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.
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.
New Oxford Annotated Bible, College Edition; Alter, Robert: Genesis: Translation and Commentary; Browning, W.R.: Oxford Dictionary of the Bible
In this class, we will read a selection of biblical texts as literature; that is, we will read them in many ways but not as divine revelation. We will take up traditional literary questions of form, style, and structure, but we will also learn how to ask historical, political, and theoretical questions of a text that is multi-authored, thoroughly fissured, and complexly sedimented in its historical layers. Among other topics, we will pay special attention to how authority is established and contested in biblical texts; how biblical authors negotiate the ancient Hebrew prohibition against representing God in images; and how the gospels are socially and historically poised between the original Jesus movement that is their source and the institutionalization of the church that follows. Assignments will include a midterm exam, a paper, and a final exam.
Chaucer, Geoffrey: The Canterbury Tales
In the late fourteenth century, Geoffrey Chaucer created a fictional pilgrimage in which travelers competed with one another to tell a tale “of best sentence and moost solaas”—meaning, a tale that best combines moral seriousness with pleasure. The resulting collection of stories, the Canterbury Tales, will provide our text for this class. Chaucer experimented with a wide range of genres and styles in the Tales; you will encounter medieval romance, fabliau (a kind of bawdy comic story), saints' lives, beast fables, autobiographical prologues, and more. In the midst of this formal diversity, we find themes that tie the story collection together: the role of women in literature and the world; the nature and meaning of vernacular poetry; the psychology of religious experience; the effect of power on human relationships; the place of art in society; the nature of causality and human free will; and more. We will read the Canterbury Tales from start to finish, focusing on close reading in order to address these themes. You will work in groups as well as individually as you learn to read Middle English (no prior experience necessary). And we will read the Tales out loud as much as we can!
Please note that the text for this class, Jill Mann’s edition of the Canterbury Tales, published by Penguin, is also available as an e-book from Amazon. HOWEVER, when you look up the book on Amazon, the Kindle book linked to the Mann edition is NOT the actual ebook. You must search for “penguin canterbury tales kindle”; the edition then appears, and it costs approximately $15. If the ebook you are buying is free, or only a few dollars, it is NOT the edition you should buy. Feel free to email me if you are having trouble finding the proper ebook.
This class satisfies the pre-1800 requirement for the English major.
The English Department is working on expanding the class size for this offering. If you woujld 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).
A course reader.
For more information on this course, please contact Professor Miller at j_miller@berkeley.edu.
This class satisfies the pre-1800 requirement for the English major.
In this course, we follow how English authors from Thomas More to John Donne participated in the grand cultural project of the Renaissance, defined by the belief that consuming and producing culture would elevate human beings above their natural state. Many of our authors supported the project; some opposed it fervently. But willingly or not, everyone we read during the semester contributed to it, if only by virtue of recording their impressions, thoughts, feelings, and fancies in writing. Our aim in the course is to understand both the project of the Renaissance and the beliefs behind it by looking at the works of Francis Petrarch, Thomas Wyatt, Mary Sidney, William Shakespeare, and John Donne, among others.
Texts: Greenblatt, ed., The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Volume B: The Sixteenth and the Early Seventeenth Century. Note that this volume has several editions between 2012 and 2018; any of those is acceptable for this course. Additional reading: Shakespeare, Midsummer Night's Dream. Any major edition is fine, including Folger, Norton, Arden, or Oxford.
This class satisfies the pre-1800 requirement for the English major.
A survey of England's "century of revolution," focusing on relationships between literature, religion, and politics. Readings will be made available electronically and in an optional reader.
This class satisfies the pre-1800 requirement for the English major.
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).
Shakespeare, William : The Norton Shakespeare (3rd edition)
Shakespeare’s poems and plays are relentlessly unsettling, sublimely beautiful, deeply moving, rigorously brilliant, and compulsively meaningful: they complicate everything, they simplify nothing, and for 400 years, they have been a touchstone—indeed, something like an obsession—for literary artists from Milton to Goethe, from George Eliot to Proust, from Emily Dickinson to Louis Zukofsky, from Brecht to Sarah Kane; and for philosophers and theorists such as Hegel, Marx. Freud, Derrida, Kristeva, Lacan, and Zizeck. We will be especially concerned with six large issues: compassion; political representation and its discontents; the nature of identity and subjectivity; colonialism; Shakespeare’s deviation from conventional dramatic practices; and the relation between the ways Shakespeare’s plays make meaning and the ways they produce emotional experience. We will read Titus Andronicus, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Merchant of Venice, Julius Caesar, Henry V, Hamlet, King Lear, Antony and Cleopatra, Coriolanus, and The Tempest.
In this course we shall read a variety of texts that sought to represent strange new worlds—or invited readers to see their own world as strange—from Royal Society publications describing microscopic worlds to popular voyage accounts regaling readers with remote worlds, to plays, prose fiction, and poems that wrote familiar worlds anew. As we read the works of philosophers, scientists, mariners, poets, dramatists, essayists, and fiction writers we will attend to their struggle to find a language to convey these strange and estranged worlds, as they popularize new scientific discoveries, debate approaches to life in a globalizing market society, or satirize new commercial regimes as well as the promised gains of scientific observation. We shall also ask how and why so many works figured the object of knowledge and the instabilities and limits of language as female. As we interpret coffee house conversationalists, hack writers, masquerading women, naïve travellers, criminal gangs, among others, we shall be especially interested in the development of new techniques of realist writing and the complexities of the satire of this period.
Provisional Reading: Poetry of John Dryden, Anne Finch, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Alexander Pope, John Gay, Jonathan Swift; Prose of Samuel Pepys, John Locke, Joseph Addison and Richard Steele, Aphra Behn, Daniel Defoe, Eliza Haywood, Henry Fielding; Plays of William Wycherley and John Gay.
This class satisfies the pre-1800 requirement for the English major.
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).
Romanticism has long been identified with democratic revolutions of the late 18th century, and the social demand that every citizen have a “voice” in the constitution of community and law. In this survey of literature of the Romantic period, we’ll consider how “voice” gets represented, and to what ends. Whose voices get heard, and who is spoken about? What does it mean to speak before the law? How do human voices get heard or silenced in the context of the “voices” of nature (particularly birds and cataracts) and of conscience? Beginning with an essay “On the Discrimination of Different Voices” (by a blind philosopher, John Gough), we’ll consider how literature of the Romantic period attempts to counteract the “silent” medium of print.
Austen, J.: Pride and Prejudice; Balzac, H.: Lost Illusions; Flaubert, Gustave: Madame Bovary; Goethe, J.W. : Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship ; Kafka, F.: Amerika; Schreiner, O.: The Story of an African Farm; Tolstoy, L.: Anna Karenina
In his 1917 essay, “Science as a Vocation,” the sociologist Max Weber writes, “The fate of our times is characterized by rationalization and intellectualization and, above all, by the ‘disenchantment of the world.’ Precisely the ultimate and most sublime values have retreated from public life either into the transcendental realm of mystic life or into the brotherliness of direct and personal human relations. It is not accidental that our greatest art is intimate and not monumental….” Since that essay appeared, many writers and critics have argued that the novel is an especially disenchanted literary form, one whose attention to the ordinary, the average, and the everyday distances it from the immediate intensity of lyric or the sublime inevitability of epic. This sense of the novel as a disenchanted form is, of course, abetted by plots that turn on the many ways in which women and men both cultivate and lose their illusions about the world, by plots that treat growing up as a matter of growing out of bad, wishful, delusive, damaged or Quixotic ideas about how things really are or how they should someday be. In this course, we’ll look at a range of novels in order to think about what it means in practice to treat the novel as the genre of lost illusions. Along the way, we’ll think about growing up, falling down, education, aging, good intentions, bad faith, love, sex, family, marriage, adultery, gambling, money, mass culture, the metropolis, religion, socialism, empire, ideology, history, death, dying, and much more.
This course provides a survey of English-language American literature to 1800. We will explore a wide range of texts from narratives of colonial settlement through the literature of the American Revolution, the Constitutional Convention, and the early republic. Topics to be discussed include: the role of Puritanism in American society; evangelism and secularism; the language of liberty, rights, and representation; the rise of the novel in America; and the rhetoric of slavery. Authors will include William Bradford, John Winthrop, Anne Bradstreet, Mary Rowlandson, Cotton Mather, Jonathan Edwards, Benjamin Franklin, Phillis Wheatley, Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, Olaudah Equiano, Thomas Paine, Hannah Foster, Charles Brockden Brown, and Washington Irving.
This class satisfies the pre-1800 requirement for the English major.
Note: On Nov. 9 the time of this class was changed to TTh 12:30-2. There will no longer be discussion sections.
A survey of U.S. literature after the Civil War, with special attention to the rise of literary realism. We will consider art’s response to what Mark Twain described as “The Gilded Age” of economic expansion, big business, and material displays of wealth (often in the form of art patronage). These decades put unprecedented faith in ideals of progress and individualism, but also were marked by all the problems of Reconstruction: arguments about the unresolved legacy of the South, about poverty, about the role of the federal government in education and social welfare, and about racial wrongs and the rise of Jim Crow laws. Writers depicted this moment in a variety of surprising ways that also reflected on literature’s uncertain status as a medium of protest, an aesthetic experience, or an autonomous realm outside of the new social realities it made visible to readers like never before. Authors include Walt Whitman, Mark Twain, Charles Chesnutt, Stephen Crane, Kate Chopin, William Dean Howells, Henry James, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Edith Wharton.
This survey of U.S. poetries will begin with 17th- and 18th-century poems by two women, Anne Bradstreet and Phyllis Wheatley, move to another (19th-century) pairing in Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson, and then touch down in expatriate and stateside modernisms, the Harlem Renaissance, the New York School, and Language Poetry, on our way to the contemporary. Rather than cover all major figures briefly, we'll spend extended time with the work of a few: poets considered will include Paul Dunbar, Gertrude Stein, T.S. Eliot, Claude McKay, Jean Toomer, Frank O'Hara, John Ashbery, Lyn Hejinian, Claudia Rankine, and Layli Longsoldier. Along the way we'll consider renovations and dissipations of conventional form and meter, the task and materials of the long poem, seriality, citationality, who and what counts as a poetic subject, and how U.S. poetries have imagined community over and against their actual Americas.
All readings will be drawn from a Course Reader.
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).
Egan, Jennifer: A Visit from the Goon Squad; Faulkner, William: As I Lay Dying; Howells, William Dean: The Rise of Silas Lapham; Morrison, Toni: Beloved; O'Connor, Flannery: Wise Blood; Pynchon, Thomas: The Crying of Lot 49; Robinson, Marilynne: Housekeeping; Wharton, Edith: The House of Mirth; Whitehead, Colson: Zone One
This course is a survey of major American novels from the late-nineteenth century to the present, with a focus on realism, naturalism, and modernism. Rather than trace a single history of the novel in this period, we will explore a range of genres that highlight some of the most significant developments in novel form, as well as the cultural and historical contexts they illuminate.
The textbooks for this course will be available at University Press Books, on Bancroft Way.
Angelou, Maya: I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings; Baldwin, James: The Fire Next Time; Hurston, Zora Neale: Dust Tracks on the Road; Morrison, Toni: Beloved; Nehisi-Coates, Ta: Between the World and Me; Walker, Alice: Third LIfe of Grange Copeland; Wright, Richard: Black Boy; Wright, Richard: Uncle Tom's Children
This course will examine some major 20th and 21st century African American novels and autobiographies. This is a vast terrain to cover and so the chosen texts do not adequately represent the diversity and richness of the novels and autobiographies written during this period. Rather, they are chosen because they significantly address paradigmatic issues, concerns, problems, etc., in modern African American culture.
Texts: Those listed above plus articles posted on bCourses
Requirements: two papers (about 2000 words) and final exam. Papers will count for 30% each of the final grade and the final exam will count for 40%.
Baldwin, James: Go Tell It on the Mountain; Ellison, Ralph: Invisible Man; Hurston, Zora Neale: Their Eyes Were Watching God; Johnson, James Weldon: The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man; Morrison, Toni: Jazz; Whitehead, Colson: The Underground Railroad
For much of the last century, black writers have crafted modern works of literary art from the materials of black culture—Ralph Ellison and James Weldon Johnson found inspiration in jazz and other musical forms, James Baldwin reworked the black sermon into literary form, Zora Neale Hurston defended folk culture and black idiomatic expression as the fundaments of black art. Much of this activity unfolded against the backdrop of a fear or hope (triggered by skeptics of black aesthetic competence, but held by some black writers and scholars as well) that the root of black distinction lay in racial oppression, that the generative force behind black literature and culture were the traumas of slavery and Jim Crow segregation; a fear or hope that black culture had no “content” beyond oppression, or (surprising as this may sound to our 21st-century ears, though this amounts to the same thing) that there was no such thing as black culture. This class will introduce students to the debate around “the idea of black culture” through an exploration of the novels and critical writings of major figures in the debate: James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, Zora Neale Hurston, James Weldon Johnson, Toni Morrison, and Colson Whitehead.
Long Soldier, Layli: Whereas; Rankine, Claudia: Citizen
course reader
Rather than attempt to assemble a predictive canon of twenty-first century poetry (so far), this course will broadly consider the place and significance of poetry in the contemporary world. This will mean looking at some of the key figures and celebrated poems of the past two decades, but it will also mean thinking about poetry within a broader political and social context. We’ll spend plenty of time looking at the formal intricacies and figural densities of a number of marvelous and often zany texts, but we'll also mull the place of poems and poets in the complex environment of contemporary culture.
We often tend to think about poetry as a rarified art form, at least within the context of classrooms and literature departments and slim volumes and literary prizes. And we often tend to equate poetry with difficulty or obscurity. And we’ll certainly look at a number of poems that are, in their different ways, difficult or strange or inscrutable. But we’ll also range quite widely across the scattered field of contemporary poetry, thinking about poetry as an art of performance (as in slam poetry and varieties of experimental sound poetry), a social media genre (the poem-tweet, the insta-poem, the poem-as-Facebook-post), and as both a generator of (for instance, Claudia Rankine’s Citizen) and participant in (as in Beyoncé’s use of Warsan Shire’s poetry in Lemonade) mixed-media forms.
Along the way, we’ll consider poetry as a mode of thought and a means of critique, and we’ll investigate the ways that poets have shaped their poems in relation to contemporary questions about race, gender, politics, and power. Finally, we’ll think about what poems have to say about the global crises that shape our unspooling century. Throughout the semester, we’ll keep in mind an underlying pair of questions: does poetry matter in a contemporary world with which it seems, in certain ways, out of step? And, if so, how?
A tentative reading list includes work by Rae Armantrout, John Ashbery, Mary Jo Bang, Caroline Bergvall, Christian Bök, Tongo Eisen-Martin, Rob Fitterman, Kenneth Goldsmith, Jorie Graham, Jen Hadfield, Lyn Hejinian, Kathleen Jamie, Rupi Kaur, Beyoncé, Layli Long Soldier, Tracie Morris, Paul Muldoon, Harryette Mullen, Geoffrey G. O'Brien, Alice Oswald, Claudia Rankine, Tom Raworth, Adrienne Rich, Denise Riley, Ed Roberson, Warshan Shire, Danez Smith, Tracy K. Smith, Juliana Spahr, Keston Sutherland, Kate Tempest, and Ocean Vuong.
Written course assignments include 2 essays and a final exam.
Adams, Maurianne: Readings for Diversity and Social Justice (Fourth Edition)
A course reader.
To start with, a general overview. This course will analyze the categories of “disability,” “race” and “ethnicity” critically. My aim in the class is to set up situations in which we can think about several of these categories intersectionally, in the context of American cultures present and past.
We’ll have a specific focus: family separation and incarceration in the United States. Starting with a recent crisis, the Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” policy and what’s happening to children on the border of this country, we’ll explore some of the many ways in which American history is a history of family separation and incarceration, reading, for instance, archives of slavery, “Indian boarding schools,” Japanese American internment, eugenic sterilization, the Chinese Exclusion Act, the “Muslim Ban,” and disability institutions as archives of orphaning, imprisonment, forced caregiving and, sometimes, reunion.
A variety of guest speakers, including artists, performers, and activists, will visit us, and we’ll work with films and digital resources as well as reading historical and sociological analyses and literary texts.
And we’ll engage in a collective research and creative project. The course will be part of the Adobe Fellowship initiative, designed to provide “opportunities for reflective making and producing—in visual art, design, film, media, performing arts, and more.” In semester-long creative projects, students will “face challenges of conceptualization, design, planning, and implementation; build new, and hone existing, creative skills; and participate in structured reflection throughout the act of creation.”
Taking our inspiration from models like the 50 Objects site (which explores the history of Japanese American internment through the examination of 50 objects), the Smithsonian Museum’s Everybody exhibit (which explores U.S. disability history through a set of artifacts), and London’s Foundling Museum (which exhibits and contextualizes the small tokens—like buttons or scraps of cloth—left by mothers with the babies given over to the Foundling Hospital), we’ll be locating, collecting, analyzing and displaying significant objects that our class will curate together, creating our own American Foundlings project.
This course satisfies UC Berkeley's American Cultures requirement.
Hurston, Zora Neale: Their Eyes Were Watching God; Johnson, James Weldon: Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man; Larsen, Nella: Passing; Toomer, Jean: Cane; Wright, Richard: Black Boy
Other materials will be available in PDF format on the course website.
The Harlem Renaissance was a cultural movement of black artists and writers in the 1920s. Centered in the Harlem neighborhood in Manhattan, the movement extended outward through international collaboration. We will be reading works by writers including Claude McKay, Langston Hughes, Nella Larsen, and Zora Neale Hurston, as well as manifestos about the nature and function of black art. Themes include migration and metropolitan life, primitivism and the avant garde, diaspora and exile, passing and identity, sexuality and secrecy, and the relation between modern art and folk tradition. Midterm and final exam, weekly writing, and one essay anticipated by preparation assignments.
“A city no worse than others, a city rich and vigorous and full of pride, a city lost and beaten and full of emptiness. It all depends on where you sit and what your own private score is. I didn't have one. I didn't care.” --Raymond Chandler, The Long Goodbye 1953
Taking shape and definition in the late 1930s and the first years of the 1940s, when the United States was more than ten years into the Great Depression and the Second World War was either imminent or had already begun, and continuing into the early 1960s, noir was a sensibility and a way of being in the world. It was a critique, an attitude, a mood, a language, and aesthetic of alienation where cynicism was part of a moral code and fatalism a part of democratic faith—and it was expressed, developed, and tested at the margins of legitimate cultural discourse: in low-budget or Poverty Row Hollywood movies, crime fiction, and TV police and detective dramas. In this course we will discuss such still-stunning films as Double Indemnity, Detour, and Sunset Boulevard alongside such indelible novels as Raymond Chandler’s Farewell, My Lovely, Ross Macdonald’s The Way Some People Die, Chester Himes’s If He Hollers Let Him Go, and Jim Thompson’s Nothing More Than Murder, and the prescient as-it-happened film criticism of Manny Farber. Our goal is to explore, as noir artists did, an America within America—and to illuminate noir within its historical period, to understand why it arose and how it dramatized specific wartime and postwar American traumas about citizenship, gender relations, the reintegration of millions of soldiers into peacetime society, abundance, corruption, and the fear of enemies from abroad and within. And to explore some of the most provocative and lasting literature and film America has produced.
This course is cross-listed with American Studies C111E.
Alvarez, Julia: In the Time of the Butterflies; Benitez, Sandra: The Weight of All Things; Castillo, Ana: The Guardians; Quiñonez, Ernesto: Chango's Fire; Rivera, Tomas: ...And the Earth Did Not Devour Him; Ruiz, Ronald: Life Long; Soto, Gary: Jesse; Viramontes, Helena Maria: Under the Feet of Jesus
This course will focus on representations of workers and rebels in U.S. Latinx novels. We will investigate the ways in which the issues of work and political activism are central themes in much U.S. Latinx literature. The formal features and thematic representations in the particular novels we’ll study have been influenced to a large degree by a broad range of social experiences: working for a living; enduring harsh working and living conditions; encountering various forms of organized state repression; growing up female in a machismo-based culture; getting involved in political movements; engaging in class struggles; fighting racism and sexism; rebelling against the system; fighting for revolution; sometimes becoming complicit with the forces of domination; and expressing these experiences in art and literature. Because this is a reading intensive course, we will spend considerable time in class discussing the novels and conducting collective close readings of selected passages. We'll be attentive to the manner in which the act of storytelling in these novels contributes to the formation of complex and sometimes contradictory identities. We'll also read and discuss short works of literary criticism and history to facilitate our analysis of the aesthetic and social issues that inform the writing of these novels and to understand how U.S. Latinx novels expand and enrich the American literary tradition generally.
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.
This course will introduce students to the study of creative writing—fiction and poetry (with a brief dip into playwriting). Students will learn to talk critically about these forms and begin to feel comfortable and confident writing within these genres. Students will write a variety of exercises and more formal pieces and partake in class workshops where their work will be edited and critiqued by other students in the class.
This course is open to English majors only.
Course packet available at Instant Copying and Laser Printing, 2138 University Ave (between Shattuck Ave. & Walnut St.), (510) 704-9700
Pitlor (Ed.), Heidi: The Best American Short Stories 2018
A course reader, which will be available from Instant Copying & Laser Printing ([510] 704-9700; 2138 University Ave., Berkeley, CA 94704).
A short fiction workshop. Over the course of the semester, each student will write and revise two stories. Each participant in the workshop will edit student-written stories and will write a formal critique of each manuscript. Students are required to attend two literary readings over the course of the semester and write a short report about each reading they attend. Students will also take part in online discussions about fiction. Attendance is mandatory.
Throughout the semester, we will read published stories from various sources and also essays by working writers about fiction and the writing life. The intent of the course is to have the students confront the problems faced by writers of fiction and to discover the techniques that enable writers to construct a convincing and engaging representation of reality on the page.
Only continuing UC Berkeley 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 aplication process is 11 PM, 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.
Oates, J. C.: Oxford Book of American Short Stories, 2012 (2nd edition)
A fiction workshop in which students will be expected to turn in material approximately every third week, to be edited and discussed in class.
Emphasis will be upon editing and revising. Quality rather than quantity is the ideal, but each student should be prepared to write about fifty pages through the term, to be gathered into a small “book” and turned in on the last class day. Appropriate assignments will be made in the (2nd) 2012 edition of The Oxford Book of American Short Stories, edited by Joyce Carol Oates.
Only continuing UC Berkeley 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, 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.
Blank, Carla: Rediscovering America; Reed, Ishmael: From Totems to Hip-Hop
A writing and literature course in which students will become familiar with trends in 20th- and 21st-century poetry. The selected poetry will be linked to developments in the other arts. Students will write poems based upon models offered by established poets as well as by former Reed students. At the end of the semester, students will organize an anthology based upon their work. This is a course that emphasizes diversity.
Only continuing UC Berkeley 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, 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.
The texts for this seminar will found in our course reader, which will be available at Krishna Copy (University and Milvia) by our first class meeting.
In this course you will conduct a progressive series of explorations in which you will try some of the fundamental options for writing poetry today (or any day)—aperture and closure; rhythmic sound patterning; sentence and line; short and long-lined poems; image & figure; stanza; poetic forms; the first, second, and third person (persona, address, drama, narrative, description); prose poetry, and revision. Our emphasis will be on recent possibilities, with an eye and ear to renovating traditions. We will also read a number of poems by graduates of my 143B sections who have gone on to publish books and win prizes. I have no “house style” and only one precept: you can do anything, if you can do it. You will write a poem a week, and we’ll discuss four or five in rotation (I’ll also respond each week to every poem you write). On alternate days, we’ll discuss illustrative poems in our course reader. If the past is any guarantee, the course will be fun and will make you a better poet.
Only continuing UC Berkeley 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, 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 futher information regarding enrollment in such courses.
This is a workshop class. Students will be submitting drafts of new poems weekly, reading lots of poetry, reading and critiquing each other's new work, so regular attendance and participation is mandatory.
Only continuing UC Berkeley 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, 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.
Poe, E.A.: The Gold-Bug and Other Tales
Course Reader
This course in the critical essay is designed for students who are writing a thesis-length research paper. For the first weeks of class, we will explore and share our own experiences, processes, obstacles and goals as writers; this will give us a baseline to measure your growth over the course of the semester. We will also discuss academic writing and the “classic style,” in order to identify models and methods to support your own practice. Although each of you will be working on his or her own project, we need a common critical object as a class. Therefore, the second part of the syllabus focuses on Edgar Allan Poe from a range of literary and critical approaches. We will have several in-class workshops and exercises on Poe. The third part of the syllabus is devoted to exploring elements of critical writing: research, argument, structure, style, and revision. We will devote our final unit of class to workshops, in which you will read and respond to advance drafts of each other’s work. By offering as well as receiving detailed feedback, you will learn how to engage productively with the challenges of producing critical work that is complex, clear, and relevant.
Only continuing UC Berkeley students are eligible to apply for this course. To be considered for admission, please electronically submit 5-7 pages of your non-fiction prose, 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, 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 classes.
Harris, Eddy: Mississippi Solo; Nieman, Linda: Boomer; Strayed, Cheryl, ed.: Best American Travel Writing 2018
Course Reader to include work by Elizabeth David, Michael Pollan, Philip Lopate, etc.
Much of American literature has had to do with a sense of motion. Note the journeys, e.g., in the best known texts of Melville and Twain. But note also that Harlemite Langston Hughes' autobiography, The Big Sea, begins on a boat and details his adventures in Europe and Africa; Canadian writer Gladys Hindmarch takes on Melville with her Watery Part of the World, and Zora Neale Hurston travels to Haiti in Tell My Horse and through the American south in Mules and Men. The point of this course is multiple and full of inquiry.
We'll consider what "travel writing" might be. We'll read selections from the Best American Travel Writing series and from the Ian Duncan and Elizabeth Bohls anthology, Travel Writing: 1700-1830; but we'll also read some unlikely travel narratives—Eddy Harris's Mississippi Solo (the adventures of an African-American canoeist), Linda Niemann's Boomer (her account of her life as a reailroad brakeman following the work through the west), cookbook author Elizabeth David's forays through France, etc.
The writing vehicle will be, for the greatest part, the personal essay. Philip Lopate (from The Art of the Personal Essay): "The essay form as a whole has long been associated with an experimental method. The idea goes back to Montaigne and his endlessly suggestive use of the term essai for his writings. To essay is to attempt, to test, to make a run at something without knowing whether you are going to succeed."
We'll write micro-essays, longer essays, and final prose projects. (Cross-genre projects are wlecome.) We'll also keep journals and work on one or two collaborative pieces. We'll workshop.
There will be three or four field trips, trips in which we'll travel as a class, at least one of which will fill a day. Dates to be decided by discussion.
Only continuing UC Berkeley students are eligible to apply for this course. To be considered for admission, please electronically submit 5-7 pages of your non-fiction prose, 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, OCTOBER 25.
This seminar challenges us to look back to a time before England's colonial period and consider how people of the 16th century began to perceive of themselves as part of a truly global world. The class will begin by thinking about what the concept of the "World" meant in early Tudor times, and also how the English were used to defining themselves in corporeal terms. We will then look at how people began to travel and where they went. We will consider how the increased use of maps helped people in England conceptualize spaces and places beyond their immediate environment, and we will look at Ireland, and the Irish, as the original "Other" to the English. From there we move to how early experiences of the Americas were described in word and image. We return to England to look at the body of Elizabeth I as the ground of political representation in the late 16th century before turning to skin and concepts of race. Finally, we study the growing impact of trade in the 17th century and the effect of new consumable items entering England's markets and homes.
This course is a hybrid between art history, history, and English, and students from all of those majors will be encouraged to talk to one another and understand topics from across disciplines. Every week we will read a 16th-century text, literary or non-literary, and also consider visuality and visual culture which will include ceremonies, clothing, maps, architecture, bodily behavior, paintings, drawings, descriptions and material culture.
This course satisfies the pre-1800 requirement for the English major.
This class is cross-listed with History of Art 192E.
In this course we’ll review the U.S. poetry of the present, reading representative poems from the last 15 years or so in relation to a number of formal concerns, poetic subjects, and debates within the social field (and its media), including: the advent of the Internet and its ongoing effect on writing and reading practice, dissemination, and national conversations about race, gender, class, and community; the emergence of “ecopoetics”; the waning and reinvention of traditional forms; prose poetry; Conceptual poetry; movement poetry (Occupy-era and antiracist work). All readings will be drawn from a Course Reader and will include Kevin Davies, Juliana Spahr, Claudia Rankine, Ben Lerner, Jennifer Moxley, Graham Foust, Ariana Reines, Douglas Kearney, Fred Moten, Lisa Robertson, Cathy Park Hong, Brenda Hillman, Javier Huerta, and many others.
Four years after publishing the first edition of Paradise Lost, Milton came out with a volume called Paradise Regain’d...to which is added, Samson Agonistes. We will spend the semester carefully reading these poems—a “brief epic” and a drama “never intended for the stage”—considering their relationship to each other and to Milton’s career as a whole. Students will hand in several close-readings and a final paper (8-10 pages). Any decent edition of Milton is acceptable, but if you can get a used copy of the Riverside Milton that would be ideal. We will occasionally dip into short passages from Milton’s earlier works; these will be made available as PDFs on the course site. This course is intended for students who have already read Paradise Lost.
This class satisfies the pre-1800 requirement for the English major.
All readings will be available on bCourses.
Audio Description is a set of practices that seeks to make visual media—the fine arts, theatrical performance, dance, film and video—accessible to people who are blind and visually impaired. In theater and film, brief descriptions of performers' actions and expressions are timed to fit in pauses in dialogue and delivered to audience members via headsets or on a separate audio track. At art museums Audio Description may involve docent-led tours or recorded audio guides on hand-held devices or smart phone apps. Although Audio Description has been around at least since the 1980s, it has received little critical scrutiny. Rules and standards have been codified over the years which are often based on a very reductive notion of what blind people can understand about the visible world.
This course will address the question: is it possible to describe visual media to people who cannot see? But ultimately it will lead to broader questions: are descriptions of visual media written for blind people fundamentally different from descriptions produced for a general audience? How might Audio Description enhance aesthetic experience for everyone? For example, now that audio description is available on popular streaming platforms such as Netflix, consumers who are not blind find it an aid when screening media “eyes-free,” as when driving.
The course will give students interested in writing about art the opportunity to explore what amounts to an unacknowledged new interpretative literary genre. We will spend the first few weeks of the semester surveying and critiquing the current standards of audio description. In addition to reading instructional texts, comparing them to traditional art criticism, we will critique examples from film, television and museums. We will also perform group exercises in class. I will invite practitioners from local museums and theaters to describe their programs. We will make group visits to local museums and theaters. Students will produce three short writing exercises, such as response pieces to readings or screenings. Students will then design and execute a project to work on for the rest of the semester. Drafts will be rigorously workshopped during class time and the instructors will provide one-to-one feedback in writing and conferences.
Depending on their interests, students might undertake to produce an audio description for a theater or dance production on campus. They might produce an audio tour for an art exhibit on campus or elsewhere in the area. They might produce audio description for videos on YouTube .They might produce an audio descriptive walking tour of a park or architectural site. They might compose their own play or screenplay where the audio description is incorporated into the script rather than added on in post-production.
The goal of the course is not to train students for careers as professional audio describers. Rather, it will help students develop critical thinking skills regarding visual media and hone their skills at descriptive writing. They will develop an awareness of the ways audience, context and the concision of the form dictates diction, tone and other facets of writing. They will also learn how to use the feedback they will receive from the instructors and their classmates to produce substantive revisions of their work. All these are skills that are transferable to other writing situations. There is also a social justice component to the course in the way that it will help students analyze how a service or policy meant to aid a marginalized group can in fact contribute to that marginalization.
On October 16 we canceled this section of English 165 because we ended up doubling the size of English 165 section 6 (on the same topic) instead. So if you are interested in this topic, please enroll in English 165 section 6. Professors Danner and Hass will co-teach that class.
This is a team-taught course on two of the most controversial novelists of the 20th century and—some critics think—two of the greatest. Vladimir Nabokov (1899-1977) was a Russian emigre who wrote novels in both Russian and English, was thought of as extending the art novel of the twentieth century as practiced by Joyce and Proust, and was notorious for having written Lolita, the story of a middle-aged European professor who kidnaps and sexually exploits an American teenager. V. S. Naipaul (1932-2018) was born in Trinidad to an Indian family, received a British colonial education there, moved to England to go to the university, and wrote novels and non-fiction that examined the politics of colonialism and the postcolonial world for which he received the Nobel prize in 2001.
This class, which will be team-taught by Professors Robert Hass and Mark Danner, is an effort to look at two of the main directions taken by the novel in the twentieth century.
Course work: two short papers, one long one or a final, and some journalling.
Texts may include Nabokov's Lolita, Pale Fire, The Defense, The Gift, Bend Sinister, Invitation to a Beheading, Ada, and Speak Memory, and Naipaul's Miguel Street, A House for Mr Biswas, In a Free State, A Bend in the River, Guerrillas, The Enigma of Arrival, and The Writer and the World.
Note that this course was originally set up as two separate sections of English 165 on the same topic, but on October 16 we canceled 165 section 5—and doubled the size of this section 6 (and moved it to a larger classroom) instead.
Homer: The Iliad (Fagles trans.); Knausgaard, Karl Ove: My Struggle: Book 1; Lucretius: The Nature of Things (Stallings trans.); Melville, Herman: Moby-Dick, or The Whale; Weil, Simone: The Iliad or the Poem of Force
“We live our everyday lives surrounded by, immersed in, matter . . . Our existence depends from one moment to the next . . . on our own hazily understood bodily and cellular reactions and on pitiless cosmic motions, on the material artifacts and natural stuff that populate our environment, as well as on socioeconomic structures that produce and reproduce the conditions of our everyday life. In light of this massive materiality, how could we be anything other than materialist?” (New Materialisms, 2010). The aim of this seminar is to consider how four epics, ancient and modern, reckon with “this massive materiality.” For our purpose, “ancient” means Homer (The Iliad) and Lucretius (The Nature of Things), and “modern” means Melville (Moby-Dick) and Knausgaard (My Struggle). Concentrating on these four texts will allow us to examine the possibility of an epic materialism, one that—in the absence of spiritual, divine, or metaphysical principles—minimizes human mastery and instead strives to convey a comprehensive range of worldly forces: physical, environmental, technical, economic, and political. Some through-lines in our seminar will be: violence (and especially war) as an all-encompassing material condition; the role of empirical observation and description in rendering the material world; the materiality of the literary object itself. As time permits, we will also turn to the “new materialisms” in criticism and philosophy to ask why materialism has recently become so appealing to so many thinkers.
In addition to informal assignments, students will write two essays and a final exam.
In this course short 19th- and 20th-century writings available electronically, by such authors as G. W. Harris, J. J. Hooper, Mark Twain, F. P. Dunne, G. Ade, R. Lardner, J. Thurber and the like, will be read and discussed, with the aim not of constructing a history but of exploring the roles of psychology, society, politics and language in American humor. Much of the course will follow the shift from live stage and printed word to radio and movie as the chief vehicles of American humor by focusing first on Chaplin, Keaton and other masters of the silent era, then on the range of comic styles and genres of the 30’s and 40’s. Developments since W. W. II, including the advent of television and new generations of humorists, will also be considered.
Writing will consist of two essays of 5 or 6 pages each or one essay of 10-12 pages. There will be no exams, but the hope is to conduct this course as a seminar, in which case attendance and participation will be expected, and will affect grades.
Chopin, K.: The Awakening; Conrad, J.: Lord Jim; Hardy, T.: Jude the Obscure; Ibsen, H.: Ghosts; James, H. : The Spoils of Poynton; Morris, W.: News from Nowhere; Schreiner, O.: The Story of an African Farm; Stoker, B.: Dracula; Wells, H.G.: The Time Machine; Wilde, O.: Salome; Wilde, O.: The Picture of Dorian Gray; Yeats, W.B.: The Wind Among the Reeds
What difference does a date make? What is it about the numerical end of a century that encourages feelings of apocalypse, degeneration, or renewal? This course will consider texts written in and around the 1890s, a decade characterized by its intense self-consciousness about what it meant to live through the last days of the nineteenth century. We’ll read novels, poems, philosophy, works of psychology, sociology, history, and aesthetics in order to think about some of the period’s key political, social, and cultural questions. We’ll also examine ways in which particular literary strategies and aesthetic movements—Naturalism, Decadence, Aestheticism, etc.—emerged to respond to these questions. While reading works by Michael Field, Sigmund Freud, Thomas Hardy, Walter Pater, Olive Schreiner, Bram Stoker, Oscar Wilde, W.B. Yeats, and others, we will explore the relations between literary culture and—among other things—sex and sexology, feminism, photography and visual culture, race theory and imperialism, spiritualism, degeneration, and the look of history from what seemed to some like the end of all things.
In the eighteenth century, Gothic was a historical category (the “Dark” or “Middle” Ages, between the fall of Rome and the Renaissance) and then an ethnic one (the Germanic peoples who overthrew classical civilization). It’s all over the place now, designating everything from a 1980s postpunk counterculture to a national anti-tradition (“American Gothic”). As Gothic became the title of a literary genre in the 1790s, the Gothic novel or Gothic romance, it also became an aesthetic category, evoking a distinctively modern relation between history and feeling. Gothic builds its stories around scenic and architectural spaces and objects, reservoirs of psychic and political energies of a supposedly defunct past, which exert a toxic affective hold – mingling desire, longing and dread – on the present. It becomes a figure for style and for the aesthetic as such, not so much aloof from moral purpose (the Protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism…) as corrupting and opposing it.
We’ll read selected works from the first hundred years of Gothic fiction. 1.) Late-eighteenth-century “classic Gothic”: Horace Walpole, The Castle of Otranto; Matthew Lewis, The Monk; Ann Radcliffe, The Italian. 2.) Romantic historical Gothic: Walter Scott, The Bride of Lammermoor; Victor Hugo, Notre-Dame de Paris. 3.) Puritan Gothic: James Hogg, Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner; Charlotte Brontë, Villette. 4.) Gothic/Aesthetic: Edgar Allan Poe, “The Fall of the House of Usher”; Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Marble Faun. We’ll intersperse our readings with some examples of modern cinematic Gothic: Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, Black Narcissus; Alfred Hitchock, Vertigo; Alain Resnais, Last Year at Marienbad; Andrei Tarkovsky, Solaris.
Coursebooks will be ordered from University Press Books, 2430 Bancroft Way. Supplementary readings will be made avaiable on our bCourses site.
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).
Berger, John: Lilac and Flag; Eagleton, Terry: Marxism and Literary Criticism; Melville, Herman: Billy Budd, Sailor and Other Stories; Olsen, Tillie: Yonnondio: From the Thirties; Plascencia, Salvador: The People of Paper
Course Reader
In the early 1990s, the Marxist literary theorist Fredric Jameson responded to critics who were at once proclaiming the emergence of a capitalist “new world order” and asserting the death of Marxism. Jameson wrote: “It does not seem to make much sense to talk about the bankruptcy of Marxism, when Marxism is very precisely the science and the study of just that capitalism whose global triumph is affirmed in talk of Marxism’s demise.” Two-and-a-half decades later—and with the political, economic and environmental contradictions of the “new world order” now in plain sight—students of literature will certainly benefit once again from reassessing the appropriateness of Marxism not only for the critique of social systems and political practices, but for the study of literature and culture, as well. This course will provide the opportunity for such a reassessment by focusing on the ways that Marxist social thought in the past century has contributed to theories of literature and culture. To be clear, this is not a comprehensive course on Marxist theory, which would be impossible to teach in a one-semester undergraduate course. At most, the course will introduce some of the basic concepts employed by Marxist critics in the study of literature and some of the debates among Marxist scholars surrounding those concepts. The goal of the course is to provide a general introduction to the range of Marxist analysis and critique in contemporary literary and cultural studies. Most of our reading will be compiled in a course reader. We will read some classical works of Marxist scholarship as well as some contemporary critical works. We’ll also ground our study of Marxism by reading and discussing selected works of literature. The course will require a substantial amount of reading and writing. Class participation is also required.
Texts (tentative list): Borderlands/ La Frontera, by Gloria Anzaldua; the Lemonade album, by Beyonce; Marvelous Bones of Time, by Brenda Coultas; The Art of the Personal Essay, by Philip Lopate; American Born Chinese, by Glenn Wang; Cane, by Jean Toomer,
Supplemental readings by Dorothy Allison, James Baldwin, CAConrad, Gish Jen, X.J. Kennedy, Maxine Hong Kingston, Claudia Rankine, others.
One of the ideas behind this course offering is that poetry and essays (life-writing, creative nonfiction, "essaying," etc.) have similar aims or field-marks—both are literary vehicles of exploration and documentation; both value experimental approaches; and both traffic with versions of the incomplete.
Another idea is that various wide particulars make up each of us—social class, race, gender, place of birth, etc. These particulars endow us with privileges, deficits, blindnesses, insights, and the like. Prompts in this course will encourage students to document these and explore how they qualify us (and how or if they obligate us) to "speak" from various positions. The purpose of writing in this course is to engage public language on one hand and personal (meaning specific) observations and experiences on the other. The purpose here is to pursue consciousness. The experiment is to attempt to do so in the forms of poetry and the personal essay.
A third idea is that hybrid forms—works that defy a single categorization or order, works that join rather than exclude—are of great interest.
Some points of departure:
How Scared Should People on the Border Be? (New York Times headline, 31 March 2017)
The situation is aggravated by the tremor that breaks into discourse on race. It is further complicated by the fact that the habit of ignoring race is understood to be a graceful, even generous, liberal gesture. To notice is to recognize an already discredited difference. (Toni Morrison)
The sea cannot be fenced./ el Mar does not stop at borders. (Gloria Anzaldua)
Writing and workshopping. Reading. Discussion. Collaborative projects. Class field trip. Performance.
Bulosan, Carlos: America is in the Heart; Cha, Theresa Hak Kyung: Dictee; Kingston, Maxine Hong: The Woman Warrior; Mukerji, Dhan Gopal: Caste and Outcast; Nguyen, Viet Thanh: The Sympathizer; Okada, John: No No Boy
A course reader with short stories and poetry.
This class provides a foundation for reading Asian American literature at three levels of scale: world, nation, and locality. At the world scale, we will discuss the political origins of the phrase “Asian American” in the late 1960s and how associations with radical forms of political activism such as the Third World Liberation Front informed the invention of the concept of "Asian American literature." We will also look back to short texts from the sixteenth through nineteenth centuries to see how a larger, world historical perspective of Asian American literature from the Manila galleon trade through the Spanish American War can illustrate the limitations of historical and literary narratives that focus too heavily on the North Atlantic. At the national scale, we will examine how Asian American writers confronted the anti-Asiatic creation of national borders through immigration exclusions and origin quotas from the 1880s to 1920s. We will trace how the legacies of these exclusions informed later works written during and after ghettoization, internment, and refugee resettlement. Finally, at the scale of "locality," we will focus on ways of reading texts situated in the San Francisco Bay Area and Northern California.
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).
Coleridge, S. T. , and Wordsworth, W.: Lyrical Ballads, 1798 and 1800; Eliot, George: Adam Bede; Smith, Zadie: White Teeth
You will also need to acquire a copy of at least one contemporary (post-2001) novel of your choice--see description below.
Course reader including additional readings from figures such as Charles Dickens, George Henry Lewes, Gustave Flaubert, John Ruskin, Thomas Hardy, Henry James, Emile Zola, Olive Schreiner, Robert Louis Stevenson, William Dean Howells, Theodore Dreiser, Virginia Woolf, Marcel Proust, Alejo Carpentier, Jorge Luis Borges, Salman Rushdie, Erich Auerbach, Georg Lukács, Roland Barthes, and others.
This course explores the relationship between life and literature, with a focus on the following types of questions: How have novelists and poets—as well as filmmakers, television producers, and Instagram aficionados—attempted to represent real life in the modern age? Is realism defined more by a focus on common objects and recognizable experiences, or on the familiarity of the language used to describe them? How do conceptions of the real transform across different eras, authors, or genres? In this course, we will analyze classical literary realism and a wide variety of responses to it. We will begin by studying the relationship of Dutch Golden Age painting to literary realism of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Next we’ll examine the ways in which subsequent literary movements—Naturalism, Modernism, magical realism, “hysterical realism,” and peripheral realisms—inherited, rejected, or adapted realist assumptions and conventions. Alongside these literary cases, we will investigate the surprising tenacity of the realist mode in more recent popular genres and media: cinematic neorealism, documentaries, sitcoms, “reality television,” and the reemergence of a trompe-l’oeil aesthetic in contemporary visual culture and social media. For a final project, students will select one or more post-2001 novels of their choice to situate within current debates about realism and to analyze in relation to the history of realism traced by the course.
Chekhov, Anton: The Major Plays; Yarmolinsky, Arman, Ed.: The Portable Chekhov
A course reader.
Anton Chekhov’s (1860-1904) prominence in the English-speaking world is comparable only to Shakespeare’s place in Russian culture. This course is devoted to Chekhov’s fictional and dramatic writing, and to the lasting influence of his art and persona on modern imagination.
We will read closely Chekhov’s short stories and plays, and situate his literary idiom in its historical context. We will discuss the inherent connections between his narrative and dramatic texts; examine his thematic and formal innovations; and consider his understated, elusive vision of human experience. We will compare different translations of his work and think about translation in broad cultural terms. We will also watch a few theater productions and film adaptations of Chekhov’s drama and follow the idea of the ‘Chekhovian’ as it evolves in the course of the twentieth century, in Russia and beyond.
Readings for every class are short (typically, 15-20 pages) but need to be thorough.
Random reading quizzes will check your textual knowledge. There will be three short essays (from one to three pages) and short written home assignments, and a course paper.
This class is cross-listed with Slavic 134E.
All texts for this course will be included in a reader, with listenings and viewings posted to a course website and each individual reading also made available digitally.
Our reader will include excerpts from selected literary works such as: Claudia Rankine, Citizen (2014); Kevin Young, The Grey Album (2012); Rita Dove, Sonata Mulattica (2009); Etheridge Knight, Belly Song and Other Poems (1973); Allen Ginsberg, Howl and Other Poems (1956); Langston Hughes, The Weary Blues (1926); Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass (1860); poems, songs, and spoken word by William Blake, Emily Dickinson, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Frank O’Hara, Saul Williams, Denice Frohman, Bob Dylan, Charles Bukowski, Douglas Kearney, June Jordan, Gil Scott-Heron
It will also include excerpts from secondary texts such as: Hanif Abdurraqib, They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us (2017); Jennifer Lynn Stoever, The Sonic Color Line (2016); Aniruddh D. Patel, Music, Language, and the Brain (2007); and Fred Moten, In the Break (2003)
What allows language to inspire change? To what extent is the power of a word rooted in its perception as sound and rhythm, shaped and reshaped by the individual histories and trainings of those who hear it? In this class, we will break down some of history’s most significant beats, investigate their perceived powers over time, and play them alongside the rhythms dominant in poetry and music today. We will also discuss the basic components of acoustics, psychoacoustics, neurology, and physiology that help us understand how we hear and interact with sound.
Student work for the semester will consist of regular readings, listenings, and viewings, attendance at live performance events (including dance, taiko, spoken word, and acrobatics events at Cal Performances), a series of written responses culminating in a substantial creative research project, and a semester-end conference presentation open to the public.
This class is funded by a joint grant from Cal Performances and The Mellon Foundation; all student tickets to live performances will be fully subsidized. Students enrolling in this course should be prepared to attend events on the following dates: Saturday, February 2; Friday, February 22; Thursday, March 21; Sunday, April 7.
Bechdel, Alison: Fun Home: A Family Tragicomedy; Hejinian, Lynn: 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.
This class was added to the spring '19 lineup of English Department courses on October 17.
Conrad, Joseph: Heart of Darkness
Films to be screened will be chosen from the following:
Battle of Algiers (Director: Gillo Pontecorvo, Italy/USA) Release Date: 1967
The Mission (Director: Roland Joffe, UK) RD: 1986
Mangal Pandey (Director: Ketan Mehta, India) RD: 2005
Burn! (Director: Gillo Pontecorv, (Italy) RD: 1970
Lawrence of Arabia (Director: David Lean (UK) RD: 1962
Moolaade (Director: Ouseman Sembene, Senegal) RD: 2004
Apocalypse Now (Director: Francis Ford Coppola, USA) RD: 1979
Chocolat (Director: Claire Denis, France) RD: 1969
Mississippi Masala (Director: Mira Nair, USA/India) RD: 1991
A Dry White Season (DirectorEuzhan Palcy, USA/Martinique) RD: 1989
The Reluctant Fundamentalist (Director: Mira Nair, USA/India) RD: 2012
The Constant Gardener (Director: Fernando Meirelles, UK) RD: 2005
Rangoon (Director: Vishal Bhardwaj, India) RD: 2017
The Sand Pebbles (Director: Robert Wise, U.S.) RD: 1966
This course will examine a series of films that focus on the nature and structure of Western colonialism and (post)colonialism. We will study the different forms of colonialism, as depicted from various perspectives, as well as the social, political, economic, and aesthetic valences that constitute the long history of colonialism. In this course I am particularly interested in films that critique the (post)colonial enterprises and structures rather than films that just happen to be located in (post)colonial settings. Among such films, the vast majority are films directed and produced from a Western (Euro-American) perspective; unfortunately, the vast majority of the non-Western films are less interested in such critiques and more preoccupied with depicting other aspects of non-Western cultural preoccupations. Nevertheless, the course will incorporate films that are non-Western critiques of colonialism, such as Moolaade, Mangel Pandey, Rangoon, etc.
Course requirement: Final course grade will be based on one group report, one paper, and a final exam – see details below:
1). Each student is required to post a brief comment about each film on the discussion page on bCourses. These comments will be graded P/NP.
2). A group (of about 4 people, depending on class size) will be required to present a research report on any aspect of postcolonial cinema not covered in the course. We will discuss the constitution of the groups, the possible topics, and the nature of the reports early in the first week of classes. Reports will constitute 25% of the final grade.
3). One paper (about 2400 words) on one of the topics to be assigned. The paper will constitute 40% of the final grade.
4). A final exam (in class on the designated exam day/time), which will constitute 35% of the final grade.
N.B. consistent failure to post regular comments on the films will count against your final grade.
Texts: In addition to the Joseph Conrad novel, Heart of Darkness, texts will consist of articles posted on bCourses (under files) and the films listed above.
The television situation comedy has been one of the most durable, wide-ranging, and successful genres of popular culture of all time. Its narrative forms (such as the “will they/won’t they” romance that depends on the televisual mode of serialization) have become premises of everyday life; its stage-set cinematography is instantly recognizable; even the sound editing (historically organized around the bizarre and coercive rhythms of a “laugh track”) has profoundly changed the way we experience the sound of words. In this class, we will critically assess the characteristic formal and aesthetic features of a genre too rarely subjected to scholarly analysis, and even more rarely to the kind of close reading we will practice here. Working across the full chronological range of sitcoms in English, from the screwball comedies of the postwar period, through to the high-concept star vehicles of the present, we will watch several episodes of different sitcoms each week, and each week focus on a recurring theme. How do sitcoms balance the competing demands of family, friendship, and erotic emplotment? How does the serial form enable, or else impede, the sitcom’s ability to represent reality? How realistic are sitcoms, anyway – and how have their various relations to realism shifted from the stage-set/laugh-track shows of the 1950s, to the deadpan mockumentaries of the 2000s? What does the American sitcom have to say, finally, about the post-1945 period’s emerging ideas about love, drugs, race, sex, youth, community, secularism, capitalism, gender, wealth, Christmas, family, and time?
Each week we will watch a total of six episodes of television, and class will entail two lectures and one discussion session. The episodes will be drawn from:
| 30 Rock | Fresh Off the Boat | The Monkees |
| The Addams Family | The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air | New Girl |
| Amos ‘n’ Andy | Friends | Parks and Recreation |
| Arrested Development | Full House | Punky Brewster |
| The Beverly Hillbillies | Home Improvement | The Office |
| The Big Bang Theory | I Love Lucy | Roseanne |
| Bob’s Burgers | It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia | Sanford and Son |
| BoJack Horseman | It’s Garry Shandling’s Show | The Simpsons |
| The Brady Bunch | The Good Place | South Park |
| Brooklyn Nine-Nine | The Jeffersons | Taxi |
| Community | The Larry Sanders Show | Third Rock from the Sun |
| The Cosby Show | Leave It To Beaver | Tom Goes to the Mayor |
| The Dick Van Dyke Show | Louie | Veep |
| Dinosaurs | Married… With Children | Welcome Back, Kotter |
| Don’t Trust the B– In Apartment 23 | Mary Kay and Johnny | Who’s the Boss |
| Drawn Together | The Mary Tyler Moore Show | Will and Grace |
| Ellen | M*A*S*H* | |
| Episodes | Master of None | |
| Family Guy | Meet the Wife | |
| Family Matters | Mister Ed |
Dante: Inferno; Dante: Purgatorio; Dante : Paradiso; Homer: The Iliad; Homer: The Odyssey; Milton, John: Paradise Lost; Pound, Ezra: Cantos of Ezra Pound--on bspace; Vergil: The Aeneid
I am convinced that the classical epic is crucial for a literary education whatever field you specialize in—for the profound encounters it offers, for the intensity and vivacity of the memorable scenes the works construct, and for the range of influences and challenges it has created for subsequent writers of all periods in Western Literature. I am mainly interested in how the authors achieve a deep sense of human experience by which the past becomes present and we expand our appreciation of how literature engages life for fairly large populations. These texts present passsionate states based in publically significant emotions which in my view show the best that literary imaginations have been able to create. I love this material and am convinced I can help you get to the same commitment. But despite this love I will abridge Paradise Lost and perhaps the Aeneid. There will be two papers totaling 10 pages and a final. Midterm is possible. I expect regular attendance.
This course satsifies the pre-1800 requirement for the English major.
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).
This course has been canceled (Jan. 7, 2019).
Dick, Philip K.: Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?: (the inspiration for the films Blade Runner and Blade Runner 2049); Ghosh, Amitov: The Calcutta Chromosome: A Novel of Fevers, Delirium & Discovery; Ishiguro, Kazuo: Never Let Me Go; Jemisin, N. K.: The Fifth Season (The Broken Earth); LaValle, Victor: The Ballad of Black Tom; Saadawi, Ahmed: Frankenstein in Baghdad; Wells, H. G.: The Island of Doctor Moreau
This course will examine in depth the history of speculative fiction and its engagement with the thematics and topoi of the new life sciences—representation of cloning, ecological dystopias, hybrid life-forms, genetic engineering dystopias. While science is the thematic point of departure of speculative fiction, the concerns of this course will be the literary. How does literature's encounter with the projected realities of the new biology revise our conceptions of the subjecct? Could there be a Leopold Bloom of the genetically engineered, a subject whose interior voice is the free-flowing expression of experience? Behind the endless removes of social, material, and technological mediation lies the construction of a flesh and blood body, separated from itself through the workings of consciousness. If indeed the post/modern subject requires a psychic space shaped by the authenticity of "being," a consciousness deeply rooted in the human experience, then how do we represent that being whose point of origin is the artificial, the inauthentic? These are some of the questions to be addressed in this course. You may of course bring others.
Please note the revised book list (as of October 8).
Cronin, Anthony: No Laughing Matter: The Life and Times of Flann O'Brien.; O'Brien, Flann: At Swim-Two-Birds ; O'Brien, Flann: The Best of Myles; O'Brien, Flann: The Dalkey Archive ; O'Brien, Flann: The Hard Life ; O'Brien, Flann: The Poor Mouth ; O'Brien, Flann: The Third Policeman
Course reader
In this seminar, we will explore the comic, satirical, and genre-crossing writings of Flann O’Brien/Myles na gCopaleen/Brian O’Nolan. We will examine him as an heir to modernist innovation, starting with his novels and moving on to his newspaper column, Cruiskeen Lawn, which we will read in anthology and through the ProQuest archive. With the aid of intertexts ranging from Dion Boucicault’s stage-Irish play, The Colleen Bawn, through Thomás Ó Criomhthain’s Gaeltacht memoir, The Islander, to Eamon De Valera’s radio addresses and 1937 Constitution of Ireland, we will situate O’Brien’s writing within the shifting discourse of Irish national identity. However, we will also consider his writing alongside Anglophone modernist fiction and poetry as well as DADA, BLAST, and Surrealist manifestos.
This exploration of O’Brien thus opens onto larger questions of late modernism, postmodernism, and the avant-garde, as well as of postcolonial literature and, more generally, the relation between aesthetics and politics. Accordingly, readings will include Andreas Huyssen, Tyrus Miller, Gayatri Spivak, Homi Bhabha, Fredric Jameson, Peter Bürger, Mikhail Bakhtin, Theodor Adorno, and Walter Benjamin.
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.
Trans people are not a novelty. A desire to change sex, or else the fact of an individual whose sex has changed, is depicted in some of the most canonical texts of the literary canon: from the Metaphorphoses of Ovid, through the cross-identifications of Shakespearean comedies, through the plastic and dissenting flesh of the novels of Charles Dickens, to the primacy of castration and penis envy in the sexual theories of Sigmund Freud. Though these highly authoritative elaborations of trans desire and embodiment were not, generally, written by people who underwent social or medical transitions, nonetheless they have conditioned the lives of trans men and women, who have written out their desires and experiences in terms they did not set out for themselves.
In this class, we will critically examine the interactions between these canonical explorations of changeable sex (also: Gore Vidal, Virginia Woolf, and the TV show Transparent) and the self-exploration of transsexual writers who did undergo social and/or medical transition: writers such as Earl Lind, Poppy Z Brite, Janet Mock, and Leslie Feinberg. We will also examine the marginal cases of authors for whom literary writing itself was a kind of gender transition—figures like George Eliot, for example, who used a masculine pseudonym throughout a long career. Students will develop their own detailed research projects on trans authors and their generic and political contexts.
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.
Baldwin, James: Another Country; Baldwin, James: Giovanni's Room; Baldwin, James: Go Tell It on the Mountain; James, Henry: The Ambassadors; James, Henry: The Beast in the Jungle; James, Henry: The Portrait of a Lady
James Baldwin never made a secret of the importance of Henry James to his creative life. The numerous quotations, echoes, and nods to James sprinkled throughout Baldwin’s writings all but directly invite us to think of James as we read Baldwin’s work. The two certainly shared a great deal in life and art, having chosen European exile and then turned that exile into a major theme within their art. Our contemporary bias for self-disclosure might predispose us to the view that Baldwin felt he found a fellow queer writer in James; however, James’s reticence on such matters means that “queer” (if it should signify anything) names the moment when the relationship gets awkward.
This class will explore the major themes these writers share as well as queer “sensibilities” that, always deniable if not always denied, may or may not be there—the many effects, both dramatic and formal, that keep us at a loss for knowledge of our subject, i.e., reticence, renunciation, opacity, bewilderment, and belated recognition.
We will read three novels by each author. By James: The Portrait of a Lady, The Beast in the Jungle, The Ambassadors. By Baldwin: Go Tell It on the Mountain, Giovanni’s Room, Another Country. Both writers also produced a vast number of essays and short stories; we will read selections from their wider oeuvre.
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.
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.
Augustine of Hippo: Confessions; Borroff, Marie, ed.: Pearl; Chaucer, Geoffrey: The Canterbury Tales (eds. Kolve and Olson); Julian of Norwich: Revelations of Love (ed. Windeatt); Shakespeare, William: Hamlet (eds. Greenblatt, et al.)
The following texts will be made availabe via bCourses:
"Soul and Body I" (Shippey, Poems of Wisdom)
"The Dream of the Rood" (Treharne, Old and Middle English English)
Seinte Margarete (Millett and Wogan-Brown, Medieval English Prose for Women)
Ancrene Wisse, selection (Millett and Wogan-Brown, Medieval English Prose for Women)
John Donne, selection (Dickson, John Donne's Poetry)
Medieval feminist scholar Carolyn Dinshaw has argued that the body is "a field on which issues of representation and interpretation are literally and metaphorically played out" ("Eunuch Hermeneutics," 27). This research seminar seeks to account for acts of bodily exploration and violation as forays into such a hermeneutic field. The works that we weill read include diverse modes of carnal apprehension in the Middle Ages and Early Modern period–from a poem voiced by a bloody Anglo-Saxon cross to Hamlet's bloody thoughts, from texts about dead virgin bodies to violated/-latable ones, in which female speakers present their bodily trauma as a privileged form of knowledge about class and gender inequalities. In these and other texts, how is knowledge of the body newly grasped through (for instance) intimate observation, suffering, or intrusion? How are these processes implicated in the knowledge-work of texts and textual genres? How are medieval and early modern thinkers' bodies implicated in the knowledge they produce?
A selection of secondary source texts will provide critical context and starting points for our class conversations. Students will be required to write a research paper and to give an oral presentation on one of the assigned readings. An annotated bibliography and prospectus worksheet will be required steps to the writing process. There will be no midterm or final.
This section of English 190 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.
This section of English 190 was canceled on November 2.
Please click here for more information about enrollment in English 190.
Poe, Edgar Allan: The Selected Writings of Edgar Allan Poe
Two essays (seven pages and thirteen pages) will be required, along with regular attendance and participation in discussion.
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.
Chesnutt, C.: Conjure Tales and Stories of the Color Line; Douglass, F.: The Portable Frederick Douglass; Keckley, E.: Behind the Scenes, or Thirty Years a Slave, and Four Years in the White House; Lee, M.: The Cambridge Companion to Frederick Douglass; Lincoln, A.: The Portable Abraham Lincoln; Prince, M. : The History of Mary Prince; Samuels, S.: The Cambridge Companion to Abraham Lincoln; Walker, D.: David Walker's Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World
Photocopied reader
We will read works by Douglass, Lincoln, their contemporaries, and their modern interpreters, taking up issues of literature, biography, politics, race, gender, and style and also debates about slavery, Civil War, and Reconstruction, then and now. Course requirements include oral presentations and a substantial research paper (20-25 pages) written in stages across the semester.
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.
Dickinson, Emily: Poems (ed. Franklin); Dickinson, Emily: Selected Letters (ed. Johnson)
Further readings will be collected in our course reader, available at Krishna Copy (University and Milvia) by our first class meeting.
This seminar will provide you with a sustained reading course in the poetry of Emily Dickinson, my favorite poet. We’ll begin with her early poetry, and trace her evolution into the singular poet we read today, with particular attention to her hymn forms and her figures. We’ll also consider how her poems might be read in relation to history and her biography. Since Dickinson wrote most of her poetry in the span of a few years, we’ll group and read her poems largely by topics. Our topics will include love and gender, definition and riddle, poetics, nature, religion, death and dying, suspense, horror, loneliness, exaltation and despair, self in society and by itself, abolition and war. We’ll also delve into her manuscripts of individual poems, packets of poems, and letters. Especially with her later poems, the distinctions between verses, poems, and letters become hazy. To gauge Dickinson’s singularity and commonness, we will also read poems and essays by her contemporaries (e.g., Lydia Sigourney, Ralph Emerson, Henry Longfellow, Helen Hunt Jackson). Your first paper will be a reading of a single poem. Your seminar paper will gather a collection of poems on a topic of your choosing, in conversation with recent criticism. By the end of the seminar, you will be reading and writing on Dickinson with pleasure and brilliance. (No kidding!)
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.
Cather, Willa: A Lost Lady; Cather, Willa: Collected Stories; Cather, Willa: Death Comes for the Archbishop; Cather, Willa: My Antonia; Cather, Willa: O Pioneers!; Cather, Willa: Sapphira and the Slave Girl; Cather, Willa: The Professor's House
Two essays (seven pages and thirteen pages) will be required, along with regular attendance and participation in discussion.
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.
Course Reader
British and American cinema experienced a renaissance in the 1960s, when it arguably surpassed the literature of its time in artistic ambition and achievement. We’ll be exploring a wide range of film genres and topics throughout the period, including the Swinging London of A Hard Day’s Night and Blow-Up, spy thrillers such as Dr. No and The Manchurian Candidate, the civil rights movement and In the Heat of the Night, film adaptations of literary classics such as Women in Love, and the social satire of The Graduate.
The movies will be made available to the class as streaming video, although I hope that we will be able to find time for several screenings we can view together. There will be a course reader but no textbooks.
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 a continuation of H195A section 1, taught by Janet Sorensen in Fall 2018. No new students will be admitted. No new application needs to be submitted. Prof. Sorensen will give out permission codes in class in November.
No new texts are required for this class.
This course is a continuation of H195A section 2, taught by Elizabeth Abel in Fall 2018. No new students will be admitted. No new application needs to be submitted. Prof. Abel will give out permission codes in class in November.
No new texts are required for this class.
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?