In the age of Facebook and Instagram, of tweets and vlogs, it can be difficult to remember that not so long ago the practice of narrating the self was often closely tied to intimate, private, and even secret forms of writing. In this course, we will consider a number of literary texts that experiment with such forms of writing, focusing in particular on the genre of the diary novel.

Joy, grief, anxiety, shame, desire, jealousy, fear, hope: emotions are a familiar part of ordinary life, even if it’s sometimes hard to say exactly what they are and where they come from.

Note: Enrollment by instructor approval. Please email Aurelia Cojocaru at aurelia.cojocaru@berkeley.edu a writing sample no longer than 3 pages by July 1st, 2017. Selected students will be notified and enrolled.

This course examines a series of films, beginning in the silent era and working towards the present day, to consider how cinema represents its own relationship to technology and industry. At its most fundamental level, the course will ask how the films on our syllabus engage with a variety of modern machines, ranging from factory apparatuses and cars to robots and spacecraft, and including the movie camera itself. We will explore how these machines are, by turns, represented as horrifyingly impersonal, thrillingly powerful, improbably beautiful, and movingly human.

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.

This course will explore the connections between detective fiction and psychoanalysis, starting from the near synchronicity of their first appearances and their mutually reinforcing methods and narrative structures. We will read Sophocles’ Oedipus the King as the archtype of both forms, considering why the question of guilt (“Who did it?”) insistently in these texts becomes a question of identity (“Who am I?”). We will also consider other aspects of identity—sexuality, race, and class—that appear repeatedly imbricated in the explorations of self of the two genres.

How is time expressed, through the narrative presentation of trauma, in contemporary Greek fiction and poetry? In recent years, trauma theory has focused more intensely on the  relationship between trauma and history. As such, trauma literature is seen to provide a mode of interpretation of history as well as as mode of penetration into history.

A study of Indo-European mythology as it is preserved in some of the earliest myth texts in Celtic, Norse, and Greek literatures. The meaning of myth will be examined and compared from culture to culture to see how this meaning may shed light on the ethos of each society as it is reflected in its literary works.

In this class we will take a close and multi-faceted look at books written primarily for children, a category of literature that remains rather under-examined, despite its popularity, persistence, and influence.  We will read examples of stories for children written in a number of different times (from the 18th to the 21st centuries) and places (Europe, Britain, North America), and our readings will make use of many different kinds of literary analysis:  historical contextualization, analyses that draw on particular literary theories, psychoanalytical approaches, and close readings.  We wil