A Stage Reading of Nagahara Hideaki’s –The Ones Who Leave– translated by Andrew Way Leong with Q & A moderated by Philip Kan Gotanda. About this event The Ones Who Leave (Sariyukumono, 去り行く者, 1927) is the only surviving play of Nagahara Hideaki, a Los Angeles-based author who wrote for a Japanese-language audience in the mid-1920s. The Ones Who Leave depicts the struggles of the...
There is still time to join our Spring 2022 seminars! 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 seminars highlighted below. For each seminar, we provide selected readings and discussion questions, along with an invitation...
In The Distance Cure: A History of Teletherapy (MIT Press, 2021), English Department Lecturer Hannah Zeavin offers a history of psychotherapy across distance and time, from Freud’s treatments by mail to crisis hotlines, radio call-ins, chatbots, and Zoom sessions. While therapy has long understood itself as taking place in a room, with two (or more) people engaged in person-to-person conversation, psychotherapy has...
READ MORE Hannah Zeavin’s <em>The Distance Cure: A History of Teletherapy</em>
The Department of English and the New Literary Project present the winner of the 2021 New Literary Project Joyce Carol Oates Prize, Danielle Evans. Danielle Evans is the author of the story collections The Office of Historical Corrections (Riverhead, 2020) and Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self (Riverhead, 2010), which won the PEN American Robert W. Bingham Prize, the...
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...
READ MORE Bad Seed: Monstrosity, Horror, and the Inhuman in Children’s Literature
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...
In Second Time Around: From Art House to DVD (Columbia University Press, 2021), Professor D.A. Miller watches digitally restored films by directors from Mizoguchi to Pasolini and from Hitchcock to Honda, looking to find not only what he saw in them as a young man, but also what he was then kept from seeing by quick camerawork, normal projection speed, missing...
READ MORE D.A. Miller’s <em>Second Time Around: From Art House to DVD</em>
A poet and a book artist take a train across the United States, creating and conversing along the way. Cecil Giscombe and Judith Margolis recently published Train Music, a collaborative travelogue that explores race and gender with a mix of poetry, prose, and visual art. In Train Music, Giscombe’s narrative disjunctions and Margolis’ figurative abstractions crisscross at a roundhouse (‘I’m not...
READ MORE Cecil Giscombe and Judith Margolis: <em>Train Music</em>
On Wednesday, February 2nd at 12pm, Elisa Tamarkin (English) will be talking with David Henkin (History) about his new book, The Week: A History of the Unnatural Rhythms That Made Us Who We Are. Click here for the livestream. We take the seven-day week for granted, rarely asking what anchors it or what it does to us. Yet weeks are...
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In the age of visual culture, why write fiction? For a wide array of contemporary writers from Toni Morrison to J.M. Coetzee, Professor Dorothy Hale suggests, the answer lies in the novel’s ethical power. For these writers, novels not only illuminate ethical action in complex social worlds, but also task writers and readers, through the narrative problem of character representation,...
READ MORE Dorothy Hale’s <em>The Novel and the New Ethics</em>
In Finding the Right Words: A Story of Literature, Grief, and the Brain, Cindy Weinstein (PhD ’89) reflects on her time as a PhD student in the Berkeley English department, which coincided with her father’s struggle with dementia. Her father was only 58; the first symptom was his difficulty to find words —an especially charged issue for Weinstein because of...
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In Acting My Age, Thomas Farber reflects, with wit and insight, on his own mortality as well as on the impending extinction of vital presences in the natural world, from coral reefs to snow leopards. The author of over two dozen wide-ranging books of fiction, nonfiction, and epigrams, Farber teaches creative writing in the English department. The following excerpt from...
In The Value of Poetry (Cambridge, 2020), Professor Eric Falci explores the literary, cultural, and political significance of poetry in the twenty-first century. Arguing that some of the most significant and enduring human notions have been voiced and held in poems, he examines the ways in which poetry captures instances of thought, feeling, and speech, and embeds them in language that is...
For information on the Bedri Distinguished Writer Series, including past and forthcoming events, please visit the Series’ website. Join us for a public lecture with Jennifer Egan, the Fall 2021 Bedri Distinguished Writer, on Thursday, November 4th at 5:00 PM in 315 Wheeler Hall (the Maud Fife Room). A smaller, department-only Q&A will take place the following day (Friday, November...
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...
