Announcement of Classes: Fall 2021
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Instructor |
Course Area |
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R1A/1 Reading and Composition: MWF 9-10 |
What’s right for bringing abundance to the fields; Under what sign the plowing ought to begin, Or the marrying of the grapevines to their elms; How to take care of the cattle and see to their breeding; Knowing the proper way to foster the bees ...(read more) |
Bircea, Jason
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R1A/2 Reading and Composition: MWF 10-11 |
This course focuses on African novels written during the latter half of the twentieth century. These works emerge from a variety of national contexts, and all respond to the process of decolonization taking place during this period. Many African write...(read more) |
Dunsker, Leo
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R1A/3 Reading and Composition: MWF 11-12 |
The American city is an incredibly complex and dynamic organism—and the subject of a great body of literature, both fiction and non-fiction. This course will trace and critically engage how American urban development has been written about fr...(read more) |
Beckett, Balthazar I.
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R1A/4 Reading and Composition: MWF 12-1 |
Abolish the police! Defund ICE! Free them all! The wave of protests across the global north last summer over the brutal killings of Black people by police initiated a profound cultural shift, massively amplifying Black Radical critiques of racial capi...(read more) |
Geary, Christopher
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R1A/5 Reading and Composition: MWF 1-2 |
In a 1913 essay, entitled “Ornament and Crime,” Austrian architect Adolf Loos makes the claim that “ornament inflicts serious injury on people’s health.” Ornament, we are told, is regressive, childlike, and—as the title suggests—criminal. A similar li...(read more) |
Reid, Angus
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R1A/6 Reading and Composition: MWF 8-9 |
Can we read a poem as a work of philosophy? As the philosopher Pierre-François Moreau has suggested, when reading philosophical works, it is all too easy to succumb to the idea that all genres and styles are nothing more than the unessential or superf...(read more) |
Serrano, Joseph
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R1A/7 Reading and Composition: MWF 2-3 |
For hundreds of years after the Columbian encounter, the phrase “American Literature” was an oxymoron and an impossibility. The hemisphere boasted no nations that Europeans had the ability to recognize as such—rather, colonies dependent on their respe...(read more) |
Warren, Noah
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R1A/8 Reading and Composition: MWF 3-4 |
In this class, we'll read English fiction of the 18th and 19th centuries alongside American feminist writing of the late 20th century to look for answers to the following questions: Can sex be ethical—perhaps even good? Is desire ever sympathetic or b...(read more) |
Nyiri, Jessy
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R1A/9 Reading and Composition: MWF 8-9 |
This writing-intensive course will familiarize students with the principal elements of the academic essay, from sentence grammar and paragraph construction to the development of original argument. When not writing, or reading about writing, students w...(read more) |
Bernes, Jasper
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R1A/10 Reading and Composition: MWF 12-1 |
This writing-intensive course will familiarize students with the principal elements of the academic essay, from sentence grammar and paragraph construction to the development of original argument. When not writing, or reading about writing, s...(read more) |
Bernes, Jasper
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R1A/11 TTh 2-3:30 |
...(read more) |
Jacoby, Leslie S
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R1A/13 Reading and Composition: TTh 9:30-11 |
“And yet was there a sort of indefinite, half-attained, unimaginable sublimity about it that fairly froze you to it.” – Herman Melville, Moby-Dick In this course, we will write and think alongside Herman Melville’s 1851 novel, Moby-Dick; or, The Wh...(read more) |
Bondy, Katherine Isabel
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R1A/14 TTh 9:30-11 |
This writing-intensive course will study love, one of the great unifying themes of literature. Is love a construct we take from literature or is literature a construct we have created to help us express, even to access, love? Do we write love...(read more) |
Laser, Jessica
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R1A/15 Reading and Composition: MWF 4-5 |
A plague-ridden Thebes, an Indian reservation, a Rio slum, a U.S.-Mexico border town, the LA hood, a California women’s prison. These are the settings for our examination of characters who run up against obstacles—from within themselves, thei...(read more) |
Walter, David
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R1A/17 Reading and Composition: MWF 8-9 |
The American city is an incredibly complex and dynamic organism—and the subject of a great body of literature, both fiction and non-fiction. This course will trace and critically engage how American urban development has been written about fr...(read more) |
Beckett, Balthazar I.
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R1A/18 Reading and Composition: MWF 10-11 |
This Reading and Composition course will focus on selected film, music, and visual art produced during the 1960s. In addition to providing a set of broad critical, aesthetic and historical issues to engage over the semester, this course place...(read more) |
Koerner, Michelle
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R1A/19 Reading and Composition: TTh 11-12:30 |
This Reading and Composition course will focus on selected film, music, and visual art produced during the 1960s. In addition to providing a set of broad critical, aesthetic and historical issues to engage over the semester, this course places conside...(read more) |
Koerner, Michelle
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R1A/20 Reading and Composition: TTh 2-3:30 |
This Reading and Composition course will focus on selected film, music, and visual art produced during the 1960s. In addition to providing a set of broad critical, aesthetic and historical issues to engage over the semester, this course place...(read more) |
Koerner, Michelle
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R1B/1 Reading and Composition: MWF 9-10 |
Poetry won’t give you the news, as William Carlos Williams said, and it won’t tell you how to avoid traffic in Los Angeles or where to find the best burritos in the Mission. But it can offer a profound glimpse into the spirit—or spirits—of a ...(read more) |
Nathan, Jesse
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R1B/2 MWF 10-11 |
This course teaches critical reading, writing, and researching skills through a survey of sickness as a bodily and social condition;, and as a literary resource and mode. Students will practice formal analysis of texts in a variety of media including ...(read more) |
Cohan, Nathan
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R1B/3 Reading and Composition: MWF 10-11 |
How and why might you choose to document your own life? What are our motives for putting our lives on the page – to understand ourselves better, to memorialize others, to leave something of ourselves to future generations? Taking up these que...(read more) |
D'Silva, Eliot
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R1B/4 Reading and Composition: MWF 11-12 |
In this course on “slow reading,” our focus will be on the literature of iteration, revision, and repetitive revisiting, with a lurking fourth term: enigma. What draws us to look at the same text again and again—and must this mystery have a “solution”...(read more) |
Choi, 최 Lindsay || Lindsay Chloe
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R1B/5 Reading and Composition: MWF 11-12 |
This course and its reading list share a preoccupation with things. Together we will explore the unique challenges of representing objects in literature and the innovations that have arisen out of confronting the medium’s (that is, language’s) constra...(read more) |
Elias, Gabrielle
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R1B/6 Reading and Composition: MWF 12-1 |
Undead hordes, bloodthirsty beasts, and uncanny human hybrids are nothing new to the human imagination; the literature and folklore of most (if not all) human cultures is full of tales that bring our imagined fears to life. In this course, our read...(read more) |
Gable, Nickolas
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R1B/8 Reading and Composition: MWF 12-1 |
The perceived divide between humans and the natural world has been defined as one of the most important frameworks under which our thoughts and behaviors are constructed. This has unquestionably been the case in the United States, whose landscapes and...(read more) |
Tomasula y Garcia, Alba
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R1B/9 Reading and Composition: MWF 1-2 |
What did “Yellow Peril Supports Black Power” once mean and how has it come to shift over time? This course explores the cultural and political representations of Afro-Asian connections: from the radical Third Worldist movements of the 1960s t...(read more) |
Hu, Jane
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R1B/10 Reading and Composition: MWF 1-2 |
When we think of politics, we probably picture politicians debating, people organizing, or some sort of voting process. But are there other ways of “doing” politics, other appropriate verbs? This course will think about how we can associate the verb (...(read more) |
Wang, Jacob
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R1B/11 Reading and Composition: MWF 2-3 |
“The mathematician’s patterns, like the painter’s or the poet’s, must be beautiful; the ideas, like the colours or the words, must fit together in a harmonious way. Beauty is the first test: there is no permanent place in the world for ugly mathematic...(read more) |
Forbes-Macphail, Imogen
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R1B/12 Reading and Composition: MWF 2-3 |
Amid the COVID pandemic, an oddly utopian undercurrent has emerged in political discourse. The experience of such a radical upheaval of our lived experience, let alone the rapid enactment of policies long deemed unrealistic, has led to a renewed willi...(read more) |
Sutton, Emily
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R1B/13 Reading and Composition: MWF 3-4 |
Do poems take up truths? Can a novel be a way of thinking about something? What can you learn—about yourself, about others, about the world—from a film? This course considers the ways that literature, art, and film are not only a part of ou...(read more) |
Ostas, Magdalena
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R1B/14 Reading and Composition: TTh 8-9:30 |
How does a body relate to an inner self, a mind, or a person? How does a body relate to an outer world? This course will consider the particular ways in which fiction can explore these questions. We will focus on three novels by speculative fictio...(read more) |
Homans-Turnbull, Marian
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R1B/15 Reading and Composition: TTh 5-6:30 |
In his 1641 Meditations, René Descartes made the claim that cogito ergo sum – thought entails existence, but nothing further may be given. Fifty years later, John Locke posited the mind as a tabula rasa, an impressible space where ideas come from the...(read more) |
Vinyard Boyle, Lizzie
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R1B/16 Reading and Composition: TTh 5-6:30 |
We commonly use the word “obscene” to describe sexual and excremental parts and functions of the body, whether it be a double entendre or explicit scatological reference. But like its Latin root obscenus, which means filthy, repulsive, and possessing ...(read more) |
Ripplinger, Michelle
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R1B/17 Reading and Composition: MWF 10-11 |
Poetry won’t give you the news, as William Carlos Williams said, and it won’t tell you how to avoid traffic in Los Angeles or where to find the best burritos in the Mission. But it can offer a profound glimpse into the spirit—or spirits—of a ...(read more) |
Nathan, Jesse
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R1B/18 Reading and Composition: MWF 11-12 |
Poetry won’t give you the news, as William Carlos Williams said, and it won’t tell you how to avoid traffic in Los Angeles or where to find the best burritos in the Mission. But it can offer a profound glimpse into the spirit—or spirits—of a ...(read more) |
Nathan, Jesse
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R1B/19 Reading and Composition: TTh 8-9:30 |
Hobbyists. Amateurs. Laypeople. Obsessionals. Devotees. Typically, when we do literary study, we look to the expert: someone who has trained for decades and is paid to know (and to teach). We will instead invest a semester in looking to the history of...(read more) |
Zeavin, Hannah
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| Course # |
Instructor |
Course Area |
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20/1 Modern British and American Literature: TTh 8-9:30 |
This lower-division class offers an overview of British literature and culture since 1979, introducing students to the major literary and cultural questions facing Britain in the period after decolonization. These include: how well do nationa...(read more) |
Lavery, Grace
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24/1 Freshman Seminar: Monday 9-10 |
We will be reading and discussing extraordinary poems by Emily Dickinson. Bryan Wagner is Associate Professor in the English Department at the University of California, Berkeley. His research focuses on African American expression in th...(read more) |
Wagner, Bryan
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24/2 Freshman Seminar: Wednesday 4-5 |
A close reading and open discussion of a few of Ralph Waldo Emerson's most interesting and puzzling essays. The instructor will post PDFs of all reading assignments. The students will post brief comments on the assigned reading in bCourses an...(read more) |
Breitwieser, Mitchell
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24/3 Freshman Seminar: Monday 2-3 |
From the time of its publication, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein has taken on almost mythical status. The story of a scientist who creates life and then cannot deal with the ethical consequences of his act has resonated deeply for centuries. ...(read more) |
Christ, Carol T.
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24/4 Freshman Seminar: Tuesday 1-2 |
We are fascinated by cults. What is it about communities and groups that promise total belief and total enthrallment that so captures the imagination? This course will look at a range of representations of cults in popular culture--from the d...(read more) |
Saha, Poulomi
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29/1 TTh 8-9:30 |
"On or around December 1910, human character changed." So goes one of Virginia Woolf's best known lines. Writing in the early decades of the twentieth century, Woolf was responding to seismic historical changes in the West wrought by industri...(read more) |
Zhang, Dora
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43A/1 Introduction to the Writing of Short Fiction MWF 1-2 |
The aim of this course is to introduce students to the study of short fiction—to explore the elements that make up the genre, and to enable students to talk critically about short stories and begin to feel comfortable and confident with their...(read more) |
Abrams, Melanie
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45A/1 Literature in English: Through Milton MW 12-1 + one hour of discussion |
This course offers an introduction to English literary history from the late fourteenth to the later seventeenth centuries. Three long epics or epic-romances—Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, and Joh...(read more) |
Goodman, Kevis
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45B/1 Literature in English: Late-17th through Mid-19th Centuries MW 1-2 + one hour of discussion |
An introductory survey or “tasting menu” of writing in English from the last words of John Milton to the early poems of Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson. This period saw revolutions in England, America and France, civil war in the new United States, a...(read more) |
Turner, James Grantham
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45C/1 Literature in English: Mid-19th through the 20th Century MW 11-12 + one hour of discussion |
This course will provide an overview of the aesthetic shifts captured by such terms as realism, modernism, and postmodernism, with an emphasis on the relation between literary form and historical context. We will explore how literature respo...(read more) |
Lee, Steven S.
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84/1 Sophomore Seminar: F 2-5 |
We will concentrate on the high and low cultural elements in the noir comedies of the Coen brothers, discussing their use of Hollywood genres, parodies of classic conventions, and representation of arbitrariness. We will also read some fictio...(read more) |
Bader, Julia
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90/1 Practices of Literary Study: MWF 3-4 |
William Faulkner was one of the crucial writers of the twentieth century. In this course, we will focus on The Sound and the Fury (1929), Light in August (1932), Absalom, Absalom! (1936)—three extraordinary and experimental novels, all set in the same...(read more) |
Wagner, Bryan
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90/2 Practices of Literary Study: TTh 3:30-5 |
How can we become more appreciative, alert readers of poetry and at the same time better writers of prose? How do poems use language differently than other forms of expression? How do they know how to say things without actually saying them...(read more) |
François, Anne-Lise
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90/3 Practices of Literary Study: TTh 12:30-2 |
This elementary-level class will introduce students the range and complexity of poetic writing in English about love and sex, encompassing amatory and erotic lyric, pornographic and vulgar poetry, and verse drama. How has literary writing sha...(read more) |
Lavery, Grace
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90/4 Practices of Literary Study: MWF 2-3 |
We will immerse ourselves in the extraordinary and influential literary career of Edgar Allan Poe: poetry, tales, satires, and essays. We will examine Poe’s work in relation to mid-nineteenth-century short fiction by Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melvil...(read more) |
Otter, Samuel
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90/5 Practices of Literary Study: TTh 5-6:30 |
When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things. For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I kn...(read more) |
Landreth, David
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Instructor |
Course Area |
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100/1 The Seminar on Criticism: TTh 5-6:30 |
This junior seminar will give students the chance to sharpen and develop their practice as close readers—and it will do so through an examination of close reading’s histories, pedagogies, methodological controversies, and political implications. Readi...(read more) |
Gang, Joshua
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100/3 The Seminar on Criticism: MWF 1-2 |
In the literary academy, general interest in Marxism began to ebb in the 1980s and hit a low in the 1990s—decades when a new vogue for government deregulation, the collapse of the Soviet Union and the market liberalization of China also affected domin...(read more) |
Lye, Colleen
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100/4 The Seminar on Criticism: TTh 12:30-2 |
From the editors who first shaped her posthumously discovered poems into publishable form to the recent scholars who have sought to restore their category-defying strangeness, Emily Dickinson’s writing has thrust readers into acts of co-creation and s...(read more) |
Goldstein, Amanda Jo
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100/5 The Seminar on Criticism: TTh 3:30-5 |
Why would anyone even care about Freud anymore? This course looks at the development of psychoanalysis as a therapeutic practice and critical methodology in the humanities. We will take up some of its foundational questions -- What is a...(read more) |
Saha, Poulomi
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100/7 The Seminar on Criticism: TTh 5-6:30 |
The Victorian period (1837-1901) is striking for social, political, economic, technical and scientific developments that seem at once old-fashioned and recognizably modern. Its poets’ engagements with traditional forms of English versificati...(read more) |
Hanson, Kristin
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104/1 TTh 2-3:30 |
This course is aimed at beginners, whether graduate* or undergraduate, familiarizing them with the principles and practice of linguistic decoding and the grammar and vocabulary of, primarily, Old English prose: historiographical (histories), ...(read more) |
Miller, Jennifer
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114B/1 English Drama from 1603 to 1700 TTh 2-3:30 |
Reaching across the upheavals of the seventeenth century, this class studies the triumphant age of drama after Shakespeare, the Jacobean period; the reactions against the drama that led to the closing of London's theaters during the English C...(read more) |
Landreth, David
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117S/1 TTh 4-5 + one hour of discussion |
Shakespeare’s poems and plays are relentlessly unsettling, sublimely beautiful, deeply moving, rigorously brilliant, and compulsively meaningful: they complicate everything, they simplify nothing, and for 400 years, they have been a touc...(read more) |
Arnold, Oliver
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118/1 TTh 5-6:30 |
We'll explore John Milton's entire career, a lifelong effort to unite intellectual, political, and aesthetic experimentation. We'll start by reading his great epic poem Paradise Lost. Then we’ll go back to the beginning, working through Milto...(read more) |
Picciotto, Joanna M
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125C/1 European Novel: TTh 2-3:30 |
The novel emerged as the principal literary genre in 19th-century Europe and has continued to dominate the literary market in Europe and North America ever since. What were the constitutive formal elements as well as social and psychological...(read more) |
Golburt, Lyubov |
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131/1 TTh 2-3:30 |
This survey of U.S. poetries will begin with 17th- and 18th-century poems by two women, Anne Bradstreet and Phyllis Wheatley, move to another (19th-century) pairing in Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson, and then touch down in expatriate a...(read more) |
O'Brien, Geoffrey G.
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132/1 MWF 2-3 |
“The”? “American”? “Novel”? We will apply pressure to all three of these terms as we read some of the best known, long-ish works of prose fiction written by U.S. authors in the 20th and 21st centuries. Rather than establishing a single histor...(read more) |
Snyder, Katherine
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133T/1 African American Literature and Culture: TTh 8-9:30 |
At the turn of the 21st century a common phrase was brought into cultural parlance: “Too soon.” And yet, why does that moment ever arrive of acceptability? In the case of slavery, the moment started knocking on the door in the Sixties and mad...(read more) |
Catchings, Alex
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C136/1 Topics in American Studies: TTh 3:30-5 + one hour of discussion |
This course traces, across many forms of American culture, what might be called “the Obama effect.” Writer Ta-Nehisi Coates has suggested that the election of Obama prompted a renaissance of black writing, in part by stimulating “curiosity about the c...(read more) |
Saul, Scott
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137B/1 Chicana/o Literature and Culture Since 1910 MWF 12-1 |
This course will focus exclusively on the study of Chicanx/Latinx novels published over the last fifty years. The themes and formal features in these novels have been influenced to a large degree by a broad range of experiences, including: li...(read more) |
Gonzalez, Marcial
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138/1 Studies in World Literature in English: TTh 8-9:30 |
Beginning with a preliminary study of the discussion and debates surrounding the usage of the terms “colonial” and “postcolonial,” we will read novels from several postcolonial locations. The course does not take at face value the overt disti...(read more) |
Banerjee, Sukanya
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141/1 Modes of Writing (Exposition, Fiction, Verse, etc.) MW 12-1 + one hour of discussion |
This course will introduce students to the study of creative writing—fiction and poetry. Students will learn to talk critically about these forms and begin to feel comfortable and confident writing within these genres. Students will write a v...(read more) |
Abrams, Melanie
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143A/1 MW 2-3:30 |
A short fiction workshop. Over the course of the semester, each student will write and revise two stories. Each participant in the workshop will edit student-written stories and will write a formal critique of each manuscript. Students will also take ...(read more) |
Chandra, Vikram
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143A/2 TTh 12:30-2 |
A short fiction workshop with a focus on the craft of writing. In this course, we will be readers, writers, and editors of short fiction. We'll read a range of published short stories in order to explore the technical ways in which a short story is cr...(read more) |
McFarlane, Fiona
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143B/1 TTh 11-12:30 |
There’ll be writing prompts and there’ll be experiments involving old forms—the sonnet, the ghazal, the haibun, varieties of orature (including song). Old forms? From an essay: I find [form] interesting as a site, as a point of disembarkation fo...(read more) |
Giscombe, Cecil S.
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143B/2 TuTh 3:30-5 |
The purpose of this class will be to produce a collective language in which to treat poetry. Writing your own poems will be a part of this task, but it will also require readings in contemporary poetry and essays in poetics, as well as...(read more) |
O'Brien, Geoffrey G.
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143C/1 MW 5:30-7 |
This course is for students interested in or already working on a novel or novella. Questions of structure, plot, setting, character, time, and voice will be addressed in our readings and throughout the course, particularly during our workshops, where...(read more) |
Rowland, Amy
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143N/1 Prose Nonfiction: TTh 9:30-11 |
This class will be conducted as a writing workshop to explore the art and craft of the personal essay. We will closely examine the essays in the assigned anthology, as well as students’ exercises and essays. Writing assignments will include three sh...(read more) |
Kleege, Georgina
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145/1 Writing Technology: MW 10-11 + one hour of discussion |
Fiction writers have always imagined better futures made possible by technological advances. In their fiction, they have created both dystopias and utopias to allow us to think about technology and the world we live in. In this interdisciplinary c...(read more) |
Chandra, Vikram
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165/2 Special Topics: Thursday 12-3 |
Called the "American Century" for its rise to prominence as a global superpower, the U.S. also made fundamental changes to policy that radically altered the complexion of new immigration. This class will examine literature about immigration during the...(read more) |
Reyes, Robert L
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165/3 Special Topics: TTh 11-12:30 |
Secret marriages and women hidden away in attics, portentous storms and mysterious mansions, the haunting sounds of unhinged laughter and the ominous creakings of a tree. Madwomen, long-lost relatives, lonely orphans cruelly treated, and a wo...(read more) |
Sirianni, Lucy
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166/1 Special Topics: TTh 9:30-11 |
"The past is never dead," Faulkner famously said. "It is not even past." In our time of racial turmoil, few High Modernist writers feel more contemporary. Faulkner managed to construct in Yoknapatawpha County a second reality where the countr...(read more) |
Danner, Mark
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166/2 Special Topics: TTh 11-12:30 |
This course takes up the question of protest and dissent – the forms it takes, its poetics and its politics – to ask about the relationship between the state and its citizenry. How do forms of protest become legitimized? What distinguishes a ...(read more) |
Saha, Poulomi
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166/3 Special Topics: TTh 2-3:30 |
One of the ideas behind this course offering is that poetry and essays (life-writing, creative nonfiction, "essaying," etc.) have similar aims or field-marks—both are literary vehicles of exploration and documentation; both value experimental...(read more) |
Giscombe, Cecil S.
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166/4 Special Topics: TuTh 2-3:30 |
The cultural uniqueness of the fin de siècle throws into disarray our usual way of organizing knowledge about the “Victorians” and the “moderns.” Far from a minor transitional stage between epochs, this is a period whose art and thought are so distinc...(read more) |
Viragh, Atti
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170/1 Literature and the Arts: TTh 3:30-5 |
We tend to separate art forms for the convenience of study and instruction, and to talk about writers in terms primarily of their influence upon other writers, but this is hardly how most artists work. In this course we will explore a tendenc...(read more) |
Best, Stephen M.
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175/1 TTh 12:30-2 |
We will read drama, poetry and short fiction by contemporary authors with disabilities. Requirements will include two analytical essays, a group presentation project and a take-home final exam. This is a core course for the disability studies mino...(read more) |
Kleege, Georgina
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177/1 Literature and Philosophy: TTh 3:30-5 |
This course will examine key texts from the history of moral philosophy and philosophy of mind and juxtapose them with a set of novels that share similar concerns. Our aim will be to arrive at clear, precise understandings of the philosophica...(read more) |
Gang, Joshua
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177/2 Literature and Philosophy: TTh 3:30-5 |
Since long before Thomas More coined the catching term “Utopia” – meaning “no place” or “not-place” – to name his fiction of a perfect island commonwealth, the literature of non-existent worlds has been calling every aspect of actually existing societ...(read more) |
Goldstein, Amanda Jo
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178A/1 MWF 1-2 |
This course is an introduction to the field of law and literature. It begins with a survey of foundational work by H. L. A. Hart, Robert Cover, Cheryl Harris, Martha Nussbaum, and others before turning to a series of United States Supreme Cou...(read more) |
Wagner, Bryan
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180Z/1 TTh 9:30-11 |
Book List Dick, Philip K.: Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?; Jemison, N.K.: The Fifth Season; LaValle, Victor: Ballad of Black Tom; LeGuin, Ursula: The Dispossessed; Machado, Carmen: Her Bodies and Other Parties; Saadawi, Ahmed: Franke...(read more) |
Jones, Donna V.
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190/1 Research Seminar: MW 9-10:30 |
The career of Samuel Beckett began with some (rather ragged) poetry, continued with a handful of novels and short stories, and culminated with a handful of the twentieth century’s most important plays. But most of his work refuses generic descriptions...(read more) |
Blanton, C. D.
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190/2 Research Seminar: W 2-5 |
This seminar will introduce students to “law and literature” studies, focusing on the way literature imagines the relation between law and justice. We’ll begin with literature of the Romantic period, and concentrate on intersections of language and th...(read more) |
Langan, Celeste
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190/3 Research Seminar: T 3:30-6:30 |
Sensation novels constitute a vastly popular -- if somewhat controversial -- sub-genre of fiction that made its mark in Victorian Britain. Playing with themes such as bigamy, murder, adultery, blackmail, and intrigue, the serial publica...(read more) |
Banerjee, Sukanya
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190/5 Research Seminar: TTh 3:30-5 |
The readings for this course will provide a framework for independent research on Jewish-Christian relations from 1066 CE when, the histories tell us, Jews first arrived in England under the auspices of William the Conqueror, to 1290 CE...(read more) |
Miller, Jennifer
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190/8 Research Seminar: T 5:30-8:30 |
Most utopian and dystopian authors and film-makers are more concerned with persuading readers and viewers of the merits of their ideas than with the "merely" literary or artistic qualities of their work. Although utopias have sometimes made converts, ...(read more) |
Starr, George A.
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190/10 TTh 3:30-5 |
This course will survey a variety of spy novels, comparing their diverse modalities. We will explore the genre’s origins in the conflicts between nations states and in values dictated by a traditional white masculinity, from the machismo of ...(read more) |
JanMohamed, Abdul R.
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190/11 Research Seminar: TuTh 2-3:30 |
In this course we will investigate the prodigious archive of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Latinx writing. This archive includes stories, poems, and chronicles published in Spanish-language newspapers throughout the United Stat...(read more) |
Cutler, John Alba
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H195A/1 MW 3:30-5 |
H195 is a two-semester course that gives students the training they need to conduct original research and develop their findings into a successful scholarly essay, 40-60 pages in length. Crucial to this enterprise is an understanding of in...(read more) |
Hale, Dorothy J.
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H195A/2 TuTh 12:30-2 |
English H195A is the first part of a two-semester sequence for those English majors writing honors theses. We will read and discuss a range of texts that will provide grounding in contemporary critical methodologies, as well as various genres...(read more) |
Saul, Scott
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Graduate students from other departments and exceptionally well-prepared undergraduates are welcome in English graduate courses (except for English 200 and 375) when space permits. Please contact the instructor if you have questions.
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Instructor |
Course Area |
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200/1 Problems in the Study of Literature T 9-12 |
This course introduces students entering the English Department’s Ph.D. program to the practice of scholarly writing, with an emphasis on three core aspects of the literary critical enterprise: textual criticism and editing, production and reception, ...(read more) |
Best, Stephen M.
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203/1 Graduate Readings: W 12-3 |
As we read five comedies, five tragedies, and The Tempest, we will consider Shakespeare’s serial offenses against the rules of art—in particular, his radical upending of conventional generic decorum—in relation to both the regime of genre (Aristotle, ...(read more) |
Arnold, Oliver
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203/2 Graduate Readings: W 3-6 |
In this course, we’ll explore the significance of two key concepts (“aesthetics” and “politics”) in several Chicanx/Latinx novels as representative examples of U.S. Latinx literature generally. To guide our exploration, we’ll begin with Walte...(read more) |
Gonzalez, Marcial
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218/1 W 2-5 |
We'll explore John Milton's entire career, a lifelong effort to unite intellectual, political, and aesthetic experimentation. We'll start by reading his great epic poem Paradise Lost. Then we’ll go back to the beginning, working through Milton’s colle...(read more) |
Picciotto, Joanna M
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243A/1 Th 9-12 |
In this class, we’ll think about fiction as practitioners: we’ll explore how fiction is made through making our own. This class will begin with generation and end with revision, and new writers are very welcome. Students will write and workshop at le...(read more) |
McFarlane, Fiona
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250/1 Research Seminars: M 3-6 |
This course traces the formation of a ‘critical’ mode of thought, in philosophy and beyond, through the late 18th and 19th centuries, concentrating on the major works of Immanuel Kant, G. W. F. Hegel, and Karl Marx. It seeks to discern and to...(read more) |
Blanton, C. D.
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250/2 Research Seminars: T 12-3 |
This course will explore the literary and cultural significance of philosophies of life. To set the course in motion, we shall begin with two provocative works: Terry Eagleton’s The Meaning of Life and Elizabeth Grosz’s The Nick of Time. In e...(read more) |
Jones, Donna V.
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375/1 The Teaching of Composition and Literature Th 5-7 pm |
NOTE: This section will be taught remotely and synchronously. ...(read more) |
Nolan, Maura
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University of California, Berkeley
English Department
322 Wheeler Hall,
Berkeley, CA 94720-1030
general phone: 510-642-3467
office hours: M-F, 10-12 and 1-4
©UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY ENGLISH DEPARTMENT