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Davis Mendez Jesse Nathan English 166 Wallace Stevens’ “The Motive of Metaphor” Wallace Stevens’ “The Motive of Metaphor” is a collection of signs, which at least for this essay is a better description of the poem. Its reading is a confluence of its reader, the text, and the poet. In this confluence, the imagination navigates the ground and...
READ MORE Student Series: An essay by English major Davis Mendez
Vikram Chandra describes the experience of watching one of his novels come to dramatic life in a television series as “surreal.” Already a well-known writer, with two novels and a collection of stories to his name, Chandra was approached in 2014 by Netflix with a proposal to base a series on his second novel, Sacred Games. The novel takes place...
Like many young people, Bernardo Hinojosa went to Europe last summer. But rather than backpacking and seeing the sights, Bernardo engaged in a different kind of tourism: he traveled from library to library, looking at medieval manuscripts and documents. As a medievalist in training – he is currently in his fourth year of completing a joint PhD in English and...
Last summer, Berkeley senior English major Arielle Moscati got two new library cards and fulfilled a long held dream: she researched her senior thesis in the British Library in London and the Bodleian Library in Oxford. A Los Angeles native, Arielle transferred to Berkeley from community college as a junior. Right away, she found her academic passion: the Middle Ages,...
In the spring semester of 2017, Tessa Rissacher took Prof. Scott Saul’s American Studies H110, “The Bay Area in the Seventies.” It changed her life. Students in the course worked on research projects that became part of an extraordinary website and cultural archive, “The Berkeley Revolution.” The website traces the social and cultural transformations centered in Berkeley during the 1960s...
For our 2015 Newsletter, Professor Jos Lavery taught English 165: Oscar Wilde and the Nineteenth Century. In this piece, Jos talks about teaching the Wildean epigram. The background of my Twitter account is a screen-cap of a slogan posted by the moderator (and who is that, exactly?) of the Oscar Wilde Facebook page. It reads, “You can never be overdressed or overeducated –...
When it comes to our alumni, the richness and diversity of the stories they study during their time on campus is mirrored in their lives after they leave Cal. The Alumni Stories series seeks to share these stories. This piece is from Sasha Podkolzina (’09) as part of our 2015 Newsletter. Here, Sasha gives a personal account of how her studies helped her cope when her future...
When it comes to our alumni, the richness and diversity of the stories they study during their time on campus is mirrored in their lives after they leave Cal. The Alumni Stories series seeks to share these stories. This piece is from David Corvo (’72) as part of our 2015 Newsletter. In this piece, David, NBC Senior Executive Producer of Primetime News, reflects on how studying narrative led him...
When it comes to our alumni, the richness and diversity of the stories they study during their time on campus is mirrored in their lives after they leave Cal. The Alumni Stories series seeks to share these stories. This piece is from Matt Young (’10) as part of our 2015 Newsletter. From Berkeley to the Forest Service to eBay to Zambia, Matt talks about how studying literature opened...
The week of October 7th, 2015, Berkeley Connect in English students had the opportunity to get up close and personal with some of the Bancroft Library’s most prized literary works. Here’s Samantha Zevanove’s first hand account of her experience. Let’s face it: as English majors in 2015, it’s easy to take books for granted. Whenever we want to get our...
READ MORE Exploring literary history at The Bancroft Library
Although this is my first year serving as Chair of the Department, I have been teaching American literature in the Department for over 25 years. Over these years, the nature and extent of the accolades my colleagues earn continue at a remarkable pace. I’ll point to only the most recent: Professor Namwali Serpell recently won the the Caine Prize for African...
The members of the English Department are delighted to welcome their newest colleague, Professor Joshua Gang. Here’s a short bio from Prof. Gang, in his own words. I’m an east coast kid originally: I grew up in Manhattan and Connecticut and did my undergrad at Brown. Originally I thought I would be a musician but literature and philosophy won me over. I...
READ MORE Hello from New Faculty Member Professor Joshua Gang
Earlier this year, B.A. and Ph.D alumnus Viet Thanh Nguyen* published his first novel, The Sympathizer, to great critical esteem. The novel, heralded by Maxine Hong Kingston as “(a) book that will go down in history as an important novel of the war in Vietnam,” has appeared on numerous best novels lists, including The New York Times and The Guardian. Recently, Viet...
