Announcement of Classes: Summer 2012

All-Courses Lists
Reading and Composition
Upper Division
Berkeley Connect

Course #		Instructor	Course Area
N1A/1 Reading & Composition: Unreliable Narrators MW 10-12 Session:	What happens when the teller of a story misleads us? What qualities make for a palatable narrator who we as readers are willing to follow to the end of the book? In this course, we will examine through select twentieth-century novels the conditions t...(read more)	Xiang, Sunny	Reading and Composition
N1A/2 Reading & Composition: Racial Metaphors of Global Capitalism MW 2-4 Session:	From myths of the Yellow Peril to contemporary discourses on the model minority, representations of Asian American subjects have long been intertwined with metaphors of economic exchange and capitalist excess. More than simply agents of capitalism, ...(read more)	Lee, Amy	Reading and Composition
N1A/3 Reading & Composition: Destroying Modernity--Ruin and Apocalypse, 1750-2012 MW 6-8 Session:	"i know this wont happen...bt i cant wait fr something like this to happen...it sure is thrilling and i'm bored of life!!" (Comment on youtube string for 2012 trailer, 5/8/2012) This class will explore the perverse pleasures of...(read more)	Cannon, Benjamin Zenas	Reading and Composition
N1B/1 Reading & Composition: Techno-Orientalism TTh 10-12 Session:	Course Objectives This course will focus on developing students’ practical fluency with exposition and argumentation, with an emphasis on research skills. A short diagnostic essay will be assigned at the beginning of the semester followed by two prog...(read more)	Fan, Christopher Tzechung	Reading and Composition
N1B/2 Reading & Composition: Fictions of the Human TTh 12-2 Session:	What constitutes our humanness? Are thinking and language-use uniquely human capacities or can intelligence be attributed to animals and machines? Is it possible to conceive of a timeless definition of the human being, or is human identity periodical...(read more)	Gaydos, Rebecca	Reading and Composition
N1B/3 Reading & Composition: Victorian Sensation TTh 4-6 Session:	The literary genre of the Victorian sensation novel of the 1860s-1870s was defined less by its form and content than by the response it was supposed to engender in its readers. This course aims to explore the significance of physical and psychologica...(read more)	Knox, Marisa Palacios	Reading and Composition
N1B/4 Reading & Composition: Crossing the Color Line TTh 6-8 Session:	Color, for anyone who uses it, or is used by it, is a most complex, calculated and dangerous phenomenon. – James Baldwin This course will explore the act of racial and gender passing in American literature and culture. Narratives of passing problema...(read more)	Martinez, Rosa Angelica	Reading and Composition

Course #		Instructor	Course Area
N117S/1 Shakespeare MW 10-12 Session:	This course is an introductory survey at the upper-division level. We will attempt to read eight Shakespeare plays plus a selection of sonnets. As California Shakespeare Theater (“Cal Shakes”) in near-by Orinda will be performing The Tempest during t...(read more)	Nelson, Alan H.	Shakespeare
N121/1 The Romantic Period MTuTh 12-2 Session:	We'll spend six weeks reading the poetry and prose of the Romantic Period. Although we'll read a number of different figures, we will focus on the careers of William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. This course will be taught in Session D, ...(read more)	Puckett, Kent	British 19th-Century
N130A/1 American Literature: Before 1800 MTuTh 4-6 Session:	This course provides a survey of English-language American literature to 1800. We will explore a wide range of texts from narratives of discovery and exploration through the literature of the American Revolution and the formations of an early nation...(read more)	Tamarkin, Elisa	American Literature
N130D/1 American Literature 1900-1945 MTuTh 10-12 Session:	A survey of American literature tracing the literary response to the emerging shape of modern life in the first decades of the twentieth century. We will read across a range of genres and styles to assess the particular influence of modernism and ot...(read more)	Goble, Mark	American Literature
N132/1 American Novel TTh 2-4 Session:	We will concentrate on the central issues deeded to the American novel by democratic ideology -- refusal and autonomy, loyalty, guilt, and atonement, futurity and the burden of the past -- and try to figure out how the formal innovations in the Ameri...(read more)	Breitwieser, Mitchell	American Literature Novel
N135/1 Literature of American Cultures: Repression and Resistance MTuTh 12-2 Session:	In this course we will analyze representations of repression and resistance in the fiction of three cultural groups: Chicanos/Chicanas, African Americans, and European Americans. We will examine various forms of repression--social, physical, and psy...(read more)	Gonzalez, Marcial	American Cultures
N141/1 Modes of Writing MTuTh 2-4 Session:	This course will introduce students to the study of writing short fiction. Students will learn to talk critically about short stories and begin to feel comfortable and confident with their own writing of them. Students will write both longer and shor...(read more)	Chandra, Melanie Abrams	Creative Writing Workshops
N166 /1 Special Topics: Graphic Novels MTuTh 10-12 Session:	Graphic novel is often defined as: “a single-author, book-length work, meant for a grown-up reader, with a memoirist or novelistic nature, usually devoid of superheroes.” Many comic artists, however, ridicule the term as a pretentious and disingenuou...(read more)	Wong, Hertha D. Sweet	American Literature Special Topics
N166 /2 Special Topics TTh 4-6 Session:	We will examine mostly the early work of the four central figures of the Beat Geneartion--- William S Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg,. Jack Kerouac and Gary Snyder. We will look at the hisrtorical and literary-historical context in which they worked to a...(read more)	Loewinsohn, Ron	American Literature Special Topics
N173/1 The Language and Literature of Films: The Film Western M 2-5 & W 2-4 Session:	An exploration of the durability and the versatility of this literary genre. We will watch a film each week, and read four novels. Two six-page essays, a final quiz, and regular attendance will be required. This course will be taught in Session C, fr...(read more)	Breitwieser, Mitchell	Film Special Topics
N180H/1 The Short Story MTuTh 2-4 Session:	After considering theories about the origin, development, and form(s) of the short story, we will read a wide and diverse selection of short fiction in the United States, paying particular attention to close readings as well as to the functions of st...(read more)	Wong, Hertha D. Sweet	American Literature
N180Z/1 Science Fiction: New Currents in Science Fiction MTuTh 10-12 Session:	This course will examine in depth the history of speculative fiction and its engagement with the thematics and topoi of the new life sciences—representation of cloning, ecological dystopias, hybrid life-forms, genetic engineering dystopias. While sci...(read more)	Jones, Donna V.	Novel

There are no special instructions for Summer 2012 English Department courses, other than to note in which session each course is offered.

The following courses are offered in Session A (May 21-June 29): English N135, N166 section 1, N180H, and N180Z.

The following courses are offered in Session C (June 18 - August 10): English N1A, N1B, N117S, N132, N166 section 2, and N173.

The following courses are offered in Session D (July 2 - August 10): English N121, N130A, N130D, and N141.

Note: English N1A and N1B cannot be staffed until shortly before classes begin, so please go ahead and enroll in those courses based on the class time and space availability.

The only lower-division courses being taught in Summer '12 are Reading and Composition (N1A and N1B).

The only graduate-level courses available in the summer are independent study (N299 and N602).