Cuadros, Gil: City of God; Hacker, Diana: A Writers Reference, 7th Edition; Islas, Arturo: The Rain God: A Desert Tale
(All available on bCourses or as course reader): Short pieces by Robert B. Reich, Barbara Ehrenreich, Anne Lamott, Cherríe Moraga, Gloria Anzaldúa, Jose Estéban Muñoz, Heather Love, Tomás Almaguer, Lee Edelman, Antonio Viego, Leo Bersani, Tomás Rivera, Richard Rodriguez, Sandra Soto, Mel Chen, Michael Hames-Garcia, Judith Butler, Ernesto Javier Martinez, David Halperin, and Richard T. Rodriguez.
We’ve heard the slogan “We’re here, we’re queer, get used to it!” But what weight do “here” and “queer” hold when a person identifies as Chicana/o? Does this identity change what it might mean to “get used to it”? Is this a question of identity politics, a question of power, a question of class? How do Chicana/o writings approach queer sexualities? Who and what do we see in these writings? Who is “here,” where is “here,” and who is asked to “get used to it”? These are some of our questions as we develop skills for successful reading and writing at the college level and encounter a set of texts that form a triangle that encompasses the Texas Río Grande Valley, Los Angeles, and the San Francisco Bay Area.
This is a writing and reading course that asks students to assist in creating a safe space in which we may read, discuss, and write about Chicana/o and queer cultural productions that speak to our present lives at Berkeley and in the United States. The emphasis of the course is effective reading and writing strategies for university work. In this class, students will be asked to think about and discover more effective approaches to text that will assist in the development of life-long reading and writing skills. The University asks students to author at least 32 pages of writing during the semester. In our approach to the writing, I ask students to consider writing as a process that includes the following steps: Understanding the assignment, Pre-Drafting, Planning, Drafting, Revising, Editing, Documentation, Last Glance, and the use of graded comments. Students will author one diagnostic essay at the beginning of term, a diagnostic midterm, and a series of short essays of increasing length (for example one 3-page essay, one 5-page essay, and one seven-page essay). These assignments will allow students ample time to consider the writing process and grow as readers and writers at Berkeley and beyond.
Boyle, T.C.: Tortilla Curtain; Dunne, John Gregory: Delano: The Story of the California Grape Strike; 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; Viramontes, Helena Maria: Under the Feet of Jesus;
Recommended: Graff, Gerald: They Say/I Say; Strunk, Jr., William: The Elements of Style
REQUIRED MEDIA:
Note: Will be available via YouTube, bCourses, and/or presented in class. DO NOT BUY THIS STUFF!
Films/Theater/Documentaries: The Grapes of Wrath; The Plough That Broke the Plains; Harvest of Shame; ¡Alambrista!; The Men Who Crashed The World; House/Divided; 99 Homes
Vernacular Music: Woody Guthrie, Dust Bowl Ballads; Bruce Springsteen, The Ghost of Tom Joad and The Seegar Sessions; Rage Against the Machine, Evil Empire and "The Ghost of Tom Joad"; Desaparecidos, Payola
Photography: Dorothea Lange and Matt Black
REQUIRED READER OF THEORETICAL, HISTORICAL, AND SECONDARY TEXTS:
Available for purchase at Copy Central. Includes texts by Dorothea Lange, John Steinbeck, Roland Barthes, Carey McWilliams, James N. Gregory, Michael Denning, Charles Shindo, Zygmunt Bauman, Rick Wartzman, Americo Paredés, Ramón Saldívar, Robert Hariman and John Louis Lucaites, David Seed, Mae M. Ngai, Gloria Anzaldúa, Brooke Fredericksen, Cordelia Candelaria, Wendy Brown, Sigmund Freud, Jonathan Dyen, Stephen J. Pitti, Mike Davis, Michael Lewis.
REQUIRED SUPPLIES:
Spiral bound index cards. 2 sets. Like this: http://amzn.com/B000FNHFYGert Hari and John Louis Lucaites
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 Depression. 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 practical fluency in college level, academic writing (constructing sentences and paragraphs, thesis development, etc). A short “diagnostic” essay is required at the beginning of the semester. In total, you will produce a minimum of 32 pages of writing, divided among a number of short essays. Full attendance and class participation is also required.
Baum, L. Frank: The Wonderful Wizard of Oz; More, Thomas: Utopia; Morrison, Toni: Beloved; Sebald, W. G.: The Emigrants; Shakespeare, William: The Tempest
Films: The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956 version); I Know Where I'm Going!
Conrad, Joseph: Lord Jim; Fagles, Robert (trans.): The Iliad; Graff, Gerald: They Say/I Say: The Moves that Matter in Academic Writing; Morrison, Toni: Beloved; Pinsky, Robert: The Inferno of Dante
A course reader
We tend to take it for granted that literary works have characters. But what is a character, and what is its relation to a real-world human? What are the stakes of that relationship? Our readings, which range in time from ancient Greece to almost the present day, suggest that answers may vary widely. This course is dedicated to exploring the history of characterization as an aspect of meaning-making in both conventionally literary works and in nonfiction, where “characters” play a key role in description and argumentation.
Along the way on our journey through different kinds of character personhood, you will be honing your ability to write and think critically in an academic setting, regardless of your major. Over the course of the semester, you will learn how to move from an interesting question, to a compelling argument, to a successful paper.
Defoe, Daniel: Robinson Crusoe; Radcliffe, Ann: The Romance of the Forest
A mandatory course reader will be made available for purchase at Replica Copy at 2138 Oxford Street. The reader will include William Beckford’s Vathek, Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, selections from Linda Colley’s Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707-1837, selections from Edward Said’s Orientalism, selections from Adam Smith’s The Theory of Moral Sentiments, and selections from Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels.
The eighteenth century witnessed Britain’s rise to the status of world superpower. As the newly United Kingdom expanded its colonial holdings and extended its imperial power around the globe, its writers imagined traversing that globe – and encountering non-British people – with greater frequency and urgency. This course will explore the rhetoric of adventure literature: what it was used for, where it came from, and how its tropes and preoccupations continue to influence contemporary Anglo-American culture today.
In the course 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. In addition to a short diagnostic essay, you will write three progressively longer essays and revise each of them, honing your reading and writing skills and better preparing you to present convincing and thorough arguments in the essay form.
Darnielle, John: Wolf in White Van; Diaz, Juno: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao; Ford, Richard: Blue Collar, White Collar, No Collar; Jones, David: In Parenthesis
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.
Class assignments include five short essays, one longer paper, and multiple presentations and weekly writing assignments.
Greene, Graham: The End of the Affair; James, Henry: The Turn of the Screw; Lerner, Ben: 10:04; West, Nathanael: Miss Lonelyhearts
We will read essays by William Wordsworth, J.S. Mill, I.A. Richards, Walter Benjamin, Susan Stewart, Lisa Robertson and William Waters, among others. We will also engage with a vast swath of poetry, including work by Langston Hughes, Gertrude Stein, W.H. Auden, Frank O’Hara, Adrienne Rich, and Claudia Rankine. These materials will be available on bCourses.
How can we best listen to literature? How is literature like or unlike a conversation? If a text is speaking to us, how might we respond? Do we believe what it tells us, and in what way? This course will examine a variety of twentieth-century British and American literature in order to probe the ways that we might listen to a text in an age of mass culture. It will examine how various mediums—the letter, the radio, the telephone, the internet—affect how texts envision their audience, questioning the extent to which we might connect literature, speech, and belief.
This class is organized around texts that thematize the oral aspect of literature, and accordingly, its primary goal is to generate a dialogue between you and the texts that we read. Just as literature produces different modes of listening, your writing will be characterized by different modes of conversing with and engaging those texts. 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. Students will be responsible for writing a series of short essays and revisions.
Johnson, James Weldon: The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man; Melville, Herman: Billy Budd and Other Stories; Sartre, Jean-Paul: No Exit; Toole, John Kennedy: A Confederacy of Dunces
Additional critical materials and shorter works will be provided in class or on bCourses.
What would lead an author to create a 'leading' character who does not seem to want to move forward in life? Why might such characters attract readers, and what's so funny--or depressing--about their everyday lives? In this class we will be investigating the properties of sloth, indecision, existentialism, and other behaviors and philosophies that may cause an individual to not do what is expected or "not do" full stop. We will discover the exceptions to laziness, rebelliousness, or apathy, and additionally encounter a host of dynamic characters that try to over-compensate for the hero's apparent lack of anxiety, passion, and ambition.
While these questions and materials will furnish us with material for rich discussions, this class is chiefly geared to improve your writing. We will attend to 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.
Burke, Edmund: Reflections on the Revolution in France; France, Anatole: The Gods Will Have Blood; Shenoda, Matthew: Tahrir Suite
Course Reader with (possible) excerpts from: Thomas Jefferson, Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine, Helen Maria Williams, William Wordsworth, Percy Shelley, William Blake, Germaine de Stael, Alain Badiou, Slavoj Zizek, Hannah Arendt, Vladimir Lenin, Rosa Luxemberg, Karl Marx, Jean-Luc Nancy, Walter Benjamin, Angela Davis, Leon Trotsky, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Amiri Baraka, et al.
Other media we might examine could include painting (Jacques-Louis David, Wassily Kandinsky), film (Sergei Eisenstein, Christopher Nolan), music (Ludwig van Beethoven, The Beatles), and spoken word (Gil Scott-Heron).
Etymologically, the word “revolution” (from the Latin revolvere) signifies a “turning back.” However, the word has come to take on quite a different meaning: the overthrow of the existing order and the birth of something radically new. This course will examine the valences, effects, and legacies of revolution starting with those events often considered to have inaugurated our modernity (the American and French Revolutions), and ending with the recent spate of revolutions around the world known as the “Arab Spring.” Along the way we will make stops to explore the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia in the early 20th century and the turbulent uprisings of the 1960s.
Throughout the semester we will hear and analyze the voices of equally fervent supporters and detractors of revolution, but we will also pay attention to people simply trying to live out their lives against the backdrop of chaotic revolutionary times. Just a few of the questions we will consider include: Do the social media-inspired revolutions of the Arab Spring trace their origins to the democratic promise of the American and French Revolutions? Do revolutions in aesthetic form have to accompany political revolutions? What do we do with hopes for a new world once revolutionary and utopian promises disappoint and start to fade?
The central goal of the R1B course will be to build your research skills and habits. You will write three papers of increasing length over the semester, one shorter one and two longer papers based on research and revision.
*Well, you know, we all want to change the world.
Agee, James & 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, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Siegfried Kracauer, Virginia Woolf, Lewis Hine, Roy Stryker, Sharon Musher, Walter Benjamin, Virginia Woolf, Roland Barthes, Geoffrey Batchen, Leigh Raiford, 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 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 essays and will culminate in a final research project and presentation.
Agee, J.: Let Us Now Praise Famous Men; Baker, K.: Nat Turner; Bechdel, A.: Fun Home; Clowes, D.: Ghost World; Lewis, J.: March; Moore, A: Watchmen; Saint-Exupéry, A.: The Little Prince; Satrapi, M.: Persepolis; Tomine, A.: Shortcomings; Yang, G.: American Born Chinese
Film adaptations, TBD
Douglass, Frederick: My Bondage and My Freedom (1855); Du Bois, W.E.B.: The Souls of Black Folk (1903); Jacobs, Harriet : Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861); Larsen, Nella: Passing (1929); Morrison, Toni: Beloved (1987); Rankine, Claudia: Citizen (2014)
Film: Melvin Van Peebles, Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song (1971); Charles Burnett, Killer of Sheep (1974)
Music: Nina Simone, Nina Simone in Concert (1964); Erykah Badu, New Amerykah Part One (4th World War) (2008); Kendrick Lamar, To Pimp a Butterfly (2015)
A course reader, including short texts by Phyllis Wheatly, David Walker, Sojourner Truth, Ida B. Wells, Booker T. Washington, W.E.B. Du Bois, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Gwendolyn Brooks, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka, June Jordan, Audre Lorde, Angela Davis, Toni Morrison, Nathaniel Mackey, Cornell West, Michelle Alexander, Fred Moten, Hilton Als, and Ta-Nehisi Coates, will be provided.
In this course, we’ll consider the origins and concerns of a radical African American intellectual tradition. Working with a variety of texts, including slave narratives, poetry, music, and film, we’ll trace the debates that structure black radical thought, with special attention to the socio-political concerns that occasion such thought. What constitutes a distinctly African American tradition of socio-political discourse? What does it mean for this tradition to be "radical"? How is this tradition central to the history of American democratic politics? How does it diverge from such politics in search of more utopian possibilities? What is this tradition’s relationship to American capitalism? How do these texts articulate “blackness” while shying away from essentialist identity politics? How and why does race/racism intersect with gender/sexuality? What is the connection between blackness and queer or otherwise non-normative gender/sexual identities? What has changed in American life as a result of black radical thought? What issues persist despite it?
Throughout the semester, you will be working to improve your skills as both a critical writer and researcher. You will write two short essays to sharpen your close reading and writing skills. In addition, you will conduct short biweekly research assignments into topics that you find particularly interesting. These assignments will form the basis of a research paper on how a literary, cinematic, or musical text investigates an historical problem of your choosing. Ideally, these papers will meditate on an of aspect race, class, and/or gender. We will hone skills like sentence craft, effective argumentation, critical thinking, source gathering, and proper use of secondary materials.
See below.
In this class we will read a small selection of letters and poems by English Renaissance poets William Shakespeare, Edmund Spenser, Samuel Daniel, and John Donne written for the purpose of obtaining patronage. These letters and poems were typically directed to wealthy and politically connected individuals in order to secure funding or political favors which enabled these authors to pursue a variety of interests and projects. These works were more than just a direct appeal for money, though. The letters and poems needed to be persuasive, succinct, resourceful, and artful, arguing in measured detail for the quality and merit of both author and work. Although these works might seem distant and irrelevant, they can nevertheless teach us a great deal about developing strong arguments that consider and match our own motivations for funding with potential funders. We can apply this to contemporary fundraising across a large spectrum of disciplines: public health, arts and humanities, entertainment, science and technology, and education. Guided activities in this class will teach you to develop grant proposals based on careful research of a potential (hypothetical) project in any discipline, and you will learn to research funding organizations (both public and private) alongside your own project. We will also learn how to write persuasive appeals for crowdsourced funding. Although we are reading early modern English literary texts to develop our critical reading skills, this class encourages you to pursue a research project based on your own interests and areas of expertise.
The purpose of this course is to develop critical reading, writing, and research skills in a way that is applicable across disciplines. In-class participation will play an important role in developing your critical thinking skills, and we will discuss approaches to crafting prose that is argumentative, clear, and nuanced. As part of the university’s Reading and Composition program, this research-focused course will guide students through the acquisition and evaluation of secondary sources and their incorporation into argumentative essays. The primary writing assignments for the course will be three progressively longer papers (2-3 pages, 6-8 pages, 8-10 pages), 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.
All required readings will be made available in a course packet and on bCourses.
Butler, Octavia: Fledgling; Griffith, Nicola: Ammonite
2012 (film); a course reader with selections from Alison Kafer, Ladelle McWhorter, Donna Haraway, Nancy C. Unger, J. Jack Halberstam, and others.
In this course, we will consider how we think about and how others have thought about the relationship between humans and nature, focusing in particular on ideas about human sexuality. We will read two novels which ask us to question our understanding of what is "human" and what is "natural" through the lens of speculative fiction, and we will watch a recent film that also uses elements of speculative fiction. To help us dig deeper into this complex, open-ended topic, we will seek out and read materials from a range of disciplines, including ecofeminism, queer theory, history of science, disability studies, indigenous studies, and critical race studies.
Our inquiry will lead us to encounter questions like: what does it mean to be queer, to think queerly, or to queer something? How have certain sexual practices and identities been stigmatized as “unnatural” or “against nature”? What assumptions about the natural world do we make when we label something “unnatural”—or, for that matter, when we imply that certain races or cultures have a special understanding of nature? What might we gain from reconsidering the various assumptions that shore up our “common knowledge” about animals, humans, and nature? How does speculative fiction offer ways of imagining different ways of relating to nature? And what other sources might we turn to as we strive to open up and clarify our ideas on these topics?
Together we will tackle the project and the process of writing a research paper. We will break down this larger project into a series of steps designed to help you build on and expand your existing skills. Topic proposals, drafting, revision, and peer feedback will all be integral to this process. We will focus on developing research skills and on incorporating these source materials into our essays.
Byatt, A.S.: Possession; McEwan, Ian: Atonement; Mitchell, David: Cloud Atlas; Smith, Zadie: NW
This course explores the investment of contemporary British culture in multiple, imaginative, and alternative concepts of time, from historical novels to speculative fictions, from London’s punk rock scene to its dubstep moment, from live comedy shows to TV serials, and from architectural constructions to art installations.
We will begin with a primer on British modernism, using visual culture (such as paintings and subway maps) and readings from T.S. Eliot, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and Graham Greene to illustrate how certain formative modernist concepts of history and memory persist in British art today. Though our focus will remain on the novel, we will integrate studies in history, poetry, criticism, art, music, and television, placing particular emphasis on the way that post-imperialism, immigration, and urban development have contributed to the richness of temporal and narrative experimentation in contemporary British culture. Readings will center around questions of history, futurity, and multiplicity, including novels by A.S. Byatt, Ian McEwan, David Mitchell, and Zadie Smith, the poetry of Sylvia Plath and Seamus Heaney, the comedy of Steve Coogan and Jennifer Saunders, cultural criticism by James Wood and J. M. Coetzee, and episodes of The Hour and Downton Abbey.
In R1B, students build on the techniques of both reading & rhetoric introduced in R1A. As such, we will engage a variety of texts across genres (novels, nonfiction, poetry, film, television, & criticism). We will also practice responding to such texts variously, writing and rewriting an analytical paper, a film review, and a research essay on a related topic of your choice over the course of the term.
Dunn, George A.: Veronica Mars and Philosophy; Wilcox, Rhonda: Investigting Veronic Mars: Essays on the Teen Detective Series
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.
Please note that in addition to the books above, you should also obtain a copy (DVD/Blu-Ray or digital download) of Veronica Mars, seasons 1 and 2.
Barthes, Roland: Camera Lucida; James, Henry: The Aspern Papers; Shelley, Mary: Frankenstein; Wordsworth, Dorothy: The Grasmere Journals; Wordsworth, William: The Prelude
Additional texts, along with video and audio files, will be posted to the bcourses site.
This course will explore the ways in which we attempt to capture, preserve, and convey our experiences. We will trace how these forms—or media—structure our memories, and how they may also obscure or distort past experience. Reading across a variety of literary genres and other media, we will contextualize forms of expression in light of historical and cultural forces and consider how cultural, political, and technological conditions inflect various modes of representation. Centering our study around two periods, the mid-nineteenth century, which witnessed the rise of photography and early sound recording, and more recent decades, which produced the internet, we will delve into what kinds of differences a medium makes. How does a poem on the page construct a different sort of record than an audio recording of a poem? How does a print diary differ from a blog?
The central aim of this course is to develop and refine critical thinking, reading, writing, and research skills. While we will address issues of mechanics and style, the emphasis will be on how to gather evidence, organize and support claims, engage secondary materials, and ultimately formulate well-researched and well-reasoned arguments for clear, persuasive essays. To that end, this course entails one short diagnostic essay (assigned during the first week of the semester) and three critical essays of increasing length, culminating in a final research project (~10 pages). Students are responsible for careful completion of all reading and writing assignments as well as active participation in class discussion and peer review.
Frayn, Michael: Copenhagen; Hacker, Diana: Rules for Writers; Huxley, Aldous: Brave New World; James, Henry: The Turn of the Screw; Toomer, Jean: Cane; Woolf, Virginia: To the Lighthouse
Selections from Gillian Beer, Hugh Kenner, Marianne Moore, Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens, Raymond Williams, and William Carlos Williams.
“On or about December, 1910, human character changed.” With this remarkable claim, Virginia Woolf tells us that in the modern world knowledge, consciousness, and emotional experience have transformed. She implies that, somehow, human subjectivity has become objectively different—in fact, that it has become more subjective, more complicated. People of the early twentieth century were preoccupied by their own modernity, convinced that in their era human experience was utterly distinct from anything that had come before.
In such shifting waters, how can we know how much we actually know? With change comes uncertainty, and, in part because their innovations were so radical, many modernist writers became newly motivated by evidence. Ezra Pound wrote that “the arts, literature, poesy, are a science, just as chemistry is a science.” Yet if human productions are totally objective, they might be no more than objects, mere uncomplicated things. On World War I battlefields, human bodies piled so high that living soldiers used them as physical barricades to provide cover from flying bullets. Modern technologies of war seemed to reduce people to objects. In opposition to writers like Pound, who championed exactitude and absolute knowledge, many modernists instead insisted that human experience was so complicatedly subjective as to be impossible to pin down. These thinkers pushed back against modern technologies and world-views that valued the absolute above the ambiguous.
This course will consider how subjectivity and objectivity operate together in poetry and fiction. What exactly is the difference between fact and opinion? Do art and literature create objective knowledge? You will use original research to develop progressively longer papers, ultimately completing 32 pages of writing in drafts as well as revisions.
Dostoevsky, Fyodor : Crime and Punishment; Shakespeare, William: Othello
Other texts will be distributed electronically.
In What is Literature?, Jean-Paul Sartre claims that the prose writer “is in a situation in language; he is invested with words. They are prolongations of his meanings, his pincers, his antennae, his spectacles. He manoeuveres 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 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 by examining a set of classical arguments about literature (by Plato, Aristotle, and Sidney) and quickly turns to the broader questions these theorists undertake: what a literary work is and why we care about it. We will scrutinize one novel, Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, a few of John Keats’s major poems, and one Shakespeare play, Othello, deriving arguments from them about the moment-by-moment experience of reading; how we might describe literary force; what it means to read well or badly; how we might describe poetry’s relation to other discourses; what the reader’s role in understanding a text is; and so on.
Requirements for the course include a series of critical papers that build toward a final research project.
Austen, Jane: Emma; Shakespeare, William: Twelfth Night; Woolf, Virginia: Mrs. Dalloway
Course Reader (required)
In this class we will look at many dimensions of a deceptively simple question: what can a party mean? We’ll study celebrations as mechanisms both of radical freedom and total social control, including the legacy of medieval Church feast-days and folk-festivals as inversions and enforcers of social hierarchies. We’ll read scenes of raucous gatherings juxtaposed with quieter revelations: the gender-bending romance of William Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, the social choreography of Jane Austen’s Emma, and the fraught provisions of a soirée in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway. As the class examines each work in its historical particularity and unique interpretive richness, students will learn strategies for effective academic writing. We will consider matters of sentence-craft alongside those of argumentation, organization, and critical reflection. In the final portion of the term, each student will complete a research paper (8-10 pages long) that develops a thematic strand of the course in an original direction while responding to a broader scholarly conversation.
Anderson, Sherwood: Winesburg, Ohio; Bishop, Elizabeth: The Complete Poems 1927-1979; Harriott, Thomas: A Briefe and New Report of a New Found Land in Virginia; Solnit, Rebecca: Infinite City: A San Francisco Atlas; Stevenson, Robert Louis: Treasure Island; Turchi, Peter: Maps of the Imagination; Verne, Jules: Around the World In Eighty Days
Movie: Around the World in Eighty Days (1956)
Short Stories: Jorge Luis Borges: “On the Exactitude of Science”; William Faulkner: “Red Leaves”
Students of this course will be asked to attend a showing of Mary Zimmerman's Treasure Island at The Berkeley Repertory Theater at 7:00 PM on April 27, 2016.
Maps exist in the divide between reality and representation. They are metaphors of space and place, and the allure of the map is grounded in its ability to produce a controlled abstraction of distance, time, space, and location. Cartographers and map makers, much like writers, translate multidimensional worlds into schemas of points, lines, planes, and words that readers interpret. Our course will take up a constellation of texts that take cues from the technology of mapping. During the semester we’ll ask the questions: What is a map? What does it mean to read a map? How do maps tell stories? What is it they say?
The main objective of this course is to equip you with the skills needed to read, write, and analyze literature coherently, and to fine-tune the techniques you use to produce persuasive research essays. The essential skills you learn and refine in this class can become the foundation of your future studies even if your major is outside the humanities, because we will focus on skills generalizable across all classes: reading, writing, researching, and critical thinking. You can expect that the essays and strategy assignments due for this course will build on each other to aid in your compositions and to help you reach new and exciting levels of analysis.
Carson, Anne: Nox; Cha, Theresa Hak Kyung: Dictee; Philip, M. NourbeSe: Zong!; Reines, Ariana: Mercury; Reznikoff, Charles: Testimony
A course reader with poems by Langston Hughes, Muriel Rukeyser, Jack Spicer, Hannah Weiner, Susan Howe, and Dana Ward.
“Poetry’s not made of words,” writes Ariana Reines in her recent book Mercury (2012). This course considers that claim. Can literature be reduced to the words that make it up, or is there a surplus that a materialistic view of poetry fails to capture? What is material and what is immaterial in 20th-century American poetry? The central archive for this investigation is a group of texts sometimes referred to as “documentary poetry,” texts with close relations to source material. Some of these texts showcase the author’s deformation of the source text, while others “merely” reproduce them. Questions to be considered include: What is at stake in these interactions with source material? What does it mean for poetry to take up a documentary task? How do poetry’s apparently immaterial aims interact with these documentary approaches?
This course seeks to develop your critical thinking and writing skills. We will learn how to build evidence-based arguments from our readings of literary texts, and how to construct and pursue compelling research questions. Assignments will include two shorter essays (one of which may be creative), and a longer research essay.
Beckett, Samuel: Three Novels: Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable; Johnson, B.S.: Christie Malry's Own Double-Entry; Joyce, James: Dubliners; Woolf, Virginia: To the Lighthouse
A film screening T.B.D.
A course reader with excerpts from Walter Pater, W.B. Yeats, Roger Fry, Rebecca West, Wyndham Lewis, Djuna Barnes, T.S. Eliot, Gertrude Stein, and various literary critics of these authors.
Virginia Woolf famously wrote that “on or about December 1910, human character changed.” In her view, the exciting and experimental works of modernism—written by authors like T.S. Eliot, James Joyce, and Woolf herself—came out of the search for new ways to express this new human character. Many have followed Woolf in considering the masterworks of modernism in terms of changes of the modern age: new ideas about psychology and the inner experience of the individual, war, technology, and an increasingly complex and urban world. In this course, we will spend time thinking about the (often uncritically assumed) emphasis on character, inner experience, and the individual. Not only will we trace the ways that it is illuminating about what makes modernist works so daring, so emotionally powerful, and so difficult; we will also try to think about ways that modernism and its heirs think beyond, beneath, or in opposition to the individual, the character, and interiority.
Building on what you have already learned in the first of the Reading and Composition courses, this second course will use the questions that this material poses of us, as well as those we pose of it, to develop your critical reflection as well as your writing and research skills that will culminate in a larger research paper at the end of the semester. Our attention will be devoted in large part to approaching a research paper as a series of cumulative but individually small and manageable pieces. Supplementing the successively longer and successively more revised essays, these intermediate steps will include things like peer editing, an annotated bibliography, and a draft outline.
Joyce, James: Dubliners
Readings: Wordsworth, The Prelude (selections); Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass (selections); Georg Simmel, “The Metropolis and Mental Life”; Virginia Woolf, “Flying Over London,” “Street Haunting”; Sherwood Anderson, Winesburg, Ohio (selections); Joan Didion, “Bureaucrats”; Ralph Ellison, “An Extravagance of Laughter”; Clarice Lispector, “Brasília”; Anne Carson, “The Life of Towns”; Mike Davis, “City of Glass” (excerpts); selected poems by Frank O’Hara, John Ashbury, Juliana Spahr, Myung Mi Kim, and others.
Films: Paul Strand, Manhatta (1921); Charlie Chaplin, City Lights (1931); Spike Lee, Do the Right Thing (1989)
The city is 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 a 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 to 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 two short critical essays (4-5 pages) and one final research project (8-10 pages). Students will also be responsible for weekly reading responses and in-class peer writing reviews.
Johnson, James Wheldon: The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man; Lowell, Robert: Life Studies; Satrapi, Marjane: The Complete Persepolis; Wordsworth, William: The Prelude
Elizabeth Bishop, Selected Prose and Poetry; Benjamin Franklin, The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin (online); Florence Hardy, The Early Life of Thomas Hardy (online); Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson, Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives (selections online); Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself” (online)
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.
Recommended: Bergvall, Caroline: Drift; Cha, Theresa Hak Kyung: Dictee; Rankine, Claudia: Citizen
You will be given a course reader containing all poems and essays listed on the syllabus, including excerpts from the works and writings of William Blake, John Keats, Charlotte Smith, Gertrude Stein, Langston Hughes, Robert Duncan, Susan Howe, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Anne Carson, Claudia Rankine, and others. These readings will be additionally available online (via bCourses) and on course reserve at the library. You will not be required to purchase any texts for this class.
Though over 55 years old, La dolce vita (“The Sweet Life,”1960) is still trending, with its famous images circulating in visual media more widely than ever. This continued ebullience is probably owing to two things. The first is the film’s still-contemporary attempt to grasp our modernity through the phenomenon of celebrity culture. And the second is the film’s still-arresting style, which, with its blend of irony and complicity, formulates the predominant terms of response to that culture. As part of our intensive viewing—and reviewing—of the film itself, we’ll also be taking a look at some 21st-century LDV quotations, including its most recent cinematic makeover, Paolo Sorrentino’s La grande bellezza (“The Great Beauty,” 2013).
This 1-unit course may not be counted as one of the twelve courses required to complete the English major.
Ferguson, Margaret: The Norton Anthology of Poetry (5th Edition); Rankine, Claudia: Citizen
A course reader
In this course we’ll read poems together, intensively, across a long historical span, a variety of contexts (cultural, philosophical, political), and a wide range of modes, forms, genres, styles and techniques. We’ll respond to poems, analyze them, listen to them and write about them; there will be opportunities to play with translating, editing, and visually presenting them, as well as with writing and performing them. Requirements: Short analytic and creative written exercises due in every class period; one short (5 pp) and one longer (8-10 pp) paper; a final exam.
This will be a reading- and discussion-intensive course designed for prospective majors and transfer students looking to understand poetry and learn how to write about it critically.
A course reader will contain a diverse range of 21st-century poems, as well as some prose readings about poetics.
Students will also pick one full-length, single-author book of poetry on which they will give a presentation to the class.
What can poems do, and how do they do it? This course will explore how we as poets engage with the world through our writing, and how we as readers find value in poems. Our goal will be to develop an expansive sense of possible poetic acts, and to refine practical strategies and techniques. Weekly topics (such as place, history, the political, social relations, and identity) will provide a frame of comparison as we consider examples from a diverse range of contemporary poets, and then learn from and give feedback upon each other’s experiments.
Participants will write a poem a week, keep a reflective reading journal, open discussion on peers’ poems, and give an end-of-semester presentation about a full-length book of poetry. The final will comprise a portfolio of revised poems, including a writer’s statement.
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., THURSDAY, OCTOBER 29.
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.
Greenblatt, S.: Norton Anthology of English LIterature, Volumes A and B
In this course we will read some of the best books ever written in English, and the course will try to treat both you and those books seriously and justly. The course will give you a sense of the shape of literary history from the earlier middle ages through 1667: the Beowulf-poet, Chaucer, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Donne, and Milton will get our closest attention, but they will also provide the scaffolding on which to hang a more detailed picture of the imaginative and intellectual development of literature. It will work hard to give you the skills to read easily and intelligently (and out loud) the earlier forms of the language in which these works are written, and to develop also the skills by which you can take writing apart and see how it works. It will also take up the big questions raised by the whole undertaking: what literary art is good for, what forms of reason and understanding are most at home in it, and why the past is worth bothering with--all, in fact, questions that the works themselves are preoccupied with.
Greenblatt, Stephen : Norton Anthology of English Literature, Volumes A and B
This is a story of discovering, then forgetting, then discovering again the fact that a particular language can be used not only for communication but also for creation. At the beginning of our story Caedmon, a shepherd, is called upon in his dream to praise God in poetry. A thousand years later, John Milton calls upon the “Heav’nly Muse” to sing “Of Man’s First Disobedience.” In between them, English turns from its humble beginnings into a medium of literature. In this course, we trace this transformation by readings works of Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, Donne, and Milton.
Austen, Jane: Persuasion; Behn, Aphra: Oroonoko; Blake, William: Songs of Innocence and of Experience; Blake, William: The Marriage of Heaven and Hell; Defoe, Daniel: Robinson Crusoe; Gates (editor), Henry Louis, Jr.: The Classic American Slave Narratives; Melville, Herman: Bartleby and Benito Cereno; Rowlandson, Mary: The Sovereignty and Goodness of God; Swift, Jonathan: Gulliver's Travels; Wordsworth, William, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Lyrical Ballads
A course reader (including poems by Alexander Pope, Thomas Gray, William Collins, Robert Burns, etc.; short fiction by Walter Scott, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe) will be made available; other readings and supplementary materials will be posted on our B-course site.
Readings in English, Scottish, Irish and North American prose fiction, autobiography, and poetry from 1688 through 1848: a century and a half that sees the formation of a new, multinational British state with the political incorporation of Scotland and then Ireland, the global expansion of an overseas empire, and the breakaway of the North American colonies to form a new empire between the Atlantic and the Pacific. Our readings will explore the relations between home and the world in writings preoccupied with journeys outward and back, real and imaginary -- not all of which are undertaken voluntarily...
Austen, Jane: Emma; Behn, Aphra: Oroonoko; Defoe, Daniel: Moll Flanders; Equiano, Olaudah: The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African, Written by Himself; Pope, Alexander: The Rape of the Lock and Other Major Writings; Wordsworth, William: Lyrical Ballads
As we read works produced in a period of tumultuous change, we shall consider those works as zones of contact, reflecting and sometimes negotiating conflict. In a world of expanding global commerce (imports like tea suddenly becoming commonplace in England), political revolution (English, American, French), and changing conceptions of what it means to be a man or woman (a new medical discourse viewing them as categorically distinct), increasingly available printed texts become sites of contestation—including debates about what constitutes “proper” language and Literature itself. We shall think about the ways in which separate groups—British and African, masters and slaves, slave owners and abolitionists, arch capitalists and devout religious thinkers, Republicans and Conservatives, men and women—use writing to devise ongoing relationships with each other, often under conditions of inequality. Throughout we shall be especially attuned to formal choices—from linguistic register to generic conventions and innovations—and how writers deploy these to incorporate opposition, resist authority or authorize themselves. Requirements will include two papers, a mid-term exam, a final exam, and reading quizzes.
Coetzee, John: Disgrace; James , Henry: What Maisie Knew; Ramazani , Jahan, et al.: Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry; Wilde, Oscar: Picture of Dorian Gray; Woolf, Virginia: Mrs. Dalloway
There will probably be postings on bcourses.
This course will involve close readings of texts by those whom I consider indispensable authors who define significant parameters for literature in England and in the US from about 1870-1950, with a final novel by the South African writer John Coetzee, who in many ways questions the value of this exercise in coming to know a dominant culture. I will emphasize learning to read texts closely and to discuss them in terms of how close reading makes demands on our getting our minds around the material. There will two lectures on Modernism in art and there will be frequent references to modern philosophy. You get all this for the price of a mere two papers, a mid-term and final exam, and mandatory regular attendance.
Conrad, Joseph: Heart of Darkness; Joyce, James: Dubliners; Le, Thuy: The Gangster We Are All Looking For; Morrison, Toni: Beloved; Nabokov, Vladimir: Pnin; Pynchon, Thomas: The Crying of Lot 49; Wilde, Oscar: The Picture of Dorian Gray; Woolf, Virginia: To the Lighthouse
Note that the instructor, book list, and course description of this section of English 45C have changed (as of Nov. 9, 2015).
This course will provide an overview of the aesthetic shifts captured by such terms as realism, modernism, and postmoderinism, 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.
Allen, Woody: The Insanity Defense
We will examine the films and writings of Woody Allen in terms of themes, narration, comic and visual inventiveness, and ideology. The course will also include consideration of cultural contexts and events at Cal Performances and the Pacific Film Archive.
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 Litearture breadth requirement in Letters and Science.
Millward, Celia: A Biography of the English Language; Millward, Celia: workbook to accompany Biography of the English Language
This course surveys the history of the English language from its Indo-European roots, through its Old, Middle and Early Modern periods, and up to its different forms in use throughout the world today. Topics include changes in its core grammatical systems of phonology (sound structure), morphology (word structure) and syntax (sentence structure); in vocabulary; in writing and literary forms; and in the social position of English and its dialects.
This course has been canceled.
This course has been canceled.
Greenblatt, S., editor: The Norton Shakespeare, 3rd edition
Shakespeare’s poems and plays are relentlessly unsettling, extravagantly beautiful, deeply moving, rigorously brilliant, and compulsively meaningful: they complicate everything, they simplify nothing, and for 400 years, they have been a touchstone—indeed, something like an obsession—for literary artists from Milton to Goethe to Emily Dickinson to Joyce to Brecht to Zukofsky to Sarah Kane and for philosophers and theorists from Hegel to Marx to Freud to Derrida to Lacan to Zizeck. We will be especially concerned with five large issues: compassion; political representation and its discontents; the nature of identity and subjectivity; colonialism; and the relation between the ways Shakespeare’s plays make meaning and the ways they produce emotional experience. Our reading will include: Titus Andronicus, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Merchant of Venice, Julius Caesar, Henry V, Hamlet, Coriolanus, and The Tempest.
If you already own a good edition of the plays (for example, the 1st or 2nd edition of The Norton Shakespeare, The Riverside Shakespeare or The Arden Shakespeare), don’t feel at all obliged to buy the 3rd edition of The Norton Shakespeare. The Norton Shakespeare is available in several formats (single-volume, two-volume, four-volume). I have ordered the two-volume edition.
Shakespeare, William: The Comedy of Errors; Shakespeare, William: The Norton Shakespeare: Essential Plays (3rd ed.);
Recommended: Greenblatt, Stephen: Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare
Shakespeare wrote a massive number of plays. Focusing on a selection of them, we’ll consider the range of Shakespeare's dramaturgy and why this range was important to him. We’ll also explore how the variety of dramatic genres in which he wrote affected Shakespeare’s representation of plot and character, as well as the literary, social, sexual, religious, political, and philosophical issues he conceptualized through plot and character. Finally, we’ll think about Shakespeare’s plays in relation to the range of social types and classes in his mass audience.
Bronte, Emily: Wuthering Heights; Collins, Wilkie: The Moonstone; Eliot, George: Adam Bede; Mayhew, Henry: London Labour and the London Poor; Pater, Walter: Studies in the History of the Renaissance; Rossetti, Dante Gabriel: Collected Poetry and Prose; Yeats, William Butler: The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats
The Victorian period witnessed dramatic and probably permanent changes to the literary culture of Britain, including: the morphing of scattered memoirs into formal autobiographies; the rise of the realist novel as the indispensable genre of bourgeois life; the investment of culture with the power to effect epochal political change and rearrange readers' sexualities; the invention of vampires, robots, serial killers, and other new forms of monstrosity; the modernization of narrative pornography; and the rejuvenation of bardic poetry. At the same time British authors were trying and failing to manage the largest empire in history, both devising new ways to dominate the world through writing and interrupting the violence that imperialism—the so-called "final phase of capitalism"—produced.
This course engages the major theoretical questions posed by Victorian literature, questions which emerge from the unprecedented global suffusion of British imperial influence. How might the enormity of this new world be meaningfully represented in language? What new accounts of personhood, ethics, sexuality, ethnicity, evolution, and art are required? Dealing with these and related questions, we will perhaps come to understand the enduring power of Victorian literature to speak to our own moment of globalization and crisis—our perennial return to the unanswered questions and open wounds of the nineteenth century.
(Note that the book list for this course was changed on November 4.)
Diaz, Junot: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.; Doerr, Anthony: All the Light We Cannot See.; Egan, Jennifer: A Visit from the Goon Squad.; Harding, Paul: Tinkers; Johnson, Adam: The Orphan Master's Son; Strout, Elizabeth: Olive Kittredge; Tartt, Donna: The Goldfinch
Reader.
The Pulitzer Prize in Fiction is awarded for “distinguished fiction by an American author, preferably dealing with American life.” In this course, we will read the seven most recent (2008-2015) Pulitzer Prize-winning novels (actually, one of them is a collection of short fiction). In addition to examining narrative form and literary style, we will consider cultural and historical contexts and thematic resonances. We will discuss the trends in types of topics and styles selected for the Pulitzer as well.
Please note that many of the novels are lengthy so it will be a good idea to read ahead.
Beckett, Samuel: Watt; Conrad, Joseph: Lord Jim; Doyle, Arthur Conan: The Sign of Four; Eliot, George: The Lifted Veil; Ford, Ford Madox: The Good Soldier; Forster, E.M.: Howards End; Joyce, James: Ulysses; Rhys, Jean: Good Morning, Midnight; Woolf, Virginia: The Waves
The British novel in the first half of the twentieth century was a site of massive formal experimentation. Time, space, narrators, characters, and language were dismantled and reconfigured in startling new ways. In this survey, we will look at novelistic experiments by seven authors: Joseph Conrad, E. M. Forster, Ford Madox Ford, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Jean Rhys and Samuel Beckett. Using close reading and formal analysis, we ask what these experiments were. We will gather a set of varied and precise ways of talking about modernism’s formal features, its philosophical issues and its social and historical context. As a foil for modernist experimentation, we will begin by examining two short nineteenth-century texts: George Eliot's The Lifted Veil and Arthur Conan Doyle's The Sign of Four.
Puchner, Martin: The Norton Anthology of Drama; Weiss, Katharine: The Plays of Samuel Beckett
There will be several plays available in Pdf on bcourses. The Norton Anthology of Drama also comes with elaborate on-line resources.
This course will be a survey of Modern Drama, mostly in Europe and in the US from about 1880 to 2000. We will read about 30 plays, and we will watch at least a couple of them. Dramatists studied will include Ibsen, Chekhov, Pirandello, O'Neill, Yeats, Beckett, Pinter, Fugard, Kushner, and Albee. But since this is an English Department course, the emphasis will be on what writers accomplish rather than what actors or readers can make of those accomplishments. I am especially interested in how dramatists interpret their fundamental materials--real human beings on stage, yet the unreality of theater as staged experience, the difficulties of making a story present rather than telling it, and the problems of addressing an audience by suggesting that concrete figures can represent fundamental needs and desires of audiences. And the sequence of readings will tell stories about how realism is both necessary in the theater and continually felt as an oppresive limitation. There will be at least one paper and a final. Since teachers like plays need audiences, regular attendance is mandatory.
Douglass, Frederick: Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass; Emerson, Ralph Waldo: Nature and Selected Essays; Hawthorne, Nathaniel: The Scarlet Letter; Melville, Herman: Moby Dick; Thoreau, Henry David: Walden; Whitman, Walt: Leaves of Grass (1855 edition)
I will lecture on several of the primary literary texts of the antebellum period. Two ten-page essays, a final exam, and regular attendance will be required.
See below.
A survey of major American novels from the late-nineteenth century to the present, with a focus on realism, naturalism, and modernism. Rather than trace a single history of the novel in this period, we will explore a range of genres—including works of popular fiction--that highlight some of the most significant developments in novel form, as well as the cultural and historical contexts they illuminate.
Readings will include texts by Henry James, Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, Ralph Ellison, Philip Roth, Paule Marshall, Thomas Pynchon, Toni Morrison, Don DeLillo, and Marilynne Robinson.
Als, Hilton: White Girls; Baldwin, James: Notes of a Native Son; Baldwin, James: The Fire Next Time; Coates, Ta-Nehisi: Between the World and Me; Ellison, Ralph: Shadow and Act; Jones, LeRoi: Blues People; Keene, John: Counternarratives; Rankine, Claudia: Citizen
Readers of James Baldwin, W. E. B. DuBois, Ralph Ellison, and Zora Neale Hurston have often turned to these authors' essays with a mind to better understanding their literary work. In this course we will consider the African American essay as a form in its own right, one that rewards close formal analysis. The essay (from Old French essai, “attempt”) is a sort of rhetorical trial balloon, implying firstness, a want of finish, and a rigorous nonsystematicity. We will consider the matter of incompletion in two respects -- the essay as it engages the topic of the incomplete project of black freedom, and the essay as ongoing experiment in form—with a goal of puzzling out how the two are related.
Readings by the following authors: Hilton Als, James Baldwin, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Ralph Ellison, Zora Neale Hurston, LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka), John Keene, Nathaniel Mackey, and Claudia Rankine.
McLuhan, Marshall: The Mechanical Bride; Roth, Philip: I Married a Communist; Salinger, J. D.: Catcher in the Rye
Additional Readings will be collected in a Reader available at Copy Central on Bancroft and on bcourses.
1948 was the year that America–after the Great Depression, after the Second World War, after sixteen year of the all but revolutionary experiment in national government of the New Deal–let out its collective breath. Finally, that great exhaling said, we can go back to real life–but what was “real life?” Centering on 1948, but moving a few years back and a few years forward, this class will explore the sometimes instantly celebrated, sometimes all but subterranean experiments in American culture and literature that tried to raise and answer that question. The artists, writers, filmmakers, painters, musicians, poets and social theorists who emerged to tell that national story included Miles Davis and Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsburg and Ross MacDonald, J.D. Salinger and Ray Bradbury, David Riesman and Marshall McLuhan. This course will follow the traces of this explosion as well as contextualize the America that was being born. It will include films, popular music, Life Magazine, advertising culture and television as well as novels, poetry and discussions of visual images.
This class is cross-listed with American Studies C111E.
This course has been canceled.
Acosta, Oscar Zeta: The Revolt of the Cockroach People; Alvarez, Julia: In the Time of the Butterflies; Castillo, Ana: Sapogonia; Pineda, Cecile: Face; Rechy, John: City of Night; Ruiz, Ronald: Jesusita; Vea, Alfredo: Gods Go Begging; Viramontes, Helena M.: Their Dogs Came With Them
This course on Chicana/o and Latina/o novels complements a Chicana/o literature course I taught in the fall entitled “Migrant Narratives.” But whereas the fall course included works that represented various literary genres (the novel, autobiography, short story, creative journalism, and poetry), the spring course will focus exclusively on the novel. As we shall see, the formal features and thematic representations of these novels have been influenced to a large degree by a broad range of experiences: living in the borderlands of nationality, language, politics, and culture; growing up female in a male-centered environment; fighting racism; engaging in class struggle; encountering various forms of organized state repression; migration and immigration; getting involved in political movements; sometimes becoming complicit with the forces of domination; and expressing these experiences in art and literature. Because this is a reading intensive course, we will spend considerable time in class discussing the novels and doing collective close readings of selected passages. We'll be attentive to the manner in which the act of storytelling in these novels contributes to the formation of complex and sometimes contradictory cultural identities. We'll also read and discuss essays on narrative theory and history to facilitate our analysis of the aesthetic and social issues that inform the writing of these novels and to understand how Chicana/o and Latina/o novels expand and enrich the American literary tradition generally.
Forster, E. M.: A Passage to India; Foucault, Michel: The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1; Keller, Nora Okja: Comfort Woman; Mootoo, Shani: Cereus Blooms at Night; Selvadurai, Shyam: Funny Boy: A Novel
See below.
This course will explore the intersection of theories of gender and sexuality and the postcolonial world. We will consider how gender and nation are shaped and represented in literature and film. Why are nations routinely imagined as women, and imperial dominion expressed in terms of sexual conquest? Western academic models of gender and sexuality provide one set of frameworks by which to discuss desires, identities, and affects—in this class we will ask how well they travel to a postcolonial context. How do theories, practices, and identity categories translate? What do they elide? What do they take as “natural”? We will suggest alternative frameworks for describing sexuality around the world and for exploring non-Western literary representations of non-normative gender identities and sexualities.
Readings and films may include work by Joseph Conrad, E.M. Forster, Shyam Selvadurai, Deepa Mehta, Sigmund Freud, and Judith Butler.
Basho: Back Roads to Far Towns; Brunvand, Jan: The Choking Doberman; Coultas, Brenda: The Marvelous Bones of Time; Lorde, Andre: Zami: A New Spelling of My Name - A Biomythography; Ondaatje, Michael: Running in the Family
Fiction packet including stories by William Kennedy, Jamaica Kincaid, Louise Erdrich, Eudora Welty, etc.
We’ll study some of the ways that fiction writers, essayists, story-tellers, and poets have responded to the worlds that their cultures have built. We’ll look at “high” forms and “low” forms and write in both and consider the distinctions. We’ll read and think about and write urban legends and short fictions, family histories and haibuns, hybrid texts and ghost stories and ballads. Students will work on individual projects and will also be asked to collaborate on group performances of creative work. Projects incorporating material from non-written sources (graphic art, for example) will be encouraged; projects incorporating material from unpublished sources (folklore, family stories, etc.) will also be encouraged.
This course is open to English majors only.
Egan, J. ed.: The Best American Short Stories, 2014
This class will be conducted as a writing workshop. We will discuss the stories in the assigned anthology and writing by students in the class. Assignments will include three short writing exercises, two new short stories, and critiques of classmates' work.
Only continuing UC Berkeley students are eligible to apply for this course. To be considered for admission, please electronically submit 8-10 pages of your fiction (no poetry, drama, screenplays, or academic papers), 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., THURSDAY, OCTOBER 29. (If you are submitting an excerpt from a longer story or novel, indicate this on the first page.)
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.
Oates, J. C., ed.: Oxford Book of American Short Stories, 2012 (2nd edition)
A fiction workshop in which students will be expected to turn in material approximately every third week, to be edited and discussed in class.
Emphasis will be upon editing and revising. Quality rather than quantity is the ideal, but each student should be prepared to write about fifty pages through the term, to be gathered into a small “book” and turned in on the last class day. Appropriate assignments will be made in the (2nd) 2012 edition of THE OXFORD BOOK OF AMERICAN SHORT STORIES edited by Joyce Carol Oates.
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., THURSDAY, OCTOBER 29.
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 from Krishna Copy (University Ave. and Milvia).
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, visual poem, 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 my 143B sections who have gone on to publish books and win prizes. 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 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., THURSDAY, OCTOBER 29.
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.
Boyer, Anne: Garments Against Women; Foster, Tanya M.: A Swarm of Bees in High Court; Giles, Samantha: deadfalls and snares; Rankine, Loffreda, and King, eds.: The Racial Imaginary; Sawako, Nakayasu: Mouth: Eats Color
Physical or digital copies of several other books will be provided.
At a pivotal moment in the development of her practice, the experimental composer Maryanne Amacher is said to have conducted a notebook-based self-analysis that revolutionized her relationship to composition. In this course, parallel to the writing, critiquing, and reading of poetry, we will borrow and adapt this idea, first determining collectively what elements of poetics to address, and then working individually to probe and/or purge our assumptions about them. In addition to the individualized readings that emerge from these studies, we will discuss recent works by Tonya Foster, Samantha Giles, Anne Boyer, Sawako Nakayasu (with Chika Sagawa), Simone White, Diana Hamilton, Rob Halpern, and others, as well as selections from the recently released book The Racial Imaginary. The semester will culminate in some form of public presentation or presentations — through live readings or talks, print or digital publication, or other media — of our ongoing investigations. Students interested in translation and who work across language, genre, and media are encouraged to apply.
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., THURSDAY, OCTOBER 29.
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.
Conrad, Joseph: Heart of Darkness; Harris, Eddy: Mississippi Solo; Niemann, Linda G.: Boomer: Railroad Memoirs
Plus excerpts from Basho's Back Roads to Far Towns (translated by Cid Corman) and Joanne Kyger's Strange Big Moon.
Much of American literature has had to do with a sense of motion. Note the journeys, e.g., in the best known texts of Melville and Twain. But note also that Harlemite Langston Hughes’ autobiography, The Big Sea, begins on a boat and details his adventures in Europe and Africa; Canadian writer Gladys Hindmarch takes on Melville with her Watery Part of the World and Zora Neale Hurston travels to Haiti in Tell My Horse and through the American south in Mules and Men. The point of this course is multiple and full of inquiry.
The familiar question, “Is this trip necessary?”, is joined to “What makes this trip important enough to celebrate?” Another field is the role of Americans and/ or Westerners as travelers in the world. What things are we heir to? What are our responsibilities and blindnesses? What’s the relation between the imperial West and our current situation? The point in this—and any writing—is to write consciously and to be mindful of the political import of our writing. A third field is the defining of the relation between travel and place (and imagination). Place is “hot” right now, as a topic. What are the elements of the sentimental here and what assumptions?
Workshop. Discussions. Reading. Writing assignments. Field trips. The writing vehicle will be, for the greatest part, the personal essay (with some forays outward into hybrid prose/ poetry forms).
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 (no poetry or academic writing) 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., THURSDAY, OCTOBER 29.
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.
Butler, J.: Excitable Speech; Foucault, M.: Fearless Speech; Freud, S.: Dora; Freud, S.: Psychopathology of Everyday Life; Melville, H.: Shorter Works; Plato: The Republic; Sophocles: Antigone; Wordsworth and Coleridge: Lyrical Ballads
This course will interrogate the way in which “free” speech, as moral value or political right, informs and complicates our understanding of literature and the literary. We will trace the conceptual intersection of freedom and speech both historically and across several disciplines, beginning with Plato and Aristotle, then proceeding to consider the effect of general literacy on the conception and regulation of free “speech,” reading Milton’s Areopagitica and Marx’s “On the Freedom of the Press.” Turning from "public" to "private" speech, we will also examine psychoanalytic and linguistic accounts of psychic and physiological disfluency. Throughout, we will consider the “freedom” of speech in relation to questions of both form and content. Are genre, meter, and grammar mere forms of constraint? Or are we free only when released by formal constraint from instrumental communication? Do political and psychic repression merely inhibit free speech, or is our idea(l) of free speech an effect of these repressions? And what do physical constraints on speech, from aphasia to stuttering, have to tell us of the relation of literary form to speech freedom? Does the global hegemony of English threaten a speech freedom that ought to be understood as dependent upon a polyglot diversity? Finally, to what extent is free speech a diminished form of freedom itself? We will end by considering the current situation of free speech in the U.S., reading materials related to the “Citizens United” decision, current discussions of "campus climate," and earlier Supreme Court cases related to free speech.
Students will have the opportunity to write three progressively longer essays (ranging from 3 to 10 pages) on different theoretical questions of free speech: on a specific philosophical, political, or aesthetic theory of speech freedom; on a legal or psychoanalytic “case”; on literary form.
Barron, W. R. J., and S. C. Weinberg, eds. and trans.: Layamon's Arthur: The Arthurian Section of Layamon's Brut (lines 9229-14297); Eliot, T. S.: The Waste Land; Lord Tennyson, Alfred: Idylls of the King; Malory, Thomas: Le Morte d'Arthur; Norris J. Lacy, Geoffrey Ashe, and Debra N. Mancoff: The Arthurian Handbook, 2nd edition; Percy, Walker: Lancelot; Steinbeck, John: Tortilla Flat; Twain, Mark: A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court
Online Course Packet including selections from (primary sources) Geoffrey of Monmouth, Chrétien de Troyes, Gawain and the Green Knight, Chaucer, Spenser, Walter Scott, Swinburne, David Lodge; and (secondary sources) Walter Benjamin, Fredric Jameson, Umberto Eco, Norris Lacy, Patrick Geary, Kathleen Davis, Alan Lupack and Barbara Tepa Lupack, Tison Pugh and Angela Jane Weisl, and Michael Alexander.
This course will focus on medievalism, i.e., the representation and conceptualization of the Middle Ages, in order to analyze how ideas about the past are used in literature and the arts, in both "high" and popular culture. The point of the course is not to separate historical facts about the Middle Ages from literary fictions, but rather to trace the ways in which the imagined medieval past and the wide and often contradictory range of ideas associated with it (middleness, disruption, origin, nostalgia, primitivism, chivalry, absolutism, etc.) have proven both useful and problematic in confronting the present and future. We will ask what each society's medievalism says about the society itself, and trace the ways that ideas about the Middle Ages have been used to promote or critique particular values. The course will center on English literature and one of its most persistent "medieval" subjects, the "Matter of Britain," tales of Arthur and his knights. We will explore several historical moments and places in which Arthurian medievalisms have flourished, using literary work as a lens into the cultures' complex engagement with their pasts. The goals of the course will be to gain a broad familiarity with the themes and history of the Arthurian tradition and at the same time to understand the perdurance of that tradition, both the reasons why the Arthurian world and its medievalism remain so useful a setting and the key changes in the conceptualization of that world over time. Our main objects of study will be works of British and American literature, but we will frequently supplement them with Arthuriana from other media and cultures.
Course Reader
In this course we’ll review the U.S. poetry of the present, reading representative poems from the last 15 years or so in relation to a number of formal concerns, poetic subjects, and debates within the social field (and its media), including: the advent of the Internet and its ongoing effect on writing and reading practice, dissemination, and national conversations about race, gender, class, and community; the emergence of “ecopoetics”; the waning and reinvention of traditional forms; prose poetry; Conceptual poetry; movement poetry (Occupy-era and antiracist work). All readings will be drawn from a Course Reader and will include Kevin Davies, Juliana Spahr, Claudia Rankine, Ben Lerner, Jennifer Moxley, Graham Foust, Ariana Reines, Douglas Kearney, Fred Moten, Lisa Robertson, Cathy Park Hong, Brenda Hillman, Javier Huerta, and many others.
This course is open to English majors only.
Bartlett, Neil: Who Was That Man?: A Present for Mr. Oscar Wilde; Beardsley, Aubrey: Salome: A Tragedy in One Act; Beerbohm, Max: Zuleika Dobson: or An Oxford Love Story; Ellmann, Richard: Oscar Wilde; Wilde, Oscar: Complete Works of Oscar Wilde; Wilde, Oscar: Teleny: A Novel Attributed to Oscar Wilde; Wilde, Oscar: The Picture of Dorian Gray: An Annotated, Uncensored Edition
Oscar Wilde's jokes, and his pathos, can seem out of place in Victorian literature: they leap off the dusty page and into a present moment where their author seems to fit more happily. Without wishing to consign him back to that potentially hostile past, the task of this course is to understand Wilde's engagement with the histories and cultures around him. A trenchant critic of Victorian sexual morality and hypocrisy, Wilde was also a voracious consumer of his contemporaries' writing and a prominent public intellectual. An historical understanding of Wilde will help shed new light on crucial questions such as: in the final decades of the British colonial occupation of Ireland, how did Wilde's Irishness enable and constrict his construction of a public indentity? To what extent do his poems and plays generate new forms for the English language, or (conversely) how are his apparent innovations mere translations from French and German Romanticism? Whatever else it may have done, how did Wilde's public homosexuality shape Victorian attitudes to gender and sex? These and related questions will help us not only shed new light on the uniqueness of Wildean writing, but connect the author himself with the broader political questions from which he is usually thought exempt.
In addition to a substantial proportion of Wilde's (all too slender) corpus, we will read relevant works by Matthew Arnold, Charles Baudelaire, Samuel Butler, the Brothers Grimm, G. W. F. Hegel, Joris-Karl Huysmans, Vernon Lee, Amy Levy, Friedrich Nietzche, Max Nordau, and Walter Pater.
This course is open to English majors only.
We will explore techniques developed by scientists, theologians, and poets to represent other life forms. Contexts we’ll investigate include encounters with new-world flora and fauna, the invention of the microscope and the discovery of the cell, and contemporary debates over plant reproduction and the possibility of extra-terrestrial life. Alongside questions related to medium and genre, we’ll consider when the representation of other creatures becomes representation in an almost political sense, casting the animal as a voiceless subject on whose behalf, and in whose place, the author speaks. We will also track how new approaches to the physical investigation of animals and plants affected their traditional status as natural symbols (of various vices and virtues, for example). Finally, we will consider the special challenges and opportunities posed by representing creatures that continued to elude empirical study, such as angels.
There will be semi-regular quizzes on the reading, two short papers, and a final exam.
All readings will be made available on the course site; students may also purchase them in the form of a course reader.
Sample Texts: Anna Laetitia Barbauld, “The Mouse’s Petition”; Erasmus Darwin, The Loves of the Plants; Henry Power, Experimental Philosophy; Henry Vaughan, Silex Scintillans
This course is open to English majors only.
This section of English 165 satisfies the pre-1800 requirement for the English major.
James, Henry : The Princess Casamassima; Kushner, Rachel: The Flame Throwers; Melville, Herman: Benito Cereno; Milton, John: Paradise Regained, Samson Agonistes, and the Complete Shorter Poems; O'Brien, Geoffrey: People on Sunday; Shelley, Percy: Shelley's Poetry and Prose
“Is it useless to revolt?” Our course borrows its title from an essay by Foucault on the Iranian Revolution of 1979. Foucault urges us to suspend judgment and listen to the voices of revolt, even as they seem entangled in a history of inescapable, recurrent violence. Attracted and repulsed by revolutionary violence, the authors in this course test Foucault’s proposition that, “While revolts take place in history, they also escape it in a certain manner.” The intersection of religion, art, and politics will loom large in our discussions. Starting with Milton’s Samson Agonistes, we will consider how religious convictions inform both political aspiration and a willingness to justify acts of violence. Such questions will lead us back to two foundational representations of revolt in the Bible (Exodus and Revelation), and they will lead us forward to contemporary questions about “terrorism.” (After 9/11, a much publicized debate on Samson Agonistes asked whether its central character is best described as a terrorist.) Other readings will range widely across historical periods and national cultures, including works by Blake, Kleist, Nat Turner, Shelley, Melville, and James in the nineteenth century, Yeats, Auden, and Darwish in the twentieth, and contemporary authors such as Kenzaburo Oe, Rachel Kushner, and (Berkeley’s own) Geoffrey O’Brien. On occasion, we will take up theoretical writings on the subject of revolt, liberation, and violence by Kant, Benjamin, Arendt, Zizek, and—of course—Foucault.
This course is open to English majors only.
Cleland, John: Fanny Hill; Delany, Samuel: Dhalgren; Lawrence, D. H. : Sons and Lovers; Pater, Walter: Marius the Epicurean; Rochester: Poems; Wittig, Monique: Les Guérillères
Before the twentieth century, "queer" usually just meant strange or peculiar; it suggested an unusual way of living or being. The word gradually became a slur to describe someone sexually different, and we have now rehabilitated it as the polite way to designate a broad but fractious coalition of identities. Queer theory today is exploring the limits of this guiding concept, debating whether and how queerness must entail resistance to socio-political norms and if so, whether it must still entail same-sex desire at all. This course will study queerness both in theory and in literary texts, focusing on works that represent the search for an alternative, different, and aesthetically charged “queer lifestyle.” We will consider literature from the libertine culture of the seventeenth century to the radical separatist fantasies of the late twentieth century. The theoretical portion of the course will cover classics of queer theory (Foucault, Sedgwick, Butler) as well as current hot topics (homonormativity, pornography and sex work, trans and queer of color critique, queer affect theory, and polyamory/compersion).
For this course there are no required texts to purchase; all assigned and most recommended readings will be photocopied, or available electronically, or both. Among the authors--listed alphabetically rather than in any other possible order--will be John Aubrey, Isaac Barrow, Richard Baxter, Sir Thomas Browne, John Bunyan, Daniel Defoe, Thomas Fuller, Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, John Milton, Sir William Petty, Sir William Temple, John Tillotson, and Isaac Walton.
Reading, discussing, and writing about British prose of the later 17th century. Among the genres to be considered will be representative samples of the “character” (of places as well as human types); the essay (controversial as well as meditative); history, biography, and memoir; polemic and homiletic divinity; and practical manuals on husbandry, cookery, fishing, &c.
This section of English 165 satisfies the pre-1800 requirement for the English major.
Gilbert, Sandra and Roger Porter: Eating Words: A Norton Anthology of Food Writing ; Karsh, Ellen and Arlen Sue Fox: The Only Grant-Writing Book You’ll Ever Need ; McElrath , Tori O’Neal: Winning Grants Step by Step: The Complete Workbook for Planning, Developing and Writing Successful Proposals
A course reader
This course for juniors and seniors will help students develop writing skills through intensive focus on the demands of three very different modes: academic argument, popular and creative food writing (essay, poetry, travel, memoir, manifesto), and grant-writing. Reading and thinking together about good food, slow food, food memory, food access, sustainability, health, hunger, student food insecurity and food justice, we will alternate between 1) working on key skills for sophisticated academic writing, 2) writing creatively, meditatively, politically and playfully about food, and 3) collaborating on drafting an actual grant application in partnership with a local community organization. This last will be at the heart of this service-learning course.
Nadine Cruz has written: “Service is a process of integrating intention with action in a context of movement toward a just relationship…an intentionally designed program, a process of learning through reflection on the experience of doing service.” Writing is necessary for a great deal of action in the world, and it is a critical tool for reflection. Students in this class will hone argumentative and creative writing skills, learn the basics of the grant-writing process, gain valuable real-world writing experience, and explore ways of using writing as a tool for integrating action, intention and reflection. Plus we'll eat well and maybe cook together.
This small seminar will be limited to twelve students.
Dante: Inferno; Donne, J.: Major Works; Hardie, P.: Cambridge Companion to Ovid; Jonson, B.: Poetaster; Marlowe, C.: Complete Poetry; Marlowe, C.: Doctor Faustus; Ovid: Heroides; Ovid: Metamorphoses; Ovid: Poems of Exile; Petrarch: Poetry; Shakespeare, W.: A Midsummer Night's Dream; Shakespeare, W.: Complete Sonnets and Poems; Shakespeare, W.: The Tempest; Spenser, E.: Edmund Spenser's Poetry
Her bosom was wrapped in smooth thin bark; her slender arms were changed to branches and her hair to leaves; her feet but now so swift were anchored fast in numb stiff roots; her face and head became the crown of a green tree. -- Ovid, Metamorphoses bk. 1
Of his bones are coral made;
Those are pearls that were his eyes;
Nothing of him that doth fade
But doth suffer a sea change
Into something rich and strange. -- Shakespeare, Tempest 1.2
The Roman poet of mythic transformation and urbane seduction, of distant longing and alien exile, Ovid infused the Renaissance with gorgeous pagan forms of desire, loss, and strangeness. His influence on literary culture was made only the more thrilling, and more pervasive, by the distance of fifteen centuries and by the radically contrary values and beliefs of Christian religion.
We'll read most of Ovid's major works in translation--Metamorphoses, his epic book of changes; Amores, his erotic lyric poems; Heroides, his collection of letters from the lovelorn women of myth; and Tristia, the lamentations of his exile to the barbarian frontier of the Roman Empire. We will trace how the greatest writers of sixteenth-century England engaged Ovid's strange pleasures and griefs in producing the richness and the strangeness of their own poetry and drama.
This course is open to English majors only.
This section of English 165 satisfies the pre-1800 requirement for the English major.
Johnson, Ben: Bartholomew Fair; More, Sir Thomas: Utopia; Orgel, Stephen: The Illusion of Power;
Recommended: Alexander, Gavin, ed.: Sidney's 'The Defence of Poesy' and Selected Renaissance Literary Criticism
This course has two goals: to explore visual culture and the role of visuality in renaissance England, and to develop research skills.
Elizabeth I's long reign saw a remarkable flowering of the arts. Her unique position as a female monarch surrounded by male courtiers produced a dynamic in which all artistic production seemed to reflect back upon her, the powerful focus of men's desires and aspirations. From the building of stately houses to the writing of poetry, a rhetoric of courtship and persuasion would underlie England's renaissance. Following on a long period of state-sponsored iconoclasm, the status of the visual arts and their relationship to verbal expression also had to be redefined. This course will consider the Elizabethan period in relation to culture under Elizabeth's father, Henry VIII, her brother and sister, and her Stuart heir James I. We will treat poetry, painting, and pageantry; rhetoric, architecture and urban development. We will also pay close attention to the applied and domestic arts--furnishings, clothing, embroidery. Writers, designers, and artists we will discuss will include Holbein, More, Hilliard, Sidney, Smythson, Jones, Jonson, Van Dyck and Rubens.
This course involves interdisciplinary, research-based learning. The evaluation of your work will be based not on examinations but on a multi-part project, on which you will have extensive, structured guidance from the professor, the GSI, and the library staff. You will write an original interdisciplinary research paper using primary sources available online.
This course satisfies the pre-1800 requirement for the English major.
This class is cross-listed with History of Art 169A.
Mackey, Nathaniel: Splay Anthem; Morrison, Toni: Jazz
In this course, we will investigate the strangely vital links between literature and music. Beginning in the early 19th century, we’ll track a series of crossings, conjunctions, and fissures. We’ll think about the place of music, and of ideas about music, within literary Romanticism. We’ll watch what happens as classical music in the mid-nineteenth century becomes increasingly literary-minded, and consider how poets in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries experimented with notions of sound and rhythm. We’ll pair a few of the key texts of literary modernism with touchstones of modern music. We’ll trace the emergence of blues poetry and jazz poetry within the Harlem Renaissance and into the 1960s. We’ll observe the basic categories of music and text dissolve and reform in the work of avant-garde writers and musicians throughout the twentieth century. We’ll speculate about the literariness of folk and pop music and the poetics of hip hop. Throughout, we’ll read and listen as poetry and narrative attempt to be like music, and songs and scores act like literature.
The great majority of texts and music will be available in a course reader and/or on bCourses, and you will be responsible for writing two essays and taking a final exam.
See below.
What can the scientific study of mind tell us about literature? And what can literature tell us about the ways our minds and brains do—and do not—work? Looking at literature, philosophy, and the sciences of mind from the past three hundred years, these are some of the questions this course will try to answer. Philosophical topics will include: the relation between literary form and empirical problems of mind, such as self-knowledge and other minds; a priori knowledge; language acquisition and use; reductionism, physicalism, and theories of mind-brain identity (i.e., 'the hard problem'); behavior; psychoanalysis and hysteria; neuroaesthetics and the cognitive study of literature.
Literary readings will potentially include those by: Defoe, Coleridge, Mary Shelley, Woolf, Beckett, Pinter, Coetzee, Haddon, McEwan, and McCarthy. Philosophical and scientific readings will potentially include those by: Descartes, Locke, Hartley, Galvani, William James, Freud and Breuer, Watson, Thorndike, Wittgenstein, Ryle, Skinner, Quine, Place, Chomsky, Churchland, Nagel, Chalmers, Putnam, Noe and others.
Spoto, Donald: The Art of Alfred Hitchcock; Truffaut, François: Hitchcock
Films will be available at the media center; the course reader will be put on B-courses.
Few film styles have more successfully courted mass-audience understanding and approval than Hitchcock’s. In the overstated lucidity of his narrative communication, nothing deserves our attention that his camera doesn’t go out of its way to point out. But as anyone who has seen a Hitchcock film knows, the director primes us to be considerably more alert than this spoon-feeding requires. In addition to our instrumental attention, we find ourselves possessed of a surplus watchfulness that has no object or use. Even when Hitchcock is not enjoining us to “pay attention,” we remain poised behind a pane of vigilance, as if expecting to see something besides his unmissable danger signals and loud significance alerts. We can’t help sensing that there is more to meet the eye in Hitchcock than, in his viewer-friendly manner, he arranges to greet the eye. To watch a Hitchcock film is thus always to come under the spell of a hidden Hitchcock, and to want, somehow, to focus our surplus attention on this imaginary thing or being. That esoteric dimension of his cinema will be the subject of this course. In contradistinction to the games that Hitchcock is known to play with his Pavlovianly trained mass audience, I postulate a game he would be playing with that absurdly, pointlessly watchful spectator who dwells within us all, but whom, as members of a mass audience, or as critics in loyal alignment with it, we mostly put on lockdown; and whom I call the Too-Close Viewer. In this game, and for this viewer alone, Hitchcock would cultivate, alongside his manifest style with its hyperlegible images, a secret style that sows these images with radical duplicity.
See below.
This class will be organized around three questions that have been of perennial concern to literary writers and philosophers: who are we? What can we know? How should we live? We’ll read a wide range of texts that respond to these questions in different ways, addressing issues such as: the nature of the self, social constructions of identity, truth and lying, faith and uncertainty, individualism and collectivity, power and knowledge, the claims of others (including animals), and the relations between humans and the environment. Along the way we will also think about the intersections between philosophy and literature, the unique constraints and possibilities of each genre, and what it means to read them together.
Sample authors include: Plato, Descartes, Hume, Berkeley, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Sartre, Fanon, Arendt, Foucault, Barthes, Montaigne, Mary Shelley, Borges, Kafka, Stevens, Coetzee, David Foster Wallace. (Final reading-list to be determined; may also include film.)
Bauby, J-D. : The Diving Bell and the Butterfly; Danquah, M.: Willow Weep for Me; Forny, E.: Marbles: Mania, Depression, Michelangelo and Me; Galloway, T.: Mean Little Deaf Queer; Guest, P.: One More Theory about Happiness; Hathaway, K. : The Little Locksmith; Keller , H.: The World I live In; Kingsley & Levitz, J & M: Count Us In; Laborit, E.: The Cry of the Gull ; Simon , R. : Riding the Bus with My Sister
This course will examine autobiography as a literary genre. We will survey the history of the genre and consider such questions as: How is reading autobiography like/unlike reading fiction? How do the truth claims made by autobiographies shape readers’ expectations? What are the forms and techniques autobiographers use to tell their stories? The texts we are reading are all written by people with disabilities, so we will also discuss the impact that disability has on life-writing. Autobiographies written by people with disabilities offer readers a glimpse into lives at the margins of mainstream culture, and thus can make disability seem less alien and frightening. Disability rights activists, however, have criticized these texts because they tend to reinforce the notion that disability is a personal tragedy that must be overcome through superhuman effort, rather than a set of cultural conditions that could be changed to accommodate a wide range of individuals with similar impairments. Are these texts agents for social change or merely another form of freak show?
Chaucer: Troilus and Criseyde; Homer: Iliad; Homer: Odyssey; Shakespeare: Troilus and Cressida; Virgil: Aeneid
Homer’s Iliad was composed in the eighth century BCE. Both the story that it narrated (the conflict between the Greeks and the Trojans) and the particular form that the story took (the genre of the epic) would become foundational building blocks of the Western literary tradition. This course will follow these two threads from antiquity to the Renaissance. We will read the story of Troy and the Trojans as it was told and retold by the Greeks (Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey), the Romans (Virgil’s Aeneid), in the Middle Ages (Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde), and in Elizabethan England (Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida). At the same time, we will see what happens to the genre of epic over time, as historical circumstances change and cultural priorities shift. We will define what we mean by “epic,” as well as what Homer, Virgil, Chaucer, and Shakespeare meant when they invoked the genre. Each of these texts imagines a world of possibilities and limitations; we will compare those freedoms and unfreedoms, what is speakable and unspeakable in Homer’s world versus Virgil’s world versus Chaucer’s world versus Shakespeare’s world. And will ask ourselves how the epic as a genre contributes to shaping the limitations and possibilities imagined by these texts.
This course satisfies the pre-1800 requirement for the English major.
See below.
In 2007, Zadie Smith edited an anthology of short fiction entitled The Book of Other People. In her preface to this volume, Smith describes her desire to give contemporary writers the opportunity to try on “different skins,” to wander “into landscapes one would not have placed them in previously.” In 1993, Toni Morrison had already stressed the potentially high stakes of seeking out an encounter with difference through the novel. Morrison declared her work as a novelist to be not just the imagination of “others,” but the risky encounter with strange or alien value systems: “to project consciously into the danger zones such others may represent for me.”
This course explores major works of Anglo-American fiction that link the value of the novel as a literary genre to the ethical, social or political good of encountering people different from oneself. Students should be prepared to read widely. The literary tradition that we are studying includes George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1871), William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying (1930), Virginia Woolf’s The Waves (1931), Zadie Smith’s On Beauty (2005), Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Blithedale Romance (1852), Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw (1898), J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace (1999), and Ian McEwan’s Sweet Tooth (2012). Class discussion will focus on the narrative techniques that each novelist develops in response to the value and difficulty of knowing and representing social others. We will consider how these narrative techniques contribute to an aesthetics of otherness, which by 2007 confers upon the novel a privileged status as the literary genre most qualified to be “the book of other people.”
Course requirements include two seven-page papers, a take-home final, and one class presentation.
This course has been canceled.
See below.
This class will explore the literature, film, and art of the 1960s in America, with a particular focus on the complex interactions between various forms of modernism and the social movements whose politics, aesthetics, and cultural ambitions most powerfully challenged the conventions of everyday life in the period. The 1960s are regularly thought of as a time of “revolution,” a decade defined by such iconic struggles as the Civil Rights Movement, the opposition to the Vietnam War, and various contests for power on the part of women, gays and lesbians, Chicanos, Native Americans, and Asian Americans. While the legacies and mythologies of these movements are especially strong here in the Bay Area, we will be just as concerned with the global contours of 1960s culture as it registered in the United States, and with transformations in high art and cinema that reflected on the internal tensions and limits of radical politics.
Our texts will include novels by Thomas Pynchon, Mary McCarthy, Norman Mailer, Truman Capote, and James Baldwin; poetry by Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop, Frank O’Hara, Gwendolyn Brooks, and the writers assembled for crucial anthology, The New American Poetry; and films including Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, Shirley Clarke’s The Cool World, and Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, as well as works of experimental cinema by Michael Snow, Stan Brakhage and more.
Please read the paragarph 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.
At what past moment did the future grow so dark? Formal liteary dystopia has been with us prominently since at least 1726, with the arrival of Swift's Gulliver. But the tendency to critique the present by imagining a darkly extrapolated future surely extends back much further—and grew in prevalence and popularity until the twentieth became the veritable dystopic century. Today central components of dystopian satire—global climate destruction, nuclear annihilation, terrorist states—have become commonplaces of our politics. In such a world has dystopia become prophetic, or redundant? In this seminar we will grapple with that question, and with the complex strategies of prophetic satire, as we explore the literature of dystopia present and past, plumbing increasingly murky visions of destruction to come.
Authors whose work we will read include Margaret Atwood, J.G. Ballard, Anthony Burgess, William Burroughs, Philip K. Dick, P.D. James, Franz Kafka, Jack London, Vladimir Nabokov, Flann O'Brien, Philip Roth, Vladimir Sorokin, H.G. Welles, and Yevgeny Zamyatin.
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.
James, Henry: The Ambassadors; James, Henry: The Golden Bowl; James, Henry: The Wings of the Dove
Henry James, several stories to be distributed through bCourses.
Close readings of Henry James' notoriously difficult final novels. This will be a very demanding class, but a rewarding one too, I hope. Two ten-page essays will be required, along with regular attendance and participation in class discussion.
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.
Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi: Americanah; Chandra, Vikram: Love and Longing in Bombay; Cole, Teju: Open City; Mpe, Phaswane: Welcome to our Hillbrow; Smith, Zadie: NW;
Recommended: O'Neill, Joseph: Netherland; Vladislavic, Ivan: Portrait with Keys
Selections from: Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts, Harlem is Nowhere; Colin Channer (ed.) Kingston Noir.
Course Reader with essays by Baudelaire, Benjamin, Fanon, Baldwin, Michel de Certeau, Stuart Hall, Jose Munoz, Chris Abani, amongst others.
Film and Television: Raoul Peck, dir., Lumumba, la mort d'un prophète; Mira Nair, dir., Salaam Bombay; David Simon, exec. prod., The Wire and Treme [selected episodes]; Bregtje van de Haak, dir., Lagos/Koolhaas.
In this seminar we will explore recent issues in postcolonial studies by focusing on cities. Moving through a diverse set of texts and very different cities—London and Lagos, Kingston and Mumbai, New York and Johannesburg, New Orleans among them—we will wonder: What makes a city postcolonial? For that matter, what makes a text postcolonial? Are there postcolonial ways to experience a city? What subjective experiences, and what narrative or aesthetic modes to describe them, emerge out of the urban postcolonial? In what sense might the United States be considered postcolonial?
You'll write weekly response papers and work up to a final research project on a Bay Area city and text of your choice.
Plese 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.
Barnes, Julian: England, England; James, P.D.: Children of Men; McEwan, Ian: Atonement; Rowling, J.K.: Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban; Smith, Zadie: NW
In this course, we will investigate the literary and cultural landscape of contemporary Britain. After several introductory sessions on the postwar period (1945-1979), we'll spend the bulk of our time working our way from the 1980s to the present. We’ll read several novels, a clutch of poems, a short play or two, and a handful of essays; we’ll watch several films and a bit of television; and we’ll listen to some music. We’ll sketch a capacious picture of British culture and literature, examining a variety of forms, modes, and genres. You will be responsible for writing 2 essays: a 3-5 page close reading and a 15-20 page research paper.
In addition to the novels listed, there will also be a course reader containing work by, among a few others, Philip Larkin, Linton Kwesi Johnson, Geoffrey Hill, Carol Ann Duffy, Daljit Nagra, Harold Pinter, A.L. Kennedy, Stuart Hall, Denise Riley, Raymond Williams, Salman Rushdie, Perry Anderson, and Tom Nairn.
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.
Aeschylus: The Oresteia; Aristophanes: The Clouds; Euripedes: The Bacchae; Jonson, Ben: The Alchemist; Kyd, Thomas: The Spanish Tragedy; Lyly, John: Gallathea; Marlowe, Christopher: Doctor Faustus; Seneca: Thyestes; Shakespeare, William: The Comedy of Errors, Hamlet, Twelfth Night; Sophocles: Antigone, Oedipus
In a poem for the first edition of Shakespeare’s collected works, Ben Jonson expressed a characteristic ambivalence about classical drama. On the one hand, he praised it as the standard by which all subsequent playwriting should be judged, while on the other hand, he derided “insolent Greece” and “haughty Rome” for having fallen short of Shakespeare. Jonson did not stop to consider the difficulties of comparing plays that derive from different eras, different cultures, and different conceptions of the theater. But our class will. At the same time, we will explore how Renaissance dramatists both imitated their extraordinary precursors and strove to outdo them.
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.
Course Reader
We might think of physical matter as being simply present, but the stuff of the world is and has been understood very differently in different times and cultures. This research seminar will explore a broad range of understandings of matter, from the Book of Genesis and early creation myths to recent documentaries on hoarders and self-help books on purging personal belongings. We will consider some of the major approaches to interpreting matter: philosophical, anthropological, ecological, psychoanalytic and Marxist. Throughout the semester, we will bring these ideas to bear on literary representations of physical material, as we read closely works by a wide range of writers including Ovid, William Wordsworth, John Keats, Thomas Carlyle, Charles Dickens, Emily Dickenson, W. B. Yeats, Marcel Proust, James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, Louis Aragon, Samuel Beckett and Karl Ove Knausgard.
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.
Kazuo, I.: Never Let Me Go; Shelley, M.: Frankenstein; Stoker, B.: Dracula; Venter, C.: Life at the Speed of Light
A course reader including texts by Eramus Darwin, Immanuel Kant, Williams Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Ralph Waldo Emerson, William James, Gertrude Stein, Henri Bergson, Ezra Pound, Wolfgang Köhler, W.H. Auden, Robert Duncan, Norbert Wiener, Katherine Hayles, Mark Hansen, Michel Foucault, and Achille Mbembe.
Films: F.W. Murnau, Nosferatu; James Whale, Frankenstein
If the romantic trope of “organic form” naturalizes literature by likening literary texts to living organisms, it equally suggests that man-made forms can be "alive." In this course, our task will be to trace the trope of "organic form" through the romantic period into the 21st century, keeping in mind that the notion of "organic form" is thoroughly ambiguous: it at once grants literary forms a biological significance and challenges the traditional distinction between life and artifice. We will read romantic and modernist poetry that tries to capture the flowing rhythms of lived experience, and we will examine novelistic representations of artificial and unholy life--the undead and monstrous beings that test the very limits of life as a normative and scientific category. Moving into the contemporary era, we will investigate how the romantic interest in the ambiguity of life reemerges in recent debates around the politics and ethics of synthetic biology and biotechnological interventions into human (and nonhuman) bodies. How might the long history of literature's relationship to the living help us better understand and/or challenge contemporary forms of biopolitical control?
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.
Hoffman, Richard: Middle English Lyrics; Keelan, Claudia: Truth of My Songs: Poems of the Trobairitz; Pearsall, Derek: Chaucer to Spenser: An Anthology; Waddell, Helen: Medieval Latin Lyrics; Young, David: The Poetry of Petrarch
Course Reader
From drinking songs and poems of seduction to works of religious meditation and devotion, the lyric reflects a variety of subjects and concerns. This course serves as an extensive introduction to lyric poetry from the twelfth to the sixteenth century, from anonymous authors to Chaucer to Spenser. We will consider what the term “lyric” means: How has it been defined? How has that definition changed? What happens to lyric form in the shift from the medieval to the renaissance? We will also investigate what these poems say concerning sexuality and gender, religious faith, and subjectivity.
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.
A reader containing the texts to be studied as well as secondary readings will be available from University Copy.
Recordings of the music to be studied can be purchased through the Musical Offering or from other sources. These include: John Blow, Venus and Adonis, Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, Harmonium Mundi 1999; Henry Purcell, Dido and Aeneas, Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra, Harmonium Mundi, 1994, rereleased 2006; Henry Purcell, King Arthur, Les Arts Florissants, Erato, 1995; John Blow, Ode on the Death of Mr. Henry Purcell, Deller Consort, Harmonium Mundi, 1987; John Gay, The Beggar’s Opera, dir. by Jonathan Miller and John Eliot Gardiner, Image Entertainment, 2000; George Frederick Handel, Acis and Galatea, Dunedin Consort, Linn Records, 2008; George Frederick Handel, Alexander’s Feast. The Sixteen, Coro, 2005; George Frederick Handel, An Ode for St. Cecilia’s Day, The King’s Consort, Hyperion, 2004; George Frederick Handel, L’Allegro, il Penseroso ed il Moderato, The King's Consort, Hyperion, 1999; George Frederick Handel, Messiah, Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra, Harmonium Mundi, 2005.
In the early 1600s, in England Shakespeare was exploring new ways of creating drama through language, with music often playing an important role, but a mostly distinct one. In those same years, in Italy Monteverdi was exploring new ways of combining language with music to create the new dramatic genre of opera. By the late 1600s, opera had come to England, too, preceded and followed by various other forms of dramatic vocal music – masques, odes, and oratorios – in a remarkable set of collaborations between poets and composers. Poems of Dryden and of Milton, for example, figured especially prominently in musical works of Purcell and Handel.
These works thus afford beautiful opportunities for extended and detailed comparison of the artistic possibilities of poetry with those of music, for exploration of how the two forms can interact, and for contextualization of aesthetic ideas from the period that continue to exert influence in our own time. One area that will be given particular attention in the course will be rhythm, since it takes distinctive forms in poetry and in music, and the combination of the two in textsetting is an art form all its own. No prior training in either of these areas is required, however.
The course will include at least one outing to a live performance, the American Bach Soloists' performance of Handel’s setting of Dryden’s ode, Alexander’s Feast.
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.
This section of English 190 has been canceled.
Please click here for more information about enrollment in English 190.
For purposes of seminar discussions we’ll probably rely on Penguin editions of Robinson Crusoe, A Journal of the Plague Year, Moll Flanders, and Roxana, and on Oxford editions of Captain Singleton and Colonel Jacque. For research purposes, and for some texts such as A New Voyage round the World not available in paperback, we’ll be using the electronic version of the 44-volume Pickering & Chatto edition of Defoe’s writings available from Intelex, and/or photocopies.
Reading, discussing, and writing mainly about the fictional works of Daniel Defoe, and (depending on student interests) about contemporary writing on some of Defoe’s subjects, such as overseas commerce, colonies, and piracy; the predicaments of women and orphans in a patriarchal, class-governed society; the tensions between trade and morality, and between natural and supernatural, in an increasingly secular world, &c.
Please read the paragraph about English 190 on page 2 of the instructions area of this Annnouncement 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.
See below.
This research seminar focuses on the poems and letters of John Keats. We will read his work in relation to some of his predecessors (Shakespeare, Milton) and near contemporaries (Wordsworth, Hazlitt) while addressing questions of the burdens of cultural capital, literary tradition, inheritance and progeny.
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 course is a continuation of section 1 of H195A, taught by Samuel Otter in Fall 2015. No new students will be admitted, and no new application needs to be submitted. Professor Otter will give out CECS (class entry codes) in class in November.
There will be no additional texts ordered for the spring semester of this course.
This is a continuation of section 2 of H195A, taught by Scott Saul in Fall 2015. No new students will be admitted, and no new application form needs to be filled out. Professor Saul will give out CECs (class entry codes) in class in November.
There will be no additional texts ordered for the spring semester of this course.
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.
Arendt, Hannah: Lectures on Kant's Political Philosophy; Aristotle: Poetics; Augustine: On Christian Doctrine; Kant, Immanuel: Critique of Judgment; Longinus: On Sublimity; Plato: Phaedrus; Plato: Republic; Sidney: Defense of Poetry
An introduction to Western literary theory from antiquity to the present, focusing on the historical shift from the disciplines of poetics and rhetoric to that of aesthetics, with special attention to the discourse of the sublime. Readings in Plato, Aristotle, Longinus, Augustine, Sidney, Erasmus, Kant, Adorno, and Arendt. The syllabus is designed to be particularly helpful to students in English, but students from other departments are welcome and may write their final paper on a primary text or texts in other languages.
This course satisfies the Group 6 (Non-historical) requirement.
Darwin, Charles: The Descent of Man; Darwin, Charles: On the Origin of Species; Dickens, Charles: Our Mutual Friend; Eliot, George: Daniel Deronda; Eliot, George: Middlemarch; Eliot, George: Selected Essays, Poems, and Other Writings
A study of the Victorian novel in relation to nineteenth-century theories of natural and aesthetic form, focused on major writings by George Eliot and Charles Darwin. We will read two novels -- Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda – by Eliot, the novelist most attuned to contemporary developments in the natural and human sciences, together with selections from Eliot’s essays, reviews, and translations; a third novel expressing a rival aesthetic, Charles Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend; the two major works, On the Origin of Species and The Descent of Man, Darwin wrote for a general public as well as for specialists, along with excerpts from his Beagle journal and other writings; and selections from writings on aesthetics and the philosophy of science by Friedrich Schiller, William Whewell, G. H. Lewes, T. H. Huxley, John Tyndall, F. Max Müller, and E. B. Tylor.
This course satisfies the Group 4 (19th Century) requirement.
Adorno, T.: Aesthetic Theory; Burke, E.: Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful; De Man, P. : Ideology of the Aesthetic; Derrida, J.: The Truth in Painting; Kant, I.: Critique of the Power of Judgment; Rancière, J.: Aesthetics and Its Discontents; Scarry, E.: On Beauty and Being Just; Schiller, F. : On the Aesthetic Education of Man
This introduction to aesthetics will navigate between the following quotations: 1) “If man is ever to solve that problem of politics in practice he will have to approach it through the problem of the aesthetic, because it is only through Beauty that man makes his way to Freedom” (Schiller); 2) “Poetry makes nothing happen” (Auden). For historical sources, we will focus on the eighteenth-century aesthetic discourses developed by Burke, Kant, and Schiller (supplemented by a few readings in British Romanticism). For developments in aesthetic theory, we will read a range of twentieth- and twenty-first-century elaborations, including, among others, Adorno, Bourdieu, Clark, Derrida, De Man, Lyotard, Rancière, Scarry, Terada, and Ngai. If time permits we may take up arguments related to today’s new formalisms and new materialisms.
This course satisfies the Group 6 (Non-historical) requirement.
Spenser, Edmund: A View of the Present State of Ireland; Spenser, Edmund: The Faerie Queene; Spenser, Edmund: The Shorter Poems
Sidney wrote that a poet's task was to "grow in effect another nature." No poet in English has fulfilled that charge more luxuriantly than Spenser. The plan of the semester will be to roam around in the leisurely, delight-filled capaciousness of The Faerie Queene, with the aim that each of us find herself at home somewhere in this alienated version of our own world. The tension between delight and didacticism, leisure and urgency, is central to any such accommodation; I'm also interested in questions of materiality and of landscape in the fiction, and I expect our inquiries will be shaped by your preoccupations as well. We'll take some detours into the shorter poems along the way, and we will try too to reckon with the genocidal despair by which Spenser articulates the project of making a home in the alien terrain of Ireland.
This course satisfies the Group 2 (Medieval through 16th Century) requirement.
See below.
This course considers the relationship between the development of critical theory and the colonized and postcolonial worlds. It will ask how and where histories, cultures, and philosophies of the global south appear and intersect with continental philosophy. Rather than pursue this question genealogically, this course is invested in producing a nexus of inquiry through three sites of (post)coloniality – North Africa, the Indian Subcontinent, and East Asia – and a variety of reading practices and methodologies. If, as Tim Brennan has argued, “The telos of the imperial project is reached when the third-world subject is able to deconstruct the epistemic violence of colonialism only by way of Continental theory,” what are the politics and epistemologies that emerge from this consideration? What are its pitfalls? And what alternate ways of reading and thinking about literature, culture, politics, and affect might develop from thinking together the continental tradition and the colonial world?
Readings may include texts from Assia Djebar, Frantz Fanon, GWF Hegel, Walter Benjamin, Karl Marx, Mahasweta Devi, Ranajit Guha, and Jacques Derrida.
This course satisfies the Group 5 (20th Century) or Group 6 (Non-historical) requirement.
Recommended: Clayton, Mary, and Hugh Magennis: The Old English Lives of St. Margaret; Swan, Mary, and Elaine Treharne, ed.: Rewriting Old English in the Twelfth Century; Treharne, E.: Living Through Conquest: The Politics of Early English, c. 1020-1220
Material on bCourses (also available for photocopying)
In this course, we will explore the curious phenomenon of Old English after the Norman Conquest. Although English’s status as a language of power was overturned in 1066, the vernacular lived on in many guises—most remarkably as recognizably Old English works copied by speakers of early Middle English. We will focus on texts in several important post-Conquest manuscripts, including saints’ lives from Cambridge, Corpus Christi College 303, and works of religious philosophy (including the Old English Soliloquies) from London, British Library, Cotton Vitellius A.xv(2). We will examine networks of transmission through the lens of a homily by Ælfric, and we will also consider the changes to the English language and the poetic metre through texts including Durham, The Grave, and the metrical prayer in Cotton Julius A.ii. At the end of the course, students will present their research in a conference-length paper.
Most material will be available via the bCourses site; however, we will also be reading Elaine Treharne’s recent Living Through Conquest; Clayton and Magennis' Old English Lives of St. Margaret; and the whole of the essay collection Rewriting Old English in the Twelfth Century.
Prerequisites: a strong reading knowledge of Old English (A- in English 104 or the equivalent).
This course satisfies the Group 2 (Medieval through 16th Century) requirement.
All readings will be in a Course Reader.
Studies in contemporary poetic cases (Anne Boyer, Graham Foust, Fred Moten, Chris Nealon, Ed Roberson, Juliana Spahr, Simone White, and others) will focus our discussions of each other's poems.
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., THURSDAY, OCTOBER 29.
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.
See below.
In this survey of British writing from 1740 to the end of the century, we will read a wide range of genres, many of them innovated or undergoing major transformations at this time, from periodical essays, novels, and georgic poems, to ballad collections, supposed translations of ancient poems, dictionaries and anthologies of “great Literature.” Critical questions we might address include: What new epistemological challenges did writers believe they faced, and how did the discourses of empiricism and moral philosophy contribute to or attempt to resolve them? How did new formal strategies in imaginative writing develop those discourses? How did obscurity figure in these strategies? How did sentimental literature propose to overcome the social atomization threatened by capital relations? How did historicism, especially a new interest in literary history, offer another means of social consolidation? This course will include both primary texts and important secondary scholarship to help introduce ongoing critical conversations in eighteenth-century studies.
Possible texts include: <!--{cke_protected}{C}%3C!%2D%2D%0A%20%2F*%20Font%20Definitions%20*%2F%0A%40font-face%0A%09%7Bfont-family%3A%22%EF%BC%AD%EF%BC%B3%20%E6%98%8E%E6%9C%9D%22%3B%0A%09mso-font-charset%3A78%3B%0A%09mso-generic-font-family%3Aauto%3B%0A%09mso-font-pitch%3Avariable%3B%0A%09mso-font-signature%3A-536870145%201791491579%2018%200%20131231%200%3B%7D%0A%40font-face%0A%09%7Bfont-family%3A%22Cambria%20Math%22%3B%0A%09panose-1%3A2%204%205%203%205%204%206%203%202%204%3B%0A%09mso-font-charset%3A0%3B%0A%09mso-generic-font-family%3Aauto%3B%0A%09mso-font-pitch%3Avariable%3B%0A%09mso-font-signature%3A-536870145%201107305727%200%200%20415%200%3B%7D%0A%20%2F*%20Style%20Definitions%20*%2F%0Ap.MsoNormal%2C%20li.MsoNormal%2C%20div.MsoNormal%0A%09%7Bmso-style-unhide%3Ano%3B%0A%09mso-style-qformat%3Ayes%3B%0A%09mso-style-parent%3A%22%22%3B%0A%09margin%3A0in%3B%0A%09margin-bottom%3A.0001pt%3B%0A%09mso-pagination%3Awidow-orphan%3B%0A%09font-size%3A12.0pt%3B%0A%09font-family%3A%22Times%20New%20Roman%22%3B%0A%09mso-ascii-font-family%3A%22Times%20New%20Roman%22%3B%0A%09mso-ascii-theme-font%3Aminor-latin%3B%0A%09mso-fareast-font-family%3A%22%EF%BC%AD%EF%BC%B3%20%E6%98%8E%E6%9C%9D%22%3B%0A%09mso-fareast-theme-font%3Aminor-fareast%3B%0A%09mso-hansi-font-family%3A%22Times%20New%20Roman%22%3B%0A%09mso-hansi-theme-font%3Aminor-latin%3B%0A%09mso-bidi-font-family%3A%22Times%20New%20Roman%22%3B%0A%09mso-bidi-theme-font%3Aminor-bidi%3B%7D%0A.MsoChpDefault%0A%09%7Bmso-style-type%3Aexport-only%3B%0A%09mso-default-props%3Ayes%3B%0A%09mso-ascii-font-family%3A%22Times%20New%20Roman%22%3B%0A%09mso-ascii-theme-font%3Aminor-latin%3B%0A%09mso-fareast-font-family%3A%22%EF%BC%AD%EF%BC%B3%20%E6%98%8E%E6%9C%9D%22%3B%0A%09mso-fareast-theme-font%3Aminor-fareast%3B%0A%09mso-hansi-font-family%3A%22Times%20New%20Roman%22%3B%0A%09mso-hansi-theme-font%3Aminor-latin%3B%0A%09mso-bidi-font-family%3A%22Times%20New%20Roman%22%3B%0A%09mso-bidi-theme-font%3Aminor-bidi%3B%7D%0A%40page%20WordSection1%0A%09%7Bsize%3A8.5in%2011.0in%3B%0A%09margin%3A1.0in%201.25in%201.0in%201.25in%3B%0A%09mso-header-margin%3A.5in%3B%0A%09mso-footer-margin%3A.5in%3B%0A%09mso-paper-source%3A0%3B%7D%0Adiv.WordSection1%0A%09%7Bpage%3AWordSection1%3B%7D%0A%2D%2D%3E--> David Hume, Treatise; Samuel Johnson, Samuel Richardson, Pamela; Laurence Sterne, A Sentimental Journey; Edmund Burke, Inquiry; Adam Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments; Olaudah Equiano, Interesting Narrative; Horace Walpole, Castle of Otranto; Ann Radcliffe, The Mysteries of Udolpho; James Macpherson, Ossian Poems; Thomas Percy, Reliques of Ancient English Poetry; Robert Burns, Janet Little, William Falconer, William Collins, William Cowper.
This course satisfies the Group 3 (18th Century) requirement.
Carchedi, G.: Behind the Crisis: Marx’s Dialectics of Value and Knowledge; Fisher, M.: Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?; Foster, J.B. and Magdoff, F.: The Great Financial Crisis: Causes and Consequences; Harman, C.: Zombie Capitalism: Global Crisis and the Relevance of Marx; Kliman, A.: The Failure of Capitalist Production: Underlying Causes of the Great Recession; Mattick, P.: Business as Usual: The Economic Crisis and the Failure of Capitalism; McNally, D.: Global Slump: The Economics and Politics of Crisis and Resistance; Robinson, W. I. : Global Capitalism and the Crisis of Humanity
Since the global financial crisis of 2007-08 and the onset of the “Great Recession,” a small but growing number of literary scholars have strived to theorize the relation between capitalist crisis and literary studies. Two short articles in the January 2012 issue of PMLA—one each by Christopher Nealon and Joshua Clover, and each entitled “Value|Theory|Crisis”—are prime examples of this kind of innovative research. The purpose of this course will be to test some of the theoretical claims that have been made about the relation between capitalist crisis and literature.
To do this, we’ll read works by Andrew Kliman, Chris Harman, and other Marxist scholars to scrutinize three theoretical claims in particular. One, the recurring economic crises of capitalism should not be understood as anomalies or temporary interruptions in productive continuity; they are rather symptoms of a system in which crisis is the norm, not the exception. Two, since the early 1970s, a period commonly associated with the dominance of neoliberalism, global capitalist production has experienced profound structural stagnation, and the attempts by capitalists to resolve stagnant production with financialization and debt have only prolonged the inevitable and unresolvable recurrence of economic (and hence political) crises. And three, all aspects of social life during the neoliberal period—including literature and cultural production generally—can be understood to one degree or another as formal and/or thematic expressions of capitalist crisis. Sociologist William I. Robinson refers to this third point as “the crisis of humanity.”
Most of the works we’ll read draw on current research in the Marxist theory of value to formulate a critique of economic crisis. During the last few weeks of the semester, however, we’ll read three novels—John Rechy’s City of Night, Karen Tei Yamashita’s Tropic of Orange, and Salvador Plascencia’s The People of Paper—to bridge the divide between theory and literature. Our purpose will not be to study “literary representations” of economic crisis in these novels, but to trace the determinate relation between capitalism and literary form—that is, to explore the ways that capitalist crises have profoundly influenced the internal logic of the literature.
This section of English 250 will count toward the Critical Theory Designated Emphasis, and it is cross-listed with Critical Theory 290 section 5.
This course satisfies the Group 6 (Non-historical) requirement.
Bennett, Jane: Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things; Hartman, Saidiya: Lose Your Mother; Liu, Alan: Local Transcendence: Essays on Postmodern Historicism and the Database; Love, Heather: Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History; Morrison, Toni: A Mercy
Fredric Jameson famously enjoined critics to “Always historicize!,” and while many responded by committing to ideology critique and the project of demystification, of late a number have sought to satisfy the imperative by “practic[ing] the principles of the craft in full awareness of their poverty” (Constantin Fasolt, The Limits of History). This course will take a particular interest in this more recent response: the paradox of satisfying the historicist imperative through methods consciously intended to moderate, discount, and contain historical ambition. Our conversations will center around recent interventions in the fields of queer theory, African-American literature/slavery studies, and postcolonial theory, asking what it is about the objects and archives in these fields that have led to the raising once again of the question of the limits of historicism. We will focus on a range of methodological experiments in these fields including queer anti-historicism and the elucidation of queer time, the affective turn and critical melancholy, deep time and the new incrementalism (scaling up versus scaling down), objects and the new materialism, and surface reading.
As this is a course on method, we will begin by trying to define what historicism is, whether it is a method or has affinities for certain methods. We will survey specific attempts to posit a relation between the literary and the historical (e.g., New Historicist anecdotalism, Foucauldian genealogy, metahistory) and will also compare a recent string of “ends of history” special issues (in American Literary History, New Literary History, Representations, and Victorian Studies) to previous debates regarding historical criticism. The course will consider “the long nineteenth century” in relation to what the critics Rachel Buurma and Laura Heffernan term the “nineteenthcentricity” of the current moment of critical historicist reflection. Students will be encouraged to think comparatively about their own fields and to consider the various “nineteenth centuries” in literary history – i.e., Victorian and American nineteenth centuries of archival abundance and an African American nineteenth century of relative archival scarcity. How do new archives change our sense of what historicism is or does? Should historicist methods be applied differently to different archives? To different ethnic literatures? Does the degraded archive of slavery (a literature forged under duress) continue to call for the “suspicious” modes of 1980s historicism? Do the minor, the lost, and the left aside require a commitment to recovery? We will seek answers in some recent examples of minoritized historiography that proffer alternatives to the narrative of retrieval, ones that attempt to grapple with the stubborn negativity of the past (Love, Feeling Backward), the ambition and failure to unearth what others haven’t (Hartman, Lose Your Mother), and the recognition that sexuality may be an impossible object within the colonial archive (Arondekar, For the Record).
Readings by Anjali Arondekar, Ian Baucom, Lauren Berlant, Georges Didi-Huberman, Rita Felski, Joel Fineman, Michel Foucault, Catherine Gallagher and Stephen Greenblatt, Saidiya Hartman, Heather Love, Walter Benn Michaels, Friedrich Nietzsche, David Scott, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Valerie Traub, and Kenneth Warren, among others.
This course satisfies the Group 6 (Non-historical) requirement.
Adichie, Chimamanda: Americanah; Atwood, Margaret: Oryx and Crake; Coetzee, J.M.: Slow Man; Cole, Teju: Open City; Egan, Jennifer: A Visit From the Goon Squad; Hamid, Mohsin: The Reluctant Fundamentalist; Ishiguro, Kazuo: Never Let Me Go; Lahiri, Jhumpa: The Namesake; McCarthy, Cormac: The Road; McCarthy, Tom: Satin Island; Sebald, W.G.: Austerlitz; Whitehead, Colson: Zone One
As a generic term, the “novel” has always been entangled with the new, the up-to-the-moment, the contemporary. If the weft of the genre of the novel is fiction, then its warp is modernity. So what might distinguish our own contemporary novels from novels of earlier historical moments that have also viewed themselves as distinctly modern? In this seminar, we will read a selection of novels published in the 21st century, asking not only “what is the contemporary?” but a related question of scale and duration: “when is the contemporary?” Along with open questions of temporality and periodization, we will consider an array of topics that inform contemporary novelistic, critical, and theoretical writings: (post) apocalypse and futurity; globalization and world literature; neoliberalism and risk; terror and trauma; digital technologies and information networks; postmodernism, post-postmodernism, and meta-modernism; hysterical realism and national allegory; the neuro-novel and cli(mate)-fi(ction); MFA style and genre fiction. Rather than attempting to develop a unified field theory of the contemporary, we will draw selectively from this laundry list of perspectives to see what they can do for us as readers of the contemporary novel at the present time.
The book list for the course is provisional, subject to revision by the instructor and by participants in the seminar.
See below.
Over recent decades, we have become accustomed to speaking of the ‘cultural logic’ of modernism, using a periodizing term to delineate a larger complex of historical effects, while also insinuating its availability to the integrated descriptions of critical reason. And understood broadly enough, modernism itself seems to comprise a series of variations on the problem of logic or critical reason, ranging from the analytic to the psychoanalytic, from dialectics to phenomenology. It is less clear, however, that one might speak with confidence of modernism’s metaphysics, its attempt to think first causes. Indeed in 1929, Martin Heidegger argued that the enterprise of metaphysics could only be authentically pursued by forswearing logic as such, trading the conceptual claims of Hegelian negation for a more primordial Nothing ultimately designed to banish Western metaphysics altogether.
This course constitutes the first stirring of a counter-hypothesis, testing the proposition that Heidegger’s own modernist moment developed its own distinctive metaphysics, even when it failed or refused to provide a proper metaphysical language. Our reading will tangle in passing with the philosophical traditions already mentioned and more, as well as the discourses of literary criticism that the period spawned. We will attend to the period’s epistemological experiments and the rise (from several directions, both artistic and technical) of inductive modes of knowing. Centrally, however, we will concentrate on four major canonical figures, attempting to grasp the metaphysical consequences of the formal logics they develop as distinctive conceptual styles.
Our largest work will begin with two poets, both of whom seem to press the limits of what a poem can know. For W. B. Yeats, the sequence of volumes following the first war (The Wild Swans at Coole, Michael Robartes and the Dancer, The Tower, The Winding Stair) seem to predicate their boldest visions on ignorance rather then insight, incognition rather than cognition. By comparison, T. S. Eliot’s early work, culminating in Ara Vos Prec and pointing to the more radical experimental break marked by “Gerontion” and The Waste Land, seems to trade vision for the more modest relevance of satire, even as the mode’s underlying referentiality seems to slide into mere inference. In each case, we are confronted with what a poet seems not to know, even as the poem essays a logic that operates behind his back.
We will pursue the larger implication of that division in the work of two novelists. Wyndham Lewis’ Human Age trilogy takes the period between the wars as a logical and historical singularity, a moment when the future is experienced in advance, before it is known, when a second future war emerges as the cause of the first. For Samuel Beckett, Lewis’ unfashionable experiment in teleology is reinscribed as occasionalism, developed from the first trilogy (Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable) to the late Comment c’est (How It Is) as a categorical incommensurability between the physical and the metaphysical.
This section of English 250 will count toward the Critical Theory Designated Emphasis, and it is cross-listed with Critical Theory 290 section 1.
This course satisfies the Group 5 (20th Century) requirement.
Meyer, E. and L. Smith: 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 October 19. No one will be admitted after the first week of spring classes.
This course may not be counted as one of the twelve courses required to complete the undergraduate English major nor may it be counted to satisfy a graduate-level requirement.