Class Archive

R1A/1

Reading and Composition:
“Alternative realities are true”: Animist Materialism in Contemporary Literature from West Africa and its Diaspora

MWF 9-10

Almost forty years ago, the pop star Madonna sang that “we are living in a material world, and I am a material girl.” But is this really a material world? And are we only material beings? While Madonna’s claim is a response to cap...(read more)

R1A/2

Reading and Composition

MWF 10-11

Class description to come.

R1A/3

Reading and Composition:
Millennial Narratives

MWF 11-12

“how long can a culture persist without the new? What happens if the young are no longer capable of producing surprises?”
    —Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism

“The air we breathe is t...(read more)

R1A/4

Reading and Composition:
“Minorities, Yes; But Oppressed, No”: Asian American Racialization from "Yellow Peril" to the "Model Minority Myth" and Beyond; or, Racialization & Representation in the Construction of Asian American Identity

MWF 12-1

This class intends to take a historical approach to studying the racial formation of Asians and Asian Americans in the United States since the late nineteenth century. Asian American historiography has often been concerned with delin...(read more)

R1A/5

Reading and Composition:
Poetry of Protest

MWF 1-2

This Rhetoric and Composition course examines protest poetry in the United States as a social phenomenon and literary tradition from the nineteenth century to the present. We will explore and think critically about “protest poetics” in ...(read more)

R1A/6

Reading and Composition

Class description to come.

R1A/7

Reading and Composition:
Circe: Interpretations of A Witchy Woman

MWF 2-3

“Humbling women seems to me a chief pastime of poets. As if there can be no story unless we crawl and weep.” --Madeline Miller, Circe​

Although Madeline Miller’s 2018 novel, Circe, recently pro...(read more)

R1A/8

Reading and Composition:
Madwomen

MWF 3-4

Madness often takes shape in literature as a kind of shattering, a disillusionment or awakening that leaves fragmented subjectivity in its wake. The figure of the madwoman in particular has been of vital importance to feminist thought in twentieth ...(read more)

R1A/9

Reading and Composition:
My Brilliant Friend: Reading Female Friendship

MWF 4-5

While popular media has commented on the recent emphasis on female friendship in literary fiction, the phenomenon has elided scholarly attention. In this course, we will both interrogate and think beyond the question of appeal: as a particular enco...(read more)

R1B/1

Reading and Composition:
Magic and Modernity, or Enchantment after Enlightenment

MWF 9-10

“The absence of myth is also a myth: the coldest, the purest, the only true myth.” 

In a moment when digital covens cast binding spells on Trump, viral Tik Tok investors combine crypto trading with astrology, and Pew Rese...(read more)

R1B/2

Reading and Composition:
Bleak House

MWF 10-11

This course teaches reading, writing, and researching skills by applying them to one big book, Charles Dickens’ Bleak House, which was not always one big book. Originally published in 20 monthly installments from 1852 to 1853, Bl...(read more)

R1B/3

Reading and Composition:
Working Class Chicanx Literature

MWF 10-11

In this course, we’ll read some classic as well as more contemporary works of chicano/a/x literature focusing specifically on the lives and labors of agricultural, industrial and domestic workers. How are th...(read more)

R1B/4

Reading and Composition:
The Love Story

MWF 11-12

What does it mean, in Taylor Swift's 2008 hit single “Love Story,” when the besotted speaker declares, “It's a love story, baby, just say, 'Yes'” -- and what, in this declaration, is the difference betwe...(read more)

R1B/5

Reading and Composition:
Thinking with Literature, Art, and Film

MWF 11-12

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 o...(read more)

R1B/6

Reading and Composition:
Staging Desire: Sex and Sexuality in Renaissance Drama

MWF 12-1

Book List:

Ford, John: ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore; Marlowe, Christopher: Edward II; Shakespeare, William: As You Like It.

Other Readings and Media:

...(read more)

R1B/7

Reading and Composition:
A History of Monsters

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...(read more)

R1B/8

Reading and Composition:
Writing the American City: From Redlining to Climate Change

MWF 12-1

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 abo...(read more)

R1B/9

Reading and Composition:
Thinking through Memory in Poetry and Fiction

MWF 1-2

How and why do we remember? What does 'memory' mean to both an individual and a culture? How do fictional narrators construct their memorial landscapes? In this class we will explore the topic of memory as it appears in a wide variety of ge...(read more)

R1B/10

Reading and Composition:
Writing Politics

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 assoc...(read more)

R1B/11

Reading and Composition:
Nature Writing in English Literature

MWF 2-3

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 English-speaking world, whose la...(read more)

R1B/12

Reading and Composition:
Writing the American City: From Redlining to Climate Change

MWF 2-3

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 abo...(read more)

R1B/13

Reading and Composition:
Practical Criticism

MWF 3-4

What is “criticism”? We wouldn’t be wrong to associate this word with disgruntled critics, snobs, and fault-finders looking for ways to put others down. As Raymond Williams notes, “criticism” comes from the Greek k...(read more)

R1B/14

Reading and Composition:
A Childhood

TTh 8-9:30

This course will focus on canonical British texts that claim either to represent for a child or to represent to a child.  As we track these texts’ supposed invention of a certain kind of British childhood—and with it a certain kind...(read more)

R1B/15

Reading and Composition:
Writing with Beowulf

TTh 5-6:30

This is not a class about Beowulf. As a course in the university’s R&C program, this is primarily a class on writing; as an R1B, it’s also a class on the skills of careful research and forceful argument.

R1B/16

Reading and Composition:
Out of Obscurity

MWF 3-4

During this course we will read together, and write about, artists of all kinds who lived the majority of their life in obscurity--from familiar literary figures like Emily Dickinson, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and Lorine Niedecker, to the Swedish arti...(read more)

R1B/17

Reading and Composition:
Thinking with Literature, Art, and Film

MWF 9-10

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 o...(read more)

R1B/18

Reading and Composition:
Frankentext: Reproduction and Literature

MWF 4-5

Reproduction (literally, “bringing into existence again”) can refer to making copies of works of art or the creation of offspring. The focus of this class will be Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel Frankenstein and its adaptations...(read more)

R1B/19

Reading and Composition:
Writing the American City: From Redlining to Climate Change

MWF 4-5

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 abo...(read more)

R1B/22

Reading and Composition:
Silence

TuTh 8-9:30

We are all silent at times. We keep quiet over dinner with our relatives or nod passively at work. Some people dislike silence, equating it with being alone and lonely, while others look forward to spending time with their thoughts, seeking out sil...(read more)

R1B/23

Reading and Composition

Class description to come.

R1B/24

Reading and Composition:
Science Fiction

TuTh 6:30-8

“We have no need of other worlds. We need mirrors. We don't know what to do with other worlds. A single world, our own, suffices us; but we can't accept it for what it is.”       -Stanislaw Lem,&nbs...(read more)

R1B/25

Reading and Composition:
Factual Fictions of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries

TuTh 6:30-8

Fake News! Alternative Facts! In recent years, our political discourse has been polarized, each side accusing the other of fudging the facts. But just what is a fact? And what if the opposite of fact isn’t understood as lying(read more)

R1A/1

Reading and Composition:
Poetics from the Global South

MWF 9-10

This course will focus a range of poetries written in English from what we might broadly call the Global South. Its aim is essentially comparative, tracking similarities and differences – thematic, generic, and stylistic &ndash...(read more)

R1A/2

Reading and Composition:
Animals and Other People

MWF 10-11

(read more)

R1A/3

Reading and Composition:
Transpacific Poetry

MWF 11-12

This course focuses on poetry written during the twentieth century across the Pacific Ocean, with a large part of the texts emerging from North America, East and Southeast Asia, and Oceania. Though these works emerge from a variety of national cont...(read more)

R1A/4

Reading and Composition

MWF 12-1

In this Rhetoric and Composition course, we will explore what it means to “enunciate” ethnic and queer positionality in LGBT and Latinx/Chicanx works. We will explore course materials with an eye to the “slipperiness” of cle...(read more)

R1A/5

Reading and Composition:
Asian American Women Writers Across Genre

MWF 1-2

What do writings by Asian American* women** have to tell us about emotional labor, transnational intimacies, and hope?

This question serves as the organizing frame for our semester's exploratory journey of critical thinking. We w...(read more)

R1A/6

Reading and Composition:
Voyage to the Moon

MWF 8-9

On July 20, 1969, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed the Apollo Lunar Module Eagle on the moon at 1:17 pm, Pacific Time. The moon landing seemed like the very definition of modernity: using cutting-edge technology to cross the boundary between E...(read more)

R1A/7

Reading and Composition:
Whose Civil War?

MWF 2-3

This class will explore the many legacies of the American Civil War. Starting with journalistic accounts and poetry from the war itself, and moving forward into novels and films, we'll think through how successive generations of writers from di...(read more)

R1A/8

Reading and Composition:
Sexual Ethics in Feminism and Fiction

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 desir...(read more)

R1B/1

Reading and Composition:
Sensational Transformations

MWF 9-10

We may think we’re past the Victorian era, but even a cursory look at our contemporary pop culture tells us otherwise. BBC keeps churning out successful period pieces. Sherlock Holmes and Dracula just won’t die. Jane Eyre is co...(read more)

R1B/2

Reading and Composition:
Sick

MWF 10-11

This course teaches 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 fiction,...(read more)

R1B/3

Reading and Composition:
The Poetry of California

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 s...(read more)

R1B/4

Reading and Composition:
The Poetry of California

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 s...(read more)

R1B/5

Reading and Composition:
Dreaming on Paper: Exceptional Mental States and the Written Word

MWF 11-12

What do we mean when we say that a text is “dreamlike?” We often appeal to this description when the text with which we are engaging is strange, experimental, or transgresses normative expectations. And yet to compare a novel, a film, o...(read more)

R1B/6

Reading and Composition:
Silence

MWF 12-1

How do writers have words to describe silence? How does silence evade speech while also being produced by it? How does silence seek expression in language, metaphors and images? This course tracks the ways in which writers and artists have employed...(read more)

R1B/7

Reading and Composition:
Recent Beasts

MWF 12-1

In tune with the intense paradoxes that have defined the relationships between humans and animals of every era, the first two decades of the 21^st century have witnessed not only an ongoing anthropogenic mass extinction (and ever-intensif...(read more)

R1B/8

Reading and Composition

MWF 12-1

Class description to come.

R1B/9

Reading and Composition:
Asian American Autofiction

MWF 1-2

Over the past few decades, American literary criticism has experienced what we might call a “rise in autofiction”—a genre that hovers uneasily between autobiography and fiction first coined in 1977 by the French novelist Serve Dou...(read more)

R1B/10

Reading and Composition:
Demonic Literature

MWF 1-2

Demons, devils, and other malicious spirits have been part of the English literary tradition since the beginnings of the language itself. How a tradition chooses to embody evil reveal not only what human behaviors it considers taboo, but also ...(read more)

R1B/11

Reading and Composition:
Petrofiction and Climate Fiction

MWF 1-2

R1B/12

Reading and Composition:
Fictions of Time, Space, Memory

MWF 2-3

Does literature speculate, or theorize?  How does the history of the novel shadow – or shape – an idea of reality that modern science takes as given?  Does the existence of fictional worlds alter the material one that we inhab...(read more)

R1B/13

Reading and Composition:
The Literature of Love

MWF 3-4

            “If I profane with my unworthiest hand

            This holy shrine, the gentle sin is this:...(read more)

R1B/14

Reading and Composition:
Passing Narratives

TTh 8-9:30

This course will focus on passing narratives, stories, in which, a character is perceived as belonging to a racial or ethnic group different from their own. In particular, we will direct our attention to a series of twentieth-century texts that exp...(read more)

R1B/15

Reading and Composition:
Genres of Dispossession

TTh 5-6:30

How did capitalism begin? There is so much at stake in this question – above all, perhaps, some clues as to what capitalism really is and how it will end. While many have presumed that capitalism arose naturally and inevitably, and that it re...(read more)

R1B/16

Reading and Composition:
Rewriting Epic

TTh 5-6:30

“Bro!” So begins a recent translation of Beowulf. Not with a solemn “So.” or an exclamatory “Listen!”, but rather with a playful invitation to reconsider the epic from a feminist standpoint, as a &l...(read more)

R1B/17

Reading and Composition:
Petrofiction and Climate Fiction

MWF 8-9

R1B/18

Reading and Composition:
Writing Modern Egypt

TuTh 3:30-5

R1A/1

Reading and Composition:
Sally Rooney: Popularity and the Popular

TWTh 9-11:30

What makes a novel popular? What makes a person popular? When we read stories, why do we want to know the characters, go to the places they’re going and hear more of what they have to say? This class critically interrogates the idea of popula...(read more)

R1B/1

Reading and Composition:
Thinking through Memory in Poetry and Fiction

TWTh 12-2:30

How and why do we remember? What does ‘memory’ mean to both an individual and a culture? How do fictional narrators construct their memorial landscapes? In this class we will explore the topic of memory as it appears in a wide variety o...(read more)

R1B/3

Reading and Composition:
Poetry and the Art of Cultivation

TWTh 10-12

What should we make of a poem that proposes to instruct its readers on the proper methods for manufacturing cider? Or on how to care for one’s sheep or cultivate sugarcane on a colonial plantation? Are such poems simply agricultural...(read more)

R1A/1

Reading and Composition:
Cider, Milk, Sugar, Wool; Poetry and the Art of Cultivation

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...(read more)

R1A/2

Reading and Composition:
Myth, Politics, and the African Novel

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 wr...(read more)

R1A/3

Reading and Composition:
The American City - From Segregation to Climate Change

MWF 11-12

The American city is an incredibly complex and dynamic organi...(read more)

R1A/4

Reading and Composition:
The Novel and the Police

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 crit...(read more)

R1A/5

Reading and Composition:
Ornament and Rhyme

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 regress...(read more)

R1A/6

Reading and Composition:
Poetry as Philosophical Genre

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...(read more)

R1A/7

Reading and Composition:
Writing American Nature

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 dep...(read more)

R1A/8

Reading and Composition:
Sexual Ethics in Feminism and Fiction

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 desir...(read more)

R1A/9

Reading and Composition:
Near Futures

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, student...(read more)

R1A/10

Reading and Composition:
Near Futures

MWF 12-1

This writing-intensive course will familiarize students with ...(read more)

R1A/11

Reading and Composition

TTh 2-3:30

R1A/12

Reading and Composition:
Catastrophe and Revolution: Toward a Poetics of Decline

TTh 11-12:30

In his biblically oriented geological treatise, Sacred The...(read more)

R1A/13

Reading and Composition:
Writing with Moby-Dick

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 Me...(read more)

R1A/14

Reading and Composition:
Love

TTh 9:30-11

This writing-intensive course will study love, one of the gre...(read more)

R1A/15

Reading and Composition:
Borderline Crooks

MWF 4-5

A plague-ridden Thebes, an Indian reservation, a Rio slum, a ...(read more)

R1A/16

Reading and Composition:
William Faulkner's Short Fiction

TuTh 3:30-5

In this course we will focus on Faulkner's short stories,...(read more)

R1A/17

Reading and Composition:
The American City - From Segregation to Climate Change

MWF 8-9

The American city is an incredibly complex and dynamic organi...(read more)

R1A/18

Reading and Composition:
Re-Visioning the "Sixties"

MWF 10-11

This Reading and Composition course will focus on selected fi...(read more)

R1A/19

Reading and Composition:
Re-Visioning the "Sixties"

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 cons...(read more)

R1A/20

Reading and Composition:
Re-Visioning the "Sixties"

TTh 2-3:30

This Reading and Composition course will focus on selected fi...(read more)

R1B/1

Reading and Composition:
Poetry of California

MWF 9-10

Poetry won’t give you the news, as William Carlos Willi...(read more)

R1B/2

Reading and Composition:
Sick

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 includi...(read more)

R1B/3

Reading and Composition:
Autobiography in Experimental Literature

MWF 10-11

How and why might you choose to document your own life? What ...(read more)

R1B/4

Reading and Composition:
The Mystery to a Solution—Or, on “slow reading”

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 myst...(read more)

R1B/5

Reading and Composition:
A Thing or Two

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&r...(read more)

R1B/6

Reading and Composition:
Monsters in English Literature

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...(read more)

R1B/7

Reading and Composition:
Sibling Rivalries

MWF 12-1

Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina humorously begins with: “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Perhaps the most riddling element is what sorts of bonds keep unhappy families—and espec...(read more)

R1B/8

Reading and Composition:
Wild(ish) America

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 ...(read more)

R1B/9

Reading and Composition:
Afro-Asian: Solidarities and Stereotypes

MWF 1-2

What did “Yellow Peril Supports Black Power” once...(read more)

R1B/10

Reading and Composition:
Writing Politics

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 assoc...(read more)

R1B/11

Reading and Composition:
Poetic Proofs

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 pl...(read more)

R1B/12

Reading and Composition:
Utopian Feminisms

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 wi...(read more)

R1B/13

Reading and Composition:
Thinking with Literature, Art, and Film

MWF 3-4

R1B/14

Reading and Composition:
Octavia Butler: Writing the Body

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 spe...(read more)

R1B/15

Reading and Composition:
Thought Experiments

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...(read more)

R1B/16

Reading and Composition:
Obscene Comedy

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, re...(read more)

R1B/17

Reading and Composition:
Poetry of California

MWF 10-11

Poetry won’t give you the news, as William Carlos Willi...(read more)

R1B/18

Reading and Composition:
Poetry of California

MWF 11-12

Poetry won’t give you the news, as William Carlos Willi...(read more)

R1B/19

Reading and Composition:
Enthusiasms: The Amateur Critic Then and Now

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...(read more)

R1A/1

Reading and Composition:
Four Nobelists - Great Writers of the Last One Hundred Years

MWF 9-10

One survived World War II in Poland. Another hailed from a small island in the eastern Caribbean, an outpost on the verge of breaking free of Europe's colonial grip. One was born to a people burdened and ravaged by centuries of enslavement. Ano...(read more)

R1A/2

Reading and Composition:
(Un)Belonging Bodies and Citizenship

MWF 10-11

Our bodies – even if we might claim them as our own &nd...(read more)

R1A/3

Reading and Composition:
Allegory and Experience in American Literature.

MWF 11-12

The century that spans 1820 to 1920 witnesses the formation of American literature as we know it. Just on the heels of the war of 1812, the America of this century takes its hard-fought independence and heads west to war with Mexico: revising its f...(read more)

R1A/4

Reading and Composition:
Five Ways of Looking at a Poem

MWF 12-1

In this course we will move through and across the history of poetry, focusing on poems and poetry through a set of open categories: Character, Identity, Form, Community and Sound. These open categories will be the ...(read more)

R1A/5

Reading and Composition:
Sports, Politics, and Protest

MWF 1-2

Playing fields might be designed to separate winners from losers, but they have recently become sites where privilege and disenfranchisement collide in volatile ways. In response, some have argued that sports should be a field apart: an escape that...(read more)

R1A/6

Reading and Composition:
Borderline Crooks

MWF 1-2

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, ...(read more)

R1A/7

Reading and Composition:
Collectives

MWF 2-3

Literary writing often presents us with profound forms of individual, subjective life—the "I" of the lyric poet, the well-developed character of the realist novel. What opportunities are there, however, for the writer who wants inst...(read more)

R1A/8

Reading and Composition:
Global Nineteenth-Century Literatures

MW 5-6:30

This class examines how nineteenth-century novelists, poets, diarists and essayists try to "think globally" in a globalizing world. We will see how their individual stories and ideas participate in much larger narratives--narratives of im...(read more)

R1B/1

Reading and Composition:
Girls, Misunderstood?: “Deviant” Women in Literature

MWF 9-10

Recent psychological thrillers such as The Woman in ...(read more)

R1B/2

Reading and Composition:
How Words Do Things

MWF 10-11

When we speak of language, it is usually in terms of what it says, what it means, what it might imply or suggest.  What if we ask instead what words do: what can, or should words do, and what can we do with them?  What is a speec...(read more)

R1B/3

Reading and Composition:
War Writing: What Is It Good For?

MWF 10-11

It is commonplace to conceive of the war writer—whether journalist, memoirist, novelist, or poet—as a dispeller of fictions and purveyor of cold, hard truths about the "reality" of warfare. Yet writers themselves have often qu...(read more)

R1B/4

Reading and Composition:
Against the Theatre

MWF 11-12

What’s in a theatre? A stage, props, audiences, actors,...(read more)

R1B/5

Reading and Composition:
Audio Texts: Reading and/as Listening Since 1930

MWF 11-12

“Every book is already an audiobook,” argue Matthew Rubery and Christopher Cannon in their “Introduction” to the 2020 PMLA forum on “Aurality and Literacy.” Their statement is meant to signify ...(read more)

R1B/6

Reading and Composition:
What Is Literature?

MWF 12-1

What is literature? According to the literary theorist Jonathan Culler, the answer is simple if a 5-year-old is asking: literature is stories, poems, and plays. But what if university students are asking? In this course, we’ll ask the questio...(read more)

R1B/7

Reading and Composition:
Self-Multiplicity and Bildung

MWF 12-1

How does a first-person narrator relate and relate to herself as a character amongst other characters? How is the narration of one’s individual growth dependent upon a synchronization with and outpacing of the environment that has produced on...(read more)

R1B/8

Reading and Composition:
Down the Rabbit Hole

MWF 12-1

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and its sequel, Through the Looking-Glass, have wormed their way into how we talk and think about fantasy. In this course, we'll read these works along with some of their many adaptations a...(read more)

R1B/9

Reading and Composition:
Caribbean Poetry In and Out of English

MWF 1-2

In this course, we will be reading the work of a wide range of Caribbean poets. Most of the poetry will have been written in English, some of it translated from French or Spanish; some of it in "correct" English, but much of it ...(read more)

R1B/10

Reading and Composition:
Robert Frost

MWF 1-2

"Improvement will not be a progression but a widening circulation.”

This course will study the works and thinking of Robert Frost, a poet of deceptive fame who, by seeming to need no introduction, needs an introductio...(read more)

R1B/11

Reading and Composition:
LGBTQ and Chicanx Literature and Cultural Work

MWF 1-2

In this course, we will explore literatures that explore LGBTQ and queer themes in Chicanx/Latinx cultural work.  In our approaches to the course material, we will consider the interrelationships between art and activism. How can not explicitl...(read more)

R1B/12

Reading and Composition:
The Novel as Cultural Form

MWF 2-3

In this class, we will read two classic novels: Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847) and Jean Rhys’s postcolonial response to it, Wide Sargasso Sea (1966). As we read, we will consider the relationship between lite...(read more)

R1B/13

Reading and Composition:
Re-Visioning the "Sixties"

MW 5-6:30

This Reading and Composition course will focus on selected sp...(read more)

R1B/14

Reading and Composition:
Girls, Misunderstood?: “Deviant” Women in Literature

TTh 8-9:30

Recent psychological thrillers such as The Woman in the Window and The Girl on the Train have made the figure of the unreliable female narrator-cum-protagonist very popular, and the plots of these stories are driven by the seeming...(read more)

R1B/15

Reading and Composition:
Re-Visioning the "Sixties"

TTh 5-6:30

This Reading and Composition course will focus on selected speeches, fiction, 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 course of the semest...(read more)

R1B/16

Reading and Composition:
Haunted Nation: Studies of American Horror

TTh 5-6:30

Why do monsters, ghosts, and other supernatural embodiments c...(read more)

R1A/1

Reading and Composition:
Choice Cuts: Writing About Food

TWTh 9:30 - 12:00

This course begins with Terry Eagleton’s assertion that “food looks like an object but is actually a relationship, and the same is true of literary works” and moves to consider that relationship in texts as varied as medieval...(read more)

R1A/2

Reading and Composition:
Five Ways of Looking at a Poem

TWTh 2:30 - 5

In this course we will move through and across the history of poetry, focusing on poems and poetry through a set of open categories: Character, Identity, Form, Community and Sound. These open categories will be the lenses through ...(read more)

R1B/1

Reading and Composition:
Caribbean Poetry In and Out of English

TWTh 10-12:30

What does "standard" English look like? How does it...(read more)

R1B/2

Reading and Composition:
Girls, Misunderstood?: “Deviant” Women in Literature

TWTh 12-2:30

The trope of female instability seen in recent psychological thrillers, such as The Woman in the Window and The Girl on the Train, has a long literary history and has its roots in deeming women “mad” or “hysteric...(read more)

R1B/3

Reading and Composition:
Art of the “Hot Take”: Voice, Critique, and Resistance

TWTh 10-12

As social media has offered ordinary users a platform for their voice, the concept of the “hot take” in journalism has been increasingly applied to provocative perspectives on current affairs shared by members of the public. This c...(read more)

R1A/1

Reading and Composition:
Screens, Pages, and Visual Rhetoric in Contemporary Fiction

MWF 9-10

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 peo...(read more)

R1A/2

Reading and Composition:
Genres of Plague: 1347, 1981, 2020

MWF 10-11

On March 11, 2020, the World Health Organization declared the novel coronavirus (Covid-19) a pandemic. Since this announcement, the pandemic has wreaked havoc in practically every country around the world: millions of cases and hundreds of thousand...(read more)

R1A/3

Reading and Composition:
Re-Visioning the "Sixties"

MWF 11-12

This Reading and Composition course will focus on selected speeches, fiction, 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 course of the semest...(read more)

R1A/4

Reading and Composition:
Staging Desire: Sex and Sexuality in Renaissance Drama

MWF 12-1

Book List: Ford, John: ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore; Marlowe, Christopher: Edward II; Shakespeare, William: As You Like It.

Other Readings and Media: Edward II (film), dir. Derek Jarman...(read more)

R1A/5

Reading and Composition:
Four Nobelists: Great Writers of the Last One Hundred Years

MWF 1-2

One survived World War II in Poland. Another hailed from a small island in the eastern Caribbean, an outpost on the verge of breaking free of Europe's colonial grip. One was born to a people burdened and ravaged by centuries of enslavement. Ano...(read more)

R1A/6

Reading and Composition:
Octavia Butler: Writing the Body

Note new time: MW 3-4:30

How do fictional identities relate to lived ones? How does a body relate to a mind, a self, or a person? And how do these relationships change as cataclysmic events change the societies in which our identities develop?    <...(read more)

R1A/7

Reading and Composition:
Performances of Identity

MWF 2-3

             "All the world's a stage. And all the men and women merely players."—As You LIke It, Act II, Sc. VII

We often hear people say that actions speak louder than word...(read more)

R1A/8

Reading and Composition:
Borderline Crooks

MW 5-6:30

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, ...(read more)

R1B/1

Reading and Composition:
Reading and Rereading

MWF 9-10

According to Vladimir Nabokov, “one cannot read a book: one can only reread it. A good reader, a major reader, an active and creative reader is a rereader.”  In this course, we will provide ourselves with the space...(read more)

R1B/2

Reading and Composition:
Literature’s Social Life

MWF 10-11

Literature doesn’t exist in a vacuum, nor does it exist only in classrooms—it has a history, a context, a wider social life that affects how it is produced as well as how it is read, interpreted, circulated, and put to use. In this cour...(read more)

R1B/3

Reading and Composition:
Placing “No Place”: Fact and Fiction in Early Modern Utopia

MWF 10-11

In 1519, Thomas More coins the word utopia, literally translating to “no place,” an ideal society which does not exist. And yet, the imaginative vision that animates his Utopia hardly emerges from “no place&rdquo...(read more)

R1B/4

Reading and Composition:
Imagining the Collapse of Society

MWF 11-12

When a civilization falls, what becomes of those remaining? When society collapses, what is left? Is the end of the world just another beginning?

Fiction, particularly speculative fiction, has attempted to understand what might come if li...(read more)

R1B/5

Reading and Composition:
Robert Frost: Education by Poetry

MWF 11-12

"The closeness—everything depends on the closeness with which you come, and you ought to be marked for the closeness, for nothing else."

This course will study the works and thinking of Robert Frost, a poet of deceptive fa...(read more)

R1B/6

Reading and Composition:
Epic Romance, Novel Histories: Chronicling Fiction

MWF 12-1

What does it mean to tell a history of history-telling?  What are the stakes for narrating, recording, or imagining events and eras through inherited (epic, romance) or novel genres—what is gained or lost, and what relation to past and f...(read more)

R1B/7

Reading and Composition:
The New American Poetry

MWF 12-1

When accepting the National Book Award in 1960 for his poetry collection Life Studies, the poet Robert Lowell characterized U.S. poetry as a house divided between two camps: “the raw” and “the cooked.” This course w...(read more)

R1B/8

Reading and Composition:
Cannibals, Collectors, Chroniclers: Fictions of Empire

MWF 12-1

This class will focus on Anglo-American representations of colonial encounter from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, a period of dramatic imperial expansion. What are the conventions of fictions of empire? How are figures like cannibals and ...(read more)

R1B/9

Reading and Composition:
Western War Literature

MWF 1-2

Western literature has, since its inception, been preoccupied with war: war as historical and as personal event, as political and ethical crisis, as quotidian reality. Insofar as war has been a master-narrative in our conception of human socie...(read more)

R1B/10

Reading and Composition:
Romantic Satanism: "Paradise Lost" and Its Radical Legacies

MWF 1-2

What does it mean to be a romantic reader of Paradise Lost? In this course, we will closely read the canonical epic poem by John Milton, before exploring its reception in a few key Romantic texts. By reading Milton alongside Will...(read more)

R1B/11

Reading and Composition:
Jewish and Black-ish: Race Relations in American Literature

MWF 1-2

Judaism may be the only religion that takes an “-ish” in its adjectival form, but it’s certainly not the only identity in American culture to consider its partiality through language. As the 2014 sit-com Black-ish&nb...(read more)

R1B/12

Reading and Composition:
Missing Home: Stories of Exile and Dislocation

MWF 2-3

Please note the changes in the instructor and course content of this section of English R1B (as of June 15).

This course turns to the experience of exile and its diverse representations in texts drawing from the post-Enlightenment to cont...(read more)

R1B/13

Reading and Composition:
Quarantine/Pandemic, Alienation/Globalization, Alone/Together

MW 5-6:30

Does Covid-19 have you feeling isolated and alone? Unusually connected to far-flung strangers, friends, and family members who are going through the same thing at the same time? Perhaps both? In this course, readings and essay topics will cons...(read more)

R1B/14

Reading and Composition:
Wronged Women: Violence and Gender in Early English Literature

TTh 8-9:30

(Note new instructor, topic, and course description as of May 11.)

The brutal representations of sexual violence on the HBO series Game of Thrones have provoked heated debate in recent years. Under what circumstances, i...(read more)

R1B/15

Reading and Composition:
Against the Theater

TTh 5-6:30

What’s in a theatre? A stage, props, audiences, actors, devices— all sustained by a general acceptance that what happens on stage is not “real.” While the theatre’s composition has remained largely stable over time, th...(read more)

R1B/16

Reading and Composition:
Religion in the First Person

TTh 5-6:30

“O Lord, I truly toil at this task and labor in myself. I have become a troublesome field that requires hard labor and heavy sweat. We are not trying to explore the regions of the sky, or measuring the distances ...(read more)

R1A/1

Reading and Composition:
The Novel and Mass Culture

MWF 9-10

Contemporary discussions of novel-reading tend to characterize it as a refined, scholarly pursuit, more closely aligned with going to the symphony or visiting an art museum than with watching TV. Yet the novel’s place in the pantheon of high ...(read more)

R1A/2

Reading and Composition:
American Satire (from Gentlemen Prefer Blondes to Sorry to Bother You)

MWF 10-11

This course will focus on longform narrative satire (read: novels, movies, and possibly a play or two) produced in the U.S. from the 1920s to just about now. Northrop Frye has defined satire as "militant irony"; a study of this most ...(read more)

R1A/3

Reading and Composition:
Exiles and Everyday Life

MWF 11-12

“Even intellectuals who are lifelong members of society can, in a manner of speaking, be divided into insiders and outsiders: those on the one hand who belong fully to the society as it is, who flourish in it without an overwhelming sense of ...(read more)

R1A/4

Reading and Composition:
Reason and Superstition in the Nineteenth Century

MWF 12-1

Nineteenth-century Britain was the setting for a dazzling array of scientific discoveries and technological innovations, from the advent of electric lighting and photography to the formulation of new theories of evolution and disease to the extensi...(read more)

R1A/5

Reading and Composition:
Victorian Vampires

MWF 1-2

The figure of the vampire is constantly being reinvented, but it is always able to feed on our collective imagination. From Buffy the Vampire Slayer to Twilight to What We Do in the Shadows, vampires pursue us—and w...(read more)

R1A/6

Reading and Composition:
(Un)Belonging Bodies and Citizenship

MWF 1-2

Our bodies—even if we might claim them as our own—are far from neutral, as they carry embedded signals, texts, and even silences that reflect our multiple social positionings. This course explores narratives of embodiment, considering h...(read more)

R1A/7

Reading and Composition:
Love and Its Discontents in Shakespeare’s England

MWF 2-3

Why are star-crossed lovers so romantic? How innocent is a love potion that makes a fairy queen fall madly in lust with a man who is part donkey? Just how heteronormative is a play in which the crossdressed heroine remains in masculine ga...(read more)

R1A/8

Reading and Composition:
Identity as Performance

MW 5-6:30

“All the world’s a stage, And all the men and women merely players.”

—As You Like It, Act II Sc. VII

We often hear people say that actions speak loude...(read more)

R1A/9

Reading and Composition:
(Un)Belonging Bodies and Citizenship

MWF 12-1

Our bodies—even if we might claim them as our own—are far from neutral, as they carry embedded signals, texts, and even silences that reflect our multiple social positionings. This course explores narratives of embodiment, considering h...(read more)

R1B/1

Reading and Composition:
Re-Visioning the "Sixties"

MWF 9-10

This Reading and Composition course will focus on selected speeches, poetry, fiction, 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 course of th...(read more)

R1B/2

Reading and Composition:
Plain Girls

MWF 10-11

"Do you think I am an automaton?—a machine without feelings? …Do you think, because I am poor, obscure, plain, and little, I am soulless and heartless?”

Published in 1847, Jane Eyre was unlike any novel pu...(read more)

R1B/3

Reading and Composition:
Narrative in Poetry, Poetry in Narrative

MWF 10-11

Poetry is among the oldest technologies humans have for preserving and distributing stories. While other media—film, prose fiction, gaming—seem to deliver many of our tales now, narrative in poetry persists and thrives in our time as a ...(read more)

R1B/4

Reading and Composition:
Re-Visioning the "Sixties"

MWF 11-12

This Reading and Composition course will focus on selected speeches, poetry, fiction, 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 course of th...(read more)

R1B/5

Reading and Composition:
From Islands to Images, Thinking-Objects in the Sea of History

MWF 11-12

Beginning with Shakespeare’s The Tempest, and passing through other works of literature from Elizabeth Bishop’s Geography III and Herman Melville’s Benito Cereno to Aimé Césaire’s (read more)

R1B/6

Reading and Composition:
Narrative in Poetry, Poetry in Narrative

MWF 12-1

Poetry is among the oldest technologies humans have for preserving and distributing stories. While other media—film, prose fiction, gaming—seem to deliver many of our tales now, narrative in poetry persists and thrives in our time as a ...(read more)

R1B/7

Reading and Composition:
Reading and Writing the Digital

MWF 12-1

R1B/9

Reading and Composition:
Hollywood Babylon—The Art of the Episodic in TV and Lit

MWF 1-2

In this course we pull out the guts of stories to try and understand how storytellers craft works that grip us. In the process we examine classic attempts to say what makes good storytelling and put to the test the idea that any story has certain &...(read more)

R1B/10

Reading and Composition:
Reading and Writing the Digital

MWF 1-2

In this course, we will survey the production, consumption, and study of literary texts in the digital age. Starting with a unit on writers' relations to their writing technologies, we will explore the moral panics and forms of resistance promp...(read more)

R1B/11

Reading and Composition:
Renaissance Revenge Tragedy

MWF 1-2

The War of the Roses (1455 - 85) inaugurated the Tudor dynasty as it dramatically demonstrated that internal violence posed an existential threat to the English nation. As the sixteenth century became increasingly marked by religious and political ...(read more)

R1B/12

Reading and Composition:
Hollywood Babylon—The Art of the Episodic in TV and Lit

MWF 2-3

In this course we pull out the guts of stories to try and understand how storytellers craft works that grip us. In the process we examine classic attempts to say what makes good storytelling and put to the test the idea that any story has certain &...(read more)

R1B/13

Reading and Composition:
Final Frontiers: America and Beyond

MW 5-6:30

Who said it better—American newspaper magnate Horace Greeley ("go west, young man") or Captain Jean-Luc Picard of the Starship Enterprise ("space...the final frontier")? Both appeals are iconic, but which more effectively ...(read more)

R1B/14

Reading and Composition:
Early American Technology

MW 5-6:30

The era of the American Revolution and Early Republic was also a time of rapid innovation in science and industry. It was arguably America’s first technology boom. This course explores the place of technology in early American culture, specif...(read more)

R1B/15

Reading and Composition:
Collectives

TTh 8-9:30

Literary writing often presents us with profound forms of individual, subjective life—the "I" of the lyric poet, the well-developed character of the realist novel. What opportunities are there, however, for the writer who wants inst...(read more)

R1B/16

Reading and Composition:
Speculative (Non)Humans: Science Fiction and Its Lively (Im)Possibilities

TTh 5-6:30

As the sometimes all-too-plastic forms that influence and are influenced by the social and technological systems around them, living beings—in their human, animal, plant, and other manifestations—remain a source of great fascination, ce...(read more)

R1B/17

Reading and Composition:
Radical Berkeley

TTh 5-6:30

This course will focus first and foremost on developing the skills necessary to research, plan, draft and revise writing at a college level. You will hone these skills through an exploration of the extraordinary history of Berkeley itself. Berkeley...(read more)

R1B/18

Reading and Composition:
Searching for Answers: Coming-of-Age Novels into the 21st Century

MW 9-10:30

To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf (1927); Oreo, Fran Ross (1974); Fun Home, Alison Bechdel (2006); Long Division, Kiese Laymon (2013)

Short critical theory excerpts will be distributed by...(read more)

R1A /1

Reading & Composition:
The Making of Americans

TWTh 12-2:30

Americans are not born but made, and who they become is bound up with what they make. This course explores the long and varied history of these linked assumptions, with a particular focus on the nineteenth century. It was in this period that a broa...(read more)

R1A /2

Reading & Composition:
Psychedelic Experience in the Literature and Culture of the 1960s and '70s

TWTh 2:30-5

This course surveys the experimental literature of the late 1960s and early 1970s, situating it in relation to both the psychedelic discourses of the period and the wave of countercultural demands for a new kind of society. We’ll read texts t...(read more)

R1B/1

Reading and Composition:
Girls, Misunderstood?: "Deviant" Women in Literature

TWTh 10-12:30

Recent psychological thrillers such as The Woman in the Window and The Girl on the Train have made the figure of the unreliable female narrator-cum-protagonist very popular, and the plots of these stories are d...(read more)

R1B/2

Reading and Composition:
The Literature of Aotearoa/New Zealand

TWTh 4-6

This course will focus first and foremost on the practice of academic writing and the skills needed to research, plan, draft and revise writing at a college level. More specifically, it stages the problem of scholarly research through an encounter ...(read more)

R1B/3

Reading and Composition:
The Marriage Plot and Its Afterlife

TWTh 10-12:30

The marriage plot novel is seen as a thing of the past, but its influence very much lives on today in our movies, our music, and our notions of romance. This course will examine a series of genre-defining marriage plot novels from the 19th century,...(read more)

R1B/4

Reading and Composition:
Love and Race in American Film

TWTh 4-6

This class examines the history of popular American cinema through its representations of love and race. We will consider the often entangled—and frequently troubling—portrayals of race and romantic love as it appears across a range of ...(read more)

R1A/1

Reading and Composition:
Human Resources: Problems in the American Workplace

MWF 9-10

Fiction has provided a means for workers to re-imagine or even escape their everyday issues from the dawn of the labor movement to the heyday of the tech startup. Across a long history of media about work—including the muckraking of Upton Sin...(read more)

R1A/2

Reading and Composition:
The Making of Americans

MWF 10-11

Americans are not born but made, and who they become is bound up with what they make. This course explores the long and varied history of these linked assumptions, with a particular focus on the nineteenth century. It was in this period that a broa...(read more)

R1A/3

Reading and Composition:
Inscribing Fear: Written Horror, Living Flesh, and the Cultures that Produce Both

MWF 11-12

The horror genre—whose very purpose is to let us experience that which frightens, startles, or disgusts through a fictional lens—is capable of inciting a wide range of visceral responses. What will be the particular focus of this class,...(read more)

R1A/4

Reading and Composition:
(Un)Belonging Bodies & Citizenship

MWF 12-1

Our bodies—even if we might claim them as our own—are far from neutral, as they carry embedded signals, texts, and even silences that reflect our multiple social positionings. This course explores narratives of embodiment, considering h...(read more)

R1A/5

Reading and Composition:
Theorizing Race and Space in Asian American Studies

MWF 1-2

How does an understanding of space and the built environment inflect our understanding of ethnicized forms of belonging? My course charts the development of Asian American identity and literature through four sites in the Bay Area: Angel Island, th...(read more)

R1A/6

Reading and Composition:
(Un)Belonging Bodies & Citizenship

MWF 1-2

Our bodies—even if we might claim them as our own—are far from neutral, as they carry embedded signals, texts, and even silences that reflect our multiple social positionings. This course explores narratives of embodiment, considering h...(read more)

R1A/7

Reading and Composition:
Energy Fictions

MWF 2-3

This course explores literary and scientific perspectives on energy and its fictions from the early 19th century to the present, from the origins of carbon modernity and petroculture in the age of steam to contemporary 21st-century attempts to reck...(read more)

R1A/8

Reading and Composition:
Identity as Performance

MW 5-6:30

"All the world's a stage, And all the men and women merely players."—As You Like It, Act II sc. VII

We often hear people say that actions speak louder than words. We express our identities, who we are(read more)

R1A/9

Reading and Composition:
Reading and Writing in the Digital Age

MWF 9-10

In this course, we will survey the production, consumption, and study of literary texts in the digital age. Starting with a unit on writers' relationships to their writing technologies across time, we will engage experiments in making tdigital ...(read more)

R1B/1

Reading and Composition:
Gothic Trash

MWF 9-10

Gothic horror has never gone out of style. From the ominous castles of Horace Walpole and Ann Radcliffe in the eighteenth century to contemporary TV hits such as American Horror Story or The Haunting of Hill House&n...(read more)

R1B/2

Reading and Composition:
Some Hard-Boiled Detectives

MWF 10-11

"It is not a very fragrant world, but it is the world you live in. . . ." So Raymond Chandler characterizes the world out of joint painted by "the realist in murder." The tradition of hard-boiled detective fiction offers (arguab...(read more)

R1B/3

Reading and Composition:
Novel Spaces: Contemporary Fiction and the Internet

MWF 10-11

In 1981, Kraftwerk released their landmark album Computer World. Since the time they recorded it, politicians, economists and journalists have suggested that the digitization of society would change everything, producing a world of in...(read more)

R1B/4

Reading and Composition:
Reading and Writing in the Digital Age

MWF 11-12

(Note the changes in the instructor and content of this section of English R1B as of early June.)

In this course, we will survey the production, consumption, and study of literary texts in the digital age. Starting with a unit on writers&...(read more)

R1B/5

Reading and Composition:
The Monstrous Renaissance

MWF 11-12

This class ventures into Renaissance texts in search of the many monsters that dwell there. We will encounter eerily human beasts, snaky-haired Gorgons, monstrous births, and fierce cannibals. We will get to know those monsters through critical ana...(read more)

R1B/6

Reading and Composition:
Drama and Disability

MWF 12-1

It is a critical truism that the disabled body is always already a theatrical body—alternatively passing and masquerading. This course will interrogate the terms of this truism by examining how both disability and theatre have been historical...(read more)

R1B/7

Reading and Composition:
The Literature of Aotearoa/New Zealand

MWF 12-1

This course will focus first and foremost on the practice of academic writing and the skills needed to research, plan, draft and revise writing at a college level. More specifically, it stages the problem of scholarly research through an encounter ...(read more)

R1B/8

Reading and Composition:
On Happiness

MWF 12-1

In contemporary popular culture, "happiness" is often pictured as an object just beyond our reach. We try to organize our future life-paths to be "happy," tend to collectively agree that happiness is a worthwhile pursuit, and de...(read more)

R1B/9

Reading and Composition:
The Information Society

MWF 1-2

What is an information society? How do we read and think in a world of information? Numerous publications in recent years, both inside and outside the academy, have identified the late twentieth and twenty-first centures as an age of information, a...(read more)

R1B/10

Reading and Composition:
Staging Desire: Sex and Sexuality in Renaissance Drama

MWF 1-2

The drama of Shakespeare and his contemporaries offers a fascinating site for the analysis of gender and sexuality as historical and theoretical constructs, rather than as the timeless and universal 'facts' of human experience which they ar...(read more)

R1B/11

Reading and Composition:
Re-Visioning the 1960s

MWF 1-2

This Reading and Composition course will explore selected works of literature, music, and visual art produced during the 1960s. Our theme places emphasis on the relationship between artistic experimentation and the emancipatory social movements of ...(read more)

R1B/12

Reading and Composition:
Re-Visioning the 1960s

MWF 2-3

This Reading and Composition course will explore selected works of literature, music, and visual art produced during the 1960s. Our theme places emphasis on the relationship between artistic experimentation and the emancipatory social movements of ...(read more)

R1B/14

Reading and Composition:
(Im)personal Essays

MW 5-6:30

What does it mean to give your writing "personality"? In this course we will consider varying kinds of nonfiction (travel writing, reportage, Netflix comedy specials, autobiographical games, autotheory, and the classic "personal essa...(read more)

R1B/15

Reading and Composition:
Don't Go There! Fairy Tales

TTh 8-9:30

There is almost nothing more familiar than a fairy tale, yet they all address unfamiliarity, danger, and risk. For children, young women and everyone else, the world is full of mysterious knowledge and dreadful ordeals. So how do fairy tales c...(read more)

R1B/16

Reading and Composition:
Queer I

TTh 5-6:30

This course asks how writers use the stories of individual lives to negotiate what it means to be "queer," in the widest possible sense of the term. Most of what we read will be pieces written by authors describing their own lived experie...(read more)

R1A/1

Reading and Composition:
Reformations, Luther to Marx

MWF 9-10

This course will provide an introduction to the literary and artistic culture of the Protestant Reformation, focusing on the century and a half between Luther's 95 Theses and the Restoration of the monarchy in England (1660)....(read more)

R1A/2

Reading and Composition:
Fiction's Swarm

MWF 10-11

The perceived divide between humans and other animals has been defined as one of the most important frameworks under which our thoughts and behaviors are constructed. Yet literature—from its earliest examples to today's offerings—is...(read more)

R1A/3

Reading and Composition:
Not Another Love Song: Poetic Cultures Medieval and Modern

MWF 11-12

We all know what poetry is, right? At least in the popular imagination, it’s emotionally charged, personal and intimate, the heartfelt expression of Angst, Love, and the poet’s True Feelings. But in many ways that view of poetry as...(read more)

R1A/5

Reading and Composition:
Crazy Rich Asians? Minority Models in the Literature of the Asian Diaspora

MWF 1-2

Taking the meteoric success of Crazy Rich Asians as a cultural phenomenon as its point of departure, this course studies and interrogates the enduring myths and persistent stereotypes that inflect the history of Asian racial formation in a...(read more)

R1A/6

Reading and Composition:
Modernism's Apocrypha

MWF 1-2

This course teaches critical analysis and college-level writing skills through existent works of literature and art that deal with inexistent, unverifiable, or otherwise unreadable texts. The figure of the apocryphal book, or invented author, will ...(read more)

R1A/7

Reading and Composition:
Creation Stories of the Premodern World

MW 5-6:30

How did the world as we know it come into being? Was there anything else before it? Who made it the way it is, and did they do it on purpose? For at least as long as humans have written stories, we have speculated about origins.

Towards a...(read more)

R1B/1

Reading and Composition:
Memoir

MWF 9-10

What constitutes the “I” of a first-person narrative? How does it alternately designate an individual, a collectivity, or even a historical consciousness? In this class, we’ll be considering the shapes that these questions take ac...(read more)

R1B/2

Reading and Composition:
The Sword and the Screen: New Tricks with Old Texts

MWF 9-10

The difficulty with epics is that they're... well, epic. Beowulf goes hunting Grendel, and 3000 lines of poetry later he's still fighting; Arthur pulls Excalibur out of the stone, starts sending knights on quests, and keeps sending...(read more)

R1B/3

Reading and Composition:
Machines Made of Words

MWF 10-11

"A poem is a small (or large) machine made of words." — William Carlos Williams
"A book is a machine to think with." — I. A. Richards

In this course, we will explore the relationship between lit...(read more)

R1B/4

Reading and Composition:
Berkeley Literature

MWF 10-11

This section of English R1B studies fiction set in Berkeley, California. We will also look south to Oakland and west to San Francisco, cities whose histories and populations are bound up with our own. We will set our readings in context by con...(read more)

R1B/5

Reading and Composition:
Living Pasts: Cultural Memory and Historical Narrative

MWF 11-12

This course explores what it means to encounter seemingly "dead" pasts, often traumatic, through artistic and cultural productions and how, through that encounter, such pasts are relived and reimagined. Together we will exa...(read more)

R1B/6

Reading and Composition:
Unreliable Friends

MWF 11-12

This course examines how texts can mislead us. Literary critic Wayne Booth famously accounts for how readers can come to develop a "friendship with books." In our course, we will explore the complexities of these friendships—how som...(read more)

R1B/7

Reading and Composition:
Fake/News: New Journalism, the War on Truth, and Democracy in Peril

MWF 12-1

"New Journalism" has always been a slippery term. But this literary movement from the 1960s and '70s, that rejected notions of journalistic objectivity in favor of political and cultural commitment, and malaise in favor of "gonzo...(read more)

R1B/8

Reading and Composition:
Prison Sentences: Reading Mass Incarceration

MWF 12-1

This section of Reading and Composition is designed to both exercise your active reading skills and to empower you to write compelling, well-informed, and well-organized expository prose and research-based essays. Over the course of the semester we...(read more)

R1B/9

Reading and Composition:
Berkeley Literature

MWF 12-1

This section of English R1B studies fiction set in Berkeley, California. We will also look south to Oakland and west to San Francisco, cities whose histories and populations are bound up with our own. We will set our readings in context by con...(read more)

R1B/10

Reading and Composition:
Style and Being Singular

MWF 1-2

“My being charming, Harriet, is not quite enough to induce me to marry; I must find other people charming—one other person at least.”
– Emma Wodehouse (Jane Austen)
“Other people are quite dreadful. The o...(read more)

R1B/11

Reading and Composition:
Varieties of Confession in American Poetry

MWF 1-2

This course will cover a body of American poetry generally written between 1950 and 1970, with particular emphasis on the works of Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, John Berryman, and Elizabeth Bishop. Topics of study will include: the rela...(read more)

R1B/12

Reading and Composition:
The Crisis in Humanities

MWF 2-3

Note the changes in instructor, topic, book list, and course description of this section of English R1B (as of Nov. 27).

"It started as a budget issue," a provost said recently, explaining his college's decisi...(read more)

R1B/13

Reading and Composition:
Situated Narratives: Finding a Sense of Place in the Novel

MWF 2-3

Place is experienced in a variety of ways: as a material force we encounter daily, as an active and constitutive relationship, as a haunting and inescapable memory or feeling. This course will consider the narrative and affective strategies us...(read more)

R1B/14

Reading and Composition:
Literary and Scientific Knowledge

MW 5-6:30

R1B/15

Reading and Composition:
Who's to Blame? Agency and Determinism in the 19th-Century Crime Novel

MW 5-6:30

The sentencing of criminals has long raised questions of responsibility and blame, nature and nurture, and these questions have only become more pressing in our contemporary political environment. This course will address questions of agency and de...(read more)

R1B/16

Reading and Composition:
Something Resolutely Indefinable: The African-American Novel, the Individual, and Sociological Thought

TTh 12:30-2

This class will consider how a series of important 20th-century African-American novels confront questions of individual identity, categrization, social definition. To this end, we shall attend to the complex connection between the tradition of bla...(read more)

R1A/1

Reading and Composition:
Global Bookworm: Am I a Cosmopolitan Yet?

TuWTh 9:30-12

This course investigates how books (and book selection) allow us to form individual conceptions of what is “global.” We will read texts that represent an array of perspectives on identity, national allegiance, and global travel, maintai...(read more)

R1A/2

Reading and Composition:
Monster Culture in Print and Film

TuWTh 1-3:30

The 19th century saw the publication of several landmark monster novels, birthing a genre that would achieve a similarly widespread popularity in the films of the 1980s and 1990s. This course will examine three monsters of Victorian literature&mdas...(read more)

R1A/3

Reading and Composition:
Mere Humanism

MTuTh 2-4

This course will evaluate the role that 'Humanism' has played across a transhistorical spectrum and a diverse generic range (we will read prose, drama, poetry across roughly five centuries). While the first half of the course will solidify ...(read more)

R1B/1

Reading and Composition:
Riddle Me This: Puzzles, Puns, and Palimpsests

TuWTh 1-3:30

"Have you guessed the riddle yet?" the Hatter said, turning to Alice again.

"No, I give it up," Alice replied. "What's the answer?"

"I haven't the slightest idea," said the Hatter....(read more)

R1B/2

Reading and Composition:
The Literature of Climate Change

TuWTh 9:30-12

This course explores literary, scientific, and postcolonial perspectives on ecological crisis on a global scale from early-19th-century ecological writing to contemporary climate fiction. Tracing the emergence of a planetary ecological consciousnes...(read more)

R1B/3

Reading and Composition:
Bodies in Motion: Refugee Experience and Contemporary Fiction

MTuTh 12-2

"But there were unspoken conditions to our acceptance, and that was the secret we were meant to glean on our own: we had to be grateful," writes Dina Nayeri of her family's experience seeking asylum in the United States in "The U...(read more)

R1A/1

Reading and Composition:
Party Time

MWF 9-10

This course broadly explores the concept of “party temporalities.” By examining parties as they appear across a range of subgenres and mediums (novels, short stories, plays, film, TV, pop songs), we will think critically about the relat...(read more)

R1A/2

Reading and Composition:
Persona and Personality in the English Essay

MWF 10-11

This course will move rapidly through time, navigating the dense and heterogeneous terrains of the essay as a form in English. From the wondrous and choppy syntactical shores of Renaissance prose (Francis Bacon, Erasmus and Mont...(read more)

R1A/3

Reading and Composition:
No Laughing Matter

MWF 11-12

Can comedy be an effective vehicle for social criticism? Or does “having a sense of humor” make social life easier only by helping us ignore life’s more unpleasant aspects? We will consider these questions while reading texts from...(read more)

R1A/4

Reading and Composition:
Something Resolutely Indefinable: The African-American Novel, the Individual, and Sociological Thought

MWF 12-1

This class will consider how a series of important 20th-century African-American novels confront questions of individual identity, categorization, social definiition. To this end, we shall attend to the complex connection between the tradition of b...(read more)

R1A/5

Reading and Composition:
Materialist Aesthetics

MWF 1-2

Materialism has often been a shared premise and point of confluence between literature and science, even the precondition for any relation between literary and scientific practice. If since the 18th century, aesthetics in the expanded sen...(read more)

R1A/6

Reading and Composition:
Pre-Raphaelite Art and Literature

MWF 1-2

This course examines the relationship between literature and art through the lives and works of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood — a revolutionary artistic movement of the mid-nineteenth century — and those in their circle. In addition to...(read more)

R1A/7

Reading and Composition:
The Personal Essay

MWF 2-3

The personal essay and the lyric poem share many qualities: aside from the (not insignificant!) fact that they’re short, they affect both personal intimacy and a supposedly equally intimate relationship to the truth. But the essay is far less...(read more)

R1A/8

Reading and Composition:
Cold War Literature and Culture

MW 5-6:30

This course explores literature and culture from the Cold War era. Topics we will focus on include: how literature represents the threat of nuclear confrontation between global superpowers; the rise (and weaponization) of pop and mass culture; poet...(read more)

R1A/9

Reading & Composition:
Identity as Performance

MWF 9-10

"All the world's a stage, And all the men and women merely players."—As You Like It, Act II Sc. VII

We often hear people say that actions speak louder than words. We express our identities, who we are, ...(read more)

R1A/10

Reading & Composition:
Cold War Literature and Culture

MWF 1-2

This course explores literature and culture from the Cold War era. Topics we will focus on include: how literature represents the threat of nuclear confrontation between global superpowers; the rise (and weaponization) of pop and mass culture; poet...(read more)

R1B/1

Reading and Composition:
The Marriage Plot and Its Afterlife

MWF 9-10

The marriage plot novel is seen as a thing of the past, but its influence very much lives on today in our movies, our music, and our notions of romance. This course will examine a series of genre-defining marriage plot novels from the 19th century,...(read more)

R1B/2

Reading and Composition:
Comic Relief

MWF 10-11

In this course, we’ll consider the varied uses of comic relief in literature and popular culture, from the therapeutic effects of frivolity to the ingenuity with which comic intelligence brings what has been interpretively foreclosed into sta...(read more)

R1B/3

Reading and Composition:
Utopian and Dystopian Fictions

MWF 10-11

What would it be like to live in a perfect world? What could be worse than the world we live in?

This course will trace attempts to answer these questions—and investigate why they have proven so compelling—in English ...(read more)

R1B/4

Reading and Composition:
Staging Desire: Sex and Sexuality in Renaissance Drama

MWF 11-12

The drama of Shakespeare and his contemporaries offers a fascinating site for the analysis of gender and sexuality as historical and theoretical constructs, rather than as the timeless and universal ‘facts’ of human experience which the...(read more)

R1B/5

Reading and Composition:
Started From the Bottom: Masculinity, the American Dream, and the Myth of Starting Over from Horatio Alger to Jay-Z

MWF 11-12

The texts for this course consider the roots and routes of the American Dream and the figure of the “self-made man” in the American cultural imagination over the past 150 years. From American literature to contemporary politics to popul...(read more)

R1B/6

Reading and Composition:
Stories of Exile and Dislocation

MWF 12-1

This course turns to the experience of exile and its plural representations in texts drawing from the post-Enlightenment to contemporary periods. To open up our line of inquiry, we will reflect upon the following questions: How might exile be ...(read more)

R1B/7

Reading and Composition:
Nature on the Page

MWF 12-1

In this course, we will examine how relationships between humans and nature are represented; what histories, perceptions, and biases inform such representations; and what the real-world consequences of particular representations may be. We will rea...(read more)

R1B/8

Reading and Composition:
Conspiracy and Detection

MWF 12-1

This course teaches critical analysis and research skills through their doubles: forensic detection and conspiracy theory. We will therefore consider the disciplinary demands of academic writing in tandem with indisciplined forms of knowledge-produ...(read more)

R1B/9

Reading and Composition:
Romantic Self / Romantic Others

MWF 1-2

What shocks the virtuous philosopher delights the chameleon poet... A poet is the most unpoetical of anything in existence, because he has no identity—he is continually in for and filling some other body.—John Keats, Letter to Richard W...(read more)

R1B/10

Reading and Composition:
Tricksters and Transformations in the Old, Weird America

MWF 1-2

In this course, we'll examine how authors have imagined and re-imagined the carnivalesque aspects of American life. We'll read stories about con-men, tricksters, wandering ghosts, seducers, conjurers, and other rhetorical magicians. In addi...(read more)

R1B/11

Reading and Composition:
The Feeling of Labor

MWF 1-2

This course will take up the changing ways in which work and labor have been depicted in literature and other arts as conditions and conceptions of labor have transformed over time, from subsistence labor to post-industrial prod...(read more)

R1B/12

Reading and Composition:
Riddle Me This: Puzzles, Puns, and Palimpsests

MWF 2-3

"Have you guessed the riddle yet?" the Hatter said, turning to Alice again.

"No, I give it up," Alice replied. "What's the answer?"

"I haven't the slightest idea,&...(read more)

R1B/13

Reading and Composition:
Re-Visioning the "Sixties"

MWF 2-3

This reading and composition course will explore selected works of literature, music, and visual art produced during the 1960s. Placing emphasis on the relationship between artistic experimentation and social movements of the era, we will ask how i...(read more)

R1B/14

Reading and Composition:
When Reading Goes Wrong

MW 5-6:30

Every day, we're called upon to make hundreds of interpretive judgments based on things we read, see, or hear. But what happens when we misjudge one of these texts, or when we're unable to judge it at all? Besides being a common element in ...(read more)

R1B/15

Reading and Composition:
Decadent Poetry

MW 5-6:30

“The ballads teem with imagination, they palpitate with emotion. We read them with laughter and tears; the metres throb in our pulses, the cunningly-ordered words tingle with life; and if this be not poetry, what is?” So wrote the ...(read more)

R1B/16

Reading and Composition:
Books with Pictures

Note new time: MWF 3-4

This course studies books with pictures in them, although we will occasionally ditch the books altogether to look at pictures in the Berkeley Art Museum and to watch moving pictures. We will study the relationship between image and text in a variet...(read more)

R1B/17

Reading & Composition:
Stories of Exile and Dislocation

MWF 1-2

This course turns to the experience of exile and its plural representations in texts drawing from the post-Enlightenment to contemporary periods. To open up our line of inquiry, we will reflect upon the following questions: How might exile be a sel...(read more)

R1B/18

Reading & Composition:
When Reading Goes Wrong

MWF 8-9

Every day, we're called upon to make hundreds of interpretive judgments based on things we read, see, or hear. But what happens when we misjudge one of these texts, or when we're unable to judge it at all? Besides being a common element in ...(read more)

R1B/19

Reading & Composition:
Re-Visioning the "Sixties"

MWF 12-1

This reading and composition course will explore selected works of literature, music, and visual art produced during the 1960s. Placing emphasis on the relationship between artistic experimentation and social movements of the era, we will ask how i...(read more)

R1A/1

Reading and Composition:
Making Heirs and Heirlooms

MWF 10-11

W.B. Yeats once wondered, "Did that play of mine send out / Certain men the English shot?" But in a poem in honor of Yeats, W.H. Auden famously assured us that "poetry makes nothing happen," while Paul Muldoon put it more to the...(read more)

R1A/2

Reading and Composition:
Nostalgic Notions: Feeling How the Past Persists in the Present

MWF 11-12

Nostalgia is an oft-felt, but seldom understood feeling. Originally a medical designation for a form of home-sickness, in the present nostalgia connotes a more general longing for the past. We experience some form of nostalgia in the inte...(read more)

R1A/3

Reading and Composition:
Image and Text

MWF 12-1

Note the revised course description:

This class will explore the relationship between image and text in poetry, novels, and the graphic novel.  We'll ask both questions of formal genre—how do images inflect, augment, or com...(read more)

R1A/4

Reading and Composition:
Transpacific Routes and Asian America

MWF 1-2

The field of Asian American literature has long been contested: what are the dialogues that have shaped the unstable definition of “Asian American,” and how might we think about Asian American literature as more than an additive categor...(read more)

R1A/5

Reading and Composition:
Stranger than Fiction: Metafiction

MWF 2-3

In this course, we’ll be reading, thinking, and writing about metafiction: fiction about fiction. Frame narratives, dream visions, plays-within-plays: these are just a few examples of the metafictional techniques that can be found in...(read more)

R1A/6

Reading and Composition:
The Muslim-American Experience

MW 5-6:30

"Why can't I have my interpretation where I'm just nice and eat pork? For you guys, religion has this cultural value. It's not like that for me. It's people calling me terrorist and getting pulled out of...(read more)

R1A/7

Reading and Composition:
The Sound of Modern American Literature

TTh 8-9:30

How can we best listen to literature? How is literature like or unlike a conversation, a piece of music, or the cacophony of a city street? This course will examine a vast swath of twentieth-century American poetry and prose in order to probe the w...(read more)

R1B/1

Reading and Composition:
Nature Poetry Before and After the Industrial Revolution

MWF 9-10

Beginning in the mid-eighteenth century and continuing into the mid-nineteenth, the Industrial Revolution fundamentally altered individuals' relationships to and conceptions of labor, family, subjectivity, religious belief, and nature. The Indu...(read more)

R1B/2

Reading and Composition:
The Booker Prize, Literary Speculation, and the Global Anglophone Novel

MWF 10-11

In 1968, Booker McConnell Ltd, “an international company dealing in sugar, rum, mining machinery, and James Bond,” established the Man Booker Prize for Fiction: a £5,000 literary prize to be awarded to a British Commonwealth, Iris...(read more)

R1B/3

Reading and Composition:
The Essay as Genre

MWF 11-12

Building on the skills students have acquired in R1A, this course will continue to develop reading, writing, and research skills. To this end, you will write and revise one shorter argumentative essay (4-5 pages) and one longer research paper (8-10...(read more)

R1B/4

Reading and Composition:
Blank Generation: The Changing Arts in 1970s New York City

MWF 12-1

In the decade of urban decay, energy crisis, deindustrialization, and Watergate, artists of all stripes were thrown back on their own resources, seeking the means and reasons for continuing the avant-garde's project of cultural revolution after...(read more)

R1B/5

Reading and Composition:
Memory & the Nation

MWF 12-1

Note the changes in the instructor, topic, book list, and course description for this section of English R1B (as of Jan. 10).

This course examines narratives of cultural and historical trauma that attempt to represent what cannot be repre...(read more)

R1B/6

Reading and Composition:
Memory & the Nation

MWF 1-2

This course examines narratives of cultural and historical trauma that attempt to represent what cannot be represented. Clinically defined, trauma is an occurrence that misses psychic registration and returns as a series of haunting symptoms, and w...(read more)

R1B/7

Reading and Composition:
Media Fictions / Fictional Medias

MWF 1-2

Note the changes in instructor, topic, book list, and course description.

What does it mean to be mediated? According to the OED, the word "media" comes from the Latin medium, for "middle, center, intermediary.&quo...(read more)

R1B/8

Reading and Composition:
Sympathy and Identification "After" the Affective Turn

MWF 2-3

In recent years, certain sectors of the humanities have been undergoing an "affective turn." Put broadly, scholars from diverse fields are challenging an older model of the self as the repository of deep, private feelings ("interiori...(read more)

R1B/9

Reading and Composition:
Writing the American City, 1900 to today

TTh 8-9:30

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)

R1B/10

Reading and Composition:
Tricksters and Transformations in the Old, Weird America

TTh 5-6:30

In this course, we'll examine how authors have imagined and re-imagined the carnivalesque aspects of American life. We'll read stories about con-men, tricksters, wandering ghosts, seducers, conjurers, and other rhetorical magicians. In addi...(read more)

R1B/11

Reading and Composition:
Life Writing

TTh 5-6:30

Life writing seems self-explanatory as writing that is about one’s life, but what does that mean, exactly? How does a life become literature, and why should literature, the province of the imagination, be made to present a real life?  Th...(read more)

R1B/12

Reading and Composition:
Music and Noise

MWF 9-10

The word "noise" came from the Latin word "nausea" or "seasickness," before it developed in Middle English to mean "quarreling." "Music," on the other hand, came from the Greek word "mousa&quot...(read more)

R1B/13

Reading and Composition:
Started from the Bottom: Masculinity, the American Dream, and the Myth of Starting Over from Jay Gatsby to Jay Z

MWF 10-11

The texts for this course consider the figure of the "self-made man" and his function in the American cultural imagination. From his representation in American literature to his representation in contemporary popular culture and politics,...(read more)

R1B/14

Reading and Composition:
Gender and Culture: Psychological and Literary Perspectives on Social Hierarchy

MWF 12-1

The anthropologists Rosaldo, Lamphere, and Bamberger note, "all contemporary societies are to some extent male-dominated, and ... sexual asymmetry is presently a universal fact of human social life" (Woman, Culture, and Socie...(read more)

R1B/15

Reading and Composition:
Nature Poetry and the Nature of Poetry

MWF 1-2

Reading a number of texts from different genres, time periods, and literary traditions, we will think about how and why poetry has represented and reflected upon nonhuman nature since at least the classical period. In doing so, we will also ask our...(read more)

R1B/16

Reading and Composition:
Modern Literature Between Past and Future

MWF 2-3

This course explores what it means to be modern. We will investigate modern historical consciousness in modern literature and thought, roughly from 1850 forward, with special attention to how each text we read figures the past, prese...(read more)

R1B/17

Reading and Composition:
Translating Poetry: Imitation and Interpretation

Note new time: MW 11-12:30

Translating a poem is somewhat like solving a puzzle, but also somewhat like writing a poem.  If the rhyme, meter, and rhythm of a poem are rooted in the sounds of the language in which it was composed, how do translators decide to render thes...(read more)

R1B/18

Reading and Composition:
On Lives Unlived: Frustration, Hope, and the Novel

Note new time: MW 12-1:30

Roads untaken, opportunities unpursued, the people we might have known, and the losses of what might have been – what are the potentials and pitfalls locked within fictions of alternate realities? Why does our knowledge of what could...(read more)

R1B/19

Reading and Composition:
Re-Visioning the Sixties

MWF 2-3

This reading and composition course will explore selected works of literature, music, and visual art produced during the 1960s. Placing emphasis on the relationship between artistic experimentation and emancipatory social movements (both in the Uni...(read more)

R1B/20

Reading and Composition:
Meaning in Modern and Contemporary American Literature

MWF 2-3

In this course, students will learn the skills of analysis and argumentation. As we learn in-depth techniques to improve our critical reading and writing strategies, the course's theme will look at the role meaning plays in d...(read more)

R1B/21

Reading & Composition:
Identity as Performance

MWF 11-12

We often hear people say that actions speak louder than words. We express our identities, who we are, through our actions, our performances, our lived experiences amidst the context and structures within which we operate. We connect w...(read more)

R1B/22

Reading & Composition:
Modernism, Perception, and the Reader

MWF 1-2

In this course, you will learn how to write a paper using the skills of analysis and argumentation. As we learn techniques to improve our critical reading and writing strategies, the course theme will largely examine the role perception plays withi...(read more)

R1A/1

Reading & Composition:
What Have I Done?

TuWTh 9:30-12

This course will examine the problematic interactions between experience, action, and knowledge. Focusing primarily on the second half of the 19^th and the first half of the 20^th century, we will read mostly narrative...(read more)

R1A/2

Reading & Composition:
The Marriage Plot: Agency and Choice in the 19th Century

TWTh 1-3:30

Womens’ rights and choices have been a national conversation for over a century now; but when did that conversation begin? In this course, we will examine womens’ choices in Victorian novels and discuss how the tensions between social, ...(read more)

R1A/3

Reading & Composition:
Black on White/White on White

MTuTh 2-4

What do we gain from learning about White privilege and experience from the perspective of both ethnic-minority and White writers and thinkers? What do these different perspectives reveal about the contours of racial privilege in the contemporary U...(read more)

R1B/1

Reading & Composition:
Choice Cuts: Writing about Food

TuWTh 1-3:30

Our course begins with Terry Eagleton’s assertion that “food looks like an object but is actually a relationship, and the same is true of literary works” and moves to consider that relationship in texts as varied as medieval ...(read more)

R1B/2

Reading & Composition:
Bay Area Poetry

TuWTh 9:30-12

This course studies Bay Area poetry, where many of the threads of twentieth-century American poetry intersect. Bay Area poetry allows us to consider the history of avant-garde movements in the 20^th century, and how they align with t...(read more)

R1B/3

Reading & Composition:
Masculinity, The American Dream, and The Myth of Starting Over from Jay Gatsby to Jay-Z

MTuTh 12-2

The texts for this course consider the figure of the “self-made man” and his function in the American cultural imagination. From his representation in American literature to his representation in contemporary popular culture and politic...(read more)

R1A/1

Reading and Composition:
Eating Bodies

MWF 9-10

In this course we will collectively re-think what we think we know about eating bodies. We will build and share nuanced analyses of the many meanings of food, practices of eating, and bodies who eat, as well as bodies who eat other bodies...(read more)

R1A/2

Reading and Composition:
The Dust Bowl and the American Cultural Imagination

MWF 11-12

In this course, we will explore the aesthetic forms and social locations of the Dust Bowl and consider the ways in which these forms and locations have echoed in the American cultural imagination since the Great Depression. We will develop your pra...(read more)

R1A/7

Reading and Composition:
Image and Text

TTh 9:30-11

This class will look at a variety of works that combine image and text to tell stories. How, we will ask, do words and images play with, against, or off of one another when we read these hybrid texts? How has their combination helped authors altern...(read more)

R1B/1

Reading and Composition:
Re-Visioning the 1960s

MWF 10-11

Note the changes in instructor, topic, book list and course description for this section of English R1B (as of Aug 30).

This reading and composition course will explore selected works of literature, music, and visual art produced...(read more)

R1B/2

Reading and Composition:
Blank Generation: The Changing Arts in 1970s New York City

MWF 11-12

In the decade of urban decay, energy crisis, deindustrialization, and Watergate, artists of all stripes were thrown back on their own resources, seeking the means and reasons for continuing the avant-garde’s project of cultural revolution aft...(read more)

R1B/3

Reading and Composition:
The Cultural Lives of Higher Education

MWF 12-1

The purpose, nature, and structure of higher education in the West are currently undergoing dramatic revision. Tuition is rising steadily at both private and public institutions, as public support for teaching and research shifts; concerns and hope...(read more)

R1B/5

Reading and Composition:
Endings

MWF 2-3

What’s in an ending?  In this class, we will explore literature about endings: personal endings (elegiac forms), national endings (the end of an era), and apocalyptic endings (the end of the world).  In addition, we will focus ...(read more)

R1B/6

Reading and Composition:
Writing Cuban-America

MWF 3-4

The history of Cubans living in the US is a complicated one, caught between the US’s imperialist wars of the late-19^th and early-20^th centuries and the Cold War machinations of the first and second worlds. This...(read more)

R1B/7

Reading and Composition:
After Empires

MW 5-6:30

In this course, we will investigate how literature and literary criticism from the 1950s to today has responded to various forms of imperialism, focusing on how the concerns of "postcolonial" texts change according to ...(read more)

R1B/8

Reading and Composition:
Re-Visioning the 1960s

MW 5-6:30

Note the changes in instructor, topic, book list and course description for this section of English R1B (as of Aug 30).

This reading and composition course will explore selected works of literature, music, and visual art produced...(read more)

R1B/9

Reading and Composition:
Technophobia

TTh 8-9:30

Science fiction often investigates how technology affects human drives and desires. Insofar as thought experiments with non-human forms of intelligence and artificial life are major tropes of the genre, representations of computers and robots in fi...(read more)

R1B/10

Reading and Composition:
Narratives of Enlightenment

TTh 9:30-11

This class explores what it means to be wise, enlightened, or educated. While it will offer no definitive answers to those enormous questions, it will look at how writers in a number of traditions have offered their own answers and written compelli...(read more)

R1B/11

Reading and Composition:
University Life

TTh 11-12:30

How have British and American writers formed their work around and inside the university? How does reading and writing literature fit into university life? How do we know whether a piece of fiction or poetry is "academic" or "anti-ac...(read more)

R1B/12

Reading and Composition:
The Undiscovered Country

TTh 12:30-2

Note the changes in instructor, topic, book list, and course description for this section of English R1B (as of May 30).

The experience of death is one of the most difficult, yet most urgent, to imaginatively represent in literatur...(read more)

R1B/13

Reading and Composition:
Visions of the World

TTh 2-3:30

“To see the Earth as it truly is, small and blue and beautiful in that eternal silence where it floats, is to see ourselves as riders on the Earth together.” – Archibald MacLeish, comment on the “Earthrise” after t...(read more)

R1B/14

Reading and Composition:
GLBT and Queer Chicanx/Latinx Literature and Cultural Work

TTh 3:30-5

In this course, we will read and write about Chicanx/Latinx literatures and cultural productions that explore GLBT and queer themes. In our approaches to the course materials, we will consider the notion of the queer, GLBT, and Chicano text.&n...(read more)

R1B/15

Reading and Composition:
Genre Trouble

TTh 5-6:30

This course will examine the complex relationships between gender and literary genre. What social and historical forces have, at various points in time, caused certain genres to be marginalized as “women’s writing” or “...(read more)

R1A/1

Reading and Composition:
The Great Depression, The Great Recession, and The "Grapes of Wrath" Narrative

MWF 10-11

Please note the changes in the instructor, topic, book list, and course description of this section of English R1A (as of early December).

In this course, we will read, analyze, and interpret various artistic responses to the Great...(read more)

R1A/2

Reading and Composition:
Theater and Magic in Shakespeare’s England

MWF 12-1

Like our 16^th- and 17^th-century ancestors, in the 21^st century we remain fascinated by the supernatural. Yet while witches, wizards, and werewolves abound in the movies and TV shows of today, we have (for the most ...(read more)

R1A/3

Reading and Composition:
Literatures of the African Diaspora

MWF 1-2

Please note the changes in the instructor, topic, book list, and course description of this section of English R1A (as of January 13).

The course material addresses the writings of the African diaspora in a broader definition of ...(read more)

R1A/4

Reading and Composition:
Girls: Feminism, the Feminine, and Fictions after 1945

MWF 2-3

This course focuses on texts of young womanhood, examining the place of female adolescence in the cultural imagination. It also seeks to interrogate the term “girl” – its fungible application across childhood, adolescence, and ad...(read more)

R1A/5

Reading and Composition:
Morality: Psychological Explanations and Literary Explorations

MWF 3-4

Note the changes in instructor, topic, book list, and course description (as of Dec. 15).

Is homicide ever morally justifiable? . . .  Is lying? Is it moral or immoral to lie to a murderer in pursuit of a victim? Humanity has ...(read more)

R1A/6

Reading and Composition:
Reading Other People's Letters

TTh 8-9:30

“Oh no, no! the letter had much rather be all your own. You will express yourself very properly I am sure. There is no danger of you not being intelligible, which is the first thing.” – Jane Austen, Emma(read more)

R1A/7

Reading and Composition:
Mission Creep: Writing in Wartime

TTh 5-6:30

Please note the changes in the instructor, topic, course description, and book list of this section of English R1A (as of 11/4/16).

We're still fighting "The Forever War." We've learned to live with it. But how do...(read more)

R1B/1

Reading and Composition:
Gay, Innocent, and Heartless

MWF 11-12

The last words of Peter Pan allude to an endless cycle in which children become adults, adults produce more children, and the cycle goes on and on “so long as children are gay and innocent and heartless.” If we should pause ov...(read more)

R1B/2

Reading and Composition:
Raising the Dead: Time, Memory, & History in Nineteenth-Century America

MWF 12-1

This course will explore the ghosts, corpses, graveyards, and living dead of nineteenth-century American literature. Through an array of fiction, poetry, cultural history, and criticism (as well as potential field trips to local cemeteries), we wi...(read more)

R1B/3

Reading and Composition:
Evidence of Things Not Seen

MWF 12-1

The biblical book of Hebrews famously defines faith as “the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen” (11:1, KJV). But in eighteenth-century Europe and North America, “unseen” things were as m...(read more)

R1B/4

Reading and Composition:
The Self and Lyric Form

MWF 12-1

The journey to self is a theme that we can all relate to and, perhaps for this reason, one that has been explored by many poets and philosophers from many cultures and traditions. Yet, writing about self often seems much like lifting a cup of water...(read more)

R1B/5

Reading and Composition:
Friends and Fiends: Imagining the Social in the British Romantic Period

MWF 1-2

Since the nineteenth century, the popular image of Romanticism has been that of the solitary genius. Typically poised atop some cloud-capped mountain or madly penning his verse in candlelight, this lone figure appears as a testament to the soverei...(read more)

R1B/6

Reading and Composition:
Writing and Rights: Literature and the Fight Against Oppression in Nineteenth-Century America

MWF 1-2

"The artist . . . is the holiest reformer of them all, for she is creating."—Paulina Wright Davis, The Una, 1853

"Polemics . . . are not likely to be epics. They are likely to be pamphlets, even when they are d...(read more)

R1B/7

Reading and Composition

MWF 2-3

This section of English R1B has been canceled.

R1B/8

Reading and Composition

MWF 2-3

This section of English R1B has been canceled.

R1B/9

Reading and Composition

MWF 2-3

This section has been canceled.

R1B/10

Reading and Composition

MWF 3-4

This section of English R1B has been canceled.

R1B/11

Reading and Composition

MWF 3-4

This section has been canceled.

R1B/12

Reading and Composition

MWF 3-4

This section has been canceled.

R1B/13

Reading and Composition

MW 5-6:30

This section has been canceled.

R1B/14

Reading and Composition:
Investigating Fiction

MW 5-6:30

“The distortion of a text is not unlike a murder. The difficulty lies not in the execution of the deed but in the doing away with the traces.” —Sigmund Freud, Moses and Monotheism

Freud suggests that murder myster...(read more)

R1B/15

Reading and Composition:
Senses of Magic

TTh 8-9:30

In one common sense, we use the word “magic” to refer to the extraordinary, the otherworldly or the supernatural.  We associate this sense of “magic” with the belief that one can gain control over external events throu...(read more)

R1B/16

Reading and Composition:
Manufactured Monsters

TTh 8-9:30

This course investigates monsters—from the stitched-together creatures of The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896) to present-day vampires, werewolves, body snatchers, and other frightening creatures of lore and lit...(read more)

R1B/17

Reading and Composition:
Walking America

TTh 5-6:30

With beauty before me, may I walk  
With beauty behind me, may I walk  
With beauty above me, may I walk
With beauty below me, may I walk
With beauty all around me, may I wal...(read more)

R1B/18

Reading and Composition

TTh 5-6:30

This section of English R1B has been canceled.

N1A/1

Reading & Composition:
Sound Counsel

MW 12-2

(Note the changes in instructor, topic, book list, and course description for this class as of March 29.)

In his essay "The Storyteller," Walter Benjamin writes, "The storyteller is a man who has counsel for his re...(read more)

N1B/1

Reading & Composition:
Senses of Magic

TTh 2-4

One common sense of the term "magic" is that the word pertains to the extraordinary, the otherworldly or the supernatural. We associate it with the belief that one can gain control over external events through special means that defy logi...(read more)

R1A/1

Reading & Composition:
Perpetual Decadence

MTuW 1:00-3:30

Please note the changes in the instructor, topic, book list, and course description for this section of English R1A (as of April 14).

Discourses of decadence (etymologically, de- down + cadere&nbs...(read more)

R1A/2

Reading & Composition:
Electoral Fictions

TuWTh 1:00-3:30

In modern democracies, voting is the primary way in which the average citizen participates in politics. Throughout history and around the world, however, elections have been plagued by corruption and propaganda, racism and sexism. This course explo...(read more)

R1B/1

Reading & Composition:
Black Radical Thought, From David Walker to Kendrick Lamar

MTuW 2:00-4:30

(Note the changes in instructor, topic, book list, and course description for this class as of March 29.)

In this course, we'll consider the origins and concerns of a radical African American intellectual tradition. Working w...(read more)

R1B/2

Reading & Composition:
The Undiscovered Country

MTuW 2:00-4:30

Please note the changes in the instructor, topic, book list, and course description for this section of English R1B (as of April 14). 

The experience of death is one of the most difficult, yet most urgent, to imaginatively r...(read more)

R1A/1

Reading and Composition:
Issues

MWF 9-10

Note the change in instructor, topic, book list, and course description for this section of English R1A (as of May 20).

How bad are things, really? This class puts problems of past and present up for debate. We take as our starting point th...(read more)

R1A/2

Reading and Composition:
The Fugitive

MWF 10-11

Run. Now. Don’t look back. (Wait, come back.) This class will consider the American fugitive. What does it mean for someone to escape some form of imprisonment without being able to lawfully reenter society? Does it mean they sneak in? Take ...(read more)

R1A/3

Reading and Composition

This section of English R1A has been canceled.

R1A/4

Reading and Composition:
Reading Ads: They'll Tell You What You Want, What You Really Really Want

MWF 12-1

Think of something that you want right now, at this very moment. Now tell me why you want it. Are you sure? Do you really want it, or do you want to want it? Or does someone else want you to want it? How do you know that your des...(read more)

R1A/5

Reading and Composition:
The Self and Lyric Form

MWF 1-2

 "I longed to be that thing, / The pure, sensuous form," writes Theodore Roethke, in a poem about watching a young snake glide out of the shadows. American poets from a wide variety of backgrounds...(read more)

R1A/6

Reading and Composition:
Wild Women in America

MWF 2-3

Wild women come in all shapes and sizes: spiritual prophets, melancholic captives, alleged witches, radical reformers, reclusive poets, cunning runaways, intimate rivals, and meditative drifters are just some of the alluring, often challenging, fi...(read more)

R1A/7

Reading and Composition:
Forms of Humiliation

MWF 3-4

What do bullying, body-shaming, and bashing do to one’s experience of language and the world? Often, scenes of humiliation involve an encounter between some private ideal we have of ourselves and our public reception. But what is humiliation...(read more)

R1A/8

Reading and Composition:
The Essay and American Life

TTh 8-9:30

Note the change in instructor, topic, book list, and course description for this section of English R1A (as of May 10).

The social theorist and cultural critic Theodor Adorno described the essay as a curious hybrid, at once more open-ended ...(read more)

R1A/9

Reading and Composition:
The Rest is Commentary

TTh 5-6:30 PM

R1B/1

Reading and Composition:
Walking America

MWF 9-10

Note the change in instructor, topic, book list, and course description for this section of English R1B.

From Walt Whitman's walks through Manhattan to Leslie Marmon Silko's treks through the Tucson wilderness, American writers have...(read more)

R1B/2

Reading and Composition:
Literature and Popular Culture

MWF 9-10

Note the change in the instructor, topic, book list, and course description for this section of English R1B (as of May 19).

How does a poem about a road merely taken become a poem about a road less traveled? What happens when literature bec...(read more)

R1B/3

Reading and Composition:
Signs of the Times

MWF 10-11

Note the change in instructor, topic, book list, and course description for this section of English R1B (as of May 16).

Do you ever feel like the faster you go, the less time you have? In the nineteenth century, rapid but uneven changes mad...(read more)

R1B/4

Reading and Composition:
"One Fine Day": Diurnal Narratives of the 20th Century

MWF 11-12

Some of the most powerful stories we tell are constrained within the temporal limits of a single day. This course embraces "the day" as a significant unit of narrative time, exploring diurnal fictions as vital sites of personal reflectio...(read more)

R1B/5

Reading and Composition

This section of English R1B has been canceled.

R1B/6

Reading and Composition

Class description to come.

R1B/7

Reading and Composition:
Lost Literature: Recovering and (re)-Discovering Hidden Texts of the Nineteenth Century

MWF 1-2

This course takes as its starting point the novel idea that academic writing is more than the frantic attempt to submit a paper on time.  In it, we will both think about and practice literary criticism as a dynamic process of discovery. ...(read more)

R1B/8

Reading and Composition:
Staging Desire: Sex and Sexuality in Renaissance Drama

MWF 1-2

The drama of Shakespeare and his contemporaries offers a fascinating site for the analysis of gender and sexuality as historical and theoretical constructs, rather than as the timeless and universal ‘facts’ of human experience which th...(read more)

R1B/9

Reading and Composition

This section of English R1B has been canceled.

R1B/10

Reading and Composition:
Monomanias

MWF 2-3

Note the change in instructor, topic, book list, and course description for this section of English R1B (as of May 10).

This course will give you a framework to think (and write) more critically about the things you can't stop thinking ...(read more)

R1B/11

Reading and Composition

This section of English R1B has been canceled.