Category: Read Along with Berkeley English

Professor: Elizabeth Abel The mystique of Bloomsbury has captured the Anglo-American cultural imagination for over a century. The term “Bloomsbury” references a small neighborhood in London; a closely knit circle of friends that included some of the signal British writers, artists, cultural critics, and social theorists of the early 20th century, coming together in a queer ambiance; and an artistic...

Professor: George Starr Across this term we’ll be looking at how writers and filmmakers have grappled with the relationship between the California dream and the California nightmare. We will begin with the film Mildred Pierce (dir. Michael Curtiz, 1945), a classic noir tale of ambition and murder; explore some essays from Joan Didion’s first nonfiction collection, Slouching Toward Bethlehem (1968);...

Professor: Kent Puckett Go here to see the course-description page on our website. We’ll read and discuss three of Shakespeare’s tragedies—Hamlet, King Lear, and Antony and Cleopatra—with an eye to how they work as aesthetic objects and how they shed light on the nature of tragedy. In addition to exploring Shakespeare’s sense of the tragic as a response to his own...

Professor: Beth Piatote Go here to see the course-description page on our website. This course explores literary production by Native American/Indigenous writers from the nineteenth century to present, drawing out the various linguistic and literary influences present in the works. We’ll emphasize the foundations of Indigenous languages, literacies, and form, while also analyzing how Native American writers have consistently appropriated...

If you are like many graduates, your seminars count among your most vivid college memories. We’d like to share that experience with you again by inviting you to read along with the two current courses highlighted below. For each seminar, we provide selected readings and discussion questions, along with an invitation to join an ongoing online discussion and monthly Open...

Prof: Poulomi Saha Course Description: From cannibalistic witches to sadistic parents to dystopian hellscapes, children’s literature is rife with terrifying figures and dark themes. This class will look at forms of monstrosity, deviance, and horror within a variety of texts that are so often figured as cute, sweet, or safe, and explore why it is that there is such pleasure...

Professors: Bryan Wagner and Christine Palmer This course will explore the social, cultural, political, and personal awakenings in the culture of the Harlem Renaissance. Roughly between 1918-1930, in the midst of racial segregation and increasing anti-Black violence, Black American writers reclaimed the right to represent themselves in a wide range of artistic forms and activist movements. We’ll consider how artists...

Welcome: The English Department welcomes you to “Writing Race:  Faulkner and his Progeny,” and I look forward to meeting you via Zoom on the first Wednesday of the month. —Mark Danner “The past is never dead,” Faulkner famously said. “It is not even past.” In our time of racial turmoil, few High Modernist writers feel more contemporary. Faulkner managed to...

Welcome to the black comedy of the Coen brothers. We’ll concentrate on three films, starting with their first, Blood Simple (1984), a neo-noir, influenced by film noirs of the 40’s and 50’s. But it is also a post-modern text about uncertainty, misunderstanding, and other films. See you on October 4th, Best, Julia Bader Through films ranging from Miller’s Crossing and...

Welcome: The English Department welcomes you to “The Other Melville,” and I look forward to meeting you via Zoom and to talking about Melville’s fiction. —Samuel Otter Most readers know the works of Herman Melville through his now-famous Moby-Dick. But Melville wrote a range of compelling fiction and poetry before and after Moby-Dick. The “Read Along with Berkley English” component...

Welcome to “Reading Along with Berkeley English.” As you can see, we are an eclectic bunch. I am a scholar of Native American Studies and American Studies. I never, never thought I would be reading (much less teaching) comics. But, although I resisted for quite some time, I finally listened to my brilliant students who insisted (repeatedly over several years) that I...