Class Archive

90/1

Practices of Literary Study:
Murderers, Madmen and Dissolutes: Cormac McCarthy and His Progeny

TuTh 12:30-2

The heroes of Cormac McCarthy's novels occupy the borderlands of the American imagination and court its darkest urges. He is a writer fascinated by violence and the sacred, by loneliness and worship, by the American jeremiad and the scream in t...(read more)

130C/1

American Literature: 1865-1900

TuTh 3:30-5

A survey of major works of U.S. literature after the Civil War, with special attention to artistic experimentation in these years and to the rise of "realism" in literature.  The "Gilded Age" put unprecedented faith in idea...(read more)

174/1

Literature and History:
The Seventies

TuTh 3:30-5

As one writer quipped, it was the worst of times, it was the worst of times. “The Seventies” routinely come in for mockery as an era of bad taste — an era when enormous sideburns, leisure suits, extra-wide bell bottoms, p...(read more)

177/1

Literature and Philosophy:
Cults in Popular Culture

TuTh 5-6:30

We are fascinated by cults. What is it about communities and groups that promise total belief and total enthrallment that so captures the imagination?

This course will look at a range of representations of cults in popular culture—f...(read more)

190/3

Research Seminar:
Nineteenth Century American Ecologies

MW 3:30-5

What did “nature” mean in nineteenth-century America? How did writers, artists, and activists from the period represent and interact with the natural world around them? In this research seminar, we will approach these questions through ...(read more)

190/6

Research Seminar:
Crisis and Culture: The 1930s, 1970s, and post-2008 in Comparative Perspective

TuTh 9:30-11

This research seminar will explore the impact of economic crisis and systemic transformation on symbolic authority and cultural production.  To what extent is culture determined by economic forces, and to what extent is it separate from these ...(read more)

100/7

The Seminar on Criticism:
In the Wake of Moby-Dick

TTh 5-6:30

We will read Moby-Dick slowly and scrupulously, immersing ourselves in Melville’s extraordinary prose and assessing the book’s literary, historical, and biographical contexts; the 20^th- and 21^st-century cr...(read more)

130A/1

American Literature: Before 1800

TTh 11-12:30

A survey of English-language American literature to 1800. We will read a wide range of texts from narratives of colonial settlement through the literature of the American Revolution, the Constitutional Convention, and the early republic. Topics to ...(read more)

130B/1

American Literature: 1800-1865

TTh 2-3:30

We will take up the remarkable fiction, poetry, and essays of this period, including works by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Edgar Allan Poe, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, Fanny Fern, Herman Melville, Wa...(read more)

C136/1

Topics in American Studies:
Harlem Renaissance

MW 12-2

This course explores the social, cultural, political, and personal awakenings in the literature, art, and music of the Negro Renaissance or the New Negro Movement, now commonly known as the Harlem Renaissance. This is remembered as a time (roughly ...(read more)

137T/1

Topics in Chicano Literature and Culture:
Riding Chicanx Literature’s First Wave and Beyond, c/s

MW 5-6:30

“The student of Chicano literature will look back at this group and this first period as the foundation of whatever is to come, even if only as the generation against whom those to come rebel. The best of the best will survive—but then ...(read more)

165/1

Special Topics:
Ecopoetry and Ecopoetics

MW 5-6:30

Ecopoetry – nature poetry that is environmental and environmentalist – is an international twenty-first century movement.  But in the nature poetry and poetics of the United States it has deep and wide-spread roots.  This semi...(read more)

190/1

Research Seminar:
Emily Dickinson

TTh 2-3:30

90/1

Practices of Literary Study:
Faulkner

MWF 3-4

William Faulkner was one of the crucial writers of the twentieth century. In this course, we will focus on The Sound and the Fury (1929), Light in August (1932), Absalom, Absalom! (1936)—thre...(read more)

90/4

Practices of Literary Study:
Poe and More

MWF 2-3

We will immerse ourselves in the extraordinary and influential literary career of Edgar Allan Poe: poetry, tales, satires, and essays. We will examine Poe’s work in relation to mid-nineteenth-century short fiction by Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herm...(read more)

100/4

The Seminar on Criticism:
Emily Dickinson and Her Critics

TTh 12:30-2

From the editors who first shaped her posthumously discovered poems into publishable form to the recent scholars who have sought to restore their category-defying strangeness, Emily Dickinson’s writing has thrust readers into acts of co-creat...(read more)

131/1

American Poetry

TTh 2-3:30

132/1

American Novel

MWF 2-3

“The”? “American”? “Novel&rdquo...(read more)

133T/1

African American Literature and Culture:
Humor and the Neo-Slave Narrative

TTh 8-9:30

At the turn of the 21st century a common phrase was brought i...(read more)

C136/1

Topics in American Studies:
American Culture in the Age of Obama

TTh 3:30-5 + one hour of discussion

This course traces, across many forms of American culture, what might be called “the Obama effect.” Writer Ta-Nehisi Coates has suggested that the election of Obama prompted a renaissance of black writing, in part by stimulating “...(read more)

137B/1

Chicana/o Literature and Culture Since 1910

MWF 12-1

This course will focus exclusively on the study of Chicanx/La...(read more)

165/2

Special Topics:
Immigration and the American Century

Thursday 12-3

Called the "American Century" for its rise to prominence as a global superpower, the U.S. also made fundamental changes to policy that radically altered the complexion of new immigration. This class will examine literature about immigrati...(read more)

166/1

Special Topics:
Writing Race: Faulkner and his Progeny

TTh 9:30-11

"The past is never dead," Faulkner famously said. &...(read more)

166/2

Special Topics:
Burn it Down/Build it Up: Protest, Dissent, and the Politics of Resistance

TTh 11-12:30

This course takes up the question of protest and dissent &nda...(read more)

170/1

Literature and the Arts:
The Writing on the Wall: African-American Literature and Visual Art

TTh 3:30-5

We tend to separate art forms for the convenience of study an...(read more)

175/1

Literature and Disability

TTh 12:30-2

We will read drama, poetry  and short fiction by contemporary authors with disabilities. Requirements will include two analytical essays, a group presentation project and a take-home final exam.

This is a core course for the disabili...(read more)

178A/1

Literature and Law

MWF 1-2

This course is an introduction to the field of law and litera...(read more)

130A/1

American Literature: Before 1800

Lectures TTh 1-2 + one hour of discussion section per week (sec. 101: F 1-2; sec. 102: F 2-3)

This course will offer a survey of the literature in English produced in North America before 1800: competing British versions of settlement; Puritan history, sermons, and poetry; conversion, captivity, and slave narratives; diaries, journals, essa...(read more)

130C/1

American Literature: 1865-1900

MW 5-6:30

A survey of major works of U.S. literature after the Civil War, with special attention to artistic experimentation in these years and to the rise of "realism" in literature.  These decades put unprecedented faith in ideals of progres...(read more)

133T/1

Topics in African American Literature and Culture:
The African American Essay

MWF 11-12

Readers of James Baldwin, W. E. B. DuBois, Ralph Ellison, Zora Neale Hurston, and other writers, often turn to their essays with a mind to better understanding their novels and other literary writing.  In this course we will consider the Afric...(read more)

153T/1

Topics in Asian American Literature and Culture:
World, Nation, City

TTh 9:30-11

This class (previously listed under "English 166/5" in Spring 2019) provides a foundation for reading Asian American literature at three levels of scale: world, nation, and locality. At the world scale, we will discuss the polit...(read more)

165/3

Special Topics:
Popular Music and Social Critique

TTh 9:30-11

At the onset of the Second World War, a Communist country music singer armed with an acoustic guitar demands the nation examine the consequences of a man-made climate crisis and pledges to destroy fascism both at home and abroad…  ...(read more)

165/4

Special Topics:
21st-Century U.S. Poetry

TTh 12:30-2

In this course we’ll review the U.S. poetry of the present, reading representative poems from the last 15 years or so in relation to a number of formal concerns, poetic subjects, and debates within the social field (and its media), including:...(read more)

165AC/1

Special Topics in American Cultures:
American Humor and Fictions of Race

MWF 1-2

American humor practices have long been a means for bolstering fictions about race, ethnicity and identity, but they also have been a means for understanding, navigating, and challenging those fictions. This course will explore how a range of liter...(read more)

166/1

Special Topics:
The Graphic Memoir

TTh 11-12:30

A graphic novel is often defined as "a single-author, book-length work, meant for a grown-up reader, with a memoirist or novelistic nature, usually devoid of superheroes." Many comic artists, however, ridicule the term as a pretentious an...(read more)

166/3

Special Topics:
Hemingway and Masculinity

TTh 11-12:30

DIfficult to point to a more foundational American writer than Ernest Hemingway. Hemingway embodied a kind of balls-to-the-wall masculine energy that dominated American modernist fiction for decades of war and conflict. For more than fifty yea...(read more)

166AC/1

Special Topics in American Cultures:
Literature in the Age of Extremes, 1900-1945

Lectures TTh 10-11 + one hour of discussion section per week (sec. 101: F 9-10; sec. 102: F 10-11; sec. 103: F 11-12; sec. 104: F 12-1)

The aim of this course will be to capture the aesthetic and political extremes of the twentieth century’s first half. We will examine conflicting efforts to bridge the boundary between art and life against the backdrop of two world wars and e...(read more)

174/1

Literature and History:
The 1970s

MWF 10-11

As one historian has quipped, it was the worst of times, it was the worst of times. “The ’70s” routinely come in for mockery: even at the time, it was known as the decade when “it seemed like nothing happened.&rdquo...(read more)

190/2

Research Seminar:
The Art of Reconstruction

MW 9-10:30

This course will explore the role and legacy of art in the most important project of American self-creation since the nation’s founding: the post–Civil War era known as Reconstruction. The diverse group of writers, painters, sculptors, ...(read more)

190/3

Research Seminar:
Fictions of Los Angeles

MW 12-1:30

Los Angeles has been described, variously, as a "circus without a tent" (Carey McWilliams), "seventy-two suburbs in search of a city" (Dorothy Parker), "the capital of the Third World" (David Rieff), and "the only...(read more)

190/4

Research Seminar:
Emily Dickinson

MW 1:30-3

In this class we’ll concentrate on just one poet, Emily Dickinson, using her work as an occasion to think about how poetry and history get made, revised, codified, brought forward, pushed aside, theorized, contested, remixed and – since...(read more)

190/7

Research Seminar:
Ecopoetry and Ecopoetics

TTh 2-3:30

Ecopoetry – nature poetry that is environmental and environmentalist – is an international twenty-first century movement.  But in the nature poetry and poetics of the United States it has deep and wide-spread roots.  This semi...(read more)

190/8

Research Seminar:
The Other Melville

TTh 3:30-5

We will read widely across Herman Melville’s literary career, exclusive of Moby-Dick: South Sea romance (Typee), transatlantic novel (Redburn), short fiction (“Bartleby,” “Benito Cereno,” and...(read more)

190/9

Research Seminar:
Chicanx Literature, Art and Performance

TTh 5-6:30

In this course, we will read the classics of Chicanx literature from the 1960s through the present.  We will open with Jose Antonio Villareall's Pocho (1959), a novel of both immigrant and first generation experience in ...(read more)

20/1

Modern British and American Literature:
Pandemic Fiction

MW 5-6:30

Through the centuries, pandemics have supplied storytellers with fodder for reflections on community and isolation, humanity and inhumanity, hope and despair, and how the future might be imagined in the face of widespread disease and death.&nb...(read more)

31AC/1

Literature of American Cultures:
American Hustle: Race, Ethnicity, and Dreams of Getting Ahead

TTh 9:30-11

In this class, we are going to do and to talk about work: getting work, making it work, working the system.

This course, which constitutes a survey of ethnic American literature, asks about the desires, imagination, and labor that go into...(read more)

53/1

Asian American Literature and Culture:
Voice, Text, Image

TTh 2-3:30

This is a lecture and discussion course that surveys early to contemporary Asian American literary and cultural production. We'll study the broad range of forms that have served as vehicles of Asian American political and cultura...(read more)

125E/1

The Contemporary Novel:
The Historical Novel

TTh 11-12:30

Texts: Anna Burns: Milkman; E. L. Doctorow: Ragtime; Amitav Ghosh: Sea of Poppies; Toni Morrison: Song of Solomon; Viet Thanh Nguyen: The Sympathizer 

What is historica...(read more)

130B/1

American Literature: 1800-1865

Lectures MW 12-1 + one hour of discussion section per week (sec. 101: F 11-12; sec. 102: F 12-1)

We will read the extraordinary fiction, poetry, essays, and speeches of this period, including works by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Edgar Allan Poe, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, Fanny Fern, Herman Me...(read more)

131/1

American Poetry

This course will be taught asynchronously.

This survey of U.S. poetries will begin with 17th- and 18th-century poems by two women, Anne Bradstreet and Phyllis Wheatley, move to another (19th-century) pairing in Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson, and then touch down in expatriate and statesid...(read more)

132/1

American Novel

Lectures MW 2-3 + one hour of discussion section per week (sec. 101: F 1-2; sec. 102: F 2-3)

Rather than define a canon, this survey ...(read more)

133B/1

African American Literature and Culture Since 1917

MWF 1-2

This course will examine some major 20^th-century African American novels; however, given the nature of the terrain, the course will also dip back into the period of slavery in the U.S. (the works of Douglass and Jacobs).  Belove...(read more)

C136/1

Topics in American Studies:
The Wall: Art, Literature, Performance on and about the U.S.-Mexican Border

MWF 2-3

This will be a course in which we will think about the emergence of a distinct border aesthetic, one in which form is often torqued by dispiriting content but which, simultaneously, also finds beauty in the cultural and natural ecologies that trace...(read more)

138/2

Studies in World Literature in English:
Multi-Culty: Cults, Pop Culture, and Globalization

TTh 12:30-2

We are fascinated by cults. What is it about communities and groups that promise total belief and total enthrallment that so captures the imagination?

This course will look at a range of representations of cults in popular culture—f...(read more)

145/1

Writing Technology:
Utopian Futures

Lectures TTh 11-12 + one hour of discussion section per week (sec. 101: F 9-10; sec. 102: F 11-12; sec. 103: F 12-1; sec. 104: F 2-3)

Recent science fiction narratives tend toward the dystopian, perhaps in reaction to the grim realities of our time.  But science fiction writers have always imagined better futures made possible by technological advances.

In this int...(read more)

170/2

Literature and the Arts:
The Writing on the Wall -- African-American Literature and Visual Art

TTh 2-3:30

We tend to separate art forms for the convenience of study and instruction, and to talk about writers in terms primarily of their influence upon other writers, but this is hardly how most artists work. In this course we will explore a tendency in A...(read more)

190/1

Research Seminar:
Utopia and Anti-Utopia

MW 10:30-12

“A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not even worth glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing.  And when Humanity lands there, it looks out, and, seeing a better country, sets sail....(read more)

190/2

Research Seminar:
Eco-crisis and Climate Refugueeism

MW 9-10:30

Note:  Newly added section of English 190 (as of 4/20):

In this seminar, we will analyze historical, contemporary, and speculative narratives that explore social locations of eco-crisis and climate refugeeism. We will consider John S...(read more)

190/4

Research Seminar:
Modern California Books and Movies

W 5-8

Besides reading and discussing fiction and essays that attempt to identify or explain distinctive regional characteristics, this course will include consideration of various movies shaped by and shaping conceptions of California. Writing will consi...(read more)

190/9

Research Seminar:
James / Baldwin

TTh 5-6:30

James Baldwin made little secret of the importance of Henry James to his creative life, paying debt in complex, archly poetic sentences that drew snide dismissals from friends and rivals alike (Mailer: “even the best of his paragraphs are spr...(read more)

27/1

Introduction to the Study of Fiction

MWF 11-12

We will immerse ourselves in the extraordinary and influential literary career of Edgar Allan Poe: poetry, tales, satires, and essays. We will examine Poe’s work in relation to mid-nineteenth-century short fiction by Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herm...(read more)

80K/1

Children's Literature:
The Bad Seed: Monstrosity, Horror, and the Inhuman in Children’s Literature

TTh 12:30-2

From cannibalistic witches in the tales of the Grimm Brothers to sadistic parents in Roald Dahl, children's literature is riff with terrifying and troubling figures. This class will look at the forms of monstrosity, deviance, and horror that ap...(read more)

130A/1

American Literature: Before 1800

TTh 11-12:30

This course surveys the literatures of early America, from the tracts that envisioned the impact of British colonization to the novels that measured the after-shock of the American Revolution.  Throughout, we will consider colonial America as ...(read more)

132/1

American Novel

MWF 2-3

This survey of the American novel begins with a somnambulist whose surprisingly violent rambles in the summer of 1787 raise questions about responsibility for the land theft that undergirded the emergent nation. It ends with a twenty-first-century ...(read more)

133A/1

African American Literature and Culture Before 1917

MW 5-6:30 PM

This course explores African American literary history from its beginning in the eighteenth century to the turn of the twentieth century, interpreting major works in the context of slavery and its aftermath. We will reflect on the complex relations...(read more)

135AC/1

Literature of American Cultures:
American Hustle

Lectures TTh 4-5 in 140 Barrows + one hour of discussion section per week in 305 Wheeler (sec. 101: F 12-1; sec. 102: F 1-2)

This course, which constitutes a survey of ethnic American literature, asks about the desires, imagination, and labor that go into the American dream. What is the relationship between immigration and dreams of upward mobility in America? This cours...(read more)

C136/1

Topics in American Studies:
American Culture in the Age of Obama

MW 5-6:30

This course traces, across many forms of American culture, what might be called “the Obama effect.” Writer Ta-Nehisi Coates has suggested that the election of Obama prompted a renaissance of black writing, in part by stimulating “...(read more)

137T/1

Topics in Chicanx Literature and Culture:
Chicanx Novels

MWF 1-2

This course will focus exclusively on the study of Chicanx novels. The themes and formal features in these novels have been influenced to a large degree by a broad range of social experiences: living in the borderlands of nationality, language, pol...(read more)

145/1

Writing Technology:
Science Fiction

Lectures MW 11-12 in 3 Leconte + one hour of discussion section per week in different locations (sec. 101: F 11-12; sec. 102: F 11-12; sec. 103: F 12-1; sec. 104: F 12-1)

This introductory course considers an overlap among the disciplines of English, Computer Science, and Data Science—British and American narratives that revolve around technology. We'll look at visual and verbal texts f...(read more)

165/4

Special Topics:
Family Histories from the Margins

TTh 3:30-5

This seminar will explore the fraught status of families in literature and what it means to write about one’s own family. The family has generated a diverse range of literary and textual forms, from the list of “begats” in th...(read more)

165AC/1

Special Topics in American Cultures:
Ethnicity, Religion and Literature

TTh 11-12:30

This class will explore how 20^th- and 21^st-century American prose fictions have imagined the relationship between religion and ethnicity. Our first questions will be formal: How do different formal choices allow these writers ...(read more)

166/2

Special Topics:
The Literature & Art of Incarceration

MWF 11-12

This is a course on the literature of incarceration variously defined and experienced across a range of control systems that attempt to stunt the entire human being. I want to think about the forms of suppression, confinement, and the humiliations ...(read more)

166/3

Special Topics:
Moby-Dick

TTh 11-12:30

Baroque, intense, and demanding, Moby-Dick richly rewards all the attention a reader can muster. We will delve in as slowly as we can in order to cultivate the intellectual receptivity that Melville hoped for in his readers, beco...(read more)

166/4

Special Topics:
Pomo: Exploring the Landscape of Postmodernism

TTh 3:30-5

Postmodernism is one of those peculiar words, like "nonfiction," that struggles to define something by what it is not. Or rather, in this case, by what it comes after: Postmodernism was what came after modernism. In this sem...(read more)

166/5

Special Topics:
American Humor: Books & Movies

Note slightly revised time: Tues. 5-8 PM

In this course short 19^th- and 20^th-century writings available electronically, by such authors as G. W. Harris, J. J. Hooper, Mark Twain, F. P. Dunne, G. Ade, R. Lardner, J. Thurber and the like, will be read and discusse...(read more)

190/1

Research Seminar:
Ecopoetry and Ecopoetics

MW 10:30-12

Ecopoetry – nature poetry that is environmental and environmentalist – is an international twenty-first century movement.  But in the nature poetry and poetics of the United States it has deep and wide-spread roots.  This semi...(read more)

190/2

Research Seminar:
William Faulkner’s Temporalities

MW 12-1:30

Jean-Paul Sartre has famously compared Faulkner’s sense of time to “a man sitting in a convertible and looking back.”  From this perspective, Sartre contends, the only view is that of the past, made “hard, clear and imm...(read more)

190/3

Research Seminar:
American Romanticism

MW 3-4:30

The course offers a close engagement with major U.S. authors before the Civil War.  We will work across literary genres—poetry, essays, novels, and autobiographies—while asking questions about the conditions in which these genres a...(read more)

190/4

Research Seminar:
Poetry and the Virtues

MW 5-6:30

Arguments for the moral value of literary study often focus on how narrative forms like the novel offer opportunities for the cultivation of empathy. But in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, literary style itself was treated as an extension ...(read more)

190/10

Research Seminar:
Modern California Books and Film

Thurs. 5-8:30 PM

Besides reading and discussing fiction and essays that attempt to identify or explain distinctive regional characteristics, this course will include consideration of various movies shaped by and shaping conceptions of California. Writing will consi...(read more)

133T/1

Topics in African American Literature and Culture:
Humor and the Neo-Slave Narrative

TWTh 1-3:30

A course exploring how the 19th-century slave narrative was reworked in the 20th century by novelists Ishmael Reed, Charles Johnson, and Paul Beatty into a humorous (or at least tragicomic) critique of American race relations after the 1960s.

166/2

Special Topics:
Global Catastrophe and Modern Literature

TTh 2-5

Global crisis defined the first part of the twentieth century. Pandemic illness and catastrophic economic collapse, along with World War after World War, meant it was a time rife with ethnic, racial, imperial, and political tensions, and a time als...(read more)

31AC/1

Literature of American Cultures:
Growing Up Funny

MWF 9-10

America, we are told, is a nation of immigrants—of people from other lands who travel here and “become” American. That's a tall order. But what of those who can never quite belong—the misfits, outliers and strangers in t...(read more)

53/1

Asian American Literature and Culture:
Voice, Text, Image

MWF 1-2

This is a brand-new lecture and discussion course that provides a survey of early to contemporary Asian American literary and cultural production. We'll study the broad range of forms that have served as vehicles of Asian American pol...(read more)

130B/1

American Literature: 1800-1865

TTh 12:30-2

We will read the extraordinary fiction, poetry, essays, and speeches of this period, including works by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Edgar Allan Poe, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, Fanny Fern, Herman Me...(read more)

130D/1

American Literature: 1900-1945:
Class, Race, Critique, Rewound

MW 5-6:30

This course is a retrospective or "rewound" survey of American literature and criticism from 1945 to 1900. We'll begin in the 1940s, working our way back in time, not only through key works in prose and poetry, but also through c...(read more)

134/1

Contemporary Literature

Lectures MW 12-1 in 141 McCone + one hour of discussion section per week in various locations (sec. 101: F 10-11; sec. 102: F 12-1; sec. 103: Th 11-12; sec. 104: Th 1-2)

In this course we will look at examples of very recently published literary works across a range of genres. We’ll explore some of the many ways that writerly innovation is challenging aesthetic norms (including those of “the novel,&rdqu...(read more)

C136/1

Topics in American Studies:
Harlem Renaissance

TTh 3:30-5

The Harlem Renaissance was a cultural movement of black artists and writers in the 1920s. Centered in the Harlem neighborhood in Manhattan, the movement extended outward through international collaboration. We will be reading works by writers inclu...(read more)

137B/1

Chicana/o Literature and Culture Since 1910:
Riding Chicanx Literature's First Wave and Beyond, c/s

TTh 11-12:30

"The student of Chicano literature will look back at this group and this first period as the foundation of whatever is to come, even if only as the generation against whom those to come rebel. The best of the best will survive—but then s...(read more)

166/4

Special Topics:
Literatures of the Asian Diaspora in America

TTh 9:30-11

This aim of this survey is two-fold: First, to interrogate the concept of nationhood and, particularly, what it means to be American.  Focusing on writings by and about peoples of Asian descent across the twentieth century and into the twenty-...(read more)

166/9

Special Topics:
New Orleans

TTh 5-6:30

We will be thinking about the culture and history of New Orleans as represented in fiction, folklore, and documentary cinema. We will also engage with the current controversy over monuments and memorialization in the c...(read more)

166AC/1

Special Topics in American Cultures:
Race and Revision in Early America

Lectures MW 1-2 in 50 Birge + one hour of discussion section per week in various locations (sec. 101: F 1-2; sec. 102: F 2-3; sec. 104: Th 10-11; sec. 105: Th 2-3; sec. 106: Th 4-5)

In this course, we will read both historical and literary texts to explore how racial categories came into being in New World cultures, and how these categories were tested, inhabited, and re-imagined by the people they sought to define. Our s...(read more)

175/1

Literature and Disability

TTh 3:30-5

This course will allow students to explore theories and representations of disability.  We’ll wonder whether it’s possible to develop an inclusive, common “theory” adequate to vario...(read more)

190/3

Research Seminar:
American Transcendentalism

TTh 9:30-11

We will immerse ourselves in the literary, political, philosophical, and aesthetic thought of the influential mid-nineteenth-century movement in the United States known as Transcendentalism. We will read fiction, essays, autobiographies, and poems ...(read more)

190/5

Research Seminar:
The Urban Postcolonial

TTh 11-12:30

An intensive research seminar exploring the relationship between urban landscapes and postcolonial literary cultures. Readings in theories of postcoloniality and diaspora as well as studies in city planning and architecture will accompany...(read more)

190/10

Research Seminar:
Inventing Nature and Constructing Race

TTh 3:30-5

Scholars have recently argued that race and nature were "invented" around the turn of the nineteenth century. We'll begin by unpacking their counterintuitive arguments: what does it mean to argue that fundamental conceptual categories...(read more)

45B/1

Literature in English: Late-17th Through Mid-19th Centuries

Lectures MW 11-12 in 3 LeConte + one hour of discussion section per week in various locations (sec. 101: F 9-10; sec. 102: F 9-10; sec. 103: F 11-12; sec. 104: F 11-12; sec. 105: Thurs. 9-10; sec. 106: Thurs. 10-11)

Readings in English, Scottish, Irish and North American prose fiction, autobiography, and poetry from 1688 through 1848: a century and a half that sees the formation of a new, multinational British state with the political incorporation of Scotland...(read more)

130A/1

American Literature: Before 1800

TTh 12:30-2

This course provides a survey of English-language American literature to 1800. We will explore a wide range of texts from narratives of colonial settlement through the literature of the American Revolution, the Constitutional Convention, and the ea...(read more)

130C/1

American Literature: 1865-1900

TTh 5-6:30

A survey of U.S. literature after the Civil War, with special attention to the rise of literary realism.  We will consider art’s response to what Mark Twain described as “The Gilded Age” of economic expansion, big business, a...(read more)

131/1

American Poetry

TTh 3:30-5

This survey of U.S. poetries will begin with 17th- and 18th-century poems by two women, Anne Bradstreet and Phyllis Wheatley, move to another (19th-century) pairing in Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson, and then touch down in expatriate and statesid...(read more)

132/1

American Novel

TTh 12:30-2

This course is a survey of major American novels from the late-nineteenth century to the present, with a focus on realism, naturalism, and modernism. Rather than trace a single history of the novel in this period, we will explore a range of genres ...(read more)

133B/1

African American Literature and Culture Since 1917:
African American Fiction

MWF 2-3

This course will examine some major 20^th and 21^st century African American novels and autobiographies.  This is a vast terrain to cover and so the chosen texts do not adequately represent the diversity and ...(read more)

133T/1

Topics in African American Literature and Culture:
The Novel and the Idea of Black Culture

MWF 11-12

For much of the last century, black writers have crafted modern works of literary art from the materials of black culture—Ralph Ellison and James Weldon Johnson found inspiration in jazz and other musical forms, James Baldwin reworked the bla...(read more)

C136/1

Topics in American Studies:
Harlem Renaissance

MW 5-6:30

The Harlem Renaissance was a cultural movement of black artists and writers in the 1920s. Centered in the Harlem neighborhood in Manhattan, the movement extended outward through international collaboration. We will be reading works by writers inclu...(read more)

137T/1

Topics in Chicana/o Literature and Culture:
Workers and Rebels in U. S. Latinx Novels

MWF 11-12

This course will focus on representations of workers and rebels in U.S. Latinx novels. We will investigate the ways in which the issues of work and political activism are central themes in much U.S. Latinx literature. The formal features and themat...(read more)

165/2

Special Topics:
21st-Century U. S. Poetry

M 2-5

In this course we’ll review the U.S. poetry of the present, reading representative poems from the last 15 years or so in relation to a number of formal concerns, poetic subjects, and debates within the social field (and its media), including:...(read more)

166/1

Special Topics:
Gothic

MWF 2-3

In the eighteenth century, Gothic was a historical category (the “Dark” or “Middle” Ages, between the fall of Rome and the Renaissance) and then an ethnic one (the Germanic peoples who overthrew classical civilization). It&r...(read more)

166/6

Special Topics:
Realism, Then and Now

MW 5-6:30

This course explores the relationship between life and literature, with a focus on the following types of questions: How have novelists and poets—as well as filmmakers, television producers, and Instagram aficionados—attempted to repres...(read more)

170/1

Literature and the Arts:
Rhythm, Riot, Revolution

TTh 11-12:30

What allows language to inspire change? To what extent is the power of a word rooted in its perception as sound and rhythm, shaped and reshaped by the individual histories and trainings of those who hear it? In this class, we will break down some o...(read more)

190/3

Research Seminar:
James / Baldwin

MW 5-6:30

James Baldwin never made a secret of the importance of Henry James to his creative life.  The numerous quotations, echoes, and nods to James sprinkled throughout Baldwin’s writings all but directly invite us to think of James as we read ...(read more)

190/5

Research Seminar:
California Books and Movies Since World War I

Thurs. 5-8:30 (incl. 1/2 hr. break)

Besides reading and discussing some fiction and poetry with Western settings, and essays that attempt to identify or explain distinctive regional characteristics, this course will consider various movies shaped by and shaping conceptions of Califor...(read more)

190/7

Research Seminar

 This section of English 190 was canceled on November 2.

190/8

Research Seminar:
Edgar Allan Poe

TTh 12:30-2

Two essays (seven pages and thirteen pages) will be required, along with regular attendance and participation in discussion.

Please read the paragraph about English 190 on page 2 of the instructions area of this Announcement of Classes fo...(read more)

190/9

Research Seminar:
Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln

TTh 12:30-2

We will read works by Douglass, Lincoln, their contemporaries, and their modern interpreters, taking up issues of literature, biography, politics, race, gender, and style and also debates about slavery, Civil War, and Reconstruction, then and now. ...(read more)

190/10

Research Seminar:
Emily Dickinson

TTh 2-3:30

This seminar will provide you with a sustained reading course in the poetry of Emily Dickinson, my favorite poet.  We’ll begin with her early poetry, and trace her evolution into the singular poet we read today, with particular attention...(read more)

37/1

Chicana/o Literature and Culture

TuWTh 9:30-12

This course is an introductory survey of the aesthetic forms and social locations of Chicanx art and literature in the United States, from the U.S.-Mexico War of 1846-1848 to our present moment of anti-immigrant nativism, which is signified rhetori...(read more)

20/1

Modern British and American Literature:
Reliving the Past: Art and the Historical Imagination

TTh 9:30-11

In 1951, William Faulkner wrote: "The past is never dead. It's not even past." In 2008, Barack Obama invoked Faulkner to discuss the racial inequalities that continue to fracture the American nation, suggesting that we can only allevi...(read more)

127/1

Modern Poetry

TTh 11-12:30

This course will concentrate intensively on four poets at the center of the modernist poetic canon: T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens, and W. B. Yeats. We will read several volumes by each, but will do so chronologically, in the order of the...(read more)

130B/1

American Literature: 1800-1865

TTh 12:30-2

On July 4 fifty years after the Declaration of Independence was signed, both John Adams and Thomas Jefferson died, an astonishing coincidence that many Americans took to signify the ending of the revolutionary era, and the beginning of a new phase ...(read more)

133A/1

African American Literature and Culture Before 1917

TTh 2-3:30

This course explores African American literary history from its beginning in the eighteenth century to the turn of the twentieth century, interpreting major works in the context of slavery and its aftermath. We will reflect on the complicated relat...(read more)

165/5

Special Topics:
Reading Walden With Care

TTh 3:30-5

Assigned text: Henry David Thoreau, Walden, Civil Disobedience and Other Writings (Norton Critical Editions). You are required to use this edition.

We will read Walden twice, in order to gain a d...(read more)

166AC/1

Special Topics in American Cultures:
Race & Revision in Early America

Lectures MW 1-2 + one hour of discussion section per week (sec. 101: F 10-11; sec. 102: F 1-2; sec. 103: Thurs. 10-11; sec. 104: Thurs. 1-2; sec. 105: Thurs. 1-2; sec. 106: Thurs. 4-5)

In this course, we will read both historical and literary texts to explore how racial categories came into being in New World cultures, and how these categories were tested, inhabited, and re-imagined by the human actors they sought to define.&nbsp...(read more)

190/1

Research Seminar:
Melville in the 50s

MW 9-10:30

In this seminar we will read as much of Herman Melville’s fiction from the 1850s as we can, delving patiently into Moby-Dick (1851) early in the semester and then tracking the experiments in prose that eventually led Melville to the ...(read more)

190/3

Research Seminar:
Representations of Coercion and Resistance in African American Slave, Jim Crow, and Neo-slave Narratives

MW 5-6:30

Within the context of slavery, the Jim Crow version of slavery, and the continuing racism in the U.S., African American literature bears witness to centuries of oppression, coercion, and exploitation; at the same time it documents great tenacity an...(read more)

203/4

Graduate Readings:
American Genres

TTh 2-3:30

We’ll discuss canonical works of American genre fiction, except for the one genre we usually read: “literary fiction.” Our genres include: children’s lit, YA, spy thriller, fantasy, science fiction, magical realism, noir, cr...(read more)

125E/1

The Contemporary Novel:
The Latest Pulitzer Prize-Winning Novels

Lectures MW 9-10 + one hour of discussion section per week (sec. 101: F 9-10; sec. 102: F 11-12; sec. 103: Thurs. 9-10; sec. 104: Thurs. 11-12)

The Pulitzer Prize in Fiction is awarded for “distinguished fiction by an American author, preferably dealing with American life.” In this course, we will read the five most recent (2013-2017) Pulitzer-Prize winning novels and two novel...(read more)

130A/1

American Literature: Before 1800

MWF 2-3

This course surveys the literatures of early America, from the tracts that envisioned the impact of British colonization to the novels that measured the aftermath of the American Revolution.  Throughout, we will consider colonial America as a ...(read more)

131/1

American Poetry

Note new time: TTh 12:30-2

This survey of U.S. poetries will begin with 17th- and 18th-century poems by two women, Anne Bradstreet and Phyllis Wheatley, move to another (19th-century) pairing in Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson, and then touch down in expatriate and statesid...(read more)

133T/1

Topics in African American Literature and Culture:
The African-American Essay

TTh 2-3:30

Readers have often turned to the essays of James Baldwin, W. E. B. DuBois, Ralph Ellison, Zora Neale Hurston (among others) with a mind to better understanding their literary work.  In this course we will consider the African-American essay as...(read more)

137B/1

Chicana/o Literature and Culture Since 1910:
Chicanx Novels

TTh 11-12:30

This course will focus exclusively on the study of Chicanx novels. As we shall see, the formal features and thematic representations of these novels have been influenced to a large degree by a broad range of social experiences: living in the border...(read more)

166/5

Special Topics:
Emily Dickinson

TTh 11-12:30

This seminar will provide you with a sustained reading course in the poetry of Emily Dickinson, my favorite poet.  We’ll begin with her early poetry, and trace her evolution into the singular poet we read today, with particular attention...(read more)

174/1

Literature and History:
The 1970s

TTh 11-12:30

As one historian has quipped, it was the worst of times, it was the worst of times. “The ’70s” routinely come in for mockery: even at the time, it was known as the decade when “it seemed like nothing happened.&rdquo...(read more)

177/1

Literature and Philosophy:
Surveillance, Paranoia, and State Power

TTh 9:30-11

This course examines the long, intimate relationship between technologies of surveillance and the making of British and American empires. While digital technology and state surveillance has been significant in the post-9/11 world, identifying, moni...(read more)

190/3

Research Seminar:
Hawthorne & Melville

MW 2-3:30

This course takes a close and critical look at the literary careers of Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville.  We will read their works in relation to each other and within their historical and intellectual contexts, with special attention t...(read more)

190/4

Research Seminar:
Reading Walden Carefully

MW 5-6:30

Assigned text: Henry David Thoreau, Walden, Civil Disobedience and Other Writings (Norton Critical Editions).  You are required to use this edition.

We will read Walden twice, in order to gain a deeper understanding...(read more)

190/5

Research Seminar:
Harlem Renaissance

MW 5-6:30

The Harlem Renaissance was a cultural and intellectual movement of black artists and writers in the 1920s. Centered in the Harlem neighborhood in Manhattan, the movement extended outward through international collaboration that reached to Hava...(read more)

190/12

Research Seminar:
California Books and Movies Since World War I

Tues. 5-8:30 (incl. 1/2 hr. break)

Besides reading and discussing some fiction and poetry with Western settings, and essays that attempt to identify or explain distinctive regional characteristics, this course will consider various movies shaped by and shaping conceptions of Califor...(read more)

203/5

Graduate Readings:
Contemporary Chicanx/Latinx Novels

TTh 2-3:30

In this course, we’ll examine narrative form in several Chicanx/Latinx novels, focusing on the role of problematic narrators. We’ll explore the specific ways that these novels tend to reify the social world through the eyes and voice of...(read more)

250/5

Research Seminar:
Black Abstraction

F 12-3

This course bears a distinct title, Black Abstraction, the strikeout meant to indicate the degree to which the blackness in "black abstraction" remains perennially subject to question.  The course will inquire into the ways in...(read more)

24/1

Freshman Seminar:
Reading Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass

M 12-2, 8/28 to 10/16 only

Walt Whitman self published the first edition of Leaves of Grass, a collection of poems, in 1855.  For the rest of his life, he reworked, revised, and added to this collection. He produced at least six distinguishable editions. We wil...(read more)

130B/1

American Literature: 1800-1865

TTh 5-6:30 PM

On July 4 fifty years after the Declaration of Independence was signed, both John Adams and Thomas Jefferson died, an astonishing coincidence that many Americans took to signify the ending of the revolutionary era, and the beginning of a new p...(read more)

130C/1

American Literature: 1865-1900

TTh 2-3:30

A survey of U.S. literature from the Civil War through 1900, with special attention to the years following Reconstruction and to rise of literary realism and naturalism. Authors will include Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Louisa May Alcott, Mark Tw...(read more)

130D/1

American Literature 1900-1945:
Literature in the Age of Extremes

MW 1-2 + discussion sections F 1-2

The aim of this course will be to capture the aesthetic and political extremes of the first half of the twentieth century.  We will examine conflicting efforts to bridge the boundary between art and life against the backdrop of two world wars ...(read more)

133A/1

African American Literature and Culture Before 1917

TTh 12:30-2

A survey of major works produced in the context of slavery and its aftermath.

C136/1

Topics in American Studies:
New Orleans

TTh 2-3:30

We will consider the representation of New Orleans in four related formats: (1) historical monograph, (2) folklore collection, (3) as-told-to autobiography, and (4) cinematic documentary. Our premise is that New Orleans is stranger than f...(read more)

137T/1

Topics in Chicana/o Literature and Culture:
Chicana/o Popular Culture

TTh 11-12:30

What is Chicanx popular culture? We answer this question by first exploring the meaning of these three terms separately. Chicana/o/x, popular (or lo popular), and culture have rich political trajectories that span the transnational co...(read more)

166/3

Special Topics:
Black Science Fiction

TTh 3:30-5

This course addresses two genres—black fiction and science fiction—at their point of intersection, which is sometimes called Afrofuturism. The umbrella term “black fiction” will include texts that issue out of and specu...(read more)

180L/1

Lyric Verse

TTh 5-6:30 PM

This course will examine the historical trajectory of a very fuzzy category, “lyric,” from its identified origins and early practice in English (anonymous medieval lyrics) to its 20^th- and 21^st- cent...(read more)

190/12

Research Seminar:
Making Memories

TTh 5-6:30

This seminar examines a literary turn toward narratives of counterfeit confessional memory. It asks what is at stake in narratiing and even confessing a past that didn't happen—and what that even means in the context of a fictional text. ...(read more)

130A/1

American Literature: Before 1800

MWF 12-1

This course surveys the literatures of early America, from the tracts that envisioned the impact of British colonization to the novels that measured the after-sho...(read more)

132/1

The American Novel

MW 2-3 + discussion sections F 2-3

This course is a survey of major American novels from the late-nineteenth century to the present, with a focus on realism, naturalism, and modernism. Rather than trace a single history of the novel in this period, we will explore a range of genres...(read more)

C136/1

Topics in American Studies:
The Fields: California Farmworker Literature

TTh 2-3:30

This course will focus on the lives and struggles of Mexican farm workers in California as represented in Chicano/a literature from the 1970s to the early twentieth-first century—or roughly the period that coincides with the rise of neoliber...(read more)

137B/1

Chicana/o Literature and Culture Since 1910:
Chicanx/Latinx Novels

TTh 11-12:30

In this course, we’ll read a cluster of post-1970 Chicanx/Latinx novels.  We’ll explore a variety of issues and experiences—race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, political activism, revolution, philosophy, art, storytelling, a...(read more)

165/1

Special Topics:
The Graphic Memoir

MWF 10-11

A graphic novel is often defined as “a single-author, book-length work, meant for a grown-up reader, with a memoirist or novelistic nat...(read more)

166/3

Special Topics:
Slavery and Conspiracy

MWF 3-4

This is a multidisciplinary seminar on the law and literature of slave conspiracy. We will be reading novels and stories by authors such as Martin Delany and Herman Melville alongside contemporary newspapers, confessions, warrants, witness deposit...(read more)

166AC/1

Special Topics in American Cultures:
Literatures of the Asian Diaspora in America

MWF 1-2

This aim of this survey is two-fold: First, to interrogate the concept of nationhood and, particularly, what it means to be American.  Focusing on writings by and about peoples of Asian descent across the twentieth century and into the twenty...(read more)

180L/1

Lyric Verse

TTh 2-3:30

This course will examine the historical trajectory of a very fuzzy category, “lyric,” from its identified origins and early practice in antiquity (Sappho, Catullus, et al.) to its 20^th and 21^st century rejections ...(read more)

190/2

Research Seminar:
Harlem Renaissance

MW 11-12:30

The Harlem Renaissance was a cultural and intellectual movement of black artists and writers in the 1920s. Centered in the Harlem neighborhood in Manhattan, the movement extended outward through international collaboration that reached all the way...(read more)

190/13

Research Seminar:
California Literature & Film Since WWI

Tues. 5-8:30 PM (see the course description)

Besides reading and discussing some fiction and poetry with Western settings, and essays that attempt to identify or explain distinctive regional characteristics, this course will consider various movies shaped by and shaping conceptions of Califo...(read more)

N125D/1

The 20th-Century Novel

MTTh 2-4

This course is a general survey of the 20th-century novel. The novel is the quintessential form of expression of modernity and modern subjectivity. In this survey of key works of the century, we will explore the novel form as it is framed by these ...(read more)

N166/1

Special Topics:
Film Noir

TTh 4-7

(read more)

N166/3

Special Topics:
American Poetry, 1650-2016

MTTh 2-4

This survey of U.S. poetries will begin with 17th- and 18th-century poems by two women, Anne Bradstreet and Phyllis Wheatley, move to another (19th-century) pairing in Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson, and then touch down in expatriate and statesid...(read more)

N180Z/1

Science Fiction

MTTh 10-12

This course will examine in depth the history of speculative fiction and its engagement with the thematics and topoi of the new life sciences--representation of cloning, ecological dystopias, hybrid life-forms, genetic engineering dystopia...(read more)

131/1

American Poetry

WF 5-6:30 P.M

This survey of U.S. poetries will begin with Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson and then touch down in expatriate and stateside modernisms, the Harlem Renaissance, the New York School, and Language Poetry, on our way to the contemporary. Rather than...(read more)

133A/1

African American Literature and Culture Before 1917

TTh 3:30-5

A survey of major works by African American writers. Themes in the course include law and violence, freedom and deliverance, culture and commerce, passing and racial impersonation.

134/1

Contemporary Literature:
21st-Century American Writing

MW 2-3 + discussion sections F 2-3

In this course we will take seriously the notion of “the contemporary” as that which coexists with us and is relevant to our times—or our spaces. All the works on the syllabus have been published in the past ten years, most withi...(read more)

138/1

Studies in World Literature in English:
Global Cities

MWF 1-2

Globalization has given rise to a new kind of urban space, a nexus where the networks of capital, labor, and bodies meet: the global city. This course, a survey of contemporary Anglophone literature, considers the narratives—fictional and ot...(read more)

171/2

Literature and Sexual Identity:
Gender, Sexuality, and Modernism

TTh 2-3:30

“Is queer modernism simply another name for modernism?” The question Heather Love poses in her special issue of PMLA will also guide this seminar on the crossovers between formal and sexual “deviance” in modernist ...(read more)

174/1

Literature and History:
The Seventies

TTh 3:30-5

As one historian has quipped, it was the worst of times, it was the worst of times. “The ’70s” routinely come in for mockery: even at the time, it was known as the decade when “it seemed like nothing happened.&rdqu...(read more)

190/1

Research Seminar:
Emily Dickinson

MWF 10-11

This seminar will provide you with a sustained reading course in the poetry of Emily Dickinson, my favorite poet.  We’ll begin with her early poetry, and trace her evolution into the singular poet we read today, with particular attentio...(read more)

190/2

Research Seminar:
Slow Seeing / Slow Reading

MWF 11-12

This is a seminar in the poetics of reading poems and seeing paintings. Over the course of the semester, students will undertake prolonged, exploratory, multi-contextual readings of a selection of recent and contemporary “difficult” po...(read more)

190/3

Research Seminar:
Moby-Dick, and More

MW 3:30-5

We will read Moby-Dick scrupulously, and we also will consider historical and literary contexts, Melville’s range of sources, 19th-century responses, 20^th- and 21^st-century literary criticism, and the pres...(read more)

190/8

Research Seminar:
James / Baldwin

TTh 12:30-2

James Baldwin never made a secret of the importance of Henry James to his creative life.  The numerous quotations, echoes, and nods to James sprinkled throughout Baldwin’s writings all but directly invite us to think of James as we read...(read more)

190/10

Research Seminar:
Do I Dare? Indecision and Modernist Literature

TTh 3:30-5

From Prufrock's peach to Frost's two roads, modernism gave us many famous moments of indecision. We will follow along with texts depicting speakers and characters as they hesitate, delay, cavil, evade, hedge, sidestep, prevaricate, tergive...(read more)

203/2

Graduate Readings:
Early African American Literature

TTh 12:30-2

Major works in the context of slavery and its aftermath. Advance syllabus (read more)

125E/1

The Contemporary Novel:
The Latest Pulitzer Prize-Winning Novels

MW 10-11; discussion sections F 10-11

The Pulitzer Prize in Fiction is awarded for “distinguished fiction by an American author, preferably dealing with American life.”  In this cou...(read more)

130B/1

American Literature: 1800-1865

MWF 1-2

I will lecture on several of the primary literary texts of the antebellum period. Two ten-page essays, a final exam, and regular attendance will be required.

132/1

The American Novel

MW 3-4; discussion sections F 3-4

A survey of major American novels from the late-nineteenth century to the present, with a focus on realism, naturalism, and modernism. Rather than trace a single history of the novel in this period, we will explore a range of genres—includin...(read more)

133B/1

African American Literature and Culture Since 1917:
The African American Essay

TTh 12:30-2

Readers of James Baldwin, W. E. B. DuBois, Ralph Ellison, and Zora Neale Hurston have often turned to these authors' essays with a mind to better understanding their literary work.  In this course we will consider the African American ess...(read more)

C136/1

Topics in American Studies:
The Great Exhaling: American History, Culture and Politics, 1946-1952

MW 4-5:30 + discussion sections

1948 was the year that America–after the Great Depression, after the Second World War, after sixteen year of the all but revolutionary experiment in national government of the New Deal–let out its collective breath. Finally, that great...(read more)

137B/1

Chicana/o Literature and Culture Since 1910

This course has been canceled.

137T/1

Topics in Chicana/o Literature and Culture:
The Chicana/o Novel

MWF 12-1

This course on Chicana/o and Latina/o novels complements a Chicana/o literature course I taught in the fall entitled “Migrant Narratives.”  But whereas the fall course included works that represented various literary genres (the n...(read more)

165/2

Special Topics:
21st-Century U.S. Poetry

MW 12-1:30

In this course we’ll review the U.S. poetry of the present, reading representative poems from the last 15 years or so in relation to a number of formal concerns, poetic subjects, and debates within the social field (and its media), including...(read more)

190/3

Research Seminar:
Late Henry James

MW 4-5:30

Close readings of Henry James' notoriously difficult final novels. This will be a very demanding class, but a rewarding one too, I hope. Two ten-page essays will be required, along with regular attendance and participation in class discussion....(read more)

N125D/1

The 20th-Century Novel

MTTh 2-4

This course is a general survey of the 20th-century novel. The novel is the quintessential form of expression of modernity and modern subjectivity. In this survey of key works of the century, we will explore the novel form as it is framed by these...(read more)

N166/1

Special Topics:
Moby-Dick and the Theory of the Novel

MTTh 4-6

In this summer session, we'll read one and only one novel: Herman Melville's Moby-Dick (1851). We'll read the book carefully and closely, working particularly to understand Melville's idiosyncratic use of particuar aesthet...(read more)

N166/2

Special Topics:
The U.S. Novel Since 1945: Authors and Workers

TTh 10-12

This course will examine the development of the U.S. novel in light of the profound reorganization of working life since 1945, a process that has involved a m...(read more)

31AC/1

Literature of American Cultures:
Immigrant Inscriptions

TTh 11-12:30

In this course we will consider a variety of texts—contemporary fiction, classic and new film, journalism, history, and cultural criticism—that help us explore the possibilities for writing the migrant self and experience. The shifting...(read more)

45B/1

Literature in English: Late-17th Through Mid-19th Centuries

MW 12-1; discussion sections F 12-1

This course has two fundamental purposes. The first is to provide a broad working overview of the development of literature in English, from the end of the 17th century, in the wake of civil war, revolution, and restoration in England, to the mid-...(read more)

45C/1

Literature in English: Mid-19th Through the 20th Century

MW 10-11; discussion sections F 10-11

This course will provide an overview of the aesthetic shifts captured by such terms as realism, modernism, and postmodernism, with an emphasis on the relation between literary form and historical context. We will explore how literature responds to...(read more)

45C/2

Literature in English: Mid-19th Through the 20th Century

MW 11-12; discussion sections F 11-12

This course will survey a range of English-language works spanning more than a century, examining the upheavals in literary forms during this period in relation to their historical and socio-political contexts. We will give prominence to the moder...(read more)

130A/1

American Literature:
Before 1800

This course has been canceled.

130B/1

American Literature:
1800-1865

MW 1-2; discussion sections F 1-2

Reading Longfellow, Poe, Emerson, Thoreau, Douglass, Jacobs, Fern, Melville, Whitman, and Dickinson, we will pay particular attention to literary form and technique, to social and political context, and to the ideologic...(read more)

130C/1

American Literature:
1865-1900

MW 4-5:30

A survey in United States literature from the Civil War to the beginning of the twentieth century. Course requirements include weekly reading responses, two essays, midterm, and final exam.

131/1

American Poetry

TTh 3:30-5

This survey of U.S. poetries will begin with Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson and then touch down in expatriate and stateside modernisms, the Harlem Renaissance, the New York School, and Language Poetry, on our way to the contemporary. Rather than...(read more)

C136/1

Topics in American Studies:
Mark Twain and the Gilded Age

TTh 11-12:30

Mark Twain’s and Charles Dudley Warner’s collaborative novel of 1873, The Gilded Age, has given a name to the American historical period of the post-Civil War era (roughly 1865 to 1890).  It is a period of great changes i...(read more)

137B/1

Chicana/o Literature and Culture Since 1910:
Migrant Narratives

TTh 11-12:30

The topic of this course is “migrant narratives,” referring both to narratives about migrants and narratives that cross boundaries of one kind or another.  We’ll read a cluster of Chicana/o literary works published between 1...(read more)

165/4

Special Topics:
Longing and Belonging in Contemporary Writing

MW 3-4:30

This course will interrogate the possible relationships between desire and social position or identity (what I conceive myself to have and to lack) by reading contemporary literature in which (read more)

165/7

Special Topics:
Modern California Books and Movies

Tuesdays 6-9 P.M.

Besides discussing fiction and poetry with Western settings, and essays that attempt to identify or explain distinctive regional characteristics, this course will include consideration of various movies shaped by and shaping conceptions of Califor...(read more)

171/1

Literature and Sexual Identity:
Gender, Sexuality, and Modernism

TTh 12:30-2

“Is queer modernism simply another name for modernism?” The question Heather Love poses in her special issue of PMLA will also guide this seminar on the crossovers between formal and sexual “deviance” in modernist ...(read more)

190/6

Research Seminar:
Emily Dickinson

TTh 9:30-11

This seminar will provide you with a sustained reading course in the poetry of Emily Dickinson, my favorite poet.  We’ll begin with her early poetry, and trace her evolution into the singular poet we read today, with particular attentio...(read more)

190/7

Research Seminar:
Ethics and U.S. Fiction

TTh 11-12:30

Is reading good for us? Or bad for us? How does literature work as, or against, moral philosophy? What responsibilities do the author and the reader hold with regard to texts? What is the relationship between ethics, aesthetics, and affect? How do...(read more)

190/8

Research Seminar:
Reading Walden

TTh 12:30-2

Thoreau believed that "[b]ooks must be read as deliberately and reservedly as they were written." That's what we'll try to do, reading Walden twice over the course of the semester, once to get our bearings, then again to...(read more)

190/13

Research Seminar:
Race and Rumors of Race in American Prose

TTh 3:30-5

Race in 2015 is still a taboo topic in many literary conversations.  In Race and Rumors of Race in American Prose we’ll take a look back and a look forward.  We’ll start with Toni Morrison’s Playing in the Dark: Whi...(read more)

246L/1

Literature in English:
1945 to the Present

This course has been canceled.

250/3

Research Seminar:
Black + Queer

Thursdays 3:30-6:30

Co-taught by Professors Nadia Ellis (English) and Darieck Scott (African American Studies); African American Studies 240 section 1 is the course number for the latter component of the course.

This graduate seminar surveys the intersections ...(read more)

27/1

Introduction to the Study of Fiction

MWF 2-3

A 2013 study at the New School for Social Research corroborates the truism that reading literary fiction enhances our ability to understand the emotional states of other people. Even without the blessing of the sciences, it is undeniable that fict...(read more)

125E/1

The Contemporary Novel:
The Latest Pulitzer Prize-Winning Fiction

MW 9-10 + discussion sections F 9-10

The Pulitzer Prize in Fiction is awarded for “distinguished fiction by an American author, preferably dealing with American life.” In this course, we will read the seven most recent (2007-2014) Pulitzer Prize-winning novels (actually, ...(read more)

130A/1

American Literature: Before 1800

This class has been canceled.

130D/1

American Literature: 1900-1945

MWF 12-1

This course will survey major works of early twentieth-century American literature by Stephen Crane, Theodore Dreiser, Ralph Ellison, William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Zora Neale Hurston, Henry James, James Weldon Johnson, and Frank Norris, w...(read more)

131/1

American Poetry

TTh 12:30-2

This survey of U.S. poetries will begin with Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson and then touch down in expatriate and stateside modernisms, the Harlem Renaissance, the New York School, and Language Poetry, on our way to the contemporary. Rather than...(read more)

174/1

Literature and History:
The Seventies

TTh 12:30-2

As one historian has quipped, it was the worst of times, it was the worst of times. "The '70s" routinely come in for mockery: even at the time, it was known as the decade when "it seemed like nothing happened."

Yet w...(read more)

176/1

Literature and Popular Culture

This class has been canceled.

190/7

Research Seminar:
Toni Morrison

TTh 12:30-2

We will read as many of Toni Morrison’s novels as we can in the time we have. Most class meetings will be organized around discussion of the assigned daily reading, though I will intrude with brief lectures when I feel that doing so will hel...(read more)

N125D/1

The 20th-Century Novel

MTTh 2-4

This course is a general survey of the 20th-century novel. The novel is the quintessential form of expression of modernity and modern subjectivity. In this survey of key works of the century, we will explore the novel form as it is framed by these...(read more)

N125E/1

The Contemporary Novel:
Selected Pulitzer Prize-Winning Novels, 2007-2014

MTTh 12-2

The Pulitzer Prize in Fiction is awarded for “distinguished fiction by an American author, preferably dealing with American life.”  In this course, we will read a selection of the most recent (2007-2014) Pulitzer Priz...(read more)

24/1

Freshman Seminar:
Reading Art Spiegelman's MAUS

Tues. 2-4 (Sept. 2-Oct. 14 only)

Art Spiegelman has been called “one of our era’s foremost comics artists” and “perhaps the single most important comic creator working within the field.” In this seminar we will devote ourselves to a close reading of ...(read more)

26/1

Introduction to the Study of Poetry

MWF 12-1

This course is designed to develop students’ ability and confidence in reading, analyzing, and understanding poetry. Through the course of the semester, we will read a wide range of modern and contemporary poets, beginning with Walt Whitman ...(read more)

27/1

Introduction to the Study of Fiction

This class has been canceled.

31AC/1

Literature of American Cultures:
Immigrant Inscriptions

TTh 9:30-11

A few miles from UC Berkeley’s campus, positioned in the San Francisco Bay near Alcatraz, sits Angel Island, site of a California State Park and one-time “processing center” (1910-1940) for migrants crossing the Pacific into the ...(read more)

45B/1

Literature in English: Late-17th Through Mid-19th Centuries

MW 1-2 + discussion sections F 1-2

As we read works produced in a period of often tumultuous change, we shall consider those works as zones of contact, reflecting and sometimes negotiating conflict. In a world of expanding global commerce (imports like tea suddenly becoming commonp...(read more)

45B/2

Literature in English: Late-17th Through Mid-19th Centuries

MW 3-4 + discussion secctions F 3-4

On the face of it, English 45B seems like a “neither/nor” course; neither a course in the great English "originals" (Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton) nor a course in “modern(ist)” literature. It represents n...(read more)

45C/1

Literature in English: Mid-19th Through the 20th Century

MW 11-12 + discussion sections F 11-12

This course provides an overview of the many literary innovations now grouped under the term “modernism,” as well as their relations to the historical and social disruptions associated with the term “modernity.”  After...(read more)

45C/2

Literature in English: Mid-19th Through the 20th Century

MW 3-4 + discussion sections F 3-4

This course examines a range of British and American texts from the period with an emphasis on literary history and its social and political contexts. We will focus on the emergence, development, and legacy of modernism as a set of formal innovati...(read more)

127/1

Modern Poetry

TTh 11-12:30

This course will survey the work of major American and British poets who flourished in the twentieth century.  Poets will include W.B. Yeats, Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, Robert Frost, W.H. Auden,  Hart Crane, Wallace Stevens, W.C. Williams, ...(read more)

130A/1

American Literature: Before 1800

MWF 2-3

This course will offer a survey of the literature in English produced in North America before 1800: competing British versions of settlement; Puritan history, sermons, and poetry; conversion, captivity, and slave narratives; diaries, journals, ess...(read more)

130B/1

American Literature: 1800-1865

TTh 2-3:30

In the mid-nineteenth century, the U.S., a nation that had barely come together, was splitting apart. The fission helped to produce the remarkably energetic works we will be studying over the course of the semester. I will focus primarily on quest...(read more)

133A/1

African American Literature and Culture Before 1917

TTh 3:30-5

African American expressive culture has been driven by an affinity for the oral; and yet the claim for black humanity has often rested upon an embrace of literacy. In this survey we will attempt to bridge these oral and literary impulses in an exp...(read more)

133B/1

African American Literature and Culture\nSince 1917

TTh 2-3:30

An examination of some of the major 20th-century African American novels.

133T/1

Topics in African American Literature and Culture:
The Fiction of Toni Morrison

TTh 9:30-11

A sequential examination of Toni Morrison’s fiction.

C136/1

Topics in American Studies:
Boys and Girls in the Era of Mark Twain and Henry James

MWF 12-1

Historians often define the era after the Civil War and especially from 1880 to ca. 1915 as the “era of the child.”  Children became the heroes of popular  culture as well as major subjects for painters and intellectuals and ...(read more)

165/5

Special Topics:
The Graphic Memoir

TTh 11-12:30

The graphic novel is often defined as "a single-author, book-length work meant for a grown-up reader, with a memoirist or novelistic nature, usually devoid of superheroes."  Many comic artists, however, ridicule the term as a preten...(read more)

166/2

Special Topics:
Chicano Literature and History

TTh 2-3:30

The Chicano Movement of the late sixties and early seventies was a social movement that reshaped the political and cultural landscape of the Mexican American community. It represented a political challenge to inequality and racism as well as a cul...(read more)

166/3

Special Topics:
Black Science Fiction

TTh 2-3:30

This course considers two specific genres—black fiction and science fiction—to explore how they inflect each other when they blend. Under the umbrella “black,” we include fictions that issue out of and/or purport to describ...(read more)

171/1

Literature and Sexual Identity:
Gender, Sexuality, and Modernism

TTh 3:30-5

Gender norms and literary forms both exploded at the turn of the twentieth century. These paired crises in social and literary narratives were perceived on the one hand as the stuttering end of western culture's story, the drying up of libidin...(read more)

180A/1

Autobiography

This course has been canceled.

190/1

Research Seminar:
American Captivities

MW 3-4:30

The Indian captivity narrative is the first literary genre that might be called uniquely “American.”  Its standard protagonist was a white woman kidnapped by Indians, but American captivity narratives also related the captivities ...(read more)

190/2

Research Seminar:
Recent African American Literature

MW 3-4:30

A seminar focused on poetry and prose published by African Americans in the last 25 years. One short essay, one group presentation, and one long essay due at the end of the semester.

Please read the paragraph on page 2 of the instructio...(read more)

190/8

Research Seminar:
Dialect Literature

TTh 12:30-2

In this seminar we will read works written in what the novelist and human rights activist Ken Saro-Wiwa termed “rotten English,” primarily the work of authors from the African diaspora, though not exclusively.  Our conversations w...(read more)

190/14

Research Seminar:
20th-Century California Literature and Film

Tues. 6-9 P.M.

Besides reading and discussing fiction and poetry with Western settings, and essays that attempt to identify or explain distinctive regional characteristics, this course will include consideration of some movies shaped by and shaping conceptions o...(read more)

246K/1

Literature in English 1900-1945:
The Modernist Novel

MW 12-1:30

127/1

Modern Poetry

TTh 2-3:30

A survey of the modernist turn in poetry. This course will explore some of the more remarkable (and occasionally notorious) formal experiments of the twentieth century's turbulent first half. We will contend with work from Britain, Ireland, an...(read more)

130D/1

American Literature: 1900-1945

TTh 11-12:30

 A survey of American texts tracing the literary response to the emerging shape of modern life in the first decades of the twentieth century. We will read across a range of genres and styles to assess the influence of modernism and other expe...(read more)

C136/2

Topics in American Studies:
The Great Exhaling: American History, Culture, and Politics, 1946-1952

TTh 3:30-5 + disc. sec. 201: W 2-3; disc. sec. 202: W 3-4; disc. sec. 203: Thurs. 10-11; disc. sec. 204: Thurs. 11-12

1948 was the year that America, after the Great Depression, after the Second World War, after sixteen years of the all but revolutionary experiment in national government of the New Deal and even in the face of a Red Scare that would dominate the ...(read more)

165/3

Special Topics:
Modern Short Story Masters: James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, Franz Kafka, and Flannery O'Connor

TTh 2-3:30

The reading and writing assignments—linked with the lectures and class discussions—are intended to develop students’ ability to analyze, understand, and interpret four great masters of the short story: Joyce, Hemingway, Kafka (in...(read more)

171/1

Literature and Sexual Identity:
Gender, Sexuality, and Modernism

MW 4-5:30

Gender norms and literary forms both exploded at the turn of the twentieth century. These paired crises in social and literary narratives were perceived on the one hand as the stuttering end of western culture's story, the drying up of libidin...(read more)

190/1

Research Seminar:
American Gothic

MW 4-5:30

In this course, we will study the Gothic tradition in American literature from the aftermath of the Revolution to the cusp of the Civil War.  We will explore how and why the dark energies of the Gothic imagination haunted our national literat...(read more)

190/7

Research Seminar:
Cybernetics; or Control and Communication in the Postwar Novel

TTh 12:30-2

The title of this course plays on Norbert Wiener’s highly influential 1948 book, Cybernetics; or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine. Though hardly remembered today, the field that it inaugurated, cybernetics, en...(read more)

190/8

Research Seminar:
Moby Dick

TTh 12:30-2

We will read Moby-Dick very closely, twice. Regular attendance and participation will be required, along with two ten-page essays. Students should purchase the Penguin Classics edition, not the Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition.

...(read more)

190/11

Research Seminar:
American Poetry After 1950

TTh 3:30-5

This course will survey trends in recent American poetry.  We will start by familiarizing ourselves with the work that has been most influential on contemporary writing--John Ashbery, Frank O'Hara, Sylvia Plath, and Robert Creeley.  ...(read more)

190/12

Research Seminar:
Henry James

TTh 3:30-5

Henry James asked a lot of his readers, especially in these fictions written late in his career, but they’re extremely rewarding, and worth the labor they require, rewarding because of the labor they require. Students enrolling in the class ...(read more)

190/13

Research Seminar:
Realism and Naturalism

TTh 3:30-5

Our readings will focus on major American writers of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century whose works helped to define the literary modes of realism and naturalism. We will be asking questions about how literature responds to new ways o...(read more)

203/2

Graduate Readings:
Campus/Novel/Theory

Tues. 3:30-6:30

This course considers the relationship between the campus, the novel, and literary theory in the West. Accordingly, we will discuss theories of the novel, read some post-war British and American “campus novels,” consider the campu...(read more)

203/4

Graduate Readings:
African American Literature in the Twentieth Century

F 11-2

A survey of major African American writers in the context of social history. 

This course satisfies the Group 5 (20th century) or Group 6 (non-historical)  requirement.

Advance syllabus (read more)

246J/1

American Literature, 1855 to 1900

TTh 11-12:30

In a speech delivered on the bicentenary of the ratification of the Constitution, Justice Thurgood Marshall scandalized his audience (and much of the nation) when he proposed that “while the Union survived the civil war, the Constitution did...(read more)

246L/1

Literature in English, 1945 to the Present:
In the Archive with American Fiction and Poetry

TTh 9:30-11

This course is two courses rolled into one.

First, it offers a survey of post-WWII American fiction and poetry, with an eye especially to how aesthetic forms were reshaped under the pressure of social movements (the 1930s left, the Civil Ri...(read more)

N31AC/1

Literature of American Cultures:
Democracy and Division

MTuTh 2-4

The United States Constitution refers to “We, the People,” as if it’s obvious who’s included in – and excluded from – that “we.” In fact, though, the reality has always been much messier. Fights over...(read more)

N125D/1

The 20th-Century Novel

MTuTh 2-4

This course is a general survey of the 20th-century novel. The novel is the quintessential form of expression of modernity and modern subjectivity. In this survey of key works of the century, we will explore the novel form as it is framed by these...(read more)

N132/1

The American Novel

TTh 2-4

We will concentrate on the central issues deeded to the American novel by democratic ideology -- refusal and autonomy, loyalty, guilt, and atonement, futurity and the burden of the past -- and try to figure out how the formal innovations in the Am...(read more)

45C/1

Literature in English: Mid-19th Through the 20th Century

MW 11-12 + discussion sections F 11-12

This course will survey British, Irish, and American literature from the mid-nineteenth century through the mid-twentieth. We will try to evoke some of the key aesthetic...(read more)

45C/2

Literature in English: Mid-19th Through the 20th Century

MW 12-1 + discussion sections F 1-2

This course examines a range of British and American texts from the period with an emphasis on literary history and its social and political contexts. We will focus on the emergence, development, and legacy of modernism as a set of formal innovati...(read more)

125D/1

The 20th-Century Novel

TTh 9:30-11

In this course we will analyze nine 20th-century American novels, taking note of how their formal organization participates in their thematic concerns.  We'll spend the first few class meetings reviewing the history of the novel as a form...(read more)

125E/1

The Contemporary Novel

TTh 8-9:30

A survey of major novels, including nonfiction novels, published in the last fifty years.  There will be two papers, a midterm, and a final exam.

Note:  The instructor (and book list and course description) of this course changed ...(read more)

130B/1

American Literature: 1800-1865

MWF 2-3

In the mid-nineteenth century, the U.S., a nation that had barely come together, was splitting apart. The fission helped to produce the remarkably energetic works we will be studying over the course of the semester. I will focus primarily on quest...(read more)

132/1

American Novel

TTh 12:30-2

This course will explore eight major American novels.  There will be two papers, a midterm, and a final exam.

Note:  The instructor (and book list and course description) of this course changed in June.  There has been no cha...(read more)

137T/1

Topics in Chicana/o Literature and Culture:
Gender and Class

TTh 12:30-2

In this course, we will explore the interconnectedness of gender and class as represented in a cluster of Chicana/o literary works, films, and art.  The films will include Lourdes Portillo and Nina Serrano’s, Despues del Terremoto (...(read more)

141/1

Modes of Writing (Exposition, Fiction, Verse, etc.):
Race, Creative Writing, and Difference

TTh 2-3:30

This course is an inquiry into the ways that race is constructed in literary texts and a look-by-doing at our own practices as people engaged in creative writing.

The purpose of writing in this course is, broadly stated, to engage public la...(read more)

143N/1

Prose Nonfiction:
Traveling, Thinking, Writing

Thurs. 3:30-6:30

Much of American literature has had to do with a sense of motion. Note the journeys, e.g., in the best known texts of Melville and Twain. But note also that Harlemite Langston Hughes’ autobiography, The Big Sea, begins on a boat and...(read more)

152/1

Women Writers:
Early American Women Writers

TTh 9:30-11

This course will survey the writing of American women from narratives of colonial settlement through the novels of the early republic.  During this period, women produced immensely popular works and developed major literary traditions that wo...(read more)

166AC/1

Special Topics in American Cultures:
Race and Revision in Early America

TTh 2-3:30

In this course, we will read both historical and literary texts to explore how racial categories came into being in New World cultures and how these categories were tested, inhabited, and re-imagined by the human actors they sought to define.&nbsp...(read more)

180A/1

Autobiography:
American Autobiography: Race, Gender, Culture

TTh 11-12:30

We will take a group of texts--conventional memoir, poetry, painting, photography, and I-focused new media--to explore what American auto/bio/graphy really means.  We will start in the 18th century with Benjamin Franklin and close with a...(read more)

180N/1

The Novel:
The American Novel Since 1900

MW 3-4 + discussion sections F 3-4

A survey of the American novel: its forms, patterns, techniques, ideas, cultural context, and interaction with other media. Special attention will be paid to questions of aesthetics, epistemology, and ethics—w...(read more)

190/8

Research Seminar:
Suspicious Mind

TTh 12:30-2

Suspicious reading, which is sometimes called “symptomatic reading,” starts from the assumption that a text’s true meaning lies in what it does not say, know, or cannot understand.  For symptomatic readers, influenced by the...(read more)

203/1

Graduate Readings:
Post-9/11 Fiction

M 1-4

Note: Those interested in taking the course, please email me (ksnyder@berkeley.edu) the first week of classes for the reading assignment required for our first seminar meeting on September 9.

For mo...(read more)

203/2

Graduate Readings:
Modernism and Film

MW 4-5:30

This course surveys a range of twentieth-century texts that allow us to explore connections between film and modernist literary practice, and the cultural implications of cinema for the period as a whole. Working with a broad conception of moderni...(read more)

45C/1

Literature in English: Mid-19th Through the 20th Century

MW 9-10 + discussion sections F 9-10

This course provides an overview of the many literary innovations now grouped under the term “modernism,” as well as their relations to the historical and social disruptions associated with the term “modernity.”  After...(read more)

127/1

Modern Poetry

MWF 12-1

This course will survey major work and significant stylistic innovations in a variety of poets.  Major figures incude William Butler Yeats, Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, Mina Loy, T.S. Eliot and Wallace Stevens.  I...(read more)

130B/1

American Literature: 1800-1865

TTh 12:30-2

In Beneath the American Renaissance, David Reynolds argues that “delving beneath the American Renaissance occurs in two senses: analysis of the process by which hitherto neglected popular modes and stereotypes were imported into lit...(read more)

130D/1

American Literature: 1900-1945

TTh 12:30-2

This course traces the formal and thematic development of American literature from 1900 to 1945, focusing on innovations in literary forms as they engage with history, identity, race, class, and gender. A principle goal of this course is to bring ...(read more)

132/1

American Novel

TTh 3:30-5

This course offers a survey of major American novels written in the years between the Civil War and the beginnings of the Civil Rights movement. Course requirements include two essays as well as midterm and final exams.

135AC/1

Literature of American Cultures:
Race and Ethnicity in Hollywood Cinema

TTh 3:30-5 + M 6-9 films

An introduction to critical thinking about race and ethnicity, focused on a select group of films produced in the United States over the twentieth century. Major themes include law and violence, kinship and miscegenation, captivity and rescue, pas...(read more)

45B/1

Literature in English: Late 17th- Through Mid-19th Centuries

MW 10-11 + discussion sections F 10-11

Our course begins at sea, with the “violent storm” and shipwreck of Gulliver’s Travels, and ends at sea in <...(read more)

45B/2

Literature in English: Late 17th- Through Mid-19th Centuries

MW 12-1 + discussion sections F 12-1

This course is an introduction to British and American literature from the eighteenth through the mid-nineteenth century. We'll read works from that period (by Swift, Pope, Sterne, Franklin, Equiano, Wordsworth, Austen, Melville, Dickinson, Wh...(read more)

45C/2

Literature in English: Mid-19th Through the 20th Century

MW 1-2 + discussion sections F 1-2

This survey course of literature in English from the mid-nineteenth century to the present will consider a variety of literary forms and movements in their historical and cultural contexts. We'll examine the literature of colonization and impe...(read more)

125E/1

The Contemporary Novel:
The Novel Since 2000

TTh 12:30-2

We who study literature are perhaps always belated. This course aims to redefine at least one literary period: the “contemporary” novel, scholarship about which sometimes stretches as far back as novels written in the 1950s! I protest....(read more)

130A/1

American Literature: Before 1800

MWF 1-2

(read more)

130C/1

American Literature: 1865-1900

TTh 2-3:30

In the wake of the Civil War, six crises preoccupy American fiction: nationality, cities, race, wealth and misery, technology and gender. In this course we will explore the ways in which these areas of urgent concern intersect one another. Two sev...(read more)

131/1

American Poetry

TTh 3:30-5

This survey of U.S. poetries will begin with Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson and then touch down in expatriate and stateside modernisms, the Harlem Renaissance, the New York School, and Language Poetry, on our way to the contemporary. Rather than...(read more)

132/1

The American Novel

MWF 1-2

This course traces the formal and thematic development of the American novel, focusing on innovations in the novel’s form as it engages with history, identity, race, class and gender.  A principle goal of this course is to increase your...(read more)

135AC/1

Literature of American Cultures:
Repression and Resistance

TTh 12:30-2

In this course we will analyze representations of repression and resistance in nine novels, three each from the following three cultural groups: Chicanos/Chicanas, African Americans, and Euro-Americans.  We will examine various forms of repre...(read more)

190/2

Research Seminar:
Too-Close Reading: Poe and Others

MW 11-12:30

Here are the main things we experience from within the reading practice scapegoated as “too close.” The first is that it is worse than useless: the futility, the irrelevance of its mountainous molehills demoralizes us all the more prof...(read more)

190/5

Research Seminar:
Poetry and the Archive

note new time: MW 9-10:30

This is a class about poets who have gone looking for the muse. They’ve found her in the form of libraries, photographs, legal records, interviews, websites, advertisements, and material artifacts, and have used these archival materials to s...(read more)

190/11

Research Seminar:
Environmental Poetry and Poetics

TTh 11-12:30

I have emarked on this course to help us think about an emergent situation for poets—the earth in crisis.  In this seminar we will explore how poets represent, and think about their place in, their natural environment.  Our primary...(read more)

246I/1

American Literature to 1855

TTh 11-12:30

The series of great earthquakes at New Madrid, Missouri that rattled the entire Mississippi Valley in December 1811 sent shock waves of horror across the new nation. The newspaper and personal accounts of ...(read more)

250/3

Research Seminars:
Reconstruction

Thurs. 3:30-6:30

“Among the revolutionary processes that transformed the nineteenth-century world, none was so dramatic in its human consequences or far-reaching in its social implications as the abolition of chattel slavery,” the historian Eric Foner ...(read more)

45B/1

Literature in English: Late 17th- Through Mid-19th Centuries

MW 10-11, + discussion sections F 10-11

This course is an introduction to British and American literature from the eighteenth through the mid-nineteenth century. We'll read works from that period (by Pope, Sterne, Franklin, Equiano, Wordsworth, Austen, Shelley, Melville, Dickinson, ...(read more)

45B/2

Literature in English: Late 17th- Through Mid-19th Centuries

MW 12-1, + discussion sections F 12-1

Readings in English, Scottish, Irish and North American prose narrative and poetry from 1688 through 1848: a century and a half that sees the formation of a new...(read more)

45C/2

Literature in English: Mid-19th Through the 20th Century

MW 3-4, + discussion sections F 3-4

A broad survey of the period that witnessed the arrival of English as a fully global literary language, with Anglophone empires (both political and cultural) centered on both sides of the Atlantic and spread around the world.  (read more)

130B/1

American Literature: 1800-1865

TTh 2-3:30

In Beneath the American Renaissance, David Reynolds argues that “delving beneath the American Renaissance occurs in two senses: analysis of the process by which hitherto neglected popular modes and stereotypes were imported into lit...(read more)

130D/1

American Literature: 1900-1945

TTh 2-3:30

This course will introduce students to American literature of the early to mid-twentieth century. Reading across a range of genres and styles, we will ask how developments in literary form meditate on and respond to the social, technological, inte...(read more)

133B/1

African American Literature and Culture Since 1917

TTh 3:30-5

A survey of major African American writings in the context of social history. There will be two essays plus a midterm and final exam.

133T/1

Topics in African American Literature and Culture:
Slavery--Theory and Literature

TTh 11-12:30

This course will explore the differences and similarities between the “theory” of slavery and the “experience” of slavery.  Theoretical explorations of slavery will be chosen from the writings of Aristotle, John Locke,...(read more)

C136/1

Topics in American Studies:
Boys and Girls in the Era of Mark Twain and Henry James

TTh 3:30-5

Historians often define the era after the Civil War and especially from 1880 to ca. 1915 as the “era of the child.”  Children became the heroes of popular  culture as well as major subjects for painters and intellectuals and ...(read more)

137T/1

Topics in Chicana/o Literature and Culture:
Chicano Poetry--Text and Context

MWF 1-2

We will open with "Yo soy Joaquin"/"I am Joaquin," Rodolfo 'Corky' Gonzalez's stirring political poem of 1968 that inspired a politically based literary output that dominated Chicano poetics for well over a decade a...(read more)

143N/3

Prose Nonfiction:
Traveling, Thinking, Writing

TTh 2-3:30

Book List: Students should come to class before buying books. The list will likely include some of the following: Basho’s Back Roads to Far Towns (translated by Cid Corman); Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness; Tete-Mic...(read more)

165/1

Special Topics:
The Pisan and Later Cantos of Ezra Pound

MW 1:30-3

This course will look at one of the most influential and controversial poets of the 20th century, Ezra Pound. Beginning with the Pisan, we'll study the rest of the Cantos of Ezra Pound during the course of a single semester. ...(read more)

165/2

Special Topics:
Race, Literature, and the Archive

TTh 9:30-11

In this course we will read works of nineteenth- and twentieth-century American writing that engage with what we might call extra-literary modes of documenting racial difference. Drawing on insights from comparative media studies and critical race...(read more)

166AC/1

Special Topics in American Cultures:
Race and Performance

MW 3-4, + discussion sections F 3-4

                "Race is not only real, but also illusory. Not only is it common sense; it is also common...(read more)

176/1

Literature and Popular Culture:
The Promised Land--Representations of Confidence, Trust, Belief, and Faith in Nineteenth Century American Literature, Religion, and Patent Medicine Advertising

TTh 9:30-11

In the “Worship” section of The Conduct of Life (1860), Ralph Waldo Emerson observed that “Society is a masked ball, where everyone hides his real character, and reveals it by hiding. . . .”  In the August 184...(read more)

190/4

Research Seminar:
American Gothic

TTh 9:30-11

In this course, we will study the Gothic tradition in American literature from the aftermath of the Revolution to the cusp of the Civil War.  We will explore how and why the dark energies of the Gothic imagination haunted our national literat...(read more)

190/6

Research Seminar:
Moby-Dick

TTh 11-12:30

Baroque, intense, and demanding, Moby-Dick richly rewards all the attention a reader can muster. We will delve in as slowly as we can in order to cultivate the intellectual receptivity that Melville hoped for in his readers, becoming attuned to th...(read more)

190/7

Research Seminar:
Literature of Racial Passing

TTh 11-12:30

A passing narrative is an account—fiction or nonfiction—of a person (or group) claiming a racial or ethnic identity that she does not (or they do not) “possess.”  Such narratives speak—directly, indirectly, and v...(read more)

190/9

Research Seminar:
Emily Dickinson

TTh 12:30-2

This is an intensive reading course in the poetry of Emily Dickinson.  We will also read poems and essays by her contemporaries (e.g., Emerson, Longfellow, Helen Hunt).  Topics include early poems and prosody, love and gender, definition...(read more)

190/10

Research Seminar:
Mark Twain

TTh 2-3:30

The seminar will read a generous selection of Mark Twain's most important published writings. We will work our way chronologically through his life and career, beginning with his earliest extant writings and ending with Mysterious Stranger...(read more)

190/11

Research Seminar:
Mass Entertainment in 1930s Hollywood

TTh 3:30-5

Hollywood movies have always been treated as examples of mass entertainment, but rarely as analyses of the phenomenon.  We'll be exploring a wide range of 1930s Hollywood film -- from gangster pictures to cartoons, music...(read more)

190/12

Research Seminar:
Henry James

TTh 3:30-5

We will read novels, shorter fiction, and essays written by Henry James across his career and also analyses of James’s work, and we will consider how James has become a central figure for rethinking literary criticism, especially for those i...(read more)

190/15

Research Seminar:
Literature of California & the West Since WWI

Thurs. 6-9 P.M.

Besides reading and discussing fiction and poetry with Western settings, and essays attempting to identify or explain distinctive regional characteristics, this course will include consideration of some movies shaped by and shaping conceptions of ...(read more)

N130A/1

American Literature: Before 1800

MTuTh 4-6

This course provides a survey of English-language American literature to 1800.  We will explore a wide range of tex...(read more)

N130D/1

American Literature 1900-1945

MTuTh 10-12

A survey of American literature tracing the literary response to the emerging shape of modern life in the first decades of the twentieth century.  We will read across a range of genres and styles to assess the particular influence of modernis...(read more)

N132/1

American Novel

TTh 2-4

We will concentrate on the central issues deeded to the American novel by democratic ideology -- refusal and autonomy, loyalty, guilt, and atonement, futurity and the burden of the past -- and try to figure out how the formal innovations in the Am...(read more)

N166 /1

Special Topics:
Graphic Novels

MTuTh 10-12

Graphic novel is often defined as: “a single-author, book-length work, meant for a grown-up reader, with a memoirist or novelistic nature, usually devoid of superheroes.” Many comic artists, however, ridicule the term...(read more)

N166 /2

Special Topics

TTh 4-6

We will examine mostly the early work of the four central figures of the Beat Geneartion--- William S Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg,. Jack Kerouac and Gary Snyder.  We will look at the hisrtorical and literary-historical context in which they wor...(read more)

N180H/1

The Short Story

MTuTh 2-4

After considering theories about the origin, development, and form(s) of the short story, we will read a wide and diverse selection of short fiction in the United States, paying particular attention t...(read more)

130A/1

American Literature: Before 1800

TTh 11-12:30

This course provides a survey of English-language American literature to 1800. We will explore a wide range of texts from narratives of discovery and exploration through the literature of the American Revolution and the formations of an early nati...(read more)

131/1

American Poetry

MW 4-5:30

This survey of U.S. poetries will begin with Whitman and Dickinson and then move through both expatriate and stateside modernisms, the Harlem Renaissance, the Objectivists, the New York School, and Language Poetry, on our way to the contemporary. ...(read more)

132/1

American Novel

TTh 9:30-11

Rather than define a canon, this survey will trace how the novel has contributed to nation-formation in the U.S. How has the novel helped to define what it means to be American, starting from the country’s fledgling days as an outpost of Eur...(read more)

130B/1

American Literature: 1800-1865

TTh 2-3:30

In Beneath the American Renaissance, David Reynolds argues that “delving beneath the American Renaissance occurs in two senses: analysis of the process by which hitherto neglected popular modes and stereotypes were imported into lit...(read more)

130C/1

American Literature: 1865-1900

TTh 12:30-2

In the wake of the Civil War, six crises preoccupy American fiction: nationality, cities, race, wealth and misery, technology, and gender. In this course we will explore the ways in which these areas of urgent concern intersect one another. Two se...(read more)

131/1

American Poetry:
How to Read: 20th-Century American Poetry

TTh 9:30-11

This course will provide an overview of American modernist poetry, addressing key concepts in modernism including impersonality, the crisis of representation, and abstraction. Among these, however, the course will take as its primary area of inves...(read more)

132/1

The American Novel

MWF 1-2

A survey of major novels written in the United States between the end of slavery and the start of the Civil Rights Movement. Two essays, midterm, and final exam.

N130A/1

American Literature: Before 1800

MTuTh 2-4P

This course provides a survey of English-language American literature to 1800.  We will explore a wide range of texts from narratives of discovery and exploration through the literature of the American Revolution and the formations of an early...(read more)

N130D/1

American Literature: 1900-1945

MTuTh 10-12P

A survey of American literature tracing the literary response to the emerging shape of modern life in the first decades of the twentieth century. We will read across a range of genres and styles to assess the particular influence of modernism and ...(read more)

N132/1

American Novel

TuTh 2-4P

We will concentrate on the central issues deeded to the American novel by democratic ideology -- refusal and autonomy, loyalty, guilt, and atonement, futurity and the burden of the past -- and try to figure out how the formal innovations in the Ame...(read more)

130A/1

American Literature: Before 1800

MWF 12-1

This course will survey the literatures of early America, from the tracts that envisioned British colonization to the novels written in the after-shocks of the American Revolution. Although our focus is on Anglophone texts, we will consider colonia...(read more)

130D/1

American Literature: 1900-1945

MWF 11-12

A survey of American literature tracing the literary response to the emerging shape of modern life in the first decades of the twentieth century. We will read across a range of genres and styles to assess the particular influence of modernism and ...(read more)

131/1

American Poetry

TTh 12:30-2

This survey of U.S. poetries will begin with Dickinson and Whitman and then move through both expatriate and stateside modernisms, the Harlem Renaissance, the Objectivists, the New York School, and Language Poetry, on our way to the contemporary. P...(read more)

130A/1

American Literature: Before 1800

MWF 3-4

130C/1

American Literature: 1865-1900

MW 2-3 + Discussion F 2-3

130D/1

American Literature: 1900-1945

TTh 12:30-2

132/1

American Novel

MW 11-12 + Discussion F 11-12

N132/1

American Novel

MW 2-4

We will concentrate on the central issues deeded to the American novel by democratic ideology -- refusal and autonomy, loyalty, guilt, and atonement, futurity and the burden of the past -- and try to figure out how the formal innovations in the Ame...(read more)

130B/1

American Literature: 1800-1865

TTh 12:30-2

131/1

American Poetry

TTh 9:30-11

132/1

American Novel

MWF 3-4

130B/1

American Literature, 1800-1865

MW 4-5:30

130D/1

American Literature, 1900-1945

TTh 2-3:30

130B/1

American Literature:
American Literature: 1800-1865

TTh 11-12:30

130C/1

American Literature:
American Literature: 1865-1900

MWF 10-11

130D/1

American Literature:
American Literature: 1900-1945

MWF 2-3

130A/1

American Literature:
Before 1800

TTh 3:30-5

130C/1

American Literature:
1865-1900

TTh 2-3:30

131/1

American Literature:
American Poetry

TTh 9:30-11

130A/1

:
American Literature: Before 1800

MWF 12-1

130D/1

:
American Literature: 1900-1945

MWF 12-1

130A/1

Junior Coursework:
American Literature: Before 1800

TTh 9:30-11

130B/1

Junior Coursework:
American Literature: 1800-1865

TTh 11-12:30

130C/1

Junior Coursework:
American Literature: 1865-1900

MW 3-4:30

131/1

Junior Coursework:
American Poetry

TTh 12:30-2

130C/1

Upper Division Coursework:
American Literature: 1865-1900

TTh 11-12:30

132/1

Upper Division Coursework:
American Novel

TTh 12:30-2

130C/1

Upper Division Coursework:
"American Literature--1865-1900:

The Making of Americans--U.S. Fiction from 1865 to 1914"

TTh 11-12:30

130D/1

Upper Division Coursework:
American Literature: 1900-1945

MW 3-4, plus one hour of discussion section per week (all sections F 3-4)

131/1

Upper Division Coursework:
American Poetry

TTh 12:30-2

130D/1

Upper Division Coursework:
American Literature: 1900-1945

TTh 11-12:30

131/1

Upper Division Coursework:
American Poetry

TTh 12:30-2

132/1

Upper Division Coursework:
American Novel

TTh 2-3:30

130A/1

Upper Division Coursework:
American Literature: Before 1800

MWF 2-3

130C/1

Upper Division Coursework:
American Literature: 1865-1900

MW 4-5:30