceptance of ""tradition"" and history; the implications of expatriatism and multiculturalism for national identity; and the politics of canon-formation, that is, which authors and texts are regularly read, how they are read, and by whom.
Written work for the course will consist of three 5- to 6-page essays; occasional pop quizzes given in lecture; and a final exam. Regular attendance at lecture and vigorous participation in section are also required. "
"James, H.: The Portrait of a Lady; Eliot, T.S: The Waste Land and Other Poems; Stevens, W.: The Palm at the End of the Mind; Woolf, V.: To the Lighthouse; Hurston, Z.: Their Eyes Were Watching God; Beckett, S.: Waiting for Godot; Plath, S.: Ariel; Pynchon, T.: The Crying of Lot 49; a Course reader (available from Odin Copy).
Recommended Text: Frye, Northrop, et al., eds.: The Harper Handbook to Literature "
"In surveying British and American literature from 1865-1965, this course will focus on what may be called the modernist tradition of innovation. We will study authors--such as Henry James, T.S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, and Samuel Beckett--whose revolutionary experiments in form established a new orthodoxy of representation: the belief that to write literature is to reinvent literature. Our study of literary form will lead us to engage larger socio-literary issues such as the relationship between high art and mass culture; the redefinition of national identity entailed by expatriatism; the search by cultural minorities for their own literary traditions and ""voices""; and the role of academic literary criticism in canon formation. "
Cunningham and Cunningham: Principles of Environmental Science; Gilbar, S, ed.: Natural State; Leopold, A.: A Sand County Almanac; Snyder, G.: No Nature; Williams, T. T.: Refuge; also a course reader
This is an innovative team-taught course that surveys global environmental issues at the beginning of the twenty-first century and that introduces students to the basic intellectual tools of environmental science and to the history of environmental thought in American poetry, fiction, and the nature writing tradition. One instructor is a scientist specializing in the behavior of soils and ecosystems (Garrison Sposito); the other is a poet (Robert Hass). The aim of the course is to examine the ways in which the common tools of scientific and literary analysis, of scientific method and imaginative thinking, can clarify what is at stake in environmental issues and environmental citizenship. This course is cross-listed with E.S.P.M. C12 and U.G.I.S. C12.
Lahiri, J.: Interpreter of Maladies
Using film, fiction, and cultural events, the course will focus on the work of the Coen brothers and the stories of J. Lahiri to discuss the representation of sexuality, domesticity, and violence.
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. "
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. "