This seminar offers practical support for Graduate Student Instructors beginning to design and teach Reading and Composition (R&C) courses on the UC Berkeley campus. Together and in dialogue with other instructors, we will explore a spectrum of theories and practices related to teaching literature and college composition, while testing and critiquing these against our own expanding experiences as students, writers, and teachers.

This is the first semester of a year-long Modern Greek Language course designed for students with no previous knowledge of the language. We will study grammar, syntax, and vocabulary in order to learn Greek as it is written and spoken today. Students will practice the skills of speaking, reading, and writing throughout the semester. In addition to our study of the language, we will watch a few Greek films in order to learn about Greek culture and history in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

As we watch and discuss Greek films from the postwar period through the economic crisis of the twenty-first century, we will consider how Greek filmmakers have forged an aesthetics and ethics of resistance to the violence of modernity. In the aftermath of the World War and the Greek Civil War that followed in its wake, Greek filmmakers responded to the country’s physical, moral, and economic collapse. They borrowed from Italian Neorealism as they sought to represent the social realities of a devastated Greece and the culture of reconstruction.

It’s been said that poetry is what is untranslatable, yet one poem often translates another, and many of us only read one another’s languages in translation. As a catch-all concept for whatever resists being captured in human terms, “Nature” can also be thought of as a language only ever encountered in translation.

In this course we will read a number of literary texts set in colonized territories. Dating primarily from the turn of the twentieth century to the period of widespread decolonization a half-century later, these texts represent a variety of forms and genres and emerge out of a number of different cultural situations and geographic locations. Some of the authors to be considered are firmly enshrined in the canon of modern European literature, while others write as colonized or postcolonial subjects engaging with European histories of exoticist representation.

This seminar (""co-listed"" as Critical Theory 205) is not an introduction to Theodor W. Adorno’s work; rather, it will involve sustained reading and discussion of Adorno’s last major text, which he was still finishing at the time of his 1969 death: AESTHETIC THEORY (1970). We will be reading Robert Hullot-Kentor’s English translation of ÄSTHETISCHE THEORIE. Though we will sometimes briefly consider the original German text, knowledge of German is not required (though it would of course prove very helpful).

This introduction to comparative literary study at the graduate level will also be a seminar on how to read what Michel Foucault calls “obscure life.” Foucault uses this phrase to refer to what he takes to be the object of “literary discourse” as we know it, a discourse whose emergence he locates (debatably) at the end of the seventeenth century.

In this joint seminar we will examine some of the conceptual and thematic places where literature and law cross over into each other’s domain. The focus will be on novel reading – Crime and Punishment, The Brothers Karamazov, and Lolita – and on texts where crime, judgment and punishment assume particular procedural, narrative, moral or metafictive importance. We will pay particular attention to the themes of transgression, healing and vengeance and how they play out in legal and metafictive fora.

Expository writing based on analysis of selected masterpieces of ancient and modern literature. R1B satisfies the second half of the Reading and Composition requirement.

Prerequisities/Placement:

1A or equivalent is prerequisite to 1B.

See the Schedule of Classes to obtain the class number for your desired section.

Expository writing based on analysis of selected masterpieces of ancient and modern literature. R1A satisfies the first half of the Reading and Composition requirement.

Prerequisities/Placement:

UC Entry Level Writing Requirement or UC Analytical Writing Placement Exam.

See the Schedule of Classes to obtain the class number for your desired section.