Some texts have the ability to confound us. A hole in the plot, an unresolved ending, a word that feels wrong: these moments of ambiguity can frustrate our attempts to pin down what a text is really saying. But such riddles can also spark our curiosity and deepen our understanding of how literature works.

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.

This is a course about the pleasure particular to reading and reflecting on literary texts, especially those short narrative texts known as tales. It is about learning to become the kind of reader capable of being seduced by a literary text: by its language, plot, sheer inventiveness – even by its ambiguity. This course will also serve as an introduction to world literature.

According to the philosopher Gottfried Leibniz, we live in “the best of all possible worlds.”  Whether or not that’s true, it hasn’t prevented us from ceaselessly imagining – or even creating – alternate realities: shiny fantasy worlds where our most cherished dreams come true or, when we’re feeling less optimistic, nightmarish dystopias where they are mercilessly crushed.  What constitutes a possible world or parallel universe?

What does it mean to meet someone or something we can’t name?  How do we know the difference between self and other, between friend and foe, between the familiar and the foreign?  What distinguishes a novel experience from an everyday event?  And how do we talk about what we’ve seen?  This course will turn to a variety of literary genres and visual representations as we interrogate the notion of the encounter.  We’ll track down visits to and from alien worlds, examine confrontations in the domestic sphere and in the street, and look at meetings with animals and with ghosts.

“The way down to hell is easy…” – Virgil, Aeneid 6.126

“Does the Eagle know what is in the pit?” – William Blake, The Book of Thel

This course experiments with different approaches to close reading through the diversions and subversions of comedy. We will get used to treating the forms of wordplay that provide most jokes with their punchlines as corresponding to aspects of literary style, from ambiguity to anticlimax, from clashing registers to the much-maligned pun. We will also look for ways that the same slipperiness of meaning plays a role in our own everyday speech habits, and in the media that saturate our social formation and participation.

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 imaginativ

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”

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