Graduate students from other departments and exceptionally well-prepared undergraduates are welcome in English graduate courses (except for English 200 and 375) insofar as limitations of class size allow. Graduate courses are usually limited to 15 students; courses numbered 250 are usually limited to 10.
When demand for a graduate course exceeds the maximum enrollment limit, the instructor will determine priorities for enrollment and inform students of his/her decisions at the second class meeting. Prior enrollment does not guarantee a place in a graduate course that turns out to be oversubscribed on the first day of class; fortunately, this situation does not arise very often.
Althusser, Louis: Reading Capital; Boggs, James: The American Revolution; Marx, Karl: Capital, Vols. 1-3; Marx, Karl: The Grundrisse
Additional course readings will be made available through bCourse.
The 1960s’ return to Marx centered on the 1857-8 manuscripts, or The Grundrisse, which were then made widely available in the West for the first time. The Grundrisse inspired diverse interpretations of Marx’s critique of political economy—ranging from (post)structuralist readings such as Louis Althusser’s Reading Capital, (post)workerist readings such as Antonio Negri’s Marx Beyond Marx, and “value-form” readings by Hans-Georg Backhaus and Helmut Reichelt. Over the next forty years, versions of these differing interpretations would exercise competing influence in the Anglophone academy at different times, but they all sought to rescue the author of The Grundrisse from the author of Capital—to rupture method from content. Since 2008, or the felt sense of the fundamental crisis tendency of capitalism, the return to Marx has centered on Capital. What if we return to The Grundrisse in light of the most developed version of Marx’s dialectical presentation of capitalist form contained in Capital? This course’s aims are twofold. First, to ask: is the Marx of the 60s the Marx we need today? Second, to undertake a (at least partial) reconstruction of the forking paths traveled by French, Italian and German Marxist theory since the start of the Long Crisis in the early 1970s. Depending in part on the needs of the group, this course may emphasize a slow reading of Marx, or move more quickly from Marx to Marx’s 60s and 70s reception, including in the US and UK at the time. To aid with course planning, those intending to take this course are encouraged to communicate with the instructor before the end of the Fall semester about their prior background in Marx and Marxism. The book list will not be finalized till the start of the spring semester (when book orders will be set up through East Wind Books in Berkeley). However, should anyone wish to go ahead and procure the titles listed here, you can be assured that whatever happens these are worth having. Be sure, in that case, to obtain the Penguin editions of the Marx volumes.
This course fulfills CT240 in the Designated Emphasis in Critical Theory.
This course surveys literature, film, and art of the 1960s with a particular focus on works from the United States that highlighted the period’s many forms of social, political, and ecological crisis, and assess the limits and possibilities of the existing traditions and styles of expression that were available to represent them. We will situate our figures in the broader global contexts that their projects variously embraced or repressed. We will read a mix of writers who were popular and prominent in the moment alongside others who were neglected for the genres or publics they engaged. Since it is impossible to provide a comprehensive overview of such a contentious period--especially one whose histories are so recent and contingent--we will instead work collectively to identify themes, aesthetics, and patterns of both affiliation and resistance that can help us organize different versions of “the Sixties” for future research and teaching of twentieth-century materials.
We will trace how writers, artists, and filmmakers after 1945 pursued their projects in the wake of global modernism and its institutions, and witnessed versions of its decline, persistence, or and radicalization--more often than not at the same time. We will see how different figures attempted to maintain the hierarchies of literary or cultural prestige in the face of generational upheaval, while others laid claim to the power of such iconic struggles as the Civil Rights Movement, the opposition to the Vietnam War and Western imperialism, and the demand for recognition across a broad and contested spectrum of gender, sexual, and racial identities.
Readings will include fiction and prose by such writers as by John Updike, Saul Bellow, Shirley Jackson, Flannery O’Connor, Thomas Pynchon, Slyvia Plath, Donald Barthleme, Mary McCarthy, Hannah Arendt, Norman Mailer, Joan Didion, and Philip Roth--writers who let us outline the contours of the period’s literary canon as it has been understood. But we will challenge what these writers can tell us about the 1960s by placing them alongside figures such as James Baldwin, J. G. Ballard, Gwendolyn Brooks, Ursula K. LeGuin, Robert Smithson, John Ashbery, Frank O’Hara, and more. The course will also trace the emergence of various forms of poststructuralist theory in the 1960s (Althusser, Foucault, Derrida, Barthes) in their historical and cultural contexts. Painting, photography, land art, and other visual culture from the period will be included along the way, and we will screen a small selection of films including Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers, Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde, Michael Snow’s Wavelength, and Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Aristotle: Poetics; Armstrong, N.: Desire and Domestic Fiction; Auerbach, E.: Mimesis; Bakhtin, M.: The Dialogic Imagination; Barthes, R.: S/Z: An Essay; Barthes, R.: The Pleasure of the Text; Bourdieu, P.: The Rules of Art; Brooks, P.: Reading for the Plot; Forster, E. M.: Aspects of the Novel; Freud, S.: Beyond the Pleasure Principle; Genette, G.: Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method; Girard, R.: Deceit, Desire, and the Novel: Self and Other in Literary Structure; Hamburger, K.: The Logic of Literature; Kojève, A.: Introduction to the Reading of Hegel; Kristeva, J.: Desire in Language; Lukács, G.: The Historical Novel; Lukács, G.: The Theory of the Novel; Lynch, D.: The Economy of Character; Propp, V.: Morphology of the Folktale; Sedgwick, E.: Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire; Watt, I.: The Rise of the Novel; White, H.: Metahistory; Woloch, A.: The One vs. the Many
In this course, we will read a lot of writing about narrative and the novel for a few related reasons. First, we’ll consider several representative texts in narratology, novel theory, and the sociology of the novel to trace out some key arguments about narrative structure and narrative voice; the rise, nature, and ostensible ends of the novel; omniscient narrators, minor characters, and ideal readers; the novel and history, the novel and sex, the novel and politics, and the novel and lost illusions. We will read books and essays by, for instance, George Eliot and Roland Barthes, Fredric Jameson and Henry James, Ralph Ellison and Gérard Genette, Mikhail Bakhtin and Erving Goffman, E. M. Forster and Julia Kristeva, Georg Lukács and Virginia Woolf. Second, we will use these readings not only to understand these different critical fields but also to think about their respective and intertwined histories. When and why did narrative theory begin to diverge significantly from the theory of the novel? How should we think about the movement of ideas between Russian, Continental, and Anglo-American critics and theorists? What’s the difference between the novel as a narrative structure, the novel as an aesthetic form, and the novel as an especially eloquent index of a disenchanted modernity? Third, we will apply these theories as we go. I’ll ask each participant in the seminar to pick a novel or another kind of narrative at the start of the semester and to use it as an object against which to test the promise and the limits of these different ways of reading, thinking, and writing about novel theory, narrative theory, and the sociology of the novel.
All readings will be in a digitally available course reader.
Studies in contemporary poetic cases will focus our discussions of each other's poems.
By the time James Baldwin died in 1987, he had, arguably, become the voice of black and queer America. As the author of numerous novels, essays, plays, and social commentaries, the Harlem-born author had managed, over his nearly forty-year career, to write about race, sex, gender, and the politics of difference in a style that was uniquely his own. His voice was personal, analytical, and highly literary, all at once.
In this course, we will not only examine James Baldwin’s career, but the times that defined him and a relationship that was, early on, central to his life as an artist: his friendship with Richard Wright, whose best-known works remain Native Son (1940) and Black Boy (1945). How did Baldwin, a Harlem born native, become our premiere poet of exile? Wright emigrated to Paris before Baldwin. Did their respective self-exiles make them quintessentially American artists, and our greatest critics?
Wright/Baldwin will be conducted like a seminar, so classroom discussion is key. Discussions will be divided between analyzing student writing, and various Wright and Baldwin texts.
Book List:
J. Baldwin, Nobody Knows My Name (Vintage)
---------, The Fire Next Time (Vintage)
--------, Notes of a Native Son (Vintage)
--------, Go Tell it to the Mountain (Vintage)
--------, Going to Meet the Man
--------, Nothing Personal (Penguin Random House)
--------, Giovanni's Room (Vintage)
--------, No Name in the Street (Vintage)
-------, The Devil Finds Work (Vintage)
-------, One Day I was Lost: A Scenario Based on the Autobiography of Malcolm X
R. Wright, Black Boy (Harper Perennial)
---------, Native Son (Perennial Modern Classics)
---------, Eight Men (Harper Perennial Classics)
---------, Black Power (Harper Collins)
Cleaver, E., Soul on Ice (Delta)
Davis, Angela, Angela Davis: An Autobiography (Haymarket)
Malcom X, The Autobiography of Malcolm X
Burke, Edmund: A Philosophical Enquiry; Burke, Edmund: Reflections on the Revolution in France; Burney, Frances: Evelina; Equiano, Olaudah: The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano; Johnson, Samuel: Selected Poetry and Prose; Johnson/Boswell: Journey to the Western Islands; Tour of the Hebrides; Smith, Adam: Theory of Moral Sentiments; Sterne, Laurence: A Sentimental Journey; Walpole, Horace: The Castle of Otranto; Williams, Helen Maria: Letters, Written in France; Williams, Raymond: Keywords; Wordsworth and Coleridge: Lyrical Ballads 1798,1800
Course Reader
This survey of British writing from (roughly) 1740 through 1800 takes up decades that have presented literary historians with more than the usual challenges to periodization and organization by author, movement, or genre. We will study the proliferation of new genres in verse and prose, the transformation of existing ones, and the recovery of archaic forms. Proceeding with more of a chronological drift than in strict chronological order, we will try to do justice to the heterogeneity and eccentricity of the period, investigating its adjacent and overlapping concerns largely by topic and question. These will include: the emerging category of “literature” within “letters”; aesthetic criticism in relation to empiricism and the “Science of Man”; Scottish Enlightenment theories of sympathy and their attempts to overcome social atomization and geographical sprawl, skirmishes over the “common” tongue and the idea of “the people”; landscape description; the revival of romance before “Romanticism”; antiquarian impulses, forms, and forgeries; borders and peripheries within the nation; new international spaces and sentiment; abolition and revolution. Alongside the primary texts, we will address both recent and some not-so-recent critical discussions within later eighteenth-century and early Romantic studies.
In addition to the books listed above, there will be a course reader with our shorter readings, including the verse of Thomas Gray, William Collins, Oliver Goldsmith, George Crabbe, William Cowper, James Macpherson, and Anna Barbauld; non-fictional or philosophical prose by John Locke, David Hume, Hugh Blair, Lord Kames, Edward Young, among others; and selected literary criticism.
Baynton, Barbara: Bush Studies; Bronte, Charlotte: Jane Eyre; Dickens, Charles: A Tale of Two Cities; Haggard, Rider: King Solomon's Mines; Plaatje, Sol: Mhudi; Schreiner, Olive: Story of an African Farm; Seacole, Mary: Wonderful Adventures of Mary Seacole; Sinha, Kaliprasanna: The Observant Owl: Hootum's Vignettes of Nineteenth-Century Calcutta ; Sorabji, Cornelia: Love and Life Behind the Purdah
Taking as a starting point the fact that Britain’s nineteenth-century empire necessitates a capacious understanding of the term “Victorian,” this course will query the expansive contours of that term. What reading practices does such a commodious understanding of Victorian entail? What commonplace assumptions does it put pressure on? What critical models does it generate? Is recalibrating Victorian a matter of ensuring representational breadth alone, important enough as such a practice remains? Over the course of the seminar, we will read a range of texts authored in multiple locations of a highly variegated imperial terrain that included dominions as well as dependencies. We will consider the transmutation of genres such as the literary sketch, the bildungsroman, and the imperial romance. We will engage with texts variously coming to terms with notions of professionalism, mobility, and urbanity. In doing so, we will pay attention to the comparatist models that we invoke. To what extent can we—or should we—consider a Victorian literary system? What possibilities does such a system open up and, alternately, foreclose? In addressing these questions, we will read Charlotte Bronte, Barbara Baynton, Charles Dickens, Harriet Martineau, Rider Haggard, Sol Plaatje, John Ruskin, Mary Seacole, Kaliprasanna Sinha, Cornelia Sorabji, and Olive Schreiner, among others. Our texts of study will comprise novels, short stories, travel accounts, memoirs, and essays, several of which will be uploaded to bCourses. Secondary readings will also be included in bCourses.
The idea of pairing “sensation” with “participation” as a means of identifying an aesthetic phenomenon characteristic of the later Middle Ages and early Renaissance emerges in part from Thomas Aquinas’ account of beauty: he argues that beauty is fundamentally a means of “participation,” because it is a universal experience of visual pleasure that recalls the viewer to the beauty of the divine. The viewer thus participates in the divine and shares that participation with other viewers. In this class, we will examine what happens to this linked pair of aesthetic qualities as it appears in the late medieval vernacular English poetry of figures like Gower, Chaucer, Hoccleve, and Lydgate; we will also consider how these ideas change under Tudor absolutism and in the wake of the English Reformation, in the works of Wyatt, Surrey, Spenser, and others. Medieval writers frequently depict forms of communal participation in their poetry; they were surrounded by participatory forms of art in their daily lives, such as the cycle dramas; royal entries; mumming; mayoral processions; wall paintings; “pageants,” or tableaux; even decorative sugar sculptures accompanied by verses (“solteltes”). These kinds of displays continue and indeed grow more elaborate under Tudor rule; even the mystery plays continue to be performed until the late 16th century. Sensation and participation thus continue to exert significant influence in the 16th century, even as the changes wrought by Tudor absolutism and the Reformation significantly alter the poetic landscape. Students are encouraged to develop research topics that combine literary readings with material culture, in the form of theatrical performance, visual art, manuscript illustration and book construction, print history (production; circulation; censorship), and more. Work for the course: final seminar paper and occasional informal written reflections, plus one presentation.
Conrad, Joseph: Heart of Darkness; Marlowe, Christopher: Doctor Faustus and Other Plays; Milton, John: Complete Shorter Poems; Shakespeare, William: The Winter's Tale
The history of Western literary theory is often told in terms of the concept of mimesis. But there is another, equally powerful, anti-mimetic strand to this history: the critique of mimesis as a form of idolatry. In this course, we will explore this critique from the prohibition against images in the Hebrew Bible up through modern attacks on mimesis and aesthetics as inherently ideological. One premise of this course, then, is that iconclasm is part of the pre-history of the critique of ideology.
Our main literary texts in the first half of the semester will be taken from Reformation England, when there was a fierce debate about the harmful power of images and the necessity of iconoclasm. We will focus on works by Marlowe, Shakespeare, and Milton. In the second half of the semester, we will discuss the afterlife of iconoclasm in Kant, Nietzsche, Marx, Freud, Adorno, Terry Eagleton, Isobel Armstrong, and Bruno Latour. Students whose interests lie primarily in national literatures other than English are welcome, and may write their final papers on primary texts and literatures not discussed in class, though they must engage the theoretical texts assigned for the seminar.
Required Texts:
Christopher Marlowe, Doctor Faustus and Other Plays (Oxford) ISBN 978-0-19-953706-8 [also in pdf]
Milton, Complete Shorter Poems, ed. John Carey (Longman) ISBN 13: 978-0582019850 (or any other edition that includes Samson Agonistes)
Shakespeare, The Winter’s Tale (any edition with line numbers)
Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness