Close reading and analysis of literary texts, including representative examples of several different genres and periods. An introduction to practical criticism required of all literature majors; should be completed prior to upper-division work in literature.
Instructor
Christoperh Chen, Micah Perks
General Education Code
TA
Quarter offered
Fall, Spring
A story within a story, the frame tale is a playful and enduring literary genre. Focuses on frame tales of the global middle ages, tracing their movement from the Indian subcontinent to the British Isles. Readings include selections from Fables of Bidpai, The Arabian Nights, Libro de Buen Amor, and The Canterbury Tales. (Formerly The Frame Tale.)
General Education Code
CC
Close reading of short stories and some novels with the aim of developing critical methods for the analysis and interpretation of prose fiction. Topics include character, plot, narrative structure, and the poetics of prose. The course topic changes; please see the Class Search for the current topic.
Instructor
Jorge Aladro Font
General Education Code
TA
Introduces techniques for the close reading of film, with particular attention to film form (shot-by-shot analysis), cinematic codes, narrative structure, and the ideological burdens of the basic cinematic apparatus. Case studies of select works by major directors from the Hollywood studio period.
General Education Code
IM
Surveys 3,000 years of Jewish literature and culture. Themes include origins of the Jews in the ancient world; formation and persistence of the Jewish diaspora; coherence and diversity of Jewish experience; Jewish narrative and textual traditions; interaction between Jews and other cultures; tensions between tradition and modernity.
Instructor
Bruce Thompson
General Education Code
ER
Introduces the fairy tale as a genre, including historical, cultural, and political contexts; relation to identity, performance, transnationalism; contemporary transformations of tales and their expression in other media (e.g., film, art, theater); and current scholarship.
General Education Code
TA
Historical overview of the genre from Augustine to contemporary experiments in memoir. Student write weekly creative-critical responses and a final creative-critical paper.
General Education Code
PR-C
Introduction to Greek myths, including selected ancient texts and visual artifacts, historical and cultural context of their creation and reception, modern theoretical approaches such as structuralism and psychoanalysis, and interpretations in various media.
Instructor
Martin Devecka
General Education Code
TA
Introduction to children's literature as a literary genre, including historical, cultural, and political considerations of the genre's relationship to gender, race, sexuality, nationalism, colonialism, and popular culture through primary texts, secondary criticism, and other media (e.g., film, illustration, comics).
General Education Code
TA
An introduction to selected modes and forms of poetry with an emphasis on close textual analysis. Examples will be taken from different historical periods and poetic traditions. Course topic changes; please see the Class Search for the current topic.
General Education Code
TA
An investigation into the various uses and abuses of race in literature. Course topic changes; see the Class Search for current topic.
Instructor
Christine Hong
General Education Code
ER
Studies religious texts held sacred by different cultures and communities around the world, concentrating primarily on their literary dimensions. Course topic changes; please see the Class Search for current topic.
General Education Code
CC
Travel narratives may be of many types: odysseys of self-discovery, adventures in nature, or journeys to exotic lands off the beaten track. This course examines travelers' accounts drawn from periods ranging from the Middle Ages to the contemporary.
Instructor
Sharon Kinoshita
General Education Code
CC
Examines speculative and science fiction (SF) texts to develop critical methods for the analysis and interpretation of SF as a critique of science, technology, and culture. Themes include encounters across species; novelty and change; expanded concepts of life; and the role of technology in human development.
Instructor
Zachary Zimmer
General Education Code
PE-T
Intensive training in the practice of literary analysis and the writing of polished research papers. Topics include manuscript sources, variant editions, reading techniques, publication technologies, web research. Workshop format. Strongly recommended for majors and/or transfer students who have completed
LIT 1 or its equivalent.
Instructor
Courtney Kersten
General Education Code
TA
Reading representative Greek tragedies with attention to history, form, and content. Course examines how Greek tragedy responds to the fact of human mortality, i.e., to the myriad and culturally specific ways in which characters in tragedy accept, evade, or deny death.
General Education Code
TA
Reading of selected Arthurian romances in verse and prose from the French, Welsh, and English traditions.
General Education Code
TA
Speaking, reading, and writing proficiency in Spanish required. The study of poetry, drama, and prose in Spain and Latin America.
Instructor
Jorge Aladro Font
General Education Code
TA
Every age has the monsters it needs. From medieval marvels to GMO chimeras, monsters serve as figures of a culture's deepest fears, anxieties, and hidden desires. This course takes a multidisciplinary, transhistorical approach to the problems and promises of monsters, and introduces monster theory.
General Education Code
TA
Introduces the fundamental questions of interpretation and cultural analysis through engagement with varying literary and cultural traditions of the Indian subcontinent since antiquity. Emphasis is on language, communicative media, literary form, memory, transmission, interpretive approaches, and translation. The course topics change; please see the Class Search for the current topic.
General Education Code
CC
Examines the copresence in literary works (fiction and non-fiction prose and poetry) of nonhuman and human animals from antiquity to the present across a variety of cultures.
Instructor
Carla Freccero
General Education Code
TA
Surveys the politics of fashion, focusing on how style has shaped ideology, culture, power, revolution, resistance, and a variety of identities, including nation, race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and class.
Instructor
Vilashini Cooppan
General Education Code
ER
A history of one or more cultural genres in written, visual, and/or musical forms. Course topic changes; please see the Class Search for the current topic.
General Education Code
TA
Medical Humanities designate an interdisciplinary field of humanities (literature, philosophy, ethics, history, and religion) concerned with application to medical education and practice. The humanities provide insight into the human condition, suffering, personhood, and our responsibility to each other; and offer a historical perspective on medical practice.
General Education Code
PE-T
Focus is on the destruction of the Jews of Europe by Nazi Germany. Issues are historically grounded, and include works of literature, social sciences, philosophy, and film.
General Education Code
ER
Speaking, reading, and writing proficiency in Mandarin Chinese required. Lectures, discussions, writing assignments, and all readings in Chinese. An investigation of Chinese culture, society, and politics in the post-1978 period through literature, film, critical essays, and internet media. Topics include labor, gender, generational divisions, family, urban life, social media, nationalism.
Instructor
Christopher Connery
General Education Code
TA
An introduction to Latino literature and culture in the U.S. A study of the creative expressions of Chicanos/as, Nuyoricans, Cuban Americans, and other Latin Americans in the U.S.
Instructor
Kirsten Silva Gruesz
General Education Code
ER
Considers love, anarchy, and revolution as three modes of liberation. Concentrating on the contemporary period, with explorations of philosophy, literature, film, popular culture, political movements and manifestos, and personal or collective experience, this course considers these variant, but overlapping, scenes of the dialectics of liberation.
Instructor
Christopher Connery
General Education Code
PR-E
What does a telenovela spoof about a virgin Latinx mother and aspiring romance novelist have to do with literature? Course explores Jane the Virgin as a commentary on the tastes, identities, and politics of 21st-century Latinx readers and writers.
General Education Code
CC
Explores the history of magic in relation to the written word. Concerns include the gendering of magic; interconnections among Judaic, Arabic, and Christian worlds; magic in the age of rationalism; and the recent popular fascination with magic.
General Education Code
CC
Combines contemplative practice, including meditative practice, with close reading of literary works to provide students with a more precise ability to interpret and respond to texts, both literary and non-literary. Works include poetry, imaginative prose, and essays.
General Education Code
PR-C
Examines literature's relationship to the past and to the experience of history. Course topic changes; please see the Class Search for current topic.
General Education Code
TA
Examines the literary production of slave societies by looking at the literatures of several pre-modern slave societies; also develops a cultural-historical narrative that explains the origins of genocidal forms of plantation slavery in the Americas by tracing their origins back to Greece and Rome.
Instructor
Martin Devecka
General Education Code
CC
A survey of global narratives, with a focus on the novel over several centuries, traditions, languages, and cultures.
Instructor
Vilashini Cooppan
General Education Code
TA
From The Sorcerer's Stone to The Deathly Hallows, this course approaches the Harry Potter books and films from a variety of critical angles, using the analytical tools of literary and cultural studies to shed new light on this dizzying phenomenon.
General Education Code
TA
Study of representative plays. No previous experience with Shakespeare is assumed.
General Education Code
TA
Introduction to Homer's Odyssey, its hero, and its world. An epic tale of a man who abandons his family to fight in the Trojan War, then returns two decades later, the Odyssey was a profound influence on the culture of ancient Greece and Rome, and continues to shape our self-understanding today.
Instructor
Martin Devecka
General Education Code
TA
Explores the close relationship between photography and literature, from the origins of photography to 19th-century realism and the contemporary photographic novel, interpreting photographs and literature to study how these fields influence each other and how their forms of representation relate.
General Education Code
IM
Examines novels by Toni Morrison, including The Bluest Eye, Song of Solomon, Sula, and Jazz, as sites of discontent and transformation, while also considering literary techniques such as form, voice, metaphor, and narrative structure. Includes discussion of Morrison's ideas about the intersection of race and sexuality, blackness as a shifting signifier, the role of the artist in society, and uses of literature for re-imagining the relationships between history, culture, and individuality.
General Education Code
ER
Introduction to the life of the Prophet Muhammad as a literary text and as a primary hermeneutic framework for understanding the Qur'an, including its relationship to a deep narrative prophetic tradition shared with other Abrahamic traditions.
Instructor
Camilo Rivas-Gomez
General Education Code
CC
Introduction to social media's evolving impact on society. How are social media changing communication, politics, identity, privacy, and what we believe? Materials include critical texts and real-world case studies, as well as films and short fiction.
General Education Code
PE-T
Why does the history of slavery reappear at certain moments in literary and popular culture? Course focuses on the 1960s and the 2000s, when slavery was frequently featured in popular and academic history, fiction, film, and television, in both imaginative and documentary forms.
General Education Code
IM
Do current social, political, and psychological conditions make it more difficult to live a good life? Drawing on the broad tradition of critical theory and utopian imaginings, the course aims to give practical and theoretical guidance toward achieving a good life.
Instructor
Christopher Connery
General Education Code
TA
Introduces topics in literature. The course topic changes; please see the Class Search for the current topic.
Introduction to the crafts and techniques of poetry, fiction, and creative non-fiction, identifying and exploring traditional and non-traditional literary forms and genres while working on individual creative writing projects. An author reading and two workshop sections per week.
General Education Code
PR-C
Quarter offered
Fall, Winter, Spring
Speaking, reading, and writing proficiency in Spanish is required. Explores creative writing from a bilingual (Spanish-English) perspective, and considers bilingualism in the literary arts (como el ejercicio de una identidad), as a way of thinking and a way of being, as a creative lens (el pensamiento de frontera), as a framework, as a border (que quiere ser cruzada).
General Education Code
PR-C
An intermediate-level course in fiction designed for prospective applicants to the creative writing concentration.
General Education Code
PR-C
Quarter offered
Fall, Winter, Spring
An intermediate-level course in poetry designed for prospective applicants to the creative writing concentration.
General Education Code
PR-C
Quarter offered
Fall, Winter, Spring
Study of literature in English or English translation. Students submit petition to sponsoring agency.
Quarter offered
Fall, Winter, Spring
Speaking, reading, and writing proficiency in French, German, Greek, Italian, Latin, Spanish or other non-English language required. Students submit petition to sponsoring agency.
Quarter offered
Fall, Winter, Spring
Study of creative writing. Students submit petition to sponsoring agency.
Quarter offered
Fall, Winter, Spring
Students submit petition to sponsoring agency.
Quarter offered
Fall, Winter, Spring
Contemporary approaches to literary and cultural theory, with emphasis on how theoretical perspectives advance and broaden the reading of literary texts. Introduction to important new theoretical developments and their antecedents. Literature majors should complete this course as early as possible. Course topic changes; see the Class Search for the current topic.
Instructor
A. Hunter Bivens, Dorian Bell
Quarter offered
Winter, Spring
Promotes the understanding of translation and its role in redefining meanings across epochs and cultures, in establishing common norms, and in advancing mutual intelligibility; but also providing encounters with absolute alterity. Actual translations are used as case studies.
Instructor
Camilo Gomez-Rivas
General Education Code
TA
The constitution of the canon of English literature from Chaucer to Cowper. Critical approach designations: Canons. Histories. Distribution requirements: Poetry, Pre-1750.
General Education Code
TA
Explores poetry and prose from 1800 to 1950 through extensive reading in the Romantics, Victorians, Moderns, articulating the connections among them, and connecting their work to key social, political, scientific, and technological moments defining these eras. Critical approach designations: Canons, Histories. Distribution requirement: Poetry.
Major works from the colonial and early national periods to 1900, with attention to their social and cultural context. Critical approach designations: Canons, Histories.
General Education Code
ER
Major works from 1900 to the present, with attention to their social and cultural context. Critical approach designation: Canons, Histories.
Instructor
Christopher Chen
Close study of Chaucer's poetry, with some attention to relevant cultural, philosophical, and historical issues in the context of the late medieval period. Particular emphasis on The Canterbury Tales. Critical approach designations: Canons, Histories. Distribution requirements: Poetry, Pre-1750.
Instructor
H. Marshall Leicester, Jr.
General Education Code
TA
Study of representative works by William Shakespeare. Course topic changes; please see the Class Search for the current topic. Critical approach designations: Canons, Media. Distribution requirements: Poetry, Pre-1750.
General Education Code
TA
Studies in Spenser's major poetry: Faerie Queene, Book I; Epithalamion; Mutabilitie Cantos. Critical approach designations: Canons, Histories. Distribution requirements: Poetry, Pre-1750.
Instructor
H. Marshall Leicester, Jr.
Representative Austen novels within political, historical, and cultural context; considers form and genre, nationalism, feminist, postcolonial, and other critical readings. Examines poetry and other writings that illuminate cultural issues of the period, as well as film and other adaptations of Austen's novels. Critical approach designations: Canons, Histories.
Study of representative work by Charles Dickens. Critical approach designations: Canons, Histories.
Instructor
John O. Jordan
General Education Code
TA
A survey of Faulkner's early fiction; focus on development of theme and technique. Also considers Faulkner as a Southern historian, stressing the relationship between personal and regional experience in time. Critical approach designations: Canons, Geographies.
An intensive study of the works of Franz Kafka, with reference to the literary, social, and historical context in which his work emerged. Course topic changes; please see the Class Search for current topic. Critical approach designations: Canons, Geographies.
Instructor
A. Hunter Bivens
General Education Code
TA
Study of representative work by Herman Melville, including novels and short stories. Critical approach designations: Canons, Histories.
General Education Code
PE-E
A chronological survey of Twain's major works, with an emphasis on the development of style and content. Among other works, The Innocents Abroad, Roughing It, Life on the Mississippi, and Huckleberry Finn are considered. Critical approach designations: Canons, Power and Subjectivities.
An examination of the major works of Gwendolyn Brooks, the first African American to win the Pulitzer Prize (in 1950), with particular attention to questions of race, gender, and class as modes through which to consider questions of form and content. Critical approach designations: Canons, Power and Subjectivities. Distribution requirement: Poetry.
Instructor
Ronaldo Wilson
General Education Code
ER
Reading the 46-canto Italian Renaissance adventure poem of Ludovico Ariosto, the most popular book of its century and a classic of humanist literature, students consider literary tradition, Renaissance humanism, and how entertainment literature may articulate moral and political criticism. Critical approach designations: Canons, Genres. Distribution requirement: Poetry, Pre-1750.
General Education Code
CC
A close study of Books I and II of the Cervantes novel together with an examination of some of the criticism on this work written in English throughout the centuries. Critical approach designations: Canons, Histories. Distribution requirement: Pre-1750.
Instructor
Jorge Aladro Font
General Education Code
CC
Reading of the Inferno, the Purgatorio, and selected canti of the Paradiso, along with selections from Dante's lyrics and from medieval Italian and French poetry. Critical approach designations: Canons, Genres. Distribution requirements: Poetry, Pre-1750.
Instructor
Filippo Gianferrari
General Education Code
TA
An intensive study of Goethe's Faust, Parts I and II. All works are read in English. Critical approach designations: Canons, Histories. Distribution requirement: Poetry.
Focuses on the Inferno, the first cantica of Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy. Examines different uses of metamorphosis in Dante's representation of Hell, including the relationship between the ancient idea of human metamorphosis and Dante's representation of the Christian contrappasso (retribution), and the medieval concept of imago Dei (in God's likeness). Critical approach designations: Canons, Power and Subjectivities. Distribution requirements: Poetry, Pre-1750.
Instructor
Filippo Gianferrari
General Education Code
TA
An epic poem about a journey of self-discovery, Dante's Comedy challenges all assumptions about literary genres, styles, and the meaning of narrative and of life. Course covers Purgatory and Paradise. Critical approach designations: Canons, Histories. Distribution requirements: Poetry, Pre-1750.
Instructor
Filippo Gianferrari
General Education Code
TA
Introduces selected modes and forms of poetry with emphasis on close textual analysis. Considers uses of Greek and Roman antiquity in English/Anglo-American poetic practice from early to post-modernity by historicizing the reproduction of antiquity through poetic forms. Critical approach designations: Canons, Genres. Distribution requirement: Poetry, Pre-1750.
Reading of Greek and Roman texts (in English translation) which utilize mythic material juxtaposed with later poems written in response to them. Readings from Homer, Sappho, Greek drama, Petrarch, modern poets; discussion of concepts of myth, strategies of response. Critical approach designations: Canons, Genres. Distribution requirement: Poetry, Pre-1750.
Medieval French literature appeared rather suddenly in the the age of castles, Crusades, knights, and chivalry, and spawned a remarkable array of genres: epic, romance, lyric, lais, saint's lives, fabliaux (bawdy tales), drama, histories, and more. This course provides a sampling of the variety of this rich tradition. Critical approach designations: Canons, Histories. Distribution requirement: Pre-1750.
Instructor
Sharon Kinoshita
General Education Code
TA
Through an examination of monsters in literature, course explores anxieties, fears, and ideals of Victorian society, paying close attention to issues of gender, sexuality, class, race, empire, scientific, and technology. Critical approach designations: Canons, Histories.
General Education Code
TA
Investigates various facets of premodern Indian thought. Emphasis of the course rotates and may fall upon metaphysics, epistemology, ontology, ethics, hermeneutics, or basic categories of Indian traditions (dharma, karma, samsara, moksha, etc.). Critical approach designations: Canons, Genres. Distribution requirement: Pre-1750.
General Education Code
CC
The pre-Islamic literature of Iran is one of the world's richest literary traditions, and forms part of the Indo-European poetic heritage. Course offers an overview of and introduction to indigenous Iranian literary traditions. The course topic changes; see the Class Search for the current topic. Critical approach designations: Canons, Histories. Distribution requirements: Global, Poetry, Pre-1750.
General Education Code
CC
Introduction to textual, source, redaction, historical, and literary criticism of individual books of the Hebrew Bible and to exegesis as science and ideology. Covers texts and iconography of neighboring mythological traditions (Mesopotamian, Ugaritic, Egyptian, Greek) when appropriate. Course topic changes; see the Class Search for current topic. Critical approach designations: Canons, Histories. Distribution requirement: Pre-1750.
General Education Code
TA
Close reading--critical and creative--of poetry. Examines how poets teach, through their writing, to radically attend to reading. The course topics changes; please see the Class Search for current topic. Critical approach designations: Genres, Histories. Distribution requirement: Poetry.
General Education Code
TA
Readings in the works of Donne, Jonson, Herbert, Herrick, Marvell, and others. Critical approach designations: Genres, Histories. Distribution requirements: Poetry, Pre-1750.
General Education Code
TA
A reading of the major Victorian poets from Tennyson to early Yeats. Critical approach designations: Genres, Histories. Distribution requirement: Poetry.
General Education Code
TA
The major figures and important movements from Poe to Emerson through Whitman and Dickinson. Critical approach designations: Canons, Genres. Distribution requirement: Poetry.
Instructor
Kirsten Silva Gruesz
Poets include Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, H.D. (Hilda Doolittle), William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, Wallace Stevens, Langston Hughes, T.S. Eliot, and others, with attention to leading movements and critical issues. Critical approach designations: Canons. Genres. Distribution requirement: Poetry.
Survey of modern poetry; includes a variety of poetic forms. Course topic changes; see the Class Search for current topic. Critical approach designations: Genres, Histories. Distribution requirement: Poetry.
Instructor
Christopher Chen
General Education Code
TA
Major poets since World War II, with attention to leading movements and critical issues. The course topic changes; please see the Class Search for the current topic. Critical approach designations: Genres, Histories. Distribution requirement: Poetry.
Instructor
Christopher Chen
Surveys contemporary poetry with attention to race, sex, and gender; includes a variety of poetic forms. Course topic changes; see the Class Search for the current topic. Critical approach designations: Genres, Histories. Distribution requirement: Poetry.
General Education Code
TA
Medieval reworkings of stories and motifs drawn from the barbarian or Germanic tradition including Beowulf, The Song of Roland, Nibelungenlied, Snorri Sturlason: King Harald's Saga from Heimskringla, and Njal's Saga. Critical approach designations: Canons, Genres. Distribution requirement: Poetry, Pre-1750.
Instructor
H. Marshall Leicester, Jr.
Focus is on the theories of rhetoric and poetry written between 1580 and 1620. Texts include English, Italian, French, and Spanish works. Critical approach designations: Genres, Histories. Distribution requirements: Poetry, Pre-1750.
General Education Code
TA
An introduction to Elizabethan poetry and poetics, with emphasis on shorter lyrics (sonnets, ballads, etc.), pastoral, erotic epyllia, devotional poetry, etc. Examines various Classical and Continental strains of influence at play in the production of English verse in the later 16th century, including Classical rhetoric, Ovidian mythology, and Petrarchanism. Critical approach designations: Canons, Genres. Distribution requirements: Poetry, Pre-1750.
A study of representative texts from the 12th through the 15th centuries. Questions of subjectivity, sexuality, and history in romance narratives are addressed. Critical approach designations: Genres, Power and Subjectivities. Distribution requirement: Pre-1750.
Focuses on a generation of early 20th-century poets from Asia, Latin America, the Middle East, and beyond. Studying their poetic output through the lens of modernism and other genres, students discover a truly global moment in literature/politics. Critical approach designations: Genres, Power and Subjectivities. Distribution requirements: Global, Poetry.
General Education Code
TA
Examines ecopoetics as theory, politic, and field of discourse. Focuses on literary and artistic production across a variety of texts that explore the role of race and representation, including literary theory, film, and visual art. Critical approach designations: Genres, Power and Subjectivities. Distribution requirement: Poetry.
Instructor
Ronaldo Wilson
General Education Code
ER
Examines Blackness as race, identity, politic, field, and discourse. Exploration guided by poetry, narrative fiction, video, film, music, and the daily news. Critical approach designations: Genres, Power and Subjectivities. Distribution requirement: Poetry.
Instructor
Ronaldo Wilson
General Education Code
ER
Explores race, gender, and form in an interrogation of rage, and how it functions across an array of works by writers and artists in how they render rage's effects and configurations through poetry, prose, and performance. Critical approach designations: Genres, Power and Subjectivities. Distribution requirement: Poetry.
Instructor
Ronaldo Wilson
General Education Code
ER
Course investigates the body as a site of political and theoretical significance in contemporary American poetry. Considers how and when corporeal poetics succeed (and fail) at capturing elusive and/or precarious subjectivities of race, sex, gender, grief, and violence. Critical approach designations: Genres, Media. Distribution requirement: Poetry.
Considers theories of sexuality and the lyric side-by-side, through readings, lectures, class discussions, and writing assignments. Questions of language, community, and self-hood inform discussions of a wide range of poets. Critical approach designations: Genres, Power and Subjectivities. Distribution requirement: Poetry.
General Education Code
TA
Acquaints students with the main stylistic features of modernism through the close reading of short stories. Critical approach designations: Genres, Histories.
An exploration of the genres, forms, and history of the Latin American short story. Focus includes contemporary women writers and writers of color from throughout Latin America in dialogue with the Latin American short story tradition. Critical approach designations: Genres, Geographies. Distribution requirement: Global.
General Education Code
CC
Roman prose fiction--the ancient novel and texts from other genres--in relation to the history of the novel. Critical approach designations: Genres, Histories. Distribution requirements: Pre-1750.
General Education Code
TA
From the 18th to the 20th century. The course topic changes; please see the Class Search for the current topic. Critical approach designations: Genres, Geographies.
General Education Code
TA
Provides an introduction to important French novels of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. All works are read in English. Critical approach designations: Genres, Geographies.
Selected readings from the novel and novella in 20th-century German literature. All works are read in English. Critical approach designations: Genres, Histories.
Examines the literary and cultural production of the modern Arab world, with an emphasis on the novel since the 1950s. Includes discussion of film, poetry, and mass culture. Critical approach designations: Genres, Histories. Distribution requirement: Global.
Instructor
Camilo Gomez-Rivas
General Education Code
CC
A survey of global narratives, focusing on the novel over several centuries, traditions, languages, and cultures. Examines the novel as a particular genre of literary expression; also examines its formative relationship with historical, social, cultural, and political processes. Critical approach designations: Genres, Power and Subjectivities. Distribution requirement: Global.
Instructor
Vilashini Cooppan
General Education Code
TA
Considers several French literary and cinematic examples of contemplating the present through the future—and the past—that paint a shifting picture of how time makes us human. Course also examines the French novel as it has developed in conversation with scientific thought since the late-19th century. All works are read in English. Critical approach designations: Genres, Geographies.
General Education Code
TA
Quarter offered
Fall, Winter, Spring
Cyberpunk, considered a subgenre within science fiction, has achieved international prominence and presents interesting interpretative challenges. Course examines some issues as manifested in representative texts. Critical approach designations: Genres, Histories. Distribution requirement: Global.
General Education Code
PE-T
Readings of contemporary and historical speculative fiction, including examination of representational practices, technologies, and politics that emerge from and/or circumscribe their interrelations. Course topic changes; please see the Class Search for current topic. Critical approach designations: Genres, Histories.
Instructor
Christopher Chen
General Education Code
ER
Studies the sublime encounter in works of science fiction literature and film. Lyotard defined the sublime as the "presentation of the unpresentable." By examining what and who constitutes the sublime, we can explore relationships among fundamental concepts like knowing, being, and embodiment. Critical approach designations: Genres, Media.
General Education Code
TA
Quarter offered
Fall, Winter, Spring
Examines the genre of travel writing and the critical and cultural issues it engages. Critical approach designations: Genres, Geographies. Distribution requirements: Global.
Comparative approaches to the study of ancient literature and culture. Topic changes; see the Class Search for current topic. Critical approach designations: Geographies, Histories. Distribution requirement: Global, Pre-1750.
Instructor
Martin Devecka
General Education Code
CC
Provides a historically-based and theoretically-informed introduction to medieval and early modern European contacts with other cultures. Readings include fourth through 17th-century writings about travel, discovery, and conquest in Asia, Africa, and America. Critical approach designations: Geographies, Histories. Distribution requirement: Global, Pre-1750.
Instructor
Camilo Gomez-Rivas
Examination of texts from the global Middle Ages in a range of world cultures and traditions, with attention to their historical and social contexts. Course topic changes; please see the Class Search for the current topic. Satisfies the Global and Pre- and Early Modern distribution requirements.
Instructor
Sharon Kinoshita
General Education Code
CC
Considers a range of phenomena from a critical world perspective: subject formation; human activity on a global scale; questions that demand a worlded answer. Course topic changes; see the Class Search for current topic. Critical approach designations: Geographies, Power and Subjectivities. Distribution requirement: Global.
The world as understood through spatial and temporal divisions: regions, nations, empires, periods in a worlded perspective. Course topic changes; see the Class Search for current topic. Critical approach designations: Geographies, Histories. Distribution requirement: Global.
How to think about the world as a whole: representations, networks, systems, taxonomies, versions of globalization. Course topic changes; see the Class Search for current topic. Critical approach designations: Geographies, Histories. Distribution requirement: Global.
Instructor
Vilashini Cooppan
Comparative examination of fiction in the modern world and of fictional responses to social change and crisis. Course topic changes; see the Class Search for current topic. Critical approach designations: Geographies, Power and Subjectivities. Distribution requirements: Global.
General Education Code
TA
Study of selected texts reflecting German society at war or in that ambiguous state called peace. Attention is given to the place of literature in German cultural life and its special role in the formation of national identity. Critical approach designations: Geographies, Power and Subjectivities.
Provides in-depth analysis of literary and cultural phenomena of southern Asia. The course topic changes; see the Class Search for the current topic. Critical approach designations: Geographies, Histories. Distribution requirement: Global.
General Education Code
CC
Focuses on contemporary China: society, politics, culture, and the economy. Critical approach designations: Geographies, Histories. Distribution requirement: Global. (Formerly Topics in Asian Modernism.)
Instructor
Christopher Connery
General Education Code
CC
Examines the rise of the idea of the Pacific Rim: its historical background, ideological assumptions, and various forms of its cultural manifestations. Critical approach designations: Geographies, Histories. Distribution requirements: Global.
General Education Code
ER
Examines a range of cultural representations, literature, and films that chart the transnational history and representational legacy of uranium and nuclear power. Critical approach designations: Geographies, Histories. Distribution requirement: Global.
Instructor
Christine Hong
General Education Code
CC
The Korean War has the dubious distinction of being known as the Forgotten War in a U.S. context. Course examines novels, short stories, film, popular visual narratives, and historical accounts of the Korean War and its often-circuitous legacies.
Instructor
Christine Hong
General Education Code
CC
Examines the fiction of ethnic Japanese writers who are located outside of Japan. How do these writers situate themselves vis-a-vis Japan and the countries in which they were born or reside? How does their status as outsiders enable them to view Japan's social problems and colonial history? Critical approach designations: Genres, Geographies. Distribution requirement: Global.
General Education Code
CC
A study of major writing from the English-speaking Caribbean, with attention to the historical and cultural context out of which it arises and to which it responds. Critical approach designations: Canons, Geographies. Distribution requirement: Global.
General Education Code
CC
Thematic and stylistic linkages: classical texts, oral traditions, and modern developments in African literature. Critical approach designations: Geographies, Power and Subjectivities. Distribution requirement: Global.
Instructor
Vilashini Cooppan
A survey of historical literature in the Americas that examines fictional attempts to re-imagine New World histories. Readings focus on secret or mangled histories, the legacies of slavery and colonialism, gendered critiques of national histories, and U.S. imperialism. Critical approach designations: Geographies, Power and Subjectivities. Distribution requirement: Global.
General Education Code
ER
Examines fiction written in English, 1883 to 1948, in order to consider the complex relations--complicit, resistant, both--between literary and imperialist discourses. Likely novelists for study are Schreiner, Haggard, Conrad, Kipling, Forster, Hilton, Paton. Critical approach designations: Genres, Geographies.
Instructor
Vilashini Cooppan
Introduces students to a selection of postcolonial theory and texts. Critical approach designations: Geographies, Power and Subjectivities.
Explores expressions of African futurism in a range of creative media--novels, short stories, and films--and analyzes them in conversation with theoretical texts. Recognizes African cultural producers and theorists as central to conversations about anti-colonialism, revolution, futurity, and the nonhuman and beyond human. Critical approach designations: Geographies, Power and Subjectivities. Distribution requirement: Global.
General Education Code
ER
Explores the sources and context of Beat writing, emphasizing the Beats' intense interest in and engagement with the world at large. Includes works by major and minor Beat writers. Critical approach designations: Geographies, Power and Subjectivities. Distribution requirement: Poetry.
General Education Code
TA
Examines cities as social spaces and as local spaces in the global economy and global imaginary. Focus is interdisciplinary, including literature, film, cultural studies, history, and sociology. Topic changes; please see the Class Search for current topic. Critical approach designations: Geographies, Histories Distribution requirement: Global.
General Education Code
CC
Examines ways in which Paris, France, a mecca of literature and art for the last two centuries, has spurred imagination, and has itself been the product of global imagination. Exploration of landmarks, monuments, and iconic aspects of Parisian culture via literary and artistic imaginings. Critical approach designations: Geographies, Media.
General Education Code
TA
Course explores the role of literature and culture in the production of national communities. Course topic changes; please see the Class Search for the current topic. Critical approach designations: Geographies, Histories. Distribution requirement: Global.
Instructor
Vilashini Cooppan
General Education Code
ER
Examines development of regional writing in the U.S. Course topic changes; see the Class Search for current topic. Critical approach designations: Geographies, Histories.
General Education Code
TA
Explores the formation of modern Turkish literature from the late-Ottoman tale to the postmodern novel. Introduces key critical concepts/debates (orientalism, canon formation, belatedness/modernization, national allegory) used in the study of non-Western literatures. Critical approach designations: Geographies, Histories. Distribution requirement: Global.
General Education Code
CC
Studies in American literature and culture, with attention to historical context. Course topic changes; please see the Class Search for current topic. Critical approach designations: Geographies, Histories.
General Education Code
TA
In response to the acquittal of white police who brutally beat black motorist Rodney King, thousands of people took to the street. This course examines cultural narratives that arose in the lead-up to and aftermath of the 1992 L.A. uprising. Critical approach designations: Geographies, Power and Subjectivities.
Instructor
Christine Hong
General Education Code
ER
Examination of representations of medieval and early modern Mediterranean history. Course topic changes; please see the Class Search for current topic. Critical approach designations: Geographies, Histories. Distribution requirements: Global, Pre-1750.
Instructor
Camilo Gomez-Rivas
General Education Code
CC
Survey of writing and culture from the 10th century B.C.E. through the sixth century C.E., focusing on poetry, philosophical and historical writing, supernatural fiction, Buddhist/Taoist texts in contexts of fragmentation, empire building, dynastic collapse, rebellion, eremitism, and courtly society. Critical approach designations: Geographies, Histories. Distribution requirements: Global, Poetry, Pre-1750.
Cross Listed Courses
HIS 141A
Instructor
Christopher Connery
General Education Code
CC
Survey of writing and culture from the Tang through early Ming dynasties (sixth century C.E. through 16th century C.E.). Themes include literary, religious, and philosophical innovation; courtly life; cultural contacts with non-Chinese people; and transformations of state and society. Critical approach designations: Geographies, Histories. Distribution requirements: Global, Poetry, Pre-1750.
Cross Listed Courses
HIS 141B
Instructor
Christopher Connery
General Education Code
CC
Examines the development of classical Arabic literature in historical context, including the appearance and importance of major genres and their broad relationship to the social and cultural history of the Arab-Islamic world. Critical approach designations: Geographies, Histories. Distribution requirements: Global, Pre-1750.
Instructor
Camilo Gomez-Rivas
General Education Code
CC
Examines the evolution of Arabic and Islamic literatures and cultures through the late-Medieval and early-modern periods. These periods produce much of the body of literature and texts that survive today, and is profoundly influential. Critical approach designations: Geographies, Histories. Distribution requirements: Global, Pre-1750.
Instructor
Camilo Gomez-Rivas
General Education Code
CC
Introductory survey of great prose writings of the continental Renaissance in their cultural and historical contexts. Authors include: Machiavelli, Castiglione, Erasmus, Rabelais, Montaigne, and Cervantes. Critical approach designations: Geographies, Histories. Distribution requirement: Pre-1750.
Surveys representations of the Euro-Amerindian encounter in the pre-national period. Readings include collective stories of indigenous peoples, European captivity narratives, reflections about spirituality and religion, poems, and a contemporary novel. Critical approach designations: Histories, Power and Subjectivities. Distribution requirement: Pre-1750.
Instructor
Kirsten Silva Gruesz
General Education Code
TA
A survey of major Romantic themes and authors between 1780 and 1820. Explores relationships to pre-Romantic and post-Romantic authors. The main goal is to achieve familiarity with a wide range of individual poems in the general context of Romanticism. Critical approach designations: Genres, Histories. Distribution requirement: Poetry.
Instructor
H. Marshall Leicester, Jr.
General Education Code
TA
British Victorian literature (1830-1901) featuring representative texts and authors. Course topic changes; please see the Class Search for the current topic. Critical approach designations: Geographies, Histories.
General Education Code
TA
Victorian prophecy, Victorian criticism: an examination of some major writings of 19th-century nonfiction prose by Carlyle, Mill, Ruskin, Newman, Arnold, Pater, and Wilde, with a glance at the social context and the minor fictional forms of the era. Critical approach designations: Genres, Histories.
Examination of selected fiction written between the end of the 18th century and the Civil War, with attention to historical and cultural as well as literary issues. Critical approach designations: Canons, Histories.
General Education Code
TA
Antislavery writing of the 19th century profoundly shaped a resistant strain in American writing. By reading speeches, essays, and life writing along with more traditionally literary work, students examine what gives language the power to move people and to change the world. Critical approach designations: Histories, Power and Subjectivities.
Instructor
Kirsten Silva Gruesz
General Education Code
ER
Examines mid- to late-19th-century English representations of non-normative gender and sexuality in popular culture. Considers how these figures in fiction conform to or resist established perceptions of gender, sexuality, race, and empire. Critical approach designations: Histories, Power and Subjectivities.
General Education Code
TA
Using Mark Twain's later writings and other literary/non-literary materials, explores responses to popular and legal discourse on blood, race, sex, resurgence of racism, and imperialism. Critical approach designations: Histories, Power and Subjectivities.
General Education Code
ER
Examines cultural life in the German Democratic Republic between 1946 and 1992 through films from the state-owned DEFA film studios. Topics include: socialist realism and international modernism in cinema; the representation of collective labor; the status of women; youth culture; and the texture of everyday life and consumer culture in socialism. Critical approach designations: Histories, Media.
Instructor
A. Hunter Bivens
General Education Code
IM
A selective examination of major writings since World War II, with attention to literary issues and historical context. Critical approach designation: Geographies, Histories.
An interdisciplinary study of the cultural and social movements of the 1960s. Critical approach designations: Histories, Power and Subjectivities. Distribution requirement: Global.
Instructor
Christopher Connery
General Education Code
PR-E
Study of 19th- and/or 20th-century literature, with attention to its literary and historical context. Course topic changes; please see the Class Search for current topic. Critical approach designations: Genres, Histories.
General Education Code
TA
Survey of modern fiction and poetry. Course topic changes; please see the Class Search for current topic. Critical approach designations: Genres, Histories. Distribution requirement: Poetry.
Instructor
Ronaldo Wilson
Examines 20th and 21st century Mexican literature, with attention to literary critical issues as they relate to cultural, historical, and political contexts. Critical approach designations: Geographies, Histories. Distribution requirement: Global.
Considers the treatment of war in American literature since World War II. Close attention paid to both literary form and historical context. Also provides perspectives on, and critical tools for thinking about, contemporary armed conflict. Course topic changes; please see the Class Search for the current topic. Critical approach designations: Histories, Power and Subjectivities.
General Education Code
TA
Examines modes of thinking and imagining the future throughout human history, and considers the fate of the future today. Topics include apocalyptic religion, utopia and dystopia, progress, revolution, finance, and everyday life. Critical approach designations: Histories, Power and Subjectivities. Distribution requirement: Global.
Instructor
Christopher Connery
General Education Code
PR-E
Explores contemporary representations of medieval cultures by considering questions of historical memory, limits of adaptation, and the power of satire. Critical approach designations: Geographies, Histories.
General Education Code
TA
Surveys the history of the book in the West from ca. 600-1500. Concentrates on the medieval illuminated manuscript and the first years of printing, and focuses on the relationship between text and image. Critical approach designations: Histories, Media. Distribution requirements: Pre-1750.
General Education Code
IM
Examines the form and function of the letter in literature from antiquity to the contemporary moment. Considers all writing, from the most expressly public to the most seemingly private, as a form of correspondence, and we will contribute our own letters, in both creative and critical modes, in an effort to expand our capacities for critical analysis of texts. Critical approach designations: Genres, Media.
General Education Code
TA
Examines the theory of tragedy from Aristotle to Nietzsche, while inviting students to read and discuss classic dramatic pieces to which the label tragedy was applied. Relies on student presentations and contributions, and teaches skills both in handling theory and in practical literary criticism. Critical approach designations: Genres, Media. Distribution requirement: Pre-1750.
Study of representative plays. Course topic changes; please see the Class Search for current topic. Critical approach designations: Canons, Media. Distribution requirement: Pre-1750.
An investigation of how American playwrights represent and criticize the concepts of gender, race and disability. Analysis of the genre of drama as a contact zone of gender, race, and disability by studying how American playwrights have critically responded to historical and social alienation, sexism, racism, and ableism in their works about "disabled" bodies. Students cannot receive credit for this course and
CRES 114. Critical approach designations: Media, Power and Subjectivities.
General Education Code
IM
Historical introduction to the theatrical forms and dramatic performance styles that have characterized the Indian tradition at different times and places. Critical approach designations: Canons, Media. Distribution requirements: Global, Pre-1750.
General Education Code
IM
Literature and art challenge, collaborate with, and use each other as inspiration. Course examines the boundaries of and connections between literature and art; focuses on the relationship between self-expression, identity, and politics in art and literature. Critical approach designations: Media, Power and Subjectivities.
General Education Code
IM
Quarter offered
Fall, Winter, Spring
An examination of the ways in which the technological and institutional practices of cinema construct modes of modern and contemporary subjectivity. Course topic changes; please see the Class Search for current topic. Critical approach designations: Media, Power and Subjectivities. Distribution requirement: Global.
General Education Code
IM
Surveys the work of Fassbinder, Kluge, Herzog, Schlöndorff, von Trotta, Reitz, Straub, Sanders-Brahms, and others. Major themes include post-fascism and the problems of history, the burden of memory, mass culture, gender, social class, and migration in postwar Germany. Critical approach designations: Geographies, Media.
Instructor
A. Hunter Bivens
General Education Code
IM
Explores the rich history of Italian cinema. Special attention is given to the links between literacy and visual narratives, Italian films and Italian novels, autobiographies, and short stories on which the films are based. Critical approach designations: Geographies, Media.
General Education Code
IM
Surveys selected Latin American and Latino feature and documentary films. Course topic changes; please see the Class Search for current topic. Critical approach designations: Media, Power and Subjectivities. Distribution requirement: Global.
General Education Code
CC
Shifting definitions of horror in the movies from the late silent period to the present through close analysis of representative films and critical texts. Course topic changes; please see the Class Search for current topic. Critical approach designations: Genres, Media.
Instructor
H. Marshall Leicester, Jr.
General Education Code
IM
Study of development and central themes of preeminent genre director of the post-Hollywood era, concentrating on central core of major works in horror/science fiction genres from Halloween to In the Mouth of Madness, with attention to the comedies and action films. Critical approach designations: Genres, Media.
Instructor
H. Marshall Leicester, Jr.
Examines development and central themes of vampire film from the silent era to the present. Critical approach designations: Genres, Media.
Instructor
H. Marshall Leicester, Jr.
General Education Code
IM
Examines cinema in India from the silent era to the contemporary production of Bollywood films. Attention is given to the rise of the culture industry in urban centers such as Mumbai, and the dialectical relationship between socio-political change and cultural form. Critical approach designations: Geographies, Media. Distribution requirement: Global.
General Education Code
IM
What does horror film have to say about women? In treating horror film as text, students gain the necessary tools to read these movies as narrative; students also identify how race, class, gender, and genre function to create complex and challenging texts. Critical approach designations: Media, Power and Subjectivities.
General Education Code
IM
Readings include theoretical essays by Freud and Lacan and such fictions as The Monk, Frankenstein, Dracula, Maus, The Yellow Wallpaper, and Beloved. Films change each year. Critical approach designations: Histories, Media.
General Education Code
TA
Studies how literature maps the world and in what ways our experiences of the world are informed by literary maps. Critical approach designations: Geographies, Media. Distribution requirement: Global.
General Education Code
IM
The study of 20th- and 21st-century productions and adaptations of ancient Greek drama in theater, dance, music, and film, including Stravinsky, Graham, Pasolini, Breuer, and von Trier, discussing artists' goals, the sociopolitical context, ideas of authenticity, and audience response. Critical approach designations: Histories, Media. Distribution requirement: Pre-1750.
General Education Code
IM
Examination of Shakespeare's Hamlet from various perspectives, including as a literary and historical object, and as a mirror of socio-political concerns. Readings include both precursors to Shakespeare and modern adaptations and revisions of the Hamlet story. Critical approach designations: Canons, Media. Distribution requirements: Pre-1750.
A reading of ancient Greek plays along with contemporary films similar to them in theme, form, and effect. Students discuss different definitions of tragedy; genre as a critical tool; and similarities and difference between the media of literature, drama, and film. Critical approach designations: Genres, Media. Distribution requirement: Pre-1750.
Cruelty is the unmotivated infliction of pain on someone else. This course investigates the notion of cruelty cultures raised by Claude Levi-Strauss through the literatures of ancient Rome and 15th-16th century Mexico as well as contemporary world literature. Critical approach designations: Histories, Power and Subjectivities. Distribution requirements: Global, Pre-1750.
Instructor
Martin Devecka
General Education Code
CC
Examines comics' origins in the United States' legacies of racial caricature and political cartoons about slavery, Asian exclusion, yellow journalism, and imperial expansion. Analyses of graphic novel's 20th-century evolution around human-rights violations and post-atrocity representational strategies around race, nationalism and minority status. Critical approach designations: Media, Power and Subjectivities. Distribution requirement: Global.
Instructor
Christine Hong
General Education Code
ER
Investigates the ways in which cultural texts--literary, aesthetic, visual, performative, and a variety of popular forms--create and transform individual experiences, everyday life, social relations, and power. Course topic changes; see the Class Search for the current topic. Critical approach designations: Media, Power and Subjectivities.
General Education Code
TA
Examination of major issues in contemporary theory, with emphasis on key concepts. Course topic changes; please see the Class Search for current topic. Critical approach designations: Canons, Power and Subjectivities.
Instructor
Christopher Chen
General Education Code
TA
Theoretical and historical inquiry into the relationship between race, militarism, and empire; a comparative examination of the Japanese and U.S. empires in the Asia-Pacific region; and a consideration of how liberal ideologies around race were wielded as a tool of imperial governance. Critical approach designations: Geographies, Power and Subjectivities. Distribution requirement: Global.
Instructor
Christine Hong
General Education Code
ER
Analyzes how the figure of the refugee, migrant, and other travelling communities are produced, engaged and represented in literary texts, cultural texts, and theories. Course materials include fiction, memoir, essay, legal tracts, and film. Critical approach designations: Geographies, Power and Subjectivities. Distribution requirement: Global.
General Education Code
CC
Examines racialized labor from the mid-19th century to the present, including the racial protest novel as a cultural form. Investigates race, gender, and citizenship as technologies used to regulate labor and to circumscribe labor's power. Critical approach designations: Histories, Power and Subjectivities. Distribution requirement: Global.
Instructor
Christopher Chen
General Education Code
ER
Provides critical insight into the complex dynamics that define our historical moment through an investigation of literary and philosophical treatments. Readings include novels, plays, philosophical essays, and political commentary. The course topic changes; see the Class Search for the current topic. Critical approach designations: Genres, Power and Subjectivities.
Instructor
Guriqbal Sahota
General Education Code
TA
Investigates the logic of U.S. imperialism, with a specific focus on the War on Terror. Includes texts in critical race and ethnic studies, history, and literature, and a diverse, range of media; novels, poetry, film, graphic literature, and music. Critical approach designations: Geographies, Power and Subjectivities. Distribution requirement: Global.
General Education Code
TA
John Brown was a 19th-century advocate of the use of armed insurrection to overthrow the institution of U.S. slavery. Why has a man dismissed as a fanatic been taken up as the subject of novels, biographies, popular songs, films, and even internet memes for the past 160 years? Course explores this question through readings in literature, history, and theory. Critical approach designations: Histories, Power and Subjectivities.
General Education Code
ER
Examines theory and practice of (gender) queer- and trans-ness in the present historical moment. Drawing primarily on critical theory from trans and queer studies, alongside literary texts and popular culture, the course introduces intellectual and affective resources for navigating questions about gender non-normativity. Critical approach designations: Histories, Power and Subjectivities.
General Education Code
TA
Examination of African American writing and cultural representations, with attention to the historical, cultural, and general literary contexts out of which they emerged and upon which they commented. Course topic changes; please see the Class Search for the current topic. Critical approach designations: Histories, Power and Subjectivities.
Instructor
Christopher Chen
General Education Code
ER
Explores the cultural, aesthetic, political, and feminist issues in select works by African American women. Through close analysis of the works, students develop an understanding of the intersections that race, gender, and class play in the literary imaginations of these writers. Critical approach designations: Histories, Power and Subjectivities.
Instructor
Christopher Chen
General Education Code
ER
Examination of Asian American literary works (fiction, poetry, dramatic essays) in the context of the historical presence of Asian Americans in the United States since the 1850s. Emphasis on comparison of select works from ethnic Asian writings. Critical approach designations: Geographies, Power and Subjectivities.
General Education Code
ER
Study of literature of the Asian diaspora, attempting to discover and define a growing body of contemporary writing under this rubric, including immigrant/migrant histories, memories of exile and refuge, as well as the fiction of imagined homelands. Critical approach designations: Geographies, Power and Subjectivities. Distribution requirement: Global.
General Education Code
ER
Explores representations of trauma in contemporary Asian American literature. Critical approach designations: Geographies, Power and Subjectivities.
General Education Code
CC
Quarter offered
Fall, Winter, Spring
Explores works of fiction, creative non-fiction, drama, and poetry written by American Indians. Focuses on historical and political issues within the text as well as on formal and thematic structures. Critical approach designations: Histories, Power and Subjectivities.
General Education Code
TA
Exploration of the idea of the Diaspora as a moving condition, and of the multli-dimensional character of global Jewish culture, covering authors who traveled across the Jewish world from medieval times to the present. Critical approach designations: Geographies, Power and Subjectivities. Distribution requirement: Pre-1750.
Instructor
The Staff The Staff
Hebrew poetry-Biblical, medieval, modern-explores cultural and literary issues central to our contemporary world. Texts and discussion focus on Jewish and Israeli literary traditions. Critical approach designations: Genres, Power and Subjectivities. Distribution requirement: Poetry.
General Education Code
CC
Comparative analysis of modern Jewish writers from Western and non-Western diasporas. Critical approach designations: Geographies, Power and Subjectivities. Distribution requirement: Global.
Focuses on modern Jewish diaspora, ethnicity, and urban life. Critical approach designations: Geographies, Power and Subjectivities.
Instructor
Bruce Thompson
General Education Code
ER
Reading and analysis of fiction and poetry, focusing on Holocaust literature as a problem in critical theory, cultural studies, and literary history. Though most of the works are read in translation, some knowledge of European languages is helpful. Critical approach designations: Histories, Power and Subjectivities.
Interrogates the master narrative of a specific European city and discusses the ways in which Jewish life and Jewish actions helped to shape that story and were shaped by it. Course topic changes; please see the Class Search for current topic. Critical approach designations: Geographies, Power and Subjectivities.
General Education Code
ER
An examination of some major Jewish writers and their responses to the American city. Major writers: Henry Roth, Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, J. Kaplan, Philip Roth. A look at Yiddish and other minority writers, and including sociological and historical materials on the American city. The course topic changes; please see the Class Search for the current topic. Critical approach designations: Histories, Power and Subjectivities.
Instructor
Bruce Thompson
General Education Code
ER
Considers the historical, current, and future directions of Chicano/a literary culture within the context of the long-standing exchanges of culture and politics across the U.S.-Mexican border and the challenges of globalization. Includes novels, essays, and films. Critical approach designations: Geographies, Power and Subjectivities. Distribution requirement: Global.
Instructor
Kirsten Silva Gruesz
General Education Code
ER
Writers in the U.S., Latin America, and the Caribbean have been drawn repeatedly to the theme of intercultural conflict as they recall the traumatic history of the hemisphere. Examining fiction, poetry, and film expands the horizons of American literature. Critical approach designations: Genres, Power and Subjectivities. Distribution requirement: Global. (Formerly Latin/o American Fiction.)
General Education Code
ER
Analyzes literature about and by indigenous peoples in Mesoamerica: traces the construction of racialized categories of identity, such as indio and mestizo in Mesoamerican cultures and examines how they interact with definitions of the human that dominate in the West. Critical approach designations: Histories, Power and Subjectivities. Distribution requirement: Global.
General Education Code
CC
Examination of the portrayal of gender roles and interactions. Particular stress on erotic experience and the courtly tradition: Ovid, Andreas Capellanus, Marie de France, Chretien de Troyes, The Romance of the Rose, Dante, Chaucer, Christine de Pizan. Critical approach designations: Histories, Power and Subjectivities. Distribution requirements: Poetry, Pre-1750.
General Education Code
TA
Explores representation of gender in early modern literature, with attention to contemporary aesthetic, cultural, and theoretical contexts. Texts include drama, poetry, and prose. Critical approach designations: Histories, Power and Subjectivities. Distribution requirement: Pre-1750.
In early modern Italy several factors converged to foster a boom in women's writing and publication. Course addresses the context and content of these writings, dealing with key theoretical and historical issues surrounding women's entry into authorship in Europe. Knowledge of Italian not required. Critical approach designations: Geographies, Power and Subjectivities. Distribution requirement: Pre-1750.
Works by women from the 18th century to the present, with special attention to the relationship of literature to history, psychology, and aesthetics. Course topic changes; please see the Class Search for current topic. Critical approach designations: Histories, Power and Subjectivities.
General Education Code
TA
Focuses on the historical development of what we broadly consider to be the human body from its Humanist instantiations in early modern Europe as seen through its alleged opposite: the monstrous body. Critical approach designations: Histories, Power and Subjectivities. Distribution requirement: Pre-1750.
Examines transformations between god, human, and animal from ancient literature to medieval, renaissance, modern, and postmodern (especially science) fiction and poetry. Critical approach designations: Histories, Power and Subjectivities. Distribution requirement: Poetry, Pre-1750.
Instructor
Carla Freccero
General Education Code
CC
Traces the vampire's appearance in different historical moments, cultural contexts, genres, and media to interrogate its place in the shifting cultural politics of gender and sexuality, as well as in relation to race, ethnicity, class, and other identity positions. Critical approach designations: Media, Power and Subjectivities.
General Education Code
TA
Examines the disruptive presences of nonhuman animals and nonanimal aliens as they appear in a variety of narrative forms: prose fiction, non-fiction, and poetry. Organized around central themes relating to the presence of animals in literature, including representation, difference, desire, and subjectivity. Critical approach designations: Histories, Power and Subjectivities.
General Education Code
TA
An overview of climate change and its representations in literary and filmic texts. Asks how climate fiction and non-fiction narratives of climate change can help us to confront issues of environmental justice, inequalities of race and class, vulnerability, land rights, and refugeehood. Critical approach designations: Geographies, Power and Subjectivities. Distribution requirement: Global.
General Education Code
PE-E
Investigates U.S. imperialism in the Asia-Pacific region by focusing on race and disability; examines how disabled subjects have responded to historical and social alienation. Critical approach designations: Geographies, Power and Subjectivities. Distribution requirement: Global.
General Education Code
ER
Investigates the nature of Islamic law as a set of textual and interpretive practices that change over time and is fully enmeshed with Arabic culture, as well as its representation and role in literature as a force, standard, and context. Critical approach designations: Genres, Power and Subjectivities. Distribution requirement: Global.
Instructor
Camilo Gomez-Rivas
General Education Code
CC
Introduction to Islamic Law and its development as a set of discursive practices and institutional formations, from its origins to its transformation by modern state systems. Focuses on development of legal theory as textual interpretation and translation into social practice. Critical approach designations: Histories, Power and Subjectivities. Distribution requirement: Global.
Instructor
Camilo Gomez-Rivas
General Education Code
CC
Examines the question of whiteness as race, identity, politic, and field of discourse, focusing on cultural literary and artistic production from the 1990s that brought about the field of critical white studies. Includes prose, poetry, literary theory, film, and visual art. Critical approach designations: Genres, Power and Subjectivities.
Instructor
Ronaldo Wilson
General Education Code
ER
Intensive work in writing fiction. Critical approach designation: Genres.
Instructor
Jennifer Tseng, Melissa Sanders-Self
General Education Code
PR-C
Quarter offered
Fall, Winter, Spring
Intensive work in writing poetry. Critical approach designation: Genres.
Instructor
Gary Young, Ronaldo Wilson
Quarter offered
Fall, Winter
Focuses on a particular process or subject used in the production of a literary text. Course is intended to work as a bridge between invention and scholarship. Course topic changes; please see the Class Search for current topic. Critical approach designation: Genres.
Instructor
Gary Young, Christopher Chen
General Education Code
PR-C
Quarter offered
Winter, Spring
Grammatical study interspersed with narrative excerpts from the Hebrew Bible. Recommended: previous study of a second language up to the advanced level. Critical approach designations: Canons, Histories. Distribution requirements: Global, Pre-1750.
Continuation of grammatical study interspersed with poetic texts from the Hebrew Bible. Critical approach designations: Genres, Geographies. Distribution requirements: Global, Poetry, Pre-1750. Together, Biblical Hebrew 1 and Hebrew 2 fulfill the language prerequisites for
LIT 102; together they also satisfy the intensive major second-language course requirements.
Intensive introduction to fundamentals of classical Coptic grammar (Sahidic dialect) designed to move rapidly into reading of primary texts. Readings include The Martyrdom of S. Coluthus, Gospel of Thomas, and the Gnostic treatise Thunder: Perfect Mind. Critical approach designations: Genres, Histories. Distribution requirement: Pre-1750.
Introduction to Egyptian hieroglyphs as a graphic, conceptual, and communicative system. Covers the basic elements of classical Egyptian grammar, drawing primarily on inscriptions from extant Egyptian monuments. Students read one prose and one poetical text from the Middle Kingdom. Critical approach designations: Geographies, Media. Distribution requirement: Global, Pre-1750. Strongly recommended: two years previous study of a foreign language at the college level or the equivalent.
General Education Code
CC
Advanced Middle Egyptian grammar (two weeks). Close reading of the Tale of Sinuhe in Middle Egyptian, selected hymns and love poetry from the New Kingdom. Critical approach designations: Genres, Geographies. Distribution requirement: Global, Poetry, Pre-1750. Together,
LIT 181D and
LIT 181E, Egyptian Hieroglyphs 1 and 2, fulfill the language prerequisites for
LIT 102; together they also satisfy the intensive major second-language course requirements.
General Education Code
CC
Close reading of the Tale of Sinuhe in Middle Egyptian. Critical approach designations: Genres, Geographies. Distribution requirements: Global, Poetry, Pre-1750.
Systematic introduction to the grammar, syntax, and usage of Classical Sanskrit, to the oral dimensions of the language, and to the Sanskrit literary tradition. Critical approach designations: Canons, Histories. Distribution requirements: Global, Poetry, Pre-1750.
Continued study of the grammar, syntax, and usage of Classical Sanskrit, and the Sanskrit literary tradition. Students read the entire Bhagavad-Gita, including key sections in the original Sanskrit. Critical approach designations: Canons, Geographies. Distribution requirements: Global, Poetry, Pre-1750. Together,
LIT 181G and
LIT 181H, Sanskrit Parts 1 and 2, fulfill the language prerequisites for Literature 102; together they also satisfy the intensive major second-language course requirements.
Speaking, reading, and writing proficiency in French required. Study of 12th- and 13th-century texts, with attention to problems of history and social change. In modern translations with selected readings in Old French or Provencal. Course topic changes; see the Class Search for current topic. Critical approach designations: Geographies, Histories. Distribution requirements: Poetry, Pre-1750.
Instructor
Sharon Kinoshita
Speaking, reading, and writing proficiency in French required. Emphasizes the close study of a limited number of poetic texts in terms of their linguistic, stylistic, and rhetorical devices. Course topic changes; please see Class Search for current topic. Critical approach designations: Genres, Geographies. Distribution requirement: Poetry.
Speaking, reading, and writing proficiency in French required. Studies in French drama and theories of theatricality. Course topic changes; see the Class Search for current topic. Critical approach designations: Genres, Media.
Speaking, reading, and writing proficiency in French required. Designed to provide an in-depth study of a given author's literary oeuvre and its cultural context. Course topic changes; see the Class Search for the current topic. Critical approach designations: Geographies, Histories.
Speaking, reading, and writing proficiency in French required. A study of texts written in French-speaking cultures: Belgium, Canada, Africa, the Caribbean. Critical approach designations: Geographies, Histories. Distribution requirement: Global.
Speaking, reading, and writing proficiency in French required. A discussion of recent developments in French literary theory. Critical approach designations: Canons, Geographies.
Instructor
Carla Freccero
Speaking, reading, and writing proficiency in French required. Examines implications of social and political change in terms of literary theory and practice. Places equal emphasis on literary and other kinds of cultural texts: historical, political, and cinematic. Course topic changes; please see the Class Search for current topic. Critical approach designations: Histories, Power and Subjectivities.
Instructor
Sharon Kinoshita, Dorian Bell
Quarter offered
Fall, Spring
Speaking, reading, and writing proficiency in French required. Course considers several French literary and cinematic examples of contemplating the present through the future and the past. Learn how reading across different cultural contexts can blur the distinction between "science" and "fiction"; how to read fictional texts alongside the films they inspire; and how to produce more effective essays and presentations in French. Critical approach designations: Genres, Media.
General Education Code
CC
Speaking, reading, and writing proficiency in German required. Wide reading of works representing the major authors, periods, and genres of German literature. Critical approach designations: Canons, Geographies.
Speaking, reading, and writing proficiency in German required. Course studies German literature and culture, with attention to historical context. Course topic changes; please see the Class Search for current topic. Critical approach designations: Geographies, Histories.
Instructor
A. Hunter Bivens
Speaking, reading, and writing proficiency in German required. A study of the emergence and development of German Romanticism. Central concerns are the Romantics' attitude toward the role of the imagination in literature and their attempts to revitalize myth and folklore in their works. Authors read include Tieck, Novalis, Hoffmann, Eichendorff, and Heine. Critical approach designations: Genres, Histories.
Speaking, reading, and writing proficiency in German required. A study of Novellen of the major 19th-century German authors. Critical approach designations: Canons, Genres.
Instructor
A. Hunter Bivens
Speaking, reading, and writing proficiency in German required. A study of a series of comic works by authors writing in German. In addition to discussing the texts in depth, we also look at theories of humor and laughter developed by thinkers such as Freud, Schopenhauer, and Bergson. Critical approach designations: Canons, Media.
Speaking, reading, and writing proficiency in German required. Selected readings of major German dramatists; attention given to various movements in theater. Critical approach designations: Canons, Media.
Speaking, reading, and writing proficiency in German required. Discusses a range of modern and contemporary German texts, including poetry, drama, and film. Critical approach designations: Geographies, Media.
Instructor
A. Hunter Bivens
Speaking, reading, and writing proficiency in German required. Selected readings from the novel and novella in 20th-century German literature. Critical approach designations: Genres, Geographies.
Instructor
A. Hunter Bivens
Speaking, reading, and writing proficiency in German required. Intensive analysis of selected poems is complemented by broader reading in certain authors and periods.Critical approach designations: Genres, Histories. Distribution requirement: Poetry.
Speaking, reading, and writing proficiency in German required. Considers recent violence against immigrants and asylum-seekers in Germany, and moves on to examine images of people perceived as foreign or alien in German literature and culture from early times to the present. Critical approach designations: Genres, Power and Subjectivities.
Reading proficiency in Ancient Greek required. Critical approach designations: Canons, Histories. Distribution requirement: Pre-1750.
Reading proficiency in Ancient Greek required. Course topic changes; see the Class Search for current topic. Critical approach designations: Histories, Media. Distribution requirement: Pre-1750.
Reading proficiency in Ancient Greek required. Course topic changes; see the Class Search for current topic. Critical approach designations: Genres, Histories. Distribution requirements: Poetry, Pre-1750.
Reading proficiency in Ancient Greek required. Course topic changes; see Class Search for the current topic. Critical approach designations: Canons, Genres. Distribution requirement: Pre-1750.
Instructor
Martin Devecka
Reading proficiency in Ancient Greek required. Readings in selected ancient Greek texts. Course topic changes; see the Class Search for current topic. Focus is on translation and interpretation; requirements normally include translation exams and interpretive essays. Critical approach designations: Canons, Genres. Distribution requirements: Global, Pre-1750.
Speaking, reading, and writing proficiency in Italian required. In-depth examination of a topic in Italian literary and cultural studies. Course topic changes; see the Class Search for current topic. Critical approach designations: Geographies, Histories.
Instructor
Filippo Gianferrari
General Education Code
ER
Speaking, reading, and writing proficiency in Italian required. Explores Italian opera as dramatic and spectacular cross-cultural phenomenon beginning in 1590s Florence through the 19th and 20th centuries. Attention to opera's function as a medium of cultural translation and political critique. Critical approach designations: Genres, Media. Prerequisite(s): Two years of university study of Italian language, or equivalent proficiency.
General Education Code
CC
Speaking, reading, and writing proficiency in Italian required. Survey of Italian theater from its beginnings in medieval ritual through the development of Renaissance staged comedy and the commedia dell'arte, pastoral and tragicomedy, opera, melodrama, and 20th-century avant-garde and political theater. Critical approach designations: Genres, Media.
Speaking, reading, and writing proficiency in Italian required. Study of development of the Italian lyric from romanticism to present, with close stylistic and thematic analyses of works of Leopardi, D'Annunzio, Ungaretti, Quasimodo, Pavese, and Montale. Critical approach designations: Canons, Genres. Distribution requirement: Poetry.
Speaking, reading, and writing proficiency in Italian required. Surveys short fiction in Italian, from bawdy medieval novellas to folk tales edited in the 19th century, to psychological and character studies. Focuses on the formal properties that distinguish short fiction from romances and novels and the social functions these writings can perform. Critical approach designations: Genres, Geographies.
General Education Code
TA
Speaking, reading, and writing proficiency in Italian required. The relationship between literature and Italian fascism is explored, including the rise and myths of fascism, critique and censorship, the persecution of minorities, the Resistance, the role of the intellectual. Authors include Borgese, Vittorini, Bassani, Pavese. Critical approach designations: Histories, Power and Subjectivities.
Instructor
Filippo Gianferrari
General Education Code
TA
Speaking, reading, and writing proficiency in Italian required. Explores the specificity of Italian women's writing and studies their literary activities in historical and social context. Readings include Italian feminist and some history as well as literary texts. Critical approach designations: Geographies, Power and Subjectivities.
Speaking, reading, and writing proficiency in Italian required. Critical study of The Decameron. Critical approach designation: Canons, Genres. Distribution requirements: Poetry, Pre-1750.
Speaking, reading, and writing proficiency in Italian required. Reading of the Inferno, the Purgatorio, and selected canti of the Paradiso, along with selections from Dante's lyrics and from medieval Italian and French poetry. Critical approach designations: Canons, Histories. Distribution requirements: Poetry, Pre-1750.
Speaking, reading, and writing proficiency in Italian required. The transition from medieval to Renaissance modes of poetry in the works of Francesco Petrarca. Readings in the Rime Sparse, the Trionfi, and the prose works. Critical approach designations: Canons, Histories. Distribution requirements: Poetry, Pre-1750.
Concurrent enrollment in an approved upper-division course in Italian literature, history of art and visual culture, or history satisfies the Disciplinary Communication requirement in Italian studies. Prerequisite(s): satisfaction of the Entry Level Writing and Composition requirements. Students submit petition to sponsoring agency. Enrollment restricted to Italian studies majors and by permission of instructor.
Quarter offered
Fall, Winter, Spring
Reading proficiency in Latin required. Course topic changes; see Class Search for the current topic. Critical approach designations: Canons, Histories. Distribution requirement: Pre-1750.
General Education Code
TA
Reading proficiency in Latin required. Course topic changes; see the Class Search for current topic. Critical approach designations: Canons, Genres. Distribution requirements: Poetry, Pre-1750.
Instructor
Charles Hedrick
Reading proficiency in Latin required. Course topic changes; see the Class Search for current topic. Critical approach designations: Canons, Histories. Distribution requirement: Pre-1750.
Reading proficiency in Latin required. Course topic changes; see the Class Search for current topic. Critical approach designations: Geographies, Histories. Distribution requirement: Pre-1750.
Instructor
Martin Devecka
Speaking, reading, and writing proficiency in Spanish required. Focuses on Spanish medieval literature, broadly covering the 12th to the 15th centuries. Examines and contextualizes literary genres developed in this period. Critical approach designations: Geographies, Histories. Distribution requirement: Pre-1750. (Formerly Medieval Spanish Literature.)
Instructor
Camilo Gomez-Rivas
General Education Code
CC
Speaking, reading, and writing proficiency in Spanish required. A critical study of several representative texts from the early period of Spanish literature in their sociohistorical context. Included among the readings are El Poema del Cid, the Romancero, La Celestina, Lazarillo de Tormes, and a Golden Age play. Critical approach designations: Geographies, Histories. Distribution requirements: Poetry, Pre-1750.
Speaking, reading, and writing proficiency in Spanish required. Studies in Spanish Golden Age theater. Critical approach designations: Histories, Media. Distribution requirement: Pre-1750.
Instructor
Jorge Aladro Font
General Education Code
CC
Speaking, reading, and writing proficiency in Spanish required. Focuses on the prose in the Renaissance period and the different genres that flourished before the creation of Cervantes' Don Quixote. Chosen texts constitute an amalgam of Renaissance ideology, and provide examples of 16th-century literature, including the picaresque novel, pastoral novel, the Byzantine novel, and the chivalresque novel. Critical approach designations: Genres, Histories. Distribution requirement: Pre-1750.
Instructor
Jorge Aladro Font
Speaking, reading, and writing proficiency in Spanish required. A close reading of the works of Cervantes, with particular attention to Don Quijote, in an attempt to discover how these works reflect the conflictive period in which the author lived. Also looks closely at the Cervantine view of the relationship of literature to life, as manifested in the works under study. Critical approach designations: Canons, Histories. Distribution requirement: Pre-1750.
Instructor
Jorge Aladro Font
General Education Code
CC
Speaking, reading, and writing proficiency in Spanish required. Examines the connections between erotic literature and mystical literature through poetic representations of sublime where Eros and Thanatos meet. As symbolisms of mystical and erotic experiences fuse and confuse each other, we are able to establish connections between Sufi, Hindi, and Judeo-Christian mystical poetry. Critical approach designations: Genres, Histories. Distribution requirement: Pre-1750.
Instructor
Jorge Aladro Font
General Education Code
TA
Speaking, reading, and writing proficiency in Spanish required. The picaresque novel of 16th-century Spain considers the fictive environment as reality in order to introduce its protagonist as a rebel against social dominion. The picaresque novel is the only literary genre comparable to what is now called literature of social protest. Critical approach designations: Genres, Histories. Distribution requirement: Pre-1750.
Instructor
Jorge Aladro Font
General Education Code
CC
Speaking, reading, and writing proficiency in Spanish required. Examines literature related to the period of the Spanish Civil War (1936-39) and the Franco years (1939-75). Includes works by Spanish writers in exile during this period; also examines literary texts written prior to the outbreak of the war. Critical approach designations: Histories, Power and Subjectivities.
Speaking, reading, and writing proficiency in Spanish required. A critical study of several representative texts from this period of Spanish literature. Critical approach designations: Geographies, Histories.
Considers salient aspects of environmental aesthetics and ecological thinking in Latin America in a variety of genres including memoir, children's literature, graphic literature, documentary film, and visual arts. Critical approach designations: Media, Power and Subjectivities. Distribution requirement: Global.
General Education Code
PE-E
Speaking, reading, and writing proficiency in Spanish required. Examines works by Spanish authors with attention to historical and cultural as well as literary issues. Course topic changes, see the Class Search for current topic. Critical approach designations: Geographies, Histories.
Speaking, reading, and writing proficiency in Spanish required. A study of Hispanic American and Peninsular literatures from the chronicles of the conquest through the 17th century. Readings deal with transformations in both the idea of empire and the rights of the conquered. Includes the works of Colon, Cortes, El Inca Garcilaso de la Vega, Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz, and others. Critical approach designations: Canons, Histories. Distribution requirements: Global, Pre-1750.
Instructor
Zachary Zimmer
General Education Code
CC
Speaking, reading, and writing proficiency in Spanish required. Follows the literary manifestations of the growing consciousness of the Latin American writer: discovery of native themes, comparative analysis of Spanish American and Peninsular European models, search for a new language literally and figuratively. Relates historical events with literary movements. Critical approach designations: Geographies, Histories. Distribution requirement: Global.
General Education Code
CC
Speaking, reading, and writing proficiency in Spanish is required. Explores the social, cultural, economic, and political changes that connect Latin America, Spain, and the United States Latina/o communities. Critical approach designations: Geographies, Power and Subjectivities. Distribution requirement: Global.
Cross Listed Courses
SPAN 105
General Education Code
ER
Speaking, reading, and writing proficiency in Spanish required. An in-depth examination of the life and work of Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz, a 17th-century nun, poet, playwright, and woman of genius and intellectual prowess whose ideas and accomplishments were ahead of her time. Critical approach designations: Canons, Histories. Distribution requirement: Pre-1750.
Instructor
Jorge Aladro Font
Speaking, reading, and writing proficiency in Spanish required. Examines Cuban literature and culture, with attention to historical context. Course topic changes: please see the Class Search for current topic. Critical approach designations: Geographies, Histories. Distribution requirement: Global.
General Education Code
CC
Speaking, reading, and writing proficiency in Spanish required. Spanish-based, English/bilingual inclusive overview of Latino/a writing in the U.S. Critical approach designations: Genres, Geographies. Distribution requirement: Global.
General Education Code
ER
Speaking, reading, and writing proficiency in Spanish required. Analysis and interpretation of Spanish-language films derived from literary works by Latin American and Spanish authors. Topic changes; see the Class Search for current topic. Critical approach designations: Genres, Media. Distribution requirement: Global.
General Education Code
IM
Speaking, reading, and writing proficiency in Spanish required. Examines globalization of Latin/o American cinema as a cultural industry. Classical issues of cultural politics and political economy are revisited from the viewpoint of current global processes. Also provides access to the representation of different aspects of globalization in Latin/o American cinema. Critical approach designations: Media, Power and Subjectivities. Distribution requirement: Global.
General Education Code
IM
Speaking, reading, and writing proficiency in Spanish required. Course examines the history, representation, and politics of Indigeneity and Indigenous literature in Latin America by analyzing novels, short stories, transcribed oral tradition, film, and radio. Critical approach designations: Geographies, Power and Subjectivities. Distribution requirement: Global.
General Education Code
ER
Speaking, reading, and writing proficiency in Spanish required. A study of the essay in Spanish America from Sarmiento to the present, concentrating on problems of national or cultural identity. Critical approach designations: Geographies, Histories. Distribution requirement: Global.
Speaking, reading, and writing proficiency in Spanish required. Poets from modernismo to the present in Spanish America. Studies how this poetry attempts to define Latin America, its past, its present history, and its vision for the future. Critical approach designations: Genres, Geographies. Distribution requirements: Global, Poetry.
General Education Code
CC
Speaking, reading, and writing proficiency in Spanish required. Examines contemporary Spanish American prose. Course topic changes; please see the Class Search for current topic. Critical approach designations: Genres, Geographies. Distribution requirement: Global.
General Education Code
CC
Speaking, reading, and writing proficiency in Spanish required. Contemporary non-fiction testimonial literature of Latin America. Critical approach designations: Genres, Power and Subjectivities. Distribution requirement: Global.
Speaking, reading, and writing proficiency in Spanish required. Explores various aesthetics of the Latin American short story including fantastic, detective, metaliterary, social critique, historical, and philosophical writings. Critical approach designations: Canons, Genres. Distribution requirement: Global.
Speaking, reading, and writing proficiency in Spanish required. Literary and sociological writings by and about women in Latin America-in Hispanic, indigenous, and African-Latino communities; in rural and urban settings; in historical and contemporary periods. Critical approach designations: Geographies, Power and Subjectivities. Distribution requirement: Global.
Speaking, reading, and writing proficiency in Spanish required. Marginalized perspectives take center stage in this course that studies ways Latin American/Latino authors textually contest dominant representations and realities, opening symbolic spaces for emergent historical subjects who gain agency and authority by re/presenting unmapped terrains. Texts include chronicles, testimonios, writings of the self, and novels. Critical approach designations: Geographies, Power and Subjectivities. Distribution requirement: Global.
Speaking, reading, and writing proficiency in Spanish required. An analysis of novels which focus on the theme of dictators and the rhetoric of dictatorships in Latin America. Texts are studied as literary manifestations of particular historical and political periods. Critical approach designations: Genres, Power and Subjectivities. Distribution requirement: Global.
Speaking, reading, and writing proficiency in Spanish required. Explores short stories and novels that have been greatly influenced by popular culture, not only in theme, but also by appropriation of popular forms of language and modes of representation. Includes works by authors from Mexico, Argentina, Cuba, and Colombia. Critical approach designations: Genres, Geographies. Distribution requirement: Global.
General Education Code
CC
Speaking, reading, and writing proficiency in Spanish required. Explores historical readers and reading practices in at least three different formations: colonial, national-popular, and transnational. Proposes a historical-theoretical reconstruction of the place of reading and readers at key moments in the history of culture in Latin America. Critical approach designations: Histories, Power and Subjectivities. Distribution requirement: Global.
Speaking, reading, and writing proficiency in Spanish required. Explores the relationships between literature and mass culture, modernization, and globalization through the study of the so-called Boom of Latin American narrative. Critical approach designations: Genres, Histories. Distribution requirement: Global.
An introduction to the indigenista movement in Peru, Bolivia, Ecuador, and Paraguay, and to the literary and ideological debates surrounding it. Authors include Mariategui, Gonzalez Prada, Arguedas, Icaza, Alegria, and Vallejo. Critical approach designations: Geographies, Power and Subjectivities. Distribution requirement: Global.
Instructor
Zachary Zimmer
Investigates film, radio, video games, new media, and other newly emergent forms of cultural production in the Spanish-speaking world. Topics may include the historical study of media, media-focused analysis of literary texts, and new media translation. The course topic changes; see the Class Search for the current topic. Critical approach designations: Genres, Media.
Instructor
Zachary Zimmer
General Education Code
CC
Speaking, reading, and writing proficienty in Spanish required. Focusing on narrative and poetry in Chile and their transformations during the 20th century, course examines the relationships between literature, nation, and representation. Critical approach designations: Canons, Histories. Distribution requirement: Global.
General Education Code
TA
Examination of individual authors or critical problems in ancient, medieval, or early modern/Renaissance literature. Course topic changes; see the Class Search for current topic. Critical approach designations: Canons, Histories. Distribution requirements: Pre-1750, Senior Seminar.
Instructor
Sharon Kinoshita
Studies in English-language poetry. Course topic changes; see the Class Search for current topic. Critical approach designations: Genres, Histories. Distribution requirements: Poetry, Senior Seminar.
Intensive examination of works by individual authors. Course topic changes; see the Class Search for current topic. Critical approach designations: Genres, Histories. Distribution requirement: Senior Seminar.
Studies of selected authors or issues in English language literature. Course topic changes; see the Class Search for current topic. Critical approach designations: Geographies, Histories. Distribution requirement: Senior Seminar.
Intensive examination of issues in U.S. literature. Course topic changes; see the Class Search for current topic. Critical approach designations: Geographies, Histories. Distribution requirement: Senior Seminar.
Instructor
Kirsten Silva Gruesz
Course topic changes; see the Class Search for current topic. Critical approach designations: Histories, Power and Subjectivities. Distribution requirements: Global, Senior Seminar.
Study of selected authors or issues in 19th-century British literature. Course topic changes; see the Class Search for current topic. Critical approach designations: Geographies, Histories. Distribution requirement: Senior Seminar.
Compares literatures and histories of slavery, abolitionism, and nationalism in 19th-century Cuba and the U.S. Readings include slave narratives and antislavery novels. Critical approach designations: Histories, Power and Subjectivities. Distribution requirements: Global, Senior Seminar.
Selected authors or issues in modern literary and cultural studies. Course topic changes; see the Class Search for current topic. Critical approach designation: Histories. Distribution requirement: Senior Seminar.
Instructor
Renee Fox, H. Marshall Leicester, Jr.
Quarter offered
Winter, Spring
Advanced work in theory (e.g., cultural, ideological, literary, social). Course topic changes; see the Class Search for the current topic. Critical approach designations: Canons, Histories. Distribution requirement: Senior Seminar.
General Education Code
TA
Satisfies the Creative Writing Literature concentration; also satisfies the senior seminar distribution requirement. Critical approach designation: Media. Distribution requirement: Senior Seminar.
Instructor
Jennifer Tseng
Satisfies the Creative Writing Literature concentration; also satisfies the senior seminar distribution requirement. Critical approach designation: Media. Distribution requirement: Senior Seminar.
Speaking, reading, and writing proficiency in Spanish is required. Examines authors or issues in Spanish and Latin American literature and cultures. Course topic changes; see the Class Search for the current topic. Critical approach designations: Geographies, Histories. Distribution requirement: Senior Seminar. Spanish studies majors may use this course to satisfy the Spanish studies senior exit requirement.
Cross Listed Courses
SPAN 190A
General Education Code
CC
Study of selected authors or issues related to modern Jewish literature and culture. Topic changes; please see the Class Search for current topic. Critical approach designations: Histories, Power and Subjectivities. Distribution requirement: Senior Seminar. Jewish Studies majors may use this course to satisfy the Jewish Studies senior exit requirement.
Instructor
Bruce Thompson
Study of selected authors or issues related to German literature and culture. Course topic changes; please see the Class Search for current topic. Critical approach designations: Geographies, Histories. Distribution requirement: Senior Seminar. German studies majors may use this course to satisfy the German studies senior exit requirement.
Instructor
A. Hunter Bivens
This three-credit course provides students with the theoretical and practical knowledge to help others become more careful, sensitive, and sophisticated readers of complex texts. Enrollment by permission of the instructor.
General Education Code
PR-S
Teaching of a lower-division seminar under faculty supervision. (See LIT 42.)
Quarter offered
Fall, Winter, Spring
Study of literature in English or English translation. Satisfies the Literature major senior exit distribution requirement. Students submit petition to sponsoring agency. Prerequisite(s):
LIT 101. Enrollment is restricted to seniors.
Quarter offered
Fall, Winter, Spring
Speaking, reading, and writing proficiency in French, German, Greek, Italian, Latin, Spanish, or other non-English language required. Satisfies the Literature major senior exit distribution requirement. Students submit petition to sponsoring agency. Prerequisite(s):
LIT 101. Enrollment is restricted to seniors.
Quarter offered
Fall, Winter, Spring
Satisfies the Creative Writing senior exit distribution requirement. Prerequisite(s):
LIT 101. Students submit petition to sponsoring agency. Enrollment restricted to senior creative writing literature majors.
Quarter offered
Fall, Winter, Spring
Study of literature in English or English translation. Students submit petition to sponsoring agency.
Quarter offered
Fall, Winter, Spring
Speaking, reading, and writing proficiency in French, German, Greek, Italian, Latin, Spanish or other non-English language required. Students submit petition to sponsoring agency.
Quarter offered
Fall, Winter, Spring
Study of creative writing. Students submit petition to sponsoring agency.
Quarter offered
Fall, Winter, Spring
Study of literature in English or English translation. Students submit petition to sponsoring agency.
Quarter offered
Fall, Winter, Spring
Speaking, reading, and writing proficiency in French, German, Greek, Italian, Latin, Spanish or other non-English language required. Students submit petition to sponsoring agency.
Quarter offered
Fall, Winter, Spring
Study of creative writing. Students submit petition to sponsoring agency.
Quarter offered
Fall, Winter, Spring
Students submit petition to sponsoring agency.
Quarter offered
Fall, Winter, Spring
The proseminar provides a common experience for entering students, facilitates exchange of ideas and approaches to literary and extra-literary texts, critical issues, and theoretical problems. It focuses on broad aspects of the history of theory and criticism, on the students' critical writing, and on aspects of professional development.
Instructor
Vilashini Cooppan
Provides training for graduate students in university-level pedagogy in general and in the pedagogy of literature specifically. Coordinated by a graduate student who has had substantial experience as a teaching assistant, under the supervision of a faculty member.
Student receives credit for attending a designated number of freestanding lectures, colloquia, symposia, or conferences during the term and reports orally, or in writing, to instructor. Enrollment restricted to graduate students.
Quarter offered
Fall, Winter, Spring
Focuses on selected texts or authors in literature and/or theory. Students meet with instructor to discuss readings and deepen their knowledge on a particular author, critic, theorist, or text.
Introduces the methods and practice of dissertation writing and publication in literature. Workshop format. Meets one hour per week.
Reinforces writing and revision skills in the discipline of literary and cultural criticism and theory, covering various genres of writing in the profession. Designed for students preparing for QE or dissertation work. Workshop structure.
Instructor
Zachary Zimmer
Considers literary canon formation through the lens of neglected or lost works by authors otherwise considered peripheral because of their language, cultural tradition, or regional affiliation.
Course topic changes; see the Class Search for current topic.
Instructor
Kirsten Silva Gruesz
Examines a particular historical period or literary movement. Course topic changes; see the Class Search for current topic.
Investigation of English language literature which transcends national boundaries. Course topic changes; see the Class Search for current topic.
Instructor
Kirsten Silva Gruesz
Explores issues arising in both the modern practice of criticism and in writings on the theory of criticism. Course topic changes; please see the Class Search for current topic.
Instructor
Carla Freccero, G.S. Sahota, Juan Poblete, A. Hunter Bivens
Quarter offered
Fall, Winter, Spring
A survey of 20th-century narratology, emphasizing structuralist and poststructuralist theories of narrative.
Instructor
Camilo Gomez-Rivas
A critical examination of feminist and related theories (queer, critical race, post-humanist) and criticism in historical and culturally specific contexts.
Course topic changes; see the Class Search for current topic.
Focuses on modernism and the intellectual and social forces which help illuminate that period. Considers concepts by which the innovative tendencies in 20th-century modernist literature and arts have been theorized and periodized, including high and late modernism, avant-garde and experimental, and the concept of global modernisms.
Examines history, tragedy, and early science as ways of representing human experience in the Western canon. Topics include truth claims and questions of evidence, the nature of historical events, and tragedy as a political medium.
In-depth examination of a topic in Early Modern Studies. Course topic changes; see the Class Search for current topic.
This course will examine primary texts and interpretations, both fictional and archival, of the encounter between western Europe and non-European populations affected by European expansion from the 15th through the 18th centuries.
Instructor
Zachary Zimmer
Focuses on work of a single author in literary historical and/or historical context. Course topic changes; see the Class Search for current topic.
Instructor
Filippo Gianferrari
Global theories of history and cultural production. Course topic changes; see the Class Search for current topic.
The course topic changes; see the Class Search for the current topic.
A combined seminar and creative-writing workshop with a concentrated focus on a particular problem, aspect, or genre of poetry or prose writing. Includes reading and analysis of selected texts with critical responses and creative writing. Explores the productive interaction between various practices of scholarship and creative invention. The course topic changes; please see the Class Search for the current topic.
Instructor
Ronaldo Wilson
In this graduate-level, multi-genre course, students develop their own creative projects of publishable quality under the guidance of the instructor.
An in-depth examination of one genre of French literature. Course topic changes; see the Class Search for current topic.
In-depth examination of one period of French literature. Course topic changes; see the Class Search for current topic.
The implications of social and political change examined in terms of literary theory and practice. Equal emphasis placed on literary and other kinds of cultural texts: historical, political, cinematic.
Instructor
Sharon Kinoshita
A study of texts written in French-speaking cultures: Belgium, Canada, Africa, the Caribbean.
Examination of topics within German literature. Course topic changes; see the Class Search for the current topic.
Instructor
A. Hunter Bivens
Reading proficiency in Italian is required. Close examination of a topic in Italian literature and culture. Course topic changes; see the Class Search for current topic.
Quarter offered
Fall, Winter, Spring
Concentrates on the study and analysis of Miguel de Cervantes' major work Don Quijote, with a three-part structure: life and literature in Don Quijote; Cervantes-the father of the modern novel; and madness and ingenio in Don Quijote.
Instructor
Jorge Aladro Font
Study of 1) the writings (chronicles, memoirs, diaries, letters) comprising European and indigenous accounts of the encounter and indigenous, criolla, and mestiza writings during the colony; and 2) the re-writings of these events in contemporary post-colonial novels.
Instructor
Zachary Zimmer
Course topic changes; please see the Class Search for the current topic.
Analyzes contemporary writers who fictionalize the phenomenon of the conquest of the Americas. These authors, who combine chronicles, biographies, and accounts with fiction, offer an imaginative way to view history.
Instructor
Zachary Zimmer
Emerging from a Europe in crisis, this 20th-century avante-garde movement opened a space in Latin/o American literature for the emergence of a post-western aesthetic exploring a cultural identity in difference. A deconstruction of vanguardismo, lo real maravilloso, lo fantástico, lo mítico-antropológico, and realismo mágico.
Theories of space/place poetics and politics, and the literary and visual re-presentations of urban spaces in Latin/o America. Questions of identity and location in modernist poetics, and the ways difference (gender, ethnicity, and sexuality) inhabit and imagine the post-modern lettered city.
Contemporary Spain through the camera of Pedro Almodovar from transgressive enthusiasm, experimentation, and cultural disobedience of the 1980s to more universal themes of human nature and borderline experiences in the pursuit of love, relationships, beauty, and art.
Instructor
Jorge Aladro Font
Course considers the process of globalization as it has affected Spain in the last ten years. Through the study of a variety of cultural texts, it explores the challenges presented to national identity and the emergence of new subjectivities and collective identities.
Overview of contemporary theoretical issues in Latin American cultural critique. Course topic changes; please see the Class Search for the current topic.
Instructor
Amanda Poblete
Analyzes the relationship between Latin American cultural products and their cultural, economic, and political contexts. The course topic changes; please see the Class Search for the current topic.
Instructor
Kirsten Silva Gruesz
Independent study formalizing the advisee-adviser relationship. Regular meetings to plan, assess, and monitor academic progress and to evaluate coursework as necessary. May be used to develop general bibliography of background reading and trajectory of study. Students submit petition to sponsoring agency. Enrollment restricted to graduate students.
Quarter offered
Fall, Winter, Spring
Individual study with a professor in the creative/critical concentration. Written work is required. Students submit petition to sponsoring agency. Enrollment restricted to graduate students.
Quarter offered
Fall, Winter, Spring
Directed graduate research and writing coordinated with teaching of undergraduates. Students submit petition to sponsoring agency. Enrollment restricted to graduate students.
Quarter offered
Fall, Winter, Spring
Study of literature in English or English translation. Directed reading that does not involve a term paper. Students submit petition to sponsoring agency. Enrollment restricted to graduate students.
Quarter offered
Fall, Winter, Spring
Speaking, reading, and writing proficiency in French, German, Greek, Italian, Latin, Spanish, or other non-English language required. Directed reading which does not involve a term paper. Students submit petition to sponsoring agency. Enrollment restricted to graduate students.
Quarter offered
Fall, Winter, Spring
Study of creative writing. Directed reading that does not involve a term paper. Students submit petition to sponsoring agency. Enrollment restricted to graduate students.
Quarter offered
Fall, Winter, Spring
Study of literature in English or English translation. Students submit petition to sponsoring agency. Enrollment restricted to graduate students.
Quarter offered
Fall, Winter, Spring
Speaking, reading, and writing proficiency in French, German, Greek, Italian, Latin, Spanish, or other non-English language required. Directed reading which does not involve a term paper. Students submit petition to sponsoring agency. Enrollment restricted to graduate students.
Quarter offered
Fall, Winter, Spring
Study of creative writing. Students submit petition to sponsoring agency. Enrollment restricted to graduate students.
Quarter offered
Fall, Winter, Spring
Quarter offered
Fall, Winter, Spring
Speaking, reading, and writing proficiency in French, German, Greek, Italian, Latin, Spanish, or other non-English language required. Students submit petition to sponsoring agency. Enrollment restricted to graduate students.
Quarter offered
Fall, Winter, Spring
Students submit petition to sponsoring agency. Enrollment restricted to graduate students.
Quarter offered
Fall, Winter, Spring
Thesis Research
Quarter offered
Fall, Winter, Spring
Thesis Research
Quarter offered
Fall, Winter, Spring
Cross-listed Courses
Critically examines how digital processes are changing scholarly practice and pedagogy in the humanities. Students experiment with how digital media can impact research and communication for textual scholars, museum professionals, archivists, librarians, public historians and educators.
Cross Listed Courses
LIT 232D
Instructor
Elaine Sullivan