Courses

Courses on Canada at UC Berkeley

Faculty and departments across campus offer a range of courses relevant to Canadian Studies. As an interdisciplinary program, Canadian Studies encourages students to take classes acrosss a variety of disciplines.

Spring 2022

Reading, Composition, and Research: Monsters and Modernity (COLWRIT R4B)

Instructor: Jonathan C. Lang
4 units | M-W-F | 1:00 pm - 2:00 pm
Dwinelle 235 | Class #: 30427

Monsters used to represent fear of the unknown. In the modern period, monsters remain as figures not simply of fear and fascination but of real use. They persist as an emblem of anxiety about a past that is too rapidly disintegrating so as to compromise the very structures of society; or alternatively as a mode of protest against the modernity of the modern period with its new forms of regulation and social control; or then again as the sign of a compromised future wherein the representation of the monster serves to question the "progress of progress," and direct suspicion onto the modern projects of science, industry, and technology. Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale will be a highlighted text.

French for Economics, Politics, and Business (FRENCH 137)

Instructor: Claire Tourmen
4 units | M-W-F | 2:00 pm - 3:00 pm
Dwinelle 109 | Class #: 32133

This class provides a solid introduction to French-speaking political cultures, with an emphasis on European countries but with discussion of other geographic areas (Québec, francophone Africa) as well. The course’s cultural objectives are coupled with linguistic objectives to help you speak about political issues in French. Whether you want to work with or within French-speaking countries, in diplomacy or international affairs, politics, medias, academia, or NGOs, this class will help you build domain-specific linguistic skills as well as intercultural competencies to be able to better interact with people from French-speaking public organizations, NGOs, and media; and to develop your capacity to search for and make sense of information in French-speaking media. You will also learn how to conduct a semi-directive interview on political matters in French.

Freshman Seminar: Tourism, Heritage and Ritual (ANTHRO 24)

Instructor: Nelson H. H. Graburn
1 unit | Friday | 1:00 pm - 2:00 pm
Anthro/Art Practice 219 | Class #: 27143

This course focuses on anthropological approaches to the two main topics: tourism and cultural heritage. Tourism is a form of secular ritual involving travel, commonly associated with modernity; there is a close relationship between tourism and pilgrimage. Heritage includes tangible and intangible parts of culture, especially forms of art, consciously preserved from the past, often for tourism. We will discuss the topics from participants’ point of view–learning, self-fulfillment, and adventure–and the impacts of these modern movements–such as ‘over-tourism’, commoditization, and co-creativity. The class will focuses on the student’s own experiences in family heritage and social rituals, arts and travel experiences, in relation to ideas discussed in class and in the digitally distributed readings.

Research Seminar: Anatomy of Criticism (ENGLISH 190)

Instructor: Kristin Hanson
4 units | Tu-Th | 3:30 pm - 5:00 pm
Wheeler 305 | Class #: 16664

What is literary criticism?  All English majors and English professors do it, or try to do it; but articulating what it is, or should be, is not easy.  The question is a theoretical one, which in this course we will consider with Canadian literary critic and theorist Northrop Frye as our guide.  Frye’s monumental Anatomy of Criticism (1957) argued that literary criticism ought to contribute to the development of an organized body of knowledge about literature, analogous to the organized body of knowledge about nature called physics.  Developing a strikingly contemporary argument through cross-cultural comparisons of literature with myth, religion, magic and ritual, Frye takes mankind’s relationships with nature on the one hand, and with language on the other, as fundamental to literature.  In this course, we will consider these ideas alongside occasional examples from Shakespeare that we are all likely to have encountered at least passingly in other courses.  The emphasis, however, will be on using the ideas to help each of us think about what our own literary criticism may contribute to such a body of knowledge.  Reflecting Frye’s deep commitment to every work of literature being relevant to understanding literature as a phenomenon, each student will research and write a long (20 pp.) valedictory paper of literary criticism on any work of English literature they choose.

Montreal: Colonization, Urbanization, Migration

Instructor: William M. Burton
4 units | M-W-F | 2:00 pm - 3:00 pm
Cory 241 | Class #: 24462

Like those in any North American city, Montreal’s writers and filmmakers have long found in colonisation, urbanisation, and migration both artistic inspiration and an aesthetic challenge. But Montreal’s status as the second-largest French-speaking city in the world has also produced a distinctive political and artistic culture in comparison to the continent’s other metropolises. In this course, we will read and watch works from the past century or so that grapple with the city’s double identity. Our material is grouped into four categories: (1) francophone settlers’ efforts to construct a uniquely North American voice; (2) the social, moral and economic dislocations and changes caused by North American-style industrialisation; (3) Indigenous resistance to colonisation in and around Montreal; and (4) migration to the city in the wake of slavery and war in the francophone world.