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?

In many ways Shakespeare is the literary inventor of modernity. His plays depict the psychological, political, economic, and social upheavals that mark the transition from the pre-modern world to a world that is recognizably our own. But he is also the most international of all writers. This course will explore Shakespeare’s extraordinary literary originality by studying his most influential plays in an international context. We will locate Shakespeare in the culture of his period by reading his plays in dialogue with masterworks from across Renaissance Europe.

The "Berkeley Connect in Comparative Literature" course works to make stronger connections among our undergraduates, graduate students, and professors–and with the larger campus and its various communities.

The "Berkeley Connect in Comparative Literature" course works to make stronger connections among our undergraduates, graduate students, and professors–and with the larger campus and its various communities.

This course is designed as a comparative study of "post-Yugoslav literature,” a term that is increasingly used in reference to a diverse, transnational, and multilingual body of works produced over the last twenty five years by the people (and their descendants) who once lived in a common, socialist state of the former Yugoslavia. Today these authors live and write in various forms of exilic displacement, scattered throughout Yugoslavia’s successor states and around the world.

From the French New Wave to the post-Revolutionary cinema of Iran, it is well known that filmmakers across the globe have often focused on the perspectives or stories of children to shed light on the struggles, joys, and mundane (turned exhilarating) moments of everyday life. Films focusing on children approach life from a “smaller” or differently illuminated scale than that of the adult subject, sometimes focusing on cycles of growth, while other times exposing the viewer to experiences, journeys, and imaginative worlds otherwise lost to adult realities.

What is meant when we say someone or something “sounds American”? Can a person sound like a certain gender, social class, sexuality, or race? How would we possibly define that sound? And what might it mean to think of a culture by the ways it sounds and listens, instead of how it looks or sees? This course will explore these questions and others by studying podcasts, poems, songs, novels, and the changing forms of sonic technologies like microphones, radios, mp3s, turntables, and more.

The Statue of Liberty with welcome torch always raised. The Hollywood sign against golden California hills. Subways and freeways running like arteries above and below ground, offering to transport us around and across the city. Many iconic images of New York City and Los Angeles construct U.S. urban centers as a space of endless movement and possibility.

How does one rest in a world that is itself unmoored or ungrounded? What would it be to keep time with a world essentially transient and perpetually changing? How can one keep faith with faithless creatures and fugitive phenomena?