Shakespeare’s poems and plays are relentlessly unsettling, extravagantly beautiful, deeply moving, rigorously brilliant, and compulsively meaningful: they complicate everything, they simplify nothing, and for 400 years, they have been a touchstone—indeed, something like an obsession—for literary artists from Milton to Goethe to George Eliot to Joyce to Brecht to Zukofsky to Sarah Kane and for philosophers and theorists from Hegel to Marx to Freud to Derrida to Lacan to Žižek. This class focuses on a selection of works from Shakespeare’s entire career. We'll be reading a limited number of plays and some of the poetry. One of the main issues we will focus on is the oscillation between "regular" and "irregular." What is the rule, and what is the exception in Shakespeare's works? How is a comedy supposed to end? How does it end? What makes a tragic hero? What are the rules of theater? What are the rules of literature? Who creates them and why? When do they get transgressed, and why? A tentative reading list includes Titus Andronicus, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Merchant of Venice, As You Like It, Troilus and Cressida, King Lear, Antony and Cleopatra, Coriolanus, The Tempest, and a substantial helping of sonnets. We will also screen clips from both stage productions and film versions of the plays.
This course satisfies the Shakespeare requirement for UC Berkeley English majors.
This course will be taught in Session A, from May 22 to June 28.
Dreiser, Theodore: Sister Carrie; Garcia Marquez, Gabriel: One Hundred Years of Solitude; Gibson, William: Neuromancer; Woolf, Virginia: Mrs. Dalloway
This course is a survey of the 20th-century novel. The novel is the quintessential form of expression of modernity and modern subjectivity. In this survey of key works of the century, we will explore the novel form as it is framed by these three thematics--history, modernism, and empire. Some questions we will address: how have the vicissitudes of modernity led to a re-direction of historical narration within the novel; how has modernist aesthetic experimentation re-shaped the very form of the novel; and lastly, how has the phenomenon of imperialism, the asymmetrical relations of power between center and periphery, widened the scope and influence of fictive milieu? We will conclude at the cusp of the 21st century with a work of speculative fiction.
This course will be taught in Session A, from May 21 to June 28.
Alcalá, Rose: My Other Tongue; Loffreda, Bety, and Rankine, Claudia, eds.: The Racial Imaginary; Philips, M. NorbeSe: Zong!; Pico, Tommy: IRL; Rankine, Claudia: Citizen; Soldier, Layli Long: Whereas; Willis-Abdurraqib, Hanif: The Crown Ain’t Worth Much; Zamora, Javier: Unaccompanied
Taking contemporary American poetry as its central focus, this survey course will consider poetry from the last 18 years in relation to a number of concerns, debates, and questions by which we can critically engage a historical moment that continues to emerge. Toggling between questions vital to the field of contemporary poetry and poetics and those central to American culture, we will see how contemporary artists respond to the complexities of race, gender, class, and community; and how those responses are mediated both through poetry and the way in which it circulates. We will engage a variety of formal concerns, poetic subjects, and contested approaches to poetic production within the context of the social field, including: the impact of the internet on writing and reading practice, dissemination, and national conversations about race; the emergence of ecopoetics; the relation between tradition in a formal, poetic sense and the legacies of American white supremacist capitalist heteropatriarchy; how poetry represents history by including its materials, and how it also attempts to present the immaterial. These engagements will orient us as we ask after the specificity with which racialized ideologies and the structures they shape determine the experience of Black writers, Indigenous writers, and Latinx writers; how does each group represent their respective experience, and what interventions does their work seek to make in the legacies of both oppression and liberation within which their work is situated?
Note that this class satisfies the American Cultures requirement for UC Berkeley students.
This course will be taught in Session D, from July 3 to August 9.
All materials will be scanned and uploaded to a bCourse site.
In this class, we’ll explore the links between reading and writing. How is reading related to our creative writing practices? Is reading important to understanding our interests, talents, and methods as creative writers? How can we become better creative writers by honing attentive and creative reading practices?
In this class, we’ll try to think through these questions by reading literary critical essays that dwell on the experience of reading. Each essay will be paired with creative work. We’ll approach pieces by novelists and poets who do both creative and critical writing like Hilton Als, Zadie Smith, Namwali Serpell, Phillip Roth, James Baldwin, Kevin Killian, Dodie Bellamy, LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka, Henry James, June Jordan, Lydia Davis, and Fred Moten. By reading these authors on the experience of reading, we can investigate how their reading and interpretive practices are entwined with their creative writing practices.
Every student will be required to workshop three pieces of original writing: one (creative) literary critical essay in the style of the authors we will read; a short story; and a collection of at least five poems. By working across these three genres, we can investigate how genre distinctions sometimes fail, and what we can gain by allowing criticism, prose, and poetry to cross-pollinate one another.
This course will be taught in Session C, from June 19 to August 9.
In this eight-week course, we will focus on two things: learning about contemporary publishing venues for short fiction—both traditional journals and online platforms—and workshopping the participants’ fiction. Together, we will read print literary magazines (Paris Review, Tin House, McSweeney’s, Kenyon Review, American Short Fiction, Zyzzva, New England Review) as well as online journals (Electric Literature, Narrative Magazine, [PANK], failbetter), and discuss how journals coalesce (or don’t coalesce) a coherent aesthetic. Each student will draft and revise two short stories; each student will respond to the work of other students in workshop and through a short written response. The final assignment is the submission of the two revised short stories workshopped over the course of the class. Students will be graded on the rigor with which they approach their own fiction and their care in responding to the work of their peers.
Unlike for the fall and spring semesters, there is no application process for English 143A in the summer.
This course will be taught in Session C, from June 18 to August 8.
Butler, Octavia: Kindred; Card, Orson Scott: Ender's Game; Delany, Samuel: Dhalgren; Le Guin, Ursula K.: The Left Hand of Darkness; Mieville, China: Embassytown
a Course Reader (short stories by Harlan Ellison, Ray Bradbury, Isaac Asimov, Connie Willis, and others, as well as critical essays by Hazel Carby, Fredric Jameson, and others)
This course will present the genre of speculative fiction and its historical commitment to imagining plausible and implausible alternatives to the present. We will begin by looking at the Golden Age of the science fiction short story, the 1950s and 60s, and then proceed to treat some representative novels from the 1970s to the contemporary. Along the way, we’ll consider some of the crucial topics and concepts that form the imaginary of this genre, from advanced technology and what it affords and subtracts from the human (artificial intelligence, the end of work, extended longevity, interstellar travel and contact with other entities, etc.), to the hyper-urban, as well as questions of race, class, gender, capitalism, war, and colonialization as they encounter and acquire new and estranging contexts. We’ll also attempt to theorize some of the modes and tropes by which such fictions explore these questions: apocalypse, futurity, new bodies and forms of communication, the hivemind, virtuality, and so on, as well as the traditional narrative conventions enlisted to support these representations.
This course will be taught in Session D, from July 3 to August 9.
Beowulf, trans. Heaney (FSG); Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, trans. Armitage; The Norton Shakespeare Histories, 3rd edition (Norton); Martin, George R. R.: A Game of Thrones; de France, Marie: Lais, trans. Waters (Broadview)
Note: Please buy these specific editions of Beowulf, Sir Gawain, and Lais. We have ordered The Norton Shakespeare Histories, 3rd edition (ed. Stephen Greenblatt et al), ISBN: 978-0-393-93859-3. If you already own a complete Shakespeare (e.g., The Riverside, The Pelican, other and/or older editions of The Norton Shakespeare), you are welcome to use it for this course. Good single-play editions—Signet, Folger, Arden, Oxford World Classics, Pelican—also work.
This course will show how Game of Thrones and A Song of Ice and Fire draw on a long literary-historical legacy, emphasizing the preoccupations that have made their way from medieval and Renaissance writers into modernity: namely, issues of gender, "otherness," kingship and tyranny, and political division and civil war. Throughout the course, we will ask why writers from Shakespeare to George R. R. Martin invent fantasies about the past to tell stories about the present.
We begin by exploring some themes and narrative topoi that, while essential to modern fantasy, actually emerge from medieval imaginative writing. The issues of honor, love, leadership, power, and violence at the center of A Song of Ice and Fire are anticipated by epics and romances written centuries earlier. (So are the dragons.) We then turn to Shakespeare's "Henriad," four plays which—like Game of Thrones—tell the story for their present by reimagining the medieval past. In Shakespeare, we will witness drunken revelry, bloody battles, and the evolution of a prince into a king. We will also see how political upheaval upends tradition and accepted values—a challenge that our own moment continues to confront.
We finish with the Game of Thrones phenomenon itself. We'll compare the first novel with the early episodes of the TV series, and consider the conversation and critiques that the show in particular has elicited. In addition to two literary-critical essays, you will have an opportunity to try your hand at writing your own "take" on Game of Thrones.
This course satisfies the pre-1800 requirement for UC Berkeley English majors.
This course will be taught in Session C, from June 19 to August 9.
Required Works: Fritz Lang: Metropolis; Philip K. Dick: Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?; Ridley Scott: BladeRunner; Denis Villeneuve: BladeRunner 2049
This course will compare literary works of futurism—science fiction, utopian and fantastic literature—with cinematic adaptations of speculative fiction. Some of the thematic questions we will address: how does the contemporary shape both literary and cinematic representations of the future? Why are cinematic futures so often failed utopias? This class will begin with a careful examination of genre and form—we will begin with excerpts from the structuralist TzvetanTodorov's The Fantastic and Frederic Jameson's The Archeology of the Future. The course will also explore the contribution of advances in film technology to cinematic depictions of the future.
This course will be taught in Session A, from May 21 to June 28.
Fielding, Helen: Bridget Jones' Diary; Kane, Sarah: Plays; Kraus, Chris: I Love Dick; Kusnher, Tony: Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes; Moore, Alan: V for Vendetta; Smith, Zadie: White Teeth; Walcott, Derek: Omeros
The 1990s are sometimes understood as a period between major events: the fall of the Berlin Wall and the attacks on the World Trade Center; the initial phase of neoliberal economics (Reagan/Thatcher) and the mature phase (Bush/Blair); the so-called “first” Gulf War and the eventual toppling of Saddam Hussein; the freeing of Nelson Mandela to the end of his Presidency; the first wave of the HIV/AIDS pandemic and the political victories of gay civil rights movement in the West. Nineties literature and pop culture sometimes seemed to sense the remoteness of historical change, and produced a range of responses, from triumphalist celebration of the final triumph of capitalism, to a horror at people’s emerging horror at the thought of being irrelevant and interchangeable, from the flat affect banter of Seinfeld, a self-described “show about nothing,” to the grungy, but pretty, suburban nihilism of Nirvana’s Nevermind. This course offers a survey of the period’s British and American culture across a wide range of genres and media: prose fiction, graphic fiction, poetry, drama, memoir, criticism, television, art-house and popular cinema, and news coverage. Moving chronologically, we will explore the definitive aesthetic formulations of the themes of war, gender, political authority, race, dating, desire, trauma, collective history, irrelevance, talking cowboy dolls, suicide, violence, and intellectual labor. We will also maintain an occasional focus on our own time, and investigate the renewed appeal of 1990s fashion and culture to a moment that, after the cataclysms of the last few years, has become newly aware of history’s tenacity and volatility, and all too painfully burdened by the sense that important things are happening all around us.
This course will be taught in Session D, from July 3 to August 9.