Whitman, Walt: Leaves of Grass and Other Writings, 2nd Rev. Ed. (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2002)
Walt Whitman self published the first edition of Leaves of Grass, a collection of poems, in 1855. For the rest of his life, he reworked, revised, and added to this collection. He produced at least six distinguishable editions. We will read selectively from what has been called “the Deathbed Edition” (1891-1892), but we will examine the first (1855) and third (1860) editions as well. In addition, we will explore the online Walt Whitman Archive, “the most comprehensive Web-based collection of Whitman’s writings and biographical information.” The seminar will culminate in actor-educator John Slade’s visit to class and his one-person performance entitled Whitman Sings! in which, in Whitman’s persona, he sets Whitman’s words to “folk, gospel, and hip hop frames.”
Note that this section of English 24 will run from August 28 to October 16 only (two hours per class meeting).
This 1-unit course may not be counted as one of the twelve courses required to complete the English major.
Shakespeare, William: Shakespeare's Sonnets and A Lover's Complaint, ed. Stanley Wells
Shakespeare's sonnets were first published in 1609, rather late in his career, with a second, curiously distorted edition in 1640. Although little is known about how they were first received by the reading public, the sonnets still cause puzzlement and delight more than 400 years later. Over the course of the semester we will read all 154 sonnets, at the rate of approximately ten per week. All students will be expected to participate actively in seminar discussions. Each student will present one informal and one formal seminar report.
The first meeting of the seminar will be Wednesday, 6 September.
This 1-unit course may not be counted as one of the twelve courses required to complete the English major.
There will be a course reader.
We will read, discuss, and write about poems by African American authors including Phillis Wheatley, Frances Harper, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Claude McKay, Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes, Gwendolyn Brooks, Amiri Baraka, Audre Lorde, Nathaniel Mackey, Harryette Mullen, and Claudia Rankine.
This 1-unit course may not be counted as one of the twelve courses required to complete the English major.
Chaucer, Geoffrey: The Canterbury Tales: A Selection; Donne, John: Poetry; Milton, John: Paradise Lost; Shakespeare, William: Macbeth; Shakespeare, William: Sonnets
In this course we will read some of the best books ever written in English, and the course will try to treat both you and those books seriously and justly. The course will give you a sense of the shape of literary history from the earlier middle ages through 1667: Chaucer, Shakespeare, Donne, and Milton will get our closest attention, but they will also provide the scaffolding on which to hang a more detailed picture of the imaginative and intellectual development of literature. It will work hard to give you the skills to read easily and intelligently (and out loud) the earlier forms of the language in which these works are written, and to develop also the skills by which you can take writing apart and see how it works. It will also take up the big questions raised by the whole undertaking: what literary art is good for, what forms of reason and understanding are most at home in it, and why the past is worth bothering with--all, in fact, questions that the works themselves are preoccupied with.
Chaucer, Geoffrey: The Canterbury Tales; Donne, John: The Complete English Poems; Milton, John: Paradise Lost; Spenser, Edmund: Edmund Spencer's Poetry
This course focuses on three major works of late medieval and early modern English literature: Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, Spenser’s Faerie Queene, and Milton’s Paradise Lost. We’ll discuss the works in themselves and as parts of a developing literary tradition. We’ll also read shorter poems by Donne, Sidney, Wroth, Herbert, Suckling, and Lovelace.
Austen, Jane: Emma; Behn, Aphra: Oroonoko; Defoe, Daniel: Moll Flanders; Equiano, Olaudah: The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano or Gustavus Vassa, the African, Written by Himself; Pope, Alexander: The Rape of the Lock and Other Major Writings; Wordsworth, William: Lyrical Ballads
As we read works produced in a period of tumultuous change, we shall consider those works as zones of contact, reflecting and sometimes negotiating conflict. In a world of expanding global commerce (imports like tea suddenly becoming commonplace in England), political revolution (English, American, French), and changing conceptions of what it means to be a man or woman (a new medical discourse viewing them as categorically distinct), increasingly available printed texts become sites of contestation—including debates about what constitutes “proper” language and Literature itself. We shall think about the ways in which separate groups—British and African, masters and slaves, slave owners and abolitionists, arch capitalists and devout religious thinkers, Republicans and Conservatives, men and women—use writing to devise ongoing relationships with each other, often under conditions of inequality. Throughout we shall be especially attuned to formal choices—from linguistic register to generic conventions and innovations—and how writers deploy these to incorporate opposition, resist authority or authorize themselves. Requirements will include two papers, a mid-term exam, a final exam, and reading quizzes.
Norton Anthology of English Literature, Volume C; Norton Anthology of English Literature, Volume D; Austen, Jane: Pride and Prejudice; Brown, Charles Brockden: Wieland; or the Transformation; Franklin, Benjamin: The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin; Jacobs, Harriet: Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl; Melville, Herman: Billy Budd and Other Stories
Our course begins at sea, with the “violent storm” and shipwreck of Gulliver’s Travels, and ends with Benito Cereno’s strange maritime encounter at “a small, desert, uninhabited island” off the southern tip of Chile. These scenes of oceanic dislocation correspond to the rise of modernity that forms our topic. Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century modernity involves a variety of new or accelerating instabilities: epistemological uncertainty; cultural relativism in newly imagined global contexts; the transformation of economic value from land to (liquid) capital; linguistic self-consciousness in a rapidly expanding print culture; and altered forms of subjectivity navigating the new political rhetoric of republicanism, freedom, and individualism. Throughout the course, we will ask what literary anxieties and opportunities such large scale transformations entail, at a time when everything solid—self, world, and society—turns fluid, as if at sea.
Bechdel, Alison: Fun Home; Coetzee, JM: Disgrace; Faulkner, William: The Sound and the Fury; Johnson, James Weldon: Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man; Luiselli, Valeria: The Story of My Teeth; Woolf, Virginia: Mrs. Dalloway
Required course reader available from MetroPublishing.
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 Valeria Luiselli; drama by Samuel Beckett, Susan-Lori Parks, and Caryl Churchill; poetry by Matthew Arnold, William Butler Yeats, Langston Hughes, TS Eliot, and Caroline Bergvall, among others.
Bechdel, Alice: Fun Home; Beckett, Samuel: Waiting for Godot; Faulkner, William: The Sound and the Fury; Hurston, Zora Neale: Their Eyes Were Watching God; James, Henry: The Turn of the Screw; Joyce, James: Dubliners; Pynchon , Thomas: The Crying of Lot 49; Rhys, Jean: Wide Sargasso Sea; Woolf, Virginia: To the Lighthouse
Poetry and critical essays will be made available on our bCourses site.
This course will focus on the formal consequences of the cultural and social revolutions of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. After examining the changes in narrative strategy and poetic diction that have come to be known as "modernism," we will trace their reverberations by examining key texts and genres across the century. We will also analyze the pressures brought to bear on formal innovation by diverse national and ethnic traditions, the legacies of colonialism, the unprecedented violence of two world wars, and the rapid development of technology.
Lahiri, J.: Interpreter of Maladies
We will concentrate on the high and low cultural elements in the noir comedies of the Coen brothers, discussing their use of Hollywood genres, parodies of classic conventions, and representation of arbitrariness. We will also read some fiction and attend events at the Pacific Film Archive and Cal Performances.
This 2-unit course may not be counted as one of the twelve courses required to complete the English major.
Among the films likely to be included in the syllabus and discussed in class are the following: Fritz Lang, Metropolis (1927); Leni Riefenstahl, The Triumph of the Will (1934); Charlie Chaplin, Modern Times (1936); George Lucas, THX -1138 (1970); Stanley Kubrick, A Clockwork Orange (1971); Michael Radford, Nineteen Eighty Four (1984); Terry Gilliam, Brazil (1985); Volker Schlondorff, The Handmaid’s Tale (1990); Andrew Niccol, Gattaca (1997); Alfonso Cuarón, Children of Men (2006); Mark Romanek, Never Let Me Go (2010); and Alex Garland, Ex Machina (2015). No texts will be assigned, but certain background materials will be posted on bCourses.
This 2-unit course may not be counted as one of the twelve courses required to complete the English major.