Joy, grief, anxiety, shame, desire, jealousy, fear, hope: emotions are a familiar part of ordinary life, even if it’s sometimes hard to say exactly what they are and where they come from.

Note: Enrollment by instructor approval. Please email Aurelia Cojocaru at aurelia.cojocaru@berkeley.edu a writing sample no longer than 3 pages by July 1st, 2017. Selected students will be notified and enrolled.

This course examines a series of films, beginning in the silent era and working towards the present day, to consider how cinema represents its own relationship to technology and industry. At its most fundamental level, the course will ask how the films on our syllabus engage with a variety of modern machines, ranging from factory apparatuses and cars to robots and spacecraft, and including the movie camera itself. We will explore how these machines are, by turns, represented as horrifyingly impersonal, thrillingly powerful, improbably beautiful, and movingly human.

In many ways Shakespeare is the literary inventor of modernity. His plays depict the psychological, political, economic, and social upheavals that mark the transition from the pre-modern world to a world that is recognizably our own. But he is also the most international of all writers. This course will explore Shakespeare’s extraordinary literary originality by studying his most influential plays in an international context. We will locate Shakespeare in the culture of his period by reading his plays in dialogue with masterworks from across Renaissance Europe.

Course Description

Utopian hope often meets an insistence on some fixed idea of human nature. Demands for greater freedom and equality are countered by “realistic” estimations of how much order and hierarchy we must bear in order to live together in society. This course will explore this drama of revolutionary desire and reactionary response as it is staged in novels by four women: Mary Shelley, Octavia Butler, Margaret Atwood, and Ann Leckie; as well as in the short stories that Alice Sheldon published under the pen name James Tiptree, Jr.

What makes a home? Is it an apartment? A native country? Or something less tangible—a feeling or a thought? In this course, we’ll devote close attention to a series of texts that address these and related questions. In the first half of the semester we’ll examine stories about building homes, thinking through the way these texts depict physical space, and what those spaces mean to us and to the stories that contain them. In the second half of the semester we’ll hit the road, considering travel accounts and fiction that focus on leaving—or sometimes destroying—homes.

Literary traditions have developed and continually redefined the often complex relations between author, poet, narrator, character, and reader in literature.

At once setting and subject, geopolitical region and aesthetic construct, the Americas have long captivated cultural imaginations across the globe. But what are we talking about when we talk about the Americas in the plural? To say “I’m American” suggests a certain singularity that disregards the double, continental expanse mapped across a hemisphere. What are the implications of understanding North and South separately and together, or instead, considering multiple Americas? What role might textuality, intertextuality, performance, and translation play in acts of border crossing?