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
"
"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.� "
Momaday , N.S. : The Way to Rainy Mountain; Spiegelman, A.: Maus(Parts 1 & 2)
Visual culture is not just about pictures, but the (post) �modern tendency to picture or visualize experience��what W.J.T. Mitchell calls �the pictorial turn.� Not surprisingly, as contemporary writers and artists struggle to find forms that convey postmodern individual identities in multicultural, often urban, social landscapes, they experiment with visual/verbal forms of self-representation and self-narration: story quilts, family photo albums, letters, comic books (co-mix), artists� books, photo-biographies, video and film, performance art, home pages, �zines,� and more. Course requirements include attendance, participation, completion of in-class activities, and a short course journal. Please bring your journal to each class.
Pinker, S: The Language Instinct, Words and Rules, and possibly The Stuff of Thought; various printed problem sets
This course examines the English language as a particular instance of the general phenomenon of human language. We will consider aspects of its phonology (sound structure), morphology (word structure), syntax (sentence structure) and semantics (linguistic meaning), as well as some pragmatics (contextual meaning) and usage issues. No previous background in linguistics is required.
Students should come to class before buying books. The following list is tentative. But, that said, it will likely include most of these books: Karen Brodkin: How Jews Became White Folks and What That Says About Race in America; John Howard Griffin: Black Like Me; Nella Larsen: Passing; Sinclair Lewis: Kingsblood Royal; Philip Roth: The Human Stain; James Weldon Johnson: The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man; Kenji Yoshino: Covering. Also: readings from Noel Ignatiev�s journal Race Traitor and from his book How the Irish Became White; some films (Imitation of Life, the 4th Alien film); excerpts from Michael D. Harris�s Colored Pictures (on the paintings of Archibald Motley, one of which appears on the cover of Larsen�s Passing); Cecilia Cutler�s essay on �White Teens, Hip-Hop, and African-American English,� etc.
"A passing narrative is an account�fiction or nonfiction�of a person or group claiming a racial or ethnic identity that they do not ""possess."" Such narratives speak�directly, indirectly, and very uneasily�to the authenticity, the ambiguity, and the performance of racial or ethnic identity; they also speak to issues of official and traditional categorization. The passing
narrative�the narrative that accounts for making the �different� claim�necessarily unsettles notions of belonging and underscores that race can be viewed as a construction.
This semester we�ll examine a number of such narratives and we�ll read in the material beyond the narratives themselves in order to better understand the contexts and arguments to which theses stories refer. We�ll discuss the impact of passing on American literature. "
Lehman, D.: The Oxford Book of American Verse
This workshop will teach various approaches toward the writing of verse. In addition to weekly writing assignments, students will read a range of poetry and essays, and will be encouraged to attend local poetry readings.
Chaucer, W.: The Canterbury Tales; Marlowe, C.: Dr. Faustus; Milton, J.: Paradise Lost; Spenser, E.: Edmund Spenser�s Poetry
This course is an introduction to major works by Chaucer, Spenser, Marlowe, and Milton, with supplemental poetry from a class reader. In each case I will ask you to consider both the strangeness and the odd familiarity of these works, so far away from us in time and yet so close to many of our contemporary concerns. I am particularly interested in the power of representational resources available to these authors and now lost to us. My general approach to literature is feminist and psychoanalytic; I hope that you will be able to develop your own approach to these texts in your section meetings and on your papers. Requirements for the course include the writing of three papers, possibly a mid-term exam, and definitely a final exam, as well as participation in section meetings.
Chaucer, G.: Canterbury Tales; Spenser, E.: Edmund Spenser�s Poetry; Marlowe, C.: Doctor Faustus ; Milton, J.: Paradise Lost
This class introduces students to the production of poetic narrative in English through the close study of major works in that tradition: The Canterbury Tales, The Faerie Queene, Doctor Faustus, and Paradise Lost. Each of these texts reflects differently on the ambition of national, epic poetry to enfold the range of a culture�s experience. We will focus particularly, therefore, on the relationships of different genres to different kinds of knowledge, to see how different ways of expressing things make possible new things to express, as English culture and English poetry transform each other from the fourteenth to the seventeenth centuries.
Bront�, E.: Wuthering Heights ;Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol. C:The Restoration and the Eighteenth Century;Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol. D: The Romantic Period; Shelley, M.: Frankenstein
This course traces the expansion and transformation of English literature, from an insular cultural form to an incipient global fact, from a writing produced in England to a writing produced in English. We will begin in the wake of one civil war, in England , and end on the threshold of another, in the United States . Along the way, we will pass through the Enlightenment and though the turmoil produced by several revolutions: English, Glorious, mercantile, bourgeois, American, French, and industrial, among others. Through it all, we will attend to some of the ways in which poetic and other literary forms revise and readapt older traditions of English writing to new historical circumstances, both at home and across the Atlantic , often constructing the forms and categories that shape our own situation in the process. Our reading will include some of the major figures of the Augustan age, the eighteenth century, the Romantic movement, the early Victorian period, and a nascent American literature.
Mary Rowlandson: Sovereignty and Goodness of God; Daniel Defoe: Robinson Crusoe; Benjamin Franklin: Autobiography; Alexander Pope: Essay on Man and Other Poems; Jane Austen: Emma; William Wordsworth: The Major Works: Including The Prelude; Emily Bronte: Wuthering Heights ; Frederick Douglass: Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave
I will lecture on the cataclysmic rise of bourgeois modernity as it registers in English and American literature during the period 1660-1860. I will emphasize the mixture of euphoria, wonder, deprivation and anxiety that this transformation provokes, and I will concentrate on the Enlightenment and Romanticism as attempts to exploit historical opportunity while compensating for history�s deficiencies. Two five-page essays, a final exam, and regular participation in lecture and discussion section will be required.
Achebe, C.: Things Fall Apart; Conrad, J.: Heart of Darkness; Hosseini, K.: The Kite Runner; Morrison, T.: Beloved; Ramazani, J., et al: The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry (Volume I): Modern Poetry; Silko, L.M.: Ceremony; Woolf, V: Mrs. Dalloway; Course Reader
This survey course of literature in English from the mid-nineteenth century to the present will consider a variety of literary forms and movements in their historical and cultural contexts. We�ll read literature in English not only by English and European American writers, but by Irish, African, Native American, African American, and Afghanistan American writers. We�ll consider the literature of colonization and imperialism and the counter literature that it inspires. We�ll examine recurrent transcultural themes: the relationship between past and present, surviving historical trauma, the transmission of oral traditions and indigenous epistemologies, and the influence of notions of race, ethnicity, class, nationality, and gender on subject formation. We�ll also do close readings. There will be three two 5-page essays, a midterm, and a final examination.
Conrad, J.: Lord Jim; Faulkner, W.: Absalom, Absalom!; Kingston, M. H.: The Woman Warrior; Naipaul, V.S.: The Mimic Men; Morrison, T.: Beloved; Woolf, V.: Mrs. Dalloway; there will also be a course reader containing selected works by W.E.B. Dubois, T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, William Carlos Williams, and others.
This course is an introduction to literature written in English mainly between the late 19 th century and the late 20 th century. There will be two kinds of emphases running through the course�one paid to the formal innovations credited to the significant authors of this period, the other paid to the socio-political conditions surrounding their aesthetic achievements. In particular, we will consider the development of English literature in the context of competing British and American empires and the globalization of English.
Bronte, C.: Jane Eyre; Rhys, J.: Wide Sargasso Sea ; Poe, E.: Selected Writings; Auster, P.: City of Glass ; Jacobs, H.: Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl; Butler , O.: Kindred; Hacker, D.: A Writer�s Reference
"This course begins with the premise that literary texts make their meanings in dialogue with one another and in engagement with their social and cultural contexts. We will be reading three nineteenth-century works alongside late-twentieth-century adaptations of these works, noting elements of homage, critique, parody, revisionism, and formal innovation in the later works. In addition, the course will introduce students to various critical approaches to literary study, including structuralism and poststructuralism, queer and feminist literary theory, and new historicism. One of the primary goals of the course is to develop students� expertise in writing a literary research paper. In addition to writing essays of literary close reading, students will learn how to conduct and present research on a related topic of their own design.
English R50 is intended for students who are planning to be English majors and who have already taken English R1A. It satisfies the College�s R1B requirement. "
Carroll, L.: Through the Looking-Glass; Coppola, S.: Marie Antoinette; Eggers, D.: The Best American Nonrequired Reading , 2007 ; Lodge, D.: Modern Criticism and Theory; Nabokov, V.: The Enchanter; Stuart, M.: Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory; Voltaire: Candide; Wilde, O.: The Picture of Dorian Gray; Course Reader
"This course continues your R1A training in the systematic practice of reading and writing, with the aim of developing your fluency through longer expository papers and the incorporation of research into argumentation. You will be responsible for writing and revising 3 papers (two 6-8 pages in length, and a final research paper of 8-10 pages), two in-class essays, three rounds of peer editing, and weekly responses to required reading.
Berkeley �s Reading and Composition sequence features courses designed to create a community of writers across the university curriculum: students read interdisciplinary texts, interact with peers from other departments, and write for many different audiences. �Short & Sweet� was designed with this end in mind: we will read many different kinds of writing, from your own essays, to poetry, graphic novels, travel-writing, non-fiction and short fiction, journalism, literary criticism and film, in an effort to make sense of formal constraints. All of our readings will be short, all of our writings will be specific, and all of our focus will be on the forms that we use to contain and express ourselves.
English R50 is intended for students who are planning to be English majors and who have already taken English R1A. It satisfies the College�s R1B requirement. "
Possible titles may include The Princess and the Goblin, White Fang, Harriet the Spy and The Golden Compass
This course will explore the complex and controversial issues that arise around a literature defined by its audience. We'll read British and American children's books from the 19th century to the present as well as a wide range of critical commentary. Students should be prepared to question everything.
Allen, W.: Without Feathers,Side Effects,Four Films,Getting Even,Non-Being and Somethingness; Girgus: The Films of Woody Allen; Hirsch: Love, Sex, Death and the Meaning of Life; Perlman: Seven Types of Ambiguity
We will examine the films and writings of Woody Allen in terms of themes, narration, comic and visual inventiveness and ideology. The course will also include a consideration of cultural contexts and events at Cal Performances and the Pacific Film Archive.
Gaspar de Alba, A.: Desert Blood: The Juarez Murders; Corpi, L.: Cactus Blood; Vea, A.: Gods Go Begging; Maya-Murray, Y.: Locas; Acosta, O. Z.: The Revolt of the Cockroach People and The Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo; Ruiz, R.: Happy Birthday Jesus and Big Bear; Villanueva, A. L.: Naked Ladies; L�pez, I. H.: Racism on Trial: The Chicano Fight for Justice
This course will examine representations of working-class characters and their encounters with the law in several Chicana and Chicano novels. Some of these novels were written by lawyers. Others are narrated from the perspective of a lawyer. All of them are about interpreting, challenging or breaking the law in one way or another. In this course, we will be concerned with the following questions: What is significant about the centrality of the law in these novels? What are the social and formal implications of novels narrated by a lawyer? What distinguishes the narratives of characters who are disciplined by the law from those who take defiant stances against the legal system? What do the representations of legal struggles reveal about history, class power and racialization? Do these novels represent realistic conditions, or do they reinforce stereotypes about Chicanos and the law? We will support our reading of the novels in this course with a fair amount of secondary reading. Assignments may include two papers, an exam, and an in-class presentation. A percentage of your grade will be based on participation.
Balzac, H.: P�re Goriot, Lost Illusions; Eliot, George: Middlemarch, Daniel Deronda; James, Henry: Roderick Hudson, The Portrait of a Lady, The Golden Bowl; a course reader with selections from Armstrong, Bourdieu, Foucault, Guillory, and others
In an 1873 letter to Grace Norton, Henry James writes, �To produce some little exemplary works of art is my narrow and lowly dream. They are to have less �brain� than Middlemarch; but (I boldly proclaim it) they are to have more form.� For the young Henry James, writing a novel meant writing something different, something better, something more than Middlemarch. To write, in other words, was to beat Middlemarch at its own game. In this course we�ll look closely at a handful of novels in order to understand the development of some of that genre�s signature techniques within the context of novelists reading and competing with other novelists. How does one novel revise, revisit, subvert, celebrate or abuse another? How might the so-called �rise� of the novel be understood as the effect of the static that results when one idea about the novel incorporates, bumps up against, or runs over another? We�ll read novels by Honor� de Balzac, George Eliot, and Henry James in order to think about some major concepts within the study of the novel: realism, the representation of the social, different forms of narration, character, plot, etc. We�ll also talk in broader terms (aesthetic, social, economic) about what these writers thought they were doing when they thought to write novels as opposed or in addition to plays, essays, poetry, etc.
Amery, Jean: At the Mind�s Limits; Delbo, Charlotte: Auschwitz and After; Lanzmann, Claude: Shoah; Levi, Primo: The Drowned and the Saved; Schlink, Bernard: The Reader; Spiegelman, Art: Maus I and II; Wiesel, Elie: Night
The German philosopher Theodor Adorno made the famous comment that to write poetry after Auschwitz was barbaric�but not to produce it even more barbarous. Of course, Adorno referred to �poetry� in the metaphorical sense, connoting artistic representation in general, but his remark does raise the question of genre: are some forms of representation more ethical, more effective, more enduring when trying to represent the �unrepresentable�? Does the camera succeed where the pen falters? Can the word cross boundaries that the visual cannot transgress? How do the verbal and visual compliment and complicate each other? The course material ranges from the documentary to the comic book, poetry to propaganda, memoir to Hollywood blockbuster.
Derounian-Stodala, K.: Women�s Indian Captivity Narratives; Baepler, P.: White Slaves, African Masters; Gates, H. L.: The Classic Slave Narratives
The captivity narrative is the first literary genre that might be called uniquely �American.� Although its standard protagonist was a white woman kidnapped by Indians, American captivity narratives also related the troubles of sailors and pirates at sea, Christians and Moslems on the Barbary Coast , and Africans enslaved and transported throughout the Atlantic world. We will study a range of Indian, pirate, and slave captivities, from the period of colonial settlement through the early nineteenth century. Secondary sources will help us think about how the phenomenon of captivity in American literature both concentrated and contained larger battles for cultural power. Quickened by crisis, intensified by danger, and driven by fantasies of destruction and deliverance, the plight of the captive came to stand in for a host of social contests. The captive�s position offers an exceptional opportunity to observe how race, gender, and religion functioned in the �no-man�s-land� of bondage. Students will write short papers throughout the semester.
Frederick Winslow Taylor: Principles of Scientific Management; Mark Twain: A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur�s Court; Edward Bellamy: Looking Backward; Sinclair Lewis: Babbitt. A course reader will include selected prose from Thorsten Veblen; Henry Adams; John Dewey; John Dos Passos; as well as selections from Mary Pattison: The Business of Home Management; Henry Ford: My Philosophy of Industry; Michel Foucault: Discipline and Punish; Robert Herrick: Waste; and selected poetry and prose from William Carlos Williams; along with advertisements, paintings, and photographs.
"This course will examine the origins and, more specifically, the cultural consequences of America's fascination with efficiency, with what has been called ""a secular Great Awakening, an outpouring of ideas and emotions in which a gospel of efficiency was preached without embarrassment"" to writers, workers, corporate executives, doctors, ""homemakers,"" teachers, as well as religious and political leaders. More particularly, we will study the impact of Frederick Winslow Taylor's principles of scientific management on early-twentieth-century American culture. Taylor 's principles, so influential in American corporate enterprise, also infiltrated the ways in which many Americans organized their domestic lives and managed their intellectual relations to the world around them. Such values as productivity, economy, immediacy, and functionalism were everywhere evident in American intellectual life and public discourse in the early decades of the twentieth century � from the debates over the first execution in the electric chair to the ""death"" of the essay as a literary form and its removal from the canon.
Our discussions will examine from theoretical perspectives the nature and the consequences of efficiency systems in everyday life � as reflected in, for example, product design, social behavior, and consumer affairs. We will also explore such issues as the creation of models of ""perfected bodily adjustment"" to ""modern times"" and the emergence of an ""engineering aesthetics"" in literature and literary criticism. We will also consider similar expressions in the arts, education, philosophy, and popular culture. In effect, the course will examine the ways in which a ""culture of efficiency"" emerged during the Progressive Era as Americans struggled to come to terms with what Harriet Monroe called ""the confusion of modern immensities"" and what William James described as ""a teeming multiplicity of objects and relations."" "
Religious Experience; Stewart: Essays and Speeches; Jacobs: Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl; Forten-Grimke: Journals; Keckley: Behind the Scenes; Smith-Foster: A Brighter Coming Day; Harper: Iola Leroy; Hopkins: Magazine Fiction; Larsen: Quicksand
"This course surveys a variety of writing by early African-American women writers, both south and north, primarily of the nineteenth century. Readings include slave narrative, spiritual autobiography, memoir, journal writing, abolitionist and feminist addresses, poetry, a domestic novel, and a science-fiction novel. We will attend to the intersection of race and gender in relation to literary and social forms, the politics of voice and print, and varying historical and literary contexts of reception�not to formulate a unified ""tradition,"" but to understand the variety and complexity of nineteenth-century black women's engagement in social and literary fields. Students will also be introduced to current critical debates in the field through relevant scholarly articles. "
Twain, M.: Innocents Abroad, Roughing It,Life on the Mississippi , Huckleberry Finn,A Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur�s Court,Pudd�nhead Wilson,Number 44 The Mysterious Stranger, Great Short Works; other material to be photocopied
Reading , discussion, and writing about the works, life and times of Mark Twain. The primary texts will include a selection of short stories and sketches by Mark Twain and earlier humorists of the �Old Southwest� and the West; The Innocents Abroad; Roughing It; the first half of Life on the Mississippi; Huckleberry Finn; A Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur�s Court; Pudd�nhead Wilson; and Number 44 The Mysterious Stranger. Writing will normally consist of midterm and final essays of 6-8 pp. each, although under some circumstances a single term paper of 12-16 pages will be possible. Depending on enrollment, each student will be responsible for organizing and leading class discussion (probably teamed with another student) once during the semester. There will be no quizzes or exams, but seminar attendance and participation will be expected, and will affect grades.
Dickinson, E.: The Poems of Emily Dickinson,Selected Letters; Habegger, A.: My Wars are Laid Away in Books; Course Reader
This is an intensive course in the poetry of Emily Dickinson. We will learn how to read (to describe and interpret) her poems, along with her letters and a biography, deeply but also broadly throughout her career. Topics include early poetry; poetic rhythm; figuration; definition and riddle; death, religion, and nature as topic and as figure; love poetry and poetic seduction; emotion & suspense; gender and sexuality; self-definition; biography; manuscript poem packets; poems revisiting poems; letters and/as poems; contemporary history (e.g., Civil War); contemporary poetry (e.g., Emerson, Robert & E.B. Browning); late poetry; reception and influence. There will be a few exercises, a shorter and a longer paper.
(to be selected from among the following): Fitzgerald, F.S.: The Great Gatsby, Tender Is the Night, This Side of Paradise, selected short stories, and essays by and about Fitzgerald; Hemingway, E.: The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell to Arms, In Our Time, The Old Man and the Sea, The Garden of Eden, selected short stories, journalism, and essays by and about Hemingway.
In this seminar, we will read extensively and intensively in the fiction of these two iconic American modernists. We will attend especially to the ways that issues of gender, both femininity and masculinity, inform Fitzgerald�s and Hemingway�s writings and their lives, and the ways these issues have shaped the continuing critical reception of these two figures. Our discussions and your writing for the course will, ideally, combine close attention to narrative form with cultural analysis. Topics for discussion may include modernist and popular authorship; travel, tourism, and expatriation; mass culture, celebrity, and conspicuous consumption; primitivism and technology; narrative technique and style; and the politics of literary canonization. Requirements for the course include 2 short essays (2-3 pages); 1 longer essay (8-10 pages); at least 1 in-class presentation; and regular attendance and active participation in all class meetings.
Norton Anthology of English Literature: The Romantic Period, Vol. C; Austen, J.: Sense and Sensibility; Douglass, F. & H. Jacobs: Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave & Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl; Mackenzie, H.: The Man of Feeling; Solomon, R.: What Is an Emotion?; Sterne, L.: Sentimental Journey
�Why do we cry?� asks Jerome Neu. �My short answer is: because we think.� Neu, like many other philosophers, believes emotions express intelligence rather than physiology. In this class, we will test Neu�s proposition, first by considering some prominent texts from the philosophy of emotion (from Adam Smith, William James, and Freud to recent authors such as Nussbaum and Fisher), then by discussing the literary representation of emotion between 1750 and 1850, a period in which poets and novelists responded to the ever-increasing rationalism and instrumentalism driving modern life. To get at the high stakes of emotion then (and still today), we will take up a number of questions: What do emotions tell us about the relationship between mind and body? What are the social functions of emotion? Are emotions biological constants or are they culturally and historically variable? Is it possible to distinguish between authentic and inauthentic emotions? How do literary representations of emotion act on the emotions of readers? Is it possible (or desirable) not to feel emotions? To get at these questions, we will read many lyric poems (by Gray, Collins, More, Charlotte Smith, Blake, Wordsworth and others) and a few novels (by Mackenzie, Sterne, and Austen), focusing on the scenes of sorrow, loss, and sympathy that dominated this period.
Carroll, L.: Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass; Lear, E.: A Book of Nonsense, Nonsense Songs and Stories, The Owl and the Pussycat, The Quangle Wangle's Hat; Dr. Seuss: And to Think that I Saw it on Mulberry Street!, Horton Hears A Who, Horton Hatches an Egg, If I Ran the Zoo, The Lorax, Yertle the Turtle, Oh! The Places You'll Go, Oh, Say Can You Say?Oh, The Thinks You Can Think! and You're Only Old Once
This course will justify the indulgence of re-reading of favorite children's books by exploring two dimensions of nonsense literature in general. One is its extreme foregrounding of linguistic structure, including verse structure, a characteristic shared with language games and of particular interest to children learning language. Another is the correlative backgrounding of overt claims about the actual world, allowing covert critiques of educational practices, social inequality, imperialism, capitalism, the American health care system and even philology.
Among the narratives we will read are, for New Mexico, selections from Historia de la Nueva Mexico (Perez de Villagra,1610), �Pastorelas� plays, Fray Angelico Chavez�s Short Stories, Anaya�s Bless Me, Ultima, Castillo�s So Far From God, Baca�s Martin and Meditations on the South Valley, and Denise Chavez�s Loving Pedro Infante; for California, selections from Ruiz de Burton�s The Squatter and the Don, Morales� The Brick People, Villarreal�s Pocho, Viramonte�s Under the Feet of Jesus, and essays from Richard Rodriguez, Cherrie Moraga, and Gloria Anzaldua.
"This course will study the historical and ideological formation of Chicano narrative in two regions. Chicano narrative in New Mexico is suffused with the iconography of Spanish colonial history, religious imagery and ritual, open and communal space ruptured by American encroachment, and by nostalgia for the loss of traditional cultural practices. California narrative also expresses chagrin at the loss of land possession after the American invasion of 1846, but very soon after 1900 turns to narrative about Mexican immigrant presence, labor exploitation, urban experience, and, often, longing for Mexico rather than an earlier California.
The major theoretical and critical method here will be to historicize our readings; to that end I will also assign some historical overviews, literary history, and some literary criticism that studies the formations of Chicano narrative"
Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway; William Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom!; Spiegelman, Maus; William Strunk, Jr. and E.B. White, The Elements of Style, Illustrated; Diana Hacker, Rules for Writers; a course reader
This course examines melodrama�s role in dramatizing Asians in American literature, theater, and film. Since Madame Butterfly and Fu Manchu, melodrama has been the most popular mode for casting Asians as victims and villains, but it has also been a way for Asian American writers (and more recently directors) to dramatize the heightened emotions of their protagonists and appeal to a wide readership. How has melodrama shaped American cultural ideas about Asians, and how have Asian Americans worked within and against this framework? Students will write two papers for the course: the first on one of the assigned texts or films, the second on their own research topic involving the relationship between racial representation and melodrama. Films will be screened outside of class in the late afternoon or evening; students who cannot make the screening can see the films on their own at the Media Center in Moffitt.
Bratton, Cook, Gledhill, eds.: Melodrama: Stage, Picture, Screen; Byars, J.: All That Hollywood Allows ; Cook, P.: Screening the Past; Klinger, B.: Melodrama and Meaning; Landy, M.: Imitations of Life
We will focus on a range of film melodramas from early silents to contemporary examples, analyzing melodrama�s relationship to the body, the family, gender roles, excess and spectacle. We will be interested in melodrama and modernity, and in the genre�s position vis a vis politics and culture.
Burrow, J. and T. Turville-Petre: A Book of Middle English; Burrow, J.: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight; Borroff, M.: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Patience, Pearl : Verse Translations
This course will survey Middle English literature, excluding Chaucer, beginning with the earliest Middle English texts and ending with Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. We will focus on language, translation, and close reading to start, leading up to a broader consideration of the Middle English literary tradition and its role in the creation of English literature as we now know it. Students will have a variety of options for written work.
Shakespeare, W.: The Riverside Shakespeare
This course treats the second half of Shakespeare�s career, focusing on the major tragedies, the so-called �problem plays� and romances. Our general approach will be to read each text closely and with attention to the socio-historical issues at play. Although largely a lecture course, discussion is warmly welcomed. There will be a number of writing assignments of different types, and, time permitting, some films that may give us an opportunity to explore more contemporary interpretations of Shakespeare.
Milton, J.: Complete Poems and Major Prose
A survey of John Milton�s career, a life-long effort to unite intellectual, political, and artistic experimentation. There will be two short papers and a final exam.
Broadie, A., ed.: The Scottish Enlightenment: An Anthology; Hume, D.: An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding; Johnson, S. & J. Boswell.: A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland / Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides; Mackenzie, H.: The Man of Feeling; Smollett, T.: The Expedition of Humphry Clinker; Burns, R.: Selected Poems; Baillie, J.: Plays on the Passions; Ferrier, S.: Marriage; Scott, W.: Rob Roy; Hogg, J., Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner; in addition to the books listed, we will be working from a course reader.
The official title for this course is �The Age of Johnson.� Although we�ll be reading Samuel Johnson�s masterpiece of philosophical tourism, A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland, this is not a course on �the age of Johnson� but on writing in Scotland in the second half of the long eighteenth century�the Age of Hume, of Burns, and of Scott, if it has to be called the age of anyone, which it probably shouldn�t. The course encompasses the so-called Scottish Enlightenment, a major European movement (1740-1795) of literary and scientific modernization based in the university towns of Lowland Scotland, as well as the post-Enlightenment boom of commercial publishing in Edinburgh (1800-1830), with innovations in periodicals and fiction that defined the nineteenth-century public sphere. The Scots may not have �invented the modern world� (as one book title boasts), but they invented some of the key discourses for imagining it, from political economy to historical romance. We will be reading works from the mainstream genres of the Scottish Enlightenment, in moral philosophy and the human sciences, by David Hume, Adam Smith, Adam Ferguson, and others, alongside the eighteenth-century projects of Scottish poetry that founded a European and North Atlantic Romanticism, including James Macpherson�s scandalous invention of ancient Highland epic and Robert Burns�s poetic synthesis of a �language really spoken by men.� And we�ll consider the rise of the Scottish novel in the period, from satirical Smollett and sentimental Mackenzie to national and historical fiction by Scott and his rivals looking back across Scotland �s century of modernization.
Perkins, D.: English Romantic Writers; Shelley, M.: Frankenstein; Shelley, P.B.: The Cenci; a Course Reader
"In 1796, Samuel Taylor Coleridge published a poem in the Monthly Magazine with an odd subtitle: ""A Poem which affects not to be Poetry."" Why write a poem that doesn�t want to seem like a poem? Literature since that time has been in conversation with the experimental poetry of Coleridge and of the Romantic period. This course will focus on key Romantic writers and their experiments, to give some historical shape to the contested terms ""poem"" and ""Poetry."" Is a poem merely a peculiar form of information storage, as in ""thirty days hath September""? Or (as Shelley put it) ""the very image of life expressed in its eternal truth""? Why do so many writers of the period assign greater value to poetry, despite the increasing popularity of prose fiction? In what ways are their poetical experiments related to the ""great national events��the American and French Revolutions, and the rise both of industrial manufacture and global capital�that were transforming social relations? To answer these and other questions we will read the work of the six ""major"" poets (Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, Keats), as well as some popular prose fiction ( Frankenstein, The Monk) of the same period."
Darwin, C.: The Origin of Species; Dickens, C.: Great Expectations; Abrams et al., eds.: The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol. B: The Victorian Age; a Course Reader
This course is an introduction to the literature and culture of the Victorian period. Victorian poets, novelists, and critics responded to rapid industrial growth, colonial expansion, and profound developments in science, technology, and social life with a mixture of exuberance, anxiety, and dismay. We will focus on the period's poetry and non-fiction prose in order to understand how particular texts represent and sometimes undermine particularly Victorian ideas about aesthetics, politics, progress, money, religion, gender, and science.
Scott, W: Waverley , or �Tis Sixty Years Since ; Hugo, V.: Notre Dame de Paris; Pushkin, A .: The Captain�s Daughter; Dickens, C.: A Tale of Two Cities; Tolstoy, L.: War and Peace
Focusing on key texts from English, French, and Russian traditions, this course examines how the genre of the novel approaches and appropriates historical material as well as reflects its own particular historical contexts. We will consider 5 European novels from the nineteenth century, a �golden age� of the novel in Europe and a period in which history and historical writing also came to dominate European intellectual discussions. The course encourages a range of critical approaches, from close reading, the theory of the novel and genre theory, to historicist and biographical inquiry. Course requirements include reading 150-200 pages per week, 2 short papers, a longer final paper, a midterm and a final exam.
Proust, M.: In Search of Lost Time
By reading one of the most significant 20 th-century novels in detail, the course will attempt to answer questions about the thematic concerns and formal techniques of modernism. The relationships between changing conceptions of language and desire, of the individual subject, and of the pressures of history, as these are figured in the particular rhetorics and structures of this paradigmatic novel, will provide the central axes of our investigation. Active in-class participation and a willingness to engage in both copious reading and regular dialogues are the only prerequisites for the course.
Lauter, P., ed.: The Heath Anthology of American Literature, Volume A: Colonial Period to 1800; Miller, P., ed.: The American Puritans: Their Prose and Poetry; Rowson, S.: Charlotte Temple; Brown, C. B.: Edgar Huntly; photocopied Course Reader
"This course will offer a survey of the literature produced in North America before 1800: European accounts of ""discovery"" and exploration; competing British versions of settlement; Puritan history, sermons, and poetry; conversion, captivity, and slave narratives; diaries and journals; eighteenth-century poetry by women; Native American oratory; autobiography; letters, essays, and political debate; and novels. Two midterms and one final examination will be required."
Jacobs, H.: Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl; Twain, M.: A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur�s Court; Gilman, C. P.: The Yellow Wallpaper; Crane, S.: Maggie, a Girl of the Streets; Jewett, S.O.: The County of the Pointed Firs; James, H.: The Turn of the Screw; Chopin, K.: The Awakening; Norris, F.: McTeague; Chesnutt, C.: The Marrow of Tradition; Berkman, A.: Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist; Course Reader (consisting of works by Louisa May Alcott and Walt Whitman)
"American Literature Between the Wars (Civil and World War One). This course will survey American Literature from the Civil War into the early twentieth century in order to explore the ways in which changes wrought on the American landscape by war, urbanization, industrialization and immigration are reflected in the evolution of American poetry and prose in both style and content. Beginning with slavery and the Reconstruction, we will trace the shifting contours of American identity into the Gilded Age and beyond as it is altered by competing notions of race, gender and politics Such literary movements as Realism and �local color� will also occupy our attention.
There will be two out-of-class essays as well as an in-class midterm and final examination. Although this is primarily a lecture course, be prepared also to participate in open discussion and for the occasional reading quiz. "
Lehman, David, ed.: The Oxford Book of American Poetry
This is a survey of American poetry from its beginnings to the present. We will spend particular time on Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, the modernist poets of the first half of the 20th century, the Harlem Renaissance, the Beat Generation and the Poets of the New York as they emerged in the post-war years, and we will try to spend some time on the poets of the last twenty years and some young poets of the present moment. There will be essays to write and a final exam.
Coetzee, J.M.: Waiting for the Barbarians; Greene, G.: The End of the Affair; Ishiguro, K.: The Remains of the Day; Roy, A.: The God of Small Things; Smith, Z.: White Teeth; Stoppard, T.: Arcadia; a Course Reader including poems by Philip Larkin, Basil Bunting, Ted Hughes, Roy Fisher, Christopher Okigbo, Derek Walcott, Kamau Brathwaite, Seamus Heaney, Derek Mahon, Medbh McGuckian, Paul Muldoon, Lorna Goodison, Carol Ann Duffy, David Dabydeen, Maggie O�Sullivan, Linton Kwesi Johnson, Geraldine Monk, and Caroline Bergvall
We will sketch the far-flung field of contemporary British literature, closely reading some key texts written since the end of World War II. In addition to paying careful attention to varieties of poetic form and narrative style, we will think through the continuing utility of such a phrase as �British literature� in a globalizing world, especially as we focus on the aftermath of the British Empire and the colonial legacy of that empire in such places as India , Africa , the Caribbean , and Ireland . Course requirements include two essays and a final exam.
Callahan, A.: Wynema; Chesnutt, C.: The House Behind the Cedars; Chopin, K: The Awakening; Crane, S.: Maggie; Eastman, C.: From the Deep Woods to Civilization; Harper, F.: Iola Leroy; Hopkins, S.: Life Among the Piutes; James, H.: Daisy Miller; Washington, B.: Up From Slavery
This is a course on Native American, African American and European American writers in the Gilded Age, roughly from the end of the Civil War to the beginning of World War I. I am especially interested in these writers� responses to the extensive and pervasive economic, political and cultural transformations of the period, a period of massive dislocation and disorientation for almost any ethnic group. I am going to present these authors chronologically rather than thematically or as ethnic groups, so that there will be constant interweaving of themes and ideas. I am planning on two in-class midterms and a final exam.
Addams, J.: Twenty Years at Hull House; Chopin, K.: The Awakening; Eastman, C.: From the Deep Woods to Civilization; Garvey, E.: The Adman in the Parlor; Lippman, W.: Drift and Mastery; Porter, G.: The Rise of Big Business; Sinclair, U.: The Moneychangers; Taylor, F.: The Scientific Principles of Management; Wharton, E.: The House of Mirth; Wiebe, R.: The Search for Order
This is an introduction to a number of cultural/political/economic/social issues from a �transitional� period of the United States between the rise of industrial capitalism (big corporate businesses and huge urban centers) in the late-19 th century and the beginnings of a modernist attempt to bring order to what was often felt to be the chaos of development. In addition to a variety of texts, there will be screenings of a number of films, mainly short films. Two midterms and a final exam.
Semb�ne, O.: God�s Bits of Wood; Doyle, R.: A Star Called Henry; Munif, A.: Cities of Salt; Cliff, M.: Abeng; Roy, A.: The God of Small Things; Adichie, C.: Half of a Yellow Sun; Tyrewala, A.: No God in Sight; Ghosh, A.: In An Antique Land; and a small Course Reader
At the midpoint of the twentieth century much of the world was still ruled by a handful of European colonial powers. Today nearly all the world is comprised of formally independent nations. This course will consider the literature that has arisen as part of, or in response to, this tremendous historical shift. Our readings will include a selection of prose works drawn from a variety of fictional and non-fictional genres, including the novel, bildungsroman, testimonial narrative, polemic, and the traveler�s tale. We�ll explore the varied roles that literature has played in processes of political and imaginative decolonization, and consider the complexly ambivalent response that currently prevails toward the legacies of independence.
Chinua Achebe: Things Fall Apart; Amos Tutuola: My Life in the Bush of Ghosts; Ben Okri: The Famished Road; Moses Isegawa: Snakepit; Helon Habila: Waiting for an Angel; Tsitsi Dangaremba: Nervous Condition; Ahmadou Korouma: Waiting for the Vote of the Wild Animals; Frantz Fanon: Wretched of the Earth
In this course we will examine the history of the African novel, from narratives of exploration, colonial dominance, and ethnographic encounter to the reassertion of tribal, ancestral, linguistic legitimacy in the late- and post-colonial novel. We will be examining the ways in which the European encounter with Africa takes the form of various kinds of enchantment, and the complex ways in which African writers have narrated both the disenchantment of colonialism and the reinvention of an enchanted world, the reimagined spirits of history, the novel, and Africa. Perhaps more than any other location, Africa has labored beneath a mountain of misconception. Labeled the �dark continent,� it has become the field onto which the anxieties of modernity have been fixed�its fears of the so-called primitive and the irrational. This course shall focus on the question of African modernity. Naturally, the social and political context of de-colonization and postcoloniality shall be central, yet we shall also spend considerable time on the question of aesthetics. The contemporary African novel has moved a considerable distance from the modernizing directives of the realist novel; radical experimentation in the form of the folkloric and ludic are deployed to express the often horrific and chaotic realities of life in the postcolony.
King, Stephen & Heidi Pitlor, eds.: The Best American Short Stories, 2007
"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. Class 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 engage with the problems faced by writers of fiction, and discover the techniques that enable writers to construct a convincing representation of reality on the page."
Jahan Ramazani, ed.: The Norton Anthology of Modern & Contemporary Poetry, 2 vols.; Course Reader
In this course you will conduct a progressive series of experiments in which you will explore the fundamental options for writing poetry today�aperture, partition, closure; rhythmic sound patterning; sentence & line; stanza; short & long-lined poems; image & figure; graphics & textual space; cultural translation; poetic forms (haibun, villanelle, sestina, pantoum, ghazal, etc.); the first, second, third, and no person (persona, address, drama, narrative, description); prose poetry. Our emphasis will be placed on recent possibilities, but with an eye & ear always to renovating traditions. 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 six or so in rotation (I�ll respond to every poem you write). On alternate days, we�ll discuss pre-modern and modern exemplary poems drawn from the Norton Anthology and from our course reader. It will be delightful.
Course Reader
The purpose of this class will be to produce an unfinished 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 done under extreme formal constraints. In addition, there�ll be regular commentary on other students� work and a brief critical consideration of a recent volume of poetry.
Robertson, L.: Occasional Work and Seven Walks from the Office for Soft Architecture; Mayer, B. and Clark Coolidge: The Cave; Smithson, R.: The Collected Writings (of Robert Smithson); Fitterman, R: Metropolis XXX; Weschler, L.: Mr. Wilson�s Cabinet of Wonder
This class will mine site-specific writing and post-conceptual art. Collectively we�ll develop a critical vocabulary through readings; individually students will pursue forms of experimental research that will inform their own projects. Our readings will be organized around historic models of the writer as self-appointed, alternative guide or explicator, often moving (wandering in cities or sublime landscapes, leading official or unofficial tours) and just as often poaching from a range of non-poetic fields including anthropology, art history, science fiction, travel literature, philosophy, history, and science. Our precedents will include Restif de la Bretonne, Edmund and Jules de Goncourt, Francis Ponge, Bernadette Mayer, Robert Smithson, The Museum of Jurassic Technology, Mark Dion, Lisa Robertson, Rob Fitterman, The Chadwicks, and The Center for Land Use Interpretation.
Students should come to class before buying texts. The list below is tentative. But, that said, it will likely include most of the following books: Joseph Conrad: Heart of Darkness; Eddy Harris: Mississippi Solo; Jack Kerouac: Dharma Bums; Linda Niemann: Boomer. We�ll also read excerpts from Travel Writing: 1700-1830 (Ian Duncan and Elizabeth Bohls); Paul Fussell�s Norton Anthology of Travel Writing; Stranger in the Village: Two Centuries of African-American Travel Writing (Farrah Griffin and Cheryl Fish); and items from the popular press.
"Much of American literature has had to do with a sense of motion. Note the journeys, e.g., in the best known texts of Melville and Twain. But note also that Harlemite Langston Hughes� autobiography, The Big Sea, begins on a boat and details his adventures in Europe and Africa; Canadian writer Gladys Hindmarch takes on Melville with her Watery Part of the World and Zora Neale Hurston travels to Haiti in Tell My Horse and through the American south in Mules and Men.
The point of this course is multiple and full of inquiry. Judith Thurman, reviewing Catherine Millet�s
instantly notorious autobiography, The Sexual Life of Catherine M., for the New Yorker: Lust is a great and inexhaustible literary subject, but writing graphically about what excites one isn�t literature. The same stupid things excite everybody.
Substitute �travel� for �lust� and you have one of the fields of inquiry here this spring semester. The
familiar question, �Is this trip necessary?�, is joined to �What makes this trip important enough to
celebrate?�
Another field is the role of Americans and/ or Westerners��subjectivity� in the vernacular�as travelers in the world. (I�d note that the world is both within and beyond our national boundaries.) What things are we heir to? What are our responsibilities and blindnesses? What�s the relation between the imperial West (of Conrad�s writing) and our current situation? The point in this�and any writing�is to write consciously and to be mindful of the political import of our writing.
A third field is the defining of the relation between travel and place (and imagination). Place is �hot�
right now, as a topic. What are the elements of the sentimental here and what assumptions?
We�ll read and write about travel. The writing vehicle will be, for the greatest part, the personal essay."
Atwan, R., ed.: The Best American Essays, 5 th edition
This workshop course concentrates on the form, theory and practice of creative nonfiction, particularly on the writing of the personal essay. Students are required to fulfill specific assignments and to write 45 pages of nonfictional narrative.
Lopate, P., ed.: The Art of the Personal Essay
This class will be conducted as a writing workshop to explore the art and craft of the personal essay. We will closely examine the essays in Phillip Lopate�s anthology, as well as students� exercises and essays. Writing assignments will include three short writing exercises (2 pages each) and two new essays (8-15 pages each). Since the class meets only once a week, attendance is mandatory.
Course Reader
The purpose of the class is to give students a chance to work on verse translation, to share translations and give and receive feedback on their work, to read about the theory and practice of translation, and perhaps to try out different practices and techniques. Participants must have some competence in a language they want to translate from and develop a project in that language. For each workshop students will provide original texts, word-for-word versions, and a draft of a translation which the class can then discuss. It makes for an interesting way to study poetry and verse technique�to see how one goes about making poetry in one language come alive in another.
Graduate students from other departments and exceptionally well-prepared undergraduates are welcome in English graduate courses (except for English 200 and 375) insofar as limitations of class size allow. Graduate courses are usually limited to 15 students; courses numbered 250 are usually limited to 10.
When demand for a graduate course exceeds the maximum enrollment limit, the instructor will determine priorities for enrollment and inform students of his/her decisions at the second class meeting. Prior enrollment does not guarantee a place in a graduate course that turns out to be oversubscribed on the first day of class; fortunately, this situation does not arise very often.
Adorno, T. and M. Horkheimer: The Dialectic of Enlightenment; Auerbach, E.: Mimesis; Buzard, J.: The Autoethnographic Work of Nineteenth-Century British Novels; Clark, T.J.: The Painting of Modern Life; Jameson, F.: The Political Unconscious,Marxism and Form; Krishnan, S.: Reading the Global; Lukacs, G.: History and Class Consciousness, The Historical Novel; Mufti, A.: Enlightenment in the Colony; Schwarz, R.: A Master on the Periphery of Capitalism; Williams, R.: The Country and the City; there will be also be a course packet containing selections from Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Louis Althusser, John Frow, Paul Ricoeur, Jason Read, Edward Said, Margaret Cohen, Sharon Marcus, Marjorie Levinson, Rob Kaufman, and others.
This course in the �History of Literary Criticism� will be an intensively focused and partial survey of the dialectic of formalism and historicism in the history of literary (and aesthetic) criticism. A core focus of the course will be the theoretical resources afforded by critical realism, understood in an expansive sense as an aesthetic mode of cognition or form of epistemology�generated in particular by situations of crisis, transition, and unevenness. To this extent, we will also be interested in the legacies of critical realism for postcolonial literary criticism�attempts to grasp the marvelous or misplaced realities of the periphery, attempts to draw a transnational cognitive map of metropolitan subjectivity. We will begin by taking stock of our contemporary critical context by examining characterizations of our �new formalist� turn in literary studies and critiques of ideological reading, before returning to a longer view of historicist and formalist impulses within the discipline. This course should be useful to students seeking an acquaintance with Marxist literary criticism in general and/or those interested in developing interdisciplinary or worldly dissertation projects.
Course Reader
Disability Studies as it has emerged in the academy in the last decade is a multidisciplinary, cross-disciplinary, interdisciplinary field. For complex historical reasons themselves worth exploring, in the United States that field has had particularly strong anchoring in the arts and humanities. This course will explore the meanings of �disability,� of �theory,� of �art� and of �the humanities� by considering each term in its relation to each others. Our conversations and readings will be determined to a significant extent by students� own research interests (but that doesn�t mean I presuppose any knowledge of disability issues), and also by the current interests of some of the foundational shapers of the field from across the country who will join us as guests. They will include a number of literary critics, scholars in deaf studies and performance studies, historians, legal scholars, and artists and photographers.
Woolf, V.: Between the Acts, Jacob�s Room, Moments of Being, Orlando, Mrs. Dalloway, A Room of One�s Own, Three Guineas, To the Lighthouse, The Voyage Out, The Waves, A Writer�s Diary, The Years; Lee, H: Virginia Woolf
This course will examine the evolution of Woolf�s career across the nearly three decades that define the arc of British modernism. This co-incidence will allow us to theorize the shape of a career and of a literary movement, and to re-read that movement through a literary oeuvre that has been cherry picked to illustrate a particular turn within it. As we map the trajectory from Woolf�s apprenticeship works in the teens through the experimental narratives of the twenties to the politically pressured projects of the late thirties, we will explore the textual strategies through which these turns were achieved and the cultural crosscurrents in which they were embedded. We will read Woolf�s critical essays to situate her narrative practice within her commentary on it (as well as within narrative theory generally); we will take advantage of the recently published holograph manuscripts to read published texts in the context of their revisions; we will exploit the proliferation of Woolf biographies to revisit her ambivalence about biography; and we will put pressure on her appropriation and revision by various critical schools and contemporary writers. Two approximately 12-page papers will be required, in addition to seminar presentations that will expand our frames of cultural and critical reference.
Jonathan Edwards, A Jonathan Edwards Reader (Yale); Benjamin Franklin, The Autobiography (Penguin); Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia (Penguin); Ralph Waldo Emerson, Selected Essays (Penguin); Henry David Thoreau, Walden and Civil Disobedience (Penguin); Herman Melville, Moby-Dick (Penguin); William James, The Writings of William James. (University of Chicago Press)
We will study the (mostly) productive tension between consolidating and dispersing impulses in American philosophical literature. Most of the discussion time will be spent on close reading, but members of the class will on occasion present secondary critical materials they have found instructive. Two ten-page essays will be required, one about halfway through, the other at the end.
Haywood, E.: Fantomina; Defoe, D.: Roxana; Richardson, S.: Pamela; Fielding, H.: Shamela, Joseph Andrews; Smollett, T.: Roderick Random; Lennox , C.: The Female Quixote; Radcliffe, A.: Mysteries of Udolpho
As we read a variety of works of eighteenth-century fiction we shall consider a series of revisionist (especially feminist) histories and theories of the early novel. The eighteenth-century British texts we have retroactively named novels often argued with each other about the status of this new form. In these debates the novels deployed and actively intervened in contemporary theories of sexuality, gender and class (all of which some saw as dangerously unstable in the period), and we shall have these debates in mind as we study these texts. Also increasingly important in the legitimating narratives around the novel was the novel�s status as a British form, and we shall think about the novels of this period in relation to national and transnational developments. Although we shall approach the readings through these specific foci, I do intend the course as a broad-based introduction to these eighteenth-century texts and some of the critical issues they have raised. Written work will reflect that introductory tone; in several 5-6-page papers you will engage these issues on an exploratory basis rather than a thorough and conclusive one.
T.J. Clark: Farewell to an Idea ; Tim Armstrong: Modernism ; Charles Altieri: The Art of Modernist American Poetry; John Ashbery: Selected Poems ; Wallace Stevens: Collected Poems and Prose ; W.C. Williams: Spring and All ; also a course reader
"I am concerned with what the new historical work in modernism puts at risk�the possibility that it has continuing vitality for engaged imaginations because it still does significant affective and intellectual work. I think much of this work derives not so much from what writers ""say"" as the arenas they construct for making visible complex systems of mutual interrelations that can only be shown and not ""said."" What can be the power of such showings? To begin answering these questions this course will begin with brief readings on relationality (Nietzsche and baby Hegel), then two weeks on Cezanne, Picasso, and non-iconic abstraction, then mostly prose and highly selected poems from Pound and Eliot as well as short stories by Wyndham Lewis. The extended case study will be Wallace Stevens for four weeks as we think about what he can use in modernism and how he feels he must modify his heritage. Finally we will spend one week on Pollock and Johns for figures of how relationality gets literalized separates visuality from various contextual backgrounds. We will close with how Ashbery at once culminates the sense of relationality and proves so amazingly fertile for younger writers."
Austen, J.: Northanger Abbey, Persuasion; Edgeworth, M.: Castle Rackrent and Ennui; Godwin, W.: Caleb Williams; Hogg, J.: Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner; Radcliffe, A.: The Romance of the Forest; Scott, W.: Waverley, The Antiquary; Shelley, M.: Frankenstein; Smith, C.: Desmond; Walpole, H.: The Castle of Otranto
We will read major works of Gothic, Jacobin, domestic, regional, national and historical fiction, published in Great Britain between 1764 and 1824, in relation to the literary and historical contexts of British Romanticism. Critical readings will be assigned. Course requirements will include a short (3-page) paper plus two 8-10 page papers and one or two in-class presentations.
King, Stephen & Heidi Pitlor, eds.: The Best American Short Stories, 2007; Nabokov, Vladimir : Lectures on Literature
"A graduate-level fiction workshop. Students will write fiction, produce critiques of work submitted to the workshop, and participate in discussions about the theory and practice of writing. We�ll also read published fiction and essays about writing from various sources. Students will produce at least 40 pages of fiction over the course of the semester.
Undergraduates are welcome to apply. Please note that the class will assume prior experience with workshops, and familiarity with the basic elements of fiction and the critical vocabulary used by writers to analyze narrative. Class attendance is mandatory."
Boswell, J.: The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides; Johnson, S.: Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland; Sterne, L.: A Sentimental Journey; Burney, F.: Evelina; Walpole, H.: The Castle of Otranto; Burke, E.: A Philosophical Inquiry, Reflections on the Revolution in France; Smith, A.: Theory of Moral Sentiments; Hume, D.: Treatise of Human Nature; Blake, W.: Songs of Innocence and Experience; Wordsworth W. and Coleridge, S. T.: Lyrical Ballads; Williams, H.M.: Letters Written from France; Williams, R.: Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society . In addition, the following works will be either in a course reader or available on-line: selected poems of William Collins, Thomas Gray, Oliver Goldsmith, George Crabbe, William Cowper (The Task), Christopher Smart (Jubilitate Agno), Anna Barbauld, and Charlotte Smith; further prose works by Samuel Johnson (e.g., �Preface� to the Dictionary and to Shakespeare) and Edward Young (�Conjectures on Original Composition�); also an array of critical essays on the period.
This course offers a survey of the period from 1740 to 1800, or from Hume�s new �science of man� to Wordsworth�s account of poetry as the �history or science of feelings.� The many different titles that have affixed themselves to these years (Pre-Romantic, Post-Augustan, the Age of Johnson, the Culture of Sensibility) might testify to its excitements and eccentricities, its metamorphic riot of genres and authors. We will try to do justice to its heterogeneity, sampling all genres of poetry and prose, although�since there is a course on the eighteenth-century novel offered concurrently in the department�we can devote relatively more time to poetry and non-fictional prose. Threads that will receive particular attention include: the emergence of aesthetics as a new science; sensibility and inequity; skirmishes over the �common tongue� and the constitution of �the people�; changing definitions of literature (printed matter or creative writing?) and authorial identity (the author as producer, as �nobody,� as genius); residual and simulated oral culture in an age of print; the Scottish Enlightenment and the romance of the Highlands; Britain in international space and nostalgia for home; gothic and Revolution; likely and unlikely versions of pastoral. To some extent our concerns will be methodological as well: what sorts of critical approaches have shaped and reshaped this shifting field�and what kinds of study seem productive for its future?
Austen, J.: Sense and Sensibility; Brown, C. B.: Wieland; Cooper, J. F.: The Prairie; Dickens, C.: Bleak House; Douglass, F.: My Bondage and My Freedom; Equiano, O.: Interesting Narrative; Fern, F.: Ruth Hall; Franklin, B.: Autobiography; Fuller, M.: Woman in the Nineteenth Century; Irving, I.: The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon; Lewis, M.: The Monk; Melville, H.: Great Short Works; Scott, W.: Rob Roy; Sterne, L.: Sentimental Journey; Webb, F. J.: The Garies and Their Friends; Wollstonecraft, M.: Mary and The Wrongs of Woman; photocopied Course Reader
We will consider American prose literature from the late-eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth century in a transatlantic context. We will analyze literary influence as it travels, in some familiar and some surprising ways, between North America and England , Scotland , and Ireland . As we do, we will take stock of recent work in transatlantic studies (Giles, Gilroy , Linebaugh and Rediker, Tamarkin, Tennenhouse, and others). Course requirements include two 8-10 page essays and one or two oral presentations.
Pearsall, D. and D. Wu: Poetry from Chaucer to Spenser; Hirsh, J.: Medieval Lyric
In this course, we will explore the lyric tradition in English, beginning with Chaucerian lyrics and ending with Spenser�s sonnets. Along the way, we will read poems from figures like Gower, Hoccleve, Lydgate, Charles d�Orleans, Hawes, Barclay, Audelay, Henryson, Douglas , Dunbar , Skelton, Wyatt, Surrey , and a raft of anonymous poets. We will focus on the development of style in Middle English and Renaissance poetry, asking if some form of continuity can be discerned between the 14 th and the 16 th centuries, or if a radical break occurred in the 16 th century that manifested itself formally and stylistically in poetry. We will pay special attention to the manuscript and print contexts for poems, examining works in compilations and anthologies and considering what vision of poetry such an examination yields.
Shakespeare, W.: Titus Andronicus, Julius Caesar, Hamlet, King Lear; Milton, J: Paradise Lost ; Kyd, T.: The Spanish Tragedy. A (very heavy) course reader will include a wide range of early modern materials (tracts about slavery, an obscure play about a slave revolt, speeches in the House of Commons, tracts about the poor, sermons, and poems by Sidney, Spenser, Donne, Crashaw, Herbert, Layner and others) and selections from theoretical and philosophical texts by Aristotle, Agamben, Zizek, Boltanski, Berlant, Ricoeur, Garber, Girard, and Nussbaum.
How did early modern subjects represent and conceptualize compassion, pity, and sympathy? We will be especially interested in compassion as a complex point of intersection among literary, political, theological, and devotional discourses and practices. Put another way, we will ask how fictions, the poor, and Christ, to take a few examples, were distinguished�or conflated�as objects of compassion. We will also juxtapose the ways in which early modern theories of compassion and other cultural logics�sacrifice, political representation, revenge�construct identity and the relationship between self and other. The importance of imagination, fiction, and fictionalizing to the development of compassion as a social, moral, and political category will be a persistent concern. If Hamlet�s astonishment over the player�s capacity to shed tears for Hecuba seems to instantiate the problem of compassionating fictions, many Renaissance authors suggest that it is easier to feel compassion for fictions or persons so distant from us that they have the status of fictions. We will also think about compassion as ideology, the relation between regarding others and self-fashioning, and what is at stake in making distinctions among compassion, sympathy, and pity. The reading list will take us all the way from Elizabethan sonneteers to the early 18 th century, when compassion emerged as one of the central terms in British culture.
A reading of Proust�s Recherche (in the Moncrieff/Kilmartin translation) alongside�and as�a reflection on traditional novel form.
Gregory, A.: selected plays; Joyce, J.: Dubliners and Ulysses; Beckett, S.: First Love and selected other works TBA; Synge, J.M.: The Aran Islands; Yeats, W.B.: selected poems and prose TBA; O�Brien, F.: The Third Policeman and selections from The Best of Myles TBA; Bowen, E.: The Last September; McGahern, J.: Amongst Women; O�Neill, J.: At Swim Two Boys; a required course reader, with selections of critical essays, plays, poems and short stories
This course is a survey of Irish literature and culture from the Celtic Revival (1890-1930) to the Celtic Tiger (1990s-present). The Celtic Revival was an upsurge of nationalist sentiment that resulted in the creation of an Irish Republic in defiance of Great Britain . The Celtic Tiger was a surge of transnational capital investment that transformed Ireland from one of the poorest to one of the richest of European countries: once marked by emigration and decline, now by prosperity, population growth, and an influx of immigrants from Eastern Europe , Africa , and Asia . Such reversals of fortune and the relative recentness of their manifestation make Ireland a unique locus of study for the experimental application of postcolonial theory, world-systems theory, and theories of nationalism, race and ethnicity. In Irish Studies the debate between postcolonialists (and nationalists) on the one hand and historical revisionists on the other is lively and occasionally brutal. Then there is the literature, which Pascale Casanova has described as itself a kind of �Irish miracle.� Looking at well-known modernists like Gregory, Yeats, Synge, Joyce, O�Brien, and Bowen, we�ll study the connections between the cultural revival, formations of national literature, and modernist formal innovation, following closely on recent theories of modernism that relocate its genesis from the metropole to the periphery. From there we�ll look at what�s happened since: fictions dealing with the partition of Ireland (the Belfast poets, The Field Day Theatre Company); fictions dealing, in the midst of the new prosperity, with the traumas of famine, emigration, civil war, stagnation, state censorship and isolation (The Field, The Butcher Boy, The Wind That Shakes the Barley, Korea, At Swim Two Boys); and finally fictions of the Celtic Tiger (�Riverdance,� Aqua, Intermission, The Snapper, etc.). The course is designed to appeal to anyone interested in Irish Studies, modernism, postcolonial theory, and sociological theories of literature (Bourdieu, Casanova et al.). We�ll also be screening a few films in the class, though the theory of film won�t be rigorously covered. Required are one or two in-class presentations (depending on enrollment), a project proposal for the final paper, and one final 20-30 page research paper of publishable quality.
"Meyer, E. and L. Smith: The Practical Tutor
Recommended Text: Leki, I. : Understanding ESL Writers"
"Through seminars, discussions, and reading assignments, students are introduced to the language/writing/literacy needs of diverse college-age writers such as the developing, bi-dialectal, and non-native English-speaking (NNS) writer. The course will provide a theoretical and practical framework for tutoring and composition instruction.
The seminar will focus on various tutoring methodologies and the theories which underlie them. Students will become familiar with relevant terminology, approaches, and strategies in the fields of composition teaching and learning. New tutors will learn how to respond constructively to student writing, as well as develop and hone effective tutoring skills. By guiding others towards clarity and precision in prose, tutors will sharpen their own writing abilities. New tutors will tutor fellow Cal students in writing and/or literature courses. Tutoring occurs in the Cesar E. Chavez Student Center under the supervision of experienced writing program staff.
In order to enroll for the seminar, students must have at least sophomore standing and have completed their Reading and Composition R1A and R1B requirements.
Some requirements include: participating in a weekly training seminar and occasional workshops; reading assigned articles, videotaping a tutoring session, and becoming familiar with the resources available at the Student Learning Center; tutoring 4-6 hours per week; keeping a tutoring journal and writing a final paper; meeting periodically with both the tutor supervisor(s) and tutees' instructors. "