131 - 140 of 230 results for: ENGLISH

How different disciplines approach topics and issues central to the study of ethnic and race relations in the U.S. and elsewhere. Lectures by senior faculty affiliated with CSRE. Discussions led by CSRE teaching fellows. Includes an optional Haas Center for Public Service certified Community Engaged Learning section.

In a post-Darwin world, the notion that we might all have an animal alter-ego lurking inside seems quite familiar. But ideas about animals¿how they think and feel, act and react¿involve identity categories such as race, gender, class and ability in surprising ways. This course will trace the relationship between animality and human life in twentieth-century American fiction, from race and indigeneity in Jack London¿s dog stories to the storytelling practices of contemporary animal advocacy groups. The course may also include an experiential component in which students will have the opportunity to explore multispecies concerns with a local organization.

This course investigates a selection of novels from 2001 to the present, either authored in the United States or strongly and meaningfully received here by critics and gatekeepers. In the absence of a fixed academic canon or acknowledged tradition of exemplary works, this course includes evaluation as one of its central enterprises. Students help to make arguments for which works matter and why. Students consider topics including the demotion of the novel to a minor art form, competition from the image, transformations of celebrity culture (in literature and outside it), relevance or irrelevance of the digital age, aftermaths of the modernist and postmodernist project, eccentricity and marginality, race and gender politics in putatively post-feminist, post-racial,and post-political vantage, and problems of meaning in rich societies oriented to risk, probability, economization, health, consumption, comfort, and recognition or representation (rather than action or event). Novels and short stories may be supplemented by philosophical and sociological visions of the contemporary.

Reading is a political act. Through our major texts of Charles Dickens's Oliver Twist, Zora Neale Hurston¿s The Eatonville Anthology, and Azar Nafisi¿s Reading Lolita in Tehran, we will explore the classed, racialized, and gendered power dynamics of literacy and literature. How can books incite social revolutions? How can they maintain harmful inequalities? When is reading a tool of empowerment and when is it a tool of social control? We will examine these questions in a number of contexts, ranging from Victorian London, to the Jim Crow American South, from the Islamic revolution in Iran to a Silicon Valley proliferating with new forms of scientific, technological, and financial literacy. The course includes a significant service learning component, in which students will volunteer to tutor underprivileged readers through Bay Area literacy programs. Final projects will ask students to reflect on these tutoring experiences and consider the complex politics at work in the act of teaching someone to read.

Course will examine the intersecting genres of fiction, autobiography, and memoir. Topics will include the literary construction of selfhood and its constituent categories (gender, race, ethnicity, religion, etc.); the role of language in the development of the self; the relational nature of the self (vis-à-vis the family, "society," God); the cultural status of "individuality"; the concept of childhood; and the role of individual testimony in our understanding of family, religious and national history. In addition to short theoretical works, authors will include Knausgaard, Nabokov, Hoffman, Winterson, Said, Levi, Barthes, and Duras.

This course will introduce students to the ways that the practices of literary text mining can help us to understand, study, and shape our understanding of identity. Each week, we will spend one class discussing critical works by theorists like Toni Morrison, and Linda Martín Alcoff and digital scholars like Roopika Risam and Ted Underwood; we will then spend the second class of the week learning and practicing digital methods in programs like Python and Gephi. Students do not need any programming knowledge to take this class.

This course will train students in applied methods for computationally analyzing texts for humanities research. The skills students will gain will include basic programming for textual analysis, applied statistical evaluation of results and the ability to present these results within a formal research paper or presentation. Students in the course will also learn the prerequisite steps of such an analysis including corpus selection and cleaning, metadata collection, and selecting and creating an appropriate visualization for the results.

Virginia Woolf once wrote, "The merest schoolgirl when she falls in love has Shakespeare or Keats to speak her mind for her, but let a sufferer try to describe a pain in his head to a doctor and language at once runs dry." Problems of representation are at the heart of the experiences of physical suffering and medical care; how has literature defined and redefined its relationship to these experiences? Topics include medical and literary interpretation, illness and metaphor, and the evolution of the surface-depth model of the self. The course centers on major works of literature that engage the imaginative potential of medicine and the narrative structures of disease, by authors including Jane Austen, Leo Tolstoy, and Arthur Conan Doyle, read alongside paintings (Rembrandt's The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp), film (Ingmar Bergman's Cries and Whispers), medical descriptions of disease, diagnostic tools, and theory (e.g., Sontag's Illness as Metaphor).

The literary representation of crime and the criminal from postrevolutionary through contemporary American literature. Topics will include the enigma of the criminal personality; varieties of crime, from those underwritten by religious or ethical principle to those produced by the deformations of bias; the impact on narrative form of the challenge of narrating crime; and the significance attributed to gratuitous crime in the American cultural context.