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ENGLISH 134C: The Western: Imagining the West in Fiction and Film (AMSTUD 134C)

The Wild West: a mythical place seared deep into the American imagination. Its familiar tropes lone riders on horseback, desert sunsets, saloon fights, train robberies echo through countless Western stories, novels, films, radio programs, and television series. Both formulaic and flexible, the Western has endured as a popular genre in American culture for more than a century, embodying and responding to many of the nation's broader anxieties surrounding its colonial history, its notions of masculinity and gender roles, its fascination with guns and violence, and its ideals of self-reliance and individualism. In this class we'll examine the Western genre through a selection of its central works in fiction and film, from the first dime novel Western, Ann S. Stephens Malaeska (1860), to Cormac McCarthy¿s acclaimed Blood Meridian (1985); and from the first silent film Western, Edwin S. Porter's The Great Train Robbery (1903), to the mid-century Hollywood films of John Ford, to Maggie Greenwald¿s feminist Western, The Ballad of Little Jo (1993). Along the way we'll examine the Western as both a literary form and a cultural phenomenon, probing the history of its enduring appeal as a genre. How do these novels and films construct, adapt, and subvert the form and expectations of the Western, and how do they both perpetuate and challenge the broader cultural problems of their, and our, time? Finally, as Californians and inheritors of the nation's westward expansion, what does the Western tell us about national myths of the West, and the place in which we live?
Last offered: Summer 2018 | UG Reqs: WAY-A-II

ENGLISH 135C: Reading and Writing the Personal Essay

This course examines the literary and cultural significance of the personal essay. We will begin with some influential theories of the essay, and conclude by considering the changing media from periodicals to blogs in which it appears. In between, we will explore some of the many reasons writers have had for writing themselves into their essays, such as explaining their personal tastes, demanding action from their readers, bearing witness to trauma, and making the personal political. Course readings will be drawn from across the rich history of the personal essay, including works by Charles Lamb, Virginia Woolf, George Orwell, James Baldwin, Susan Sontag, Joan Didion, Alice Walker, David Foster Wallace, Elif Batuman, and Ta-Nehisi Coates. As we explore the literary history, structure, and style of the personal essay, we will also reflect on what this genre reveals about the modern person. How are individuals shaped by social, cultural, and political forces? How are the ways we construct and express ourselves affected by changes in the media? And what might the personal essay reveal about the shifting boundaries between self and other, public and private, fact and fiction? Throughout the course, students will complete a series of short critical assignments, culminating in a final paper in which they will apply what they have learned to produce personal essays of their own.
Last offered: Summer 2018 | UG Reqs: WAY-A-II

ENGLISH 137B: We see into the life of things: Forms of Romanticism

This course will offer a survey of ten major Romantic writers who published between the 1780s and 1820s, and of their innovations in four key genres: poetry, life-writing (including both travel-writing and autobiography), essays, and the novel. These texts variously appeared as strange, absurd, trivial, alarming and even revolutionary to their first readers, and this course will seek to recapture the artistic, imaginative, social, political and philosophical ferment which inspired the Romantics and which they hoped would reanimate and refocus their contemporaries at a time of remarkable socio-political change.
Terms: Win | Units: 5 | UG Reqs: WAY-A-II
Instructors: Owens, T. (PI)

ENGLISH 138: Facts and Fictions: British Writing in the 1930s

In American politics where `alternative facts has entered the lexicon in a `post-truth attempt at media control, and in Britain where Brexit has reactivated a `little England model of insular nationalism, the concerns of British writers in the 1930s that `low dishonest decade as the poet W.H. Auden famously described it on nationalism, militarism, and the politics of language seem especially prescient now. Alert to nativism in a post-Depression era, and the losses of progressive ideals (unevenly) cultured during the 1920s, these writers explored the relationship and stakes between words and politics as they faced an increasingly fascistic continent. Writers include: George Orwell, Storm Jameson, Winifred Holtby, Vera Brittain, Naomi Michinson, Evelyn Waugh, Virginia Woolf, Aldous Huxley, W.H. Auden, Christopher Isherwood, and C.L.R. James.
Last offered: Autumn 2018 | UG Reqs: WAY-A-II

ENGLISH 139B: American Women Writers, 1850-1920 (AMSTUD 139B, FEMGEN 139B)

This course traces the ways in which female writers negotiated a series of literary, social, and intellectual movements, from abolitionism and sentimentalism in the nineteenth century to Progressivism and avant-garde modernism in the twentieth. Authors include Harriet Beecher Stowe, Harriet Jacobs, Rebecca Harding Davis, Emily Dickinson, Kate Chopin, Edith Wharton, Gertrude Stein, Willa Cather, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman.
Last offered: Autumn 2018 | UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, GER:EC-Gender, WAY-A-II

ENGLISH 143A: American Indian Mythology, Legend, and Lore (AMSTUD 143M, ENGLISH 43A, NATIVEAM 143A)

(English majors and others taking 5 units, register for 143A.) Readings from American Indian literatures, old and new. Stories, songs, and rituals from the 19th century, including the Navajo Night Chant. Tricksters and trickster stories; war, healing, and hunting songs; Aztec songs from the 16th century. Readings from modern poets and novelists including N. Scott Momaday, Louise Erdrich, and Leslie Marmon Silko, and the classic autobiography, "Black Elk Speaks."
Last offered: Autumn 2018 | UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, GER:EC-AmerCul, WAY-A-II, WAY-EDP

ENGLISH 143F: The Rise of the Food Memoir: 20th and 21st Century Perspectives

Marcel Proust eats a madeleine and remembers things past; M.F.K. Fisher evokes her childhood with the illicit taste of street tar; Bich Minh Nguyen recalls a red canister of Pringles in a cold Michigan house. What is it about food that lends itself so readily to the genre of the memoir? Beginning in the early 20th century and ending in the past decade, this course traces the development of the food memoir, its authors ranging from modernists to chef celebrities. As we read works by authors such as Ernest Hemingway, George Orwell, Madhur Jaffrey, Laura Esquivel, and Gabrielle Hamilton, we will consider issues of gender, race, and nationality, understanding the food memoir as situated somewhere at the intersection of ethnography and autobiography.
Terms: Aut | Units: 2-5 | UG Reqs: WAY-A-II

ENGLISH 144: Major Modernists: Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, Katherine Mansfield, T. S. Eliot

What made modernism `new? Is the movement `evergreen? We examine representational change, narrative innovation, and political aesthetics in the poetry, short fiction, and novels of four iconic pioneers: Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, Katherine Mansfield, and T.S. Eliot.
Last offered: Spring 2018 | UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, WAY-A-II

ENGLISH 144B: Contemporary British Fiction: History, Language, Place

How do contemporary British novelists represent dramatic changes in culture, class, demography, generation, economy, gender, race, and national identity following the allied victory in the Second World War (1939-1945)?  Focusing on writers born between 1948 and 1975, we examine the structuring of historical consciousness in novels by Zadie Smith, Ian McEwan, Kazuo Ishiguro, Jeanette Winterson, Hanif Kureishi, Julian Barnes, Ali Smith, and Hilary Mantel.
Terms: Spr | Units: 3-5 | UG Reqs: WAY-A-II, GER:DB-Hum
Instructors: Staveley, A. (PI)

ENGLISH 144F: Female Modernism: Women Writers in Paris Between the Wars (FEMGEN 144F)

The course will focus on expatriate women writers - American and British - who lived and wrote in Paris between the wars. Among them: Edith Wharton, Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, H.D., Djuna Barnes, Margaret Anderson, Janet Flanner, Natalie Barney, Kay Boyle, Mina Loy, Romaine Brooks, Mary Butts, Radclyffe Hall, Colette, and Jean Rhys. A central theme will be Paris as a lure and inspiration for bohemian female modernists, and the various alternative and emancipatory literary communities they created.
Terms: Win | Units: 5 | UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, WAY-A-II
Instructors: Castle, T. (PI)
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