"Allison, D. Bastard out of Carolina
Kingston, M.H. The Woman Warrior
Morrison, T. The Bluest Eye
A course reader "
"This course will take a brief look at what it is to be a woman in American culture. We will pair readings in psychoanalysis and philosophy with the texts listed above to flesh out the questions they raise about our society: Why are these girls' coming-of-age stories scored by sexual violence, racked by the dictates of beauty, scarred by what it takes to become 'American feminine'? We will address theories of power, trauma, and ideology in forging an understanding of race, class and gender-based subject formations.
The development of analytical reading and argumentative writing skills is a central objective of this course. To this end, a large portion of class time will be devoted to individual writing exercises and group writing workshops. Students will be required to write four short analytical essays with selected rewrites, culminating in a final paper which combines autobiography and analysis. "
"Brodsky, J.: selected poems
James, H.: selected stories
Lahiri, J.: selected stories from Interpreter of Maladies
Okri, B.: The Famished Road
Rushdie, S.: Midnight?s Children
Truong, M.: The Book of Salt"
In this course, we will examine the theme of exile in 20th century literature in English. Exile has become a subject of much interest, even considered by some critics to be the norm of contemporary existence. Yet its definitions vary widely, and one of the goals of this course will be to unpack what might constitute exile and how it has been represented in literature, both thematically and formally. In addition to examining the literature, we will critique the concept of exile itself and consider how the term has been used in both productive and problematic ways. Our critical approach to the texts will interlace with our own critical approaches to writing. We will compose essays gradually, beginning with questions that emerge from our initial responses to the texts and working our way toward effective writing and argumentation. A series of in-class workshops will be held to assist students with brainstorming ideas, developing theses, and drafting and revising critical essays. Students will also exchange drafts of their essays in order to offer and receive feedback. (Please note: book list is subject to change.)
"Miller, A. The Crucible
Shakespeare, W. Macbeth
Shelley, M. Frankenstein
Stevenson, R. The Strange Case of Doctor Jekyll and Mr.Hyde
Wilde,O. The Picture of Dorian Gray
Wright, R. Native Son
Course Reader: ?Rime of the Ancient Mariner?, selections from ?Paradise Lost?, selections from Discipline and Punish, ?The Murders in the Rue Morgue?, ?The Sign of Four? "
"Once I falsely hoped to meet with beings who?would love me for the excellent qualities I was capable of unfolding. I was nourished with high thoughts of honor and devotion. But now crime has degraded me beneath the meanest animal?was there no injustice in this?? Am I thought to be the only criminal, when all human kind has sinned against me??You hate me; but your abhorrence cannot equal that with which I regard myself.?--- Frankenstein
Mary Shelley?s Frankenstein raises vexing, irresolvable questions about the nature and formation of the criminal. Frankenstein?s monster commits brutal, unspeakable acts but claims his downfall is the responsibility of human society and his creator, who shun him. As the novel progresses, it becomes increasingly unclear where the locus of criminality lies, and whose acts?the monster?s or Frankenstein?s?are more inherently ?criminal?.
This class will be focused around fictional attempts to explain and explore the nature and mentality of the criminal. What possesses people to step outside the bounds of ?normality? to become criminals.? When and how are those borders contained.? One might argue, and people certainly have, that human nature is inherently criminal (replete with the supposedly sinful pleasures of lust, anger, and greed), kept in check through a rigorous system of social control. As such, we are constantly seeking to explain, and explain away, those who would step outside the boundaries of so-called normality and engage in their criminal instincts. What is criminality? Is it inherent to the human condition? A condition of birth, education, class, race, or gender? Who is responsible for the creation of a criminal? the society which creates the criminal, or the criminal himself? Where are the limits of justice, and when does lawful vengence become unlawful crime? This is an exhausutive topic, one which we cannot do full justice to in a semester. Rather, we?ll simply examine a large sampling of attempts to read the criminal mind over a large historical period.
Students will be assigned to keep a journal in reponse to assigned readings, and for a total of five papers of varying lengths (2-4 pages). There will be an emphasis on revision and editing. "
"Bawcutt, N., ed.: Measure for Measure
Bevington, D., ed.: Shakespeare: The Late Romances
Crewe, J., ed.: Troilus and Cressida
Marsh, N.: Shakespeare: Three Problem Plays
Snyder, S., ed.: All's Well that Ends Well"
In this course, we will read seven of Shakespeare's later plays, three of them often called the problem plays and four usually lumped together as the romances.Together, these constitute some of Shakespeare's most difficult, painful, and uncategorizable work. All betray a tragi-comic view of man, play with ideas of class and nobility and familial relationships, and deeply challenge our moral bearings by combining absurdly horrific betrayals with miraculous happy endings. We will spend about two weeks on each play, and you will write a series of close readings and short argumentative papers that will be frequently subject to peer editing and revision. You will constantly use and improve your practical writing skills.
"Anon. (trans. Heaney): Beowulf
Delany, S.: The Einstein Intersection
Sturgeon, T.: More Than Human
plus a course reader containing the following short texts:
Anon. (trans. Bradley): Judith
Butler, O.: ""The Evening and the Morning and the Night""
Carroll, L.: ""Jabberwocky""
Chiang, T.: ""Liking What You See""
Ford, J. M.: ""Heat of Fusion""
Keats, J.: Lamia
Murphy, P.: ""His Vegetable Wife""
Padgett, L.: ""Mimsy Were the Borogoves""
Shelley, P.: ""Ozymandias""
Wolfe, G.: ""The Fifth Head of Cerberus""
Zelazny, R.: ""24 Views of Mt. Fuji, by Hokusai""
"
"Using texts that explore the exercise of unusual power by unusual characters, this course examines the entangled interfaces linking human and almost-human, individual and community, and identity and responsibility. Who determines what is ""human"" or ""normal""? How does ignoring or minimizing difference impact someone's relationship with society? Where and how do personal and social responsibility overlap and come into conflict? What are some ramifications of the resulting ideological compromise? These questions and others offer points of departure for class discussion as well as the written component of this course. In a series of short essays, we will address the argumentative thesis, issues of sentence and paragraph structure, use of textual evidence, and the process of revision. In addition, please be aware that active participation in class is vital to your success in this course. "
"Strunk & White, The Elements of Style.
Twain, M. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
Hemingway, E. The Sun Also Rises
Kerouac, J. On The Road.
Nabokov, V. The Annotated Lolita.
Mann, T. Death in Venice.
McCarthy, C. The Crossing.
Xeroxed COURSE READER "
"In this course we will study what it means to be ""on the road"" in classic American literature (and one European novella.) We will read about the roadtrips of impulsive boys, American expatriates in Europe, European emigres in America, and Beat Generation hipsters. In class discussions throughout the semester we will examine the techniques by which fiction writers explore their themes and the rather different techniques by which essay writers argue their theses. To illustrate these differences, each novel will be accompanied by an expository essay (or poem) addressing a related topic. The class is intended to develop the student's ability to read analytically and to write standard English prose. Students will write about a dozen 2-4 page papers. These will include opportunities for creative writing, journalism, and expository essays, as well as the usual ""English paper"" analyzing the text. "
"Behn, A. Love Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister
Donne, J. Complete English Poems
Gordon, K. The Deluxe Transitive Vampire
Kierkegaard, S. The Seducer's Diary
Richardson, S. Pamela
Wilmot, J. The Complete Poems of John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester
Wycherley, W. The Country Wife"
"While it's unlikely that anyone has ever emerged from reading a particularly absorbing poem to find his or her shirt unbuttoned, we still find it helpful to use the metaphor of seduction to talk about a certain power that literature can have over us. Poems, stories and plays are frequently said to ""draw us in"" and, if they're good, to ""touch us,"" bringing us within arm's reach of an imaginary author or narrator. Closing imaginative distance in this way forces something into our consciousness that doesn't naturally occur there (hypnotic rhymes, soothing meter, absorbing plots), and makes us forget something else that does (awareness of our self and surroundings). So while this course will explore seduction as a theme, focusing on works of amorousness and exploitation, it will more powerfully concern the antidote to seduction: paying attention. You will learn in this course how to notice the things literature doesn't want you to notice, to question the things it asks you to take for granted, and to investigate the assumptions it tries to bury. And while we will work at becoming perverse and uncooperative readers of literature in order to see how poems and stories operate on us, the most important objective of this class is to turn this new critical awareness back onto our own work and to begin paying attention to the things in our own writing we'd rather forget. In short, we will learn how not to be seduced by our own words. There will be a fair amount of talk about critical reading, but the focus will be on the mechanics of writing. Along the way, you will produce thirty-two pages of your own polished writing, much of which will be required reading for your classmates. "
"Austen, J.: Emma
Austen, J.: Persuasion
Hacker, D.: Rules for Writers: A Brief Handbook
Shakespeare, W.: The Merry Wives of Windsor
Shakespeare, W.: Othello
Tydeman, W. (editor): Four Tudor Comedies
A xeroxed course reader "
This course will train you to write grammatical, concise, stylistically sophisticated, and convincing expository and analytic prose. We will develop your ability to close-read a text, develop a thesis, and marshal and analyze evidence in logically coherent arguments. Class discussions will require participation based on your careful and active reading at home. Class time will also include group work, quizzes, in-class writing, and oral presentations. Our attention will be addressed to novels and plays that represent gossip as a constructive or destructive social force. You will write four or five essays, each of which will incorporate exploratory writing, initial drafts, peer editing, and significant revision. Some of these texts are difficult and long, and all of them are challenging; you must be prepared to keep up with the reading. Constant attendance and frequent participation in class are required.
"Austen, J: Persuasion Crews, F.: The Random House Handbook Shakespeare, W: Twelfth Night Trollope, A: Ayala?s Angel
Film List:
Clueless (Heckerling, 1995)
Holiday (Cukor, 1938)
Persuasion (Michell, 1995)
Some Kind of Wonderful (Deutch, 1987)
Sylvia Scarlett (Cukor, 1936)
Twelfth Night (Nunn, 1996) "
"This course will investigate a certain strain of romantic comedy predicated on the hero?s (or heroine?s) inability to recognize his (or her) ideal partner. In addition to considering the history of romantic comedy more broadly, we?ll study how these particular comedies describe objects of desire, and how sometimes the most desirable partners are rendered romantically and erotically ?illegible? (through processes as diverse as gender confusion, the incest taboo, and the failure to conform to ideals of beauty).
Students will write a series of progressively longer essays, beginning with a diagnostic essay and culminating in a five-page paper. All essays, save the diagnostic, will involve the writing of drafts; three papers will require graded revisions. Though our primary foci (in addition to the course?s thematic concerns) will be argumentation, critical thinking, and essay organization, we will also undergo a semester long grammar and style review, conducted through in-class lessons and quizzes. "
"Bront?, E. Wuthering Heights
Conrad, J. The Nigger of the ?Narcissus?: A Tale of the Sea
Hacker, D. A Writer?s Reference
Hardy, T. Tess of the D?Urbervilles
Sontag, S. Regarding the Pain of Others
Course Reader, available at University Copy (2425 Channing Way)
Contains theoretical essays, short stories and poems, as well as material pertaining directly to rhetorical strategies, organizational and argumentative strategies, and examples of expository writing. "
In this course, we will be using a wide variety of pre-Romantic, Romantic, Victorian and contemporary texts in order to examine the changing function of rhetorical strategies across disciplines and across centuries. In particular, we will be asking questions about the role of ?fellow-feeling,? or sympathy, in the attempt to build a free and democratic society. We will pay close attention to the ways in which language and narrative operate, examining not only what kind of stories get told but how they are told. We will notice, for example, that in order for one fictional character to ?sympathize? with another (and in order for readers to sympathize with characters), narratives must enact certain kinds of violence on their subjects?we seem to be able to ?feel? the most for others only when those others are made to suffer?and that this violence produces ?subjects in distress.? These subjects are sometimes, and quite literally, ?monstrous,? and are often broken, mutilated, damaged, or brutalized in some way . . . and we want to know why! Finally, we will turn from late 18th century discussions of sympathy?s social role to more modern texts to consider the ways in which sympathy is deployed in our own cultural and historical moment. Because this class is reading and writing intensive, you will be asked to do many different kinds of writing, and will be required to do full revision of two major assignments. In addition, you will be required to keep up with the reading and take reading quizzes on a daily basis.
No course description is available at this time.
"Baldwin, J., Giovanni's Room
Congreve, W., Love for Love
Turgenev, I., First Love
The Course Reader will be a compilation of various poems, short stories, fairy tales, and essays.
Films:
Casablanca
Edward Scissorhands "
"This course fulfills the first portion of the undergraduate reading and composition requirement, and as such, it aims to strengthen students� basic writing skills and teach them how to write increasingly complex expository and argumentative essays. The course is, therefore, designed to be writing-intensive rather than reading-intensive.
In addition to completing all writing assignments, students will be expected to come to class regularly and prepared to discuss the readings. The texts we will read closely and write about critically, as well as the movies we will watch, come from a variety of periods and genres and can be (more or less loosely) characterized as �love stories.� In order to give our discussions and writing projects as precise a focus as possible, we will examine what elements of these stories make them �timeless� and how each genre/period engages with representations of love established or conventionalized by other genres/periods. "
"Joyce, J.: Dubliners
Locke, A.: The New Negro
Toomer, J.: Cane
Johnson, J. W.: Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man
Course Reader including (at least) Zora Neale Hurston, T.S. Eliot, William Carlos Williams, Nella Larsen. "
"In this course we will think about the relationship between the ""aesthetic"" and the ""political"" by reading works from two literary formations of the 1920s and 30s that are often taken to embody the two sides of this divide -- modernism, read most often for its purely aesthetic qualities, and the Harlem Renaissance, typically seen in terms of its political commitments. Our goal will be to understand what commonalities obtain between these seemingly distinct bodies of work so that we can more accurately assess where they diverge. As with any good comparison, we will not attempt to disconnect the Harlem Renaissance from its politics nor to argue that modernism is focused primarily on racial equality, but rather to see how these two bodies of work challenge each other and allow for new ways of thinking about the complicated interaction between art and society.
Students will be required to write 5 essays (not including one in-class, ungraded diagnostic essay); three of them will be 3 pages and the last two will be 5. Each student will also be required to submit one rough draft and one revision on an essay of his/her choosing; however I will accept revisions of any paper one week after I?ve handed it back and am happy to look over drafts throughout the semester. There will also be a number of homework assignments -- largely responses to the reading -- and some in-class writing. Vigorous participation and attendance is a must. "
"Paul Auster: The Book of Illusions
Graham Greene: The Quiet American
Grace Metalious: Peyton Place
Susan Sontag: Regarding the Pain of Others
Course reader (essays and short stories)
Frederick C. Crews: The Random House Handbook (recommended)
Films:
Alan Ball: Six Feet Under (selections)
Michael Epstein: American Masters - None Without Sin
Justin Lin: Better Luck Tomorrow
Errol Morris: The Fog of War
Phillip Noyce: The Quiet American
Nicholas Ray: Bigger Than Life
Stephen Sondheim: Sweeney Todd "
"Melodrama is often seen as an old-fashioned or simplistic genre, because it appeals to emotions rather than reason and dramatizes the battle between good and evil. But these characteristics also make melodrama a popular way of dealing with complex problems; melodrama gives its audience clarity in a morally ambiguous world. We will examine the ways that people (from novelists and filmmakers to journalists and politicians) use melodrama to address questions about sexuality, class, race, and nationhood.
Students will begin the course by writing short close readings of small moments in the texts, and progress to longer essays which link these close readings together to form a larger argument. Through these assignments (several of which will be rewritten), students will sharpen two skills: looking closely at evidence and using that evidence to make a claim that matters to them. Additional requirements include three reading quizzes and an oral presentation on one of the works.
Films will be screened outside of class in the late afternoon or evening; students who cannot make the screening can see the films on their own at the Media Center in Moffitt. Texts may be subject to change; please come to the first class before purchasing any books. "
"Chesnutt, C. selections from The Conjure Woman
Harris, J.C. selections from Nights with Uncle Remus
Gilman, C.P. The Yellow Wallpaper
James, H. selections from The American Scene
Toomer, J. Cane
Dos Passos, J. The 42nd Parallel
Darwish, M. Memory for Forgetfulness
Joseph W. Williams, Style: Ten Lessons in Clarity & Grace, 5th edition
A course reader (to be printed by Odin Readers on Center St. and Oxford) containing: this syllabus, poems by Walt Whitman, Gertrude Stein, Hart Crane, George Oppen, Juliana Spahr strategies for close reading, peer editing instructions, paper guidelines, & common errors, as well as critical and poetic works
Recommended texts: John Berger, J. Ways of Seeing Queneau, R. Exercises in Style "
"In this course we will experiment with reading against traditional notions of ?realism? in order both to grasp the central concerns of realist literature composed over the turn of the 20th century and to broaden our analytical horizons. This will mean reading against tendencies with which you may be most comfortable, which view literary characters and narrative voices as the driving forces of literary works and as the repositories of reliable information and/or unencumbered choice . We will approach a number of works which stress the role of external forces of circumstance?historical, economic, geographical, racial, sexual, cultural?in steering experience. We will pay special attention to our authors? obsessions with the shaping power of space and place in an urbanizing landscape. And because many of these writers, surrounded by an unprecedented onslaught of images, are obsessed with the vagaries of appearance, we will watch as their texts negotiate the difference between experience regarded as aesthetic and experience of an unmediated ?actuality.? We will try to think about what spaces and images do to or for subjects in addition to the more familiar focus on what subjects do within or with them. We will also discuss whether, and how, realist ?documentary? modes and ?aesthetic? modes of writing diverge or dovetail.
The course?s theme resonates with our focus on research and composition. As we learn to write, we realize how profoundly un?realistic,? how artful, are our practices of containing and sorting the commotion of our surroundings. By viewing channels of ?information? with a critical eye, we will learn to critique and hone our own modes of perception and its reportage. We will try our collective hand at writing on a number of genres. Documenting the development of our own ideas, we will try to responsibly address those aspects of circumstance which our writing crops or foregrounds, and thus to become more aware and dialectically rigorous thinkers. We will develop two research papers over the course of the semester, moving from drafts through revisions to polished work. "
No course description is available at this time.
"Darwin, C.: On the Origin of the Species; Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex.
Paley, W.: Natural Theology.
Hardy, T.: Tess of the D'Urbervilles; selected poetry and prefaces.
Hopkins, G.: selected poetry.
Stoker, B.: Dracula.
Jonz, S.: Adaptation (film). "
"In this course, we will engage with the concept of ""adaptation"" as it relates to literary genre, social change, Darwin's theory of evolution, and your own approach to writing. You will learn how to be an observant reader, as well as how to be an ""adaptive,"" versatile writer who can respond to the specific requirements of literary analysis and scholarly research. You will be required to write two research papers that relate to the subject matter of the course and also reflect your independent research. Each student will be asked to write a report on an additional relevant text that reflects his/her own interest in the material.
The subject matter of the course will be the relationship between Darwinian evolutionary theory and late Victorian fiction. We will read selections from Charles Darwin's On the Origin of the Species and Descent of Man and will use close reading techniques to uncover the ""literary"" features of these scientific writings. We will establish a sense of short story and novel reading in the mid-nineteenth century by considering serial publication in magazines, three-volume publication, and subscription libraries. Among other features of the texts, we will discuss narrative voice, audience, and the relationship between society/culture and these writers. How can we locate cultural assumptions in an author's use of language? How can we turn an eye toward our own writing, and use this analysis productively toward second and third drafts? We will also look at the novel as a ""adaptive"" form of literature contrasted to the ""higher"" form of poetry, particularly in its associations with the market, women readers and authors, and public taste. Reading will include two novels, a few poems, and few short stories; in the last week of the course, we will watch the film Adaptation to extend our discussion of adapting genres. "
"Course Reader
Coleridge, S.T. and W. Wordsworth The Lyrical Ballads
Eliot, G. Adam Bede
Hacker, D. Rules for Writers
Hong Kingston, M. The Fifth Book of Peace
Johnson, S. Rasselas
Recommended:
Crews, F. The Random House Handbook 6th edition. "
"In this course we will read a variety of works that have been?or might be?construed as offering ?wisdom? to their readers. We will examine sacred texts from several religious traditions, classical forms of wisdom writing (fables, aphorisms, dialogues), and, finally, modern and contemporary literary works written in a variety of genres.
We will want to consider several interrelated questions in our discussions: How does wisdom differ from other kinds of information? Is wisdom a single entity, or a descriptive term that is applied indiscriminately to many discrete kinds of learning? Should we value wisdom more (or, perhaps, less) than other kinds of knowledge? Finally, what is the relationship of wisdom writing to the category of ?literature? itself? Are all literary works examples of wisdom literature? If not, than what do we learn by reading a literary text? If so, why do teachers of literature?including this one?protest when you try to state what the ?message? of a literary work is?
The assignments for this course are designed to improve your writing and research skills. To that end, there will be several substantial papers, as well as exercises in pre-writing, revision, and library research. "
"Blake, W. William Blake: Selected Poetry.
Chekhov, A. The Portable Chekhov.
Dickens, C. The Mystery of Edwin Drood.
Frost, R. The Poetry of Robert Frost.
Shakespeare, William. Shakespeare?s Sonnets.
Williams, J. Style: Towards Clarity and Grace.
A course reader of primary and secondary sources will also be provided.
Required Books:
Carlos Bulos: America is in the Heart
Barbara J. Pulmano Reyes: Gravities of Center
Brian Ascalon Roley: American Son
Nick Carbo, ed.: Pinoy Poetics
Films (in-class):
Penee Bender, Joshua Brown, and Andrea Ades Vasquez, Savage Acts, Wars, Fairs & Empire
Curtis Choi, Fall of the I-Hotel
Gene Cajayon and John Manal Castro, The Debut
Course Reader "
"This course examines selected texts in Filipino literature in English, with emphasis on how writing communities and reading constituencies are developed through media (newspapers, magazines, film) for a minority literature. We focus on how Filipinos in the United States have utilized newspapers and magazines for publication during the early 20th century, when it was difficult or almost impossible to publish in the mainstream press. Many of the texts that we will read during the first half of the class will be from periodicals. We will begin by looking at the historical (colonial) contexts of Filipino writing in the Philippines, at the cultural transitions of Filipino writers who migrated to the United States in the early 20th century, and how they created writing communities and reading constituencies. We will read documents -- essays, speeches, letters -- of the Philippine Independence movement published in the United States, in relation to texts written by American authors � for example, Mark Twain -- involved in the Anti-Imperialist movement. These early documents form the framework for a literature that expresses a strong transnational awareness, and a concern for advocacy and local community action. Close reading and discussion of stories, essays, speeches and reportage will allow us to discuss and write about what makes an essay or speech convincing, and a short story or novel meaningful within various personal and social contexts. There will be equal emphasis in this class on both critical reading and essay writing.
The World Wide Web is providing new venues and reading constituencies for minority writers that is unprecedented. We will become part of this online community in our class ""weblog,"" (online journal), where we can ask questions and discuss the assigned texts. You are encouraged to browse authors' websites and blogs, and Filipino American writers will also be invited to ""visit"" online and participate in our discussions. . "
"Poe, Edgar Allan: ?The Murders in the Rue Morgue? and other stories (course reader)
Coyle, Arthur Conan: ?The Hound of the Baskervilles? (course reader)
Christie, Agatha: Murder on the Orient Express
Mosley, Walter: Devil in a Blue Dress
Morrison, Toni: Song of Solomon
Auster, Paul: City of Glass
Films:
Chinatown
Memento
Mulholland Drive "
"Whodunnit? Who cares? This course about detective fiction will pose more complex questions: What is the relationship between the detected and detective? Between detection and desire? Between criminal and police? What constitutes moral culpability? How do these texts draw the line between public and private? What is it that so irresistably draws ordinary people into ?the scene of the crime?? Beginning with Edgar Allan Poe, commonly acknowledged as the father of modern detective fiction, we will be analyzing a wide variety of detective stories, novels, and films. In essays, revisions, and other short writing assignments, students will be encouraged to explore the social, cultural, and personal dimensions of a genre that is often regarded as light entertainment.
We will also be viewing three films. Students will have the option of watching them during scheduled class screenings or on their own.
This course is intended to develop students? expertise in writing the college research paper. In addition to writing and revising at least one essay about the assigned fictional texts, students will learn how to conduct and present research on a related topic of their own design. "
"Equiano, O: Interesting Narrative
Child, L. M.: Hobomok
Melville, H.: Typee
Cooper, J. F.: The Pioneers
Ridge, J. R.: Joaquin Murieta
Asbury, H.: Gangs of New York
Xeroxed reader "
"1953 marked the first appearance of the word ?ethnicity?; three years later, the U.S. officially abandoned e pluribus unum as its national motto. These minor events were mirrored by a larger scholarly recognition that the history of American society could not continue to be told in the same way, as a tale of progress toward inclusion, or (in turn) of the many merging into one political culture. Our goal in this course will be not only to question the history implied in the phrase e pluribus unum by pointing to persistent exclusions, but to see if we might invert the formula: ""out of one, many."" We will look at a series of (mostly short) texts which represent American ethnicities in a period when no stable concept of ethnicity was available, and when representations of other societies tended to contribute to the imagining of forms of political life, taking writers through and beyond the unifying experiment of the American Constitution. Can ethnic identification--supposedly involuntary or inherited--actually be a model for defining a people and its political will? Has an emphasis on the assimilation of ethnic groups blinded us to the ways the organization of ethnicities may relate to political transformations? How do Anglo-American writers turn to other ethnic groups for models of collective action or of social unity? How do the reports of American explorers, the seafaring of amateur anthropologists, and the rediscovery/invention of ""New"" Worlds and ""primitive"" societies contribute to this project of rethinking politics? How are ethnic idioms represented?
Although students will be required to write several short responses and one long paper on these texts, they will have the option of writing a final research paper on variations of these themes in the twentieth century and beyond. They will be encouraged to shape their project to a discipline of their choosing--whether history, literature, film, sociology, or anthropology--but also to remember that ethnicity is relational and political. While the first premise of this course is that writing about others does not simply reflect one's own ideological assumptions, the second is that writing about one group?s ""experience"" as though it inhabited a vacuum is no less problematic. This final paper will be evaluated according to the strength of research and argument represented in it, as well as by the effort put into draft revisions. "
"Wilde, O. The Importance of Being Earnest, The Decay of Lying, The Critic as Artist
Woolf, V. To the Lighthouse
Plato. The Republic
Joseph Williams. Style: 7 Lessons Towards Clarity and Grace
Course Reader. Selections from Nietzsche, Heidegger, Descartes "
"This course approaches literary works from a philosophical standpoint, taking up certain longstanding philosophical debates about the nature of Truth, and applying those debates to works of literature. We will spend the first few weeks familiarizing ourselves with some of these debates through brief selected readings in the history of philosophy by Plato, Descartes, and Nietzsche. Put simply, we will discuss whether truth is an objective (and universal) part of our external world, or instead, a set of subjective (or pluralistic) perspectives on reality. We will then apply these debates to works by Oscar Wilde and Virginia Woolf. In the case of Wilde, I expect we will explore what it means for Wilde to write essays in the form of dialogues, a conversational form which embraces a multiplicity of perspectives. Likewise, I hope we will appreciate the philosophy behind Woolf?s narrative techniques (i.e. alternating perspectives, fluid points-of-view) and how these techniques reflect her own sense of ""truth."" In the last few weeks of the semester, we will take up these same issues in films, focusing on examples of what is often called ""unreliable narration"" (a term for narratives that in some sense ""lie"" to us). We will look at three canonically ""unreliable"" films: Kurosawa?s Rashomon, Hitchcock?s Stage Fright, and Siodmak?s The Killers.
Our method throughout will be a close in-class analysis of the novels, dialogues, and films. Our focus will be on the development of your close-reading skills as well as an improvement in your writing that builds upon your experience in 1A. Thus, a significant portion of in-class time will also be spent ""workshopping"" each other?s writing. There will also be exercises assigned to develop your research skills for the final paper. "
The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry, The Sun Also Rises (Hemingway, E.), Invisible Man (Ellison, R.), Passing (Larsen, N.), The Passion (Winterson, J.)
In this class we will explore some of the unique challenges posed by modernist literature. Then we will explore the relationship between canonical modernism and African-American literature of the first half of the twentieth century. Further, we will try to decide to what degree certain postmodernist texts inherit a modernist aesthetic and to what degree these texts strike out in new and original directions. In the process, we will reflect on how we might assign meaning to these new developments.
"Nabokov, Vladimir. Lolita
Pynchon, Thomas. The Crying of Lot 49
DeLillo, Don. White Noise
Easton Ellis, Bret. American Psycho
Films:
Lynch, David. Blue Velvet (1986)
Fincher, David. Fight Club (1999)
Inarritu, Alejandro Gonzales. Amores Perros (2001)
Excerpts from:
Twin Peaks
Buffy the Vampire Slayer [an error occurred while processing this directive] "
"This course is designed to introduce the complex problem of the postmodern. Despite the frequent deployment of this term, its definition remains vague, ranging from the fuzzy to the completely opaque. The central questions driving the course will revolve around competing models for defining the postmodern. These questions include: how do we differentiate the modern from the postmodern? Can we define postmodernity as a clearly demarcated historical period, or are its boundaries more fluid? Can we identify something like a postmodern style? Can we trace a genealogy of the postmodern? What are its material roots? In particular, what is its relationship to the rise of mass culture, and specific media such as film, television, video and digital technologies? How does postmodernity affect major categories of identity formation such as gender, class and race? As we gain a fuller understanding of the problems surrounding the field, we will also try to identify some of the underlying anxieties of these major accounts, particularly with regard to the consumer, the proliferation of the mass-produced, spectacle, and globalization. Ultimately, we will want to ask what it would mean to move beyond the postmodern?
We will attempt to explore these questions mainly through the primary literary texts. However, I will also introduce additional materials from other disciplines which might illuminate the problem and allow us to refine our analytic skills through various disciplines. Most of the supplemental material will be drawn from the visual arts, such as Surrealism, Dada and Pop Art. We will also try to engage some works of television and music video. The aim here is to get a sense of the interdisciplinary nature of the phenomenon, and see how it emerges differently according to particular media.
The main aim of this course is to continue developing and polishing the writing/ critical thinking skills obtained in 1A. By engaging the primary works of the class, we will continue focusing on critical thinking skills, close reading/ analysis, argumentation and organization. In addition to our formal essays, we will have weekly writing assignments, as well as substantial revisions which will allow students to work with feedback. The semester will culminate in a final research paper which will require the use of secondary sources in preparation for upper division level work. "
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. "
"Hughes, T.: Tom Brown's Schooldays; Collins, W.: Moonstone; Forster, E.M.: A Passage to India or Howards End; Orwell, G.: ""England Your England""; Ishiguro, K.: The Remains of the Day; Smith, Z.: White Teeth; and a course reader with selected poems by Tennyson and Gerard Manley Hopkins and critical essays "
"This is a research intensive junior seminar that explores some of the compulsions and contradictions inherent in the fabrication of a national culture. We will begin by posing two questions: who are the ""English"" who have named our language, this department, and a vast literature that has often had little to do with ""England""? What is ""Englishness""? This course is an attempt to play with these questions while reading a collection of late-19th- and 20th-century works (poems, essays, and novels mostly) and using the resources of the library and various kinds of criticism to thicken our inquiry. Our major reading (i.e., the longer novels) will include Wilkie Collins' Moonstone (1868) and Zadie Smith's White Teeth (2000). We will try to study how ""Englishness"" constantly defined (and redefined) itself alongside and against issues of race, sexuality, nation, location, class, gender, and empire. In keeping with the research and methods mandate of English 100, we will make several class trips to Doe and Bancroft Libraries in order to prepare to write a major research paper. Course requirements include attendance and active participation in all meetings, 1 graded oral presentation, 2 short papers, and a longer (15 page) research paper. There will be no midterm or final exam.
Note: Students are required to have completed at least two courses from the 45A-B-C sequence prior to enrolling in this seminar. "
See below
"This course will focus specifically on women and style while covering a diverse range of texts. We will be interested in the way women writers styled themselves-in what manner they present themselves as authors and artists, how they encode textual self-presences, and the way women and art are represented in their texts. The course will also look at the way women?s texts are styled, and how those texts are positioned in relation to specific aesthetic, formal, and literary values, especially as these construct the feminine. All of the texts will confront issues of gender and style through the formal qualities of the work, and many will feature a central female figure who herself practices a literary, fine, domestic, plastic, or dramatic art. Attention will be paid to the larger cultural context and aesthetic debates that these arts reference, and especially to Stowe?s, Spofford?s, Wharton?s and Gilman?s books on the style of homes.
Texts include: poetry by F. Osgood, E. Dickinson; F. Fern, Ruth Hall; H. B. Stowe, Uncle Tom?s Cabin; E. Keckley, Behind the Scenes; E. B. Browning, Aurora Leigh; H. Spofford, The Amber Gods; L. M. Alcott, ""A Pair of Eyes"" and ""The Marble Woman;"" E. Wharton, The House of Mirth; C. P. Gilman, The Yellow Wallpaper "
"Niedecker, Lorine: Collected Works; Oppen, George: New Collected Poems; Zukofsky, Louis: ""A""; Zukofsky, Louis: Complete Short Poetry "
"With strong literary affiliations to Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams (and with political commitments thoroughly antithetical to those of Pound), the Objectivist Poets emerged as a group in a 1931 issue of Poetry magazine, guest edited by the group?s ostensible founder (or curator), Louis Zukofsky. Announcing their program, Zukofsky defined ""an objective"" as ""The lens bringing the rays from an object to a focus. That which is aimed at. ... Desire for what is objectively perfect, inextricably the direction of historic and contemporary particulars."" What such poetry looks like is, as we will see, enormously varies.
There are five central figures among the Objectivist Poets; while looking at the work of all of them, this course will focus primarily on the writings of George Oppen (1908-1984), Lorine Niedecker (1903-1970), and Louis Zukofsky (1904-1978). In order to read their works well (and in order to understand the reasons for their enormous influence on postmodern and contemporary experimental writing) we will consider this important facet of late Modernism in terms of methodology as well as technique. "
Carson A.: Autobiography of Red; Dove, R.: Thomas and Beulah; Gl?ck, L.: Wild Iris; Shakespeare, W.: Sonnets; Course Reader
"This seminar focuses on the protean form of the poetic sequence in a broad range of poets mostly writing in English. It is NOT a survey course in literary history and makes no pretense to canonical coverage. It IS a chance to read some great poetry while exploring different modes of repetition, revision, retraction, call-and-response and completion between poems, as well as formal problems of structure, variant orders, groupings, double plots and multiple voices.
What makes a poem free-standing as well as part of a larger structure? How do poetic sequences organize time differently than more explicitly plot-dependent narrative or dramatic genres? What kinds of experimental patterns--constellations, parallelisms, circular and recursive movements--emerge as alternatives to linear development?
Particular focus will be given to the overlap between problems of formal unity and social and political questions of erotic union, social cohabitation, community and relationship. What kinds of porous, tenuous, shifting, even failed structures or ""houses"" do sequences represent? How is the isolated lyric poem to the sequence as the sexual act to marriage or life-long companionship?
Readings include sonnet cycles, elegiac sequences, marriage sequences, meditative or devotional verse and novels in verse by Petrarch, Shakespeare, Donne, Wordsworth, Dickinson, Barrett Browning, Meredith, Whitman, Hardy, Yeats, Stevens, Geoffrey Hill, Louise Gl?ck, Anne Carson and Rita Dove, among others. Independent readings of other poetic sequences also encouraged. "
Aristotle: Poetics; Bakhtin, M: The Dialogic Imagination; Barthes, R: S/Z; Chesnutt, C: The House Behind the Cedars; Propp, V: The Morphology of the Folktale; Sophocles: Sophocles I: Three Tragedies; course reader
"This is an introduction to some classics in the theory of narrative. We will look also at a number of, mainly, short narratives and analyze them closely, slowly. Theorists as early as Aristotle always used an exemplary narrative for their analyses, and so we shall have to read the narratives of the theorists along with the theories. We shall strive to listen to stories, to see how plots are composed, organized.
There will be a number of exercises, many of them ungraded but required. And I project that there will be required about five papers that will be graded. "
Acosta, Oscar: Revolt of the Cockroach People, Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo; Castillo, Ana: Sapogonia; Maya-Murray, Yxta: Locas; Ramos, Manuel: The Ballad of Rocky Ruiz; Ruiz, Ronald: Happy Birthday Jesus, Big Bear; Viramontes, Helena: Under the Feet of Jesus; Santiago, Danny: Famous All Over Town
"This course will examine representations of working class characters and their encounters with the law in nine Chicana/o novels. All of these novels tell stories of workers who challenge the law in one form or another. Six of the novels were written by practicing attorneys, and four of them are narrated from the perspective of an attorney. What is the social significance of the centrality of the law in these novels? How are the events of the novel to be interpreted when narrated from the perspective of a lawyer? What do the representations of legal struggles reveal about history, class positioning, and the formation of cultural identity? These are the kinds of questions we will seek to answer in our study of these novels. All members of the seminar are expected to attend class regularly and participate actively in classroom discussions. Students will be required to present at least one oral report in class and write at least two papers.
Be sure to read the paragraph starting on page 1 of this Announcement of Classes regarding enrollment in English 100! "
Jane Austen, Emma; Mikhail Bahktin, The Dialogical Imagination; Honor? de Balzac, P?re Goriot; Roland Barthes, S/Z; Pierre Bourdieu, The Rules of Art; Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment; Gustave Flaubert, Sentimental Education; E.M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel; Georg Luk?cs, Theory of the Novel; D.A. Miller, Jane Austen, or the Secret of Style; Course reader with texts by Bahktin, Barthes, Woloch, et al.
"The seminar undertakes to read four major novelists, each in conjunction with a theorist or critic who has based his account of the novel-form on this one particular practitioner. The pairings are: Balzac/Barthes, Flaubert/Bourdieu, Dostoevsky/Bahktin, and Austen/Miller. These accounts will also help us reflect on two ostensibly universal understandings of the novel, by Lukacs and Forster, and vice versa.
Requirements: As befits a seminar, attendance is required at every meeting, and the quality of your participation in class discussion will be no less important a factor in your final evaluation than your written work. The latter will consist of two papers and a final examination. "
Austin, M.: Land of Little Rain; Norris, F.: McTeague; Stegner, W.: Angle of Repose; Twain, M.: Roughing It; West, N.: Miss Lonelyhearts and Day of the Locust; Chandler, R.: Farewell, My Lovely. A course reader will contain selections from: Browne, J.R.: A Peep at Washoe and Washoe Revisited; Muir, J.: The Yosemite; Ridge, J.R.: The Life and Adventures of Joaquin Murieta; Stevenson, R.L.: The Silverado Squatters; + Jeffers, R.; Gunn, Th.; Hass, R.
"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). "
Richard Sylvester (ed.), Anchor Anthology of Sixteenth-Century Verse; John Milton, Samson Agonistes; John Bunyan, Grace Abounding; Erin Mackie (ed.), The Commerce of Everyday Life: Selections from the Tatler and the Spectator; Frances Burney, Evelina; Jane Austen, Persuasion; John Ashbery, Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror; Roland Barthes, A Lover's Discourse; Kazuo Ishiguro, The Unconsoled; a course reader with additional poetry and theoretical essays.
"Reading across a wide historical and generic range, we will explore how literary works conceive of their creators. Whether presented as a literal ""expression""-a symptom of melancholia, lovesickness, or religious ecstasy-as an extension of the author's senses, or as an entire world pervaded by authorial omnipresence, every text has an implied author, with which the actual author may identify but to which he is not identical. This author in the text, however, inevitably shapes our impression of the author of the text. We will try to sharpen our sense of the relationship between ideal authors and their real-world counterparts by tracking the comings and goings of the author's body and the scene of literary composition, from the Renaissance lyric ""I,"" through personae like Mr. Spectator and the Female Spectator, to their disappearance and redistribution in epistolary narration and free indirect discourse, i.e., the novel. We'll end by considering a few recent texts in which the author appears in a self-portrait as variously populated as the world. Throughout the course we will reflect on the role of the author in our own work as well, paying close attention to how our choice of terms (work versus text, intention versus strategy) modifies the kinds of assertions we make as critics."
Austen, J., Pride and Prejudice; Dickens, C., Bleak House, Our Mutual Friend; Shakespeare, W., 1 Henry IV; Shaw, G.B., Pygmalion
"Big nineteenth-century novels are noted for sprawling. The novels of Charles Dickens are particularly noted for sprawling. I want this course to show you that genuine sprawl can and often does coexist with organizations of wholes and parts as precise and delicate in their scale as the smaller, usually cruder ones that commonly thrust themselves upon one's consciousness when one reads a short, openly delicate lyric.
I mean to spend at least half the in-class time of the course on two examples of precision sprawl--Dickens's Bleak House and his Our Mutual Friend.
I will want first, however, to look just as hard at one other great nineteenth-century British novel--Pride and Prejudice--and one notable but academically uncelebrated twentieth-century novel: EITHER Agatha Christie's The Mysterious Affair at Styles--1920--or her The Secret Adversary--1922 (I haven't decided which and don't expect to before July, but since you will need to buy neither, the delay shouldn't matter).
My reason for including one of the Christie books in a course labeled ""nineteenth-century"" is that it's difficult to be pretentious in talking about books that are still genuinely popular. Christie books are obviously pleasure machines. Pride and Prejudice and the two Dickens books are too, but they have now been so long, so deep in so many kinds of pretentious interpretation that it is easy to think of them as thesis mines. We will begin the course with a Christie book because it is an uncluttered site from which to see what fictions do to pleasure readers. After that, it should be easy to look at Pride and Prejudice, Bleak House, and Our Mutual Friend as the mere sources of casual delight that they are.
Justifying the presence of Pygmalion-which is neither nineteenth-century nor a novel--is not so easy. Suffice it to say that, by the time you've read both Our Mutual Friend and it, the presence of Bernard Shaw's 1913 play Pygmalion on the reading list will be obvious. The same is true of Melville?s Bartleby the Scrivener-an 1856 novella that relates to Bleak House in much the way Pygmalion does to Our Mutual Friend.
(You can get Bartleby, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, and The Secret Adversary free on the internet; go to www.gutenberg.net; put BARTLEBY [or either Christie title] into the title box; click on ""search,"" and download the complete text. I don't think you need buy hard copies of either Bartleby or the Christie novel I finally choose.
In fact, you can get the whole reading list from www.gutenberg, if you like. At the first class meeting, we can talk about the practicality of substituting free e-texts for expensive book store copies.)
I will also ask you to read Shakespeare's 1 Henry IV. I will want it fresh in your minds when we start on Our Mutual Friend.
I will assign three essays--each of a length determined by the amount you have to say and your skill in saying it economically. The third essay will take the place of a final examination.
I will give daily quizzes to make sure everyone keeps up with the reading. "
Bratton, Cook, Gledhill, eds.: Melodrama; Doane, M.: The Desire to Desire; Kaplan, E.: Motherhood & Representation; Gledhill, Ch., ed.: Home is Where the Heart Is
We will examine film melodramas from some early silent examples to 50?s & 60?s Hollywood classic realist/narratives. Melodrama has affiliations to a range of genres and invites interpretations from neo-Marxist, psychoanalytic and feminist critiques. We will consider the appeal of melodrama to its audience, and canvas the dominant moods and themes from Griffith to Sirk.
Chomsky, N.: Language and Mind; Pinker, S.: The Language Instinct; Radford, A.: Transformational Grammar: A First Course
This course will focus on the structure of English. There will be a dual emphasis on a rich array of constructions and on the grammatical theories proposed to account for them. While the primary focus is on the grammar of spoken English, some attention will be given to the theory of universal grammar and to the relation between grammar and literary style.
"Di Cesare, Mario, ed., George Herbert and the Seventeenth-Century Religious Poets; Donne, John, Complete English Poems; Maclean, Hugh, ed., Ben Jonson and the Cavalier Poets; Milton, John, Paradise Lost, ed. Scott Elledge
Recommended: Bacon, Francis, Essays; Hill, Christopher, A Century of Revolution, 1603-1714 "
"Although I am putting a history book on the recommended list, this will be a course on works written in the first three quarters of the seventeenth century, not a course on the century itself.
I think I can teach you more about the seventeenth-century works I don't discuss in class by looking in detail at a few works than I could by scurrying through a handful of anthologies or by generalizing at length about either the particular qualities of particular authors or schools or by focusing on the particular qualities that characterize the culture that seventeenth-century literature reflects. I'm not good at categorizing, and I deeply mistrust categorization as an intellectual tool.
I will spend most of my time--probably all of it, in fact--on verse. That's mainly because verse was what the seventeenth century did best, but also because I don't have much that is worth listening to to say about much seventeenth-century prose. I may talk about one or two of Francis Bacon's essays, but the reading will otherwise be of verse by Donne, Jonson, Herrick, George Herbert, Waller, Milton, Suckling, Lovelace, and Marvell. I want particularly to talk about things that most English majors have dealt with before--notably the most often assigned poems of Donne and Herbert and, most notably, Paradise Lost. (I realize that Paradise Lost might put some people off taking the course. Such people have probably tried, or been asked to try, to read Paradise Lost as if it got the stock Sunday-school responses it sounds as if it's trying to get. Given a chance to read the poem as something other than a failed effort to versify its editors' footnotes, such people are likely to see how beautiful Paradise Lost is and to wish it longer.)
Three papers, each of a length determined by how much you have to say and how efficient you are in saying it. The third paper will take the place of a final examination and will be due in my box in 322 Wheeler Hall any time between the last class meeting and 3:30 p.m. on whatever day is assigned this course for a final exam. "
Any one of the following Complete Shakespeare editions: The Complete Pelican Shakespeare, Stephen Orgell and A.R. Braunmuller, eds.; The Riverside Shakespeare, G. Blakemore Evans, et al., eds.; The Norton Shakespeare, Stephen Greenblatt, ed.; The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, David Bevington, ed.
"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. We?ll include some of the sonnets as well, which were written and re-written in this period. Our approach will be to consider Shakespeare writing within, that is, shaping and shaped by, a lively theatrical and poetic tradition, as well as some of the historical and social issues put into ""play"" in the plays. Further, we?ll be conscious of Shakespeare as a cultural icon, specifically our critical sense that the chronological order of his plays represent a progression away from the very plays and poems that we?ll spend most of the semester reading. Here is a tentative reading list: The Taming of the Shrew, Richard III, Midsummer Night?s Eve, Romeo and Juliet, Much Ado About Nothing, Hamlet and the Sonnets. "
The Riverside Shakespeare (2nd edition)
This course is designed to give you a sense of the range of Shakespeare?s career. Lectures will focus on two related topics: first, how Shakespeare uses plot and character to think about literary, social, sexual, religious, political, and philosophical issues; and second, how Shakespeare justifies his life in the theater, when much of English society regarded the theater as a frivolous, debased, and vaguely criminal institution
Milton, J.: Paradise Lost, Complete Shorter Poems, Selected Prose; Course Reader
This course offers an introduction to the poetry and prose of one of the greatest writers and political radicals in English literature. We will learn to read Milton?s work closely, with attention to all of its rhetorical complexity. We will also study the social and political context of Milton?s work, with particular emphasis on the English revolution. Secondary readings in contemporary pamphlets, poetry, and political theory, as well as in modern literary theory and criticism.
The Norton Anthology of English Literature, 7th edition, Volume I, Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Selection; Wycherley, J.: The Country Wife; Defoe, D.: Robinson Crusoe; Course reader
"The period from the ""Restoration"" of Charles II (1660) to the death of Alexander Pope (1744) produced the last poems of Milton, the first English pornography and feminist polemic, the most devastating satires ever written, some of the most influential novels, the most amusing comedies, and the most outrageous obscenity. London (already the largest city in the world) burned to the ground--we will begin the course by reading contemporary accounts of this catastrophe--but within a few generations had developed all the benefits of modern civilization: a stock market, a scientific revolution, an insurance industry, a colonial empire based on slavery. This course will try to convey not only the abundance and brilliance of this period, but its contrasts and contradictions. Canonical figures like Milton, Hobbes, Dryden, Congreve, Pope and Swift will be juxtaposed to scandalous and/or marginal authors: women writers like Aphra Behn, Mary Astell and Mary Wortley Montagu, Puritan outlaws like John Bunyan, and renegade aristocrats like the Earl of Rochester. This stylish but realistic literature tackles fundamental questions: How can a culture restore its self-confidence after a devastating civil war? Is the success of society incompatible with morality? Does reason help us to lead a better life, or is it a cruel delusion? How can men and women live together in a civilized world? What resources are available for those who are excluded from this ""civilization,"" especially the enslaved and the colonized? Is this ""the best of all possible worlds""? If not, are irony and humor absolutely necessary to make existence bearable? Are babies tastier roasted or boiled?
Most of our readings come from the Norton Anthology, with additional poems by Rochester and others, plus Wycherley's sex-farce The Country Wife and Defoe's world-famousRobinson Crusoe. "
Bennett, Arnold, The Old Wives? Tale; Butler, Samuel, Erewhon or The Way of All Flesh; Conrad, Joseph, Under Western Eyes or Nostromo; Hardy, Thomas, The Return of the Native; James, Henry, The Portrait of a Lady; Lawrence, D. H., Sons and Lovers or some early stories; Meredith, George, Diana of the Crossways or The Ordeal of Richard Feverel; Wilde, Oscar, The Importance of Being Earnest
This course will consider the British novel between Late Victorianism and Modernism. The reading list will include some of the above.
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 in English. Workload: Reading: 150-200 pages per week. Written work: short written assignments, take-home midterm paper (3-5 pages), final paper (5-8 pages), in-class final exam (textual explication).
Lauter, P., ed.: The Heath Anthology of American Literature (vol.1); Miller, P., ed.: The American Puritans: Their Prose and Poetry; Rowson, S.: Charlotte Temple; Brown, C. B.: Edgar Huntly; Photocopied Reader
"This course will offer a survey of the literature produced in North America before 1800: European accounts of ""discovery"" and exploration; competing Puritan versions of settlement; conversion, captivity, and slave narratives; diaries and journals; eighteenth-century poetry by women; Native American oratory; autobiography; letters, essays, political debate; and novels. Arching across this survey will be concerns linking literature and history, language and politics. What are the ""stories"" of America? What are their shapes, sounds, and trajectories? Who tells them, when, and why? Some of the crucial narrative junctures to be explored will be the ""discovery"" of America, the Antinomian Crisis, the Pequot War, the declaring of independence, and the 1793 yellow fever epidemic. Two midterms and one final examination will be required. "
Louisa May Alcott, Little Women; Charles Chesnutt, Marrow of Tradition; Emily Dickinson, Complete Poems; Theodore Dreiser, Sister Carrie; Paul Laurence Dunbar, Lyrics of Lowly Life; Jos? Mart?, Selected Writings; Jacob Riis, How the Other Half Lives; Mark Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn; Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Southern Horrors; Edith Wharton, House of Mirth; Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass; There will also be a course reader of poetry, short stories, and journalism.
A survey in United States literature from the end of the Civil War to the beginning of the twentieth century. The course pays special attention to matters of violence, urban life, and social reform as they were refracted within an increasingly stratified public sphere. There will be two midterms and one final exam.
Burroughs, W.S: Naked Lunch; Chin, Frank: Donald Duk; Ellison, Ralph: Invisible Man; Kingston, M: The Woman Warrior; Pyncheon, Thomas: The Crying of Lot 49; Wright, Richard: Native Son; Burroughs, W.: Junky; a Course Reader, available at cost from Copy Central, 2560 Bancroft Way.
"This course will examine images, metaphors and strategies of visibility and invisibility in narrative literature produced by members of three American cultures--African American, Asian American and European American--taking note of the differences and similarities within the cultures studied as well as the similarities and differences between them. In this examination I hope that we will all learn more about how it is that what we see is deeply affected by our cultures. Our cultures also deeply influence whom we see, as well as how we feel about being seen by anyone defined as ""other,"" or about revealing to ""others"" any information that is felt ought to remain hidden. This examination should also afford us a chance to learn the various ways in which different cultures work to make this influence invisible, and to learn how writers may use material that their own cultures attempt to hide or suppress in establishing themselves or their characters as selves. The course will consist mostly of lecture, though I?ll try to accommodate as much discussion as time and class size will allow. "
Addams, J: Twenty Years at Hull House; Chesnutt, C: The Marrow of Tradition; Dixon, T: The Clansman; Lippman, W: Drift and Mastery; Porter, G: The Rise of Big Business; Sinclair, U: The Moneychangers; Taylor, F: The Scientific Principles of Management; Wharton, E: The House of Mirth; Wiebe, R: The Search for Order
This is an introduction to a number of cultural/political/economic/social issues from a transitional period of the United States between the rise of industrial capitalism (big corporate businesses and huge urban centers) in the late 19th-century and the beginnings of a modernist attempt to bring order to what was often felt to be the chaos of development. In addition to a variety of texts, there will be screenings of a number of films. Two mid-terms and a final exam.
See below
This course will focus on American literature and culture in the 1920?s. We will address the main features of this extraordinary decade through novels, memoirs, films, and cultural histories. We will devote substantial time to Americans in Paris, including both writers and jazz musicians. We will read texts by Janet Flanner, Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, Sylvia Beach, Louis Armstrong and Malcolm Cowley, among others. Requirements include one paper, one mid-term, and a final.
"Anzald'a, G: Borderlands/La frontera; S. Cisneros: Caramelo; Hinojosa, R.: Klail City; Martinez, R.: Crossing Over; Paredes, A.: Between Two Worlds; Folklore and Culture; George Washington G?mez; The Shadow; ""With His Pistol in His Hand"": A Border Ballad and Its Hero; Rechy, J.: The Miraculous Day of Amalia G?mez"
This course will explore the invention of a Chicano and Chicana sense of place, and with the sense of freedom and dystopia associated with ethno-racial structures of feeling tied to a geoculture and region. How do imaginative writers such as Am?rico Paredes, Gloria Anzald?a, John Rechy, Rolando Hinojosa, Rub?n Martinez, and Sandra Cisneros negotiate the tension between the national and transnational forces at work in the Americas measuredly and by design? Exposure to postcontemporary works in cultural criticism, border thinking, and theory will also be part of the semester?s agenda.
A Course Reader will be available at cost from Copy Central.
This is an advanced workshop course in writing fiction, intended for students who are already pretty experienced with the basic skills of characterization, plotting, etc. This course has no prerequisites, but a knowledge of the critical vocabulary we use in analyzing and evaluating fiction will be helpful. Since the workshop is open to students in other disciplines, we may need to spend some time at the beginning of the term getting familiar with general procedures and terms. We will spend most of our class time analyzing stories written by class members. It will be my responsibility to make sure that these discussions are thorough, critical and supportive. Each student can expect to have two of his/her stories discussed by the entire class, and a third story critiqued by the instructor.
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. "
Weingarten, R. and Higgerson, R. eds.: Poets of the New Century; Gioia, D., Mason, D., and Schoerke, M., eds.: Twentieth-Century American Poetics
This workshop is for those who love to read and write poetry and who wish to continue the serious study and practice of poetics. Although much of our time will be spent discussing student poems, we'll also analyze poetry and essays on poetics from two assigned anthologies. You?ll be asked to write a weekly poem, often in response to a specific catalyst; to write short responses to the assigned poems and essays; and to make responsible contributions to all discussions. Class attendance is an absolute must. You also might be asked to memorize and recite/perform a contemporary poem and/or to attend and comment upon a few designated poetry readings.
"Attridge, Derek, Poetic Rhythm: An Introduction; Course Reader
Note: The required text will be available only through:
Cody's Books
2454 Telegraph Avenue
Berkeley, CA 94704
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, short written commentaries on other students' work, a review of a poetry reading, and a semi-self-directed study of prosody; these efforts will all be gathered in a final portfolio of work to be handed in at semester's end. Class participation will include memorization and recitation of other writer's poems and discussion of material brought in by the instructor.
Lopate, P. ed.: The Art of the Personal Essay
"This class will concentrate on the art and craft of the personal essay. Students will complete three short writing assignments and two new essays. We will discuss the essays in the assigned anthology as well as students? work.
To be considered for admission in this course, please submit 10-12 double-spaced, photocopied pages of your creative nonfiction (no fiction, poetry, plays, or academic writing), along with an application form, to Professor Kleege?s mailbox in 322 Wheeler BY 4:00 P.M., TUESDAY, April 20, AT THE LATEST. "
A course reader
"This is a workshop for the translation of poetry. Translators are expected to share their work and to participate in the criticism of the work of others. Discussion will range from the larger problems of the possibility of translation to the particular problems of a specific text in a specific language. Our task is to produce translations, but en route we will consider whether the ""poetry"" translates along with the ""meaning""; the matter of music versus sense; the presence of the translator?s voice; intention; matters of form; the interplay of poet, translator, reader; and the like. Translators must work on poetry but may do so in any language. "
"BOOKS REQUIRED (all in paperback) (E = early in course; M = middle; L = late)
M - Piers Plowman: An Edition of the C-Text, ed. Derek Pearsall. University of Exeter [England] Press (distributed in US by Northwestern U Press), 1994. 0-85989-429-0 [$16.95]
E - Poems of the Pearl Manuscript, ed. M. Andrew and R. Waldron. University of Exeter [England] Press (distributed in US by Northwestern U Press), 1997. 0-85989-514-9 [$19.95]
E - Wynnere and Wastoure and the Parlement of the Thre Ages, ed. Warren Ginsberg. Medieval Institute Publications, 1992. 1-879288-26-5 [$7.00]
M - The Piers Plowman Tradition, ed. Helen Barr. J. M. Dent, 1993. 0-460-87050-5 [$8.95]
L - King Arthur's Death: The Middle English The Stanzaic Morte Arthur and The Alliterative Morte Arthure, Ed. Larry D. Benson and Edward E. Foster. Medieval Institute Publications, 1994. 1-879288-38-9 [$13.] "
"This seminar will read a substantial selection of the best alliterative poetry of the later 14C in England. These works represent an intensive cultivation, during a few decades, of a metrical preference with much deeper roots in earlier English verse, and a short ""afterlife."" We will examine the literary and cultural significance of this brief flourishing of alliterative verse--and the relations of the ""masterpieces"" of the form to antecedent and subsequent writings in this form--as it offers an unusual medieval case of the self-conscious clustering of explicit literary values and ideologies around a formal practice, and the nuanced articulation of relations between forms and cultural meanings.
Students will write a long (~15-18 pp) final research paper, reporting more briefly throughout the term on each of several steps in research and writing. There will also be a library reserve list, and a selection of photocopied material in a reader. "