In this senior seminar, we will revisit an age-old problem in the study of fiction:  how do readers become involved in the lives of literary characters? In particular, we will ask how the representation of thought and feeling influence our conception of fictional character.  Primary texts include Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility; Henry James, What Maisie Knew; Virginia Woolf, Mrs.

In this senior seminar, we will revisit an age-old problem in the study of fiction:  how do readers become involved in the lives of literary characters? In particular, we will ask how the representation of thought and feeling influence our conception of fictional character.  Primary texts include Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility; Henry James, What Maisie Knew; Virginia Woolf, Mrs.

In this course we will study the relationship between obsession and identity, personal and/or national. Obsession according to Merriam Webster Dictionaryis: “ A persistent disturbing preoccupation with someone or something or with an often unreasonable idea or feeling” and the Miller-Keane Encyclopedia and Dictionary of Medicine, Nursing and Allied Health: “A recurrent persistent thought, image or impulse that is unwanted and distressing (ego-dystonic) that comes involuntarily to the mind despite attempts to ignore or suppress it.”

A study of Indo-European mythology as it is preserved in some of the earliest myth texts in Celtic, Norse, and Greek literatures. The meaning of myth will be examined and compared from culture to culture to see how this meaning may shed light on the ethos of each society as it is reflected in its literary works.The role of oral tradition in the preservation of early myth will also be explored.

This course revolves around the reception of classical myth and literature, focusing on what seems to be an unlikely mythical figure — Herakles.

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).

This course examines forms of Modern Greek writing (prose, poetry, drama) and the reading of literary texts as auxiliary to the acquisition of compositional skills.

Prerequisites: Consent of the instructor.

A reader for the course is prepared by the instructor.

Text:  A Manual of Modern Greek by Anne Farmakides,Yale University Press, ISBN 978-0-30003019-8

How do literary works and films simultaneously disclose and keep their secrets? This course examines the role of secrets in producing and blocking narrative movement, and in releasing and withholding meaning.

What makes American history, and why would we want to—need to—remake it? This course explores literary and visual materials produced in the post-Civil Rights U.S. by artists and writers who ponder this question and approach history like a raw material that demands to be refashioned and constantly problematized. What versions of American history have they remade, and what new versions and visions of history do they produce in the process? How has re-making history been used to gain a critical understanding of silences and omissions in the United States’ story?

Note:  Enrollment by instructor approval only; email a maximum 5 page writing sample to instructor Jocelyn Saidenberg (jsaidenberg@berkeley.edu).  Selected applicants will be then notified and enrolled.