List and Course Description: For more information on this course, please email the professor at gpadilla@berkeley.edu
Blake, W.: Songs of Innocence and of Experience, ed. Geoffrey Keynes
"In recent years the study of William Blake has come to concentrate more and more upon what has been called his composite art--the union of text and image that characterized Blake's work in illuminated printing. In this seminar we'll study the interactions of words and images in Blake's most accessible book: the Songs of Innocence and of Experience. The seminar will meet in the Stone Room of the Bancroft Library so that we can make use of the library's extensive collection of Blake facsimiles and also look at some original Blake engravings. We'll also be able to use an invaluable research tool on the World Wide Web: the William Blake Archive.
In order to fulfill the seminar requirements you need to do the following: 1) Register in advance as a Bancroft Library reader. (This takes only a few moments, but if everybody waits until just before our first meeting, we'll lose a lot of time). 2) Obtain the text--it will be at the customary bookstores, or you can get it at amazon.com--and bring it to each seminar meeting so we can study it together closely and compare it with facsimiles of other copies. 3) Come regularly to seminar meetings and participate in discussion. 4) Write an essay on some aspect of our subject, due at our next-to-the-last meeting.
Our subject for the first meeting is plates 1-4, 12, 19, 28, 29, 33, and 37. Please study these with the editorial notes, and read the editor's introduction as well. "
Kinzie, M: A Poet?s Guide to Poetry; Photocopied Reader
In this seminar, we will consider what nineteenth-century British and American poets have to say (issues of self, desire, pleasure, memory, freedom, faith, beauty, nature, and nation, among others) and how they say these things (features of line, syntax, diction, trope, meter, rhyme, and form). We will read a range of poets, including Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Keats, Poe, Dickinson, Whitman, Browning, Arnold, Melville, Rossetti, and Hopkins.
Joyce, J.: Dubliners
James Joyce?s Dubliners (1914) is a collection of short stories about his native city. Joyce helps invent the modern short story as he tries to evoke the mood or spirit of Dublin as it manifests itself in the behavior of the Dublin men and women. When Joyce wrote, Ireland was still ruled from London both politically and culturally. Joyce?s book is a declaration of cultural independence, as he makes his subject matter the muted lives of middle-class Dubliners. In these stories he studies the social tapestry of Dublin, portraying his characters as protagonists of their own dramas, but at the same time shaped by their environment and so part of the larger Dublin story.
A reader to be assembled by the instructor
In this course the elements of fiction will be practiced and discussed. Students will be expected to complete at least two short stories during the semester. This work will be edited and criticized by the instructor and the class. The class will also produce an anthology of the students? work.
Chaucer: G.: The Canterbury Tales; Milton, J.: Paradise Lost; Spenser, E.: Edmund Spenser?s Poetry; Norton Anthology of English Literature (Volume 1)
This course is an introduction to major works by Chaucer, Spenser, and Milton, with supplements from the Norton Anthology. 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 approaches to these texts in your section meetings and on your papers. Requirements for the course include the writing of three papers and a final exam, as well as participation in section meetings.
"Chaucer, G.: The Canterbury Tales; Spenser, E.: Edmund Spenser's Poetry; Donne, J.: John Donne's Poetry; Milton, J.: Paradise Lost (all Norton Critical Editions)
Recommended Texts: Davis, N. et al.: A Chaucer Glossary; Abrams, M. H.: A Glossary of Literary Terms "
An introduction to English literary history from the late fourteenth to the late seventeenth centuries, with an emphasis on epic and epic romance. The Canterbury Tales, The Faerie Queene, and Paradise Lost will be our main texts, but we will also look at selected Renaissance lyrics (primarily by John Donne). In addition to the formal and historical issues specific to each text, we will consider the following common threads: tensions between received authority (literary, religious, or political) and experience, challenges to didacticism posed by playful or errant literary form, shifting definitions of place and personhood, and wandering quests of all kinds.
Not yet fully determined, but it will most likely include the following: Behn, A., Oroonoko; Swift, J., Gulliver?s Travels; Defoe, D., Robinson Crusoe; Equiano, O., Interesting Narrative; Austen, J., Persuasion; Scott, W., Guy Mannering; Melville, H., Benito Cereno. A 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, Poe, Hawthorne, Melville.
Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol. II; Austen, J: Pride and Prejudice; Brockden Brown, C: Wieland; Franklin, B: Autobiography; acobs, H: Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl; Mackenzie, H: The Man of Feeling; Melville, H: Billy Budd and Other Stories; Swift, J: Gulliver?s Travels
"Our course begins at sea, with the ""violent storm"" and shipwreck of Gulliver?s Travels, and ends at sea in Benito Cereno, with a tragic convergence of Europe, America, and Africa, just off ""a small, desert, uninhabited island toward the southern extremity of the long coast of Chili."" These scenes of dislocation stage the loss of solid ground and correspond to the rise of modernity that forms our topic. Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century modernity involves a variety of new or accelerating instabilities: epistemological anxiety; cultural relativism in newly imagined global contexts; the transformation of economic value from land to (liquid) capital; linguistic self-consciousness in a rapidly expanding print culture; altered forms of subjectivity navigating the revolutionary rhetorics of freedom and individualism. The subtitle of Wieland sums up our course in a word: ""The Transformation."" Throughout, we will ask what literary anxieties and opportunities are created by ""transformation,"" when all that had once seemed solid--self, world, society--turns fluid, as if at sea. "
Conrad, J: Heart of Darkness; Yeats, W.B.: Selected Poems; Eliot, T.S.: The Waste Land & Other Poems; Joyce, J.: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man; Faulkner, W.: The Sound and the Fury; Lawrence, T.E.: Seven Pillars of Wisdom; Woolf, V.: To the Lighthouse; Beckett, S.: Murphy; a course reader with selections from Hopkins, G.M.; Pound, E.; Williams, W.C.
"This course is an introduction to modernism, the period in literary history that Perry Anderson has called a ""portmanteau concept,"" and that we might likewise today frustratedly conclude was a suitcase of largely failed aesthetic and political impulses. Given the survey nature of this lecture, we will outline in broad strokes some of the constitutive moments of several Anglo-American modernisms from among the work of Conrad, Yeats, Eliot, Joyce, T.E. Lawrence, Woolf, Williams, Pound, Faulkner, and Beckett. We will pay considerable attention to doing close literary and cultural readings of these texts and will ask probing questions of form and function. Course requirements include three papers, a midterm, and a final exam, and active participation in lectures and discussion sections.
Note: Given the extensive use of literary history and intertextuality by most of the figures we will be reading, students are strongly urged to have completed 45A and 45B prior to enrolling in this course. "
Conrad J.: Heart of Darkness; Faulkner, W.: The Sound and the Fury; Hurston, Z.N.: Their Eyes Were Watching God; James, H.: The Turn of the Screw; Rhys, J.: Wide Sargasso Sea; Woolf, V.: To the Lighthouse
This course is primarily an introduction to literary modernism in early- through mid-twentieth-century Britain, America, and Ireland. We will be asking what constitutes the modern in a range of now canonical texts that broke with narrative, rhetorical, and cultural traditions. Some of the specific topics we will explore are the relations between formal innovation and transformations of sexual, racial, and national identities; the methods of composing a usable past; the self-representation of the modern author; and the cultural status and uses of literature. In addition to the books listed above, we will be studying a selection of poetry and essays collected in a reader. Written work will consist of three short papers, a final, and a midterm. Regular attendance at lecture and active participation in discussion sections are essential.
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.
Reader (available at Copy Central, 2560 Bancroft Way)
"We will focus on the short fiction and poetry of a select number of contemporary Native North American writers (from within the U.S., not Canada). Key concerns will be on how writers map themes central to contemporary Native American literatures: ceremonial healing, myth and history, orality and literacy, postmodern survival, internal colonialism, sovereignty, return, land-based narrative, community and individuality, ""mixedblood"" identity, geocentric subjectivity, storytelling as cultural continuity and political resistance. In addition, we will examine the literary, cultural and regional influences on these writers and place their work in the context of Native American literatures specifically and U.S. literatures and global indigenous literatures, generally. "