Shakespeare, William: Shakespeare's Sonnets and A Lover's Complaint, ed. Stanley Wells
Shakespeare's sonnets were first published in 1609. Although little is known about how they were first received by the reading public, they have caused puzzlement and delight since their second edition, published in 1640. Over the course of the semester we will read all 154 sonnets, at the rate of approximately ten per week. All students will be expected to participate actively in seminar discussions. Each student will present one informal and one formal oral seminar report.
This 1-unit course may not be counted as one of the twelve courses required to complete the English major.
See below.
How can we become more appreciative, alert readers of poetry and at the same time better writers of prose? How do poems use language differently than other forms of expression? How do they know how to say things without actually saying them? This course attends to the rich variety of poems written in English,drawing on the works of poets from William Shakespeare to Elizabeth Bishop, John Keats to Gwendolyn Brooks, Emily Dickinson to Li-Young Lee. We will use exercises in listening to, reading aloud, performing and memorizing poems to familiarize ourselves with a number of different forms, including riddles, songs, sonnets, odes, villanelles, and ballads, while also engaging topics such as meter, rhyme, the poetic line, and figurative language. Through sustained discussions of individual poems and varied writing assignments, you will have the chance to explore some of the major periods, modes, and genres in English poetry and to expand the possibilities of your own writing.
The texts will be available at University Press Books, on Bancroft Way.
This will be a reading- and discussion-intensive course designed for prospective majors looking to understand poetry and learn how to write about it critically.
This section of English 27 has been canceled.
This section of English 27 has been canceled.
Austen, Jane: Emma (Penguin Books); Bronte, Emily : Wuthering Heights (Penguin Books); Conrad, Joseph: Heart of Darkness & Congo Diary (Penguin Books); Fitzgerald, F. Scott: The Great Gatsby (Scribners Books); Morrison, Toni: The Bluest Eye (Vintage International Books); Pynchon, Thomas: The Crying of Lot 49 (Perennial Fiction Library); Woolf, Virginia: To the Lighthouse (Harvest Books/ Harcourt Books)
The title of the course is “Introduction to the Study of Fiction,” but more specifically the course will be an introduction to analytic critical writing about fiction. We will work on close reading, on learning how to read with a mind open to and curious about the writer’s choices, about the motives for and consequences of those choices. Our discussions will loosely divide into two areas of emphasis, narrative—what is it about the plot that is designed to draw our interest, how is it arranged or structured—and narration—the tone and character of the telling of the story. I will be particularly interested in the question of how narrative and narration are related to one another in each of the works we read. The goal of the discussions will be to help you decide upon and formulate theses for essays, and then to develop plausible and well-evidenced explorations of those theses, so several class sessions will be devoted to essay-writing rather than to discussion of the literary works. Two five-page and one seven-page essays will be required, along with regular attendance and participation in discussion, with occasional brief (less than a page) writing assignments to facilitate discussion.
Designed primarily for prospective English majors and students early in the major; students whose major is not English are also welcome, provided there is room for them.
In order to make page reference during discussion easy and quick, all students must purchase the assigned editions of the required books. No e-books.
Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi: Americanah; Diaz, Junot: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao; Fukunaga, Cary (dir.): Sin Nombre; Kazan, Elia (dir.): Gentleman's Agreement; Kincaid, Jamaica: Lucy; Lee, Chang-Rae: Native Speaker; Robbins and Wise (dirs.): West Side Story;
Recommended: Martinez, Oscar: The Beast
Short fiction by Edwidge Danticat, Jonathan Lethem, and Jhumpa Lahiri as well as contextualizing works of history, sociology, and cultural criticism.
In this course we will consider a variety of texts—contemporary fiction, classic and new film, journalism, history, and cultural criticism—that help us explore the possibilities for writing the migrant self and experience. The shifting terrain of race in the United States, shifts that occur in part because of successive waves of migration here, complicates how migrant experience can be imagined and represented. We will discuss this shifting terrain in an effort to understand more deeply the context within which immigrant experiences can be rendered. And we will analyze the dynamic ways in which artists respond to the complexities of race and the sometimes painful complications of migration.
This course satisfies UC Berkeley's American Cultures requirement.
Behn, Aphra: Oroonoko, The Rover, and Other Works; Greenblatt, S.: The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Volumes A-C
This course will introduce students to Chaucer, Spenser, Marlowe, Donne, and Milton; to literary history as a mode of inquiry; and to the analysis of the way literature makes meaning, produces emotional experience, and shapes the way human beings think about desire, commerce, liberty, God, power, the environment, subjectivity, empire, justice, death, and science. We will study how a literary text emerges out of the author's reading of his or her predecessors and in relation to contemporary political, religious, social, and scientific discourses and events.
If you purchase the Norton Anthology at the UC bookstore, it will be bundled with a free copy of the Norton Critical Edition of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales.
Chaucer, Geoffrey: Canterbury Tales (15 Tales and the General Prologue); Greenblatt, Stephen: Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol. 1; Milton, John: Paradise Lost
This course will concentrate on Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, Spenser’s Faerie Queene(Book I), and Milton’s Paradise Lost; additional works from the Norton Anthology will be read for literary and historical context. If this course has a thesis, it is that English authors, while cognizant of native literary traditions, looked to ancient Greece and Rome, and to contemporary France and Italy, for inspiration and approval. Written work for the semester will consist of several quizzes, one midterm exam, three papers, and a final exam. Students must be prepared to attend lectures and discussion sections faithfully.
Austen, Jane: Pride and Prejudice; Defoe, Daniel: Robinson Crusoe; Gay, John: The Beggar's Opera; Melville, Herman: Benito Cereno; Pope, Alexander: Essay on Criticism; Essay on Man; The Rape of the Lock; Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft: Frankenstein; Sterne, Laurence: A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy; Swift, Jonathan: Gulliver's Travels; Whitman, Walt: Leaves of Grass; Wordsworth, William: The Prelude
This course has two fundamental purposes. The first is to provide a broad working overview of the development of literature in English, from the end of the 17th century, in the wake of civil war, revolution, and restoration in England, to the mid-19th century, on the cusp of civil war in the United States. We will thus trace English literature’s expansion and transformation, from an insular cultural form to an incipient global fact, from a writing produced in England to a writing produced in English. We will also attend to the particular forms that emerged in this process--poetry and criticism, satire and novel--exploring the ways in which they revise and readapt older traditions to new historical circumstances, often constructing the categories that shape our own habits and styles of reading in the process.
Our second purpose is to offer an introduction to some of the basic techniques and methods of critical reading and writing that guide our collective interpretation of that literature. Lectures in the course will seek to provide a sense of essential conceptual, historical, and literary-historical contexts, while both lectures and discussion sections will be designed to inculcate a sense of the formal diversity, complexity, and significance of the texts at hand.
Austen, J.: Persuasion; Defoe, D.: Robinson Crusoe; Equiano, O.: The Interesting Narrative; Franklin, B.: Autobiography; Melville, H.: Billy Budd and Other Tales; Sterne, L.: A Sentimental Journey
A course reader.
This course is an introduction to British and American literature from the eighteenth through the mid-nineteenth century. We'll read works from that period (by Swift, Pope, Sterne, Franklin, Equiano, Wordsworth, Austen, Melville, Dickinson, Whitman, and others) and think about how politics, aesthetics, the everyday, race, gender, and identity all find expression in a number of different literary forms. We'll especially consider the material and symbolic roles played by the idea and practice of revolution in the period.
Cole, T.: Open City; Conrad, J.: Heart of Darkness; Morrison, T.: Beloved; Nabokov, V.: Pnin; Pynchon, T.: The Crying of Lot 40; Wilde, O.: The Picture of Dorian Gray; Woolf, V.: To the Lighthouse
This course will provide an overview of the aesthetic shifts captured by such terms as realism, modernism, and postmodernism, with an emphasis on the relation between literary form and historical context. We will explore how literature responds to the pressures of industrialization, war, and empire, as well as to an ever-growing awareness of a diverse, interconnected world. Attention will also be paid to the relation between literature and other forms of cultural expression, e.g., painting, music, and film.
Note: Since the reading list may change, please don’t buy books until after the first class.
Achebe, Chinua: Things Fall Apart; Beckett, Samuel: Waiting for Godot; DeLillo, Don: White Noise; Faulkner, William: The Sound and the Fury; Hurston, Zora Neale: Their Eyes Were Watching God; Joyce, James: Dubliners; Wilde, Oscar: The Picture of Dorian Gray; Woolf, Virginia: Mrs. Dalloway
Critical essays as well as poems by Elizabeth Bishop, Emily Dickinson, T. S. Eliot, Langston Hughes, Wallace Stevens, W. B. Yeats and others will be made available on bCourses.
This course will survey a range of English-language works spanning more than a century, examining the upheavals in literary forms during this period in relation to their historical and socio-political contexts. We will give prominence to the modernist movement of the early twentieth century, considering its formal experiments as a set of responses - sometimes elegiac, sometimes celebratory, often alienated - to a rapidly changing world. This was a world that was urbanized and industrialized in new and unprecedented ways, torn apart by two world wars, and grappling with the legacies of colonialism. It was also a world of new technologies that altered the experience of space and time, and one where traditional social divisions - along lines of class, race, gender, sexuality, and national identity - were being redrawn. Our guiding questions will include: what is the relationship between literature and history? How do form and content interact in literary works? What does literature tell us about our conceptions of the self and of others?
Assignments will likely include 3 papers and a final.
The required books for the course will be available at University Press Books, and the Course Reader, Introduction to Environmental Studies, will be sold exclusively at Metro Publishing; both of these establishments are located on Bancroft Way, a little west of Telegraph Ave. There will also be a required envornmental science textbook (possibly provided as an eBook).
This is a team-taught introduction to environmental studies. The team consists of a professor of environmental science (Gary Sposito), a professor of English (Robert Hass), and three graduate student instructors working in the field. The aim of the course is to give students the basic science of the environment, an introduction to environmental literature, philosophy, and policy issues, and analytic tools to evaluate a range of environmental problems. The course requires some time spent outdoors in observation as well as a lot of reading and writing.
This course is cross-listed with E.S.P.M. C12.
Lahiri, J.: Interpreter of Maladies
We will concentrate on the high and low cultural elements in the noir comedies of the Coen brothers, discussing their use of Hollywood genres, parodies of classic conventions, and representation of arbitrariness. We will also read some fiction and attend events at the Pacific Film Archive and Cal Performances.
This 2-unit course may not be counted as one of the twelve courses required to complete the English major, but it may be used to satisfy the Arts and Literature breadth requirement in Letters and Science.