Announcement of Classes: Fall 2013

R1A/1

Reading and Composition:
On Campus: Fictions of College Life

MWF 9-10

What would it mean to imagine our own lives at university as part of an invented universe? The fictional possibilities of the college...(read more)

R1A/3

Reading and Composition:
Narratives We Live By

MWF 11-12

How does narrative shape our experience of ourselves and the world around us? In what ways do established narratives inflect the choices we make? What possibilities does narrative offer for a more active reworking of our world? In this class, we&r...(read more)

R1A/4

Reading and Composition:
Gossip

MWF 1-2

Gossip, according to Roland Barthes, constitutes “murder by language”—which, although extreme, is hardly a surprising condemnation. From Soren Kierkegaard’s dismissal of gossip as “idle talk,” to one contemporar...(read more)

R1A/5

Reading and Composition:
Narrative, Narration, Narrators

MWF 2-3

In this course, we will read a series of texts that highlight, question, or vex their own status as narratives.  Along the way, we will encounter frame narratives that do not seem to fit the stories they enclose or that fail to close at all, ...(read more)

R1A/6

Reading and Composition:
Gods and Monsters

MWF 3-4

This course is a study of the nature of greatness. We will discuss the strained relationship between greatness and goodness, and the relationship between goodnes...(read more)

R1A/8

Reading and Composition:
The Demands of Beauty

MW 4-5:30

Channeling Dante’s insight that “beauty awakens the soul to act,” Ralph Waldo Emerson once wrote that the love of beauty begins with appreciation—the cultivation of taste—and culminates in the creation of a work of ar...(read more)

R1A/10

Reading and Composition:
A Meet and Happy Conversation

TTh 9:30-11

In Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, John Milton writes that “a meet and happy conversation is the chiefest and noblest end of marriage.” This course will explore the ethical, romantic, and philosophical implications of this...(read more)

R1A/11

Reading and Composition:
Saints and Soldiers

TTh 11-12:30

While holy warriors have gained a bad reputation in today’s world, warrior-saints were once a flavor of holy persons quite popular in England from the Middle Ages up through the Early Modern period.  Though not all are canonized (offici...(read more)

R1A/12

Reading and Composition:
War In Words: Literature of the Great War

TTh 12:30-2

During World War 1, combatant poets wrote poetry directly from the trenches and even circulated literary publications while bursting shells and gunfire threatened sudden death at any moment. This co-incidence between exploding shells and explosive...(read more)

R1A/13

Reading and Composition:
Transmission, Tradition, Translation

TTh 2-3:30

How, and to what extent, can one person’s experiences be transmitted to another person?  What would it mean for a made object to enable an encounter in which the perspectives and concerns unique to someone in profoundly distant circumst...(read more)

R1A/14

Reading and Composition:
The Way We Read Now

TTh 3:30-5

This course is an occasion to reflect on how--if at all--we read now. Our engagement with this famously vexed question will be twofold. We'll first consider what we read, entering into contemporary debates on how digital and media tec...(read more)

R1A/15

Reading and Composition:
Boundaries and Borders

TTh 5-6:30

What is “race”? This class explores the concept of race, racial identity, and the fictions of racial difference as authored by history and science, power and dominance, culture and social standing. We will focus on exploring the permea...(read more)

R1B/1

Reading and Composition:
The Really Quite Contemporary

MWF 9-10

In this course we will investigate our reals, some [real]isms, and maybe even realityism in contemporary prose and poetry.  We will look at works of contemporary fiction and poetry—and also at television and film— that both insist...(read more)

R1B/2

Reading and Composition:
The Conscience

MWF 10-11

This course explores how writers and philosophers have grappled with notions of the “conscience” throughout western literature. Far from being a static, universal or unchanging concept, “the conscience” has a long, dynamic,...(read more)

R1B/3

Reading and Composition:
The Afterworlds of the American Revolution, 1776-1819

Note new time: TTh 3:30-5

In 1776, as Jefferson declared, the American Colonies could no longer tolerate the yoke of English rule, and must “throw off such Government” and “dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another.” The Re...(read more)

R1B/5

Reading and Composition:
Bloodfeud

MWF 1-2

Blood, guts, violence, bravery, cowardice, obligation, and various combinations of the above will be the focus of this course. We will study medieval and modern accounts of feud in a variety of genres (including heroic poetry, sagas, grammatical t...(read more)

R1B/7

Reading and Composition:
What's Serious About What's Funny?

MW 4-5:30

"Comedy proceeds out of suffering.  Usually someone else's."--Joseph Gelmis

"Comedy is in long shot, tragedy in close-up."--Charlie Chaplin

In this course we will consider a series of formal and historica...(read more)

R1B/8

Reading and Composition:
note new topic: Vaudeville Blues and the Harlem Renaissance

TTh 8-9:30

Karl Miller's text Segregating Sound offers readings of previously unavailable record label archival material that gives us a revised reading of the U.S. popular recording industry and its marketing of racial categories and hierarchie...(read more)

R1B/9

Reading and Composition:
Suspension, Uselessness

TTh 9:30-11

I mean Negative Capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason.

- John Keats

As an R&C course, th...(read more)

R1B/10

Reading and Composition:
Profane Illuminations

TTh 11-12:30

Though Walter Benjamin coined the phrase to describe a specifically “materialistic, anthropological inspiration” that signifies “the true creative overcoming of religious illumination,” the profane illuminations this class ...(read more)

R1B/11

Reading and Composition:
note new topic: Novel/Nation

TTh 12:30-2

This course is a study of the relationship between two modern social forms: the novel and the nation. As historian Benedict Anderson has shown, the rise of the nation has an intimate, if not mutually constitutive, relation to the rise of the novel...(read more)

R1B/12

Reading and Composition:
note new topic: When Reading Goes Wrong

TTh 2-3:30

Every day, we're called upon to make hundreds of interpretive judgments based on things we read, see, or hear.  But what happens when we misjudge a text, or when we're unable to judge it at all?  Depictions of failed readings are...(read more)

R1B/14

Reading and Composition:
note new topic: The Bonds of Taste

TTh 5-6:30

What does it mean to cultivate "good taste" for oneself? What sorts of social relationships happen when we judge someone else's taste or recognize through their appreciations a kindred spirit? How is taste learned and taught? How doe...(read more)

105/1

Anglo-Saxon England

TTh 2-3:30

“Britain, once called Albion, is an island of the ocean...” When the priest Bede set out in the early 700s to write the history of the place we now call England, he portrayed it as a new nation with a deep past, a remote corner of the ...(read more)

115A/1

The English Renaissance (through the 16th Century)

MWF 1-2

For more information on this course, please contact Professor Miller at j_miller@berkeley.edu.

This course satisfies the pre-1800 requirement for the English major.

117B/1

Shakespeare

TTh 12:30-2

A study of a dozen plays from the second half of Shakespeare's career, including Hamlet, Twelfth Night, Troilus and Cressida, Othello, Measure for Measure, King Lear, Macbeth, The Winter's Tale, and The Tempest(read more)

117S/1

Shakespeare

TTh 11-12:30

This class focuses on a selection of works from Shakespeare’s entire career. We'll be reading a limited number of plays and some of the poetry. One of the main issues I'd like to focus on is the oscillation between "regular&quot...(read more)

121/1

The Romantic Period

MWF 10-11

This course will examine the Romantic movement in Britain, a movement often described as an outgrowth of the “Age of Revolution.” From the hopes for the French Republic to the “revolution in poetic language” attempted in (read more)

122/1

The Victorian Period

MWF 2-3

The Victorian period witnessed dramatic and probably permanent changes to literature in Britain, including: the morphing of scattered memoirs into formal autobiographies; the rise of the realist novel as the indispensable genre for describing the ...(read more)

125D/1

The 20th-Century Novel

TTh 9:30-11

In this course we will analyze nine 20th-century American novels, taking note of how their formal organization participates in their thematic concerns.  We'll spend the first few class meetings reviewing the history of the novel as a form...(read more)

125E/1

The Contemporary Novel

TTh 8-9:30

A survey of major novels, including nonfiction novels, published in the last fifty years.  There will be two papers, a midterm, and a final exam.

Note:  The instructor (and book list and course description) of this course changed ...(read more)

130B/1

American Literature: 1800-1865

MWF 2-3

In the mid-nineteenth century, the U.S., a nation that had barely come together, was splitting apart. The fission helped to produce the remarkably energetic works we will be studying over the course of the semester. I will focus primarily on quest...(read more)

132/1

American Novel

TTh 12:30-2

This course will explore eight major American novels.  There will be two papers, a midterm, and a final exam.

Note:  The instructor (and book list and course description) of this course changed in June.  There has been no cha...(read more)

137T/1

Topics in Chicana/o Literature and Culture:
Gender and Class

TTh 12:30-2

In this course, we will explore the interconnectedness of gender and class as represented in a cluster of Chicana/o literary works, films, and art.  The films will include Lourdes Portillo and Nina Serrano’s, Despues del Terremoto (...(read more)

141/1

Modes of Writing (Exposition, Fiction, Verse, etc.):
Race, Creative Writing, and Difference

TTh 2-3:30

This course is an inquiry into the ways that race is constructed in literary texts and a look-by-doing at our own practices as people engaged in creative writing.

The purpose of writing in this course is, broadly stated, to engage public la...(read more)

143A/1

Short Fiction

TTh 11-12:30

The aim of this course is to explore the genre of short fiction--to discuss the elements that make up the short story, to talk critically about short stories, and to become comfortable and confident with the writing of them. Students will write tw...(read more)

143B/1

Verse

TTh 12:30-2

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-li...(read more)

143B/2

Verse

TTh 3:30-5

A seminar in writing poetry.

To be considered for admission to this class, please submit 5 photocopied pages of your poems, along with an application form, to Professor Sutherland's mailbox in 322 Wheeler, BY 4:00 P.M., TUESDAY, APR...(read more)

143N/1

Prose Nonfiction:
Traveling, Thinking, Writing

Thurs. 3:30-6:30

Much of American literature has had to do with a sense of motion. Note the journeys, e.g., in the best known texts of Melville and Twain. But note also that Harlemite Langston Hughes’ autobiography, The Big Sea, begins on a boat and...(read more)

143T/1

Poetry Translation Workshop

TTh 9:30-11

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 gi...(read more)

152/1

Women Writers:
Early American Women Writers

TTh 9:30-11

This course will survey the writing of American women from narratives of colonial settlement through the novels of the early republic.  During this period, women produced immensely popular works and developed major literary traditions that wo...(read more)

165/1

Special Topics:
Modern Poetry

MWF 12-1

The reading and writing assignments—linked with the lectures and class discussions—are intended to develop students’ ability to analyze, understand, and interpret modern poetry, as they gain greater authority in critical writing....(read more)

165/2

Special Topics:
Hardly Strictly Lyric Poetry

MW 4-5:30

Historically and etymologically, lyric poetry was poetry sung to the accompaniment of a lyre.  Most lyric poetry studied as English literature today, however, reflecting "literature"'s own history and etymology, is ...(read more)

166/2

Special Topics:
Engaging the Play--Being the Player

TTh 12:30-2

This course will explore inventive ways of engaging the theater text.

Students will read from a selection of plays and be expected to give presentations analyzing theme, story, as well as point of view of the playwright. This will be follow...(read more)

166/1

Special Topics:
Literature and Science from the Romantics to the Present

MWF 1-2

This course offers an introduction to questions and problems in the study of literature and science, with special attention to Romantic science and its afterlife. Romanticism has come to name both a historical moment (sometimes called an “ag...(read more)

166AC/1

Special Topics in American Cultures:
Race and Revision in Early America

TTh 2-3:30

In this course, we will read both historical and literary texts to explore how racial categories came into being in New World cultures and how these categories were tested, inhabited, and re-imagined by the human actors they sought to define.&nbsp...(read more)

175/1

Literature and Disability

MW 4-5:30

We will examine the ways disability is represented in a variety of works of fiction and drama.  Assignments will include two short (5-8 page) critical essays, a group performance project and a take-home final examination.  (This is a cor...(read more)

180A/1

Autobiography:
American Autobiography: Race, Gender, Culture

TTh 11-12:30

We will take a group of texts--conventional memoir, poetry, painting, photography, and I-focused new media--to explore what American auto/bio/graphy really means.  We will start in the 18th century with Benjamin Franklin and close with a...(read more)

180L/1

Lyric Verse

MW 4-5:30

For more information on this course, please contact Professor Miller at j_miller@berkeley.edu.

This course satisfies the pre-1800 requirement for the English major.

180N/1

The Novel:
The American Novel Since 1900

MW 3-4 + discussion sections F 3-4

A survey of the American novel: its forms, patterns, techniques, ideas, cultural context, and interaction with other media. Special attention will be paid to questions of aesthetics, epistemology, and ethics—w...(read more)

190/1

Research Seminar:
Victorian Sensations

MW 4-5:30

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 will explore the significance of physical and psy...(read more)

190/5

Research Seminar

This section of English 190 has been canceled.

190/6

Research Seminar:
The Urban Postcolonial

TTh 11-12:30

For reasons to do with some of its most canonical texts, postcolonial literature is often thought to present a conflict between “tradition” and “modernity,” a conflict often imagined as the peaceful village intruded upon by...(read more)

190/7

Research Seminar:
Ecopoetry and Ecopoetics

TTh 11-12:30

What is ecopoetry, and what, if anything, distinguishes it from nature poetry?   How does ecopoetics differ from another poetics?  In this seminar we will explore topics surrounding this question, which include the pathetic fallacy ...(read more)

190/8

Research Seminar:
Suspicious Mind

TTh 12:30-2

Suspicious reading, which is sometimes called “symptomatic reading,” starts from the assumption that a text’s true meaning lies in what it does not say, know, or cannot understand.  For symptomatic readers, influenced by the...(read more)

190/9

Research Seminar:
Words and Images: The Intellectual Marketplace of Antebellum America

TTh 12:30-2

This seminar will focus on the literature and visual culture of the early United States — roughly the 1790s through the 1840s, with more than a glance back to George Whitefield and Jonathan Edwards and forward to Walt Whitman and Herman Melv...(read more)

190/11

Research Seminar:
The Politics and Aesthetics of Participation

TTh 2-3:30

This course will track the concept of participation across the 20th century, tracing its manifestation in key aesthetic, political, economic and technological forms. The first half of the course will investigate how, over the course of the 20th ce...(read more)

190/12

Research Seminar:
Metaphysical Poets from Donne to Vaughan

TTh 2-3:30

This class focuses on a group of poets who were philosophical before there was philosophy. Four decades before the publication of René Descartes’ Meditations, John Donne began writing poems in which, in the words of a later c...(read more)

190/15

Research Seminar:
Studies in Children's Literature

TTh 3:30-5

This course will explore the history and theory of writing for children from the mid-eighteenth century through the present. We’ll read works that, in twenty-first-century terms, are considered appropriate for readers from kindergarten throu...(read more)

190/16

Research Seminar:
Film Noir

MW 5:30-7 P.M. + film screenings W 7-10 P.M.

We will examine film noir’s influence on neo-noir and its relationship to “classical” Hollywood cinema, as well as its history, theory and generic markers, while analyzing in detail the major films in this area. The cour...(read more)

190/17

Research Seminar:
Utopian and Dystopian Literature

TTh 5-6:30 + film screenings Tues. 7-10 P.M.

Most utopian and dystopian authors are more concerned with persuading readers of the merits of their ideas than with the "merely" literary qualities of their writing. Although utopian writing has sometimes made converts, inspiring reader...(read more)

H195A/1

Honors Course

MW 12-1:30

This course is designed as the accompaniment to the writing of an honors thesis, the research for and the writing of which will take place in the second semester (H195B). The first semester will prepare you to move toward crafting this long essay ...(read more)

H195A/2

Honors Course

MW 1:30-3

This seminar has the goal of preparing students to write an Honors thesis on a topic of their own devising in the spring semester.  To prepare for that adventure, together we will read ...(read more)

200/1

Problems in the Study of Literature

MW 10:30-12

Approaches to problems of literary study, designed to concentrate on questions of scholarly method, from traditional modes of textual analysis to more recent styles of critical theory and practice.

This course satisfies the Group 1 (problem...(read more)

203/1

Graduate Readings:
Post-9/11 Fiction

M 1-4

Note: Those interested in taking the course, please email me (ksnyder@berkeley.edu) the first week of classes for the reading assignment required for our first seminar meeting on September 9.

For mo...(read more)

203/2

Graduate Readings:
Modernism and Film

MW 4-5:30

This course surveys a range of twentieth-century texts that allow us to explore connections between film and modernist literary practice, and the cultural implications of cinema for the period as a whole. Working with a broad conception of moderni...(read more)

203/3

Graduate Readings:
Prospectus Course

Th 2-5

This is a practical writing workshop intended to facilitate and accelerate the transitions from qualifying exams to prospectus conference, from prospectus conference to first dissertation chapter, and from the status of student to that of scholar....(read more)

205A/1

Old English

TTh 11-12:30

This class introduces students to the language, literature, and modern critical study of the written vernacular culture of England before the Norman Conquest—an era whose language and aesthetics now seem radically foreign. By the end of the ...(read more)

246F/1

Graduate Proseminar: The Later-Eighteenth Century

Tues. 3:30-6:30

The later eighteenth century has presented literary historians with more than the usual challenge to periodization or organization by author and movement; they have responded with an unusual number of designations: the “Age of Johnson,&rdquo...(read more)

250/1

Research Seminar:
Critical and Peripheral Realisms

Tues. 3:30-6:30

To what extent has our tendency to measure aesthetic achievement within the terms set by the historical modernisms of 1890-1920 blocked our perception of twentieth century peripheral literatures? This course will entertain historical diagnoses of ...(read more)

250/2

Research Seminar:
Sensory Aesthetics in Late Medieval and Early Renaissance Poetry and Drama

W 1-4

Sensation is a liminal phenomenon, a phenomenon that marks edges and borders. It is the interface between the material world and the physical body as well as between the body and the mind. Medieval writing is full of sensation, from the theoretica...(read more)

250/3

Research Seminar:
The Romantic Novel and the History of Man

Thurs. 3:30-6:30

In his introduction to Tom Jones (1749) Henry Fielding formally announced the “rise of the novel” by grounding the new genre on “human nature,” which David Hume had recently proclaimed the foundation of all the sci...(read more)

310/1

Field Studies in Tutoring Writing

TBA

Through seminars, discussions, and reading assignments, students are introduced to the language/writing/literacy needs of diverse college-age writers such as the developing, bi-dialectal, and non-native English-speaking (NNS) writer. The course wi...(read more)

375/1

The Teaching of Composition and Literature

Tues. 1-3

This course (previously numbered English 302) will explore the theory and practice of teaching literature and writing. Designed as both a critical seminar and a hands-on practicum for new college teachers, the class will cover topics such as cours...(read more)