Announcement of Classes: Spring 2021

All-Courses Lists
Reading and Composition
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Course #		Instructor	Course Area
R1A/1 Reading and Composition: Four Nobelists - Great Writers of the Last One Hundred Years MWF 9-10	One survived World War II in Poland. Another hailed from a small island in the eastern Caribbean, an outpost on the verge of breaking free of Europe's colonial grip. One was born to a people burdened and ravaged by centuries of enslavement. Another gr...(read more)	Nathan, Jesse	Reading and Composition
R1A/2 Reading and Composition: (Un)Belonging Bodies and Citizenship MWF 10-11	Our bodies – even if we might claim them as our own – are far from neutral, as they carry embedded signals, scripts, and even silences that reflect our unique social positions. This course explores narratives of embodiment, considering how bo...(read more)	Cho, Jennifer	Reading and Composition
R1A/3 Reading and Composition: Allegory and Experience in American Literature. MWF 11-12	The century that spans 1820 to 1920 witnesses the formation of American literature as we know it. Just on the heels of the war of 1812, the America of this century takes its hard-fought independence and heads west to war with Mexico: revising its foun...(read more)	Robinson, Jared	Reading and Composition
R1A/4 Reading and Composition: Five Ways of Looking at a Poem MWF 12-1	In this course we will move through and across the history of poetry, focusing on poems and poetry through a set of open categories: Character, Identity, Form, Community and Sound. These open categories will be the lenses through which we interpret a ...(read more)	Swensen, Dana	Reading and Composition
R1A/5 Reading and Composition: Sports, Politics, and Protest MWF 1-2	Playing fields might be designed to separate winners from losers, but they have recently become sites where privilege and disenfranchisement collide in volatile ways. In response, some have argued that sports should be a field apart: an escape that tr...(read more)	McWilliams, Ryan	Reading and Composition
R1A/6 Reading and Composition: Borderline Crooks MWF 1-2	A plague-ridden Thebes, an Indian reservation, a Rio slum, a U.S.-Mexico border town, the LA hood, a California women's prison. These are the settings for our examination of characters who run up against obstacles—from within themselves, their familie...(read more)	Walter, David	Reading and Composition
R1A/7 Reading and Composition: Collectives MWF 2-3	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
R1A/8 Reading and Composition: Global Nineteenth-Century Literatures MW 5-6:30	This class examines how nineteenth-century novelists, poets, diarists and essayists try to "think globally" in a globalizing world. We will see how their individual stories and ideas participate in much larger narratives--narratives of imperial conque...(read more)	Viragh, Atti	Reading and Composition
R1B/1 Reading and Composition: Girls, Misunderstood?: “Deviant” Women in Literature MWF 9-10	Recent psychological thrillers such as The Woman in the Window and The Girl on the Train have made the figure of the unreliable female narrator-cum-protagonist very popular, and the plots of these stories are driven by the seeming mental inst...(read more)	Ghosh, Srijani	Reading and Composition
R1B/2 Reading and Composition: How Words Do Things MWF 10-11	When we speak of language, it is usually in terms of what it says, what it means, what it might imply or suggest. What if we ask instead what words do: what can, or should words do, and what can we do with them? What is a speech act, and is there a ...(read more)	Vinyard Boyle, Elizabeth	Reading and Composition
R1B/3 Reading and Composition: War Writing: What Is It Good For? MWF 10-11	It is commonplace to conceive of the war writer—whether journalist, memoirist, novelist, or poet—as a dispeller of fictions and purveyor of cold, hard truths about the "reality" of warfare. Yet writers themselves have often questioned the written word...(read more)	Furcall, Dylan	Reading and Composition
R1B/4 Reading and Composition: Against the Theatre MWF 11-12	What’s in a theatre? A stage, props, audiences, actors, devices— all sustained by a general acceptance that what happens on stage is not “real.” While the theatre’s composition has remained largely stable over time, the last few centuries hav...(read more)	Ogunniyi, Kevin	Reading and Composition
R1B/5 Reading and Composition: Audio Texts: Reading and/as Listening Since 1930 MWF 11-12	“Every book is already an audiobook,” argue Matthew Rubery and Christopher Cannon in their “Introduction” to the 2020 PMLA forum on “Aurality and Literacy.” Their statement is meant to signify the double ontology of the codex: how textuality and orali...(read more)	Ullman, Alex	Reading and Composition
R1B/6 Reading and Composition: What Is Literature? MWF 12-1	What is literature? According to the literary theorist Jonathan Culler, the answer is simple if a 5-year-old is asking: literature is stories, poems, and plays. But what if university students are asking? In this course, we’ll ask the question for our...(read more)	Wang, Jacob	Reading and Composition
R1B/7 Reading and Composition: Self-Multiplicity and Bildung MWF 12-1	How does a first-person narrator relate and relate to herself as a character amongst other characters? How is the narration of one’s individual growth dependent upon a synchronization with and outpacing of the environment that has produced oneself? Wh...(read more)	Yniguez, Rudi	Reading and Composition
R1B/8 Reading and Composition: Down the Rabbit Hole MWF 12-1	Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and its sequel, Through the Looking-Glass, have wormed their way into how we talk and think about fantasy. In this course, we'll read these works along with some of their many adaptations and reimaginings for the light...(read more)	O'Brien, Garreth	Reading and Composition
R1B/9 Reading and Composition: Caribbean Poetry In and Out of English MWF 1-2	In this course, we will be reading the work of a wide range of Caribbean poets. Most of the poetry will have been written in English, some of it translated from French or Spanish; some of it in "correct" English, but much of it written in local dialec...(read more)	Dunsker, Leo	Reading and Composition
R1B/10 Reading and Composition: Robert Frost MWF 1-2	"Improvement will not be a progression but a widening circulation.” This course will study the works and thinking of Robert Frost, a poet of deceptive fame who, by seeming to need no introduction, needs an introduction at least a semester long. We ...(read more)	Laser, Jessica	Reading and Composition
R1B/11 Reading and Composition: LGBTQ and Chicanx Literature and Cultural Work MWF 1-2	In this course, we will explore literatures that explore LGBTQ and queer themes in Chicanx/Latinx cultural work. In our approaches to the course material, we will consider the interrelationships between art and activism. How can not explicitly activi...(read more)	Trevino, Jason Benjamin	Reading and Composition
R1B/12 Reading and Composition: The Novel as Cultural Form MWF 2-3	In this class, we will read two classic novels: Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847) and Jean Rhys’s postcolonial response to it, Wide Sargasso Sea (1966). As we read, we will consider the relationship between literary form and culture. How do novels r...(read more)	Struhl, Abigail	Reading and Composition
R1B/13 Reading and Composition: Re-Visioning the "Sixties" MW 5-6:30	This Reading and Composition course will focus on selected speeches, 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 ...(read more)	Koerner, Michelle	Reading and Composition
R1B/14 Reading and Composition: Girls, Misunderstood?: “Deviant” Women in Literature TTh 8-9:30	Recent psychological thrillers such as The Woman in the Window and The Girl on the Train have made the figure of the unreliable female narrator-cum-protagonist very popular, and the plots of these stories are driven by the seeming mental instability o...(read more)	Ghosh, Srijani	Reading and Composition
R1B/15 Reading and Composition: Re-Visioning the "Sixties" TTh 5-6:30	This Reading and Composition course will focus on selected speeches, 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 semester,...(read more)	Koerner, Michelle	Reading and Composition
R1B/16 Reading and Composition: Haunted Nation: Studies of American Horror TTh 5-6:30	Why do monsters, ghosts, and other supernatural embodiments continue to haunt us? What feeds our cultural desires and refusals to be “spooked” by otherworldly visitors who point to unfinished business and unresolved crises? This course examin...(read more)	Cho, Jennifer	Reading and Composition

Course #		Instructor	Course Area
24/1 Freshman Seminar: Some Essays by Emerson Wednesdays 4-5	A close reading and open discussion of a few of Ralph Waldo Emerson's most interesting and puzzling essays. The instructor will post PDFs of all reading assignments. The students will post brief comments on the assigned reading in bCourses and attend ...(read more)	Breitwieser, Mitchell	Freshman Seminars
24/2 Freshman Seminar: Emily Dickinson Tuesdays 1-2	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. ...(read more)	Wagner, Bryan	Freshman Seminars
24/3 Freshman Seminar: Nineteenth Century Fiction and the Boundaries of the Human Mondays 2-3	Dramatic advances in science in the 19th century transformed English understanding of the nature of man and his place in the universe. Theories of evolution, discoveries in the fossil record, advances in electrochemistry, new theories of the mind all ...(read more)	Christ, Carol T.	Freshman Seminars
24/4 Freshman Seminar: Cults in Popular Culture Tuesdays 4-5	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 Introduction to the Study of Poetry MW 5-6:30	In this course we’ll read poems together, intensively, across a long historical span, a variety of contexts (cultural, philosophical, political), and a wide range of modes, forms, genres, styles and techniques. We’ll respond to poems, analyze them, li...(read more)	Schweik, Susan	Poetry
43A/1 Introduction to the Writing of Short Fiction MW 3-4:30	This is an introductory workshop that focuses on writing and revising short fiction. We will also read published short stories and other literary work to see how writers handle the essentials of voice, character, setting, structure, point of view, con...(read more)	Rowland, Amy	Creative Writing Workshops
43A/2 Introduction to the Writing of Short Fiction MW 3:00-4:30	Class description to come.	Wilson, Mary
45A/1 Literature in English: Through Milton Lecture MW 9-10 + one hour of discussion section per week (sec. 101: F 9-10; sec. 102: F 10-11; sec. 103: F 12-1; sec. 104: F 1-2)	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...(read more)	Landreth, David	Introductory Surveys
45B/1 Literature in English: Late-17th through Mid-19th Centuries Lectures MW 2-3 + one hour of discussion section per week (sec. 101: F 10-11; sec. 102: F 11-12; sec. 103: F 1-2; sec. 104: F 2-3; sec. 105: Thurs. 10-11; sec. 106: Thurs. 11-12)	Readings in prose fiction, poetry and autobiography from the British Isles and the Atlantic world from 1688 through 1850: a century and a half that sees the formation of a new, multinational British state, with the political incorporation of Scotla...(read more)	Duncan, Ian	Introductory Surveys
45C/1 Literature in English: Mid-19th through the 20th Century Lectures MW 11-12 + one hour of discussion section per week (sec. 101: F 10-11; sec. 102: F 11-12; sec. 103: F 12-1; sec. 104: F 1-2; sec. 105: Thurs. 1-2; sec. 106: Thurs. 2-3)	This course will survey Anglophone literature from the mid-nineteenth century through the mid-twentieth. We will evoke some of the key aesthetic, cultural, and socio-political trends that characterized the movements of modernity as we closely investig...(read more)	Falci, Eric	Introductory Surveys
84/1 Sophomore Seminar: Hitchcock M 10-12	This course will focus on the Hitchcock oeuvre from the early British through the American period, with emphasis on analysis of cinematic representation of crime, victimhood, and the investigation of guilt. Our discussions and critical readings will c...(read more)	Bader, Julia	Sophomore Seminars

Course #		Instructor	Course Area
110/1 Medieval Literature: Love in the Middle Ages MWF 10-11	Set aside the stereotypes: there’s more to medieval love than gallant knights and fair maidens. In this course, we'll traverse the many ways one could write about love before 1400. Some medieval authors cultivated divine love, while others told dirty ...(read more)	Strub, Spencer	Pre-1800 Requirement Middle English Poetry
112/1 Middle English Literature MW 5-6:30	For more information on this course, please contact Professor Miller at j_miller@berkeley.edu. This course satisfies the pre-1800 requirement for the English major. ...(read more)	Miller, Jennifer	Pre-1800 Requirement Middle English
117S/1 Shakespeare Lectures TTh 1-2 + one hour of discussion section per week (sec. 101: F 11-12; sec. 102: F 12-1; sec. 103: F 1-2; 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 Drama Poetry
119/1 Literature of the Restoration and the Early 18th Century TTh 11-12:30	The period from the “Restoration” of Charles II (1660) to the death of Alexander Pope (1744) produced the last poems of Milton, the first English pornography and feminist polemic, the most devastating satires ever written, influential novels like Robi...(read more)	Turner, James Grantham	Pre-1800 Requirement British 18th-Century
120/1 Literature of the Later 18th Century TTh 3:30-5	We’ll investigate the relationship of literature to other arts in the period, particularly painting and landscape design. Our focus will be on engagements with “nature,” understood as the non-human world and the ground of culture. In this period, natu...(read more)	Picciotto, Joanna M	Pre-1800 Requirement British 18th-Century
121/1 The Romantic Period: Romantic Voices MWF 11-12	"Thou hast a voice, great Mountain, to repeal/ Large codes of fraud and woe..." --P.B. Shelley, "Mont Blanc" Romanticism has long been identified with democratic revolutions of the late 18th century, with the social demand that every citizen have a...(read more)	Langan, Celeste	British 18th-Century British 19th-Century Poetry
125B/1 The English Novel (Dickens through Conrad) TTh 9:30-11	In this course we will read novels that were written from the 1840s through the end of the nineteenth century, a period that is marked by Britain’s growth as the first modern industrialized society and as an expansive colonial power. This was a period...(read more)	Banerjee, Sukanya	British 19th-Century Novel
125C/1 The European Novel: Desire and Form TTh 9:30-11	The genre of the novel is named for its capacity for novelty or imaginative invention. This course will examine spectacularly creative instances of fictional prose in the European novel from the fourteenth to the twentieth century. We will examine how...(read more)	Flynn, Catherine	Novel
126/1 British Literature, 1900-1945 Lectures TTh 2-3:30 + one hour of discussion section per week (sec. 101: F 1-2; sec. 102: F 2-3)	How did British and Irish literature change over the first half of the twentieth century? Was “modernism” a historical moment, an aesthetic movement, or a critical attitude—or some combination of the three? How did writers contend with upheavals such ...(read more)	Gang, Joshua	British 20th- and 21st-Century
130A/1 American Literature: Before 1800 Lectures TTh 1-2 + one hour of discussion section per week (sec. 101: F 1-2; sec. 102: F 2-3)	This course will offer a survey of the literature in English produced in North America before 1800: competing British versions of settlement; Puritan history, sermons, and poetry; conversion, captivity, and slave narratives; diaries, journals, essays,...(read more)	Otter, Samuel	Pre-1800 Requirement American Literature
130C/1 American Literature: 1865-1900 MW 5-6:30	A survey of major works of U.S. literature after the Civil War, with special attention to artistic experimentation in these years and to the rise of "realism" in literature. These decades put unprecedented faith in ideals of progress and individualis...(read more)	Tamarkin, Elisa	American Literature
133T/1 Topics in African American Literature and Culture: The African American Essay MWF 11-12	Readers of James Baldwin, W. E. B. DuBois, Ralph Ellison, Zora Neale Hurston, and other writers, often turn to their essays with a mind to better understanding their novels and other literary writing. In this course we will consider the African-Ameri...(read more)	Best, Stephen M.	Literatures in English American Literature African American Literature
133T/2 Topics in African American Literature and Culture: The Art of the Black Diaspora TTh 9:30-11	The black diaspora is, amongst other things, a literary tradition: a complex, cross-generic set of texts produced by black writers located in almost every nation across the globe, equal in complexity and variation to the modern concept of race that is...(read more)	Ellis, Nadia	Literatures in English African American Literature World Literature
134/1 Contemporary Literature: Contemporary British Fiction (and a few films) Lectures TTh 11-12 + one hour of discussion section per week (sec. 103: F 11-12; sec. 104: F 12-1)	This course will examine British novels and films from the past thirty years--from roughly 1990 through the present. Topics of discussion will include: the legacies of empire, World War II, Thatcherism, and New Labor; the erosion of the welfare state;...(read more)	Gang, Joshua	British 20th- and 21st-Century Novel Film
138/1 Studies in World Literature in English: (Post)Colonial Fiction TTh 11-12:30	This course will examine some British colonial novels within the socio-political-economic context of late British colonialism and some (post-)colonial novels written after the devolution of formal British colonialism. Texts will be chosen from t...(read more)	JanMohamed, Abdul R.	Literatures in English World Literature
141/1 Modes of Writing (Exposition, Fiction, Verse, etc.) TTh 12:30-2	This course will introduce students to the study of creative writing—fiction and poetry. 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...(read more)	Abrams, Melanie	Creative Writing Lecture Courses
143A/1 Short Fiction MW 10:30-12	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...(read more)	Chandra, Vikram	Creative Writing Workshops
143A/2 Short Fiction TTh 3:30-5	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
143B/1 Verse TTh 11-12:30	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 (verse); short and lo...(read more)	Shoptaw, John	Poetry Creative Writing Workshops
143B/2 Verse: The Migratory Ear: Listening as a Generative Strategy TTh 2-3:30	“…listen/to the sound/of the grass/as we speak/the sound/of the grass/is the poem/we are writing/together/as we speak” (Cecilia Vicuña, ed. and trans. Rosa Alcalá) What becomes possible when we listen differently, beyond the bounds of familiar ...(read more)	Hofer, Jen Eleana	Poetry Creative Writing Workshops
143N/1 Prose Nonfiction: Travel and Place MW 5-6:30	“Traveling, Thinking, Writing.” 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, begi...(read more)	Giscombe, Cecil S.	Creative Writing Workshops
153T/1 Topics in Asian American Literature and Culture: World, Nation, City TTh 9:30-11	This class (previously listed under "English 166/5" in Spring 2019) 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 phr...(read more)	Leong, Andrew Way	American Literature Asian American Literature
160/1 Methods and Materials of Literary Criticism TTh 2-3:30	If you're reading this, and you've done coursework in English or other languages and literatures, then you're probably a literary critic. You've written who knows how many critical, interpretive, or comparative essays with more close readings than you...(read more)	Leong, Andrew Way	Literary Theory
161/1 Introduction to Literary Theory TTh 12:30-2	This course explores the distinctive nature of “theory” as a twentieth-century approach to the study of literature. Our inquiry is organized around the major movements in the field: formalism, structuralism, deconstruction, Marxism, psychoanalysis, i...(read more)	Hale, Dorothy J.	Literary Theory
165/2 Special Topics: Utopian and (mostly) Dystopian Movies W 5-8	Most utopian and dystopian authors and film-makers are more concerned with persuading readers and viewers of the merits of their ideas than with the "merely" literary or artistic qualities of their work. Although utopias have sometimes made converts, ...(read more)	Starr, George A.	Film Special Topics
165/3 Special Topics: Popular Music and Social Critique TTh 9:30-11	At the onset of the Second World War, a Communist country music singer armed with an acoustic guitar demands the nation examine the consequences of a man-made climate crisis and pledges to destroy fascism both at home and abroad… A generation later, ...(read more)	Cruz, Frank Eugene	American Literature African American Literature Chicanx and/or Latinx Novel Poetry Special Topics
165/4 Special Topics: 21st-Century U.S. Poetry TTh 12:30-2	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 adve...(read more)	O'Brien, Geoffrey G.	American Literature Poetry Special Topics
165/5 Special Topics: Alrish TTh 2-3:30	This course will use both traditional and digital humanities methods to explore Irish drama from the eighteenth to the twenty-first centuries. Working through a series of historical periods, we will consider individual plays in their own right and aga...(read more)	Flynn, Catherine	Drama Special Topics
165/6 Special Topics: “Moments of Truth”: Narrating the Endings of Lies, Disinformation, and Deceit W 3-6	As a new year and new semester begins, we begin an investigation of the dawning of the age of post- “post-truth” or, to state it differently, of the various attempts (sometimes successful) to end the lies, lying, and liars of the 2016-2020 US Admini...(read more)	Ramona Naddaff	Special Topics
165AC/1 Special Topics in American Cultures: American Humor and Fictions of Race MWF 1-2	American humor practices have long been a means for bolstering fictions about race, ethnicity and identity, but they also have been a means for understanding, navigating, and challenging those fictions. This course will explore how a range of literary...(read more)	Fehrenbacher, Dena	American Cultures American Literature African American Literature Asian American Literature Special Topics
166/1 Special Topics: The Graphic Memoir TTh 11-12:30	A graphic novel is often defined as "a single-author, book-length work, meant for a grown-up reader, with a memoirist or novelistic nature, usually devoid of superheroes." Many comic artists, however, ridicule the term as a pretentious and disingenuou...(read more)	Wong, Hertha D. Sweet	American Literature Special Topics
166/3 Special Topics: Hemingway and Masculinity TTh 11-12:30	DIfficult to point to a more foundational American writer than Ernest Hemingway. Hemingway embodied a kind of balls-to-the-wall masculine energy that dominated American modernist fiction for decades of war and conflict. For more than fifty years the i...(read more)	Danner, Mark	American Literature Novel Special Topics
166/4 Special Topics: The Social Media of Literature MWF 12-1	We tend to think of literary composition as a solitary act, but this obscures all the labors of friends, peers, and other readers before a work ever makes it to print. What do social networks and social media do to literary composition, dissemination,...(read more)	Zeavin, Hannah	Special Topics
166/5 Special Topics: Anton Chekhov MWF 2-3	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 ...(read more)	Muza, Anna	World Literature Drama Special Topics
166AC/1 Special Topics in American Cultures: Literature in the Age of Extremes, 1900-1945 Lectures TTh 10-11 + one hour of discussion section per week (sec. 101: F 9-10; sec. 102: F 10-11; sec. 103: F 11-12; sec. 104: F 12-1)	The aim of this course will be to capture the aesthetic and political extremes of the twentieth century’s first half. We will examine conflicting efforts to bridge the boundary between art and life against the backdrop of two world wars and economic d...(read more)	Lee, Steven S.	Literatures in English American Cultures American Literature Special Topics
170/1 Literature and the Arts: Metamorphoses TTh 3:30-5	This course will explore literature through comparisons with other arts. We will focus on a few stories from Ovid’s Metamorphoses that have inspired transmutations into English literature and also into paintings, sculptures, and operas across differen...(read more)	Hanson, Kristin	Special Topics
174/1 Literature and History: The 1970s MWF 10-11	As one historian has quipped, it was the worst of times, it was the worst of times. “The ’70s” routinely come in for mockery: even at the time, it was known as the decade when “it seemed like nothing happened.” Yet we can see now that the ’70s was ...(read more)	Saul, Scott	American Literature Film Special Topics
176/1 Literature and Popular Culture: Medieval Futures MWF 1-2	We usually think of speculative fiction as forward-looking. But it’s no accident that the most popular modern sci-fi saga narrates the struggles of knights and monks “a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away”: even our most futuristic fantasies look...(read more)	Strub, Spencer	Special Topics
177/1 Literature and Philosophy: Reading Capital TTh 9:30-11	Why read the first volume of Capital more than 150 years after its initial publication in 1867? Not only is Marx being seriously and widely read again since the financial crisis of 2008, but Capital Vol. 1 in particular is considered his work most ap...(read more)	Lye, Colleen	Literary Theory Special Topics
180C/1 Comedy TTh 2-3:30	Tragedy has been deemed dead for nearly as long as it has existed. For some, it gave up its soul when philosophy appeared in ancient Greece. For others, it’s capitalism and action movies that killed it in the twentieth century. But while tragedy has b...(read more)	Marno, David	Special Topics
180H/1 The Short Story MWF 2-3	The lyf so short, the crafte so longe to lerne… -- Chaucer This course will investigate how authors craft stories, so that both non-writers and writers may gain a new perspective ...(read more)	Chandra, Vikram	Special Topics
180Z/1 Science Fiction TTh 2-3:30	“Not real can tell us about real.” This is one of the fundamental lessons learned by a new race of genetically engineered trans-humans in Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake. It is also one of the fundamental principles of the popular narrative genre kno...(read more)	Snyder, Katherine	World Literature Novel
190/1 Research Seminar: Literary Collaboration: Samuel Coleridge and William and Dorothy Wordsworth MW 5-630	We will study the poetry and prose that emerged from the remarkable collaboration (and competition) between William and Dorothy Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, written in the tumultuous decades around 1800. We will devote some of ou...(read more)	Goodman, Kevis	British 19th-Century Poetry Research Seminars
190/2 Research Seminar: The Art of Reconstruction MW 9-10:30	This course will explore the role and legacy of art in the most important project of American self-creation since the nation’s founding: the post–Civil War era known as Reconstruction. The diverse group of writers, painters, sculptors, and other artis...(read more)	de Stefano, Jason	American Literature African American Literature Research Seminars
190/3 Research Seminar: Fictions of Los Angeles MW 12-1:30	Los Angeles has been described, variously, as a "circus without a tent" (Carey McWilliams), "seventy-two suburbs in search of a city" (Dorothy Parker), "the capital of the Third World" (David Rieff), and "the only place for me that never rains in the ...(read more)	Saul, Scott	American Literature Novel Film Research Seminars
190/4 Research Seminar: Emily Dickinson MW 1:30-3	In this class we’ll concentrate on just one poet, Emily Dickinson, using her work as an occasion to think about how poetry and history get made, revised, codified, brought forward, pushed aside, theorized, contested, remixed and – since this is a rese...(read more)	Schweik, Susan	American Literature Poetry Research Seminars
190/5 Research Seminar: Climate Change Fiction, or Cli-Fi TTh 11-12:30	Contemporary fiction writers have increasingly been turning their gaze, and ours, toward global climate change, an accelerating environmental crisis of our own making. In this class, we will consider the rise of the literary genre known since 2008 as ...(read more)	Snyder, Katherine	Novel Research Seminars
190/6 Research Seminar: Black Postcolonial Cultures: Real and Imagined Spaces TTh 12:30-2	This research seminar explores black postcolonial cultures with an emphasis on texts that engage creatively with spatial constraint and possibility. Readings in theories of postcoloniality and diaspora as well as studies in questions of space, place, ...(read more)	Ellis, Nadia	African American Literature World Literature Literary Theory Research Seminars
190/7 Research Seminar: Ecopoetry and Ecopoetics TTh 2-3:30	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
190/8 Research Seminar: The Other Melville TTh 3:30-5	We will read widely across Herman Melville’s literary career, exclusive of Moby-Dick: South Sea romance (Typee), transatlantic novel (Redburn), short fiction (“Bartleby,” “Benito Cereno,” and more), Revolutionary War narrative (Israel Potter), Civil W...(read more)	Otter, Samuel	American Literature Novel Research Seminars
190/9 Research Seminar: Chicanx Literature, Art and Performance TTh 5-6:30	In this course, we will read the classics of Chicanx literature from the 1960s through the present. We will open with Jose Antonio Villareall's Pocho (1959), a novel of both immigrant and first generation experience in the U.S. and then we will move ...(read more)	Padilla, Genaro M.	American Literature Chicanx and/or Latinx Research Seminars
H195B/1 Honors Course TTh 9:30-11	This course is a continuation of English H195A, taught by Janet Sorensen in Fall 2020. No new students will be admitted, and no new application needs to be submitted. Prof. Sorensen will give out permission codes in class in November. No new texts ...(read more)	Sorensen, Janet	Honors and Tutorial Courses
H195B/2 Honors Course MWF 2-3	This course is a continuation of English H195A, taught by Celeste Langan in Fall 2020. No new students will be admitted, and no new application needs to be submitted. Prof. Langan will give out permission codes in class in November. No new texts ar...(read more)	Langan, Celeste	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
201B/1 Topics in the History of the English Language: A Linguistic Perspective on Variation and Change in a Modern English Metrical Tradition TTh 12:30-2	This course is not about the history of the English language itself, but rather about meter, conceptualized as a linguistic literary form with an internal history of its own, shaped by language and the mind’s capacity for language. The focus will be ...(read more)	Hanson, Kristin	Graduate Courses
203/1 Graduate Readings: Realism MW 10:30-12	Realism achieves critical mass in England in 1856: the year George Eliot turned to writing fiction. Reviewing Ruskin’s Modern Painters, Eliot comments: "The truth of infinite value that he teaches is realism – the doctrine that all truth and beauty ar...(read more)	Duncan, Ian	Graduate Courses
203/2 Graduate Readings: "A dream of passion": Affects in the Renaissance Theater MW 12-1:30	This class studies the production of feeling on and around the early modern stage. We'll consider a range of vocabularies for the experience of theatrical feeling, from Aristotle's theory of purgative pleasure, to the medical-ecological model of the h...(read more)	Landreth, David	Graduate Courses
203/3 Graduate Readings: Radical Enlightenment W 2-5	Channeling the voice of his own Enlightened despot, Kant’s famous answer to the question “What is Enlightenment?” included the chilling injunction to “argue as much as you want and about whatever you want, only obey!” In Foucault’s hands, the limit-se...(read more)	Goldstein, Amanda Jo	Graduate Courses
203/4 Graduate Readings: Philosophical Contexts for Modernist Poetry TTh 2-3:30	This course will concentrate on supplementary readings that help give context and significance to Modernist writing. It will begin with William James and F.H. Bradley on the concept of experience as an alternative to Romantic ideals of subjective exp...(read more)	Altieri, Charles F.	Graduate Courses
246D/1 The Renaissance: 17th Century Through Milton TTh 11-12:30	A straightforward survey of seventeenth-century literature, emphasizing breadth not depth and reading rather than writing. Poetry will be our focus, but we'll also sample some prophetic and political literature of the civil war period. Readings wil...(read more)	Picciotto, Joanna M	Graduate Courses
250/1 Research Seminars: Literature, Communism, Fascism Tues. 3:30-6:30	“Humankind, which once, in Homer, was an object of contemplation for the Olympian gods, has now become one for itself. Its self-alienation has reached the point where it can experience its own annihilation as a supreme aesthetic pleasure. Such is the ...(read more)	Lee, Steven S.	Graduate Courses
250/2 Research Seminars: Autotheory Note new time: M 3-6	There is very little criticism we could point to today that purposely flies under the banner of “theory.” This course will explore one variant that does—autotheory—the name given to work that, in one form or another, stages the encounter between first...(read more)	Best, Stephen M.	Graduate Courses
250/3 Research Seminars: Freud and His Followers Thurs. 3:30-6:30	This course looks at the development of psychoanalysis as a therapeutic practice and critical methodology in the humanities. We will take up some of its foundational questions -- What is a body? What is the social? What do women want? What is...(read more)	Saha, Poulomi	Graduate Courses
298/1 Collaborative Research Seminar: Beauty	Townsend Center Collaborative Research Seminar Tuesdays, 3-6 PM, Geballe Room, Townsend Center (or via Zoom , TBA). Enrollment by Application Participating Faculty: Jacob Dalton, South and Southeast Asian Studies, East Asian Languages and Cu...(read more)	Hale, Dorothy J.	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, 2, 5, 6, and 7 are intended mainly for continuing upper-division students, while sections 3, 4, and 8 are intended mainly for new junior transfer students;

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.

DeCal Courses in the English Department

Please consult the DeCal website for information and instructions.

Students interested in leading a DeCal course must submit complete proposals to the Department by 12:00 noon. on Thursday, October 29, 2021. The proposal consists of

A completed Course Proposal Form
A syllabus
A letter of support from a member of the English Department faculty

which should be submitted via this form by the deadline.

The Department will contact you during the week of November 2, 2020 to let you know whether it approves your course for consideration by the Committee on Courses of the Academic Senate. If your proposal is accepted, you must submit all required materials directly to them by their deadline of November 11, 2020 and attend a workshop at the Student Learning Center, which provides resources to undergraduate course facilitators.

Please understand that the Department will not be able to consider incomplete applications, and be as thorough as possible with your submission.

Independent Study courses require approval and supervision by a member of the English Department faculty. Once you have found a sponsoring faculty member, please submit this form to apply for independent study credit. A member of the department will get back to you with a class number and instructions to add the course.