Freshman Seminar

It is said that Beethoven’s late string quartets, derided by critics at the time of their composition, “taught us how to listen to them.” Many written works also “tell us how to read them.” In this seminar we will be looking at the openings of many essays, poems, novels and other works to see how they instruct us in reading. There is no reading list, but each week students will be required to discuss and post about short parts of different written works, for example, the famous opening of the first chapter of Moby-Dick, “Call me Ishmael . . .” I hope that this seminar will appeal to those who want to improve their paranoid reading skills (“how did that author do that to me?”) 

Daniel Melia is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Rhetoric, where he has taught for forty-three years.

Faculty web site: http://rhetoric.berkeley.edu/people.php?page_id=1056&p=62