Sketch of Wheeler Hall by Wendy Xin
Edward Hopper, Nighthawks (1942)
ENG R1B Anytown, USA
Session A | Miguel Samano
In an essay entitled “The Great American Novel” (1925), Edith Wharton denounced her fellow novelists for privileging “the common mean of American life anywhere” over those “nicely shaded degrees” that provide its towns, suburbs, and cities their distinctive local color. Yet if “a typical city, strictly speaking, does not exist,” as the sociologists Robert and Helen Lynd noted in their influential (1929) Middletown study, then why has the fiction of typicality animated American writers and social scientists from the early twentieth century to our present? Conversely, why have perceived threats to the indistinctness of American places generated so much animus against those who due to their race, national origin, or creed feel somehow out-of-place? In this R1B course, we’ll turn to literary fiction, creative nonfiction, cultural criticism, and sociological studies to hone our own sense of the typicality of those various settings that Henry James once described as “the American scene.” We’ll begin our journey together with the small town and it with the city; in transit between the two, we’ll spend time considering that habitat which a majority of Americans call home: the suburbs. In addition to those by Wharton, James, and the Lynds, texts may include those by Sherwood Anderson, Louis Worth, St. Clair Drake, Toshio Mori, Herbert Gans, John Updike, Toni Morrison, Oscar Casares, Teju Cole, and Rebecca Solnit, among other Americans for whom place has provided a crucial background for social thought and literary experiment.
ENG 31AC Race and Roots in Oakland
Session A | John Alba Cutler
Oaktown. The Town. Bump City. This course examines literature and film set in Oakland, a city that has become emblematic of racial struggle in postwar America. As the home of the Black Panther Party, twentieth-century Oakland became a symbol of urban Black power, but its complicated history as the home to multiple white, Native American, Latino/a/x, and Asian/American communities is less well known. This course examines how Oakland literature and film invite us to see these communities as fully entangled, even (perhaps especially) where the differences and frictions among them have proven most painful. We will pay special attention to how literature and film not only reflect but also create racial realities in a city that has adopted the roots of the oak tree as a symbol of belonging. Texts include Tommy Orange, There There; Leila Mottley, Nightcrawling; Michael Chabon, Telegraph Avenue; and Lucha Corpi, Cactus Blood. Films include Fruitvale Station, Blindspotting, East Side Sushi, and We Are the Radical Monarchs.
Satisfies Literatures in English major and American Cultures requirement.
ENG 117S Shakespeare
Session A | David Marno
In film, the most private thoughts and feelings of a character are often conveyed through close-ups that magnify the smallest facial gesture. On the stage, where the audience is always kept at a distance from the actors, language has to do comparable work. This course focuses on how Shakespeare uses dramatic language to make the movements of thought, will, or desire perceptible to an audience.
Reading plays and poetry from across Shakespeare’s career, we will attend closely to what language does on the stage. When does speech convey intention directly and transparently? How can words suggest meanings that run counter to what they seem to say? And when does language cease to function primarily as a vehicle for expression at all, becoming instead a shared medium that shapes what can be thought and felt, rather than simply expressing what a speaker already has in mind?
Readings will range across Shakespeare’s career and may include Titus Andronicus, Richard III, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Troilus and Cressida, Hamlet, King Lear, The Tempest, Cymbeline, Henry VIII, and the sonnets.
The course combines lecture and discussion, with sustained attention to dramatic form, language, and performance. Assessment will be based on two essays, a final exam, and course participation, including required bCourses posts. All texts will be made available on bCourses.
Satisfies Shakespeare major requirement.
ENG 125A What Makes Austen Work
Session A | Kent Puckett
In this course we’ll read five of the six novels Jane Austen published between 1811 and 1818: Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park, Emma, and Persuasion. We’ll focus on Austen’s importance to both the history and the theory of the novel. Looking at these novels alongside critical works by Georg Lukács, Käte Hamburger, E.M. Forster, Virginia Woolf, Mikhail Bakhtin, Gérard Genette, Leo Bersani, D.A. Miller, and others, we’ll consider what Austen’s fiction makes of some aspects fundamental to the novel: narration, description, plot, character, voice, and style. We’ll consider, in other words, what makes Austen work.
Peter Hobday as Carl in a scene from Sarah Kane’s “Cleansed” at the National Theater in London. Photo Credit: Stephen Cummiskey
ENG 166 How to Put on a Play
Session A | Joshua Gang
Plays aren't generally meant to be read. They're meant to be *realized*--staged, performed, experienced. This course will survey European theater, from ancient Greece through the present day, by looking at the practical and intellectual problems raised by bringing a play from the page to the stage—that is, through the problems of dramaturgy. Dramatic texts will likely include: Euripedes’s The Bacchae, Aristophanes’s Lysistrata, the York Mystery Plays and Everyman (whose authors are unknown), William Shakespeare’s Othello, Aphra Behn’s The Rover, Henrik Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler, W.E.B. DuBois’s Star of Ethiopia, Bertolt Brecht’s Mother Courage and Her Children, Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, Adrienne Kennedy’s A Movie Star Has to Star in Black and White, and Sarah Kane’s Cleansed—as well as a list of key theoretical and practical texts from the history of theater. In addition to studying famous productions of the plays listed above, topics of discussion will include: the practices of ancient Greek theater; the relation of drama to religion and spiritual practice; early modern acting; Restoration comedy; color conscious casting; realism and expressionism; Black pageants and the African diaspora; Aristotelian theater and “method” acting versus epic theater; theater’s relation to other media; censorship and obscenity; and unstageability. Evaluation will be based on a series of group and individual projects, including dramaturgical reports, staging mock-ups, and acting editions and/or performances.
Satisfies the Pre-1800 major requirement.
ENG 166AC Migrant Forms
Session A | Nadia D Ellis
This class is an exploration of the aesthetics of movement. We will look at bodies in movement – across national boundaries, within diasporic spaces – and think through cultural and aesthetic ideas borrowed, taken up, re-configured and re-presented as a result of these communities sharing space. Each of the works we study here is defined by inventiveness of form, signaling the way movement, migrancy, and interrelation are rich contexts for creative invention. Whilst political discourses across North America and Europe have become increasingly and stridently hostile to migration, configuring migrants as a “problem” or a “crisis” at and within state borders, the figures and texts we look at reframe these discourses. Migrant Forms thinks through the bodies who move and arrive, settle and connect, as well as through the inventive craft of these people, whose experience of life through the ever-shifting ground beneath all our feet compels them to find new sounds, genres, categories, and structures to represent the world as they see it, as it actually exists.
Satisfies Literatures in English major and American Cultures requirement.
Session D (July 6 - August 14)
Franz Kline with Frank O'Hara - In-text plate from 21 Etchings and Poems, 1960.
ENG R1A How To Read A Poem
Session D | Nate Schmidt
Poetry has historically been a privileged object of literary criticism, especially of the so-called 'New Criticism' that, while no longer regnant, continues in several ways to inform literary critical practice today. Poetry has, in turn, been a privileged medium of literary pedagogy, of teaching students not only how better to read literature but also, and just as importantly, how better to write about it, with proper attention both to the texts in question and to argumentative rigor. In this course we will be looking at a number of poems and also at a number of complementary critical accounts. This double exposure--to isolated poems and to the criticism elicited by them--will allow us to reflect on how certain poems work, on how their attendant criticism works, and most importantly, on how your own argumentative writing might become adequately sensitive and critical. Pairings might include: G.M. Hopkins and I.A. Richards, John Donne and Cleanth Brooks, William Shakespeare and William Empson, Elizabeth Bishop and Michael Wood, Denise Riley and Denise Riley, Andrea Brady and Frank O'Hara, Joshua Kotin and James Schuyler, Keston Sutherland and Verity Spott, Claude McKay and Jasper Bernes, and so on.
As an R1A, this course will be focused on developing your skills of analytic writing. Assignments are likely to include brief but focused exercises in close reading (in the form of bCourses posts) and two substantive essays.
Hilma af Klint, "The Ten Largest No. 9" (1907)
ENG R1B True Love
Session D | Tom Kozlowski
Perhaps nothing is more human, more desired, and more poorly understood than love. What does it look like? What makes it "true"? How can we trust it? What are its boundaries or lack thereof? Who decides? Shakespeare tells it one way, Thích Nhất Hạnh another. Marvin Gaye and Lauryn Hill and all those pop stars spin more versions still. Any path you take will lead to poets and prophets, heartbreak and healing, justice and struggle, but each path starts and ends with you and what kind of love you have for yourself. For in the end, the fate of personal, public, and planetary health all rest upon a fundamental commitment to compassion as an energy of transformation.
Together in this course, we’ll think love, read love, write love, and unlearn love. We'll work through its expansive manifestations across poems, novels, parables, letters, songs, films, and spiritual guidance all over time and space. Moreover, as a writing-intensive course and Cal requirement, we’ll hone the analytical skills needed for critical thinking, patient attention, and nuanced, persuasive argumentation. Expect to read something new every day, and prepare to be consistently engaged with drafting, journaling, reflection, and revision. With consistent dedication, you’ll be stunned to see not only growth in clarity and confidence in style but lasting self-discovery.
ENG 17 Shakespeare
Session D | Oliver Arnold
Shakespeare’s plays are relentlessly unsettling, sublimely beautiful, deeply moving, rigorously brilliant, and compulsively meaningful: they complicate everything; they simplify nothing. As we puzzle over the way Shakespeare represents compassion, desire, identity, republicanism, colonialism, racism, freedom and unfreedom, and work, we will keep two overarching questions percolating: how does Shakespeare conceive theater (its uses, its value)?; and what makes Shakespeare SHAKESPEARE? That is, what makes Shakespeare distinctive and what makes him a strange colossus, a touchstone for literary artists from Milton to Goethe, from George Eliot to Proust, from Emily Dickinson to Sarah Kane, from Brecht to Toni Morrison and for philosophers and theorists such as Hegel, Marx. Freud, Derrida, Kristeva, Lacan, and Zizeck? We will read a few handfuls of sonnets and roughly six plays, including Titus Andronicus, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Othello, King Lear, and The Tempest. We will also devote substantial class time to watching and discussing scenes from film adaptations and filmed performances of the plays.
Satisfies Shakespeare major requirement.
ENG 20 The Modernist Novel
Session D | Catherine Flynn
In this survey of American, European and Caribbean novels from the first half of the twentieth century, we will consider how writers dismantled and reconfigured the novel to respond to a world transformed by social and political movements, urbanization, empire, and war. We will think about the characteristic difficulty of these works, their foregrounding of the materiality of language, and their innovative presentations of time and narrative as responses to new understandings of individuality and consciousness. We will also discuss the changing critical conception of literary value and of the canon. Our six key texts will be Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons (1914), Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier (1915), James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway (1925), Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood (1936), and Jean Rhys’s Good Morning, Midnight (1939). We will also consider passages from Woolf’s Orlando (1928) and The Waves (1931), William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury (1929), Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), Joyce’s Finnegans Wake (1939), and Samuel Beckett’s Watt (1953).
"The Careless Typist," 1901. Bettmann Archive.
ENG 43A Introduction to the Writing of Short Fiction
Session D | Vikram Chandra
A short fiction workshop.
Over the course of the semester, each student will write and revise a short story. Each participant in the workshop will edit student-written stories and will write a critique of each manuscript.
Throughout the semester, we will read published fiction and also essays by working writers about fiction and the writing life.
The intent of the course is to have the students learn about and practise the techniques that enable writers to construct a convincing and engaging representation of reality on the page.
Please note that students will only write fiction within the genre of psychological realism. We will not workshop science fiction or fantasy fiction.
ENG 141 Modes of Writing
Session D | Melanie Abrams
In this online class, you'll learn to read like a writer by studying the craft of creative writing, explore your own process by writing your own short stories and poems, and then get feedback in small peer workshops designed to help you become an even better writer and reader. Students will read and analyze contemporary fiction and poetry (i.e.: what’s being published today) and write a variety of exercises as well as more formal pieces. Note that this is not merely a generative writing class, but one where you will learn the craft of writing, so come prepared to learn what constitutes a strong story and poem and then integrate it into your own work. Attendance is mandatory. Come write with us this summer!
Cover image of Leila Aboulela's novel River Spirit
ENG 174 The African Historical Novel
Session D | Farah Bakaari
The African historical novel has always been implicated in questions of history, sovereignty, and politics. From the passionate countryside fictions of Ngugi wa Thiong’o and Bessie Head to the gritty urban tales of Zoë Wicomb and Ousmane Sembène, the great realist tradition of the African novel has always been deeply committed to narrating the historical forces that have shaped and determined Africa’s place in the world. This has led many critics to claim that more than any other literary tradition, the African novel is the most preoccupied with history and its effects, precisely because the very inception of the form had coincided with a moment of intense political and economic transformation. Reflecting on the West African novel, Emmanuel Obiechina, for instance, writes, “the writers show an almost obsessive preoccupation with the influence of these conditions. This is the condition of life; these are ways in which people feel its pressure; these pressures demand expression.” This course considers the forms this expression has taken, in past and present. We will read six renowned historical novels that explore Africa’s history from precolonial cultures to postcolonial imaginaries to ask what does the novel form offer in how we imagine the past and its purchase on the present?
Satisfies Literatures in English major requirement.
ENG 176 Introduction to Popular Fiction
Session D | Srijani Ghosh
We will explore several different popular genres—detective fiction, science fiction, horror, fantasy, the Hollywood musical, and the Western—to discover what makes these genres “popular” and in what ways they produce their mass appeal. Is popular fiction simply light leisure reading for the public or do they have "literary" merit beneath the generic formulas? How do popular fictional works play an integral role in helping us understand the dynamics of gender, science, cultural norms, and politics of the era?
ENG 180Z Speculative Fiction
Session D | Geoffrey O’Brien
This course will present the genre of speculative fiction in the U.S. and its historical commitment to imagining plausible and implausible alternatives to the present. We will begin by looking at the later Golden Age of the science fiction short story, the 1960s and 70s, and then proceed to treat some representative novels from the 1970s to the contemporary. Along the way, we’ll consider some of the crucial topics and concepts that form the imaginary of this genre, from advanced technology and what it affords and subtracts from the human (artificial intelligence, the end of work, extended longevity, interstellar travel and contact with other entities, etc.), to the hyper-urban, as well as questions of race, class, gender, capitalism, climate, war, and colonialization as they encounter and acquire new and estranging contexts. We’ll also attempt to theorize some of the modes and tropes by which such fictions explore these questions: apocalypse, futurity and deep pasts, new bodies and forms of communication, the hivemind, virtuality, and so on, as well as the traditional narrative conventions enlisted to support these representations.