The Announcement of Classes is available one week before Tele-Bears begins every semester. Creative Writing and (for fall) Honors Course applications are available at the same time in the racks outside of 322 Wheeler Hall.
Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness; Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from the Underground; F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby; Ian McEwan Enduring Love; and Diana Hacker, Rules for Writers.
The aim of any text is to make a claim on a reader’s time, to arouse in him or her an obsession with its narrative world. One way a text can accomplish this is to depict an obsession of its own: unhealthy, often all-consuming, and always fascinating. Obsession originally referred to “the action of besieging,” and that more menacing version is the kind we’ll be examining in a variety of infatuated characters across a variety of narrative forms. The four main texts (two novellas and two novels) will take us from the Belgian Congo (Heart of Darkness) to Jazz Age New York (The Great Gatsby), and from the streets of St. Petersburg (Notes from the Underground) to the skies of England (Enduring Love). We’ll also read short stories by Kafka, D.H. Lawrence, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and Nikolai Gogol.
The goal of the course is to read carefully and critically, and to develop a healthy obsession with clear, cogent prose.
John P. Rumrich and Gregory Chaplin, eds., Seventeenth-Century British Poetry 1603-1660, Norton Critical Edition (2006). ISBN 0-393-97998-9 (pbk.)
English writers of the seventeenth century produced some of the most memorable short- to medium-length verse in the English language. Poets of particular note include Aemelia Lanyer, John Donne, Ben Jonson, Robert Herrick, George Herbert, Andrew Marvell, and John Milton. Readings will be taken from a single text, Seventeenth-Century British Poetry 1603-1660, chosen for its excellent selections and modest cost.
Requirements: Written work will consist of several short papers, a midterm exam, and a final exam. Students must be prepared to attend faithfully, and will be given the opportunity to participate in class discussion.
Note that this class satisfies the pre-1800 requirement for the English major.
This course is taught in session C, from June 21st to August 13th.
Shakespeare: Comedy of Errors, Hamlet, Twelfth Night, Measure for Measure, Macbeth, The Winter's Tale
This course is both an intense and an introductory upper-division course on Shakespeare. It is introductory in that it will cover systematically several important aspects of the plays and several critical tools needed to understand and analyze them--language, scene, gesture, character, verse, narrative structure. It is intense in that we and we will also be giving close, hard scrutiny to six plays in six weeks.
Note that this class satisfies the Shakespeare requirement for the English major.
This course is taught in Session D, from July 6th to August 13th.
D. Allison, Bastard Out of Carolina; D. Giardina, Storming Heaven; C. Pineda, Frieze; R. Ruiz, Happy Birthday Jesus; D. Trumbo, Johnny Got His Gun; J. Wideman, Philadelphia Fire; K. Yamashita, Tropic of Orange
In this course, we will read seven contemporary novels published from 1939 to 1997. The common thread in these novels is that they all focus on the internal turmoil of characters involved in social conflicts: war, racism, sexism, sexual abuse, child abuse, the criminal justice system, and class exploitation. Consequently, the characters in these novels are affected by extreme forms of alienation, reification, disconnection, fragmentation, paranoia, and hopelessness. Yet despite seemingly insurmountable obstacles they also display an urgent desire to comprehend and change the social world in which they live. In addition to reading these novels as social commentaries, we will be attentive to such formal literary features as style, point of view, symbolism, irony, characterization, and narrative structure. Methodologically, we will situate each novel in its historical context, but we will also emphasize the importance of close textual analysis. A long paper and several short writing assignments will be required.
This course is taught in Session A, from May 24th to July 2nd.
The Scarlet Letter, by N. Hawthorne; Huckleberry Finn, by M. Twain; The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald; Their Eyes Were Watching God, by Z.N. Hurston; The Rain God by A. Islas; Housekeeping, by M. Robinson
We will concentrate on the central issues deeded to the American novel by democratic ideology -- refusal and autonomy, loyalty, guilt, and atonement, futurity and the burden of the past -- and try to figure out how the formal innovations in the American novel are responses to those issues.
Requirements: Two six-page essays, a final exam, and regular attendance and participation will be required.
This course is taught in session C, from June 21st to August 13th.
Readings will include: Adams, M et. al., Readings for Diversity and Social Justice; Barclay, R., Melal: A Novel of the Pacific; Domurat Dreger, A., One of Us: Conjoined Twins and the Future of Normal; Garcia, L., Criminal of Poverty: Growing Up Homeless in America; Moraga, C., Heroes and Saints and Other Plays; and a xeroxed course reader.
This course will analyze the categories of “disability,” “race” and “ethnicity” critically. “Disability” as an identity category is always raced, whether we attend to that intersection or not, and people defined in racial terms are also always placed on axes of disability and ability, well and ill, normal and abnormal, malformed and well-formed. Much work on that ambiguous umbrella term “disability” treats disabled people as ungendered (that is, male), unraced (that is, white), without nationality (that is, native-born American but barely a citizen), and unsexualized (that is, heterosexual, but only in default). My aim in this course is to set up situations in which you can think about several of these categories simultaneously in the context of American cultures present and past.
To this end, we will take three familiar cultural figures as case studies: beggars, freaks and victims. Each of these illustrates how racism and ableism have intertwined (along with class issues) in American (dis)ability cultures. A variety of guest speakers, including performance artists and activists, will visit us, and we’ll view a series of films.
Requirements: Written requirements: two papers and a final exam.
Note that this class satisfies U.C. Berkeley's American Cultures requirement.
This course is taught in Session A, from May 24th to July 2nd.
This American Cultures course focuses on California representations of Chicana/o, Chinese American, and African American culture in literature and film (and some comedy!). Thanks to the media industry, which circulates its representations worldwide, the state occupies a central place in the nation’s imaginative life. California is typically framed in starkly dramatic terms as either paradise (a promised land of agricultural plenitude, sunny beaches, material bling) or nightmare (a concrete wasteland, mean neighborhoods with graffitied fences, crushing freeways, racial difficulty). It is, of course, all of this.
Like the rest of us, writers cannot help but be informed by these images. In this course we will consider works across several novels, films and various elements of popular culture that offer their own visions of and arguments about life in the Golden State. To what extent do writers/film-makers provide us with alternative or revisionist histories of the state? How do the ideas about culture and character they develop in their work compare with the notions of self-making, self-invention and commodity culture we see and hear on the small and on the large screen? To what extent do these authors speak in dialogue with narratives of film and television? What counter stories do they tell? And how does comedy feed on common stereotypes to alleviate the pressure we too often put on ourselves over the serious social interactions we encounter daily? Is comedy helpful, or does it deepen stereotype?
These are some of the questions I have, and I expect to hear your questions/responses during the course. To that end, you will form small groups whose task it will be to organize and lead class discussion. You will be responsible for the course material, but you I encourage you to introduce material you find in media, the internet, and from family/neighborhood.
Note that this class satisfies U.C. Berkeley's American Cultures requirement.
This course is taught in Session D, from July 6th to August 13th.
Allen Ginsberg: Howl and Other Poems; Kaddish; William Burroughs: Junky; Naked Lunch; Jack Kerouac: On The Road; Gary Snyder: No Nature
This course will examine major works (mostly the early stuff) by four central figures of the Beat Generation-- Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, W.S. Burroughs, and Gary Snyder. First we'll survey the literary/historical context in which these writers formed themselves, their visions and their styles. How do they continue important traditions, even as they rebel against them? We'll pay close attention to the differences as well as the similarities between these four, as well as the outside influences on them. Among other things, we'll examine their notions of spontaneity and authenticity, and the influence on them of "foreign" cultures.
Requirements: Class requirements: two short papers (each counting for 30% of your grade) and a final exam (counting for the remaining 40% of your grade).
This course is taught in Session C, from June 21st to August 13th.