Please contact instructor for course description.

LTAM 110 The Americas

We will read Chang's short stories in connection with her prose essays that aim to re-interpret and re-contextualize her early writings.  In addition to close reading, we will also go over current scholarships on Chang's works.  Texts in Chinese and English translation will be made available.  Students need to write weekly journal entry, either in English or in Chinese, in critical responses to readings.

LTCH 101 Chinese

LTCH 101 Asia

Please contact instructor for course description.

The course examines scavenging, recycling, sampling, copyright, archive, fandom, and cultural appropriation. Our exploration of these issues highlights found media as central to questions of consumption and re-production, exhibition and re-distribution, that is, questions of cultural values. The course situates found media within the larger art and culture contexts of Dada, Pop Art, appropriation art, music sampling, popular culture, and new media environments. We will focus on the use of found media from the 1930s to the present: the reworking of existing imagery (e.g. Hollywood movies, television, historical archives, educational film, nature documentary, home movies, pornography) to generate new aesthetic frameworks and cultural meanings. The course asks: How are these acts of media appropriation and recirculation critical, pleasurable, and transformative? In what ways are they recuperated into high art or hyper-consumerist milieus? How do we engage with these conflicting developments as consumers, producers, critics?

LTCS 110

This interdisciplinary class introduces students to the historical and present-day cultures of the Zapotec people both in Oaxaca and the diaspora.  Participants will learn about Zapotec culture through diverse modes of engagement, including language, film, literature, poetry, and modern digital media. Active participation is key, especially as there will be opportunities for participating in community engaged projects.  

A hands-on class in writing about art, including art criticism, critical essays, catalogues, books, and short-form material.  Not only will we read and discuss a range of examples of critical art writing, students will also produce original works of art criticism.  The class is very writing intensive, with weekly essays and a full-length final project, as well as multiple in-class writing exercises.  The class is appropriate for students with a strong background in critical writing, art history, visual culture, or expository writing and analysis.

LTCS 170

We will focus on writings by Eileen Chang, Ling Shuhua, Jiao Tong, Mo Yan, and many others, to consider ways in which these authors re-define Chineseness through food and wine.  Texts will be available in Chinese and in English translation.  Students need to write weekly journal entry in response to reading materials.  The entry can be either in English or in Chinese. 

LTEA 110C Asia

This course offers a survey of materials on lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer literature, cinema, culture, and critical theory from 20th-century Hong Kong, Taiwan, and China.  The course will have weekly reading and writing homework.  We will also view many movies both for homework and in class.  All the readings are in English, and the films all have English-language subtitles.  By the end of the course you will have a basic understanding of the emergence of (and controversies around) LGBTQ film, fiction, memoir, and popular cultures in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and China from the end of the 19th century through about 2005.  

LTEA 120C

LTEA 120C Asia

This course surveys English literature from Old English to the middle of the seventeenth century. Among the texts we will  consider will be Beowulf, Chaucer’s  Canterbury Tales, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Spenser’s Fairie Queene, Marlowe's Dr. Faustus, and Milton's Paradise Lost. We will also examine selections from medieval lyric and drama, Kempe, Donne, Jonson, Herbert, Herrick, and Marvell. Lectures will discuss these texts and their cultural, social, political, and religious contexts, with special attention to issues of gender and sexuality. The course is designed to familiarize students with the traditional "canon" of early English literature, but also to facilitate an understanding of how that canon came to be formed and to encourage questioning of the idea of the "canon" itself.

Please contact instructor for course description.

Please contact instructor for course description.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that Jane Austen has much to say about marriage and manners. But what might her novels have to say about war, revolution, politics, poverty, and the world beyond the English country house? This course places the novels of Jane Austen in the context of the literary, cultural, and political worlds that surrounded them. We will read Austen’s novels while immersing ourselves in the historical context of Austen’s time and considering her place as an author in conversation with a broader literary culture. At the same time, we will sharpen our skills of literary analysis, as we consider how Austen can teach us how narrative works—and how novels create worlds of their own. 

This course focuses on U.S. horror movies and horror fiction of the 21^st century. How does an analysis of what scares us enable us to make sense of our cultural moment? What do current trends in horror movies and fiction tell us about pervasive fears and anxieties in the United States in 2019? How does horror as a genre open up questions about power, identity, violence, and injustice? In this course we will turn to film, literature, and critical theory to address these questions.

In this course we will consider representations of Jews and Judaism and the role of anti-Semitism and philo-Semitism in English literature of both the pre-modern and modern periods. We will consider both historical context and the question of how anti-Semitism is implicated in questions of aesthetics. Readings include Chaucer’s Prioress’s Tale, Marlowe’s Jew of Malta, Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice, Edgeworth’s Harrington, du Maurier’s Trilby and poetry by T.S. Eliot. This course fulfills the "a" requirement.

How and why did California become a U.S. state? Following the U.S.-Mexico War (1846-1848), the U.S. seized large swaths of land from Mexico, including California. Shortly thereafter, gold was discovered and thousands flooded into the region in the hopes of earning their fortune. The rest of the century would be marked by massive migrations into the newly acquired U.S. territory.

California played a significant role in many of the most famous events and debates of the nineteenth century: slavery and the Compromise of 1850, settler colonialism, manifest destiny, westward expansion of U.S. empire, the transcontinental railroad, and the Chinese Exclusion Act, to name a few. In addition to contextualizing California statehood, this course takes up the literary and cultural significance of California in the 1800s, both within California and beyond. In order to interrogate what we mean when we say “California,” we will read across an array of novels, short stories, poetry, testimonios, journalism, speeches, government documents, and political cartoons, as well as turning to contemporary representations of “California” in the arts.

LTEN 154 The Americas

Is there a queer US literary canon? We will examine how identity categories have been shaped by questions of class, race, and politics over time, and we will investigate what we mean by progress in the context of gay, lesbian, and queer politics. Readings will include books by James Baldwin, Alison Bechdel, Monique Truong, and others.

LTEN 159 The Americas

Woody Guthrie has been called “a rusty-voiced Homer” and “the greatest ballad-maker” the United States has ever known. Still, according to folk music critic Robert Shelton, “his reputation as a writer, poet and philosopher is still underground.” In this course, we will study Woody’s songs, poems, stories, essays, and autobiography, as if he were a regular part of the American literature curriculum. Researching his relations, as a writer, to other writers, to working class struggles and to anti-war, anti-fascist, and anti-lynching movements, we will explore different strategies to connect him to the canon of American writers/thinkers.

LTEN 159 The Americas

Laced between and through the fashioning of national identities and communities as well as the politics of cultural identity on the Asia-Pacific Rim are tales of loss, mourning, longing, and love. This course interrogates the intersection of love and politics in 20th and 21st century Asian and Asian-American literature and film. Set against the backdrop of the Cold War and the designation of the Pacific Rim as an arena of conflict between the so-called First and Second Worlds, our exploration examines the theme of national romance, the Orientalist imagination on Broadway, in Hollywood and their reception overseas, and the "homecoming" narratives of Asian-Americans to their parents' countries of origin, as motifs that illustrate the role of the aesthetic in promoting or critiquing visions of national and individual cultural identity. Course requirements include attendance, participation, one exam, one group oral presentation, short responses, and two papers of increasing length. 

This course is cross-listed with ETHN 124. This course fulfills the Diversity Equity, and Inclusion requirement for undergraduate students (see http://academicaffairs.ucsd.edu/ug-ed/diversity/). 

LTEN 181 The Americas

Please contact instructor for course description.

This course will focus on the work of Italo Calvino, one of Italy’s most important writers of the 20^th century. In all of his works, from his resistance novel – A Path to the Nest of Spiders – to his experimental and eco-critical works (including Marcovaldo, Invisible Cities, If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler, and Mr. Palomar), Calvino aspired to a “scientific-poetic imagination” that might configure “a map of the world and the knowable.” We will explore these works in connection to our own activities of knowing, mapping, writing, and relating to the world.

LTEU 140 The Mediterranean

LTEU 140 Europe

How did France gain the reputation for being a place of sexual liberation and freedom? How and when did the cultural stereotype of the "femme fatale" emerge? We will explore the changes in notions of femininity and womanhood across 20th century France, and investigate how literary and visual texts have shaped our cultural understandings of gender, race, and French culture. Readings will include works by Colette, Simone de Beauvoir, Anne Garreta, Virginie Despentes, and others. The class will also include film and visual media.

Russian 150:Survey of Russian Drama is devoted to a study of eight major plays of the Russian Empire composed over the course of two centuries. All the main traditions of the theater are represented: Romanticism, Realism, Symbolism and the Avant-Garde. Playwrights featured include Alexander Pushkin, Nikolai Gogol, Alexander Ostrovsky, Anton Chekhov, Alexander Blok, Leonid Andreev, and Lesya Ukrainka. Since the corpus of chosen plays are all part of the living repertoire of the Russian and Ukrainian theaters, we will study them not only as literary constructs, but also examine how they have been and might be performed.

LTEU 154 Europe

First course in the intermediate sequence designed to be taken after LIFR1C/CX (If you choose to take LIFR1D/DX, you will still need to take LTFR 2A to continue in the French program). Short stories, cartoons and movies from various French-speaking countries are studied to strengthen oral and written language skills while developing reading competency and cultural literacy. A thorough review of grammar is included. Taught entirely in French. May be applied towards a minor in French literature. Successful completion of LTFR 2A satisfies the language requirement in Revelle and in Eleanor Roosevelt colleges.

Plays from the 19th and 20th centuries as well as movies are studied to strengthen the skills developed in LTFR 2A. Includes a grammar review. Taught entirely in French. May be applied towards a minor in French literature or towards fulfilling the secondary literature requirement.

Emphasizes the development of language skills and the practice of textual analysis. Discussions are based on the analysis of various poetic texts (poems, short story, and songs) and on a film. Taught entirely in French. May be applied towards a minor in French literature or towards fulfilling the secondary literature requirement. Students who have completed 50 can register in upper-level courses (115 or 116).

La nature apparaît différemment aux yeux des paysans,  des poètes, ou des philosophes. Elle peut être source de richesse ou lieu de repos, un jardin ou une forêt, ou bien encore un sujet de réflexion pour les philosophes et les économistes.  Dans ce cours nous étudierons certaines de ces representations dans la littérature française jusqu’au 18eme siècle.

LTFR 115 French

LTFR 115 The Mediterranean

LTFR 115 Europe

Learning ancient Greek gives students access to the foundational texts of many modern disciplines such as medicine, mathematics, history, philosophy, and literary studies. Ancient Greek is fun to learn, improve your analytical skills and prepare you for advanced qualitative analysis. Many notable public figures such as California’s governor Jerry Brown, J.K. Rowling, the author of Harry Potter, Karl Marx, and Chuck Geschke, co-founder of Adobe Systems, majored in Classics. 

This is the first quarter of a three-quarter sequence. Following completion of this sequence (LTGK 1-2-3), students will be equipped to read in the original Greek great works of philosophy, history, literature, as for example the medical texts of Hippocrates, the founder of Western medicine, the geometrical treatise of Euclid and even the New Testament. They will also be eligible to enroll in upper-division Greek Literature courses. Students are evaluated by quizzes, a midterm and a final. There is no paper to be written for this class. 

In this class students will be Introduced to ancient Greek, the language of great scientific, philosophical, historical, and literary texts. In this introductory level, students will learn basic grammar and vocabulary, and engage with easy readings of ancient Greek texts. Surprisingly, learning to read ancient Greek is easier than learning to speak a modern language. This is because ancient Greek is not a spoken language anymore it can only be read and written.

We will read in ancient Greek one of the speeches from the ancient Athenian law courts. It is a defence speech, on a charge of murder, which contains fascinating details of everyday life in a Greek household.

Previous study of ancient Greek is required.

LTGK 104

LTGK 104 Greek

LTGK 104 The Mediterranean

LTGK 104 Europe

This intermediate-level course is conducted entirely in German and emphasizes the four language skills: speaking, listening, reading and writing while focusing on cultural awareness, developing higher level literacy skills and a review of grammar. Course activities include cultural readings on historical content as well as current events, discussion of films and classroom practice in the target language.

This course offers an introduction to the study of German literature. It is intended for students who have completed two years of university German (2ABC) or the equivalent (please contact the instructor if you have questions). The course is required for German Studies majors and can also be used to fulfill the requirements for a German Studies minor. We will read representative examples of various literary genres (lyric poetry, short prose, drama) by major German authors from Goethe through Kafka to the present day, and also view a few German films. Readings and class discussion in German.

LTGM 100 German

LTGM 100 Europe

Everybody eats.  Italians just do it better!!  And each of the 20 different regions of Italy has its own gastronomic traditions. And that's why our culture and grammar review course will focus on the language of food and travel.  During this quarter, we will review verbs, prepositions, possessives, impersonal verbs and impersonal SI forms, "NE" used to indicate quantity, commands, overabundant verbs, and more.  We will "travel" to Capri and Campania, Tuscany, Rome,  Amatrice, and Lazio, Umbria, and Sardegna.  LTIT 2A is the first quarter of the second year Italian sequence, which is a prerequisite for participation in EAP Bologna program.  The textbooks will be used throughout all 3 quarters.  For more information, please contact me at demarchi@ucsd.edu.  Grazie!

Italian ghost stories.  While most Italian writers of his time developed a realistic genre and style, Dino Buzzati wrote novels and short stories can be called rare examples of magic realism in Italian Literature.  In this course we will read some of these stories, from the collection "La boutique del mistero," and we will watch the film adaptation of one of them.  We will also review some grammar points and practice Italian conversation skills.  Students will write and present an original "surrealist " short story in Italian.  For more information, please contact me at demarchi@ucsd.edu.  Grazie!

LTIT 100 Italian

LTIT 100 The Mediterranean

LTIT 100 Europe

First year Korean 1A (5 units) is the first part of the Beginning Korean series. This course is designed to assist students to develop low-beginning level skills in the Korean language. These skills are speaking, listening, reading, and writing, as well as cultural understanding. This course will begin by introducing the writing and sound system of the Korean language. The remainder of the course will focus on grammatical patterns such as basic sentence structures, some grammatical points, and expressions. Upon completion of this course, students will be able to do the following in Korean: 

Speaking: Students are able to handle successfully a limited number of uncomplicated communicative tasks by creating with the language in straightforward social situation. Conversation is restricted to some of the concrete exchanges and predictable topics necessary for survival in the target-language culture. They can express personal meaning by combining and recombining what they know and what they hear from their interlocutors into short statements and discrete sentences.

Listening: Students are able to understand some information from sentence-length speech, one utterance at a time, in basic personal and social contexts, though comprehension is often uneven.

Reading: Students are able to understand some information from the simplest connected texts dealing with a limited number of personal and social needs, although there may be frequent misunderstandings.

Writing: Students are able to meet some limited practical writing needs. They can create statements and formulate questions based on familiar material. Most sentences are re-combinations of learned vocabulary and structure.

Second Year Korean 2A is the first part of the Intermediate Korean. Students in this course are assumed to have previous knowledge of Korean, which was taught in the Korean 1A, 1B, and 1C courses. Students in this course will learn low-intermediate level skills in the areas of listening, speaking, reading, and writing in Korean, as well as expand their cultural understanding. Upon completion of this course, students are expected to acquire and use more vocabularies, expressions and sentence structures and to have a good command of Korean in various conversational situations. Students are expected to write short essays using the vocabularies, expressions, and sentence structures introduced. Upon completion of this course, students will be able to do the following in Korean:

Speaking: Students are able to handle a variety of communicative tasks. They are able to participate in most informal and some formal conversations on topics related to school, home, and leisure activities. Students demonstrate the ability to narrate and describe in the major time frames in paragraph-length discourse. They show the ability  to combine and link sentences into connected discourse of paragraph length.

Listening: Students are able to understand short conventional narrative and descriptive texts with a clear underlying structure though their comprehension may uneven. They understand the main facts and some supporting details. Comprehension may often derive primarily from situation and subject-matter knowledge.

Reading: Students are able to understand conventional narrative and descriptive texts with a clear underlying structure though their comprehension may be uneven. These texts predominantly contain high-frequency vocabulary and structure. Students understand the main ideas and some supporting details. Comprehension may often derive primarily from situational and subject-matter knowledge.

Writing: Students are able to meet basic work and/or academic writing needs. They are able to compose simple summaries on familiar topics. They are able to combine and link sentences into texts of paragraph length and structure. They demonstrate the ability to incorporate a limited number of cohesive devices.

Third Year Korean 3 Fall (5 units) is the first part of the advanced Korean. Students in this course are assumed to have previous knowledge of Korean, which was taught in the Korean 2A, 2B, and 2C courses. Students in this course will learn low-advanced level skills in the areas of listening, speaking, reading, and writing in Korean, as well as expand their cultural understanding. Upon completion of this course, students are expected to acquire and use more vocabularies, expressions and sentence structures and to have a good command of Korean in formal situations. Students are expected to read and understand daily newspapers and daily news broadcasts. Upon completion of this course, students will be able to do the following in Korean:

Speaking: Students are able to communicate with accuracy and fluency in order to participate fully and effectively in conversations on a variety of topics in formal and informal settings from both concrete and abstract perspectives. They discuss their interests and special fields of competence, explain complex matters in detail, and provide lengthy and coherent narrations, all with ease, fluency, and accuracy. They present their opinions on a number of issues of interest to them, and provide structured arguments to support these opinions.

Listening: Students are able to understand speech in a standard dialect on a wide range of familiar and less familiar topics. They can follow linguistically complex extended discourse. Comprehension is no longer limited to the listener's familiarity with subject matter, but also comes from a command of the language that is supported by a broad vocabulary, an understanding of more complex structures and linguistic experience within the target culture. Students can understand not only what is said, but sometimes what is left unsaid.

Reading: Students are able to understand texts from many genres dealing with a wide range of subjects, both familiar and unfamiliar. Comprehension is no longer limited to the reader's familiarity with subject matter, but also comes from a command of the language that is supported by a broad vocabulary, an understanding of complex structures and knowledge of the target culture. Students at this level can draw inferences from textual and extralinguistic clues.

Writing: Students are able to produce most kinds of formal and informal correspondence, in-depth summaries, reports, and research papers. They demonstrate the ability to explain complex matters, and to present and support opinions by developing cogent arguments and hypotheses. They demonstrate a high degree of control of grammar and syntax, of general vocabulary, of spelling or symbol production, of cohesive devices, and of punctuation.

This course is designed to develop cultural understanding and professional/academic level reading skill for students with coverage of materials on Korean language history from the 5th century to the present, previous and current writing systems, and Korean language structure. This is a Korean cultural/literature topics course designed for students to understand Korean language history and structure.

Readings in Korean Language History and Structure I focuses on Korean language history and writing systems Readings in Korean Language History and Structure II focuses on Korean language sound system and word formation system Readings in Korean Language History and Structure III focuses on Korean language grammar system and meaning change.

LTKO 149 in the 2019 Fall quarter focuses on Korean language grammar system and meaning change.

LTKO 149 Korean

LTKO 149 Asia

Please contact instructor for course description.

{Note to those who’ve already had Latin 100: you’ll be put into a separate group and will read a text more advanced than those who are straight out of Latin 1-2-3.}

This course will continue right where we left off in the spring, somewhere midway through section 4 of Reading Latin. Nothing new to buy, no strange text to adjust to, no paper, no language lab, no fuss, no muss. The modus operandi will be the same as before: in-class recitation/translation, a quiz every 4-5 days, exercises to test your comprehension, etymological baubles to wow you. Counts towards a Latin minor?

Please contact instructor for course description.

Please contact instructor for course description.

Please contact instructor for course description.

LTRU 104B Russian

LTRU 104B Europe

Russian 150:Survey of Russian Drama is devoted to a study of eight major plays of the Russian Empire composed over the course of two centuries. All the main traditions of the theater are represented: Romanticism, Realism, Symbolism and the Avant-Garde. Playwrights featured include Alexander Pushkin, Nikolai Gogol, Alexander Ostrovsky, Anton Chekhov, Alexander Blok, Leonid Andreev, and Lesya Ukrainka. Since the corpus of chosen plays are all part of the living repertoire of the Russian and Ukrainian theaters, we will study them not only as literary constructs, but also examine how they have been and might be performed.

LTRU 150 Russian

LTRU 150 Europe

Please contact instructor for course description.

Please contact instructor for course description.

Please contact instructor for course description.

Please contact instructor for course description.

Please contact instructor for course description.

LTSP 130B Spanish

LTSP 130B The Americas

En este curso vamos a leer ensayos, cuentos, y novelas indigenistas del Perú y Ecuador.  Escritas en un período de rápida modernización entre 1920 y 1970, estas obras denuncian la explotación y abuso de los pueblos indígenas del Perú Ecuador por los grandes terratenientes, las empresas transnacionales y los representantes del estado. Aunque intentaron representar y defender los intereses de los pueblos indígenas, los autores indigenistas no eran indios. Eran, más bien, intelectuales mestizos de provincia que usaron la literatura para criticar y desafiar el poder de las elites criollas y así promover sus propios intereses tanto como los de las comunidades indígenas que buscaban representar (en ambos sentidos de esta palabra: tanto política como literariamente). Vamos a analizar las formas literarias que estos autores usaron para representar las diferencias culturales y los conflictos étnicos y de clase social provocados por la modernización en el Perú y Ecuador durante la primera mitad del siglo XX.

LTSP 136 Spanish

LTSP 136 The Americas

En este curso vamos a leer una selección de cuentos latinoamericanos del siglo XX de varios países (Colombia, El Salvador, Guatemala, México, Nicaragua, Perú, Puerto Rico).  Analizaremos cómo se ha usado el género del cuento para representar temas sociales como la modernización, el autoritarismo, el imperialismo, la revolución y el papel de grupos tradicionalmente subordinados (e.g. las mujeres, los pueblos indígenas) en estos procesos. 

LTSP 142 Spanish

LTSP 142 The Americas

Please contact instructor for course description.

The course focuses on the historical and literary development of the young adult (YA) novel from the late 1960s to the present. Through the study of YA novels, we consider how ideas about childhood and adolescence have been conceived and transformed in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.  The course investigates the category of the American teen as a modern identity category: a juvenile delinquent, a figure of innocence, a sexual subject, a political activist, and a blank slate of potential. We will look at genres such as the social problem novel, the coming-of-age novel, the coming-out novel, as well as romance, fantasy, and dystopian novels. Authors may include S.E. Hinton, Judy Blume, Lois Lowry, J.K. Rowling, John Green, Angie Thomas, Jenny Han, and Stephen Chbosky.

LTWL 116

This course will offer a survey of literary works and some filmic texts produced between the 1910s, colonial Korea, and the 1990s, post-authoritarian South Korea. Keeping in mind of the ways in which literary production and social change were a mutually constitutive process during these tumultuous decades, we will re-examine literary works, associated with various ideological orientations, such as conservative nationalism, socialism, socialist feminism, anticommunism, etc.  Our discussion of these works, which represent such social and historical changes as Japanese colonization, the Asia-Pacific War, the national division, the Korean War, rapid industrialization, dissident movements, labor activism, emergent feminism and LGBTQ movement, will explore the following questions among others: How do we think about the relations between politics and art? How does social change help produce different kinds of literature and how can literature be a force in shaping social change? In addition, we will compare our re-examination of the older literature to the recent contemporary South Korean popular cultural productions, i.e., mostly films, that look back on the history of social upheaval during these earlier decades.

This course is a comparative survey of Caribbean literatures and music.   Given these islands' linguistic, political and cultural diversity, we look for what Antonio Benítez-Rojo calls the “dynamic states or regularities that repeat themselves” in the region.   These repetitions help us focus on key social and cultural movements that have emerged in response to the region’s dynamism and status as one of the world’s most sought-after imperial frontiers.   The course is grounded in a socio-historic approach to cultural studies and investigates plantation slavery, emancipation and its subsequent new labor arrangements, the quest for nationhood, and the most recent debates around post-coloniality and transnational U.S.-Caribbean identities.  What aesthetic strategies have Caribbean artists used to creatively engage their environments? Primary literary texts will be complemented by music (salsa, reggae, calypso, hip hop) and film.

LTWL 176

Film director Alejandro González Iñárritu’s work displays a mastery of film narrative and of film form, along with a personal film style. In the unfolding of his films, he enjoys playing at the cutting edge of intersecting lives and intersecting narrative accounts. In so doing, he also manifests a keen search for his characters’ motivations (helped by a few prominent actors of our times) and a specific philosophical vision of the world. We shall focus on an in depth study of 21 Grams (2003), Babel (2006), and Birdman (2014) for which he earned three Oscars, wherein the philosophical aspects of postmodernism are underscored. Excerpts and clips from his first film, Amores Perros (2000) and his latest one, The Revenant (2015), will provide bookends to the class discussions.

As usual, precise methods of film analysis – frame and shot composition, shot-by-shot analysis, narrative programs, filmic figures, film genre,  deep structure, integration of specific films into the history of cinema, and filmic poetics – will be emphasized during the first weeks of the term. Students will explore the case of the compelling style of Iñárritu’s films. “Veteran” students will be asked for work building upon their previous research.

LTWL 183

LTWL 183

This advanced seminar is open to all literature majors in their senior year and is required for those interested in the Honors Program. It offers students the opportunity to reflect on their experiences as undergraduate majors and to prepare them for more advanced work in the field, which may include an honor’s thesis or graduate study. We will read selected works of literary theory that establish different frameworks for the interpretation of individual texts. By paraphrasing and responding critically to these works in a series of short assignments, students will work toward developing their own ideas in dialogue with previous critics. In the second half of the class, students will develop a longer research essay on a topic of their choice that may serve as the basis for their honors thesis. Regular attendance and informed participation in class discussions are required. The class offers students an exciting chance to engage with challenging texts and to hone their interpretive skills in a supportive classroom setting.

Please contact instructor for course description.

Please contact instructor for course description.

In this course, we commit ourselves to studying, discussing, and creating beautiful works of short fiction. First, we study the elegant works of authors present and past, being attentive readers. Then we use those examples to enrich our approaches to writing. You’ll develop and submit one completed and radically revised story. You’ll also focus on being a critic, in the very best sense, of the work of others.

Please contact instructor for course description.

Please contact instructor for course description.

There are no firm prerequisites for this advanced upper-division course, although experience with creative writing, visual and other arts, and/or a background in literary theory or gender studies may help you feel more comfortable with some of the assignments.  The main requirement for this course is that you come prepared to work (& play) very hard.  As a member of the class, you will spend a minimum of 8 hours outside of class each week reading and writing, as well as theorizing your classmates’ work.       

The focus in this course is on writing and “the body” as practiced by writers, other artists, and theorists of the 20th Century in the U.S. In this incarnation of Experimental Writing, we’ll create written works that perform our truest and most complex states of “desire, longing, and suffering (Maso).”  This is, therefore, more of a fine arts class than a regular writing class.  During the course, we’ll make hybrid literary art, or art that is primarily textual but might also involve visual, sound, or theatrical artistry.  Never relying upon limiting ideas of what “literature” can be or should be, our work will blend literary genres to create surprising, weirdly inventive texts.  For instance, I may have you make a narrative that is also a map or board game.

Experimenting with some of these writers’ techniques and inquiries, as well as making up our own, we’ll play exhilarating, edgy literary games.  We’ll produce new works that are unexpected, thrilling and politically relevant.  I hope that the whole-hearted creative abandon I of ask of you during this course will become a most potent and pleasurable tool in your life-long artistic struggle against all forces seeking to dull your strange brilliance.

Playwright Bertolt Brecht was famously quoted as saying, “Art is not a mirror held up to reality but a hammer with which to shape it.” The same can be said of performance. While performance can be seen as a reflection of society or culture, it is not a mirror. Performance itself can be the hammer. But being a hammer is not enough. Performance, unlike the page, is written for an audience with the goal of creating a singular, uninterrupted experience or moment. In order to fuel this creation, performers have described a kind of feeling or spirit that is difficult to describe but in a single word can mean so much: heart. In order for the hammer to be effective, the performer & the writer/creator must have heart. In this workshop, we will spend the quarter exploring these two fundamental states of performance: the heart & the hammer. This workshop will cover basics of performance including proper format on the page, voice, dialogue, & scene-building/world-building. This workshop is for writers who wish to perform their own work or stage work for others and is open to all levels of performance. The course will cover a wide array of performance (such as plays, one-acts, improv, Slam, spoken-word, & guerilla theater) to allow writers the opportunity to nurture their passions as well as uncover new ones. Time in the workshop will primarily be spent workshopping student work, generative writing exercises, and various performance/theater exercises (so please dress comfortably!). This workshop is a small, intimate opportunity to work with others who are seeking to live beyond the page. This course is a critical-thinking & writing course where 50% is engagement in course discussions, texts, theater exercises, engagement with guest speakers, and peer-critique of student work 25% weekly writing assignments and exercises 25% a final consisting of each student preparing and performing/staging their best piece from the quarter for our end-of-the-quarter Performance Showcase which will be an event with a live audience. Along with media samples of work, required texts are: “Angels in America” by Tony Kushner, “blud” by Rachel McKibbens, and “Don’t Call Us Dead” by Danez Smith as well as selections from Pussy Riot, Yesika Salgado, Rudy Francisco, Saul Williams, Miguel Piñero, & others. 

In this course, we will discuss and create works of personal narrative. The class will devote time to study, reading authors present and past for inspiration. In class discussions, we’ll explore the meanings of personal narrative, as well as authors’ varied approaches to the form. Then we’ll utilize that material so as to enrich our own writing. In this class, students complete one extended personal narrative piece, as well as practice being a student and critic, in the very best sense, of the work of others. Throughout the quarter, students will be called on to engage actively in writing exercises and assignments—both inside and outside of class—with a view to developing a single essay as the culmination of the quarter’s work and reflections.

What is a book? Guided by writer and editor Bruna Mori, the class will investigate the poetics and politics of writing and distributing their work, spanning manuscript compilation, handcraft and digital processes, and small and large press publishing. Insight will be shared by authors, editors, artisans, and printers on the act of making, means of production, and state of current and future dissemination of literature.

Joan Didion once said, “Grammar is a piano I can play by ear.” It is with this spirit that this course will enter: studying a masterful eye towards grammar (the rules of speech and language), while at the same time exploring how these rules can shift through writing in the form of style (the way these rules are bent in order to create new languages and linguistics). What happens to the rules when they are played with? How do we master the rules just so we can reimagine them in our own work? How does the power of a sentence change a text or even change history? This workshop will explore the basics of grammar through regular practice, discipline, and thoughtful discourse around tense, punctuation, and presentation on the page. We will also engage in the exploration of how grammar can create, enhance, enforce, control, inspire, and free language. We will spend our time mastering technique so that we may explore how this part of language affects our writing, most especially the style in which we choose to use grammar to define ourselves. Creative work will be informed by the practice of being a “rule-follower” yet also finding ways to subvert the rules and push style and language to its limits. This course is a critical-thinking and workshop course where 50% is engagement in course discussions, texts, engagement with guest speakers, and critique of student/peer work 25% weekly writing assignments and exercises 25% a final consisting of a 3-5 page creative work that shows both the “rule-follower” and “subverter” working together in the same piece. Our required texts are The Elements of Style by William Strunk Jr., The Penguin Guide to Punctuation, and Ulysses by James Joyce. Along with classic examples of grammar and style by Proust and Joyce, we will also study contemporary masters and subverters such as Joan Didion, Charles Bukowski, Kathy Acker, Anne Carson, Kamau Brathwaite, Adrienne Rich, Gloria Anzaldúa, and bell hooks.

This capstone course for creative writers will look at contemporary forms with an eye towards the future of our art. We will read across genres and then we will cross genres out, focusing on our 21st yearning for hybridity and the dissolution of genre itself. This course will be very reading and writing intensive.

Please contact instructor for course description.

Please contact instructor for course description.