Atwood, Margaret: Oryx and Crake; Butler, Octavia: Parable of the Sower; Gee, Maggie: The Flood; Hoban, Russell: Riddley Walker; Lee, Chang-Rae: On Such a Full Sea; McCarthy, Cormac: The Road; Watkins, Claire: Gold Fame Citrus; Whitehead, Colson: Zone One
Apocalyptic stories have been told for centuries, even millenia. But novels, movies, and other forms of media that imagine the end of the world—and what comes after that—seem to have inundated us (floods!) in recent times. In this course, we will consider the post-apocalyptic narrative tradition, and look closely at several particularly elegant 20th- and 21st-century examples of this popular genre. We will ask: what does the imagined end of the world currently look like? What do the most common scenarios—pandemic, ecological collapse, angry robots, alien invasion—tell us about our own world? How are these visions of the end times interwoven with ideas about race, gender, class, and other forms of identity and difference? Why do we seem to have developed such a voracious appetite (zombies!) for narratives about our own obliteration and potential for regeneration? Will we find out before it's too late?
We will read and view a diverse selection of post-apocalyptic novels and movies, with glances at other media such as television, video games, and comics, attending closely to the ways that narrative form and other formal and aesthetic devices contribute to the meaning of these texts. We will also consider the popular and critical reception of our texts in order to gauge their impact (asteroids!) on the planet. Written work for this class will include analytical essays; less conventional types of interpretive or “creative” responses; online posts; and frequent reading quizzes.
The book list given here is subject to change, and certainly to streamlining; please wait until after the first class before purchasing. In addition to these possible novels, possible films include Night of the Living Dead, Shaun of the Dead, Children of Men, Mad Max: Fury Road, and WALL-E.
Dickinson, Emily: The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson (Johnson, ed.); Dickinson, Emily: The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson (Johnson, ed.)
The text for this course 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.
How can we become more appreciative, alert readers of poetry and at the same time better writers of prose? How do poems use language differently than other forms of expression? How do they know how to say things without actually saying them? This course attends to the rich variety of poems written in English, drawing on the works of poets from William Shakespeare to Frank O’Hara, Coleridge to M. NourbeSe Philip, Emily Dickinson to Li-Young Lee. We will use exercises in listening to, reading aloud, performing and memorizing poems, so as to familiarize ourselves with a number of different forms, including riddles, songs, sonnets, odes, villanelles, and ballads, while also engaging topics such as meter, rhyme, the poetic line, and figurative language. Through sustained discussions of individual poems and varied writing assignments, you will have the chance to explore some of the major periods, modes, and genres in English poetry and to expand the possibilities of your own writing.
Required Books (available at University Press Books, 2430 Bancroft): The Norton Anthology of Poetry (either the Shorter Fifth Edition from 2005 or the Fourth Edition from 1996); Alfred Corn, The Poem’s Heartbeat: A Manual of Prosody
Requried Text: Course reader, with poetry and critical pieces by Anne Boyer, Tongo Eisen-Martin, Christopher Nealon, Harryette Mullen, Srikanth Reddy, Juliana Spahr, Rosmarie Waldrop, C. D. Wright, Timonthy Yu, and others.
Even if it's written in solitude, poetry is a highly social form of art. A poet may speak to their reader, to their city, to their government, to their time. They may write to their friends or fellow poets, or they may write to, with, or against the poets of the past. In this workshop we will continue the conversation that is poetry. We'll ask how writers position themselves within local, social, and aesthetic dialogues, and we'll consider how contremporary writers respond to and build upon the work of their peers. We'll also develop a vocabulary to respond to each other's writing. All participants will submit a poem each week for feedback, and you'll be asked to provide written and oral feedback to your peers.
Students will be asked to attend a poetry reading and complete two short writing assginments on the poets in our course reader. At the end of the semester, each participant will submit a portfolio of their revised work.
This is an introduction to the writing of poetry, so all space in the class will be saved for sophomores and freshmen (at least initially). Interested students should enroll directly into this course, and no application or writing sample is required.
Cavendish, M: The Blazing World; Chaucer, G.: The Canterbury Tales; Milton, J: Paradise Lost; Spenser, E.: Edmund Spenser's Poetry; Stump and Felch, eds.: Elizabeth I and Her Age; Webster, J: The Duchess of Malfi
English 45A introduces students to the foundations of literary writing in Britain, from the early Middle Ages to the Renaissance and English Civil War. This semester I'd like to focus on how that foundational narrative—the story of how British authors claim authority— is shot through by questions of gender. Is literary activity implicity, or explicitly, masculine? Is authority itself, in a patriarchal society, necessarily masculine? Do women who write count as authors? How do male writers engage the possibility of female authority?
We'll range in chronological sequence across our period, but at the center of our semester's study will be the figure of Elizabeth Tudor, for fifty years the sovereign Queen of the English patriarchy, adored and abhorred by her male subjects in equal measure (and often in the same breath). Spenser professed the representative system of his Elizabethan epic, The Faerie Queene, to offer "mirrors more than one" to contemplate his sovereign, and we will read our syllabus as likewise refracting the image of female authority into different shapes and scales.
Austen, J: Persuasion; Blake, W: Oroonoko; Blake, W: Songs of Innocence and Experience; Blake, W: The Marriage of Heaven and Hell; Defoe, D: Robinson Crusoe; Gates, H. L.: The Classic American Slave Narratives; Melville, H: Bartleby and Benito Cereno; Rowlandson, M: The Sovereignty and Goodness of God; Swift, J: Gulliver's Travels; Wordsworth, W. & S.T. Coleridge: Lyrical Ballads
Shorter works and supplementary texts will be made available in a course reader and/or posted on our B-Courses site.
Readings in English, Scottish, Irish and North American prose fiction, autobiography, and poetry from 1688 through 1848: a century and a half that sees the formation of a new, multinational British state with the political incorporation of Scotland and then Ireland, the global expansion of an overseas empire, and the breakaway of the North American colonies to form a new empire between the Atlantic and the Pacific. Our readings will explore the relations between home and the world in writings preoccupied with journeys outward and back, real and imaginary—not all of which are undertaken voluntarily...
We will read works by Mary Rowlandson, Aphra Behn, Daniel Defoe, Jonathan Swift, Alexander Pope, Lady Mary Wortly Montague, Anne Finch, William Collins, Thomas Gray, James Macpherson, Robert Burns, Olaudah Equiano, William Blake, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Jane Austen, Walter Scott, Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Frederick Douglass, and Herman Melville.
Achebe, Chinua: Things Fall Apart ; Faulkner, William: The Sound and the Fury ; James, Henry: The Turn of the Screw ; Joyce, James: Dubliners; Morrison, Toni: Jazz; Ramazani, Jahan: The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry, Vol. 1; Wilde, Oscar: The Picture of Dorian Gray ; Woolf, Virginia: To the Lighthouse
Other readings will be posted on the bCourses site, under “Resources."
This course examines radical changes and unexpected continuities in literature in English from 1850 to (almost) the present. We will read poetry and fiction from Britain, Ireland, North America and Africa in order to explore a range of literary responses to different aspects of modernity, such as urbanization, colonialism and popular culture.
This course will also form an introduction to the concepts and critical tools used to analyze literature. We will approach the texts in a variety of ways: we will consider them as belonging to different modes (realism, naturalism, modernism, postmodernism); we will think about them as producing new kinds of narrative and poetic form; and we will read them closely.
Tentative book list: Ballantyne, R. M.: The Coral Island: A Tale of the Pacific Ocean: Barrie, J. M.: Peter and Wendy; Carroll, Lewis: Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There; Dr. Seuss: How the Grinch Stole Christmas; Fleming, Ian: Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang: The Magical Car; Lewis, C. S.: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe; Musil, Robert: The Confusions of Young Törless; Oates, Joyce Carol: Foxfire: Confessions of a Girl Gang; Rowling, J. K.: Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix; Sendak, Maurice: Where the Wild Things Are; Thompson, Kay: Eloise; Tiqqun: Preliminary Materials for a Theory of the Young Girl
This course has two principal aims: (1) to provide an overview of the history of children's literature in English; (2) to introduce students to the major generic, political, aesthetic, and philosophical questions such literature has posed. Among these latter, for example, we will consider such issues as: the purpose of education; the nature and ethics of infantile sexuality; the mechanisms of language acquisition; the category of "innocence"; violence and violent desire; child labor; didactic and fantastical modes of address; the infant-animal relationship; embodied differences of gender, race, sexuality, and (dis)ability; peer pressure.
We will treat as axiomatic the notion that the "child" is a contingent and constructed object, always reinvented to suit the needs of its historical moment. From the supine and quiescent darlings of Christina Rossetti's nursery rhymes, to the gurgling and adorable brat Eloise, through the dashing and manly boys promoted by R. M. Ballantyne and Rudyard Kipling, the children described in children's literature very often seem tailor-made to serve the interests of the powerful. We will not, then, make generalizations about what children are, what children like, or what children know. But we will wonder together whether the inverse is true too, and that something in the infantile attachments we feel towards children's literature might also resist conscription into the normative mechanisms of maturity.
Alan, Woody: The Insanity Defense
We will examine the films and writings of Woody Allen in terms of themes, narration, comic and visual inventiveness, and ideology. The course will also include consideration of cultural contexts and events at Cal Performances and the Pacific Film Archive.
This 2-unit course may not be counted as one of the twelve courses required to complete the English major, but it may be used to satisfy the Arts and Literature breadth requirement in Letters and Science.