Announcement of Classes: Spring 2020

All-Courses Lists
Reading and Composition
Lower Division
Upper Division
Graduate
Berkeley Connect
DeCals
Independent Study

Course #		Instructor	Course Area
R1A/1 Reading and Composition: The Novel and Mass Culture MWF 9-10	Contemporary discussions of novel-reading tend to characterize it as a refined, scholarly pursuit, more closely aligned with going to the symphony or visiting an art museum than with watching TV. Yet the novel’s place in the pantheon of high cultural ...(read more)	Kaletzky, Marianne	Reading and Composition
R1A/2 Reading and Composition: American Satire (from Gentlemen Prefer Blondes to Sorry to Bother You) MWF 10-11	This course will focus on longform narrative satire (read: novels, movies, and possibly a play or two) produced in the U.S. from the 1920s to just about now. Northrop Frye has defined satire as "militant irony"; a study of this most militant of fictio...(read more)	O'Brien, Garreth	Reading and Composition
R1A/3 Reading and Composition: Exiles and Everyday Life MWF 11-12	“Even intellectuals who are lifelong members of society can, in a manner of speaking, be divided into insiders and outsiders: those on the one hand who belong fully to the society as it is, who flourish in it without an overwhelming sense of dissonanc...(read more)	Khan, Mehak Faisal	Reading and Composition
R1A/4 Reading and Composition: Reason and Superstition in the Nineteenth Century MWF 12-1	Nineteenth-century Britain was the setting for a dazzling array of scientific discoveries and technological innovations, from the advent of electric lighting and photography to the formulation of new theories of evolution and disease to the extension ...(read more)	Kaletzky, Marianne	Reading and Composition
R1A/5 Reading and Composition: Victorian Vampires MWF 1-2	The figure of the vampire is constantly being reinvented, but it is always able to feed on our collective imagination. From Buffy the Vampire Slayer to Twilight to What We Do in the Shadows, vampires pursue us—and we can’t get enough. We often look ba...(read more)	Hobbs, Katherine	Reading and Composition
R1A/6 Reading and Composition: (Un)Belonging Bodies and Citizenship MWF 1-2	Our bodies—even if we might claim them as our own—are far from neutral, as they carry embedded signals, texts, and even silences that reflect our multiple social positionings. This course explores narratives of embodiment, considering how bodies can r...(read more)	Cho, Jennifer	Reading and Composition
R1A/7 Reading and Composition: Love and Its Discontents in Shakespeare’s England MWF 2-3	Why are star-crossed lovers so romantic? How innocent is a love potion that makes a fairy queen fall madly in lust with a man who is part donkey? Just how heteronormative is a play in which the crossdressed heroine remains in masculine garb even when ...(read more)	Rice, Sarah Sands	Reading and Composition
R1A/8 Reading and Composition: Identity as Performance MW 5-6:30	“All the world’s a stage, And all the men and women merely players.” —As You Like It, Act II Sc. VII We often hear people say that actions speak louder than words. We express our identities, who we are, through our actions, our performances, our...(read more)	Ghosh, Srijani	Reading and Composition
R1A/9 Reading and Composition: (Un)Belonging Bodies and Citizenship MWF 12-1	Our bodies—even if we might claim them as our own—are far from neutral, as they carry embedded signals, texts, and even silences that reflect our multiple social positionings. This course explores narratives of embodiment, considering how bodies can r...(read more)	Cho, Jennifer	Reading and Composition
R1B/1 Reading and Composition: Re-Visioning the "Sixties" MWF 9-10	This Reading and Composition course will focus on selected speeches, poetry, fiction, music, and visual art produced during the 1960s. In addition to providing a set of broad critical, aesthetic and historical issues to engage over the course of the s...(read more)	Koerner, Michelle	Reading and Composition
R1B/2 Reading and Composition: Plain Girls MWF 10-11	"Do you think I am an automaton?—a machine without feelings? …Do you think, because I am poor, obscure, plain, and little, I am soulless and heartless?” Published in 1847, Jane Eyre was unlike any novel published before. It tells the story of a wom...(read more)	Eisenberg, Emma Charlotte	Reading and Composition
R1B/3 Reading and Composition: Narrative in Poetry, Poetry in Narrative MWF 10-11	Poetry is among the oldest technologies humans have for preserving and distributing stories. While other media—film, prose fiction, gaming—seem to deliver many of our tales now, narrative in poetry persists and thrives in our time as a powerful elemen...(read more)	Nathan, Jesse	Reading and Composition
R1B/4 Reading and Composition: Re-Visioning the "Sixties" MWF 11-12	This Reading and Composition course will focus on selected speeches, poetry, fiction, music, and visual art produced during the 1960s. In addition to providing a set of broad critical, aesthetic and historical issues to engage over the course of the s...(read more)	Koerner, Michelle	Reading and Composition
R1B/5 Reading and Composition: From Islands to Images, Thinking-Objects in the Sea of History MWF 11-12	Beginning with Shakespeare’s The Tempest, and passing through other works of literature from Elizabeth Bishop’s Geography III and Herman Melville’s Benito Cereno to Aimé Césaire’s Notebook on a Return to My Native Land and C.L.R. James’s Black Jacobin...(read more)	Robinson, Jared	Reading and Composition
R1B/6 Reading and Composition: Narrative in Poetry, Poetry in Narrative MWF 12-1	Poetry is among the oldest technologies humans have for preserving and distributing stories. While other media—film, prose fiction, gaming—seem to deliver many of our tales now, narrative in poetry persists and thrives in our time as a powerful elemen...(read more)	Nathan, Jesse	Reading and Composition
R1B/7 Reading and Composition: Reading and Writing the Digital MWF 12-1	In this course, we will survey the production, consumption, and study of literary texts in the digital age. Starting with a unit on writers’ relations to their writing technologies, we will explore the moral panics and forms of resistance ...(read more)	Zeavin, Hannah	Reading and Composition
R1B/9 Reading and Composition: Hollywood Babylon—The Art of the Episodic in TV and Lit MWF 1-2	In this course we pull out the guts of stories to try and understand how storytellers craft works that grip us. In the process we examine classic attempts to say what makes good storytelling and put to the test the idea that any story has certain “rul...(read more)	Walter, David	Reading and Composition
R1B/10 Reading and Composition: Reading and Writing the Digital MWF 1-2	In this course, we will survey the production, consumption, and study of literary texts in the digital age. Starting with a unit on writers' relations to their writing technologies, we will explore the moral panics and forms of resistance prompted by ...(read more)	Zeavin, Hannah	Reading and Composition
R1B/11 Reading and Composition: Renaissance Revenge Tragedy MWF 1-2	The War of the Roses (1455 - 85) inaugurated the Tudor dynasty as it dramatically demonstrated that internal violence posed an existential threat to the English nation. As the sixteenth century became increasingly marked by religious and political war...(read more)	Drawdy, Miles	Reading and Composition
R1B/12 Reading and Composition: Hollywood Babylon—The Art of the Episodic in TV and Lit MWF 2-3	In this course we pull out the guts of stories to try and understand how storytellers craft works that grip us. In the process we examine classic attempts to say what makes good storytelling and put to the test the idea that any story has certain “rul...(read more)	Walter, David	Reading and Composition
R1B/13 Reading and Composition: Final Frontiers: America and Beyond MW 5-6:30	Who said it better—American newspaper magnate Horace Greeley ("go west, young man") or Captain Jean-Luc Picard of the Starship Enterprise ("space...the final frontier")? Both appeals are iconic, but which more effectively coaxes us to think of expansi...(read more)	Ramm, Gerard	Reading and Composition
R1B/14 Reading and Composition: Early American Technology MW 5-6:30	The era of the American Revolution and Early Republic was also a time of rapid innovation in science and industry. It was arguably America’s first technology boom. This course explores the place of technology in early American culture, specifically it...(read more)	de Stefano, Jason	Reading and Composition
R1B/15 Reading and Composition: Collectives TTh 8-9:30	Literary writing often presents us with profound forms of individual, subjective life—the "I" of the lyric poet, the well-developed character of the realist novel. What opportunities are there, however, for the writer who wants instead to focus on the...(read more)	Bernes, Jasper	Reading and Composition
R1B/16 Reading and Composition: Speculative (Non)Humans: Science Fiction and Its Lively (Im)Possibilities TTh 5-6:30	As the sometimes all-too-plastic forms that influence and are influenced by the social and technological systems around them, living beings—in their human, animal, plant, and other manifestations—remain a source of great fascination, celebration, and ...(read more)	Tomasula y Garcia, Alba	Reading and Composition
R1B/17 Reading and Composition: Radical Berkeley TTh 5-6:30	This course will focus first and foremost on developing the skills necessary to research, plan, draft and revise writing at a college level. You will hone these skills through an exploration of the extraordinary history of Berkeley itself. Berkeley ha...(read more)	Sutton, Emily	Reading and Composition
R1B/18 Reading and Composition: Searching for Answers: Coming-of-Age Novels into the 21st Century MW 9-10:30	To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf (1927); Oreo, Fran Ross (1974); Fun Home, Alison Bechdel (2006); Long Division, Kiese Laymon (2013) Short critical theory excerpts will be distributed by the instructor. Who are you? What are you looking for? Th...(read more)	Baker-Gibbs, Ariel	Reading and Composition

Course #		Instructor	Course Area
24/1 Freshman Seminar: Emily Dickinson W 4-5	We will be reading and discussing 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. ...(read more)	Wagner, Bryan	Freshman Seminars
24/2 Freshman Seminar: Cults in Popular Culture Tuesdays 2-3	We are fascinated by cults. What is it about communities and groups that promise total belief and total enthrallment that so captures the imagination? This course will look at a range of representations of cults in popular culture—from the documentary...(read more)	Saha, Poulomi	Freshman Seminars
26/1 Literature In English: Introduction to Poetry MW 5-6:30	What is poetry and why should we care? This course offers an introduction into poetry by discussing a wide range of poems written or translated into English as well as definitions and theories of poetry from Aristotle to the present. We will attend to...(read more)	Marno, David	Poetry
27/1 Introduction to the Study of Fiction MWF 11-12	We will immerse ourselves in the extraordinary and influential literary career of Edgar Allan Poe: poetry, tales, satires, and essays. We will examine Poe’s work in relation to mid-nineteenth-century short fiction by Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melvil...(read more)	Otter, Samuel	American Literature Novel
28/1 Introduction to the Study of Drama TTh 9:30-11	The work of this class will be to understand the drama as literature in company. Lots of other literary forms make claims about what social life is like, and strive to act upon the social life of their readers beyond the reading experience. But the dr...(read more)	Landreth, David	Drama
43B/1 Introduction to the Writing of Verse TTh 3:30-5	This course serves an introductory creative writing workshop where participants will write, revise, and discuss their original works of poetry in a collaborative group setting. Through a series of writing prompts, technical exercises in form and meter...(read more)	Ritland, Laura	Creative Writing Workshops
45A/1 Literature in English: Through Milton Lectures MW 2-3 in 180 Tan (note new location) + one hour of discussion section per week in 301 Wheeler (sec. 101: F 2-3; sec. 102: F 3-4; sec. 103: Thurs. 10-11; sec. 104: Thurs. 11-12)	This is a story of discovering, then forgetting, then discovering again the fact that a particular language can be used not only for communication but also for creation. At the beginning of our story Caedmon, a shepherd, is called upon in his dream to...(read more)	Marno, David	Introductory Surveys Middle English Renaissance and Early Modern
45B/1 Literature in English: Late-17th Through Mid-19th Centuries Lectures MW 12-1 in 60 Evans + one hour of discussion section per week in different locations (sec. 101: F 12-1; sec. 102: F 1-2; sec. 103: Thurs. 9-10; sec. 104: Thurs. 10-11; sec. 105: F 12-1; sec. 106: F 1-2)	This course is a survey of British and American literature from the late-seventeenth through the mid-nineteenth century. We will look at how literary genres evolve alongside new forms of knowledge, understanding, and experience, with particular atten...(read more)	Tamarkin, Elisa	Introductory Surveys
45C/1 Literature in English: Mid-19th Through the 20th Century Lectures MW 10-11 in 159 Mulford + one hour of discussion section per week in different locations (sec. 103: Thurs. 1-2; sec. 104: Thurs. 2-3; sec. 105: F 10-11; sec. 106: F 11-12)	This class aims to introduce students to a wide range of literary writing composed in English since 1850, providing introductory-level access to the historical and formal problems that literature has raised. Rather than aim for anything like coverage,...(read more)	Lavery, Grace	Introductory Surveys
80K/1 Children's Literature: The Bad Seed: Monstrosity, Horror, and the Inhuman in Children’s Literature TTh 12:30-2	From cannibalistic witches in the tales of the Grimm Brothers to sadistic parents in Roald Dahl, children's literature is riff with terrifying and troubling figures. This class will look at the forms of monstrosity, deviance, and horror that appear in...(read more)	Saha, Poulomi	British 19th-Century British 20th- and 21st-Century American Literature
84/1 Sophomore Seminar: Film Noir and Neo-Noir Tuesdays 9-12	An analysis of some classic American crime films and some recent examples of the genre. This 2-unit course may not be counted as one of the twelve courses required to complete the English major. ...(read more)	Bader, Julia	Sophomore Seminars

Course #		Instructor	Course Area
104/1 Introduction to Old English TTh 12:30-2	This course is aimed at beginners, whether graduate* or undergraduate, familiarizing them with the principles and practice of linguistic decoding and the grammar and vocabulary of, primarily, Old English prose: historiographical (histories), hagiograp...(read more)	Miller, Jennifer	Pre-1800 Requirement Old English
114B/1 English Drama from 1603 to 1700 TTh 2-3:30	Reaching across the upheavals of the seventeenth century, this class studies the triumphant age of drama after Shakespeare, the Jacobean period; the reactions against the drama that led to the closing of London's theaters during the English Civil War ...(read more)	Landreth, David	Pre-1800 Requirement Renaissance and Early Modern
115B/1 The English Renaissance (17th Century) TTh 3:30-5	An introduction to one of the great ages of English literature, focusing on works by John Donne, Ben Jonson, George Herbert, Thomas Hobbes, Andrew Marvell, John Milton, Robert Herrick, Margaret Cavendish, Katharine Phillips. We will discuss the relati...(read more)	Kahn, Victoria	Pre-1800 Requirement Renaissance and Early Modern
117S/1 Shakespeare Lectures TTh 4-5 in 3 LeConte (note new location) + one hour of discussion section per week in 300 Wheeler (sec. 101: F 9-10; sec. 102: F 11-12; sec. 103: F 12-1; sec. 104: F 2-3)	What makes Shakespeare Shakespeare? We’ll search for answers to that question through the astonishing variety of Shakespeare’s plays. We’ll explore the ways that Shakespeare develops plot and character in his drama, as well as the literary, social, ...(read more)	Knapp, Jeffrey	Shakespeare
118/1 Milton Lectures MW 2-3 in (note new room:) 243 Dwinelle + one hour of discussion section per week in different locations (sec.101: F 1-2; sec. 102: F 2-3)	We'll explore John Milton's career, a lifelong effort to unite intellectual, political, and artistic experimentation. Required Text: John Milton, The Complete Poetry and Essential Prose of John Milton, ed. William Kerrigan, John Rumrich, and Stephe...(read more)	Picciotto, Joanna M	Pre-1800 Requirement Renaissance and Early Modern
125A/1 The English Novel (Defoe through Scott) MWF 1-2	The period from which our reading draws has been credited with the “rise of the novel”—the emergence of the then new genre, the “novel,” so familiar to us today. While critics have qualified and revised that claim, the texts we’ll read do experiment w...(read more)	Sorensen, Janet	Pre-1800 Requirement British 18th-Century Novel
125C/1 The European Novel TTh 9:30-11	In The Theory of the Novel, Georg Lukacs writes, “The novel form is, like no other, an expression of transcendental homelessness.” This course will survey the history of the European novel in the context of “rootlessness” and “estrangement”—“rootless...(read more)	Jones, Donna V.	Novel
125C/2 The European Novel: The Many Faces of the 19th-Century European Novel TTh 2-3:30	The novel emerged as the principal literary genre in 19th-century Europe and has continued to dominate the literary market in Europe and North America ever since. What were the constitutive formal elements as well as social and psychological concerns ...(read more)	Golburt, Lyubov	British 19th-Century World Literature Novel
125E/1 The Contemporary Novel Lectures MW 9-10 in 20 Wheeler (note new location) + one hour of discussion section per week in different locations (sec. 101: F 9-10; sec. 103: F 10-11)	While the novel has a rich and storied past, its newness—its NOVEL-ty—is built into its very name. In this course, we will consider the innovations, formal and otherwise, through which the novel continues to surprise and engage us in the 21st century....(read more)	Snyder, Katherine	Novel
126/1 British Literature, 1900-1945 Lectures TTh 2-3 in 20 Barrows + one hour of discussion section per week in 305 Wheeler (sec. 101: F 2-3; sec. 102: F 3-4)	In this course, we will examine British and Irish literature from the turn of the twentieth century through the aftermath of World War II. This was a period of tremendous turmoil and thoroughgoing change in Britain, Ireland, and the world. Looking at ...(read more)	Falci, Eric	British 20th- and 21st-Century Novel Poetry
127/1 Modern Poetry MWF 1-2	This course will be a general survey studying the major writers and stylistic experiments that have shaped contemporary poets' understanding of their heritage. We will go into depth on particular poems but will not be very attentive to the shape of o...(read more)	Altieri, Charles F.	Poetry
130A/1 American Literature: Before 1800 TTh 11-12:30	This course surveys the literatures of early America, from the tracts that envisioned the impact of British colonization to the novels that measured the after-shock of the American Revolution. Throughout, we will consider colonial America as a place ...(read more)	Donegan, Kathleen	Pre-1800 Requirement American Literature
132/1 American Novel MWF 2-3	This survey of the American novel begins with a somnambulist whose surprisingly violent rambles in the summer of 1787 raise questions about responsibility for the land theft that undergirded the emergent nation. It ends with a twenty-first-century Nig...(read more)	McWilliams, Ryan	American Literature Novel
133A/1 African American Literature and Culture Before 1917 MW 5-6:30 PM	This course explores African American literary history from its beginning in the eighteenth century to the turn of the twentieth century, interpreting major works in the context of slavery and its aftermath. We will reflect on the complex relationship...(read more)	Wagner, Bryan	American Literature African American Literature
135AC/1 Literature of American Cultures: American Hustle Lectures TTh 4-5 in 140 Barrows + one hour of discussion section per week in 305 Wheeler (sec. 101: F 12-1; sec. 102: F 1-2)	This course, which constitutes a survey of ethnic American literature, asks about the desires, imagination, and labor that go into the American dream. What is the relationship between immigration and dreams of upward mobility in America? This course w...(read more)	Saha, Poulomi	American Cultures American Literature African American Literature Asian American Literature Chicanx and/or Latinx
C136/1 Topics in American Studies: American Culture in the Age of Obama MW 5-6:30	This course traces, across many forms of American culture, what might be called “the Obama effect.” Writer Ta-Nehisi Coates has suggested that the election of Obama prompted a renaissance of black writing, in part by stimulating “curiosity about the c...(read more)	Saul, Scott	American Literature African American Literature
137T/1 Topics in Chicanx Literature and Culture: Chicanx Novels MWF 1-2	This course will focus exclusively on the study of Chicanx novels. The themes and formal features in these novels have been influenced to a large degree by a broad range of social experiences: living in the borderlands of nationality, language, politi...(read more)	Gonzalez, Marcial	American Literature Chicanx and/or Latinx Novel
141/1 Modes of Writing (Exposition, Fiction, Verse, etc.) MW 5-6:30	We'll study some of the ways that fiction writers, essayists, story-tellers, and poets have responded to the worlds that their cultures have built. We'll read published work by our predecessors and by contemporary writers (including Maxine Hong Kings...(read more)	Giscombe, Cecil S.	Creative Writing Lecture Courses
143A/1 Short Fiction MW 9-10:30	The aim of this course is to explore the genre of short fiction—to discuss the elements that make up the short story, to talk critically about short stories, and to become comfortable and confident with the writing of them. Students will write two sh...(read more)	Abrams, Melanie	Creative Writing Workshops
143A/2 Short Fiction TTh 2-3:30	This course is a workshop that focuses on writing and revising short fiction. We will also read published short stories and other literary work to see how writers craft effective stories. We will examine the essentials of voice, character, setting, st...(read more)	Rowland, Amy	Creative Writing Workshops
143B/1 Verse MW 1:30-3	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 ...(read more)	Shoptaw, John	Poetry Creative Writing Workshops
143B/2 Verse TTh 2-3:30	As some would have it, the field of verse can be organized into poems and non-poems, poets and non-poets. In this schema poets are individuals who bear responsibility for the asethetic choices that produce poems, and poems are things that instruct and...(read more)	Matuk, Farid	Creative Writing Workshops
143N/1 Prose Nonfiction: Personal Essay TTh 12:30-2	This class will be conducted as a writing workshop to explore the art and craft of the personal essay. We will closely examine the essays in the assigned anthology, as well as students’ exercises and essays. Writing assignments will include three sh...(read more)	Kleege, Georgina	Creative Writing Workshops
145/1 Writing Technology: Science Fiction Lectures MW 11-12 in 3 Leconte + one hour of discussion section per week in different locations (sec. 101: F 11-12; sec. 102: F 11-12; sec. 103: F 12-1; sec. 104: F 12-1)	This introductory course considers an overlap among the disciplines of English, Computer Science, and Data Science—British and American narratives that revolve around technology. We'll look at visual and verbal texts from the early twentieth century t...(read more)	Serpell, C. Namwali	Introductory Surveys British 20th- and 21st-Century American Literature Creative Writing Lecture Courses
160/1 Methods and Materials of Literary Criticism Thurs. 2-5	In this course, we will look at some major moments in and read some major works of literary criticism written in English. Beginning with Sir Philip Sidney’s “The Defence of Poesy” and moving through writing by William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleri...(read more)	Puckett, Kent	Literary Theory
165/1 Special Topics: Elegy, Mourning, and the Representation of the Holocaust MW 3-4:30	After World War II, the German writer Theodor Adorno famously commented that it is “barbaric” to continue to write poetry after Auschwitz, because any attempt to convert extreme suffering into aesthetic image or form commits an injustice against the v...(read more)	Goodman, Kevis	Poetry Special Topics
165/2 Special Topics: Enlightenment & Romance: Scotland in the 18th Century MWF 10-11	Eighteenth-century Scotland was home both to the so-called Scottish Enlightenment, one of the advanced civil societies in the Atlantic world, and to the beginnings of the global movement of taste and feeling later to be called Romanticism. Here were i...(read more)	Duncan, Ian	Pre-1800 Requirement British 18th-Century Special Topics
165/3 Special Topics: On Lies, Lying, and Post-Truths--A Reading- and Writing-Intensive Investigation W 3-6	Read a newspaper, listen to the news or a podcast, scan social media—lies are everywhere. The subject of much intellectual debate, social and political anxiety, and ethical and psychological consternation, lies are hard to grasp and capture, contain a...(read more)	Nadaff, Ramona	Special Topics
165/4 Special Topics: Family Histories from the Margins TTh 3:30-5	This seminar will explore the fraught status of families in literature and what it means to write about one’s own family. The family has generated a diverse range of literary and textual forms, from the list of “begats” in the book of Genesis to the f...(read more)	Wilson, Evan	British 19th-Century American Literature African American Literature Novel Special Topics
165AC/1 Special Topics in American Cultures: Ethnicity, Religion and Literature TTh 11-12:30	This class will explore how 20th- and 21st-century American prose fictions have imagined the relationship between religion and ethnicity. Our first questions will be formal: How do different formal choices allow these writers to render different forms...(read more)	Fehrenbacher, Dena	American Cultures American Literature African American Literature Asian American Literature Chicanx and/or Latinx Native American Literature Novel Special Topics
166/2 Special Topics: The Literature & Art of Incarceration MWF 11-12	This is a course on the literature of incarceration variously defined and experienced across a range of control systems that attempt to stunt the entire human being. I want to think about the forms of suppression, confinement, and the humiliations of ...(read more)	Padilla, Genaro M.	American Literature African American Literature Asian American Literature Chicanx and/or Latinx Native American Literature Special Topics
166/3 Special Topics: Moby-Dick TTh 11-12:30	Baroque, intense, and demanding, Moby-Dick richly rewards all the attention a reader can muster. We will delve in as slowly as we can in order to cultivate the intellectual receptivity that Melville hoped for in his readers, becoming attuned to the su...(read more)	Breitwieser, Mitchell	American Literature Novel Special Topics
166/4 Special Topics: Pomo: Exploring the Landscape of Postmodernism TTh 3:30-5	Postmodernism is one of those peculiar words, like "nonfiction," that struggles to define something by what it is not. Or rather, in this case, by what it comes after: Postmodernism was what came after modernism. In this seminar we'll attempt to go be...(read more)	Danner, Mark	British 20th- and 21st-Century American Literature Novel Special Topics
166/5 Special Topics: American Humor: Books & Movies Note slightly revised time: Tues. 5-8 PM	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 constru...(read more)	Starr, George A.	American Literature Special Topics
166/6 Special Topics: Art of Writing: Grant Writing, Food Writing, Food Justice Lectures MW 12-1 in 122 Barrows + one hour of discussion section per week in different locations (sec. 101: F 12-1; sec. 102: F 12-1)	This course will help students develop writing skills through intensive focus on the demands of two very different modes: popular and creative food writing (essay, poetry, travel, memoir, manifesto), and grant-writing. Reading and thinking together ab...(read more)	Schweik, Susan	Special Topics
166/7 Special Topics: Arthurian Romance TTh 2-3:30	King Arthur and his Round Table together constitute one of the most enduring imaginative inventions in the European literary tradition. In the modern era, writers and artists have created Arthurian plays, films, poems, novels, cartoons, paintings, and...(read more)	Nolan, Maura	Pre-1800 Requirement Old English Middle English Special Topics
172/1 Literature and Psychology: Literature and Therapy Lectures MW 1-2 in 2060 Valley LSB + one hour of discussion section per week in different locations (sec. 101: F 1-2; sec. 102: F 2-3; sec. 103: W 3-4; sec. 104: W 4-5; sec. 105: F 9-10; sec. 106: F 10-11)	The originator of the “talking cure,” Sigmund Freud, placed a great deal of faith in the capacities of literature: both to depict and figure psychic problematics for a reader, and to transform an author’s own neurotic condition into art. One credible ...(read more)	Lavery, Grace	Literary Theory Special Topics
177/1 Literature and Philosophy: Reading Capital MW 10:30-12	Marx's Capital stands as one of the foundational texts of modern critical theory. Some acknowledge openly the debts owed to Marx's critique of political economy and of the capitalist mode of production; others consider the obligations odious. Between ...(read more)	Lye, Colleen	Special Topics
180A/1 Autobiography: Disability Memoir Lectures TTh 3:30-4:30 in 300 Wheeler + one hour of discussion section per week in different locations (sec. 101: F 12-1; sec. 102: F 2-3)	This course will examine autobiography as a literary genre. We will survey the history of the genre and consider such questions as: How is reading autobiography like/unlike reading fiction? How do the truth claims made by autobiographies shape readers...(read more)	Kleege, Georgina	Special Topics
180H/1 The Short Story TTh 11-12:30	This course will be a survey of the short story from the 19th century to the present: its historical and cultural contexts, its formal and stylistic properties. We’ll consider the short story’s predecessors, the work of its major practitioners, and th...(read more)	McFarlane, Fiona	World Literature Special Topics
180L/1 Lyric Verse MWF 11-12	This course will survey lyric poetry in English from the Renaissance to the present, with an emphasis on pre-modern work. I am mostly interested in two aspects of the work. The first is understanding how lyric can define different complete modes of se...(read more)	Altieri, Charles F.	Poetry
180N/1 The Novel: Intimates and Strangers: Henry James, J.M. Coetzee and the Ethics of Otherness MW 5-6:30	Henry James (1843-1916) and J.M. Coetzee (b.1940), born just about a century apart, share a view of novel writing as an inquiry into the ethics of inter-personal relations. Both fiction writers favor plots that initiate an ethical crisis by throwing ...(read more)	Hale, Dorothy J.	Novel
180T/1 Tragedy MWF 12-1	An ancient (if not foundational) genre in the western literary tradition, tragedy is the one most closely linked with key religious and philosophical questions, due to its concern with catastrophic misfortune, suffering and fatality in human life. The...(read more)	Duncan, Ian	Drama Special Topics
180Z/1 Science Fiction TTh 12:30-2	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 scie...(read more)	Jones, Donna V.	Novel Special Topics
190/1 Research Seminar: Ecopoetry and Ecopoetics MW 10:30-12	Ecopoetry – nature poetry that is environmental and environmentalist – is an international twenty-first century movement. But in the nature poetry and poetics of the United States it has deep and wide-spread roots. This seminar will explore this mov...(read more)	Shoptaw, John	American Literature Poetry Literary Theory Research Seminars
190/2 Research Seminar: William Faulkner’s Temporalities MW 12-1:30	Jean-Paul Sartre has famously compared Faulkner’s sense of time to “a man sitting in a convertible and looking back.” From this perspective, Sartre contends, the only view is that of the past, made “hard, clear and immutable” in its isolation. Yet if...(read more)	Hale, Dorothy J.	American Literature Novel Research Seminars
190/3 Research Seminar: American Romanticism MW 3-4:30	The course offers a close engagement with major U.S. authors before the Civil War. We will work across literary genres—poetry, essays, novels, and autobiographies—while asking questions about the conditions in which these genres appeared, their reade...(read more)	Tamarkin, Elisa	American Literature Research Seminars
190/4 Research Seminar: Poetry and the Virtues MW 5-6:30	Arguments for the moral value of literary study often focus on how narrative forms like the novel offer opportunities for the cultivation of empathy. But in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, literary style itself was treated as an extension of ...(read more)	Picciotto, Joanna M	Pre-1800 Requirement Renaissance and Early Modern American Literature Poetry Research Seminars
190/5 Research Seminar: British Fiction Since 1945 TTh 9:30-11	This research seminar will survey the British novel (broadly construed) since 1945. Topics of discussion will likely include: realism and alternatives to realism; formal experimentation and novel psychology; race, immigration, and empire; feminism; An...(read more)	Gang, Joshua	British 20th- and 21st-Century Novel Research Seminars
190/6 Research Seminar: Hollywood in the Thirties TTh 12:30-2	Our subject will be Hollywood cinema from the birth of talking pictures to the start of World War II. We'll sample the extraordinary range of films that Golden-Age Hollywood offered its consumers: from gangster pictures and screwball comedies to melo...(read more)	Knapp, Jeffrey	Film Literary Theory Research Seminars
190/7 Research Seminar: Jane Austen TTh 2-3:30	Close readings of several of Jane Austen's major works. Two essays (seven pages and thirteen pages) will be required, along with regular attendance and participation in discussion. ...(read more)	Breitwieser, Mitchell	Research Seminars
190/8 Research Seminar: James Joyce TTh 3:30-5	This seminar will focus on James Joyce’s landmark modernist novel, Ulysses. In preparing to tackle the text, we will read Homer’s Odyssey, some of Joyce’s early writings, and parts of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. The majority of the semest...(read more)	Flynn, Catherine	British 20th- and 21st-Century Novel Research Seminars
190/9 Research Seminar: Victorian Versification TTh 3:30-5	The Victorian period (1837-1901) is striking for its social, political, economic, technical and scientific developments that seem at once old-fashioned and recognizably modern. Its formal poetic achievements are no exception to this characterization....(read more)	Hanson, Kristin	English Language and Linguistics British 19th-Century Poetry Research Seminars
190/10 Research Seminar: Modern California Books and Film Thurs. 5-8:30 PM	Besides reading and discussing fiction and essays that attempt to identify or explain distinctive regional characteristics, this course will include consideration of various movies shaped by and shaping conceptions of California. Writing will consist ...(read more)	Starr, George A.	American Literature Research Seminars
H195B/1 Honors Course MW 5-6:30	This course is a continuation of English H195A, taught by Mark Goble in Fall 2019. No new students will be admitted, and no new application needs to be submitted. Prof. Goble will give out permissions codes in class in November. No new texts are r...(read more)	Goble, Mark	Honors and Tutorial Courses
H195B/2 Honors Course TTh 2-3:30	This course is a continuation of English H195A, taught by Elizabeth Abel in Fall 2019. No new students will be admitted, and no new application needs to be submitted. Prof. Abel will give out permission codes in class in November. No new texts are ...(read more)	Abel, Elizabeth	Honors and Tutorial Courses

Graduate students from other departments and exceptionally well-prepared undergraduates are welcome in English graduate courses (except for English 200 and 375) when space permits. Please contact the instructor if you have questions.

Course #		Instructor	Course Area
203/1 Graduate Readings: Contemporary Fiction MW 12-1:30	In reading contemporary fiction, we might do worse than to begin by asking "what is the contemporary?" This is partly a question about time: what is the scale, duration, and position in history of the contemporary? Is the contemporary best understood ...(read more)	Snyder, Katherine	Graduate Courses
203/2 Graduate Readings: Modernist Fiction and Affect TTh 11-12:30	This course is designed to function as an introduction to two fields, one literary-historical, and one critical: Anglo-American modernist fiction, and affect theory. We’ll read a selection of both “high modernist” and lesser-known novels of the early ...(read more)	Zhang, Dora	Graduate Courses
203/3 Graduate Readings: Comedy and Violence TTh 12:30-2	What relation does comedy have to violence? Can humor be a gauge of political freedom? This transhistorical seminar will examine the relation between comedy and violence in Irish, English and French texts from the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries....(read more)	Flynn, Catherine	Graduate Courses
203/4 Graduate Readings: The Lyric Eye: A Material History of Poetic Form Thurs. 3:30-6:30	This course will investigate the material history of poetic form in England—the ways in which the formal features of poems are visually articulated in surviving books and manuscripts—from the pre-Conquest period to the printing of Tottel's Miscellany ...(read more)	Miller, Jennifer	Graduate Courses
217/1 Shakespeare: Tragedy, etc. TTh 9:30-11	We will focus on Shakespeare's peculiar approach to tragedy (he broke every rule in the book), but we won't focus obsessively: we will also give sustained attention to Shakespere's representation of citizenship, compassion, artificial persons, poverty...(read more)	Arnold, Oliver	Graduate Courses
243A/1 Fiction Writing Workshop MW 1:30-3	The purpose of this workshop is to begin to write a novel or a story collection. It is unlikely that you will finish writing either in the three months we spend together. Fiction takes time. There are some reported exceptions to this, but given that t...(read more)	Serpell, C. Namwali	Creative Writing Workshops Graduate Courses
243B/1 Poetry Writing Workshop W 3-6	Studies in contemporary poetic cases will focus our discussions of each other's poems. Only continuing UC Berkeley graduate students (and upper-division students with considerable writing experience) are eligible to apply for this course. To be con...(read more)	O'Brien, Geoffrey G.	Creative Writing Workshops Graduate Courses
246G/1 Romantic Period TTh 2-3:30	This course on the Romantic “period” will consider periods of time as they are imagined, experienced, or enacted in some characteristic genres: song, prophecy, lyrical ballad, romance, letter, fragment, travel journal, periodical review, historical no...(read more)	Langan, Celeste	Graduate Courses
246H/1 Victorian Period F 9-12	In this course we will approach the literature and culture of the Victorian period through its poetry and poetics. We'll read a lot of both in order to do three related things. First, we'll consider the idea of the literary as it was embodied in the f...(read more)	Puckett, Kent	Graduate Courses
250/1 Research Seminar: Ways of Knowing, Ways of Representing in Eighteenth-Century English Fiction M 3-6	In this course we will read the early English fiction once associated with "the rise of the novel" with a view to the strategies this writing deployed to address new epistemological challenges. An expanding empire, an urbanizing nation (recently trans...(read more)	Sorensen, Janet	Graduate Courses
250/2 Research Seminar: Black Cultures of Gender and Sexuality Tues. 3:30-6:30	This seminar, offered in collaboration with the Department of African American Studies and co-taught with Professor Darieck Scott, explores theories and cultures of gender and sexuality from the perspective of black diasporic people. We will focus on ...(read more)	Ellis, Nadia	Graduate Courses
250/3 Research Seminar: Critique of Capitalism, or Reading Marx Now W 3-6	Since the 2008 financial crisis, there has been a marked revival of interest in Marx and his thought, one that compares to the late 60s and early 70s return to Marx. How is the present day return to Marx a different one from that of global 1968? Today...(read more)	Lye, Colleen	Graduate Courses

BERKELEY CONNECT: Would you like to get together with your peers to talk about literature and books? Are you wondering what to do with your English major once you graduate? Do you want to hear about the books that most influenced your English professors? Do you want expert advice about which courses to take? Would you like to see your favorite professors debating about a great work of literature? If so, please join Berkeley Connect!

Berkeley Connect in English fosters community in the English Department and offers a space for “serious play”: small group discussions about ideas and texts, explorations of the many riches of the Berkeley campus, visits by department faculty and distinguished alumni, and one-on-one advice on courses and graduate programs from graduate students and professors.

Individual Berkeley Connect groups (each with about 15-20 students) meet every other week for one hour of “serious play.” On the off weeks, your graduate student mentor will hold office hours so that you can talk individually about issues important to you. Some of the small group meetings will be informal discussions of a range of literary issues, while others involve visits to places around campus (such as the Berkeley Art Museum and the Bancroft Library). On other weeks we will meet as a large group to hear from distinguished alumni, or to listen to Berkeley English professors talk about their own paths into literary study or debate key books in their field with other professors.

Berkeley Connect in English is intended for students who have taken classes in English and are interested in taking more. There are no essays, papers, exams, or outside reading for Berkeley Connect, just lots of good discussion, valuable advice, and all sorts of “serious play.” Although this is not a traditional course, each participant will enroll in and earn one unit for group independent study (as English 98BC or 198BC, on a Pass/NP basis). The program is not meant to offer extra help or tutoring on things like the mechanics of paper-writing or literary analysis; rather, it aims at providing a more relaxed and fun way to make the best of your Berkeley experience.

Berkeley Connect in English sections: English 98BC sections 1-2 are intended for lower-division (freshmen and sophomore) students. English 198BC sections 1, 3, and 6 are intended for continuing upper-division students; section 5 is intended for new junior transfer students; and sections 2 and 4 are intended for both.

Though Berkeley Connect may be repeated for credit, students may enroll in no more than one section of Berkeley Connect in English in a given semester. Moreover, a Berkeley Connect class may not be taken in more than two departments in the same semester.

DE-CAL CLASSES: All proposals for Spring 2020 De-Cal courses must be submitted at the front desk in the English Department main office (322 Wheeler) BY 4:00 P.M., THURSDAY, OCTOBER 31 (not the later date that is listed on the Academic Senate's website as the final date for departments to submit copies of the proposals to them). Please note that individual faculty members may sponsor only one De-Cal course per semester. Students wishing to offer a De-Cal course must provide, to the English Department office, the following for approval: 1) a carefully completed COCI Special Studies Course Proposal Form, available at: academic-senate.berkeley.edu/committee/coci/339, for 198 classes. Students must download and complete the newest version of this form and obtain the proposed faculty sponsor’s signature on it before submitting it, along with the other necessary paperwork; 2) a copy of the fully developed syllabus of the proposed course; 3) a copy of the course description, including the criteria for passing the course; 4) a completed Unit Value Worksheet; and 5) the faculty sponsor's letter of support. (Also make sure that you have completed the training requirement for student facilitators; the Undergraduate Course Faciliator Training & Resources [UCFTR] program hosts multiple trainings across each semester.) A few days after the October 31 submission deadline, the students whose proposals have been approved by the Department Chair will be notified that they need to see Laurie Kerr, in 322 Wheeler, in order to arrange for a classroom for their course and to work out a few other details before the submission of copies of their proposals to COCI (for its final approval) and to the De-Cal office.

INDEPENDENT STUDY COURSES: These are instructor-approved courses and require a written application, available from 319 Wheeler. Applications should be signed by the instructor and returned by the student to 319 Wheeler. Students will be emailed the class number that they will use to enroll in the class on Cal Central. Often students will elect to wait until spring courses have started to apply for independent study courses.