The Announcement of Classes is available one week before Tele-Bears begins every semester. Creative Writing and (for fall) Honors Course applications are available at the same time in the racks outside of 322 Wheeler Hall.
Thoreau, H.D.: Walden
We will read Thoreau's Walden in small chunks, probably about thirty pages per week. This will allow us time to dwell upon the complexities of a book that is much more mysterious than those who have read the book casually, or those who have only heard about it, realize. We will also try to work some with online versions of the books, using the wordsearch command to identify words such as "woodchuck" or "dimple" that reappear frequently, in order to speculate on patterns Thoreau is trying to establish. Regular attendance and participation, along with a loose five-page essay at the end, are required.
This 1-unit course may not be counted as one of the twelve courses required to complete the English major.
Course reader.
A workshop course intended for students who have recently begun to write verse or who have not previously taken a course in creative writing.
To be considered for admission to this class, please submit 5 photocopied pages of your poems, along with an application form, to Christopher Chen's mailbox in 322 Wheeler, BY 4:00 p.m., TUESDAY, OCTOBER 27, AT THE LATEST.
Be sure to read the paragraph concerning creative writing courses on page 1 of this Announcement of Classes for further information regarding enrollment in such courses!
Our readings are all contained in three books: the new eighth edition of the Norton Anthology of English Literature, Volume A, Medieval; Volume B, The Sixteenth Century, The Early Seventeenth Century; and Shakespeare's Hamlet.
We will study the changing nature of creative writing "through" Milton, Spenser and Chaucer, but the point is to introduce many voices rather than studying just three authors. 45 is a lower-division course, the pre-required gateway to the English major; you can return to explore the texts that interest you more thoroughly, at a higher level. This will not be a strict chronological "survey" but more a sampling of key themes, as they are constructed in different genres and in different periods across a thousand years of turbulent history. What makes a hero or heroine that we can take seriously (epic and tragedy)? what makes us fall in love (desire and the lyric)? what makes us smile or nod in recognition (satire and comedy)? Larger, overarching questions will concern us throughout: what is the status of literature, and how does fiction relate to emotion? Along the way we will gain a sense of the evolving conception of art and the deep roots of English as a world language, a resource for every modern writer.
Heaney, S: Beowulf; Donaldson, E: Beowulf; Chaucer, G: Canterbury Tales; Marlowe, C: Dr. Faustus; Donne, J: Various poems; Milton, J: Paradise Lost
This course will focus on the central works of the early English literary tradition, beginning with Beowulf and ending with Paradise Lost. We will examine the texts in light of the cultures in which they were produced, asking ourselves why these works were written when they were written, and what the unfamiliar cultures of the Middle Ages and Renaissance have to say to us now. We will also focus on developing reading skills and on understanding the literary tradition as a set of interrelated texts and problems that recur over the course of centuries. We will examine these works as formal artifacts as well as historical documents. Students will work on close readings, on literary language, and on understanding generic distinctions as they functioned in the past and function now. Expect to write three papers, to take a midterm, and a final exam.
Austen, J: Pride and Prejudice; Bronte, E: Wuthering Heights; Douglass, F: Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass; Franklin, B: Autobiography and other writings; Irving, W: The Sketch-Book; Pope, A: Essay on Man and other poems; Rowlandson, M: The Sovereignty and Goodness of God; Swift, J: Gulliver’s Travels; Walpole, H: The Castle of Otranto; Wordsworth, W: The Five Book Prelude
This is a course in a few major works of English and American literature from the end of the 17th-century through the first half of the 19th-century. We will work our way from Puritanism through the Enlightenment and into Romanticism. There are major intellectual and literary transformations taking place in the course of this century and a half, and we will follow a few of them.
Behn, A.: Oroonoko; Defoe, D.: Robinson Crusoe; Austen, J.: Persuasion; Scott, W.: Rob Roy; Melville, H.: Benito Cereno; Rowlandson, M.: Narrative of Captivity and Restoration; Equiano, O.: Narrative of the Life
Recommended: Swift, J.: Gulliver's Travels
Readings in English, Scottish, Irish and North American prose narrative 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 massive expansion of an overseas empire, and the revolt of the American colonies. 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. Readings will include prose fiction by Aphra Behn, Daniel Defoe, Jonathan Swift, Jane Austen, Walter Scott, E. A. Poe and Herman Melville; autobiographies by Mary Rowlandson and Olaudah Equiano; and poetry by John Dryden, Alexander Pope, William Collins, Thomas Gray, James Macpherson, Robert Burns, William Blake, William Wordsworth, S.T. Coleridge, and others.
Achebe: Things Fall Apart; Ellmann, O'Clair, Ramazani: The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry, Volume I: Modern Poetry; Faulkner: The Sound and the Fury; James: The Turn of the Screw and Other Short Fiction; Joyce: Dubliners; Pynchon: The Crying of Lot 49; Wilde: The Picture of Dorian Gray; Woolf: Mrs. Dalloway
A broad survey of the period that witnessed the arrival of English as a fully global literary language, with Anglophone empires (both political and cultural) centered on both sides of the Atlantic and spread around the world. We will concentrate on the era’s efforts in poetry and fiction, attending to the ways in which texts both incorporate and shape the formal effects of modernity at large.
Beckett,  S.: Waiting for Godot; Eliot,  T.S.: Selected Poems; Faulkner,  W: The Sound and the Fury; Hurston,  Z: Their Eyes Were Watching God; Joyce,  J: Dubliners; Woolf,  V: Mrs. Dalloway
This course will survey British, Irish, and American literature from the mid-nineteenth century through the mid-twentieth. We will try to evoke some of the key aesthetic, cultural, and socio-political trends that characterized the movements of modernity as we closely investigate a selection of the major texts from this sprawling period. At times the lectures will zoom in on particular features of texts, and at other times they will zoom out to cultural conditions and aesthetic drifts. In addition to the texts listed, we will read poems by Whitman, Dickinson, Hardy, Hopkins, Yeats, Stein, Stevens, Moore, H.D., Hughes, and Auden. There will be two essays, a final exam, and (perhaps) a mid-term.
Defoe, Daniel: Moll Flanders; Behn, Aphra: Oroonoko; Fforde, Jasper: The Eyre Affair
Recommended: Ruthven, K.K.: Faking Literature
Western literary history, especially since the eighteenth century, is full of impostors and forgeries. Since Chatterton purported to “discover†a fifteenth-century poet and his contemporary Macpherson faked an ancient Celtic epic, there have been many instances of literary fraud to amuse, perplex, or outrage the reading public. Most recently, James Frey (A Million Little Pieces) was taken severely to task for fabricating parts of his best-selling memoir. Within a month of this scandal, the identity of the popular “autobiographical†author, J. T. LeRoy, was exposed as a fake. Both these recent exposés have reawakened a very old debate that we seem not yet to have resolved in our culture concerning the worth of literature and the distinction between fiction and non-fiction. By what values do we judge literature? Are truth and authenticity the most important values? Or are works of literatureâ€â€even those claiming to be trueâ€â€best understood as performance? We will address these larger questions through topics such as the status of the “truth claim†in modern literature; authenticity and originality as categories of style; and the rise of the novel in literary history. This course satisfies the second half of the reading and composition requirement. In addition to refining the composition skills learned in R1A, we will focus on incorporating research successfully into argumentation, and introducing the fundamentals of literary study for the English major.
English R50 is intended for students who are planning to be English majors and who have already taken R1A. It satisfies the College’s R1B requirement.
This course may not be counted as one of the twelve courses required for the English major.
Dangarembga, T: Nervous Conditions; Defoe, D: Robinson Crusoe; Islas, A: The Rain God
Recommended: Booth, W: The Craft of Research
This course will explore the formal interests and strategies of minority authors. “Minority†here is taken not in the U.S. ethnic sense of the word but broadly, and the authors we will examine represent diverse arenas of world literature. Each of the course’s primary textsâ€â€Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions, Arturo Islas’s The Rain God, Derek Walcott’s Pantomime, and a handful of poems by Eavan Boland, Nuala ni Dhomhnaill, and Medbh McGuckianâ€â€takes an outsider’s stance toward canonical literary forms and traditions. We will examine how these texts do so through formal innovation.
English R50 will build upon your R1A training in textual analysis and composition, and it will provide an introduction to literary research. The course is divided into four units to facilitate the integration of reading and research. In each unit we will examine a literary work alongside a variety of research materials that animate the text. Secondary materials will include, but are not limited to, historical and biographical information, the author’s source materials, studies on the development of particular literary forms, works of literary criticism, and other texts or cultural objects to which our authors address themselves. Some of these materials will be distributed in class; you will collect the remainder during the course of your research. Assignments include a research bibliography for each of the four units; an argumentative essay for each of the four units; one research report and oral class presentation; and periodic short writing exercises.
English R50 is intended for students who are planning to be English majors and who have already taken R1A. It satisfies the College’s R1B requirement.
This course may not be counted as one of the twelve courses required for the English major.
Lahiri, J.: The Interpreter of Maladies
We will discuss some short stories, view some films on food and its relation to family, ethnicity and sexuality, as well as attend some Cal Performances events.
This 2-unit course may not be counted as one of the twelve courses required to complete the English major.