This course is about the intersections between literature and Hollywood film across the twentieth century and into the present. We will look at novels and films which not only help us better understand the social implications of media technologies, but also show how literature itself tries to understand its place as one medium among many. The class will consider such topics as the status of reading in a culture of looking, the politics of the extremely popular, celebrity as a way of life, and the commercial origins of the modern work of art. Of particular interest will be texts that address directly the mythology of Hollywood, as well as writers who borrow liberally from film technique as an aesthetic resource.

The American city is a complex and dynamic organism—and the subject of a great body of literature (both fiction and non-fiction) and film. Focusing on New York City, Los Angeles, and the Bay Area, this course will trace and critically engage how American urban development has been depicted on the page and on screen from the early twentieth century to today. By studying how writers and filmmakers have addressed the dramatic changes that impact American urban spaces, this course asks students to write critically about race and urban development from 1930s redlining and white flight to the battles over “urban renewal” and the anti-eviction campaigns of the Civil Rights era, the impact of 1970s neoliberal policies, the “war on drugs” and militarized “broken windows” policing of the 1980s, the urban uprisings of the early 1990s, and today’s hyper-gentrification. Paying special attention to how different racial groups – European-American, African-American, Asian-American, Native-American, and Latinx – have engaged, avoided, or confronted each other within these urban spaces, we will study how these changing cityscapes have on the one hand reflected and on the other hand actively influenced seismic changes in racial formation in the United States. Over the course of this summer session, students will submit three shorter written reflections on the readings we will cover. This class satisfies the Literatures in English Major Requirement. https://english.berkeley.edu/major-requirements

Even Francis Bacon, in an essay explicitly characterizing revenge as an illegitimate and destabilizing form of extrajudicial violence, cannot quite bring himself to say that acts of vengeance are unequivocally unjust. Rather, he writes, “revenge is a kind of wild justice.” In this course, we will explore the ambivalence of revenge—its frightening allure and its pleasing terror—by returning to the early modern theater and to those plays which sought to celebrate, to interrogate, and to capitalize upon our perennial fascination with getting even. We will read quintessential examples of the revenge tragedy genre—The Spanish Tragedy; Hamlet; The Revenger’s Tragedy—as well as seventeenth-century plays that have a more skeptical and revisionary relationship to that genre’s ideologies, politics, and themes—The Atheist’s Tragedy; The Tempest; Samson Agonistes. We will read these texts both as historical documents that capture distinctly early modern anxieties about violence and power in a moment of political instability and also as provocations that continue to inspire playgoers and readers to grapple with complex questions about the nature of revenge, the (il)legitimacy of state violence, the limits of forgiveness, the relevance of free will, and the capacity of literature to create the conditions for a more just world.

In this six-week in-person course, we will tackle Ulysses, Joyce’s modernist celebration of ordinary men and women. We will learn about the most intimate thoughts and actions of Leopold Bloom, Molly Bloom, and Stephen Dedalus, as well as a host of characters ranging from the mysterious Man in the Mackintosh to the dashing womanizer Blazes Boylan. As we think about Joyce’s reworking of the traditional novel, we will consider Ulysses at a variety of scales: schematic outline, narrative form, sentence, and word. Lending support to our exploration will be Joyce’s own crib notes, the 1954 and the 2024 adaptations of Homer’s epic poem Odyssey, and the Cambridge Centenary Ulysses: The 1922 Text with Essays and Notes (available online through the library).

Writers in the 20th and 21st centuries have continually looked to the Middle Ages — or, more to the point, to their idea of the Middle Ages — when constructing epic narratives set in fantastic worlds. In the course we’ll ask what it is about the medieval that writers of fantasy find so useful, as well as considering what aspects of the medieval — especially race, gender, and sexuality — their accounts ignore. We’ll read primarily the medieval literature that fantasy draws on (including Beowulf, Marie de France, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and Malory), but we'll also dip judiciously into modern works by Tolkien, Delany, Jemisin, Martin, and others.

Come write with us this summer! In this online class, you'll learn to read like a writer by discussing the craft of creative writing, explore your own process by writing your own short stories and poems, and then get feedback in small peer workshops designed to help you become an even better writer and reader. Students will read contemporary fiction and poetry (i.e.: what’s being published today) and write a variety of exercises as well as more formal pieces. Attendance is mandatory. Come write with us this summer!

This survey of U.S. poetries will begin with 17th- and 18th-century poems by two women, Anne Bradstreet and Phillis Wheatley, move to another (19th-century) pairing in Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson, and then touch down in expatriate and stateside modernisms, the Harlem Renaissance, and the New York School, on our way to the contemporary. Rather than cover all major figures briefly, we'll spend extended time with the work of a few: poets considered will include Paul Dunbar, Gertrude Stein, T.S. Eliot, Claude McKay, Jean Toomer, Frank O'Hara, John Ashbery, Claudia Rankine, and Layli Longsoldier. Along the way we'll consider renovations and dissipations of conventional form and meter, the task and materials of the long poem, seriality, citationality, who and what counts as a poetic subject, and how U.S. poetries have imagined community over and against their actual Americas.

This class focuses on a selection of works from Shakespeare’s entire career. We'll be reading a limited number of plays and some of the poetry. One of the main topics we'd like to focus on is the oscillation between regular and irregular. What is the rule, and what is the exception in Shakespeare's works? Who has the last word in a tragedy and why? What about comedies ending with a character addressing the audience? What are the rules of theater, and what are the rules of literature? Who creates them and for what purpose? When do they get transgressed, and why? A tentative list of the readings includes Midsummer Night’s Dream, Troilus and Cressida, King Lear, and Cymbeline, as well as the sonnets. The format of the class includes lectures as well as discussion, all based on questions and comments from students. All texts will be made available on bCourses. Grading will be based on two essays, a final exam, and course participation, including required bCourses posts.

One of the defining themes of modern (and especially modernist) literature is alienation, and this has a number of different valences: senses of rejection, exclusion, or impossibility; feelings of dissatisfaction; rebellious, transgressive, or anti-social impulses. It’s a relatable feeling. And related to it is another seminal idea about modernism in relation to the notion of what Maurice Blanchot termed désœuvrement— “worklessness,” or “inoperativity,” or “idleness,” or “unworkability.” Wouldn’t you rather not work? And isn’t literature at least partly about being idle? We read literary ‘works,’ and sometimes we read them precisely because we don’t want to work. And sometimes literature doesn’t want to work either—in multiple senses of the word. So, then, an important strain of modernism is born from and allied with such feelings, nurturing the impulse for what is ‘not safe for work’—nurturing the impulse to be ‘not safe for work.’ This takes a variety of forms, and in this class we’ll trace some of them in order to locate something important and valuable in what is anti-social, lazy, defiant, or transgressive in literature. We’ll seek to understand a range of impulses against work, society, and propriety in both form and content, as an emotion or affect or theme essentially linked with a formal dynamic. Our readings will open onto the underlying pragmatic goal of this course, which is to facilitate the development of your critical reflection and writing skills. We will use the questions that this material poses of us, as well as those we pose of it, to construct persuasive and cogent arguments out of them. Building on what you have already learned in the first of the Reading and Composition courses, this second course will use the questions that this material poses of us, as well as those we pose of it, to develop your critical reflection as well as your writing and research skills that will culminate in a larger critical writing project at the end of the term.

Engaging with sports is a fundamentally aesthetic enterprise. Like theater or dance, sports are performative, embodied. Like novels or films, sports produce narrative structures—in fact, much of our attachments to sports, I would argue, is grounded in those narratives. Like painting or the plastic arts, sports generate crystallizations: particular moments, spatial arrangements of time. And like contemporary life in general, sports provide the beginning of so much discourse: talking and tweeting and writing. In this course, we’ll think about sportswriting as an inclusive genre of writing and aesthetic habitus. Writing about sports certainly counts as sportswriting: novels, essays, journalism, poems. Likewise the writing done by athletes, which is often and unusually bad, but for interesting reasons. Also writing that might not, at first, appear to be about sports at all, but which has been structurally, formally, or otherwise influenced by sports. This means that, over the course of the term, we will do sportswriting, and we’ll also write about sportswriting (to appreciate, critique, contextualize it), and we’ll write alongside sportswriting (as we examine the particular political, cultural, aesthetic, and personal contexts that give it meaning, that help establish what these texts are and what they mean and what they do). Likewise, our definitions of both sports and writing will be generous and amoebic. If something strikes you as a sport, it probably is—and if you want it to be a sport for the purposes of a piece of writing, then the writing itself can make it so. Chess, yoga, debate, speedrunning Super Mario Bros—these might all qualify. Similarly, we’ll read novels and short stories and poems; we’ll watch films, we’ll scrutinize journalism and essays and memoir. But we might also take a look at video essays, tweets, photography, painting—maybe even a TikTok. Because ours is an R&C course, it’s meant to offer you a set of tools—a metaphor you’ll probably hear a lot that really means you’re going to learn ways, methods, and techniques of thinking and writing. Literally: carpenters (I assume) learn various ways to plane and cut wood. A more germane example: a midfielder must master both the basic techniques (the first touch, the pass, the volley) and also develop a style (N’golo Kante and Luka Modric do not play the same way, despite the fact that they’re both midfielders.) I’d like us to do both: to become more proficient writers, to get the basic steps down, and also construct a sense of our own voices, a way of writing, a signature. To these ends, we’ll practice ways to approach close and critical reading, rhetorical analysis, academic and argumentative writing. Importantly, good writing does not occur when a prefabricated form has been mastered, when a set of repeatable moves have been memorized. Good writing, solid essays, strong voice, creative argumentation—all these come about through experimentation, failure, collaboration, a willingness to feel and stumble around inside the process of writing. For this reason, this course prioritizes the development of your writing practice, in the sense of any creative, vocational, spiritual, or otherwise serious and expressive practice. We’ll approach writing holistically: as an academic skill, yes, but also a method of self-expression, a practice to hone, and a way of better understanding the problems and artworks we care about. Our writing will be agile; it will reach various audiences. We will combine academic curiosity, intellectual rigor, cultural affinity, personal history, and aesthetic deftness. In other words: we’ll learn to write well by becoming writers. Over our term together, we’ll build towards a final research-intensive essay, which is true of all R1B courses. As we approach that assignment, we’ll complete smaller acts of writing that will prepare us. Significantly, grading in this course reflects the importance of writing as a diachronic process, with a dedication to revision, rethinking, and reconsideration. The work of an essay (or any other form!) begins well before you sit down and open a blank document. It begins in exploration and reflection and discussion and smaller acts of writing. We’ll move through these steps together. The writing we do will always have a purpose. Your writing and thinking matter, and we’ll treat it, as such, seriously.