Kazuo Ishiguro : When We Were Orphans; Virginia Woolf: Mrs. Dalloway; William Shakespeare: Romeo and Juliet
Film:
Alfred Hitchcock, Rope (1948)
Alfred Hitchcock, Rear Window(1954)
Luis Buñuel, The Exterminating Angel (1967)
Baz Luhrmann, Romeo + Juliet (1996)
Hou Hsiao-Hsien, Millennium Mambo (2001)
Harmony Korine, Spring Breakers (2012)
TV:
The OC, selected episodes
Mad Men, selected episodes
The Office, selected episodes
Other readings and secondary materials will be made available over bCourses.
This course broadly explores the concept of “party temporalities.” By examining parties as they appear across a range of subgenres and mediums (novels, short stories, plays, film, TV, pop songs), we will think critically about the relationship between social gatherings and time. What happens to time when you’re at a party? When do parties happen? And why are parties so often regarded as events where one can forget about time? Not only will we consider the time of actual parties, but also that which surrounds them (both party prep and pre-gaming as well as the after-party and, of course, the hangover).
While this course considers parties, it will not necessarily be a party. Instead, we seek to situate the party in its sociopolitical and cultural contexts—as a space that affords not only levity and play, but which presents problems of social awkwardness, physical threat, obliviousness, and pain as well. In doing so, we aim to locate party time always in its historical time. What is the relationship, we might ask, between the 19th-century ball and the frat party, the office party and the house party, clubbing and a wake?
The purpose of R1A is to develop critical reading and effective scholarly writing skills, to which end we will write and rewrite frequently. In addition to three essays, students will also compose weekly bCourse posts, in-class presentations, and individual reading/viewing journals.
Lopate, Philip: The Art of the Personal Essay; Lopate, Philip: The Art of the Personal Essay
Additional material will be provided in the form of bCourses PDF's. These will mostly be contemporary and late 20th centrury nonfiction/essays by authors such as David Rakoff, Rebecca Solnit, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Claudia Rankine, Malcolm Gladwell and Roxane Gay.
This course will move rapidly through time, navigating the dense and heterogeneous terrains of the essay as a form in English. From the wondrous and choppy syntactical shores of Renaissance prose (Francis Bacon, Erasmus and Montaigne), to the razor-sharp wit of the 19th century (WIlliam Hazlitt, Charles Lamb), to the resplendent and various depths of the 20th century (James Baldwin, George Orwell, Joan Didion, Jumpha Lahiri and David Foster Wallace), this course wil chart a path through the essay as a form while continually appealing to the practice of essay composition.
The course will explore various modes of essayistic genre and address (the confessional, the scholarly, the pop scientific essay), but also the underlying formal and creative functions at work in these styles. We will address the extent to which ‘creative nonfiction’ has emerged as its own teachable category, and try to understand how its institutionalization has affected the form of the essay. Throughout, several underlying questions will help us formulate our understanding of the essay: how is self exploration thematized in the voice of the author? How does essayistic genre change our concept of authorial ‘voice’? What is the difference between voice and persona? What is the function of ‘personality’ as a literary construct in the essay? Finally, how do these concepts relate to our contemporary understanding of ‘the personal’? Our core text (containing about 65-70% of our readings) will be Philip Lopate’s The Art of the Personal Essay, though further material will be regularly made available through bCourses. Students will be required to write three essays (and revisions).
Greene, Graham: Our Man in Havana; Waugh, Evelyn: Scoop
Short pieces from Jonathan Swift, Charles Dickens, Zadie Smith, George Mikes, Pont, and Max Beerbohm.
Screenings of The Thick of It, The Inbetweeners, Chewing Gum, and Bridget Jones's Diary.
Can comedy be an effective vehicle for social criticism? Or does “having a sense of humor” make social life easier only by helping us ignore life’s more unpleasant aspects? We will consider these questions while reading texts from a British tradition in which it is less the “stiff upper lip” than a penchant for irony, wit, and laughing it off that allows people to weather political and personal crisis. Examining particular comic devices, we will also analyze how comedy can enforce and revise national identity in a modern, globalized world that increasingly imperils it. Our identity as a class will also come to the fore—in screenings where some of us will laugh (or not laugh) at things that may or may not be laughing matters.
Although this course samples British comedy across a broad historical period (1729 to the present) in diverse forms, R1A’s ultimate goal is to help students hone their ability to both analyze arguments as readers and construct arguments as writers. This class’s assignments will include two essays, as well as more casual weekly writing assignments. Peer-review, GSI conferencing, and self-revision will all play a role in the writing process.
Baldwin, James: Giovanni's Room; Hurston, Zora Neale: Their Eyes Were Watching God; Johnson, James Weldon: Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man; Morrison, Toni: The Bluest Eye
A course reader including short excerpts and essays, as well as writing exercises.
This class will consider how a series of important 20th-century African-American novels confront questions of individual identity, categorization, social definiition. To this end, we shall attend to the complex connection between the tradition of black American literature and the discourse of sociology—the science of social institutions and relationships. As an emergent scientific discipline in 20th-century America, sociology was, along with anthropology, an important resource that numerous black artists drew upon artistically as well as politically. However, sociology's aspiration to systematic categorization of social groups and interactions struck many as a problematic pigeonholing of the individual human being. While Zora Neale Hurston was a practicing anthropologist, in her novels she "tried to deal with life as we actually live it—not as the sociologists imagine it." More strenuously still, James Baldwin believed sociological thinking disavowed an irreducible kernel of uniqueness and freedom: the individual "is not, after all, merely a member of a Society or a Group or a deplorable conundrum to be explained by Science. He is—and how old-fashioned the words sound!—something more than that, something resolutely indefinable, unpredictable." With thoughts like these as our guiding lights, we shall attempt to consider the achievements of the African-American novel as an artistic form representing the paradoxical and often tragic relations between the individual and society. While our main focus will of course be race, other intersecting concerns such as gender and sexuality will also concern us.
Our readings will open onto the underlying pragmatical goal of this course, which is to facilitate the development of your critical reflection and writing skills. We will use the questions that this material poses of us, as well as those we pose of it, to construct persuasive and cogent arguments out of them, writing progressively larger essays with progressively more sophisticated conceptual substance. The semester will begin with a short diagnostic essay, followed by three papers of increasing length. A peer review process will help you as you revise at least two of these papers. In all, you will produce at least thirty-two pages of writing over the semester—including drafts and revisions. But we will endevour to bear in mind how each of these steps may transform that "all"—that is, the whole process of our learning.
Darwin, Charles: Origin of Species; La Mettrie: Machine Man and Other Writings; Robinson, Kim Stanley: Aurora; Shiel, M.P.: The Purple Cloud; Sterne, Laurence: Tristam Shandy
Materialism has often been a shared premise and point of confluence between literature and science, even the precondition for any relation between literary and scientific practice. If since the 18th century, aesthetics in the expanded sense has referred not just to a domain of literary theory but to material phenomena in the world, then materialist aesthetics in science and literature take empirical processes, bodies, and physical systems as their basis of explanation and grounds of inquiry. This course investigates the key tropes of materialist aesthetics between science and literature from the late 18th century to the present. How might we understand materialism as a literary and scientific practice of explanation and representation? To what extent do materialist practices in science and literature converge and depart? Along the way, we'll ask how materialist aesthetics in science and literature might provide a distinctive vantage point on questions of form, scale, history, mileu, technology, and climate. Readings include La Mettrie, Lucretius, Sterne, Erasmus Darwin, Wordsworth, Shelley, Cuvier, Byron, Charles Darwin, Samuel Butler, M.P. Shiel, and Kim Stanley Robinson. This is an R1A course, the first course in a two-semester R&C sequence. Over the course of the semester, you'll compose several essays of increasing length designed to enhance your writing and composition skills.
Course reader including selections from the work of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Christina Rossetti, Elizabeth Siddall, William Morris, Algernon Charles Swinburne, John Keats, Alfred Tennyson, Geoffrey Chaucer, Giovanni Boccaccio, William Shakespeare, John Ruskin, Robert Buchanan, and Walter Pater.
We will also view selections from Desperate Romantics, a BBC drama based on the lives of the PRB.
This course examines the relationship between literature and art through the lives and works of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood — a revolutionary artistic movement of the mid-nineteenth century — and those in their circle. In addition to literature by the Pre-Raphaelites themselves, we will also read works by authors such as Keats, Tennyson, Chaucer, Boccaccio and Shakespeare, which inspired many of their artworks. Key themes of this course include the relationship between poetry and painting, the medieval and the modern, the artist and their work, and the traditional and the avant-garde. The principal focus of R1A courses is to develop student writing, and as such this class will practice close reading and argumentative skills through regular short writing assignments. We will further reflect on and hone our critical skills through exploring contemporary criticism of Pre-Raphaelite poetry and painting by critics such as Ruskin, Buchanan, Dickens, and Pater. This course will also involve an excursion to the exhibition “Truth and Beauty: The Pre-Raphaelites and the Old Masters”, which will be on display at the Legion of Honor museum from June 30 – September 30 2018.
Lopate, Phillip (ed.): The Art of the Personal Essay
The Center Will Not Hold (film)
I Am Not Your Negro (film)
The personal essay and the lyric poem share many qualities: aside from the (not insignificant!) fact that they’re short, they affect both personal intimacy and a supposedly equally intimate relationship to the truth. But the essay is far less studied — an omission all the more curious given that while in your time here at Berkeley you’ll not necessarily have to write any poetry, lyric or otherwise, your work in a whole range of subjects will require you to write the same lucid, careful prose that characterizes the best essayists.
This class takes its experimental cue from the etymology of the word “essay” itself: it is an attempt, a try, and (as in its modern English cognate “assay”) a test. In order to write better essays yourselves, then, we will subject both the personal essays we’ll read together and your own nonfiction writing to a series of trying questions. Who is the “I” in an essay? What are the — or are there — differences between an essay that poses questions, and an essay that answers them? How are works structured in a genre that affects an ostentatious nonchalance, and how can those supple forms move us beyond the seemingly regimented form of the academic essay? How do you take material — whether gathered through research, reading, or your own lived experience — and shape it into compelling prose? Can a short story be an essay? Can a list? Can, indeed, a lyric poem? While we will focus on the Anglophone personal essay in the twentieth century, we’ll read essays originally written in Latin, Chinese, Japanese, French, and German, and from the first century CE to the twenty-first; the authors we will study include James Baldwin, Seneca, Joan Didion, William Hazlitt, Sei Shonagon, and many others. We will also read a range of critics writing on the personal essay and the unique literary and literary-historical problems that the genre poses, and we will in turn act as critics of each other’s essayistic writing.
The object of the course is the personal essay, but since it is an offering in the University’s Reading & Composition program its objective is the production of the academic one. While the requirements of R1A mean that you’ll produce academic essays that put forward vigorous arguments supported with copious evidence from the texts you’ve read, you’ll produce a range of writing over the course, in a range of other, less academic genres — including, yes, the personal essay in a range of guises.
Dick, Philip K.: Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?; Nguyen, Viet Thanh: The Sympathizer; Santos Perez, Craig: from Unincorporated Territory [guma']
This course explores literature and culture from the Cold War era. Topics we will focus on include: how literature represents the threat of nuclear confrontation between global superpowers; the rise (and weaponization) of pop and mass culture; poetic and artistic responses to propaganda, nationalism, and conformism; and the pressure that an automated, technologized society places on traditional forms of human communication and identity. In addition to grappling with the ideological tensions that animate this era, we will consider how writers respond to the environmental devastation and violence associated with the atmospheric "testing" (i.e. the actual detonation) of nuclear weapons, the hot wars of the so-called Cold War, and the ongoing legacy of colonialism.
This course is designed to improve your argumentative writing skills. In addition to short writing assignments, peer revision, and in-class presentations, students will write three essays over the course of the semester.
Akhtar, Ayad: Disgraced; Chopin, Kate: The Awakening; Kaysen, Susanna: Girl, Interrupted; Morrison, Toni: The Bluest Eye; Satrapi, Marjane: Persepolis 1
"All the world's a stage, And all the men and women merely players."—As You Like It, Act II Sc. VII
We often hear people say that actions speak louder than words. We express our identities, who we are, through our actions, our performances, our lived experiences amidst the context and structures within which we operate. We connect with our immediate socio-political circumstances, and these relations, in turn, determine our performances of our identities. Personal identity is thus not a concrete unchangeable idea, but its performance is constantly in flux depending on the context. This will be a reading- and writing-intensive course where we will examine short stories, poems, novels, plays, and films focusing on the construction of identity through performance.
Together with our critical inquiry into modes of reading, we will practice our writing skills. We will devote plenty of time to critical thinking and essay-writing skills, paying particular attention to argumentation, analysis, and the fundamentals of writing at the college level.
Dick, Philip K.: Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?; Dick, Philip K.: Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?; Nguyen, Viet Thanh: The Sympathizer; Nguyen, Viet Thanh: The Sympathizer; Santos Perez, Craig: from Unincorporated Territory [guma']; Santos Perez, Craig: from Unincorporated Territory [guma']
This course explores literature and culture from the Cold War era. Topics we will focus on include: how literature represents the threat of nuclear confrontation between global superpowers; the rise (and weaponization) of pop and mass culture; poetic and artistic responses to propaganda, nationalism, and conformism; and the pressure that an automated, technologized society places on traditional forms of human communication and identity. In addition to grappling with the ideological tensions that animate this era, we will consider how writers respond to the environmental devastation and violence associated with the atmospheric "testing" (i.e., the actual detonation) of nuclear weapons, the hot wars of the so-called Cold War, and the ongoing legacy of colonialism.
This course is designed to improve your argumentative writing skills. In addition to short writing assignments, peer revision, and in-class presentations, students will write three essays over the course of the semester.
Austen, Jane: Emma; Austen, Jane: Pride and Prejudice; Gissing, George: The Odd Women; Meredith, George: The Egoist
Films:
You've Got Mail
Bridget Jones' Diary
Clueless
It Happened One Night
How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days
The marriage plot novel is seen as a thing of the past, but its influence very much lives on today in our movies, our music, and our notions of romance. This course will examine a series of genre-defining marriage plot novels from the 19th century, as well as contemporary films and other media, with an eye to identifying the conventions and the emotional logic which govern them, and learning to assess these narratives critically going forward. Students will also learn to write persuasive research papers and craft original arguments, satisfying the undergraduate R1B requirements.
Bechdel, Alison: Fun Home; Fielding, Helen: Bridget Jones's Diary; Wilde, Oscar: The Importance of Being Earnest
We’ll screen two films, Some Like It Hot and To Be Or Not To Be, as well as selected episodes from Arrested Development and The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel.
Additional readings will be made available on bCourses, including selections from Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, Harold Pinter’s The Dumb Waiter, Pu Song Ling’s Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio, and poems by Wislawa Szymborska.
In this course, we’ll consider the varied uses of comic relief in literature and popular culture, from the therapeutic effects of frivolity to the ingenuity with which comic intelligence brings what has been interpretively foreclosed into stark relief. To that end, we’ll examine a range of comic genres and impulses, from stand-up to sitcoms, from comedies of manners to comedies of menace.
Some of the questions we’ll consider along the way include: what is the relation between comedy and tragedy, and what happens when a comedy that engages with historical trauma refuses its spectators comic relief? How might we understand the exclusionary and reparative effects of comedy? Do stand-up and sitcoms offer different ways of conceptualizing the relation between art and life? We’ll also examine comedy as an agent of political intervention across various literary and cultural settings, considering how the cultural contingencies of comedy as an aesthetic form intersect with questions of gender, race, and sexuality in texts ranging from Classical Chinese tales to contemporary Polish poetry.
Although we’ll be looking at all kinds of funny business, we’ll also take seriously the course’s primary aim of building on the critical reading and writing skills learnt in R1A. Students will develop their research capacities and work towards a substantial research paper by rigorously peer-editing and revising their work throughout the semester.
Armitage, Simon, trans.: Pearl; Atwood, Margaret: The Handmaid's Tale; More, Thomas: Utopia; Wells, H.G.: The Time Machine
Additional primary and secondary readings will be available on bCourses.
What would it be like to live in a perfect world? What could be worse than the world we live in?
This course will trace attempts to answer these questions—and investigate why they have proven so compelling—in English writing from medieval visions of heaven and hell to twentieth-century speculative fiction. As we read, we will consider the relationship between the two projects, and between the worlds writers imagine and the worlds in which they wrote. We will discuss the ways race, class, gender, and other categories of identity figure in imagined worlds, and the ways social structures can make the same imagined world ideal for some and terrible for others. With the goal of developing critical reading and analytical skills, we will pay close attention to literary world-building techniques, to the forms and genres in which writers have chosen to imagine other worlds, and to the rhetorical effects of locating them in the past, present, and future. And we will talk about the ways stories make arguments and arguments make use of stories.
All term we will be guided by the goal of developing your writing and research skills, including making extended arguments and incorporating secondary sources. We will talk not only about how course readings make arguments, but also about how to identify compelling research questions, engage in critical conversations, and make persuasive arguments of your own. Student writing will constitute an important third category of course material: in addition to several short written assignments, you will develop, draft, peer-edit, and revise two essays, an argumentative essay on course texts and a final research essay.
Ford, John: 'Tis Pity She's a Whore; Lyly, John: Galatea; Marlowe, Christopher: Edward II; Shakespeare, William: As You Like It
Edward II (film), dir. Derek Jarman (1991).
A course reader will also be produced containing additional primary and secondary texts including works from Renaissance antitheatricalists like Philip Stubbes and Stephen Gosson, as well as modern theorists of gender and sexuality such as Michel Foucault and Judith Butler.
The drama of Shakespeare and his contemporaries offers a fascinating site for the analysis of gender and sexuality as historical and theoretical constructs, rather than as the timeless and universal ‘facts’ of human experience which they are often assumed to be. In a ‘transvestite theatre’ in which all roles, male and female, are played by boys and men, assumptions regarding the absolute and fixed nature of gender difference are called into question, while the fact that scenes of heterosexual desire are played out between men creates a space for the expression of homosexual and other transgressive desires. At the level of both form and content, the early modern theatre above all underlines the status of gender as performance. We will read a set of plays produced between the 1580s and 1630s which pose gender and sexuality as central problems, studying these in conjunction with a variety of both Renaissance and modern-day texts confronting these debates. We will seek to reflect upon the immense shaping power of the societal norms which govern sex and gender, and to locate those instances where non-normative identities and sexualities assert themselves.
The broader academic purpose of this course is to develop your critical reading and writing skills, whatever your major might be. You will write and revise three papers of increasing length over the semester, and work with peers to improve your writing and critical thinking.
Alger, Horatio: Ragged Dick and Struggling Upward; Burgett, Bruce: Keywords for American Cultural Studies; Faulkner, William: Absalom, Absalom!; Fitzgerald, F. Scott: The Great Gatsby; Jay-Z: Decoded; MLA: MLA Handbook, 8th Edition; Obama, Barack: Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance; Williams, Raymond: Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society
Jay-Z, Selected lyrics & music
Lurhmann, Baz (director). The Great Gatsby (2013).
Weiner, Matthew (creator). Mad Men (2007-15).
Additional required secondary readings will be available online and/or distributed in class.
The texts for this course consider the roots and routes of the American Dream and the figure of the “self-made man” in the American cultural imagination over the past 150 years. From American literature to contemporary politics to popular culture, we will explore the American fascination with the idea of “starting over.” We will consider Horatio Alger’s Gilded Age and his impoverished hero’s rise to respectability, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s mysterious icon of the Jazz Age, Jay Gatsby, and William Faulkner’s tale of the monomaniacal Thomas Sutpen, whose ghostly design speaks from the Antebellum South to the first decades of the 20th century. From Faulkner’s high modernist polytemporality, we will follow the American Dream to the end of the 20th century (and into popular culture and the 21st century) via Barack Obama’s journey from a bi-racial “broken home” in Hawai'i to the Oval Office, Dick Whitman's rebirth as Don Draper on a battlefield during the Korean War in Matthew Weiner's 2007 TV show Mad Men, and Jay-Z’s meteoric rise from a hustler in Brooklyn’s Marcy Projects to the “God of Rap” who surveys his pop culture empire each year from high atop the Forbes’ List.
While I am self-consciously framing our work in relation to the question of “American masculinity,” these texts create unique spaces for investigating problems of race, gender, homosociality, war, class, and class mobility. You will have the opportunity to engage these problems, among others, through in-class discussion and your written work this semester.
Most importantly, this course will develop your proficiency in expository and argumentative writing and academic research skills. Three papers are required: a diagnostic essay; a midterm essay; and a final research paper. In addition to these papers, in-class writing, workshops, participation, presentations, and full attendance are also required to earn a passing grade.
Baldwin, James: The Fire Next Time; Diaz, Junot: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao; Kang, Han: The Vegetarian
Course reader including excerpts from Henry Thoreau, Albert Camus, Edwidge Danticat, Jhumpa Lahiri, Gloria Anzaldua, and relevant critical theory
This course turns to the experience of exile and its plural representations in texts drawing from the post-Enlightenment to contemporary periods. To open up our line of inquiry, we will reflect upon the following questions: How might exile be a self-determined choice leading to greater freedom or autonomy? Are exile and its attendant feelings an unresolvable part of the human condition? How might larger sociohistorical, political, and cultural forces precipitate the need for individuals or groups to survive in a state of physical or psychological exile? What are the possibilities of life after exile, and what new knowledge can be produced about one's self through his/her/their uprooting from "home" (particularly in relation to others and to the larger communities to which he/she/they belong)?
Writing will be integrated into every class session, and also take the form of short responses to readings (1-2 pages) and argumentative papers that grow in length and complexity over the semester (3-10 pages).
Carson, Rachel: Silent Spring; Dillard, Annie: Pilgrim at Tinker Creek; Haushofer, Marlen: The Wall
In this course, we will examine how relationships between humans and nature are represented; what histories, perceptions, and biases inform such representations; and what the real-world consequences of particular representations may be. We will read three primary works that focus on human/nature interactions in three different narrative forms: investigative environmental report (Silent Spring), nonfiction narration (Pilgrim at Tinker Creek), and novel (The Wall). Through this, we will gain a sense of how writing can capture and influence feelings about nature, open up a space to interrogate assumptions about nature, and even shape major political decisions regarding the natural world. In addition to our main texts, we will broaden our understandings on human/nature interactions and the writings that influence them by reading materials from a range of disciplines, including ecofeminism, critical race studies, history of science, and colonial ecology.
A few broad questions we will consider during this class include: What precisely is nature? How have particular human cultures (or even particular individuals) opposed or embraced it, and why? And how have certain human identities and behaviors been elevated “above” nature, stigmatized as “unnatural,” or even denigrated because of their supposed closeness to nature? We will also explore how different forms of narration and representation offer ways of examining extant assumptions about nature, humans, and animals, as well as in imagining different ways of relating to the natural world. In addition to this course’s required readings, students are encouraged to explore other sources through which to open up and clarify our ideas on nature, writing, and representation.
As the subject of nature in writing is vast and multifaceted, it offers a diverse lens through which students will tackle the project and the process of writing a substantial research paper. We will break down this larger project into a series of steps, including topic proposals, drafting, revision, and peer feedback. Students will be given writing assignments throughout the semester, leading up to a final research essay.
Pynchon, Thomas: The Crying of Lot 49; Reed, Ishmael: Mumbo-Jumbo; Ross, Fran: Oreo
Course reader
John Carpenter, They Live and/or Frances Ford Coppola, The Conversation
This course teaches critical analysis and research skills through their doubles: forensic detection and conspiracy theory. We will therefore consider the disciplinary demands of academic writing in tandem with indisciplined forms of knowledge-production: paranoia, passion project, wild goose chase, hyperstition. Taking the detective as a literary mode rather than as a genre, our main course texts are incompletely generic novels from post-modern America. Alongside scholarly accounts of the generalization of conspiracy-theorizing and shorter literary texts of the paranoiac canon, they will free us up to ask about such topics as: genres of policing as well as the policing of genres; the private detective and corporate conspiracy; documentary evidence and modernist fragmentation; and the cop inside your head.
Students will write, peer-review, and revise a series of progressively longer (2, 5, and 9 page) essays, with the goal of integrating sophisticated and creative readings of literary texts into an existing critical conversation.
Abrams, M. H. (ed. Greenblatt, et al.): The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol. D, The Romantic Period; Hogg, James: The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner; Shelley, Mary: Frankenstein;
Recommended: Hacker, Diana and Nancy Sommers: A Pocket Style Manual
What shocks the virtuous philosopher delights the chameleon poet... A poet is the most unpoetical of anything in existence, because he has no identity—he is continually in for and filling some other body.—John Keats, Letter to Richard Woodhouse, 27 October 1818
When John Keats writes of the "chameleon poet" that "has no identity" and that wholly inhabits "some other body," he contrasts his model of poetic (non-)identity with William Wordsworth's so-called "egotistical Sublime." Wordsworth's poetry, Keats suggests, is all ego—all self and no other. While the stereotype of the solitary and even solipsistic Romantic lyric poet remains our most enduring commonplace about Romanticism, Keats's letter suggests that there are other competing models of identity that take shape in Romantic literature. From roadside encounters with strangers and the melancholy speakers of Charlotte Smith's Elegiac Sonnets, to the "creature" and the "Arabian" Safie in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, this course will explore different models of Romantic literary selfhood and their relations to the representation of others. How do literary forms and genres shape the identities of Romantic selves and others? How does poetry imagine the shoring up or transgressing of boundaries of the self? To what extent is British Romantic selfhood defined and stabilized in opposition to non-European and non-human others? Alternatively, to what extent is identity mutable, performed, and hybridized?
This R1B course will continue to build on the reading, writing, and critical thinking practices developed in R1A. We will focus on analyzing and constructing complex and sustained arguments. The writing assignments will be longer than in R1A, and papers will incorporare a research component.
Note the new instructor for this section.
Alcott, Louisa May: Behind a Mask; Bird, Robert Montgomery: Sheppard Lee; Chesnutt, Charles: Conjure Tales
Bob Dylan, extensive audio selections
Film: I'm Not There, Todd Haynes
Television: Better Call Saul episodes
A course reader will include excerpts from Native American trickster narratives, P.T. Barnum, Joel Chandler Harris, Herman Melville, and Edgar Allan Poe.
In this course, we'll examine how authors have imagined and re-imagined the carnivalesque aspects of American life. We'll read stories about con-men, tricksters, wandering ghosts, seducers, conjurers, and other rhetorical magicians. In addition to considering how characters con one another, we'll focus on ways that Native-American and African-American authors use theatricality and language to subvert power structures and preserve cultural heritages. We'll conclude the course with a unit on artistic metamorphosis, evaluating ways that Bob Dylan constantly reinvents himself in part by excavating folk traditions from the Old, Weird America.
You will choose a research topic related to the course theme and ultimately produce a polished 12-15 page argumentative essay. The course focus on performativity will provide a means to consider broader questions of academic norms and audience expectations. You will learn to find critical works, differentiate between more and less credible sources, and locate your arguments in an ongoing scholarly conversation. Along the way, you will refine your project by producing formal research questions, annotated bibliographies, and drafts, and by reviewing one another's work.
Readings will be made available via a course reader (to be purchased)
We will plan to screen two films: Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times (1936, silent), and Chantal Akerman's Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975, English subtitles).
This course will take up the changing ways in which work and labor have been depicted in literature and other arts as conditions and conceptions of labor have transformed over time, from subsistence labor to post-industrial production. How have the many modes of work -- agricultural, reproductive, domestic, factory-floor -- shaped the making of literary artifacts? How, as readers and thinkers, do we engage with (artistic or literary) works that seem especially demanding of our labor, throwing the burden of understanding or enjoyment on their audience? In addition to poems, short stories, and films, we will be reading a small set of critical essays to orient our thinking about these questions.
At the practical level, we will experiment with writing in various forms and formats, practicing and talking through the particular kind of work that scholarly writing (and thinking) about literature demands: this will involve revision and peer writing workshops, and a semester-long effort to find and form practices genial to developing your own process and habits of writing. By the end of the semester, students will complete a substantial piece of critical writing based on their own research, engaging with primary and secondary source material.
The Word Exchange: Anglo-Saxon Poems in Translation; Carroll, Lewis: Alice in Wonderland (Norton Critical Edition); Donoghue, Emma: Kissing the Witch: Old Tales in New Skins; Gaiman, Neil: The Sleeper and the Spindle; Snyder, Scott: Batman: Zero Year, vols. 1 and 2
Selections from other texts will be provided online and in class.
"Have you guessed the riddle yet?" the Hatter said, turning to Alice again.
"No, I give it up," Alice replied. "What's the answer?"
"I haven't the slightest idea," said the Hatter.
"Nor I," said the March Hare.
Alice sighed wearily. "I think you might do something better with the time," she said, "than wasting it in asking riddles that have no answers."
Well, then: why IS a raven like a writing desk? In Alice, no one seems to know, but the pen and the bookchest in the Old English riddles might have an opinion! In the texts for this course, bells and onions speak, happy endings fail to end, and nothing is quite as it seems—but that, of course, is the fun of it all.
Our goal in this course is to "get messy." Like solivng a riddle, academic writing is a process of discovery: we walk new roads, we test our ideas, and when we lose the way we back up and try again. And whatever Alice may think, it is the riddles without answers—the wrong turns, revisions, and unexpected detours—that demand our greatest insights and innovations. The course readings combine Old English medieval riddles with graphic novels, fairy tales, and Alice's classic adventures to consider how these texts form a response to the genres, styles, and stories that came before them. Each has, at one point or another, been dismissed by literary critics, and yet each has unique strengths and experimental possibilities that deserve our attention.
We will begin the semester with an extended exploration of what it means to enter a critical academic conversation. Who else has written about the works we are reading? What do they have to say, and how does that change our own interpretation of the the text? In addition to working with library databases and resources, you will also be learning to think of yourselves and your classmates as producers of academic writing. Throughout the course, you will receive feedback not only from me, but from one another, as you learn to integrate published books, articles, reviews, and other forms of academic writing into your own research papers.
While some riddles may remain unsolved, you will gain experience in "getting lost" as you develop your skills as an academic writer and literary critic—and these, of course, will help you find your way.
Baldwin, James: The Fire Next Time; Charter, Ann (editor): The Portable Sixties Reader; Pynchon, Thomas: The Crying of Lot 49
This reading and composition course will explore selected works of literature, music, and visual art produced during the 1960s. Placing emphasis on the relationship between artistic experimentation and social movements of the era, we will ask how innovative practices of language, image, and sound engaged with the more directly political events of the period (from the Civil Rights Movement to the protests against the Vietnam War and Women's Liberation). How have writers, visual artists, and musicians used their creative work to challenge militarism, racism, social and economic inequality, sexual violence and gendered discrimination? What role do poetry, popular music, and visual art play in composing new social formations and transformations?
Over the course of the semester, students will strengthen their capacities to make persuasive arguments as well as formulate compelling questions to guide their own final research projects. This course places particular emphasis on rhetorical analysis and literary critique. Writing assignments emphasize drafting, revising, and responding to peer feedback. In addition to several in-class writing exercises, students should expect to write two critical essays (5-6 pages) and complete a final research project.
MLA Handbook, 8th edition; Hwang, David Henry: M. Butterfly; Ishiguro, Kazuo: Remains of the Day; McEwan, Ian: Atonement; Nabokov, Vladimir: Pale Fire; Spark, Muriel: The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
Essays and poems on bCourses
Every day, we're called upon to make hundreds of interpretive judgments based on things we read, see, or hear. But what happens when we misjudge one of these texts, or when we're unable to judge it at all? Besides being a common element in post-World War II literature on both sides of the Atlantic, these depictions of failed readings also raise important questions about our expectations for genres, not just as readers, but as writers. What do we assume about a poem, for example, or an essay, when sitting down to read or write one? How do the writers of those pieces manipulate generic assumptions for maximum effect?
These generic assumptions, along with other sets of conventions and codes that underwrite the reading and writing process, are easiest to see when a reader fails to employ them appropriately. Therefore, the reading for the course will consist mainly of novels whose narrators and characters get it wrong—socially, factually, textually, or some combination of the three. Much of the drama in these texts comes from our sense of these mistakes, so they provide perfect opportunities to ask how and why the conventions of reading are breaking down, and how those breakdowns might be prevented, both from the reader's side and the writer's. In turn, this exploration will lead to careful considerations of writing and the elements that help to constitute skillful uses of language. We'll also be reading some essays about reader response and generic convention to give us a firmer grasp of the subject, in addition to a few poems that will put our own use of conventions to the test.
The writing part of the course will take the form of short essays (mostly 3-5 pages in length), a research paper (8-10 pages), and brief assignments designed to acquaint you with the research process.
Baudelaire, Charles: Les Fleurs du Mal; Wilde, Oscar: The Major Works
“The ballads teem with imagination, they palpitate with emotion. We read them with laughter and tears; the metres throb in our pulses, the cunningly-ordered words tingle with life; and if this be not poetry, what is?” So wrote the critic William Archer in 1901, as he tried to describe how it felt to read a contemporary poet’s work. The closing decades of the nineteenth century witnessed profound changes in sociopolitical, scientific, and artistic life. It was all the poets could do to keep up; what could they add to this age of “progress” and prose, when novels were considered more serious literature, and the major cultural debates were being carried out in essay form? In these disorienting times, poets took advantage of the freedom they had when no one was looking. They began to think in surprising new ways about the relationship of poetry to the body, the senses, and the material and social world. They may even have invented some of the ways we think about poetry today. In this class, we will situate these poets alongside essays from the period, as well as one key novel, Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray. We will explore the rich variety of poetic styles and theories they came up with, and speculate about what they have contributed to our own ideas about poetry’s pressures, powers, touches and tingles.
This writing-intensive class builds on the skills developed in R1A. It is designed to extend your knowledge of the arts of reading and writing, while introducing the fundamentals of researching, evaluating and working with secondary sources. In addition to weekly discussion posts, three essays will be required, in draft and revision, followed by a final research paper.
Bechdel, Alison: Fun Home; Brosh, Allie: Hyperbole and a Half; Saunders, George: The Very Persistent Gappers of Frip
Additional Readings: John Berger, Ways of Seeing; Sergei Eisenstein, Strike; Robert Wiene, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari
This course studies books with pictures in them, although we will occasionally ditch the books altogether to look at pictures in the Berkeley Art Museum and to watch moving pictures. We will study the relationship between image and text in a variety of media. Whether viewing high art or reading web comics, we will ask: how do images and words convey meaning? Do they convey the same kind of meaning? How do they work together?
Baldwin, James: The Fire Next Time; Diaz, Junot: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao; Kang, Han: The Vegetarian
Course reader including excerpts from Henry Thoreau, Albert Camus, Edwidge Danticat, Jhumpa Lahiri, Gloria Anzaldua, and relevant critical theory
This course turns to the experience of exile and its plural representations in texts drawing from the post-Enlightenment to contemporary periods. To open up our line of inquiry, we will reflect upon the following questions: How might exile be a self-determined choice leading to greater freedom or autonomy? Are exile and its attendant feelings an unresolvable part of the human condition? How might larger sociohistorical, political, and cultural forces precipitate the need for individuals or groups to survive in a state of physical or psychological exile? What are the possibilities of life after exile, and what new knowledge can be produced about one's self through his/her/their uprooting from "home" (particularly in relation to others and to the larger communities to which he/she/they belong)?
Writing will be integrated into every calss session, and also take the form of short responses to readings (1-2 pages) and argumentative papers that grow in length and complexity over the semester (3-10 pages).
Hwang, David Henry: MLA Handbook, 8th edition; Ishiguro, Kazuo: Remains of the Day; McEwan, Ian: Atonement; Nabokov, Vladimir: Pale Fire; Spark, Muriel: The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
Essays and poems on bCourses
Every day, we're called upon to make hundreds of interpretive judgments based on things we read, see, or hear. But what happens when we misjudge one of these texts, or when we're unable to judge it at all? Besides being a common element in post-World War II literature on both sides of the Atlantic, these depictions of failed readings also raise important questions about our expectations for genres, not just as readers, but as writers. What do we assume about a poem, for example, or an essay, when sitting down to read or write one? How do the writers of those pieces manipulate generic assumptions for maximum effect?
These generic assumptions, along with other sets of conventions and codes that underwrite the reading and writing process, are easiest to see when a reader fails to employ them appropriately. Therefore, the reading for the course will consist mainly of novels whose narrators and characters get it wrong—socially, factually, textually, or some combination of the three. Much of the drama in these texts comes from our sense of these mistakes, so they provide perfect opportunities to ask how and why the conventions of reading are breaking down, and how those breakdowns might be prevented, both from the reader's side and the writer's. In turn, this exploration will lead to careful considerations of writing and the elements that help to constitute skillful uses of language. We'll also be reading some essays about reader response and generic convention to give us a firmer grasp of the subject, in addition to a few poems that will put our own use of conventions to the test.
The writing part of the course will take the form of short essays (mostly 3-5 pages in length), a research paper (8-10 pages), and brief assignments designed to acquaint you with the research process.
Baldwin, James: The Fire Next Time; Charter, Ann (editor): The Portable Sixties Reader; Pynchon, Thomas: The Crying of Lot 49
This reading and composition course will explore selected works of literature, music, and visual art produced during the 1960s. Placing emphasis on the relationship between artistic experimentation and social movements of the era, we will ask how innovative practices of language, image, and sound engaged with the more directly political events of the period (from the Civil Rights Movement to the protests against the Vietnam War and Women's Liberation). How have writers, visual artists, and musicians used their creative work to challenge militarism, racism, social and economic inequality, sexual violence and gendered discrimination? What role do poetry, popular music, and visual art play in composing new social formations and transformations?
Over the course of the semester, students will strengthen their capacities to make persuasive arguments as well as formulate compelling questions to guide their own final research projects. This course places particular emphasis on rhetorical analysis and literary critique. Writing assignments emphasize drafting, revising, and responding to peer feedback. In addition to several in-class writing exercises, students should expect to write two critical essays (5-6 pages) and complete a final research project.
Shakespeare: A Midsummer Night's Dream; Shakespeare: Henry IV, Part One; Shakespeare: Macbeth; Shakespeare: Romeo and Juliet; Shakespeare: Sonnets; Shakespeare: The Merchant of Venice; Shakespeare: The Winter's Tale
English 17 offers an introduction to the study of Shakespeare that is intended for students new to the Berkeley English Department. Incoming transfer students, future majors, and non-majors are especially welcome.
The premise of our class (and part of the reason the department requires a Shakespeare class of its majors) is that Shakespeare's texts are remarkably good to think with—remarkably pleasurable, remarkably productive. The class will give sustained attention to about half a dozen major plays and the Sonnets, using them to develop a rich set of themes and ideas as the semester unfolds: ideas about beauty and cruelty, performance and nature, citizenship and individuality, future and past.
We'll devote special attention to developing the skills that will allow us to think most productively with Shakespeare: skills of reading, of close analysis, of reasoned and structured argument, and maybe too some elementary skills of performance.
We will alternate between large-scale lectures on Mondays and Wednesdays, in which I will offer some concepts and arguments as raw material for your thinking; and discussion sections on Fridays, where you, your classmates, and your discussion leader will develop your thinking in conversation and work on techniques for realizing your ideas in writing.
We will start with a number of short assignments focusing on particular skills, which will build up to two medium-sized papers and a final exam.
Brown, William Wells: Clotel: or, the President's Daughter: A Narrative of Slave Life in the United States; Scott, Walter: Waverley: or, 'Tis Sixty Years Since; Whitehead, Colson: The Underground Railroad; Woolf, Virginia: Orlando: A Biography
Course reader that includes supplementary texts by R. G. Collingwood, Hayden White, Michel-Rolph Trouillot, W. E. B. DuBois, Walter Benjamin, Jorge Luis Borges, Art Spiegelman, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Zeina Hashem Beck, and more.
In 1951, William Faulkner wrote: "The past is never dead. It's not even past." In 2008, Barack Obama invoked Faulkner to discuss the racial inequalities that continue to fracture the American nation, suggesting that we can only alleviate today's problems by confronting our past—by seeking in it both positive and negative models for inhabiting the present and building the future. Following that injunction, this course asks how history is made vivid through art (including literature, theatrical performance, dance, music, and visual media) and how that art can help reframe or reinterpret histories that are seemingly remote, messy, or unfinished. We will read works of historical and counterfactual fiction—from Walter Scott's Waverley (1814) to Colson Whitehead's The Underground Railroad (2016)—alongside secondary texts from the fields of literary criticism, history and art history, philosophy, media studies, and cultural studies. In addition, we will study musical and visual art that puts the past back into play, from Kara Walker's debut installation Gone (1994) to the Hamilton (2015) soundtrack. Through these works and the Cal Performances events we attend, we will explore diverse theories of aesthetic and cultural change, from those that view art as a distraction from the "real" work of politics to those that regard art as the ideal medium for reimagining or redressing the past, and so reshaping the present.
In addition to the class meetings, students are required to attend the following evening performances: Schaubühne (Enemy of the People): Oct. 12-13
Wynton Marsalis and the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra, Greek Theater: Sept. 23
Jordi Savall, Routes of Slavery: Nov. 3
Compagnie Kãfig, Pixel: Nov. 16-17
Big Dance Theater, 17c: Dec. 13-16
This course, including free student tickets to performances, is made possible by Cal Performances, with support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
Note that this course was previously listed as English 170, but on May 30 it was changed to English 20. Although it is now a lower-division class, the content, time, and location have not changed.
Dickinson, Emily: The Complete Poems of Emily Dicksinson (Johnson Ed.)
The text for this class will be available online.
We will read and discuss extraordinary poems by Emily Dickinson.
This 1-unit course may not be counted as one of the twelve courses required to complete the English major.
We will watch and discuss films that span the length of Alfred Hitchcock's cinematic career, with a special focus on "Vertigo," "Rear Window," "Psycho" and other masterpieces from the decades after World War Two. In addition to discussing Hitchcock's style and place in film history, we will also explore how his work reflects on the period's politics and popular genres.
This 1-unit course may not be counted as one of the twelve courses required to complete the English major.
McCloud, Scott: Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art (Paradox Press, 2000); Sacco, Joe: Palestine (Seattle Fantagraphics Books, 2001)
“The landmark work of comics journalism,” Joe Sacco’s Palestine is “a political and aesthetic work of extraordinary originality.” In this seminar, we will devote ourselves to a close reading of Palestine, informed by comics scholarship. Maintaining an open and inclusive discussion, we will consider the comics form and its possibilities for reportage and narrative, Sacco’s representation of the Occupied Territories, and Sacco’s self-representation in relation to his encounters with diverse Palestinian perspectives. Students should be prepared for active participation and at least 6 pages of informal writing.
This 1-unit course may not be counted as one of the twelve courses required to complete the English major.
Atwood, Margaret: The Handmaid's Tale
In concert with the selection of Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale for the campus's 2018 On the Same Page program, this seminar will offer a closer look at this award-winning 1985 novel and the award-winning Hulu television series that first aired in 2017, with a second season released in spring 2018. What made this such a powerful novel in its own moment? And why do its reverberations continue to be felt so powerfully today? We will read some of the journalistic think pieces about the TV series and, if we have time, we may explore one or more of the previous adaptations of Atwood's novel for radio, opera, ballet, film, and a concept album by indie band Lakes of Canada. Seminar members will participate through lively in-class discussion, weekly bCourses posts, conversation starters, and culminating creative response projects in a medium of your choice.
The class will meet weekly for the first seven weeks of the semester (August 28 to October 9).
This 1-unit course may not be counted as one of the twelve courses required to complete the English major.
Behn, Aphra: Oroonoko, The Rover, and Other Works; Greenblatt, Stephen: The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Volume 1
This course will introduce students to Chaucer, Spenser, Marlowe, Donne, and Milton; to literary history as a mode of inquiry; and to the analysis of the way literature makes meaning, produces emotional experience, and shapes the way human beings think about desire, commerce, liberty, God, power, the environment, subjectivity, empire, justice, death, and science. We will study how a literary text emerges out of the author's reading of his or her predecessors and in relation to contemporary political, religious, social, and scientific discourses and events.
If you purchase the Norton Anthology at the UC bookstore, it will be bundled with a free copy of the Norton Critical Edition of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales.
Austen, Jane: Emma; Behn, Aphra: Oroonoko; Defoe, Daniel: Moll Flanders; Equiano, Olaudah: The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano or Gustavus Vassa, the African, Written by Himself; Pope, Alexander: The Rape of the Lock and Other Major Writings; Wordsworth, William: Lyrical Ballads
As we read works produced in a period of tumultuous change, we shall consider those works as zones of contact, reflecting and sometimes negotiating conflict. In a world of expanding global commerce (imports like tea suddenly becoming commonplace in England), political revolution (English, American, French), and changing conceptions of what it means to be a man or woman (a new medical discourse viewing them as categorically distinct), increasingly available printed texts become sites of contestation—including debates about what constitutes “proper” language and Literature itself. We shall think about the ways in which separate groups—British and African, masters and slaves, slave owners and abolitionists, arch capitalists and devout religious thinkers, Republicans and Conservatives, men and women—use writing to devise ongoing relationships with each other, often under conditions of inequality. Throughout we shall be especially attuned to formal choices—from linguistic register to generic conventions and innovations—and how writers deploy these to incorporate opposition, resist authority or authorize themselves. Requirements will include two papers, a mid-term exam, a final exam, and reading quizzes.
This course examines a range of British and American texts from the period with an emphasis on literary history and its social and political contexts. We will focus on the emergence, development, and legacy of modernism as a set of formal innovations that help us see how literature operates as a means of cultural response in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. We will also consider modernism alongside other literary modes and styles (realism, naturalism, postmodernism) that pursue different strategies for representing the experience of the world—and for finding a place for literature within it. Particular attention will be paid to close reading and questions of literary form even as we think about such larger issues as the relationship between reading and entertainment, the changing status of art in respect to new technologies of information and representation, and the challenges to traditional conceptions of the self that are posed by new languages of psychological, national, and racial identity.
Featured authors will include Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Henry James, James Conrad, T. S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, William Faulkner, and Toni Morrison.
We will concentrate on the high and low cultural elements in the noir comedies of the Coen brothers, discussing their use of Hollywood genres, parodies of classic conventions, and representation of arbitrariness. We will also read some fiction and attend events at the Pacific Film Archive and Cal Performances.
This 2-unit course may not be counted as one of the twelve courses required to complete the English major.
Millward, Celia: A Biography of the English Language
This course surveys the history of the English language from its Indo-European roots, through its Old, Middle and Early Modern periods, and up to its different forms in use throughout the world today. Topics include changes in its core grammatical systems of phonology (sound structure), morphology (word structure) and syntax (sentence structure); in vocabulary; in writing and literary forms; and in the social position of English and its dialects.
Marsden, Richard: Cambridge Old English Reader
This course will equip you to read the earliest English literature: lives of saints, accounts of Viking invasion, poetry about onions, and the rest. You will learn to read Old English by direct study of texts in the original. This course will help you engage the English language critically and with historical perspective, and our readings offer a window onto the cultural practices of Anglo-Saxon England, including its religion, politics, and education.
No prior experience with Old English or MIddle English is required.
Please note the change in the instructor (as of 7/5/18).
This course satisfies the pre-1800 requirement for the English major.
A course reader
For more information on this course, please contact Professor Miller at j_miller@berkeley.edu.
This course satisfies the pre-1800 requirement for the English major.
Imagine that the play is an exquisite silk dress. In lectures, we look at it from many different angles; we consider the materials it’s made of; we imagine who made it and why; we listen to the sounds it makes as it moves. If you ever felt intrigued by the thought of what it would feel like to put it on, this is a class for you. During the semester, we will not only close read, analyze and interpret one of Shakespeare’s strangest plays, Cymbeline, King of Britain, we will also have an opportunity to perform our own version of it.
To be sure, this is a literature class, and our purpose isn’t to stage the finest ever version of the play, but to use performance as one more tool that will help us understand Shakespeare’s text. In addition to the play, we will read some of its textual sources, critical essays on Shakespeare and Renaissance drama, some performance theory, and we will also watch theatrical and film adaptations of various Shakespeare plays. No previous acting experience required.
Required book: William Shakespeare, Cymbeline, ed. Barbara Mowat and Paul Werstine. Additional readings will be posted on bCourses and/or distributed in class.
NOTE: Students should plan to attend, in addition to the lectures, the twice-weekly rehearsals, which will take place MW 3-4:30 in 300 Wheeler. Some additional rehearsals may also be needed as the performance date approaches.
NOTE ALSO: Because this course concentrates on one play only, it will not satisfy the Shakespeare requirement for English majors.
Milton, John: The Complete Poetry and Essential Prose of John Milton
Probably the most influential and famous (and, in his own time, infamous) literary figure of the seventeenth century, John Milton has too often been misrepresented as a mainstay of a traditional canon rather than as the rebel he was. Those who do not know his work frequently assume that he was a remote or traditional religious poet, although in fact he was an independent and unconventional thinker, who distrusted any passively held faith and was relentlessly self-questioning. As we follow Milton’s carefully shaped career from the shorter early poems, through some of the controversial prose of the English Civil War era, and into the astounding work that emerged in the wake of political defeat (Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, Samson Agonistes), we will discover a very different literary and political figure, known in his time as a statesman as well as a poet, and in both pursuits considered more an iconoclast than an icon. We will come to understand Milton’s writing in relation to the political and scientific revolutions that he witnessed and in which he took part, and we will also think about his experiments in poetic form, his ambivalent incorporations, revisions, and expansions of classical literature and biblical texts alike, the literary dimension of his often unorthodox theology, his writings on love, marriage, and divorce, his life-long preoccupation with vocation – and more.
Note: This single textbook for the course is a necessity: John Milton, The Complete Poetry and Essential Prose of John Milton, ed. William Kerrigan, John Rumrich, and Stephen Fallon (Modern Library). Avoid Kindle versions, which are problematic. Cheap, used copies should be available online ($15 as of the writing of this description).
This course satisfies the pre-1800 requirement for the English major.
Romanticism was once defined as a turn toward “nature” in response to the industrialization marking Britain’s transition to modern capitalism in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Rather than simply resurrecting the idea of the Romantic poets as “nature” poets, we will carefully examine figures of reflection and grounding, dispersal and dwelling, in these writers, while also searching for alternatives to the curative role often assigned both “nature” and “poetry” in environmentalist criticism. Topics will include: the gendering of “nature”; the conflict between “modernity” and “modernization” and the persistence of marginalized communities; agriculture as a border-space between “culture” and “nature”; the role of memory and imagination in sustaining a sense of place; weather-reporting, plant-study and other practices of attention; fantasies about ecological disaster, social catastrophe, and science’s ability to save or destroy humankind. As we compare different definitions of “nature”—as a set of finite, exploitable resources, a normative authority limiting human experimentation, a repository of traditional ways of doing and knowing, and a site of vulnerability in need of protection from extinction—we will also explore the alternatives to the nature/human binary developed by the writers in question.
We will read one non-Romantic-period work--Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (published 1962)--so as to test the thesis that this environmental classic reads as an example of the gothic novel; we will compare the slow and delayed temporality of environmental violence to the slow, incremental, recursive temporality of Romantic poetry and prose.
Readings will include works by Austen, Blake, Carson, Clare, Coleridge, Keats, Radcliffe, Mary Shelley, Percy Shelley, Dorothy Wordsworth, and William Wordsworth.
Book list (All other texts will be available electronically on the course’s b-space site.)
Required books will be available at University Press Books, 2430 Bancroft:
Longman Anthology of British Literature, Volume 2A: The Romantics and their Contemporaries, 5th Edition; Jane Austen, Mansfield Park; Rachel Carson, Silent Spring; Ann Radcliffe, The Mysteries of Udolpho; Mary Shelley, Frankenstein; Dorothy Wordsworth, Grasmere and Alfoxden Journal
Dickens, Charles: The Old Curiosity Shop; Eliot, George: Daniel Deronda; Rossetti, Christina: Major Poems; Swinburne, A. C.: Major Poems
The Victorian period witnessed dramatic and probably permanent changes to the literary culture of Britain, including: the morphing of scattered memoirs into formal autobiographies; the rise of the realist novel as the indispensable genre of bourgeois life; the investment of culture with the power to effect epochal political change and rearrange readers' sexualities; the invention of vampires, robots, serial killers, and other new forms of monstrosity; the modernization of narrative pornography; and the rejuvenation of bardic poetry. At the same time British authors were trying and failing to manage the largest empire in history, both devising new ways to dominate the world through writing and interrupting the violence that imperialism—the so-called "final phase of capitalism"—produced.
This course engages the major theoretical questions posed by Victorian literature, questions which emerge from the unprecedented global suffusion of British imperial influence. How might the enormity of this new world be meaningfully represented in language? What new accounts of personhood, ethics, sexuality, ethnicity, evolution, and art are required? Dealing with these and related questions, we will perhaps come to understand the enduring power of Victorian literature to speak to our own moment of globalization and crisis—our perennial return to the unanswered questions and open wounds of the nineteenth century.
Dostoyevsky, Fyodor: Crime and Punishment ; Edgeworth, Maria: Castle Rackrent ; Huysmans, Joris-Karl: A Rebours; Mann, Thomas: Death in Venice; Rabelais, Francois: Gargantua and Pantagruel; Voltaire: Candide
This course will examine diverse instances of the European novel from the sixteenth to the twentieth century and consider how appetites of various kinds feature as organizing forces. How do hunger, lust, material greed, and the desire for order, beauty, and freedom structure these novels? What types of collectives are created through these desires? What kinds of individuality are conceived?
The English Department is working on expanding the class size for this offering. If you would like to enroll in this course after it fills, please put yourself on the wait list and if we are able to accommodate you, you will be added as soon as possible (no later than the first week of classes).
The novel emerged as the principal literary genre in 19th-century Europe and has continued to dominate the literary market in Europe and North America ever since. What were the constitutive formal elements as well as social and psychological concerns of novelistic narrative in the period of its greatest ascendancy? Focusing on a selection of novels from the German, English, French, and Russian traditions, this course examines the many guises the novel assumed in the process of its becoming, over the course of the 19th century, the central genre within which key social, political, and aesthetic issues of its time could be deliberated.
All novels considered in this course are markedly experimental. Each showcases a different dimension of the novel genre: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774) is a sentimental epistolary novel; Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818), an epistolary Gothic horror novel that also lays the groundwork for the emergence of science fiction; Alexander Pushkin's Eugene Onegin (1823-1831), an ironic and fragmentary novel in verse; Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary (1856), a novel that establishes the model of modern realist narration; and finally Leo Tolstoy's magisterial War and Peace (1865-1869), a text that can be loosely termed a historical novel while raising crucial questions about the very premises of what it means to be historical and novelistic.
This class is cross-listed with Slavic 133.
Book List (specified editions are highly recommended; print versions preferred to digital):
Goethe, The Sorrows of Young Werther, trans. David Constantine; Oxford World Classics, 978-0199583027
Shelley, Frankenstein, ed. J. Paul Hunter; Norton Critical Editions, 978-0-393-92793-1
Pushkin, Eugene Onegin, trans. James Falen; Oxford University Press, 978-0199538645
Flaubert, Madame Bovary, ed. Margaret Cohen; Norton Critical Editions, 978-0393979176
Tolstoy, War and Peace; trans. Louise and Aylmer Maude; Norton Critical Editions, 978-0393966473
Carpentier, Alejo: The Lost Steps; Dreiser, Theodore: Sister Carrie; Gibson, William: Neuromancer; Hardy, Thomas: Jude the Obscure; Mann, Thomas: Doctor Faustus; 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.
The English Department is working on expanding the class size for this offering. If you would like to enroll in this course after it fills, please put yourself on the wait list and if we are able to accommodate you, you will be added as soon as possible (no later than the first week of classes).
Batuman, Elif: The Idiot; Diaz, Herman: In the Distance; Doerr, Anthony: All the Light We Cannot See; Greer, Andrew Sean: Less; Nguyen, Viet Thanh: The Sympathizer; Whitehead, Colson: The Underground Railroad
The Pulitzer Prize in Fiction is awarded for “distinguished fiction by an American author, preferably dealing with American life.” In this course, we will read the four most recent (2015-2018) Pulitzer-Prize winning novels and two novels nominated for the Pulitzer in 2018. In addition to examining narrative form and literary style, we will consider cultural and historical contexts and thematic resonances. We will discuss the trends in topics and styles selected for the Pulitzer as well. We will spend the last one-third, or so, of the course reading and responding to the three novels nominated for the Prize in 2018. Working in small groups, you will take on the role of the Pulitzer Prize Committee, writing responses to, assessments of, and recommendations about each of the novels and making a strong case for which novel deserves the award.
Incomplete Primary Reading (in chronological order of Pulitzer Prize, 2015-2018):
Doerr, Anthony. All the Light We Cannot See (2015)
Nguyen, Viet Thanh. The Sympathizer (2016)
Whitehead, Colson. The Underground Railroad (2017)
Batuman, Elif. The Idiot (2018)
Diaz, Hernan. In the Distance (2018)
Greer, Andrew Sean. Less (2018)
Secondary Reading:
Assorted essays uploaded to bCourses.
Conrad, Joseph: Heart of Darkness; Greene, Graham: The Third Man; Joyce, James: Ulysses; Spark, Muriel: The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie; West, Rebecca: Return of the Soldier; Woolf, Virginia: The Waves
The required books listed above will be available at University Press Books (2430 Bancroft Ave). A required course reader will be available from Metro Publishing (2440 Bancroft Ave).
How did British and Irish literature change over the first half of the twentieth-century? Was “modernism” a historical moment, an aesthetic movement, or a critical attitude—or some combination of the three? How did writers contend with upheavals such as Irish nationalism, World Wars I and II, suffrage, fascism, and the fluctuations of empire? And how did conventional literary forms respond to the advents of film, radio, and television? These are some of the questions this course will try to answer. Evaluation will be based on a combination of papers, exams, and course participation.
Readings will likely include: Conrad, Heart of Darkness; Lewis et al, BLAST; West, Return of the Soldier; Joyce, Ulysses; Woolf, The Waves; Spark, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie; Greene, The Third Man; Synge, Playboy of the Western World; manifestos by Marinetti and Loy; and poetry by Hardy, Yeats, Eliot, Auden, Smith, WWI combatants, Derek Walcott, Kamau Brathwaite, and others.
The English Department is working on expanding the class size for this offering. If you would like to enroll in this course after it fills, please put yourself on the wait list and if we are able to accommodate you, you will be added as soon as possible (no later than the first week of classes).
Eliot, T. S.: Prufrock and Other Observations; Ara Vos Prec; The Waste Land; Four Quartets; Pound, Ezra: Blast; Lustra; Hugh Selwyn Mauberley; A Draft of XVI Cantos; Pisan Cantos; Stevens, Wallace: Harmonium; Ideas of Order; The Man with the Blue Guitar; Parts of a World; Yeats, W.B.: Responsibilities; The Wild Swans at Coole; Michael Robartes and the Dancer; The Tower; The Winding Stair
This course will concentrate intensively on four poets at the center of the modernist poetic canon: T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens, and W. B. Yeats. We will read several volumes by each, but will do so chronologically, in the order of their publication, between 1914 and 1945.
Douglass, Frederick: Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass; Emerson, Ralph Waldo: Nature and Selected Essays; Hawthorne, Nathaniel: The Scarlet Letter; Melville, Herman: Moby Dick; Thoreau, Henry David: Walden and Civil Disobedience; Whitman, Walt: Leaves of Grass, the Original 1855 edition
On July 4 fifty years after the Declaration of Independence was signed, both John Adams and Thomas Jefferson died, an astonishing coincidence that many Americans took to signify the ending of the revolutionary era, and the beginning of a new phase in American nationality. They had little in their national past to draw upon in forming a sense of identity, and the material and cultural sparseness of the present seemed to offer little more, so they began to think of themselves as forerunners to an historically unprecedented future greatness to be realized in the vast territorial expanse that the U.S. had become. This idealizing imagination of magnificent destiny sharply contrasted with social, political and economic realities—slavery, imperialist expansionism, Indian relocation, and the wrenching dislocations of emergent capitalism. Each of the works we will read in this class is an exploration of that contradiction, a measurement of the experiential consequences of those severe historical powers, and an evaluation of the credibility of American national optimism under the growing threat of civil war.
Class meetings will mix lecture and discussion. I will be referring to individual passages to be discussed by page number, so you should purchase the assigned editions of the books (being ordered through the campus bookstore) to make following along easier. Two eight-page essays and a final exam will be required, along with regular attendance.
Brown, William Wells: Clotel; Chesnutt, Charles: The Marrow of Tradition; Douglass, Frederick: Narrative of the Life; DuBois, W. E. B.: The Souls of Black Folk; Dunbar, Paul Laurence: Lyrics of Lowly Life; Equiano, Olaudah: Interesting Narrative of the Life; Harper, Frances E. W.: Iola Leroy; Jacobs, Harriet: Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl; Walker, David: Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World; Wells-Barnett, Ida B.: Mob Rule in New Orleans; Wheatley, Phillis: Poems on Various Subjects
We will also be reading shorter works by Anna Julia Cooper, Alexander Crummell, Ottobah Cuguano, Martin Delany, Sutton Griggs, Jupiter Hammon, Edmonia Highgate, Victor Séjour, Maria Stewart, Lucy Terry, Sojourner Truth, Nat Turner, Booker T. Washington, and Robert Alexander Young.
All texts are available on the course website and on reserve in the library. There are no books to purchase.
This course explores African American literary history from its beginning in the eighteenth century to the turn of the twentieth century, interpreting major works in the context of slavery and its aftermath. We will reflect on the complicated relationship between literature and political activism by examining the genres and formal devices through which African Americans responded to the demand for individual and collective self-representation. Themes include authorship and authenticity, captivity and deliverance, law and violence, memory and imagination, kinship and miscegenation, passing and racial impersonation. Required works by authors such as Phillis Wheatley, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, and W. E. B. Du Bois will be supplemented by reading in history, theory, and criticism. Syllabus here.
Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi: Americanah; Gyasi, Yaa: Homegoing; Hartman, Saidiya: Lose Your Mother; Head, Bessie: A Question of Power; Hurston, Zora Neale: Their Eyes Were Watching God; Larsen, Nella: Passing; McKay, Claude: Home to Harlem; Scott, Dennis: An Echo in the Bone; Soyinka, Wole: The Beatification of Area Boy
The texts for this class will be available at University press Books, Bancroft Avenue.
Films: Daughters of the Dust, dir. Julie Dash (1991); Moonlight, dir. Barry Jenkins, writer Tarell Alvin McCraney (2016); Black Panther; dir. Ryan Coogler (2018)
Music: 'Nuff Said, Nina Simone (1968); Marcus Garvey, Burning Spear (1975); Lemonade, Beyoncé (2016)
Course Reader with works by Marcus Garvey, Alain Locke, Katherine Dunham, James Baldwin, Stuart Hall, Mintz & Price, and others, available at Copy Central, Bancroft Avenue.
Just find that dappled dream of yours
Come on back and see me when you can
– "Do What You Gotta Do," Clarence Carter (& Nina Simone & Roberta Flack, et al...)
The black diaspora is, amongst other things, a literary tradition: a complex, cross-generic set of texts produced by black writers located in almost every nation across the globe, equal in complexity and variation to the modern concept of race that is inextricably tied to its formation. But how can one conceptual framework possibly contain such a dazzlingly various canon? In this class we’ll read novels, watch films, listen to music, and look at art to begin to answer that question. As the sub-title of the course suggests, we’ll begin with a certain supposition: that something particular happens when we think of black diasporic creativity as emerging between imperative and dream (…you gotta do); between roving and recovery (come on back...). We'll ask about the necessities of black invention; about its luxuries, its excesses, and its pleasures. And we'll use diasporic theory to think about what happens, politically and conceptually, when we attend to black differences as we do to the shifts in tonality and meaning between versions of a song.
The texts for this course will be available at University Press Books, on Bancroft Way. Please contact the instructor before buying texts.
The Penguin Book of First World War Poetry; Breton, Andre: Nadja; Fussel, Paul: The Great War and Modern Memory; H.D.: Kora and Ka; Stein, Gertrude: Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas; Woolf, Virginia: Mrs. Dalloway
In the years following World War One, European intellectuals debated the implications of the new balance of power and the terms of the peace among the combatant nations, but they were haunted by the prospect of the decline of the West itself. A four-year global conflict that claimed 8.5 million lives and wounded 20 million soldiers, World War One destroyed any confidence that European history unfolded necessarily onward, upward, and progressively. World War One resulted not only in physical destruction but also the dissolution of world-views, mental coordinates, dominant images, and structuring metaphors of late-nineteenth-century European thought. For example, the belated experiences of trauma and the dislocated speech of the shell-shocked soldier undermined the mechanist understanding of the mind as a mere calculator or chemical machine. The gradual unsettling of imperial authority also threw into question several ideological conceptions. Conscripts from throughout the colonized world participated in all aspects of this fully mechanized war and thus were exposed first-hand to the violent realities of inter-imperial rivalry.
The Great War was the watershed moment of modernity. In this course we will read literature that reveals to us how every aspect of life was transfigured by it.
Lopate, Philip : The Art of the Personal Essay; Mullen, Harryette: Sleeping With the Dictionary; Rios, Joseph: Shadowboxing
Texts will include chunky course readers—available from ZZ Copies—concerning poetry and fiction.
We'll study some of the ways that fiction writers, essayists, story-tellers, and poets have responded to the worlds that their cultures have built. We'll read published work by our predecessors and by contemporary writers (including Maxine Hong Kingston, Angela Carter, and William Kennedy); we'll look at "high" forms and "low" forms and write in both and consider the distinctions. We'll read and think about and write urban legends and short fictions, family histories, hybrid texts, ghost stories, and sonnets. Students will work on individual projects and will also be asked to collaborate on group performances of creative work. Projects incorporating material from non-written sources (graphic art, for example) will be encouraged;' projects incorporating material from unpublished sources (folklore, family stories, etc.) will also be encouraged.
Discussion, workshopping, writing prompts.
A course pack will be made available online with short stories by Anton Chekhov, Franz Kafka, H.P. Lovecraft, Flannery O'Connor, Lucia Berlin, Octavia Butler, Edward P. Jones, Alice Munro, Peter Orner, Kristen Roupenian, and George Saunders.
This workshop is designed to hone basic elements of the short story. We will read some exceptional stories in a variety of genres. We will compose and revise 1-2 stories over the course of the semester.
Only continuing students are eligible to apply for this course. To be considered for admission, please electronically submit 10-15 double-spaced pages of your fiction, by clicking on the link below; fill out the application you'll find there and attach the writing sample as a Word docoument or .rtf file. The deadline for completing this application process is 11 PM, THURSDAY, APRIL 26.
Also be sure to read the paragraph concerning creative writing courses on page 1 of the instructions area of this Announcement of Classes for further information regarding enrollment in such courses.
Reader available at Instant Copying and Laser Printing, 2138 University Ave. (between Shattuck Ave. & Walnut St.), (510) 704-9700.
The aim of this course is to explore the genre of short fiction – to discuss the elements that make up the short story, to talk critically about short stories, and to become comfortable and confident with the writing of them. Students will write two short stories, a number of shorter exercises, weekly critiques of their peers’ work, and be required to attend and review two fiction readings. The course will be organized as a workshop and attendance is mandatory. All student stories will be edited and critiqued by the instructor and by other students in the class.
Only continuing students are eligible to apply for this course. To be considered for admission, please electronically submit 10-15 double-spaced pages of your fiction, by clicking on the link below; fill out the application you'll find there and attach the writing sample as a Word document or .rtf file. The deadline for completing this application process is 11 PM, THURSDAY, APRIL 26.
Also be sure to read the paragraph concerning creative writing courses on page 1 of the instructions area of this Announcement of Classes for further information regarding enrollment in such courses.
Carper & Attridge: Meter and Meaning: An Introduction to Rhythm in Poetry
Course Reader
In addition to reading and writing poems, we'll also: study prosody via weekly scanning assignments; read critical essays on poetics; historicize formal conventions and talk about genre; create; destroy; rebuild; delight. I'm hoping that by the end of the semester you'll have improved your ability to read sound in a wide range of poetries, which will make you a better writer.
Only continuing students are eligible to apply for this course. To be considered for admission, please electronically submit 5 of your poems, by clicking on the link below; fill out the application you'll find there and attach the writing sample as a Word document or .rtf file. The deadline for completing this application process in 11 PM, THURSDAY APRIL 26.
Also be sure to read the paragraph concerning creative writing courses on page 1 of the instructions area of this Announcement of Classes for further information regarding enrollment in such courses.
The purpose of this class will be to produce a collective language in which to treat poetry. Writing your own poems will be a part of this task, but it will also require readings in contemporary poetry and essays in poetics, as well as some writing assignments done under extreme formal constraints. In addition, there’ll be regular commentary on other students’ work.
All readings will be drawn from a course reader.
Only continuing students are eligible to apply for this course. To be considered for admission, please electronically submit 5 of your poems, by clicking on the link below; fill out the application you'll find there and attach the writing sample as a Word document or .rtf file. The deadline for completing this application process is 11 PM, THURSDAY, APRIL 26.
Also be sure to read the paragraph concerning creative writing courses on page 1 of the instructions area of this Announcement of Classes for further information regarding enrollment in such courses.
There will be a required course reader.
This course is a nonfiction workshop in which you'll learn to write about many different types of art and culture, from TV and film to music and other forms of performance, while developing your own voice as a writer and reflecting on what has shaped your own sensibility. For examples of the wide variety of student writing produced in earlier versions of the course, visit "The Annex" at www.medium.com/the-annex.
Our semester will be guided by a few basic questions: What can we demand from culture, and how are we transformed by it? What does it mean to love or hate a song, TV show, or work of art? How are we shaped by our encounters with specific works of art? And how do our arguments about a particular piece of "culture" connect to broader dreams about politics, freedom, community, and our sense of the possible?
On several occasions, we will be honored to host a visit with an esteemed writer, whose work will be featured in the class. Previous visitors have included the New Yorker's Hua Hsu, The Week's Lili Loofbourow, and Macarthur 'genius grant' winner Josh Kun.
Only continuing students are eligible to apply for this course. To be considered for admission, please electronically submit 5-10 double-spaced pages of your creative nonfiction (no poetry or academic writing), by clicking on the link below; fill out the application you'll find there and attach the writing sample as a Word document or .rtf file. The deadline for completing this application process is 11 PM, THURSDAY, APRIL 26.
Also be sure to read the paragraph concerning creative writing courses on page 1 of the instructions area of this Announcement of Classes for further information regarding enrollment in such courses.
Jamison, L. ed. : The Best American Essays 2017
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 the assigned anthology, as well as students’ exercises and essays. Writing assignments will include three short writing exercises (2 pages each) and two new essays (10-20 pages each).
Only continuing students are eligible to apply for this course. To be considered for admission, please electronically submit 5-10 double-spaced pages of your creative nonfiction (no poetry or academic writing), by clicking on the link below; fill out the application you'll find there and attach the writing sample as a Word document or .rtf file. The deadline for completing this application process is 11 PM, THURSDAY, APRIL 26.
Also be sure to read the paragraph concerning creative writing courses on page 1 of the instructions area of this Announcement of Classes for further information regarding enrollment in such courses.
This course will interrogate the way in which “free” speech informs and complicates our understanding of literature and the literary. We will trace the conceptual intersection of freedom and speech both historically and across several disciplines, beginning with Plato and Aristotle, then proceeding to consider the effect of general literacy on the conception and regulation of free “speech,” reading Milton’s Areopagitica and Marx’s “On the Freedom of the Press.” Turning from "public" to "private" speech, we will also examine psychoanalytic and linguistic accounts of psychic and physiological disfluency. Throughout, we will consider the “freedom” of speech in relation to questions of both form and content. Are genre, meter, and grammar mere forms of constraint? Or are we free only when released by formal constraint from instrumental communication? Do political and psychic repression merely inhibit free speech, or is our idea(l) of free speech an effect of these repressions? And what do physical constraints on speech, from aphasia to stuttering, have to tell us of the relation of literary form to speech freedom? Does the global hegemony of English threaten a speech freedom that ought to be understood as dependent upon a polyglot diversity? Finally, to what extent is free speech a diminished form of freedom itself? We will end by considering the current situation of free speech in the U.S., reading materials related to the “Citizens United” decision, current discussions of "campus climate," and earlier Supreme Court cases related to free speech.
Students will have the opportunity to write three progressively longer essays (ranging from 3 to 10 pages) on different theoretical questions of free speech: on a specific philosophical, political, or aesthetic theory of literature; on a legal or psychoanalytic “case”; on literary form.
Texts will include: Norton Anthology of Literary Theory; Butler, J.: Excitable Speech; Foucault, M.: Fearless Speech; Freud, S.: Dora; Melville, H.: Shorter Works; Plato: The Republic; Sophocles: Antigone; Wordsworth and Coleridge: Lyrical Ballads.
The English Department is working on expanding the class size for this offering. If you would like to enroll in this course after it fills, please put yourself on the wait list and if we are able to accommodate you, you will be added as soon as possible (no later than the first week of classes).
Bartlett, Neil: Who Was That Man?: A Present for Mr. Oscar Wilde; Beardsley, Aubrey: Salome: A Tragedy in One Act; Beerbohm, Max: Zuleika Dobson: or An Oxford Love Story; Ellmann, Richard: Oscar Wilde; Wilde, Oscar: Complete Works of Oscar Wilde; Wilde, Oscar: Teleny: A Novel Attributed to Oscar Wilde; Wilde, Oscar: The Picture of Dorian Gray: An Annotated, Uncensored Edition
Oscar Wilde's jokes, and his pathos, can seem out of place in Victorian literature: they leap off the dusty page and into a present moment where their author seems to fit more happily. Without wishing to consign him back to that potentially hostile past, the task of this course is to understand Wilde's engagement with the histories and cultures around him. A trenchant critic of Victorian sexual morality and hypocrisy, Wilde was also a voracious consumer of his contemporaries' writing and a prominent public intellectual. An historical understanding of Wilde will help shed new light on crucial questions such as: in the final decades of the British colonial occupation of Ireland, how did Wilde's Irishness enable and constrict his construction of a public identity? To what extent do his poems and plays generate new forms for the English language, or (conversely) how are his apparent innovations mere translations from French and German Romanticism? Whatever else it may have done, how did Wilde's public homosexuality shape Victorian attitudes to gender and sex? These and related questions will help us not only shed new light on the uniqueness of Wildean writing, but connect the author himself with the broader political questions from which he is usually thought exempt.
In addition to a substantial proportion of Wilde's (all too slender) corpus, we will read relevant works by Matthew Arnold, Charles Baudelaire, Samuel Butler, the Brothers Grimm, G. W. F. Hegel, Joris-Karl Huysmans, Vernon Lee, Amy Levy, Friedrich Nietzche, Max Nordau, and Walter Pater.
The English Department is one of the most curious developments in the history of human civilization. What do we study? The answer used to be, “literary texts of the English canon.” But then we questioned what belonged to the canon, what constituted a literary text, whether its segregation from non-literary texts was defensible, and eventually whether we should restrain ourselves to the study of texts at all.
At times we have claimed that what holds together students of English is not what we study but how we do so. But what exactly are the skills of an English major? Other literature departments require the knowledge of at least one foreign language; most English majors read texts in their first language. There are some “methods” that we supposedly share, such as “close reading” or “critical thinking.” But aside from the difficulty of explaining why we should have exclusive claims to either of these skills, we have also called them into doubt by exposing their historical particularities, epistemological biases, and political inefficiencies.
This constant self-questioning of the subjects and methods is not an incidental feature of the study of English but the logical consequence of the utopian ideal behind it: namely, to create a completely democratic discipline. This ideal is inherently paradoxical: it seeks to establish an academic discipline, that is, a branch of knowledge separate from all other branches of knowledge; and yet it seeks to leave or actively make this knowledge accessible to all. Why do we want such a discipline, and what are the consequences of wanting it?
In this course, we will be looking at the Department of English as a social and intellectual experiment with a fascinating past, a challenging present, and a doubtful future. What were the original motivations behind its establishment? What are the driving forces that continue to maintain it today? What are the particular challenges facing the English Department and its students today? And finally, if there’s a future for this field, what does it look like?
Readings include chapters from the history of literary criticism from Plato to Donna Haraway; accounts of the modern university from Wilhelm Humboldt to John Guillory; and theories of education and its politics from Thomas More to Simone Weil and Hannah Arendt. All readings will be posted on bCourses.
This course will consider literature in relation to media theory. Is literature made obsolete by new media? What happens when we consider print literature in relation to other “distressed” media, from black-and-white photography to silent film to analog recording? What happens to the concept of authenticity in the digital age? How does print differ from “code” as a “general medium” of sensory forms—sight, sound, touch? What do we value about “virtual” reality? Using Marshall McLuhan’s claim that “the content of one medium is always another medium” as a guiding concept, we will try to assess the impact of other media, especially photography, film, and recorded sound, on literature’s function and value. Our particular interest will be in the status of the “document”—an historical or fictional piece of evidence that is somehow presented, represented, or mediated by the art form (or “platform”) in question. We’ll compare “documents” (including reported and recorded speech) as they are mediated in both 19th- and late 20th-century literary forms. One question that may emerge, as we consider the history of mediation from Dracula to Danielewski’s House of Leaves, is why mediation is so often registered an occult or gothic phenomenon. Students will be responsible for weekly discussion posts on the reading and two critical projects (one of which needs to be in print form!).
Texts will include: Beckett, S.: Krapp's Last Tape; Danielewski, M., House of Leaves; Johnson, R.: RADI OS; Mann, E., Four Plays; Stoker, B.: Dracula; Williams, W.C.: Paterson; Wordsworth and Coleridge, Lyrical Ballads. Secondary reading: Bolter and Grusin: Remediations; Hansen, M., ed., Critical Terms for Media Studies Kittler, F.: Gramophone Film Typewriter; McLuhan, M.: Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man.
Since long before Thomas More coined the catching term “Utopia” – meaning “no place” or “not-place” – to name his fiction of a perfect island commonwealth, the literature of non-existent worlds has been calling every aspect of actually existing societies into question. This course seeks to investigate the rival ways of thinking about “nature” – human and otherwise – that support utopian visions of political community and to explore the longstanding link between utopian fiction and ecological perspectives on this earth.
The course will usually be run as a seminar. Readings will allow us to explore utopian literature's intersections with science fiction, pastoral, satire and the literature of exploration, and are likely to include: Theocritus, Virgil, Thomas More, Gerrard Winstanley, Margaret Cavendish, Edward Bellamy, William Morris, Henri David Thoreau, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Karl Marx, Hannah Arendt, Aldous Huxley, Rachel Carson, Margaret Atwood, Ernest Callenbach, Ursula K. LeGuin, Octavia Butler.
Assigned text: Henry David Thoreau, Walden, Civil Disobedience and Other Writings (Norton Critical Editions). You are required to use this edition.
We will read Walden twice, in order to gain a deeper understanding of this rich and frustrating book. The number of pages assigned each week will be considerably less than in most English classes, but you will need to read slowly and deliberately, so roughly the same amount of out-of-class prep time will be needed. Class meetings will vary between occasional lectuers, full group discussion, and small group discussion. You will be writing two essays.
Our primary texts will be CDs of The Flatlanders, Butch Hancock, Joe Ely, Jimmie Dale Gilmore, Townes van Zandt, Guy Clark and others.
A few brief secondary readings wlll be available as a course reader.
Historically and etymologically, lyric poetry was sung to the accompaniment of a lyre. Most lyric poetry studied as English literature today, however, reflecting the term "literature"'s own history and etymology, is related to the genre in ways other than by being sung. The aim of this course is to study some lyric poetry in its traditional form of song.
We will focus, however, not on the old lyric poetry that gave the genre its name, but on contemporary lyrics in a flourishing tradition whose live performances we have opportunities to hear locally: songs of a set of (mostly West) Texans who perform regularly at the Hardly Strictly Bluegrass music festival held in Golden Gate Park in October, as well as songs that influenced them. We will consider the songs' lyrics' poetic forms, including their use of rhyme, alliteration, meter and syntactic parallelism; their imagery; differences between lyric and narrative songs; their cultural origins, including their bluegrass, blues and tejana influences; and some differences between sung and unsung poetry.
The course will include attendance at the Hardly Strictly Bluegrass festival and possibly other outings as well.
Most utopian and dystopian authors are more concerned with persuading readers of the merits of their ideas than with the "merely" literary qualities of their writing. Although utopian writing has sometimes made converts, inspiring readers to try to realize the ideal society, most of it has had limited practical impact, yet has managed to provoke readers in various ways—for instance, as a kind of imaginative fiction that comments on "things as they are" indirectly yet effectively, with fantasy and satire in varying doses. Among the critical questions posed by such material are the problematic status of fiction that is not primarily mimetic, but written in the service of some ulterior purpose; the shifting relationships between what is and what authors think might be or ought to be; how to create the new and strange other than by recombining the old and familiar; and so on.
Various films (such as Metropolis, Triumph of the Will, Modern Times, 1984, Handmaid's Tale, Brazil, THX1138, Gattaca, A Clockwork Orange, and Children of Men) will be included in the syllabus and discussed in class. The works on the book list are not required, but recommended: in some cases, as classics of their genre, in others, for purposes of comparison with film adaptations. Writing will consist of one long essay of 16-20 pages. There will be no quizzes or exams, but seminar attendance and participation will be expected, and will affect grades.
Book List
Recommended: Zamiatin, E: We; Atwood, M : The Handmaid's Tale; Burgess, A: A Clockwork Orange; Gilman, C. P.: Herland; Huxley, A: Brave New World; Ishiguro, K: Never Let Me Go; Orwell, G: 1984; Wells, H. G.: Three Prophetic Novels
Deutelbaum, M.: A Hitchcock Reader; Modleski, T.: The Women Who Knew Too Much
This course will focus on the Hitchcock oeuvre from the early British through the American period, with emphasis on analysis of cinematic representation of crime, victimhood, and the investigation of guilt. Our discussions and critical readings will consider socio-cultural backgrounds, gender problems, and psychological and Marxist readings as well as star studies.
The English Department is working on expanding the class size for this offering. If you would like to enroll in this course after it fills, please put yourself on the wait list and if we are able to accommodate you, you will be added as soon as possible (no later than the first week of classes).
Required Texts:
Aeneid, selection (trans. Fagles, Penguin Classics Deluxe)
Bede, The Ecclesiastical History of the English Nation, selection (trans. Sherley-Price, Penguin Classics)
Beowulf (trans. Heaney, Norton)
St. Patrick's Purgatory (Gardiner, Visions of Heaven & Hell Before Dante)
Sir Orfeo (Treharne, Old and Middle English, c. 890-c. 1450)
Mandeville's Travels (trans. Bale, The Book of Marvels and Travels)
Margery Kempe, The Book of Margery Kempe (trans. Windeatt, Penguin Classics)
John MIlton, Paradise Lost (Teskey, Norton Critical Edition)
"Britain, formerly known as Albion, is an island in the ocean, lying towards the north west at a considerable distance from the coasts of Germany, Gaul, and Spain, which together form the greater part of Europe." (Bede, Ecclesiastical History of the English People, trans. Leo Sherley-Price)
"The mind is its own place, and in it self
Can make a Heav'n of Hell, a Hell of Heav'n."
(John MIlton, Paradise Lost, 1.255-56)
This is a seminar that explores the various perspectives that writers of medieval and early modern texts use to map the world around them. As we will see, the world looks very different depending on who is telling the story, so class discussion will inevitably draw on textual criticism and historical context to supplement our conversations about how each text builds its own world. Over the course of the semester, we will also keep track of our own map of the medieval/early modern world to see where worlds collide or remain distinct.
The section of English 166 satisfies the pre-1800 requirement for the English major.
Cavarero, Ariana: For More than One Voice: Toward a Philosophy of Vocal Expression (2005); Chion, Michel: Sound: An Acoulogical Treatise (2016); Dickinson, Emily: The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson; Hopkins, Gerard Manley: The Major Works; Rose, Trishia: Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America (1994); Stoever, Jennifer Lynn : The Sonic Color Line: Race and the Cultural Politics of Listening (2016)
Course reader with selections from Boethius, François Rabelais, and architectural theory
"...it is said that light is a sound too high-pitched for the human ear to hear but that one day it will become accessible to another ear awakened in another life and that, indeed, we will be able to hear the music of the spheres, like the movement of love that, in Dante's words, 'moves the sun and the other stars.'"
—Sound: An Acoulogical Treatise, Michel Chion
In François Rabelais's The Life of Gargantua and Pantagruel, there is a famous scene in which sounds from an ancient battle, previously frozen in the air, become unthawed, emitting the clash of weapons, the boom of drums, and the cries of unrecognizable languages. Although this scene has often been read as an anticipation of recording technology, it is also an example of a legend that thematizes sound's mystical, world-making, time-travelling capacity. In this class, we will begin by studying a range of such legends and their cultural applications, from the music of the spheres, to the architectural theory of churches, to the convention of the sample in contemporary music. How is sound peculiarly invested with the power to maintain the possibility of simultaneous worlds? How can we train our ears to hear these unheard realities? Much of this investigation will proceed by following an in-depth reading of the works of Gerard Manley Hopkins and Emily Dickinson, two authors who, in different ways and on opposite sides of the Atlantic, confounded the difference between mystical beliefs and sonic theory We will bring a range of methodological approaches to bear on these two authors, from prosody and meter, to lyric theory, to performance. We will read their poetry and prose, Hopkins's journals, Dickinson's fragments, as well as the letters of both authors. In applying broader questions about sonic mysticism to these texts, we will consider more particular problems as well; for example, how does Hopkins's theory of Reversed Feet and Reversed or Counterpoint Rhythm transpose the music of the spheres? How does Dickinson develop conceptual correspondences by rhyming at long distance? In addition to a research paper, students will write a creative project that develops a mystical sonic theory of their own.
This section of English 166 has been canceled (7/5/18).
Brown, W. W. : Clotel, or the President's Daughter; Cesaire, A. : A Tempest; Conde, M. : I, Titua, Black Witch of Salem; Jefferson, T.: Notes on the State of Virginia; Morrison, T. : A Mercy; Shakespeare, W. : The Tempest
In this course, we will read both historical and literary texts to explore how racial categories came into being in New World cultures, and how these categories were tested, inhabited, and re-imagined by the human actors they sought to define. Our study will be organized around four early American sites: Landfall in the North Atlantic, Pocahontas at Jamestown, Witchcraft at Salem, and Jefferson’s Virginia. In each of these places Native, European, and African ways of making meaning collided, and concepts of racial difference were formed. These four sites will function as interpretive nodes. For each, we will read a selection of primary documents, and then explore how racial constructions forged at each site have been re-imagined and revised throughout American cultural history.
This course satisfies the pre-1800 requirement for the English major.
This course satisfies UC Berkeley's American Cultures requirement.
Bechdel, Alison: Fun Home: A Family Tragicomedy; Hejinian, Lyn: My Life
All other readings will be in a course reader.
In this course, we will survey literatures of the self and their history from antiquity to the present. We will attend to the writing of the self in its many genres and forms: the diary, the autobiography, the poem, the novel, the memoir, the case study, the graphic novel, and digital self-presentation. Auto-writings negotiate a paradox: a subjective engagement with subjective fact that often aspires to a nearly scientific objectivity; sometimes they task themselves with the opposite: undoing or revising a scientific or political consensus. We will think about these literatures as means of self-preservation, self-knowing, self-tracking, diagnosis, an accounting for a self, as a site of counter-history, and as a tool for (re)enfranchisement. Authors include Augustine, Kempe, Pepys, Rousseau, Whitman, Douglass, Freud, Stein, Woolf, Hejinian, Anzaldúa, Bechdel, and Nelson.
Baldwin, James: The Devil Finds Work; Baldwin, James: The Fire Next Time; Barthes, Roland: Camera Lucida; Barthes, Roland: Mythologies; Sontag, Susan: Against Interpretation
This course offers an in-depth study of three of the most influential public intellectuals of the twentieth century: James Baldwin, Roland Barthes, and Susan Sontag. Working in the postwar period between France and the United States, and grappling in different ways with their own minority experience, each of these writers was passionately engaged with the cinema, which provided the occasion for some of their most provocative reflections on race, sex, art, and culture. As well as offering brilliant insights into cinema as art form and medium, their writing provides a map of the intellectual, political, and cultural history of the past fifty years, posing questions that are more relevant than ever today. We will analyze the way these (and some other) authors make their arguments, how they think and write about film and art, and, especially, how they bring to light the relation between film aesthetics and the politics of race, class, gender, sexuality, and national identity. We will follow their lead in watching and responding to provocative films that challenge our taken-for-granted assumptions. We will also approach the essay as an art in its own right, exploring how great cultural criticism not only comments on but also creates the world. Students will work through a series of writing exercises to produce innovative cultural criticism of their own, or a longer research paper
This class is cross-listed with Film 140, and it will be co-taught by Prof. Stephen Best and Prof. Damon Young.
This seminar explores the forms of culture that emerged, or experienced a renaissance, during the presidency of Barack Obama. Starting with Obama's own bildungsroman-like Dreams from My Father, we will then explore such forms as the theatrical remix (Hamilton: The Musical; CalShakes' Black Odyssey, which we will attend); the neo-slave narrative (Colson Whitehead's The Underground Railroad; Paul Beatty's The Sell Out); the family novel (Jessmyn Ward's Salvage the Bones; Angela Flournoy's The Turner House); the race-driven horror tale (Get Out; Victor LaValle's The Ballad of Black Tom); the lyrical tale of personal awakening (Moonlight, adapted from Tarrell Alvin McRaney's play In Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue); and the innovative remix of musical genres, like hip-hop, jazz, and neo-soul, often coded as 'black' (Solange's A Seat at the Table; D'Angelo's Black Messiah; Kendrick Lamar's To Pimp a Butterfly).
Finger, A.: Call Me Ahab; Friel, B. : Molly Sweeney; Lewis, V.A. ed.: Beyond Victims and Villains; Nussbaum, S.: Good Kings, Bad Kings; Shakespeare, W.: Richard III; Unwin, S. : All Our Children
We will examine the ways disability is represented in a variety of works of fiction and drama. Sometimes disability is used as a metaphor or symbol of something else. In other cases, texts explore disability as a lived experience. We will analyze the representation of disability as it intersects with other cultural factors such as gender, class, race, economics, politics, etc. Through your close reading of these texts, you will sharpen your critical thinking skills and develop methods to analyze representations of disability in other texts, films, popular culture, and public policy. Assignments will include two short (5-8 page) critical essays, a group performance project and a take-home final examination.
(This is a core course for the Disability Studies Minor).
Acosta, Oscar Zeta: The Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo; Cantu, Norma: Canicula: Snapshots of a Girlhood en la frontera; Castillo, Ana: Black Dove; Castillo-Guilbault, Rose: Farmworker's Daughter; Gonzalez, Rigoberto: Butterfly Boy: Memories of a Chicano Mariposa; Ruiz, Ronald: The Lawyer; Trevino Hart, Elva: Barefoot Heart: Stories of a Migrant Child; Urrea, Luis Alberto: The Devil's Highway
The autobiography is a problematic narrative form. In telling their stories, Chicanx autobiographers reconstruct the past partly by relying on unreliable memory, creating the illusion of historical accuracy through the imagination. Chicanx autobiographers, however, do not create this illusion cynically; their stories emerge from the need to offer an alternative to hegemonic biographical narratives that promise transparent representation but exclude or misrepresent Chicanx history and subjectivity. Thus, to a large degree, Chicanx autobiographies disrupt the claims of conventional self-referential narratives as we have understood them. And yet, they are nevertheless able to convey some truths about history and personal experience, if not through their surface narratives then through the tensions and contradictions that take shape in the construction of the narrative itself—or one might say, at the level of form. To supplement our study of Chicanx autobiographies, we’ll read short works of history and literary criticism. We’ll also make an effort to understand the similarities and differences between autobiography and other narrative forms, such as the novel.
The English Department is working on expanding the class size for this offering. If you would like to enroll in this course after it fills, please put yourself on the wait list and if we are able to accommodate you, you will be added as soon as possible (no later than the first week of classes).
Chaucer: Troilus and Criseyde; Homer: Iliad; Homer: Odyssey; Shakespeare: Troilus and Cressida; Virgil: Aeneid
Homer’s Iliad was composed in the eighth century BCE. Both the story that it narrated (the conflict between the Greeks and the Trojans) and the particular form that the story took (the genre of the epic) would become foundational building blocks of the Western literary tradition. This course will follow these two threads from antiquity to the Renaissance. We will read the story of Troy and the Trojans as it was told and retold by the Greeks (Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey), the Romans (Virgil’s Aeneid), in the Middle Ages (Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde), and in Elizabethan England (Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida). At the same time, we will see what happens to the genre of epic over time, as historical circumstances change and cultural priorities shift. We will define what we mean by “epic,” as well as what Homer, Virgil, Chaucer, and Shakespeare meant when they invoked the genre. Each of these texts imagines a world of possibilities and limitations; we will compare those freedoms and unfreedoms, what is speakable and unspeakable in Homer’s world versus Virgil’s world versus Chaucer’s world versus Shakespeare’s world. We will ask ourselves how the epic as a genre contributes to shaping the limitations and possibilities imagined by these texts.
This course satisfies the pre-1800 requirement for the English major.
A course reader, which will be available from Instant Copying & Laser Printing ((510) 704-9700; 2138 University Ave, Berkeley, CA 94704).
The lyf so short, the crafte so longe to lerne…
-- Chaucer
This course will investigate how authors craft stories, so that both non-writers and writers may gain a new perspective on reading stories. In thinking of short stories as artefacts produced by humans, we will consider – without any assertions of certainty – how those people may have experienced themselves and their world, and how history and culture may have participated in the making of these stories. So, in this course we will explore the making, purposes, and pleasures of the short story form. We will read – widely, actively and carefully – many published stories from various countries in order to begin to understand the conventions of the form, and how this form may function in diverse cultures. Students will write a short story and revise it; engaging with a short story as a writer will aid them in their investigations as readers and critics. Students will also write two analytical papers about stories we read in class.
Attendance is mandatory.
James, C. L. R.: Mariners, Renegades & Castaways: The Story of Herman Melville and the World We Live In; Levine, R.: The New Cambridge Companion to Herman Melville; Melville, H.: Moby-Dick; Melville, H.: The Piazza Tales and Other Prose Pieces, 1839-1860; Melville, H.: White Jacket; Melville, H. : Pierre, or the Ambiguities; Otter, S.: Melville's Anatomies
In this seminar we will read as much of Herman Melville’s fiction from the 1850s as we can, delving patiently into Moby-Dick (1851) early in the semester and then tracking the experiments in prose that eventually led Melville to the corrosive skepticism of The Confidence Man (1857) and to abandon fiction altogether thereafter. If time permits, we will also consider Melville in the 1950s. That is, we will examine how Cold War political debates influenced mid-century Melville criticism, paying special attention to C. L. R. James, a Caribbean intellectual who wrote his study of Moby-Dick while under detention on Ellis Island for “passport violations” in 1952. Students will write a short initial essay on Moby-Dick and a research paper on a topic of their choice.
Please read the paragraph about English 190 on page 2 of the instructions area of this Announcement of Classes for more details about enrolling in or wait-listing for this course.
Please click here for more information about enrollment in English 190.
In this seminar we will trod fiction's "path not taken"—the tradition of the novel of ideas that, with the triumph of Realism in the nineteenth century of Dickens and Balzac, became mainstream fiction's dark shadow. Our exploration will stretch from Rabelais, in the sixteenth century, to Thomas Mann, Walker Percy and Iris Murdoch in the twentieth, with stops in between for Laurence Sterne, Voltaire, Denis Diderot, Herman Melville and John Cowper Powys. Throughout we will focus on what this tradition can tell us about what the novel is, what it became—and what it can be.
Please read the paragraph about English 190 on page 2 of this Announcement of Classes for more details about enrolling in or wait-listing for this course.
Please click here for more information about enrollment in English 190.
Within the context of slavery, the Jim Crow version of slavery, and the continuing racism in the U.S., African American literature bears witness to centuries of oppression, coercion, and exploitation; at the same time it documents great tenacity and resistance and the capacity to overcome these forms of subjugation. This course will examine the relation between the socio-political structures of historical domination and the literary manifestations of the effects of oppression and modes of resistance. Along with historical texts, we will read literary texts ranging from Jacobs' and Douglass' autobiographies to novels by Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, and Jesmyn Ward. The course will focus primarliy on forms of resistance and overcoming. Course requirements: one oral report and one 18-20 page research paper.
Please read the paragraph about English 190 on page 2 of the instructions area of this Announcement of Classes for more details about enrolling in or wait-listing for this course.
Please click here for more information about enrollment in English 190.
In this seminar, we will read our way slowly into William Blake's forbidding and exciting “fourfold” poetic environments: graphic works of “Illuminated Printing” in which a city like London, or “Golgonooza,” is also a level of consciousness, a bodily organ, a phase of fallen history, and grotesque fun with g’s and o’s. With the aid of intertexts ranging from the Book of Revelations to Romantic political philosophy and contemporary literary theory, we will trace Blake’s mythic characters’ attempts to form artistic, erotic, and political community while enmeshed in what the poet called “the Web of Urizen”: the internalized system of moral “virtues” that shored up the national defense, wage-labor exploitation, and colonial slavery in Blake’s era of revolution and reaction.
A focus on Blake opens onto broader problems that animate Romantic-era artworks: the relation between aesthetics and politics, nature and technology, personal and national history, innovation and inherited form. Readings will include Mary Wollstonecraft, Thomas Paine, Edmund Burke, Walter Benjamin, Michel Foucault, Northrop Frye, and W.J.T. Mitchell and a sprinkling of latterday Blakean poets.
Please read the paragraph about English 190 on page 2 of the instructions area of this Announcement of Classes for more details about enrolling in or wait-listing for this course.
Please click here for more information about enrollment in English 190.
Adichie, Chimamanda: Americanah; Cole, Teju: Open City; Dreiser, Theodor: Sister Carrie; Lovelace, Earl: The Dragon Can't Dance; Mpe, Phaswane: Welcome to Our Hillbrow; Reed, Ishmael: Blues City; Selvon, Sam: The Lonely Londoners; Smith, Zadie: NW; Vlasidavic, Ivan: Portrait With Keys; Woolf, Virginia: Mrs. Dalloway
The texts for this class will be available at University Press Books, Bancroft Ave.
Films: La Noire de... dir. Sembene (1966); Fruitvale Station dir. Coogler (2013); Black Panther dir. Coogler (2018)
An intensive research seminar exploring the relationship between urban landscapes and postcolonial literary cultures. Readings in theories of postcoloniality and diaspora as well as studies in city planning and architecture will accompany close examination of novels, films, and music. Weekly written responses and a long final research paper will be required.
Please contact instructor before purchasing texts.
Please read the paragraph about English 190 on page 2 of the instructions area of this Announcement of Classes for more details about enrolling in or wait-listing for this course.
Please click here for more information about enrollment in English 190.
Allison, Dorothy: Bastard Out of Carolina; Jones, Gayl: Corregidora; Nguyen, Viet Thanh: The Sympathizer; Ozick, Cynthia: The Shawl; Ruiz, Ronald: Happy Birthday Jesus; Trumbo, Dalton: Johnny Got His Gun; Wideman, John Edgar: Philadelphia Fire
In this course, we’ll analyze representations of repression and resistance in a collection of contemporary American novels. We’ll examine various forms of repression—physical, social, political, and psychological—represented in these works, and we’ll study the various ways the novels resist repression. (Please be forewarned: some of these works include graphic and disturbing representations of violence and abuse.) Several questions inform the course theme: What are the formal features of the literature of repression and resistance? How is it that literature can convert forms of repression into aesthetically pleasing representations? Can pain and suffering be symbolized, stylized, or transfigured into an aesthetic form and still retain its representational-historical value? At what point does an event become so horrific that it can no longer be represented aesthetically? Where is the line drawn? We’ll make use of a comparative approach to analyze the similarities and differences between the various novels, and we’ll strive for a critical appreciation of both the social significance and the aesthetic quality of the literature. Students will be required to write a research paper and give an oral presentation.
Please read the paragraph about English 190 on page 2 of the instructions area of this Announcement of Classes for more details about enrolling in or wait-listing for this course.
Please click here for more information about enrollment in English 190.
This course is designed as an investigation of Mark Twain's writings, and a chance to develop skills essential to research. Classes will be held in the Bancroft Library, making use of the unique collections of the Mark Twain Papers—the world's largest collection of Samuel L. Clemens's manuscripts, letters, and early editions. Students will decipher manuscripts, compare printed editions, and edit short works, learning how scholar-editors sift evidence, generate historical understanding, prsent relevant data, and create new approaches to old material. These skills are no sideline: in today's world, many things which appear obvious (on page or onscreen) are not so. How to cope? "Editing" can mean a textual investigation aimed at producing a usable, soundly constructed (yet always provisional) text. The habits that go into editing are part of our effort to test what we've received; they apply not only to books but to anybody's "version of" anything.
We will begin with lesser-known Mark Twain: the early, tough-minded comic journalism written from San Francisco. These texts bring up problems of attribution, transmission, and editing without an authorial manuscript. Then we will read Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain's first (and last?) great masterpiece. Huck Finn offers many chances to ask what authorial intention is, and how far it can legitimately be exerted. "The Private History of a Campaign that Failed" is Mark Twain's rather strategic "apology" for his Civil War history; it can usefully be read in tandem with A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court. Pudd'nhead Wilson follows: a Mark Twain course would be incomplete without this nightmarish melodrama of America's racist history. We should also read parts of Twain's Autobiography, the complete text of which has only just been published and which, being a dictated text, poses special editorial problems. So does No. 44, The Mysterious Stranger, a story of devils and humans which Twain never finished to his satisfaction.
Students will be assigned textual-critical and literary experiments (papers). These may range over Mark Twain's works and letters or veer off into other areas of interest. They should focus our attention on how reading matter—and much else besides—is constructed for us on the basis of theories, discoveries, and assumptions. A final project will be chosen by the student and presented to the class.
Reading List:
-- One course reader made up by the instructor, consisting of early MT journalism, etc.
--"The Recent Carnival of Crime in Connecticut" (in Course Reader)
--Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (UC Press edition, 2001)
--"The Private History of a Campaign That Failed" (1885) (in Course Reader)
-- Pudd'nhead Wilson (Norton Critical Edition, 2015)
--Autobiography (UC Press edition), selections (in Course Reader)
-- No. 44, The Mysterious Stranger (UC Press edition, 2004)
Please read the paragraph about English 190 on page 2 of the instructions area of this Announcement of Classes for more details about enrolling in or wait-listing for this course.
Please click here for more information about enrollment in English 190.
This section of English 190 has been canceled.
Please click here for more information about enrollment in English 190.
This section of English 190 has been canceled.
Please click here for more information about enrollment in English 190.
Besides reading and discussing some fiction and poetry with Western settings, and essays that attempt to identify or explain distinctive regional characteristics, this course will consider various movies shaped by and shaping conceptions of California, such as E. v. Stroheim's Greed, J. Ford's Grapes of Wrath, N. Ray's In A Lonely Place, B. Wilder's Sunset Boulevard, R. Polanski's Chinatown, the Coen brothers' Man Who Wasn't There, T. Haynes's Safe, P. Anderson's There Will Be Blood, &c. Writing will consist of one long essay of 16-20 pages. There will be no quizzes or exams, but seminar attendance and participation will be expected, and will affect grades.
Readings will include Chandler, R.: The Big Sleep; Didion, J.: Slouching Toward Bethlehem; Steinbeck, J.: The Long Valley; Steinbeck, J.: The Pastures of Heaven; West, N.: The Day of the Locust.
Please read the paragraph about English 190 on page 2 of the instructions area of this Announcement of Classes for more details about enrolling in or wait-listing for this course.
Please click here for more information about enrollment in English 190.
This seminar seeks to introduce students to the pleasure of Jamesian difficulty. We will undertake an intensive reading of James's fiction, playing close attention to the extended figuration and syntax that is the signature of Jamesian style. Topics of discussion include: James's notion of novelistic aesthetics; his investment in point of view; his engagement with a variety of narrative modes (the novel of manners; the gothic; psychological realism); his investigation into morality and ethics; his inquiry into the problem of knowledge; his cultivation of narrative ambiguity; his representation of queer identity; and the values that led other fiction writers and literary critics to forward his reputation as "the master" of the art of the novel. The course will begin with short stories by Nathaniel Hawthorne and George Eliot, wrtiers to whom James paid homage and whose influence is strongly registered in James's fiction. Novels by Edith Wharton and Virginia Woolf will allow us to appreciate the immediate impact that James's work had on the modern novel.
For the 15-20 page critical essay due at the end of the term, students may write on any aspect of James's significance as a literary and cultural figure. A prospectus, bibliography and full rough draft of the essay will be required steps of the writing process. Each student will also be responsible for one oral presentation on the assigned reading. There is no midterm or final exam.
Fiction by James includes short stories as well as Washington Square; The Turn of the Screw; The Portrait of a Lady; and The Ambassadors. Also required: The Age of Innocence, Wharton; To the Lighthouse, Woolf. A course reader will be available through Copy Central.
Please read the paragraph about English 190 on page 2 of the instructions area of this Announcement of Classes for more details about enrolling in or wait-listing for this course.
Please click here for more information about enrollment in English 190.
A course reader.
For more information on this course, please contact Professor Miller at j_miller@berkeley.edu.
This course satisfies the pre-1800 requirement for the English major.
Please read the paragraph about English 190 on page 2 of the instructions area of this Announcement of Classes for more details about enrolling in or wait-listing for this course.
Please click here for more information about enrollment in English 190.
See below.
In the first semester of this two-semester-long course, we will familiarize ourselves with a number of critical approaches to literary study and reflect a bit on the institution of criticism itself. These discussions will provide a background from which to identify the critical methods and stakes of our own individual projects, culminating in a 40+ page paper due at the end of the two semesters. We will read selections from a collection of critical essays, and we will read one work together—likely Jane Austen's Emma—and review a variety of critical approaches to it. Students will prepare a précis or two of critical works, collectively identify and prepare presentations on additional critics they would like to read, develop a thesis for their own writing project on a work (or works) of their choice, and produce an annotated bibliography on relevant materials for their project.
Students who satisfactorily complete H195A-B (the Honors Course) will satisfy the Research Seminar requirement for the English major. (More details about H195A prerequisites, how and when students will be informed of the results of their applications, etc., are in the paragraph about the Honors Course on page 2 of the instructions area of this Announcement of Classes.)
To be considered for admission to this course, you will need to electronically apply by:
• Clicking on the link below and filling out the application you will find there, bearing in mind that you will also need to attach:
• a PDF of your Academic Summary (go into Cal Central, click your "My Academics" tab, then click "View Academic Summary" and "Print as PDF"),
• a PDF of your non-UC Berkeley transcript(s), if any,
• a PDF (or Word document) of a critical paper that you wrote for another class (the length of this paper not being as important as its quality), and
• a PDF (or Word document) of a personal statement, including why you are interested in taking this course and indicating your academic interest and, if possible, the topic or area you are thinking of addressing in your honors thesis.
The deadline for completing this application is 11 PM, FRIDAY, MAY 11.
Booth, Wayne C.: The Craft of Research; Eagleton, Terry: Literary Theory: An Introduction; Shakespeare, William: The Tempest; Woolf, Virginia: Mrs. Dalloway;
Recommended: MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers (7th edition)
A course reader of critical essays, poetry, and short fiction will be available on bCourses.
H195A/B is a two-semester seminar that lays the groundwork for and guides you through the completion a 40-60 page Honors thesis on a subject of your choice. The first semester offers an inquiry into critical approaches, research methods, and theoretical frameworks. We will engage with some of the key theoretical movements and debates of the twentieth century (e.g., New Criticism, post-structuralism, psychoanalysis, materialism(s), feminism, postcolonial and critical race theory, affect theory). We will ground our collective inquiry in readings of a few primary texts that highlight the questions posed by specific genres (fiction, poetry, drama). The goal is to help you to define a compelling research project that will sustain your interest over several months, to conceptualize and contextualize the critical questions that enlist your keenest curiosity, to engage with secondary materials productively, to articulate the stakes of your inquiry, and to develop a persuasive critical voice and argument.
I encourage you to think about potential thesis projects over the summer. Ideally, you will have narrowed the field to a couple of options by the start of fall semester. In addition to the assigned readings, the work for that semester will entail some preliminary research, thinking, and writing that will culminate in a thesis proposal and annotated bibliography by the semester’s end.
During the spring semester students will meet with me in individual conferences and share preliminary drafts in working groups. Portions of the thesis will be submitted for feedback at regular intervals. A draft of the entire thesis will be due in early April; the final version will be due in early May.
Students who satisfactorily complete H195A-B (the Honors Course) will satisfy the Research Seminar requirement for the English major. (More details about H195A prerequisites, how and when students will be informed of the results of their applications, etc., are in the paragraph about the Honors Course on page 2 of the instructions area of this Announcement of Classes.)
To be considered for admission to this course, you will need to electronically apply by:
• Clicking on the link below and filling out the application you will find there, bearing in mind that you will also need to attach:
• a PDF of your Academic Summary (go into Cal Central, click your "My Academics" tab, then click "View Academic Summary" and "Print as PDF"),
• a PDF of your non-UC Berkeley transcript(s), if any,
• a PDF (or Word document) of a critical paper that you wrote for another class (the length of this paper not being as important as its quality), and
• a PDF (or Word document) of a personal statement, including why you are interested in taking this course and indicating your academic interest and, if possible, the topic or area you are thinking of addressing in your honors thesis.
The deadline for completing this application is 11 PM, FRIDAY, MAY 11.
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.
Readings TBA.
Approaches to literary study, including textual analysis, scholarly methodology and bibliography, critical theory and practice.
Enrollment is limited to entering doctoral students in the English program.
This course satisfies the Group 1 (Problems in the Study of Literature) requirement.
Aristotle: Poetics; Augustine: On Christian Doctrine; Kant, Immanuel: Critique of Judgment; Longinus: On Sublimity; Plato: Republic; Sidney, Philip: Apology for Poetry
An introduction to Western literary theory from antiquity to the present, focusing on the historical shift from the disciplines of poetics and rhetoric to that of aesthetics, with special attention to the concept of aesthetics and the discourse of the sublime. Readings in Plato, Aristotle, Euripides, Longinus, Augustine, Sidney, Erasmus, Kant, Lyotard, Benjamin, and Adorno. The syllabus is designed to be particularly helpful to students in English, but students from other departments are welcome and may write their final paper on a primary text or texts in other languages.
Required Texts: Plato, Republic (any edition with marginal references, e.g. 327a, but the preferred edition is Cambridge UP; ISBN 978-0521484435); Aristotle, Poetics (Norton; ISBN 978-0393952162); Longinus, On Sublimity, trans. D. A. Russell (on B-courses); Saint Augustine, On Christian Doctrine (on B-courses); Philip Sidney, Apology for Poetry (the van Dorsten edition is available on B-courses); Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment (Cambridge; ISBN 978-0521348928). Other readings will be available on B-courses.
This course satisfies the Group 6 (Non-historical) requirement.
This class is cross-listed with Comparative Literature 250.
Benjamin, Walter: The Arcades Project; Brainard, Joe: I Remember; Gladman, Renee: Calamities; Goldberg, Ariel: The Photographer; Greenstreet, Kate: The End of Something; Lefebvre, Henri: Everyday Life in the Modern World; Mayer, Bernadette: Midwinter Day; Scalapino, Leslie: New Time; Sherman, Stuart: Telling Time: Clocks, Diaries, and English Diurnal Form 1660-1785; Victor, Divya: Things to Do with Your Mouth; de Certeau, Michel: The Practice of Everyday Life vol 1
A course reader, available from Copy Central on Bancroft
This seminar will undertake a critical reading of, and participation in, some possibilities (or impossibilities) of contemporary realisms and realities, public and private. It will query, from an array of perspectives, problems of process, representation, historical awareness, resistance, spectatorship, etc., with reference to a range of theoretical works read in parallel with the some recent (and largely “experimental”) literary texts. In addition to keeping up with the readings, each student will be required to undertake a daily writing project of his or her own that is capable of querying the conditions and character of dailiness, within the contexts of postmodern subjectivity, global precarity, and the ubiquity of neoliberal capitalism.
This course satisfies the Group 6 (Twentieth Century) requirement.
Baum, L. Frank: The Wizard of Oz; Cain, James: The Postman Always Rings Twice; Crichton, Michael: Jurassic Park; Highsmith, Patrica: The Talented Mr Ripley; King, Stephen: Carrie; L'Engle, Madeleine: A Wrinkle in Time; Lovecraft, H.P.: The Complete Fiction; Ludlum, Robert: The Bourne Identity; Machado, Carmen Maria: Her Body & Other Parties; Portis, Charles: True Grit; Slim, Iceberg: Pimp: The Story of My Life; Steel, Danielle: The Gift; Tan, Amy: Joy Luck Club; Walker, Alice: The Color Purple
We’ll discuss canonical works of American genre fiction, except for the one genre we usually read: “literary fiction.” Our genres include: children’s lit, YA, spy thriller, fantasy, science fiction, magical realism, noir, crime fiction, neo-slave narrative, weird, western, and horror. While we’ll dip into scholarship along the way, our primary aim will be to use the novels to generate our own theories. Two essays. One novel or two novellas a week, but they're all page turners!
NB: I won't be ordering books at the Cal bookstore but for the first two: Baum's The Wizard of Oz and Lovecraft's Complete Fiction.
This course satisfies the Group 5 (Twentieth Century) requirement.
Recommended: Hayot, Eric: The Elements of Academic Style
This will be a hands-on writing workshop intended to facilitate and accelerate the transition from qualifying exams to prospectus conference, from prospectus conference to first dissertation chapter, and from the status of student to that of scholar. The workshop provides a collaborative critical community in which to try out successive versions of your dissertation project and to learn how your peers are constructing theirs. We will review a range of prospectuses from the past to demystify the genre and to gain a better understanding of its form and function. The goal is to insure that by the end of the semester, every member of the workshop will have submitted a prospectus to his or her committee.
Writing assignments are designed to structure points of entry into the prospectus: although some of the early assignments may be more immediately relevant to certain projects than to others, they all have the benefit of facilitating the passage from ideas to words on paper or screen according to a series of deadlines. Beginning with exercises to galvanize your thinking, the assignments will map increasingly onto the specific components of the prospectus as the semester proceeds. These assignments provide a skeletal structure rather than a comprehensive guide for your work. You should be reading and thinking about your project throughout the semester (ideally in conversation with your advisor) and may find that working on one assignment triggers productive thinking about another; don’t feel you need to wait for the deadline to start work on it. I will be available to discuss any facet of the writing process by email or to schedule individual meetings outside of regular office hours.
Chaucer, Geoffrey: The Canterbury Tales
Please note that this course description was revised on April 30.
This course focuses on the works that Chaucer wrote prior to the Canterbury Tales: the Book of the Duchess, Parliament of Fowls, House of Fame, Boece, the Legend of Good Women, and Troilus and Criseyde, along with his shorter poems. We will be particularly interested in questions of style: can we define a Chaucerian style? How does that style develop as Chaucer moves through his "French" and "Italian" periods? What notions of style were available to Chaucer in the late 14th century? We will consider the relationship of Chaucer's poetic style to the presentation of his texts in manuscripts and to classical notions of style, as well as to medieval literary criticism in the form of rhetorical handbooks and commentaries. We will also read some key 20th- and 21st-century accounts of style to help us think about what style meant to Chaucer.
The text for this class will be the Riverside Chaucer. You can buy a paperback edition on Amazon, rather than the hardback that the bookstore would order; it is much cheaper and easier to carry around!
Students will write two conference-length papers and do one presentation.
This course satisfies the Group 2 (Medieval through Sixteenth Century) requirement.
Furman, Laura: The O. Henry Prize Stories 2017
A course reader, which will be available from Instant Copying & Laser Printing ([510] 704-9700; 2138 University Ave., Berkeley, CA 94704).
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 write and revise at least 40 pages of fiction over the course of the semester.
Undergraduates are welcome to apply. Class attendance is mandatory.
Only continuing students are eligible to apply for this course. To be considered for admission, please electronically submit 15 double-spaced pages of your fiction, by clicking on the link below; fill out the application you'll find there and attach the writing sample as a Word document or .rtf file. The deadline for completing this application process is 11 PM, THURSDAY, APRIL 26.
Also be sure to read the paragraph concerning creative writing courses on page 1 of the instructions area of this Announcement of Classes for further information regarding enrollment in such courses.
In this semester's 243B we'll be actively fielding questions around environmentally conscious/location-oriented writing.
Some beginnings:
From Jonathan Skinner's introduction to the Ecopoetics section of the new Cambridge anthology, American Literature in Transition, 2000-2010: "Ultimately, 'Ecopoetics' may be more productively approached as a discursive site, to which many different kinds of poetry can contribute, than as the precinct of a particular kind of 'eco' poetry." And then he asks the important question—"How, then, does an individual's sense of the larger Earth enter into an endeavor made small in the face of overbearing world-ecological forces?"
And Camille Dungy, in her introduction to the Black Nature poetry anthology, wrote, "I have to remember what has been said: I am black and female; no place is for my pleasure... How do I write a poem about the land and my place in it without remembering, without shaping my words around, the history I belong to, the history that belongs to me?"
And Brian Teare, in "Poetry as Fieldwork," wrote, "One of the commitments I make to any site I walk through while writing is to learn as much as I can about it: its natural history, its flora and fauna, its geology, its hydrology, all the layers of empirical knowlege that get laid down by Western culture on top of the land."
Text: Ecopoetics: Essays in the Field, edited by Angela Hume and Gillian Osborne. University of Iowa Press, 2018. It's an expensive book and I assign it hesitantly because of that. The least expensive option is direct purchase form the University of Iowa Press website, which offers a 25% discount.
A course reader will include work by A. R. Ammons, GLoria Anzaldua, Basho, Ed Roberson, and others.
Field trips, class visitors, writing workshops, weekly prompts, journal work, public performance.
Only continuing students are eligible to apply for this course. To be considered for admission, please electronically submit 5 of your poems, by clicking on the link below; fill out the application you'll find there and attach the writing sample as a Word document or .rtf file. The deadline for completing this application process is 11 PM, THURSDAY, APRIL 26.
Also be sure to read the paragraph concerning creative writing courses on page 1 of the instructions area of this Announcement of Classes for further information regarding enrolling in such courses.
We’ll explore collectives made possible by the early modern communications revolution, focusing on print and the rise of periodical and serial forms. Case studies will include the Levellers, the Royal Society, and the Methodists, along with responses to these groups, from the famous (Andrew Marvell, Henry Fielding) to the anonymous. Secondary readings will be drawn from theoretical literature on modernity (in relation to media, secularization, and state-formation) as well as relevant criticism.
Readings available on bcourses. Students will complete short assignments (a brief oral presentation, a review, two close readings) or one article-length paper.
This course satisfies the Group 3 (Seventeenth through Eighteenth Century) requirement.
Reading the newly published On the Origin of Species together in November 1859, George Eliot and George Henry Lewes hailed Charles Darwin’s book as confirmation of the “Development Hypothesis,” founded a hundred years earlier in German embryology, extended to the evolution of life on earth by Johann Gottfried Herder, Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, Geoffroy Saint Hilaire, and Robert Chambers, and applied to the progress of human societies by Auguste Comte and Herbert Spencer. “Development” in the broad sense furnished the dominant ideological model for Victorian thinking about natural and human history. Darwinian natural selection would pose a radical challenge to the purposive and progressive imperatives informing development, which saved humanity’s place at the center of nature and the end of history in a fully secularized cosmos. Darwin’s writings also make explicit the theory of evolution as, above all, a theory of form, in which scientific and aesthetic criteria converge. The Descent of Man (1871) proposes an independent evolutionary agency, sexual selection, which determines human history -- including human sexual and racial differentiation -- via the aesthetic discrimination of form.
We will read some major works of nineteenth-century British fiction and poetry in light of contemporary ideas of development, focusing on the two new genres – the Bildungsroman and historical novel – born in the “novelistic revolution” (Franco Moretti) of European Romanticism. The Bildungsroman synchronizes personal development with a realization of species being ("the full and harmonious development of humanity"); the historical novel triangulates the disparate scales of individual and racial progress with national history. We’ll begin with a novel written in French but swiftly naturalized into English, where it became hugely influential, Germaine de Staël’s Corinne, and with Walter Scott’s foundational historical novel Waverley; and go on to consider works by Charles Dickens (Bleak House), Alfred Tennyson (The Princess and In Memoriam A.H.H.), Elizabeth Barrett Browning (Aurora Leigh), and George Eliot (The Mill on the Floss, Daniel Deronda), alongside writings by Herder, Lamarck, Chambers, Feuerbach, Spencer, Lewes, Darwin, and some readings in contemporary philosophy and theory (from Quentin Meillassoux to Elizabeth Grosz) and in the history of science.
Course books will be ordered from University Press Books (not via the university bookstore); supplementary readings will be made available via the seminar b-Courses site.
This course satisfies the Group 4 (Nineteenth Century) requirement.
Meyer, E. and L. Smith: Practical Tutor;
Recommended: 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.
This course meets the field study requirements for the Education minor, but it cannot be used toward fulfillment of the requirements for the English major. It must be taken P/NP.
Pick up an application for a pre-enrollment interview at the Student Learning Center, Atrium, Cesar Chavez Student Center (Lower Sproul Plaza), beginning April 2. No one will be admitted after the first week of fall classes.
This course may not be counted as one of the twelve courses required to complete the undergraduate English major nor may it be counted to satisfy a graduate-level requirement.
Recommended: Graff, G.: They Say/I Say; Rosenwasser, D. : Writing Analytically
All required readings will be posted on bCourses and available in a Course Reader.
Co-taught by a faculty member and a graduate student instructor (the department's R & C Assistant Coordinator), this course introduces new English GSIs to the practice and theory of teaching literature and writing at UC Berkeley in sections linked to English 45 and select upper-division courses, as well in R1A and R1B, and beyond. At once a seminar and a hands-on practicum, the class will cover topics such as strategies for leading discussion, teaching critical reading skills and the elements of composition, responding to and evaluating student writing, developing paper topics and other exercises, and approaching the other responsibilities that make up the work of teaching here and elsewhere. The course will offer a space for mutual support, individual experimentation, and the discovery of each member's pedagogical style. We will pair each class participant with an experienced GSI teaching in R1A or R1B, so that new teachers can observe different kinds of teaching situations and classes besides their own. There will also be opportunities to be observed teaching and to receive feedback during the term.
This course satisfies the Pedagogy Requirement.