The Announcement of Classes is available one week before Tele-Bears begins every semester. Creative Writing and (for fall) Honors Course applications are available at the same time in the racks outside of 322 Wheeler Hall.
Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art; Spiegelman, A.: Maus, Volume I: A Survivor's Tale, My Father Bleeds History; Spiegelman, A.: Maus, Volume II: A Survivor's Tale, And Here My Troubles Began
This seminar will meet for seven weeks on the following dates: August 29, September 5, September 12, September 19, September 26, October 3, and October 10.
Art Spiegelman has been called "one of our era's foremost comics artists" and "perhaps the single most important comic creator working within the field." In this seminar we will devote ourselves to a close reading of his Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic memoir, Maus, informed by a small dose of comics criticism. Students should be prepared for active involvement and at least six pages of informal writing.
This 1-unit course may not be counted as one of the twelve courses required to complete the English major.
Atwood, Margaret: Oryx and Crake; Atwood, Margaret: The Handmaid's Tale; Atwood, Margaret: The Year of the Flood
<!--{cke_protected}{C}%3C!%2D%2D%0A%20%2F*%20Font%20Definitions%20*%2F%0A%40font-face%0A%09%7Bfont-family%3ACambria%3B%0A%09panose-1%3A2%204%205%203%205%204%206%203%202%204%3B%0A%09mso-font-charset%3A0%3B%0A%09mso-generic-font-family%3Aauto%3B%0A%09mso-font-pitch%3Avariable%3B%0A%09mso-font-signature%3A3%200%200%200%201%200%3B%7D%0A%20%2F*%20Style%20Definitions%20*%2F%0Ap.MsoNormal%2C%20li.MsoNormal%2C%20div.MsoNormal%0A%09%7Bmso-style-parent%3A%22%22%3B%0A%09margin%3A0in%3B%0A%09margin-bottom%3A.0001pt%3B%0A%09mso-pagination%3Awidow-orphan%3B%0A%09font-size%3A12.0pt%3B%0A%09font-family%3A%22Times%20New%20Roman%22%3B%0A%09mso-fareast-font-family%3ACambria%3B%0A%09mso-bidi-font-family%3A%22Times%20New%20Roman%22%3B%7D%0A%40page%20Section1%0A%09%7Bsize%3A8.5in%2011.0in%3B%0A%09margin%3A1.0in%201.25in%201.0in%201.25in%3B%0A%09mso-header-margin%3A.5in%3B%0A%09mso-footer-margin%3A.5in%3B%0A%09mso-paper-source%3A0%3B%7D%0Adiv.Section1%0A%09%7Bpage%3ASection1%3B%7D%0A%2D%2D%3E--> Canadian author and Booker Prize winner Margaret Atwood has published more than 40 books of poetry, criticism and nonfiction prose, and narrative fiction over the course of a writing career that extends from the 1960s to the present. In this seminar, we will read her most well known novel, The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), as well as her two most recent ones, Oryx and Crake (2003) and The Year of the Flood (2009). In each of these “near future” fictions, Atwood follows contemporary political, social, and environmental trends to their potential dystopian conclusions, asking: What if the U.S. were controlled by religious fundamentalists or by bioengineering corporations? What might be the possibilities for resistance in this brave new world? What if environmental degradation destroyed human fertility, or a manmade pandemic wiped out the majority of the human race? Who might survive, and how might they try to rebuild the world? We will consider Atwood’s post-apocalyptic imaginings with an eye to how their narrative form contributes to their meaning. Seminar members will participate through lively in-class discussion, online posts, oral and written summaries of published reviews and criticism, and a 3-4 page final reflection.
This 1-unit course may not be counted as one of the twelve courses required to complete the English major.
No texts.
In this seminar we will attend literary, art, and musical performances in and around Berkeley to introduce first-year students to the astonishing range of cultural production on the campus and in the Bay Area. We will visit the Berkeley Art Museum and the Hearst Museum, as well as, if possible, museums in Oakland and San Francisco; we will attend dance, theater, and musical performances at Zellerbach Hall and elsewhere on campus; and we will view at least one film at the Pacific Film Archive. We will engage in discussion based on short response papers by the students in the seminar. This seminar is part of the Connections@Cal initiative. This seminar is a Berkeley Arts Seminar. Admission to the on-campus arts events included in this course will be provided at no cost to students. This seminar is part of the Food for Thought Seminar Series.
Field trip and performance dates and arrangements will be discussed in class.
This 1-unit course may not be counted as one of the twelve courses required to complete the English major.
Furman, Laura: The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories 2012
A course reader, to be purchased from Zee Zee Copy.
A short fiction workshop. Over the course of the semester, each student will write and revise two stories. Each participant in the workshop will edit student-written stories, and will write a formal critique of each manuscript. Students are required to attend two literary readings over the course of the semester, and write a short report about each reading they attend. Students will also take part in online discussions about fiction. Attendance is mandatory.
Throughout the semester, we will read published stories from various sources, and also essays by working writers about fiction and the writing life. The intent of the course is to have the students confront the problems faced by writers of fiction, and to discover the techniques that enable writers to construct a convincing and engaging representation of reality on the page.
To be considered for admission to this class, please submit a writing sample (ten pages or less, double-spaced) of fiction you have written, along with an application form, to Vikram Chandra's mailbox in 322 Wheeler Hall, BY 4:00 P.M., TUESDAY, APRIL 17, AT THE LATEST.
Be sure to read the paragraph concerning creative writing courses on page 1 of this Announcement of Classes for futher information regarding enrollment in such courses!
Chaucer, Geoffrey: Canterbury Tales; Donne, John: Complete Poems; Marlowe, Christopher: Doctor Faustus; Milton, John: Paradise Lost; Spenser, Edmund: Edmund Spenser's Poetry
This class introduces students to the production of poetic narrative in English through the close study of major works in that tradition: the Canterbury Tales, The Faerie Queene, Doctor Faustus, Donne's lyrics, and Paradise Lost. Each of these texts reflects differently on the ambition of poetry to encompass the range of a culture’s experience. We will focus particularly on the relationships of different genres to different kinds of knowledge, to see how different ways of expressing things make possible new things to express, as English culture and English poetry transform each other from the fourteenth to the seventeenth centuries.
Please note that this class will first meet on Monday, August 27; discussion sections will not start being held until Friday, August 31.
Chaucer, Geoffrey: Canterbury Tales; Donne, John: John Donne's Poetry; Milton, John: Paradise Lost; Spenser, Edmund: Edmund Spenser's Poetry
An introduction to English literary history from the fourteenth through the seventeenth centuries. Canterbury Tales, The Faerie Queene, and Paradise Lost will dominate the semester, as objects of study in themselves, of course, but also as occasions for considering issues of linguistic and cultural change, and of literary language, form, and innovation.
Please note that this class will first meet on Monday, August 27; discussion sections will not start being held until Friday, August 31.
Norton Anthology of English Literature Volume C; Norton Anthology of English Literature Volume D; Franklin, Benjamin: The Autobiography and Other Writings; Jacobs, Harriet: Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl; Melville, Herman: Moby-Dick; Shelley, Mary: Frankenstein
Our course begins at sea, with the “violent storm” and shipwreck of Gulliver’s Travels, and ends at sea in Moby-Dick, with the Pequod sinking in a “vortex” just above the equator in the Pacific Ocean. These scenes of oceanic dislocation correspond to the rise of modernity that forms our topic. Eighteenth- and nineteenth- century modernity involves a variety of new or accelerating instabilities: epistemological uncertainty; 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; and altered forms of subjectivity navigating the new political rhetoric of republicanism, freedom, and individualism. Throughout the course, we will ask what literary anxieties and opportunities such large scale transformations entail, at a time when everything solid—self, world, and society—turns fluid, as if at sea.
Please note that this class will first meet on Monday, August 27; discussion sections will not start being held until Friday, August 31.
Austen, J.: Persuasion; Defoe, D.: Robinson Crusoe; Equiano, O.: The Interesting Narrative; Franklin, B.: Autobiography; Melville, H.: Billy Budd and Other Tales; Sterne, L.: A Sentimental Journey
This course is an introduction to British and American literature from the eighteenth through the mid-nineteenth century. We'll read works from that period (by Swift, Pope, Sterne, Franklin, Equiano, Wordsworth, Austen, Melville, Dickinson, Whitman, and others) and think about how politics, aesthetics, the everyday, race, gender, and identity all find expression in a number of different literary forms. We'll especially consider the material and symbolic roles played by the idea and practice of revolution in the period.
Please note that this class will first meet on Monday, August 27; discussion sections will not start being held until Friday, August 31.
Faulkner, William: The Sound and the Fury; James, Henry: The Portrait of a Lady; Joyce, James: Dubliners; Ramizani: Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry; Wilde, Oscar: The Picture of Dorian Gray and Other Writings; Woolf, Virginia: Mrs. Dalloway
There will be some texts on bspace.
This course will focus on texts that I think are indispensable for the study of modernism in English and in American literature. It will be primarily lecture on Mondays and Wednesdays, although there will considerable efforts at discussion. My emphasis will be on close reading rather than literary history, so papers also will require careful attention to specific passages. There will be a mid-term and two essays required. And regular attendance is mandatory.
Please note that this class will first meet on Monday, August 27; discussion sections will not start being held until Friday, August 31.
READER; Achebe, C.: Things Fall Apart; Conrad, J.: Heart of Darkness; Morrison, T.: Beloved; Silko, L.: Ceremony; Spiegelman, A.: Maus (2 volumes); Woolf, V.: Mrs. Dalloway
This survey course of literature in English from the mid-nineteenth century to the present will consider a variety of literary forms and movements in their historical and cultural contexts. We'll examine the literature of colonization and imperialism and the counter literature that it inspires. We'll study literary experimentation and recurrent transcultural themes: the relationship between past and present, surviving historical trauma, translating orality into print, and the influence of notions of race, ethnicity, class, nationality, and gender on subject formation. We'll read Irish and English texts, Native American and European American texts, African American and African English texts, yet challenge the simplistic binary dualisms these categories suggest. We'll also practice lots of close reading. There will be two 5-to-7-page essays, a midterm, and a final examination.
Please note that this class will first meet on August 27; discussion sections will not start being held until Friday, August 31.
The required books for the course will be available exclusively at Analog Books, located just one block up Euclid Avenue from the North Gate entrance to the Berkeley campus. The Course Reader, Introduction to Environmental Studies, will be available exclusively from Copy Central, 2483 Hearst Avenue, right across the street from the North Gate entrance. There will also be a required environmental science textbook (possibly provided as an eBook).
This is a team-taught introduction to environmental studies. The team consists of a professor of environmental science, a professor of English, and three graduate student instructors woking in the field. The aim of the course is to give students the basic science of the environment, an introduction to environmental literature, philosophy, and policy issues, and analytic tools to evaluate a range of environmental problems. The course requires some time spent outdoors in observation as well as a lot of reading and writing.
This course is cross-listed with E.S.P.M. C12.
Books to be determined.
We will concentrate on the high and low cultural elements in the noir comedies of the Coen brothers, discussing their use of Hollywood genres, parodies of classic conventions, and representation of arbitrariness. We will also read some fiction and attend events at the Pacific Film Archive and Cal Performances. This seminar may be used to satisfy the Arts and Literature breadth requirement in Letters and Science.
This 2-unit course may not be counted as one of the twelve courses required to complete the English major.
No books required.
This simple, two-word admonition ("Know Thyself") carved over the entrance to the ancient temple at Delphi might be called the founding oracle of western humanism. The phrase itself is alive and well today, as a Google search will amply confirm, but what does it mean? We will read and discuss texts exemplifying the remarkable variety of ways in which the oracle has been interpreted, and some of the key concepts and controversies associated with it, concluding with Socrates’ bemusing declaration that “The unexamined life is not livable for a human being.” The course is intended to appeal especially to students desirous of getting in on the intellectual conversation of our time and curious as to its cultural antecedents. As part of the Connections@Cal initiative it calls for on-line discussion during the week preparatory to student-led discussion in class, as will be explained more fully in the first meeting.
This 2-unit course may not be counted as one of the twelve courses required to complete the English major.