This course surveys literary texts and films produced by African writers and filmmakers from the 20th century to the present. It invites students to think through these crucial questions: What constitutes the “modern” in modern African literature and film? How do literary texts and films (re)imagine modern Africa? How do they fashion innovative narratives and ways of thinking about African historical, cultural, social, economic, psychological, and spiritual experiences to deconstruct the colonial imagination of Africa? Why do these African narratives and ways of thinking matter in the world today? We will address these questions in our close analysis of the form, content, and style of selected African novels, short stories, poems, plays, and films. In this course, students will learn the core concepts and debates in African literature and film. We will focus on film adaptations of literary texts to reflect on the intertextual and intermedial modalities of African cultural productions. While learning to analyze how African writers and filmmakers engage with the questions of tradition, modernity, language, knowledge, representation, violence, home, migration, and identity in their work, students will also learn to situate these questions in their cultural, historical, and geographical contexts. They will learn to critically analyze the aesthetic, political, and ethical dimensions of African texts.

LTAF 120

LTAF 120 Africa

We will read representative texts from the Sinophone world on such themes as transport, motion, and emotion.  Lu Xun's homeward bound stories will serve as starting points, so that we may go over his experience studying abroad and consider his complicated feelings about Shaoxing or in many ways, modern China.  Eileen Chang's short story of a romantic encounter in a sealed-off tram, together with her reflections on being a Shanghainese in Hong Kong, will reveal the novelist's intricate structure of identity formation.  Yu Hua on a teenager hitch-hiking on the road will be one among numerous textual examples regarding coming of age or psycho-social developments.  In this upper-division course, we will use primary and secondary sources (available on Canvas, in Chinese original, and also in English translation)  to examine ways in which means of transportation-- bike, bus, ship, train, plane, and so on--produce meanings and contribute to the political economy of motion and emotion.  After a sustained period of Covid lockdown, students may find these diverse repertoires of transport  literature to be inspiring.  They will have to read the texts before class, turn in weekly journal entries online, do study group presentations, in addition to writing a short research paper on a chosen topic on contemporary Chinese or Sinophone literature.

LTCH 101 Chinese

LTCH 101 Asia

Frankenstein’s Children:

In this class we will trace the lasting influence of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein or, The Modern Prometheus (1818) on U.S. literature. More specifically, we will explore how retellings of Shelley’s iconic narrative have chased the gnawing question of what it means to be human. In addition to Shelley’s novel, course content will include an array of twentieth- and twenty-first-century novels, short stories, films, and comic books that creatively re-narrate Frankenstein to investigate questions of racial formation, gender, sexuality, enslavement, motherhood, policing, artificial intelligence, and disability, while also interrogating the risks of unchecked scientific innovation.

LTCS 108

This course aims at developing students’ study of modern and contemporary Japanese/Japanophone literature and media through the study 20th and 21st century histories and legacies of colonialism, imperialism, and nationalism. With particular attention to the relationship among empire-building, modernity/modernism, and the genealogies of race and racism, this course will offer a series of discussions about the stakes of literary, artistic, and intellectual work in how the idea of “Japan” is shaped and transformed over modern and contemporary history.

This class is an introduction to the analysis of literary and historical text using computational methods. The course is designed for students who have already some knowledge of programming and want to use such skills to better understand humanistic texts and data. The class uses the Python programming language and follows the textbook Humanities Data Analysis: Case Studies with Python (Princeton 2021).

The course is articulated around projects that students begin developing from the beginning of the quarter in groups and is organized into five modules. In the first, students familiarize themselves with basic techniques of text mining of humanities data. They learn how to find textual patterns and how to interpret them in the context of a larger discourse. In the second module, students apply social network theory (graph theory) to literary and historical texts. Using python libraries for the modeling of social networks, students learn to formalize social relationships of fictional and historical characters, specifically how actors relate to each other in a text. In the third module, students become familiarized with vector space models that can be used to identify similarities among texts and classify documents according to topics, literary genre, and authorship. In the fourth module, students learn to automatically create maps of fictional, historical, and philosophical landscapes and explore the significance of geography in the construction of the text’s meaning. And finally in the fifth module, students will learn various techniques used for identifying the author of documents. This is particularly interesting when the author of a text is unknown or is writing with a pseudonym. Just consider that it was a computer program that help show that J.K. Rowling was the author of the Cuckoo’s Calling, a novel that was originally published under the pen name, Robert Galbrait.

This course offers an introduction to the study of Japanese films. This course pays close attention to the languages and styles of films as well as the historical and socio-cultural contexts.  The primary goal of this course is to learn how to read formal and historical aspects of films and develop ability to talk about films in critical terms.

LTEA 138

LTEA 138 Asia

This course will examine two genres, horror and melodrama, in South Korean popular culture and literature. How did these genres evolve from the 1960s to the contemporary context of South Korea’s cultural globalization? How do these respective genres conceptualize, represent and deal with various social and historical issues such as postcolonial nation-building, class conflicts, gendered and sexual violence among many others? By examining these two genres, we will also explore the larger issue of violence at many levels, political, ideological, economic, social, representational and epistemological. The primary sources that we will read and view include literary works, films, and TV dramas. At least half of the materials will deal with the horror genre, both in terms of primary sources, movies and TV shows, and secondary articles on horror. If you are triggered by the genre, we clearly recommend that you do not take this class.

LTEA 141 Asia

Between 1832 and the present Britain has undergone radical changes socially, politically, sexually, economically, religiously, and . . . literarily.  Besides getting a sense of some major authors of this period, we will also try to grasp the ways in which literature has undergone transformations both to create and to keep up with those other categories of alteration.  One marked transition has been the appearance of more women, more (openly) gay/lesbian, more working-class, and more post-colonial writers, so we will sample writings by all of these.  Another important set of shifts has been in the modes and lengths of narrative and in the formal features and social significance of poetry these too will occupy our attention, and we’ll spend some time getting an adequate vocabulary to talk about them.  Books are available at the UCSD Bookstore, and course grades will be based on a mid-term exam, final exam, weekly quizzes, 5-7 page essay, and attendance/participation in discussion sections.

Please contact instructor for course description.

The course will explore issues that have fascinated Shakespeare's audiences over the centuries--love, war, identity, sex, mortality, good and evil--through a selection of plays from the second half of his career. We will pay close attention to Shakespeare’s masterful way with words and images, with plots and characters but at the same time, we will connect our close readings of Shakespeare’s dazzling language to a broader historical understanding of these texts and their patterns of meaning. 

LTEN 113

In this course, we will study formal experimentalism in modern and contemporary poetry.  Poetry in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries can be characterized by a desire to break apart formal constraints and experiment with form, language, sound, and visuality.  The impetus for this experimentalism has varied.  British modernist poetry, for example, expressed a desire to break away from tradition, both aesthetically and culturally, while also seeking to use poetic form to contend with a fractured world.  We will thus ask if experimental poetry references a break between “tradition” and “modernity,” and if that modernity is marked more by optimism for the future or anxiety about technological, cultural, and social change.  We will also examine how the geographies of the British isles, the English language, and the postcolonial “commonwealth” affect the production of modern poetry.  How do the politics of English, British, and postcolonial identity inform how poets use language?  In the hands of postcolonial poets, is experimentalism a tool of resistance?

This course introduces students to the depth and variety of nineteenth-century British fiction by exploring four novels, representative of the forms, styles, themes, and imaginative worlds of the Victorian era in English history. These novels are: Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations, Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone, and Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Among the questions we will raise will be: what is a novel, and what is the social function of prose fiction in society? How is the narrator of a novel also a character? What is the relationship between the novel’s representation of social reality and its representation of the imagination of the author? Other issues I hope we will explore include: the nature of the supernatural, the literary response to colonial expansion, the new attention to the human body in medicine and law, changing attitudes to sexuality, and the practices of letter writing and social literacy. Two papers (one 5-7pp, the second, 7-10pp), no final exam. Attendance and participation in class is expected.

Though he was only a literary construct, the world’s most famous detective Sherlock Holmes can, in his sometimes-annoying way, teach us lessons we badly need in the 21st century: how to cut through the deceptive and inaccurate narratives about the world that the media, salespeople, power-brokers, and our own brains serve up to us all day every day.  How do we become more skeptical thinkers?  Recognize and overcome our own biases?  Get some distance from emotional, impulsive, heuristic world views?  In this course we will read both Arthur Conan Doyle’s fictional accounts of Holmes and some modern scientific literature that helps us understand why thinking like the detective is essential and can rescue us from fads, frauds, medical misinformation, and general stupidity.

Please contact instructor for course description.

LTEN 180 The Americas

Please contact instructor for course description.

LTEN 181 The Americas

In this class we will discuss the generic category of American “gothic” fiction—a term that denotes a set of texts beginning in the nineteenth century that share a propensity toward horror, haunting, the supernatural, and various other forms of psychological titillation. Writers such as Edgar Allen Poe became famous for their ability to create stories that tapped into the “dark” and fantastical recesses of the human imagination. In our class we will interrogate the notion that the American horror story represents a mere a playground for the reader’s psyche. In doing so, we will read avowedly gothic texts alongside narratives not normally associated with this literary category such as the slave narrative. What does it mean that American gothic and slave narratives were being composed so close to one another in US history? Are there ways in which the tropes (or themes) of horror novels/autobiographies and “racial” novels/plays articulate with one another? How does a centering of histories of slavery and genocide in the US challenge conventional definitions of the category “gothic”? Can canonical horror or gothic texts be read as allegories of seemingly unrelated historical circumstances such as slavery and colonial genocide? What are the aesthetic, social, and historical points of contact between the categories of the gothic and the real within American social history? How do our texts and films unveil the ways in which gender dominance, racial capitalism, misogyny, and patriarchy are structured into the experience of terror and subjection in the US? We will supplement our literary exploration with discussion of films, visual art, and music that gravitate around the aesthetic/social categories of horror and haunting.

LTEN 183 The Americas

In this class we will examine what the prison abolitionist scholar Angela Davis describes as the U.S. “slavery of prison” from the end of the Civil War through today’s prison industrial complex. Some questions of concern will be: What are the connecting links between chattel slavery and prison slavery? Why do prison narratives repeatedly invoke the antebellum period (slavery) in reference to supposedly post-slavery moments? What are the connections between colonial settler genocide, slavery, and prison slavery? What institutional, social, and cultural apparatuses inform America’s current status as the most incarcerating nation in the history of humankind? How do overlapping social structures such as capitalism, colonialism, white supremacy, patriarchy, neoliberalism, and homo/transphobia inform strategies of criminalization across different time-periods? What forms of resistance have the imprisoned marshaled in order to combat regimes of terror, torture, familial dislocation, and re-enslavement? Through our engagement with prison narratives, songs, and testimonies related to slavery and the prison industrial complex, we will connect the everyday incidence of legal murder of criminalized black, brown, Indigenous, and poor bodies in the “free world” to the conditions of slow murder that prisoners endure under the prison industrial complex, a system that now incarcerates well over 2.3 million people both domestically and globally. Our readings of captive narratives will be supplemented by analysis of alternative cultural forms—e.g. prison blues, chain gang songs, hip-hop—that have been used by the enslaved and the incarcerated to give expression to (and resistance against) the experience of racialized, gendered, and classed state terror

LTEN 185 The Americas

In this course, we will study the history and literature of the South Asian diaspora.  Peoples from the South Asian subcontinent have long and continuing histories of migration to other parts of the world.   This course focuses on how migration (voluntary and forced) and displacement stemming from colonialism has been rendered and represented in global literature and cultures.  We will study some of the more well-known cases of migrant literature in North America and Europe, but also examine the history and literature of the diaspora in the Caribbean, East Africa, the Middle East, and elsewhere.  Along the way we will seek to understand how experiences and patterns of migration have been shaped by practices of colonialism and indentured labor, both during the period of explicit European imperialism and in the postcolonial present.  We will further ask: how have South Asian peoples been differently racialized in these various historical, geographic, and social contexts?  What role do class, religion, gender, and sexuality play in  how migration is understood and represented?  Is there such a thing as a “global” South Asian identity?

At the height if the Black Plague, a group of young women and men abandon their city to find refuge in the countryside, recreating through their storytelling the world they thought they had lost forever.

We will be reading and discussing Giovanni Boccaccio's Decameron, in a contemporary English translation.

For any questions, please contact me at demarchi@ucsd.edu

LTEU 105

LTEU 105 The Mediterranean

LTEU 105 Europe

In 2017, the hashtag #balancetonporc emerged on Twitter to indicate stories of sexual harassment at work. Journalists were quick to define this as the French #MeToo moment, but what does it mean to take a movement in one context and pull it into another? How did this formulation add to a long history of US-French exchanges about gender, sex, sexuality, and power? Discussions about gender and sex in the United States often reference “French feminisms” or take as a starting point a presumed openness about sex and sexuality that is associated with French culture. We will examine a variety of texts from the past 100 years to trace dominant and counter-cultural trends in France that have promoted or critiqued traditional notions of femininity, masculinity, and heterosexuality. From Simone de Beauvoir to #balancetonporc, we will study how French engagements with sex and power have changed over time, and discuss what we can take from these debates to inform our own views about gender and justice.

LTEU 141 Europe

Please contact instructor for course description.

LTEU 150A Europe

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. Prerequisite:  LTFR 2A or equivalent or a score of 4 on the AP French language exam.

Emphasizes the development of effective communication in writing and speaking. Includes a grammar review. A contemporary novel and a film are studied to explore cultural and social issues in France today. Taught entirely in French. May be applied towards a minor in French literature or towards fulfilling the secondary literature requirement. Students who have completed 2C can register in upper-level courses. Prerequisite: LTFR 2B or equivalent or a score of 5 on the AP French language exam.

Please contact instructor for course description.

LTFR 141 French

LTFR 141 The Mediterranean

LTFR 141 Europe

Please contact instructor for course description.

2B is an intermediate-level course conducted entirely in German. The course provides a review and an expansion of the four German language skills. 2B emphasizes reading authentic literature, culture texts and discussions of current events and films. Another focus is the review of grammar and gaining more communication skills in the target language. 

Our journey through Italian language, food and culture continues with stops in Bologna, Milan, Aosta, and Central Italy.

We will also focus on Italian families.

For any questions, please contact me at demarchi@ucsd.edu

At the height if the Black Plague, a group of young women and men abandon their city to find refuge in the countryside, recreating through their storytelling the world they thought they had lost forever.

We will be reading and discussing Giovanni Boccaccio's Decameron, in a contemporary English translation.

For any questions, please contact me at demarchi@ucsd.edu.

LTIT 115

LTIT 115 Italian

LTIT 115 The Mediterranean

LTIT 115 Europe

First Year Korean 1B (5 units) is the second part of the Beginning Korean series. This course is designed to assist students to develop mid-beginning level skills in the Korean language. These skills are speaking, listening, reading, and writing, as well as cultural understanding. LTKO 1B is designed for students who have already mastered the materials covered in LTKO 1A or who are already in the equivalent proficiency level. This course will focus on grammatical patterns, such as sentence structures, some simple grammatical points, and some survival level use of the Korean language. Additionally, speaking, reading, writing, and listening comprehension will all be emphasized, with special attention to oral speech. Upon completion of this course, students will be able to do the following in Korean: 

Speaking: Students are able to handle successfully a variety of uncomplicated communicative tasks in straightforward social situations. Conversation is generally limited to those predictable and concrete exchange necessary for survival in the target culture. They are capable of asking a variety of questions when necessary to obtain simple information to satisfy basic needs.

Listening: Students are able to understand simple, sentence-length speech, one utterance at a time, in a variety of basic personal and social contexts. Comprehension is most often accurate with highly familiar and predictable topics although a few misunderstandings may occur.

Reading: Students are able to understand short, non-complex texts that convey basic information and deal with basic personal and social topics to which they bring personal interest or knowledge, although some misunderstandings may occur. They may get some meaning from short, connected texts featuring description and narration, dealing with familiar topics.

Writing: Students are able to meet a number of practical writing needs. They can write short, simple communications, compositions, and requests for information in loosely connected texts about personal preferences, daily routines, common events, and other personal topics.

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

Second Year Korean 2B (5 units) is the second part of the Intermediate Korean. Students in this course are assumed to have previous knowledge of Korean, which was taught during the Korean 1A, 1B, 1C, and 2A courses. Students in this course will learn mid-intermediate level of standard modern Korean in listening, speaking, reading, and writing, as well as expand their cultural understanding. After the 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 also expected to write short essays using the vocabularies, expressions, and sentence structures introduced. Upon completion of this course, students will become able to do the following in Korean: 

Speaking: Students are able to handle with ease and confidence a large number of communicative tasks. They participate actively in most informal and some formal exchanges on a variety of concrete topics relating to work, school, home, and leisure activities, as well as topics relating to events of current, public, and personal interest or individual relevance.

Listening: Students are able to understand conventional narrative and descriptive texts, such as extended descriptions of persons, places, and things, and narrations about past, present, and future events. The speech is predominantly in familiar target-language patterns. They understand the main facts and many supporting details.

Reading: Students are able to understand conventional narrative and descriptive texts, such as extended descriptions of persons, places, and things and narrations about past, present, and future events. They understand the main ideas, facts and many supporting details. Students may derive some meaning from texts that are structurally and/or conceptually more complex.

Writing: Students are able to meet a range of work and/or academic writing needs. They are able to write straightforward summaries on topics of general interest. There is good control of the most frequently used target-language syntactic structure and a range of general vocabulary.

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

Third Year Korean 130W (4 units) is the second 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, 2C and 130F courses. Students in this course will learn mid-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 130 Korean

LTKO 130 Asia

Please contact instructor for course description.

Wait, was that a joke? Reading comedy, in antiquity and modernity, shines a light on the systems of power on which humor depends. In that spirit, we’ll read the Roman comic playwright Plautus. He was a trailblazer, adapting Greek comic conventions in a new Roman social environment. His stock characters—the cranky old guy, the “thirsty” young man, the wise-cracking sidekick—facilitate plot-driven, sitcom-style plays whose humor still resonates today. But there are many aspects of Roman comedy, like its treatment of the “wily slave” and the war veteran, that pose fundamental if uncomfortable questions about comedy’s alternative reaffirmation and subversion of systems of power.

LTLA 103

LTLA 103 Latin

LTLA 103 The Mediterranean

LTLA 103 Europe

Please contact instructor for course description.

Please contact instructor for course description.

Please contact instructor for course description.

LTRU 104C Russian

LTRU 104C Europe

Please contact instructor for course description.

LTRU 110A Russian

LTRU 110A Europe

LTSP 2B is an intermediate-level language course that reinforces and enhances the development of the communicative skills (reading, writing, listening, and speaking) and the intercultural competency of the student. Class activities are designed so that students can build up these skills and function at an intermediate language level. Conducted entirely in Spanish, this class will provide students with ample opportunity to work in small groups and in pairs while gaining confidence communicating in Spanish.

As language does not exist outside of culture, the class also assumes that the teaching of Spanish cannot be decoupled from the countries and cultures where that language is spoken, including the United States. Therefore, we will learn the language in the cultural contexts in which it is produced, using a variety of formats (film, literature, journalism, songs, etc.) and registers from most formal to more colloquial and from the metropolitan rule to each of the regional variations of the language. 

LTSP 2B is the second course of the intermediate level sequence at UC, San Diego. It is consequently followed by LTSP 2C.

LTSP 2C is the continuation of LTSP 2B and the final course in the intermediate level series (LTSP 2A, LTSP 2B, LTSP 2C).

This course is conducted entirely in Spanish and strives to refine the four skills (speaking, listening, reading, and writing) while increasing intercultural competence and critical thinking by connecting authentic material with students’ own life experiences. A greater focus is put on writing and translation skills to maintain the basic ideas, intent, style, and linguistic register of the original source. Students will be exposed to culture and literature using a variety of authentic materials including movies, radio, advertisements, written texts, etc. Collaborative learning activities such as peer review, pair and small group activities, and discussion will be emphasized to improve student written and oral communication skills and competency.

Second course in a sequence designed for bilingual students seeking to become biliterate. Special emphasis given to improvement of written expression, grammar, and orthography. Prepares bilingual students with little or no formal training in Spanish for more advanced course work. Prerequisites: LTSP 2D and/or consent of instructor

LTSP 100A es un curso de escritura y lectura superior para hablantes de español como segunda lengua. El objetivo del curso es mejorar y desarrollar el registro académico y formal del español en sus cuatro destrezas (escritura, lectura, comprensión auditiva, producción oral). El curso entrega las herramientas necesarias para funcionar en contextos laborales o académicos Latinoamericanos, españoles o estadounidense (i.e. trabajar para una ONG, una universidad o cualquier otra organización)

Los objetivos del curso son los siguientes: 1)Aprender a hacer resumenes escritos de textos complejos, 2) Escribir textos autobiográficos, expositivos, descriptivos y argumentativos 3) Aprender como hacer una presentación oral formal en español. 4) Identificar y leer textos complejos de diversos registros (ensayísticos, narrativos, poéticos, periodísticos, sociológicos etc.). 5) Aprender como escribir una crítica académica con notas, bibliografía, hipótesis, argumento y conclusión. 6)Interpretar y escribir textos culturales, filmicos y musicales. 7) Familiarizarse con las principales corrientes de la crítica literaria y cultural en América Latina.

LTSP 100A Spanish

Please contact instructor for course description.

LTSP 100B Spanish

Please contact instructor for course description.

LTSP 116

LTSP 116 Spanish

LTSP 116 The Americas

Las series de televisión se han transformado en la última decada en el formato de ficción más consumido en el mundo. América Latina, a pesar de la brecha digital y del peso que todavía tiene la televisión en abierto, no es una excepción. No es exagerado decir que la ficción habita hoy primordialmente en las series y en su formato “folletinesco” que permite, entre otras cosas, desarrollar historias con mucho mayor detalle y mucho más espacio y tiempo.

En esta clase aprenderemos, en primer lugar, a analizar series de Argentina y Chile como una nueva forma de ficción visual que entronca con otras formas literarias como la novela de entregas o el folletín . Trataremos de entender tanto el lenguaje visual con que están construidas las series, como el sistema de producción televisiva y su inserción en un mercado global cada vez más caracterizado por lo que algunos críticos de televisión denominan “televisión compleja” o “televisión de algoritmo”. Estas nuevas formas de televisión se dan en el contexto de un “giro digital” que ha cambiado drásticamente nuestro acceso a la cultura en general y la televisión y el cine en particular, creando audiencias cada vez más específicas a través de plataformas como Netflix, Hulu y otras.

La pregunta central de esta clase es cómo estos nuevos formatos televisivos lidían con la cuestión de la justicia social en América Latina en general y en el Cono sur en particular, ¿Puede la televisión contruir sentidos críticos que acompañen a los movimientos sociales en su búsqueda de justicia? América Latina es un continente que se caracteriza por la herencia colonial de la desigualdad, la violencia y la opresión de diferentes sectores de estas sociedades abigarradas. 

LTSP 169 Spanish

The “encounter” in the Americas gave birth to an entire corpus of texts about the “Indian.” Thus, the “Indian” is a constant trope in Latin American literary, political, and cultural discourses. In this course we will focus on a particular movement coined as INDIGENISMO in the 20th century. This political, literary, and cultural expression emerged in countries where multiple Indigenous communities continue to thrive. Students will learn about the particularities and intricacies of indigenismo through analyzing representative texts. We will read dialectically indigenista (non-indigenous writers ) and indigenous novels. We will juxtapose Balún Canán, and X-Teya, El Callado dolor de los Tzotziles and El tiempo principia en xibalbá. How does a politics of nation-building influence Indigenista writers and how do Indigenous writers respond?

LTSP 172 Spanish

LTSP 172 The Americas

This course offers an introduction to the most important concepts and critical issues in literary and cultural studies today.  Our primary focus will be literary theory and critical methodology.  The study of literary theory will lead us to explore exciting, foundational questions having to do with textual interpretation, cultural production, and the making of meaning. Students will learn about the most important schools of recent and contemporary literary theory and then apply these theories to the interpretation of texts. We will ask not only “What do these texts mean?” but also “How do they mean?” Some of the other questions we will raise and discuss include the following: what is “literature”? What is the purpose and function of literary studies? How do we determine what a text means? Where does meaning reside—in the author, the reader, or the text? What is the relationship between literature and society? Between text and historical context? Our study of critical theory will help us to understand the ways in which literature and culture both respond to and shape the world around us.

In 19B, we will read, analyse, and discuss a selection of literary and philosophical texts that were produced between 480 BCE and 31 BCE, during the classical age of Athens, and the Hellenistic period that followed Alexander the Great’s conquests. Among the assigned readings are tragedies by Sophocles and Euripides, a comedy written by Aristophanes, selections from the historians Herodotus and Thucydides, a dialogue of Plato, and part of the epic of Jason and the Argonauts. 

Grading will be based on attendance, participation in class discussion, a draft and a short final paper.

In this class we will become familiar with the generic (e.g. genre) description of the Palestinian folk and fairy tale. We will also unsettle the presumed limitations and boundaries of the folk and fairy tale as they relate to the field of world literature broadly and Palestinian literature specifically. What makes something a folk or fairy tale? What role do these tales play in society? What are these tales’ relationships to written and formal literary products? And, what are the imagined worlds created within the text and the historical worlds from which they emerge? Through close readings of select tales, we will examine their historical contexts, literary themes, histories of transmission and literary significance.

LTWL 110B

LTWL 110B The Mediterranean

This course explores children’s literature from its origins in classical antiquity to the present day. The study of children’s literature serves as a testing ground for important questions about the acts of imaginative empathy demanded by literature and the ethics of authorial influence. It also allows us to interrogate the assumptions we make about children and childhood, especially as connected to innocence, playfulness, freedom, and creativity. We will explore primary texts in detail and analyze some of the critical frameworks which help us to negotiate the relationship between adult and child, including narratology, postcolonial theories, and feminist critiques.

There are several interrelated strands to our work in this course. We will explore the origins of children’s literature in fables, fairy tales and folklore the notion of “childhood” as a concept and critical discourses engendering it the intersection between children’s literary texts, education, and social values and the mature genre of children’s literature which makes up a canon of modern classics. Throughout, we will interrogate themes of universal importance to the study of modern literature such as familial relationships travel and displacement interaction with the natural world friendship adolescence and coming-of-age magic and mythology education and psychological development as well as religion and morality. We will also pay close attention to the rhetorical power of children’s literature, the dual audience many children’s texts address (adults and children), the deeper ideological messages a text may convey, as well as the interplay between images (the visual) and words (the verbal). Though our primary focus will be on children’s literature in the Western tradition, we will also examine modern Chinese and Japanese children’s texts, which are closely interwoven with the classical East Asian traditions and are distinct in their aesthetic and literary qualities. To this end, we will consider the process of cross-cultural translation and exchange that informed the evolution of modern East Asian literature and continues to remain important in our global world today.

The objective of this course is to introduce students to both the tradition and modern iteration of speculative fiction in Arabic literature. What does it mean to assert a modern genre of Arabic science fiction? Through close analyses of Arabic fantasy/speculative fiction/sci-fi works (in translation), students will interrogate the origins of this modern genre and its relationship to “Western” science, progress and modernity. The texts upon which we will focus originate primarily from Iraq, Egypt and Palestine, including pieces of short fiction, novels, theatre and film. 

LTWL 124 The Mediterranean

How do we compare our analysis of our everyday dreams with the dreams represented in film? Our readings in film interpretation will run the gamut from Freud’s foundational Interpretation of Dreams, to today’s psychoanalytic theories and to research done in neuroscience so as to elaborate upon this question. Films proposed for extended study will include such classics as Alfred Hitchcock’s renowned Spellbound (1945) and Ingmar Bergman’s Wild Strawberries (1957). Other films which explore dreams and dream-like fantasies, e.g. in Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut (1999), and Chris Nolan’s complex dream-within-dreams in Inception (2010), or Michael Haneke’s The Piano Teacher (2001) —whose main protagonist may not be dreaming though her lived experience is nightmarish, —as well as clips from several other contemporary films. These clips will illustrate the relationship of psychoanalysis and cinema which is at the heart of film theory and film history, as are several approaches to the semiotics of cinema. The films with explicit dreams, fantasies, and reveries will be studied with focus on the viewer/character and/or therapist/patient interactions, towards the interpretation of symptoms, anxiety, conflict, trauma, repression, et al.

The course will be run in seminar style around the main topics of dreams, dream interpretation, the flashback as art and convention, audiences’ involvement, patients and psychoanalysts in cinema, with rf. to the foundational texts of film semiotics (by C. Metz, L. Mulvey, G. & K. Gabbard). Lectures will also deal with methods of psychoanalytic theory applied to dreams in film – which involve psychoanalysts and semioticians from early Freud to current research in neuroscience (e.g. J. Fosshage.)

For their paper on close analysis and for their course project, students will consult with their professor to choose a specific film involving dreams, in conjunction with at least one of the authors selected from the reading list and from the course Reader (made available by week 3 through University Readers.) Several films will be suggested for such, during the first half of the course – e.g., Michel Gondry’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004), or his amusing The Science of Sleep (2006), among so many films where dreams appear.

(Course cannot be repeated.) Graduate students are welcome. The course will be counted towards the minor in Film Studies at UCSD.

LTWL 128

This course is designed as a series of discussions around the politics of gender and sexuality in East Asia and how to better understand these topics and their relationship to contemporary geopolitics. Alongside key texts in film, fiction, and cultural studies, readings will focus on developing familiarity with theories in transnational feminist critique, queer studies, sexuality studies, critical race studies, postcolonial studies, and psychoanalysis. 

This course explores the place of the natural world in the Western literary imagination, with primary attention to English and American writers. Beginning with the story of Creation and the Flood in the Old Testament, we will examine the ways in which human stewardship of the land has been interpreted as a social, if not a spiritual, responsibility. We will look, too, at Classical and medieval notions of agricultural labor and the celebration of the land. We then turn to Early Modern Europe and America. The image of a lost Eden motivates the colonial enterprises of the Renaissance. The experience of Nature as sublime lies at the heart of Romanticism. American transcendentalism grounded itself in the ecological, while modern warfare reshaped the relationship between nationhood and the earth. Finally, The discipline of ecocriticism raises questions about the social responsibility of reading and teaching. This course will move chronologically through some major periods and texts. Primary source readings will dovetail with recent critical texts about the environmental imagination. At the heart of the course is, therefore, a basic question: what is the responsibility of the humanities to the planet? Three short (5pp) papers, no final exam. Attendance and participation in class is expected. 

Since the period of Impressionism of the 19th century to the digital age (anime, manga, games) of the 21st century, Japan has offered extremely attractive images to non-Japanese viewers. Focusing on their films about Japan, this course examines how the Japanese history and culture have been imagined and narrated by the distant observers.

LTWL 180

What is “queer”? What is a queer film? How are same-sex desires pathologized, affirmed, and contested in different cinematic genres and historical contexts? What role does cinema play in the formation of modern lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans desires, identities, and movements? Bent Is Beautiful examines the ways in which communities, cultures, and subjects that we today designate as “queer” have been rendered in/visible from cinema’s beginning to the present. It seeks to account for how queer subjects have responded to that in/visibility in their construction of queer communities and identities, in particular, through their non-normative viewing practices and their own film and video production. It begins by exploring the politics of representation as it relates to the dialectics of visibility / invisibility, stereotyping / authenticity, and homophobia / affirmation. The rest of the course investigates key areas of queer cinematic production: documentary, avant-garde and experimental film, New Queer Cinema, AIDS activist video, trans politics, queer of color critique, and LGBTQ+ television.

LTWL 181

Spying is as old as the history of the world (e.g. the Trojan Horse, Judas, etc.) The spy film genre is complex and is comprised of hundreds of films. The films selected for this course will range across the history of cinema from WW1 and WW2, to the Cold War, its aftermath (and contemporary hacking.) Filmmakers inclined to work within the spy film genre are apt to address geopolitical as well as psychological issues, in a dialectical process wherein an adversary is scrutinized, made to be transparent while the spy is to remain invisible – until often uncovered in a reverse voyeuristic process. In this regard, the figure of the “double agent” is particularly compelling in literature and cinema, as double agents may become unstable, unravel, or even fragment within their psychological and ideological underpinnings in the course of their activities. Aside from the films on the list and the clips mentioned below, at least one James Bond film (TBA) and one spy novel by John Le Carré and Ian Fleming will be referenced as masterful examplars of the anxiety and the suspense so pertinent to the genre.

Films and clips studied this quarter seem to involve a theory about spying, and to interpellate audiences to significant interpretation. The list involves classic and cult spy films: Carol Reed. The Third Man (1949) Sam Fuller. Pick up on South Street (1953) John Frankenheimer. The Manchurian Candidate (the 1962 version, vs its more recent remake) Martin Ritt. The Spy who came in from the Cold (1965) Richard Marquand. Eye of the Needle (1980) Philip Noyce. The Quiet American (the 2002 remake, vs the original) Stephen Gaghan. Syriana (2005) Steven Soderbergh. The Good German (2006) Anton Corbjin. A Most Wanted Man (2014.) They will be studied in depth, in reverse chronological order, along with clips from other remarkable cult films such as: Joseph von Sternberg. Dishonored (1931) Alfred Hitchcock. Lifeboat (1944) John Huston. The Kremlin Letter (1970) Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck. The Lives of Others (2005) and Christian Carion. Farewell (2009.)

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

LTWL 184

Please contact instructor for course description.

Please contact instructor for course description.

Please contact instructor for course description.

This course will focus on the emerging field of digital poetry and digital literature, that is, the intersection of artistic poiesis (making) with digital technology. As the digital scholar Chris Funkhouser states, “A poem is a digital poem if computer programming or process (software) are distinctively used in the composition, generation, or presentation of the text (or combination of texts).” We will read and respond to various examples of digital literature as well as theory and critiques of this emergent form alongside digital literature’s logical (and, sometimes, illogical) antecedents. Finally, we will create and workshop digital poetic texts of our own—highlighting ways that current technologies (including social media applications) can be repurposed for artistic effect. No prior knowledge of programming or software is necessary to take this course--please bring a willingness to experiment and to learn together. 

In this course, we'll explore the ongoing evolution of the common categories of genre fiction - science, fiction, fantasy and horror - to hybridize and reinvent themselves to include the surreal, the slipstream, and the fabulist. We’ll read example fiction texts and craft essays, and allow these texts to inform writing that is then workshopped in small groups.  The course will function as a hybrid: literature seminar/craft class/generative space.

This course is a workshop that explores basic methods of film writing: story development, scene structure, dialogue, and character definition. Emphasis is on finding visual equivalents for human emotions and on developing the writer’s individual personal vision. This work builds on exercises, assignments workshopped in small groups, and work leading up to one short (20 page, narrative script workshopped by the entire group and revised. Instrumental in the development of the student as writer is the ability to read, and effectively critique, the work of their peers. 

Please contact instructor for course description.

Both creative nonfiction and science aspire to the “truth,” some accurate modeling of the world around us (and within us).  Both depend on careful observation and reality-testing, whether by experimentation or through an ideal of narrative verisimilitude. Yet both also require imagination for discovery.  How can science power insightful narratives about the world?  How can the craft of writing nonfiction illuminate and communicate the work of science? In this course students will be reading a wide variety of writing across all genres that addresses science in creative ways, and then take cues from those readings to develop their own pieces of writing about science. Science students with an interest in creative writing and creative writing students with an interest in science are equally encouraged to register. 

What particular challenges arise when teaching literary arts versus expository or critical writing? In this course, a hands-on practicum which forms part of a unique collaboration between UCSD and San Diego’s public arts magnet school, the San Diego School of Creative and Performing Arts (SDSCPA), students will consider the “scene of instruction” (to invoke the language of the poet Claudia Rankine) of the creative writing workshop. Participants will engage texts devoted to creative writing pedagogy, including possible work by Rankine, June Jordan, Lyn Hejinian, Junot Díaz, Felicia Rose Chavez, Susan Briante, and Cristina Rivera Garza. Alone or in teams, participants will develop lesson plans for craft workshops (reading/viewing/listening lists and writing prompts) and then put their plans into action in SDSCPA creative writing classrooms. Finally, each participant will produce a teaching portfolio that includes a statement of creative writing pedagogy ahead of their possible application to MFA programs or teaching positions in the field. 

The course will include class meetings in the assigned classroom, as well as specific meetings solely on Zoom.  Please refer to the course syllabus for specifics.

Please contact instructor for course description.

Please contact instructor for course description.

Please contact instructor for course description.