Class Archive

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)

175/1

Literature and Disability:
States of Exception

TuTh 12:30-2

From the blind poet to the fat detective to the “twisted” villain, literature often foregrounds bodily difference as an exceptional condition. What are the stakes and effects of literature’s interest in the exception—and in ...(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)

20/1

Modern British and American Literature:
Post-Apocalyptic Fiction

TTh 5-6:30

Apocalyptic stories have been told for centuries, even millenia. But novels, movies, and other forms of media that imagine the end of the world—and what comes after that—seem to have inundated us (floods!) in recent times....(read more)

80K/1

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

TTh 2-3:30

From cannibalistic witches to sadistic parents to dystopian hellscapes, children's literature is rife with terrifying figures and dark themes. This class will look at the forms of monstrosity, deviance, and horror that appear in a variety ...(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)

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)

166/1

Special Topics:
Beckett

TTh 2-3:30

The Twentieth Century offered a unique blending of advancement and atrocity, genocide and progress, and surely no single artist captured this more fully and more fearlessly than Samuel Beckett. Spanning the modernist and postmodernist eras,&nb...(read more)

166/2

Special Topics

TTh 2-3:30

We will study the work of Nabokov as a novelist on two continents over a period of nearly sixty years. The course will be structured (more or less) chronologically and divided between novels translated from Russian and written in English. After beg...(read more)

171/1

Literature and Sexual Identity:
Gender, Sexuality, Modernism

TTh 12:30-2

This course will focus on one area of the rapidly expanding field of literature and sexual identity: the early twentieth-century literary experiments that have earned the title “modernism.” Famously “queer,” modernism’...(read more)

175/1

Literature and Disability:
Helen Keller and Her Cultural Legacies

MWF 10-11

Every schoolchild knows the story of Helen Keller. We learn early that Keller became blind and deaf as a toddler, that after years without language, she was taught to sign, read and write, and eventually speak, that she was the first deafblind coll...(read more)

176/2

Literature and Popular Culture:
The Sit-Com

MW 10:30-12

The television situation comedy has been one of the most durable, wide-ranging, and successful genres of  popular  culture  of  all  time.  Its  narrative  forms  (such  as  the  &ldq...(read more)

165/1

Special Topics:
Writing at the University: A Writing Studio for Transfer Students

TWTh 10-12:30

Having successfully completed their composition courses in community college, transfer students possess the writing skills necessary for academic success. Still, research ...(read more)

166/1

Special Topics:
Epic Poetry

MW 2-5

This course will be a thorough investigation of one of the most important poetic forms in literary history: the epic poem. The epic poem in the period we will be looking a...(read more)

166/2

Special Topics:
The Rise of the Young Adult

TWTh 4-6:30

How can the young adult be a figure of propaganda and a deeply subversive figure? And what does it do today? The adolescent has been at the crux of the American national imag...(read more)

166/4

Special Topics:
Introduction to Popular Fiction

TWTh 9:30-12

(read more)

176/1

Literature and Popular Culture:
The Horror Genre

TWTh 12-2:30

(read more)

180Z/1

Science Fiction

TWTh 3-5:30

E.M. Forster begins his classic science fiction novella, “The Machine Stops,” with a question disguised as an invitation: “Imagine, if you can…” But what exactly is the use of imagination? And what exactly ar...(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)

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)

165/3

Special Topics:
Rebel Slaves and Dark Doubles: Black Women Writers' Engagements with Jane Eyre

TTh 11-12:30

Secret marriages and women hidden away in attics, portentous ...(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)

166/3

Special Topics:
"Race, Social Class, Creative Writing, and Difference"

TTh 2-3:30

One of the ideas behind this course offering is that poetry a...(read more)

166/4

Special Topics:
The Literature of the Fin de Siècle

TuTh 2-3:30

The cultural uniqueness of the fin de siècle throws into disarray our usual way of organizing knowledge about the “Victorians” and the “moderns.” Far from a minor transitional stage between epochs, this is a period wh...(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)

177/2

Literature and Philosophy:
Ecology and Utopia

TTh 3:30-5

Since long before Thomas More coined the catching term “Utopia” – meaning “no place” or “not-place” – to name his fiction of a perfect island commonwealth, the literature of non-existent worlds has be...(read more)

165/2

Special Topics:
Utopian and (mostly) Dystopian Movies

W 5-8

Most utopian and dystopian authors and film-makers are more concerned with persuading readers and viewers of the merits of their ideas than with the "merely" literary or artistic qualities of their work. Although utopias have sometimes ma...(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)

165/5

Special Topics:
Alrish

TTh 2-3:30

This course will use both traditional and digital humanities methods to explore Irish drama from the eighteenth to the twenty-first centuries. Working through a series of historical periods, we will consider individual plays in their own right and ...(read more)

165/6

Special Topics:
“Moments of Truth”: Narrating the Endings of Lies, Disinformation, and Deceit

W 3-6

As a new year and new semester begins, we begin an investigation of the dawning of the age of post- “post-truth” or, to state it differently, of the various attempts (sometimes...(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)

166/4

Special Topics:
The Social Media of Literature

MWF 12-1

We tend to think of literary composition as a solitary act, but this obscures all the labors of friends, peers, and other readers before a work ever makes it to print. What do social networks and social media do to literary composition, disseminati...(read more)

166/5

Special Topics:
Anton Chekhov

MWF 2-3

Anton Chekhov's (1860-1904) prominence in the English-speaking world is comparable only to Shakespeare's place in Russian culture. This course is devoted to Chekhov's fictional and dramatic writing, and to the lasting influence of his a...(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)

170/1

Literature and the Arts:
Metamorphoses

TTh 3:30-5

This course will explore literature through comparisons with other arts. We will focus on a few stories from Ovid’s Metamorphoses that have inspired transmutations into English literature and also into paintings, sculptures, and oper...(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)

176/1

Literature and Popular Culture:
Medieval Futures

MWF 1-2

We usually think of speculative fiction as forward-looking. But it’s no accident that the most popular modern sci-fi saga narrates the struggles of knights and monks “a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away”: even our most futu...(read more)

177/1

Literature and Philosophy:
Reading Capital

TTh 9:30-11

Why read the first volume of Capital more than 150 years after its initial publication in 1867?  Not only is Marx being seriously and widely read again since the financial crisis of 2008, but Capital Vol. 1 in particular is c...(read more)

180C/1

Comedy

TTh 2-3:30

Tragedy has been deemed dead for nearly as long as it has existed. For some, it gave up its soul when philosophy appeared in ancient Greece. For others, it’s capitalism and action movies that killed it in the twentieth century. But while trag...(read more)

180H/1

The Short Story

MWF 2-3

The lyf so short, the crafte so longe to lerne…

                              &nb...(read more)

165/1

Special Topics:
Writing at the University: A Writing Studio for Transfer Students

TWTh 2-4:30

Having successfully completed their composition cou...(read more)

166/1

Special Topics:
Broadway Musicals

MW 2-5

A survey of the Broadway musical from George Gershwin to Lin-Manuel Miranda, this course will investigate the musical's claim to being the quintessential American art form. Organized around texts and institutions which are explicitly engaged wi...(read more)

166/2

Special Topics:
Law and Literature in the United States

TWTh 4-6:30

This course will introduce students to law and literature studies by exploring the legal and literary culture of the United States from the Declaration of Independence (1776) to Citizens United v. Federal Elections Commission (2010). We will focus ...(read more)

166/3

Special Topics:
Queer Tourism

TWTh 12-2:30

The word "tourist" has sometimes been applied to those who try on identities to which they do not belong or to which they do not fully commit. This course focuses on twentieth century novels that (1) register queer culture exists, which b...(read more)

166/4

Special Topics:
Four Nobelists: Czeslaw Milosz, Derek Walcott, Toni Morrison, and Seamus Heaney

TWTh 1-3:30

In this course, we’ll explore the lives and works of Cz...(read more)

172/1

Literature and Psychology

TWTh 12-2

In this course, we will survey literatures of the self and their history from antiquity to the present, in its many genres and forms: the diary, the autobiography, the poem, the novel, the memoir, the case study, the graphic novel, and digital self...(read more)

180Z/1

Science Fiction

MW 9-12

This course presents the genre of speculative fiction and its historical commitment to imagining plausible and implausible alternatives to the present. It will begin by looking at the Golden Age of the science fiction short story, the 1950s and 60s...(read more)

39A/1

Freshman and Sophomore Seminar:
Reading Marx Now

W 2-5

Marx is being seriously and widely read again since the financial crisis of 2008, and Capital Vol. 1 in particular is considered his work most appropriate to our times. Reading Capital today, we’ll see why 20^th- a...(read more)

165/1

Special Topics:
Law and Literature in the United States

MW 12-1:30

This course will introduce students to law and literature studies by exploring the legal and literary culture of the United States from the Declaration of Independence (1776) to Citizens United v. Federal Elections Commission (2010). We wi...(read more)

166/1

Special Topics:
Writing as Social Practice

TTh 5-6:30

One of the ideas behind this course offering is that poetry and essays (life-writing, creative nonfiction, "essaying," etc.) have similar aims or field-marks—both are literary vehicles of exploration and documentation; both value ex...(read more)

166/3

Special Topics:
The Age of Crisis

TTh 3:30-5

(read more)

170/1

Literature and the Arts:
Opera and Literary Form

TTh 12:30-2

Opera and Literary Form

"An exotic and irrational entertainment" (Samuel Johnson). Invented i...(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)

172/1

Literature and Psychology

TTh 9:30-11

In this course, we will survey literatures of the self and their history from antiquity to the present. We will attend to the writing of the self in its many genres and forms: the diary, the autobiography, the poem, the novel, the memoir, the case ...(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)

180H/1

The Short Story

TTh 12:30-2

This course will be a survey of the short story from the 19th century to the present: its historical and cultural contexts, its formal and stylistic properties. We'll consider the short story's predecessors, the work of its major practition...(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)

165/2

Special Topics:
Enlightenment & Romance: Scotland in the 18th Century

MWF 10-11

Eighteenth-century Scotland was home both to the so-called Scottish Enlightenment, one of the advanced civil societies in the Atlantic world, and to the beginnings of the global movement of taste and feeling later to be called Romanticism. Here wer...(read more)

165/3

Special Topics:
On Lies, Lying, and Post-Truths--A Reading- and Writing-Intensive Investigation

W 3-6

Read a newspaper, listen to the news or a podcast, scan social media—lies are everywhere. The subject of much intellectual debate, social and political anxiety, and ethical and psychological consternation, lies are hard to grasp and capture, ...(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)

166/6

Special Topics:
Art of Writing: Grant Writing, Food Writing, Food Justice

Lectures MW 12-1 in 122 Barrows + one hour of discussion section per week in different locations (sec. 101: F 12-1; sec. 102: F 12-1)

This course will help students develop writing skills through intensive focus on the demands of two very different modes: popular and creative food writing (essay, poetry, travel, memoir, manifesto), and grant-writing. Reading and thinking together...(read more)

166/7

Special Topics:
Arthurian Romance

TTh 2-3:30

King Arthur and his Round Table together constitute one of the most enduring imaginative inventions in the European literary tradition. In the modern era, writers and artists have created Arthurian plays, films, poems, novels, cartoons, paintings, ...(read more)

172/1

Literature and Psychology:
Literature and Therapy

Lectures MW 1-2 in 2060 Valley LSB + one hour of discussion section per week in different locations (sec. 101: F 1-2; sec. 102: F 2-3; sec. 103: W 3-4; sec. 104: W 4-5; sec. 105: F 9-10; sec. 106: F 10-11)

The originator of the “talking cure,” Sigmund Freud, placed a great deal of faith in the capacities of literature: both to depict and figure psychic problematics for a reader, and to transform an author’s own neurotic condition in...(read more)

177/1

Literature and Philosophy:
Reading Capital

MW 10:30-12

Marx's Capital stands as one of the foundational texts of modern critical theory. Some acknowledge openly the debts owed to Marx's critique of political economy and of the capitalist mode of production; others consider th...(read more)

180A/1

Autobiography:
Disability Memoir

Lectures TTh 3:30-4:30 in 300 Wheeler + one hour of discussion section per week in different locations (sec. 101: F 12-1; sec. 102: F 2-3)

This course will examine autobiography as a literary genre. We will survey the history of the genre and consider such questions as: How is reading autobiography like/unlike reading fiction? How do the truth claims made by autobiographies shape read...(read more)

180H/1

The Short Story

TTh 11-12:30

This course will be a survey of the short story from the 19^th century to the present: its historical and cultural contexts, its formal and stylistic properties. We’ll consider the short story’s predecessors, the work of its m...(read more)

180T/1

Tragedy

MWF 12-1

An ancient (if not foundational) genre in the western literary tradition, tragedy is the one most closely linked with key religious and philosophical questions, due to its concern with catastrophic misfortune, suffering and fatality in human life. ...(read more)

180Z/1

Science Fiction

TTh 12:30-2

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 dystopias. W...(read more)

166/1

Special Topics:
Medieval Fantasy from Tolkien to Game of Thrones

MW 2-5

Writers in the 20th and 21st centuries have continually looked to the Middle Ages — or, more to the point, to their idea of the Middle Ages — when constructing epic narratives in fantastic worlds. In this course we’ll ask what it ...(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)

166/3

Special Topics:
The Broadway Musical

MW 2-5

A survey of the Broadway musical from Ira Gershwin to Lin Manuel-Miranda, this course will investigate the musical's claim to being the quintessential American art form. Organized around texts and institutions which are explicitly engaged with ...(read more)

180Z/1

Science Fiction:
A Survey of Science Fiction from E.T.A. Hoffman to N.K. Jemisin

TWTh 9:30-12

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

20/1

Modern British and American Literature:
The Handmaid's Tale in Adaptation

TTh 12:30-2

With the advent of the Trump presidency (2016-present), Margaret Atwood’s dystopian, feminist masterpiece, The Handmaid’s Tale, has gained new relevance. And with the popular and critical success of its Hulu TV series adaptatio...(read more)

165/1

Special Topics:
Utopian and (mostly) Dystopian Movies

W 5-8 PM (note slight change in time; ends at 8:00 rather than 8:30)

Most utopian and dystopian authors are more concerned with persuading readers of the merits of their ideas than with the "merely" literary qualities of their writing. Although utopian writing has sometimes made converts, inspiring readers...(read more)

165/2

Special Topics:
The Pleasures of Allegory

MWF 12-1

If you want to understand both how stories are put together and how we experience stories, allegory is not a bad place to start. Broadly speaking, an allegory is a story that demands to be read on more than one level. One version of this&mdash...(read more)

166/1

Special Topics:
Getting Global: Literature & Film of an Expanding & Unequal World

MWF 12-1

This is a course about literature and cinema in our increasingly global world. We will look at some of the most exciting pieces of fiction and film, most of them centered on the theme of travel and human relationships forged across continents.&nbsp...(read more)

166/2

Special Topics:
Literature in the Century of Film

MWF 1-2

This course examines various intersections between literature and visual media in the twentieth century, with a particular focus on texts concerned with film and its cultural influence. We will read novels, stories, poetry, and essays which not onl...(read more)

166/3

Special Topics:
Writing as Social Practice

MW 3-4:30

One of the ideas behind this course offering is that poetry and essays (life-writing, creative nonfiction, "essaying," etc.) have similar aims or field-marks—both are literary vehicles of exploration and documentation; both value ex...(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)

166/7

Special Topics:
Charles Dickens

TTh 2-3:30

Close readings of several of Charles Dickens's major works.

Grading will be based on two eight-page essays, on-time completion of all assigned reading, and attendance and participation in discussion.

Please purchase the indi...(read more)

166/8

Special Topics:
Green Thought in a Green Shade

TTh 2-3:30

The natural world and the non-urban environment have inspired writers and artists, especially in the 17th and 18th centuries, but they have also provoked intense critical d...(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)

166/11

Special Topics:
The Works of Vladimir Nabokov

TTh 11-12:30

We will study the work of Nabokov as a novelist on two continents over a period of nearly sixty years. The course will be structured (more or less) chronologically and divided between novels translated from Russian and written in English. After beg...(read more)

177/1

Literature and Philosophy

MWF 1-2

This class will be organized around two questions that have been of perennial concern to literary writers and philosophers: who are we? How should we live? We’ll read a wide range of texts that respond to these questions in different way...(read more)

180H/1

The Short Story

This course has been canceled (June 4, 2019).

165/1

Special Topics:
Global Tudors

This seminar challenges us to look back to a time before England's colonial period and consider how people of the 16th century began to perceive of themselves as part of a truly global world. The class will begin by thinking about what the conc...(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)

165/4

Special Topics:
The Art of Writing: The Visible Made Verbal

W 3-6

Audio Description is a set of practices that seeks to make visual media—the fine arts, theatrical performance, dance, film and video—accessible to people who are blind and visually impaired.  In theater and film, brief descriptions...(read more)

165/5

Special Topics:
Note: See English 165 section 6

On October 16 we canceled this section of English 165 because we ended up doubling the size of English 165 section 6 (on the same topic) instead. So if you are interested in this topic, please enroll in English 165 section 6.  Professors Danne...(read more)

165/6

Special Topics:
Nabokov and Naipaul

TTh 3:30-5

This is a team-taught course on two of the most controversial novelists of the 20th century and—some critics think—two of the greatest. Vladimir Nabokov (1899-1977) was a Russian emigre who wrote novels in both Russian and English,...(read more)

165/7

Special Topics:
The Materialist Epic

TTh 12:30-2

“We live our everyday lives surrounded by, immersed in, matter . . . Our existence depends from one moment to the next . . . on our own hazily understood bodily and cellular reactions and on pitiless cosmic motions, on the material artifacts ...(read more)

165/8

Special Topics:
American Humor

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

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 discussed, wi...(read more)

165/9

Special Topics:
The 1890s

Thurs. 5-8

What difference does a date make? What is it about the numerical end of a century that encourages feelings of apocalypse, degeneration, or renewal? This course will consider texts written in and around the 1890s, a decade characterized by its inten...(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)

166/2

Special Topics:
Marxism and Literature

MWF 2-3

In the early 1990s, the Marxist literary theorist Fredric Jameson responded to critics who were at once proclaiming the emergence of a capitalist “new world order” and asserting the death of Marxism.  Jameson wrote: “It does ...(read more)

166/4

Special Topics:
Poetry and Prose of Race and Social Class

TTh 2-3:30

One of the ideas behind this course offering is that poetry and essays (life-writing, creative nonfiction, "essaying," etc.) have similar aims or field-marks—both are literary vehicles of exploration and documentation; both value ex...(read more)

166/5

Special Topics:
Asian American Literature - World, Nation, Locality

MWF 1-2

This class 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 political origins of the phrase “Asian American” in the late 1960...(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)

166/7

Special Topics:
Anton Chekhov

MWF 3-4

Anton Chekhov’s (1860-1904) prominence in the English-speaking world is comparable only to Shakespeare’s place in Russian culture. This course is devoted to Chekhov’s fictional and dramatic writing, and to the lasting influence of...(read more)

172/1

Literature and Psychology:
Literatures of the Self

MW 9-10:30

In this course, we will survey literatures of the self and their history from antiquity to the present. We will attend to the writing of the self in its many genres and forms: the diary, the autobiography, the poem, the novel, the memoir, the case ...(read more)

166AC/1

Special Topics in American Cultures:
Race and Ethnicity in Classical Hollywood Cinema

TuWTh 12-2:30

An introduction to critical thinking about race and ethnicity, focused on films produced in Hollywood between the 1920s and 1960s and independent cinema from the 1980s that responds to these classical precedents. Themes include law and violence, ki...(read more)

165/1

Special Topics:
Oscar Wilde and the Nineteenth Century

MW 3-4:30

Oscar Wilde's jokes, and his pathos, can seem out of place in Victorian literature: they leap off the dusty page and into a present moment where their author seems to fit more happily. Without wishing to consign him back to that potentially hos...(read more)

165/2

Special Topics:
The English Department

MW 5-6:30

The English Department is one of the most curious developments in the history of human civilization. What do we study? The answer used to be, “literary texts of the English canon.” But then we questioned what belonged to the canon, what...(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)

165/4

Special Topics:
The Ecology of Utopia

TTh 2-3:30

Since long before Thomas More coined the catching term “Utopia” – meaning “no place” or “not-place” – to name his fiction of a perfect island commonwealth, the literature of non-existent worlds has be...(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)

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)

165/7

Special Topics:
Utopian and (mostly) Dystopian Movies

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

Most utopian and dystopian authors are more concerned with persuading readers of the merits of their ideas than with the "merely" literary qualities of their writing. Although utopian writing has sometimes made converts, inspiring readers...(read more)

166/2

Special Topics:
Alfred Hitchcock

Mon. 4:30-9:00 (incl. half-hour break)

This course will focus on the Hitchcock oeuvre from the early British through the American period, with emphasis on analysis of cinematic representation of crime, victimhood, and the investigation of guilt. Our discussions and critical readings wil...(read more)

166/3

Special Topics:
Journeys: British World-Building, c. 700-1700

TTh 11-12:30

"Britain, formerly known as Albion, is an island in the ocean, lying towards the north west at a considerable distance from the coasts of Germany, Gaul, and Spain, which together form the greater part of Europe." (Bede, Ecclesias...(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)

166/5

Special Topics

TTh 9:30-11

This section of English 166 has been canceled (7/5/18).

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)

172/1

Literature and Psychology:
Literatures of the Self

TTh 11-12:30

In this course, we will survey literatures of the self and their history from antiquity to the present. We will attend to the writing of the self in its many genres and forms: the diary, the autobiography, the poem, the novel, the memoir, the case ...(read more)

173/1

The Language and Literature of Films:
The Film Essay: James Baldwin, Roland Barthes, Susan Sontag

Lectures TTh 3:30-5 + film screenings Thurs. 5-8

This course offers an in-depth study of three of the most influential public intellectuals of the twentieth century: James Baldwin, Roland Barthes, and Susan Sontag. Working in the postwar period between France and the United States, and grappling ...(read more)

174/1

Literature and History:
Culture in the Age of Obama

MWF 12-1

This seminar explores the forms of culture that emerged, or experienced a renaissance, during the presidency of Barack Obama. Starting with Obama's own bildungsroman-like Dreams from My Father, we will then explore such forms as t...(read more)

175/1

Literature and Disability

TTh 3:30-5

We will examine the ways disability is represented in a variety of works of fiction and drama.  Sometimes disability is used as a metaphor or symbol of something else.  In other cases, texts explore disability as a lived experience. ...(read more)

180A/1

Autobiography:
Chicanx Autobiographies

TTh 11-12:30

The autobiography is a problematic narrative form. In telling their stories, Chicanx autobiographers reconstruct the past partly by relying on unreliable memory, creating the illusion of historical accuracy through the imagination. Chicanx autobiog...(read more)

180H/1

The Short Story

MWF 10-11

The lyf so short, the crafte so longe to lerne…

                              &nb...(read more)

152/1

Women Writers: Studies in Prose Fiction: Isak Dinesen

TTh 11-12:30

This course will examine the works of the Danish author Karen Blixen (1885-1962), who also wrote under the pen name of Isak Dinesen. Dinesen is often seen as a modern-day Scheherazade, making storytelling into a matter of life and death. She famous...(read more)

165/1

Special Topics:
H.P. Lovecraft in His Tradition

MW 3-4:30

--William Hope Hodgson, The House on the Borderland (Dover: 978-0486468792)

--D. Thin, ed., Shadows of Carcosa: Tales of Cosmic Horror (New York Book Review of Books Classics).

--H. P. Lovecraft, Tales...(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)

165/3

Special Topics:
Is It Useless To Revolt?

MW 9:30-11

“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 suspend judgment and listen to the voices of revolt, even as they seem entangled in a ...(read more)

165/4

Special Topics:
Neo-Slave Narratives

TTh 3:30-5

While this course will focus on neo-slave narratives, we will begin by briefly examining several slave narratives.  The course will explore the similarities and differences between the two groups, asking the following kinds of questions: how d...(read more)

165/5

Special Topics:
Incarcerations: The Literature of (Physical, Mental, Spiritual) Imprisonment

TTh 3:30-5

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 o...(read more)

166/1

Special Topics:
Comedy & Violence

MWF 2-3

What relation does comedy have to violence? Can humor be a gauge of political freedom? How does it resist violence or ally itself with it? In this class, we will consider various styles of humor—wit, buffoonery, satire, parody, nonsense, absu...(read more)

166/2

Special Topics:
Romantic Science

Note new time: TTh 2-3:30

Today we use the word “experimental” to designate both the most respected scientific method and the most outlandish works of art. This course on Romantic era literature and science explores a key phase of the hidden interrelation (and r...(read more)

166/3

Special Topics:
Classical & Renaissance Drama

TTh 3:30-5

In a poem for the first edition of Shakespeare’s collected plays in 1623, his fellow playwright Ben Jonson expressed a characteristic ambivalence about classical drama.  On the one hand, he praised it as the standard by which all subsequ...(read more)

166/4

Special Topics:
Marxism & Literature

TTh 3:30-5

For the past thirty years, it’s become a cliché that it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. Yet, ever since the 2008 financial crash, there’s been rising popular consciousness of capitalism&...(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)

166/6

Special Topics:
Speculative Fiction

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

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 dystopias. W...(read more)

170/1

Literature and the Arts:
Moving Through Loss; or, The Space and Stage of Mourning

Note new time: MW 5-6:30

“My suffering is inexpressible but all the same utterable, speakable. The very fact that

language affords me the word ‘intoler...(read more)

173/1

The Language and Literature of Films:
(Post)colonial Film

Lectures TTh 11-12:30 + film screenings W 6-9 PM

This course will screen and examine a series of films that focus on the nature and structure of Western colonialism and postcolonialism.  We will study the different forms of colonialism, as depicted from various perspectives, as well as the s...(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)

174/2

Literature and History:
History as Literature

TTh 3:30-5

Are the events of the world and human lives meaningful? And if they are, how do we discern the meaning?

History, as a form of narrative literature, seeks to answer these questions. In this class we will read a range of historical texts, w...(read more)

180A/1

Autobiography:
Disability Memoir

TTh 12:30-2

This course will examine autobiography as a literary genre. We will survey the history of the genre and consider such questions as: How is reading autobiography like/unlike reading fiction? How do the truth claims made by autobiographies shape read...(read more)

166/1

Special Topics:
Speculative Fictions, Possible Futures

TuWTh 4-6:30

This course will present the genre of speculative fiction and its historical commitment to imagining plausible and implausible alternatives to the present. We will begin by looking at the Golden Age of the science fiction short story, the 1950s and...(read more)

166/2

Special Topics:
Games of Thrones, Medieval to Modern

TuWTh 10-12

This course will show how Game of Thrones and A Song of Ice and Fire draw on a long literary-historical legacy, emphasizing the preoccupations that have made their way from medieval and Renaissance writers into mod...(read more)

173/1

The Language and Literature of Films:
Cinematic Futures, Literary Visions

MTuTh 2-4:30

This course will compare literary works of futurism—science fiction, utopian and fantastic literature—with cinematic adaptations of speculative fiction. Some of the thematic questions we will address: how does the contemporary shape bot...(read more)

176/1

Literature and Popular Culture:
The 1990s: A Decade About Nothing

TuWTh 9:30-12

The 1990s are sometimes understood as a period between major events: the fall of the Berlin Wall and the attacks on the World Trade Center; the initial phase of neoliberal economics (Reagan/Thatcher) and the mature phase (Bush/Bl...(read more)

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)

165/1

Special Topics:
Genres of Free Speech

MW 5-6:30

We endure a difficult relation to free speech. Most arguments on the topic, whether for or against, focus on the capacity of language to harm others, directly or indirectly, and therefore concern the scope and nature of necessary prohibitions of sp...(read more)

165/2

Special Topics:
Art of Writing

TTh 2-3:30

This seminar/workshop, co-taught by Lyn Hejinian and Daniel Benjamin, will be devoted to collaboratively composed writing in a range of genres, including poetry, short fiction, performance, and critical essays. Multiple examples of collaborations w...(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)

166/4

Special Topics:
Writing Poetry and Nonfiction, Writing as Social Practice

TTh 5-6:30

One of the ideas behind this course offering is that poetry and essays (life-writing, creative non-fiction, “essaying,” etc.) have similar aims or field-marks—both are literary vehicles of exploration and documentation; both value...(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)

173/1

The Language and Literature of Films:
The Film Essay: Cinema, the Minoritized Subject, and the Practice of Writing

TTh 3:30-5

Taking as a point of departure James Baldwin’s dazzling work of film criticism, The Devil Finds Work, this course introduces students to some of the best writing on film that describes the encounter with cinema—and with particu...(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)

180H/1

The Short Story:
The Short Story

MWF 2-3

The lyf so short, the crafte so longe to lerne…

                         &nbsp...(read more)

80K/1

Children's Literature

MWF 12-1

This course has two principle aims: (1) to provide an overview of the history of children’s literature in English; (2) to introduce students to the major generic, political, aesthetic, and philosophical questions such literature has posed. A...(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)

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)

165/2

Special Topics:
Incarcerations: The Literatures of Physical Confinement and Spiritual Liberation

TTh 3:30-5

This is a course primarily on the literature of incarceration variously defined and experienced across a range of control systems that attempt to stunt the entire human being. We will read prison narrative/poetry (George Jackson's prison lette...(read more)

166/1

Special Topics:
Marxism and Literature

MWF 1-2

For the past thirty years, it’s become a cliché that it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. Yet, ever since the 2008 financial crash, there’s been rising popular consciousness of capitalism...(read more)

166/2

Special Topics:
Studies in Literature and Environment (Shelter and Weather)

MWF 3-4

What makes environmental violence hard to represent and how can literature bear witness to the silence, slowness, and invisibility of ecological relations? Of what use is the problematic concept of “nature” in ordering our relations to...(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)

166/4

Special Topics:
Literature in the Century of Film

MW 5-6:30 PM

In this course, we will examine intersections between literature and visual media in the twentieth century, with a particular focus on texts concerned with film and its cultural effects. We will read novels, short stori...(read more)

166/5

Special Topics:
Modern Irish Literature

TTh 11-12:30

180A/1

Autobiography:
Disability Memoir

TTh 11-12:30

Autobiographies written by people with disabilities offer readers a glimpse into lives at the margins of mainstream culture, and thus can make disability seem less alien and frightening.  Disability rights activists, however, often criticize ...(read more)

180Z/1

Science Fiction

TTh 9:30-11

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 dystopias. ...(read more)

N173/1

The Language and Literature of Films:
The Hollywood Western, 1940-1963

M 2-5 & W 2-4

Regular attendance is required. Two seven-page essays and a final quiz. Viewing notes taken during films viewed on Mondays will be handed in on Wednesdays. The class will be a mix of lecture and discussion.

This class is open to UC Berkel...(read more)

C77/1

Introduction to Environmental Studies

TTh 12:30-2 + 1-1/2 hours of discussion section per week

This is a team-taught introduction to environmental studies. The team consists of a professor of environmental science (Gary Sposito), a professor of English (Robert Hass), and three graduate student instructors working in the field. The aim of th...(read more)

C136/1

Topics in American Studies

This class has been canceled.

165/1

Special Topics:
Telling Stories: The Power of Narrative in Academic Writing

MWF 1-2

This seminar is dedicated to the principle that because narrative is at the core of how we come to understand the world, narrative is also an especially powerful method of scholarly practice. We will study the art of storytelling as it is practice...(read more)

166/1

Special Topics:
Aesthetics and the Environment in the Eighteenth Century

MWF 12-1

Why do we take pleasure in contemplating the natural world? What sort of pleasure is this? The eighteenth century was preoccupied with this question, which abutted on others: What is beauty? Is it something we perceive directly, or do we experienc...(read more)

166/2

Special Topics:
Vladimir Nabokov

MWF 10-11

We will study the work of Nabokov as a novelist on two continents over a period of nearly sixty years. The course will be structured (more or less) chronologically and divided between novels translated from Russian and written in English. After be...(read more)

170/1

Literature and the Arts:
The Deaths and Lives of Saints

MWF 11-12

The paradox of Western sainthood is summed up by a phrase from Latin calendars: dies natalis, “birthday.” Marking a saint’s chief feast, the dies natalis celebrates the day of his or her death: death as birth wi...(read more)

170/2

Literature and the Arts:
Opera and Literary Form

TTh 3:30-5

Together with the novel, opera became one of the characteristic European art forms of the long nineteenth century. Attending to the hybrid status of opera as a dramatic as well as a musical form, the course will focus on a series of major musical-...(read more)

171/1

Literature and Sexual Identity:
Postcolonial Sex

MWF 3-4

This course will explore the intersection of theories of gender and sexuality and the postcolonial world. We will consider how gender and nation are shaped and represented in literature and film. Why are nations routinely imagined as women, a...(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)

175/1

Literature and Disability

TTh 9:30-11

We will examine the ways disability is represented in a variety of works of fiction and drama.  Assignments will include two short (5-8 page) critical essays, a group performance project and a take-home final examination.  (This is a cor...(read more)

180H/1

The Short Story

MWF 12-1

The lyf so short, the crafte so longe to lerne…

                          &...(read more)

20/1

Modern British and American Literature:
Graphic Poetics

TTh 3:30-5

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)

165/1

Special Topics:
Arthurian Medievalisms

MW 9-10:30

This course will focus on medievalism, i.e., the representation and conceptualization of the Middle Ages, in order to analyze how ideas about the past are used in literature and the arts, in both "high" and popular culture. The point of ...(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)

165/3

Special Topics:
Oscar Wilde and the Nineteenth Century

MW 4-5:30

Oscar Wilde's jokes, and his pathos, can seem out of place in Victorian literature: they leap off the dusty page and into a present moment where their author seems to fit more happily. Without wishing to consign him back to that potentially ho...(read more)

165/4

Special Topics: Representing Non-Human Life in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Britain

TTh 12:30-2

We will explore techniques developed by scientists, theologians, and poets to represent other life forms. Contexts we’ll investigate include encounters with new-world flora and fauna, the invention of the microscope and the discovery of the ...(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)

165/6

Special Topics:
Queer Lifestyles in Literature and Theory

TTh 3:30-5

165/7

Special Topics:
Later 17th-Century Nonfictional Prose

TTh 6-7:30 P.M.

Reading, discussing, and writing about British prose of the later 17th century. Among the genres to be considered will be representative samples of the “character” (of places as well as human types); the essay (controversial as well as...(read more)

165/8

Special Topics:
Arts of Writing: Academic Writing, Grant Writing, Food Writing

TTh 11-12:30

This course for juniors and seniors will help students develop writing skills through intensive focus on the demands of three very different modes: academic argument, popular and creative food writing (essay, poetry, travel, memoir, manifesto), an...(read more)

165/9

Special Topics:
Ovid and the English Renaissance

TTh 3:30-5

Her bosom was wrapped in smooth thin bark; her slender arms were changed to branches and her hair to leaves; her feet but now so swift were anchored fast in numb stiff roots; her face and head became the crown of a green tree. -- Ovid, Metamor...(read more)

166/2

Special Topics:
Elizabethan Renaissance: Art, Culture, and Visuality

MW 4-5:30 + discussion sections

This course has two goals: to explore visual culture and the role of visuality in renaissance England, and to develop research skills.

Elizabeth I's long reign saw a remarkable flowering of the arts. Her unique position as a female mona...(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)

173/1

The Language and Literature of Films:
Hidden Hitchcock

MW 11-12:30 + film screenings Thursdays 7-10 P.M.

Few film styles have more successfully courted mass-audience understanding and approval than Hitchcock’s.  In the overstated lucidity of his narrative communication, nothing deserves our attention that his camera doesn’t go out of...(read more)

177/1

Literature and Philosophy

TTh 2-3:30

This class will be organized around three questions that have been of perennial concern to literary writers and philosophers: who are we? What can we know? How should we live? We’ll read a wide range of texts that respond to these questions ...(read more)

180A/1

Autobiography:
Disability Memoir

TTh 11-12:30

This course will examine autobiography as a literary genre. We will survey the history of the genre and consider such questions as: How is reading autobiography like/unlike reading fiction? How do the truth claims made by autobiographies shape rea...(read more)

180Z/1

Science Fiction

This course has been canceled.

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)

N173/1

The Language and Literature Films: The Hollywood Western

M 2-5 & W 2-4

Regular attendance is required. Two seven-page essays and a final quiz. Viewing notes taken during films viewed on Mondays will be handed in on Wednesdays. The class will be a mix of lecture and discussion.

This class is open to UC students...(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 dystopi...(read more)

C77/1

Introduction to Environmental Studies

TTh 12:30-2 + 1-1/2 hours of discussion section per week

This is a team-taught introduction to environmental studies. The team consists of a professor of environmental science (Gary Sposito), a professor of English (Robert Hass), and three graduate student instructors working in the field. The aim of th...(read more)

C107/1

The Bible as Literature

MW 3-4; discussion sections F 3-4

We will read a selection of biblical texts as literature.  That is, we will read the Bible in many ways, but not as divine revelation.  We will take up traditional literary questions of form, style, and structure, but we will also learn ...(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)

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)

165/2

Special Topics

This section of English 165 has been canceled.

165/3

Special Topics

This section of English 165 has been canceled.

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)

165/6

Special Topics

This class has been postponed till Spring 2016.

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)

165/8

Special Topics:
Modern Medievalism: A Study of Medieval Poetry and Modern Fantasy

TTh 9:30-11

The medieval period is often swept under broad descriptors, like the "Dark Ages," and with these descriptors come equally vague notions of medieval society. One might, for example, imagine medieval society enveloped by religious hysteria...(read more)

165AC/1

Special Topics in American Cultures

This course has been canceled.

166/1

Special Topics:
Epistles: The Letter in Life and Literature

MWF 12-1

In this course, we will explore one of the most intimate, versatile, and surprising of literary forms: (read more)

166/2

Special Topics:
Where the Wild Things Are: Empire and Travel Writing

MWF 11-12

This course journeys to the far-flung places where wild things roam. Our itinerary takes us through novels, travel narratives, journalism, and online sources that depict fantastical lands populated by wild beasts, "savage" peoples, and s...(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)

176/1

Literature and Popular Culture

This course has been canceled.

80K/1

Children's Literature

TTh 12:30-2

This course has two principal aims: (1) to provide an overview of the history of children's literature in English from the eighteenth century to the present; (2) to introduce students to the major generic, political, and aesthetic questions su...(read more)

165/1

Special Topics:
American Modernism

TTh 2-3:30

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 range of responses to such event...(read more)

165/2

Special Topics:
Fathers and Sons

TTh 2-3:30

We will explore the burdens and blessings, affections and alienation of the father-son relationship through the novels, memoirs, autobiographies, and a play by American, British, and Russian writers.

Their works take us to how sons look bac...(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)

166/2

Special Topics:
Literature in the Century of Film

TTh 9:30-11

In this course, we will examine intersections between literature and visual media in the twentieth century, with a particular focus on texts that are concerned with film and its cultural effects. We will read novels, short stories, poetry, and ess...(read more)

166/3

Special Topics:
The Works of Vladimir Nabokov

TTh 9:30-11

We will study the work of Nabokov as a novelist on two continents over a period of nearly sixty years. The course will be structured (more or less) chronologically and divided between novels translated from Russian and written in English. Aft...(read more)

176/1

Literature and Popular Culture

This class has been canceled.

180A/1

Autobiography:
Disability Memoir

TTh 3:30-5

Autobiographies written by people with disabilities offer readers a glimpse into lives at the margins of mainstream culture, and thus can make disability seem less alien and frightening.  Disability rights activists however, often criticize t...(read more)

180H/1

The Short Story

TTh 3:30-5

The lyf so short, the crafte so longe to lerne…

                          &...(read more)

180Z/1

Science Fiction

TTh 12:30-2

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 dystopias. While...(read more)

N173/1

The Language and Literature Films:
The Hollywood Western

M 2-5 & W 2-4

Regular attendance is required. Two seven-page essays and a final quiz. Viewing notes taken during films viewed on Mondays will be handed in on Wednesdays. The class will be a mix of lecture and discussion.

This class is open to UC students...(read more)

N180Z/1

Science Fiction

MTTh 10-12

(read more)

C77/1

Introduction to Environmental Studies

TTh 12:30-2 + 1-1/2 hours of discusssion section per week

This is a team-taught introduction to environmental studies. The team consists of a professor of environmental science (Gary Sposito), a professor of English (Robert Hass), and three graduate student instructors working in the field. The aim of th...(read more)

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)

165/1

Special Topics:
Critical Influences in Contemporary Culture

TTh 9:30-11

165/2

Special Topics:
Freedom and the University: The 1960s and Its Afterlives

TTh 11-12:30

The sixties represent a period in which the university became for the first time a central locus of struggles for freedom—for civil rights, Black Power, Third World self-determination, and women’s and gay liberation, and a...(read more)

165/3

Special Topics:
Greek Tragedy in Translation

TTh 12:30-2

The lectures, class discussions, readings, and writing assignments are intended to develop students' ability to analyze, understand, and evaluate a number of important ancient texts. The class will examine the deep implications of these early ...(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)

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)

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)

166/4

Special Topics:
Global Cities

TTh 9:30-11

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 otherwi...(read more)

175/1

Literature and Disability

MW 4-5:30

We will examine the ways disability is represented in a variety of works of fiction and drama.  Assignments will include two short (5-8 page) critical essays, a group presentation project, and a take-home final examination.  (This is a c...(read more)

20/1

Modern British and American Literature:
Music and Literary Modernism

TTh 3:30-5

“All art,” wrote English critic Walter Pater in 1877, “constantly aspires to the condition of music.” In this course, we will launch our own investigation into music’s influence on British and American modernist ...(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)

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)

180A/1

Autobiography:
Disability Memoir

TTh 3:30-5

Autobiographies written by people with disabilities offer readers a glimpse into lives at the margins of mainstream culture, and thus can make disability seem less alien and frightening.  Disability rights activists, however, often criticize ...(read more)

180H/1

Short Story

MW 4-5:30

The lyf so short, the crafte so longe to lerne…

                          &nb...(read more)

N173/1

The Language and Literature of Films:
The Hollywood Western

M 2-5 & W 2-4

Regular attendance is required. Two seven-page essays and a final quiz. Viewing notes taken during films viewed on Mondays will be handed in on Wednesdays. The class will be a mix of lecture and discussion.

This course will be taught in...(read more)

N180Z/1

Science Fiction:
Speculative Fiction and Dystopias

MTuTh 10-12

This cou...(read more)

C77/1

Introduction to Environmental Studies

TTh 12:30-2 + 1-1/2 hours of discussion section per week

This is a team-taught introduction to environmental studies. The team consists of a professor of environmental science, a professor of English, and three graduate student instructors woking in the field. The aim of the course is to give students t...(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)

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)

166/2

Special Topics:
Engaging the Play--Being the Player

TTh 12:30-2

This course will explore inventive ways of engaging the theater text.

Students will read from a selection of plays and be expected to give presentations analyzing theme, story, as well as point of view of the playwright. This will be follow...(read more)

166/1

Special Topics:
Literature and Science from the Romantics to the Present

MWF 1-2

This course offers an introduction to questions and problems in the study of literature and science, with special attention to Romantic science and its afterlife. Romanticism has come to name both a historical moment (sometimes called an “ag...(read more)

175/1

Literature and Disability

MW 4-5:30

We will examine the ways disability is represented in a variety of works of fiction and drama.  Assignments will include two short (5-8 page) critical essays, a group performance project and a take-home final examination.  (This is a cor...(read more)

165/1

Special Topics:
Modern Latin American Fiction

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 six great masters of Latin American fiction (in English translations): Jorge...(read more)

166/1

Special Topics:
African American Literature from Reconstruction to Renaissance

TTh 9:30-11

This course offers an overview of African American literature from Reconstruction through the New Negro (or Harlem) Renaissance. Particular attention will be paid to questions of history, memory, and changing notions of modernity.

166/2

Special Topics:
Readings for Fiction Writers

TTh 12:30-2

This course will focus on each novelist's invention of, or critique of, national identity myths in a time of national crisis.  Students will explore the intimate connection between choice of narrative strategy and construction of meaning....(read more)

166/3

Special Topics:
Infrastructuralism: Reading Setting in Literature and Film

TTh 3:30-5

In a film essay on the way movies depict Los Angeles, Thom Andersen raises a question that will form the basis for this course: “If we can appreciate documentaries for their dramatic qualities, perhaps we can appreciate fiction films for the...(read more)

N166 /1

Special Topics:
Freud, Marx, Nietzsche

TTh 3:30-5

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, ...(read more)

C77/1

Introduction to Environmental Studies

TTh 12:30-2 + 1-1/2 hours of discussion section per week

This is a team-taught introduction to environmental studies. The team consists of a professor of environmental science, a professor of English, and three graduate student instructors woking in the field. The aim of the course is to give students t...(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)

165/2

Special Topics:
The Elizabethan Renaissance

TTh 3:30-5 + one hour of disc. sec. (sec. 201: W 12-1, 2070 Valley LSB; sec. 202: W 9-10, 2066 Valley LSB)

This course has two goals: to explore visual culture and the role of visuality in renaissance England, and to develop research skills. Elizabeth I's long reign saw a remarkable flowering of the arts. Her unique position as a female monarch sur...(read more)

166/1

Special Topics:
18th-Century British Travel Writing

TTh 11-12:30

This course is based on the idea that if there is one genre in which ideas of identity--ideas of how one's own self and culture are related to other selves and other cultures--are systematically negotiated, then this must be the hybrid genre o...(read more)

166/2

Special Topics:
Specters of the Atlantic

TTh 12:30-2

The large scale transportation of Africans to the Americas is a signal fact of modernity in the West. The trouble is that we both do and do not know this. One of the most salient, confounding aspects of life in the Caribbean and the United States,...(read more)

166/3

Special Topics:
Engaging the Play: Being the Player

TTh 2-3:30

The course will explore inventive ways of engaging the theater text.

Students will read from a selection of plays and be expected to give presentations analyzing theme, story, as well as point of view of the playwright. This will be followe...(read more)

166/4

Special Topics:
Hitchcock's Secret Style

MW 2-3:30 + films Thurs. 6-9 P.M.

It is the claim of “Hitchcock’s Secret Style” that the work of this famous filmmaker, viewed all over the world and analyzed ad infinitum, has only barely begun to be looked at.  DVD technology, by facilitating a closer atte...(read more)

175/1

Literature and Disability

MW 4-5:30

We will examine the ways disability is depicted in a diverse range of texts.  Sometimes disability is used as a metaphor or symbol of something else.  In other cases, texts explore disability as a lived experience.  We will analyze ...(read more)

180H/1

Short Story

TTh 2-3:30

“The lyf so short, the crafte so longe to lerne…”

                            &nb...(read more)

190/9

Research Seminar:
The Urban Postcolonial

TTh 9:30-11

For reasons to do with some of its most canonical texts (Achebe’s Things Fall Apart being the most proffered example), postcolonial literature is often thought to present a conflict between “tradition” and “moderni...(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)

C107/1

The English Bible as Literature

TTh 9:30-11

We will read a selection of biblical texts as literature.  That is, we will read these texts in many ways, but not as divine revelation.  We will take up traditional literary questions of form, style, and structure, but we will also lear...(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)

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)

165/4

Special Topics:
Self Creation--Confession, Memoir, Autobiography

M 3-6

In confession we create the self. Confession is premised on truth - ultimate truth, the truth that exposes everyday truth as pretense, pose and mendacity. To create a confession is to create a new self: a self cleansed, reborn, redeemed. To create...(read more)

166/1

Special Topics:
Specters of the Atlantic

This section of English 166 has been canceled.

166/2

Special Topics:
Narrating the Nation

TTh 12:30-2

This course will focus on each novelist’s invention of, or critique of, national identity myths in a time of national crisis. Students will explore the intimate connection between choice of narrative strategy and construction of meaning.

171/1

Literature and Sexual Identity:
Sex & Race in Postcolonial London

This course has been canceled.

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)

180A/1

Autobiography:
Disability Memoir

TTh 2-3:30

Autobiographies written by people with disabilities offer readers a glimpse into lives at the margins of mainstream culture, and thus can make disability seem less alien and frightening.  Disability rights activists, however, often criticize ...(read more)

180Z/1

Science Fiction:
Speculative Fiction and Dystopias

MWF 12-1

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 dy...(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)

203/2

Graduate Readings:
Struggling With Consolation--Reading Boethius in Anglo-Saxon England

TTh 9:30-11

This course has a double aim: to explore the reception of Boethius’s De consolatione Philosophiae in Anglo-Saxon England and to do so by engaging one of the remarkable achievements of Anglo-Saxon translation, the Old English version...(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)

N173/1

The Language and Literature of Films:
The Film Western

M 2-5 & W 2-4

An exploration of the durability and the versatility of this literary genre. We will watch a film each week, and read four novels.

Two six-page essays, a final quiz, and regular attendance will be required.

This course will be ta...(read more)

C77/1

Introduction to Environmental Studies

TTh 12:30-2 + 1-1/2 hours of discussion section per week

This is a team-taught introduction to environmental studies. The team consists of a professor of environmental science, a professor of English, and three graduate student instructors working in the field. The aim of the course is to give students ...(read more)

C136/1

Topics in American Studies:
Black Reconstruction

MWF 2-3

“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)

165/1

Special Topics:
(note new topic) Religion and Poetry in the Renaissance

TTh 11-12:30

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 do a case study of sixteenth and seventeenth cent...(read more)

166/1

Special Topics:
Engaging the Play: Being the Player

TTh 2-3:30

The course will explore inventive ways of engaging the theater text.

Students will read from a selection of plays and be expected to give presentations analyzing theme, story, as well as point of view of the playwright. This will be followe...(read more)

166/2

Special Topics:
Race and Cultures of Mobility in American Literature

MWF 1-2

This course examines how nineteenth- and twentieth-century U.S. writers imagined the connections between race, mobility, and national identity. Movement in American literature is often understood to betoken freedom, exploration, and escape--whethe...(read more)

175/1

Literature and Disability:
Representations of Disability in Literature

MWF 3-4

We will examine the ways disability is represented in a variety of works of fiction and drama. Writing assignments will include two short (5-8 page) critical essays and a take-home final examination. (This is a core course for the Disability Studi...(read more)

180H/1

Short Story

MW 4-5:30

“The lyf so short, the crafte so longe to lerne…”

-- Chaucer

This course will investigate how authors craft stories, so that both non-writers and writers may gain a new perspective on reading stor...(read more)

80K/1

Children's Literature

TTh 2-3:30

Children's Literature is a complex subject of intersecting concerns. Ideas about childhood and about what is good or bad for children rub up against commercial interests and the interests of educators and parents, not to mention those of the (...(read more)

C136/1

Topics in American Studies:
The Progressive Era

MWF 2-3

We will look at a number of books, films, etc. from or about the U.S. in the early 20th century, roughly 1890-1916. Modern United States begins to be formed definitively in this period, with important developments in the economy (large corporation...(read more)

152/1

Women Writers:
Early American Women Writers

TTh 2-3:30

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 would fu...(read more)

166/1

Special Topics:
Scotland and Romanticism

TTh 11-12:30

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 for cul...(read more)

170/1

Literature and the Arts:
Medievalism and Art

MWF 11-12

Loved, hated, imitated, and mocked (sometimes by the same people), the medieval-inspired style of the Gothic Revival was inescapable in Britain and America during the nineteenth century, and its legacy is still visible today. In this class, we wil...(read more)

173/1

The Language and Literature of Films:
Film Noir

TTh 5:30-7 + films Thurs. 7-10 p.m.

We will examine film noir's influence on neo-noir and its relationship to "classical" Hollywood cinema, as well as its history, theory and generic markers, while analyzing in detail the major films in this area. The course will also ...(read more)

175/1

Literature and Disability

TTh 3:30-5

Rather than focus simply on literary representations of disability, in this course we will try to think about the concept of literature via the category of disability. We are told that "poems make nothing happen" (Auden); for speech-act ...(read more)

180A/1

Autobiography:
Disability Memoir

TTh 11-12:30

Autobiographies written by people with disabilities offer readers a glimpse into lives at the margins of mainstream culture, and thus can make disability seem less alien and frightening. Disability rights activists, however, often criticize these ...(read more)

180Z/1

Science Fiction

TTh 9:30-11

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 dystopi...(read more)

N166/1

Special Topics:
A Critical Approach to Children's Literature

MW 12-2P

With a jump-start from the 19th century with Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, we will focus on books written for and/or read by children in the 20th and 21st centuries. Using a variety of critical techniques we will examine a range o...(read more)

C77/1

Introduction to Environmental Studies

TTh 12:30-2 + 1 - 1/2 hours discussion section per week

This is a team-taught introduction to environmental studies. The team consists of a professor of environmental science, a professor of English, and three graduate student instructors working in the field. The aim of the course is to give students t...(read more)

80K/1

Children’s Literature

MWF 2-3

Children's Literature is a complex subject of intersecting concerns. Ideas about childhood and about what is good or bad for children rub up against commercial interests and the interests of educators and parents, not to mention those of the (s...(read more)

C136/1

Topics in American Studies:
Literature and History of Mexican American Farm Workers

TTh 11-12:30

In this course we will study the social movements, political aspirations, and literary expressions of Mexican American farm workers in the U.S. during the twentieth century, focusing on the period from 1930 to 1990. The methodological approach will...(read more)

166/1

Special Topics:
Postwar British Drama

MWF 3-4

A survey of the post-war renaissance of British dramatic writing, concentrating on the decades after the tumultuous year of 1956, when the Suez Crisis abroad and the emergence of the 'Angry Young Men' at home demonstrated the extent to which both c...(read more)

166/2

Special Topics:
Vladimir Nabokov

TTh 9:30-11

We will study the work of Nabokov as a novelist on two continents over a period of nearly sixty years. The course will be structured (more or less) chronologically and evenly divided between novels translated from Russian and written in English. ...(read more)

166/3

Special Topics:
Engaging the Play—Being the Player

TTh 12:30-2

The course will explore inventive ways of engaging the theater text.

Students will read from a selection of plays and be expected to give presentations analyzing theme, story, as well as intention of playwright. This will be followed with ...(read more)

174/1

Literature and History

TTh 12:30-2

This course will interrogate the binary implied in its rubric--the distinction between literature and history--by considering the ways in which literary remains constitute the pieces with which we may begin to puzzle out a fully embodied past and ...(read more)

152/1

Women Writers

MWF 11-12

165/1

Special Topics:
Short Story Modern Masters: Joyce, Hemingway, Kafka, Borges

MWF 1-2

165/2

Special Topics:
Narrating Absence: Not-Knowing in Literary Analysis

MW 4-5:30

166/1

Special Topics:
Studies in Literature and Environment

MWF 10-11

What does literature have to teach us about contemporary debates on genetic engineering, food politics, toxic pollution, global warming, e-waste, species extinction and the “death of the planetÃ&...(read more)

166/2

Special Topics:
American Regionalism

MWF 1-2

166/3

Special Topics:
The Essay: Traditions and the Individual Talent

TTh 11-12:30

166/4

Special Topics:
Literary and Cinematic Cities

TTh 2-3:30

173/1

The Language and Literature of Films:
Film Noir

TTh 5:30-7 Films: Thurs. 7-10 pm

180H/1

Short Story

MW 4-5:30

180Z/1

Science Fiction:
Speculative Fiction and Dystopias

MWF 11-12

N166/1

Special Topics:
The Beat Generation

TTh 2-4

This course will examine major works (mostly the early stuff) by four central figures of the Beat Generation-- Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, W.S. Burroughs, and Gary Snyder.  First we'll survey the literary/historical context in which thes...(read more)

C77/1

Introduction to Environmental Studies

TTh 12:30-2 + 1-1/2 hours of discussion per week

80K/1

Children's Literature

MWF 12-1

C107/1

English Bible as Literature

MWF 2-3

C136/1

Topics in American Studies: The Literature and History of Mexican American Farm Workers

TTh 12:30-2

In this course we will study the social movements, political aspirations and cultural expressions of Mexican farm workers in the U.S. during the twentieth century, focusing on the period from 1930-1980. The methodological approach will be interdis...(read more)

C136/2

Topics in American Studies: A Gallery of Wonders, Curiosities, Spectacles, Cynics, and Suckers: Consumer Culture in Post-Civil War America

MW 4-5:30

165/1

Special Topics: Scotland and Romanticism

TTh 11-12:30

165/2

Special Topics: American Postmodernism--Olson and the Black Mountain School

TTh 12:30-2

166/1

Special Topics: The Global South: Faulkner, Garcia Marquez, Morrison, and Cisneros 


TTh 11-12:30

166/2

Special Topics: Readings for Fiction Writers

TTh 3:30-5

166/3

Special Topics: British Cinema

MW 4-5:30 + films Tues. 6-9 P.M. in 300 Wheeler

173/1

The Language and Literature of Films: Meta-Cinema and the Hollywood Novel

TTh 3:30-5

175/1

Literature and Disability

TTh 3:30-5

180R/1

The Romance

TTh 9:30-11

80K/1

Children's Literature

TTh 11-12:30

165/1

Special Topics:
Poetry Writing in an Ecological Field of Composition

MWF 2-3

166/1

Special Topics:
Readings for Writers/Narrating the Nation

TTh 3:30-5

173/1

The Language and Literature of Films:
Alfred Hitchcock

MW 10:30-12 + Film Screenings Th 5-8 P.M. in 123 Wheeler

175/1

Literature and Disability

MW 12-1:30

180H/1

The Short Story

MW 4-5:30

C77/1

Introduction to Environmental Studies:
Introduction to Environmental Studies

Lectures TTh 12:30-2, plus one and a half hours of discussion section per week

C136/1

Topics In American Studies:
American Literature and the City

Lectures TTh 12:30-2 in 390 Hearst Mining, plus one hour of discussion section per week

165/1

Special Topics:
Greek Drama in Translation

TTh 9:30-11

166/1

Special Topics:
The Works of Vladimir Nabokov

MWF 10-11

166/2

Special Topics:
The Global South: William Faulkner, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Toni Morrison, & Sandra Cisneros

MWF 11-12

166/3

Special Topics:
Literature in the Century of Film

TTh 9:30-11

170/1

Literature:
Literature and the Arts

MWF 11-12

180A/1

Literature:
Autobiography: Disability Memoir

TTh 11-12:30

80K/1

Freshman and Sophomore Studies:
Children�s Literature

TTh 9:30-11

C136/1

Topics In American Studies:
The U.S. in the Progressive Era, 1890-1917

MWF 2-3

C77/1

Lower Division Coursework:
Introduction to Environmental Studies

TTh 12:30-2, plus one and a half hours of discussion section per week

95/1

Sophomore Seminar:
Other Voices: Multicultural Literary Perspectives

M 12-1, plus one our of discussion section per week (W 12-1)

C107/1

Junior Coursework:
The Bible as Literature

MWF 1-2

C136/1

Junior Coursework:
Topics in American Studies: The Era of the Child--The U.S. 1865-1900

TTh 9:30-11

165/1

Special Topics:
Hollywood Talkies to World War II

MW 2-3:30, plus film screenings Mondays 3:30-6:30

166/1

Special Topics:
Readings for Writers/Narrating the Nation

TTh 11-12:30

166/2

Special Topics:
Hitchcock's Skin (or, A Theory of the Thriller)

MW 12:30-2, plus film screenings Tuesdays 6-9 P.M

175/1

Upper Division Coursework:
Literature and Disability

MWF 10-11

C136/1

Upper Division Coursework:
Topics in American Studies: The U.S. in the Progressive Era, 1890-1917

MWF 10-11

165/1

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

TTh 2-3:30

166/1

Special Topics:
Race and Performance in the 20th-Century U.S.

MWF 11-12

166/2

Special Topics:
The 20th-Century Epic in Prose

TTh 9:30-11

170/1

Upper Division Coursework:
Literature and the Arts

MWF 1-2

95/1

Lower Division Coursework:
Other Voices: Multicultural Literary Perspectives

M 12-1, plus one our of discussion section per week (W 12-1)

166/1

Special Topics:
Theorizing Children's Literature

TTh 9:30-11

166/2

Special Topics:
Readings for Writers

TTh 11-12:30

166/3

Special Topics:
1922

TTh 3:30-5

166/4

Special Topics:
Vladimir Nabokov

MWF 10-11

166/5

Special Topics:
Post-War Italian Cinema (1945-70)

MW 3:30-5 in 300 Wheeler, plus film screenings Tues. 6-9 P.M. (also in 300 Wheeler)

171/1

Upper Division Coursework:
Literature and Sexual Identity

TTh 12:30-2

175/1

Upper Division Coursework:
Literature and Disability

TTh 12:30-2

180H/1

Upper Division Coursework:
The Short Story

MWF 3-4

Class description to come.

C77/1

Lower Division Coursework:
Introduction to Environmental Studies

TTh 12:30-2 in 159 Mulford, plus 1_ hours of discussion section per week

C136/1

Upper Division Coursework:
Topics in American Studies: The 1950's

TTh 2-3:30

166/1

Special Topics:
Race and Performance in the 20th-Century U.S.

TTh 11-12:30

176/1

Upper Division Coursework:
"Literature and Popular Culture: The Western in Fiction and Film

Hutson, Richard "

180A/1

Upper Division Coursework:
Disability Autobiography