ENGLISH 115C: Hamlet and the Critics (TAPS 151C)
Focus is on Shakespeare's
Hamlet as a site of rich critical controversy from the eighteenth century to the present. Aim is to read, discuss, and evaluate different approaches to the play, from biographical, theatrical, and psychological to formalist, materialist, feminist, new historicist, and, most recently, quantitative. The ambition is to see whether there can be great literature without (a) great (deal of) criticism. The challenge is to understand the theory of literature through the study of its criticism.
Terms: Aut
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, WAY-A-II
Instructors:
Lupic, I. (PI)
ENGLISH 115D: Shakespeare, Language, Contexts
This course will consider a range of Shakespeare plays (and the language of the plays) in relation to different contemporary and post-contemporary contexts, including transvestite theater, gender, sexuality, history, geopolitics, travel, and performance.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 5
Instructors:
Parker, P. (PI)
;
Fenech, N. (TA)
ENGLISH 118: Literature and the Brain (ENGLISH 218, FRENCH 118, FRENCH 318, PSYCH 118F)
Recent developments in and neuroscience and experimental psychology have transformed the way we think about the operations of the brain. What can we learn from this about the nature and function of literary texts? Can innovative ways of speaking affect ways of thinking? Do creative metaphors draw on embodied cognition? Can fictions strengthen our "theory of mind" capabilities? What role does mental imagery play in the appreciation of descriptions? Does (weak) modularity help explain the mechanism and purpose of self-reflexivity? Can the distinctions among types of memory shed light on what narrative works have to offer?
Last offered: Autumn 2012
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum
ENGLISH 122A: Austen and Woolf
Reading of three novels by Jane Austen¿arguably the most influential and gifted of British female novelists-¿and three novels by Virginia Woolf, whose debt to Austen was immense. Topics include the relationship between women writers and the evolution of the English novel; the extraordinary predominance of the marriage plot in Austen¿s fiction (and the various transformations Woolf works on it); each novelist¿s relationship to the cultural and social milieu in which she wrote.
Last offered: Winter 2008
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum
ENGLISH 124: The American West (AMSTUD 124A, ARTHIST 152, HISTORY 151, POLISCI 124A)
The American West is characterized by frontier mythology, vast distances, marked aridity, and unique political and economic characteristics. This course integrates several disciplinary perspectives into a comprehensive examination of Western North America: its history, physical geography, climate, literature, art, film, institutions, politics, demography, economy, and continuing policy challenges. Students examine themes fundamental to understanding the region: time, space, water, peoples, and boom and bust cycles.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: GER:EC-AmerCul, GER:DB-Hum, WAY-SI, WAY-A-II
Instructors:
Cain, B. (PI)
;
Fishkin, S. (PI)
;
Freyberg, D. (PI)
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more instructors for ENGLISH 124 »
Instructors:
Cain, B. (PI)
;
Fishkin, S. (PI)
;
Freyberg, D. (PI)
;
Kennedy, D. (PI)
;
Nemerov, A. (PI)
ENGLISH 126B: The Nineteenth Century Novel
A set of major works of art produced at the peak of the novel¿s centrality as a cultural form: Austen¿s
Emma, Bronte¿s
Wuthering Heights, Eliot¿s
Middlemarch, Dickens¿s
Great Expectations, Stevenson¿s
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Hardy¿s
Tess of the d¿Urbervilles. The paradoxes of work, consciousness and the organization of narrative experience, habit and attention. Urban experience, shifting forms of individualism, ways of knowing other persons. Binary and concentric structures, happiness and moral action, arrays of characters.
Terms: Aut
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, WAY-A-II
Instructors:
Brink-Roby, H. (PI)
ENGLISH 127A: American Madness
This course delves into the bizarre annals of nineteenth-century madness -- the world of Ahab's "monomania," Edgar Allan Poe's "brain fever," and Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "hysteria". Placing these literary texts in the context of the historical development of psychiatry during the nineteenth century, we will find that madness often assumes different forms in men and women, white Americans and African-Americans, capitalists and laborers -- suggesting that social inequalities cannot be cleanly separated from biological dispositions in our understanding of insanity. Reading these fictions of madness will not only illuminate the fundamental tensions of American culture, but will give us a new perspective on the construction of mental illness in the contemporary United States.
Terms: Aut
| Units: 3-5
Instructors:
Walser, H. (PI)
ENGLISH 130: Sex and the Novel (FEMGEN 130S)
How do novels represent sexual life? This course reads texts from the eighteenth century to the present day, and considers how novelists represent the discombobulating effects of desire in fictional prose. Authors may include: S. Richardson, N. Hawthorne, J. Austen, E. Brontë, G. Gissing, H. James, D.H. Lawrence, J. Joyce, V. Nabokov, J. Baldwin, A. Hollinghurst and Z. Smith.
Terms: Win, Spr
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II, WAY-EDP
Instructors:
Jarvis, C. (PI)
;
Taylor, M. (PI)
ENGLISH 131B: On the Road: American Travel Films
For more than a century, cars and cinema have occupied a romantic place in the American imagination, as vehicles that can take us someplace new, or engines for our fantasies of mobility, freedom and personal expression. Perhaps this is one reason why the road movie is one of the most enduring subgenres of twentieth-century film. In this class, we¿ll watch ten classic American travel films, one for each decade starting from Buster Keaton¿s silent Go West (1925) and arriving at Christopher Nolan¿s space epic Interstellar (2014). We thus begin on a train and end on a spaceship. In between we¿ll travel by car, bus, motorcycle and even on foot across America and beyond, in search of answers to the motivating questions for this course: what is the attraction of the open road, and how is the romance of its call embraced and challenged by the multiple genres of these films, the concerns of the decades in which they were produced, and the limits they impose on the idea of unrestricted travel, individual growth and independence.
Terms: Sum
| Units: 3-5
Instructors:
Barnhart, L. (PI)
ENGLISH 134A: Historical Fiction: Bringing the Past to Life in Text and Film
How does the past come to life, on the page and on the screen? From Walter Scott, to Toni Morrison, to the popular romances, films, and television series of today, this course considers a range of texts that draw their settings, characters, and plots from history. We will examine how each work addresses some of the central tensions of historical fiction: between the imagined past and the past as reconstructed through research, between description and the spirit of the past, between accuracy and relevance. Our focus will be on the craft of historical fiction and the power of techniques like description, dialogue, setting, and character to reanimate the past. For the final assessment, students will choose between a traditional argumentative paper and a historical story of their own invention.
Terms: Sum
| Units: 3-5
Instructors:
Llewellyn, T. (PI)
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