Mitchell, Bruce, and Fred C. Robinson: A Guide to Old English
A coursepack.
Hwæt! Leorniað Englisc!
In this all-new version of the introduction to Old English, you will begin to read and write Old English from your first day in class, while also learning fundamental principles of grammar and historical language change. As you progress in your knowledge, you will begin exploring the wide range of literature in Old English, including riddles, love-laments, heroic poetry, and exotic travel narratives. You will learn what to do about demons, and the surprising reason that pepper is black. (Hint: it involves snakes.) By the end of the course, you will be able to read most Old English texts with the aid of a dictionary. You will also have a strong grasp of the linguistic principles that still shape modern English, and will be well prepared for further study of modern and medieval languages.
There are no prerequisites for this course, and no prior knowledge is expected. Graduate students interested in Old English should contact the instructor: a concurrent version of this course may be taken for graduate credit.
This course satisfies the pre-1800 requirement for the English major.
New Oxford Annotated Bible NSRV with Apocrypha [College Edition]; Alter, Robert: Genesis; Browning, WRF: Oxford Dictionary of the Bible
We will read a selection of biblical texts as literature. That is, we will read the Bible in many ways, but not as divine revelation. We will take up traditional literary questions of form, style, and structure, but we will also learn how to ask historical, political, and theoretical questions of a text that is multi-authored, fissured, and historically layered. Among other topics, we will pay special attention to how authority is established and contested in biblical texts; how biblical authors negotiate the ancient Hebrew prohibition against representing God in images; and how the gospels are socially and historically poised between the Jesus movement that is their source and the institutionalization of the church that follows. Assignments are likely to include two take-home midterms and a final.
This course is cross-listed with Religious Studies C119.
All readings will be made available electronically.
A survey of England's "century of revolution," focusing on relationships between literature, religion, and politics.
This course satisfies the pre-1800 requirement for the English major.
Shakespeare: A Midsummer Night's Dream; Shakespeare: As You Like It; Shakespeare: Henry IV, Part One; Shakespeare: Henry IV, Part Two; Shakespeare: Henry V; Shakespeare: Richard II; Shakespeare: Romeo and Juliet; Shakespeare: Sonnets; Shakespeare: The Merchant of Venice
English 117A studies the first half of Shakespeare's career in depth. We'll focus on eight plays--a tragedy, three major comedies, and the great four-play "Lancastrian" cycle of histories--and on the Sonnets. And we will acquaint ourselves with some highlights from the four-century tradition of writing about Shakespeare, developing our own critical skills by matching wits with great critics of the past (some of whom, like Johnson, Coleridge, or Wilde, you may already have met in other contexts). We will meet as a lecture on Mondays and Wednesdays, and will break into TA-led discussion sections on Fridays. Written work will include a close-reading essay, a guided research essay, and a variety of smaller-scale assignments drawing out individual concepts and skills.
Greenblatt , Stephen, ed. : The Norton Shakespeare
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" and "irregular." What is the rule, and what is the exception in Shakespeare's works? How is a comedy supposed to end? How does it end? What makes a tragic hero? Is Hamlet a tragic hero? What are the rules of theater? What are the rules of literature? When do they get transgressed, and why? A tentative list of the plays includes Titus Andronicus, Richard III, A Midsummer Night's Dream, As You Like It, King Lear, and The Tempest. We'll also read some of the sonnets. There will be two essays and a final exam.
The main text will be The Norton Shakespeare (ed. S. Greenblatt). Additional materials will be distributed through the course website.
Milton, John: The Major Works (Oxford World's Classics)
Some handouts and bCourse files will illustrate aspects of Milton's personal life and times.
Intensive reading in the poetry and prose of John Milton (1608-1674), written during a period of dramatic historical change, and including the most influential single poem in the English language, Paradise Lost. Our goal is to get under the skin of this great but troublesome writer, examining not only the major poems but the controversial writings that made his reputation as a political and sexual radical. This class will be a mixture of lecture, performance, and discussion; I will try to give you a sense of the revolutionary ideas and events of Milton's lifetime, but the main emphasis will always be on the power and imagination of the writing, as revealed by careful reading.
This course satisfies the pre-1800 requirement for the English major.
Bronte, C.: Jane Eyre; Bronte, E.: Wuthering Heights; Carroll, L.: Alice's Adventures in Wonderland; Conrad, J.: Lord Jim; Dickens, C.: Nicholas Nickelby; Eliot, G.: The Mill on the Floss; Hardy, T.: The Return of the Native; Thackeray, W.M.: Vanity Fair
In this class we'll read novels by Charles Dickens, Charlotte Bronte, George Eliot, Lewis Carroll and others. We'll think about these novels in two related ways. First, what was it about the novel—as opposed, for instance, to the poem or the essay—that made it so important to nineteenth-century culture (as well as to our more or less accurate twenty-first-century ideas about that culture)? Was it because it showed the world as it really was or because it offered an opportunity to escape that world? Was it because it said something persuasive or true about life, about other people, about history, about sex, love or money? What, in other words, were nineteenth-century readers reading (and reading for) when they read Vanity Fair, Wuthering Heights, or Alice's Adventures in Wonderland? Second, we'll use "The English Novel: Dickens through Conrad" to ask and, perhaps, to answer persistent questions about the novel as such. What is a novel? Why are novels (sometimes) so long? Is a novel most about its characters or most about its plot? Should the novel educate or entertain? Thinking about the novel as a particular game with particular rules ("'I don't think they play at all fairly,' Alice began...") will help us both to understand the novel in its context and maybe to know what we talk about when we talk about novels.
Austen, Jane: Pride and Prejudice; Dostoevsky, Fyodor: The Idiot; Tolstoy, Leo: Anna Karenina; Woolf, Virginia: Mrs. Dalloway
A close reading of selected works of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy in conjunction with English novels. We will focus on how the Russian and English novels resemble one another, differ from one another, and respond to one another, especially in their treatment of love, family, community and society, and in the workings of the novel as a genre. In her famous essay “The Russian Point of View,” Virginia Woolf suggests that whereas the English novelist feels a “constant pressure” to recognize “barriers” and “boundaries,” both ideological and formal, the Russian novelist “cannot restrain himself.” The English novelist is inclined to “satire,” the Russian to “compassion”; the English to scrutiny of society, and the Russian to understanding of individuals. Is Woolf right? The course begins with Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice (1813), proceeds to Fyodor Dostoevsky's The Idiot (1869), in the Peaver and Volokhonsky translation, and Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, in the Maude translation (1877), and concludes with Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway (1925).
Workload: Close reading of assigned texts (up to 200 pages per week), regular attendance, midterm, one paper, final exam.
Prerequisites: None. (All readings are done in English.)
This course is cross-listed with Slavic 132.
Achebe, Chinua: Things Fall Apart; Gibson, William: Neuromancer; Mann, Thomas: The Magic Mountain; Woolf, Virginia: Mrs. Dalloway; Zola, Emile: La Bete 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 reshaped 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?
See below.
Readings will likely include: Conrad: Heart of Darkness; Joyce: Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man; Lewis: BLAST; West: Return of the Solidier; Woolf: Mrs. Dalloway; Spark: The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie; Greene: The Third Man; Brecht: Threepenny Opera; and poetry by Loy, Hardy, Yeats, Eliot, Auden, Smith, and WWI combatants.
How did the form, content, circulation, and ambitions of British literature change over the first half of the twentieth century? How did writers contend with historical upheavals such as World War I, suffrage, and the wane of empire? With the advent of electronic media? These are some of the questions this course will try to answer.
This course has been canceled.
Fern, Fanny: Ruth Hall; Jacobs, Harriet: Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl; Levine, Robert S.: Norton Anthology of American Literature, Vol. B (8th ed.); Melville, Herman: Moby Dick; Thoreau, Henry David: Walden
Photocopied reader (available at Copy Central, 2576 Bancroft Way)
Reading Longfellow, Poe, Emerson, Thoreau, Douglass, Jacobs, Fern, Melville, Whitman, and Dickinson, we will pay particular attention to literary form and technique, to social and political context, and to the ideological formations and transformations of the antebellum period. We will be concerned with issues of "self" (the search for transcendence and the entanglement in relations); landscape; the Puritan legacy; the nature and role of the emotions; the efforts to reform the American character; the democratic experiment; and the struggles over the rights and roles of women, African Americans, and Native Americans in the expanding nation. Two midterms and one final examination will be required.
Chesnutt, Charles: Conjure Tales and Stories of the Color Line; Chopin, Kate: The Awakening; Crane, Stephen: Great Short Works; Dickinson, Emily: Complete Poems; Dreiser, Theodore: Sister Carrie; Dunbar, Paul Laurence: Collected Poetry; James, Henry: Daisy Miller; Jewett, Sarah Orne: Country of the Pointed Firs; Twain, Mark: Adventures of Huckleberry Finn; Whitman, Walt: Complete Poems
A survey in United States literature from the Civil War to the beginning of the twentieth century. Course requirements include weekly reading responses, two essays, midterm, and final exam.
Lerner, Ben: Mean Free Path; Rankine, Claudia: Citizen
This survey of U.S. poetries will begin with Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson and then touch down in expatriate and stateside modernisms, the Harlem Renaissance, the New York School, and Language Poetry, on our way to the contemporary. Rather than cover all major figures briefly, we’ll spend extended time with the work of a few: poets considered will include Paul Dunbar, Gertrude Stein, T. S. Eliot, Claude McKay, Jean Toomer, Frank O’Hara, John Ashbery, Lyn Hejinian, Claudia Rankine, and Ben Lerner. Along the way we’ll consider renovations and dissipations of conventional form and meter, the task and materials of the long poem, seriality, citationality, who and what counts as a poetic subject, and how U.S. poetries have imagined community over and against their actual Americas. In addition to the two required books, primary and secondary readings will be drawn from a Course Reader. There will be a take-home midterm, a term paper, and a final exam.
This course has been canceled.
Adams, Henry: Democracy; Alger, Horatio: Ragged Dick; Cashman, Sean: America in the Gilded Age; Chesnutt, Charles: The House Behind the Cedars; Howells, William Dean: The Rise of Silas Lapham; Riis, Jacob: How the Other Half Lives; Twain, Mark: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn; Twain, Mark: The Gilded Age
There will be a small class reader.
Mark Twain’s and Charles Dudley Warner’s collaborative novel of 1873, The Gilded Age, has given a name to the American historical period of the post-Civil War era (roughly 1865 to 1890). It is a period of great changes in the country—the rise of monopolistic industrial capitalism in powerful corporations with consequent urbanization and the rise of cities such as New York, Boston, Chicago, etc., and the struggle of a rural America against these new powers. It is a period of great economic unrest, with regular depressions (known as “panics”) and labor strikes. With Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1865), we glimpse the failed Reconstruction of the freed men and women from slavery as various forms of oppression are invented in the nation to re-subjugate African Americans. And, this is a period of a certain intellectual turmoil as writers try to understand what is going on in the country.
There will be two midterm exams and a final exam.
This course is cross-listed with American Studies C111E.
Acosta, Oscar Zeta: The Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo; Anzaldua, Gloria: Borderlands/La Frontera - The New Mestiza; Gonzalez, Rigoberto: Crossing Vines; Plascencia, Salvador: The People of Paper; Rivera, Tomas: Y no se lo trago la tierra; Trevino Hart, Elva: Barefoot Heart - Stories of a Migrant Child; Urrea, Luis Alberto: The Devil's Highway; Viramontes, Helena Maria: Under the Feet of Jesus
Film: Alambrista, by Robert Young
The topic of this course is “migrant narratives,” referring both to narratives about migrants and narratives that cross boundaries of one kind or another. We’ll read a cluster of Chicana/o literary works published between 1970 and 2005 and watch one or two films. Even though the primary thematic focus of the course will be on migration, we’ll also explore other experiences represented in these works—race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, political activism, philosophy, art, storytelling, and writing—which have influenced the form and content of Chicana/o literature. We'll discuss the manner in which Chicana/o literature contributes to the formation of complex and sometimes contradictory cultural identities, but we’ll also pay close attention to literary features of these works, including form, style, point of view, characterization, dialogue, and figurative language. Several works of literary history or criticism will be included in the syllabus to facilitate our reading of the literature and to help us understand how Chicana/o literature expands and enriches the American literary tradition generally. Class participation is mandatory. Writing assignments will include two essays.
The Penguin Book of First World War Poetry; DuBois, W.E.B. : Dark Princess; Fussell, Paul: The Great War and Modern Memory; Junger, Ernst: Storm of Steel; Senghor, Leopold: Selected Poems; Stein, Gertrude: Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas; Woolf, Virginia: Mrs. Dalloway
In the years following World War One, European intellectuals debated the implications of the new balance of power and the terms of the peace among the combatant nations, but they were haunted by the prospect of the decline of the West itself. A four-year global conflict that claimed 8.5 million lives and wounded 20 million soldiers, World War One destroyed any confidence that European history unfolded necessarily onward, upward, and progressively. World War One resulted not only in physical destruction but also the dissolution of world-views, mental coordinates, dominant images, and structuring metaphors of late-nineteenth-century European thought. For example, the belated experiences of trauma and the dislocated speech of the shell-shocked soldier undermined the mechanist understanding of the mind as a mere calculator or chemical machine. The gradual unsettling of imperial authority also threw into question several ideological conceptions. Conscripts from thoughout the colonized world participated in all aspects of this fully mechanized war and thus were exposed first-hand to the violent realities of interimperial rivalry.
The Great War was the watershed moment of modernity. In this course we will read literature that reveals to us how every aspect of life was transfigured by it.
Pinsky, Robert: Singing School; Swensen, Cole & David St. John: American Hybrid
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. Students will write a variety of exercises and more formal pieces and partake in class workshops where their work will be edited and critiqued by other students in the class. Please note that although Melanie Abrams will be the instructor of record for this section of English 141, Professor Robert Hass and Lecturer Melanie Abrams will actually team-teach the two sections of the course. Students will enroll in one section and spend five weeks reading and writing fiction with Abrams, and five weeks reading and writing poetry with Hass. Both instructors will collaborate for two weeks to teach playwriting.
Course reader available at Instant Copying and Laser Printing
This course is open to English majors only.
Pinsky, Robert: Singing School; Swensen, Cole & David St. John: American Hybrid
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. Students will write a variety of exercises and more formal pieces and partake in class workshops where their work will be edited and critiqued by other students in the class. Please note that although Robert Hass will be the instructor of record for this section of English 141, Lecturer Melanie Abrams and Professor Robert Hass will actually team-teach the two sections of the course. Students will enroll in one section and spend five weeks reading and writing poetry with Hass, and five weeks reading and writing fiction with Abrams. Both instructors will collaborate for two weeks to teach playwriting.
Course reader available at Instant Copying and Laser Printing
This course is open to English majors only.
Furman, Laura: The O. Henry Prize Stories 2014
Class reader available from Instant Copying & Laser Printing, 2138 University Avenue.
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.
Only continuing UC Berkeley students are eligible to apply for this course. To be considered for admission, please electronically submit 10-15 double-spaced pages of your fiction, by clicking on the link below; fill out the application you'll find there and attach the writing sample as a Word document or .rtf file. The deadline for completing this application process is 4 P.M., FRIDAY, APRIL 17.
Also be sure to read the paragraph concerning creative writing courses on page 1 of the instructions area of this Announcement of Classes for further information regarding enrollment in such courses.
Course Reader (available at Krishna Copy)
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 (Sapphics, 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. We will also read a number of poems by graduates of Verse who have gone on to publish poems and books. 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 five in tri-weekly rotation (I’ll also respond each week 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 be fun and will make you a better poet.
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 application you'll find there and attach the writing sample as a Word document or .rtf file. The deadline for completing this application process is 4 P.M., FRIDAY, APRIL 17.
Also be sure to read the paragraph concerning creative writing courses on page 1 of the instructions area of this Announcement of Classes for futher information regarding enrollment in such courses.
Coultas, Brenda: The Marvelous Bones of Time; Field, Thalia: Bird-Lover’s Backyard; Rankine, Claudia: Citizen
Course Reader
What I take as a given is that poetry is a public activity, one with the job of disrupting the status quo, the “interested” discourse of TV and advertising, the endless double-talk of politics. This semester I’m wanting us to emphasize poetry as a public site, as an event that necessarily takes place in public. We do shape poetry for our own purposes—some of these are classic (advancing art, e.g., or doing violence to language) and some are tawdry (use your imagination) and many fall inbetween—and I’m asking that this fall, as part of the work of this course, we work toward one or two public (open to the public) events involving poetry.
Overlapping with the above concern is my thought that the project of poetry can tangle interestingly with discourses beyond the expected literary ones. The reading assignments and prompts over the course of the semester will speak to this. I’ll be asking students to incorporate materials from other areas—areas, disciplines, investigations of their choosing—into the writing during the fall semester; I’ll be asking students to do work toward final projects that incorporate materials from these fields of knowledge.
We’ll read three recent books that touch the thought mentioned above—Brenda Coultas’s The Marvelous Bones of Time, Thalia Field’s Bird-Lover’s Backyard, and Claudia Rankine’s Citizen. There will also be a course-reader from Zee-Zee Copy.
Reading, weekly writing expectations, interrogation, argument, field trips, public events, "workshopping," "woodshedding," etc. Students will be responsible for leading discussions on the work of the various assigned texts.
Only continuing UC Berkeley students are eligible to apply for this course. To be considered for admission, please electronically submit 5 pages of your poems (any combination of long or short poems or fragments of poems, the total length not exceeding five pages), by clicking on the link below; fill out the application you'll find there and attach the writing sample as a Word document or .rtf file. The deadline for completing this application process is 4 P.M., FRIDAY, APRIL 17.
Also be sure to read the paragraph concerning creative writing courses on page 1 of the instructions area of this Announcement of Classes for further information regarding enrollment in such courses.
Forster, E.M.: Aspects of the Novel
The purpose of this course is to begin writing a novel. None of us will finish writing a novel in the three months we spend together. Novels take time, notwithstanding NaNoWriMo. There are some reported exceptions to this—Jack Kerouac wrote the first draft of On the Road in three weeks, Jonathan Safron Foer drafted his first novel in two months. But, given that the work is in the revision, we will restrict our goal this semester to “a start.” We'll read each other's efforts. We'll read some published novels along the way to explore the various shapes a narrative can take. We’ll also read E.M. Forster’s Aspects of the Novel (1927). We may as well have some notion of what we’re trying to do.
Only continuing UC Berkeley students are eligible to apply for this course. To be considered for admission, please electronically submit no more than 5 pages of your fiction, by clicking on the link below; fill out the application you'll find there and attach the writing sample as a Word document or .rtf file. The deadline for completing this application process is 4 P.M., FRIDAY, APRIL 17.
Also be sure to read the paragraph concerning creative writing courses on page 1 of the instructions area of this Announcement of Classes for further information regarding enrollment in such courses.
Sullivan, John Jeremiah: The Best American Essays 2014
This course is a creative writing workshop to explore the art and craft of the personal essay. We will read and discuss the essays in the assigned anthology as well as work submitted by students. Writing assignments will include three short exercises (approximately two pages each) and two new essays (approximately 10-20 pages each).
Only continuing UC Berkeley students are eligible to apply for this course. To be considered for admission, please electronically submit 5-10 double-spaced pages of your creative nonfiction by clicking on the link below; fill out the application you'll find there and attach the writing sample as a Word document or .rtf file. The deadline for completing this application process is 4 P.M., FRIDAY, APRIL 17.
Also be sure to read the paragraph concerning creative writing courses on page 1 of the instructions area of this Announcement of Classes for further information regarding enrollment in such courses.
Bergvall, Caroline: Drift (2014); Conrad, CA: Ecodeviance (Soma)tics for the Future Wilderness (2014); Hong, Cathy Park: Engine Empire (2012); Kapil, Bhanu: Schizophrene (2011); Philip, M. NourbeSe: Zong! (2008); Rankine, Claudia: Citizen (2014); Santos Perez, Craig: from Unincorporated Territory [guma'] (2014); Santos Perez, Craig: from Unincorporated Territory [saina] (2010)
A Course Reader with critical texts by W.T.J. Mitchell, Johanna Drucker, Katherine Hayles, Mark Hansen, Harryette Mullen, C.S. Giscombe, Charles Olson, Heriberto Yépez, Gloria Anzaldúa, Epeli Hau'ofa, Homi Bhabha, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Lauren Berlant, Rob Nixon, Donald Pease, Achille Mbembe, and Alexander Galloway.
In this class we will read seven books of (very) contemporary poetry, which highlight the multiple national and linguistic identities that characterize the poetic subject in an increasingly globalized world. We will investigate different poetic strategies for representing race, gender, and sexuality in an allegedly "post-national," "post-racial" era and we will think about contemporary technologies--from social media to digital surveillance--that at once render human bodies hypervisible and invisible. Specific attention will be paid to how 21st-century poets use the physical format of the book to communicate with other representational technologies (video, photography, digital texts) as well as to whether it is possible to describe contemporary poetry as a trans-medial art.
This section of English 165 has been canceled.
This section of English 165 has been canceled.
Berry, Wendell: Jayber Crow; Berry, Wendell: The Art of the Common Place; Coetzee, J. M.: Disgrace; Cole, Teju: Open City; Hiraide, Takashi: The Guest Cat; Rankine, Claudia: Citizen; Rankine, Claudia: Don't Let Me Be Lonely; Robinson, Marilynne: Housekeeping; Robinson, Marilynne: Lila; Sebald, W. G.: Vertigo; Spahr, Juliana: The Transformation; Yamashita, Karen: I Hotel
This course will interrogate the possible relationships between desire and social position or identity (what I conceive myself to have and to lack) by reading contemporary literature in which longing for (love, sex, wealth, economic or political security) seems in tension with or premised on modes of belonging to (family, property, culture, community, nation, earth, global capitalism). Beginning with Claudia Rankine’s Don’t Let Me Be Lonely and Citizen, we will ask what it means to (want to) belong (to another), and whether or where writing, as an act of address, is a form of self-possession or self-dispossession. We will read novelists, essayists, and poets for whom place or proximity (neighborhood) is crucial to belonging (Wendell Berry, Marilynne Robinson) as well as those who explore transient, exilic, or indebted modes of longing (Juliana Spahr, Mohsin Hamid, Teju Cole). My aim is to use longing and belonging to think about how these texts do or do not belong to “the contemporary”; to that end, readings have been selected for range and variety. We will read “regional” U.S. writing as well as “global Anglophone” writing (and one text translated from Japanese); poetry, prose fiction, and essays on environmental ethics. The class will be conducted as a seminar; students will write two short essays and one final 10-page essay.
Our primary texts will be CDs including songs of The Flatlanders, Butch Hancock, Joe Ely, Jimmie Dale Gilmore, Steve Earle, Townes van Zandt, Guy Clark, Robert Earl Keene and others.
A few brief secondary readings wlll be available as a course reader.
Historically and etymologically, lyric poetry was sung to the accompaniment of a lyre. Most lyric poetry studied as English literature today, however, reflecting the term "literature"'s own history and etymology, is related to the genre in ways other than by being sung. The aim of this course is to study some lyric poetry in its traditional form of song.
We will focus, however, not on the old lyric poetry that gave the genre its name, but on contemporary lyrics in a flourishing tradition whose live performances we have opportunities to hear locally: songs of a set of (mostly West) Texans who perform regularly at the Hardly Strictly Bluegrass music festival held in Golden Gate Park in October, as well as songs that influenced them. We will consider the songs' lyrics' poetic forms, including their use of rhyme, alliteration, meter and syntactic parallelism; their imagery; differences between lyric and narrative songs; their cultural origins, including their bluegrass, blues and tejana influences; and some differences between and unsung poetry.
The course will include attendance at the Hardly Strictly Bluegrass festival and possibly other outings as well.
This class has been postponed till Spring 2016.
Chandler, R.: The Big Sleep; Dick, Philip K.: Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?; Didion, J.: Slouching Towards Bethlehem; Stegner, W.: The Angle of Repose; West, N.: The Day of the Locust
In addition to the books listed, there will be poetry by R. Jeffers, W. Everson, J. Spicer, T. Gunn and R. Hass, essays by J. Cain, M. Davis, C. McWilliams, E. Wilson, etc., and some short stories.
Besides discussing fiction and poetry with Western settings, and essays that attempt to identify or explain distinctive regional characteristics, this course will include consideration of various movies shaped by and shaping conceptions of California, such as Sunset Boulevard and Chinatown.
This section of English 165 is open to English majors only.
Borroff, Marie, trans.: Pearl; Borroff, Marie, trans.: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight; Davies, Sioned, trans.: The Mabinogion; Heaney, Seamus, trans.: Beowulf; Tolkien, J.R.R.: The Lord of the Rings; Tolkien, J.R.R., trans.: Sir Orfeo
Also a course reader.
The medieval period is often swept under broad descriptors, like the "Dark Ages," and with these descriptors come equally vague notions of medieval society. One might, for example, imagine medieval society enveloped by religious hysteria provoked by plague; indeed, we often encounter such portayals in films. However, these inaccuracies are sometimes deliberate. Instead of attempting historical accuracy, writers portray an imaginary Middle Ages to connect the medieval to the modern; re-imagining the Middle Ages thereby provides these writers a unique perspective for examining contemporary ideas and society. This class will explore the pseudo-medieval settings of modern fantasy, and the medieval poetry that inspired them. We will examine two influential writers of the genre: George R.R. Martin and J.R.R. Tolkien. But while we will read selections from their work (and in the case of Martin, watch scenes from the HBO series Game of Thrones), most of our time will be spent examining the medieval poetry that helped shape their writing and the fantasy genre.
This course has been canceled.
The Letters of Abelard and Heloise; Auden, W.H., and Louis MacNeice: Letters from Iceland; Austen, Jane: Lady Susan, The Watsons, Sanditon; Dickinson, Emily: The Master Letters of Emily Dickinson; Hanff, Helene: 84, Charing Cross Road; Kleege, Georgina: Letters to Helen Keller; Ortberg, Mallory: Texts from Jane Eyre; Wilde, Oscar: De Profundis and Other Prison Writings; Wollstonecraft, Mary: Letters Written in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark
A course reader
In this course, we will explore one of the most intimate, versatile, and surprising of literary forms: the letter. Connecting individuals across time and space, the letter has been alternately—and sometimes simultaneously—made a vehicle for satire, philosophy, science, comic observation, literary theory, and (of course) love. Besides the major themes and genres of epistolary forms in English literature, we will think about the medium itself, as we witness the transition from messenger to Postal Service to email and beyond. Students will have the opportunity both to generate their own letter collections and to research the Bancroft’s archival holdings of historic letters. The course will be co-taught by Professors Lyn Hejinian and Emily Thornbury.
We will begin discussing Austen’s Lady Susan during our first week, so those interested in the course should obtain a copy as soon as possible.
Texts may include The Heart of Darkness, Around the World in 80 Days, Gulliver’s Travels, and A Small Place.
This course journeys to the far-flung places where wild things roam. Our itinerary takes us through novels, travel narratives, journalism, and online sources that depict fantastical lands populated by wild beasts, "savage" peoples, and strange (or not so strange) customs. Beginning with early exploration narratives, the course considers how the genre of travel writing, in making distant sites and subjugated peoples at once alluringly dangerous and intimately familiar, has played a crucial role in the consolidation of imperial power. We then travel to the postcolonial era where once exotic colonies have become familiar sites of tourism and trade. The course will consider contemporary accounts of tourism and travel to ask how globalization has changed the contexts, styles, and forms of travel and its description.
Baldwin, James: Giovanni's Room; Barnes, Djuna: Nightwood; Bechdel, Alison: Fun Home; Cunningham, Michael: The Hours; James, Henry.: Selected Tales; Larsen, Nella: Passing; Stein, Gertrude: Tender Buttons; Toibin, Colm: The Master; Truong, Monique: The Book of Salt; Wilde, Oscar.: The Picture of Dorian Gray; Woolf, Virginia.: Mrs. Dalloway
An electronic course reader will contain poetry, essays, and short stories. Films will be available for screening at the Media Resource Center.
“Is queer modernism simply another name for modernism?” The question Heather Love poses in her special issue of PMLA will also guide this seminar on the crossovers between formal and sexual “deviance” in modernist literature. We will read back and forth across a century (from Henry James to Colm Toibin, from James Joyce to Alison Bechdel, from Gertrude Stein to Monique Truong) to stage a series of encounters between the aesthetic practices and discourses of modernism and those of contemporary queer theory and cultural production. As we map the shifting contours of some key forms and terms, we will pause to consider (among other things) the mobile dimensions of queer time and space; the historical migration of concepts such as perversion, inversion, masquerade, abjection, and shame; the mutual implication of race, gender, and sexuality; the formal and hisorical components of the closet; the legibility of transsexual/transgender bodies; and the composition of affective histories. To complement (and complicate) the chronological axis of this inquiry, we will also attend to the metropolitan spaces in which sexual boundaries blurred and subcultures thrived, especially the three urban sites central to modernist experimentation: London, New York, and Paris.
This course is cross-listed with LGBT 100 section 1.
Davis, Lennard: Disability Studies Reader; Finger, Anne: Call Me Ahab; Haddon, M.: Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time; Keller, H.: Story of My Life; Kleege, G.: Blind Rage: Letters to Helen Keller; Meville, Herman: The Shorter Novels of Herman Melville; Oe, K.: A Quiet Life; Shell, Mark: Stutter; Wordsworth and Coleridge: Lyrical Ballads, 1798
In this course we will think about the concept of literature via the category of disability. We are told that "poems make nothing happen" (Auden); for speech-act theory, fictional utterance is a peculiarly "parasitic" form of speech (Searle). Noting the negativity of these definitions, we will coinsider how literature can operate to disable "normal," instrumental assumptions about communication, enabling a challenge to standards of value.
The course will have several components. An introductory section will provide students with a grounding in disability theory, with special attention to the attempt to provide a common theory of disability categories (sensory, cognitive, motor; illness/injury; ugliness/fatness/queerness; legal disabilities of race/gender/class/religion). We will then shift to an examination of the role of literature in the "humanization" of disability, beginning with Enlightenment attempts to teach language to the deaf, dumb, and blind. We'll then read a series of texts that work at once to represent disability and to "disable" generic norms. Finally, we'll consider the extent to which print literature is a medium "disabled" by the advent of new media (film, record, computer)--which will give us a chance to consider ways media and other designed objects produce as well as neutralize disabilities.
Students will write 2 short essays and one longer (8-10 page) essay; there will be no final exam, but regular attendance is required. There will also be at least two film screenings (probably Majidi's The Color of Paradise and von Trier's Idiots).
This is a core course for the Disability Studies Minor.
This course has been canceled.
See below.
In this course, we will investigate lyric poetry—its complex history, its intricate forms and practices, and some of its philosophical underpinnings and theoretical surround. We’ll start by thinking about the so-called “roots of lyric,” not only Sappho and Greek lyric, but other forms and shapes that are deeply buried within the matrices of modern poetry—chants, spells, charms, riddles, curses. Along the way, we’ll revisit some favorites from the English-language canon (Donne, Marvell, Blake, Keats, Hopkins, Dickinson, Stevens, Hughes, Moore, Bishop, Ashbery, Plath) as well as a handful of recent experiments. We’ll pair various poems with various media (painting, music, comics, movies) and intellectual fields (history, ecology, cognitive science) in order to tease out some of the alternate currents running through the texts. Reading assignments will be small, but dense. In addition to a final exam, there will be one short essay (3-5 pages), and one longer essay (7-9 pages) that may be critical, historical, or a hybrid critical-creative piece.
Poems and essays will be available in a course reader or, whenever possible, electronically. No books will be required.
Shakespeare, William: The Tempest; Shakespeare, William: The Winter's Tale; Shakespeare, William (co-author): Pericles; Sidney, Philip: Arcadia; Spenser, Edmund: The Faerie Queene, Book One
Downloadable from bCourses will be translations of Greek romances including Achilles Tatius, Leucippe and Clitophon, one chapter from Joyce's Ulysses, and critical articles on the concept and history of Romance.
Everybody thinks they know what “romance” is, but in fact the term is controversial and difficult to define. Does it mean escapist fiction with monsters and enchanters, entertaining but unbelievable? (What makes fiction believable, anyway?) Or a novel that fails because it is too sentimental and the ending too happy? Or a profound allegory of questing for the ultimate truth? Literary theory has expanded the definition of Romance, but it is still a contested and nebulous concept.
This course will select and scrutinize a few key examples of “romances” from ancient Greece and Renaissance England. Chivalric-allegorical poetic romance is represented by Book One of Spenser’s Faerie Queene, neoclassical prose romance by Sidney’s Arcadia, in its original first draft with selections from his later unfinished expansion. Shakespeare’s magical last plays complete the list: The Tempest and The Winter’s Tale, plus parts of Pericles (only some of which is by Shakespeare). We will study these three plays in relation to the earlier prose fiction that Shakespeare adapted for the stage, comparing those sources carefully with the poetic drama. Selected prose fiction from the ancient Mediterranean – works less well known than Homer’s Odyssey but still influential and fascinating – will be available in modern translations, downloadable from bCourses. Alongside these primary texts we will read brief samples of classic literary theory (Northrop Frye), revisionist literary history (Margaret Doody, Patricia Parker), my own research on what “Romance” and “Novel” actually meant in the early modern period, and a brilliant parody of popular romance from James Joyce’s Ulysses.
In the last quarter of the semester students will be asked to pick, and present, one work (from any period) that typifies exactly what they think “romance” means in literature. The Pilgrim’s Progress? Joseph Andrews? Wuthering Heights? The Blithedale Romance? The Lord of the Rings? Fifty Shades of Grey? – the choice will be yours.
This course satisfies the pre-1800 requirement for the English major.
Burke: Reflections on ... the Sublime and the Beautiful; Hogarth: The Line of Beauty; Kant: Critique of Judgment; Lessing: Laocoön; Rancière: The Future of the Image; Scarry: On Beauty and Being Just; Starr: Feeling Beauty
The enlightenment was the first great century of modern aesthetics, giving us a critical vocabulary to think about how, as Foucault put it, we construct ourselves as works of art. This course will give the student a taste of some of the foundational statements from the eighteenth century and discuss them in relation to major contemporary aesthetic questions. Topics will include the digital mediation of mass culture, the relation between art and political inequality, the ethics of representing violence, pornography and surveillance, gendered and queer spectatorship, the neurology behind aesthetic experience, and the neoliberal performance of taste. We will supplement the critical texts by selecting and analyzing examples of our own aesthetic self-formations through a choice of either regular short writing assignments or a final project assembling and discussing a personal canon. Kant declared that the motto of enlightenment was Sapere Aude (Dare to know!), demanding that we grow up, use our reason, and join a public world. We will collaboratively assess how the aesthetic aspects of our lives contribute to the ongoing enlightenment project of a well-ordered social world or whether they tend towards something else.
Please read the paragraph about English 190 on page 2 of the instructions area of this Announcement of Classes for more details about enrolling in or wait-listing for this course.
Please click here for more information about enrollment in English 190.
Byron, Lord: Don Juan; Homer: The Iliad; Lucretius: The Nature of Things; Melville, Herman: Moby-Dick, or The Whale
“As human beings we inhabit an ineluctably material world. We live our everyday lives surrounded by, immersed in, matter . . . Our existence depends from one moment to the next . . . on our own hazily understood bodily and cellular reactions and on pitiless cosmic motions, on the material artifacts and natural stuff that populate our environment, as well as on socioeconomic structures that produce and reproduce the conditions of our everyday life. In light of this massive materiality, how could we be anything other than materialist?” So write the editors of a recent collection of essays on New Materialisms (2010). The aim of this seminar is to consider how four monumental literary texts, ancient and modern, reckon with “this massive materiality.” For our purpose, “ancient” means Homer (The Iliad) and Lucretius (The Nature of Things), and “modern” means the nineteenth century: Byron’s comic masterpiece Don Juan and Melville’s anything-but-comical Moby-Dick. Concentrating on these four texts will allow us to examine the possibility of an epic materialism, one that—in the absence of spiritual, divine, or metaphysical principles—minimizes human mastery and instead strives to convey a comprehensive range of worldly forces: bodily, physical, environmental, technical, economic, and political. Some through-lines in our seminar will be: violence (and especially war) as an all-encompassing material condition; the role of empirical observation and description in rendering the material world; the materiality of the literary object, itself subject to copying, piracy, deterioration, and repurposing. As time permits, we will also raise questions about the “new materialisms” in criticism and philosophy, reading essays by Weil, Althusser, Greenblatt, Harman, Bennett, and Morton, among others. Why has materialism become so appealing to recent thinkers? How do these “new materialisms” open windows onto past texts? Perhaps more importantly: can these older texts speak back, altering the way we view current trends?
In addition to informal assignments throughout the semester, students will produce 20 pages of writing, including the option of a longer research paper.
Please read the paragraph about English 190 on page 2 of the instructions area of this Announcement of Classes for more details about enrolling in or wait-listing for this course.
Please click here for more information about enrollment in English 190.
See below.
This course focuses on the art of the novel as practiced and theorized by Henry James. James believed that, despite two centuries of novelistic production, the art of the novel was still to be discovered. During his lifetime and into our contemporary moment, James has been credited by both fiction writers and literary critics with making that discovery. Through our study of James’s experiments with the gothic, realist, and dramatic modalities of the novel, we will explore two related questions: How does James's fictional practice seek to realize the novel’s aesthetic potential? And how does James's critical writing develop a theory of the novel that will give philosophical grounding to his notion of aesthetic value?
Most of our course reading will be devoted to James's writing. But we will also consider the impact his work had on twentieth-century novelists and theorists. Why do James’s ideas about novel form become the basis for later theories of the novel? How do James's novels become interpreted and reinterpreted to remain touchstones of artistic achievement?
A 15-20 page critical essay is due at the end of the term. Students may investigate any aspect of James’s significance as a literary and cultural figure. A prospectus, bibliography and full rough draft of the essay will be required steps of the writing process. There is no midterm or final exam.
Reading includes The Spoils of Poynton, The Turn of the Screw, The Awkward Age, The Wings of the Dove, The Ambassadors and selected short fiction.
Please read the paragraph about English 190 on page 2 of the instructions area of this Announcement of Classes for more details about enrolling in or wait-listing for this course.
Please click here for more information about enrollment in English 190.
This section of English 190 has been canceled.
Please click here for more information about enrollment in English 190.
Dickinson, Emily: Selected Letters (ed., Johnson); Dickinson, Emily: The Poems of Emily Dickinson (ed. Franklin);
Recommended: Habegger, Alfred: My Wars are Laid Away In Books
Course Reader (available at Krishna Copy).
This seminar will provide you with a sustained reading course in the poetry of Emily Dickinson, my favorite poet. We’ll begin with her early poetry, and trace her evolution into the singular poet we read today, with particular attention to her hymn forms and her figures. We’ll also consider how her poems might be read in relation to history and biography. Since Dickinson wrote most of her poetry in the span of a few years, we’ll group and read her poems largely by topics. Our topics will include love and gender, definition and riddle, poetics, nature, religion, death and dying, suspense, horror, loneliness, pain and despair, self in society and by itself, abolition and war. We’ll also delve into her manuscripts of individual poems, packets of poems, and letters. Especially with her later poems, the distinctions between verses, poems, and letters become hazy. To gauge Dickinson’s singularity and commonness, we will also read poems and essays by her contemporaries (e.g., Lydia Sigourney, Ralph Emerson, Henry Longfellow, Helen Hunt Jackson). Your first paper will be a descriptive reading, on your own, of a single poem. In your seminar paper, you will take up a collection poems on a topic of your choosing, in conversation with other critics.
Please read the paragraph about English 190 on page 2 of the instructions area of this Announcement of Classes for more details about enrolling in or wait-listing for this course.
Please click here for more information about enrollment in English 190.
Ellis, Bret Easton: American Psycho; James, Henry: The Golden Bowl; Morrison, Toni: Beloved; Nabokov, Vladimir: Lolita; Robinson, Marilynne: Gilead; Twain, Mark: Huckleberry Finn
Stanley Kubrick, Lolita (1962). Mary Harron, American Psycho (2000). Behn Zeitlin, Beasts of the Southern Wild (2012).
Is reading good for us? Or bad for us? How does literature work as, or against, moral philosophy? What responsibilities do the author and the reader hold with regard to texts? What is the relationship between ethics, aesthetics, and affect? How do genre and form bear on the ethics of literature? How does literature influence our ideas about character, action, principle, virtue, and value?
This course takes up these questions about ethics and literature in U.S. fiction since 1850. We will consider a set of novels, short stories, and film adaptations alongside essays in ethical criticism. Please be advised that all readings and screenings in the course are required; some texts include graphic violence and sexually explicit subject matter. The seminar will move toward the development, writing, and revision of a final 20-page research paper.
Please read the paragraph about English 190 on page 2 of the instructions area of this Announcement of Classes for more details about enrolling in or wait-listing for this course.
Please click here for more information about enrollment in English 190.
Thoreau, Henry David: Walden, Civil Disobedience, and Other Writings (Norton Critical Edition)
Thoreau believed that "[b]ooks must be read as deliberately and reservedly as they were written." That's what we'll try to do, reading Walden twice over the course of the semester, once to get our bearings, then again to burrow in. Two ten-page essays and regular participation in class discussion will be required.
In order to make page reference during discussion easy and quick, all students must purchase the assigned edition of Walden. No e-books.
Please read the paragraph about English 190 on page 2 of the instructions area of this Announcement of Classes for more details about enrolling in or wait-listing for this course.
Please click here for more information about enrollment in English 190.
Eagleton, Terry: Ideology: An Introduction
This research seminar will focus on the concept of ideology. We will examine the manner in which ideology has been employed as a category for social analysis, but we will gear our attention especially toward the ways ideology has been useful for literary criticism. We will study critiques of ideology from various methodological perspectives: Marxism, psychoanalysis, feminism, post-structuralism and critical race theory. While much of the reading material will be theoretical, we will ground our analytical explorations by reading and discussing several short works of fiction (especially in the second half of the semester), likely including works by Ralph Ellison, Flannery O’Connor, Mahasweta Devi, Virginia Woolf, Manuel Rojas, James Baldwin, Jack London, Sandra Cisneros, Isak Dinesen, Andre Dubus, Raymond Carver, John Berger, Juan Rulfo, Dylan Thomas, William Faulkner, and Toni Morrison. Students will be required to write a research paper, deliver a short presentation in class, and contribute to class discussions. Most of the readings will be included in a substantial course reader.
Please read the paragraph about English 190 on page 2 of the instructions area of this Announcement of Classes for more details about enrolling in or wait-listing for this course.
Please click here for more information about enrollment in English 190.
This section of English 190 has been canceled.
Please click here for more information about enrollment in English 190.
Chaucer, Geoffrey: Dream Visions and Other Poems; Delanty, Greg and Michael Matto, eds.: The Word Exchange: Anglo-Saxon Poems in Translation; Hoffman, Richard L. and Maxwell S. Luria, eds.: Middle English Lyrics; Lydgate, John: Mummings and Entertainments; Reames, Sherry, ed.: Middle English Legends of Women Saints; Shuffleton, George, ed.: Codez Ashmole 61: A Compilation of Popular Middle English Verse; Stanbury, Sarah, ed.: Pearl
Online Course Packet including additional selections from: (primary works) Horace, Quintilian, Augustine, Jerome, Isidore of Seville, Judith, Guthlac A, Dream of the Rood, Aldhelm, Bede, Asser, William of Malmesbury, Conrad of Hirsau, Geoffrey of Vinsauf, Thomas Aquinas, Dante, Boccaccio, Prik of Conscience, Gower, Lydgate, Henryson, Hoccleve; and (secondary works) Eric Auerbach, Paul Zumthor, Eleanor Johnson, Martin Irvine, Rita Copeland, Peter Dronke, A.J. Minnis, Maura Nolan, Christopher Cannon, Fredric Jameson, Northrop Frye, Fred Robinson, John Miles Foley, Robert Bjork, Renee Trilling, and Emily Thornbury.
This class will explore early England's shifting literary landscape in order to better understand what poetry was and what it was for in the Middle Ages. Juxtaposing our close analyses of individual poems and groups of poems with medieval theories of poetry and metapoetic discourse, we will hypothesize the values (aesthetic, social, intellectual, spiritual) medieval cultures assigned poetry and try to articulate the various functions poetry could serve in those cultures. We will ask how medieval thinkers defined poetry; how they aligned it with other artistic and intellectual pursuits; how the actual poetry produced followed, generated, strayed from, or contradicted the prescriptions of medieval literary theorists; and how medieval poets conceived of and navigated tradition and innovation. Drawing on our findings, we will try to account for the emergence, endurance, dominance, and/or disappearance of certain poetic genres, modes, and forms in the English Middle Ages, while tracing their development and divergence from earlier literature, and examining their afterlives in later periods. A major goal will be to gain familiarity with the Middle Ages' many poetic forms and kinds (and their history), but we will also pay sustained attention to the ways medieval verse helped its makers and audiences conceptualize authority, identity, history, religion, invention, emotion, and community.
Please read the paragraph about English 190 on page 2 of the instructions area of this Announcement of Classes for more details about enrolling in or wait-listing for this course.
This section of English 190 satisfies the pre-1800 requirement for the English major.
Please click here for more information about enrollment in English 190.
Acosta, Oscar Zeta: Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo; Butler, Octavia: Kindred; Cather, Willa: Sapphira and the Slave Girl; Faulkner, William: Absalom, Absalom; Larsen, Nella: Passing; Morrison, Toni: Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination; Twain, Mark: Huckleberry Finn; Whitehead, Colson: Zone One; Wright, Richard: Native Son; Yang, Gene Luen : American Born Chinese
Film: Alien: Resurrection
Race in 2015 is still a taboo topic in many literary conversations. In Race and Rumors of Race in American Prose we’ll take a look back and a look forward. We’ll start with Toni Morrison’s Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination and we’ll read two of the texts she discusses—Willa Cather’s Sapphira and the Slave Girl and Twain’s Huckleberry Finn. We’ll read Nella Larsen’s novel Passing and William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! and Richard Wright’s Native Son. We’ll read Gene Luen Yang’s graphic novel, American Born Chinese, and Oscar Zeta Acosta’s Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo. We’ll finish with two futuristic novels—Kindred, Octavia Butler’s time-travel fantasy, and Zone One, Colson Whitehead’s tale of zombie apocalypse. And we’ll watch the final film in the Alien series, Resurrection. Requirements: two ten-page papers, class presentations, participation in the life of the class.
Please read the paragraph about English 190 on page 2 of the instructions area of this Announcement of Classes for more details about enrolling in or wait-listing for this course.
Please click here for more information about enrollment in English 190.
Atwood, Margaret: The Handmaid's Tale; Dick, Philip K.: Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?; Gilman, Charlotte P.: Herland; Huxley, Aldous: Brave New World; Ishiguro, Kazuo: Never Let Me Go; Orwell, George: 1984; Wells, Herbert G.: Three Prophetic Novels; Zamyatin, Yevgeny: We
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 readers to try to realize the ideal society, most of it has had limited practical impact, yet has managed to provoke readers in various ways--for instance, as a kind of imaginative fiction that comments on "things as they are" indirectly yet effectively, with fantasy and satire in varying doses. Among the critical questions posed by such material are the problematic status of fiction that is not primarily mimetic, but written in the service of some ulterior purpose; the shifting relationships between what is and what authors think might be or ought to be; how to create the new and strange other than by recombining the old and familiar; and so on. Some films (such as Metropolis, Modern Times, 1984, Brazil, THX1138, A Clockwork Orange, and Children of Men) will be included in the syllabus and discussed (although probably not shown) in class.
Please read the paragraph about English 190 on page 2 of the instructions area of this Announcement of Classes for more details about enrolling in or wait-listing for this course.
Please click here for more information about enrollment in English 190.
Kaplan, E.: Women in Film Noir; Krutnik, F.: In a Lonely Street; Martin, R.: Mean Streets and Raging Bull; Osteen, M.: Nightmare Alley; Telotte, J.: Voices in the Dark
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 will also be concerned with the social and cultural background of the 40's, the representation of femininity and masculinity, and the spread of Freudianism.
Please read the paragraph about English 190 on page 2 of the instructions area of this Announcement of Classes for more details about enrolling in or wait-listing for this course.
Please click here for more information about enrollment in English 190.
Barthes, Roland: Camera Lucida; Barthes, Roland: Mythologies; Barthes, Roland: S/Z; Booth, Wayne C.: The Craft of Research (3rd ed.); Dickinson, Emily: The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson; Eagleton, Terry: How to Read a Poem; Lanham, Richard: Analyzing Prose (2nd ed.); Melville, Herman: Great Short Works; Miller, D.A.: Bringing Out Roland Barthes;
Recommended: MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers (7th ed.)
Photocopied reader (available at Copy Central, 2576 Bancroft Way)
This course, the first part of a two-semester sequence, is designed to prepare you to write an Honors thesis, which you will complete in the spring semester. During the fall semester, we will read literary, critical, and theoretical materials intensely, with the challenges and pleasures of researching and writing an Honors thesis in mind, and you will complete a sequence of assignments that culminates in a thesis prospectus.
Students who satisfactorily complete H195A-B (the Honors Course) will satisfy the Research Seminar requirement for the English major. (More details about H195A prerequisites, how and when students will be informed of the results of their applications, etc., are in the paragraph about the Honors Course on page 2 of the instructions area of this Announcement of Classes.)
To be considered for admission to this course, you will need to electronically apply by:
• Clicking on the link below and filling out the application you will find there, bearing in mind that you will also need to attach:
• a PDF of your college transcript(s),
• a PDF of your spring 2015 course schedule,
• a PDF (or Word document) of a critical paper that you wrote for another class (the length of this paper not being as important as its quality), and
• a PDF (or Word document) of a personal statement, including why you are interested in taking this course and indicating your academic interest and, if possible, the topic or area you are thinking of addressing in your honors thesis.
The deadline for completing this application is 4 P.M, FRIDAY, APRIL 17.
Eagleton, Terry: How to Read a Poem; Joyce, James: The Dead; Wood, James: How Fiction Works; Woolf, Virginia: Mrs. Dalloway
There will be at least one packet of short stories and critical readings, to be picked up at the beginning of the term.
English H195A is the first part of a two-semester sequence for those English majors writing honors theses. It is designed to give students the critical tools and practical skills to write a strong essay, in the spring semester, that will have a greater scope than any essay they've written before.
The course will begin with some ground-clearing critical works by James Wood (How Fiction Works) and Terry Eagleton (How to Read a Poem), then will move into case studies of central literary and artistic figures, such as Emily Dickinson, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, Francis Ford Coppola, and others.
Throughout, we'll be thinking practically about how to write scintillating, cogent essays: how to open up one's research and then settle in on a topic; how to find and use primary archives; how to machete through the thickets of secondary criticism and find one's voice as a critic; how to compose critical prose that is lively, cogent, and seductive to the reader.
Students who satisfactorily complete H195A-B (the Honors Course) will satisfy the Research Seminar requirement for the English major. (More details about H195A prerequisites, how and when students will be informed of the results of their applications, etc., are in the paragraph about the Honors Course on page 2 of the instructions area of this Announcement of Classes.)
To be considered for admission to this course, you will need to electronically apply by:
• Clicking on the link below and filling out the application you will find there, bearing in mind that you will also need to attach:
• a PDF of your college transcript(s),
• a PDF of your spring 2015 course schedule,
• a PDF (or Word document) of a critical paper that you wrote for another class (the length of this paper not being as important as its quality), and
• a PDF (or Word document) of a personal statement, including why you are interested in taking this course and indicating your academic interest and, if possible, the topic or area you are thinking of addressing in your honors thesis.
The deadline for completing this application is 4 P.M., FRIDAY, APRIL 17.