Announcement of Classes: Fall 2014

R1A/1

Reading and Composition:
(Self) Portraits in (Post) Modern Literature

MWF 10-11

Our topic for this course in critical analysis and essay composition will be literary portraiture in a series of Modern, Postmodern, and Contemporary novels, poems, and cross-genre works. During the semester we will encounter a dandy whose looks n...(read more)

R1A/2

Reading and Composition:
(new topic:) "Structures of Feeling": The Individual in Modernity

MWF 12-1

Let's begin with two loose assumptions, that novels register everyday experience and that novels bear witness to large epistemic shifts. As the possibilities of individual and collective life flounder spectacularly under the pressures of moder...(read more)

R1A/3

Reading and Composition:
How Taste Matters: Self-Curation, Public Identity, and the Modern Aesthetic Life

MWF 1-2

In 1862, Ruskin wrote of the state, “Economists usually speak as if there were no good in consumption absolute. So far from this being so, consumption absolute is the end, crown, and perfection of production; and wise consumption is a far mo...(read more)

R1A/4

Reading and Composition:
The First Person, Medieval to Modern

MWF 3-4

"I am large, I contain multitudes," Walt Whitman's Song of Myself admits parenthetically. This course takes Whitman's multitudes seriously, investigating change and continuity in six centuries of first-person narration. ...(read more)

R1A/5

Reading and Composition:
Temptation and Desire in Renaissance Literature

MW 4-5:30

The great English epics and dramas of the Early Modern period can’t do without temptation. Why not? What makes temptation such a generative concept? Can we define it? Is temptation just an excuse to blame devils, monsters, or women for one&r...(read more)

R1A/6

Reading and Composition:
Shakespeare and Film

TTh 8-9:30

How do filmmakers translate Shakespeare from live theater to screen? How do Shakespeare’s tragedies, versus his comedies, versus his histories, lend themselves to or resist certain types of movie adaptation? Do some genres or plays work bett...(read more)

R1A/7

Reading and Composition:
The Idea of the West

TTh 9:30-11

In this course, we will examine a variety of texts in order to ask the question: what do we mean when we talk about the West? What is it that writers and ar...(read more)

R1A/8

Reading and Composition:
The Literary Character

TTh 11-12:30

How do loose bits of textual material transform into literary characters of heft and substance? The question seems deceptively simple when referred to the poles of cultural habit or of the fluid workings of the reader’s imagination. In this ...(read more)

R1A/9

Reading and Composition:
Writing and Rights: Literature and the Fight against Oppression in Nineteenth-Century America

TTh 2-3:30

"The artist ...  is the holiest reformer of them all, for she is creating."-- Paulina Wright Davis, The Una, 1854

"Polemics ...  are not likely to be epics.  They are likely to be pamphlets, even when they are ...(read more)

R1A/10

Reading and Composition:
Making American Literature

TTh 5-6:30

What does it take to write American literature? What in the history of the United States distinguishes the culture, texture, and style of American letters?

In this course we'll explore highly effective strategies in American literary wr...(read more)

R1B/1

Reading and Composition:
Modern Minds

MWF 10-11

In this writing- and research-intensive course we will consider how late nineteenth and early twentieth century writers both responded to and helped shape modern  conceptions of the human mind. Our readings and discussions will focus on the b...(read more)

R1B/2

Reading and Composition:
American Transience in the 20th Century

MWF 12-1

Since the imperious dream of Westward expansion, notions of American autonomy, power, and identity have often been caught up with living in motion.  But of course, motion also involves exposure: to displacement, to homelessness, to precarious...(read more)

R1B/3

Reading and Composition:
Note new topic: War, Empire, and Asian American Cultural Critique

MWF 2-3

Dubbed the "American Century," the 20th century bore witness to the rise of the United States as a global superpower, the outcome of American involvement in World War II and the Cold War. From the Philippine-American War to the Pacific W...(read more)

R1B/4

Reading and Composition:
Obsession

MWF 3-4

This course will give you a framework to think (and write) more critically about the things you can’t stop thinking about anyway. Throughout the ...(read more)

R1B/5

Reading and Composition:
Note new topic: Theorizing the Popular Song

TTh 9:30-11

In this course we will examine recent scholarship on the emergence of the popular recording industry in the early 20th century, paying particular attention to how the demands of a capitalist marketplace (mass reproduction, advertising, and distrib...(read more)

R1B/6

Reading and Composition:
Sincerity & Honesty

TTh 12:30-2

What does it mean to be sincere or honest? How does one even define honesty, and how has that definition changed over time? What are the prerequisites for truth-speaking to take place? Is sincerity even possible? What is the cost of honesty, and w...(read more)

R1B/7

Reading and Composition:
Sorrow Songs: Aural Poetry in Nineteenth-Century America

TTh 3:30-5

In this introduction to college composition and research, we will develop skills of close-attention to literary texts and analytic argument through readings of songs, poems, and critical essays, and we will investigate how literary texts (or other...(read more)

R1B/8

Reading and Composition :
Life Stories

MWF 1-2

This course will examine how authors born in nineteenth-century Britain shaped lived experience into nonfictional narrative, turning their own lives and the lives of those around them into stories. We’ll consider autobiography, biography, me...(read more)

R1B/9

Reading and Composition :
Wild Child

MWF 3-4

This course will explore the literary depiction of the “wild child” and the association of childhood with “primitive,” “savage,” or “natural” conditions. We’ll consider a broad spectrum of wild...(read more)

104/1

Introduction to Old English

MWF 11-12

Hwæt! Leorniaþ Englisc!

In this class, you will learn to read, write, and even speak the language of Beowulf. Once you have completed it, you will be able to understand—and will have read!—a wide range of te...(read more)

115A/1

The English Renaissance (through the 16th century)

MWF 3-4

In this course, we follow how English authors from Thomas More to John Donne participated in the grand cultural project of the Renaissance, defined by the belief that consuming a...(read more)

115B/1

The English Renaissance (17th century)

TTh 11-12:30

An introduction to one of the great ages of English literature (poetry, prose, and drama), focusing on works by King James I, Donne, Jonson, Herbert, Marvell, Milton, Cavendish, Hutchinson, Halkett, and Bunyan. We will discuss the relationship bet...(read more)

117S/1

Shakespeare

TTh 2-3:30

This course will be a basic introduction to the major plays of Shakespeare.  It will include Midsummer Night 's Dream, probably Merchant of Venice, Richard II, Hamlet, Othello, King Lear(read more)

117S/2

Shakespeare

MW 10-11 + discussion sections F 10-11

Shakespeare's poems and plays are relentlessly unsettling, crazy beautiful, deeply moving, rigorously brilliant, and compulsively meaningful: they complicate everything, they simplify nothing, and for 400 years, they have been a touchstone--in...(read more)

118/1

Milton

This course has been postponed from fall 2014 to spring 2015.

119/1

Literature of the Restoration & the Early 18th Century

TTh 3:30-5

The period from the "Restoration" of Charles II (1660) to the death of Alexander Pope (1744) produced the last poems of Milton, the first English pornography and feminist polemic, the most devastating satires ever written, some of the mo...(read more)

125D/1

The 20th -Century Novel

TTh 9:30-11

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...(read more)

126/1

British Literature: 1900-1945

MW 3-4 + discussion sections F 3-4

(read more)

127/1

Modern Poetry

TTh 11-12:30

This course will survey the work of major American and British poets who flourished in the twentieth century.  Poets will include W.B. Yeats, Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, Robert Frost, W.H. Auden,  Hart Crane, Wallace Stevens, W.C. Williams, ...(read more)

130A/1

American Literature: Before 1800

MWF 2-3

This course will offer a survey of the literature in English produced in North America before 1800: competing British versions of settlement; Puritan history, sermons, and poetry; conversion, captivity, and slave narratives; diaries, journals, ess...(read more)

130B/1

American Literature: 1800-1865

TTh 2-3:30

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)

133A/1

African American Literature and Culture Before 1917

TTh 3:30-5

African American expressive culture has been driven by an affinity for the oral; and yet the claim for black humanity has often rested upon an embrace of literacy. In this survey we will attempt to bridge these oral and literary impulses in an exp...(read more)

133B/1

African American Literature and Culture\nSince 1917

TTh 2-3:30

An examination of some of the major 20th-century African American novels.

133T/1

Topics in African American Literature and Culture:
The Fiction of Toni Morrison

TTh 9:30-11

A sequential examination of Toni Morrison’s fiction.

133T/2

Topics in African American Literature and Culture

This section of English 133T has been canceled.

135AC/1

Literature of American Cultures:
Race and Ethnicity in American Cinema

MW 12-1 + discussion sections F 12-1

An introduction to critical thinking about race and ethnicity, focused on a select group of films produced between the 1910s and the 1970s. Themes include law and violence, kinship and miscegenation, captivity and rescue, passing and racial impers...(read more)

C136/1

Topics in American Studies:
Boys and Girls in the Era of Mark Twain and Henry James

MWF 12-1

Historians often define the era after the Civil War and especially from 1880 to ca. 1915 as the “era of the child.”  Children became the heroes of popular  culture as well as major subjects for painters and intellectuals and ...(read more)

138/1

Studies in World Literature in English:
Partitioned States/Partitioned Selves

note new time: TTh 2-3:30

Territorial division has long been used as a means of political reorganization, especially in the face of ethnic or ideological conflict. This course examines the relationship between territorial splitting, or partition, and empire in the twentiet...(read more)

141/1

Modes of Writing:
Writing Fiction, Poetry, and Plays

TTh 9:30-11

This course will introduce students to the study of creative writing--fiction, poetry, and drama.  Students will learn to talk critically about these forms and begin to feel comfortable and confident writing within these genres.  Student...(read more)

141/2

Modes of Writing:
Writing Fiction, Poetry, and Plays

TTh 9:30-11

This course will introduce students to the study of creative writing--fiction, poetry, and drama.  Students will learn to talk critically about these forms and begin to feel comfortable and confident writing within these genres.  Student...(read more)

143A/1

Short Fiction

MW 1:30-3

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.  S...(read more)

143A/2

Short Fiction

TTh 12:30-2

This class is a workshop in short fiction. It is designed to introduce students to the basic principles of narrative style and structure, and to encourage a model of constructive critique in a workshop setting. Our readings will include short stor...(read more)

143B/1

Verse

MW 4-5:30

What I take as a given is that poetry (and by implication, all "creative writing") is a public activity, one with the job of disrupting the status quo, the "interested" discourse of TV and advertising, the endless double-talk o...(read more)

143B/2

Verse

TTh 11-12:30

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/3

Verse

TTh 3:30-5

A seminar in writing poetry.

Only continuing UC Berkeley students are eligible to apply for this course. To be considered for admission, please electronically submit 5 of your poems, by clicking on the link below; fill out the applicati...(read more)

143N/1

Prose Nonfiction:
The Personal Essay

MW 12-1:30

This class will be conducted as a writing workshop to explore the art and craft of the personal essay.  We will closely examine the essays in Phillip Lopate’s anthology, as well as students’ exercises and essays.  Writing ass...(read more)

143N/2

Prose Nonfiction

TTh 2-3:30

Within a workshop setting, we will read, discuss, and practice writing the major forms and styles of nonfiction, with special attention to the essay as a literary genre.  Students will express their understanding and appreciation of this lite...(read more)

161/1

Introduction to Literary Theory

TTh 11-12:30

In this course we will study how literary theory developed as a field in the twentieth century, even as it regularly drew its principles, methods, and inspiration from other academic disciplines and social discourses.  Our focus will be on th...(read more)

165/1

Special Topics:
Critical Influences in Contemporary Culture

TTh 9:30-11

165/2

Special Topics:
Freedom and the University: The 1960s and Its Afterlives

TTh 11-12:30

The sixties represent a period in which the university became for the first time a central locus of struggles for freedom—for civil rights, Black Power, Third World self-determination, and women’s and gay liberation, and a...(read more)

165/3

Special Topics:
Greek Tragedy in Translation

TTh 12:30-2

The lectures, class discussions, readings, and writing assignments are intended to develop students' ability to analyze, understand, and evaluate a number of important ancient texts. The class will examine the deep implications of these early ...(read more)

165/5

Special Topics:
The Graphic Memoir

TTh 11-12:30

The 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 preten...(read more)

165/6

Special Topics:
The End of the Poem: Poetic Closure

TTh 2-3:30

This class addresses an inevitable feature of all poems, the last line: the position from which the poem’s entire form is, for the first time, apprehended. This focus will require attention to all the formal and thematic principles by which ...(read more)

166/2

Special Topics:
Chicano Literature and History

TTh 2-3:30

The Chicano Movement of the late sixties and early seventies was a social movement that reshaped the political and cultural landscape of the Mexican American community. It represented a political challenge to inequality and racism as well as a cul...(read more)

166/3

Special Topics:
Black Science Fiction

TTh 2-3:30

This course considers two specific genres—black fiction and science fiction—to explore how they inflect each other when they blend. Under the umbrella “black,” we include fictions that issue out of and/or purport to describ...(read more)

166/4

Special Topics:
Global Cities

TTh 9:30-11

Globalization has given rise to a new kind of urban space, a nexus where the networks of capital, labor, and bodies meet: the global city. This course, a survey of contemporary Anglophone literature, considers the narratives--fictional and otherwi...(read more)

171/1

Literature and Sexual Identity:
Gender, Sexuality, and Modernism

TTh 3:30-5

Gender norms and literary forms both exploded at the turn of the twentieth century. These paired crises in social and literary narratives were perceived on the one hand as the stuttering end of western culture's story, the drying up of libidin...(read more)

173/1

The Language and Literature of Films:
British Cinema

TTh 12:30-2 + films Tues. 6-9 P.M.

This course will look at the British cinema from the 1930s to the present from a number of different angles. First, we will consider British cinema as a national industry and ask how the economic and social conditions under which British films hav...(read more)

174/1

Literature and History:
The French Revolution

MWF 12-1

“The French Revolution did not take place.”

“The French Revolution is not yet over.”

These two sentences might seem not only counterfactual, but also contr...(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 presentation project, and a take-home final examination.  (This is a c...(read more)

180A/1

Autobiography

This course has been canceled.

180N/1

The Novel

This course has been canceled.

190/1

Research Seminar:
American Captivities

MW 3-4:30

The Indian captivity narrative is the first literary genre that might be called uniquely “American.”  Its standard protagonist was a white woman kidnapped by Indians, but American captivity narratives also related the captivities ...(read more)

190/2

Research Seminar:
Recent African American Literature

MW 3-4:30

A seminar focused on poetry and prose published by African Americans in the last 25 years. One short essay, one group presentation, and one long essay due at the end of the semester.

Please read the paragraph on page 2 of the instructio...(read more)

190/3

Research Seminar:
James Joyce

MW 4-5:30

Our course traces the evolution of Joyce’s writing, from his angry essays at the turn of the twentieth century to his all-compassing comedy, Finnegans Wake, published just before the outbreak of World War II. We will consider the tr...(read more)

190/4

Research Seminar:
Victorian Masculinities

TTh 9:30-11

The Queen for whom the Victorian era was named defines the period’s cultural reputation in more ways than one; the stereotypes of Victorianism—moral constraint, prudery, repression—are almost always associated with women. This co...(read more)

190/5

Research Seminar:
Paradise Lost and the Ancient Epic

TTh 11-12:30

“Not less but more heroic” … that is Milton’s claim in his modern epic Paradise Lost, comparing his own Biblical theme to the achievements of ancient epic, Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey and Vir...(read more)

190/6

Research Seminar:
Ecopoetry

TTh 12:30-2

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 and anthropomorphi...(read more)

190/7

Research Seminar:
Virginia Woolf

TTh 12:30-2

This course will examine the evolution of Woolf’s career across the nearly three decades that define the arc of British modernism. This co-incidence will allow us to theorize the shape of a career and of a literary movement, and to re-read t...(read more)

190/8

Research Seminar:
Dialect Literature

TTh 12:30-2

In this seminar we will read works written in what the novelist and human rights activist Ken Saro-Wiwa termed “rotten English,” primarily the work of authors from the African diaspora, though not exclusively.  Our conversations w...(read more)

190/9

Research Seminar:
Contemporary British Culture and Literature

TTh 12:30-2

In this course, we will investigate the literary and cultural landscape of contemporary Britain.  After several introductory sessions on the postwar period (1945-1979), we'll spend the bulk of our time in the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s.&nbsp...(read more)

190/10

Research Seminar:
The Romantic Novel

TTh 2-3:30

Readings in the “novelistic revolution” (Franco Moretti’s phrase) of European Romanticism. With our main focus on the establishment of  “the classical form of the historical novel” in Scott’s Waverley(read more)

190/11

Research Seminar:
Manifesto Modernism

TTh 2-3:30

This course will examine modernist prose and poetry in English from the perspective of a particularly modern genre of writing, the manifesto. By exploring the literary qualities of the manifesto as well as the manifesto-like qualities of modernist...(read more)

190/12

Research Seminar:
The Rejection of Closure: Slow Readings

TTh 3:30-5

This is a seminar in the poetics of reading. Over the course of the semester, students will undertake prolonged, exploratory, multi-contextual readings of a selection of recent and contemporary “difficult” poems. Works by Larry Eigner,...(read more)

190/13

Research Seminar

190/14

Research Seminar:
20th-Century California Literature and Film

Tues. 6-9 P.M.

Besides reading and discussing fiction and poetry with Western settings, and essays that attempt to identify or explain distinctive regional characteristics, this course will include consideration of some movies shaped by and shaping conceptions o...(read more)

190/15

Research Seminar:
Film Noir

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

We will examine the influence of film noir 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 course...(read more)

H195A/1

Honors Course

MW 4-5:30

English 195A is the first part of a two-semester sequence for those English majors writing honors theses. This course gives you the opportunity, training, and time to conduct original research that will enable you to make a scholarly contribution ...(read more)

H195A/2

Honors Course

TTh 3:30-5

This course will guide and accompany you as you undertake the capstone project of your English major: a Heartbreaking (40-60 pages!) Honors Thesis of Staggering Genius. The fall semester will serve as an introduction to literary theory and critici...(read more)

200/1

Problems in the Study of Literature

MW 10:30-12

(read more)

203/2

Graduate Readings:
Allegories of Late Capitalism and the Writing of Everyday Life

TTh 12:30-2

This seminar will undertake a critical reading of, and participation in, some possibilities (or impossibilities) of contemporary realisms and realities. It will query, from an array of perspectives, problems of process, location, historical awaren...(read more)

203/3

Graduate Readings:
The Novel in Theory

TTh 2-3:30

This course traces the development of novel theory in the twentieth century.  Designed as an introduction to major arguments that are still influential in literary studies generally, the course asks why so many different theoretica...(read more)

205A/1

Old English

This course will not be offered in 2014-15, but English Department graduate students may take the undergraduate equivalent, English 104 (Introduction to Old English), this fall in its place; see the listing for that course in this Announcement of ...(read more)

211/1

Chaucer

MW 1:30-3

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

This course satisfies the Group 2 (Medieval through Sixteenth Century) requirement.

217/1

Shakespeare

M 3-6

Instead of pursuing a master problematic, we will take up a wide range of issues: when I read Shakespeare these days, I am interested in his representations of citizenship, compassion, artificial persons (political representatives, diplomats, surr...(read more)

243N/1

Prose Nonfiction Writing Workshop

This course has been canceled.

246C/1

Renaissance

W 3-6

This survey course will focus on the poetry, drama, and prose literature of sixteenth-century England.  We'll also read key works from the past fifty years of literary scholarship on the period.

Whenever possible, readings will be ...(read more)

246K/1

Literature in English 1900-1945:
The Modernist Novel

MW 12-1:30

250/1

Research Seminars:
Comintern Modernisms

W 3-6

It has long been common practice to see Western metropolises like Paris and New York as competing centers of global modernism, as capitals of a "world republic of letters."  The aim of this seminar is to posit an alternate mapping o...(read more)

250/2

Research Seminars:
Victorian Prose Style

Thurs. 3:30-6:30

In this course, we’ll look at the idea of prose style in a few different ways.  First, we’ll read some key texts on the theory of st...(read more)

250/3

Research Seminars:
Poetry and the Fate of the Senses

M 3-6

This comparative seminar in lyric poetry borrows its title from Susan Stewart's Poetry and the Fate of the Senses (University of Chicago Press, 2002), to ask about the relation between poetry and sensory deprivation (or plenitude) and...(read more)

310/1

Field Studies in Tutoring Writing

T. B. A.

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)

310/1

Field Studies in Tutoring Writing

T.B.A.

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\nLiterature

Thurs. 9-11

Co-taught by a faculty member and a graduate student instructor (the department's R&C Assistant Coordinator), this course introduces new English GSIs to the theory and practice of teaching literature and writing both at UC Berkeley (in Eng...(read more)