How does literature relate to the social world?  Through what means of representation do literary works comment on societal issues?  How does literature intervene in social struggles?  Does the literary illuminate the social in unique ways?  How does genre shape literary interventions?

Travel has long been an important literary theme. The Bible, The Iliad, and The Odyssey all are road (or at least sea lane) stories. Before Jack Kerouac went on the road, crisscrossing America’s highway system, Don Quixote had traveled the dirt roads of early modern Spain.  Dante paused “in the middle of the road of our life,” before taking a guided tour through heaven, purgatory, and hell. The voyage can be a spiritual quest, an adventure, an escape, an exercise in satire, self-knowledge, a way to confirm, or dissolve, prejudices.

A 3.5 GPA in HS English, a reading knowledge of a modern or foreign language is required or consent of instructor.

Students at UC Berkeley are supposed to learn to think critically. Certainly, critical thinking is a central component of a genuine education and a crucial ingredient in an open society—but what exactly does it mean? How does one do it effectively and where can it go wrong?  This class will explicitly address these questions.

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This course fulfills the first portion of the undergraduate reading and composition requirement. It is designed to introduce you to the inns and outs of critical reading, literary analysis, and academic writing. The course emphasizes reading and writing as processes that are shaped by communities of readers and writers.  This means that peer editing, oral presentations, and discussion in class and on the web-based discussion board will be important components of the course

This course will examine the theme of the quest across several literary genres: the novel, a religious text, drama, and poetry. A primary goal of the course will be to identify and compare the various ways in which authors have worked with this theme throughout literary history. In our readings we will consider how the idea of the quest helps to shed light on the relationship between life and art, spiritual and religious doctrine, literary visions of social utopia, as well as the dilemma of fashioning a poetic self in the context of shifting forms of social and aesthetic values.

Disfigurement, dismemberment, rape, and rhetoric are sometimes intricately intertwined in the medieval literary world, where rhetoric, as ornamented or dressed up speech, is related to the image of the dressed up female body through the Latin term figura.  While the Romans merely associated the trope of personification with the feminine (hence the earliest personifications were usually portrayed as women), medieval patristic writings show that women are later conceived of as tropes themselves.  Howard Bloch has shown that the creation of Eve from the rib of Adam could only be conceived of i

In this course we will try to define women’s voices in war, both in male and  female authors from various places and eras.   The texts we will read range from a Greek epic and drama of the eighth and fifth centuries B.C.

“What’s the use of stories that aren’t even true?” Haroun asks his father the storyteller in Salman Rushdie’s Haroun and the Sea of Stories.  In this course, we will explore the ways in which texts from a variety of genres, languages, and time periods address this question and its ramifications: when and how do these texts reflect upon their own status as literary and artistic projects, and upon the relation between fiction and “reality?” When and how does storytelling function as a medium of culture or politics? When and how does storytelling become related to the art of seduction?