Beckett, Samuel: Watt; Joyce, James: Dubliners; Woolf, Virginia: To the Lighthouse
A course reader that may include poems, short stories, and excerpts from works by W.H. Auden, Djuna Barnes, Joseph Conrad, T.S. Eliot, Thomas Hardy, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Henry James, Wyndham Lewis, Mina Loy, Walter Pater, Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, Rebecca West, Oscar Wilde, Virginia Woolf, and William Butler Yeats; and theoretical or critical excerpts from figures such as Sigmund Freud, Roger Fry, Max Nordau, and Georg Simmel.
Virginia Woolf famously wrote that “on or about December 1910, human character changed.” In her view, the exciting and experimental works of modernism—written by authors like T.S. Eliot, James Joyce, and Woolf herself—came out of the search for new ways to express this new human character. Many have followed Woolf in considering the masterworks of modernism as responses to the changes of the modern age: new ideas about psychology and the inner experience of the individual, war, technology, and an increasingly complex and urban world.
In this survey of modernist literature, we will spend time tracing the links Woolf emphasized—links between modernist literature and such developments as literary impressionism, modernist visual art, depth psychology, and psychoanalysis. But, at the same time, we will also investigate another modernist tradition—one that seeks to undo the binds holding literature to the integral representation of character, emotion and psychology, the individual, and inner experience.
This course will be taught in Session D, which runs from July 7 to August 15.
Acosta, Oscar: The Revolt of the Cockroach People; Herman, Melville: Benito Cereno; Kobek, Jarett: Atta
Films: The Godfather, Part II; Do The Right Thing
A course reader and/or b-space site including: selections from Hector St. John de Crevecoeur, Thomas Jefferson, Frederick Douglass, Sui Sin Far, Charles Chesnutt, Zitkala Sa, Amy Tan, Alice Walker, and others.
The United States Constitution refers to “We, the People,” as if it’s obvious who’s included in – and excluded from – that “we.” In fact, though, the reality has always been much messier. Fights over who was part of that “we” nearly derailed the United States’ founding, and its subsequent history has been defined by struggles over who is included in the “real America,” as one politician infamously put it a few years ago. In this course, we’ll look at how American literature has helped make and remake that “We, the People.” We’ll focus especially on slavery, immigration, racial integration, and terrorism, and we’ll look closely at how fiction, essays, poetry, and films have intervened into often-violent struggles over who counts as an American and as a person. As we do so, we’ll investigate how this process of defining and redefining the American people has prompted Americans to alter the boundaries of categories like “whiteness” and “blackness” and even to rethink the concept of race itself.
This course satisfies UC Berkeley's American Cultures requirement.
This course will be taught in Session D, which runs from July 7 to August 15.