The Announcement of Classes is available one week before Tele-Bears begins every semester. Creative Writing and (for fall) Honors Course applications are available at the same time in the racks outside of 322 Wheeler Hall.
W.E. DuBois, Of Our Spiritual Strivings ; Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway ; William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying ; Toni Morrison, Beloved ; Maxine Hong Kingston, The Woman Warrior ; A course reader will include essays.
"�So, thought Septimus, looking up, they are signaling to me. Not indeed in actual words; that is, he could not read the language yet; but it was plain enough, this beauty, this exquisite beauty, and tears filled his eyes as he looked at the smoke words languishing and melting in the sky and bestowing upon him in their inexhaustible charity and laughing goodness one shape after another of unimaginable beauty and signaling their intention to provide him, for nothing, for ever, for looking merely, with beauty, more beauty! Tears ran down his cheeks.� Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway (1925)
This course will introduce students to the process and practice of critical reading and writing. By becoming aware of the critical choices you make when you write a thesis, a sentence, or paragraph, you will become a more active participant in the creative process of writing, and reading. The texts we will read this semester ask us to be perceptive and skillful readers, to look closely at the stylistic choices the authors have made in their own creative process. We will enter the minds of unstable characters that are nonetheless given the power of narrative omniscience, and whose experiences question the rules of grammar. As �active� readers, our job will be to put the formal pieces together by understanding how the choices writers make at the syntactical level, word choice or verb tense, and linguistic, free-indirect style, structure the text�s meaning (For example, how is the excerpt above an example of free-indirect style?). The pleasure of these texts will be located in the work that you will do to interpret how the form produces the novel�s meaning, and in turn how that participation helps you to develop as a writer.
Writing Requirement: Reading and writing critically will take practice. We will engage with these texts critically through class discussion, close reading exercises, personal response papers and longer expository essays. I will assign four to five smaller papers of 2-4 pages each. We will also devote class time to brainstorming ideas, developing theses, and drafting and revising critical essays. Our goal is to become comfortable with the idea that writing critically and reading critically are part of one and the same process. "
Charles Chesnutt, The Conjure Woman and Other Conjure Tales ; E.L. Doctorow, The March ; W.E.B. Dubois, Black Reconstruction in America ; Herman Melville, Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War ; Walt Whitman, Poetry and Prose; Strunk and White, The Elements of Style ; A course reader
"This course will explore writing in two ways: first, by examining how literary responses to the Civil War have shaped, and continue to shape, Americans� sense of racial and national history; and second, by studying the process of argumentative exposition. To disclose the effects of what Walt Whitman called America�s �real parturition years� and to consider how writing, more generally, responds to trauma, we will look at novels, lyrics, films, folktales and narrative histories about the Civil War. Beginning with Herman Melville�s Battle-Pieces and ending with E.L. Doctorow�s The March, we will examine the various ways in which representations of the Civil War, both literary and visual, are intimately bound up with questions about race, nationalism, and political ideals in the United States.
Taking these texts as occasions to produce further writing about the war, students will write a series of short papers (each 4-5 pages long), three of which will be workshopped and peer-edited. Considerable emphasis will be placed on learning the mechanics of essay writing: lectures and in-class workshops on topics ranging from thesis statements to transitions and sentence construction will be frequent. "
Selected Canterbury Tales (Geoffrey Chaucer); Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There (Lewis Carroll); Fight Club (Chuck Palahniuk); Dragons of Autumn Twilight (Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman); A course reader, including secondary material, and short stories/poems by William Gibson, Jorge Luis Borges, and Geoffrey Chaucer.
"The R1 series is built to hone your critical thinking, and to train you in the basic reading and composition techniques necessary to organize, sharpen, and communicate that thinking. Each section is formed around a discussion topic; since anything in this world can (and should) be subject to critical thought, anything is fair game.
Even games are fair game. As contemporary America saturates itself with new gaming media, a scholarly approach to the tales which games tell�at their present moment and in their historical context�is increasingly relevant. English R1A/3 discussions will center on the interplay between gaming and narrative (stories created from games, based on games, told through games, etc). The more playable a narrative is, the less linear it becomes�approaching, though never reaching, a simulated (manipulated) reality, �an infinite series of times, in a growing, dizzying net of divergent, convergent and parallel times� (to use Borges�s words). This is as true of Grand Theft Auto as it is of chess (What story does chess contain? What stories contain chess?).
By spring�s end, you will be trained in how to look deeper into things that, because they are playful, may seem simple�but never are. At the same time, you will be trained in how to use clear prose to create and participate in a written discourse about those subjects (whether in essay-writing or weblogging). The syllabus will incorporate literary, cinematic, and playable narratives (role-playing, board, and video games), as well as secondary texts drawn from gamer culture. Our approach to playable texts will be limited by, and adjusted to, student access to media (console games, especially newer ones, will be demoed in class); however, you�ll be expected to play certain easily accessible (and usually free) games as homework, just like any reading or screening assignment (though sometimes the instructor will provide cheats or strategy guides)."
Richard Brautigan, Trout Fishing in America ; Charlotte Bront�, Jane Eyre; Bob Dylan, Chronicles, Volume 1; Diana Hacker, Rules for Writers (Fifth ed.); Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping ; Course Reader
"At the beginning of Trout Fishing in America, Richard Brautigan frets over accurately remembering and recording his own memories, saying, �I�d like to get it right.� What does this mean? �Getting it right� may not always mean reporting it the way it happened, or trying to tell an objective truth. In this course, we�ll read a variety of �autobiographical� writing in order to explore how an author (or a fictional character acting as an author) makes and manages his or her own memories. We�ll also consider how texts make a collective memory via what and how their makers choose to remember and record. Crucial semester-long inquiries will include the choices writers make and how writers manage their texts.
The primary goal of this course is to improve critical reading, thinking, and writing, and to give you analytical tools to use in the world outside of our class. We�ll develop methods of approaching texts, posing useful questions, and constructing clear and convincing arguments. We�ll also constantly work on your writing skills, from grammar to argumentation, ideally to write papers that you think are interesting, provocative, and useful."
Behn, A.: Oroonoko, or, The Royal Slave; Equiano, O.: An Interesting Narrative in the Life of Olaudah Equiano. Lunsford, A.: The Everyday Writer; Course Reader.
"Is it ethical, or even possible, to represent the trauma of slavery in the form of literature? Though representations of slavery are inherently problematic, they are an important part of British literary tradition. In this course, we will examine representations of slavery in British prose and poetic works from the eighteenth and eighteenth centuries. We will begin by reading Aphra Behn�s Oroonoko, or, The Royal Slave (1688), in which the author gains entry into a male-dominated realm of letters by immortalizing her title character. Moving from Behn�s narrative, which appeared during the period of Britain�s domination of the Atlantic slave trade, we will turn to late eighteenth century abolitionist writing that sought to end what Anna Barbauld described as �Uncheck�ed�human traffic.� Like Oroonoko, abolitionist writers seem to intervene in, and enter into, the British literary tradition by condemning slavery and questioning their own (and any writer�s) ability to represent its horrors. Our readings from this period will include Olaudah Equiano�s An Interesting Narrative in the Life of Olaudah Equiano (1794), poems by Barbauld, Hannah More, and Mary Robinson, and prose by Thomas Clarkson. At the end of the semester, students will critique the 2007 film Amazing Grace, which marked the bicentennial of Britain�s abolition of the slave trade.
The writing requirement includes composing, and in some cases revising, five essays of varying length (2-4 pages). This course fulfills the first part of the undergraduate reading and composition requirement. "
Auster, P.: Travels in the Scriptorium: A Novel ; Beckett, S.: Waiting for Godot ; Dick, P.K.: Valis ; Ishiguro, K.: The Unconsoled ; Lethem, J.: Amnesia Moon ;
"A narrative trope and a metaphor for fractured identity, the condition of amnesia has taken on cultural weight. Memory is coded as progress; haunted by the warning that �those who forget history are doomed to repeat it,� we as a society struggle to learn from our mistakes, to compare now to then: Is Iraq another Vietnam? Is this generation more rebellious than the last? To forget, then, is to lose identity, or to regress, or to more generally fail; amnesia is finally the loss of both culture and self. Anamnesis, then, is our salvation. The sudden lifting of amnesia, �anamnesis� is generally used to describe a spiritual revelation, but in this course we will take up the phenomenon both as a description of a more general enlightenment and as a metaphor for the process of reading. Reading is always a negotiation between receiving and producing knowledge; like the uncovering of a forgotten memory, what reading communicates is to some extent already known. This course will consider how amnesia and anamnesis work in popular discourse, and how, as descriptors, they shape our values and identities. Reading widely in scientific, autobiographical and fictional accounts of amnesia and anamnesis, we will also interrogate the corresponding ways in which amnesia and anamnesis might be productive, exploring their potentials for producing new narratives and new identities.
Writing Requirements: four essays, three revisions, peer-review workshops, weekly blog postings "
"By foregrounding the concept of voice, this course addresses the dual goal of Reading & Composition courses -- to improve students� written and oral expression. Early in the twentieth century, the voices of writers and artists from the British colonies of Jamaica, Barbados, Trinidad and Guyana contributed to the development of national consciousness which, in turn, helped these colonies to gain independence in the 1960s and 1970s. The course title alludes to a radio program which aired on BBC�s West Indian Service in the 1940s and 1950s. Writers who participated in the program reflected on how � Caribbean voices� were different from English voices, asking what new things they had to say and in what form those things could be expressed.
As students read and write about the artistic discoveries of these figures, they will be developing voices of their own. �Voice� is a term for the personal qualities not only of your writing style but also of your speech. In this class, students will record some of their writing assignments as podcasts; peer review will involve reading as well as listening to other students� work. Similarly, the syllabus comprises readings and �listenings,� drawn from the work of Louise Bennett, Kamau Brathwaite, Wilson Harris, C. L. R. James, Walter Jekyll, Claude McKay, V. S. Naipaul, Elizabeth Nunez, and Jean Rhys. "
(all the material will be in a Course Reader)
"This is a composition class loosely structured around the (admittedly huge) question of what art does for us personally and for the culture as a whole. Why do we respond to certain music or movies or novels and not others? What governs the art trends that we live through? Does art have any power to change the world? What motivates us to make art and what motivates us to consume it? With the help of some classic critical works, we will think through these questions as we read, view, and listen our way through some notable artwork of our time. Because Berkeley hosts some of the most exciting contemporary artists and programs, we will be attending art-related events around campus all semester. With a fund given to this class by the Consortium for the Arts, we will visit the Berkeley Art Museum (where painter and printmaker Enrique Chagoya and video artist Joan Jonas are scheduled to have shows), see films at the Pacific Film Archive, attend a play and/or a dance performance through Cal Performances, and go to a poetry reading.
The class requirements are: regular class attendance and attendance at the artistic events, several short essays you will be required to revise, weekly 1 page response writings, and occasional quizzes. To help you tackle the different types of works, however, we will practice analyzing the various types of media in class. We will also study and practice the skills needed for good expository writing: how to analyze a text, how to create a strong argument, how to support the argument, and how to express your ideas clearly. "
Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim ; F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby ; Jean Toomer, Cane ; Virginia Woolf, Orlando ; Diana Hacker, Rules for Writers 5 th edition; Alfred Hitchcock, Vertigo ; Course reader
"This class will focus on developing critical reading and writing skills through the study of modern fiction. The main point of entry for our texts will be the complex issue of personal identity, which we will examine from several different angles over the course of the semester. In exploring this slippery concept our central questions will be: What does identity consist in for the characters of these texts? To what extent can they create themselves? To what extent do external forces constitute their identities? What brings about crises of identity and how are they resolved, if at all? To what extent is identity a function of race, class, gender, nation, and how do these categories compete and coexist within the same individual? In addition to our four primary texts and one film screening there will be course reader with selections from W.E.B. Du Bois, T.S. Eliot, Sigmund Freud, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman.
This is a writing intensive course and, as such, a significant portion of the class will be dedicated to developing your expository skills. Students will be required to complete a number of short essays and several revisions. "
Hunter S. Thompson. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. (1971); Oscar Acosta. Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo. (1972); Lorna Dee Cervantes. Emplumada. (1981); Lucha Corpi. Cactus Blood. (1995); Nikki Giovani. Love Poems. (1997); Diana Hacker, Rules for Writers. (5 th ed.)
"Alfred Arteaga, Imamu Amiri Baraka, Elaine Brown, Angela Davis, Allen Ginsberg, Thom Gunn, Robert Hass, Lyn Hejinian, Janice Gould, June Jordan, Cherr�e Moraga, Maxine Hong Kingston, Huey P. Newton, Ishmael Reed, Sonia Sanchez, Amy Tan.
Course Description: This course is designed as a writing workshop. Through peer editing and multiple drafts of papers, we will learn the art of proposing and sustaining an argument, the difference between grammar and rhetorical style, and the various stages of a research project. Together we will close-read for elements of style and composition and work across a variety of literary forms (autobiography, novel, poetry, journalism, and political essay), taking Bay Area writers as model rhetoricians. By focusing on writing as a process of rewriting and rethinking that is always in relation to the social life of the author and the social life of language itself, we will destroy the image of the solitary writer whose artistic product comes to her/him in an unmediated lightning bolt of inspiration (voil�! a poem! a novel! an eight page college research paper!).
Students will be encouraged to research a Bay Area social movement and the literatures associated with it (e.g. LGBT, Black Panthers, The Third World Strike or Ethnic Studies, Free Speech Movement, Beat Generation, Gonzo journalism, Black Arts movement, etc.). Once we have identified your area of interest, we will learn how to locate secondary materials and how to incorporate your research findings into the flow of your argument. "
Various myths and constructions of Egypt have been centrally important to the cultural development of the Western tradition from antiquity to the present. Egypt has often been viewed in a highly conflicted manner as both a land of idolatry and magic and a home of complex science and technology, as a space of political repression and slavery and of rule by sage, law-abiding monarchs, as the land of death and of excessive fertility. This class will explore the meaning of these contradictions and explore issues of sexuality, discourses of racial difference, methods of historiography, theories of the sublime, the relation of knowledge to power, and the rhetoric of national identity. We will cover a variety of texts, possibly including texts from religion (Genesis and Exodus), literature (Shakespeare�s Antony and Cleopatra), film (The Ten Commandments), music (Mozart�s The Magic Flute), and philosophy (Freud�s Moses and Monotheism). Most importantly, this will be a class that will help you hone your writing and research skills. Be prepared to write approximately 30 pages and revise them often.
"David Cronenberg, Videodrome (1983); Don DeLillo, White Noise (1985);
Katsuhiro Otomo, Akira (1988); Matthew Barney, Cremaster 3 (2002); Christian Marclay, Video Quartet (2003); Bernadette Corporation, Reena Spaulings (2005) "
"This course will continue to develop and polish the critical thinking and writing skills introduced in English 1A. Through the primary works of the class, we will refine close reading, analysis, argumentation and organization. In addition, we will engage a range of secondary materials, from criticism to theoretical essays. Our final project will integrate individual research. We will pursue these objectives through the course topic, which looks at the problem of New Media.
Our contemporary media landscape has been acutely affected by the digital (and its unique encoding of information). For many, the change from analog to digital marks a profound shift not only in the organization of information, but in the nature of media itself and how we engage with it. This shift amounts to a significant break with what has preceded the digital, and this is what�s touted as �new� in �New Media.� It�s clear that we�re plugged into a multitude of information sources (the internet, virtual reality, video games, ipods, etc.), and questions of simulation, interface and interactivity are increasingly pressing, but the jury is still out on whether this adds up to a new information age, or simply an acceleration of what came before. The course will historicize discourses of New Media, examining the emergence of other �new� technologies such as film, television and video. What do these earlier technologies reveal about the digital landscape? How has our fundamental relation to information changed? What anxieties does do they activate?
The class will engage these questions through a wide variety of objects: examples of previous �new� media, narratives organized around the status of technology, and, of course, a wide range of New Media artworks. The class will also include numerous field trips and screenings at SFMOMA and the PFA."
Anton Chekhov, The Portable Chekhov ; Charles Dickens, Great Expectations ; Joseph Gibaldi, MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers ; Thomas Hardy, The Mayor of Casterbridge ; A Course Reader may also be used. I will let you know at the end of the first week.
In this course we will read closely and write about markedly different kinds of literature � a novel, verse, a couple short stories, a play � with the aim of coming to some conclusions about what makes great literature great. The reading list is thus made up of some of the war-horses of this culture�s literature. We will start with the presumption that these works are great and worth studying. I�ve chosen not to organize this class around a theme because I want students to resist the urge to compartmentalize experience. It�s common for people to like different sorts of literature, but uncommon for students and teachers to think about what, for example, the experience of little poems and big novels have in common. In this class we will try to make such connections, not only between the works on the reading list, but also between the works on the reading list and contemporary popular art forms like country song lyrics, television sitcoms (and so on). This course is designed to help students write clearly and honestly about the experience of reading. Students will write weekly 1-2 page papers as well as two research papers totaling 16 pages.
Flatland (Edwin A. Abbott); The Time Machine (H.G. Wells); The Island of Dr. Moreau (H.G. Wells); Brave, New World (Aldous Huxley); Never Let Me Go (Kazuo Ishiguro); Course Reader
"The reader of science fiction often finds him or herself venturing into a world where the rules of the reader�s reality simply don�t apply: lands inhabited by alien species and races, existing in prehistoric or futuristic eras; societies governed by strange laws, ruled by strange technologies, guided by strange principles; ways of life which are all too familiar�but with a slightly different twist.
Yet, despite being alien, unreal, and sometimes downright creepy, such stories often provide a fresh perspective on reality as we know it, problematizing and questioning our ethical codes, modes of thought, political and economic systems, and social structures. In this class, we�ll undertake an exploration of some of these different worlds. We�ll start out in the two-dimensional reality of Abbott�s Flatland, jump into The Time Machine by H.G. Wells, and then head to The Island of Dr. Moreau inhabited by half-human, half-animal creatures. From there, we�ll move on to the chilling visions of future British society depicted in Huxley�s Brave New World and Ishiguro�s Never Let Me Go.
We will be tackling the issues raised by these works via discussion, analytical reading, and writing and research. As a means of honing research skills, we will be investigating the historical context in which these works were written. Students will be required to write three essays, respectively, 2-3 pages, 6-7 pages, and 8-10 pages in length. The last two essays will each undergo a substantial amount of revision (including peer-revision), and the 8-10 page writing assignment will be a research paper. "
Arthur Conan Doyle, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes ; Wilkie Collins, The Moonstone ; G. K. Chesterton, The Complete Father Brown, vol 1 ; Robert Louis Stevenson, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde ; Henry James, �The Turn of the Screw�
"In this class, we will read mystery stories written during the Victorian era, and we will approach Victorian culture as a mystery to be explored through students� own research into the laws and culture of this period (1837-1901). We will develop a sense of the taboos and pressures that motivate the crimes depicted in Victorian mysteries, while we uncover the origins and distinctive features of the mystery genre. Among other topics, we will discuss the invention and revision of the detective figure, the racial politics of Victorian mysteries, psychological variants on the classic mystery structure, and the role of mystery in all narrative fiction.
This course is designed to develop reading, writing, and research skills, and students are expected to participate actively in class discussion. Each student will write a short essay of 2 pages and then two longer essays (5 and 10 pages), each of which will be revised. We�ll treat writing as a process�working from thesis-formation, to defining research terms, to information gathering, to outlines, and through multiple drafts. Students will respond to each others� work in both written and oral comments. This course satisfies the second half of the R & C requirement. "
Walter Benjamin, �Theses on the Philosophy of History�; John Curran, The Painted Veil ; Michael Herr, selections from Dispatches ; Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner ; Le Minh Khue, �Tony D.�; W. Somerset Maugham, The Painted Veil ; Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons, Watchmen ; Barbara Sonneborn, Regret to Inform ; Dalton Trumbo, Johnny Got His Gun ; Carl von Clausewitz, selections from On War
"This course will explore the connections between war and literary form, with a general focus on 20 th century literature written in English. We will consider how writers represent war in explicit and implicit ways, how various literary genres set up different expectations for the representation of war, how social and historical conflicts during wartime subvert conventions of literary genre, and how issues of race, gender, and class underpin these formal subversions. In our investigation of texts ranging from Carl von Clausewitz�s influential work on warfare and strategy (On War, 1873) to representations of 21 st century wars, we will consider how war and literary genre interweave in the texts under study and how genres both assimilate and become assimilated by the imperatives of wartime narration.
Our critical approach to the texts will interlace with our own critical approaches to writing. We will compose essays gradually, beginning with questions that emerge from our initial responses to the texts and working our way toward effective writing and argumentation. Students will extend their English 1A skills by focusing on how more complex ideas and research results can be refined and integrated into progressively longer essays. A series of in-class workshops will be held to assist students with discussing, drafting, and revising critical essays. "
James Weldon Johnson, The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man; E. L. Doctorow, Ragtime; Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild; Jhumpa Lahiri, The Namesake; Wayne C. Booth, The Craft of Research; course reader of selected stories and articles
"This course will examine the relationship between truth and fiction in literature and film. Some of these works dramatize real events; others show the impact that stories have on their readers and authors. What do we seek from fictional works�how do they help us interpret or alter the narratives of our own lives? What standards of credibility and coherence do we demand from fictional as opposed to nonfictional works? What kinds of fictions have assumed the status of truth in structuring our social relations?
Students will begin by writing a close reading (2-3 pages) of one of the texts, then write and revise two essays (5 and 10 pages) which link close readings together to form a larger argument. To help draft and revise the essays, students will participate in class activities of peer editing. Over the course of the semester, students will also conduct research for the topic of their second essay and present their research in an oral presentation. Through these assignments, students will sharpen two skills: looking closely at evidence and making a claim that matters to them.
"
Classen, Constance. The Color of Angels: Cosmology, Gender and the Aesthetic Imagination. London: Routledge, 1998; Hacker, Diana. Rules for Writers (5 th ed.); Howes, David, ed. Empire of the Senses: The Sensual Culture Reader. Oxford, Eng.: Berg, 2005; Course Reader (CR).
"Scholars used to assume that the number, function, and ranking of the senses were determined entirely by biology and, therefore, were among the only constants of human experience across different cultures and throughout the centuries. However, in the late 1960s, Michael McLuhan and Walter Ong argued that social developments like the introduction of writing, the invention of the printing press, and the increase in literacy shifted Western culture from an aural orientation toward a visual one. Since Walter J. Ong�s and Marshall McLuhan�s pivotal studies on the rise of visualism in the West, historians have written extensively on the social construction of sight, documenting how it has been interpreted and deployed as an organizational principle in the realms of art, architecture, literature, science, economics, and government. Yet, as studies on vision proliferated, the role of the other senses was ignored.
This changed in the 1990s with the �sensuous revolution,� when academics from a range of disciplines began to focus on how senses other than sight mediate experience and produce knowledge. The dominance of vision in the western sensorium was denaturalized by anthropologists who described the alternative sensoriums of non-western societies. Within studies of the west, historians and sociologists traced the cultural construction of hearing, smell, touch, and taste, and revealed the relationships between these previously understudied senses to powerful religious, political, and gender ideologies.
In light of these studies, we will think about the representation of the senses in literature. More specifically, we will consider the following questions: what literary techniques do writers use to maximize readers� access to imaginary sights, sounds, smells, and textures? How do literary works that stimulate these sensory experiences provide a larger thematic and stylistic context that inscribes them with particular meanings? How do writers modify literary genres typically structured by visual experience so that these forms can accommodate an alternative sensorium?
Students will explore these issues while learning how to read critically, write clearly, and argue persuasively. Emphasizing the development of research skills, this course will teach them how to locate academic sources, evaluate these outside materials, and use them to construct their own positions. Over the course of the semester, students will produce approximately 32 pages of writing. This writing will be broken down into three essays which will increase in length as the term progresses. For the final two papers, they will be required to perform research tasks and reference texts beyond those provided in class. "
Travels with Charlie ; Colonial American Travel Narratives; Mandatory course reader
"Is globalism really a new thing for America? The colonization and settlement of the Americas was the first time that people from four continents were all part of the same ""global"" economic system, a system defined by immigration and put into place by the first transnational corporations in history. Maybe it shouldn't surprise us that the idea of "" America"" always seems to have something to do with travel and that the freedom of the open road and seas has an almost mythic importance in imagining what it means to be �American.� After all, what better symbol of a ""nation of immigrants"" than a transcontinental highway? Go west, young man!
With the question of America�s place in the world in mind, we will focus on a particular genre of American writing, the travel narrative. We will seek to understand how different writers have imagined �America� by taking a journey themselves, from early explorers like Christopher Columbus and Alexander Von Humboldt to colonists like Mary Rowlandson and J. Hector St. John de Crevecoeur, from citizens of the United States like Walt Whitman and John Steinbeck to international sojourners like Jos� Mart�, Domingo Sarmiento, and Alexis de Tocqueville. � America� has meant many things to many people, and this course will seek to explore some of the variety of what different writers have thought it means for a place to be defined in terms of mobility, immigration, and freedom of movement.
Coursework will consist of three medium length papers as well as a series of brief response essays to be delivered to the instructor via email. Your final paper will include a significant component of outside research. "
"Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses ; Richard Rodriguez, Days of Obligation: An Argument with My Mexican Father ; Willa Cather, Death Comes for the Archbishop ; John R. Erickson, The Original Adventures of Hank the Cowdog ; Diana Hacker, Rules for Writers, fifth ed.
Course Reader: Selections from Father Eusebio Kino, S.J., Historical Memoir of Pimer�a Alta; Mar�a Chona, The Autobiography of a Papago Woman; Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire; Wallace Stegner, Where the Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs; selected poems and short fiction by Thomas Hornsby Ferrill, Amado Muro, Baxter Black, Sandra Cisneros and others. "
"What is it about the American Southwest � a region famed for sweeping vistas, a vibrant syncretic culture, and prickly traditions of independence � that perennially fascinates people of all ages and backgrounds? This course will attempt a literary answer to that question, taking as its guiding motif �crossing over,� the passing of frontiers: from youth to adulthood, from one culture to another, from this world to what lies beyond. But before an intelligent answer must come intelligent questions � the chief aim of this course, therefore, is to teach what intelligent questions to ask, and how and why to ask them. As a practical matter, this means that students will learn the skills needed to locate, analyze and write intelligently about secondary material on our syllabus authors, i.e. research skills, building on techniques mastered in R1A (or an analogous course) for writing clear, persuasive expository and argumentative prose. In addition to research skills, therefore, topics to be reviewed as needed include grammar; sentence and paragraph construction; essay structure; thesis development and argumentation; proper use of evidence; and style.
The course will, however, focus on the development of practical fluency with larger expository and argumentative units that describe and synthesize the results of student research. In addition to a short (3 page) diagnostic essay assigned at the start, each student will complete two progressively longer essays in the class, totaling at least 16 typewritten pages, with at least an equal number of pages of preliminary drafting and revising. Class time will frequently be spent on group work and in-class writing. Regular attendance, completion of the reading, and frequent in-class participation are requirements.
If you enjoy reading, researching and writing about inscrutable mystery plots, cowboy poetry (our vernacular pastoral), or epic films set in austere landscapes, or if you just find talking-dog stories entertaining, this course is for you. By carefully analyzing and writing about these stories, poems, essays, novels, paintings and films, high-art and popular alike, we will explore why hoary old genres and techniques can still delight and instruct millions of �common readers� when applied to Southwestern themes. Thus we will also pay close attention to the crossing over of literary borders: from pastoral to satire, from satire back to pastoral, and from both of these into a uniquely Southwestern mode reconciling the two. "
�The Meaning of July Fourth for the Negro� � Frederick Douglass; Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl � Harriet Ann Jacobs; Puddn�head Wilson � Mark Twain; The Trial (film) � Orson Welles (1963) Franz Kafka; Light in August � William Faulkner; Lucy � Jamaica Kincaid
"From affirmative action to enemy combatants, �identity� and legally-supported identifications maintain important yet often-challenged positions within our society. In this course we will utilize readings, class discussions, group work, and essays to examine a variety of literatures that revolve around the interplay of mobility, identity, and the Law. Specifically, we will observe and analyze the manners in which different works chronicle the transgression of spaces and identities created by laws. Ultimately, we will evaluate these works� abilities to create new spaces and identities that resist legal constraint. Each text provides a platform for the contemplation, discussion, analysis, and written presentation of these themes.
This course also takes up where the first half of R&C coursework leaves off, building from an intermediate to advanced proficiency in rhetorical and critical composition. There will be a heavy group-work component in this course, supporting both the composition and literature material: if you can learn to help other people with their analyses and writing, then you can learn to do it for yourself. Course evaluation will be based on class participation, group work, and three essay assignments of increasing length."
W. Shakespeare, Hamlet; H. Melville, Bartleby �Bartleby the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street�; E. M. Forster, Howard�s End; E. Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises; K. Ishiguro, Remains of the Day; Course Reader: poetry by T.S. Eliot, Pound, Stevens, and Sassoon, and short stories by Tolstoy, Henry James, Hemingway, Checkhov, and Joyce.
"This class will focus on literary texts which use various representational strategies to depict scenes of personal and social stasis. With each text, we will return to a central question: How does this author represent stasis? We will also often ask related questions: What are the consequences for the notion of development in the play, poem, novel, story, etc? Does this particular piece of literature resolve any of the problems it raises? If not, how does the author craft the work so that we still derive a sense of satisfaction from it? We will begin with Hamlet and end with The Sun Also Rises.
This class requires a minimum of 32 pages of essay writing, including drafts. One of these essays will be a long research paper, due at the end of the semester."
Charles M. Jones, et al. Looney Tunes ; Ken Kesey. One Flew Over the Cuckoo�s Nest ; Yukio Mishima. Temple of the Golden Pavilion ; Philip Roth. American Pastoral ; Franz Kafka. The Metamorphosis ; Lennard Davis. The Disability Studies Reader ; Susan Yankowitz. Night Sky; Sheila Hale. The Man Who Lost His Language; Arthur Kopit. Wings
"This course explores the numerous conflicted and contradictory ways in which speech disorders have been represented in twentieth century literature. We will engage with texts from a range of genres including novels, plays, nonfiction memoirs, essays and even cartoons, all of which portray the conditions either of stuttering or of aphasia. We will approach each of our primary texts alongside relevant secondary literature from the fields of Psychology, Linguistics, Speech Pathology, and Disability Studies. Because this course is also intended to serve as an introduction to Disability Studies, many of the central concerns of this growing field will guide our discussions throughout the semester. Some topics under consideration will include cultural definitions of what constitute �regular� or �normal� ways of speaking, the socially constructed status of the �normal� or �able� body, related issues of illness and recovery, the stigmas and comedic value often associated with speech disorders, and what the phenomenology of speech disorders can teach us ultimately about what it means to communicate. Although our primary impetus throughout the course will be, as one critic puts it, to discover �how representation attaches meaning to bodies,� the richness of all of the texts will undoubtedly lead us to explore them from numerous viewpoints, not solely that of Disability Studies.
Our method throughout will be a close in-class analysis of the novels, dialogues, and films. The focus will be on the development of your close-reading skills as well as an improvement in your writing that builds upon your experience in R1A. Thus, a portion of in-class time will also be spent workshopping each other�s writing. There will also be exercises assigned to develop your research skills for the final paper. "
T.S. Eliot, Selected Poems ; Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea ; Samuel Beckett, Company ; Georg B�chner, Danton�s Death ; ---, Lenz; ---, Leonce and Lena; A required course reader with excerpts from the work of various poets and philosophers
"�Boredom,� E.M. Cioran writes, �is the echo in us of time tearing itself apart�the revelation of the void, the drying up of that delirium which sustains�or invents�life.� Cioran is just one of many writers convinced that the seemingly unremarkable phenomenon of boredom can offer profound insights into the human condition. In this course, we will explore the various ways that poets, playwrights, and novelists�such as T.S. Eliot, Georg B�chner, Samuel Beckett, and Jean-Paul Sartre�treat boredom not only as a thematic concern but as a formal and existential horizon for their literary experiments. Throughout the semester, I will encourage us to place literary texts in dialogue with brief but provocative philosophical reflections on boredom excerpted from the work of such thinkers as Blaise Pascal, Arthur Schopenhauer, S�ren Kierkegaard, and Ferdinand de Pessoa. We will also watch two films along the way.
In this course, you will be too busy to be bored. The primary aim of this course is to sharpen your analytical and close-reading skills and to teach you to write cogent academic essays with well-supported arguments. You will be required to write at least two essays, each of which will go through a stage of revision. You will also be expected to post an online response to weekly reading assignments and to be an active participant in class discussions. "
"Plays (tentative): A Midsummer Night�s Dream ; The Merchant of Venice; As You Like It; Othello ; Antony and Cleopatra ; The Tempest
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"Shakespeare�s plays often project stereoptic visions of worlds set apart from the geographical center of the dramatic action. These removed places, like Arden forest in As You Like It, the realm of fairies in A Midsummer Night�s Dream, or romantic Belmont in The Merchant of Venice, for example, are, among other things, spaces of exile, fantasy, or promise�sometimes all at once. In later plays, remote geographies frequently appear as non-European locales that represent the exotic, sensual, mysterious, and dangerous, like Egypt in Antony and Cleopatra, Cyprus in Othello, and the south Mediterranean and Caribbean in The Tempest. But these exotic places also offer a doubled perspective on the European worlds from which they are set apart, either as contrasting other or as reflecting mirror. We will explore a few of these peripheral worlds in several Shakespeare plays, and the critical views that their distance from the center affords. More generally, we will pay attention to matters of theme and character, and concentrate on dramatic structures and conventions and on the richness of the plays� language.
This course is primarily designed to teach you how to work with principal modes of academic rhetoric: description, analysis, and argument. You will be required to write, in addition to a diagnostic essay and a number of short writing assignments, at least two formal essays, each of which you will substantially revise, and the last of which will include a research component. As each student will also workshop these essays with a peer-editing group, you must be prepared to write detailed comments on other students� work. "
Russian Short Stories from Pushkin to Buida, edited by Robert Chandler, Penguin Classics; Chekhov, Anton. Short Stories, Norton Critical Edition; MLA Handbook; Johnson, Edward. The Handbook of Good English.
"This is a writing course whose main objective is to turn you into competent writers of academic prose. However, since we need a subject to write about, I decided on one I am interested in and which, I hope, will be of interest to you: short stories by Russian writers. Focusing on the short story, as opposed to, say, the novel�something that readers of fiction more immediately associate with Russian literature�will allow us to enjoy a great variety of readings, spanning a good hundred years from the golden age of Pushkin and Gogol to the early Soviet era of Babel and Bulgakov. At least a third of the short stories we are going to read will be by Chekhov, the most celebrated master of the genre in Russian. Although this course is certainly not meant to be a survey of Russian literature, I think that it will go some way towards providing you with initial acquaintance with most Russian classics�an acquaintance which, I hope, will subsequently inspire you to read their greater (meaning both �more famous� and �larger in size�) works on your own.
Much of our in-class time will be dedicated to discussing your writing, developing your skills of close and analytical reading, and learning how to be effective when sharing your insights with your readers. Other than the short stories, I will ask you to read a number of scholarly essays. I will ask you to write a short essay every week or two and give you a chance to revise some of them. Many of our routines will serve to solidify the gains of your writing-and-composition experiences as R1A students: you can expect some specific assignments aimed at polishing your grammar, improving you vocabulary, etc. We will conduct in-class writing assignments and peer-review exercises regularly. The assignments will ensure that by the end of the semester you know what a solid academic essay based on sound research looks like and can produce one of your own. "
Emily Bront�, Wuthering Heights ; Diana Hacker, Rules for Writers ; William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury ; Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea ; Jos� Saramago, Blindness ; Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway ; A course reader containing theoretical material related to the theme of the course.
"This course takes on a basic assumption about the experience of reading literature: namely, that we not only feel and experience emotions when we read, but also that the narratives we encounter in literature seem to house feelings and forms of consciousness radically distinct from our own. While we often take this assumption for granted, perhaps by chalking it up to literature's unfathomable �essence� or (more commonly) tracing it back to an author's most probable intention/meaning, we stumble upon an important problem in trying to account for issues of consciousness and feeling analytically�as, say, textual properties, rather than as merely �depicted� or �portrayed� aspects of real people. We will begin with the challenging question: what is it about narratives that enables them to produce and sustain the illusion of a world composed of, among other things, consciousness and feeling? In other words, how do feelings and consciousness ""happen"" in narrative?
As a way of tackling these abstract ideas, we will organize our class discussions around the particular role that narrators play in creating the world of their narratives. Some questions to guide us in our analyses include: what role does the consciousness of a first-person or third-person narrator play both in relation to and apart from the �minds� of (other) characters? Can we find a language to analyze textual consciousness and feeling without assuming an automatic correspondence between the world of a narrative and the �reality� that defines our own? Finally, how can we analyze characters' feelings without pretending that they are real people?
In a nutshell, this is a three-pronged composition course: reading, analyzing (thinking critically), and writing will be our sustained focus. In class, we will devote the majority of our time to developing both critical thinking and argumentative writing skills. More specifically, we will practice close readings of our chosen texts, which will in turn enable us to work towards the type of analytical thinking that is required to write solid analytical prose. As a way of getting there, we will journey through the world of �exposition and argumentation� (the backbones of composition) and make stops at the following destinations: grammar; sentence and paragraph construction; essay structure; thesis development; using evidence; and style. The majority of class time will revolve around class discussions, group work, and writing workshops
Over the course of the semester, each student will be assigned four papers and a number of short take-home assignments. Class time will be frequently spent on group work and in-class writing. The writing portion of this course will be geared towards the production of a final and longer research paper that will make use of multiple critical sources. Each paper will involve a primary draft, a peer editing phase, and then the revision and resubmission of a final draft to the instructor for a grade."
Simone Weil, War and the Iliad, trans. Mary McCarthy; Claudia Rankine, Don�t Let Me Be Lonely; Yusef Komunyakaa, Neon Vernacular; Whitman: Poetry and Prose, ed. by Justin Kaplan, and a Reader, with excerpts from the Iliad, Trojan Women, Lysistrata, James Janko, Philip Gourevitch, and Hannah Arendt, and poems by Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen, Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop, Randall Jarrell, Juliana Spahr, and Paul Celan
"In your writing for this course, you will try to come up with an answer to one question: what does literature say or tell us about war? Some poets glorify or rationalize war, while others protest. For still others, a work of literature does not say anything: literature, like war, just is. Since, at this moment, we ourselves are citizens and soldiers in a time of war, it seems important to think again�ourselves�about the responsibility of the imagination to the representation of war.
To do so, we will read and look at fictional and non-fictional poems, prose, and film about the Trojan War, the Civil War, World War I, World War II, the Vietnam War, and the present war in Iraq and Afghanistan. We will think about heroism, healing, trauma, memory, recovery, rhetoric, verisimilitude, and myth.
You will write three two-page papers�two close readings and a critique�as well as a six-page paper, on a primary source and a ten-page research paper that draws upon at least three secondary sources. You will learn the subtleties of grammar, punctuation, and sentence and paragraph structure. To refine your arguments and writing style, you will produce and revise drafts of your papers and conduct intensive in-class peer review. Finally, at the end of the semester, you will present your research paper to your peers at an in-class conference on �Literature in a Time of War.� "