Milton, John: Paradise Lost; Shakespeare, William: Hamlet
Other required texts: Course reader, available for purchase.
This course will provide an introduction to the literary and artistic culture of the Protestant Reformation, focusing on the century and a half between Luther's 95 Theses and the Restoration of the monarchy in England (1660). Readings will include polemic social and religious texts (Martin Luther, John Calvin, Rachel Speght, "Martin Marprelate") as well as literary works (Hamlet, selections from Paradise Lost, poems by Aemelia Lanyer, Lucy Hutchinson, Madame Guyon); we will also look at a few paintings and (defaced) statues, and read a bit of philosophy (Hume). After surveying the literary and artistic modes of the Reformation proper (1530-1660), we'll spend the last few weeks considering the way the social, cultural, and religious upheavals of this period provide a model for later revolutions, in and outside of art—especially those of early critical social theory in Ludwig Feuerbach and Karl Marx, as well as in Romantic painting. Thee explorations will be underwritten by the question: How did the experience of the Protestant Reformation shape the cultural landscape of the West as we still experience it? How did changes in the sphere of religion ripple outward into the literary and artistic forms of the period, and richochet forward into our present? In pursuing these questions, students will gain practice reading and analyzing texts, fomulating questions and arguments on the basis of textual detail, and producing clear, argumentative writing.
Coetzee, J.M.: The Lives of Animals; Haushofer, Marlen: The Wall; Joy Fowler, Karen: We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves; London, Jack: Call of the Wild & White Fang; Melville, Herman: Moby-Dick: or, The Whale; Ovid: Metamorphoses; Spiegelman, Art: Maus; Taniguchi, Jiro: "The Ice Wanderer" and Other Stories
All other materials will be provided on bCourses.
The perceived divide between humans and other animals has been defined as one of the most important frameworks under which our thoughts and behaviors are constructed. Yet literature—from its earliest examples to today's offerings—is filled with a rich menagerie of fictionalized beasts. From white whales that encapsulate the awesome terror of the nonhuman world to anthropomorphized mice made to represent an oppressed people, animals of all shapes, sizes, and meanings serve a wide variety of roles within fiction's pages. This course will critically examine but a few of literature's creatures—in works from narrative poetry to graphic novels, from ancient Greece to contemporary Japan—to study not only what sorts of "animals" have been written into existence, but also what effects these literary forms of living creatures have had on material species, our own included. As we read, we will consider multiple aspects to how animals, humans, and the relationships between them are portrayed in fiction: what literary and rhetorical devices are used to represent creaturely life; how the social/material constructions of class, race, and gender get embedded into the flesh of fictional beasts; what arguments about the "nature" of living animals, humans included, are made manifest in the written word. With the goal of developing your critical reading and analytical skills, we will devote class time to discussing the course reading through a combination of lecture material, question and answer, and group discussion. We will also dedicate time to preparing for graded essays by building research, writing, and editing skills in weekly writing workshops.
Delanty and Matto, eds: The Word Exchange: Anglo-Saxon Poetry in Translation; Heaney, Seamus, trans.: Beowulf; Rankine, Claudia: Citizen: An American Lyric
We all know what poetry is, right? At least in the popular imagination, it’s emotionally charged, personal and intimate, the heartfelt expression of Angst, Love, and the poet’s True Feelings. But in many ways that view of poetry as a product of and reflection on interiority is a recent development in poetry’s history, one that doesn’t reflect the many reasons poems have been written in English for the past thousand-odd years — or indeed reflect the place of poetry today. In this class we will only rarely talk about our feelings; instead, we’ll ask ourselves a series of critical questions: Why do we read poems (or sing songs) at the inauguration of a president? Why do spells so often rhyme? Why would someone want to tell a joke in the form of a poem? How can poems be used to instruct, to insult, to praise, to commemorate, to narrate, and to pray? What do poems look like when their writers believe that the verse they write can, quite literally, change the world?
To further estrange our sense of the possibilities of poetry, of what poetry can do and say and be, we’ll read deeply (in translation) from the body of English verse that one might think the most distant from us and our poetic conceptions: the poems written in Old English and copied into their earliest extant manuscripts around the year 1000. Well will at all times read those poems next to other, more contemporary ones — asking what Emily Dickinson’s “To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee” has to do with a charm for agricultural fertility, comparing Dorothy Parker’s sardonic dismissal of suicide with monastic instructions for living, and weighing the criticisms of sovereignty, race, and agency offered by Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric and the epic poem Beowulf.
As a course in the University’s Reading and Composition program, our study of the poems we read isn’t its own end: instead, we’ll sharpen our sense of the possibilities of others’ verse by sharpening our own prose, crafting essays that draw on copious textual evidence to make cogent literary arguments but that are, above all, compelling pieces of critical writing themselves.
Cha, Theresa Hak Kyung: Dictee; Kureishi, Hanif: The Buddha of Suburbia; Kwan, Kevin: Crazy Rich Asians; Liew, Sonny: The Art of Charlie Chan Hock Chye
All other materials—selected poetry, short fiction, and drama—will be made available on bCourses.
We'll screen a few films—Ang Lee's The Wedding Banquet, Leste Chen's Eternal Summer, and Jon Chu's Crazy Rich Asians—as well as selected episodes from Fresh Off The Boat.
Taking the meteoric success of Crazy Rich Asians as a cultural phenomenon as its point of departure, this course studies and interrogates the enduring myths and persistent stereotypes that inflect the history of Asian racial formation in a transnational context. Oscillating between figures of the “model minority” associated with economic acumen and the inassimilable alien ineligible for citizenship, the long history of diasporic Asian racialization is fraught with paradoxes that testify to the complex histories of imperialism, colonialism, and Orientalism in which it is enmeshed.
Ranging across literary and cinematic texts in diverse cultural and geopolitical settings—from Singapore to Taiwan, from postcolonial London to Asian America—we will engage with “minority models” of aesthetic expression that seek to transform hegemonic terms of ethnic representation. Some of the topics we’ll consider along the way include: a poetics of reticence that resists ostensibly progressive but exclusionary forms of queer visibility; bearing witness to historical trauma by way of mythic sources and counterfactual archives; the psychic costs of assimilation and racial forgetting; translation as a mode of mediating between forms of linguistic and historical incommensurability; the role of comedy in reiterating and subverting stereotypes of the hyperaffluent Asian elite and the immigrant family chasing the “American dream".
As we reckon with how our texts intervene in longstanding representational legacies, we will also hone our critical reading and writing skills. Throughout the semester, students will develop their capacity for forceful argumentation by writing, peer-reviewing, and revising several short essays.
Bolano, Roberto: Nazi Literature in the Americas; Carlyle, Thomas: Sartor Resartus; Lispector, Clarice: Breath of Life; O'Brien, Flann: At Swim-Two-Birds
This course teaches critical analysis and college-level writing skills through existent works of literature and art that deal with inexistent, unverifiable, or otherwise unreadable texts. The figure of the apocryphal book, or invented author, will serve as a lens for thinking about the relationship between the authentic and the fake, the original and the copy, and the literary and the obscene, relationships that came to a head in the early-twentieth-century artistic movement known as Modernism. We will read literature and criticism of the Modernist period as well as some proto-Modernist works and later ones that invent their own Modernisms. Further areas of inquiry will include mimicry and satire, the politics of memory, fake philosophy, and cosmic horror.
Students will write, peer-review, and revise a series of literary-critical essays, with the goal of fostering attentive reading, imaginative analysis, and bold writing.
Dalley, Stephanie, trans.: Myths from Mesopotamia: Creation, The Flood, Gilgamesh, and Others; Snorri Sturluson: The Prose Edda; Tedlock, Dennis, trans.: Popul Vuh: The Mayan Book of the Dawn of Life; Wetherbee, Winthrop, trans.: Bernardus Silvestris: Poetic Works
Additional readings will be made available via bCourses, including selected translations from the Sanskrit Rig Veda and Hebrew book of Genesis.
How did the world as we know it come into being? Was there anything else before it? Who made it the way it is, and did they do it on purpose? For at least as long as humans have written stories, we have speculated about origins.
Towards an understanding of why these questions have motivated so many and varied responses, this course will survey some of the oldest texts that imagine the creation of the world and the beginning of human life—including sources from ancient Mesopotamia and India, medieval Iceland and France, and late Mayan Central America. We will examine how they imagine people in relation to their environments and each other, and the social structures and practices each presents as original; we will consider what, if anything, these texts present as wrong with the world, and how they explain or account for it. With the central goal of developing critical reading and analytical skills, we will discuss the literary genres and forms used to write about creation, and the rhetorical strategies involved—the ways in which stories make arguments, and arguments make use of stories. We will also attend to the mediated forms in which these stories reach us, and discuss the histories of conquest and canon formation, practices of editing and translation, and other forces that shape our reception.
In addition to reading and thinking, we will be guided by the goal of developing your expository and argumentative writing skills. We will talk not only about how course readings make arguments, but also about how to identify compelling questions, communicate clearly in writing, and make persuasive arguments of your own. You will develop, draft, peer-edit, and revise several short essays over the course of the term.
Bechdel, Allison: Fun Home; Coetzee, J. M.: Foe; Diaz, Junot: This is How You Lose Her; Kingston, Maxine Hong: Woman Warrior; Rankine, Claudia: Citizen
A course reader will be issued.
What constitutes the “I” of a first-person narrative? How does it alternately designate an individual, a collectivity, or even a historical consciousness? In this class, we’ll be considering the shapes that these questions take across a variety of forms, including the personal essay, the book-length treatise, the graphic novel, the “ethnographic novel,” the poetry collection, as well as the genre of film. Beginning with the wildly popular Modern Love column in The New York Times, we’ll examine the beguiling pull of the first-person narrative. From there we will branch into an investigation of how narrative interweaves with documentary photography or comic line-drawings in Claudia Rankine’s Citizen, Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home and the graphic-novel film Persepolis, respectively.
We will query the fine line between fiction and memoir by debating the controversies that have swirled around several prominent fiction writers: Junot Diaz, whose favored narrator, Yunior, bears close biographical similarities to the writer himself; Maxine Hong Kingston, whose first novel Woman Warrior sparked an impassioned debate about Orientalism and whether ethnic persons were ultimately doomed to ethnographic self-narration instead of aesthetic invention; J. M. Coetzee, who enigmatically accepted his Nobel Prize in Literature by giving a speech in the voice of a fictional character, Robinson Crusoe. How do these writers articulate a relationship to race and ethnicity, to themselves and to the world, via their negotiations of the first-person narrative? The course will culminate in a longer research paper where you’ll learn how to utilize secondary and critical sources in support of an original thesis.
The difficulty with epics is that they're... well, epic. Beowulf goes hunting Grendel, and 3000 lines of poetry later he's still fighting; Arthur pulls Excalibur out of the stone, starts sending knights on quests, and keeps sending knights on quests until you start to wonder if they're ever coming back! (Hint: They're not.) The size of these stories is overwhelming; they are bracing and innovative and exciting, but sometimes it can be hard to see the forest for the trees.
So: what if we started counting things? What if, instead of using highlighters to keep track of who said what and what went where, we used Python instead? This class will combine the adventures of two epic heroes, Beowulf and King Arthur, with some basic Python text analysis. To this end, each week will be divided into three parts: Reading Discussion (Mondays), Writing Skills (Wednesday), and DH Studio (Friday). We'll still be deeply invested in the literary scholar's toolkit; close-reading and critical writing will be crucial components of the course. We will look for patterns of metaphor, imagery, sound, and wordplay in each text. But we will use Python to expand the number of ways in which we can seek out those patterns for our analysis: we will close-read word frequencies, and track adjective use for different characters, look for collocations and debate what they mean. Ultimately, it may not be an easy journey -- but it will be an epic one!
Required Texts:
Beowulf, trans. Seamus Heaney (ISBN 978-0393320978)
L'Morte D'Arthur, Thomas Mallory (Norton Critical Edition, ISBN 978-0393974645)
Additional materials will be provided by the instructor. Please note that we will be using Project Gutenberg versions of both texts for our work in Python; however, you will still need to purchase the editions listed above.
Padua, Sydney: The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage; Stoppard, Tom: Arcadia
Additional materials will be made available online.
"A poem is a small (or large) machine made of words." — William Carlos Williams
"A book is a machine to think with." — I. A. Richards
In this course, we will explore the relationship between literature, machinery, and automata. We will begin with a unit on close-reading and Romantic poetry, in which we will learn how to take poems apart to discover how they work. In conjunction with this, we will look at 18th- and 19th-century theories concerning the association of ideas and determinism, in particular through metaphors which represent the mind as either a machine or an aeolian harp. The second unit of this course will move forward one generation (literally) to examine early ideas surrounding computing through the work of Byron's daughter, Ada Lovelace, and Charles Babbage, on the Analytical Engine. This unit will focus on historical research using both primary and secondary sources. In the third and final unit of the course, we will continue to move forward into the nineteenth century to investigate the emergence of detective fiction as a genre, particularly through stories in which detection is likened to a computational process (including works by Edgar Allan Poe and Arthur Conan Doyle). We will consider the ways in which literary analysis and historical research also involve elements of "detection." This final unit will involve a digital humanities component, in which we will use computer-assisted text analysis to investigate nineteenth-century fiction.
Kerouac, Jack: Dharma Bums; Kingston, Maxine Hong: Tripmaster Monkey; Orange, Tommy: There There
Short readings may be posted to bCourses, possibly including writings by Isabel Allende, Eldridge Cleaver, Clark Kerr, John Muir, Huey Newton, Alice Walker, and Gene Luen Yang.
This section of English R1B studies fiction set in Berkeley, California. We will also look south to Oakland and west to San Francisco, cities whose histories and populations are bound up with our own. We will set our readings in context by considering Berkeley's history, especially as it can still be seen in buildings, place names, street placements, and landmarks. Students should come away with an increased appreciation for the rich cultural history of the place where they live and study.
This course explores what it means to encounter seemingly "dead" pasts, often traumatic, through artistic and cultural productions and how, through that encounter, such pasts are relived and reimagined. Together we will examine narratives of cultural and historical trauma that attempt to represent what cannot be represented. Clinically defined, trauma is an occurrence that misses psychic registration and returns as a series of haunting symptoms, and we will explore how certain writers have created a space for those symptoms to manifest in the stories they tell.
These questions may frame our line of inquiry as you also take on the task of becoming adept scholars: How do writers attempt to capture what defies representation, and why might they be compelled to impart their "trauma" narratives to their audience? How might we better understand how and why certain communities rally around traumatic histories to further cement group identity? What kind of ethical response do these narratives inspire since, as consumers of these narratives, we are choosing to bear witness? How might the way we choose to remember affect our perceived loyalty as citizens?
Writing assignments for this course will include two short essays and a longer argument-driven, research project. Weekly written responses, in-class writing workshops, and peer review and collaboration will also be incorporated.
Twain, Mark: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Course reader featuring short works by Junot Diaz, Raymond Carver, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Flannery O'Connor, and Edgar Allan Poe
This course examines how texts can mislead us. Literary critic Wayne Booth famously accounts for how readers can come to develop a "friendship with books." In our course, we will explore the complexities of these friendships—how sometimes friends (narrators) lie, withhold information, or gossip without complete context. We will be examining a novel and short stories by a host of American authors who deploy different strategies of unreliability. Our goal will be to first spot these deceptions, come to understand them, and see how they affect both the meanings of texts and our own relationship to reading.
Alongside our reading and discussions, we will be developing your expository and argumentative writing skills. Assignments will include weekly written responses, two short essays (2, 5 pages), and a longer, 9-paged argumentative research essay. There will also be peer review and in-class workshops.
Acosta, Oscar Zeta: The Revolt of the Cockroach People; Didion, Joan: We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live: Collected Nonfiction; Ellis, Warren and Darick Robertson: Transmetropolitan, Vol. 1: Back on the Streets; Thompson, Hunter S.: Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and Other American Stories; Wolfe, Tom: The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test
"New Journalism" has always been a slippery term. But this literary movement from the 1960s and '70s, that rejected notions of journalistic objectivity in favor of political and cultural commitment, and malaise in favor of "gonzo" participation, and embraced notions of "truth" and art over and against fact and information, suddenly appears even more complex in light of our contemporary political and historical moment. With the rise of Donald J. Trump and his surprising MAGA coalition (from coal workers in Kentucky to Kanye West), it seems that the American cultural imagination is poised to grapple with many of the tensions and contradictions that produced New Journalism's heyday. Questions of truth and lies, fact and fiction, real and fake, actual and virtual, are again playing out across the newspapers, magazines, and TV news programs consumed by millions of Americans daily, in addition to 21st-century new-media spaces, in hyper speed (social media "feeds," "timelines," and the minute-to-minute news cycle). This surprising return of the problems (if not poetics) of New Journalism has been complicated by the alarming proliferation of Orwellian doublespeak in national political discourse, which is legible in part through a number of keywords that will guide our thinking in this course, including "alternative facts," "post-truth," and of course, "fake news." In this course, we will reconsider the "novels," essays, memoirs, and visual culture of New Journalism through the texts of Joan Didion, Tom Wolfe, Hunter S. Thompson, Oscar Zeta Acosta, Michael Herr, Gay Talese, Norman Mailer, Ralph Stedman, and others. We will also explore the legacy of New Journalism through some of today's most popular forms: literary nonfiction, longform journalism, and the streaming Netflix documentary film/series. Our exploration of what one critic has called the "New New Journalism" will include texts by Michael Lewis, Matt Taibbi, Wes Lowery, and more, before we turn to consider the possible futures of "fake/news" through the dystopic cyber-punk comic "Transmetropolitan," by Warren Ellis and Darick Robertson.
As we consider these problems and analyze these texts, we will develop your proficiency in expository and argumentative writing and academic research. Three formal papers are required: a diagnostic essay; a midterm essay; and a final research paper. In addition to these papers, in-class writing, workshops, presentations, participation, and full attendance are also required to earn a passing grade.
Alexander, Michelle: The New Jim Crow; Berger, Dan: Captive Nation: Black Prison Organizing in the Civil Rights Era; Jackson, George: Soledad Brother
13th (Ava DuVernay, 2016)
The Prison in Twelve Landscapes (Brett Story, 2016)
This section of Reading and Composition is designed to both exercise your active reading skills and to empower you to write compelling, well-informed, and well-organized expository prose and research-based essays. Over the course of the semester we will focus on the ways effective arguments are constructed (evidence, sound reasoning, rhetorical and stylistic strategies) as well as the “exigency” of those arguments (i.e. why is this argument demanded by this situation?). To this end, our work this semester will be oriented around the issue of mass incarceration and prison struggle. We will study the history of mass incarceration in the United States through texts, films, music, and visual art produced by activists, scholars, and artists working both within and outside the prison system. Course materials have been chosen to provide examples of effective argumentative strategies. My hope is that they will also provide us with a series of important historical and social questions for our discussions. Students are encouraged to pursue research topics related to the theme of prison struggle but not necessarily covered in the course readings.
Kerouac, Jack: Dharma Bums; Kingston, Maxine Hong: Tripmaster Monkey; Orange, Tommy: There There
Short readings may be posted to bCourses, possibly including writings by Isabel Allende, Eldridge Cleaver, Clark Kerr, John Muir, Huey Newton, Alice Walker, and Gene Luen Yang.
This section of English R1B studies fiction set in Berkeley, California. We will also look south to Oakland and west to San Francisco, cities whose histories and populations are bound up with our own. We will set our readings in context by considering Berkeley's history, especially as it can still be seen in buildings, place names, street placements, and landmarks. Students should come away with an increased appreciation for the rich cultural history of the place where they live and study.
Austen, Jane: Emma; Wilde, Oscar: The Picture of Dorian Gray
A course reader with secondary essays and criticism TBA.
“My being charming, Harriet, is not quite enough to induce me to marry; I must find other people charming—one other person at least.”
– Emma Wodehouse (Jane Austen)
“Other people are quite dreadful. The only possible society is oneself.”
– Lord Goring (Oscar Wilde)
In this course, we will consider the pleasures and the perils of being singular—a single or uncoupled person, as well as someone who just “stands out”. We will do so through two writers known for their distinctive writing style: Jane Austen and Oscar Wilde. Austen and Wilde bookend the nineteenth century, a period when individual style became increasingly important for a writer’s success in the marketplace. It was also a time when spinsters and “confirmed bachelors” were looked at askance for not participating in marriage and sexual reproduction. In our secondary readings, we will consider the relationship between style and lifestyle, as well as why certain 19th- century critics (and some subsequent theorists) have associated stylishness with celibacy or with an overt and problematic sexuality.
In accord with the purpose of R1B, this course will prepare and require students to write a research paper.
Berryman, John : The Dream Songs; Lowell, Robert: Life Studies ; Plath, Sylvia : Ariel Poems ; Sexton, Anne: To Bedlam and Part Way Back
This course will cover a body of American poetry generally written between 1950 and 1970, with particular emphasis on the works of Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, John Berryman, and Elizabeth Bishop. Topics of study will include: the relationship between form and content in the definition of what constitutes 'lyric' versus 'narative' poetry; questions of gender in relation to the lyric, and the scope of poetry in relation to particular forms of mental illness. We will be historically contextualizing our understandings of the lyric during this period by also considering contemporaneous ideas about illness and psychology from the time in which these authors were writing. Our readings will cover a grouping of writers who often emerge under the heading of 'confession,' but part of the course's aim will be to complicate and broaden our understanding of what 'confession' might mean in relation to lyric, specifically the difference between confession as a mode of poetic speech, and 'Confessional' as a historical marker of a particular group of writers. Throughout, we will be honing the skills which the R & C Course is designed to cultivate, expanding our available repertoire of knowledge of writing skills in relation to poetry, and developing the research skills which are fundamental to the production of strong academic research papers.
Karinthy, Frigyes: Journey Around My Skull; Snow, C.P.: The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution
Note the changes in instructor, topic, book list, and course description of this section of English R1B (as of Nov. 27).
"It started as a budget issue," a provost said recently, explaining his college's decision to eliminate History, French, German, and other humanities departments. But the sense of "crisis" resulting from a perceived divergence in values, beliefs, and commitments between humanistic "disciplines" and what once was called "natural philosophy" (science) has been centuries in the making. In this class, we will survey a number of moments in the historical development of this crisis, with a special focus on the opposition between physiological and "introspective" psychology. We will read an autobiography that describes, with poetry, humor, and excruciating medical detail, an author's daily life with a swelling brain tumor, his questions about its meaning and nature, and even the risky brain surgery he undergoes while conscious. We will also range more broadly in poetry, stories, and essays, from William Blake's shudder at "dark Satanic Mills," to Karl Marx's early exploration of "alienation," the "Literature and Science" debate between Matthew Arnold and T.H. Huxley, the "new psychology" arising in the late-Victorian period, the "two cultures" described by C.P. Snow, our new technologies of gene editing and artificial intelligence, and what has been called a "crisis in humanities" in education today. Our guiding question: how much should models of empirical research, and indeed the scientific "method" itself, frame our broader approach to values, ethics, responsibilities, truth, and political action in the world of human experience?
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, two essays will be required, in draft and revision, followed by a final research paper.
Cisneros, Sandra: The House on Mango Street; Cole, Teju: Open City; Faulkner, William: Absalom, Absalom!; García, Cristina: Dreaming in Cuban
Place is experienced in a variety of ways: as a material force we encounter daily, as an active and constitutive relationship, as a haunting and inescapable memory or feeling. This course will consider the narrative and affective strategies used to represent place, paying particular attention to how displaced characters situate themselves within narrative. To this end, the course will not only hit upon the necessary questions of identity and belonging, but ask, ultimately, what kind of place narrative is for the exile, the immigrant, and the nostalgic. Topics that will emerge when situating narrative include the uplifting and debilitating experience of nostalgia, the omnipresence of the city and education, and the often-uncontrollable power of memory. This course will look to interrogate a selected set of literature closely alongside important scholarship in order to connect these affective and cultural subjects to student research. This course will emphasize research skills and the construction of complex arguments in composition.
Butler, Samuel: Erewhon; Darwin, Charles: On the Origin of Species; La Mettrie: Machine Man and Other Writings; Lucretius: The Nature of Things; Robinson, Kim Stanley: Aurora; Shiel, M.P.: The Purple Cloud
How can literature and science advance our knowledge of the material world? Materialism has often been a point of confluence between literature and science, even the core premise for any relation between literary and scientific inquiry. This course examines the core tropes of materialist epistemology between science and literature, investigating the production of scientific and literary knowledge from the Enlightenment to the present. How might we understand literature and science as modes of material inquiry? To what extent do literary and scientific knowledge converge and depart? How do scientific and literary inquiry expand our insights into the physical world, and what are the limits of scientific and literary thought? How might materialist epistemology in literature and science challenge human scales, aesthetic categories, and patterns of thought by situating the human species within larger earth systems, planetary scales, and physical processes?
We’ll trace the historical trajectory of materialist literature from the scientific revolution and the enlightenment to the present that emerges alongside scientific disciplines, from the life sciences, thermodynamics, evolutionary theory, ecology, and quantum physics. Along the way, we'll ask how materialist epistemology in science and literature might provide insight into questions of form, scale, environment, history, milieu, technology, energy, and climate. Readings include Bacon, Diderot, La Mettrie, Lucretius, Wordsworth, Mary Shelley, Charles Darwin, Lord Kelvin, H.G. Wells, and Liu Cixin. This is an R1B course, the second course in a two-semester R&C sequence. Over the course of the semester, you'll compose several papers of increasing length designed to develop your ability to conduct your own innovative research.
Braddon, Mary Elizabeth: Lady Audley's Secret; Collins, Wilkie: The Moonstone; Dickens, Charles: Oliver Twist; Sayers, Dorothy: Gaudy Night
Short stories by Edgar Allan Poe and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
Film: The Phantom of the Opera
The sentencing of criminals has long raised questions of responsibility and blame, nature and nurture, and these questions have only become more pressing in our contemporary political environment. This course will address questions of agency and determinism in the crime novels of the 19th century, using historical sources such as essays on sociology and biology to inform our readings of classic crime novels. Students will also learn to compose original papers using critical and historical sources to inform their arguments.
Baldwin, James: Giovanni's Room; Hurston, Zora Neale: Their Eyes Were Watching God; Morrison, Toni: The Bluest Eye; Wright, Richard: Native Son
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, categrization, social definition. To this end, we shall attend to the complex connection between the tradition of black American literrature and the discourse of socoology—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 deveolopment 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. Building on what you have already learned in the first of the Reading and Composition courses, this second course will use the questions that this material poses of us, as well as those we pose of it, to develop your critical reflection as well as your writing and research skills that will culminate in a larger research paper at the end of the semester. Our attention will be devoted in large part to approaching a research paper as a series of cumulative but individually small and manageable pieces. Supplementing the successively longer essays, these intermediate steps will include things like peer editing, an annotated bibliography, and a draft outline.