Fall 2006 Advance Course Information

This information effective for Fall 2006. Check with instructor the first day of class for any changes.

English-Language Literature

[LTEL-155B]

155B. Regions of the United States—San Francisco

Instructor: Rob Wilson
Office: Oakes College, Room 311
Office Hours: Mondays, 1-4, and by arrangement.
E-mail: rwilson@ucsc.edu
Phone: 831-459-2401

The following syllabus is from fall 2003

Course Description

This course studies representations of San Francisco as a literary-cultural icon, visionary zone, and geopolitical region of global/local/national power as these representations have taken place in selected literature, film, and essays from Gold Rush myths to the Beat-generated SF Renaissance down to postmodern fringe cultures.  The focus is on the production of San Francisco not only as a space of material accumulation and social formation, but also as a zone of visionary production, speculative excess, community re-invention, class division, and mongrel emergence. 

Delving into an array of texts in the course, we study San Francisco as a long-globalizing city and literary-region that extends its vast periphery as “contado” into the Sierras, the Big Sur, the East and South Bay, as well as outward across the Pacific to Hawaii and sites in Asia and Latin America. 

This course by no means provides a strict history of San Francisco, but serves as an example-rich study of the tropes, myths, narratives, visions, ethnic communities, and multiple life-styles that the city has generated:  San Francisco as a space of symbolic affiliation, cultural re-invention, political provocation, and identity-transformation; San Francisco as a US visionary frontier where the myths of Europe and the Americas meet the influx of Asia and the Pacific forces and forge the creative energies, literatures, and social survival tactics of the future; San Francisco as some kind of sublime edge and dangerous vortex on the Pacific, not so much land’s end as a beginning and promise to remake the world’s body.

The course touches upon some of the following themes and San Francisco configurations:  the Beat poet as urban flaneur and entrepreneur; the poetic production and negotiation of urban spaces, myths, and tropes; the material geography of the city and its historical production; San Francisco as space of symbolic affiliation/ rejection; the Hippie-era reinvention of revolutionary culture, urban space, and the psychedelics of space-time alteration; the legacies of the 1960s, as in Rave culture; representations by visitors, settlers, and rival communities; class configurations of the city and the semiotics of wealth and space; San Francisco and its huge contado; counter-cultural configurations and alternative uses of this same contado; filmic representations of San Francisco as psychic edge, noir orientalism, and social abyss;  trans-Pacific San Francisco and the politics and poetics of Chinatown;  multiple community claims upon the space and history of San Francisco from Manilatown to the Castro and La Raza; street subversions, expressive genres, and modes; urban movements and reinventions; new narratives and emerging practices of post-Beat San Francisco literary culture.

Required Texts 

You will need to read materials in all of the following texts:

(Books are available only from The Literary Guillotine, 204 Locust Street, in downtown Santa Cruz, phone:  831-457-1195 ; used copies may also be found at other stores or on the Internet.)

• Lawrence Ferlinghetti, San Francisco Poems (City Lights Books/Foundation).
• Richard Brautigan, Trout Fishing In America (Dell).
• James Brook, Chris Carlsson & Nancy Peters, eds., Reclaiming San Francisco:  History, Politics, Culture (City Lights Books).
• John Miller, ed., San Francisco Stories (Chronicle Books).
• Gray Brechin, Imperial San Francisco (University of California Press).
• Allen Ginsberg, Howl (City Lights Books).
• Jack Kerouac, Dharma Bums (Penguin Books).
• Maxine Hong Kingston, Tripmaster Monkey (Vintage Books/ Random House).

Required Assignments

Each student must keep up with the weekly readings and come to class prepared to ask questions about the text or to focus upon specific passages that challenge and intrigue the reader.  Along these lines, I require each student to bring to the weekly class discussion-sections at least one question per week relating to the assigned readings; the alternative would be to present (via reading out loud) a rough written paragraph in which you take some kind of stand or suggest possible topics or issues for class discussion.  These questions and passages will provide the basis of the teaching assistant (TA)-led discussion section and may later become the basis for part of a subsequent class session, if communicated to the instructor by the TA.

Midterm

There will be a one-day midterm (consisting of some key identifications, analysis of chosen passages or poems, and brief essays).  Full preparation materials for this midterm will be handed out a week in advance of the exam session.  The midterm will take place on Thursday, October 30 in class; no make-ups allowed, except in cases with written medical excuses.

Final Paper

The final paper will consist of a “research” essay, ranging in length at around 8-10 pages, and in the form of critical (or creative) analysis with footnotes and bibliography.  The main topic will be to pick any “San Francisco” author, site, genre, social community, or cultural phenomenon and discuss some of the cultural, geopolitical, and social dynamics making this object a distinctive expressive phenomenon. Group projects will be allowed, and each person will receive the same grade for what is presented. 

To choose topics, you can use your imagination, experience, and conceptual skills; we will be open to any and all projects that touch upon some materials and themes discussed in the class and apply them to San Francisco urban space and culture in some inventive, informed, and interesting way.   You will need to provide a one-page outline of your proposed topic and discuss it with the instructor/TA as you begin it.  If you do some creative project, you will need to provide a one-page description of what you were aiming to achieve, some of the techniques used, and San Francisco authors and materials drawn upon as model or source.  Due by December 10.

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