Class Archive

29/1

Major Writers:
John Donne

TTh 5-6:30

Much of John Donne’s poetry speaks from the bedroom (“And now good-morrow to our waking souls”); much of the rest, from the grave (“When my grave is broke up again”). The voice, however, is always the same: morbid yet ...(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)

117S/1

Shakespeare

Lectures TTh 2-3 + one hour of discussion section per week (sec. 101: F 9-10; sec. 102: F 10-11; sec. 103: F 1-2; sec. 104: F 12-1; sec. 105: F 12-1; sec. 106: F 1-2)

This class focuses on a selection of works from Shakespeare’s entire career. We'll be reading a limited number of plays and some of the poetry. One of the main issues I'd like to focus on is the oscillation between "regular"...(read more)

118/1

Milton

MW 5-6:30

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)

166/3

Special Topics:
The Age of Crisis

TTh 3:30-5

(read more)

175/1

Literature and Disability

TTh 2-3:30

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 di...(read more)

179/1

Literature and Linguistics

TTh 11-12:30

The medium of literature is language. This course aims to deepen understanding of what this means through consideration of how certain literary forms cn be defined as grammatical forms. These literary forms include meter; rhyme and alliteration; sy...(read more)

26/1

Literature In English:
Introduction to Poetry

MW 5-6:30

What is poetry and why should we care? This course offers an introduction into poetry by discussing a wide range of poems written or translated into English as well as definitions and theories of poetry from Aristotle to the present. We will a...(read more)

126/1

British Literature, 1900-1945

Lectures TTh 2-3 in 20 Barrows + one hour of discussion section per week in 305 Wheeler (sec. 101: F 2-3; sec. 102: F 3-4)

In this course, we will examine British and Irish literature from the turn of the twentieth century through the aftermath of World War II. This was a period of tremendous turmoil and thoroughgoing change in Britain, Ireland, and the world. Looking ...(read more)

127/1

Modern Poetry

MWF 1-2

This course will be a general survey studying the major writers and stylistic experiments that have shaped contemporary poets' understanding of their heritage.  We will go into depth on particular poems but will not be very attentive to th...(read more)

143B/1

Verse

MW 1:30-3

In this course you will conduct a progressive series of explorations in which you will try some of the fundamental options for writing poetry today (or any day)--aperture and closure; rhythmic sound patterning; sentence and line; short and long-lin...(read more)

165/1

Special Topics:
Elegy, Mourning, and the Representation of the Holocaust

MW 3-4:30

After World War II, the German writer Theodor Adorno famously commented that it is “barbaric” to continue to write poetry after Auschwitz, because any attempt to convert extreme suffering into aesthetic image or form commits an injustic...(read more)

180L/1

Lyric Verse

MWF 11-12

This course will survey lyric poetry in English from the Renaissance to the present, with an emphasis on pre-modern work. I am mostly interested in two aspects of the work. The first is understanding how lyric can define different complet...(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)

190/4

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)

190/9

Research Seminar:
Victorian Versification

TTh 3:30-5

The Victorian period (1837-1901) is striking for its social, political, economic, technical and scientific developments that seem at once old-fashioned and recognizably modern.  Its formal poetic achievements are no exception to this character...(read more)

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)

122/1

The Victorian Period

TTh 9:30-11

The Victorian period (1837 - 1901) is a notoriously arbitrary periodic designation, tied to the reign of one particular woman, Victoria Alexandrina Hanover, otherwise known as Queen Victoria I. The period is not self-evidently defined by any generi...(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)

190/6

Research Seminar:
Literature on Trial: Romanticism, Law, Justice

TTh 11-12:30

This course will introduce students to “law and literature” studies, focusing on the way literature imagines the relation between law and justice.  We’ll concentrate on literature of the ...(read more)

26/1

Introduction to the Study of Poetry:
The Reading of Poetry

TTh 5-6:30

How can we become more appreciative, alert readers of poetry and at the same time better writers of prose? How do poems use language differently than other forms of expression? How do they know how to say things without actually saying th...(read more)

111/1

Chaucer:
Canterbury Tales

MW 5-6:30

In the late fourteenth century, Geoffrey Chaucer created a fictional pilgrimage in which travelers competed with one another to tell a tale “of best sentence and moost solaas”—meaning, a tale that best combines moral seriousness w...(read more)

121/1

The Romantic Period:
Romantic Voices

MWF 2-3

Romanticism has long been identified with democratic revolutions of the late 18^th century, and the social demand that every citizen have a “voice” in the constitution of community and law.  In this survey of li...(read more)

134/1

Contemporary Literature:
Poetry in the Twenty-First Century

Lectures MW 9-10 in 56 Barrows + one hour of discussion section per week in different locations (sec. 102: F 10-11; sec. 104: F 1-2)

Rather than attempt to assemble a predictive canon of twenty-first century poetry (so far), this course will broadly consider the place and significance of poetry in the contemporary world.  This will mean looking at some of the key figures an...(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)

165/3

Special Topics:
John Milton's Last Poems

MW 5-6:30

Four years after publishing the first edition of Paradise Lost, Milton came out with a volume called Paradise Regain’d...to which is added, Samson Agonistes. We will spend the semester carefully reading these poems...(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)

180E/1

The Epic: Imagined Communities and the Classical Epic

TTh 5-6:30

I am  convinced that the classical epic is crucial for a literary education whatever field you specialize in—for the profound encounters it offers, for the intensity and vivacity of the memorable scenes the works construct, and...(read more)

190/7

Research Seminar

 This section of English 190 was canceled on November 2.

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)

118/1

Milton

MW 5-6:30

Probably the most influential and famous (and, in his own time, infamous) literary figure of the seventeenth century, John Milton has too often been misrepresented as a mainstay of a traditional canon rather than as the rebel he was. Those who do n...(read more)

122/1

Victorian Period

Lectures MW 12-1 + one hour of discussion section per week (sec. 101: F 12-1; sec. 102: F 2-3)

The Victorian period witnessed dramatic and probably permanent changes to the literary culture of Britain, including: the morphing of scattered memoirs into formal autobiographies; the rise of the realist novel as the indispensable genre of bourgeo...(read more)

126/1

British Literature, 1900-1945

MWF 2-3

How did British and Irish literature change over the first half of the twentieth-century? Was “modernism” a historical moment, an aesthetic movement, or a critical attitude—or some combination of the three? How did write...(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)

165/3

Special Topics:
Literature and Media Theory

TTh 9:30-11

This course will consider literature in relation to media theory.  Is literature made obsolete by new media?  What happens when we consider print literature in re...(read more)

165/6

Special Topics:
Hardly Strictly Lyric Poems

TTh 3:30-5

Historically and etymologically, lyric poetry was sung to the accompaniment of a lyre.  Most lyric poetry studied as English literature today, however, reflecting the term "literature"'s own history and etymology, is related...(read more)

166/4

Special Topics:
"this morning's minion": Sonic Mysticism in Gerard Manley Hopkins and Emily Dickinson

TTh 3:30-5

"...it is said that light is a sound too high-pitched for the human ear to hear but that one day it will become accessible to another ear awakened in another life and that, indeed, we will be able to hear the music of the spheres, like the mov...(read more)

180E/1

The Epic

TTh 12:30-2

Homer’s Iliad was composed in the eighth century BCE. Both the story that it narrated (the conflict between the Greeks and the Trojans) and the particular form that the story took (the genre of the epic) would become foundational bui...(read more)

190/4

Research Seminar:
William Blake

TTh 9:30-11

In this seminar, we will read our way slowly into William Blake's forbidding and exciting “fourfold” poetic environments: graphic works of “Illuminated Printing” in which a city like London, or “Golgonooza,” ...(read more)

250/4

Research Seminar:
Evolution and Literary Form, 1800-1900

Thurs. 3:30-6:30

Reading the newly published On the Origin of Species together in November 1859, George Eliot and George Henry Lewes hailed Charles Darwin’s book as confirmation of the “Development Hypothesis,” founded a hundred years ear...(read more)

26/1

Introduction to the Study of Poetry

MWF 2-3

In this course we’ll read poems together, intensively, across a long historical span, a variety of contexts (cultural, philosophical, political), and a wide range of modes, forms, genres, styles and techniques. We’ll respond to poems, a...(read more)

118/1

Milton

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

We'll explore John Milton's whole career, a lifelong effort to unite intellectual, political, and artistic experimentation.

This course satisfies the pre-1800 requirement for the English major.

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)

134/1

Contemporary Literature

Lectures MW 11-12 + 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. 1-2)

This course will survey Irish and British writing since World War II.  As we dig into the formal and generic workings of a range of texts, we will also think through the political and cultural contexts from which they emerge.  Along ...(read more)

165/2

Special Topics:
Handel's Art in Setting English Words to Music

MW 3:30-5

Rhythm is a significant source of artistic effects in both poetry and music.  However, while the forms it can take in the two arts are similar in some ways, they are different in others.  An interesting window into these similarities and ...(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)

190/1

Research Seminar:
Trials of Literature: Romanticism, Justice, and the Law

MW 9:30-11

This seminar will focus on the way literature imagines the relation between law and justice, concentrating on literature of the Romantic period. We’ll consider writers’ interest in persons (from beggars and trespassers to gods and sover...(read more)

190/8

Research Seminar:
Literary Theory and Its Objects

TTh 12:30-2

This course explores some ...(read more)

190/10

Research Seminar:
Pagan Fictions in Christian Literature

TTh 5-6:30

Although late antique and medieval Christian authors routinely decried the falsehood of pagan literature, they could hardly get enough of it. Pagan mythology became not only a major inspiration of medieval poetry and philosophy but even a part of e...(read more)

190/11

Research Seminar:
Andrew Marvell

TTh 5-6:30

An intensive study of Marvell's poetry and prose. Students will complete a final research paper of 15-20 pages. 

All readings will be made available on the course site.

This section of English 190 satisfies the pre-...(read more)

203/1

Graduate Readings:
Radical Enlightenment?

Note new time: TTh 9:30-11

Channeling the voice of his own Enlightened despot, Kant’s famous answer to the question “What is Enlightenment?” included the chilling injunction to “argue as much as you want and about whatever you want, ...(read more)

24/2

Freshman Seminar:
Shakespeare's Sonnets

W 12-1

Shakespeare's sonnets were first published in 1609, rather late in his career, with a second, curiously distorted edition in 1640. Although little is known about how they were first received by the reading public, the sonnets still cause p...(read more)

122/1

The Victorian Period

MW 2-3 + discussion sections F 2-3

The Victorian period witnessed dramatic and probably permanent changes to the literary culture of Britain, including: the morphing of scattered memoirs into formal autobiographies; the rise of the realist novel as the indispensable genre of bourgeo...(read more)

143B/3

Verse

TTh 2-3:30

The purpose of this class will be to produce a collective language in which to treat poetry. Writing your own poems will be a part of this task, but it will also require readings in contemporary poetry and essays in poetics, as well as some wr...(read more)

170/1

Literature and the Arts:
Literature and Music

MW 11-12 + discussion sections F 11-12

In this course, we will think about the strangely vital links between literature and music.  Beginning in the early nineteenth century, we’ll track a series of crossings, conjunctions, and fissures.  We’ll think about the...(read more)

175/1

Literature and Disability

TTh 3:30-5

This course will have several components. An introductory section will provide students with a grounding in disability theory; we’ll wonder whether it’s possible to develop a common “theory” adequate to various disability ca...(read more)

179/1

Literature and Linguistics

TTh 11-12:30

The medium of literature is language.  This course aims to deepen understanding of what this means through consideration of how certain literary forms can be defined as grammatical forms.  These literary forms include meter; rhyme and all...(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)

118/1

Milton

MW 10-11 + discussion sections F 10-11

Probably the most influential and famous (and, in his own time, infamous) literary figure of the seventeenth century, John Milton has been misrepresented too often...(read more)

119/1

Literature of the Restoration and the Early 18th Century

TTh 12:30-2

In an age of commercial print expansion, men and women writers negotiated the possibilities, limits, and perceived dangers of publishing. In this class, we will explore the forms and strategies writers deployed in those negotiati...(read more)

166/5

Special Topics:
Modern Irish Literature

TTh 11-12:30

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)

190/8

Research Seminar:
Literatures of the Ocean

TTh 9:30-11

In this seminar we’ll explore literary (and some non-literary) representations of life at sea and of sailors, both offshore and on, primarily but not exclusively during the expansion of Britain’s first empire during the eighteenth cent...(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)

121/1

The Romantic Period

TTh 11-12:30

This course will look with wild surmise at the event of Romanticism.  What happened to literature between 1789 and 1830?  Is it true, as some critics have claimed, that Romantic-era writers revolutio...(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)

143B/1

Verse

MW 11-12:30

In this course you will conduct a progressive series of explorations in which you will try some of the fundamental options for writing lyric poetry today (or any day)--aperture and closure; rhythmic sound patterning; sentence and line; short and l...(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)

190/4

Research Seminar:
U.S. Modernism

MW 5-6:30 PM

We will survey major American writers from the first half of the twentieth century, with a special focus on texts that challenged both the formal and social conventions of literature in the period. We will examine a ran...(read more)

190/6

Research Seminar:
The Medium Is the Message: Reading Poetry in Manuscript & Print, 1300-1600

TTh 9:30-11

Modern readers almost exclusively encounter medieval and Renaissance literature in highly mediated anthologies and scholarly editions, far removed from the manuscripts and early print books in which they first circulated. In this course, we will p...(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)

203/4

Graduate Readings:
Lyric, Poetry, Poetics

W 3-6

This course will provide an introduction to poetics and theories of poetry, especially lyric poetry, since the early 19^th century.  We will watch as conceptualizations of poetry, lyric, and verse torque a...(read more)

20/1

Modern British and American Literature:
Graphic Poetics

TTh 3:30-5

26/1

Introduction to the Study of Poetry

TTh 12:30-2

In this course we’ll read poems together, intensively, across a long historical span, a variety of contexts (cultural, philosophical, political), and a wide range of modes, forms, genres, styles and techniques. We’ll respond to poems, ...(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)

165/5

Special Topics:
Is It Useless to Revolt?: Literature of Revolt

TTh 2-3:30

“Is it useless to revolt?”  Our course borrows its title from an essay by Foucault on the Iranian Revolution of 1979.  Foucault urges us to suspe...(read more)

170/1

Literature and the Arts:
Literature and Music

MWF 11-12

In this course, we will investigate the strangely vital links between literature and music. Beginning in the early 19th century, we’ll track a series of crossings, conjunctions, and fissures.  We’ll think about the place of music,...(read more)

180E/1

The Epic: Legends of Troy

TTh 2-3:30

Homer’s Iliad was composed in the eighth century BCE. Both the story that it narrated (the conflict between the Greeks and the Trojans) and the particular form that the story took (the genre of the epic) would become foundational bu...(read more)

190/9

Research Seminar:
Medieval and Renaissance Lyric

TTh 2-3:30

From drinking songs and poems of seduction to works of religious meditation and devotion, the lyric reflects a variety of subjects and concerns.  This course serves as an extensive introduction to lyric poetry from the twelfth to the sixteent...(read more)

190/10

Research Seminar:
Purcell and Handel: Their Art in Setting English Texts to Music

TTh 3:30-5

In the early 1600s, in England Shakespeare was exploring new ways of creating drama through language, with music often playing an important role, but a mostly distinct one.  In those same years, in Italy Monteverdi was exploring new ways of c...(read more)

190/13

Research Seminar:
Keats and Literary Tradition

TTh 5-6:30 P.M.

This research seminar focuses on the poems and letters of John Keats. We will read his work in relation to some of his predecessors (Shakespeare, Milton) and near contemporaries (Wordsworth, Hazlitt) while addressing questions of the burdens of cu...(read more)

26/1

Introduction to the Study of Poetry:
The Reading of Poetry

MWF 12-1

How can we become more appreciative, alert readers of poetry and at the same time better writers of prose? How do poems use language differently than other forms of expression? How do they know how to say things without actually saying t...(read more)

118/1

Milton

MW 4-5:30

Intensive reading in the poetry and prose of John Milton (1608-1674), written during a period of dramatic historical change, and including the most influential single poem in the English language, Paradise Lost. Our goal is to get under t...(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)

139/1

The Cultures of English:
Literature of The Great War

MWF 11-12

In the years following World War One, European intellectuals debated the implications of the new balance of power and the terms of the peace among the combatant nations, but they were haunted by the prospect of the decline of the West itself. A fo...(read more)

141/1

Modes of Writing (Exposition, Fiction, Verse, etc.)

TTh 9:30-11

This course will introduce students to the study of creative writing--fiction, poetry, and drama.  Students will learn to talk critically about these forms and begin to feel comfortable and confident writing within these genres.  Student...(read more)

141/2

Modes of Writing (Exposition, Fiction, Verse, etc.)

TTh 9:30-11

This course will introduce students to the study of creative writing--fiction, poetry, and drama.  Students will learn to talk critically about these forms and begin to feel comfortable and confident writing within these genres.  Student...(read more)

143B/1

Verse

TTh 11-12:30

In this course you will conduct a progressive series of explorations in which you will try some of the fundamental options for writing poetry today (or any day)--aperture and closure; rhythmic sound patterning; sentence and line; short and long-li...(read more)

143B/2

Verse

TTh 12:30-2

What I take as a given is that poetry is a public activity, one with the job of disrupting the status quo, the “interested” discourse of TV and advertising, the endless double-talk of politics. This semester I’m wanting us to (read more)

165/1

Special Topics:
Contemporary Poetry

MW 4-5:30

In this class we will read seven books of (very) contemporary poetry, which highlight the multiple national and linguistic identities that characterize the poetic subject in an increasingly globalized world. We will investigate different poetic st...(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)

165/5

Special Topics:
Hardly Strictly Lyric Poems

TTh 2-3:30

Historically and etymologically, lyric poetry was sung to the accompaniment of a lyre.  Most lyric poetry studied as English literature today, however, reflecting the term "literature"'s own history and etymology, is relate...(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)

175/1

Literature and Disability

MWF 12-1

In this course we will think about the concept of literature via the category of disability. We are told that "poems make nothing happen" (Auden); for speech-act theory, fictional utterance is a peculiarly "parasitic" form of s...(read more)

180L/1

Lyric Verse

TTh 9:30-11

In this course, we will investigate lyric poetry—its complex history, its intricate forms and practices, and some of its philosophical underpinnings and theoretical surround.  We’ll start by thinking about the so-called “roo...(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)

190/11

Research Seminar:
Poetry and Poetics in the Middle Ages

TTh 2-3:30

This class will explore early England's shifting literary landscape in order to better understand what poetry was and what it was for in the Middle Ages. Juxtaposing our close analyses of individual poems and groups of poems with medieval theo...(read more)

203/1

Graduate Readings:
Poetic Meter

W 2-5

This course will provide a basic introduction to the major meters of the modern English poetic tradition from the perspective of a theory of poetic meter rooted in generative linguistics.  Taking the "strict" iambic pentameter of Sh...(read more)

26/1

Introduction to the Study of Poetry

MWF 10-11

This course aims to do two things: 1) serve as an introduction to the variety of forms, modes and styles of poetry written in English; 2) provide a survey of the historical transformation of poetry in English over the last 200 years. We will begin...(read more)

45A/2

Literature in English: Through Milton

MW 3-4 + discussion sections F 3-4

What is the English literary tradition?  Where did it come from? What are its distinctive habits, questions, styles, obsessions? This course will answer these and other questions by focusing on five key writers from the Middle Ages and t...(read more)

121/1

The Romantic Period

TTh 11-12:30

This course will look with wild surmise at the event of Romanticism.  What happened to literature between 1789 and 1830?  Is it true, as some critics have claimed, that Romantic w...(read more)

122/1

The Victorian Period

TTh 3:30-5

The Victorian period witnessed dramatic and probably permanent changes to the literary culture of Britain, including: the morphing of scattered memoirs into formal autobiographies; the rise of the realist novel as the indispensable genre of bourge...(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)

143B/1

Verse

M 3-6

The purpose of this class will be to produce a collective language in which to treat poetry.  Writing your own poems will be a part of this task, but it will also require readings in contemporary poetry and essays in poetics, as well as some ...(read more)

166/1

Special Topics:
Scotland and Romanticism

MWF 11-12

Between 1760 and 1830 Scotland was one of the centers of the European-North Atlantic “Republic of Letters.” Here were invented the signature forms and discourses of the “Enlightenment” and “Romanticism” (terms f...(read more)

179/1

Literature and Linguistics

TTh 11-12:30

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190/8

Research Seminar:
Shakespeare’s Versification

TTh 3:30-5

This course will explore Shakespeare's artistic use of the formal resources of verse, especially meter, rhyme, alliteration and syntactic parallelism, as well as, by way of contrast, some of his use of music.  We will consider what define...(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)

26/2

Introduction to the Study of Poetry

TTh 11-12:30

How can we become more appreciative, alert readers of poetry, and at the same time better writers of prose? This course attends to the rich variety of poems written in English, drawing on the works of poets from William Shakespeare to Elizabeth Bi...(read more)

119/1

Literature of the Restoration & the Early 18th Century

TTh 3:30-5

The period from the "Restoration" of Charles II (1660) to the death of Alexander Pope (1744) produced the last poems of Milton, the first English pornography and feminist polemic, the most devastating satires ever written, some of the mo...(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)

141/1

Modes of Writing:
Writing Fiction, Poetry, and Plays

TTh 9:30-11

This course will introduce students to the study of creative writing--fiction, poetry, and drama.  Students will learn to talk critically about these forms and begin to feel comfortable and confident writing within these genres.  Student...(read more)

141/2

Modes of Writing:
Writing Fiction, Poetry, and Plays

TTh 9:30-11

This course will introduce students to the study of creative writing--fiction, poetry, and drama.  Students will learn to talk critically about these forms and begin to feel comfortable and confident writing within these genres.  Student...(read more)

143B/1

Verse

MW 4-5:30

What I take as a given is that poetry (and by implication, all "creative writing") is a public activity, one with the job of disrupting the status quo, the "interested" discourse of TV and advertising, the endless double-talk o...(read more)

143B/2

Verse

TTh 11-12:30

In this course you will conduct a progressive series of explorations in which you will try some of the fundamental options for writing poetry today (or any day)--aperture and closure; rhythmic sound patterning; sentence and line; short and long-li...(read more)

143B/3

Verse

TTh 3:30-5

A seminar in writing poetry.

Only continuing UC Berkeley students are eligible to apply for this course. To be considered for admission, please electronically submit 5 of your poems, by clicking on the link below; fill out the applicati...(read more)

165/6

Special Topics:
The End of the Poem: Poetic Closure

TTh 2-3:30

This class addresses an inevitable feature of all poems, the last line: the position from which the poem’s entire form is, for the first time, apprehended. This focus will require attention to all the formal and thematic principles by which ...(read more)

174/1

Literature and History:
The French Revolution

MWF 12-1

“The French Revolution did not take place.”

“The French Revolution is not yet over.”

These two sentences might seem not only counterfactual, but also contr...(read more)

190/5

Research Seminar:
Paradise Lost and the Ancient Epic

TTh 11-12:30

“Not less but more heroic” … that is Milton’s claim in his modern epic Paradise Lost, comparing his own Biblical theme to the achievements of ancient epic, Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey and Vir...(read more)

190/6

Research Seminar:
Ecopoetry

TTh 12:30-2

What is ecopoetry, and what, if anything, distinguishes it from nature poetry? How does ecopoetics differ from another poetics? In this seminar we will explore topics surrounding this question, which include the pathetic fallacy and anthropomorphi...(read more)

190/12

Research Seminar:
The Rejection of Closure: Slow Readings

TTh 3:30-5

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

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)

143B/1

Verse

TTh 11-12:30

In this course you will conduct a progressive series of explorations in which you will try some of the fundamental options for writing poetry today (or any day)--aperture and closure; rhythmic sound patterning; sentence and line; short and long-li...(read more)

161/1

Introduction to Literary Theory:
Free Speech, in Theory

TTh 2-3:30

This course will interrogate the way in which “free” speech, as moral value or political right, informs and complicates our understanding of literature and the literary.  We...(read more)

166/1

Special Topics:
Theory of the Poet

MWF 11-12

The figure of The Poet occupies a significant place in cultural imagination, even when The Poet is thought to occupy a marginal position or engage in useless activity. Bard, rebel, cultural diplomat, priest, historian, recluse—who or what is...(read more)

166/2

Special Topics:
Contemporary British and Irish Poetry

TTh 11-12:30

This course will survey British and Irish poetry from the past sixty years. It is a large and multifaceted body of work, and much of it remains under-read, especially in the U.S. We will consider the development of a late modernist and postmodern ...(read more)

174/1

Literature and History:
Writing the British Nation

TTh 12:30-2

This course will offer an introduction to critical methods focused on practices of historical interpretation. While we will read widely in critical and theoretical writing, our case studies will focus on key texts in the history of nationhood and ...(read more)

180L/1

Lyric Verse

TTh 9:30-11

This is a course in the short poem in English, its past and its present. It’s been said that the short poem in English in the sixteenth century, alongside the development of the soliloquy in the theater, invented and staged the modern concep...(read more)

190/9

Research Seminar:
Literature of the Ocean

TTh 12:30-2

Provisional Book List:  William Wycherley, The Plain-Dealer; Ned Ward, The Wooden World Dissected; Daniel Defoe, Captain Singleton; Olaudah Equiano, Interesting Narrative; Tobias Smollett, Roderick Rand...(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)

250/1

Research Seminars:
Religion and Poetry in Early Modern England

W 11-2

What does it mean to speak to God through a sonnet? Why would someone retell the story of the Biblical Fall in verse? Why rewrite the Psalms in rhyme royal? In this course, we’ll read sixteenth- and seventeenth-century religious poetry along...(read more)

N20/1

Modern British and American Literature

MTuTh 10-12

Virginia Woolf famously wrote that “on or about December 1910, human character changed.” In her view, the exciting and experimental works of modernism—written by authors like T.S. Eliot, James Joyce, and Woolf herself—came ...(read more)

165/1

Special Topics:
Modern Poetry

MWF 12-1

The reading and writing assignments—linked with the lectures and class discussions—are intended to develop students’ ability to analyze, understand, and interpret modern poetry, as they gain greater authority in critical writing....(read more)

165/2

Special Topics:
Hardly Strictly Lyric Poetry

MW 4-5:30

Historically and etymologically, lyric poetry was poetry sung to the accompaniment of a lyre.  Most lyric poetry studied as English literature today, however, reflecting "literature"'s own history and etymology, is ...(read more)

180L/1

Lyric Verse

MW 4-5:30

For more information on this course, please contact Professor Miller at j_miller@berkeley.edu.

This course satisfies the pre-1800 requirement for the English major.

190/7

Research Seminar:
Ecopoetry and Ecopoetics

TTh 11-12:30

What is ecopoetry, and what, if anything, distinguishes it from nature poetry?   How does ecopoetics differ from another poetics?  In this seminar we will explore topics surrounding this question, which include the pathetic fallacy ...(read more)

190/12

Research Seminar:
Metaphysical Poets from Donne to Vaughan

TTh 2-3:30

This class focuses on a group of poets who were philosophical before there was philosophy. Four decades before the publication of René Descartes’ Meditations, John Donne began writing poems in which, in the words of a later c...(read more)

119/1

Literature of the Restoration and the Early 18th Century

TTh 12:30-2

We will explore the relationship between literature and everyday life in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Areas of emphasis include popular periodical literature (England's first advice column, the first "women's m...(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)

143B/1

Verse

TTh 11-12:30

In this course you will conduct a progressive series of explorations in which you will try some of the fundamental options for writing poetry today (or any day)—aperture and closure; rhythmic sound patterning; sentence and line; short and lo...(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)

143B/1

Verse

MW 4-5:30

This seminar/workshop in the writing of poetry is intended for the exploration of contemporary solutions to long-standing, as well as recent, questions facing poets. Students in the class will undertake writing projects in relation to technical an...(read more)

143B/2

Verse

TTh 12:30-2

In this course you will conduct a progressive series of experiments in which you will explore some of the fundamental options for writing poetry today—aperture and closure; rhythmic sound patterning; sentence and line; short and long-lined p...(read more)

165/1

Special Topics:
Poetry Writing in an Ecological Field of Composition

TTh 9:30-11

Among other issues associated with the composition of poetry, this class seeks to contend with the difficulties that arise from how a poem is displayed on the page. We will look at a number of poets, such as Cummings...(read more)

180L/1

Lyric Verse

MWF 12-1

This course is an immersion in the history of lyric verse in English. We will read most of the standard warhorses. The focus of the course will be on the poems as poems, on what they do to minds in the time it takes to read or hear them, and only ...(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)

190/10

Research Seminar:
John Clare: A Peasant Naturalist Among the Romantic Poets

TTh 9:30-11

John Clare was an uneducated farm laborer, a contemporary of Keats, who became very briefly a very famous poet in the 1820's in the wake of the great years of Burns, Byron, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Shelley.  He published three books, co...(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)

H195A/2

Honors Course

TTh 3:30-5

English H195A is the first part of a two-semester sequence for those English majors writing honors theses. It is designed to give students the critical tools and practical skills to write a strong essay, in the spring semester, that will have a gr...(read more)

118/1

Milton

TTh 3:30-5

The most influential and famous (sometimes infamous) literary figure of the seventeenth century, John Milton has been misrepresented too often as a mainstay of a traditional canon, rather than the rebel he was. Or he is assumed to be a remote reli...(read more)

119/1

Augustan Age: Literature of the Restoration and the Early 18th Century

TTh 3:30-5

We will explore the relationship between literature and everyday life in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Areas of emphasis include popu...(read more)

134/1

Contemporary Literature

MWF 11-12

This course will survey British and Irish writing since World War II.  We will dig deeply into the texts' formal and generic workings, and think through the cultural and social contexts from which they emerge. Along the way, we'l...(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)

143B/1

Verse

TTh 11-12:30

In this course you will conduct a progressive series of experiments in which you will explore some of the fundamental options for writing poetry today—aperture and closure; rhythmic sound patterning; sentence and line; short and long-lined p...(read more)

143T/1

Poetry Translation Workshop

TTh 2-3:30

This is a workshop course in the translation of poetry. Participants need to be at least moderately competent in some language other than English. All of the work will involve translating from other languages into English. Participants will be exp...(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)

180E/1

The Epic

MWF 2-3

This course will be team-taught by Professors Altieri and Nolan. Our primary concern is to read carefully and discuss intensely most of the major epics in Western European literature. We love these texts and we are convinced that students will fin...(read more)

190/2

Research Seminar:
Yeats, Joyce, & Beckett

MW 4-5:30

This course will focus on the major writings by this trio of Irish modernists.  We will think about the ways in which these writers fit into and challenge international canons of modernist literature, about the Irish attachments and condition...(read more)

190/8

Research Seminar:
Medieval English Poetry

TTh 12:30-2

The poetry of medieval England, often witty, sometimes moving, occasionally shocking, and frequently creative in form, style and use of language, has inspired poets including Seamus Heaney, Gerard Manley Hopkins and Geoffrey Hill. We will be explo...(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)

203/1

Graduate Readings:
Literature & the Science of the Feelings, 1740-1819

M 3-6

William Wordsworth’s 1800 declaration that poetry “is the history or science of feelings” cuts many ways, as such genitive constructions often do.  His phrase alludes both to the contemporary human and life sciences that mad...(read more)

212/1

Readings in Middle English:
The Auchinleck Manuscript

W 3-6

This course will consider a wide range of Middle English writing through examination of a single manuscript book surviving to us from the early fourteenth-century:  Edinburgh, National Library of Scotland, Advocates' MS 19.2.1, now known ...(read more)

127/1

Modern Poetry

TTh 2-3:30

180E/1

The Epic: Imagined Communities and the Classical Epic

MW F 1-2

180L/1

Lyric Verse

TTh 12:30-2

We will spend much of the semester trying to figure out what the title of this course means. We’ll start by thinking about the so-called “roots of lyric,” not only Sappho and Greek lyric, but other forms and shapes that are deepl...(read more)

127/1

Upper Division Coursework:
Modern Poetry

MW 1-2, sections F 1-2

180L/1

Literature:
Lyric Verse

TTh 11-12:30

26/1

Literature In English:
Introduction to the Study of Poetry

TTh 2-3:30

127/1

:
Modern Poetry

TTh 11-12:30

180L/1

Upper Division Coursework:
Lyric Verse

TTh 9:30-11

180E/1

Upper Division Coursework:
The Epic

TTh 12:30-2

127/1

Upper Division Coursework:
Modern Poetry

MWF 11-12

127/1

Upper Division Coursework:
Modern Poetry

TTh 3:30-5

180L/1

Upper Division Coursework:
Lyric Verse

TTh 2-3:30