For over a century, Henry James (1843-1916) has been regarded as a writer’s writer. Hailed as the “Master” within his lifetime by the many who prized his narrative art as well as his professionalism, James found new fans in each subsequent generation of British and American writers. In our own century, James’s importance for other artists shows no sign of diminishment. 2004 saw not one, not two, but three different novels that made the master of fiction the subject of fictional treatment.
This course examines James’s legacy through the wide range of imitations, adaptations, and revisions that his writing has directly inspired. We will pay particular attention to James’s importance for novelists who identify as social outsiders. We will also investigate why James is simultaneously regarded as the consummate artist (an ethical paragon who puts before all else his commitment to his creative work) and a dangerous connoisseur of dark knowledge, whose fiction lures the reader into an ethical abyss.
The fiction and films that we will be studying ask us to consider a host of other cultural and philosophical questions. What does it mean to be a stranger in a strange land? Is there such a thing (or was there such a thing) as a particularly American social type? What does it mean to live the good life? What are the possibilities for shared consciousness between two people? What are the social circuits of sexual desire? How does the open secret function as a condition of epistemology as well as sexuality? And a question that all the readings engage: what might be the value of beauty for life as well as art?
Writing requirements for the course include a five-page close reading essay and a ten-page final essay. For the final essay, students will learn how to formulate their own thesis claims in relation to published scholarship. Because his work has received wide critical attention, James criticism provides an excellent introduction to theoretical methods.
Course reading will include
H. James, The Turn of the Screw (1898); The Ambassadors (1903); selected short stories. P. Highsmith, The Talented Mr. Ripley (1955); J. Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room (1956); P. Roth, The Ghost Writer (1979); C. Tóibin, The Master (2004); C. Ozick, Foreign Bodies (2010); S. Rooney, Beautiful World, Where Are You (2021).
Films will be drawn from:
R. Clement, Purple Noon (1960); J. Clayton, The Innocents (1961); I. Softley, The Wings of the Dove (1997); S. McGhee and D. Siegel, What Maisie Knew (2012); A. Minghella, The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999).
Our seminar will take up Thoreau’s challenge to read Walden as deliberately as it was written. We will work through the book slowly over the course of the semester, while learning how best to approach it, and the environment in which it was written, at different moments and in response to changing questions, problems, and needs. We will treat Walden as a guide to reading Walden, teaching us how to be attentive, to notice things we normally miss, and to keep something as long and slow as Thoreau’s book can be interesting to us, “a fresh prospect every hour.” Along the way, we’ll assume a range of critical, historical, political, and theoretical perspectives that require engagement with Ralph Waldo Emerson, with other Transcendentalists and some anti-Transcendentalists, and with diverse traditions of philosophical and poetic writings that consider Walden to be important.
In this seminar of literary criticism, we will explore some of the stories that have been told about writing as a technology of reproduction, dissemination, circulation, amplification, preservation, and citation. While writing commonly refers to the one-way transfer of speech to some kind of material object capable of circulating on its own, how does literature bear witness to the ongoing transfers between oral practices and written objects? If writing is commonly understood to originate as a means of recording debt and storing accumulated knowledge, what is its relation to other figures of temporal prosthesis and play--figures that disperse as well as extend the otherwise passing moment? While not technically a course in the environmental humanities, we will spend some time on the notion of the Anthropocene as the inscription of racialized violence and genocide upon the earth’s geological strata. Readings will include works by Cha, Derrida, Douglass, DuBois, Ong, Plato, Vicuña, Yusoff. Dear students, please accept this description as a temporary placeholder!
Arnold, Krupat: Native American Autobiography: An Anthology; Black Elk, Nicholas: Black Elk Speaks: The Complete Edition; Hale, Janet Campbell: Bloodlines: Odyssey of a Native Daughter; Harjo, Joy: Poet Warrior; Hogan, Linda: The Woman Who Watches Over the World: A Native memoir; Miranda, Deborah E.: Bad Indians: A Tribal Memoir; Momaday, N. Scott: The Way to Rainy Mountain; Mourning Dove, Jay Miller: Mounring Dove: A Salishan Autobiography; Silko, Leslie Marmon: The Turquoise Ledge: A Memoir; Swann, Brian and Arnold Krupat, eds.: I Tell You Now: Autobiographical Essays by Native American Writers
As we develop our critical reading and writing skills, we will examine a wide range of Native American personal narratives, from pre-contact pictographic narratives painted on animal hides and later drawn in ledgerbooks to nineteenth-century as-told-to autobiographies to twentieth and twenty-first century personal memoirs. We’ll focus on Indigenous epistemologies and self-constructs; transcultural definitions of autobiography and subjectivity; transgenerational trauma and resilience; and the role of memory, imagination, and story in resisting and surviving settler-colonialism.
James, C.L.R.: Mariners, Renegades, and Castaways: Herman Melville and the World We Live In; Melville, Herman: Moby-Dick: or, The Whale; Niemeyer, Mark: The Divine Magnet: Herman Melville's Letters to Nathaniel Hawthorne; Olson, Charles: Call Me Ishmael
Photocopied course reader
We will read Moby-Dick slowly and scrupulously, immersing ourselves in Melville’s extraordinary prose and assessing the book’s literary, historical, and biographical contexts; the 20th- and 21st-century critical traditions it has generated; narrative theory relevant to understanding Melville’s literary experiments; and the presence of the book in global culture. Course requirements include oral presentations and two essays (5-7 pages and 8-10 pages).
For more information about this class, please contact Jennifer Miller at j_miller@berkeley.edu.
This class offers an in-depth study of the second half of Shakespeare's career, featuring the major tragedies alongside later comedies and tragicomedies. We'll read ten of those plays together: Julius Caesar, Hamlet, Twelfth Night, Othello, Measure for Measure, King Lear, Macbeth, Coriolanus, Antony and Cleopatra, and The Tempest. Our main focus will be on how Shakespeare uses the technology of the theater, and the living bodies of its actors, to craft characters and experiences that are larger than life. We'll also think a lot about the difference in values among different political systems that Shakespeare stages, and how they interact with differences in time, place, race, gender, and genre.
All of our plays are available to Cal students for free via the library's online resources (in the Arden Shakespeare editions). If you prefer to read paper, the best bang for your buck is vol. 2 of The Norton Shakespeare, which includes all our plays but Julius Caesar, plus a paperback of that play; I've ordered this combination at the bookstore. But any post-1970 edition of a play will do, as long as you find the annotations sufficient to understand the language.
The period from which our reading draws has been credited with the “rise of the novel”—the emergence of the then new genre, the “novel,” so familiar to us today. While critics have qualified and revised that claim, the texts we’ll read do experiment with new forms of prose fiction and new ideas about what is worth representing. As we read these works and track their innovations, we shall be especially interested in considering what it was that some found dangerous about them. Like surfing the internet, novel reading wasn’t something you wanted the “impressionable”—from teenagers to women—to do alone, or maybe at all. Might the perceived threat have had something to do with early novels’ connection to romance and the erotic? Might it have to do with what one critic calls the “narrative transvestitism” of the early novel—in which men write books featuring female heroines who will describe, in an innovative, frank prose style, how a woman really feels? Highly conscious of these debates, eighteenth-century writers responded to them in their generic experiments, deploying rhetorical and thematic means to legitimate their writing, appealing to (and sometimes transforming) moral discourse, and creating hybrids of new and classical writing, all offering complex new forms of writing and, some would argue, consciousness.
Course Requirements will include quizzes, participation, including a group presentation, two papers, a mid-term exam, and a final.
Course texts will likely include: Eliza Haywood: Love in Excess; Daniel Defoe: Roxana; Samuel Richardson: Pamela; Henry Fielding: Shamela and Joseph Andrews, Horace Walpole: The Castle of Otranto; Jane Austen: Northanger Abbey.
This course satisfies the pre-1800 requirement for the English major.
Balzac: Père Goriot; Flaubert: Madame Bovary; Goethe, Johann Wolfgang: Wilhelm Meister’s Year of Apprenticeship; Grimmelshausen: The Adventures of Simplicious Simplicissimus; Louis: Who Killed My Father ; Smith: White Teeth ; Woolf: Mrs. Dalloway
In The Theory of the Novel the critic Georg Lukacs writes, “The novel form is, like no other, an expression of transcendental homelessness.” This course will survey the history of the European novel in the context of “rootlessness” and “estrangement”—“rootlessness” vis-a-vis class, nation, and gender, and “estrangement” vis-a-vis the self.
Browning, Barbara: I Am Trying to Reach You; Cohen, Joshua: Book of Numbers; Lin, Tao: Shoplifting from American Apparel; Rooney, Sally: Conversations with Friends
Digital Reader featuring excerpts from J. David Bolter, Andrew Keen, Theodor Adorno, Marshall McLuhan, N. Katherine Hayles, and Lev Manovich
A study from the Global Web Index reveals that internet users aged sixteen to sixty-four averaged 6 hours and 43 minutes online per day in 2019. This amounts to 102 full days of screentime per person. If people are spending nearly a third of their lives engaging screens now, what has changed about the way we engage things that have always existed off of screens? Like, for instance, a physical page from a codex book?
This course will cover four contemporary novels and examine how they represent text that is normally rendered on computer or smartphone screens. From Gmail chat to Java compilers and plaintext that has been copied and pasted, these novels work to replicate visual facets of screen-interfaces that make us use the books differently. In addition, these novels try to represent through language lives that are lived both digitally and "in reality." During this course, we will explore theories of human-computer interaction alongside the history of the book to understand precisely how the power of typography changes as it appears in different mediums. We will begin devising responses to questions that define this century: how do interfaces manipulate our sense of agency? Which holds the most revolutionary potential—smartphones, desktop computers, or books? How ethical is the "open source" mentality that underscores coding languages, Wikipedia, and YouTube?
A survey of English-language American literature to 1800. We will read a wide range of texts from narratives of colonial settlement through the literature of the American Revolution, the Constitutional Convention, and the early republic. Topics to be discussed include: the role of Puritanism in American society; the language of liberty, rights, and representation; the rise of the novel in America; evangelism and secularism; the rhetorics of slavery and abolition; and the price of independence.
Fern, Fanny: Ruth Hall: A Domestic Tale of the Present Time; Jacobs, Harriet: Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl; Levine, Robert S.: The Norton Anthology of American Literature, Vol. B: 1820-1865; Melville, Herman: Moby-Dick; Whitman, Walt: Leaves of Grass (1855 edition)
Photocopied course reader
We will take up the remarkable fiction, poetry, and essays of this period, including works by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Edgar Allan Poe, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, Fanny Fern, Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, and Emily Dickinson. We will attend to literary form and technique, social and political context, and the ideological formations and transformations of these decades, especially the urgent debates about democracy, slavery, race, gender, sexuality, individuality, theology, economic system, social reform, the role of writers, and the power and limits of words. Two midterms and one final examination will be required.
This course satisfies L & S's Historical Studies breadth requirement.
Cullen, Countee: Color; Hughes, Langston: Fine Clothes to the Jew; Hughes, Langston: The Weary Blues; Hurston, Zora Neale: The Sanctified Church; Hurston, Zora Neale: Their Eyes Were Watching God; Johnson, James Weldon: Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man; Larsen, Nella: Passing; Locke, Alain: The New Negro; McKay, Claude: Harlem Shadows; Thurman (et al), Wallace: Fire!!; Toomer, Jean: Cane
This course explores the social, cultural, political, and personal awakenings in the literature, art, and music of the Negro Renaissance or the New Negro Movement, now commonly known as the Harlem Renaissance. This is remembered as a time (roughly 1918-1930) when, in the midst of legal segregation and increasing anti-Black mob violence, Black American writers, artists, philosophers, activists, and musicians, congregating in New York City’s Harlem, reclaimed the right to represent themselves in a wide range of artistic forms and activist movements. At stake: who were, and are, Black Americans? What was distinctive about Black art? What gave it such broad, international appeal? Could art be used to uplift the conditions of a people? Were Black artists obligated to make their art a means of protest against racism? If they were, would they produce art or propaganda? Our task in this course is to explore these and other questions through close analysis of major works by W. E. B. Du Bois, Claude McKay, Nella Larsen, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Aaron Douglas, Louis Armstrong, Bessie Smith, and many others. This course is co-taught by Professor Christine Palmer (American Studies) and Professor Bryan Wagner (English).
Acosta , Oscar Zeta: The Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo; Castillo, Ana: Sapogonia; Chavez, Denise: Loving Pedro Infante; Diaz, Natalie: When My Brother Was an Aztec; Hernandez, Jaime: The Girl from H.O.P.P.E.R.S.: A Love and Rockets Book; Munoz, Manuel: What you see in the Dark; Plascencia, Salvador: The People of Paper; Rivera, Tomas: ...and the earth did not devour him
“The student of Chicano literature will look back at this group and this first period as the foundation of whatever is to come, even if only as the generation against whom those to come rebel. The best of the best will survive—but then survival is an old Chicano tradition.”
Juan Bruce-Novoa, Chicano Authors: Inquiry by Interview.
Nearly forty years have passed since Juan Bruce-Novoa published Chicano Authors. An early Chicano literary critic, Bruce-Novoa documents this boom of creative writers in his book of interviews, naming them the “first wave.” This first wave—which he and others have come to regard as a consequence of the Chicano Movement—will serve as a reference point. In this course, we will encounter some of the most influential practitioners of Chicanx letters. This will include a variety of genres and media: novels, short stories, poetry, essays, film, comics, and music. Among the many themes in our exploration, we will observe how these writers (and artists) imagine place, history, citizenship, race, class, gender, nation, the body, art, community, and the cosmos. We will begin with the idea of the first wave as a “guide post,” to question where and when it began, and to consider how it became Chicanx Literature.
This course will introduce students to the study of creative writing—fiction and poetry. Students will learn to talk critically about these forms and begin to feel comfortable and confident writing within these genres. Students will write a variety of exercises and more formal pieces. In weekly discussion sections, students will participate in class workshops where their work will be edited and critiqued by other students in the class.
Course packet available via bCourses and at Instant Copying and Laser Printing, 2138 University Ave (between Shattuck Ave. & Walnut St.), (510) 704-9700
The aim of this course is to explore the genre of short fiction—to discuss the elements that make up the short story, to talk critically about short stories, and to become comfortable and confident with the writing of them. Students will write two short stories, a number of shorter exercises, weekly critiques of their peers’ work, and be required to attend and review two fiction readings. The course will be organized as a workshop and attendance is mandatory. All student stories will be edited and critiqued by the instructor and by other students in the class.
Course packet available via bCourses and at Instant Copying and Laser Printing, 2138 University Ave (between Shattuck Ave. & Walnut St.), (510) 704-9700
Writing samples should be 8-15 pages of fiction (a complete short story, a few short shorts, a section of a novel, etc.). Since this is a class that focuses on psychological realism, please avoid genre fiction for your sample (no sci fi, fantasy, fan fic, etc.). No need to strive for perfection here (this class focuses on learning the craft of fiction, so I expect you have much to learn!), but strong sentences, an understanding that fiction revolves around conflict, and three-dimensional characters are encouraged.
Ward, Jesmyn: The Best American Short Stories 2021
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 part in online discussions about fiction. Attendance is mandatory.
Students will only write fiction within the genre of psychological realism. We will not workshop science fiction or fantasy fiction.
Throughout the semester, we will read published stories from various sources and also essays by working writers about fiction and the writing life. The intent of the course is to have the students confront the problems faced by writers of fiction and to discover the techniques that enable writers to construct a convincing and engaging representation of reality on the page.
Please note that you have to apply to get into this class. To be considered for admission, please electronically submit 10-15 double-spaced pages of your fiction by clicking on the link below. You may submit one or more stories, but please stay within the page limit and remember to double-space.
A course reader will be available from Krishna Copy (University Ave & Milvia).
In this course you will conduct a progressive series of explorations in which you will try some of the fundamental options for writing poetry today (or any day) — aperture and closure; rhythmic sound patterning; sentence and line (verse); short and long-lined poems; image & figure; stanza; poetic forms; the first, second, and third person (persona, address, drama, narrative, description); and prose poetry. Our emphasis will be on recent possibilities, with an eye and ear to renovating traditions. We will also read a number of poems by graduates of my 143B sections who have gone on to publish books. 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 four or five in rotation (I’ll also respond each week to every poem you write). On alternate days, we’ll discuss illustrative poems in our culturally and poetically diverse course reader. If the past is any guarantee, the course will be fun and will make you a better poet.
TO APPLY, ATTACH YOUR WRITING SAMPLE BELOW. PLEASE SEND ME FIVE PAGES OF FIVE OR MORE POEMS.
In this class we will read as writers and write as readers, explore some of the larger mysteries and technical fine points of poetry, and how one is often to be found in the other. Course readings covering a range of 20th and 21st-century poetry will be provided, along with interviews and essays that address poetics and technique. Students will give brief informal presentations on writers up for discussion, and will have the opportunity to introduce to the class poems or collections not represented on the reading list. Our workshop will include experiments in established forms, free verse, avant-garde procedures, and their hybrids, and a variety of writing prompts and exercises will be available. Students will respond carefully to one another’s work and we’ll talk about strategies for revision, how to liberate the energy and immediacy of a poem. In the course of our conversations we will develop together a reading list and set of questions to carry forward into our creative lives.
TO APPLY, ATTACH YOUR WRITING SAMPLE BELOW. PLEASE SEND FIVE PAGES OF FIVE OR MORE POEMS.
This course is for students who are interested in or already working on a novel or novella. Through creative writing exercises and reading, we’ll explore how a novel is made, including questions of structure, research, and planning; through workshops, you’ll share the beginning of your own project. By the end of the semester, you will have the first chapter or two of a novel- or novella-in-progress, and a sense of where to take your work next. Reading to be confirmed.
Please note that access to this class is by application only. Click the link below to apply before October 29, 2021. Your 10-15 page writing sample need not be from a novel-in-progress - it can be any fiction that you consider your strongest.
Gilbert, Sandra M. : Eating Words: A Norton Anthology of Food Writing
This is a creative nonfiction writing workshop focused on the topic of food. Food writing encompasses more than snooty restaurant reviews or poetic descriptions of the taste of wine, coffee, and chocolate. Food writing can include memoir, cultural critique, and scientific explication. Topics writers might pursue include but are not limited to: food traditions, food taboos, food trends, fast food, slow food, junk food, fad diets, eating disorders, food as medicine, food production, agribusiness, organic and sustainable farming and fishery, migrant farm labor, restaurant work, food science, bioengineering of food, food deserts, hunger, etc.
Students will read examples of food writing from the assigned anthology and other sources. They will also read and discuss their classmates’ work. Written assignments will include 3 short exercises (approximately 2 pages each) and 2 full-length essays (approximately 8-20 pages), plus formal critiques of classmates’ work.
Only continuing UC Berkeley students are eligible to apply for this course. To be considered for admission, please electronically submit 5-8 pages of your writing (which need not be food-related but should not be academic writing, fiction, or poetry), by clicking on the link below; fill out the application you'll find there and attach the writing sample as a Word document or .rtf file.
This course is a nonfiction workshop in which you’ll learn to write about many different types of art and culture, from TV to music and other forms of performance, while also developing your own voice and sensibility on the page as you learn to write about your own life and the lives of others. By the end of the class, you should come away with a working knowledge of how to write reviews, profiles, and autobiographically-shaded essays that engage with a cultural figure, flashpoint, workplace, or landscape.
Our semester will be guided by a few basic questions: What can we demand from culture? What does it mean to love or hate a song, fashion style, TV show, actor, director, performer, artist, athlete, celebrity — or, in this digital age, a platform or an app? How are we changed by our encounters with specific works of art, specific places, specific people? And how do our arguments about a particular work of art, particular artist, particular place, or particular cultural phenomenon connect to broader dreams about politics, freedom, community, and our sense of the possible?
Two special features of the course bear specific mention.
First, we will be guided by the understanding that the art of writing is, in large part, the art of re-writing. The workshopping of your pieces is designed to help you get some fresh perspective on how your earlier drafts play in the minds of your readers—and what might be improved. You are expected to engage in substantial revision of several of the pieces you write for the course, with both first versions and revised versions submitted as part of your end-of-term portfolio.
Second, there’s a digital publication attached to this course: “The Annex” (http://www.medium.com/the-annex). Everyone in the class should consider contributing at least one of their pieces to The Annex (though you should feel to publish pieces elsewhere too, of course—on the Medium platform all rights are retained by the author). It’s anticipated that, before publication on The Annex, each piece will undergo a process of editing and revision.
An upper division writing workshop, open to undergraduate and graduate students from any department who have either taken English 43-level writing seminars or have equivalent skills/experience.
Drawing on narrative strategies in memoir, the diary, travel writing, and fiction, students will have work-shopped in seminar two literary nonfiction pieces, 5-15 pages. Each week, students will turn in one-page critiques of the (one or two) student pieces being workshopped. Some weeks, as well, there will be a 1- or 2-page journal entry on prompts assigned (these entries may be used as part of the longer pieces).
We will read from a course reader, which will be available before the beginning of the term from Krishna Copy (University Ave. and Milvia).
Ecopoetry – nature poetry that is environmental and environmentalist – is an international twenty-first century movement. But in the nature poetry and poetics of the United States it has deep and wide-spread roots. This seminar will explore this movement in U.S. nature and environmental(ist) poetry from the nineteenth to the contemporary poetry and poetics, romantics and post-romantics (including Whitman, Dickinson, Emerson and Thoreau), modernists (including Frost, Stevens, Jeffers, Moore, Eliot, Sterling Brown) post-modernists (including Snyder, Merwin, Bishop, Berry) and contemporaries (including Diaz, Graham, Hass, Baker, Gander, Dungy, Hillman and Hirshfield). We will read relevant theories of nature and its representation in poetry; and we’ll also read ecopoetics, essays by poets and others about the natures and uses of ecopoetry. While our exploration will be primarily historical, our focus will also be theoretical, involving a number of recurrent topics, including anthropocentrism (and ecocentrism), anthropomorphism (and the pathetic fallacy), place, disaster and pollution, environmental justice, and climate change. You will learn how to read a poem ecocritically. You will be asked to write three five-page essays on a poem by a post-romantic, a modern, and a post-modern poet. Alternately, you may write a five-page essay on a post-romantic or modern and a ten-page essay on a contemporary poet. I welcome students from English and from other majors. This seminar is multi-centered and open-ended. It benefits from local the experiences and expertise from its students. I learn as much as I teach.
The Twentieth Century offered a unique blending of advancement and atrocity, genocide and progress, and surely no single artist captured this more fully and more fearlessly than Samuel Beckett. Spanning the modernist and postmodernist eras, Beckett's vast body of work in fiction and drama confronts us with a relentless exploration of loneliness and destruction and a single-minded flight to the very limits of human expression. Out of this near maniacal quest he produced -- impossibly -- writing that is off the charts funny. How did he achieve this pungent blending of laughter and doom in works like Waiting for Godot, Molloy, Endgame and so many others? In this class, through a close reading of Beckett's stories, novels and plays, and a taste of some of the writers who most influenced him and whom he most influenced, we will seek to find out. In addition to Beckett's major works we will read a bit of Descartes, some Joyce, a pinch of Proust and a sprinkling of Harold Pinter, Edward Albee, Sam Shepherd and Suzan-Lori Parks, among others.
Nabokov, Vladimir: Laughter in the Dark; Nabokov, Vladimir: Lolita; Nabokov, Vladimir: Pnin; Nabokov, Vladimir: Short Stories; Nabokov, Vladimir: The Defense; Nabokov, Vladimir: The Gift
We will study the work of Nabokov as a novelist on two continents over a period of nearly sixty years. The course will be structured (more or less) chronologically and divided between novels translated from Russian and written in English. After beginning several short stories, we will examine some of the fiction of his European period, before turning our attention to Lolita and Pnin. Competing interpretations of Nabokov will be considered, but our emphasis will be on metafiction, the theme of perversity and Nabokov's cultivation of a perverse reader.
“Curiously enough, one cannot read a book: one can only reread it.” Students should expect to devote a considerable amount of time to reading and rereading and should come to class prepared to discuss the assigned texts. Participants in the class should anticipate reading (and then, in a perfect world, curiously rereading) 150 pages per week. Written work will consist of two papers (5 to 10 pages) on topics to be chosen in consultation with the professor. Penalties will be assessed for late papers. There will be a midterm and a final examination.
Is happiness possible in a world of ecological catastrophe, economic inequality, and racial oppression? This course will explore recent literature by Black, Indigenous, Latinx, and Asian American writers and poets preoccupied with the nature of joy. Against the grain of literature that represents the experience of racialization as immiseration, these texts explore the possibilities of meaning, happiness, beauty, and community both as responses to racialization and as the generative outcome of artistic creation. We will pay particular attention to the specificity of differently racialized histories as they impinge on or, alternately, create the conditions in which human flourishing (an idea whose influence runs from Aristotle through Marx to contemporary political theory) becomes possible. We will read in all genres and supplement our consideration of primary texts with theoretical texts on the political valences of happiness, bodily pleasure, ecological communion, and racial solidarity. Texts will include Luis Alberto Urrea’s The House of Broken Angels, Ross Gay’s Be Holding, Natalie Diaz’s Postcolonial Love Poem, Louise Erdrich’s LaRose, and Gish Jen’s Typical American, among others. Students will learn to identify and analyze different conceptions of joy and their relation to theories and histories of racialization. They will also develop essays that synthesize theoretical concepts and closely examine the form and function of primary texts.
Baldwin, James: Giovanni's Room; Barnes, Djuna: Nightwood; Cunningham, Michael: The Hours; Hollinghurst, Alan: The Line of Beauty; Larsen, Nella: Passing; Nelson, Maggie: The Argonauts; Wilde, Oscar: The Picture of Dorian Gray and Other Writings; Woolf, Virginia: Mrs. Dalloway; Woolf, Virginia: Orlando
The bCourses site will include samples of modernist poetry (T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, Langston Hughes), theoretical essays (Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, Eve Sedgwick, Lee Edelman, Susan Stryker), short stories (Henry James, Bruce Nugent), and visual materials drawn from contemporary art installations.
This course will focus on one area of the rapidly expanding field of literature and sexual identity: the early twentieth-century literary experiments that have earned the title “modernism.” Famously “queer,” modernism’s challenges to literary and social norms entangled formal and sexual “deviance.” To unravel these entanglements, we will read back and forth across the twentieth century to stage a series of encounters between the aesthetic practices and discourses of modernism and those of contemporary queer theory and cultural production. As we read texts by Oscar Wilde, Henry James, Djuna Barnes, T.S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein, Langston Hughes, Nella Larsen, and James Baldwin, we will consider (among other issues) the mobile dimensions of queer time and space; the historical migration of concepts such as perversion, inversion, masquerade, transvestism, abjection, and shame; the mutual implication of race, gender, and sexuality; the formal attributes of the closet; the legibility of transgender bodies; and the composition of affective histories. To complement (and complicate) the chronological axis of this inquiry, we will also attend to the metropolitan spaces in which sexual boundaries blurred and subcultures thrived, especially the three urban sites central to modernist experimentation: London, New York, and Paris.
The course will require two papers, a midterm, and a final exam.
Dilthey, Wilhelm: Poetry and Experience; Dostoevksy, Fyodor: Crime and Punishment; Freud, Sigmund: The Penguin Freud Reader; Gilman, Charlotte Perkins: The Yellow Wall-Paper, and Selected Writings ; James, William: The Principles of Psychology; Karinthy, Frigyes: A Journey Round My Skull; Plath, Sylvia: Ariel: The Restored Edition; Rilke, Rainer Maria: The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge; Sacks, Oliver: An Anthropologist On Mars: Seven Paradoxical Tales ; Woolf, Virginia: Mrs. Dalloway
Course reader will include works by Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis, Vernon Lee (Violet Paget), Georg Simmel, Charles Baudelaire, Edouard Dujardin and others
Is psychology a science that deals with objective facts? Are these facts established through third-person observation and verification, or first-person experience? Is the object of psychology the neuroanatomy of the brain or the cognitive structures of thought and feeling? Are the origins of mental phenomena best understood through a study of evolutionary history, anatomy and physiology, philosophy of mind, or social interaction? Such questions bedeviled psychology from the moment of its birth as an independent discipline in the late nineteenth century. Answers were provided not only by those now calling themselves “psychologists,” but by writers experimenting with literary forms such as the interior monologue, stream of consciousness, free indirect discourse, life writing and experimental poetry. In fact, we will see how such questions about psychology are not merely matters of scientific debate. They are part of larger cultural and philosophical questions about what it means to be human. As a result, the answers we settle on determine much more than the scope of psychology as a discipline. They entail a vision of the value and role of humanistic thought in a scientifically and economically rationalized society. In this class, we will unravel these interdisciplinary problems that appear braided together in scientific and literary works. Students will develop papers addressing fundamental problems of psychology from both “ends,” finding in literature new ways of framing and understanding the structures of human experience.
Keller, Helen: Midstream; Keller, Helen: The Story Of My Life; Keller, Helen: The World I live In; Kleege, Georgina: Blind Rage: Letters to Helen Keller; Nielsen, Kim: The Radical Lives Of Helen Keller
Course Reader;Film: The Miracle Worker
Every schoolchild knows the story of Helen Keller. We learn early that Keller became blind and deaf as a toddler, that after years without language, she was taught to sign, read and write, and eventually speak, that she was the first deafblind college graduate. Keller has captured our collective imagination, inspiring countless biographies, academic treatises, children's picture books, an Oscar-winning film, and even a Barbie doll. We quote her words, tour her childhood home, praise her teacher Anne Sullivan, speculate about her love life, and most of all, admire her indomitable spirit. But how much do we really know about Helen Keller? Has her story been obscured by the extent to which we have mythologized it? How can we seek out the truth of the story, and what does the impulse to mythologize it reveal about our ever-shifting understandings of disability and disabled identity?
We will begin our exploration by considering the writings of Helen Keller herself. Reading her autobiographies, essays, and letters, we'll examine the many roles she chose to take on throughout her long and multifaceted career. We'll discuss her work as a philosopher of the sensory who responded from her lived experience as a disabled woman to philosophers like John Locke, Samuel Molyneux, and Denis Diderot's theorizations about the blind and deaf's conceptions of sight and hearing. We'll talk, too, about Keller as a tireless activist—a feminist, a pacifist, an early supporter of the NAACP and ACLU, and of course a crusader for disability justice. We will then consider others' representations of Keller, examining how her story was alternately exalted, diminished, repurposed, and deployed. Why does Keller occupy such an enduring place in the non-disabled imagination, and how has her story been used? And how, in works like Georgina Kleege's Blind Rage: Letters to Helen Keller, have today's disabled thinkers built on, challenged, and celebrated Keller's life and legacy?
Because Keller was so prolific during her life and so constantly referenced thereafter, our analysis of her will serve as an introduction to the broader field of disability studies. We will learn, through our work on Keller, about the history, terms, and concepts integral to the field, and we will see how changing attitudes toward Keller reflect large-scale changes in attitudes toward disability itself. We will also prioritize attending closely to the textual details of Keller's exceptionally evocative writing, and as such, the course will serve, too, to give students a strong foundation in the value and techniques of close reading and literary analysis
The television situation comedy has been one of the most durable, wide-ranging, and successful genres of popular culture of all time. Its narrative forms (such as the “will they/won’t they” romance that depends on the televisual mode of serialization) have become premises of everyday life; its stage-set cinematography is instantly recognizable; even the sound editing (historically organized around the bizarre and coercive rhythms of a “laugh track”) has profoundly changed the way we experience the sound of words. In this class, we will critically assess the characteristic formal and aesthetic features of a genre too rarely subjected to scholarly analysis, and even more rarely to the kind of close reading we will practice here. Working across the full chronological range of sitcoms in English, from the screwball comedies of the postwar period, through to the high-concept star vehicles of the present, we will watch several episodes of different sitcoms each week, and each week focus on a recurring theme. How do sitcoms balance the competing demands of family, friendship, and erotic emplotment? How does the serial form enable, or else impede, the sitcom’s ability to represent reality? How realistic are sitcoms, anyway – and how have their various relations to realism shifted from the stage-set/laugh-track shows of the 1950s, to the deadpan mockumentaries of the 2000s? What does the American sitcom have to say, finally, about the post-1945 period’s emerging ideas about love, drugs, race, sex, youth, community, secularism, capitalism, gender, wealth, Christmas, family, and time?
Each week we will watch a total of six episodes of television, and class will entail two lectures and one discussion session. The episodes will be drawn from:
| 30 Rock | Fresh Off the Boat | The Monkees |
| The Addams Family | The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air | New Girl |
| Amos ‘n’ Andy | Friends | Parks and Recreation |
| Arrested Development | Full House | Punky Brewster |
| The Beverly Hillbillies | Home Improvement | The Office |
| The Big Bang Theory | I Love Lucy | Roseanne |
| Bob’s Burgers | It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia | Sanford and Son |
| BoJack Horseman | It’s Garry Shandling’s Show | The Simpsons |
| The Brady Bunch | The Good Place | South Park |
| Brooklyn Nine-Nine | The Jeffersons | Taxi |
| Community | The Larry Sanders Show | Third Rock from the Sun |
| The Cosby Show | Leave It To Beaver | Tom Goes to the Mayor |
| The Dick Van Dyke Show | Louie | Veep |
| Dinosaurs | Married… With Children | Welcome Back, Kotter |
| Don’t Trust the B– In Apartment 23 | Mary Kay and Johnny | Who’s the Boss |
| Drawn Together | The Mary Tyler Moore Show | Will and Grace |
| Ellen | M*A*S*H* | |
| Episodes | Master of None | |
| Family Guy | Meet the Wife | |
| Family Matters | Mister Ed |
Heaney, S.: Beowulf: A New Verse Translation (Bilingual Edition); Woolf, V: Mrs. Dalloway;
Recommended: Pinker, S: The Language Instinct
A reader containing miscellaneous articles and literary texts, including poems of Shakespeare, Yeats, Thomas, Dylan, Blake and others, and stories of Mansfield.
The medium of literature is language. This course aims to deepen understanding of what this means through consideration of how certain literary forms can be defined as grammatical forms. These literary forms include meter; rhyme and alliteration; syntactic parallelism; formulas of oral composition; and special narrative uses of pronouns, tenses and other subjective features of language to express point of view and represent 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.
A course reader.
In this class we’ll concentrate on just one poet, Emily Dickinson, using her work as an occasion to think about how poetry and history get made, revised, codified, brought forward, pushed aside, theorized, contested, remixed and – since this is a research seminar – researched. A series of exercises designed to hone research skills will lead you toward a final project. That could be a paper, or it could take some other form; you might stick close to Dickinson’s work, or you might move far afield. But her poems will anchor our discussions together. I never get tired of them.
I recommend that you get hold of a hard copy of either Thomas H. Johnson, ed., The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson or R.W. Franklin, ed., The Poems of Emily Dickinson: Reading Edition. That way, you can hand-write notes in the margins. But Dickinson’s work has been digitalized—a phenomenon we’ll be analyzing. So you will be able to access all of her work online.
Note: Students who took/are currently taking Amanda Jo Goldstein's English 100/4 ("Emily Dickinson and her Critics") in the fall of 2021 must consult Professor Schweik before enrolling in this class.
Please click here for more information about enrollment in English 190.
Frye, N.: Anatomy of Criticism; Shakespeare, W.: A Midsummer Night's Dream; Shakespeare,, W.: Antony and Cleopatra; Shakespeare,, W.: The Winter's Tale; Shakespeare, , W.: Henry IV, Part I;
Recommended: Anon.: The Bibile (authorized King James Version); Aristotle: Poetics; Brinton, D.: Rig Veda Americanus; Faulkner, R. and Goelet, O. (trans): The Egyptian Book of the Dead; Frazier,, J. : The Golden Bough; Frye, N. : The Educated Imagination; Graves, R.: The Greek Myths
What is literary criticism? All English majors and English professors do it, or try to do it; but articulating what it is, or should be, is not easy. The question is a theoretical one, which in this course we will consider with Canadian literary critic and theorist Northrop Frye as our guide. Frye’s monumental Anatomy of Criticism (1957) argued that literary criticism ought to contribute to the development of an organized body of knowledge about literature, analogous to the organized body of knowledge about nature called physics. Developing a strikingly contemporary argument through cross-cultural comparisons of literature with myth, religion, magic and ritual, Frye takes mankind’s relationships with nature on the one hand, and with language on the other, as fundamental to literature. In this course, we will consider these ideas alongside occasional examples from Shakespeare that we are all likely to have encountered at least passingly in other courses. The emphasis, however, will be on using the ideas to help each of us think about what our own literary criticism may contribute to such a body of knowledge. Reflecting Frye’s deep commitment to every work of literature being relevant to understanding literature as a phenomenon, each student will research and write a long (20 pp.) valedictory paper of literary criticism on any work of English literature they choose.
Please click here for more information about enrollment in English 190.
Deference to the instincts of a community serves as final arbiter in much intellectual and political work: when, for example, the linguist Noam Chomsky defines a the syntax of a language as the “instincts of a native speaker.” Yet as that framing indicates, discourses of “community” can also traffic in contested sociological categories, especially those relating to race, ethnicity, and nativity. In queer and trans spaces, meanwhile, “community” appears both as the cherished goal of cultural practice and as its enabling premise. This class asks how these questions shape our understanding of literature and culture. Building in work in critical race studies, philosophy, sociology, and anthropology, we will ask both how distinct literary communities develop theories and practices of community, test the utility of a generalizable theory of community, paying attention especially to queer critiques of community-based movements by writers like Stephen Best, Jodi Dean, Lee Edelman, and Miranda Joseph. Other readings will include Sarah Ahmed, David Eng, Michel Foucault, Jillian Hernandez, C. L. R. James, Immanuel Kant, Colleen Lye, Fred Moten, José-Esteban Muñoz, Amber Musser, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, and Mecca Jamilah Sullivan.
Please click here for more information about enrollment in English 190.
Allison, Dorothy: Bastard Out of Carolina; Gonzalez, Rigoberto: Butterfly Boy: Memories of a Chicano Mariposa; Jones, Gayl: Corregidora; Nguyen, Viet Thanh: The Sympathizer; Ozick, Cynthia: The Shawl; Trumbo, Dalton: Johnny Got His Gun; Wideman, John Edgar: Philadelphia Fire
Course Reader
In this course, we’ll analyze representations of repression and resistance in a collection of contemporary literary works, mainly novels. We’ll examine various forms of repression—physical, social, political, and psychological—represented in these works, and we’ll study the various ways the novels resist repression. (Please be forewarned: some of these works include graphic and disturbing representations of violence and abuse.) Several questions inform the course theme: How is it that literature can convert forms of repression into aesthetically pleasing representations? Can pain and suffering be symbolized, stylized, or transfigured into an aesthetic form and still retain its sociohistorical value? At what point does an event become so horrific that it can no longer be represented aesthetically? Where is the line drawn? What are the formal features of the literature of repression and resistance? We’ll make use of a comparative approach to analyze the similarities and differences between the various literary works, and we’ll strive for a critical appreciation of both the social significance and the aesthetic quality of the literature. We’ll also spend a considerable amount of time during the semester discussing research strategies and essay writing.
Please click here for more information about enrollment in English 190.
Burns, Anna: Milkman; Doctorow, E. L.: Ragtime; Morrison, Toni: Song of Solomon; Spufford, Francis: Red Plenty; Welch, James: Fools Crow
What is historical and what is fictional about the genre of historical fiction? Since the nineteenth century, this oxymoronic genre has redrawn the border between history and fiction, realism and romance. In this survey, we will begin by reading a couple of examples from the 1970s —works such as Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon and E.L. Doctorow’s Ragtime—and then focus primarily on novels from the twenty-first century. How is the sense of history these novels offer itself a product of changing history? In pursuing answers from contemporaries, we might also wonder about the future of historical fiction, not to mention fiction and history more broadly.
Please click here for more information about enrollment in English 190.
Anyone who has travelled or lived in parts of the world (including their own country) where they were visibly an outsider—by countenance, clothing or conduct—will have experienced the sometimes fearful instability of “otherness”. Contrary to common notions of medieval parochialism, medieval people did a lot of travelling, and they did it for the most part on foot, entering and exiting communities in relation to which their “sameness” or “otherness” was obvious and shifting. In line with common notions of medieval parochialism, these relative differences were telling in a world embroiled in religious conflict, for instance, in which not looking or behaving like those around you could get you killed. How did medieval people, embodied as they were, and marked (by choice or force) with the signs of their cultural origins, engage the ever-changing world through which they moved? How did they negotiate these relative alterities—of themselves and of those they encountered—recording them for posterity (that is, for us)?
Looking closely at medieval maps, manuscript illuminations, legal documents, personal letters and travel narratives of different Christians, Muslims and Jews, as well as the accounts of those they encountered both inside and outside their prescribed communities, we will aim to see how race shaped up and metamorphosed, transforming both self and “other” kaleidoscopically, for medieval people on the move—and for those who travelled with them, vicariously, from the comfort of their reading chairs.
Please click here for more information about enrollment in English 190.
Chandler, R: The Big Sleep; Didion, J: Slouching Toward Bethlehem; Steinbeck, J: The Long Valley; Steinbeck, J: The Pastures of Heaven; West, N: The Day of the Locust
Besides reading and discussing fiction and essays that attempt to identify or explain distinctive regional characteristics, this course will include consideration of various movies shaped by and shaping conceptions of California. Writing will consist of a term paper of 16-20 pages. There will be no quizzes or exams, but seminar attendance and participation will be expected, and will affect grades.
Please click here for more information about enrollment in English 190.
The Honors Seminar is a year-long course. In this second semester, we focus on drafting and revising a 40-60 page Honors Thesis. The course is not open to new enrollment. No new books are required.
This course is a continuation of English H195A, taught by Scott Saul in Fall 2021. No new students will be admitted, and no new application needs to be submitted. Prof. Saul will give out permission codes in class in November.
No new texts are required for this class.