Fall 2002 Course Offerings:
Lower- and Upper-Division Undergraduate Courses

CL 24, #17271, Stephen Tollefson, Tu 3:00-4:00, 123 Dwinelle

"Reading and Reciting Poems in English (P/NP)"

People today do not have enough poetry in their heads, and everyone should be able to recite one or two of their favorite poems. In addition to its purely personal benefits, knowing some poetry by heart has practical applications in a tough job interview, you can impress the prospective boss by reciting just the right line, say, from Dylan Thomas: "do not go gentle into that good night / rage rage against the dying of the light." Or at a party some time, you'll be able to show off with a bit of T.S. Eliot: "in the room the women come and go, talking of Michelangelo." In this seminar, we will read a number of classic poems as well as a number of other (perhaps lesser, but still memorable) poems, and discuss them. The poems cut across centuries and types. Students will be encouraged to find other poems for the group to read. Participants will be required to memorize and recite 50-75 lines of their choice, and to prepare a short annotated anthology of their favorite poems.

CL 40, #17272, Julie Anderson & Lael Gold, TT 12:30-2:00, 20 Wheeler

Woman Warriors: A Cross Cultural Comparison

Whether for their protection, recovery, or acquisition, women are one traditional reason why men wage war. Despite this close association with war, however, women rarely participate in combat. What happens when women enter that most male of all spaces: the battlefield? Do they lose an essential peaceful female quality? Do they become sexless? Or sometimes, by joining battle, do women become highly sexualized male fantasy figures? In this course, we will examine how female identity is constructed both through and against war in various literary and filmic representations. Our sources will come from both ancient and modern cultures, from the East as well as the West, and from "high" and popular culture alike. We will work chronologically, beginning with readings from Aristophanes, Herodotus, the Bible, the Mahabharata, and Chinese yue fu poetry (all in translation). Next we will look at medieval and Renaissance representations of warrior women, from the Italian epic to Tang Dynasty stories. Moving into the modern era, we will read George Bernard Shaw's Saint Joan, Maxine Hong Kingston's Woman Warrior, and the poetry of Qiu Jin, a turn-of-the-century Chinese revolutionary and feminist. Finally, we will turn our attention to representations of women warriors in film, television and science fiction.

Books to Buy:

• The Lysistrata by Aristophanes (trans. by Douglass Parker, Signet Classic)
• Saint Joan by George Bernard Shaw
• Woman Warrior by Maxine Hong Kingston
• Jerusalem Delivered by T. Tasso (ed. and trans. by Anthony M. Esolen, Johns Hopkins)
• Course Reader

CL 41C, #17275, Lin Zou & Jonathan Rowan, TT 9:30-11:00, 242 Dwinelle

Forms of the Novel: Memory and Mourning

This class will examine how the novel serves as a site of memory and mourning while it depicts its characters’ experiences under the influence of destructive forces. We will introduce a set of vocabulary with which we can name these destructive forces: irrecoverable time, fate, the unknowable, the horror, etc. The class will pay particular attention to the question of how time and the “unknowable” become structuring elements in the novel and intrinsically shape the forms of the novel. At the same time, we will explore how memory and mourning as subjective responses to the “unknowable” are also constitutive in the forms of the novel and foreground the novel’s value claim.

While our readings are mostly western modern and modernist novels, we will read the Chinese novel Dream of the Red Chamber, and see how different ideas of memory are at work in the east and west conceptions of the novel. In the discussion of Dream of the Red Chamber, we will contrast/compare the Chinese theory of xiaoshuo with the western theories of the novel or fiction. I hope that this comparison will shed new lights into our understanding of the novel form.

Texts

• Cao Xueqin Dream of the Red Chamber (selections)
• Mary Shelley Frankenstein
• Joseph Conrad Heart of Darkness
• Franz Kafka The Trial
• William Faulkner Absalom, Absalom
• Samuel Beckett Molloy
• Vladimir Nabokov Ada; or, Ardor: a family chronicle
• Italo Svevo Confessions of Zeno
• A course reader containing materials on theory

• Film Noir Reader, Silver
• Shades of Noir, Copjec
• Film Art, Bordwell and Thompson
• Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud
• Novels and stories by Raymond Chandler, Dashell Hammett, Cornell Woolrich, Paul Cain, James M. Cain, Earnest Hemmingway

Films:

• M (Lang, 1931)
• The Maltese Falcon (Huston, 1941)
• This Gun for Hire (Tuttle, 1942)
• Murder, My Sweet (Dmytryk, 1944)
• Double Indemnity (Wilder, 1944)
• The Woman in the Window (Lang, 1944)
• Laura (Preminger, 1944)
• The Phantom Lady (Siodmak, 1944)
• Detour (Ulmer, 1945)
• Scarlet Street (Lang, 1945)
• The Big Sleep (Hawks, 1946)
• The Postman Always Rings Twice (Garnett, 1946)
• Gilda (Vidor, 1946)
• Dark Mirror (Siodmak, 1946)
• The Killers (Siodmak, 1946)
• The Kiss of Death (Hathaway, 1947)
• Out of the Past (Tourneur, 1947)
• The Big Clock (Farrow, 1948)
• Secret Beyond the Door (Lang, 1948)
• Criss Cross (Siodmak, 1949)
• Night and the City (Dassin, 1950)
• Sunset Boulevard (Wilder, 1950)
• The Blue Gardenia (Lang, 1953)
• Pickup on South Street (Fuller, 1953)
• Vertigo (Hitchcock, 1958)
• A Touch of Evil (Wells, 1958)
• Le Samourai (Melville, 1967)
• Chinatown (Polanski, 1974)
• Blade Runner (Scott, 1982)
• LA Confidential (Hanson, 1997)

CL 60AC:1, #17281, Josephine Park, MWF 10:00-11:00, 160 Dwinelle

“Outsiders and Imposters in American Cultures”

This course examines the American myth of the outsider. The great American novel repeatedly sets aside a place for this lonely figure, an enigma who can be filled with the dreams and expectations of the self-made American. This figure in the margins stands paradoxically at the center of works of literature which try to describe an American essence; these lone riders have become a symbol for what is, writ large, American exceptionalism. What happens to this figure, however, when it is applied to the margins of minority cultures which are themselves on the fringes? These groups stigmatized for a visible difference lay bare the ideological labor involved in constructing Americans. Is this doubly isolated figure permitted the same powers of definition accorded to the classic American outsider--or is this a luxury only for the dominant society? At the borders of different American cultures, does this individual become easier to denounce as a collaborator--or more dangerous to the community? Are these figures as necessary to American novels which describe ethnic Americas as they are to the Great American novel? It will be the work of this course to tease out the different forces behind the racialized outsider, examining both the specific, historical moments which bring about this location at the outer edges and the particular allegiances, both private and public, which the outsider takes on. Ultimately, these inquiries will provide us with the tools to examine the strengths and weaknesses of membership to a particular group in a particular historical moment.

Primary Texts:

• F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
• James Weldon Johnson, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man
• Nella Larsen, Passing
• Leslie Marmon Silko, Ceremony
• John Okada, No-no Boy
• Sherman Alexie, Indian Killer
• Chang-rae Lee, Native Speaker
• Blade Runner (dir. Ridley Scott)

In Reader (selections):

• Werner Sollors, Beyond Ethnicity
• Walter Benn Michaels, Our America
• Lisa Lowe, Immigrant Acts
• Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter

CL 60AC:2, #17284, Trinity Treat, TT 3:30-5:00, 160 Dwinelle

Literature and Culture of 1960s America

This course intends to introduce students to some of the social and artistic movements, music, and especially literature that emerged from the decade of the 1960s, and what "60s counterculture" meant for Anglo-Americans, African-Americans, Native Americans, and Chicanos: Where did each group see itself in relation to events such as the Vietnam War? What were the ways in which individuals from each ethnic group merged art and politics? What did a vision of a "multicultural America" look like in the 1960s? We will read works by Jack Kerouac, Nikki Giovanni, James Baldwin, N. Scott Momaday, and Oscar Zeta Acosta, among others.

Course description pending. Look for final course description and reading list in July.

CL60AC:3, #17287, Monica Heredia & Leticia Bermúdez, TT 12:30-2:00, 123 Wheeler

Geographies of Difference

Within the notion of a "color blind" society lies a kind of utopian desire to view and treat people as equal. The notion suggests that race is a physical characteristic we can avoid by simply blinding our eyes to difference. In this course we will examine such assumptions and explore how some writers have dealt with the extraordinary complexity of racial difference in literature. Most of the texts selected for this course take place in geographical locations that are gateways for immigration into the United States (e.g., Los Angeles, Miami, New York, and San Francisco). This course will focus on the geographical location of the writers and their narrators: Do they write to/from an urban or rural location, to/from the present or past, to/from the US or Other culture? We will explore how place, time and culture complicate the notion and the personal experience of race, and we will ask whether it is possible or even desirable to blind ourselves to racial difference.

Texts

• Abbott, Shirley, "Why Southern Women Leave Home"
• Anzaldua, Gloria, Borderlands (excerpts)
• Cervantes, Lorna Dee, Emplumada (excerpts)
• Delillo, Don, White Noise
• Ellison, Ralph, Invisible Man (excerpts) and his essay "Hidden Name, Complex Fate"
• Garcia, Cristina, Dreaming in Cuban
• Guinier, Lani & Torres, Gerald, The Miner’s Canary (excerpts)
• Fae Myenne Ng, Bone
• Kincaid, Jamaica, Lucy
• Kyung Cha, Theresa, Dictee
• Morrison, Toni, The Bluest Eye
• Pham, Andrew, X., Catfish and Mandala
• Post, Robert C., The Logic of American Antidiscrimination Law (excerpts)
• Pratt, Mary Louise, Imperial Eyes (excerpts)
• Sapphire, Push

CL 84:1, #17289, Leslie Kurke, M 12:00-1:00, 123 Dwinelle

"Elvis Presley and the Myths of America" (P/NP)

We will consider the early career of Elvis Presley (1954-1958) for what it can teach us about the complexities of the American South and the country at large in the Post-WWII era, and for Elvis' enduring impact on American popular culture. Specifically, we will focus on the complex implication of race, class, locality, and gender/sexuality in Elvis Presley's transgressive "invention" of rock and roll. The course will entail some secondary reading but will focus mainly on Presley's 1950's songs, films, and TV appearances. The course will serve as an introduction to Comparative Literature insofar as it engages students in the "literary" and ideological analysis of diverse forms of popular culture. Obtain instructor approval by emailing the professor at kurke@socrates.berkeley.edu. She will then conduct brief interviews in the week before classes start.

CL 100:1, #17290, Karl Britto, MWF 11:00-12:00, 221 Wheeler

Introduction to Comparative Literature: "Rewriting the Canon"

In this course, we will examine a number of texts by authors from Africa and the Caribbean, all written in self-conscious relationship to earlier works from the European canon. Working closely with these texts and their sources, we will read comparatively so as to explore the ways in which similar stories, characters, and narrative structures are transformed by authors writing from different historical, cultural, and geographic locations.

Required texts:

• Shakespeare, The Tempest
• Aimé Césaire, A Tempest/Une tempête
• Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe
• J. M. Coetzee, Foe
• Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre
• Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea
• Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights
• Maryse Condé, Windward Heights/La migration des coeurs

CL 100:2, #17293, James Whitta, TT 11-12:30, 221 Wheeler

Epistolary Fictions: Love, Letters, Literature

This course will examine the phenomenon of literary love, "literally," in narratives that articulate the workings of desire in epistolary form. We will consider the ways in which erotic epistolary fiction from various cultural contexts and historical periods has centered questions of interiority, intimacy, identity and gender-formation. How do epistolary narratives invent psychological spaces of personal integrity and power? establish conditions of intimacy between reader and writer? configure the absent (beloved, addressee) as present? represent the dialogic nature of discourse? mediate or "screen" communication? establish ideologies of romantic desire? When or how does epistolary fiction turn itself into a fetish displacing reader and writer, transferring libidinal energy onto itself and its own processes of textual production? How do letters become "literature," a commodity circulating in political, economic and historical contexts? These and other questions will engage us as we read a variety of epistolary fictions, from the ancient Roman verse epistles of Ovid's Heroides to contemporary cybernetic narratives of "virtual" love. Theoretical readings will enhance our experience of primary texts. Requirements: several in-class presentations, two 5-7 pp. papers, one 10-pp. paper.

Required texts:

• Ovid's Heroines (Daryl Hine, trans.)
• Murasaki Shikibu, The Tale of Genji (abridged version)
• The Letters of Abelard and Heloise (Betty Radice, trans.)
• Goethe, The Sorrows of Young Werther
• The Love Letters of a Portuguese Nun
• Natsumi Soseki, Kokoro
• Viktor Shklovsky, Zoo, or Letters Not about Love
• Alice Walker, The Color Purple
• Avodah Offit, Virtual Love
• Roland Barthes, A Lover's Discourse

In addition, there will be a course reader containing literary and theoretical texts, including Donne, Pope, Dickinson, Poe, Rilke; Bakhtin, Lacan, Derrida, Genette.

CL 112A, #17296, Maria Kotzamanidou, MWF 12:00-1:00, 125 Dwinelle

Modern Greek

Modern Greek is unique among languages in that it is the only modern language directly descended from Ancient Greek. In this course, the student studies reading, writing, pronunciation, and use of contemporary spoken idiom, all within the historical and cultural context of the language. By the end of the course, the student should have a strong grammatical and linguistic foundation in Greek as it is spoken today. (No prerequisite.)

CL 151, #17299, Robert Kawashima, TT 2:00-3:30, 258 Dwinelle

The Archaeology of Ancient Mediterranean Knowledge

In this course, we will account for the “distinctiveness” of Israelite religion through Foucault’s “archaeology of knowledge.” In particular, we will discover an “epistemic break,” which underlies the emergence of Israelite monotheism out of the so-called pagan religions of the ancient Near East and archaic Greece. If this class will thus organize itself around ancient Israel, we will nonetheless devote equal attention to the comparative evidence provided by Canaanite, Mesopotamian, and Greek traditions. (Thus, students interested in any of these cultures are encouraged to attend.) Naturally, part of the semester will also be devoted to understanding Foucault. Course assignments have yet to be finalized, but they will likely include a final research paper.

Required Texts:

• The Hebrew Bible/Old Testament
• Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge
• Michael David Coogan, Stories from Ancient Canaan
• Stephanie Dalley, Myths from Mesopotamia
• Hesiod, Theogony, Works and Days, trans. M. L. West
• Course reader, with additional primary and secondary materials

Recommended Texts:

• Foucault, The Order of Things
• Foucault, Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology: Essential Works of Foucault, 1954-1984, Volume II

CL 155, #17302, Anne-Lise François, TT 11:00-12:30, 121 Wheeler

Studies in Modern Lyric Poetry

This seminar offers an in-depth comparative study of five Romantic and early Modernist poets: Keats, Baudelaire, Dickinson, Rilke and Yeats. We will focus on how these poets understand and redefine the genre of the lyric within the European and North-American literary traditions: What formal features do they emphasize as central to the lyric? How do their experimentations with form and structure open up or re-inscribe the traditional limits of the genre? What distinguishes lyric temporality from time in a novel or a play? Why should the lyric-supposed at its origin to derive from an oral tradition of song--come to such fruition in the medium of print? We will give particular attention to questions of voice, address, empirical reference, and the identity of the lyric “I” in a genre Northrop Frye once defined as that in which the speaker turns his back to the audience.

The course will also give some attention to questions in literary history, although we will try to avoid overly rigid or predetermined understandings of terms such as “romanticism” and “modernism.” Instead we will focus on each poet’s responses to modernity, in particular to the changes represented by urbanization, the rationalization of time and space, and the advent of mass culture in the age of mechanical reproduction; we will attempt to understand the changing roles--messianic, consolatory, critical, representative-- assigned the figure of the “solitary” poet and “autonomous” work of art during the age of print capital and European colonialism.

Most crucially, however, we will want to ask what happens when we read these five poets together, five poets who, in different ways, push the limits of language as an expressive medium, and are passionately engaged by the relations of the verbal to the visual arts, of visionary to sensory experience, of memory to imagination, and of language to violence. Tracing the meeting of stone and flesh, of the carnal and the sacred in their poetry, we will compare recurring figures of poetry as prayer, poetry as transgression, and poetry as bearing witness to limit-experiences.

Time permitting, room will be made for students’ interests in other poets of the period.

Reading List:

• Charles Baudelaire, Flowers of Evil (Bilingual edition)
• Emily Dickinson, Complete Poems
• John Keats, Selected Poems and Letters
• Rainer Maria Rilke, Selected Poetry (Bilingual edition)
• William Butler Yeats, Major Works
• Course Reader (Critical Essays by Benjamin, Culler, Frye, Johnson, Mill)

CL 170, # 17305, Maria Kotzamanidou, F 3:00-6:00, 175 Dwinelle

The Social Consciousness of Modern Greek Cinema

The stories told by Greek filmmakers in the last fifty years reflect the concerns, changes, and upheavals of Greek society. From melodrama and nostalgia film to film noir, these concerns are powerfully articulated in the language of cinematic art. (Films are in Greek, some with subtitles, secondary reading in English. For further information about the film list and reading list, please contact the instructor.)

CL 185:1, #17308, Leslie Kurke, MWF 2:00-3:00, 105 Northgate

Gender, Sexuality, and Culture: "History of Sexualities"

Cross-listed with UGIS and Women's Studies 145; Area of concentration: 4

This course will study sexuality and gender in two very different historical periods--ancient Greece and 19th-century Europe. Sexuality will be defined as including sexual acts (e.g. sodomy, pederasty, masturbation); sexual identities (e.g. erastes and eromenos); and sexual systems (e.g. kinship structures, subcultures, political hierarchies). Readings and lectures will focus on situating queer sexualities relative to dominant organizations of sex and gender. Topics will include Greek democracy and male homosexuality; the biology of sexual difference; the politics of sodomy; “romantic” friendship between women and men; and the emergence of strictly defined homosexual and heterosexual identities. We will read literary texts along with historical documents and secondary readings to constitute a comparative analysis of ancient Greece and 19th-century Europe.

Authors to be read include Hesiod, Sappho, Aeschylus, Plato, Balzac, Wilde, and Freud.

There will be two papers and a final exam. There will also be regular in-class writing assignments that will count towards your final grade.

CL 190, #17311, Francine Masiello, TT 11:00-12:30, 222 Wheeler

Joyce in Buenos Aires

When James Joyce, in Ulysses, wrote that the “cracked looking glass of a servant” was a symbol of Irish art, he pointed to a condition that was to mark culture throughout the colonial world. In his meditation on cultural politics and the estheticizing dimensions of language that might answer metropolitan powers, Joyce supplied a rich field for later inquiry by Latin American writers; his legacy is most notably felt among intellectuals in Buenos Aires. This course will investigate those traditions that have taken liberally from James Joyce and have transformed his texts in order to accommodate a peculiar Argentine literary sensibility for depicting the interrelationship between history and language, popular and high culture, and modernist and postmodern esthetics. The center, of course, is the city. In this line, the literary representation of Dublin and Buenos Aires-with their multiple voices, popular subjects, and endlessly nomadic characters-will be the center of sustained comparison.

In this course, we will read Ulysses and Finnegans Wake and then turn to several canonical Argentine texts, among them Borges’s Ficciones, Ricardo Piglia’s La Ciudad Ausente, and Manuel Puig’s La traición de Rita Hayworth and The Buenos Aires Affair. A major seminar paper and several class presentations will be required.