Mitchell, Bruce, and Fred C. Robinson: Guide to Old English
A coursepack
Hwæt! Leorniað Englisc!
In this introduction to Old English, you will begin to read and write Old English from your first day in class, while also learning fundamental principles of grammar and historical language change. As you progress in your knowledge, you will begin exploring the wide range of literature in Old English, including riddles, love-laments, heroic poetry, and exotic travel narratives. You will learn what to do about demons, and the surprising reason that pepper is black. (Hint: it involves snakes.) By the end of the course, you will be able to read most Old English texts with the aid of a dictionary. You will also have a strong grasp of the linguistic principles that still shape modern English, and will be well prepared for further study of modern and medieval languages.
This course satisfies the pre-1800 requirement for the English major.
There are no prerequisites for this course, and no prior knowledge is expected. Graduate students interested in Old English should contact the instructor: a concurrent version of this course may be taken for graduate credit.
A course reader
For more information about this course, please contact Professor Miller at j_miller@berkeley.edu.
This course satisfies the pre-1800 requirement for the English major.
A course reader
For more information about this course, please contact Professor Miller at j_miller@berkeley.edu.
This course satisfies the pre-1800 requirement for the English major.
Shakespeare, William: The Norton Shakespeare
A survey of the second half of Shakespeare’s working life, including the later “problem” comedies, the major tragedies and the magical romances, his final works. Lectures will touch upon the complete writings and present sample scenes (with a selection of sonnets), so that you will know at least something about every work. Discussions will focus on a smaller group of six plays, to be explored in depth: Twelfth Night, Measure for Measure, Macbeth, King Lear, The Winter’s Tale, The Tempest. If schedules permit I will also plan class visits to live performances and/or cinema presentations of relevant Shakespeare plays.
Quizzes with passages from the sample texts (ID and brief critical commentary); two papers on the in-depth plays; final exam.
Greenblatt, S., ed.: The Norton Shakespeare
Additional materials will be distributed through bCourses.
This class focuses on a selection of works from Shakespeare’s entire career. We'll be reading a limited number of plays and some of the poetry. One of the main issues I'd like to focus on is the oscillation between "regular" and "irregular." What is the rule, and what is the exception in Shakespeare's works? How is a comedy supposed to end? How does it end? What makes a tragic hero? Is Hamlet a tragic hero? What are the rules of theater? What are the rules of literature? Who creates them and why? When do they get transgressed, and why? A tentative list of the plays includes Titus Andronicus, Richard III, A Midsummer Night's Dream, As You Like It, Troilus and Cressida, King Lear, and The Tempest. We'll also read some of the sonnets. Three short assignments and a final exam.
See below.
We’ll investigate the relationship of literature to other arts in the period, particularly painting and landscape design. Our focus will be on engagements with “nature,” understood as the non-human world and the ground of culture. In this period, nature also served as the foundation for the “rights of man,” yet those imagined as living “closest” to nature—animals, the laboring poor, slaves, and women—could not find a secure place in this discourse. We will explore why.
The books for this course will be available at University Press Books on Bancroft; other readings will be available on the course website. Texts will include the following:
James Thomson, The Seasons; William Hogarth, The Analysis of Beauty; Christopher Smart, Jubilate Agno; Oliver Goldsmith, The Deserted Village; George Crabbe, The Village; Quobna Ottobah Cugoano, Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil of Slavery; Mary Woolstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Women; William Godwin, Caleb Williams; Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France; Thomas Paine, Rights of Man; William Blake, Milton: A Poem in Two Books, as well as poems by William Collins, Thomas Gray, Anna Letitia Barbauld, and Charlotte Smith.
This course satisfies the pre-1800 requirement for the English major.
Arnold, Matthew: Essays in Criticism; Barrett Browning , Elizabeth: Poems; Braddon, Mary Elizabeth: Lady Audley's Secret; Bronte, Emily: Wuthering Heights; Dickens, Charles: Selected Journalism, 1850 - 1870; Eliot, George : Adam Bede; Tennyson, Alfred: Poems
The Victorian period witnessed dramatic and probably permanent changes to the literary culture of Britain, including: the morphing of scattered memoirs into formal autobiographies; the rise of the realist novel as the indispensable genre of bourgeois life; the investment of culture with the power to effect epochal political change and rearrange readers' sexualities; the invention of vampires, robots, serial killers, and other new forms of monstrosity; the modernization of narrative pornography; and the rejuvenation of bardic poetry. At the same time British authors were trying and failing to manage the largest empire in history, both devising new ways to dominate the world through writing and interrupting the violence that imperialism—the so-called "final phase of capitalism"—produced.
This course engages the major theoretical questions posed by Victorian literature, questions which emerge from the unprecedented global suffusion of British imperial influence. How might the enormity of this new world be meaningfully represented in language? What new accounts of personhood, ethics, sexuality, ethnicity, evolution, and art are required? Dealing with these and related questions, we will perhaps come to understand the enduring power of Victorian literature to speak to our own moment of globalization and crisis—our perennial return to the unanswered questions and open wounds of the nineteenth century.
The texts for this course will be available at University Press Books, on Bancroft Way.
Dreiser, Theodore: Sister Carrie; Garcia Marquez, Gabriel: One Hundred Years of Solitude; Gibson, William: Neuromancer; Woolf, Virginia: Mrs. Dalloway; Zola, Emile: La Bete Humaine;
Recommended: Culler, Jonathan: Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction
This course is a general survey of the 20th-century novel. The novel is the quintessential form of experession of modernity and modern subjectivity. In this survey of key works of the century, we will explore the novel form as it is framed by these three thematics—history, modernism, and empire. These are some questions we will address: How have the vicissitudes of modernity led to a re-direction of historical narratiion within the novel? How has modernist aesthetic experimentation re-shaped the very form of the novel? And lastly, how has the phenomenon of imperialism, the asymmetrical relations of power between center and periphery, widened the scope of fictive milieu?
Please note the changes (made on May 17) in the book list, above.
Beckett, Samuel: Watt; Conrad, Joseph: Lord Jim; Ford, Ford Madox: The Good Soldier; Forster, E. M.: Howards End; Joyce, James: Ulysses; Rhys, Jean: Good Morning, Midnight; Woolf, Virginia: The Waves
The British novel in the first half of the twentieth century was a site of massive formal experimentation. Time, space, narrators, characters, and language were dismantled and reconfigured in startling new ways. In this survey, we will look at novelistic experiments by seven authors: Joseph Conrad, E. M. Forster, Ford Madox Ford, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Jean Rhys and Samuel Beckett. Using close reading and formal analysis, we ask what these experiments were. We will gather a set of varied and precise ways of talking about modernism's formal features, its philosophical issues and its social and historical context.
This course has been canceled (as of 4/6/17).
Douglass, Frederick: Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass; Emerson, Ralph Waldo: Nature and Selected Essays; Hawthorne, Nathaniel: The Scarlet Letter; Melville, Herman: Moby Dick; Thoreau, Henry David: Walden and Civil Disobedience; Whitman, Walt: Leaves of Grass, The Original 1855 edition)
On July 4 fifty years after the Declaration of Independence was signed, both John Adams and Thomas Jefferson died, an astonishing coincidence that many Americans took to signify the ending of the revolutionary era, and the beginning of a new phase in American nationality. They had little in their national past to draw upon in forming a sense of identity, and the material and cultural sparseness of the present seemed to offer little more, so they began to think of themselves as forerunners to an historically unprecedented future greatness to be realized in the vast territorial expanse that the U.S. had become. This idealizing imagination of magnificent destiny sharply contrasted with social, political and economic realities—slavery, imperialist expansionism, Indian relocation, and the wrenching dislocations of emergent capitalism. Each of the works we will read in this class is an exploration of that contradiction, a measurement of the experiential consequences of those severe historical powers, and an evaluation of the credibility of American national optimism under the growing threat of civil war.
Class meetings will mix lecture and discussion. I will be referring to individual passages to be discussed by page number, so you should purchase the assigned editions of the books (being ordered through the campus bookstore) to make following along easier. Two eight-page essays and a final exam will be required, along with regular attendance.
A survey of U.S. literature from the Civil War through 1900, with special attention to the years following Reconstruction and to rise of literary realism and naturalism. Authors will include Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Louisa May Alcott, Mark Twain, Stephen Crane, Charles Chesnutt, William Dean Howells, Henry James, and Edith Wharton.
Hemingway, E.: The Sun Also Rises; Hurston, Z. N.: Their Eyes Were Watching God; Lewis, S.: It Can't Happen Here; Roth , H.: Call it Sleep; West, N.: The Day of the Locust; Wright, R.: Native Son
The aim of this course will be to capture the aesthetic and political extremes of the first half of the twentieth century. We will examine conflicting efforts to bridge the boundary between art and life against the backdrop of two world wars and economic depression, as well as ongoing struggles for race, gender, and class-based equality. The course is structured around three interrelated oppositions—modernism versus realism, protest literature versus folk literature, and fascism versus communism. These oppositions subsequently gave way to more sanguine notions of cultural freedom amid an “American Century” that was only first articulated in 1941. As we will see, however, these oppositions provide a useful precedent for considering what seems to be a new age of extremes in the contemporary United States.
Note: Since the reading list may change, please don't purchase books until after the first class.
Brown, William Wells: Clotel; Chesnutt, Charles W.: The Marrow of Tradition; Douglass, Frederick: Narrative of the Life; Du Bois, W. E. B.: The Souls of Black Folk; Equiano, Olaudah: Interesting Narrative; Harper, Frances E. W.: Iola Leroy; Hopkins, Pauline E.: Of One Blood; Jacobs, Harriet: Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl; Walker, David: Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World; Wheatley, Phillis: Poems on Various Subjects
Additional readings will be made available in PDF format.
A survey of major works produced in the context of slavery and its aftermath.
Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi: Americanah; Hurston, Zora Neale: Tell My Horse; McKay, Claude: Home to Harlem; Rankine, Claudia: Citizen; Scott, Dennis: An Echo in the Bone
Please note the revised book list (above) as of July 18.
Films: Daughters of the Dust, dir. Julie Dash; Moonlight, dir. Barry Jenkins, writer Tarell Alvin McCraney
Music: 'Nuff Said, Nina Simone (1968); Marcus Garvey, Burning Spear (1975); Lemonade, Beyoncé (2016)
Course Reader with works by Marcus Garvey, Alain Locke, Katherine Dunham, James Baldwin, Stuart Hall, Saidiya Hartman, and others, available at Copy Central, Bancroft Avenue
Just find that dappled dream of yours
Come on back and see me when you can
– Clarence Carter & Nina Simone & Roberta Flack, et al
The black diaspora is, of course and amongst other things, a literary tradition: a complex, internally differentiated set of texts produced by black writers located in almost every nation across the globe, equal in complexity and variation to the modern concept of race that is inextricably tied to its formation. But what conceptual framework could possibly contain such a dazzlingly various literary canon? In this class we’ll read novels, watch films, listen to music, and look at art to begin to answer that question. As the title of the course suggests, we’ll begin with a certain supposition: what happens when we think of black diasporic creativity as emerging between imperative and dream (…you gotta do); between roving and recovery (come on back...)? What, then, are the necessities of black invention; and what are its luxuries, its excesses, its pleasures? And what changes, politically, conceptually, when we attend to diasporic difference as we do to the shifts in tonality and meaning between versions of a song?
The texts for this course will be available at University Press Books, on Bancroft Way.
Asbury, Herbert: The French Quarter; Bechet, Sidney: Treat It Gentle; Evans, Freddi: Congo Square; Hall, Gwendolyn Midlo: Africans in Colonial Louisiana; Hurston, Zora Neale: Mules and Men; Lomax, Alan: Mister Jelly Roll; Powell, Lawrence: The Accidental City; Tallant, Robert: Gumbo Ya Ya
Documentaries: Always for Pleasure (Les Blank, 1978), All on a Mardi Gras Day (Royce Osborn, 2003), When the Levees Broke (Spike Lee, 2006).
All other texts and images will be made available on BCourses in PDF format.
We will consider the representation of New Orleans in four related formats: (1) historical monograph, (2) folklore collection, (3) as-told-to autobiography, and (4) cinematic documentary. Our premise is that New Orleans is stranger than fiction.
This class is cross-listed with American Studies C111E, section 1.
Abel, Jessica: La Perdida; Corpi, Lucha: Black Widow's Wardrobe; Guillermo Gomez Pena et al.: Codex Espangliensis: From Columbus to the Border Patrol; Hernandez, Gilbert: Love and Rockets Vol. 14: Luba Conquers the World; Hernandez, Gilbert: Love and Rockets Vol. 8: "Blood of Palomar"; Hernandez, Jaime: Love and Rockets Vol. 13: Chester Square; Hernandez Brothers: Love and Rockets, New Stories no. 8; Joseph Rodriguez & Ruben Martinez: East Side Stories: Gang Life in East L.A.; Rechy, John: The Miraculous Day of Amalia Gomez: A Novel; Romo, Ito: The Border Is Burning; Romo, Ito: The Bridge/El Puente; Serros, Michele: Chicana Falsa: And Other Stories of Death, Identity, & Oxnard
Short pieces (via bCourses) by Ricardo Bracho, Alice Bag, Harry Gamboa, Chingo Bling, La Santa Cecilia, and Cristina Ibarra
What is Chicanx popular culture? We answer this question by first exploring the meaning of these three terms separately. Chicana/o/x, popular (or lo popular), and culture have rich political trajectories that span the transnational context of the Americas and that reach back to the nineteenth century. The course begins with three to four weeks on the genealogy of these three terms, and some essays on aesthetics, politics, and identity. We then turn to the study of popular culture by examining various kinds of objects and texts produced by Chicanx artists since the rise of the Chicano movement in the 1960s through the "post"-nationalist, transgendered present: graphic novels, photographs, visual culture, performance, literature and film. The meaning of each of these terms—Chicana/o->x, popular, culture—is always shifting, determined by the social and political contexts of cultural production, contexts these objects allow us to explore and understand in their full complexity. Our goal is simple: to better understand the relationship that existed or exists between the Chicana/o/x artists and the populations they create art for and about through cultural products. What are the multifaceted dimensions and the multiple histories contained in these cultural products? How is "popular culture" different from mass culture or high culture? What is the difference between popular culture and cultura popular? What is the relationship between Chicana/o culture, Mexcian culture, and the Chicanx present? How do objects of culture address questions of identity, asethetics, geography, history, politics, and political art? These are the questions this course seeks to investigate and address.
Course reader available at Instant Copying and Laser Printing
Modes of Writing: Writing Fiction, Poetry, and the Personal Essay
This course will introduce students to the study of creative writing--fiction, poetry, and (to a lesser degree) the personal essay. Students will learn to talk critically about these forms and begin to feel comfortable and confident writing within these genres. Students will write a variety of exercises and more formal pieces and partake in class workshops where their work will be edited and critiqued by other students in the class.
Please note that although Melanie Abrams will be the instructor of record for this section of English 141, Professor Robert Hass and Lecturer Melanie Abrams will actually team-teach the two sections of the course. Students will enroll in one section and spend six weeks reading and writing poetry with Hass, and six weeks reading and writing fiction with Abrams. Both instructors will collaborate over the last two weeks to teach the personal essay.
This course is open to English majors only.
Course reader available at Instant Copying and laser Printing
Modes of Writing: Writing Fiction, Poetry, and the Personal Essay
This course will introduce students to the study of creative writing--ficction, poetry, and (to a lesser degree) the personal essay. Students will learn to talk critically about these forms and begin to feel comfortable and confident writing within these genres. Students will write a variety of exercises and more formal pieces and partake in class workshops where their work will be edited and critiqued by other students in the class.
Please note that although Robert Hass will be the instructor of record for this section of English 141, Lecturer Melanie Abrams and Professor Robert Hass will actually team-teach the two sections of the course. Students will enroll in one section and spend six weeks reading and writing poetry with Hass, and six weeks reading and writing fiction with Abrams. Both instructors will collaborate over the last two weeks to teach the personal essay.
This course is open to English majors only.
Furman, Laura: The O. Henry Prize Stories 2016
A course reader, which will be available from Instant Copying & Laser Printing ((510) 704-9700; 2138 University Ave, Berkeley, CA 94704).
A short fiction workshop. Over the course of the semester, each student will write and revise two stories. Each participant in the workshop will edit student-written stories and will write a formal critique of each manuscript. Students are required to attend two literary readings over the course of the semester and write a short report about each reading they attend. Students will also take part in online discussions about fiction. Attendance is mandatory.
Throughout the semester, we will read published stories from various sources and also essays by working writers about fiction and the writing life. The intent of the course is to have the students confront the problems faced by writers of fiction and to discover the techniques that enable writers to construct a convincing and engaging representation of reality on the page.
Only continuing UC Berkeley students are eligible to apply for this course. To be considered for admission, please electronically submit 10-15 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 PM, THURSDAY, APRIL 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 course reader
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 (our only text). 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 PM, THURSDAY, APRIL 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.
Padgett, Ron, ed.: The Teachers and Writers Handbook of Poetic Forms; Pinsky, Robert: The Sounds of Poetry: A Brief Guide
Course reader
Soundings: A Poetry Workshop
"How you sound??" the poet Amiri Baraka asked. This workshop is designed to be an exploration of "voice" through poetic form, music, kitchen appliances, rush hour traffic, and the natural world. Our lens for cultivating "deep listening" is wide and may consist of touchstones by poets John Taggart, Gertrude Stein, Theodore Roethke, Lucille Clifton, and N. H. Pritchard as well as musicians John Cage, Alice Coltrane, Igor Stravinsky, and Sun Ra. There will be assigned readings and class discussion of craft and form, but expect to focus primarily on your own poetry's "soundscapes" throughout the semester.
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 PM, THURSDAY, APRIL 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 PM, THURSDAY, APRIL 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 course reader.
This course is a nonfiction workshop in which you'll learn to write about many different types of art and culture, from TV and music to theater and visual art—in other words, the genres discussed in the culture-and-arts pages of major newspapers and magazines. By the end of the class, you should come away with a working knowledge of how to write reviews, profiles, "think pieces," and essays of cultural criticism. For examples of student writing from an earlier version of the course, visit "The Annex" at www.medium.com/the-annex.
Our semester will be guided by a few basic questions: what can we demand from culture? What does it mean to love or hate a song, TV show, or work of art? How are we changed by our encounters with specific works of art? And how do our arguments about a particular piece of "culture" connect to broader dreams about politics, freedom, community, and our sense of the possible?
Two special features of the course bear specific mention. First, on several occasions, we will be honored to host a visit with an esteemed writer, whose work will be featured in the class. Second, the class will at times take us out of the classroom and have us engage with artists and the public. For one assignment in particular, you will have the opportunity to connect with local artists. You are also invited to publish some of your work in digital form so as to shape ongoing cultural conversations in the Bay Area and at large.
Only continuing UC Berkeley students are eligible to apply for this course. To be considered for admission, please electronically submit 5-10 double-spaced pages of your creative nonfiction (no poetry or academic writing) by clicking on the link below; fill out the application you'll find there and attach the writing sample as a Word document or .rtf file. The deadline for completing this application process is 11 PM, THURSDAY, APRIL 27.
Also be sure to read the paragraph concerning creative writing courses on page 1 of the instructions are of this Announcement of Classes for further information regarding enrollment in such courses.
A course reader will be available from Copy Central on Bancroft Way.
This is a workshop in the translation of poetry into English. Workshop members will develop a project and submit a translation a week (together with the original poem and a word-for-word version), and the work of the class will be for members to give one another feedback on their translations and to talk with one another about the pleasures and perils of the process. There will be weekly reading in the theory and practice of verse translation. The final project will be for each workshop member to produce a chapbook of a dozen or so translations.
Only continuing UC Berkeley students are eligible to apply for this course. To be considered for admission, please electronically apply by clicking on the link below; fill out the application you'll find there and attach the following items as a Word document or .rtf file: (1) 5-8 pages of YOUR OWN translations of either your own poems or other people's poems (or a combination of the two) into English, as well as the corresponding pages in the original language; (2) a brief statement (no more than a sentence or two) describing the translation project you hope to work on; and (3) a one-paragraph statement of your interest in translation.
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.
This course will offer an introduction to literary theory with a focus on twentieth- and twenty-first-century political approaches to the study of literature, including theories of Marxism, feminism, sexuality, race, post-colonialism, and ecocriticism. The course will strive to provide students with an understanding of the basic concepts, methods, and vocabulary employed in these various theoretical systems, as well as the similarities and differences between them. We will ground our study of literary theory by reading and discussing selected works of short fiction or poems. The course will require a substantial amount of reading and writing. You will need to purchase two course readers: one will include theoretical/critical works, and the other will include literary works.
The Book of Lamentations; Augustine: Confessions; Foucault, Michel: Fearless Speech; Pope, Alexander: The Dunciad; Shakespeare, W: King Lear; Silverman, Sarah: Jesus Is Magic; Simpson, O. J.: If I Did It: Confessions of the Killer; Solanas, Valerie: SCUM Manifesto; Walker, David: Walker's Appeal
We endure a difficult relation to free speech. Most arguments on the topic, whether for or against, focus on the capacity of language to harm others, directly or indirectly, and therefore concern the scope and nature of necessary prohibitions of speech. In this class, we will approach the topic quite differently, and ask how we recognize free speech, whether in ourselves or others; how we differentiate it from “unfree” speech; and how it may variously enable or jam the operations of power. First, we will pursue these questions in philosophical, theoretical, and psychoanalytical registers, and inquire whether free speech is desirable (with Kant), whether it is psychologically possible (with Freud), and whether the public telling of unpopular truths may weaken, rather than regulate, the democratic institutions the practice apparently serves to uphold (with Foucault). We will quickly, however, move on to consider the more practical and more literary-historical matter of genres of free speech, and examine the literary modes most associated with risky truth-telling. These will include: the jeremiad, in which the ruin of a civilization is prophesied, at risk to the prophet’s position and reputation (Lamentations, David Walker); the comedy, in which the privileged figure of the fool is empowered to disclose unspeakable political truths (King Lear, Sarah Silverman); the confession, in which a guilty party discloses the nature of his crimes under condition of aesthetic absolution (O. J. Simpson, Augustine); and the polemic, in which an apparently outrageous discourse articulates the social location of subjects outside the bounds of mainstream opinion (The SCUM Manifesto, A Modest Proposal). The class will therefore assess through historical examples Plato’s famous exclusion of poets from his ideal Republic, and will maintain an occasional focus on the frequent (and, indeed, often jeremiadical, comic, confessional, and/or polemical) evocations of free speech in our contemporary historical and institutional climate.
The texts for this course will be available at University Press Books, on Bancroft Way.
This section of English 165 is open to English majors only.
Ashbery, John: Nest of Ninnies; Harney, Stefano: The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study; Philip, M. NourBese: Zong!
A course reader will be available from Bancroft Copy.
This seminar/workshop, co-taught by Lyn Hejinian and Daniel Benjamin, will be devoted to collaboratively composed writing in a range of genres, including poetry, short fiction, performance, and critical essays. Multiple examples of collaborations will be provided, and some theoretical readings will be assigned. All readings are intended to further inquiry into the aesthetic and social characteristics that are special to collaboratively authored writings. Meanwhile, the principle focus of the course will involve course participants in undertaking collaborations themselves.
This small seminar will be limited to 12 students.
Butler, Octavia: Dawn; Delaney, Samuel: Babel-17; Duffy, Damian: Kindred: A Graphic Novel; Johnson, Mat: Pym; LaValle, Victor: Destroyer; Laymon, Kiese: Long Division; Lovecraft, H.P.: The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym; Schuyler, George: Black No More
Screenings of a Star Trek episode (1966), Sun Ra, Space is the Place (1974), John Sayles, The Brother from Another Planet (1984). Stories by Octavia Butler, Ray Bradbury, W.E.B. DuBois, Samuel Delaney, Derrick Bell.
This course addresses two genres—black fiction and science fiction—at their point of intersection, which is sometimes called Afrofuturism. The umbrella term “black fiction” will include texts that issue out of and speculate about the African-American experience. The category “science fiction” will comprise texts that speculate about alternative, cosmic, dystopian, and future worlds. Overlapping—and mutually transforming—concepts will include: genetics, race, diaspora, miscegenation, double consciousness, technology, ecology, biology, language, history, futurity, space (inner and outer), and, of course, the alien. We will consider stories, novels, graphic novels, comics, films, music, and television clips.
See below.
One of the ideas behind this course offering is that poetry and essays (life-writing, creative non-fiction, “essaying,” etc.) have similar aims or field-marks—both are literary vehicles of exploration and documentation; both value experimental approaches; and both traffic with versions of the incomplete.
Another idea is that various wide particulars make up each of us—social class, race, gender, place of birth, etc. These particulars endow us with privileges, deficits, blindnesses, insights, and the like. Prompts in this course will encourage students to document these and explore how they qualify us (and how or if they obligate us) to “speak” from various positions. The purpose of writing in this course is to engage public language on one hand and personal (meaning specific) observations and experiences on the other. The purpose here is to pursue consciousness. The experiment is to attempt to do so in the forms of poetry and the personal essay.
A third idea is that hybrid forms—works that defy a single categorization or order, works that join rather than exclude—are of great interest.
Some points of departure:
How Scared Should People on the Border Be?
(New York Times headline, 31 March 2017)
The situation is aggravated by the tremor that breaks into discourse on race. It is further complicated by the fact that the habit of ignoring race is understood to be a graceful, even generous, liberal gesture. To notice is to recognize an already discredited difference.
(Toni Morrison)
The sea cannot be fenced,/ el Mar does not stop at borders.
(Gloria Anzaldua)
Writing. Reading. Discussion. Collaborative Projects. Class field trips. Performance.
Texts (tentative list): Borderlands/ La Frontera, by Gloria Anzaldua; The Lemonade album, by Beyonce; Marvelous Bones of Time, by Brenda Coultas; The Art of the Personal Essay, by Philip Lopate; American Born Chinese, by Glenn Wang; Cane, by Jean Toomer. Supplemental readings by Dorothy Allison, James Baldwin, CAConrad, Gish Jen, X. J. Kennedy, Maxine Hong Kingston, Claudia Rankine, others.
Brown, W. W.: Clotel; Cesaire, A. : A Tempest; Conde, M.: I, Tituba; Morrison, T. : A Mercy; Shakespeare, W.: The Tempest
course reader
In this course, we will read both historical and literary texts to explore how racial categories came into being in New World cultures and how these categories were tested, inhabited, and re-imagined by the human actors they sought to define. Our study will be organized around four early American sites: Landfall in the North Atlantic, Pocahontas at Jamestown, Witchcraft at Salem, and Jefferson’s Virginia. In each of these places Native, European, and African ways of making meaning collided, and concepts of racial difference were formed. These sites will function as interpretive nodes; for each, we will read a selection of primary documents and then explore how racial constructions forged at each site have been re- imagined and revised throughout American cultural history to the present day.
This course satisfies the pre-1800 requirement for the English major.
This course satisfies UC Berkeley's American Cultures requirement.
Morrison, Toni: Jazz
In this course, we will think about the strangely vital links between literature and music. Beginning in the early nineteenth century, we’ll track a series of crossings, conjunctions, and fissures. We’ll think about the place of music, and of ideas about music, within literary Romanticism. We’ll watch what happens as classical music in the mid-nineteenth century becomes increasingly literary-minded, and how poets in the late nineteenth century experimented with sound and rhythm. We’ll pair a few of the key texts of literary modernism with touchstones of modern music. We’ll trace the emergence of blues poetry and jazz poetry in the Harlem Renaissance and into the 1960s. We’ll watch the basic categories of music and literature dissolve and reform in the work of avant-garde writers and musicians throughout the twentieth century. We’ll speculate about the literariness of folk and pop music and the poetics of hip hop. Throughout, we’ll watch poetry and narrative attempt to be like music, and songs and scores act like literature.
The great majority of texts and music will be available in a course reader and/or on bCourses, and students will be responsible for writing two essays and taking a final exam. We'll read texts by William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Keats, Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Stéphane Mallarmé, T.S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Willa Cather, Ezra Pound, Langston Hughes, Toni Morrison, Fred Moten, Rita Dove, Bob Dylan, Nina Simone, Linton Kwesi Johnson, and Lin-Manual Miranda, among a number of others. And we'll listen to a lot of music.
Baldwin, James: The Devil Finds Work; Bryant, Tisa : Unexplained Presence; Watts, Philip: Roland Barthes' Cinema
Taking as a point of departure James Baldwin’s dazzling work of film criticism, The Devil Finds Work, this course introduces students to some of the best writing on film that describes the encounter with cinema—and with particular films—as formative of the minority subject. How are our experiences of race, gender, and sexuality informed by our encounters with cinema? How do those encounters generate a writing practice that gives an account of those films and speaks about and in some cases back to them? We will read great essays about cinema, by writers including Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, Virginia Woolf, Susan Sontag, Stanley Cavell, Roland Barthes, Tisa Bryant, D.A. Miller, and Kaja Silverman. We will consider how these authors make their arguments, what their close attention to film language allows us to see that we didn’t see before, and—especially—how they interrogate the relationship between film aesthetics and the politics of race, gender, and sexuality. We will approach the essay as a form in its own right, one that rewards close formal analysis. In the last part of the course, we will look at film works that themselves function like essays, offering critical perspectives on race, gender, sexuality, and the phenomenology of cinema.
The course includes a weekly screening, which will be held on Thursday evenings--sometimes 5-7 PM at 142 Dwinelle, and sometimes 7-10 PM in the Pacific Film Archive's Barbara Osher Theater (on Center Street), as indicated.
This course is crosslisted with Film 140.
Coetzee, J.M.: Slow Man; Haddon, M.: Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time; Keller, Helen: Story of My Life; Kleege, Georgina: Blind Rage: Letters to Helen Keller; Melville, Herman: The Shorter Novels of Herman Melville; Oe, Kenzaburo: A Quiet Life; Shakespeare: Richard III; Wordsworth and Coleridge: Lyrical Ballads, 1798;
Recommended: Davis, Lennard: Disability Studies Reader
This course will have several components. An introductory section will provide students with a grounding in disability theory; we’ll wonder whether it’s possible to develop a common “theory” adequate to various disability categories (sensory, cognitive, motor; illness/injury; ugliness/fatness/queerness; legal disabilities of race/gender/class/religion). We will then shift to an examination of the role of literature in the "humanization" of disability, and read a series of texts that work at once to represent disability and to "disable" generic norms. Rather than focus simply on literary representations of disability, we will try to think about the concept of literature via the category of disability. We are told that “poems make nothing happen" (Auden); that dramatic performance and fictional utterance are peculiarly "parasitic" forms of speech (Austin/Searle). Noting the negativity of these definitions, we will consider how literature can operate to disable "normal," instrumental assumptions about communication. Finally, we'll consider the extent to which print literature is "disabled" by the advent of new media--which will give us a chance to consider ways media and other designed objects, including designed environments, produce as well as neutralize disabilities.
Assignments will include two short (5-8 page) critical essays, a group or individual presentation project, and regular discussion posts. There will be no final exam, but regular attendance is required.
This is a core course for the Disability Studies Minor.
Booth, Stephen: Shakespeare's Sonnets; Heaney, Seamus: Beowulf: A New Verse Translation, Bilingual Edition; Woolf, Virginia: Mrs. Dalloway;
Recommended: Pinker, Steven: The Language Instinct
A photocopied course reader containing most required readings and literary texts.
The medium of literature is language. This course aims to deepen understanding of what this means through consideration of how certain literary forms can be defined as grammatical forms. These literary forms include meter; rhyme and alliteration; syntactic parallelism; formulas of oral composition; and special narrative uses of pronouns, tenses and other subjective features of language to express point of view and represent speech and thought. The emphasis will be on literature in English, but comparisons with literature in other languages will also be drawn. No knowledge of linguistics will be presupposed, but linguistic concepts will be introduced, explained and used.
A course reader, which will be available from Instant Copying & Laser Printing ((510) 704-9700; 2138 University Ave, Berkeley, CA 94704).
The lyf so short, the crafte so longe to lerne…
-- Chaucer
This course will investigate how authors craft stories, so that both non-writers and writers may gain a new perspective on reading stories. In thinking of short stories as artefacts produced by humans, we will consider – without any assertions of certainty – how those people may have experienced themselves and their world, and how history and culture may have participated in the making of these stories. So, in this course we will explore the making, purposes, and pleasures of the short story form. We will read – widely, actively and carefully – many published stories from various countries in order to begin to understand the conventions of the form, and how this form may function in diverse cultures. Students will write a short story and revise it; engaging with a short story as a writer will aid them in their investigations as readers and critics. Students will also write two analytical papers about stories we read in class. Attendance is mandatory.
Course Reader
This course will examine the historical trajectory of a very fuzzy category, “lyric,” from its identified origins and early practice in English (anonymous medieval lyrics) 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 modes, 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.
See the course description, below.
A course reader is also required. Details TBA.
In 2007, Zadie Smith edited an anthology of short fiction entitled The Book of Other People. In her preface to this volume, Smith describes her desire to give contemporary writers the opportunity to try on “different skins,” to wander “into landscapes one would not have placed them in previously.” In 1993, Toni Morrison had already stressed the potentially high stakes of seeking out an encounter with difference through the novel. Morrison declared her work as a novelist to be not just the imagination of “others,” but the risky encounter with strange or alien value systems: “to project consciously into the danger zones such others may represent for me.”
This course explores major works of Anglo-American fiction that link the value of the novel as a literary genre to the ethical, social or political good of encountering people different from oneself. Within this tradition, the aesthetic accomplishment of the novel is linked to its formal resources for depicting otherness. Students should be prepared to read widely. The literary tradition that we are studying includes George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1871), William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying (1930), Virginia Woolf’s The Waves (1931), Toni Morrison's Sula (1973), J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace (1999) and Elizabeth Costello (2003), and Zadie Smith’s On Beauty (2005). Lectures will focus on the narrative techniques that each novelist develops in response to the value and difficulty of knowing and representing social others. We will consider how these narrative techniques contribute to an aesthetics of otherness, which by 2007 confers upon the novel a privileged status as the literary genre most qualified to be “the book of other people.”
Written course requirements include two seven-page papers and a final exam.
Burgess, Anthony: A Clockwork Orange; Fleming, Ian: Dr. No; Lessing, Doris: The Golden Notebook; Selvon, Samuel: The Lonely Londoners ; Spark, Muriel: The Driver's Seat
Required course reader from MetroPublishing.
This seminar will examine the fiction, drama, poetry, film, and music of Great Britain in the 1960s. Topics will possibly include: post-war and post-Empire; race and immigration; economic austerity and welfare policy; social realism and dystopia; feminism; “Angry Young Men”; Swinging London and mod; obscenity; the decriminalization of homosexuality; the British Invasion; and the Cold War. Course grades will be based on a 4-5 page paper, a 15-20 page research paper, and in-class discussion.
Readings will possibly include: fiction by Doris Lessing, Muriel Spark, Sam Selvon, Anthony Burgess, Alan Sillitoe, and Ian Fleming; plays by Samuel Beckett, Caryl Churchill, Harold Pinter, Shelagh Delaney, Joe Orton, and Edward Bond; poetry by Kamau Brathwaite, Stevie Smith, Seamus Heaney, Philip Larkin, Ted Hughes, and JH Prynne; films Seven Up, Dr. No, Kes, Victim, Women in Love, Quadrophenia, and A Hard Day’s Night; albums by the Beatles, Rolling Stones, and Zombies; and various political texts, including the British Nationality Act of 1948 and the Commonwealth Immigrant Acts of 1962 and 1968, the 1959 Obscene Publications Act, the Wolfenden Report, and Enoch Powell’s 1968 “Address to the General Meeting of the West Midlands Area Conservative Centre” (a.k.a., the “Rivers of Blood” speech).
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.
Dickens, C.: A Tale of Two Cities; Eliot, G.: Middlemarch; Flaubert, G.: Sentimental Education; Scott, W.: Waverley; or, 'Tis Sixty Years Since; Tolstoy, L.: War and Peace
“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way—in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.” Charles Dickens’ famous opening to A Tale of Two Cities (1859) seems to begin with an effort to characterize a portion of the past, the years leading up to and including the French Revolution. Instead, though, of giving us a clear sense of what the past was really about, Dickens presents both the era and efforts to capture the era in the self-consciously complex terms of contradiction, paradox, and comparison. For Dickens the represented past is both a historical fact and a conceptual problem. In this class we’ll look at a number of nineteenth-century historical novels. Reading works by Sir Walter Scott, Dickens, George Eliot, Leo Tolstoy, and Gustave Flaubert, we’ll ask what it means to try to capture real and often famous events in the form of narrative fiction. Does a novel about history always imply one or another philosophy of history? What does it mean to treat real historical figures—like Napoleon—within the context of imaginative prose? How much time—ten years, sixty years, a hundred years—needs to pass before remembered events become properly historical? What happens when the political conditions of the past are remembered, revived, or revised in relation to the politics of the present? What, indeed, does writing about the past have to say about the condition, the needs, the dreams of the present?
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.
Beckett, Samuel: Echo's Bones; Beckett, Samuel: More Pricks than Kicks; Bowen, Elizabeth: The Collected Stories of Elizabeth Bowen; Joyce, James: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man; Joyce, James: Dubliners; O'Brienn, Flann: The Third Policeman; Stoker, Bram: Dracula; Yeats, Jack B.: The Aramanthers
A course reader that may include excerpts from Sheridan Le Fanu, Lady Wilde (Speranza), Lady Gregory, W.B. Yeats, Jack B. Yeats, Seamus Heaney, Samuel Beckett, Hester Dowden, Seán O'Casey, John M. Synge, and others.
Life is full of death; the steps of the living cannot press the earth without disturbing the ashes of the dead—we walk upon our ancestors—the globe itself is one vast churchyard.
—Charles Maturin
This class will focus on a series of Irish writers who, in the period of crisis culminating in the establishment of an independent Irish nation (roughly, from about 1890 to about 1940), all seem to organize their works with recourse to notions of the afterlife—the purgatorial, the ghostly, the vestigial. We will attend to this recurring idea as both a theme and a trope; in other words, we will seek to understand how and why these writers are concerned with representing a purgatorial world, but also how the afterlife structures their works as a set of formal literary devices for thinking through a complex social and historical crisis. We likewise will take the opportunity to learn a little bit about the history of Ireland in the period, particularly in its relationship to Great Britain: first as a colonial territory, then as a Free State racked by civil war, and then as a fledgling nation whose autonomy is threatened by being drawn into the international conflict that becomes World War II.
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.
Doctorow, E. L.: The Book of Daniel; Malraux, A.: Man's Fate; Platonov, A.: The Foundation Pit; Serge, V.: Conquered City; Stoppard, T.: The Coast of Utopia
This seminar will piece together a cross-regional, cross-linguistic genre that we will loosely call “the literature of revolution”—texts that try to capture (and, at times, direct) great historical and political upheaval. Our starting point will be the French Revolution, our ending point will be the Arab Spring, but our primary focus will be the troubled, international history of twentieth-century communism. Throughout the semester, we will trace how literary texts allow for multiple ways of theorizing revolution and, more broadly, the flow of history. How do these texts help us to understand the tendency for revolutionary illusions to give way to disillusion? How do revolutions both expand and limit creative possibilities? What does revolution mean in the twenty-first century—long after communism’s collapse and the supposed “end of history”?
Note: Since the reading list may change, please don't purchase books until after the first class.
Please read the paragraph about English 190 on page 2 of the instructions area of this Announcement of Classes for more details about enrolling in or wait-listing for this course.
Please click here for more information about enrollment in English 190.
Bernard Scudder, trans.: The Saga of Grettir the Strong; Bjork, Robert E., ed. & trans.: Old English Shorter Poems: Wisdom and Lyric; Byock, Jesse L., trans.: The Saga of King Hrolf Kraki; Hobsbawm, E. J.: Bandits; Knight, Stephen and Ohlgren,Thomas, eds.: Robin Hood and Other Outlaw Tales; Kunz, Keneva, trans.: The Vinland Sagas; Liuzza, R. M., ed. & trans.: Beowulf; McKim, Anne, ed.: The Wallace: Selections; Palsson, Hermann and Edwards, Paul, trans.: Eyrbygga saga
Shorter readings and additional secondary literature will be made available on bcourses.
This course focuses on murderers, monsters, and thieves. Zombies, although not our main focus, also arise. Such figures are excluded from society and cut off from their fellow human beings, whether because they have committed an unpardonable crime or are undead. This course examines how that exclusion helps to define the society doing it as well as the outcasts themselves. What crimes are unpardonable, and why? Why are some outcasts exiled or outlawed, some treated as monsters, and some actually monstrous? What does it mean to be an outlaw, someone literally outside the law? Over the course of the semester, we will read texts from medieval England and Scandinavia featuring such characters, with an eye toward their rhetorical construction as a society's insiders and outsiders.
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 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.
Eliot, George: Adam Bede; Eliot, George: Daniel Deronda; Eliot, George: Felix Holt; Eliot, George: Middlemarch; Eliot, George: The Lifted Veil; Eliot, George: The Mill on the Floss
A course reader will include selections of George Eliot’s poetry and prose nonfiction, as well as selections drawn from the writings of thinkers contemporary to her, including Charles Darwin, Auguste Comte, Charles Dickens, John Stewart Mill, and George Henry Lewes.
Note the changes in the topic, book list, and course description for this section of English 190 as of early June, 2017.
Beginning at the age of 37, publishing under a male pen name,George Eliot reinvented the novel as we know it. Over the course of seven novels, she showed how, “with a single drop of ink for a mirror,” the realist novel could forge deep into characters’ inner lives, as well as far beyond them, to explain social change, resurrect lost pasts, and address pressing scientific questions. In this seminar, we’ll study Eliot's novels—what Virginia Woolf called “the incomplete story of George Eliot herself.” We’ll ask how meaningful Woolf’s link—between Eliot’s own story and Eliot’s fictional stories—might be. How do we organize questions of form, gender, voice, and genre through the figure of the author, and how did Eliot herself conceive of authorship through her writing? Through readings of five of Eliot’s major novels, as well as her short fiction, nonfiction prose, and poetry, we’ll track Eliot’s engagement with the conventions of the realist novel, her experimentations with narrative form and voice, and her relationship to the scientific, political, aesthetic, and philosophical debates contemporary to her.
The texts for this class will be available at University Press Books, on Bancroft Way.
Please click here for more information about enrollment in English 190.
Akomfrah, John: The Nine Muses; Bastos, Augusto Roa: I the Supreme; Carpentier, Alejo: Explosion in the Cathedral; Danticat, Edwidge: Brother, I'm Dying; Delillo, Don: Libra; Derrida, Jacques: Archive Fever; LeGuin, Ursula: The Dispossessed; Morrison, Toni: A Mercy; Nietzsche, Friedrich: The Use and Abuse of History; Trouillot, Michel-Rolph: Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of the Past; White, Hayden: Metahistory; de Certeau, Michel: The Writing of History
Historiography is a study of the writing of history; indeed, it is an examination of the problematic of historical writing—how does one derive and form a coherent narrative of what has happened from incomplete and fragmented artifacts of the past? In this class we will focus on the interplay between the literary and history. Our questions: How does literature address the interstices of history—the past that evades narration (the Haitian Revolution), the agents absent from the archive (the enslaved or refugees)? What is the relation between the writing of history and power? Can we narrate history from a fictional future? What happens when an historical event transitions into conspiracy (the Kennedy assassination)?
Please read the paragraph about English 190 on page 2 of the instructions area of this Announcement of Clases for more details about enrolling in or wait-listing for this course.
Please click here for more information about enrollment in English 190.
Coetzee, J.M.: Disgrace; Conrad, Joseph: Heart of Darkness; James, Henry: The Ambassadors; James, Henry: The Turn of the Screw; Melville, Herman: Benito Cereno; Poe, Edgar Allan: The Purloined Letter
Films: Rope (dir., Alfred Hitchcock); The Lives of Others (dir., Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck); The White Ribbon (dir., Michael Haneke)
Literary critics have made suspicion an essential aspect of what it means to read. When we set out to do a “suspicious reading” of a text we assume a few things about it: that its true meaning consists in what it cannot say, know, or understand about itself; that such meaning lies at a certain remove from the reader; and that “symptoms” of meaning’s buried presence need to be “demystified” by the critical reader. This is a class on suspicious and non-suspicious modes of reading. We will interrogate the roots of suspicious reading, most pointedly in the writings of Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud, but we will also be unafraid in asking whether conceiving literary works as hiding their meaning or possessing an “unconscious” remain relevant ways to conceptualize texts in an era of fake news, unsubstantiated allegations, conspiracy theories, and “alternative facts.” Should we continue to see literature as a laboratory for critique, where we interrogate the work of art and diagnose its hidden anxieties and meanings, or as a possible resource for alternatives to suspicion? To answer this question, we will explore recent shifts toward an “ethics of reading” that reorients reading from something we do to the text to something that is done to us (where ethics refers not to the situation of readers and characters, or the author’s worldview, but to the varieties of formal relationality that works of literature afford in the process of reading -- i.e., building networks, communicating with intellectual strangers).
The course takes up its topic in three distinct observances: [1] the literary and cinematic tradition in which a hermeneutics of suspicion is subjected to scrutiny (Henry James, The Turn of the Screw; Edgar Allan Poe, The Purloined Letter; Herman Melville, Benito Cereno; A. Hitchcock, Rope; F. H von Donnersmarck, The Lives of Others); [2] the literary-critical turn toward “surface reading,” a portmanteau term that captures reading practices willing “to respect rather than reject what is in plain view,” in the words of Rita Felski, particularly those attributes of a text that in the past may have been dismissed as either too feminine or too queer, i.e., style, texture, surface, the ephemeral, the obvious, and the enchanting; and [3] works of literature and film that reward attentiveness to the play of their surfaces (Henry James, The Ambassadors; J. M. Coetzee, Disgrace; Michael Haneke, The White Ribbon).
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.
Carroll, Lewis: The Annotated Alice; Lear, Edward: The Complete Nonsense; Seuss, Dr.: Horton Hatches the Egg; Seuss, Dr.: Your Favorite Seuss;
Recommended: Pinker, Steven: Words and Rules
A short photocopied reader containing miscellaneous secondary articles.
This course will explore nonsense as a literary genre, connecting its distinctive linguistic form to the ideas it takes up. In nonsense, conventional meanings of linguistic forms are prevented from arising, but the forms themselves are unimpeachable, and the system that created them allows new meanings to arise according to its own logic. This foregrounds the linguistic system itself, making nonsense of special interest to children learning language. At the same time, it lends nonsense an inherently subversive streak: amidst their humor and charm, the classic nineteenth-century English nonsense writers Lear and Carroll, and their American descendant Dr. Seuss, criticize educational practices, social inequality, environmental destruction, imperialism, capitalism and even philology. In class, we will explore the nonsense of these writers; in research papers, students may explore English nonsense literature from any period.
Please read the paragraph about English 190 on page 2 of the instructions area of this Announcement of Classes for more details about enrolling in or wait-listing for this course.
Please click here for more information about enrollment in English 190.
Atwood, Margaret: The Blind Assassin (2000); Barnes, Julian: The Sense of an Ending (2011); Cole, Teju: Open City (2011); Eskin, Blake: The Making and Unmaking of Binjamin Wilkomirski (2003); Gondry, Michel, and Kaufman, Charlie: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004); Ishiguro, Kazuo: Pale View of Hills (1982); McCarthy, Tom: Remainder (2005); McEwan, Ian: Atonement (2001); Murdoch, Iris: Jackson's Dilemma (1995); Sebald, W.G.: Austerlitz (2001)
A course reader with select critical readings: Paul Ricoeur, "Narrative Time" (1985); Benedict Carey, "A Study of Memory Looks at Fact and Fiction," New York Times (2/3/2007); Michael Hopkin, "Iris Murdoch's last book reveals early Alzheimer's," Nature (12/1/2004); P. Garrard, et al, "The effects of very early Alzheimer's disease on the characteristics of writing by a renowned author," Brain (2005): 250-60; (selections) Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending (1967); (selections) Alison Winter, Memory: Fragments of a Modern History (2012); (selections) Marianne Hirsch, The Generation of Postmemory (2012).
This seminar examines a literary turn toward narratives of counterfeit confessional memory. It asks what is at stake in narratiing and even confessing a past that didn't happen—and what that even means in the context of a fictional text. These works invite us to consider both conscious and unconscious counterfeiters, those who only belatedly—or never—realize that their memories were imagined all along. These questions find echoes in recent heated debates over the nature of "recovered memories"; the ethics of certain therapeutic and pharmaceutical memory treatments for PTSD; and the proliferation of social media platforms for curating experience with varying degrees of regulation and accountability. Familiar debates over the status of voluntary and involuntary memory in both life and literature take on new valences as the unreliability of a narrator becomes as much a function of his or her own capacity to remember as the desire to present a particular version of a story. The course moves between examinations of narrative and memory construction at the levels of narrators, authors, and narrator-authors, as we consider a wide range of contemporary novels, secondary criticism, and relevant literary controversies.
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.
Booth, et al., Wayne: The Craft of Research, 2nd ed.; Eagleton, Terry: Literary Theory: An Introduction, 3rd edition; MLA: MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers, 7th ed.;
Recommended: Lentricchia, et al., Frank: Critical Terms for Literary Study
Required course reader is available from Copy Central, 2576 Bancroft Way. Contact: <bancroft@copycentral.com> 510-848-8649. Pre-order on-line before 5pm and reader will be ready by 8am the next day.
H195 is a two-semester course that gives students the training they need to conduct original research and develop their findings into a successful scholarly essay, 40-60 pages in length.
Crucial to this enterprise is an understanding of interpretative methods. What kind of criticism will you practice? Which scholarly conversation will you seek to join? To help orient you in the field, the fall semester of H195 gives students the opportunity to learn about the major theoretical movements that have helped shape literary study as its now conducted. Special attention will be given to theories of close reading (New Critical, psychoanalytic, deconstructive); structuralist theories (linguistic, ideological, discursive, narrative); and theories of identity (gender and sexuality, race and ethnicity, post-colonial). Since many of the assigned essays are also superb examples of effective argumentation, our consideration of method will also extend to writerly practices such as thesis construction, rhetorical techniques and uses of evidence.
The most important requirement for the course is curiosity. What would you like to know more about? What author, issue, or era would you like to spend a year thinking about? Some students begin the class with a strong intuition about what they might like to do; others are wrestling with two or three research ideas. These are happy problems and can be sorted out in consultation with the professor. But do not sign up for the Honors Course if you can’t imagine immersing yourself in a topic of your own choosing for a full year.
By the beginning of October, research topics should be in place. You will be expected to work closely with the Humanities Librarian to develop expertise in navigating scholarly resources. A prospectus and bibliography are required by the end of the fall term. Students who have satisfactorily completed the fall course requirements will receive the grade of IP for the fall term. Written work includes a short analysis of one of the assigned works of criticism. All written work for the fall will be graded.
In the spring semester, students organize into writing groups and meet regularly to help one another with their independent research. There are a few required meetings of the class as a whole, a modest amount of assigned reading, and no written work other than the Honors thesis. A complete draft of the thesis is due before spring break.
Students who satisfactorily complete H195A-B (the Honors Course) will satisfy the Research Seminar requirement for the English major. (More details about H195A prerequisites, how and when students will be informed of the results of their applications, etc., are in the paragraph about the Honors Course on page 2 of the instructions area of this Announcement of Classes.)
To be considered for admission to this course, you will need to electronically apply by:
• Clicking on the link below and filling out the application you will find there, bearing in mind that you will also need to attach:
• a PDF of your Academic Summary (go into Cal Central, click your "My Academics" tab, then click "View Academic Summary" and "Print as PDF"),
• a PDF of your non-UC Berkeley transcript(s), if any,
• a PDF (or Word document) of a critical paper that you wrote for another class (the length of this paper not being as important as its quality), and
• a PDF (or Word document) of a personal statement, including why you are interested in taking this course and indicating your academic interest and, if possible, the topic or area you are thinking of addressing in your honors thesis.
The deadline for completing this application is 11 PM, FRIDAY, MAY 12.
Parks, Suzan-Lori: Topdog/Underdog; Stevenson, Robert Louis: Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde;
Recommended: Leitch , Vincent B.: The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism
Online coursepack with essays on: narrative theory, poetics, film theory, linguistics, psychoanalysis, structuralism, poststructuralism, ideology, and identity.
This two-semester course is designed as an accompaniment to the writing of your Honors Thesis. The fall semester prepares you to write this long essay (40-60 pages) on a topic and texts of your choosing. It will behoove you to decide on that topic and/or those texts before we begin. As a class, we will read some literary theory and critical essays that offer different approaches to analyzing and writing about texts. The readings will not necessarily be lengthy, but they will be intense and sometimes difficult. Along the way, you will each do some preliminary research, outlining, and writing, which will culminate in your thesis prospectus. Throughout the semester, we will focus on negotiating the challenges of composing an essay of this length; developing efficient research methods; engaging critically with secondary material; organizing your thoughts; and honing the writing and rhetorical skills that will yield lucid, cogent, and perhaps even beautiful theses.
Students who satisfactorily complete H195A-B (the Honors Course) will satisfy the Research Seminar requirement for the English major. (More details about H195A prerequisites, how and when students will be informed of the results of their applications, etc., are in the paragraph about the Honors Course on page 2 of the instructions area of this Announcement of Classes.)
To be considered for admission to this course, you will need to electronically apply by:
• Clicking on the link below and filling out the application you will find there, bearing in mind that you will also need to attach:
• a PDF of your Academic Summary (go into Cal Central, click your "My Academics" tab, then click "View Academic Summary" and "Print as PDF"),
• a PDF of your non-UC Berkeley transcript(s), if any,
• a PDF (or Word document) of a critical paper that you wrote for another class (the length of this paper not being as important as its quality), and
• a PDF (or Word document) of a personal statement, including why you are interested in taking this course and indicating your academic interest and, if possible, the topic or area you are thinking of addressing in your honors thesis.
The deadline for completing this application is 11 PM, FRIDAY, MAY 12.