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.
Mary Karr, The Liar’s Club; Eli Clare, Exile & Pride; Harry G. Frankfurt, On Bullshit; Jamaica Kincaid, My Brother; Jeanette Winterson, Written on the Body; Diane Hacker, Rules for Writers. (Some texts may be added later.)
What are the different ways that we come to understand first person narration? How are different selves created and chosen through texts and textual choices? How do issues of memory and claims to authenticity affect the way that we read different kinds of texts? This course will focus on how the self is constructed in literary non-fiction but will also incorporate fiction and poetry. We will examine how different choices made by the author construct specific understandings of who the author (or narrator) is and the story which they are telling. Students may be asked to reflect on these issues through small in-class creative writing assignments if time permits.
This course is aimed at developing reading and writing skills in a variety of genres. Students will learn and practice strategies for all stages of the writing process, from prewriting to revision, and also work on grammar, syntax, and style. Course assignments will include a minimum of 32 pages of writing divided among a number of short essays, at least two of which will be revised. This course fulfills the first half of the university’s R&C requirement.
A course reader of elegies and essays; Diana Hacker, Rules for Writers; Jeffrey A. Hammond, The American Puritan Elegy: A Literary and Cultural Study; Mary Louise Kete, Sentimental Collaborations: Mourning and Middle-Class Identity in Nineteenth-Century America; Jahan Ramazani, Poetry of Mourning: The Modern Elegy from Hardy to Heaney; Melissa F. Zeiger, Beyond Consolation: Death, Sexuality, and the Changing Shapes of Elegy.
In this class, we will study the American elegy, following its development from the 17th-century to the present. Reading poems in conjunction with essays in literary criticism and cultural history, we will ask the following question: How did elegiac conventions both reflect and create the conceptual meaning and psychological experience of death and grief in America?
Students will pursue this line of inquiry while learning how to write clearly, read critically, and argue persuasively. Emphasizing the development of these skills, this course will teach students how to evaluate authors’ theses, formulate their own positions, and express them in clear sentences, paragraphs, and essays. Over the course of the semester, students will produce approximately 32 pages of writing which will be broken down into 4 essays of equal length.
Henry David Thoreau, Walden; Aldo Leopold, Sand County Almanac; J.M. Coetzee’s The Lives of Animals; David Sibley, The Sibley Field Guide to Birds of Western North America; and a course reader with poems, essays, and/or excerpts by William Wordsworth, Bill McKibben, David Owen, Elizabeth Kolbert, William Blake, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Robinson Jeffers, David Owen, Wendell Berry, William Cronon, Jacques Derrida, and Michael Pollan.
In this class, you will become ecologically literate, and learn to write clear argumentative prose. You will learn to identify birds and trees, and keep a journal to practice writing about the environment. As exemplars, we will look at how other writers—Thoreau, Leopold, Steinbeck, McKibben—have written about their environments. In the meantime, in several short papers, you will synthesize your own observations into ecological hypotheses, and revise and perfect them in response to criticism and peer review. In this class, I hope to move together from nature writing to environmental justice. Ultimately, you will be encouraged to reflect on your own place in nature: at the end of the semester, you will present your final paper on “The Future of Nature” at an in-class conference. By the end of the term, you will also be able to tell a Red-Tailed Hawk from a Turkey Vulture from half a mile away.
Charles Dickens, “A Christmas Carol”; James Joyce “The Dead”; David Sedaris Holidays on Ice; William Shakespeare Twelfth Night; Thomas Kane The Oxford Essential Guide to Writing; a Course Reader.
Holidays find much common ground with literature. In their ways, both exist outside of time and place by means of their inherent, if relative, universality. Thanksgiving is not celebrated around the globe, just as Donne is not read the world over, but both hold their places through shared perception and appreciation, their physical trappings– be they books or turkeys– merely symbols through which a greater project might be enacted, namely the poetry or the giving of thanks. Holidays are strictly dictated by the calendar (Which do you call it, Independence Day or the 4th of July?), but by their very nature function external to the calendar, as one Halloween is the same as the one before it, and is on some level every Halloween. When celebrating a holiday, we feel like we have stepped out of our lives, and, as Washington Irving puts it, we do not “regulate...time by hours, but by [the smoking of] pipes.” In short, holidays are magical days when time both stands still and extends back centuries, when the power of symbolism is heightened, and when we feel that on this day we can see a larger picture of both ourselves and the world. While we shall take holidays as the subject matter for the materials of this course, this is first and foremost a class on writing. The class will not focus on the assigned literature, but on the students, who will rigorously develop their analytical thinking and writing skills. Students will learn to develop a working thesis and expand it into a cohesive extended examination of relevant issues regarding the primary texts or films under scrutiny. Through weekly writing assignments, students will learn to think through writing, improving their ability to assess a work critically and to express the intricacies of their observations. The final project will ask that students produce a sustained, multifaceted argument, which interprets individually collected research, in the form of a ten-page essay. The final goal of the course will be to challenge students to become clear, efficient, effective writers.
Instructor, time, and location to be announced.
No one will be able to enroll in this section until it has been finalized, which might not be until November or so.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile; Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe; Jane Austen, Persuasion; Vikram Seth, The Golden Gate; Georges Perec, A Void
This class will try to stimulate reflection on what learning is, and what its relation is to different kinds of constraint. The pressure of this question (learning) and this theme (constraint) will be everywhere brought to bear on the task of this course: learning to write and research better. How can we think more critically about our own learning processes and the forms of constraint that enable them?
The first part of our readings will consider some of the constraints around learning that we are perhaps most likely to think of – universities, classrooms, pedagogical relationships, the essay form, even language itself – by reading two Enlightenment texts that worked hardest to situate learning elsewhere: Rousseau’s Emile and Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. The second part of the course moves away from the scene of education to look at two late 20th century texts that manifest the productive possibilities in different kinds of self-imposed constraint: Vikram Seth’s novel in verse The Golden Gate, and Gilbert Adair’s translation of Georges Perec’s La Disparition, written without the letter e. The hinge between these parts will tackle in many ways the hardest aspect of our theme, the relation between writing and the personal, through a reading of Austen’s novel Persuasion and a selection of poems by Gerald Manley Hopkins. These literary works will be interspersed with bite-sized selections from such theorists as D.A. Miller, Jacques Ranciere, Gregory Bateson, and Jacques Derrida.
Graham Greene, The Ministry of Fear, Franz Kafka, The Trial, Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49, William Shakespeare, Richard III, a Course Reader.
In his essay “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” Richard Hofstadter identifies the distinguishing feature of a conspiracy theory not in “the absence of verifiable facts,” but rather in the “curious leap in imagination…from the undeniable to the unbelievable.” This course is about how conspiracy fiction reverses this process, imaginatively leaping from the unbelievable to the undeniable.
We will be less concerned with determining the validity of the plentiful conspiracy theories in circulation than examining how they work narratively. What kinds of techniques do conspiracy fictions use, how does information get withheld and transmitted, and how do we describe the experience of reading them? We will begin with selections from Paradise Lost, making the acquaintance of Milton’s Archconspirator Lucifer. From there we’ll enter the realm of mortal scheming: Machiavellian plotting in Richard III, the extended juridical nightmare of Kafka’s The Trial, a World War II spy network in Graham Greene’s The Ministry of Fear, and a playfully ominous history of the postal system in Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49. The texts come at conspiracy fiction from different angles – tragic, epic, allegorical, realistic, stylized, parodic – so following this particular thread will also provide a broad survey of literary form.
Though conspiracy tends towards opacity, the aim of this course is to avoid it at all cost in your writing. Writing assignments will build up from a series of shorter exercises and culminate in a longer research project.
Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey; Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre; James Weldon Johnson, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man; Horace Walpole, The Castle of Otranto.
The plot of many works of fiction is often that of a secret being gradually revealed to the reader. This course will examine texts in which characters conceal things from each other, from the most mundane motives to the darkest Gothic sins of the past. We will also trace the methods in which a secret is uncovered, whether by accidental revelation or deliberate detection. Expanding our focus outward, we will examine the expectations of genre created by these texts in engaging the question of how the ability of protagonists to “read” certain clues is connected with the reader’s experience with and understanding of the narrative.
As we apply our own reading resources to analyzing texts built upon strategic obscurity, the class will continuously work on developing the ability to write with clear exposition and argumentation. In order to expand and integrate these arguments within a larger intellectual context, students will cultivate their own sleuthing skills in learning and deploying methods of research through periodic assignments. Students will ultimately apply these practices in writing and revising three papers of increasing length, ranging from three to ten pages.
Tillie Olsen, Yonnondio; Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God; Nathanael West, Day of the Locust; a course reader including work by James Agee, Hart Crane, Pietro di Dinato, Woody Guthrie, Langston Hughes, Toshio Mori, and William Saroyan.
By the relief office I seen my people;
As they stood there hungry, I stood there asking
Is this land made for you and me?
—Woody Guthrie
In the 1930s, as economic crisis brought new attention to the struggles of working men and women, Americans asked how their country had failed and how it could be fixed. What did—or perhaps, what should—America mean? The Great Depression was an era of stark deprivation, but also of committed idealism, as laborers, artists, and activists tried to reshape society. Americans embraced the promises of progress and change, but they also looked back toward folk cultures that they hoped would help unify the country.
This introduction to college writing and argument will be interdisciplinary in method. We’ll read a good deal of literature alongside proletarian manifestos, dance, photography, music, and film. Our course material will help us ask questions about the relations between “high” and “low” culture, between art, labor, and politics, and between race, gender, and nation—themes you will explore in an eight to ten page research paper analyzing a cultural document of your choice. You will also complete two shorter essays, and we’ll spend much of our time discussing how to improve your research and composition skills.
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.
T.B.A.
Please contact Jennifer Miller at j_miller@berkeley.edu for more information about this course.
This course satisfies the pre-1800 requirement for the English major.
Shakespeare,  W.: The (Shorter) Norton Shakespeare, essential plays, the sonnets (2nd ed.)
This course treats the second half of Shakespeare's career, focusing on some of the major tragedies, the so-called "problem plays," and the later comedies/romances. Our general approach will be to read each text closely and with attention to the socio-historical issues at play. As indicated in the schedule, each play is keyed to a specific theme engaged in the play as well as the broader cultural context of the time. Students are expected not only to be able to follow the basic plot outline, characterization, etc. of each play, but to push beyond these toward a more nuanced interpretive practice. Although a largely lecture course, discussion is warmly welcomed. There will be a number of writing assignments of different types, and, time permitting, a film that may give us an opportunity to explore more contemporary interpretations of Shakespeare.
Shakespeare, W.: The Riverside Shakespeare
NB: I have ordered the Riverside Shakespeare at the bookstore. You may use any scholarly edition of each play, however, as convenient to you (‘scholarly’= published after 1960; has annotations, line numbers, and an introduction; and says who edited the text).
This class is a single-semester introduction to the scope of Shakespeare’s dramatic career. Our readings will range across different genres, from early plays to late, and from some of the greatest hits to some more unfamiliarâ€â€even disquietingâ€â€works, in order to see what relations we may draw across this diverse early modern production, and what relation the texts bear in turn to the monolithic institution of ‘Shakespeare’ in contemporary culture.
Milton, J.: The Complete Poetry and Essential Prose of John Milton, ed. Kerrigan, Rumrich, and Fallon
A Note on Texts: I am very concerned about the rising prices of textbooks and the serious burden these can place on student budgets; however, each member of the class must have his or her own copy of the (actual, not virtual) book, for marking up, bringing to class, etc. The good news: there is only one required text, and this new edition, updated and helpfully annotated, is one of the most economical and complete volumes available. Note, too, that substantially discounted copies of this edition are available on Amazon.com, and other sites. The text will also be available for purchase at the ASUC bookstore and Ned’s.
Arguably the most influential and famous (sometimes infamous) literary figure of the 17th Century, John Milton has too often been represented to our own present as the mainstay of an entrenched canon, a “required†author. However, as we follow Milton’s carefully orchestrated career, from the shorter and earlier work, through some of the controversial prose of the English civil war era (including Areopagitica, The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, and The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates), to the astounding work that emerged in the wake of political defeat (Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, Samson Agonistes), we will discover a very different literary and political thinker, more an iconoclast than an icon. We will come to understand Milton’s writing in relation to the political and intellectual revolutions that he participated inâ€â€for he was a major public figure, known both in victory and defeat as a radical statesman and polemicist as well as major poet. We will also discuss his experiments in poetic form, his ambivalent incorporations, revisions, or expansions of both classical literature and biblical texts, the function of his unorthodox theology, his writings on marriage and divorce, his long preoccupation with vocation, and more.
This course satisfies the pre-1800 requirement for the English major.
Defoe, D: Robinson Crusoe; Lennox, C: The Female Quixote; Pope, A: Poetry and Prose; Richardson,  S:  Pamela; Swift,  J: Writings
Recommended: Fielding, H: Shamela; Haywood, E: Anti-Pamela
We will explore the relationship between literature and everyday life in the first half of the eighteenth century. Areas of emphasis include popular periodical literature, the early novel, and the writings of Alexander Pope and Jonathan Swift. In addition to the texts listed above there will be a course reader.
Course requirements: two close readings (2 pages), one substantial paper (7-10 pages), and a final exam.
This course satisfies the pre-1800 requirement for the English major.
Austen, J: Sense and Sensibility; De Quincey, T: Confessions of an English Opium-Eater; Godwin, W: Caleb Williams; Shelley, M: Frankenstein; Blake, W: Blake's Poetry and Designs; Wordsworth, W: The Prelude; Byron, GG: Major Works; Wordsworth, Coleridge, W, ST: Lyrical Ballads; Keats, J: Keats's Poetry and Prose; Shelley, P: Shelley's Poetry and Prose
Romanticism is a term as difficult to define as it is persistent. We will read British Romanticism as a set of diverse, sometimes contradictory responses to an overarching question: what is the role of literature in a rapidly modernizing world? British Romantic writers had no choice but to locate their ambitions in relation to the period’s revolutionary and secularizing movements; nearly twenty years of continuous war between England and France; the reorganization of the economy, including the specialization of knowledge and the division, alienation, and mechanization of labor; a book market and print culture that placed authors at a distance from anonymous readers; large scale urbanization and the development of mass commercial media; the ascent of England as an international power, with imperial interests at home (the Act of Union) and abroad. As fundamental terms found themselves subject to redefinition (“poetry,†“nature,†“work,†“society,†even what it means to be “humanâ€Â), Romantic writers struggled to define the relevance of literature in ways that continue to resonate in literary production today. Students will write two essays and take a final exam.
Behn, A.: Oronooko; Defoe, D.: Moll Flanders; Richardson, S.: Pamela; Smollett, T.: Humphry Clinker; Burney, F.: Evelina; Beckford, W.: Vathek; Godwin, W.: Caleb Williams; Austen, J.: Persuasion
A survey of early fiction, much of which pretended to be anything but. Most of it, published anonymously, purported to be a true "History," "Expedition," or the like, about "Things as They Are." We will consider at the outset why these works so strenuously disavowed their status as romances or novels, and why for purposes of disguise they chose the genres they did.
This course satisfies the pre-1800 requirement for the English major.
Proust, M.: In Search of Lost Time (6 vols.) (Modern Library Classics)
By reading one of the most significant 20th century novels in detail, the course will attempt to answer questions about the thematic concerns and formal techniques of modernism. The relationships between changing conceptions of language and desire, of the individual subject, and of the pressures of history, as these are figured in the particular rhetorics and structures of this paradigmatic novel, will provide the central axes of our investigation. Active in-class participation and a willingness to engage in both copious reading and regular dialogues are the only prerequisites for the course.
Please note that we will be reading all of Proust's novel, rather than, as is often the case, only the first and last chapters (volumes).
Smith,  Z.: White Teeth; McEwan,  I.: Atonement; Mitchell,  D.: Cloud Atlas; Foer,  J. S.: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close; McCarthy,  C.: The Road; Diaz,  J.: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
Recommended: Robinson,  M.: Gilead; Ishiguro,  K.: Never Let Me Go
We who study literature are perhaps inexorably belated. But this course aims to redefine at least one temporally muddled literary term: the “contemporary,†a period that sometimes stretches as far back as 1950 in academic parlance. I protest! It ought to mean NOW. And so: a survey of novels written by Americans and Brits since 2000. That is, novels written during your lifetime.
We will be interested in historical context, forms of beauty, ways of knowing, and the ethical and political resonance of the literature of this period. We will pose simple questions about reading as it takes place now in the West: Who reads? What do we read? Why do we read? How do we read? We will examine: debates about the status of the novel, competing genres, new modes of production and distribution, and what the contemporary means, anyway. Finally, we will want to consider how these novelists are reshaping the map of the Western canon, by questioning exactly what counts and why. The reading will include six novels, selected reviews of them, and recent published debatesâ€â€journalistic and academicâ€â€about the contemporary novel. An average of 200 pages of reading per week. Two papers (5-7 pp); ID midterm; ID and essay final. For a head start, read either Gilead or Never Let Me Go as you will have to read one of them on your own time during the course of the semester.
Ramazani, J.: Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry, Vol. 1; Oppen, G.: New Collected Poems; Niedecker, L.: Collected Works; Zukofsky, L.: Selected Poems
This course will be devoted to studying the work of a series of major figures in modern poetry and poetics. Each of these poetsâ€â€Pound, Eliot, Stein, Stevens, Loy, Moore, H.D., Williams, Hughes, Brown, Zukofsky, Niedecker, Oppenâ€â€undertakes ambitious experiments that expand the formal and perceptual bounds of poetry. We will approach these figures primarily via close readings, but we will also read them in connection with the larger artistic movements of this extraordinarily fertile era, and with reference to key aesthetic theories. Through these readings, this course will explore modern poetry’s complex inheritances: its vexed relation to Romantic and Symbolist poetics; its renewal of other poetic traditions, from Pound’s “poem containing history†through ideogram and collaged quotation to Zukofsky’s Marxist reanimation of the sestina form; and its ties to visual and musical cultures. At the same time, we will consider how and why these poets “make it new,†in Pound’s phrase, and what their methods disclose about the transactions between poetic practice and social life. Understanding how this work grapples with the period’s central concernsâ€â€urbanization, the entrenchment of commodity capitalism, the barbarisms of war, fascism, and racial oppression, and the emergent modes of cognition arising from technological innovation and new media formsâ€â€will be a primary objective. We will also investigate the animating importance of “difficulty†to modern poetry, keeping in mind Eliot’s contention that “poets in our civilization, as it exists at present, must be difficult.â€Â
Coursework will include weekly writing assignments; two longer essays; a midterm and a final exam.
Bradford, William: Plymouth Plantation; Rowlandson, Mary White: The Sovereignty and Goodness of God; Edwards, Johnathan: A Jonathan Edwards Reader; Jefferson, Thomas: Notes on the State of Virginia; Franklin, Benjamin: The Autobiography; Equiano, Olaudah: The Interesting Life and Other Writings; Some xeroxed poems and other short texts
I will lecture on the struggle to alter traditional modes of cultural understanding to account for the extraordinary circumstances of New World life as it is reflected and expressed in these books, together with the gradual emergence of novel social and political paradigms and linked transformations in the conception of personal identity. Two seven-page midterm essays and a final exam will be required.
This course satisfies the pre-1800 requirement for the English major.
Whitman, W.: Complete Poems; Dickinson, E.: Complete Poems;
Twain, M.: Pudd'nhead Wilson; Howells, W.D.: A Hazard of New Fortunes;
Chesnutt, C. The Marrow of Tradition; Dreiser, T.: Sister Carrie; James,
H.: The Portrait of A Lady; James, H.: The Turn of The Screw and Other
Short Fiction
A survey of U.S. literature from 1865 to the beginning of the twentieth century. We’ll begin with the texts listed above; then together we’ll choose the reading and design the syllabus for the last weeks of the course. A midterm, frequent short informal papers, and a final project which will involve both research and class participation.
Larsen, N.: Quicksand and Passing; Norris, F.: McTeague; Wharton, E.: The Age of Innocence; Eliot, T. S.: The Waste Land; Hemingway, E.: The Sun Also Rises; Fitzgerald, F. S.: The Great Gatsby; Cather, W.: The Professor's House; Faulkner, W.: As I Lay Dying; West, N.: Miss Lonleyhearts and Day of the Locust; Wright, R.: Native Son
A survey of American literature tracing the literary response to the emerging shape of modern life in the first decades of the twentieth century. We will read across a range of genres and styles to assess the particular influence of modernism and other experimental modes on writing of period, while also exploring the significance that realism and naturalism continued to hold for many U. S. authors. We will be specifically concerned with how writers addressed such topics as national identity and racial difference; new psychologies of consciousness, emotion, and sexuality; “high” modernism and popular culture; class and cosmopolitanism; and the literary response to new mediums of information and entertainment.
Stowe,  H. B.: Uncle Tom's Cabin; Twain,  M.: Adventures of Huckleberry Finn; Harper,  F. E. W.: Iola Leroy; Chesnutt,  C.: The Marrow of Tradition; Toomer,  J.: Cane; Hurston,  Z. N.: Their Eyes Were Watching God; Faulkner,  W.: Light in August; Ellison,  R.: Invisible Man
A survey of major novels written in the United States between the end of slavery and the start of the Civil Rights Movement. Two essays, midterm, and final exam.
Equiano, O.: The Interesting Narrative of Olaudah Equiano; Douglass, F.: Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass; Brent, L.: Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl; DuBois, W. E. B.: The Souls of Black Folk; Chesnutt, C: The Conjure Woman; Washington, B. T.: Up from Slavery; Johnson, J. W.: The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man
African American expressive culture has been driven by an affinity for the oral; yet the claim for black humanity has often rested upon an assumed connection between literature and literacy. In this survey we will attempt to bridge these oral and literary impulses in an exploration of selected works from the canon of African American literature. We will concern ourselves not only with the conceptual distinctions between orality and literacy, but also with how those distinctions gather force within debates over the power of language in politics and history: Rather than a teleological progression from orality to literacy, why does one find in much African American literature a promiscuous coupling of the two? What is the relation of this literature’s recurrent, slippery orality to a codified, authenticating literary apparatus? How does speaking relate to subjectivity? What are the politics of speaking, reading, and writing in British North America and the emergent United States? How might slaves have apprehended the power of orality – rhetoric, eloquence, performative speech – at a time when magnificent effects seemed to follow from the act of “declaring†independence?
McKay, C : Home to Harlem ; Ellison, R : Invisible Man ; Hurston, Z. N.  : Tell My Horse ; Achebe, C : Arrow of God ; Dangarembga, T : Nervous Conditions ; Brodber, E : Louisiana ; Danticat, E : Breath, Eyes, Memory ; Diaz, J : Drown ; Smith, Z : On Beauty ; Adichie, C. N. : Half of a Yellow SunÂÂ
Course Reader includes selections from Dubois, Garvey, Fanon, CLR James, amongst others.
This course will survey prose of the African diaspora in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. We will consider the substance and contingencies of expressions of black global commonality and think about the relationship between politics and aesthetics in African diasporic literature. Lectures will explore such themes as black subjectivity and politics of representation; the dialectical relationship between particular and “universal†black experiences; the influence of black popular cultures on literary form; and the inheritances and innovations of contemporary black writers. If a single major problem haunts the course texts and their juxtapositions it is this: how do artists manage the paradox of radical difference and implicit identity embodied in the term “diaspora�
The reading for this course has not been finalized, but will include works by Lucy Terry, Phillis Wheatley, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Claude McKay, Jean Toomer, Langston Hughes, Sterling Brown, Gwendolyn Brooks, Melvin Tolson, Russell Atkins, Amiri Baraka, Sonia Sanchez, Elouise Loftin, Audre Lorde, Nathaniel Mackey, Cecil Taylor, Ed Roberson, Harryette Mullen, and Tyrone Williams.
An introduction to African American poetry and poetics, moving from the eighteenth century to the present.
T.B.A.
"Race is not only real, but also illusory. Not only is it common sense; it is also common nonsense. Not only does it establish our identity; it also denies us our identity."  Howard Winant
"Each society demands of its members a certain amount of acting. The ability to present, represent, and act what one actually is."  Hannah Arendt
This course is two courses wrapped up in one. First, it offers a selected history of major innovations in American popular culture of the last hundred years  from the origins of the American culture industries in blackface minstrelsy, ragtime, and jazz to the development of the Hollywood studio system, rock 'n' roll, soul music, and the "New Hollywood".
Second, it tells that first very large story through America's unique history of crossracial and crossethnic interplay. Why, we might ask, is the story of the US so often told through stories of interracial dependency or conflict, whether it's the story of American colonists dressing up as Indians at the Boston Tea Party, Little Eva blessing Uncle Tom, or Elvis or Eminem borrowing from the 'other side of the tracks'? Following this line of inquiry, we will trace America's history through the development of structures of inequity and opportunity that define our social history, and through the development of complicated race-inflected stories of camaraderie, rivalry, beset virtue, and desire that often define our national fantasy life.
This course satisfies UC Berkeley’s American Cultures requirement.
Viramontes,  H.: Their Dogs Came With Them; Urrea,  L.: Nobody's Son: Notes from an American Life; Rodriguez,  R.: Brown: The Last Discovery of America; Moraga,  C.: Loving in the War Years: Lo Que Nunca Pasó Por Sus Labios; Castillo,  A.: The Guardians: A Novel; Anaya,  R.: Heart of Aztlán; Acosta,  O.: The Revolt of the Cockroach People
Films: I Am Joaquin (1969); Requiem 29 (1971); Please Don't Bury Me Alive (1976); Chicana (1979); Zoot Suit (1981); The Ballad of Tina Juarez (1994); Walkout (2006)
The emergence of Chicano/a literary studies as an academic discipline, along with the production of the first Chicano/a films, coincided historically with the Chicano Movement in the late 1960s and early 1970s. There is no disputing that the political aims of the movement were promoted by Chicano/a cultural production during those years. The cultural became political, and eventually cultural identity came to be understood as nearly synonymous with radical political consciousness. But to what extent was the prioritizing of culture successful in bringing about political empowerment for Chicanos and Chicanas? Did the importance given to culture via literature and film help realize the movement's aspirations for social change? What has been the impact of this "cultural turn" from forty years ago on Chicano/a cultural production today? In this course we will study several literary works and films produced by Chicanos and Chicanas over the past four decades to examine their assumptions about the role of literature and culture in developing political consciousness and building social movements. But we will also pay close attention to the ways in which these works imagine (or don't imagine) resolutions to the social contradictions they represent--and to their critical views of class, race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and national origin. Students will be required to read selected essays of literary and film theory to assist in analyzing the specific primary works we study. The film list is subject to change.
Anand, M.R.: Untouchable; Gold, M.: Jews Without Money; Hughes, L.: A Negro Looks at Soviet Central Asia; Koestler, A.: Darkness at Noon; Malraux, A.: Man’s Fate; Marguez, G.G.: One Hundred Years of Solitude; Platonov, A.: Soul
Pascal Casanova has influentially defined Paris as the “capital of the literary world,†as the center of what she calls the “world republic of letters.†Accordingly, contemporary discussions of world literature typically focus on the spread of Western European literary forms. This course will engage these discussions by tracing an alternate, non-Western model of world literatureâ€â€one centered in Moscow rather than Paris. Focusing on the 1920s and 30s, we will explore politically radical notions of “international literature†which achieved prominence after the Bolshevik Revolution and which attracted left-leaning writers from around the world. Reading works by, among others, Soviet authors Isaac Babel and Andrei Platonov; American authors Langston Hughes and Michael Gold; French author Andre Malraux; and Indian author Mulk Raj Anand, our goal will be to reconstruct the emergence and decline of a literature that was to help usher in international revolution. We will conclude by uncovering traces of this literature in a canonical work of “world literature,†Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude.
Beckett, S.: Waiting for Godot, Endgame, Happy Days and a few shorts from the Collected Shorter Plays of Samuel Beckett; O'Casey, S.: The Plow and the Stars; Murphy, T.: Bailegangaire; Keane, J. B.: “The Field†in Three Plays; Shaw, G.B.: Pygmalion; Sheridan, J.: The Field (1998); Asquith, A., and Howard, Leslie: Pygmalion (1938); Lloyd, D.: The Press; Gregory, A.: The Rising of the Moon; Friel, B.: Translations; Yeats, W. B.: The Death of Cuchulain & The Countess Cathleen in Eleven Plays of W.B. Yeats; Yeats, W.B., and Gregory, A., W. B.: Cathleen ni Hoolihan ; Wilde, O.: The Importance of Being Ernest & Salomé; Synge, J.M.: The Playboy of the Western World & The Well of the Saints
This course concentrates on Irish Drama from the late 19th century to the present. Among the questions the course will raise: What is specific to the Irish dramatic tradition? Why were certain of the plays on the syllabus the subject of intense controversy and protest in Ireland? What role did the earlier imposition of English on an Irish speaking population and the later movement to revive Gaelic play in the development of an Irish theater? in plays whose language is highly marked, e.g., as poetry? Why is it so closely associated with modernism? Why was its modernism bound up with its being by and large a theater for small audiences? How does Beckett, some of whose most important plays were written and performed first in French and few of whose plays were performed in Ireland in his lifetime, fit into this tradition? Since the works we will be reading were meant ultimately to be performed, we will look at some film productions of the plays read and dvd's of the Druid Theatre's Synge and of Beckett plays. (Note: many of these plays are quite short.)
Reader available at Zee Zee Copy.
This course will introduce students to the study of creative writing – fiction, poetry, and drama. Students will learn to talk critically about these genres and begin to feel comfortable and confident with their own writing of them. Students will write in each of these genres and will partake in class workshops where their work will be edited and critiqued by other students in the class.
Note: This course is open to English majors only.
See below.
This course is an inquiry into the ways that race is constructed in literary texts and a look-by-doing at our own practices as people engaged in creative writing.
The purpose of writing in this course is, broadly stated, to engage public language on one hand and personal (meaning specific) observations and experiences on the other. The purpose of writing is not to come up with answers to the truly vexing problems of racism and economic and political disparity. The purpose here is to pursue consciousness. How one refers to race (one’s own as well as the races of others) is of paramount importance; the fact that there are ways in which American cultural institutions typically quantify and refer to race is of at least equal importance.
The writing vehicle will be, for the greatest part, the personal essay. It’s a peculiar form related to fiction and to autobiography and to poetry. We’ll likely read Michael Ondaatje’s Running in the Family and Audre Lorde’s Zami; we’ll read essays and stories by James Baldwin, Tess Schlesinger, Richard Ford, Jean Toomer. We’ll lean on Philip Lopate’s Art of the Personal Essay.
Writing assignments will broad; that is, they will allow for a variety of responses.
The book list is tentative. Students should come to class before buying books.
Note: This course is open to English majors only.
Ford, R.: The Granta Book of the American Short Story
This class will be conducted as a writing workshop where students will submit and discuss their own short fiction. We will also closely examine the work of published writers in the anthology. Students will complete 3 short writing assignments approximately 40 pages of new fiction, and one-page critiques of classmates’ work.
To be considered for admission in this course, please submit 10 photocopied pages of your fiction writing, along with an application form, to Professor Kleege’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!
Recommended: Ramazani, J. (editor): Norton Anthology of Modern & Contemporary Poetry
In this course you will conduct a progressive series of experiments in which you will explore some of the fundamental options for writing poetry todayâ€â€aperture, partition, closure; rhythmic sound patterning; sentence & line; stanza; short & long-lined poems; image & figure; graphics & textual space; cultural translation; poetic forms (haibun, villanelle, sestina, pantoum, ghazal, etc.); the first, second, third, and no person (persona, address, drama, narrative, description); prose poetry. Our emphasis will be placed on recent possibilities, but with an eye & ear always to renovating traditions. I have no “house style†and only one precept: you can do anything, if you can do it. You will write a poem a week, and we’ll discuss five or so in rotation (I’ll respond to every poem you write). On alternate days, we’ll discuss recent illustrative poems drawn from our course reader. If the past is any guarantee, it will be delightful.
To be considered for admission in this course, please submit 5 photocopied pages of your poetry, along with an application form, to Professor Shoptaw'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!
Swensen, C. & St. John, D. (eds): American Hybrid: A Norton Anthology of New Poetry
In this advanced poetry workshop, we will not only deepen our own writing practices, but also become increasingly familiar with the wide range of poetry-making materials and strategies. To this end, we will treat this course both as a workshop, where we discuss one another’s poems, and as a studio, where we engage in exercises, improvisations, and collaborations. Readings in poetry and poetics, as well as frequent outings to poetry-related events, will both inform and inspire our writing, but we will not rely upon tradition to define poetry’s possibilities. Instead, in questioning typical genre distinctions, we will hopefully come to a flexible and nuanced set of answers to the controversial question, What is poetry?
You are expected to fully engage assigned readings, to write a poem each week, and to provide your classmates with thoughtful written comments on their work. You will also be asked to memorize and recite a poem; to attend and report on five readings; and to write two book reviews. The course will culminate in your best effort to communicate your evolving poetic project in two separate, but intertwined, forms. You will edit, design, and produce a chapbook of your poems; and you will pair with one of your classmates for an interview that makes explicit your implicit poetic project.
To be considered for admission in this course, please submit 5 photocopied pages of your poetry, along with an application form, to Professor Fisher'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!
Atwan, R.: The best American Essays, 5th edition
This workshop course concentrates on the form, theory and practice of creative nonfiction, particularly on the personal essay. Workshop participants are required to write a minimum of 45 pages of original non-fictional narrative during the semester.
To be considered for admission in this course, please submit 10 photocopied pages of your original nonfiction, along with an application form, to Professor Mukherjee’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!
T.B.A.
Please contact Jennifer Miller at j_miller@berkeley.edu for more information about this course.
This course satisfies the pre-1800 requirement for the English major.
Joyce, J: Dubliners; Hemingway, E: The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway: The Finca Vigia Edition; Kafka, F: The Metamorphosis, in the Penal Colony, and Other Stories (Muir); Borges, J: Ficciones (Kerrigan)
The Reading and writing assignments--linked with the lectures and class discussions--are intended to develop students’ ability to analyze, understand, and interpret four great masters of the short story: Joyce, Hemingway, Kafka, and Borges. (The latter two will be read in translation.) Special emphasis will be placed on the techniques each writer deployed in his stories and how they work in delivering the content for each author.
These masterworks provided some basic tools that have shaped all of modern and contemporary fiction. Students will be expected to read and study these stories deeply and come to class prepared to discuss them. Papers will concentrate, not merely on what the tales are about, but how they function.
This course is open to English majors only.
Eliot,  T.S.: The Waste Land; Beckett,  S.: Waiting for Godot; Ellison,  R.: Invisible Man; Faulkner,  W.: Sanctuary; James,  H.: The Turn of the Screw; Course Reader,  including Freud’s essay on fetishism, excerpts from Muller and Richardson’s The Purloined Poe, Nabokov’s “The Vane Sisters,†& D. F. Wallace’s “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again.â€Â
Films: Coppola,  F.F.: The Conversation (1974); Hitchcock,  A.: The Birds (1963)
Critical reading usually involves reading “between the lines†of a literary text, picking up on the implications of its manifest content. In this course, however, we will focus on reading what is altogether missing: for example, the lack of a coherent narrator in Eliot’s Waste Land; the act of waiting for someone who never comes in Beckett’s Godot; or the literally unspeakable horror represented by birds in Hitchcock’s The Birds. Though the assigned texts come from several time periods, one of the primary goals of the course will be to understand why the explicit inclusion of ellipses and “unrepresentable†ideas is most characteristic of modernism. Does the nameless or “undomesticated†element serve to subvert the dominant culture, or, conversely, to define it? Do blank spaces unsettle narratives, or provide a harmonious “negative spaceâ€Â? How do they function in concert with other experimental techniques, such as stream-of-consciousness narration and fragmentation, from which seemingly nothing is excluded? Finally, we will consider the relationship of narrative absences to paranoiaâ€â€both the characters’ and our ownâ€â€as we attempt to impose meaning upon these non-signifying spaces.
This course is open to English majors only.
Johnson,  J. W.: The Autobiography of An Ex-Colored Man; Larsen,  N.: Passing; Ross,  F.: Oreo; Butler,  O.: Survivor; Obama,  B.: Dreams from My Father; Senna,  D.: Caucasia; Yamashita,  K.T.: Tropic of Orange; Roley,  B.A.: American Son; Nunez,  S.: A Feather on the Breath of God
This course examines U.S. fiction in the last century for which mixing works both as cultural themeâ€â€ethnic, racial, and class mixturesâ€â€and as literary formâ€â€genre, style, and narrative mixtures. The course will triangulate African-American, European-American and Asian-American cultures. Rather than engaging in a systematic study of these three U.S. cultures separately, however, the course traces lines of connection between them and explores how these lines proliferate and entangle with other U.S. cultures like Hispanic America. We follow the recent movement in ethnic studies toward comparison, reflecting a different understanding of ethnicity whereby a culture not only can be better understood in relation to other cultures, but also only comes into existence that way. The interrelation of cultures is thus constitutive of culture.
At the same time, we will put pressure on the inter- in interracial and inter-ethnic to see how it correlates with other inter- formations like the international, the interdisciplinary, and what we might call the intermedial: we will watch some films. We will explore historical, political, and intellectual contexts for our mixed fictions, according attention to issues of personal identity like intersubjectivity, agency, and integrity. Finally, the paradigm of mixing will be taken up as a question: Do cultures mix, mingle, coalesce, conflate, merge, analogize, parallel, conflict, synthesize, syncretize, absorb, condense, pass for (or over), cover over (or for) each other? Up to 200 pages of reading per week; three papers (7 pp). For a head start, we begin with The Autobiography of An Ex-Colored Man.
This course is open to English majors only.
This course satisfies UC Berkeley's American Cultures requirement.
Austin, Mary: Land of Little Rain; Carson, Rachel: Silent Spring; Leopold, Aldo: Sand County Almanac; Rosseau, J. J. : A Discourse on the Origin of Inequality; Sarris, Greg: Mabel McKay: Weaving the Dream; Shelley, Mary: Frankenstein; Thoreau, Henry David: Walden; Wordsworth, Dorothy: Grasmere and Alfoxden Journals; course reader will include selections from Abbey, Basho, Berger, Carson, Clare, Davis, Haraway, Hass, Jewett, Masumoto, Muir, Pollan, Oliver, Snyder, Solnit, Thompson, Williams, Wordsworth.
Films: Baichwal/Burtynsky: Manufactured Landscapes; Haynes: Safe; Herzog: Grizzly Man; Scott: Bladerunner; Varda: The Gleaners and I
What does literature have to teach us about contemporary debates on genetic engineering, food politics, toxic pollution, global warming, e-waste, species extinction and the “death of the planet� How can literary study help us understand the figures of silence, slowness, and invisibility defining environmental discourse? How can we understand the problematic concept of “nature†in modern literature and what do ideas about race and gender have to do with it? What kinds of literacy are specific to certain places and not others? This course will address these questions by examining the role of language and literature in making possible different kinds of interaction between people and environments. Topics will include: animal-human-machine-continuums; relations between people who work the land and those who tour it; the role of memory and imagination in writing about place and the loss of place; weather-reporting and other ways of counting time; fantasies about ecological disaster and science’s ability to save or destroy humankind.
Cather,  W.: My AntonÃÂa; Ellison,  R.: Invisible Man; Faulkner,  W.: Light in August; Norris,  F.: McTeague; West,  N.: Miss Lonelyhearts & The Day of the Locust
What makes a work of literature characteristically “American� This question is complicated by the variety of distinct geographical and cultural landscapes that make up the country. In some ways, the representation of place in American regional literature becomes a kind of genre-coding, so that we come to expect the ghosts of slavery to appear in Southern narratives, a wild frontier in the West, etc. In this course, we will examine these generic conventions about place, and observe the methods authors use to embrace, adapt, or resist them. Often, the concept of caricature itself becomes the focus of a narrative, as characters struggle to disentangle themselves from identities imposed upon them by settings. Special attention will be paid to character (in addition to landscape, architecture, and sociological factors) as a means of representing a region. The collective group of texts will provide, beyond regional differences, a composite view of the national culture. Contemporary America is singularly fascinated with violence and sex; this course will focus on the related concepts of grotesqueness and fecundity, strangely interconnected, that have historically preoccupied American writers.
Arana, Marie (ed): The Writing Life
This course will focus on reading  and writing about  essays on the craft of writing by a medley of historical and contemporary figures in American literature. The essays we will read provide a view of writing literature from the inside  an opportunity for a close examination of the satisfactions and frustrations many writers experience with the composing process. We will also read these essays within the context of the literature each writer has published, and we will attend more generally to the “place†of the writer and literature in American life.
The writers we will read will be as varied as the essays themselves: award-winning and best selling novelists, playwrights, poets, essayists, and memoirists, as well as distinguished teachers and critics. Depending on the course participants’ previous reading experiences, the reading list will blend essays from among such historical luminaries as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Frederick Douglas, Gertrude Stein, William Carlos Williams, Robert Frost, and Wallace Stevens as well as selections from among such contemporary writers as Sherman Alexie, Julia Alvaez, Ray Bradbury, Michael Chabon, Joan Didion, Annie Dillard, Francine Du Plessix Gray, Frances Fitzgerald, Tracy Kidder, Stephen King, David Mamet, Alice McDermott, Gloria Naylor, David Sedaris, Amy Tan, Alice Walker, Wendy Wasserstein, and John Edgar Wideman. Working within a reading/writing workshop context, students will have several opportunities to practice and appreciate the literary qualities of their own thinking and writing about composing American literature.
Breton, A.: Nadja; Calvino, I.: Invisible Cities; Ellison, R.: Invisible Man; Joyce, J.: Dubliners; Pynchon, T.: The Crying of Lot 49; Woolf, V.: Mrs. Dalloway
Films: Metropolis (1927); Rear Window (1954); Blade Runner (1982)
This course examines representations of the city in twentieth-century literature and film, asking how urban experience shapes modernist and postmodernist aesthetics. The course will examine the material conditions and demands of the city, but it will also consider the city as, in Italo Calvino’s terms, “made of desires and fears,†as complex, unstable sites of community and alienation, novel enticements and novel anxieties. In Invisible Cities, Calvino writes:
With cities it is as with dreams; everything imaginable can be dreamed, but even the most unexpected dream is a rebus that conceals a desire or its reverse, a fear. Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their perspectives deceitful, and everything conceals something else.
Calvino suggests that the city, like a text, is a kind of representational riddle that invites interpretation or decoding. We will thus consider the way in which urban experience produces a particular kind of subject who must interpret the city’s palimpsistic layers and create his or her place within its perspectival vicissitudes. Our texts take us into particular citiesâ€â€Paris, London, Dublin, New York, and San Franciscoâ€â€but the course is also, more generally, a consideration of the way in which one’s relation to and experience of place shape subjectivity.
Kaplan, E.: Women in Film Noir; Silver & Ursini, eds.: Film Noir Reader 4; Krutnik, F.: In A Lonely Street; Telotte, J.: Voices in the Dark
We will examine film noir’s relationship to “classical†Hollywood cinema, as well as its history, theory and generic markers, while analyzing in detail the major films in this area. The course will also be concerned with the social and cultural background of the 40's, the representation of femininity and masculinity, and the spread of Freudianism.
Heaney, S.: Beowulf; Woolf, V.: Mrs. Dalloway; a photocopied reader of articles, short stories and miscellaneous poems from across a thousand years of English literature
The medium of literature is language. This course will explore this relationship through a survey of literary forms defined by linguistic forms, and consideration of how these literary forms are both like and unlike forms of non-literary language. These literary forms include meter; rhyme and alliteration; syntactic parallelism and other syntactic structures special to poetry; formulas of oral composition; and special narrative uses of pronouns, tenses and other subjective features of language to express point of view and render 'represented speech and thought'. The emphasis will be on literature in English, but comparisons with literature in other languages will also be drawn. No knowledge of linguistics will be presupposed, but linguistic concepts will be introduced, explained and used.
Reader
“The lyf so short, the crafte so longe to lerne…â€Â
-- Chaucer
This course will investigate how authors craft stories, so that both non-writers and writers may gain a new perspective on reading stories. In thinking of short stories as artifacts produced by humans, we will consider – without any assertions of certainty – how those people may have experienced themselves and their world, and how history and culture may have participated in the making of these stories. So, in this course we will explore the making, purposes, and pleasures of the short story form. We will read – widely, actively and carefully – many published stories from various countries in order to begin to understand the conventions of the form, and how this form may function in diverse cultures. Students will write a short story and revise it; engaging with a short story as a writer will aid them in their investigations as readers and critics. Students will also write two analytical papers about stories we read in class. Attendance is mandatory.
Hoffman, E.T.A: The Sandman; Adam, Villiers de l’Isle: The Future Eve; Wells, H.G.: The Island of Doctor Moreau; Capek, Karel: R.U.R; Ishiguro, Kazuo: Never Let Me Go; James, P.D.: Children of Men; Mielville, China: Perdido Street Station; Dick, Philip K.: Do Androids Dream Electric Sheep; Thacker, Eugene: The Global Genome; Moylan, Tom: Scraps of the Untainted Sky; Jameson, Frederic: Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions; Otis, Lisa: Membranes: Metaphors of Invasion in Nineteenth-Century Literature, Science and Politics
Films: Soylent Green (1973); Bladerunner (1981); Gattaca (1997); Children of Men (2006)
This course will examine in depth the history of speculative fiction and its engagement with the thematics and topoi of the new life sciencesâ€â€representation of cloning, ecological dystopias, hybrid life-forms, genetic engineering dystopias. While science is the thematic point of departure of speculative fiction, the concerns of this course will be the literary. How does literature’s encounter with the projected realities of the new biology revise our conceptions of the subject? Could there be a Leopold Bloom of the genetically engineered, a subject whose interior voice is the free-flowing expression of experience? Behind the endless removes of social, material and technological mediation lie the construction of a flesh and blood body, separated from itself through the workings of consciousness. If indeed the post/modern subject requires a psychic space shaped by the authenticity of ‘being’, a consciousness deeply rooted in the human experience, then how do we represent that being whose point of origin is the artificial, the inauthentic? These are some of the questions to be addressed in this course. You may of course bring others.
Doctorow, E.L.: Ragtime; Gold, M.: Jews Without Money; Kingston, M.H.: The Woman Warrior; Stoppard, T.: Travesties; Wright, R.: Native Son
This seminar will investigate the relationship between culture and economics. To what extent is cultural production determined by market forces, and to what extent is it separate from these forces? Particularly during moments of crisis, how might culture help us to imagine new ways of imagining and structuring society? To answer these questions, the seminar will focus on the last three major worldwide economic crisesâ€â€the 1930s, the 1970s, and the crisis that began in September 2008. We will see how the 1930s witnessed what has been called the “laboring†of American culture, but also the emergence of cultural forms that advanced fascism in Europe. We will see how the 1970s witnessed the emergence of an ostensibly depoliticized “postmodern†culture, but also the promotion of what has come to be known as “multiculturalism.†Finally, we will explore both the possibilities and limitations brought by the most recent crisis. Students will be invited to locate examples of contemporary culture and to relate these to cultural forms from the earlier two decades. Note: Since the readings might change, please refrain from buying books until after the first meeting.
English 190 replaced English 100 and 150 as of Fall '09. English majors may fulfill the seminar requirement for the major by taking one section of English 190 (or by having taken either English 100 or English 150 before Fall '09). Please read the paragraph on page 2 of this Announcement of Classes for more details about enrolling in or wait-listing for this course.
Please click here for more information about enrollment in English 190.
Shakespeare: A Midsummer Night's Dream; Shakespeare: As You Like It; Shakespeare: All's Well that Ends Well; Shakespeare: The Winter's Tale; Mozart, W.A.: Le Nozze di Figaro (opera) (1786); Mozart, W.A.: Così fan tutte (opera) (1787); Mozart, W.A.: Don Giovanni (opera) (1790); Verdi, G.: Falstaff (opera) (1893); Cukor, G.: Philadelphia Story (film) (1940); Hawks, H.: His Girl Friday (film) (1940); Sturges, P.: The Lady Eve (film) (1941); Sturges, P.: Sullivan's Travels (film) (1941); Sturges, P.: The Palm Beach Story (film) (1942); Sturges, P.: Miracle at Morgan's Creek (film) (1944)
Recommended: Shakespeare: Twelfth Night
In this course we will study modern versions of the so-called “old†or romantic comedy -- comedies of courtship, marriage, and remarriage, which explore the relations between sexuality, politics, and social order. We will look at (and listen to) works from three supreme iterations of the genre: the plays of William Shakespeare, the operas of Lorenzo da Ponte and W. A. Mozart, and the 1940s Hollywood comedies of Howard Hawks, George Cukor, and Preston Sturges. Our discussions will be guided by some of the critics, theorists and philosophers of comedy, notably Stanley Cavell and Northrop Frye.
English 190 replaced English 100 and 150 as of Fall '09. English majors may fulfill the seminar requirement for the major by taking one section of English 190 (or by having taken either English 100 or English 150 before Fall '09). Please read the paragraph on page 2 of this Announcement of Classes for more details about enrolling in or wait-listing for this course.
Please click here for more information about enrollment in English 190.
Emerson , Ralph Waldo: Nature and Selected Essays; Thoreau, Henry David: A Week on the Concord and Merrimac Rivers ; Thoreau, Henry David: Walden and Civil Disobedience; Thoreau, Henry David: The Maine Wood; Thoreau, Henry David: Cape Cod; Thoreau, Henry David: The Journals of Henry David Thoreau 1837-1861; Plato: Symposium
A close and careful reading of these two friends and writers, with an emphasis on the connection they draw between ecological experience and spiritual self-discovery. Two ten page essays will be required, as will regular attendance and participation.
English 190 replaced English 100 and 150 as of Fall '09. English majors may fulfill the seminar requirement for the major by taking one section of English 190 (or by having taken either English 100 or English 150 before Fall '09). Please read the paragraph on page 2 of this Announcement of Classes for more details about enrolling in or wait-listing for this course.
Please click here for more information about enrollment in English 190.
In addition to the books that follow, there will be photocopied readings, e.g. poetry by T. Gunn and R. Hass, essays by J. Cain and E.
Chandler, R.: The Big Sleep; Dick, P.: Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?; Didion, J.: Slouching toward Bethlehem; Jeffers, R.: Selected Poems; Stegner, W.: The Angle of Repose; Steinbeck, J.: The Long Valley; West, N.: The Day of the Locust
Besides reading and discussing fiction and poetry with Western settings, and essays attempting to identify or explain distinctive regional characteristics, this course will include consideration of some movies shaped by and shaping conceptions of California. Depending on enrollment, each student will be responsible for organizing and leading class discussion (probably teamed with another student) once during the semester. Writing will consist of two short or one long essay totalling ca. 20 pages. There will be no quizzes or exams, but seminar attendance and participation will be expected, and will affect grades.
English 190 replaced English 100 and 150 as of Fall '09. English majors may fulfill the seminar requirement for the major by taking one section of English 190 (or by having taken either English 100 or English 150 before Fall '09). Please read the paragraph on page 2 of this Announcement of Classes for more details about enrolling in or wait-listing for this course.
Please click here for more information about enrollment in English 190.
The book list is tentative. It will likely include the literary works and speeches of the following authors: James Baldwin (The Fire Next Time); Amiri Baraka (Dutchman, “The Screamersâ€Â); Angela Davis (The Meaning of Freedom); Frederick Douglass (1845 Narrative); Zora Neale Hurston (“Characteristics of Negro Expressionâ€Â); Barack Obama (Speech on Race); Ishmael Reed (Mumbo Jumbo); Booker T. Washington (Up from Slavery); Malcolm X (“The Ballot or the Bulletâ€Â).
Black rhetoric has proven by turns incendiary and inspiring of late. This course will explore the oral and rhetorical traditions of African Americans that have played a significant role in the shaping of national culture and history, i.e., work songs, spirituals, blues, jazz, as well as prayers, sermons, and speeches. These forms reflect the struggle of African Americans for a meaningful freedom; but in subjecting our texts to rigorous formal analysis we will strive to remain open as to whether that freedom dream was for inclusion, or for something altogether more radical. We will attempt, that is, to read and hear in this material both what is expressed with a view to persuasion and what is not – the room that black culture allows for a “telling inarticulacy,†as Nathaniel Mackey has phrased it (a “frustration with and questioning of given articulacies, permissible ways of making senseâ€Â).
There will be a great deal of listening in this class to both black music and speeches; for texts that predate the invention of sound recording, our examples will be drawn from available published sources.
English 190 replaced English 100 and 150 as of Fall '09. English majors may fulfill the seminar requirement for the major by taking one section of English 190 (or by having taken either English 100 or English 150 before Fall '09). Please read the paragraph on page 2 of this Announcement of Classes for more details about enrolling in or wait-listing for this course.
Please click here for more information about enrollment in English 190.
Barnes, D.: Nightwood; Carter, A.: The Passion of New Eve; DeLillo, D.: The Body Artist; Faulkner, W.: As I Lay Dying; Fitzgerald, F.S.: Tender is the Night; Gibson, W.: Neuromancer; Hemingway, E.: The Sun Also Rises; Toomer, J.: Cane
Films: Modern Times (1936); Blade Runner (1982)
Harold Segel characterizes modernism as “the transition from an intellectual and verbal culture to one distinguished by antirationalism, anti-intellectualism, the primacy of spontaneity and intuition, the repudiation of the epistemological value of language, and the celebration of the physical, which was perceived as direct experience of the phenomenal world†Taking Segel’s claims as a point of departure, this course will ask how changing conceptions of the body in twentieth-century literature and film are implicated in new definitions of knowledge, culture, representation, and the category of the “human.†We will start with Hemingway and Fitzgerald, questioning how their valorization of physicality, athleticism, and beauty informs the language and narrative structure of these novels. We will also consider novels from the same period, however, whose linguistic excess and experimentation raise questions about the status of the body and problematize the notion of direct experience of the world. The course will then turn toward the second half of the century, asking how postmodern, posthuman, or cyborg bodies offer new definitions of bodily form. Throughout the course, we will also read different theories of the body, considering both what theory illuminates about fictional representations of the body and what fiction contributes to theories of the body. In considering different theoretical models and the different bodily forms to which modernism and postmodernism give rise, the course foregrounds the notion that the body’s ontology is not necessarily accomplished, but continually reconceived, or even recreated.
English 190 replaced English 100 and 150 as of Fall '09. English majors may fulfill the seminar requirement for the major by taking one section of English 190 (or by having taken either English 100 or English 150 before Fall '09). Please read the paragraph on page 2 of this Announcement of Classes for more details about enrolling in or wait-listing for this course.
Please click here for more information about enrollment in English 190.
Texts will include works by Mark Twain, Sherman Alexie, Louisa May Alcott (Little Women), L. Frank Baum (The Wonderful Wizard of Oz), Langston Hughes (Dream Keeper), etc. This list is tentative. Students should check the course's bSpace site before buying books.
This course will be an inquiry into a literature often marginalized in academic discourse. We'll explore children's literature's relation to United State's culture; we'll read classic and new texts and critical writings, study award giving, and debate cultural specificity.
English 190 replaced English 100 and 150 as of Fall '09. English majors may fulfill the seminar requirement for the major by taking one section of English 190 (or by having taken either English 100 or English 150 before Fall '09). Please read the paragraph on page 2 of this Announcement of Classes for more details about enrolling in or wait-listing for this course.
Please click here for more information about enrollment in English 190.
Milton, J: Complete Poems (Penguin); De Quincey, T: Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (Oxford); Austen, J: Sense and Sensibility (Oxford); Brockden Brown, C: Wieland (Penguin); Crane, H: Complete Poems (Liveright)
This course aims to follow the strange history of “enthusiasm†by tracing its manifestations in a variety of literary and historical contexts. Today, “enthusiasm†carries the generally positive meaning of “rapturous interest or excitement,†but the word derives from the ancient Greek “ethousiasmos†(“the fact of being possessed by a godâ€Â), and in eighteenth-century Europe it generally carried negative connotations. Samuel Johnson defined it as a particularly dangerous form of error: “a vain belief in divine revelation.†After exploring some ancient sources (Plato, Longinus, and biblical texts), we will focus on modern representations of enthusiasm in four historical phases: 1) The English Revolution (with emphasis on Milton); 2) Eighteenth-Century Britain (Locke, Shaftesbury, Hume, and Smart); 3) The Romantic Period (Blake, Brockden Brown, Austen, and De Quincey); and 4) the rhapsodic tradition in American poetry (Emerson, Whitman, Crane, and Ginsberg). Students will write two essays and take a final exam.
English 190 replaced English 100 and 150 as of Fall '09. English majors may fulfill the seminar requirement for the major by taking one section of English 190 (or by having taken either English 100 or English 150 before Fall '09). Please read the paragraph on page 2 of this Announcement of Classes for more details about enrolling in or wait-listing for this course.
Please click here for more information about enrollment in English 190.
Dickinson, E: Poems: Readers’ Edition; Dickinson, E: Selected Letters
Recommended: Habegger, A: My wars are laid away in books; Pollack, V: A historical guide to Emily Dickinson
This is an intensive seminar in the poetry of Emily Dickinson. We will learn how to read (to describe and interpret) Dickinson’s poems, with pleasure and confidence, deeply and also broadly throughout her career. Topics will include early poetry & biography; rhythms and rhymes; figuration; women writers & women’s poetry; letters & biography; love & (non)marriage; definition and riddle; death & dying; religion & the afterlife; science (e.g., evolution); nature as topic and as figure; emotion (for instance, despair & fear); gender & sexuality; the Civil War & Abolition; self-definition & self-reliance; manuscript poem packets; contemporary poetry (e.g., Emerson, Longfellow, the Brownings, Lydia Sigourney); late poetry & letters. We will learn to research in Dickinson by first considering how to present her unpublished poems, how to use variorum editions, concordances & indices, how to locate and incorporate relevant criticism, both of individual poems and of larger issues. There will be an exercise in scansion, a shorter paper on a single poem, and a longer paper on a group of poems.
English 190 replaced English 100 and 150 as of Fall '09. English majors may fulfill the seminar requirement for the major by taking one section of English 190 (or by having taken either English 100 or English 150 before Fall '09). Please read the paragraph on page 2 of this Announcement of Classes for more details about enrolling in or wait-listing for this course.
Please click here for more information about enrollment in English 190.
T.B.A.
The seminar will read a generous selection of Mark Twain’s most important published writings. We will work our way chronologically through his life and career, beginning with his earliest extant writings and ending with Mysterious Stranger (which he left unpublished). The class will have ready access to the Mark Twain Papers, whose extensive primary and secondary resources students are encouraged to take advantage of for their research. One brief oral report (as the basis for class discussion) and one research paper, due at the end of the term.
English 190 replaced English 100 and 150 as of Fall '09. English majors may fulfill the seminar requirement for the major by taking one section of English 190 (or by having taken either English 100 or English 150 before Fall '09). Please read the paragraph on page 2 of this Announcement of Classes for more details about enrolling in or wait-listing for this course.
Please click here for more information about enrollment in English 190.
Franklin, B.: Autobiography; Jefferson, T.: selected writings; Whitman, W.: selected poetry; Emerson, R.: selected essays; Poe, E. A.: selected essays and stories; Melville, H.: The Confidence Man; Barnum, P. T.: Life of P.T. Barnum (1855 ed)
In the “Worship†section of The Conduct of Life (1860), Ralph Waldo Emerson observed that “Society is a masked ball, where everyone hides his real character, and reveals it by hiding. . . .†In the August 1849 issue of The Literary World, Evert Duyckinck, a prominent American biographer and publisher, argued that “It is not the worst thing that can be said of a country that it gives birth to a confidence man. . . . It is a good thing, and speaks well for human nature, that . . . men can be swindled.†We will explore research questions that emerge from studying the appearance  and the appeal  of various versions of “the confidence man†in the literature and popular culture of pre- and post-Civil War America. At once a celebrant of shared belief and faith as well as an agent for exploiting assurance and trust, the confidence man trades on the ambiguities of self-representation and imaginative authority in the cultural transaction of making audiences believe.
We will consider expressions of what I call the “promissory tradition†in American literature and culture, especially as it is expressed in the writings of Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson to Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman, and the pragmatism of William James. We will also spend considerable time reading and discussing Edgar Allen Poe’s fascination with hoaxes and the art of “diddling,†as well as grappling with issues of identity and duplicity in Herman Melville’s complex and disquieting novel, The Confidence Man, in which Melville discovers that “the great art of telling truth†may well best be practiced by telling lies. We will also examine expressions of this tradition in the popular culture of the period, ranging from the celebrated humbugs of P. T. Barnum to the ubiquitous appeals of patent medicine advertising.
English 190 replaced English 100 and 150 as of Fall '09. English majors may fulfill the seminar requirement for the major by taking one section of English 190 (or by having taken either English 100 or English 150 before Fall '09). Please read the paragraph on page 2 of this Announcement of Classes for more details about enrolling in or wait-listing for this course.
Please click here for more information about enrollment in English 190.
Beckett, S.: Murphy; Beckett, S.: Watt; Beckett, S.: "First Love", "The Expelled," "The Calmative," "The End"; Beckett, S.: Molloy; Beckett, S.: The Unnamable; Beckett, S.: Waiting for Godot; Beckett, S.: How It Is; Beckett, S.: Company, Ill Seen Ill Said, Worstward Ho from Nohow On; Beckett, S.: Stirrings Still, Imagination Dead Imagine, some Fizzles from The Complete Short Prose: 1929â€â€1989; Beckett, S.: Endgame, Not I, Happy Days, That Time and other short plays from the Collected Shorter Plays of Samuel Beckett
Recommended: Beckett, S.: Proust and Three Dialogues; Knowlson, J.: Damned to Fame: the Life of Samuel Beckett
This course will cover both Beckett's prose and his theater. We will address Beckett both as an Irish writer and as a figure of international writing--he is, after all, a major French writer. Special attention will be paid to Beckett's experiments with language, to his attempts to work free of Joyce's influence and the resultant "minimalist" style of the last works. (The reading list is long because many works listed are quite short.)
English 190 replaced English 100 and 150 as of Fall '09. English majors may fulfill the seminar requirement for the major by taking one section of English 190 (or by having taken either English 100 or English 150 before Fall '09). Please read the paragraph on page 2 of this Announcement of Classes for more details about enrolling in or wait-listing for this course.
Please click here for more information about enrollment in English 190.
See below.
A passing narrative is an accountâ€â€fiction or nonfictionâ€â€of a person or group claiming a racial or ethnic identity that she or they do not “possess.†Such narratives speakâ€â€directly, indirectly, and very uneasilyâ€â€to the authenticity, the ambiguity, and the performance of racial or ethnic identity; they also speak to issues of official and traditional categorization. The passing narrativeâ€â€the narrative that accounts for making the “different†claimâ€â€necessarily unsettles notions of belonging and underscores that race can be viewed as a construction or a series of conventions.
The course will investigate the public nature of race by examining narrativesâ€â€published and unpublished stories, novels, memoirs, and filmsâ€â€that call the absoluteness of its boundaries into question. We’ll look as well at texts that treat racial imitationâ€â€minstrelsy, “yellow-face,†etc. All said, we’ll be looking rather closely at books and movies that reveal, document, question, and celebrate ambiguous spaces in an imposing structure, one often assumed to be “natural.â€Â
We’ll likely read Karen Brodkin’s How Jews Became White Folks, James Weldon Johnson’s Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, Nella Larsen’s Passing, Philip Roth’s The Human Stain, Gene Yang’s American-Born Chinese, Kenji Yoshino’s Covering, essays by Gloria Anzaldua, Noel Ignatiev, Henry Louis Gates, etc. Films will probably include Orson Welles’ Touch of Evil, Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s Alien: Resurrection, Louis King’s Charlie Chan in Egypt, Alan Crosland’s The Jazz Singer, etc.
Position papers, discussions led by class members, final 12+ page writing project involving research. (Hybrid projects are welcome.)
The book list is tentative. Students should come to class before buying books.
English 190 replaced English 100 and 150 as of Fall '09. English majors may fulfill the seminar requirement for the major by taking one section of English 190 (or by having taken either English 100 or English 150 before Fall '09). Please read the paragraph on page 2 of this Announcement of Classes for more details about enrolling in or wait-listing for this course.
Please click here for more information about enrollment in English 190.
Modleski, T.: The Women Who Knew Too Much, 2nd edn.; Deutelman, M. & Poague, L., eds.: A Hitchcock Reader, 2nd edn.
This will be a seminar on the Hitchcock canon from the British through the American period, with emphasis on cinematic representation of gender, guilt and victimhood. Our discussions and critical readings will consider humor, censorship, socio-cultural backgrounds and a range of critical approaches.
English 190 replaced English 100 and 150 as of Fall '09. English majors may fulfill the seminar requirement for the major by taking one section of English 190 (or by having taken either English 100 or English 150 before Fall '09). Please read the paragraph on page 2 of this Announcement of Classes for more details about enrolling in or wait-listing for this course.
Please click here for more information about enrollment in English 190.
T.B.A.
This is a continuation of section 1 of H195A, taught by Gautam Premnath in Fall 2009. No new students will be admitted. No new application form needs to be filled out. Professor Premnath will give out CECs (class entry codes) in class in November.
T.B.A.
This is a continuation of section 2 of H195A, taught by Professor Gonzalez in Fall 2009. No new students will be admitted. No new application form needs to be filled out. Professor Gonzalez will give out CECs (class entry codes) in class in November.
T.B.A.
This is a continuation of section 3 of H195A, taught by Professor Rubenstein in Fall 2009. No new students will be admitted. No new application form needs to be filled out. Professor Rubenstein will give out CECs (class entry codes) in class in November.
Graduate students from other departments and exceptionally well-prepared undergraduates are welcome in English graduate courses (except for English 200 and 375) insofar as limitations of class size allow. Graduate courses are usually limited to 15 students; courses numbered 250 are usually limited to 10.
When demand for a graduate course exceeds the maximum enrollment limit, the instructor will determine priorities for enrollment and inform students of his/her decisions at the second class meeting. Prior enrollment does not guarantee a place in a graduate course that turns out to be oversubscribed on the first day of class; fortunately, this situation does not arise very often.
Theorists will include: Roland Barthes, Jean Baudrillard, Walter Benjamin, Jonathan Crary, Guy Debord, Michel Foucault, Luce Irigaray, Jacques Lacan, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, W.J.T. Mitchell, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Susan Sontag. Primary texts will include: T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land, selected World War I poets, Virginia Woolf, Jacob’s Room, and Mrs. Dalloway; and collections of Holocaust photographs.
Probing what has been called the “visual turn†in literary studies, this course will scrutinize the interplay between verbal and visual modes of representation in a range of philosophical, literary, and visual texts. We will ask how and why visual perspectives and materials have been incorporated into literary study. Through readings in semiotics, psychoanalysis, phenomenology, and Marxism, we will map some key tensions of twentieth-century cultural theory and production: the relations between subjects and objects of observation, mechanical reproduction and imaginative creation, the legibility of images and the visibility of words. Literary and photographic theories and practices will be our primary subjects, but we will also glance at film from time to time. The course will be divided into three basic units: a broad theoretical inquiry into questions of epistemology, subject formation, and vision; a more targeted exploration of topics that cross different media (the codes of realism, the composition of the image, the construction of perspective); and an inquiry into the uses of verbal and visual media in the construction of cultural memory. This final unit will dwell primarily on two defining crises of the twentieth century: World War I, a famously literary war, and World War II, specifically the Holocaust, as a vexed crux of iconic images.
Two papers will be assigned: depending in part on your choice of topics, the course could satisfy either the twentieth-century or the non-historical requirement.
The principal text for the course will be a draft of a book I am writing as an introduction to the subject; we will use it and the poetry on which its claims are based to establish a common foundation from which each student will explore the metrical practice of a poet or poets of his or her own choosing.
This course will provide a basic introduction to the major meters of the modern English poetic tradition from the perspective of a theory of meter rooted in generative linguistics. Taking the strict iambic pentameter of Shakespeare's Sonnets, the looser iambic pentameter of Shakespeare's plays, and Hopkins' Sprung Rhythm pentameter as representatives of three distinct but overlapping meters, we will explore the structural properties of stress, syllable count and caesura placement in these forms, the ranges of variation they allow, their different manifestations in closely related forms and in the practice of other poets, their aesthetic effects in particular poems, their formal relationships to their Romance, Old English and Classical Latin and Greek influences, and most fundamentally, their relationships to the rhythmic structure of language itself. No prior background in either metrics or linguistics is required.
Jonson, B.: Five Plays by Ben Jonson, ed. Wilkes; Nashe, T.: The Unfortunate Traveller and Other Works, ed. Steane; Shakespeare, W.: The Winter’s Tale, ed. Orgel; Shakespeare, W.: Sonnets and Poems, ed. Mowat and Werstein; Spenser, E.: Edmund Spenser’s Poetry, ed. Maclean and Prescott; Webster, J.: The Duchess of Malfi, ed. Gibbons; Course Reader
This course will be structured as a scholarly detective story, driven by a question that has never been satisfactorily answered: how did “that rare Italian master, Julio Romanoâ€Ââ€â€prized pupil of Raphael; designer of sexually explicit engravings for the scandalous sonetti l ussuriosi of Pietro Aretino; supervisor of artistic works at the court of Federico Gonzaga, first Duke of Mantua--enter the Shakespeare canon as the alleged creator of a simulated statue in The Winter’s Tale, the only Renaissance artist Shakespeare mentions by name? Lines of approach will be biographical, religious, intertextual, and aesthetic. In pursuit of an acceptable answer we’ll map a multi-media, trans-national cultural movement, studying the relationships among written, aural, and visual arts in the Renaissanceâ€â€poetry, prose fiction, drama, masque, erotica, engraving, painting, scenic design, sculpture, and architectureâ€â€focusing on the English-Italian connection. We’ll consult primary sources by Aretino, Greene, Jonson, Marston, Nashe, Shakespeare, Spenser, and Webster, as well as 16th and early 17th century writers on the visual arts; and secondary sources by recent literary, theater, and art historians. One short paper (8-10 pages) and one long paper (about 20 pages) will be required.
Wekker, G: The Politics of Passion ; Powell, P: The Pagoda ; Selvadurai, Shyam: Funny Boy ; Gopinath, G: Impossible Desires ; Johnson and Henderson: Black Queer Studies ; Munoz, J: Disidentifications ; Eng and Hom: Q & AÂÂ
Recommended: Glave, T: Our CaribbeanÂÂ
Films: Fire (1996); Black Is, Black Ain't (1995); Brother to Brother (2004)
This seminar is dedicated to the intersection between queer theory and “minority†literatures and cultures. We will take as our starting point the critique of queer theory’s ethnocentrism most potently embodied in Cathy Cohen’s famous essay “Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens.†Having considered Cohen’s invocation towards a queerer queer theory (and some of the critical debate surrounding it), we will examine works by artists and scholars of various ethnic backgrounds that engage, critique, and supplement queer theory as it emerged in the US academy. Our field is necessarily disparateâ€â€generically, racially, and nationally. We will look at fiction, film, criticism, performance, photography, and anthropology; at artists from the United States, Asia, Africa, and their diasporas.ÂÂ
Course Reader will include work by Audre Lorde; Gloria Anzaldúa; Rinaldo Walcott, Justin Chen; CherrÃÂe Moraga; Jasbir Puar; David Eng; M. Jacqui Alexander; Omi’seke Natasha Tinsley; Zanele Muholi; Michael Hames Garcia, amongst others.
Course Reader
Topics in poetics raised by theorists (Barthes, Bourdieu, Deleuze, Glissant, Riffaterre) and practitioners (Alcalay, Joron, Mackey, Palmer, Spahr et al.) will focus our discussion of each other’s poetry.
To be considered for admission in this course, please submit 5-10 photocopied pages of your poetry, along with an application form, to Professor O'Brien'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!
Rooms and lives: a creative or literary nonfiction graduate workshop open to students from any department. Drawing on narrative strategies found in memoir, the diary, travel writing, and fiction, students will have workshopped in class three 10-20 page pieces. Each will take as point of departure detailed description of a real room, the piece then expanding out to its occupants, past or present, including the authorial self. Each week, students will also turn in one-page critiques of the two or three student pieces being workshopped as well as a 3-page journal entry (these entries may comprise part of the longer pieces). Probable semester total of written pages, including critiques: 70-80. Class attendance mandatory.
To be considered for admission in this course, please submit 5-10 photocopied pages of your nonfiction, along with an application form, to Professor Farber'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!
Authors to include Frederick Douglass, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Harriet Beecher Stowe, George Lippard, Ralph Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Harriet Wilson, Herman Melville, Elizabeth Stoddard, Harriet Prescott Spofford, David Walker, Maria Stewart, Edgar Allen Poe, Frances Osgood, Lydia Sigourney, Walt Whitman, William Cullen Bryant, Emily Dickinson, and others.
A survey of U.S. literature in the decades before the Civil War with special attention to narratives of race and nation, the development of American romanticism, and cultures of poetry in the U.S.
James, H.: "In the Cage"; Dos Passos, J.: Manhattan Transfer; Crane, H.: The Complete Poems of Hart Crane; Fitzgerald, F. S.: Tender is the Night; Stein, G.: Everybody's Autobiography; Cendrars, B.: Hollywood; West, N.: Novels and Other Writings; Adorno, T.: The Stars Down to Earth; Williams, W. C.: Complete Collected Poems 1906-1938; Agee, J.: Let Us Now Praise Famous Men; Kittler, F.: Discourse Networks 1800/1900; Loos, A.: Gentlemen Prefer Blondes; Gibson, W.: Pattern Recognition
This course surveys a range of Anglo-American texts from the first half of the twentieth-century—with a strong emphasis on US figures—that explore different versions of a modernist fascination with media aesthetics. Working with an expanded sense of what counts as modernism, our readings and screenings will revisit period debates about the values, limits, and possibilities of particular aesthetic mediums (poetry, painting, music), and contextualize these debates within a history of media from the turn-of-the-twentieth-century to the present. Film will be a major focus in the course, which will include examples of both experimental cinema (Charles Sheeler and Paul Strand’s Manhatta, Dziga Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera, Borderline, starring H. D. and Paul Robeson) and Hollywood features (Sherlock, Jr., A Star is Born, The Women, His Girl Friday). Our discussions with consider such topics as urban form and the scene of early cinema, montage and the poetics of assembly, screwball comedy and “classical Hollywood” sexuality, celebrity, publicity, and modern “personality,” literary constructions of “spatial form,” and the idea of communications in the network culture made possible by the telegraph and telephone.
T.B.A.
We will examine the theory and practice of mass entertainment during two comparable moments of major innovation in mass entertainment: the construction of permanent theaters in sixteenth-century London, and the invention of talking pictures in twentieth-century Hollywood.  The course will have several aims: to explore the distinctiveness of the art that each innovation generated; to compare these arts; and to consider whether any themes or problems of mass entertainment persist from one period and art-form to the next.
Hegel,  G.W.F.: Lectures on the Philosophy of World History: Introduction ; Marx, K., and Engels, F.: Manifesto of the Communist Party ; Marx, K., and Engels, F.: The German Ideology; Arendt, H.: The Human Condition ; Farah, N.: Gifts ; Cliff, M.: No Telephone to Heaven ; Cliff, M.: Abeng; Mo,  T.: Brownout on Breadfruit Boulevard; Mo,  T.: Renegade or Halo Halo; Ghosh,  A.: The Hungry Tide; Naipaul,  V.S.: A Way in the World
The intensification of globalization in the past decade has led to a renewed interest in reinventing Goethe’s project of world literature. Recent discussions of the topic, however, have taken the normative significance of ‘the world’ for granted. This course explores the vocation of world literature in contemporary globalization. The first part of the course examines various ideas of the world and its link to literature and culture in Goethe, Hegel, Marx and Arendt. In the second part of the course, we will turn to consider novels from and about postcolonial space that attempt to transform the world created by Northern political and economic hegemony. We will study novels from Africa, Asia and the Caribbean that explore the consequences of commercial and financial flows such as international tourism, humanitarian aid, foreign investment etc. for humane social development. Issues to be discussed include: the normative status and transformative power of world literature in the wake of Marxist critique; the autonomy of literary and cultural flows in relation to economic flows; non-Eurocentric accounts of world literature; the connections between the formal features of committed literature and its thematic concerns in the crafting of new figurations and stories of belonging of postcolonial peoples and migrants; narrative experimentation, the revival of the story form and the use of 'magic' and its relation to realism; and the political use of the Bildungsroman. Readings will also include theoretical work and criticism by David Harvey, Salman Rusdhie, Walter Benjamin, Benedict Anderson, David Damrosch, Pascale Casanova, Franco Moretti, and Giovanni Arrighi. Students should submit a 20-page paper on a topic of their choice (to be determined in consultation with the instructor.
This course is cross-listed with Rhetoric 240D.
Texts for “Agents (and Others) in Anglo-Saxon England":
Ælfric’s Lives of Saints, ed. W. W. Skeat, EETS o.s. 76, 82 (London, 1881-85), no. XVII.
Ælfric’s Catholic Homilies, the First Series, ed. Peter Clemoes, EETS s.s. 17 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), no. VII.
Ælfric’s Catholic Homilies, the Second Series, ed. Malcolm Godden, EETS s.s. 5 (London: Oxford University Press, 1979), no. X.
Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy, ed. H. F. Stewart, et al., Loeb Classical Library 74 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1918), books IV and V.
The Old English Boethius, ed. Malcolm Godden and Susan Irvine, 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), B-text, cap. 39-42.
“Carmen de libero arbitrio,†ed. Michael Lapidge, “Three Latin Poems from Æthelwold’s School,†in his Anglo-Latin Literature 900-1066 (London: Hambledon Press, 1993), 225-78 and 484-86.
Wulfstan of Winchester, Life of St. Æthelwold, ed. and trans. Michael Lapidge and Michael Winterbottom (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991) (selected chapters)
Memorials of St. Dunstan, ed. William Stubbs, Rolls Series 63 (London, 1874), selections from “B,†Vita S. Dunstani; Osbern, Vita S. Dunstani.
King Alfred’s West-Saxon Version of Gregory’s Pastoral Care, 2 vols., EETS, o.s. 45, 50 (London, 1871), selections
Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People, ed. Bertram Colgrave and R. A. B. Mynors (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969), V.6.
The Old English Version of Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People, ed. Thomas Miller, 4 vols., EETS o.s. 95, 96, 110, 111 (London, 1890-1898), V.6.
Bertram Colgrave, ed., Two Lives of Saint Cuthbert (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1940), selected chapters.
Bischofs Wærferth von Worcester Übersetzung der Dialoge Gregors des Grossen, ed. Hans Hecht, Bibliothek der angelsächsischen Prosa 5 (Leipzig, 1900), II.xxiii-xxv
+L157
George Philip Krapp and Elliott Van Kirk Dobbie, eds., “Soul and Body II,†ASPR 3 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1936).
The Vercelli Homilies and Related Texts, ed. D. G. Scragg, EETS o.s. 300 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), no. XXII.
Isidore, Synonyma (PL 83), selections.
Die angelsäschsischen Prosabearbeitungen der Benedictinerregel, ed. Arnold Schröer, Bibliothek der angelsächsischen Prosa 2 (Kassel, 1885), selected chapters.
G. N. Garmonsway, ed., Ælfric’s Colloquy, rev. ed. (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1978).
Florence E. Harmer, ed., Anglo-Saxon Writs (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1952),
no. 108.
Judith, ed. Mark Griffith, Exeter Medieval English Texts and Studies (Exeter: Exeter University Press, 1997).
This course will investigate questions of agency and identity (particularly religious identity) in the textual world of Anglo-Saxon England. As part of our investigations, we will begin with some early medieval engagements of predestination and free will, focusing on Anglo-Saxon negotiations of these issues in a range of philosophical, theological, and pastoral texts. We will first ask how Anglo-Saxon writers conceptualized agency and who they thought could be agents. Such questions will require some wide-ranging reading in the laws, liturgy, hagiography, monastic rules and commentary, as well as in practices of education. In probing this material we will be seeking the cultural logic at work in these texts and working toward a further set of questions: What models of agency do we wish to bring to the study of texts from a highly traditional society? What can practices regarding people who are legally incompetent (children, women, and slaves) tell us about agency in Anglo-Saxon England? What light does the abbatial relation (of abbot or abbess to subject), carefully theorized in commentaries on the Rule, shed on questions of agency? The ultimate research goal of the course will be the writing of a publishable paper.
Coleridge, S. T.: The Major Works; Wordsworth, W.: The Prelude, 1799, 1805, 1850; Wordsworth., W: The Major Works; Brett and Jones, ed.: Wordsworth and Coleridge: Lyrical Ballads 1798, 1800; Burke, E.: A Philosophical Enquiry; Course Reader
Recommended: Hume, D.: A Treatise of Human Nature; Smith, A.: The Theory of Moral Sentiments; Williams, R.: Keywords
This course will offer an intensive reading of the major poetry and prose written by William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, whose remarkable literary collaboration, friendship, and conflict (should) dispel old truisms about the solitary Romantic genius or lonely creative imagination. We will devote some of our time to questions raised by the complexity of collaborative authorship itself: matters of property and possession, influence, conversation and aversion, ventriloquism and plagiarism. At the same time, we will use this pair to consider and contextualize what it meant to say (as Wordsworth did in 1800) that “Poetry is … the history or science of feelings.†How are we to understand this ambition in relation to the Scottish “science of man,†i.e., the powerful systems of human nature charted during the eighteenth century by David Hume, Adam Smith, Lord Kames, and others? Where does it stand in relation to the “science of sensate cognition,†(then) only recently dubbed “aesthetic†on the continent? The other keyword in Wordsworth’s phrase, “history,†merits equal attention in a number of manifest or residual forms: the history of ideas about feeling, the feelings’ own history, and the historical events (the French Revolution, the Napoleonic wars) that gathered and galvanized the subject and exercise of emotion in Britain during the decade before and after 1800.
In addition to reading the primary texts assignedâ€â€Wordsworth and Coleridge, plus selections from Hume, Smith, Kames, Kant, Burke, Erasmus Darwin, Dorothy Wordsworth and othersâ€â€you should come out of this class with an overview of major contributions to the massive amount of superb scholarship, recent and not-so-recent, on these two poets.
Meyer, E. and L. Smith: The Practical Tutor
Recommended Text: Leki, I. : Understanding ESL Writers
Through seminars, discussions, and reading assignments, students are introduced to the language/writing/literacy needs of diverse college-age writers such as the developing, bi-dialectal, and non-native English-speaking (NNS) writer. The course will provide a theoretical and practical framework for tutoring and composition instruction.
The seminar will focus on various tutoring methodologies and the theories which underlie them. Students will become familiar with relevant terminology, approaches, and strategies in the fields of composition teaching and learning. New tutors will learn how to respond constructively to student writing, as well as develop and hone effective tutoring skills. By guiding others towards clarity and precision in prose, tutors will sharpen their own writing abilities. New tutors will tutor fellow Cal students in writing and/or literature courses. Tutoring occurs in the Cesar E. Chavez Student Center under the supervision of experienced writing program staff.
In order to enroll for the seminar, students must have at least sophomore standing and have completed their Reading and Composition R1A and R1B requirements.
Some requirements include: participating in a weekly training seminar and occasional workshops; reading assigned articles, videotaping a tutoring session, and becoming familiar with the resources available at the Student Learning Center; tutoring 4-6 hours per week; keeping a tutoring journal and writing a final paper; meeting periodically with both the tutor supervisor(s) and tutees' instructors.
This course meets the field study requirements for the Education minor, but it cannot be used toward fulfillment of the requirements for the English major. It must be taken P/NP.
Pick up an application for a pre–enrollment interview at the Student Learning Center, Atrium, Cesar Chavez Student Center (Lower Sproul Plaza), beginning October 13. No one will be admitted after the first week of spring classes.
This course may not be counted as one of the twelve courses required to complete the English major.