French 245B: Scenes from the History of the Novel
Nicholas Paige
Dwinelle 4226 | Tuesday, 2-5pm
This seminar has both an introductory and a research dimension. On the one hand, it will present students with an overview of the early (pre-Realist) French novel, along with critical-theoretical milestones on the genre’s “rise.” But we will also have a more specific goal, which is conceptualizing changes in the use of scenes in fictional narratives over a span of 150 years.
The scene-summary distinction is among the oldest in narratology. Summary telescopes a temporally dilated series of important actions by excluding the proximate context and details of each. By contrast, scenic narration approaches the pace of recounted events by restoring detail, often plunging the reader into the sensory world of the characters. By some accounts, scenes start to push out summary in the nineteenth-century novel, leading to the critical orthodoxy expressed in the Jamesian injunction, “Show, don’t tell.” So the question for us will be: Is it possible to see the modern scene emerge in these earlier novels? Or are they organized around entirely different (and coherent) narrative principles?
Novels will include works by Scudéry, Lafayette, Marivaux, Riccoboni, Diderot, and Stael.
English 218: Milton
James Grantham Turner
Wheeler 337 | Monday, 12-3pm
For better or worse, most roads in literary history lead either to or from Milton. The goal of this course is to find a way through the massive corpus of Milton's writing, to see how Milton “produces himself” in his work. You should get an adequate knowledge of the major poems, or new angles if you are already familiar with them, but we will also give a central place to hitherto marginal texts: prose, minor poems, manuscript variants, foreign-language writings. Without prescribing a theme, my selections will foreground Milton’s materiality, in several senses: awareness of economic corruption; political activism in the “Puritan Revolution”; educational theory that includes physical exercise and hands-on experiment; the “wanton growth” of the natural environment, the ecosystem of Paradise and the Fall; monist cosmology; visceral fear of gender inversion; conflicted relation to the body, especially digestion and sexuality (and later blindness); music, dance and scenery in the Ludlow Mask (“Comus”); the physical production and correction of Milton’s manuscripts and printed books.
The class meets only once a week, all morning with a short break. However, it is not planned as a specialist research seminar. I welcome students in entirely different periods and language areas, as well as Early Modernists and future Miltonists. Individuals can choose the amount of secondary literature they wish, and may concentrate on close readings. If you are a Modernist, say, a Classicist, a poet, an Italian Renaissance specialist, a political historian, a theologian or an Anglo-Saxonist you can craft essays that bring your own expertise to bear. His dark materials continue to generate new expressions.
The secondary literature on Milton is overwhelmingly vast, and I am concerned that attention to ‘the literature’ will crowd out the literature. I have curated an idiosyncratic selection of articles and passages from books, which will be optional rather than required; you will get full credit for papers that focus entirely on keen-eyed readings in Milton’s own oeuvre. To provide a ‘locovore’ tasting menu most of these anthologized texts will be by current or former members of the Berkeley faculty or PhD students who developed papers generated for this very course, English 218. (For the specialist I provide much fuller bibliographical listings, customized to the individual project.) I will also suggest a few instances of creative, as well as scholarly, responses to Milton’s work, dark with excessive bright.
Required Texts: Oxford Classics Major Works ed. Orgel and Goldberg, or any similar version you already own; all other texts downloadable
History 280B: Interior Subjects: Public and Private Personhood in Early Modern England
Ethan H. Shagan
Dwinelle 3104 | Wednesday, 2-4pm
Early modern England, once known to historians too grandiosely as the “first modern society,” was the site of precocious experiments to convert private subjectivity into public life, experiments we associate with the emergence of liberalism. In a wide range of contexts—religious interiority, republican theories of citizenship, life-writing, voting and majority rule, women’s roles in litigation, the rise of commercial credit, the bourgeois public sphere, and many others—interiority achieved a paradoxical new public significance, not only shaping people’s own experiences but shaping society. In this course, we will explore how early modern subjects created a familiar modern condition in which the more interiority matters, the more exposed it becomes. This focus will give students a chance to explore several canonical subjects in early modern British history and to think in novel ways about connections between them.
Music 220: The Continuous and the Discrete: Theories of Music, Media, and Mathematics
Lester Hu
Hargrove 210 | Thursday, 1-4pm
Is the world made of smooth continua or discrete units? This seemingly recondite question of metaphysics undergirds many classical binaries across a variety of domains, e.g., melody vs harmony, flow vs division, reduction vs emergence, and even individual vs society or human vs machine. This seminar takes the continuous vs discrete binary as a guiding problem across the histories and theories of music, mathematics, media, and the philosophies of science and politics. It examines how different discourses and traditions encounter the binary and attempt to negotiate or even bridge across it. Topics include theories of tuning, rhythm, and acoustics from Ancient Greece to Enlightenment Europe; media theory centered on the works and legacies of Friedrich Kittler; the history and philosophy of infinity and the infinitesimal in mathematics; the use of mathematics as a philosophical heuristic in Gilles Deleuze and Alain Badiou; debates on emergence; and political philosophies grounded in musical and mathematical thought. Prior training in music theory or collegiate mathematics is NOT required, though welcome.