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.
The principal text for the course will be a draft of a book I am writing on meter in English. The principal task will be practical scansion, with each student pursuing an extended exploration of the metrical practice of a poet of their choosing. Therefore, most materials will be either photocopies or electronic files which can be modified to allow ample room for scribbling on. Students should also expect to purchase a good edition of the works of the poet they choose to focus on, as will be discussed further in class.
This course is an introduction to the major meters of the English poetic tradition from a linguistic perspective. Beginning with the iambic pentameter of Shakespeare's Sonnets, we will explore its defining constraints on stress, syllable count and caesura placement, rhythmic variation these allow, expressive effects they create, and their relationship to rhythmic structure in language. We will then situate this meter historically, exploring its development from closely related forms in Romance languages, including Petrarch's Rime, and into various alternative forms of iambic pentameter in English, including those of Shakespeare's plays, Milton's Paradise Lost, and other English poetry. Finally, we will consider these several meters in relation to their still more distant ancestors in Old English and Classical Latin and Greek, and some of their descendents, including various forms of strong-stress and triple meters that came to be popular especially in the nineteenth century, in the work of such poets as Hopkins, Tennyson and Swinburne. Throughout, the main goal will be for students to become confident in ascertaining and describing metrical form and integrating it with consideration of other aspects of poetry. No prior background in metrics or linguistics or even English poetry is required.
English Renaissance Drama: A Norton Anthology
Course Reader
This course will be a survey of some of the best seventeenth-century English drama. We will focus on the plays as plays – as series of actions upon the minds of audiences – and on ones first performed between 1603 and 1642, when the theaters were closed. If we have time, we may talk some about a Dryden play and possibly Congreve’s The Way of the World.
In no particular order, here are some of the plays I plan to assign: Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale, Beaumont’s The Knight of the Burning Pestle, Ford’s ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore, Jonson’s Epiocene and Bartholomew Fair, Middleton and Rowley’s The Changeling, Shirley’s The Cardinal, Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi, and a couple of masques – Jonson’s The Masque of Blackness and Milton’s Comus.
Two formal essays and an essay in lieu of the final exam.
This course satisfies the pre-1800 requirement for the English major.
Shakespeare, William: Norton Shakespeare
We will read ten or eleven plays from the later half of Shakespeare's career (which covers the late "problem" comedies, the major tragedies, and the tragicomedies). Taking our cue from the plays' self-consciousness of their medium of theater, we'll consider how the actions and utterances of performing bodies can define and reshape the boundaries between what's present, what's represented, and what is made real. I've ordered the Norton Shakespeare at the bookstore, but you may use any recent edition of the plays.
Shakespeare, W.: The Comedy of Errors; Shakespeare, W.: The Norton Shakespeare: Essential Plays, Sonnets
Shakespeare wrote a vast number of extraordinary plays. We'll consider the range of these plays and why this range was important to him. We'll also explore how the variety of plays in which he wrote affected Shakespeare's representation of plot and character, as well as the literary, social, sexual, religious, political, and philosophical issues he conceptualized through plot and character. Finally, we'll think about Shakespeare's plays in relation to the range of social types and classes in his mass audience.
[PLEASE NOTE: The Norton collection I've assigned is a paperback of selected plays, not the hardcover complete plays.]
Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Comedy; Behn, Aphra: Oroonoko, The Rover, and Other Works; Bunyan, John: Grace Abounding; Defoe, Daniel: Robinson Crusoe; Pope, Alexander: Alexander Pope: The Major Works; Swift, Jonathan: The Writings of Jonathan Swift
We will explore the relationship between literature and everyday life in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Areas of emphasis include popular periodical literature (England's first advice column, the first "women's magazine," and the first periodical to be published daily), religious responses to the so-called "new science," the early novel, and the writings of Alexander Pope and Jonathan Swift. In addition to the texts listed, there will be a course reader.
Course requirements: two short analyses (1-2 pages), one substantial paper (7-9 pages), and a final exam.
This course satisfies the pre-1800 requirement for the English major.
The books will be available at Analog Books, 1816 Euclid Ave.
Late-eighteenth-century writing shaped many of the forms and institutions of literature we now take for granted. Fiction writers worked to establish the genre—and—legitimate as worthy reading—what we now call novels, while others experimented with the first gothic horror stories. Poets reckoned with a literary market and tidal wave of printed works that threatened to render all writing mere commodities. They thematized their position as misunderstood guardians of creative spirit, sometimes of a national past, in model of the tortured poet with which we are still familiar. Women writers cannily intervened in the republic of letters, even as their public writing was seen as semi-scandalous. All helped develop a new sense of Literature with a capital “L”—not just writing but imaginative writing that might play a special role in society, from protecting classical values in a modernizing world, to promoting a standard national language and literature, to cultivating sentimental feelings for others in an increasingly anonymous society.
Authors include: David Hume, Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding, Frances Burney, Horace Walpole, Jane Austen, Samuel Johnson, Thomas Gray, William Collins, William Cowper, Charlotte Smith.
This course satisfies the pre-1800 requirement for the English major.
Dickens, Charles: Great Expectations; Eliot, George: Silas Marner; Hardy, Thomas: The Mayor of Casterbridge; Wilde, Oscar: The Importance of Being Earnest
Course Reader
This course is designed to be a wide-ranging survey of some of the best imaginative writing in English from the so-called “Victorian” period (roughly, 1837-1901), as well as an introduction, though only incidentally, to the historical pressures that shaped the works. The focus will be on the works themselves – and why twenty-first century readers might value them.
We will spend most of our time on the works of the major poets (Tennyson, Browning, the pre-Raphaelites, Arnold, Hopkins, and so forth) and novelists (Eliot, Dickens, Hardy, maybe Thackeray). We will spend a shorter amount of time on the prose writers (Carlyle, Newman, Ruskin, Pater). And we will end the term with The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde.
Three formal essays. The third essay in lieu of the final exam.
Austen, J.: Persuasion; Beckford, W.: Vathek; Behn, A.: Oroonoko; Burney, F.: Evelina; Defoe, D.: Robinson Crusoe; Godwin, W.: Caleb Williams; Richardson, S.: Pamela; Smollett, T.: Humphry Clinker
A survey of early fiction, much of which pretended to be anything but. Most of it, published anonymously, purported to be a true "History," "Expedition," or the like, about "Things as They Are." We will consider at the outset why these works so strenuously disavowed their status as romances or novels, and why for purposes of disguise they chose the genres they did.
This course satisfies the pre-1800 requirement for the English major.
Bronte, Emily: Wuthering Heights; Conrad, Joseph: Heart of Darkness; Dickens, Charles: Bleak House; Eliot, George: The Mill on the Floss; Gaskell, Elizabeth: North and South; Hardy, Thomas: Jude the Obscure; Kipling, Rudyard: Kim; Trollope, Anthony: Dr. Wartle's School; Wells, H.G.: The War of the Worlds
What do novels do? How do they 'think'? How do they change the ways in which we perceive fictional and real worlds? Why does the novel come to dominate the literary scene so thoroughly in the Victorian period and into the twentieth century? What did nineteenth-century readers get out of reading prose fiction, whether in serial or volume form, and how do past reading practices connect with the ways we read and consume fiction today?
We will pursue these questions and others through a range of novels by authors including Dickens, Emily Bronte, Elizabeth Gaskell, Trollope, Hardy, H.G. Wells, Rudyard Kipling and Joseph Conrad. The class will consist of a mix of lecture, full-class discussion, in-class activities, a paper, and two exams.
Achebe , Chinua: Things Fall Apart; Gibson , William : Neuromancer; Mann , Thomas: The Magic Mountain; Woolf , Virginia: Mrs. Dalloway; Zola, Emile: La Bête Humaine
This course is a general survey of the 20th-century novel. The novel is the quintessential form of expression of modernity and modern subjectivity. In this survey of key works of the century, we will explore the novel form as it is framed by these three thematics-- history, modernism and empire. These are some questions we will address: how have the vicissitudes of modernity led to a re-direction of historical narration within the novel; how has modernist aesthetic experimentation re-shaped the very form of the novel; and lastly how has the phenomenon of imperialism, the asymmetrical relations of power between center and periphery, widened the scope of fictive milieu?
Ramazani, Jonathan: Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry
This course will survey major work and significant stylistic innovations in a variety of poets. Major figures incude William Butler Yeats, Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, Mina Loy, T.S. Eliot and Wallace Stevens. I am not sure if I will include poets of John Ashbery's generation. The major work of the class will be finding the kinds of critical questions that deepen our pleasure and sense of significance in the work. There will be two papers, a mid-term and final, and regular attendance is required.
Douglass, Frederick: Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave & Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl
A course reader
In Beneath the American Renaissance, David Reynolds argues that “delving beneath the American Renaissance occurs in two senses: analysis of the process by which hitherto neglected popular modes and stereotypes were imported into literary texts; and the discovery of a number of forgotten writings which, while often raw, possess a surprising energy and complexity that make them worthy of a study on their own.” In this class we will consider many of the major authors of the period (for example: Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman, Henry David Thoreau, Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, Emily Dickinson) against the vibrant backdrop of antebellum politics and popular culture.
This was an age when Andrew Jackson redefined the presidency and James K. Polk expanded the nation’s territory. This was also a period of violent mobs, Barnum’s freaks, all-seeing mesmerists, polygamous prophets, temperance advocates, revivalist preachers, and resolute feminists. The literature and popular culture of the 1830s, 40s, and 50s bear witness to democracy caught in the throes of the controversy over slavery, the rise of capitalism, and the birth of urbanization. In the midst of this turbulence, a remarkable range of mass cultural forms surfaced, including P.T. Barnum's American Museum, the moving panorama, and an early form of photography called daguerreotype.
Together, we will read, talk, and write about a great deal of the major literature of this era, study fascinating examples of the popular culture of the period, and explore the emergent cultural practices that make the antebellum period such an instructive and significant period in American cultural history. We will focus on issues of "self" (the search for transcendence and the complexities of relations); the Puritan legacy; the landscape; the democratic experiment; the efforts to reform the American character; and the struggles over the rights and roles of women, African Americans, and Native Americans in the expanding nation. Two midterms — or essays — and a final examination will be required.
Eliot, T. S.: The Waste Land, Prufrock and Other Poems; Faulkner, William: Light in August; Frost, Robert: Early Poems; Hammett, Dashiell: Red Harvest; Hemingway, Ernest: The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway; Hughes, Langston: Selected Poems of Langston Hughes; Wharton, Edith: The House of Mirth
This course traces the formal and thematic development of American literature from 1900 to 1945, focusing on innovations in literary forms as they engage with history, identity, race, class, and gender. A principle goal of this course is to bring you to an almost fatal fascination with the choices the writers we study make (the striking stylistic, rhetorical, and structural features of the writing, including word choice and order, style, symbol, metaphor, structure, and narrative). We will also want to consider the writers' lives, prevailing beliefs, and the various environments (literary, geographical, political, etc.) within which these writers worked.
Three Classic African American Novels; Cather, Willa: Sapphira and the Slave Girl; Ellison, Ralph: Invisible Man; Faulkner, William: The Sound and the Fury; Johnson, James Weldon: Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man; Stowe, Harriet Beecher: Uncle Tom's Cabin; Twain, Mark: Pudd'n'head Wilson
This course offers a survey of major American novels written in the years between the Civil War and the beginnings of the Civil Rights movement. Course requirements include two essays as well as midterm and final exams.
Achebe, C.: Arrow of God; Adichie, C.: Half of a Yellow Sun; Baldwin, J.: Go Tell It On the Mountain; Brodber, E.: Louisiana; Diaz, J.: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao; Marshall, P: Brown Girl, Brownstones; McKay, C.: Home to Harlem; Rhodes-Pitts, S.: Harlem is Nowhere
We will also study shorter works and critical essays by such writers as Ralph Ellison, Zora Neale Hurston, Jamaica Kincaid, Edwidge Danticat, George Lamming, CLR James, Stuart Hall, Edouard Glissant, Nathaniel Mackey, Brent Hayes Edwards, Krista Thompson, and Saidiya Hartman.
This course surveys 20th and 21st century texts by black writers in order to explore the making and meaning of African diaspora literature. Through attention to writers' citational practices, including their references to music, religion, visual art, and each other, we will explore how a black global imaginary is constructed and delineate the conversations that emerge amongst writers in the global sphere of literature. We will also tackle the difficult questions diaspora poses. What might it mean to belong to the diaspora, for instance? How are the claims of identity balanced against the antagonisms of difference? How do writers speak to each other across nation, region, and diaspora? And how do gender and sexuality refract any presuppositions of diaspora?
Students will write regular response papers, make presentations, and conduct a substantial final research paper.
There will be an online reader or some pdfs to download.
Films: Broken Blossoms (1919), The Sheik (1921), The Jazz Singer (1927), Bordertown (1935), Intruder in the Dust (1949), The Searchers (1956), Touch of Evil (1958), Imitation of Life (1959), West Side Story (1961), Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (1967), Night of the Living Dead (1968), Apocalypse Now (1979), Do the Right Thing (1989).
An introduction to critical thinking about race and ethnicity, focused on a select group of films produced in the United States over the twentieth century. Major themes include law and violence, kinship and miscegenation, captivity and rescue, passing and racial impersonation. There will be weekly writing assignments, two essays, and three exams.
This course satisfies U. C. Berkeley's American Cultures requirement.
We will survey Chicano/a literature, art and film from the Chicano/a Movement (1960s through the 1980s) through more recent political and aesthetic formations.
The class will open with study of a particularly fertile period during which the civil rights movement fomented a cultural florescence within the Chicano community that led to publication/performance of politically spirited and unifying poetry, art, novels and documentary film.
We will think about the convergence of a political aesthetic in the work of these novelists, poets, painters/sculptors, filmmakers, and we will try to account for the contrasts and connections with the wider spheres of art and politics that influenced their work. To help situate and ground our thinking, we will outline the historical and political backgrounds of this period and press these up against a cultural production that articulated resistance to the U.S. hegemony just as it often restated the patriarchal, homophobic, and nationalist and identitarian problematic that confronted the Chicano community in the first place. We will think about social and political content, of course, but I also want to look at the formation of a distinct aesthetic experimentation with language and form/genre and audience.
This course is open to all English majors interested in questions of race, ethnicity, gender, and the convergences and contestations of literary and artistic representation and experiment and form.
Course Requirements:
30%: sustained in-class contribution and group projects/presentations. At the beginning of class, I will clarify how this will work
30%: mid-term paper of 6 pages
40%: final essay of 8-10 pages based on topics of your own choosing, but covering at least three writers, artists or filmmakers.
Coetzee, J. M.: Life and Times of Michael K; Magona, S.: Mother to Mother; Mda, Z.: The Heart of Redness; Paton, A.: Cry the Beloved Country; Van Niekerk, M.: Agaat
There will also be a course reader.
‘What is South African Literature?’ is an introduction to a broad range of storytellers who make up the country’s literature from the colonial period to the present day. Students will be exposed to a variety of voices in English or English translation – including, but moving well beyond, Nobel Prize winners J.M. Coetzee and Nadine Gordimer – through in-depth explorations of novels, shorts stories and poetry. But the question ‘What is South African Literature?’ is also, of course, entangled with issues of power. Not only are repression and resistance persistent themes in the literature itself, the history of South African literature has been shaped by political acts – from the earliest transcriptions of indigenous oral poetry, to the conscription of ‘culture as a weapon of the struggle’ during apartheid, and the suppression of creative expression, and disruption of literary traditions, through censorship and exile. This course will engage students in debates over what comprises ‘Literature’ (the place of orature and the interaction of oral and written forms; ‘aesthetics of revolution’ vs. ‘aesthetics of transcendence’...), whether it is possible/helpful to talk of a unitary South African Literature, and the role of South African literature in a post-apartheid, post-colonial and transnational world. In short, this course will consider how the story of South African literary historiography has been written and rewritten – giving insight into how canons are formed, why they are challenged, and by whom. The aim is to develop close-reading skills while never losing sight of socio-political and historical concerns.
Course reader available from Zee Zee Copy
This course will introduce students to the study of creative writing – fiction, poetry, and drama. Students will learn to talk critically about these genres and begin to feel comfortable and confident with their own writing of them. Students will write in each of these genres and will partake in class workshops where their work will be edited and critiqued by other students in the class.
This course is open to English majors only.
Perrotta, Tom: Best American Short Stories 2012
A course reader, to be purchased at 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 engage with the problems faced by writers of fiction, and discover the techniques that enable writers to construct a convincing representation of reality on the page.
To be considered for admission to this class, please submit 10-15 photocopied pages of your fiction, along with an application form, to Vikram Chandra's mailbox in 322 Wheeler, BY 4:00 P.M., TUESDAY, OCTOBER 23, AT THE LATEST.
Be sure to read the paragraph concerning creative writing courses on page 1 of this Announcement of Classes for further information regarding enrollment in such courses!
(eds.) R.V. Cassill & Joyce Carol Oates.: The Norton Anthology of Contemporary Fiction (Second Edition);
Recommended: Mukherjee, Bharati.: The Middleman & Other Stories
This limited-enrollment workshop course will concentrate on the form, theory and practice of short fiction.
To be considered for admission to this class, please submit 10-12 photocopied pages of your fiction, along with an application form, to Bharati Mukherjee's (a.k.a. B. Blaise) mailbox in 322 Wheeler, BY 4:00 P.M., TUESDAY, OCTOBER 23, AT THE LATEST.
Be sure to read the paragraph concerning creative writing courses on page 1 of this Announcement of Classes for further information regarding enrollment in such courses!
Oates, J. C., ed.: The Oxford Book of American Short Stories 2012
A fiction workshop in which students will be expected to turn in material approximately every third week, to be edited and discussed in class.
Emphasis will be upon editing and revising. Quality rather than quantity is the ideal, but each student should be prepared to write about fifty pages through the term, to be gathered into a small “book” and turned in on the last class day. Appropriate assignments will be made in the new, 2012 edition of THE OXFORD BOOK OF AMERICAN SHORT STORIES edited by Joyce Carol Oates.
To be considered for admission to this class, please submit 10-15 photocopied pages of your fiction, along with an application form, to Prof. Joyce Carol Oates' mailbox in 322 Wheeler, BY 4:00 P.M., TUESDAY, OCTOBER 23, AT THE LATEST.
Be sure to read the paragraph concenring creative writing courses on page 1 of this Announcement of Classes for further information regarding enrollment in such courses!
Course reader, available from Krishna Copy (University & Shattuck)
In this course you will conduct a progressive series of explorations in which you will try some of the fundamental options for writing poetry today (or any day)—aperture and closure; rhythmic sound patterning; sentence and line; short and long-lined poems; image & figure; stanza; poetic forms (haibun, villanelle, sestina, pantoum, ghazal, etc.); the first, second and third person (persona, address, drama, narrative, description); prose poetry, and revision. Our emphasis will be on recent possibilities, with an eye and ear 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 four or so in rotation (I’ll respond to every poem you write). On alternate days, we’ll discuss illustrative poems in our course reader. If the past is any guarantee, the course will make you a better poet.
To be considered for admission to this class, please submit 5 photocopied pages of your poems, along with an application form, to John Shoptaw's mailbox in 322 Wheeler, BY 4:00 P.M., TUESDAY, OCTOBER 23, AT THE LATEST.
Be sure to read the paragraph concerning creative writing courses on page 1 of this Announcement of Classes for further information regarding enrollment in such courses!
No texts.
An upper-division creative nonfiction writing workshop open to students from any department. Drawing on narrative strategies found in memoir, the diary, travel writing, and fiction, students will have work-shopped three literary nonfiction 5-10 page pieces. Each will take as point of departure the words and emotions like or love. What’s liked or loved (or not) and so described may include people, places, things. Each week, students will also turn in one-page critiques of the two or three student pieces being work-shopped as well as a 1-2 page journal entry on prompts assigned (these entries may be used as part of the longer pieces). Probable semester total of written pages, including critiques: 60-70. Class attendance: mandatory.
To be considered for admission to this class, please submit 10-15 pages of your creative nonfiction or fiction, along with an application form, to Thomas Farber's mailbox in 322 Wheeler, BY 4:00 P.M., TUESDAY, OCTOBER 23, AT THE LATEST.
Be sure to read the paragraph concerning creative writing courses on page 1 of this Announcement of Classes for further information regarding enrollment in such courses!
A course reader will be available from Copy Central on Bancroft.
This is a workshop in the translation of poetry into English. Workshop members will develop a project and submit a translation a week (together with the original poem and a word-for-word version) and the work of the class will be for members to give one another feedback on their translations and to talk with one another about the pleasures and perils of the process. There will be weekly reading in the theory and practice of verse translation. The final project will be for each workshop member to produce a chapbook of a dozen or so translations.
Admission will be by permission of the instructor, based on (1) five to eight pages of YOUR OWN translations of either your own poems or other people's poems (or a combination of the two) into English, as well as the corresponding pages in the original language, and also a brief statement (no more than a sentence or two) describing the translation project you hope to work on; (2) a one-paragraph statement of your interest in translation; and (3) an application form; all of the above is to be submitted to Robert Hass's mailbox in 322 Wheeler, BY 4:00 P.M., TUESDAY, OCTOBER 23, AT THE LATEST.
Be sure to read the paragraph concerning creative writing courses on page 1 of this Announcement of Classes for further information regarding enrollment in such courses!
Borges, Jorge Luis: Ficciones; Donoso, Jose: The Obscene Bird of Night; Fuentes, Carlos: The Death of Artemio Cruz; Garcia Marquez, Gabriel: One Hundred Years of Solitude; Lispector, Clarice: The Passion According to G.H.; Rulfo, Juan: Pedro Paramo
The reading and writing assignments--linked with the lectures and class discussions--are intended to develop students’ ability to analyze, understand, and interpret six great masters of Latin American fiction (in English translations): Jorge Luis Borges, Juan Rulfo, Carlos Fuentes, Clarice Lispector, Jose Donoso, and Gabriel Garcia Marquez. As the course develops, we'll examine the deep Latin American contexts (philosophical, historical, psychological...) of the works as well as their innovative and influential forms. Students will be expected to participate fully in class discussions and to write critical papers effectively arguing how the works achieve their particular aims.
This course is open to English majors only.
Norton Anthology of African American Literature; Three Classic African American Novels; Dunbar, Paul: Sport of the Gods; Johnson, James Weldon: Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man
This course offers an overview of African American literature from Reconstruction through the New Negro (or Harlem) Renaissance. Particular attention will be paid to questions of history, memory, and changing notions of modernity.
Coetzee, J.M.: Disgrace; Danticat, Edwidge: The Dew Breaker; Diaz, Junot: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao; Fitzgerald, F. Scott: The Great Gatsby; Flaubert, Gustave: Madame Bovary; Forster, E.M.: Howards End; Mukherjee, Bharati: Jasmine; Smith, Zadie: White Teeth
This course will focus on each novelist's invention of, or critique of, national identity myths in a time of national crisis. Students will explore the intimate connection between choice of narrative strategy and construction of meaning.
Barthes, Roland: Camera Lucida; Waldie, D.J.: Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir; Ware, Chris: Building Stories; Yamashita, Karen Tei: Tropic of Orange
The course will include a reader.
In a film essay on the way movies depict Los Angeles, Thom Andersen raises a question that will form the basis for this course: “If we can appreciate documentaries for their dramatic qualities, perhaps we can appreciate fiction films for their documentary reflections.” Beginning with Andersen’s film, Los Angeles Plays Itself, we’ll consider his hypothesis and investigate the surprising importance, sometimes even the primacy, of setting in literary and filmic works—including Charles Lamb’s essays in praise of urban London, a Hitchcock film, William Wordsworth’s Guide to the Lakes, Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories, Karen Tei Yamashita’s magical-realist novel Tropic of Orange, Chris Ware's new graphic novel Building Stories (this text is a 'total work of art,' with a number of different pieces, so it retails for $50--it is currently $30 on Amazon), D.J. Waldie’s suburban memoir Holy Land, and Patrick Keiller’s Robinson in Space.
Rather than take spaces, places, and infrastructure in these works as the object of a transparent representation, we will pay close attention to the way the written word and the camera shape how we read, see, and perceive the worlds that fictional characters inhabit. We will consider both the role of places and spaces in these works and their relevance (or irrelevance) to story and discourse, to narrative and descriptive modes, and to theories of novelistic and filmic space. While our primary focus will be on what literary and film scholars have to say on these issues, we will also consider the work of geographers and architectural theorists, among others. Theorists and critics of literary, filmic, and urban space will include Stephen Heath, Roland Barthes, Michel de Certeau, and György Lukács.