| ENGLISH 10 | INTRODUCTION TO SHAKESPEARE | BERGHOF, A. | This will be a really FUN Shakespeare class! Where else can you get course credit for watching live performances of Shakespeare under the stars, meeting the actors, discussing film adaptations of the plays, making a video as an option in place of one of the 3 short essay assignments, and looking at paintings inspired by the plays you study? We'll read three of Shakespeare's most entertaining and engaging plays, and we'll explore them in relation to their artistic and cultural context. A Midsummer Night's Dream, The Winter's Tale, and The Tempest are the perfect plays to read in summer school, because they're dreamy, ethereal, thought-provoking, and often absolutely hilarious! The thematic focus of the course will be monstrosity and animalism, as we pursue the plays' fascination with hybrids and the liminal space between the human and the inhuman. Whether you have absolutely no background in Shakespeare whatsoever or you've studied his plays in depth, the breadth, variety, and focus of this course will have something enriching to offer. Please feel free to email the instructor, Dr. Alice Crawford Berghof at aberghof@uci.edu if you have any questions about the course. Repeatability: May be taken for credit 3 times as topics vary. (IV) |
| ENGLISH 102C | VICTORIAN VICE | BARTLETT, J. | In this course we will read a number of literary works that explore the “dark side” of nineteenth-century culture, when the widening gulf between rich and poor and correlated fears of social, moral, and physical decay were sensationalized in stories of transgression and punishment. We will find this trend in the “best” and “worst” places—poems in coterie magazines, newspaper coverage of crimes and criminals, detective fiction, social criticism, slum memoirs, and government documents—while interrogating our own critical assumptions about the vocabularies of the literary, the judgment of taste, and narratives of sociocultural identity. |