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This course will study the adaptation from short stories to films, with a particular eye toward the form and structure of each media and their relationship to each other. Students will read a variety of 20th and 21st century stories and watch their adaptations (including ¿Rashomon" and ¿Brokeback Mountain,¿), as well as write a short screenplay adaptation and a short critical essay on a story/film of their choosing.

(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."

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.

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.

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.

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.

From its inception, Jewish-American literature has taken as its subject as well as its context the idea of Jewishness itself. Jewish culture is a diasporic one, and for this reason the concept of Jewishness differs from country to country and across time. What stays remarkably similar, though, is Jewish self-perception and relatedly Jewish literary style. This is as true for the first-generation immigrant writers like Isaac Bashevis Singer and Anzia Yezierska who came to the United States from abroad as it is for their second-generation children born in the United States, and the children of those children. In this course, we will consider the difficulties of displacement for the emigrant generation and their efforts to sustain their cultural integrity in the multicultural American environment. We'll also examine the often comic revolt of their American-born children and grandchildren against their (grand-)parents nostalgia and failure to assimilate. Only by considering these transnational roots can one understand the particularity of the Jewish-American novel in relation to mainstream and minority American literatures. In investigating the link between American Jewish writers and their literary progenitors, we will draw largely but not exclusively from Russia and the countries of Eastern Europe.

Major works of US fiction since World War II, in social, historical, and aesthetic perspective. Ellison, Bellow, O'Connor, Pynchon, Reed, Morrison, Robinson, DeLillo, Gaitskill.

Jews are sometimes referred to as 'the people of the book.' Would Portnoy's Complaint count as a book that constitutes Jewish-American peoplehood? What about Fear of Flying? This seminar introduces students to influential Jewish-American novels (and some short stories and film) from the late nineteenth century to the present day. These works return time and again to questions of diaspora, race, queer social belonging, and the duty to a Jewish past, mythical or real. Through close readings of short stories and novels coupled with secondary readings about Jewish-American history and culture, we will explore how American Jewishness is constructed differently in changing historical climates. What makes a text Jewish? What do we mean by Jewish humor and Jewish seriousness? How do Jewish formulations of gender and power respond to Jews' entrance into the white American mainstream? As we read, we'll think through and elaborate on models of ethnicity, privilege, sexuality, and American pluralism. Authors include Cahan, Yezierska, Singer, Roth, Bellow, Malamud, Ozick, Mailer, Jong, and Englander.