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
S. Keilen, W. Godzich
General Education Code
TA
Quarter offered
Fall, Spring, Summer
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.
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.
Instructor
Christopher Chen
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
Quarter offered
Winter, Summer
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.
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
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.
Instructor
Guriqbal Sahota
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.
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 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.
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, Summer
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