In this seminar we will read the work of Berkeley poets; study the paintings, sculpture, and video installations in our own Berkeley Art Museum; attend musical and theatrical performances at Zellerbach Hall; see and discuss films at the Pacific Film Archive (PFA) near campus; and, hopefully, we will plan a visit to the Oakland Art Museum and perhaps one of the art museums in San Francisco. My aim is quite simply to introduce first-year students to the astonishing range of cultural production on the campus and in the Bay Area.
Many, if not most, of the musical, film, and theater events take place in the evening; so, I will ask that you keep many of your Wednesday and Thursday, and some weekend, evenings open for attending performances. I can't schedule our events until I see what is offered for the spring, and that probably won't be until later in the fall semester.
We will engage in discussion based on short response papers by the students in the seminar. I expect students who enroll in the course to commit themselves to evening performances that will be the basis of discussion at the Wednesday afternoon seminar.
There are no texts for this class.
This 1-unit course may not be counted as one of the twelve courses required to complete the English major.
Thoreau, Henry: Walden
As close and careful a reading of Thoreau's dense and enigmatic work as we can manage in the time that we have. Regular attendance and participation and five pages of writing will be required.
This 1-unit course may not be counted as one of the twelve courses required to complete the English major.
See below.
Apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic stories—are these really two different things?—have been told for centuries. But novels and movies that imagine the end of the world (and what comes after that) seem to have inundated us recently. In this course, we will read and view several particularly elegant 21st-century examples of this popular genre. We will ask: what does the imagined end of the world currently look like? What do the most common scenarios—ecological collapse, pandemic, zombies, angry robots—tell us about our own world? Why do we seem to have developed such a voracious appetite for narratives about our own obliteration and potential for regeneration? Will we find out before it's too late?
Possible novels: Margaret Alwood, Oryx and Crake (2003); Cormac McCarthy, The Road (2006); Colson Whitehead, Zone One (2011)
Possible films: Children of Men (2006); WALL-E (2008); Mad Max: Fury Road (2015)
This 1-unit course may not be counted as one of the twelve courses required to complete the English major.
Aristophanes: Lysistrata; Askins, R.: Hand to God; Brook, P.: The Empty Space; Kushner, T.: Angels in America; Marlowe, C.: Tamburlaine the Great, Part One; Shakespeare, W.: Twelfth Night; Sophocles: Antigone; Stoppard, T.: The Real Thing; Waters, S.: Temple; Wilde, O.: The Importance of Being Earnest
The work of this class will be to understand the drama as literature in company. Lots of other literary forms make claims about what social life is like, and strive to act upon the social life of their readers beyond the reading experience. But the drama is itself sociable. It assembles a company of actors and stage hands to make itself happen, and enfolds with them a whole new company, the audience, as it happens. Even if we read a playscript in solitude, even if it's the script of a play that has never been acted, the form of the text reminds us that it is written against solitude--it calls us to invest the speeches we read in human bodies, charting with their words and movements a space in which the play is happening.
We'll move back and forth between active reading of playtexts and play-going at local theaters as the semester progresses. Our reading will focus on a few crucial concepts for the analysis of drama--the tragic choice, the workings of space and illusion, spectacle, character, prop-- using both primary dramatic texts and some classic literary studies. About half of the primary texts will be important prototypes from earlier periods--ancient Greece and Renaissance England-- and the rest will come from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. We'll do a bit of tragedy as a point of reference, but most of the plays will be comedies, in keeping with the coming of spring.
This will be a writing- and discussion-intensive course; it's designed for lower-division prospective English majors looking to understand drama and learn how to write about it critically.
Course Reader
This is an introductory course on writing short fiction. Its aim is twofold: to help students become more practiced and confident fiction writers, and to foster reflection on and mindful engagement with the writing process.
Toward those ends, we will read, write, and – most importantly – revise intensively. Through a series of writing and revision exercises, students will develop a flash fiction piece and a second, longer short story. We’ll also regularly read, talk, and write about the process of fiction writing, as well as engage, in person and in writing, with one another’s work.
Attendance is mandatory.
Only continuing UC Berkeley students are eligible to apply for this course. To be considered for admission, please electronically submit ten pages or less (double-spaced) of fiction you have written, 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 11 P.M., THURSDAY, OCTOBER 27.
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.
Books may include a few of the following: Brandon Brown, Top Forty (2014); Cody-Rose Clevidence, Beast Feast (2014); CA Conrad, ECODEVIANCE (2014); Graham Foust, Time Down to Mind (2015); Rob Halpern [---------]: Placeholder (2015); Elaine Kahn, Women in Public (2015); Douglas Kearney, Mess and Mess (2015); Trisha Low, The Compleat Purge (2013); Fred Moten, The Feel Trio (2014); Nathanaël, The Middle Notebooks (2015); Sara Nicholson, What the Lyric Is (2016); Morgan Parker, Other People’s Comfort Keeps Me Up at Night (2015); Claudia Rankine, Citizen (2014); Solmaz Sharif, Look (2016); Ocean Vuong, Night Sky With Exit Wounds (2016); Simone White, Of Being Dispersed (2016).
This course is primarily a poetry workshop. Reading and writing assignments will help generate our workshop material and give us the language and tools to treat that material. Readings will include poetry and poetics from the last several hundred years as well as a handful of single volume works by contemporary poets. Writing assignments will engage both vision and process: they will inflate and anchor us. We will practice working within established forms and we will practice destabilizing form. We will work to understand the work we study and produce within its cultural, historical, political, and aesthetic contexts. In addition to writing poems, students will be required to do some critical writing, comment on other students’ work, attend poetry readings, and memorize and recite other writers’ poems. At the semester’s end students will revise their work, produce chapbooks, and organize a reading.
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 doucment or .rtf file. The deadline for completing this application process is 11 P.M., THURSDAY, OCTOBER 27.
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.
Cavendish, Margaret: The Blazing World; Chaucer, Geoffrey: The Canterbury Tales; Marie de France: Lais; Milton, John: Paradise Lost; Spenser, Edmund: The Faerie Queene, Book Three; Webster, John: The Duchess of Malfi
Some shorter texts (mostly texts written by Elizabeth and her male and female courtiers) will be distributed as .pdf.
English 45A introduces students to the foundations of literary writing in Britain, from the early Middle Ages to the Renaissance and English Civil War. This semester I'd like to focus on how that foundational narrative--the story of how British authors claim authority-- is shot through by questions of gender. Is literary activity implicity, or explicitly, masculine? Is authority itself, in a patriarchal society, necessarily masculine? Do women who write count as authors? How do male writers engage the possibility of female authority?
We'll range in chronological sequence across our period, but at the center of our semester's study will be the figure of Elizabeth Tudor, for fifty years the sovereign Queen of the English patriarchy, adored and abhorred by her male subjects in equal measure (and often in the same breath). Spenser professed the representative system of his Elizabethan epic, The Faerie Queene, to offer "mirrors more than one" to contemplate his sovereign, and we will read our syllabus as likewise refracting the image of female authority into different shapes and scales.
Austen, J.: Persuasion; Behn, A.: Oroonoko; Blake, W.: Songs of Innocence and of Experience; Blake, W.: The Marriage of Heaven and Hell; Defoe, D.: Robinson Crusoe; Gates, H.L.: The Classic American Slave Narratives; Melville, H.: Bartleby and Benito Cereno; Rowlandson, M.: The Sovereignty and Goodness of God; Swift, J.: Gulliver's Travels; Wordsworth, W.: Lyrical Ballads
Shorter works and supplementary texts will be made available in a course reader and/or 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...
We will read works by Mary Rowlandson, Aphra Behn, Daniel Defoe, Jonathan Swift, Alexander Pope, Lady Mary Wortly Montague, Anne Finch, William Collins, Thomas Gray, James Macpherson, Robert Burns, Olaudah Equiano, William Blake, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Jane Austen, Walter Scott, Harriet Jacobs, Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Frederick Douglass, and Herman Melville.
Bechdel, Alison: Fun Home; Coetzee, JM: Disgrace; Faulkner, William: The Sound and the Fury; Johnson, James Weldon: Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man; Mieville, China: The Last Days of New Paris; Woolf, Virginia: Mrs. Dalloway
There will also be a required course reader containing writings by: Matthew Arnold, William Butler Yeats, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, TS Eliot, WH Auden, Samuel Beckett, Salman Rushdie, Caroline Bergvall, Susan-Lori Parks, Caryl Churchill and others.
This course will survey British, American, and global Anglophone literature from the end of the 19th century through the beginning of the 21st. Moving across a number of genres and movements, this course will examine the ways 20th- and 21st-century writers have used literary form to represent, question, and even produce different aspects of modernity. Particular attention will be paid to close reading and key concepts in literary study, as well as literature’s broader engagements with questions of race, gender and sexuality, colonialism, religion, mass media, economy, and ecology. Evaluation will be based on two papers, a midterm, and a final exam.
Readings will likely include: fiction by James Weldon Johnson, Virginia Woolf, William Faulkner, Salman Rushdie, Alison Bechdel, JM Coetzee, and China Mieville; drama by Zora Neale Hurston, Samuel Beckett, Susan-Lori Parks, and Caryl Churchill; poetry by Matthew Arnold, William Butler Yeats, Langston Hughes, TS Eliot, and Caroline Bergvall among others.
Achebe , Chinua: Things Fall Apart; Faulkner, William: The Sound and the Fury; Henry, James: The Turn of the Screw; Morrison, Toni: Jazz; Ramazani, Jahan: The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry (Third Edition). Volume 1: Modern Poetry; Wilde, Oscar: The Picture of Dorian Gray; Woolf, Virginia: To the Lighthouse
Other readings will be posted on the bCourses site, under “Resources.”
This course examines radical changes and unexpected continuities in literature in English from 1850 to (almost) the present. We will read poetry and fiction from Britain, Ireland, North America and Africa in order to explore a range of literary responses to different aspects of modernity, such as urbanization, colonialism and popular culture.
This course will also form an introduction to the concepts and critical tools used to analyze literature. We will approach the texts in a variety of ways: we will consider them as belonging to different modes (realism, naturalism, modernism, postmodernism); we will think about them as producing new kinds of narrative and poetic form; and we will read them closely.
Ballantyne, R. M. : The Coral Island: A Tale of the Pacific Ocean; Barrie, J. M.: Peter and Wendy; Carroll, Lewis: Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There; Dr. Seuss: How the Grinch Stole Christmas; Fleming, Ian: Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang: The Magical Car; Lewis, C. S.: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe; Musil, Robert: The Confusions of Young Törless; Oates, Joyce Carol: Foxfire: Confessions of a Girl Gang; Rowling, J. K.: Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix; Sendak, Maurice: Where the Wild Things Are; Thompson, Kay: Eloise; Tiqqun: Preliminary Materials for a Theory of the Young Girl
Preliminary List of Supplementary Materials (subject to change):
Louis Althusser, ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses’ (1970); Miley Cyrus, Bangerz (2013); Lee Edelman, ‘The Future is Kid Stuff’ (2006), from No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (2006); Sigmund Freud, ‘A Child Is Being Beaten’ (1919); The Uncanny (1919); Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920); Rudyard Kipling, ‘If’ (1910, [1895]); Melanie Klein, ‘Some Theoretical Conclusions Regarding the Emotional Life of the Infant’ (1952); Jacques Lacan, ‘The Split between the Eye and the Gaze,’ from The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (1998); John Locke, from An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690); dir. Fernando Meirelles, City of God (2002); Jean-Jacques Rousseau, from Émile, or, On Education (1762); dir. Bryan Singer, X-Men: Apocalypse (2016); Britney Spears, …baby one more time (1999); D. W. Winnicott, ‘Transitional Objects and Transitional Phenomena,’ (1953).
This course has two principle aims: (1) to provide an overview of the history of children’s literature in English; (2) to introduce students to the major generic, political, aesthetic, and philosophical questions such literature has posed. Among these latter, for example, we will consider: the purpose of education; the nature and ethics of infantile sexuality; the mechanisms of language acquisition; the category of “innocence”; violence and violent desire; child labor; didactic and fantastical modes of address; the infant-animal relationship; embodied differences of gender, race, sexuality, and (dis)ability; peer pressure. In this class, we will pay particular attention to the figure of the child warrior: those ardent and energetic conscripts to Dumbledore’s Army; Katniss Everdeen charged with rescuing a decadent dystopia from its own worst urges; the children of Narnia expected to define and uphold a new version of Christian chivalry; the ultraviolent femmes of Spring Breakers or Foxfire fighting brutal men using only the impoverished tools with which an exploitative patriarchy has endowed them. We will seek out the forerunners of these children in the imperial adventure fiction of the nineteenth century, and in philosophical and psychoanalytic literature claiming for children an insurgent, sometimes revolutionary, potential.
We will treat as axiomatic the notion that the “child” is a contingent and constructed object, always reinvented to suit the needs of its historical moment. From the supine and quiescent darlings of Christina Rossetti’s nursery rhymes, to the gurgling and adorable brat Eloise, through the dashing and manly boys promoted by R. M. Ballantyne and Rudyard Kipling, the children described in children’s literature very often seem tailor-made to serve the interests of the powerful. We will not, then, make generalizations about what children are, what children like, or what children know. But we will wonder together whether the inverse is true too, and that something in the infantile attachments we feel towards children's literature might also resist conscription into the normative mechanisms of maturity.
Allen, Woody: The Insanity Defense (Random House; 978-0-8129-7811-7)
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.