Reading & Composition

Every day in Berkeley we pass individuals who are so eccentric, so strange, so “out there,” that we often call them (without reflection) “crazy.”  But how do we decide between “crazy” and “unique”—between  those who might be considered genuinely “mad” and those who are simply “marching to the beat of their own drum”?  In this course we will consider madness in its many forms and characterizations in literature, film, and visual art.  Our study, however, will not be of madness itself so much as the way it exemplifies the close connection, for all of us, between what we see and the imaginative lens through which we see it.

We will meet Don Quixote who, pathetic or profound, sees a world that is precisely as romantic as he wishes it to be, and a Little Prince who knows for certain, when looking at a sketch of a wooden box with holes, that inside that box is a live sheep. We’ll listen to the townspeople, in “The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World,” as they re-imagine the village they thought they knew in the course of telling to each other the likely story of the dead body that washes up one day on their beach.  We will watch as the narrator of “The Yellow Wallpaper” encounters successive new versions of herself in the paper that covers her room.

As we examine the texts before us, we will consider how the process of reading fiction and of viewing art is also an exercise of the imagination: the worlds and characters we “see” before us are worlds and characters we ourselves, in part, create.  What does it mean to read?  What is the place and the process of interpretation?  And how do our interpretations of art impact the world we encounter and the self we create when we leave the classroom?  Is reading any less a process of intellectual creation than the one of writing: that exercise by which we give form and shape to our interpretations—represent and communicate to others what we see in the art we analyze?

This will be a course in which we encounter great texts, reflect together on what we take from them, and express our individual interpretations in several longer, and shorter, papers designed to develop the best of skills in reading, writing, interpretation, and research.

WRITTEN TEXTS:

• Gabriel García-Márquez, “The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World”
• Charlotte Perkins Gilman, “The Yellow Wallpaper”
• Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince
• Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote (selections)
• Euripides, The Bacchae
• Selected poetry of Lewis Carroll, W.B. Yeats, Emily Dickinson

FILMS AND VISUAL ART:

• One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
• The King of Hearts
• Silence of the Lambs
• Selected images from Géricault,Van Gogh, and Picasso