TEACHING HISTORY AND PHILOSOPHY

Comp.Lit 165: “From Cerberus to Cyberpunk -- Mythology, the Millennium & Popular Culture"
 Lecturer in Comparative Literature, UCB Department  Comparative Literature. Summer 1999.

Rhetoric 122: "Elizabethan and Jacobean Drama"
Lecturer in Rhetoric, UCB Department of Rhetoric . Spring 1999

Rhetoric 20: “Mythologies, Allegories and Interpretation The History of Interpretation.”
Lecturer in Rhetoric, UCB Department of Rhetoric. Summer 1998

Latin 2: "Caesar and Catullus"
Lecturer in Latin, UCB Department of Classics. Fall 1997.

Comp.Lit. 1B: "Popular Culture, Mythology and the Gothic"
Lecturer in Comparative Literature, UCB Department  Comparative Literature. Spring 1997.

Classics 35: "Aeschylus to Soyinka: Greek Tragedies and their Anglophone Legacy"
Lecturer in Greek Tragedy, UCB Department of Classics. Fall 1996.

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 Proposed Courses

Politics, Entertainment and Popular Fantasy in British Romanticism

Forms and Passions: Philosophy and its Others

Virtual Modernity: Romanticism,Mythology and the Enlightenment
 

Shelley's Mythology and the Age of Reason
Taboos and the Conspiracy of Circumstance in the American Novel

Classical Mythology
 

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Spring 1998, Reader, Greek Tragedy, UCB Department of Classics.

  Spring 1996, ESL Instructor, Berkeley English Academy.

  Spring 1995, Reader, Greek Tragedy, UCB Department of Classics.

1989-94 Graduate Student Instructor, English Composition
and World Literature, UCB Comp.Lit

1988-89 Teaching Assistant, English Composition
and World Literature, UCB Comp.Lit

English Romantic Literature. Anglophone drama, poetry and poetics

Classical tragedy and lyric. The epic. Mythology and allegory.
                    Popular culture

Critical theory. Philosophical approaches to literature
                    --ethics and aesthetics.

  Composition.Computer assisted pedagogy.

       I am a comparatist with emphasis on British Romantic literature and literary theory. My work is informed by a study of ancient Greek philosophy and tragedy and my interest in Romanticism is shaped by a study of Kantian and Nietzschean ethics and aesthetics. As a graduate student I taught composition and world literature for the Department of Comparative Literature at the University of California at Berkeley for six years and was awarded its Outstanding Graduate Student Instructor Award for 1994-5. Since receiving my PhD in Comparative Literature, I have been serving as a lecturer in Comparative Literature, Classics and Rhetoric at UCB offering such upper and lower division courses as  "Mythology and the Gothic in British and American Romanticism," "The History of Interpretation," "Elizabethan and Jacobean Drama," "From Cerberus to Cyberpunk: Mythology, the Millennium and Popular Culture," "Aeschylus to Soyinka: Greek Tragedies and their Anglophone Legacy" and "Latin II: Caesar and Catullus."

    In eighteen semesters of teaching at Berkeley, my courses have been dedicated to encouraging students of diverse backgrounds, ages and a wide variety of learning experiences to work with literary texts and to hone their critical thinking and written and spoken language skills. I have designed my own courses and established the pedagogical routines. These courses involve class discussion and group activities, as well as instruction on research methods in electronic and other media and the option of submitting a prospectus and research paper for extra credit. In addition to such traditional approaches, I have also employed class web pages, Internet news groups, email-to-web bulletin boards, chat rooms, web projects,  and electronic homework submission  to make myself more accessible to my students, to foster their confidence and to help with their papers and exam preparation.  Since participation is a prime value in my teaching,  my courses often include the opportunity for extra credit, either collectively through projects such as student drama performances or through independent studies culminating in class presentations. Such accommodations also have improved preparedness for class discussions and encouraged a greater sense of community.

 
    In composing reading lists for these courses, I bring works from world antiquity together with other more recent, European, African, Asian, British and American works as well as selections of critical and philosophical writers such as Nietzsche and Barthes.  My courses are designed with comparative interests in mind, and examine, for instance, the interrelations of the prophetic, ethical and satirical visions in various literary genres. Such courses have ranged from the sublime to the picaresque and the Gothic, including Classical literature and philosophy and works by writers such as Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Burke, Hume, the English Romantic poets, Mary Shelley, Charlotte Bronte and Americans such as O'Neill, Hurston and Pynchon. To make the literary works more accessible, I enter the domain of Cultural Studies and draw from such genres as film, newspapers, television, popular science writing, the culture of the Internet and the Worldwide Web and folklore. For instance, I have traced the influence of British Romanticism through American literature and popular culture by pursuing the trail of Ivanhoe  through Huckleberry Finn, Life on the Mississippi and Griffith's Birth of a Nation  down through contemporary manifestations of such Gothic and romance legacies in Star Wars as well as the Internet and Web. In this way, I have been able to make literature more alive by working with my students' cultural competencies while at the same time defamiliarizing their sense of the common place. Based on the strength of student evaluations that emphasized my commitment and accessibility, I was awarded the teaching award mentioned in the first paragraph of this document.
 
During the Fall semester of 1996, I applied such sensibilities in Classics 35, my lower division survey course,  "Greek Tragedies and their Modern Anglophone Legacy." I devoted the first twelve weeks to Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides and in the remaining three weeks explored their influence on tragedies by Shelley, O'Neill and Soyinka as well as Wharton's Ethan Frome, a short novel with affinities to Sophoclean tragedy. Likewise, I included Hitchcock's "Psycho" for several reasons: for its invocation of Aeschylus' Oresteia; as a way of introducing psychoanalysis, Freud's rewriting of Sophoclean tragedy; and as an example of the tragic legacy in film, a medium whose emphasis on spectacle and on the imitation of action is quite different from that of the Athenian stage. I also considered, under the personae of John Brown, John Henry and Tupac Shakur, the differing forms of the notion of the tragic that occur in the popular media of folklore, ballad and print and television journalism. The lectures upon these diverse works were literary in emphasis and, as such, included critical discussions of mythological, historical, political and dramaturgical considerations. The effectiveness of this approach was, I think, demonstrated in the decision of a number of students to perform a scene from one of our tragedies in class.