"How do humans read? This question has preoccupied literary critics and historians alike, yet rarely do scholars of the two disciplines join in discussing this foundational question. In this seminar we will bring together theoretical and historical analyses and offer various modalities to conceptualize the practice of reading.

The study of sound–in relation to music, literature, media, and performance–has required scholars to reconceive their objects of study and, in many cases, the very grounds of interpretation. In this seminar we aim to build a shared vocabulary to consider how material encounters are interwoven with symbolic exchanges to produce that experience we commonly call sound. Perhaps because sound has so often been overlooked as fundamental to cultural life, it also has served repeatedly as the adhesive for community formations organized in opposition to dominant cultures.

What are the resources novels marshal to produce knowledge of different kinds? How does the social location from which they emerge impact what they say, the knowledge they can hold. Along with six novels, we will pursue a set of readings from sociology and linguistic anthropology, as well as some key essays from the literature on critical sexuality studies and decolonial thinking. Among the concepts that will be of central concern for us will be point of view, forms of capital, cultural fields, and language ideologies.

This seminar offers practical support for Graduate Student Instructors beginning to design and teach Reading and Composition (R&C) courses on the UC Berkeley campus. Together and in dialogue with other instructors, we will explore a spectrum of theories and practices related to teaching literature and college composition, while testing and critiquing these against our own expanding experiences as students, writers, and teachers.

This seminar (""co-listed"" as Critical Theory 205) is not an introduction to Theodor W. Adorno’s work; rather, it will involve sustained reading and discussion of Adorno’s last major text, which he was still finishing at the time of his 1969 death: AESTHETIC THEORY (1970). We will be reading Robert Hullot-Kentor’s English translation of ÄSTHETISCHE THEORIE. Though we will sometimes briefly consider the original German text, knowledge of German is not required (though it would of course prove very helpful).

This introduction to comparative literary study at the graduate level will also be a seminar on how to read what Michel Foucault calls “obscure life.” Foucault uses this phrase to refer to what he takes to be the object of “literary discourse” as we know it, a discourse whose emergence he locates (debatably) at the end of the seventeenth century.

In this joint seminar we will examine some of the conceptual and thematic places where literature and law cross over into each other’s domain. The focus will be on novel reading – Crime and Punishment, The Brothers Karamazov, and Lolita – and on texts where crime, judgment and punishment assume particular procedural, narrative, moral or metafictive importance. We will pay particular attention to the themes of transgression, healing and vengeance and how they play out in legal and metafictive fora.

Hannah Arendt's writings have been criticized for their limited vision of the political sphere. Yet, her reflections continue to inform contemporary debates on civil disobedience, violence, and freedom in ways worth considering. In this course, we will work with both the limits and the promise of Arendt's writing for the present, her engagement with Kafka and Benjamin on tradition, authority, and power, and her critique of both individualist and collective notions of freedom implied by her ideas of plurality, concerted action, and revolution. Course is by permission of the instructor only.

Notions of analogy, allegory, and symbolism refer to rhetorical devices and practices, forms of poetic language, and modes of forming perception and knowledge. Often understood in opposition to conceptual thought, they are connected with premodern epistemological orders, magical or mythical relations to things and the world, and to a series of modern movements from Romanticism to Symbolism, Surrealism, and Magical Realism.

In her landmark study, _Reading in Detail_, Naomi Schor argues that the detail has traditionally been devalued in Western aesthetics, gendered feminine through an association with the everyday, the domestic, or the ornamental.