Pynchon, Thomas : The Crying of Lot 49; Sebald, W.G.: Austerlitz;
Recommended: Davis , Mike: City of Quartz
Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own; James Joyce, Dubliners (selections); James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son (selections); Anne Carson, “The Life of Towns”; Charlie Chaplin, City Lights (1931); Paul Strand, Manhatta, (1921); Walt Whitman, “Manahatta” (from Leaves of Grass); Spike Lee, Do the Right Thing (1989); Michel de Certeau, “Walking in the City,” Joan Didion, “Goodbye to All That”; Mike Davis, City of Quartz (excerpt).
The city can be many different things in literature. As a plot device, the city is often a place of danger and opportunity, a place where characters make their way or lose themselves in the attempt. As setting, the city may be open or closed; it may invite the freedom of exploration or provoke the anxiety that arises from exclusion. These interpretations consider the city as a backdrop, as the stage on which the drama of fiction unfolds. But what happens when we push it to the foreground? What happens when we consider the city itself as subject, character, or text?
In this class we will examine 20th-century texts that foreground the city in various ways. We will encounter moments in which urban space is conflated with mental space, private space with public power, cityscape with text. In our written assignments we will try to move beyond the old divisions between character and setting and consider the broader implications of these crossover moments.
The primary aim of this course is to develop your critical thinking, writing, and research skills, and to help you to write across the disciplines. To this end, you will write and revise three short critical essays (4-5 pages) during the course of the semester. Students will also be responsible for weekly reading responses and in-class peer writing reviews.
Bechdel, Alison: Fun Home; Butler, Octavia: Fledgling
Beasts of the Southern Wild, dir. Benh Zeitlin, 2012; a course reader/bCourses readings including writings from: Gloria Anzaldua, Samuel R. Delany, Annie Dillard, bell hooks, José Muñoz, Eve Sedgwick, Evie Shockley, and others.
This course will begin with the request (and the requirement) that you read with pen in hand. But we'll quickly move from the idea of taking notes in the margins of material, printed pages to thinking of images, movies, TV shows, advertisements, and even social and political structures as "texts" which you will comment on, mark up, explain, and critique with the power of your pen (or your laptop).
"Marginalia"—the notes and scribbles that we make in the margins of the printed page—is a term that sounds dismissive and belittling. After all, who would give serious attention to the penciled comments in the margins of a library book, or the graffiti that covers a sign in the hallway? My contention is that those notes, scribbles, annotations, and glosses have the power to transform the original text. Our collective project will rearrange the supposed priority of "center" over "margin," and affirm that we should pay a lot of attention to marginalia. We will consider the relationship of "center" to "periphery" in its broadest social and political senses, and we will make it our task to question, disrupt, and rearrange the implied hierarchy and order implied in this mapping.
This is an R1A course, and so we will do a lot of writing and a lot of revision, with the goal of developing your academic reading and writing skills. We will practice beginning with the roughest of rough drafts—an assortment of scribbles in the margins of a text—and using these jottings to craft an essay. Along the way, we will remember and consider the initial surprise, pleasure, skepticism, interest, insight, and other kinds of engagement with the text that prompted us to write in the margins in the first place. Our attention to marginalia will help us imagine how those who read our essays will, in turn, handle and respond to them.
Notley, Alice: The Descent of Alette; O'Hara, Frank: Lunch Poems; Rankine, Claudia: Citizen
A course reader will be available with texts by William Shakespeare, Charlotte Smith, Dorothy Wordsworth, William Wordsworth, Jack Spicer, Ted Berrigan, Bernadette Mayer, Anne Boyer, Brandon Brown, and Dana Ward.
We will also listen to a number of pop songs, by artists including Frank Ocean, Icona Pop, Taylor Swift, Dr. Dre, and Stevie Wonder, as well as all of Kendrick Lamar's To Pimp a Butterfly. Additionally, we will listen to songs suggested by members of the class.
So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee. (Shakespeare, Sonnet 18)
Do poems last forever? Shakespeare seemed to think so, or at least he thought that poems could transmit a boy’s beauty after his body was long dead. In this course, we will consider the claims to “forever” that poems make. Is this claim essential to poetry, or is poetry perhaps just as fleeting as a summer’s day? We’ll think about the desire for poems to last forever alongside another lyric genre that seems committed to its own self-destruction: the pop song. While a pop hit can get stuck in your head, it’s likely to be replaced by another one. Are poems more like pop songs? Or can pop songs last forever too, as Frank Ocean sings: “Do you not think so far ahead? / ‘Cause I been thinking ‘bout forever”? In this course we will consider the temporal implications of love poems written on bar napkins, mythopoetic epics, club hits, slow jams, political interventions, ballads, anthems, songs that own the summer, and poems that everyone knows by heart. Where and how do poems or songs last—in our heads, on the page, in our repetitions? Are today’s songs and poems covering the same ground as Shakespeare did centuries ago? Or do new forms bring new feelings? Over the semester, we will be listening to short songs, and reading (mostly) short texts, slowly and carefully. We’ll consider how form and medium impact thematic content, and how questions of temporality are encoded in form.
This course seeks to develop your critical thinking and writing skills. Therefore, alongside this close reading and listening, you will produce several papers of increasing length. These papers will be developed through outlining, drafting, editing, and revising.
Greenblatt (editor), Stephen: The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol. 2; Shelley, Mary: Frankenstein
Nichols, Jeffrey: Take Shelter (film)
Wordsworth famously wrote, “Nature never did betray/ The heart that loved her.” What then of storms and natural disasters – moments when our environment becomes disordered, disruptive, or overpowering? We will read representations of nature’s stormy instability as a reflection or extension of human loss and tumult; an aesthetic marvel to be enjoyed from a distance; an indifferent force of desolation; and, perhaps most terrifying, a dynamic system in which we humans act as a potentially overwhelming and destructive force that unsettles and intensifies nature’s hazardous instability. We will explore how these various renderings participate in cultural discourses that are deeply rooted in time and place. This course brings a body of literary works into conversation with each other while also considering how these texts may shape and inform 20th- and 21st-century environmental writings.
While we will spend a good deal of class time puzzling over the intricacies and idiosyncrasies of the selected texts, our primary aim in this course is to develop academic reading and writing skills. To this end, we will have frequent practice in writing in a variety of forms of discourse, including exercises in observation, description, and reflection, as well as short analytical essays. Processes of outlining, drafting, editing, peer-review, and revising will be central to the life of our classroom and your work for this class at home.
Cicero: Political Speeches; Donne, John: The Complete English Poems; Shakespeare, William: Julius Caesar; Shakespeare, William: Othello; Swift, Jonathan: A Modest Proposal and Other Satirical Works
12 Angry Men (film), dir. Sidney Lumet (1957); To Kill a Mockingbird (film), dir. Robert Mulligan (1962)
Course reader including excerpts from rhetorical theory (Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Quintilian, Erasmus, Kenneth Burke); and political speeches (John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Jr.).
Every author must face the problem of what constitutes persuasive speech. From Plato and Aristotle in fourth century B.C.E. Greece to the twentieth-century philosopher Kenneth Burke, theorists have struggled to understand rhetoric: what is it? How does it persuade? Is it inherently moral? In this class, we will read a series of literary and political texts from a wide variety of times and places in order to understand how each author or character understands rhetoric and seeks to persuade his or her audience. We will attend to both the similarities and the differences among these speakers and writers in order to examine how the time, place, and goal of each determine his or her rhetorical strategies.
Of course, every student (and most professionals) must also face this problem of how to persuade. Even as you read samples of famously persuasive rhetoric from Cicero, Shakespeare, Swift, Kennedy, and King, you will also consider how their strategies of persuasion may or may not succeed in your own writing. By interrogating the goals and audiences of each writer on the syllabus, you will learn to examine critically the rhetoric of your own writing and that of your peers. You will consider what makes an argument persuasive, using what you learn to develop your skills in argumentative and expository writing.
Butterworth, Jez: Jerusalem ; Shelley, Mary: Frankenstein (1818 Text); Whitman, Walt : Leaves of Grass
Course Reader
“I celebrate myself, and sing myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you”
-Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself”
What does it mean to be an individual, to say “I”? What does it mean to be part of a group or community? These days we seem to take individualism and the importance of the individual for granted, but was it always this way? This class will examine the ways in which individuals are conceived of and formed, as well as how larger communities include some individuals and exclude others. How are these outcasts and outsiders represented, and how do they represent themselves?
We will consider these and other questions by exploring and discussing a wide range of media from the past two hundred years: literature (poetry, novels, plays, essays), philosophy, film, TV, and visual art – especially artists classified (accurately or not) under the umbrella term “outsider art.”
The central goal of the R1A course will be to develop your critical thinking and writing skills. You will write and revise three papers of increasing length over the semester, and work with peers to improve your writing and ideas.
Moseley, Walter: Devil in a Blue Dress; Smith, Anna: Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992; West, Nathanael: Day of the Locust
Films: Roman Polanski, Chinatown (1974); Charles Burnett, Killer of Sheep (1977).
A course reader will be available for purchase.
In this course, we’ll explore the political, economic, cultural, and social histories that have culminated in Los Angeles's distended geography, smog-filtered light, and barely connected enclaves. We’ll learn how writers and filmmakers have used the city’s geography as a platform for exploring temporal and spatial experience in urban communities, from the dawn of Hollywood to the explosive racial and class disturbances of the 1990s. The point is to explore Los Angeles as both a physical space and a cultural concept, with the categories of race, class, and gender as our through lines. How does L.A.’s geography structure subjectivity for the citizens who move about its sprawl? How does that geography impart unique experiences of time and space? What can the city’s image tell us about American political and cultural ideals? What do the city’s socio-economic realities indicate about the failure of those ideals? How has L.A.’s status as a hub of ethnic, sexual, and cultural diversity made it a unique background against which to critique and reimagine the categories of race, class, and gender? What literary and cinematic techniques have artists devised to represent urban experience in a city that often resists representation? How have these conventions shifted over time, and what might these shifts tell us about the changing nature of life in Los Angeles?
Throughout the semester, you will be working to find and improve your voice as both a critical and creative writer. Through two essays and a biweekly “city journal” that tracks your experience as an urban subject, we will hone skills like sentence craft, effective argumentation, and critical thinking.
Anderson, Sherwood: Winesburg, Ohio; O'Connor, Flannery: A Good Man is Hard to Find; West, Nathanael: Miss Lonelyhearts
The Night of the Living Dead, dir. George Romero, 1968; South Park, dir. Matt Stone and Trey Parker: selected episodes; Broad City, dir. Ilana Glazer and Abbi Jacobson, 2014: selected episodes.
A course reader will include selections from the likes of Charles Chesnutt, Edgar Allan Poe, Shirley Jackson, William Faulkner, and Sylvia Plath.
How does ickiness work? What makes something grotesque? Why, so often, are we also laughing? This course will examine various texts that have that special something that turns our tummies. We will look at novels, stories, and films that generate discomfort—digestive and otherwise—and explore the various lines they toe and tangle: between horror and humor, perversion and pathos, attraction and repulsion. Tackling issues of excess, deformity, and taboo, this course will explore how various ick factors, at specific historical junctures, confront and cross fraught boundaries—of gender, race, and sexuality, among others—and why we both love and loathe it so much when they do.
In this course, you will be asked to write several short essays of increasing length in order to develop your academic reading and writing skills. We will work on reading critically, posing analytical questions, and crafting and supporting well-reasoned arguments through both these papers and additional in-class exercises. Students will be asked to draft, revise, and peer-review their written assignments over the course of the semester.
Thomas, Rob, ed.: Neptune Noir: Unauthorized Investigations into Veronica Mars; Thompson, Ethan and Jason Mittell, eds.: How to Watch Television
Veronica Mars (Seasons 1 and 2--available as DVD/BluRay box sets or downloads from iTunes, Amazon, etc.); also a Course Reader and other online readings as selected by the instructor.
Writing about television constitutes one of the most popular forms of literary criticism outside of academic circles today. TV critic Lili Loofbourow argues that episode recaps and their in-depth analysis of our favorite shows fulfill our need for a "sustained, ethical, collective conversation" and that television shows provide the common text for that conversation in a secular age. This course will examine the claim that TV shows provide a way to talk about questions that used to belong to the domains of religion and philosophy, through our own sustained engagement with the first two seasons of the critically acclaimed teenage noir detective show Veronica Mars, which we will watch and discuss together in the form of a group recapping blog. As with most multi-arc television shows, there are many potential topics that students might choose to pursue, from issues of the conventions of the detective show genre and its structure to the ethical quandaries faced by a teenage private eye in a socially and racially diverse southern California town. Part of the course's aim is to help you learn how to decide what engages your interest and makes for an effective critical approach to a topic.
The class will involve a substantial time commitment: at least four hours of weekly TV viewing; supplementary reading to help students learn the stylistic and formal requirements of episode recaps; group blogging; and several papers that develop blog posts into larger-scale engagements with the course material and the question of mass media's role in ethical debates. Peer review will play a significant role in the editing and grading processes.
Darnielle, John: Wolf in White Van; Diaz, Juno: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao; Dove, Rita: Thomas and Beulah; Ford, Richard: Blue Collar, White Collar, No Collar; Milutis, Joe: Failure: A Writer's Life; Perec, George: A Void
Additional resources will be made available through bCourses.
(Note the new instructor, topic, book list, and course description for this class:)
Work and play regulate the rhythm of living, but when was the last time you saw them represented as you experience them? Realistic novels may mention both to be realistic, only to bypass them in favor of events and plot set-pieces. Workplace media, like police procedurals, are depicted as all discovery and confrontation, while avoiding the drudgery of paperwork, uneventful patrolling, and outreach. And presentations of play, as in professional sports, fail to resemble the weekend soccer game, or the aimless entertainment we indulge in after our work days.
This class will work with texts that foreground work and play as discrete and interrelated: contradistinguished and co-constructed. By wrangling with concepts that are simultaneously familiar and under-explored, we will engage with the kind of thought-work that goes into the best writing, regardless of one's discipline.
Over the course of the semester, you will write two short essays and one longer research-based project. There will also be various shorter assignments designed to hone your ability to formulate complex arguments and ask the kinds of questions that generate fruitful analysis.
Agamben, Giorgio: The Open; Hogg, James: The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner; Shelley, Mary: Frankenstein (1818 edition); Stevenson, Robert Louis: The Curious Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
A course reader, to be purchased at a location TBD
What is a monster? Why do we fear it? What role does it play in our conception of ourselves and our world? Our work in this class will focus on the figure of the monster, especially as it appears in the literature of nineteenth-century Britain. We will pursue this figure from the frozen moors of northern England, through the barren wastes of the Alps and the North Pole, to the foggy London streets stalked by Mr. Hyde and the infamous Jack the Ripper. In so doing, we will discover how writers and their readers used this figure to determine what society was, and who belonged to it.
In the process of this investigation, you will learn how to analyze and mobilize rhetoric in and through writing. You will not only think about how writers make explicit and implicit arguments about the world around them, but also explore how to develop your own written arguments coherently and effectively. Furthermore, you will hone your research skills and your ability to develop arguments at length. In the process, you will write and revise two progressively longer research essays.
Albee, Edward: Desert Solitaire; Anzaldua, Gloria: Borderlands/La Frontera; Austin, Mary: The Land of Little Rain; Bitsui, Sherwin: Flood Song; Silko, Leslie Marmon: Ceremony
Required Course Reader will include primary works by T.S. Eliot, Charles Olson, and Robert Misrach, and critical writings by Michel Foucault, W.T.J. Mitchell, Mark Reisner, Rebecca Solnit, and Shiloh Krupar.
(Note the new instructor, topic, book list, and course description for this class:)
In this course, our primary focus will be the cultural representation of the American desert in the post-1945 period. From the first detonation of the atomic bomb in New Mexico to the massive infrastructure projects devoted to bringing water to the west, the American desert has served as both backdrop and rallying cry for American environmental struggle. We will investigate the ways in which literature, film, and activist writing reveal the desert as a site at once subjected to and critical of the administrative logic of late modernity. Drawing on secondary readings in critical geography and cultural criticism on landscape and place, we will confront the desert as a contested, produced, and rigorously managed site.
This course acts as an introduction to college composition and research. Together, we will develop skills of critical reading and learn how to build evidence-based arguments from our readings of literary texts. We will also learn how to construct compelling research questions from literature and other arts. To help you through this process, we will devote significant class time to developing analytical, argumentative, and verbal skills. Concretely, over the course of the semester, you will produce at least 32 pages of writing.
Diaz, Junot: This is How You Lose Her; Goethe, J. W.: The Sorrows of Young Werther; Greene, Graham: The End of the Affair; Nelson, Maggie: Bluets; Reines, Ariana: Coeur de Lion
Other materials will be available on the course website, including work by Roland Barthes, Anne Carson, Joan Didion, Lydia Davis, John Donne, Shakespeare, Petrarch, William Wordsworth, and John Keats. We’ll also incorporate some popular love songs, including everything from Edith Piaf to Kanye West.
While a break-up may (in theory) end a relationship, it rarely ends a novel. This course will take its cue from novels and poems that dramatize the break-up in all of its obsessive, playful, and melancholy permutations in order to get a better glimpse of what it is, exactly, that the break-up breaks. How is a break-up characterized in written form? Does writing down an ending merely prolong it? What counts as a break-up? Can you break up with a place, a house, or a habit? What is our relationship (or obligation) to the person, place, or thing after the break-up? This course will also examine how the relationship between lover and loved object relates to the relationship between writer and reader. It will use break-ups to help us probe poetic terms like apostrophe (when a poet addresses an absent person) or lyric address (how the poetic “I” speaks to the poetic “you”) and to investigate how a poem or novel eventually ends.
While this course will be organized around ideas of the break-up, its primary purpose is to develop your skills as a writer, reader, researcher, and critical thinker. That being said, many of the patterns of behavior that we will find to characterize the break-up—flirtation, agitation, spats, stubborn melancholy—might also apply to your relationship with your own writing! This class will be structured as a workshop and will include peer revision, individual meetings, and in-class discussions of various techniques of essay writing and research. Students will be responsible for a short diagnostic essay followed by two longer essays and revisions.
Graff, Gerald: “They Say / I Say”: The Moves that Matter in Academic Writing; Lakoff, George: Metaphors We Live By; Shakespeare, William : Julius Caesar; Williams, Joseph M.: Style: Lessons in Clarity and Grace
A course reader, available at the copy center or on bCourses
A film TBD
Language is a tool for expression, but also for manipulation and the exercise of power. In this class, we will be looking at a wide variety of the ways in which power makes itself felt through language, ranging from subtle and ostensibly honest persuasion, to persuasion backed up by force, to the language of direct authority. In the process, we will consider how to decode the assumptions that often underlie such language and shape our responses to it. As we’ll see, the ethics of speaking and writing are anything but simple, and as speakers and writers ourselves, we can’t avoid making compromises.
The subject matter of the course has a direct relationship to your mode of engagement with it: in addition to considering how speakers wield power through language, you will be honing your own skills of argument and persuasion in several papers throughout the semester, most of which you will revise. These writing assignments will allow you to harness your own sources of power (knowledge, creativity, a captive audience) and apply them to the discipline of academic writing.
Bechdel, Alison: Fun Home; James, Henry: Washington Square ; Kaysen, Susanna: Girl, Interrupted ; Sittenfeld, Curtis: Prep
Films: Do the Right Thing, Spike Lee; The Suburbs, Arcade Fire; American Beauty, Sam Mendes; Illmatic, Nas; Downton Abbey, episode 1
Excerpts in course reader from Charles Dickens's David Copperfield and Oliver Twist, Robert Burns, Edgar Allen Poe, Adrien Nicole LeBlanc's Random Family and Marcel Proust
In this course, we will consider the multiple forms the house and home can take, as well as the relationship between the individual house, apartment, dorm room, etc. and its surrounding environs. We will use a range of texts to help us theorize the physical dwelling itself and its connection—or lack thereof—to the more abstract feeling of being “at home.” We will also consider the condition of the “private space” situated within a larger institutional structure (the campus, the hospital, the housing project, the country estate, the jail, the cemetery) or neighborhood (urban, suburban, rural, small-town and city). Additionally, we will consider the range of possible spaces an individual can occupy throughout his or her life, investigating how this sequence of homes influences our interpretations of whether our own lives and the lives of others are successful, unsatisfying, ideal, unconventional, problematic, normative or just quirky enough.
This course will add to the composition skills developed in R1A by focusing on students’ research skills; students will write two short essays and one longer research-based paper.
Rivera, Tomás: . . . y no se lo tragó la tierra/ . . . And the Earth Did Not Devour Him; Steinbeck, John: The Grapes of Wrath: Text and Criticism: Revised Edition
DVDs: The Grapes of Wrath; Harvest of Shame; House/Divided
CDs: Dust Bowl Ballads; The Ghost of Tom Joad; Renegades
Reader/bCourse Site: Course reader and/or bCourse site will include excerpts from Carey McWilliams's Factories in the Field; Américo Paredes's George Washington Gómez; Ernesto Galarza's Spiders in the House and Workers in the Fields; Stephen J. Pitti's The Devil in Silicon Valley; David Kennedy's Freedom From Fear; Michael Denning's The Cultural Front; Randy Shaw's Beyond the Fields; Mike Davis's Ecology of Fear; and photographs by Dorothea Lange, Horace Bristol, and Matt Black. More information on the first day of class.
(Note the new instructor, topic, book list, and course description for this class.)
In this course we will think about what cultural historian Michael Denning has called the "lowercase grapes of wrath narrative," which emerged during the Great Deparesson. In John Steinbeck's 1939 novel, this was a story about economic collapse and environmental catastrophe. It was a story about home and homelessness: foreclosures, evictions, and forced migration. It told a story of poverty, suffering, and exploitation and at the same time, a story of hope, perseverance, and social change through activism.
In what ways did this story haunt the American cultural imagination in the second half of the twentieth century? In what ways might it still haunt us today in light of a number of uncanny returns: another crash on Wall Street, another "Great" economic crisis, a new season of environmental apocalypse, and another round of bankers with foreclosure notices in hand? If the twenty-first century reboot of hard times in the Golden State has shifted the setting from California's Central Valley to the postmodern nowhere of Silicon Valley, and if the desperate masses now queue up for hours not at soup kitchens but instead at Apple Stores, is the "grapes of wrath" narrative still relevant? Does the U.S. popular imagination look elsewhere, or to other narratives, to resolve our current crises, to think through what has happened, and to imagine what will happen next?
As we explore these questions, we will develop your skills as a writer, reader, researcher, and critical thinker. Three papers are required. All three will combine analysis of primary texts with research from secondary sources. The first paper is a 3-page diagnostic essay. The second paper will be 5-6 pages; the final paper will be 10 pages; and both of these longer essays will undergo revision. In-class writing, workshops, and discussion are required.
Ishiguro, Kazuo: Never Let Me Go; Shelley, Mary: Frankenstein; Whitehead, Colson: Zone One
BBC America: Orphan Black; Darwin, Charles: On the Origin of Species (excerpts); Encinosa Fú, Michel: "Como tuvieron que morir las rosas" ["Like the Roses Had to Die"]; Jonze, Spike: Her; Rivera, Alex: Sleep Dealer; Wells, H.G.: The Island of Doctor Moreau (excerpts)
Many of us tacitly surrender to the belief that “social progress is driven by technological innovation, which in turn follows an inevitable course.” Quite often, we encounter this idea of progress through variously coded forms of narrative emplotment about the so-called "human condition." The question of what it means to be human, then, becomes all the more important when considering the ideological dominance of technological utopianism and social progressivism. Especially in consideration of human variability, abjection, and alterity, we must ask whether "progress," when taken to its "inevitable" extreme, enacts a redefinition of the human. If so, how do literature and film negotiate anxieties concerning the course of history and the sociohistorical relations that govern the categorical treatment of human differentiation? How is the representation of (non)normality affected by the systemic stratifications of raced, classed, gendered, and disabled bodies that mediate cultural production? Does technology, as Rosalind Williams suggests, produce historical contradictions by eliding the very power structures it reproduces?
In this class, we will explore these challenging questions, while developing our critical thinking skills for the purpose of effective rhetorical practice and composition. Most importantly, we will focus on how to find, evaluate, and make use of research tools and resources for analytic writing across the curriculum. The primary writing assignments for the course will be three progressively longer papers combining analysis of primary texts with research from secondary sources. Strategies for revision will form another major focus of the course, and the second and third papers will include substantial work and feedback at the prewriting and draft stages of composition.
Dostoyevsky, Fyodor: Crime and Punishment; Garcia Marquez, Gabriel: Strange Pilgrims; James, Henry: The Figure in the Carpet; More, Thomas: Utopia; Sartre, Jean-Paul: Nausea; Shakespeare, William: Othello; Williams, William Carlos: Imaginations
Also a course reader
In What Is Literature?, Jean-Paul Sartre claims that the prose writer "is in a stuation in language; he is invested with words. They are prolongations of his meanings, his pincers, his antennae, his spectacles. He manoeuvers them from within....[Whereas] the poet is outside language. He sees words inside out as if he did not share the human condition, and as if he were first meeting the word as a barrier as he comes toward men." In describing prose as a mode of ecstatic and embodied engagement and poetry as a mode of estrangement, Sartre resolved generically a set of arguments routinely made about literature: that it is uniquely tied to action and that it resides at an absolute distance from the world and its actions. This course begins by interrogating Sartre's distinction and quickly turns to the broader questions Sartre undertakes: what literary work is and why we care about it. We will scrutinize a small group of novels, short stories, poems, and one Shakespeare play, deriving arguments from them about the effects of reading, what it means to contemplate an ideal world (or to have such an ideal fictively excised from the mind), what the reader's creative role is, and so on. We will also examine a selection of classical and contemporary arguments which describe the literary as a special modality, as a means of training our minds to handle certain kinds of problems, as a manifestation of the gap between authorial intention and the logic of language, and so on, comparing these arguments with what we find in our sample literary group. Requirements for the course include one short (three-page) diagnostic essay, two mid-length (five-page) essays, and a longer (eight-page) research paper.
The MLA Handbook; Johnson, James Weldon: The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man; Lowell, Robert: Life Studies; Satrapi, Marjane: The Complete Persepolis; Wordsworth, William: The Prelude
Also (available on-line): Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography and Florence Hardy's The Early Life of Thomas Hardy.
Course reader, including Walt Whitman's Song of Myself, poems and stories by Elizabeth Bishop, and introductory material on autobiography.
Life writing seems self-explanatory as writing that is about one's life, but what does that mean, exactly? How does a life become literature, and why should literature, the province of the imagination, be made to present a real life? This course examines the rewards and difficulties that follow from life writing's proposition to connect the biographical self of the author with the self of the text. We will begin with a brief examination of autobiography as a genre before turning our attention to literary works in genres that are not necessarily autobiographical, but which authors have adapted to tell the story of an autobiographical self. Among other questions, we will be asking how each work creates its identification between the author's "I" and the text's "I," as well as what the work gains, loses, or calls into question through that identification. In addition to the readings, the course will also sharpen students' written argumentative and research skills; you will write and revise several essays, culminating in an eight- to ten-page research paper.
Golding, William: The Spire; Hardy, Thomas: Jude the Obscure; Ibsen, Henrik: Four Major Plays: A Doll's House, Ghosts, Hedda Gabler, The Master Builder; Levi, Primo: The Monkey's Wrench
One of the key questions that critical writers ask about literature is "how"? How does the writer build the first sentence and finally end a scene, chapter, or stanza? How are the material surroundings of the characters rendered? How can we articulate and form arguments about the subtle variations and contradictions that surface from our studies? How can we buld arguments about the text we are taking apart? If we focus on the way tangible structures are envisioned and built (or renovated or destroyed) and how the "architects" in and of the texts relate to the process of construction, we can create a strong foundation to consider form versus content. The course materials will therefore investigate the struggles of architects and builders in order to heighten our awareness of the formal and structural choices made by the author. This will in turn furnish lessons for constructing our own critical arguments in class discussions and on paper.
While these questions and proposed texts will furnish us with material for rich discussions, this class is chiefly geared to improve your writing. We will concentrate on both mechanics and style, learning how to read closely, formulate interesting arguments, gather evidence, and organize claims into persuasive essays. Over the course of the semester, you will produce approximately 32 pages of written work through a gradual process of drafting, editing, reviewing, and revising. The assignments will also include a research paper, satisfying the course requirement.
Hacker, Diana: Rules for Writers; Hemingway, Ernest: The Sun Also Rises; James, Henry: The Turn of the Screw; Joyce, James: Dubliners; Toomer, Jean: Cane; Woolf, Virginia: To the Lighthouse
Also a course reader with selections from W. B. Yeats, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound, Marianne Moore, T. S. Eliot, Ernest Hemingway, and W. H. Auden.
The early twentieth century was peculiarly preoccupied with its own modernity. While science and technology made great strides forward, two World Wars left devastation, and writers struggled to portray the tumult of a swiftly changing social landscape. Somehow, to them, subjective human experience seemed objectively different.
But in such shifting waters, how can we know how much we actually know? What exactly is the difference between fact and opinion? Do art and literature create objective knowledge? In the 1910s and '20s, while some argued that art should become scientific, others valued a newly radical ambiguity in creative expression. This course will examine how subjectivity and objectivity operate together in language. You will use original research to develop progressively longer papers, ultimately completing 32 pages of writing in drafts as well as revisions.
Agee, James and Walker Evans: Let Us Now Praise Famous Men; Rankine, Claudia: Citizen; Sebald, W. G.: The Emigrants; Sontag, Susan: On Photography; Turabian, Kate: A Manual for Writers of Research Papers, Theses, and Dissertations; Woolf, Virginia: Orlando
Course Reader, including essays by Charles Baudelaire, Elizabeth Eastlake, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Walter Benjamin, Virginia Woolf, Alfred Stieglitz, Henri-Cartier Bresson, Roland Barthes, Susan Sontag, Anna Pegler Gordon, Margaret Olin, Geoffrey Batchen, Elizabeth Abel, Teju Cole, and Alison Winter.
This course examines the increasingly central role of photography in capturing and constituting events in our everyday lives. We will conduct a broad survey of critical essays on photography from its inception to the present day, tracking not only its technological development over the last century and a half but also key debates regarding photography's capacity to change the world and our sense of ourselves in it. As we begin to understand the world as photographed and photographable in the twentieth century, new questions emerge as to the kinds of narrative practices we turn to in telling stories of our individual and collective experiences. Does photography record history or make it? What kinds of (in)visibility has the medium offered its subjects throughout the last two centuries? We move from critical investigations to contemporary literary texts that attempt to grapple with these issues both thematically and formally. Our class will enter these ongoing conversations in a similar spirit, maintaining a Tumbir comprised of mixed photographic and verbal responses both to our texts and to each other's posts. This course also requires two short critical essays and will culminate in a final research project and presentation.
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.
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.
Graduate students from other departments and exceptionally well-prepared undergraduates are welcome in English graduate courses (except for English 200 and 375) insofar as limitations of class size allow. Graduate courses are usually limited to 15 students; courses numbered 250 are usually limited to 10.
When demand for a graduate course exceeds the maximum enrollment limit, the instructor will determine priorities for enrollment and inform students of his/her decisions at the second class meeting. Prior enrollment does not guarantee a place in a graduate course that turns out to be oversubscribed on the first day of class; fortunately, this situation does not arise very often.
Leitch, Vincent, gen ed: The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism
Approaches to literary study, including textual analysis, scholarly methodology and bibliography, critical theory and practice.
Enrollment is limited to entering doctoral students in the English program. This course satisfies the Group 1 requirement (problems in the study of literature).
This course has been postponed until Spring 2016.
See below.
This course will provide a basic introduction to the major meters of the modern English poetic tradition from the perspective of a theory of poetic meter rooted in generative linguistics. Taking the "strict" iambic pentameter of Shakespeare's Sonnets, the "loose" iambic pentameter of Shakespeare's plays, and the "Sprung Rhythm" of Hopkins' lyrics as representatives of three distinct but overlapping meters, we will explore the structural properties of stress, syllable count and caesura placement in these forms, the ranges of variation they allow, their different manifestations in closely related forms and in the practice of other poets, their aesthetic effects in particular poems, their formal relationships to their Romance, Old English and Classical Latin and Greek influences, and their relationships to the rhythmic structure of language itself.
The principal text for the course will be a draft of a book intended as an introduction to the subject; we will use it and the poetry on which its claims are based to establish a common foundation. The principal task for each student will be to explore the metrical practice of a poet or poets of his or her own choosing.
No prior background in either metrics or linguistics is required.
This course satisfies the Group 6 (non-historical) requirement.
See below.
This course will have two parts: in the first, we will read across the range of Henry James’s career, from its American beginnings to the achievements of his major phase; in the second, we will discuss a series of figures directly or indirectly influenced by James’s signature aesthetic and stylistic innovations. We will be especially interested in the development of James’s “realism,” and how it provides, for himself and others, a language for examining the shape of modern life from the late-nineteenth century through the mid-twentieth century. Readings by James will include Washington Square, The Portrait of a Lady, The Ambassadors, The Golden Bowl, The Wings of the Dove, and various shorter works. After James, we will read texts by Edith Wharton, Gertrude Stein, Elizabeth Bowen, Lionel Trilling, James Baldwin, and Philip Roth. We also will screen films by Roberto Rossellini and Vittorio De Sica.
This course satisfies the Group 4 (Nineteenth Century) or Group 5 (Twentieth Century) requirement.
Barrett Browning, E.: Aurora Leigh; Bronte, C.: The Professor; Carlyle, T.: Sartor Resartus; Du Bois, W. E. B. : The Souls of Black Folk; Freud, S.: The Wolfman and Other Case Studies; Hegel, G. W. F.: Preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit (ed. Y. Yovel); Swinburne, A. C. : Major Poems and Selected Prose (ed. J. McGann); Wilde, O.: De Profundis and Other Prison Writings
This course embarks from the premise that “Victorian” names neither a period of time (1837 – 1901) nor the body of a British sovereign (Alexandrina Victoria Hanover) but a spatially and temporally mobile set of stylistic practices and formal principles. We will survey a range of literary and theoretical works from the nineteenth century in order to locate the seductive, pervasive, and periodically pernicious trope of the “Victorian” within its broader intellectual context, and to explore the problems it continues to encounter: the social and cultural transformations wrought by the industrial and financial phases of capitalism; the subjectively disorienting effects of imperialism, globalization and urbanization; the political and aesthetic afterlives of Romantic ideology; the ethical and aesthetic challenges of realism; the competing necessities of individuation and collectivization; and the troubling differences between desire, sex, and love. Our inquiries will be guided by the signal philosophical interventions of Hegel and Freud, an early and a belated Victorian; these contexts will ground discussion of classical debates over Victorian-ness in the work of Gyorgy Lukács, Theodor Adorno, Michel Foucault, and Gilles Deleuze, as well as more recent work in Victorian studies by Catherine Gallagher, Fredric Jameson, the “historical poetics collective,” and others.
In addition to the core texts listed above, we will read some of the critical essays of Matthew Arnold, Charles Dickens, and George Eliot, and some poetry by Robert Browning, Rudyard Kipling, Christina Rossetti, and Alfred, Lord Tennyson. We may also consider paintings by J. A. M. Whistler, John Everett Millais, and J. M. W. Turner, and operas by Michael Balfe and Gilbert and Sullivan. These multimedia commitments will return us to the specificity of the literary, and help us to form research questions over the viability and vitality of “Victorian” as a category of analysis, and perhaps prompt us to generate new names and categories with which we might escape the gravitational force it exerts.
This course satisfies the Group 4 (Nineteenth Century) requirement.
No texts.
This will be a hands-on writing workshop intended to facilitate and accelerate the transition from qualifying exams to prospectus conference, from prospectus conference to first dissertation chapter, and from the status of student to that of scholar. The workshop will provide a collaborative critical community in which to try out successive versions of your dissertation project and to learn how your peers are constructing theirs. Weekly writing assignments will structure points of entry into these projects. Beginning with exercises to galvanize your thinking, the assignments will map increasingly onto the specific components of the prospectus. We will also review a range of prospectuses from the past to demystify the genre and to gain a better understanding of its form and function. The goal is to insure that by the end of the semester, every member of the workshop will have submitted a prospectus to his or her committee. For students who complete a draft of the prospectus early in the semester, we will reserve time to consider it fully and to structure assignments relevant to the writing of the first chapter (including the question of which chapter should be written first). We will also discuss the dissertation in relation to the job market, conference papers, scholarly journals, and publishable articles.
This course will not be offered in 2015-16, but English Department graduate students may take the undergraduate equivalent, English 104 (Introduction to Old English), in its place; see the listing for that course in this Announcement of Classes.
This course has been canceled.
See below.
All readings will be made available electronically.
We will track the controversies that dominated public life in the generation before the outbreak of war (with particular emphasis on the Martin Marprelate phenomenon and the furor excited by the "Book of Sports"), explore the textual remains of social movements made possible by the abolition of monarchy (with emphasis on the Diggers and the Levellers), and closely read the first books of poetry written in the aftermath of the invention of the newspaper. We will also read a fair amount of secondary literature. Each student will give a brief in-class presentation and produce a research paper.
This course satisfies the Group 3 (Seventeenth through Eighteenth Century) requirement.
Copeland and Sluiter: Medieval Grammar and Rhetoric: Language Arts and Literary Theory, AD 300-1475; Minnis and Scott: Medieval Literary Theory and Criticism c. 1100-c. 1375: The Commentary Tradition
Much material online and in the library.
The medieval volume of the Cambridge History of Literary Criticism begins by saying that the years from the 1980s until their present (2005) has been "a golden age" for the study of medieval "literary theory and criticism." That is about right: whole bodies of sources in the grammatical, rhetorical, and exegetical traditions, sources unknown or too little and crudely known to literary scholarship, have been discovered, edited, placed, and cited: more wealth than you can easily manage or know what to do with. And the field has not, in fact, shown clear signs of knowing what to do with it.
This makes a golden opportunity for both research and ideation. (a) For research, because there is a massive corpus of materials and scholarly tools ripe for investigation but too little deployed, a circumstance in which real discovery is possible. The materials are not very systematic, and some of the tools are not obvious or well known. So one job of this seminar is to give you a handle on the materials and, especially on the research tools. (b) For ideation, because most of the big intellectual questions they raise have scarcely been broached--beginning with the question what it means to call this material "theory and criticism." So another job of this seminar will be to start finding and articulating these questions, and working out angles of approach.
This will be a genuine research seminar, not a reading course. The first weeks will offer an intensive introduction to research tools new and (mostly) old, and to scholarship old and (mostly) new, and it will begin to crack open the question of describing and understanding the premises and goals of rhetoric and of commentary. In those weeks, we will read in translation some of the most suggestive primary sources and get a sense of what scholarship has and has not done. We will probably use Dante's Vita nuova and/or Convivio as a heuristic point of literary reference. But the students will have begun the semester choosing a work (presumably a medieval one, and presumably one on which they have a settled interest in working) and an initial question, in relation to which they will be using this material and an initial idea for research. As the semester proceeds, our agenda will be set increasingly by the developing research of the participants.
The two books ordered for the course do not really represent the work we will be doing, but we will use them a fair bit. They are two recent anthologies of sources in translation, both based on exemplary scholarship. (Their footnotes and bibliographies will prove invaluable.) Unfortunately, both are expensive; I'll make sure that all library copies are on reserve. Most of our work will be with materials made available online and in the library, and with the participants' developing projects.
This course satisfies the Group 2 (Medieval through Sixteenth Century) requirement.
Baldwin, James: Giovanni's Room; Cliff, Michelle: No Telephone to Heaven; Hemphill, Essex: Ceremonies; Larsen, Nella: Passing; Lorde, Audre: Zami; Nugent, Thurman, et al: Fire!! A Quarterly Devoted to Negro Artists; Salkey, Andrew: Escape to an Autumn Pavement;
Recommended: McKay, Claude: Home to Harlem
Films: Jackson, Shirley, dir.: Portrait of Jason; Julien, Isaac, dir.: Frantz Fanon, Black Skin White Mask; Julien, Isaac, dir.: Looking for Langston; Frears, Stephen, dir.: My Beautiful Laundrette; Frears, Stephen, dir.: Sammy and Rosie Get Laid
Critical works by, amongst others: M. Jacqui Alexander; Judith Butler; Cathy Cohen; Roderick Ferguson; Frantz Fanon; Jose Munoz; Christina Sharpe; Vincent Woodward.
Co-taught by Professors Nadia Ellis (English) and Darieck Scott (African American Studies); African American Studies 240 section 1 is the course number for the latter component of the course.
This graduate seminar surveys the intersections between black and queer literatures, cultures, and theories. The course serves both as an introduction to black queer studies and as a way to deepen an already established research interest in the field. We will study classics of 20th-century black queer literature and culture—including James Baldwin, Audre Lorde, and Marlon Riggs—as well a wide variety of contemporary criticism and culture that engages and extends this tradition.
The seminar is a joint offering of the Departments of English and African American Studies and it works in tandem with The Black Room, a Working Group presented by both Departments and supported by the Institute of International Studies. The Black Room will sponsor the public lectures and seminar visits of critics Daphne Brooks and Tavia Nyong’o.
Students will make presentations, write brief response papers, and produce a significant final research paper.
This course satisfies the Group 5 (Twentieth Century) (English Department) requirement.
See below.
“Permit me to repeat,” Adorno writes in his celebrated essay on lyric poetry’s relationship to its context, “that we are concerned not with the poet as a private person, not with his psychology or his so-called social perspective, but with the poem as a philosophical sundial telling the time of history.” In this course, we read the poetries of John Donne and T. S. Eliot to see how (or indeed whether) they tell the time of history. To raise the stakes of this exercise, we will focus on Donne’s Holy Sonnets and Eliot’s Four Quartets, ie. poems that share an investment in religion but were written under markedly different circumstances. How does a religious poem that is the product of a religious culture differ from a religious poem written in a predominantly secular society? How do poems express, resist, or ignore their immediate contexts? How do they transpose themselves in other, real of fictional contexts? And what critical tools best enable us to articulate and answer such questions? In addition to spending ample time on the poems, we will read Eliot on early modern poetry, modern critics on Donne and Eliot, and representative critical essays on lyric poetry.
(Note: This course description was altered slightly on April 23.)
This course satisfies the Group 6 (Non-historical) requirement.
Meyer, E. and L. Smith: The Practical Tutor;
Recommended: Leki, I.: Understanding ESL Writers
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 will provide a theoretical and practical framework for tutoring and composition instruction.
The seminar will focus on various tutoring methodologies and the theories which underlie them. Students will become familiar with relevant terminology, approaches, and strategies in the fields of composition teaching and learning. New tutors will learn how to respond constructively to student writing, as well as develop and hone effective tutoring skills. By guiding others towards clarity and precision in prose, tutors will sharpen their own writing abilities. New tutors will tutor fellow Cal students in writing and/or literature courses. Tutoring occurs in the Cesar E. Chavez Student Center under the supervision of experienced writing program staff.
In order to enroll for the seminar, students must have at least sophomore standing and have completed their Reading and Composition R1A and R1B requirements.
Some requirements include: participating in a weekly training seminar and occasional workshops; reading assigned articles, videotaping a tutoring session, and becoming familiar with the resources available at the Student Learning Center; tutoring 4-6 hours per week; keeping a tutoring journal and writing a final paper; meeting periodically with both the tutor supervisor(s) and tutees' instructors.
This course meets the field study requirements for the Education minor, but it cannot be used toward fulfillment of the requirements for the English major. It must be taken P/NP.
Pick up an application for a pre-enrollment interview at the Student Learning Center, Atrium, Cesar Chavez Student Center (Lower Sproul Plaza), beginning April 1. No one will be admitted after the first week of fall classes.
This course may not be counted as one of the twelve courses required to complete the undergraduate English major nor may it be counyed to satisfy a graduate-level requirement.
Recommended: Davis, B.: Tools for Teaching (e-text available through UCB library website); Rosenwasser, D. and Stephen, J.: Writing Analytically (Cengage Learning, 7th ed., 2012)
All required readings will be posted on bCourses and/or available in a Course Reader.
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 practice and theory of teaching literature and writing at UC Berkeley in sections linked to English 45 and select upper-division courses, as well as R1A and R1B, and beyond. At once a seminar and a hands-on practicum, the class will cover topics such as strategies for leading discussion, teaching critical reading skills and the elements of composition, responding to and evaluating student writing, developing paper topics and other exercises, and approaching the other responsibilities that make up the work of teaching here and elsewhere. The course will offer a space for mutual support, individual experimentation, and the discovery of each member’s pedagogical style. We hope to pair each class participant with an experienced GSI teaching in R1A or R1B, so that new teachers can observe different kinds of teaching situations and classes besides their own. There will also be opportunities to be observed teaching and to receive feedback during the term.
This course satisfies the Pedagogy Requirement.