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.

“Sexuality brings into play too great a diversity of conjugated becomings; these are like n sexes, an entire war machine through which love passes.”

– A Thousand Plateaus.

In this course we explore theories and practices of gender and race through physical performances in interdisciplinary art works, which include theatre, dance, performance art, film, animation, and music in live and mediated forms. We will focus on how race and gender stereotypes shift, resist, and radicalize in art works, which travel outside national borders and encounter “other” bodies. Whose body is this in these aesthetic and popular representations? Who is making up the rules for our bodies? Whose body dares disrupt an authoritarian national image?

How do we understand a literary imitation? What is the nature of our intellectual double take when we perceive it? Does our recognition stir self-congratulation, delight, annoyance, disappointment—or lead us to skip over it entirely as the ‘mere copy’ of a more valued original?

In this course, we will read works of fiction, nonfiction, and theory by contemporary voices who reflect on growing up in the United States in the 21st century.

Maybe that’s because when I was a kid

a white boy told me I was marginalized

and all I could think of was the edge

of a sheet of paper, how empty it is—

the abyss I was told never to write into.

-Clint Smith, “Queries of Unrest”

Course Description: