Please contact instructor for course description.

LTAF 120

LTAF 120 Africa

Please contact instructor for course description.

LTAM 110 The Americas

QTBIPOC Comics - This class explores how twenty-first-century authors and artists use comics to tell stories that showcase Queer, Trans, Black, Indigenous, and of Color (QTBIPOC) experiences. We will read a variety of comics and graphic novels whose narratives span various modes of storytelling, from the speculative to the historical. This class is intended to help students deepen their understanding of comic storytelling, especially for marginalized voices and experiences. As we read graphic memoirs, speculative futurist tales, and historical retellings, we will reflect on how comics tell stories differently than, say, novels or movies. What distinguishes it from other forms of storytelling? Why does the comic as a form of storytelling continue to be so popular? Why has it been a fruitful means of expression for QTBIPOC creators?

The course looks at the relationship between love and time in contemporary romantic comedies. It examines rom-com relationships that follow traditional life courses and those that reject romantic chronology altogether. Films may include How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days, 50 First Dates, The 40-Year-Old Virgin, I Give It A Year, and Weekend. Students will learn foundational skills in film analysis.

Pleasure & Protest - The course explores the role of pleasure, and protest, in the production, reception, and performance of Asian American identities in film and video. We will review the debates about stereotype criticism in Asian American media studies and go on to examine the “perverse” potentials of spectatorship. The course considers how the representations of the deviant sexuality of Asian Americans (e.g. hypersexual women and emasculated men) do more than uniformly harm and subjugate Asian American subjects. We will look at how Asian American filmmakers have protested toxic media representations and how they have articulated the pleasure and joy of Asian American lives in their work. We will study a range of media genres, including narrative fiction, documentary, experimental shorts, video art, television sitcom, and trans cinema.

LTCS 119

We will read representative fictional works from modern China on the subject of food, around issues such as food security, food justice, food as medicine, comfort food, and so on.

LTEA 110B Asia

This course serves as an introduction to the various aspects of Hong Kong cinema, one of the largest and most dynamic film industries in the world. We study the history and development of Hong Kong cinema, its stylistic features, diverse genres (martial arts, action, comedy, ghost story, historical epic, and melodrama), major themes, and the emergence and characteristics of the New Wave. We pay attention to internationally acclaimed directors (John Woo, Tsui Hark, Ann Hui, Stanley Kwan, Wong Kar-wai, and Fruit Chan) and stars (Bruce Lee, Jackie Chan, Chow Yun-fat, Michelle Yeoh, Maggie Cheung, and many others). The course also explores dimensions of Hong Kong’s film industry, its local, regional, and international markets and audiences, patterns of transnational collaborations, and the global influence of Hong cinema.
The class is conducted in English, and all the films are subtitled in English.

LTEA 120C

LTEA 120C Asia

This course examines various popular cultural productions such as films, music and music videos, and TV dramas, from modern Korea, including colonial Korea under the Japanese rule and South Korea from the post-1945 era. It is a survey of the key events and issues of the Korean peninsula in the modern era as represented by popular culture. We will pay attention to the following topics: Japanese imperialism, the US hegemony over South Korea including its culture, globalization, class, gender/sexuality, multiethnic and subimperial South Korea, globalization and racial formation, cultural technologies among others

LTEA 142

LTEA 142 Asia

This course will explore what has been a driving force for modernization on the Korean peninsula from the colonial era to contemporary South Korea, i.e., developmentalism. We will study the impact of the past and ongoing extraction, exploitation and devastation of human proletarian labor and the environment as “resources” in colonial Korea and in post-Liberation South Korea. We will critically examine the inextricable linkage between the ideology of development and the emerging environmentalism. We will engage with various types of textual sources, including literature, films, and documentaries from the peninsula as well as scholarly works and films produced in the West.

LTEA 145 Asia

This course is meant to provide students with an introduction to the rich history and culture of the Philippines through the Philippine language Tagalog and / or Filipino. Students with either native or advanced heritage fluency will read some of the prominent texts of colonial and national literature and music, as well as read or watch plays and films from high to popular culture. The class will place an emphasis on translation, as well as the close reading / interpretation of cultural currents. While most of the readings will be in Tagalog or Filipino, discussions will take place in English and some Filipino.

LTEA 151 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 and writings by 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.

This course focuses on early North American cultural production in the area that would become the United States. Fundamental questions include: what did it mean to free a colony from European control? what narratives developed to justify independence to a heterogeneous population? how would a new nation be organized and who would be a citizen? how could revolutionaries fighting in the name of liberty and equality justify the institution of chattel slavery and its mandate that men/women constitute the property of another? 


Close attention is paid to questions of genre and rhetorical strategies as we trace the importance of oratory, poetry, the rise of the novel, and short stories into the early national period. Class discussions include workshops on the geography of the region, how to read primary sources, and explore a variety of digital early American websites. Historical moments such as the French Indian War, the American Revolution, the Louisiana Purchase, the War of 1812, and debates about chattel slavery and Native/settler conflicts in areas from New York to the Carolinas ground the discussion We examine how the complexities of multi-lingualism, gender equality, competing claims of national, ethnic and racial self-identification, and the realities of migration, often forced, were issues actively debated over two hundred years ago through the lens of both “high” and “popular” culture.

Please contact instructor for course description.

The Canterbury Tales (a). What was it like to live the wake of the Black Death pandemic and the social, political and economic upheaval it caused? We will explore medieval life and thought through Chaucer’s masterpiece The Canterbury Tales paying close attention to its historical, cultural and literary contexts. Special consideration will also be paid to issues of gender and sexuality and how they inflect Chaucer’s poetics and politics, as well as to the role of Christianity in Chaucer’s works. We will also reflect on Chaucer’s influence in the present day, including the BBC’s 2003 adaptions of the tales, poems from Patience Agbabi’s Telling Tales, and the Refugee Tales project, www.refugeetales.org. This course fulfills the “a” requirement.

LTEN 107

This course will focus on the works of Virginia Woolf. One of the most celebrated modernist writers, Woolf’s experimental writing explored themes of memory, intimacy, and relation. We will examine how Woolf’s novels and non-fiction interrogated and challenged traditionalist understandings of gender and sexuality from a feminist lens, how her writing expresses a critical perspective on the fragmentation of modern society, and how she grappled with Britain’s class structure and its position as global imperial power. We will also study how Woolf reimagined the novel in English as centrally concerned with subjectivity and interiority, but in a way that brought into play and questioned the role and impact of history on the experiences of everyday life.

This course examines the print culture of the early Americas, with a focus on the United States. We pay particular attention to the materiality of print: the production of paper, the work of printers and editors, and how authors sought to find formats and typographies that would best suit the imagination. This period marked the move from the hand press and papermaking to eventual industrialization of these artistic practices. This quarter we will be using “book history” approaches alongside close reading. Both methods echo Leon Jackson’s reminder that “printedness is neither a neutral nor a fixed medium it signifies in distinct and culturally inflected ways that change and are contested as the society in which print appears debates and changes its broader cultural values.” Is the “imagined” idea of an early national American print culture an accurate interpretation of the past?
In addition to the revolution in production and circulation possibilities, the period saw the reimagination of genres that had been particularly important in the colonial era, such as natural histories, captivity narratives, and epistolary collections. Special attention is paid to the importance of the periodical press as a mode of disseminating new fiction, including fragments, short stories and novels. We also consider essays concerning questions of literary and historical taste, evaluating the development of a regional and national print public sphere. We examine texts that in today’s age may seem more “historical” than literary, although the strict disciplinary divisions between these fields did not yet exist in the time period under consideration. Indeed, this moment marked the rise of “literature” as a separate discipline. While focusing on the antebellum United States, we also consider “American” in the hemispheric sense, with readings that demonstrate how closely tied the early republic was to neighboring Saint-Domingue (Haiti) and Cuba.

LTEN 152 The Americas

Please contact instructor for course description.

LTEN 171 The Americas

(Cross-listed with LTRU150)

The site of an ongoing war with Russia, Ukraine offers a case study in diverse but intersecting cultures, literatures, and mythologies. The region that gave birth to canonical writers in Ukrainian, Russian, Yiddish, Hebrew, and Crimean Tatar remains the site of conflicting national myths. How might we define a territory that has been claimed by multiple cultures and political powers? In this course we will examine texts and films, produced in a variety of languages, from the nineteenth century to the present, that complicate the landscape of a national literature. Central to class discussions will be questions of borderlands, national and ethnic identity, the uses and constructs of folk ethnography, and the role that Ukraine has played in other literary traditions (including Russian, Jewish, West European, and Turkish). We will consider the significance of Ukrainian geography to art produced within its borders, and we will explore narrative uses of landscape and travel within the boundaries of Ukraine. Possible topics for final papers include North American nostalgia for Ukraine, non-Ukrainian writers’ (such as Balzac’s) portrayals of Ukraine, or moments of literary self-definition by Ukrainian writers.

All readings will be available in the original as well as in English. A separate office-hour close-reading will be held several times during the quarter for students who are able to read any of the assigned texts in the original language.

LTEU 154

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. Class is divided in 2 groups for discussion sections (4 class meetings a week). 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. Prerequisite: LIFR 1C/CX or equivalent or a score of 3 on the AP French language exam or a score of 4 or 5 on the Language Placement Exam.

Plays from the 19th and 20th centuries as well as movies are studied to strengthen the skills developed in LTFR 2A. Continues the grammar review started in LTFR 2A. Taught entirely in French. Class is divided in 2 groups for discussion sections (4 required meetings a week in total). May be applied towards a minor in French literature or towards fulfilling the secondary literature requirement. Prerequisite: LTFR 2A or equivalent or a score of 4 on the AP French language exam.

Emphasizes the development of language and analytical skills through the close reading of texts of different periods and genres. Taught entirely in French. May be applied towards a minor or a major in French literature. Counts towards a concentration in French regional concentration on Europe and the Mediterranean. Prerequisite: LTFR 2C or equivalent or consent of instructor.

LTFR 104 French

LTFR 104 The Mediterranean

LTFR 104 Europe

Please contact instructor for course description.

This course offers an in-depth exploration of Sophocles' "Oedipus Tyrannus" in its original Greek. Students will engage with the text not only from a linguistic perspective but also through the lens of its enduring influence on modern film, literature, and art.

The course will include:

1) Linguistic Analysis: Weekly readings and detailed examinations of the Greek text, focusing on syntax, vocabulary, and literary devices.
2) Cultural Reception: Discussions on the adaptation and reinterpretation of "Oedipus Tyrannus" in various modern media, including film, literature, and visual art.
3) Presentations: Students will deliver weekly presentations on assigned aspects of the text, ranging from thematic elements and character analysis to modern adaptations and critical reception.
4) Final Exam: A comprehensive exam covering both the linguistic and cultural components of the course.

By the end of the course, students will have a deep understanding of "Oedipus Tyrannus" in its original context and its lasting impact on contemporary culture.

LTGK 103

LTGK 103 Greek

LTGK 103 The Mediterranean

LTGK 103 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.

Italian Language and Culture through Food and Travel. According to recent surveys, multilingualism and cultural competency are essential elements in today's professional environment, starting with the job market, and their importance is growing fast. In this course (the first part of the second year Italian series) we embark on a journey through Italian regions, focusing on Italian food, travel, culture, traditions and people. Italian grammar will be reviewed daily and tested in quizzes and a final exam. 

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.

Pre-Requisite: No Prior Study of Korean.

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.

Pre-Requisite: LTKO 1C or equivalent level of Korean language proficiency

Third Year Korean 130F (4 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.

Pre-Requisite: LTKO 2C or equivalent level of Korean language proficiency

LTKO 130F Korean

LTKO 130F Asia

Please contact instructor for course description.

Please contact instructor for course description.

LTLA 100

LTLA 100 Latin

LTLA 100 The Mediterranean

LTLA 100 Europe

Please contact instructor for course description.

Please contact instructor for course description.

Please contact instructor for course description.

LTRU 104B Russian

LTRU 104B Europe

Please contact instructor for course description.

LTRU 150

LTRU 150 Russian

LTRU 150 Europe

Emphasizes the development of communication skills, listening comprehension, reading ability, and writing skills. It includes grammar review, compositions, and class discussions. This course is for students who began learning Spanish in a classroom environment. Students who have experience with Spanish outside of the classroom (at home, in their community) should take courses for heritage learners (1F, 2F, 3F, 100F).

Review of major points of grammar with emphasis on oral communication and critical reading and interpretation of Spanish texts through class discussions, vocabulary development, and written compositions. It is a continuation of LTSP 2A. This course is for students who began learning Spanish in a classroom environment. Students who have experience with Spanish outside of the classroom (at home, in their community) should take courses for heritage learners (1F 2F, 3F, 100F).

Continuation of LTSP 2B, with special emphasis in speaking and writing. It includes discussion of cultural topics, grammar review, composition and presentations to further develop the ability to read longer fiction/nonfictional texts. This course is for students who began learning Spanish in a classroom environment. Students who have experience with Spanish outside of the classroom (at home, in their community) should take courses for heritage learners (1F, 2F, 3F, 100F).

This course is designed for those students who learned Spanish at home and/or other students from Spanish-speaking backgrounds that have little or no formal training in the language. The main goals of the course are to enhance students' reading, writing, speaking and listening skills in a culturally relevant setting. Students also explore their cultural heritage and learn about Hispanic cultures in the United States and the language diversity of its speakers.

This course is designed for students who have been raised in a Spanish-speaking environment and speak some Spanish as a result of hearing it in the home, and in the community by family, friends, and neighbors, or some experience with Spanish in the classroom. The main goals of this course are to further develop and expand the Spanish language skills in reading, writing, listening, and speaking, while promoting a greater connection with the Hispanic cultures of the students' heritage.

An advanced Spanish conversation and writing course for second language learners. The objective of this course is to promote the development of academic Spanish in reading, writing, listening and speaking skills. Students will explore a variety of cultural, literary, and writing genres from the Spanish speaking world. This course has the purpose of preparing students to work in a professional context in Spanish. Students who have experience with Spanish outside of the classroom (at home, in their community) should take the equivalent course for heritage learners (LTSP 100F).

LTSP 100A Spanish

For students who learned Spanish at home and/or who went to school in a Spanish speaking country. This course allows students to expand their oral, reading, and writing academic proficiency in Spanish and, through class discussions, promotes critical thinking in a relevant cultural context for Latinx Students. Additionally, students will explore a variety of cultural, literary, and writing genres. This course has the purpose of preparing students to work in a professional context in Spanish.

LTSP 100F Spanish

An overview of the study of the Spanish language as it is spoken in the community and the social and cultural meaning attached to different ways of speaking. Topics include culture of language, language variation and change, language attitudes and ideologies, language and gender, language contact, language choice, language mixing, language politics and planning.

LTSP 124 Spanish

LTSP 124 The Americas

Please contact instructor for course description.

LTSP 135A

LTSP 135A Spanish

Please contact instructor for course description.

LTSP 174 Spanish

Translation Theory and Practice. This course has two purposes: it will introduce you to the art of literary translation, and it will advance your understanding of literary theory through readings and discussions about translation. The first six weeks will be devoted to short translation exercises and to discussing literary theory. You will submit a short mid-term theory essay, which discusses a problem of translation, in light of one of the texts you have read. You will also begin working on a larger-scale translation with your “translation team.” During the last four weeks of the course we will workshop your final translation projects. These projects will be completed in groups of two or three, from a language that at least one person in the group can read at an intermediate to advanced level. Your final paper will be an essay introduction this translation.

In this class, we will consider “environmental literature” not only in terms of literary texts that are explicitly about or represent the natural world, but also in terms of works that make us think more broadly about the ways that we connect or disconnect from our environments, and how we might differently structure our relationships to the more-than-human world around us. We will additionally consider how these writers and artists engage questions of critical environmental justice that overlap and intersect with scholarship in Indigenous, settler colonial, and critical race studies.

This class introduces students to the earliest literature, culture, and religion of the ancient Greeks. In LTWL 19A, we will read and discuss a selection of literary and historical texts that were produced between 800 and 480 BCE, a time crucial for the development of early Greek identity. Among these texts are Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, Hesiod’ Theogony, the Homeric Hymns that tell the stories of the gods, the writings of the first philosophers, as well as the tragedies of Aeschylus that reflect on political power and the relation of the Greeks with their neighbors. Evaluation of this class consists of class participation, a midterm, and a final essay.

Please contact instructor for course description.

LTWL 100

The course explores​ how young adulthood ha​s​ been conceived and transformed in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. This quarter's focus is sexual coming of age in the YA novel and ​the ​teen movie ​from ​1975 ​to​ the present​. Our discussions will be informed by scholarship in cultural history, literary studies, trauma studies, film​/media​ studies, gender and sexuality studies. We will look at genres such as the realist novel, the graphic novel, the historical novel, the short story, along with the teen movie, the horror film, and the television series. Topics of discussion may include: didacticism, market demographics, censorship and book banning, intergenerational readership, literary merits, and stylistic experimentation. ​Books may include Forever (1975)​, The Perks of Being a Wallflower (1999)​, Blankets (2003)​, Gordo (2021)​, Last Night at the Telegraph Club (2021)​ films may include Fast Times at Ridgemont High, Jennifer’s Body, ​and Euphoria​.

LTWL 116

What is a hero? How does a hero's character evolve? Why is there often so much in common between a hero and a villain? Is there really such a thing as a villain? Fascinating patterns are found through different cultures, and in this course we will talk about works of literature and less traditional narratives, including manga, animé, video games, film, and folk legends.
From the Classics, to Pokémon, via the Italian Renaissance, Korean Folk tales, Star Wars, The Legend of Zelda and other texts we will try to identify the traits that Joseph Campbell saw as essential to the identity of the hero figure in all cultures.
"Mini" presentations, a longer presentation, and a final paper.
For more info, contact Adriana De Marchi Gherini: demarchi@ucsd.edu

Films about “relationships” constitute a quasi “genre” in the history of cinema. This course will vet the psychology and aesthetics of modern/postmodern “relationships.”

Filmmakers have found myriad ways of questioning the definition and the unfolding of “relationships”, —wherein couples meet, love, fight, part, or meet again, in the everyday as well as during traumatic circumstances— and  worked hard e.g. in deconstructing sexual jealousy. Or they challenged us with their creative portrayals of a wide spectrum of “attachments” by presenting the arc of protagonists’ feelings and emotions in their convoluted relationships.

Excerpts from classics or cult films will highlight examples of a few conflicted relationship entanglements. Film analysis will extend to clips from Mike Nichols's Closer (2004), his masterpiece about  crisscrossing couples – played by C. Owens, J. Roberts, N. Portman and J. Law–, (contrasted with his cult film Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?1966), Stanley Kubrick’s study of the aggressive use of dreams and fantasies in Eyes Wide Shut (1999), Paul Schrader’s postmodern lovers lost in an uncanny Venice in The Comfort of Strangers (1990), Woody Allen’s self-destructive characters in his classic Manhattan (1979) (contrasted with his morally tragi-comic Match Point (2005), or David Lynch’s protagonists’ identity crisis in his –actually not so complex– Mulholland Drive (2001), Lisa Cholodenko's tormented women lovers in High Art (1998) —interwoven with her attention to photographic art.

Excerpts from a few other clips from more current films will also be included.

As usual, precise methods of film analysis – shot composition, shot-by-shot and sequence-by-sequence analysis, narrative sub-plots, – will be emphasized during the first weeks of the term. During the second half of the term, filmic figures, film genre, deep structure, integration of specific films into the history of cinema, and filmic poetics will be underscored so as to explore /Relationships/ films in their cinematic and psychological interweave. “Veteran” students will be asked for work building upon their previous research.

LTWL 183

LTWL 183

This course is designed to give an overview of some of the major themes and topics in contemporary literary scholarship. Topics covered will include: 1) an overview of current literary theories and methodologies 2) refining or developing literary research skills and 3) preparation for writing works of original literary criticism. While this course is a prerequisite for students who plan to write an honors thesis, you do not have to write an honors thesis to take this course. All Literature majors with senior standing are welcome to enroll.

Please contact instructor for course description.

Please contact instructor for course description.

A workshop for students with some experience and special interest in writing fiction. This workshop is designed to encourage regular writing in the short forms of prose fiction and to permit students to experiment with various forms. There will be discussion of student work, together with analysis and discussion of representative examples of short fiction from the present and previous ages. LTWR 100 and LTWR 100GS may be taken for credit for a combined total of three times. Restricted to major/minor code LT34 during first pass of registration. All other students may register during second pass of registration with the approval of the department. Prerequisites: LTWR 8A.

Please contact instructor for course description.

Please contact instructor for course description.

In this workshop, students will practice skills of narration, characterization, and style with particular attention to the demands of nonrealistic genres, especially the challenge of suspending disbelief in fictional environments that defy conventional logic. Readings and lectures will accompany writing exercises. May be taken for credit up to three times. Restricted to major/minor code LT34 during first pass of registration. All other students may register during second pass of registration with the approval of the department. Prerequisites: LTWR 8A.

A workshop designed to encourage writing of original screenplays and adaptations. There will be discussion of study work, together with analysis of discussion of representative examples of screen writing. May be taken for credit up to three times. Restricted to major/minor code LT34 during first pass of registration. All other students may register during second pass of registration with the approval of the department.

Reading and Writing Memoir in Graphic Narrative/ Comics. This is an intermediate to advanced upper division course in analyzing the complex interplay of reading and seeing that graphic memoir activates, allowing for unique polyvical narrative stagings of "self" in tension as the moment of telling overlaps with moments of showing via the special grammar of comics. The stories we will read will very likely circle awkward topics about trying to be in the world or trying to find ways to avoid it, survive it, and/or heal it as an artist with a weird mind, questionable talent, and less-than-enchanting social skills. Using Hilary Chute's Why Comic as a course guide, we will read and discuss Commix narratives from the underground diy head shop scene to the hallowed high-literary works of "graphic novels" and comics war journalism.

This craft-study course requires heavy reading and participation with collaborative assignments and analytical papers. It is not a writing workshop, and assignments are reading-centered, rather than teaching the fundamentals of making comics or writing prose personal narratives.

In learning how design of form and content co-create a modular sense of selfhood while frequently undermining notions of heroic coherence of self, course participants will practice using comics techniques to tell life stories that allow for righteousness alongside foolishness and avoid the lure of the slickly singular self-improvement narrative. Writers of narrative should leave the course with new techniques that allow them to write better memoir and creative nonfiction stories with or without pictures, frames, or speech bubbles.

This is a good course for those who want to read several graphic novels and shorter memoir comics and to learn to reverse-engineer them as a way to see how graphic memoir creates what Rocco Versace calls a "special reality."

LTWR 120C

Please contact instructor for course description.

Please contact instructor for course description.

Please contact instructor for course description.

Please contact instructor for course description.