Graff, Gerald: They Say/I Say: The Moves That Matter in Academic Writing; Steinbeck, John: The Grapes of Wrath: Text and Criticism, revised edition
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; House/Divided; 99 Homes
Music: Woody Guthrie, Dust Bowl Ballads; Bruce Springsteen, The Ghost of Tom Joad; Rage Against the Machine, "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 John Steinbeck, Carey McWilliams, James N. Gregory, Michael Denning, Charles Shindo, Americo Paredés, Ramón Saldívar, Robert Hariman and John Louis Lucaites, David See, Mae M. Nagai, Jonathan Dyen, Susan Shillinglaw, Shannon Jackson and Marianne Weems.
Please note the changes in the instructor, topic, book list, and course description of this section of English R1A (as of early December).
In this course, we will read, analyze, and interpret various artistic responses to the Great Depression of the 1930s and the Great Recession of 2008. We will begin with John Steinbeck's 1939 novel The Grapes of Wrath and conclude with Matt Black's Instagram project The Geography of Poverty. In between, we will engage works of art by Dorothea Lange, John Ford, Woody Guthrie, Americo Paredés, Bruce Springsteen, Rage Against the Machine, The Builders Association, and Ramin Bharani as we attempt to connect the problems of the Great Depression to contemporary problems that America continues to grapple with today: economic collapse, environmental catastrophe, fear and anxiety, the politics of migration, the decline of the white American working class, and the looming threat of fascism. As we explore these works of art and their historical contexts, we will develop your practical fluency in college-level academic writing. In total, you will produce a minimum of 32 pages of writing, including a short diagnostic essay at the beginning of the semester. Full attendance, weekly reading responses, team teaching, writing workshops, and participation in classroom discussion are all required to earn a passing grade in this course.
Jonson, Ben: The Alchemist (New Mermaids edition); Marlowe, Christopher: Doctor Faustus: A- and B- Texts (Revels edition); Shakespeare, William: A Midsummer Night's Dream (Arden edition); Shakespeare, William: The Tempest (Arden edition)
A course reader will also be provided containing additional primary and secondary texts (including excerpts from Renaissance tracts about witchcraft and modern critical readings of the plays).
Like our 16th- and 17th-century ancestors, in the 21st century we remain fascinated by the supernatural. Yet while witches, wizards, and werewolves abound in the movies and TV shows of today, we have (for the most part) lost any belief in such magical phenomena. For Shakespeare and his contemporaries, however, magic was still very much a ‘real’ fact of human existence. Witchcraft was a hot topic in the popular media of the day, the focus of an increasing number of religious tracts, philosophical treatises, and popular pamphlets as well as plays. This course examines early modern lore about witchcraft, demons, and magic in relation to drama written by three of Renaissance England’s greatest playwrights: William Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe, and Ben Jonson. From the devilish pact made by Doctor Faustus with Lucifer to the (apparently) more benign regime of the wizard Prospero on a magical island, their plays contain diverse portrayals of the supernatural, sometimes funny, sometimes frightening. But as well as offering depictions of magic in their plays, the writers we will study also seek to present the theater itself as a form of magic. What might it mean to conceive of theater in this way? What are the potential dangers of aligning an art form with such an ambiguous phenomenon as magic (which could be thought of alternately as heinously sinful or as the greatest expression of human potential)?
The broader academic purpose of this course is to develop your critical reading and writing skills, whatever your major might be. You will write and revise three papers of increasing length over the semester, and work with peers to improve your writing and critical thinking.
Achebe, Chinua: Things Fall Apart; Kincaid, Jamaica: Annie John; Morrison, Toni: Sula
Coaurse Reader and Digital Humanities Project material
Please note the changes in the instructor, topic, book list, and course description of this section of English R1A (as of January 13).
The course material addresses the writings of the African diaspora in a broader definition of the term. It touches on specific themes and ideas from pre-colonial Nigeria to post-colonial Caribean moving onto the "neo-colonial" New World. The course seeks to define the above terms as concepts and attitudes as exemplified in literature and films.
This course focuses primarily on developing your critical thinking, reading and writing skills. It is the first in a two-course sequence that seeks to hone your techniques of expository writing. Basic rhetorical tools such as description, analysis, explanation, narration, speculation and argument are discussed, enabling you to share your experiences, information and views with others. The emphasis all along is on provocative theses, strategies of argument and competent analysis of evidence.
Eugenides, Jeffrey: The Virgin Suicides; Ferrante, Elena: My Brilliant Friend; Kingston, Maxine Hong: The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts; Morrison, Toni: The Bluest Eye; Nabokov, Vladimir: Lolita; Plath, Sylvia: The Bell Jar
This course focuses on texts of young womanhood, examining the place of female adolescence in the cultural imagination. It also seeks to interrogate the term “girl” – its fungible application across childhood, adolescence, and adulthood, as well as the way it is bound up with questions of class, race, sexual orientation, and gender normativity.
Though our focus will be on post-1945 American novels, film, and television, we will also encounter fictions from other national traditions, as well as poetry, criticism, music, art, and theory. Examining how femininity is, on the one hand, ideologically produced and economically driven, and, on the other, a “naturalized” performance that may feel vital to one’s personal identity, we will pursue how second- and third-wave feminist theory, intersectional feminism, and queer theory might reshape and extend our notions of the feminine, and of what it means to be a “girl.” Finally, by centralizing narratives by and about women, we will consider the possibility of distinctively feminist and feminine modes of reading, writing, and inhabiting space.
Course texts include the writings of Susan Sontag, Simone de Beauvoir, Judith Butler, and bell hooks, the novels Lolita, The Bell Jar, The Bluest Eye, The Woman Warrior, The Virgin Suicides, and My Brilliant Friend, films like Heathers, Crooklyn, The Bling Ring, and American Honey, and television episodes from Girls to Orange is the New Black.
R1A is designed to hone your skills in both reading and rhetoric. As such, we will engage a variety of texts across genres (novels, nonfiction, short stories, poetry, film, & criticism). We will also practice responding to such texts variously, writing and rewriting an analytical paper, a film review, and a critical essay over the course of the term.
Blake, William : Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience; Freud, Sigmund: Civilization and Is Discontents; Morrison, Toni: Sula
Note the changes in instructor, topic, book list, and course description (as of Dec. 15).
Is homicide ever morally justifiable? . . . Is lying? Is it moral or immoral to lie to a murderer in pursuit of a victim? Humanity has long been concerned with questions of morality, questions encompassing both the nature and the development of morality. Along with philosophers, both sage and everyman, we will consider: What is just and what is unjust? Do we construct moral values through social interaction, or is morality the product of cultural, religious, or educational training? We will pursue these questions by considering psychological explanations and literary explorations of morality. Our psychological readings will include the foremost theories of morality and moral development which emerged over the past century, including those of Freud, Piaget, Kohlberg, and Turiel, as well as the perspectives of contemporary cultural psychologists, neuroscientists, and cultural critics. Interwoven with our psychological readings will be three literary explorations of morality, as represented by the poetry of William Blake, excerpts form Dostoyevsky's The Brothers Karamazov, and the novel Sula, by Toni Morrison.
Since this is an R1A course, we will focus on the development of college-level critical reading and writing skills. The overarching goal of our work together is the development of your ability to understand and analyze complext texts and to gain confidence and skill in articulating your knowledge and position, particularly through your writing. I look forward to our work together!
Austen, Jane: Lady Susan; Carson, Anne: The Beauty of the Husband; Coates, Ta-Nehisi: Between the World and Me; Ortberg, Mallory: Texts from Jane Eyre; Smart, Carolyn: Careen
A Course Reader will also include letters by Austen, Lord Byron, John Keats, and Martin Luther King; poetry by Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Patrick Lane; and short fiction and essays by Thomas De Quincey, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and Edgar Allan Poe.
“Oh no, no! the letter had much rather be all your own. You will express yourself very properly I am sure. There is no danger of you not being intelligible, which is the first thing.” – Jane Austen, Emma
In this class we will consider the letter as object of enquiry. How does the act of writing a letter perform, enact, or mask the personality of the writer? What does it mean to write a public letter (or editorial, open letter, or Reply-All e-mail) versus a private letter? In short fiction, epistolary novels, and poetry, we will read the letter as plot device—the misdirected, lost, blackmailing, or love letter—and as form, a way to think about audience, address, and rhetorical style. We will consider the material conditions of letter writing, from folded paper to texting, and the modes of circulation, from mail coaches to cell towers, as a way to map out changes in speed, industrialization, and globalization from the eighteenth century until today.
This enquiry into the letter as form will allow us to think about our own relationship to writing: who we write for, how we achieve rhetorical persuasiveness, and clarity of communication. As part of this process class assignments will include a series of short essays, with a focus on revision, analysis, and clarity of thought.
Sacco, Joe: Journalism; Scranton, Roy and Gallagher, Matt, eds.: Fire and Forget: Short Stories From the Long War
A reader of poetry and essays. (I will build PDFs and post on bCourses.)
Please note the changes in the instructor, topic, course description, and book list of this section of English R1A (as of 11/4/16).
We're still fighting "The Forever War." We've learned to live with it. But how do we experience it, beyond color-coded terrorist threats, toothpaste confiscations, walking through the airport in our socks? What do we talk about when we talk about war and what does it do to our language? TSA, NSA, IEDs, ISIS, FUBAR, etc. How does our experience of war look and sound in our cultural output? In this class we will read poetry, fiction, and journalism about war, and watch a few films. But our primary text will be our own writing, and the writing of our peers. The course will center around rigorous peer review workshops and required rewrites. Before it's over (will it ever end?) we'll forge a relationship with our own writing process that's less combative and less traumatic.
Bambara, Toni Cade: Gorilla, My Love; Barrie, James: Peter Pan; Carroll, Lewis: Alice's Adventures in Wonderland; Chee, Alexander: Edinburgh ; Cisneros, Sandra: The House on Mango Street; James, Henry: Turn of the Screw; Levithan, David: Two Boys Kissing; Morrison, Toni: The Bluest Eye; Nabokov , Vladimir : Lolita; Torres, Justin: We the Animals
The last words of Peter Pan allude to an endless cycle in which children become adults, adults produce more children, and the cycle goes on and on “so long as children are gay and innocent and heartless.” If we should pause over this description, it is perhaps because it may be difficult to think of children as being both innocent and heartless at once. Haven't children always been innocent? And yet to speak of all children in this way may hide the fact that some people's children have at times appeared more or less innocent than those of others. In order to investigate these concerns and more, this course examines various representations of childhood in literature and film, with a unique sensitivity for how they vary across race, class, gender, and sexuality. What does it means to represent childhood as a period of innocence? Whose childhoods get to exist within this category? Finally, how do such ideas and projections impact the lives of the children who must grow up inside of these worlds?
As a writing intensive course, our goal will be to grow as clear and critical writers, regardless of your major. To that end, we will not only learn how to craft compelling questions and arguments, but also how to conduct original research which will engages with the ideas of other thinkers. The course requirements will include two papers that you will write and revise over the course of the semester.
Morrison, Toni: Beloved ; Stowe, Harriet Beecher: Uncle Tom's Cabin: or, Life Among the Lowly
All other readings will be provided iin a course reader or made available on bCourses.
This course will explore the ghosts, corpses, graveyards, and living dead of nineteenth-century American literature. Through an array of fiction, poetry, cultural history, and criticism (as well as potential field trips to local cemeteries), we will delve deeply and morbidly into the central role “death” played in nineteenth-century American society. Most importantly, we will examine its literary function in the midst of immense political and economic upheaval, technological innovation, and artistic and philosophic renaissance. By reading across representations of death and dying that range from intensely sentimental to disgustingly grotesque, we will continuously return to the following questions: how did American society conceive of, and represent, its past in relation to its present and future moments? How do we make historical or theoretical sense of the intimate relations these authors draw between the living and the dead? What is the role of death, and by extension, time and memory, in literature?
English R1B builds on the critical reading and writing skills developed in English R1A, working toward the production of an original research paper. In preparation, we will examine our texts in their historical and critical contexts, exploring the potential benefits and limitations of the multiple approaches to research.
Brown, Charles Brockden: Wieland and Memoirs of Carwin the Biloquist; Waterman, Bryan, ed.: The Salem Witch Trials Reader
All other readings will be provided in a course reader.
The biblical book of Hebrews famously defines faith as “the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen” (11:1, KJV). But in eighteenth-century Europe and North America, “unseen” things were as much a matter of faith as a problem of knowledge. Theories of the occult, notions of the supernatural, and supposedly miraculous events were increasingly submitted to empirical inquiry, scientific scrutiny, and rational analysis. Meanwhile, technological innovations like the microscope suddenly made visible entire worlds of objects that had never before been seen. This course will examine how literature of the long eighteenth century sought to represent, examine, and analyze supernatural, miraculous, occult, or otherwise obscure phenomena. We’ll ask how our authors sought to define and codify what counted as evidence of things, supernatural or otherwise, that were not or could not be clearly seen. Readings will vary across disciplines, from scientific texts like Robert Hooke’s treatise on microscopes and Isaac Newton’s on optical physics, to documentary accounts of events like the Salem witchcraft crisis, to works of fiction and poetry that deal in hauntings, miracles, and visitations from “beyond” the natural world.
Of course, R1B is also designed to engage students in extensive essay writing and informed scholarly research. To that end, we will use questions and discussions about evidence from our readings as a platform on which to think about what counts as evidence in our own research projects, what kinds to use, and how best to do so. In this course you will develop your writing practice and experiment with and hone your skills in scholarly research, critical thinking, and intellectual analysis by writing and reading texts that are concerned with evidence and research. Appropriately, the history of the word essay is tied to histories of evidence and experimentation. In its original sense, an essay is “a trial, testing, proof”—an “experiment” (OED, entry 1a.). Writing assignments in this course will allow students to experiment with different kinds of research methodologies. We will also put our work on trial, as it were, through continuous and thoughtful peer review. The goal is less to critique, however, than to create an open and engaged conversation about writing well and how to make our own writing better.
Hesse, Herman: Siddhartha (1922); Miller : Bhagavad Gita (1986); Nishida, Kitaro: An Inquiry into the Good (1911); kwe: Dirges of Becoming (2010)
The journey to self is a theme that we can all relate to and, perhaps for this reason, one that has been explored by many poets and philosophers from many cultures and traditions. Yet, writing about self often seems much like lifting a cup of water from a rushing stream and asking someone to guess which way the river is flowing. In this course, we will travel many streams of thought and expression of the human experience, embracing a wide array of selections exploring the notions of self and experience in the world. By reflecting on and writing about our readings (some philosophical, some poetic), we will turn attention to our own life experience and the expression of our individual understandings of self.
English R1B is a writing-intensive course that develops students' practical fluency in expository and argumentative writing, in close reading of primary and secondary texts. This course also builds and refines the skills required for university-level research. Emphasizing the development of research skills, this course will teach you how to locate academic sources, evaluate these outside materials, and use them to construct your own positions. Above all, the class will provide a space for you to expore your spoken and written voice within a community of learning.
Austen, Jane: Northanger Abbey; Blake, William: Selected Poetry; Coleridge, Samuel Taylor & Wordsworth, William: Lyricial Ballads; Hogg, James: The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner; Shelley, Mary : Frankenstein; Wordsworth, Dorothy: The Grasmere and Alfoxden Journals
A course reader including writings by Edmund Burke, William Godwin, Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Thomas Paine, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Mary Wollstonecraft.
Since the nineteenth century, the popular image of Romanticism has been that of the solitary genius. Typically poised atop some cloud-capped mountain or madly penning his verse in candlelight, this lone figure appears as a testament to the sovereign powers of mind and self. Yet for all their representations of solitude, so many works from the British Romantic period are driven by a desire for and fear of another. In this course, we will trace the persistent presence of others in key literary and political texts of the period. From the ideal friend of Romantic poetry to the pernicious fiend of Gothic fiction, this class will explore how a social world materializes in the space between individuals.
As an R1B, this course will strengthen students’ reading and analytical knowledge, while introducing them to some of the essential techniques for research writing. Through close reading of texts (both primary and secondary) and frequent writing assignments, students will learn how to engage with different sources to support their own original theses.
Douglass, Frederick: Narrative of the LIfe of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave; Fern, Fanny: Ruth Hall and Other Writings; Keller, Helen: The World I Live In; Stowe, Harriet Beecher: Uncle Tom's Cabin
A course reader containing short works by William Apess, Mary L. Day, Helen DeKroyft, Sarah Mapps Douglass, Elsie Fuller, Frances E. W. Harper, E. Pauline Johnson (Tekahionwake), Catharine Maria Sedgwick, Lydia Siguourney, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Sojourner Truth, William Walker, Zitkala-Sa (Gertrude Simmons Bonnin), and others.
"The artist . . . is the holiest reformer of them all, for she is creating."—Paulina Wright Davis, The Una, 1853
"Polemics . . . are not likely to be epics. They are likely to be pamphlets, even when they are disguised as stories and plays."—Albert Murray, The Omni-Americans, 1970
Nineteenth-century America witnessed a blossoming of reformist zeal. A diverse array of activists fought for such disparate causes as prison reform, temperance, and the expansion of missionary work. In our course, we will take up four of the most galvanizing and far-reaching social movements of the era: the battles for the rights of Native Americans, slaves, women, and individuals with disabilities. More specifically, we will take up a variety of novels, short stories, and poems produced by and for these movements, asking how liteature transformed and was transformed by the reformist projects considered. How can the act of turning from the "real" to the imaginative render the author or artist "the holiest reformer we have"? Are the categories of "polemic" and "epic"—activisim and artistry—truly mutually exclusive? In short, what kind of change could literature hope to create, and what kind of literature would be created by the hope of social change?
Throughout the course, we will be attuned not only to the role of writing in the nineteenth century but also to its importance for you as students and thinkers today. The course is designed to help you to prepare for future writing and research at Berkeley and beyond, so over the course of the semester, you will outline, draft, workshop, write, and rewrite a series of papers, refining along the way your ability to read meticulously and write persuasively. Your work will culminate in the writing of a substantial research paper based on the issues central to the course as they relate to your own interests.
This section of English R1B has been canceled.
This section of English R1B has been canceled.
This section has been canceled.
This section of English R1B has been canceled.
This section has been canceled.
This section has been canceled.
This section has been canceled.
Chandler, Raymond: The Long Goodbye; Collins, Wilke: The Moonstone; Gerald Graff and Cathy Birkenstein: They Say, I Say; Mieville, China: The City & the City; Sophocles: Oedipus Rex; Tey, Josephine: The Daughter of Time; Whitehead, Colson: The Intuitionist
“The distortion of a text is not unlike a murder. The difficulty lies not in the execution of the deed but in the doing away with the traces.” —Sigmund Freud, Moses and Monotheism
Freud suggests that murder mysteries appeal to us in part because readers are always detectives, collecting and interpreting clues to a text’s secrets. Taking Freud’s analogy as our provocation, we will use stories of murder and detection to improve as textual sleuths. Our texts will come from ancient Athens and contemporary America, and they will include not only the novels and play listed above, but also several short stories and at least one film adaptation. We will ask how different murder mysteries imagine the process of detection and discovery. Using the rhetorical textbook They Say, I Say and model critical essays, we will also reflect on how we investigate and research literature. A scaffold of increasingly complex research and writing assignments will support a substantial research paper.
Berssenbrugge, Mei-mei: Hello, the Roses; Duncan , Robert: The Opening of the Field; Marlowe, Christopher: Doctor Faustus; Notley, Alice: Certain Magical Acts; Rothenberg, Jerome: Technicians of the Sacred; Shakespeare, William: The Tempest
Course Reader with writings by Marcel Mauss, Lucien Levy-Bruhl, Ernst Cassirer, Emile Benveniste, Stanley Tambiah and Jane Harrison others. Movie TBD.
In one common sense, we use the word “magic” to refer to the extraordinary, the otherworldly or the supernatural. We associate this sense of “magic” with the belief that one can gain control over external events through special means that defy logic or rationality. More seemingly excessive forms of associative and nonlinear thinking are referred to warily as “magical thinking.” In this course we will consider not only these senses of magic as we find them addressed in a variety of literary representations and discourses, but also other possible senses, such as the more straightforward sense that the notion of magic pertains to what we might call the “self-existence” of the world. In what way do things already have, at their most ordinary level, a mode of existing that it might make sense to describe as ‘magical’? In what ways does the notion of magic have a sense that helps us to engage with the world at this most basic level? Why might literary study be a privileged site in which to ask these kinds of questions?
Since this is an R1B course, students will continue to develop skills in critical reading and essay composition that they began to cultivate in R1A. This time around we will build upon those skills by introducing students to research methodology as they produce final research papers on a topic of their choice pertaining to the course materials. We will continue to work on writing and argumentation skills in a series of in-class exercises, revisions and peer editing workshops.
Le Fanu, Sheridan: Carmilla; Wells, H. G.: The Island of Dr. Moreau
This course investigates monsters—from the stitched-together creatures of The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896) to present-day vampires, werewolves, body snatchers, and other frightening creatures of lore and literature. We will read two short novels (Dr. Moreau and Carmilla), watch the films Invasion of the Body Snatchers and Alien, and read a selection of short stories and articles. The material for this course will also include two student-nominated texts (one book and one film).
The monsters that we will investigate are "manufactured" in more than one sense of the word. Their minds and bodies are stitched together by mad scientists or transformed by a fateful bite, but they are also constructed and created socially. They emerge as monstrous because of the way in which they are portrayed. We will ask: what do a culture's fictional monsters suggest about what that culture fears and reviles? To come to grips with this question, we will practice critical habits of mind and draw on critiques from queer theory, feminism, disability studies, and critical race studies. We will also excavate the histories of particular monsters and consider the specific historical contexts in which they appear and reappear.
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 papers.
Anderson, Sherwood: Winesburg, Ohio; Baum, L. Frank: The Wonderful Wizard of Oz; Hawthorne, Nathaniel: The Scarlet letter; Solnit, Rebecca: Wanderlust: A History of Walking; Stowe, Harriet Beecher: Uncle Tom's Cabin: Or Life Among the Lowly
To be provided in class by the instructor:
Henry David Thoreau, Walking; Map: Berkeley PATH Wanderers Association, Berkeley and its Pathways; Movies: The Wiz (1978), Manhatta (1921); Short Stories: Kate Chopin, “A Morning Walk”; Ray Bradbury, “The Pedestrian”; Poems by Elizabeth Bishop, Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Walt Whitman
With beauty before me, may I walk
With beauty behind me, may I walk
With beauty above me, may I walk
With beauty below me, may I walk
With beauty all around me, may I walk
Wandering on the trail of beauty, may I walk
Navajo Night Chant
From Walt Whitman's walks through Manhattan to Leslie Marmon Silko's treks through the Tucson wilderness, American writers have long been preoccupied with the subject of walking and its political, aesthetic, and social meanings. This course will examine the theme of walking from a variety of interpretative frames, and from the perspectives of a wide array of American authors. Our goal will not just be to consider the history of walking in America, but more crucially to understand how that history has shaped American literature and culture and consequently the ways in which we each walk in the world.
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.
This section of English R1B has been canceled.
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.
Campbell, James: The Anglo-Saxons; Keynes, Simon, and Michael Lapidge.: Alfred the Great; Liuzza, R.M.: Beowulf, 2nd ed. Facing Page Translation; McClure, Judith, and Roger Collins, trans.: Bede: The Ecclesiastical History of the English People; Webb, J.F., and D.H. Farmer: The Age of Bede
A course reader.
“Britain, once called Albion, is an island of the ocean...” When the priest Bede set out in the early 700s to write the history of the place we now call England, he portrayed it as a new nation with a deep past, a remote corner of the world that was nevertheless closely connected to Rome, Gaul, and Ireland. Although the “English people” that Bede wrote about did not exactly exist yet, his vision of their past helped map a new future for them as a coherent nation. As we will see in this course, literature was central to the very idea of Anglo-Saxon England: it was in some ways written into being.
By reading a very wide range of texts—histories, biographies, epic and lyric poems, riddles and letters—we will find a multitude of ways to understand these developing versions of English nationhood, as well as the Anglo-Saxons’ cultural preoccupations, values, and ideas. In our readings we will discover what people in the early middle ages found exciting, instructive, beautiful, or exotic. We will also think about think about the physical presence of the past in landscape and artifacts, as we study maps, manuscripts, runes, and artworks of various kinds—painted images, stone sculpture, and metalwork.
By the end of the course, you will have gained new insight into a culture and literature that is both very different from the present and an organic part of the modern world. No knowledge of medieval languages is required, and all texts will be available in translation.
This course satisfies the pre-1800 requirement for the English major.
Chaucer, Geoffrey: Canterbury Tales (ed. Mann); Chaucer, Geoffrey: Troilus and Criseyde (ed. Barney)
The course will read Chaucer's two greatest works--the Canterbury Tales (easily one of the most entertaining works and one of the most compelling works in English) and the Troilus and Criseyde (perhaps less entertaining, but no less compelling)--along with some small samples from the rest of his works and from his literary tradition. The readings will be in Middle English; we will take care to see that students develop the capacity to read it comfortably.
This course satisfies the pre-1800 requirement for the English major.
A course reader
For more information on this course, please contact Professor Miller at j_miller@berkeley.edu
This course satisfies the pre-1800 requirement for the English major.
Shakespeare, William: [all of the above listed plays from Signet Classics]
This course will be an exercise in unabashed celebration of genius. I will be continually asking what work these plays are doing in order to render dynamically certain basic features of human experience and to raise significant questions about why we perform certain actions and risk various outcomes. I am interested in history and politics only insofar as they affect our understanding of why the plays offer relatively timeless grasps of what goes into human actions, and what can result from disturbances in our psyches. We will probably read twelve plays--and reading here will entail re-reading because I think that is a commitment English majors should make to any text that deserves to be taken seriously. I know there will be a final and at least one paper. Other assignments will depend on enrollment.
Any Shakespeare text will do. I think every English major should have the collected plays but I will order individual paperbacks for the convenience of carrying around. Plays will include Midsummer Night's Dream, As You Like It, Richard II, Hamlet, Lear, Othello, Macbeth, Measure for Measure, Winter's Tale, and The Tempest.
Shakespeare, William: Norton Shakespeare: Essential Plays (3rd ed.); Shakespeare, William: The Comedy of Errors (Signet 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.
Milton, John: The Complete Poetry and Essential Prose of John Milton (Modern Library, ed. Kerrigan, Rumrich, and Fallon, 2007, ISBN-13: 978-0679642534)
Probably the most influential and famous (and, in his own time, infamous) literary figure of the seventeenth century, John Milton has been misrepresented too often as a mainstay of a traditional canon rather than as the rebel he was. He is also sometimes assumed to be a remote or traditional religious poet rather than the independent thinker he also was—someone who distrusted any passively held faith that was not self-questioning. As we follow Milton’s carefully shaped career from the shorter early poems, through some of the controversial prose of the English Civil War era, and into the astounding work that emerged in the wake of political defeat (Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, Samson Agonistes), we will discover a very different literary and political figure, known in his time as a statesman as well as a poet, and in both pursuits considered more an iconoclast than an icon. We will come to understand Milton’s writing in relation to the revolutions that he witnessed and in which he took part, and we will also think about his experiments in poetic form, his ambivalent incorporations, revisions, and expansions of classical literature and biblical texts alike, the literary dimension of his unorthodox theology, his writings on love, marriage, and divorce, his engagement with contemporary scientific debates, his life-long preoccupation with vocation – and more.
This course satisfies the pre-1800 requirement for the English major.
See below.
In an age of commercial print expansion, men and women writers negotiated the possibilities, limits, and perceived dangers of publishing. In this class, we will explore the forms and strategies writers deployed in those negotiations, whether women poets, romance writers, and playwrights navigating the scandalous publicity of publishing their work; philosophers, periodical writers, and fiction writers aiming to popularize new scientific discoveries, political theories, and approaches to life in a globalizing market society; or satirists skeptical of a new commercial regime and its proliferation of print. As we interpret late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century depictions of coffee house conversationalists, hack writers, masquerading women, naïve travellers, criminal gangs, among others, we shall be especially interested in the development of new techniques of realist writing and the complexities of the satire of this period.
Provisional Reading: Poetry of John Dryden, Anne Finch, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Alexander Pope, John Gay, Jonathan Swift; Prose of John Locke, Joseph Addison and Richard Steele, Aphra Behn, Daniel Defoe, Eliza Haywood, Henry Fielding; Plays of William Wycherley and John Gay.
This course satisfies the pre-1800 requirement for the English major.
Austen, Jane: Northanger Abbey; Flaubert, Gustave : Madame Bovary; Goethe, Johann Wolfgang: The Sorrow of Young Werther; Pushkin, Alexander: Eugene Onegin; Tolstoy, Leo: War and Peace
The novel emerged as the principal literary genre in 19th-century Europe and has continued to dominate the literary market in Europe and North America ever since. What were the constitutive formal elements as well as social and psychological concerns of novelistic narrative in the period of its greatest ascendancy? Focusing on a selection of novels from the German, English, French, and Russian traditions, this course examines the many guises the novel assumed in the process of its becoming, over the course of the 19th century, the central genre within which key social, political, and aesthetic issues of its time could be deliberated.
All novels considered in this course are markedly experimental. Each showcases a different dimension of the novel genre: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774) is a sentimental epistolary novel; Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey (1817), a mock-Gothic novel of manners; Alexander Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin (1823-1831), an ironic and fragmentary novel in verse; Gustave Flaubert’s, Madame Bovary (1856) establishes the model of modern realist narration; and finally Leo Tolstoy’s magisterial historical novel War and Peace (1865-1869) raises crucial questions about the very premises of what it means to be historical and novelistic.
Workload/Requirements. Close reading of assigned texts (up to 200 pages per week), regular attendance, short assignments, midterm, one paper, final exam.
This course is cross-listed with Slavic 133.
Adiche, Chimamanda: Americanah; Cole, Teju: Open City; Díaz, Junot: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao; Egan, Jennifer: A Visit From the Goon Squad; Hamid, Mohsin: The Reluctant Fundamentalist; Lerner, Ben: 10:04: A Novel; McCarthy, Cormac: The Road; McCarthy, Tom: Remainder; McEwan, Ian: Saturday; Mieville, China: The City & The City; O'Neill, Joseph: Netherland; Whitehead, Colson: Zone One
A course reader of selected book reviews, interviews, and critical essays.
Bradford, W.: Of Plymouth Plantation; Brown, C. B.: Weiland, or The Transformation; Crevecoeur, H.: Letters from an American Farmer; Equiano, O.: An Interesting Narrative; Foster, H.: The Coquette; Franklin, B.: The Autobiography and Other Writings; Jefferson, T.: Notes on the State of Virginia; Rowlandson, M.: The Sovereignty and Goodness of God; Williams, R.: A Key into the Language of America
This course surveys the literatures of early America, from the tracts that envisioned the impact of British colonization to the novels that measured the after-shock of the American Revolution. Throughout, we will consider colonial America as a place of encounter – a place where diversity was a given, negotiation was a necessity, and transformation was inescapable. We will read broadly in the many genres of writing produced in the colonial and early national era, keeping our eyes trained both to literary form and to the world beyond the page. Our topics will include contact and settlement, “translations” of Native American culture, religious and social formations, captivity narratives, natural history, print culture, the Atlantic slave trade, the writing of revolution, and the contested ideals of the new republic. Throughout, we will pay special attention to how writing operated to forge new models of the self that could withstand and absorb the tumult of colonial life.
This course satisfies the pre-1800 requirement for the English major.
Egan, Jennifer: A Visit from the Goon Squad; Faulkner, William: As I Lay Dying; Howells, William Dean: The Rise of Silas Lapham; Morrison, Toni: Beloved; O'Connor, Flannery: Wise Blood; Pynchon, Thomas: The Crying of Lot 49; Robinson, Marilynne: Housekeeping; Wharton, Edith: The House of Mirth; Whitehead, Colson: Zone One
This course is 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 that highlight some of the most significant developments in novel form, as well as the cultural and historical contexts they illuminate.
Castillo-Guilbault, Rose: Farmworker's Daughter; Garcia, Diana: When Living Was a Labor Camp; Gonzalez, Rigoberto: Crossing Vines; Neuburger, Bruce: Lettuce Wars; Plascencia, Salvador: The People of Paper; Soto, Gary: Jesse; Soto, Gary: The Elements of San Joaquin; Viramontes, Helena Maria: Under the Feet of Jesus
Films: Alambrista; and Fighting for Our Lives
This course will focus on the lives and struggles of Mexican farm workers in California as represented in Chicano/a literature from the 1970s to the early twentieth-first century—or roughly the period that coincides with the rise of neoliberalism as a dominant politico-economic system in Western capitalism. We’ll consider the ways that the daily struggles and political movements of Mexican farmworkers link Chicano/a history and culture to immigration law, state repression, racialization, gender discrimination, class exploitation, and the expansive power of transnational agricultural corporations—in short, to the building of empire and global capitalism. All of the literary works that we’ll study in this course document or dramatize these links either thematically or formally. We’ll also read several essays on history and literary criticism to contextualize the literature, and we’ll view two or three films. Required assignments will include a midterm, a class presentation, and two papers.
This course is cross-listed with American Studies C111E section 1.
Alvarez, Julia: In the Time of the Butterflies; Cantu, Norma: Canicula: Snapshots of a Girlhood en la frontera; Castillo, Ana: Give It To Me; Cruz, Angie: Let it Rain Coffee; Gilb, Dagoberto: The Last Known Residence of Mickey Acuna; Gonzalez, Rigoberto: Crossing Vines; Hijuelos, Oscar: The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love; Islas, Arturo: The Rain God
Course Reader
In this course, we’ll read a cluster of post-1970 Chicanx/Latinx novels. We’ll explore a variety of issues and experiences—race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, political activism, revolution, philosophy, art, storytelling, and writing—represented in these works; all of these experiences have influenced the form and content of Chicanx/Latinx novels. We'll discuss the manner in which the literature contributes to the formation of complex and sometimes contradictory identities, but we’ll also pay close attention to the literary features of these novels, including form, style, point of view, characterization, dialogue, and figurative language. We’ll read several works of history and literary criticism to contextualize the literature and to help us understand how Chicanx/Latinx literature enriches the American literary tradition generally.
Achebe, Chinua: Things Fall Apart; Coetzee, J. M.: Waiting For the Barbarians; Conrad, Joseph: Heart of Darkness; Conrad, Joseph: Nostromo; Dangarembga, TsiTsi: Nervous Conditions; Forster, E.M.: A Passage to India; Gordimer, Nadine: Burger's Daughter; Kipling, Rudyard: Kim; Lemming, George: In the Castle of My Skin; Rushdie, Salman: Midnight's Children
This course will examine some British colonial novels within the socio-political-economic context of late British colonialism and some (post-)colonial novels written after the devolution of formal British colonialism.
T.B.A.
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 be strongly encouraged.
This course is open to English majors only.
Reader available at Instant Copying and Laser Printing, 2138 University Avenue
The aim of this course to explore the genre of short fiction – to discuss the elements that make up the short story, to talk critically about short stories, and to become comfortable and confident with the writing of them. Students will write two short stories, a number of shorter exercises, weekly critiques of their peers’ stories and published short stories, and be required to attend and review a fiction reading. The course will be organized as a workshop and attendance is mandatory. All student stories will be edited and critiqued by the instructor and by other students in the class.
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 11 P.M., THURSDAY, OCTOBER 27.
Also be sure to read the paragraph cocerning creative writing courses on page 1 of the instructions area of this Announcement of Classes for futher information regarding enrollment in such courses.
An online course reader with short stories and craft essays.
This workshop is designed to hone basic elements of the short story: style, voice, perspective, structure, plot, character, and so on. We will read some exceptional short stories in a variety of genres. We will compose and revise 1-3 short stories (30 pages total) over the course of the semester. We will comment on each other’s writing in progress; learn to perform a reading; and complete short assignments involving the practical matters of a writing career.
Only continuing UC Berkeley students are eligible to apply for this course. To be considered for admission, please electronically submit 10 double-spaced pages of your prose fiction (no poetry, drama, screenplays, or academic work), 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.
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 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.
Our readings will come from a course reader available, after the first class meeting, at Krishna Copy (Milvia and University).
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; 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 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
The purpose of this class will be to produce a collective language in which to treat poetry. Writing your own poems will be a part of this task, but it will also require readings in contemporary poetry and essays in poetics, as well as some writing assignments done under extreme formal constraints. In addition, there’ll be regular commentary on other students’ work and two instances of recitation. All readings will be drawn from a course reader.
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 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.
Forster, E.M.: Aspects of the Novel; Mitchell, David: Cloud Atlas
The purpose of this workshop is to begin to write a novel. It is unlikely that you will finish writing a novel in the three months we spend together. Novels take time. There are some reported exceptions to this—Jack Kerouac wrote the first draft of On the Road in three weeks, Jonathan Safron Foer drafted his first novel in two months—but we will restrict our goal this semester to: “a start.” Much of the semester will be devoted to drafting, revising, and helping each other improve our nascent work. We’ll read one sprawling, multifarious, genre-bending work, David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas (2004), in order to explore the various shapes a novel can take. We’ll also read E.M. Forster’s Aspects of the Novel (1927). We may as well have some inkling as to what we’re trying to make.
Only continuing UC Berkeley students are eligible to apply for this course. To be considered for admission, please electronically submit no more than 5 double-spaced pages of your fiction, as well as (at the end of the same document, please) a rough outline/plot summary of your idea for a novel, by clicking on the link below; fill out the application you'l find there and attach the writing sample as a Word document or .rtf file. The deadine for completing this application process in 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.
Levy, Ariel: The Best American Essays 2015
This class will be conducted as a writing workshop to explore the art and craft of the personal essay. We will closely examine the essays in the assigned anthology, as well as students’ exercises and essays. Writing assignments will include three short writing exercises (2 pages each) and two new essays (10-20 pages each).
Only continuing UC Berkeley students are eligible to apply for this course. To be considered for admission, please electronically submit 5-10 double-spaced pages of your creative nonfiction (no poetry, fiction 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 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.
Barry, Lynda: One! Hundred! Demons!; Bechdel, Alison: Are You My Mother? A Comic Drama; Bechdel, Alison: Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic; Chast, Roz: Can't We Talk About Something More Pleasant? A Memoir; McCloud, Scott: Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art; Sacco, Joe: Palestine; Satrapi, Marjane: Persepolis; Spiegelman, Art: Maus, Volumes I and II; Yang, Gene Luen: American Born Chinese
Reader (scholarly essays on comics and memoir).
A graphic novel is often defined as “a single-author, book-length work, meant for a grown-up reader, with a memoirist or novelistic nature, usually devoid of superheroes.” Many comic artists, however, ridicule the term as a pretentious and disingenuous attempt to rebrand comics in order to elevate their cultural status. We will examine the definitions, history, and diverse forms of graphic narratives in the U.S., focusing on graphic memoirs.
This class is open to English majors only.
Wall Tappings: Women's Prison Writings, 200 A.D. to the Present; Cisneros, Sandra: The House on Mango Street; Coates, Ta-Nehisi: Between the World and Me; Jackson, George: Soledad Brother: The Prison Letters of George Jackson; Perkins Gilman, Charlotte: The Yellow Wallpaper and Other Stories; Santiago Baca, Jimmy: A Place to Stand; Wakatsuki Houston, Jeanne: Farewell to Manzanar: A True Story of Japanese American Experience During and After the World War II Internment
This is a course primarily on the literature of incarceration variously defined and experienced across a range of control systems that attempt to stunt the entire human being. We will read prison narrative/poetry (George Jackson's prison letters, Jimmy Santiago Baca's poetry composed while in prison), but we will also consider other forms of incarceration: Latinas incarcerated in the "domestic sphere" (as in Perkins Gilman's The Yellow Wallpaper and Cisneros' House on Mango Street), or in detention centers (Wakatsuki's Farewell to Manzanar and the Angel Island poems carved into the walls by Chinese immigrants in the early 20th century). In addition to literary forms of expression, we will also survey some of the art and photography of incarceration. And we will also read some essays/chapters that theorize the control systems of incarceration: Gramsci, Foucault, et al.
I want to think about the forms of suppression, confinement and the humiliations of control imposed not only on the body but on the mind and heart. We want to concentrate on the ways in which human beings find the strength to survive conditions of subjection to voice their intellectual, emotional and spiritual presence.
I will certainly be asking students to recommend material you believe crucial to our work in the course.
Course assignments: You will write two papers of 6-8 pages and you will also work in discussion groups that will offer in-class presentations. There will be brief, unannounced quizzes on the material of the day. These cannot be made up since they will be composed in class.
This class is open to English majors only.
Adiga, Arvind: White Tiger; Lanchester, John: Whoops!; Martin, Randy: The Financialization of Daily Life; Ong, Han: Fixer Chao; Ozeki, Ruth: All Over Creation; Park, Ed: Personal Days; Tucker, Robert: The Marx-Engels Reader; Volosinov, Valentin : Marxism and the Philosophy of Language; Whitehead, Colson: Zone One; Williams, Raymond: Marxism and Literature
For the past thirty years, it’s become a cliché that it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. Yet, ever since the 2008 financial crash, there’s been rising popular consciousness of capitalism’s crisis-bound character and, therefore, its historicity and potential transformability. What part has contemporary literature played in the promotion of this consciousness? It is customary to think of literature as uniquely suited to building empathy, helping us imagine the lives of others. But literature also aspires to representing the abstract social forces that set determinate limits and conditions upon individuals’ exercise of freedom. How does literature’s peculiar means of connecting experience and structure, part and whole, individual and totality offer an actionable theory of capitalism’s lived experience? We’ll read contemporary theories of ecological crisis, financialization, debt, gendered precarity, and structural racism that are some of the central features of 21st century capitalist life (Randy Martin, John Lanchester, Kathy Weeks, Jason Moore, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, etc.). We’ll turn to novels that center on various kinds of precarious characters to consider what a difference fiction makes to the treatment and solution of large economic and political problems (Arvind Adiga, Han Ong, Ruth Ozeki, Ed Park, Colson Whitehead). Along the way, we’ll get acquainted with some classical and more recent Marxist works of literary and aesthetic theory (e.g. Bakhtin, Volosinov, Raymond Williams, Lukacs, Jameson) so as to acquire the necessary analytical tools for making links between literature and political economy. This is a theory-heavy course and best suited to students who are really interested in working with some difficult theory, though no previous background is required. In addition to the books listed above, there will also be a course packet of additional readings. (Do not, however, purchase any books until after the first class meeting when the syllabus will have been finalized).
See below.
What makes environmental violence hard to represent and how can literature bear witness to the silence, slowness, and invisibility of ecological relations? Of what use is the problematic concept of “nature” in ordering our relations to other living beings? What kinds of literacy are required to have “a sense of place” or a knowledge of the seasons? Is such literacy comparable to the kind of attention that reading poetry often demands? This course will address these questions by examining the role of language and literature in making possible different kinds of interaction between people and environments. Other topics will include; relations between rural workers and landscape tourists; the role of memory and imagination in writing about place and the loss of place; weather-reporting and other ways of counting time; fantasies about ecological disaster and science’s ability to save or destroy humankind; figures of shelter and exposure.
Books (available at University Press Books, not the Cal Student Store): Mary Austin, Land of Little Rain; Matsuo Bashō, Narrow Road to the Deep North; Rachel Carson, Silent Spring; Ann Fisher-Worth and Laura-Gray Street, The Ecopoetry Anthology; Greg Sarris, Mabel McKay: Weaving the Dream; Mary Shelley, Frankenstein; Henry Thoreau, Walden; Dorothy Wordsworth, Grasmereand Alfoxden Journals
A reader with critical readings by Berger, Davis, Heidegger, Nixon, Solnit, Thompson, Vivieros de Castro, Galeano, Williams, & others
Films: Baichwal/Burtynsky, Manufactured Landscapes; Haynes, Safe; Herzog, Grizzly Man; Scott, Bladerunner; Varda, The Gleaners and I; ZhangKe Jia, Still Life
Delany, M.: Blake; or, The Huts of America (Ed. J. McGann); Grandin, G.: Empire of Necessity; Gray, T.: Confessions of Nat Turner; Jordan, W.: Tumult and Silence at Second Creek; Lepore, J.: New York Burning; Melville, H.: Benito Cereno; Walker, D.: Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World
Lemuel Paker Conner, Testimony of Fourteen Slaves Relative to a Proposed Slave Uprising in Adams County, Mississippi.
Amasa Delano, Narrative of Voyages and Travels in the Northern and Southern Hemispheres, Comprising Three Voyages around the World.
Daniel Horsmanden, The Journal of the Proceedings in the Detection of the Conspiracy . . . . for Burning the City of NEW-YORK
James Hamilton, Negro Plot: An Account of the Late Intended Insurrection Among a Portion of the Blacks of the City of Charleston.
Lionel Kennedy, An Official Report of the Trials of Sundry Negroes, Charged with an Attempt to Raise an Insurrection in the State of South Carolina.
"Proces contre les Esclaves du Poste”, from Original Acts of Pointe Coupee (available in manuscript, French transcription, and English translation).
This is a multidisciplinary seminar on the law and literature of slave conspiracy. We will be reading novels and stories by authors such as Martin Delany and Herman Melville alongside contemporary newspapers, confessions, warrants, witness depositions, and trial transcripts. We will also be reading history and theory by Peter Brooks, Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, Jill Lepore, Michel-Rolph Trouillot, and Gordon Wood. Students will choose between writing a research paper (20-25 pages) and working on a collaborative digital project related to one of the conspiracies covered in the course.
Didion, Joan: Play It As It Lays; Dreiser, Theodore: Sister Carrie; Fitzgerald, F. Scott: The Love of the Last Tycoon; Gibson, William: Pattern Recognition; Johnson, James Weldon: The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man; Lambert, Gavin: Inside Daisy Clover; Stoker, Bram: Dracula; West, Nathaniel: Miss Lonelyhearts & The Day of the Locust
In this course, we will examine intersections between literature and visual media in the twentieth century, with a particular focus on texts concerned with film and its cultural effects. We will read novels, short stories, poetry, and essays which not only help us better understand the social implications of media technologies, but also show how literature itself tries to understand its new place as one medium among many in the period. The class will consider such topics as the status of reading in a culture of looking, the politics of the extremely popular, celebrity as a way of life, and the commercial origins of the modern work of art. Of particular interest will be texts that address directly the mythology of Hollywood, as well as writers who borrow liberally from film technique as an aesthetic resource. In addition to our readings, we will screen: The Jazz Singer (1926), Sunset Boulevard (1950), Singin' in the Rain (1951), and Peeping Tom (1960).
Beckett, Samuel: Waiting For Godot; Beckett, Samuel: Watt; Bowen, Elizabeth: The Last September; Joyce, James: Ulysses; O'Brien, Edna: The Country Girls; O'Brien, Flann: At Swim-Two-Birds; Yeats, W.B.: The Collected Poems
Hamid, M.: The Reluctant Fundamentalist; Kingston, M.H.: China Men; Murayama, M.: All I asking for is my body; Okada, J.: No-No Boy ; Shteyngart, G.: Super Sad True Love Story; Yamashita, K.T.: I Hotel; lê, t.: The Gangster We Are All Looking For
This aim of this survey is two-fold: First, to interrogate the concept of nationhood and, particularly, what it means to be American. Focusing on writings by and about peoples of Asian descent across the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, we will examine various strategies for making America more inclusive—from appeals to the country’s founding ideals, to experiments with literary form, to calls for leftist revolt. The second aim will be to interrogate concepts of race and ethnicity by questioning singular notions of “Asian America” and “Asian American literature.” In order to do this, we will adopt a transnational and cross-racial perspective in order to connect these literatures to a broad history of global wars, empires, and revolutions. This perspective will also enable us to compare these writings with those from other branches of the Asian diaspora, as well as with other racial and ethnic groups in the U.S. In short, the survey will provide us with a critical grasp of race and nation, as well as of literature’s ability to re-imagine these in an increasingly “post-national”, “post-racial” world.
Bauby, J-D.: The Diving Bell and the Butterfly; Danquah, M. : Willow Weep for Me; Forney, E. : Marbles; Galloway, T.: Mean Little Deaf Queer; Guest, P. : One More Theory about Happiness; 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
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, often criticize 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? In this course, we will examine a diverse selection of disability memoirs and consider both what they reveal about cultural attitudes toward disability and what they have in common with other forms of autobiography.
Course Reader
This course will examine the historical trajectory of a very fuzzy category, “lyric,” from its identified origins and early practice in antiquity (Sappho, Catullus, et al.) to its 20th and 21st century rejections and rehabilitations (all the way up to last year’s Citizen by Claudia Rankine, whose subtitle is “An American Lyric”). Rather than define the term decisively, we will attempt to amass data about what kinds of contents and formal features have been associated with lyric over time and how poets have responded to that growing archive when contributing new instances of such verse. Along the way, we will also consider several theorizations and histories of lyric practice, including the idea that the very category has become a useless or even misrepresentative synonym for “poetry” that collapses multiple verse genres.
All poems and essays will be drawn from a course reader available at Metro Publishing on Bancroft by the 2nd class meeting.
Dick, Philip K.: Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?; Hoffman, E. T. A.: The Sandman; Shelley, Mary: Frankenstein; Strugatsky, Arkady and Boris: Roadside Picnic; Wells, H. G.: The Island of Doctor Moreau; Whitehead, Colson: Zone One
This course will examine in depth the history of speculative fiction and its engagement with the thematics and topoi of the new life sciences—representation of cloning, ecological dystopias, hybrid life-forms, genetic engineering dystopias. While science is the thematic point of departure of speculative fiction, the concerns of this course will be the literary. How does literature's encounter with the projected realities of the new biology revise our conceptions of the subject? Could there be a Leopold Bloom of the genetically engineered, a subject whose interior voice is the free-flowing expression of experience? Behind the endless removes of social, material, and technological mediation lies the construction of a flesh and blood body, separated from itself through the workings of consciousness. If indeed the post/modern subject requires a psychic space shaped by the authenticity of "being," a consciousness deeply rooted in the human experience, then how do we represent that being whose point of origin is the artificial, the inauthentic? These are some of the questions to be addressed in this course. You may of course bring others.
Online readings.
This course introduces tools and methods of the Digital Humanities as they can be used in studying the art and literature of the early modern period. Our focus is on how, around 1600, things were in motion: people, but also objects and ideas. By 1600, more than a century had gone by since the invention of printing, the 'discovery' of the Americas, and the adoption of near-mass-production methods in artists' workshops. Technologies of navigation and mapping made travel more possible, and both texts and images were being widely distributed for both economic and ideological reasons. Digital tools offer us ways to track, visualize, and interpret some of these mobilities.
The class will be broken into three loosely interrelated projects across disciplines (history, art history, literature), each of which will involve both individual and group work. In each project you will gather and interpret data, will learn a digital tool or set of tools, and will develop a sense of how working digitally in this field changes the scope and potential of the questions that we, as humanists, ask of our cultural materials.
There are no prerequisites for this course. We certainly do not expect that you know any coding, but we welcome anybody who does!
This course is cross-listed with History of Art C109.
This course satisfies the pre-1800 requirement for the English major.
PLEASE NOTE: This class has (as of Oct. 25) been approved as a new course. You can now go ahead and enroll in it (or, if you cannot enroll directly, put yourself on the wait list).
Adichie, C: Americanah; Cole, T: Open City; Rhodes-Pitts, S.: Harlem is Nowhere; Smith, Z: N.W.
Course Reader with required essays will be available for purchase. Films and television shows, available for screening in Moffit Library, will include projects by Mira Nair (Salaam Bombay), David Simon (Treme), Barry Jenkins (Medicine for Melancholy), and Raoul Peck (Lumumba: Death of a Prophet).
This is a course that weds postcolonial literary theory to cultural studies to critical geography to art. We'll read novels and watch films from several cities--London, Kingston, Johannesburg, New York, New Orleans, Lagos, Bombay/Mumbai--and think about how artists render urban space when they are also attending to questions of power, desire, memory, and performance. Weekly written responses will help to track our reactions to these course texts, whilst forming the foundation of the course's heart: an independent research project on a Bay Area City of your choice.
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.
Cullen, C.: Color; Hughes, L.: Fine Clothes to the Jew; Hurston, Z. N.: Their Eyes Were Watching God; Larsen, N.: Passing; McKay, C.: Harlem Shadows; Toomer, J.: Cane
Other course materials will be made available in PDF format.
The Harlem Renaissance was a cultural and intellectual movement of black artists and writers in the 1920s. Centered in the Harlem neighborhood in Manhattan, the movement extended outward through international collaboration that reached all the way to Marseilles, Dakar, and Moscow. We will be reading works by writers including Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Nella Larsen, and Claude McKay as well as contemporary manifestos about the function of black art. Students will complete a long essay (20-25 pages) anticipated by several shorter assignments geared to stages in the writing process.
Please read the paragraph about English 190 on page 2 of the instructions area of this Announcement of Classes for more details about enrolling in or wait-listing for this course.
Please click here for more information about enrollment in English 190.
See below.
In the early twentieth century, philosophers began to suspect that all their ancient problems—from the riddle of selfhood to the mystery of other minds to the imprecision of sensation—were actually problems with language. We could fix everything, they thought, if only we could speak more clearly. And so, they concluded, philosophy had better become devoted to the study of language. This “linguistic turn” occurred simultaneously with the advent of literary modernism, which itself emphasized the fact of language by experimenting with grammar and syntax. However, unlike philosophers of the linguistic turn, modernists immediately recognized that this swerve into language created more (and richer) problems than it solved, because language is inherently ambiguous and paradoxical. Thus, we will see that modernist literature predicts the linguistic turn’s eventual demise at the hands of poststructural theorists decades later.
We will read works of modernist literature alongside philosophical sources in order to understand how philosophers and authors simultaneously worked through (often while in close personal and professional intimacy) issues with language like: vagueness/exactitude, denotation/connotation, figuration, metaphor, reference, description, naming, and sense/nonsense. Our focus throughout the course will be less on how modernists received philosophical ideas about language and more on how they manipulated and extended these ideas into new aesthetic and stylistic protocols.
We will read authors such as: Amiri Baraka, Samuel Beckett, Hart Crane, T.S. Eliot, William Faulkner, E.M. Forster, Robert Frost, Henry James, James Joyce, Marianne Moore, Charles Olson, Ezra Pound, Thomas Pynchon, Gertrude Stein, Wallace Stevens, Virginia Woolf, and W.B. Yeats.
We will read philosophers and theorists such as: Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Gottlob Frege, Edmund Husserl, Luce Irigaray, Julia Kristeva, J.S. Mill, C.S. Peirce, Richard Rorty, Bertrand Russell, Ferdinand Saussure, Wilfred Sellars, A.N. Whitehead, and Ludwig Wittgenstein.
Additionally, we will screen a number of films and plays that foreground language as a philosophical issue.
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.
Austen, Jane: Selected Letters; Austen, Jane: The Oxford Illustrated Jane Austen; Miller, D.A.: Jane Austen, or the Secret of Style; Shields, Carol: Jane Austen: A Life
Films: Sleepless in Seattle; Clueless.
Also to be made available to students on B courses is a reader including criticism and theory from Mikhail Bakhtin, Ann Banfield, Roland Barthes, Frances Ferguson, Franco Moretti, and Alex Woloch.
While there is hardly a dearth of criticism on Jane Austen, it is rare to find her used, as Balzac, Flaubert, Dostoevsky, or Proust is used, as the basis for theorizing the Novel as a form. The gender bias of classic continental novel theory ignores her, and recent feminist historicism tends to do away with her originality as a creator of forms the better to claim her as a congenial sister. Precisely this formal originality (to which we owe our very norms of impersonal narration, to say nothing of the virtual invention of free indirect style) will be the main object of our consideration in the seminar. We will also pursue some pertinent minor topics: the curiously popular genre of the Austen biography (so little life, so many lives!) and, on a broader scale, the late-twentieth-century transformation of Austen into that most unwriterly of things: an icon.
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.
Adorno, Theodor: Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life; Adorno, Theodor and Max Horkheimer: Dialectic of Enlightenment; Arendt, Hannah: The Origins of Totalitarianism; Langland, William: Piers Plowman: A New Annotated Edition of the C-text
Please note the changes in the topic, book list, and courses description of this class (as of November 22).
This course looks at two distinct moments in which individual authors attempted to create encyclopedic visions in an attempt to diagnose what they took to be the historical crises of their time. The first moment is medieval: William Langland's England in the 14th century. After the cataclysm of a pandemic (the Black Death), Langland's England was embroiled in a war (the Hundred Years War), witness to a major social upheaval (the Peasant's Revolt), the scene of conflict surrounding an authoritarian ruler (or so Richard II enemies thought of him), riven by religious dissent and controversy (with the early stages of the Wycliffite heresy), and subject to a host of other traumatic social changes due to economic transition (as part of the transition from feudalism to mercantile capitalism). These paroxysms—disease, war, authoritarian rule, religious upheaval, and economic change and uncertainty—likewise characterize the modern moment that will be our secondary focus: the mid-20th century and the horrific events surrounding World War II, which we will discuss through the writings of German émigrés in America (namely, Theodor Adorno, Hannah Arendt, and Max Horkheimer).
All of these writers tried to comprehend their historical moments in a way that remained true to the complexity of their situations, and the works they produced as a result were therefore as complex. They are conceptually expansive and encyclopedic in their concerns. Because the material Langland covers is so temporally distant from us, we will work through that more slowly; it will take us the entire semester to work through one version of Langland's poem. As we begin with Langland's poem, and as you become accustomed to Middle English, we will also read some secondary criticism that will teach you how to read Langland's work. Some of the shorter daily readings of Langland will also be supplemented with critical explication of his work. In addition, the slow reading of Langland's work will be punctuated along the way by the work of Adorno, Arendt, and Horkheimer. We will use these modern writers to help us think through the medieval one. Their attempts to understand historical trauma in all of its complexity will help us understand how Langland does the same thing, and how we might do so ourselves.
This section of English 190 satisfies the pre-1800 requirement for the English major.
Please note that some seats in this section of English 190 are open to senior and junior non-majors.
Please click here for more information about enrollment in English 190.
Césaire, Aimé: A Tempest; Msomi, Welcome: uMabatha; Sears, Djanet: Harlem Duet; Shakespeare, William: Macbeth; Shakespeare, William: Othello; Shakespeare, William: The Merchant of Venice; Shakespeare, William: The Tempest; Shakespeare, William: Titus Andronicus
Films:Throne of Blood, dir. Akira Kurosawa; Omkara, dir. Vishal Bhardwaj; The MāoriMerchant of Venice, dir. Don Selwin.
A course reader including: Thomas Hariot, A Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia; “Of cannibals,” Michel de Montaigne; The Merchants Advizo; “Hamlet in the Bush,” Laura Bonnanan; “Claudius’s Diary,” Shiga Naoya; “The Robben Island Bible”; selections from Race in Early Modern England: a Documentary Companion, ed. Ania Loomba; selections from A Theory of Adaptation, Linda Hutcheon.
Digital Resource: MIT’s Global Shakespeares Archive (http://globalshakespeares.org/) ed. Alexander Huang and Peter Donaldson.
William Shakespeare's works have been staged all over the world, adapted as films, operas, musicals, ballets, and novels. They have been transposed into diverse settings, from fascist Italy to the Wild West, medieval Japan to the fictional planet of Altair IV. Writers and artists have blended the works of Shakespeare with an array of global traditions, ranging from Japanese Noh Theater to Korean Opera. Why has Shakespeare captured imaginations so vividly around the world? Harold Bloom even goes so far as to credit Shakespeare with the very “invention of the human.” Can it be that, as Shakespeare lovers and scholars have often claimed, there’s a universality to The Bard’s genius addressing “the human condition”? Or does the global dissemination and adaptation of Shakespeare engage political and cultural forces that go far beyond the individual brilliance of one Renaissance playwright? And, if so, what do these cultural intersections mean?
To engage these questions, we will begin with an examination of five Shakespeare plays in their original historical context on the page and on the stage. We will lay the groundwork for interrogating assumptions about the “universality of the human” by paying particular attention to issues of identity, race, and gender in Shakespeare’s works in the early modern context. We will then expand our view to these plays’ production histories around the world using the video clips, interviews, and reviews on MIT’s Global Shakespeares Archive. And finally we will examine an array of 20th and 21st century works from around the globe that are variously described as “adaptations,” “appropriations,” or “translations” of the plays we’ve studied. If, as some have argued, Shakespeare and the Western canon have been tools of cultural oppression, then how might these adaptations be read as acts of rebellion or liberation? What value have these writers found in Shakespeare’s material? How do they transform, correct, or reimagine Shakespeare’s works and even the figure of Shakespeare himself?
This section of English 190 satisfies the Shakespeare requirement for the English major.
Please read the paragraph about English 190 on page 2 of the instructions area of this Announcement of Classes for more details about enrolling in or wait-listing for this course.
Please click here for more information about enrollment in English 190.
See below.
Philosophy as a form has been governed by a sense of “homesickness.” Literary discourse has similarly grappled with a longing for remembered places. Thornfield Hall, Satis House, Brideshead Castle, the Isle of Skye, Manderley—from pristine estates and tattered ruins to English moors and Scottish islands, spaces memorialized in novels and films summon a deep-seated nostalgia for bygone eras, familiar characters, a certain way of life, scenes of reading recalled. This course will examine the spaces in and of fiction by interrogating exactly how our affective immersion within a narrative feels like a longing for the solidity of a physical or geographical site. When does a fictional structure take on the contours of “the real”? What do we mean when we talk about “space” in books that appear materially as nothing more than flat, solid, bounded things? How is the diegetic content of a novel or film enhanced by its formal and aesthetic representations of an entire invented cosmos with its own rules, characters, topography, texture? Why are narrative resolutions often premised on a return to a specific place, and what is it about this kind of “place-love”—always laced with a sense of repetitive yearning—that begins to resemble a kind of melancholy? While we will spend a good deal of class time puzzling over the intricacies and idiosyncrasies of the selected texts, we will also read broadly across theories of narrative form, contemporary critical work on affect, nostalgia, and longing, and more recent investigations into the relationship between urban design, lived space, and human behavior.
Primary texts will include: Jane Eyre (1847) – Charlotte Brontë; Great Expectations (1861) – Charles Dickens; To the Lighthouse (1927) – Virginia Woolf; Brideshead Revisited (1945) – Evelyn Waugh, as well as several films to be selected from the following list: Rebecca (1940) – dir. Alfred Hitchcock; Last Year at Marienbad (1961) – dir. Alain Resnais; Playtime (1967) – dir. Jacques Tati; Summer Hours (L’Heure d’été) (2008) – dir. Olivier Assayas. Secondary readings will include: The Poetics of Space, Gaston Bachelard; The Arcades Project, Walter Benjamin; “Prefaces to the New York Edition,” Henry James; Place for Us, D. A. Miller; On Longing, Susan Stewart; “The Decoration of Houses,” Edith Wharton
Please read the paragraph about English 190 on page 2 of the instructions area of this Announcement of Classes for more details about enroling in or wait-listing for this course.
Please click here for more information about enrollment in English 190.
See below.
In this seminar we’ll explore literary (and some non-literary) representations of life at sea and of sailors, both offshore and on, primarily but not exclusively during the expansion of Britain’s first empire during the eighteenth century. We’ll explore formal techniques that attempted to bring the faraway spaces of the sea and the distant figure of the sea traveller home to British readers. We’ll read theories of sentiment and sympathy to think about how remote figures become compatriots with whom readers might feel. We’ll consider how print representations of an alien wooden world—the ship at sea—and of globe-travelling sailors constituted them, nonetheless, as British, particularly through depictions of nautical language. Pirates posed a challenge to this image of sailors, and we’ll think too about the significance of the popularity of pirate narratives. Exploring the imaginative possibilities the sea presented, we’ll read aesthetic theory to think about how the sea and sailors’ experiences at sea might function as aesthetic objects and perceptions. Our readings might take us in several alternative but clearly adjacent directions—imperial discourse, slavery, trans-Atlantic studies, literature and science—and other interests students might bring to the table, and students’ interests will shape some of our class discussions and certainly the research writing. We will move between seminar discussions on the readings and, increasingly as the semester moves forward, conversations about research and writing practices in the preparation of a 20-page research paper.
Provisional Book List: Daniel Defoe, Captain Singleton; A General History of Pirates; Olaudah Equiano, Interesting Narrative; Tobias Smollett, Roderick Random; Frances Burney, Evelina; Poetry of John Dryden, James Thomson, William Falconer, William Cowper, Samuel Taylor Coleridge; accounts of the voyages of William Dampier, George Anson, and James Cook. Archival research materials might include naval songs, logs and journals of voyages. Philosophical writings of Edmund Burke, Adam Smith, and recent scholarship on writing and the sea, including James Bunn, Margaret Cohen and Ian Baucom.
This section of English 190 satisfies the pre-1800 requirement for the English major.
Please read the paragraph about English 190 on page 2 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.
Bjork, Robert E., and John D. Niles: A Beowulf Handbook; Jack, George: Beowulf: A Student Edition; Orchard, Andy: A Critical Companion to Beowulf
Students should also have one or more modern English translations for consultation.
Beowulf is the longest, subtlest, and in many ways the strangest and most difficult Old English poem that has survived from Anglo-Saxon England. Since its rediscovery in the 18th century, we have learned much about its language and literary background, but many fundamental aspects of Beowulf remain unknown—including the time and place of its origin, and the identity and purpose of its author. In this seminar, we will read the whole of Beowulf closely in the original, alongside important critical and literary parallels that will help us understand the poem’s background, as well as the controversies surrounding its interpretation. Students will then conduct their own investigations into Beowulf and its many lingering mysteries.
While command of Old English is not a prerequisite, this seminar is ideal for students who have completed English 104 (Introduction to Old English) and would like to continue their study of Old English literature through its greatest surviving text.
This section of English 190 satisfies the pre-1800 requirement for the English major.
Please read the paragraph about English 190 on page 2 of this Announcement of Classes for more details about enrolling in or waiit-listing for this course.
Please click here for more information about enrollment in English 190.
Course Reader
Our subject will be the theory and practice of mass entertainment in Hollywood from the birth of talking pictures to the start of W.W. II. We'll sample the extraordinary range of films that Golden-Age Hollywood offered its consumers: from screwball comedies and gangster pictures to melodramas, westerns, feature-length animation, musicals, and horror.
Most of the movies we'll discuss are available for rent or purchase from iTunes or Amazon Instant Video. You may view all of them for free through the streaming service of our own Media Resources Center. The only required text will be a Course Reader, which will gather relevant theory and criticism on the films as well as contemporaneous reviews and cultural commentaries.
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.
Gilgamesh; Borges, J. L.: The Immortal; Capek, K.: The Markropulos Case; Gray, John: The Immortalization Commission; Lucretius: On the Nature of Things; Shelley, Mary: The Mortal Immortal; Theroux, Marcel: Strange Bodies
There is an amusing and successful internet meme in circulation somewhat apropos to the contemporary debate around the question of immortality: The meme comically declares "Science can tell you how to clone a dinosaur. The humanities can tell you why that isn't such a good idea." Of course, when offered the prospect of a radically extended lifespan in place of dinosaur clones running amok, one might assume the humanities would gather to the side of science: no to dinosaurs; yes to immortality! Who would not want more life, a longer life, a life that is not marked by the slow, yet inevitable effects of senescence and degeneration? The assumption that immortality would be not only universally desired, but a universal good, undergirds much of the popular, futurist writing. In February 2011 the cover of Time Magazine announced that the year 2045 would mark a time when humanity would achieve virtual immortality; again in 2013 Time presented the tech giant Google's exploration into anti-aging therapies, declaring the venture "Google vs. Death." In sharp contrast, however, if we were to tally the literary and cinematic depictions of immortality—from Gilgamesh to Zardoz—and include even philosophical responses to the possibility of a radically extended life, it appears humanists are as averse to eternal life as they are to dinosaurs in our midst. Why the discrepancy? Is life worth living without the knowledge of our own finitude?
In this seminar we will explore the literary depictions of life without death. We will begin with Greeks (Lucretius and Plato), and Gilgamesh, move through several works of speculative fiction, and conclude with theoretical works on life, death, and biopolitics.
Please read the paragraph about English 190 on page 2 of the instructions area of this Announcement of Classes for more details about enrolling in or wait-listing for this course.
Please click here for more information about enrollment in English 190.
See below.
Besides reading and discussing some fiction and poetry with Western settings, and essays that attempt to identify or explain distinctive regional characteristics, this course will consider various movies shaped by and shaping conceptions of California, such as E. v. Stroheim's Greed, J. Ford's Grapes of Wrath, B. Wilder's Sunset Boulevard, R. Polanski's Chinatown, the Coen brothers' Man Who Wasn't There, T. Haynes's Safe, &c. Writing will consist of one long essay of 16-20 pages. There will be no quizzes or exams, but seminar attendance and participation will be expected, and will affect grades.
NOTE: Although the time listed for this class on Cal Central is 5-8 P.M., this class will actually run till 8:30, but with a half-hour break from 6:30 to 7:00.
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 David Marno in Fall 2016. No new students will be admitted, and no new application needs to be submitted. Professor Marno will give out permission codes in class in November.
There will be no additional texts ordered for the spring semester of this course.
Barthes, Roland: S/Z
This is a continuation of section 2 of H195A, taught by Celeste Langan in Fall 2016. No new students will be admitted, and no new application form needs to be filled out. Professor Langan will give out permission codes in class in November.
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.