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.
Arrighi, Giovanni: The Long Twentieth Century; Boltanski, Luc and Chapiello, Eve: The New Spirit of Capitalism; Desai, Radhika: Geopolitical Economy; Duncan, Richard: The Dollar Crisis; Harvey, David: The New Imperialism; Moore, Jason: Capitalism in the Web of Life; Wallerstein, Immanuel: The Essential Wallerstein
See below.
World literature theories that have borrowed from the work of Immanuel Wallerstein on early capitalism to conceptualize the dynamics of literary centers and peripheries have difficulty accounting for the Asian Anglophone novel, an ascendant form of late capitalism. Since the early 1970s, the prominent manufacturing role played by Asian economies within the capitalist world system has led scholars to argue either that the center of global hegemony has now shifted East or that the reliance on a floating dollar as the world’s currency has ensnared Asia in a new kind of financialized, structural dependency. This same period sees the rise of the Asian Anglophone novel as a medium through which Asian writers have experimented with diverse fictional modes of representing problems of sovereignty, identity and alternative modernity in a globalized economy. We’ll immerse ourselves in world systems theory debates about the nature of the “long downturn” since the early 70s (Arrighi, Harvey, Brenner, Wallerstein, Radhika Desai, Richard Duncan, etc.), and bring these to bear on the various positions held by world literature and anti-world literature theorists (Casanova, Moretti, Schwartz, Spivak, Jameson, the Warwick Collective, etc.). Further readings on the temporal implications of today’s credit economy, debates between proponents of immaterial labor versus those of Value Form Marxism, the reemergence of social reproduction feminism, theories of race and surplus populations, and the question of “anthropocene or capitalocene?” will be assigned as needed, depending on the interests of the group and the course’s eventual literary foci. The course’s literary component will consist of one work chosen from among 3-4 major novelists each (Amitav Ghosh, Han Ong, Kazuo Ishiguro, Ha Jin, Maxine Hong Kingston, Amit Chaudhuri, Chang Rae Lee, Xu Xi, Ninotchka Rosca are likely contenders for the final 3-4). Besides graduate students who may be specifically interested in the field of Asian Anglophone literature, this course would be useful to those interested in histories and theories of transnational capitalism since the 1970s and in historical materialist approaches to race, gender, empire and ecology. If you are a literature student who wants to get a grip on political economy and how to think about economic mediations of culture, this is a good course for you.
This course satisfies the Group 5 (Twentieth Century) or Group 6 (Non-historical) requirement (for English Department graduate students). It also fulfills a CORE requirement in the Designated Emphasis in Critical Theory (240).
Christianse, Yvette: Unconfessed; Butler, Octavia: Kindred; Gains, Ernest: A Lesson Before Dying; Johnson, James Weldon: The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man; Jones, Gayl: Corregidora; Morrison, Toni: Beloved; Morrison, Toni: Bluest Eye; O'Brien, Mary: The Politics of Reproduction ; Walker, Alice: Third Life of Grange Copeland; Wiedman, John: The Lynchers
See below.
Using psychoanalytic, phenomenological, and economic theorization of death and life, this course will examine instances of the political economy of life (and birthing) and death in African American literature.
We will read the (Euro-American) exegetic theorization of life and death against the grain of the diegetic theorization of birthing, life, and death that is embedded in African American literary texts, in particular in some of the post-civil rights black feminist texts that focus on birthing and death.
The relation between life and death can be seen as binary or as dialectical, or one can map it as a matrix of exchange, in which, like Marx’s articulation of use and exchange values, life and death function as mutually constitutive and, at the same time, mutually exclusive. Slavery can be seen as being constituted around a “death contract” (mostly implicit, at times explicit): the vast bulk of the slave’s labor and erotic energies (i.e., his/her “life”) are “exchanged” for the postponement of his/her death, a postponement that is instantly and arbitrarily revocable. The threat/fear of death functions as the exchange mechanism enabling the transformation of erotic energies into surplus value.
I am particularly interested in the contradiction of the slave mother who is forced to birth a child into death-bound subjectivity, to give life to a socially dead subject. These tensions of the constitutive-exclusive relation between life and death are brilliantly articulated and theorized in novels such as Beloved.
A list of the theoretical texts and a reader will be posted on bCourses. Mary O’Brien’s The Politics of Reproduction is a required text; it is out of print but inexpensive copies are available online bookstores.
Possible literary texts: A Lesson Before Dying, Beloved, Bluest Eye, Corregidora, Kindred (and “Blood Child”), The Autobiography of an Ex-colored Man, The Lynchers, Third Life of Grange Copeland, Unconfessed.
Attenborough, F. L.: The Laws of the Earliest English Kings; Robertson, A. J.: The Laws of the Kings of England from Edmund to Henry I
Attenborough, F. L. ed. and trans., The Laws of the Earliest English Kings. Cambridge, 1922; repr. Felinfach: Llanerch Publishers, 2000; repr.2006 by The Lawbook Exchange, Ltd. ISBN-13: 9781584775836. The book is currently available free online https://archive.org/details/cu31924070153519.
Liebermann,F., ed. Die Gesetze der Angelsachsen. 3 vols. Halle: Max Niemeyer, 1903-16. (available electronically through the library portal)
Various materials will be available on B-Courses.
In the last decade, there has been considerable interest in Anglo-Saxon law from the perspectives of history and literature, including a new, international project to re-edit the corpus. This course will consider both the social and textual dimensions of Anglo-Saxon law from Æthelberht to Cnut. We will also look at some collections of conciliar decisions available in Anglo-Saxon England and ask how church law interacted with secular law. Questions of evidence, of crime and sin, and of punishment will occupy us. We will also consider selected strategies for avoiding the latter. Some of our usual suspects will be: adulterers, bishops, counterfeiters, exiles, foreigners, kings, murderers, nuns, slanderers, slaves, thieves, and wives, to name an obvious few. We will investigate what the laws tell us about the changing understanding of the body during the Anglo-Saxon period and about the different schemes of rendering satisfaction for crime and sin.
Requirements: daily engagement with the texts, one or two class presentations, a short experimental paper (aimed at trying out the idea for the final paper), a final paper of 15-20 pages. Topics will be chosen in consultation with the professor.
Prerequisites: a strong reading knowledge of Old English (A- in English 104 or the equivalent) OR permission of the instructor.
This course satisfies the Group 2 (Medieval through Sixteenth Century) requirement.
Chaucer, Geoffrey: The Canterbury Tales
This course will introduce specialists and non-specialists alike to the close reading of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. You need have no previous experience with Middle English; indeed, if you do have previous experience, you may find that Chaucer challenges you in ways you aren't expecting! We will start with the General Prologue and read the Tales through to the Retractions, paying attention along the way to who Chaucer was, why he was writing, what he was reading, where he situated his tales, when everything takes place, and above all, HOW Chaucer's literary art functions at the level of the word, the clause, the sentence, the line, the stanza, all the way up to the idea of the Tales as a whole. A central question that we will address will be the question of style. Can we use the word "style" to describe Chaucer's artfulness? What does "style" mean in Middle English and in the classical rhetoric from which Chaucer got many of his ideas about literature? What do we mean by style in the present day? Is it a useful category of literary analysis? What is the relationship of style to theory and to history? In the simplest terms, what enables a critic to identify a style as characteristic of an author? Of an era? Of a place? Students will write short papers and exercises rather than a seminar paper, though the option of a long paper is open to anyone wishing to write one.
If you want to get started, you can get Jill Mann's Penguin edition of the Canterbury Tales. It is also available as a Kindle edition. **However** Buyers beware! When you go to the listing on Amazon for the Mann edition, and click on "Kindle edition," you are taken to a 99 cent edition by someone I've never heard of. DO NOT get this edition. Instead, search the Kindle store using this search string, "Chaucer Canterbury Tales Middle English." The Mann Kindle edition should come up in this search. You will know it is the right edition because it is the one costing $3.99 . Or use this link: https://www.amazon.com/Canterbury-Tales-Penguin-Classics-ebook/dp/B002RI9O6Y/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1474606938&sr=1-1&keywords=chaucer+canterbury+tales+Middle+English . (Working as of Sept. 22, 2016). If you still can't find it, email me and I'll unearth it again. They don't seem to want to sell this book, for some reason. No doubt they are worried that worldwide demand would crash their servers if they made it too easy to acquire.
This course satisfies the Group 2 (Medieval through Sixteenth Century) requirement.
Diaz, Junot: The Best American Short Stories, 2016
A graduate-level fiction workshop. Students will write fiction, produce critiques of work submitted to the workshop, and participate in discussions about the theory and practice of writing. We’ll also read published fiction and essays about writing from various sources. Students will write and revise at least 40 pages of fiction over the course of the semester.
Undergraduates are welcome to apply. Class attendance is mandatory.
Only continuing UC Berkeley students are eligible to apply for this course. To be considered for admission, please electronically submit 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 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.
A graduate-level writing workshop, open both to graduate students from any department as well as to undergraduate students from any department who have taken English 143-level writing seminars or have equivalent skills or experience.
Drawing on narrative strategies found in memoir, the diary, travel writing, and fiction, students will have work-shopped two or three literary nonfiction 5-15 page pieces. Most weeks, students will also turn in one-page critiques of the two or three student pieces being work-shopped as well as a 1- or 2-page journal entry on prompts assigned (these entries may be used as part of the longer pieces). Probable semester total of written pages, including critiques: 60-70. Class attendance required.
Only continuing UC Berkeley students are eligible to apply for this course. To be considered for admission, please electronically submit 10-15 pages of your creative nonfiction or 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 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.
See below.
In this survey, we follow how authors from Francesco Petrarca and Thomas More to John Donne participated in the grand cultural project of the Renaissance, ostensibly defined by the belief that consuming and producing culture would elevate human beings above their natural state. Many of our authors supported the project; some opposed it fervently. But willingly or not, everyone we read during the semester contributed to it, if only by virtue of recording their impressions, thoughts, feelings, and fancies in writing. In addition to the works of Petrarca, Wyatt, Philip and Mary Sidney, Spenser, Shakespeare, and Donne, among others, we will also explore how scholarly views about the Renaissance as a cultural project have changed and developed from Jacob Burckhardt’s The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy to New Historicism and beyond.
The required books for the course are Greenblatt, ed., The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Volume B: The Sixteenth and the Early Seventeenth Century (New York: Norton, 2012) Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, ed. Peter Holland (Oxford, 2008) and The Merchant of Venice, ed. Jay L. Halio (Oxford, 2008). [If you already own either the Oxford or the Norton Shakespeare, no need to purchase separate copies of these two plays.] I will supplement the Norton by posting both primary and secondary readings on bCourses.
This course satisfies the Group 2 (Medieval through Sixteenth Century) requirement.
Arnold, M.: Culture and Anarchy; Browning, E.B.: Aurora Leigh; Darwin, C.: On the Origin of Species; Dickens, C.: Bleak House; Gaskell, E.: Mary Barton; Hardy, T.: Tess of the D'Urbervilles; Pater, W.: The Renaissance; Tennyson, A.: Poems
Shorter texts and supplementary readings will be made available in a course reader and/or on our B-Courses site.
We will read and discuss some major works of Victorian poetry, fiction, and critical and scientific prose, in light of nineteenth-century discussions of aesthetic, social, and natural conceptions of form, as well as current debates over the status and constitution of Victorian studies. Since this is a survey, our thematic scope will be quite open, but topics may include: the status of poetry in an age of prose; long literary forms (both continuous and serial) and temporal conceptions of form; progress, development, education, reform, and Victorian ideas (antiquarian, humanist, anthropological) of "culture"; and relations between science and aesthetics. Students will attend a spring colloquium (featuring advanced graduate students and local faculty in the field) on the state of Victorian studies.
Works will include:
Alfred Tennyson, In Memoriam and The Princess; Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Aurora Leigh; Arthur H. Clough, Amours de Voyage; Elizabeth Gaskell, Mary Barton; Charles Dickens, Bleak House; George Eliot, Daniel Deronda; Thomas Hardy, Tess of the D’Urbervilles; Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species and The Descent of Man; Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy; selected writings on aesthetics by John Ruskin, Walter Pater, and Oscar Wilde. Selected readings in current criticism.
This course satisfies the Group 4 (Nineteenth Century) requirement.
Brown, William Wells: Clotel: or, The President's Daughter; Chesnutt, Charles: The Conjure Woman; Crafts, Hannah: The Bondswoman's Narrative; Douglass, Frederick: My Bondage and My Freedom; Douglass, Frederick: Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass; DuBois, W. E. B.: The Souls of Black Folk; James, Henry: The Golden Bowl; Melville, Herman: Benito Cereno; Stowe, Harriet Beecher: Uncle Tom's Cabin
In a speech delivered on the bicentenary of the ratification of the Constitution, Justice Thurgood Marshall scandalized his audience (and much of the nation) when he proposed that “while the Union survived the civil war, the Constitution did not” – for the latter, he reasoned, had been superseded by the Fourteenth Amendment, “a new, more promising basis for justice and equality.” Our goal in this course will be to plumb the depths of this rebirth of the nation in a generation’s search for new ways of thinking about philosophy and politics in the wake of slavery and civil war.
We will survey a broad field of American literature from the second half of the nineteenth century; work that is distinctive for its paradoxical disaffiliation from those attributes often taken as essential to the constitution of a national literature (i.e., tradition, custom, inheritance). We will read a body of American prose fiction, autobiography, and philosophy with an eye to discerning how it “ferments with a foreign stimulus” (to borrow a phrase from D. H. Lawrence) – the related yet distinct impulses toward cosmopolitan detachment and pragmatic contingency. Black writers play a crucial role in the transformation of abolition from a cause requiring solidarity to a springboard for cosmopolitan detachment, and by way of this reimagining of the central dispute of the age exemplify the Emersonian dicta that “Men walk as prophesies of the next age.” Their writings will thus figure prominently in our discussions. Possible critical topics will include: abolition, cosmopolitanism, and the development of a transatlantic community of discourse; the deployment of British literature in antislavery discourse and African American print culture; civil war and the rise of antifoundationalism in American thought; slavery, natural rights, and the secularization thesis; sentimentality and the relation of feelings to perception; the intellectual consequences of the failure of Reconstruction.
This course satisfies the Group 4 (Nineteenth Century) requirement.
Coleridge, S. T.: The Major Works, Including Biographia Literaria (Oxford); Wordsworth, W.: The Prelude, 1799, 1805, 1850 (Norton Critical Edition); Wordsworth, W., and S. T. Coleridge: Lyrical Ballads, 1798 and 1800 (Routledge);
Recommended: Wordsworth, W. (ed. Richard Matlack): Poems in Two Volumes (Broadview)
A course reader
This class will study the major poetry and prose that emerged from the remarkable literary collaboration and conflict between William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, including their jointly produced Lyrical Ballads (1798 and 1800), Coleridge’s “Conversation” poems, Wordsworth’s The Prelude (1799 and 1805 versions), Poems of 1807, and The Excursion (in part), as well as the entirety of Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria. We will devote some of our time to questions raised by the complexity of collaborative authorship itself: matters of property and possession, conversation and miscommunication, influence, ventriloquism, and plagiarism. At the same time, we will use this pair to consider and contextualize what it meant to say – as Wordsworth did in 1800 – that “Poetry is the history or science of feelings.” How are we to understand this “science of feelings” both in relation to the eighteenth-century “science of man” (largely Scottish) and the “science of sensate cognition,” which, in Germany, had recently been named “aesthetic”? The other aspect of Wordsworth’s phrase, the “history” of feelings, will command our attention as well, in a number of overlapping manifestations: the feelings’ own history (both personal and public); the historical events that put exceptional pressure on the emotions and their display during the decades of the French Revolution, counter-revolutionary response in Britain, and Napoleonic wars; and, above all, both writers’ ways of registering and recording the historical present of modernity as it unfolded in the body and in literary form. While the primary texts will remain primary, this class will also give you a chance to sample the waves of extraordinary criticism generated about these two figures, work that has not merely persisted but has flourished and renewed itself through a succession of currents: phenomenology, deconstruction, new historicism, materialisms old and new, affect theory, science studies, and a good bit more. For quite unlike-minded readers, Wordsworth and Coleridge have proved good to think with for some time.
This course satisfies the Group 4 (Nineteenth Century) requirement.
Ashbery, John: Collected Poems, Vol. 1; Eliot, T.S.: Collected Poems, Vol. 1; Harrison and Wood, Charles and Paul: Art in Theory: 1900-2000; Moore, , Marianne: Collected Poems; Pound , Ezra: Personae; Stevens, Wallace: Collected Poetry and Prose
This course is still a work in progress. The basic idea is to develop the possibility that new developments in materialism offer tremendous possiblities for appreciating Impressionist art and Imagist writing. But they also make it imperative to appreciate why the Modernist painters totally rejected Impressionism and why the Modernist poets soon utterly rejected Imagism. I want to explore why these rejections also involved judgments on materialism and how those rejections might influence our own thinking--both about specific works of art and about how Modernist art might be even more important for our cultural situation than it was for the culture in which it was developed. We will beginn with some readings in vitalist materialisms as we work for at least two weeks on Impressionist art and Cezanne [this format will not allow me to accent the e], as well as Merleau-Ponty on Cezanne. Then we will spend three weeks on Modernist reactions, along with some readings in Hegel's aesthetics and much reading in Art in Theory 1900-2000. Participants will be asked to make fairly short presentations on single paintings from the epoch 1863-1930. Then we will study how Modernist writing stages the dynamics of self-consciousness as a counter vitality to vitalist materialism. We will begin with how Pound and Moore reject Imagism, how Eliot's theological poems reject what he thought to be the limitations of Modernism, and how Stevens kept reframing what self-consciousness might involve, and how Ashbery reframes Stevens, in accord with how Jackson Pollock reinterprets surrealism. We will read widely in these poets writings on poetics but try to focus our conversation in extended discussion of particular poems presented by the participants. If we have time we will also look at why some younger contemporaries utterly reject the role of image and epiphanic narrative in their work.
There should be elaborate readings on bpace and exemplary paintings. Papers can pursue any materials discussed in the course.
This course satisfies the Group 5 (Twentieth Century) requirement.
Augustine: Of Christian Doctrine; Marlowe, Christopher: Dr. Faustus; Milton, John: Samson Agonistes; Shakespeare, William: The Winter's Tale;
Recommended: Althusser, Louis: Lenin and Philosophy; Eagleton, Terry: Ideology of the Aesthetic; Hawkes, David: Ideology; Ricoeur, Paul: Lectures on Ideology and Utopia; Zizek, Slavoj: The Sublime Object of Ideology
All other readings will be posted on B-courses.
The history of Western literary theory is often told in terms of the concept of mimesis. But there is another, equally powerful, anti-mimetic strand to this history, and that is the critique of mimesis as a form of idolatry. In this course, we will explore this critique from the prohibition against images in the Hebrew bible up through modern attacks on mimesis as inherently ideological. Our main literary texts in the first half of the semester will be taken from Reformation England, when there was a fierce debate about the harmful power of images and the necessity of iconoclasm. We will focus on works by Marlowe, Bacon, Shakespeare, and Milton. In the second half of the semester, we will discuss the afterlife of iconoclasm in Marx, Freud, Althusser, Zizek, Adorno, Terry Eagleton, and Isobel Armstrong. Students whose interests lie primarily in national literatures other than English are welcome, and may write their final papers on primary texts and literatures not discussed in class, though they must engage the theoretical texts assigned for the seminar.
This section of English 250 is cross-listed with Comparative Literature 250 section 1.
This course satisfies the Group 6 (Non-historical) 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 17. 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.