This cluster is ideal for intended English majors.
Course Information
ENGLISH 45C 001: Literature in English: The Mid-19th through the Mid-20th Century, 4 Units
- This course may satisfy prerequisites for English and Interdisciplinary Studies Field.
- This course meets the English requirement and Arts & Literature, L&S Breadth.
- Schedule: TR 4:00-5:00 PM; Discussion F 3:00-4:00 PM (Instructor: Mark Goble)
ENGLISH 90 003: Practices of Literary Study, 4 Units
- This course may satisfy a prerequisite for English.
- This course meets the English requirement and Arts & Literature, L&S Breadth.
- Schedule: TR 9:30-11:00 AM (Instructor: Kara Wittman)
ENGLISH 98BC 001: Berkeley Connect in English, 1 Unit
- Schedule: W 4:00-5:00 PM
Course Descriptions
- ENGLISH 45C 001: Literature in English: The Mid-19th through the Mid-20th Century, 4 Units
This course examines a range of British and American texts from the period with an emphasis on literary history and its social and political contexts. We will focus on the emergence, development, and legacy of modernism as a set of formal innovations that help us see how literature operates as a means of cultural response in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. We will also consider modernism alongside other literary modes and styles that pursue different strategies for representing our experience of the world—and for finding a place for literature within it. Particular attention will be paid to close reading and questions of literary form even as we think about such larger issues as the relationship between reading and entertainment, the changing status of art in respect to new technologies of information and representation, and the challenges to traditional conceptions of the self that are posed by new languages of psychological, national, and racial identity.
- ENGLISH 90 003: Practices of Literary Study, 4 Units
We might say that the essay, the literary and philosophical form of nonfiction writing characterized by playfulness and curiosity, wonder and digression, criticality and irony, and the *nature* essay have always been one and the same. The “relationship of nature and culture is [the essay’s] true theme,” writes a foremost theorist of the form, Theodor W. Adorno. Some of the earliest modern essayists were natural philosophers; some of our contemporary critics have suggested that the genre best suited for representing climate change and environmental devastation is the essay. This class will ask why. What is the relationship between nature and the essay? How does the essay encourage us, or allow us, to notice the planet? How does the essay track and shape our attention to the overlooked, the taken-for-granted, the world of microbes and bugs and porcupines and sea cucumbers? If nature writing falls into cliché, what does it risk obscuring? Henry David Thoreau saw the nature essay as a way to register what we stand to lose; Camille T. Dungy sees it as a way to enshrine what we value; the film essayists Chris Marker and John Akomfrah turn to the nature essay as a means to interrogate the complex and fraught connections between us. We will explore the global history of the nature essay, from classical Greece to 10th-century Japan, from 16th-century Tenochtitlan to 20th-century France, and from the 21st-century US to the outer rim of the solar system to form our own theories about how the nature essay works and what modes of attention, care, and action it might encourage. You will also practice writing nature essays in this seminar; you’ll cultivate the mode of attention the form demands, the sustained questioning it rewards. - ENGLISH 98BC 001: Berkeley Connect in English, 1 Unit
Berkeley Connect in English is a mentoring program, designed for English majors and those intending to major in English, that helps students build intellectual community. Over the course of a semester, enrolled students participate in regular small-group discussions facilitated by a graduate student mentor (following a faculty-directed curriculum), meet with their graduate student mentor for one-on-one academic advising, attend lectures and panel discussions featuring department faculty and alumni, and go on field trips to campus resources. Course may be repeated for credit, and up to 4 credits can be applied to the major degree.
