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.
Course readings will be representative influential scholarly articles from various subfields of linguistics. As delightful background, Steven Pinker’s The Language Instinct is highly recommended.
Few areas of research within the humanities are not mediated in some way by language. Language is an object of philosophical investigation, a medium of historical record and cultural expression, the material of literature, and a metaphor for and source of contrast with other art forms. As a result, many fields within the humanities have their own traditions of discourse about language, including claims about it and also critiques of those claims. At the same time, especially since the development of historical linguistics in the 19th c. in Europe, and of generative theories of language in the 20th c. in America, the study of language has become a well-defined field in its own right. The purpose of this course is to help students in the humanities who wish to incorporate claims about language in their work to do so in ways that take into account claims about language made by those who take it as their primary object of research.
One common impediment to humanities scholars engaging with linguistics can be the temptation to focus on a single subsystem that seems especially relevant to their own research -- phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, pragmatics, sociolinguistics or historical linguistics. One of the distinguishing characteristics of language, however, is the way in which these subsystems interact; often one subsystem cannot be understood without understanding another. For this reason, this introduction will consist of brief but intensive introductions to each of these subsystems and their interactions. Another impediment can be the absence in second-hand overviews of a field of the methodological issues central to graduate study. For this reason, to the extent possible, these introductions will be organized around guest lectures from scholars currently engaged in research in these subfields, together with representative scholarly articles and analytic exercises. That is, even though the course will be organized around basic questions like “what is syntax?” or “what is pragmatics?”, it will try to answer these questions in ways that are appropriate for graduate students. Finally, one other impediment can be practical knowledge of and access to the linguistic expertise available across campus, some centered in the linguistics department, and some dispersed across departments defined by individual languages and cultures. For this reason, the course will include a couple of roundtable discussions of topics involving intersections of humanities and linguistics, with a view to acquainting students with as many faculty and fellow students engaged in linguistic research relevant to their research as possible.
Students potentially interested in this course are encouraged to stop by to discuss their interest with the instructor as soon as possible, so that it can help shape the course.
This course centers on William Faulkner, and will use his experiments in historical fiction to ask a series of questions about the representation of time, duration, change, and epoch in the twentieth century and after. We will discuss Faulkner’s place within American modernism, and examine how his depictions of race, politics, economics, and trauma compare to other writers in his own period (Willa Cather) and later (Toni Morrison, David Mitchell, Ruth Ozeki, William Gibson). Faulkner’s major texts (The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, Absalom, Absalom!, Light in August) will let us test some of the novel’s limits as a literary form in American culture, and help us see why later writers turn to different modes—from gothic horror to science fiction—to register both the faster and slower dynamics of history that pattern our sense of the contemporary moment.
Readings will include novels by William Faulkner, and examples of contemporary historical fiction by Toni Morrison, David Mitchell, Ruth Ozeki, William Gibson, and Richard Powers.
Kingston, Maxine: China Men; Kipling, Rudyard: Kim; Melville, Herman: Billy Budd; Rossetti, Christina: Goblin Market; Toomer, Jean: Cane; Wilde, Oscar: The Picture of Dorian Gray
Course reader of shorter works and criticism.
The queer and the oriental are two figures on the wrong sides of Western philosophies of world history. Imagined as perverted deviations from, or inverted reflections of, a progress from despotic ancestral pasts to free reproductive futures, the queer and oriental are two species of wrong that resist being raised up or sublated into higher generalities of rightness or whiteness. Too wrong for history, these two wrongs also cannot be rectified or reduced into each other—but not for lack of trying. Over the course of the long twentieth century, a seemingly endless pile-up of cultural productions has positioned Orientals as queers or featured queers Orientalizing themselves and others. The mind-gagging accumulation of such productions illustrates how thoroughly such maneuvers never really work; or rather, how they work, like desires often do, by never being fulfilled.
The seminar opens with the ongoing tension between two different departures from Hegel’s philosophy of world history—economic materialist approaches exemplified by Marx and genealogical approaches exemplified by Nietzsche. We will explore how ongoing tensions between these approaches—variously described through binaries such as “materialist/idealist,” “total/fragmentary,” and “restricted/general”—have been a recurrent feature of work in queer theory, postcolonial theory, and critical race studies. In a twist on Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s statement that “any understanding of virtually any aspect of modern Western culture must be, not merely incomplete, but damaged in its central substance to the degree that it does not incorporate an analysis of modern homo/heterosexual definition,” the aim of this seminar is to pursue the corollaries to the putative axiomaticity of “modern Western culture.” Our mantra will be: any understanding of virtually any aspect of homo/hetero definition must be, not merely incomplete, but damaged in its central substance to the degree that it does not incorporate an analysis of non/modern non/Western division.
We will combine our theoretical explorations with the pragmatic task of coverage. Accordingly, we will read a selection of canonical works by such authors as Christina Rosetti, Herman Melville, Oscar Wilde, Rudyard Kipling, Ezra Pound, Jean Toomer, Yoné Noguchi, and Maxine Hong Kingston.
Bevington, D.: English Renaissance Drama; Shakespeare, W.: Hamlet; Shakespeare, W.: Henry IV Part 1; Shakespeare, W.: The Merchant of Venice; Shakespeare, W.: Twelfth Night
Course Reader, which includes plays and criticism
Shakespeare’s preeminence as a dramatist has often paradoxically excluded him from courses on English Renaissance drama. We’ll be returning Shakespeare to the company of his fellow playwrights, reading (among other works) Twelfth Night with Lyly’s Gallathea, The Merchant of Venice with Marlowe’s Jew of Malta, and Hamlet with Kyd’s Spanish Tragedy. We will also be exploring Renaissance drama from a variety of other perspectives: its generic diversity and complexity; the social status of actors and playwrights; tensions between art and commerce; the representations of gender, class, and race in the plays; and important recent scholarship on these subjects.
Dickinson, E.: The Poems of Emily Dickinson; Emerson, R.W.: Ralph Waldo Emerson: The Major Poetry; Horton, G. M.: The Black Bard of North Carolina: George Moses Horton and His Poetry; Larson, K. : The Cambridge Companion to Nineteenth-Century American Poetry; Melville, H.: Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War; Piatt, Sarah: Palace Burner: The Selected Poetry of Sarah Piatt; Whitfield, James M.: The Works of James M. Whitfield: "America" and Other Writings; Whitman, W. : Drum-Taps: The Complete 1865 Edition
Photocopied reader; PDFs on bCourses site
This course will have three overlapping goals. It will provide a survey of major figures in nineteenth-century U. S. poetry. It will take stock of recent work in “Historical Poetics” by critics who have sought an alternative to what they view as a narrow tradition focused through a retrospective modernist lens. Such critics aim to recover nineteenth-century conceptions of poetry and a wider range of poets, genres, and contexts. And the course will consider the relationships between traditional and emerging literary maps of the field. Poets likely to be covered include Bryant, Dickinson, Emerson, Longfellow, Melville, Poe, and Whitman and also Phoebe Cary, Stephen Crane, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Frances Harper, George Moses Horton, Sarah Piatt, Lydia Sigourney, and James M. Whitfield. Some of the readings will be available in paper copies (ordered as books or compiled in a photocopied reader); others, given their status as out-of-print, not-in-print since the nineteenth century, or rare, will be available in electronic form. Course requirements will include two 8-10 page papers (linked or separate) and oral presentations. For at least one of these assignments, participants in the course will be asked to do primary research in the poetic cultures of the nineteenth-century U. S.
Millton, John: Major Works
Selected life records and autobiographical documents
Facsimiles of manuscript rough drafts
Selection of critical literature
For better or worse, most roads in literary history lead either to or from Milton. The goal of this course is to find a way through the massive corpus of Milton's writing, to see how Milton “produces himself” in his work. You should get an adequate knowledge of the major poems, or new angles if you are already familiar with them, but we will also give a central place to hitherto marginal texts: prose, minor poems, manuscript variants, foreign-language writings. Without prescribing a theme, my selections will foreground Milton’s materiality, in several senses: awareness of economic corruption; political activism in the “Puritan Revolution;” educational theory that includes physical exercise and hands-on experiment; the “wanton growth” of the natural environment, the ecosystem of Paradise and the Fall; monist cosmology; visceral fear of gender inversion; conflicted relation to the body, especially digestion and sexuality (and later blindness); music, dance and scenery in the Ludlow Mask (“Comus”); the physical production and correction of Milton’s manuscripts and printed books. We will coordinate with a conference on “Milton and Materiality” organized by our own students and the Townsend Center this Spring.
The class meets only once a week, from noon to 3pm with a short lunch break; essential to bring food and drink. However, it is not planned as a specialist research seminar. I welcome students in entirely different periods and language areas, as well as Early Modernists and future Miltonists. As explained below, individuals can choose the amount of secondary literature they wish, and may concentrate on close readings. If you are a Modernist, say, or a Classicist or an Anglo-Saxonist you can craft essays that bring your own expertise to bear.
We begin with an achronic ‘brochure’ of autobiographical passages and life-records from various decades, to get under Milton’s skin. Then follows a read-through of the major verse and prose. Some classes, especially on Paradise Lost, will be joined by Milton experts whom I am able to fly in thanks to my endowed James D. Hart Chair. Our basic text, to keep us on the same page, is the inexpensive paperback Oxford Authors selection, edited by Stephen Orgel and Jonathan Goldberg. If you already own The Riverside Milton, ed. Roy Flannagan, or Complete Poetry and Major Prose, ed. Merritt Y. Hughes, they will do fine (I can supply the page numbers of prose extracts as needed). For those who want to delve into the larger scholarly editions that specialists use I will arrange a visit to our own Department Library and provide a list of research tools.
The secondary literature on Milton is overwhelmingly vast, and I am concerned that attention to ‘the literature’ will crowd out the literature. I will curate an idiosyncratic selection of articles and passages from books, which will be optional rather than required; you will get full credit for papers that focus entirely on keen-eyed readings in Milton’s own oeuvre. To provide a ‘locovore’ tasting menu most of these anthologized texts will be by current or former members of the Berkeley faculty or PhD students who developed papers generated for this very course, English 218. For the specialist I will provide much fuller bibliographical listings, customized to the individual project.
No required texts.
Creative Nonfiction: A graduate level writing workshop, open to graduate students from any department. Open also to undergraduate students from any department who have taken English 143-level writing seminars or have equivalent skills or experience.
Drawing on narrative strategies in memoir, the diary, travel writing, and fiction, students will have work-shopped two literary nonfiction pieces, 5-15 pages. Most weeks, students will also turn in one-page critiques of the (one or two) student pieces being workshopped as well as a 1- or 2-page journal entry on prompts assigned (these entries may be used as part of the longer pieces). Probable semester total of written pages, including critiques: 60-70. Class attendance required.
Only continuing UC Berkeley students are eligible to apply for this course. To be considered for admission, please electronically submit 10-15 pages of your creative nonfiction or 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 P.M., THURSDAY, OCTOBER 25.
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.
Castiglione, B.: The Courtier; Golding, A.: Ovid's Metamorphoses; Machiavelli, N.: The Prince; Marlowe, C.: Complete Plays; Marlowe, C.: Complete Poems and Translations; More, T.: Utopia; Shakespeare, W.: As You Like It; Sidney, P.: Major Works; Spenser, E.: The Faerie Queene; Wyatt, T.: Collected Poems;
Recommended: Brigden, S.: New Worlds, Lost Worlds: The Rule of the Tudors, 1485-1603
"Lately two gentlemen poets... had it in derision, for that I could not make my verses jet upon the stage in tragical buskins, every word filling the mouth like the faburden of Bow Bell, daring God out of heaven with that atheist Tamburlaine, or blaspheming with the mad priest of the sun; but let me rather openly pocket up the ass... than wantonly set out such impious instances of intolerable poetry, such mad and scoffing poets, that have prophetical spirits as [if] bred of Merlin's race. If there be any in England that set the end of scholarism in an English blank verse, I think either it is the humour of a novice that tickles them with self-love, or too much frequenting the hot-house hath sweat out the greatest part of their wits." (Robert Greene, lamenting the explosive debut of rival playwright Christopher Marlowe.)
What are the language arts for? What can they do? What are the proper bounds, and what the possible scope, of human reason, rhetoric, or invention? The advent of humanism in English universities and schools converged with the formation of the Tudor state, and offered high hopes for the place of learning in the new polity. Those hopes were dashed over the course of the following decades of upheaval, even as the objects of learning--the scope of the present world, the legacy of the past, the future of the soul--became perilously unstable. We'll be examining the despairing frustration and the glamorous peril of the writing life in sixteenth-century English: so we will start with "the end of scholarism" as Greene ironically locates it, in the detonating force of the lines Marlowe gives his nihilist world-beater Tamburlaine, and move from there to define the individual ingredients of sixteenth-century culture and thought from which Marlowe concocts his explosive mixture. We'll put particular emphasis on Utopia, Golding's translation of Metamorphoses, and Book Three of The Faerie Queene.
This pro-seminar has two interrelated aims. The first is to survey British fiction (broadly construed) from 1945 through the present. The second is to survey that field’s major critical conversations and give students the tools to enter critical discourse meaningfully and judiciously. Topics of discussion will include: realism and its alternatives; experimental form and novelistic psychology; race, immigration, and empire; feminism; Angry Young people; social welfare, Thatcherism, and New Labour; the decriminalization of homosexuality and the legacy of AIDS; the Troubles and Northern Ireland; the legacies of WWI and WWII; nationalism, the European Union, and Brexit. Evaluation will be based on a presentation, a conference-length paper, and a final article-length paper (which continues or develops the work begun in the conference paper).
Primary texts will include: Graham Greene’s The Third Man (1948); Samuel Beckett’s Molloy (1951); Iris Murdoch’s Under the Net (1953); Samuel Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners (1957); Alan Sillitoe’s “Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner” (1959); Muriel Spark’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961); selections from Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook (1962); Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea (1966); BS Johnson’s Christie Malry’s Own Double Entry (1973); Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1981); Kazuo Ishiguro’s Remains of the Day (1988); WG Sebald’s Rings of Saturn (1995); Seamus Deane’s Reading in the Dark (1998); JM Coetzee’s Disgrace (1999); Alan Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty (2004); and Fiona Mozley’s Elmet (2017). We will also examine a handful of films: The Third Man (Reed, 1948); Seven Up! (Almond, 1964); War Requiem (Jarman, 1989); The Crying Game (1992); Blue (Jarman, 1993); and This is England (Meadows, 2006). Critical and theoretical readings will likely include those by: Georg Lukács, Colleen Lye and Jed Esty, Alain Robbe-Grillet, James McNaughton, Emilie Morin, Molly Hite, Martha Nussbaum, Paul Gilroy, Kwame Anthony Appiah, Marina Mackay, David Kurnick, Rebecca Walkowitz, Derek Attridge, Michael McKeon, Alasdair MacIntyre, Theodore Martin, and others.
Books will be available for purchase from University Press Books (2430 Bancroft). Other readings will be made available through the course site.
Bergson, Henri: Time and Free Will; Harrison and Wood: Art in Theory: 1900-2000; Hegel, Friedrich: Lectures in Aesthetics, selections; Heidegger, Martin: Introduction to Metaphysics; Kant, Emmanuel: Critique of Judgment; Moore , Marianne: Observations 1924; Nietzsche: Genealogy of Morals, selections; Nietzsche, Friedrich: Birth of Tragedy; Pater, Walter: Studies in the Renaissance; Pound, Ezra: Draft of Thirty Cantos; Yeats, W.B: selections from Collected Poems
This course stems from my fascination with how often major philosophers idealized art by attributing to it powers that could promise versions of redemption from practical life. I want to read Hegel, Kant, Nietzsche, Pater, Bergson, Heidegger, and an anthology of statements by modernist paintings to get clear on what was argued and why people could believe or at least engage those arguments, as indeed most of the major modernist painters and poets did. Then we will look at some paintings and essays by Picasso and Malevich along with the poetry of at least Yeats, Pound, and Marianne Moore. In one sense I think teachers in the arts need to know well the best possible accounts of the powers that they can mediate in their professional lives. In another I am amazed by agreement about the roles of art in cultural life of these philosophers coming at the questions from many perspectives. What cultural conditions led to their developing those perspectives? And does knowledge of the cultural conditions breed skepticism for us or tilt us toward sympathy with such projects? How can we make plausible counter arguments? How do twentieth-century writers manage to elaborate and defend similar idealizations in an age usually seen as deeply ironic? And can these perspectives make materialist arguments about the arts more difficult to make, even perhaps as they make them more necessary?