This course will examine representations of “unruly” women in contemporary Latinx literary and cultural production. We will consider how, for example, familial relations, traditions, and the performance of gender identities inform Latina womanhood and, thus, Latina girlhood. We will analyze how representations of transgressive Latinas/xs disrupt identities and identifications. The purpose of the class is to examine a multitude of Latina/x voices and perspectives that illuminate the heterogeneity of Latinidad or “being Latinx.”

LTAM 105 The Americas

Please contact instructor for course description.

In this class we will study films and cultural representations from an about the Andes in the context of the energy transition to a green economy or an economy that is not dependent on fossil fuels. The course is divided into two parts.

In the first part we will study from a historical and comparative perspective Western views of nature and indigenous Andean ways that do not make the distinction between nature and culture or human and other than human entities. We will read in this context, The Huarochiri Manuscript, The Chronicle of Guaman Poma de Ayala, and the Royal Commentaries of Inca Garcilaso de la Vega.

On the second part of the class, we will look at the intensification of mining and extractivism in the Andes to sustain the global electrification of the economy (eco-colonialism). Within this context, we will study the clash between western narratives of climate change and Andean views of “nature” that do not make the distinction between human and other than human entities. We will study Andean resistance to environmental colonization in the context of this clash between worlds. Some of the films and narratives that we will analyze in the second part include but are not limited to Para Recibir el Canto de los pajaros (Bolivia), Hija de laguna (Perú), and CAM: Liberar una nación (Chile) or Pupila de Mujer (Argentina). Students will be required to write small response papers, and final project

LTAM 120 The Americas

Europe's Legendary Monsters: the Werewolf and the Vampire - Why do we find monsters captivating? How do representations of monsters reflect the cultures in which they are created? We will explore these questions through two of Europe’s most famous monsters: the werewolf and the vampire. How did these legends arise and how did they develop over time? What was the twelfth-century “werewolf renaissance”? The eighteenth-century “vampire epidemic”? How did actual early modern historical figures Erzsébet Báthory, the “Blood Countess,” and “Vlad the Impaler” inspire literary classics like Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla (1872) and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897)? Why do these legends live on and what do today’s adaptations tell us about contemporary culture? What do they tell us about ourselves? Readings will be drawn from the medieval period until today. We will also discuss several films and read Stoker’s Dracula in its entirety. (If you’ve never read it, I recommend getting a head start on this longer work over winter break.)

The course focuses on the explosion of horror, thriller, and suspense movies across Asia in the new millennium. Our investigation of this wildly popular genre will be framed by the politics of gender, sexuality, race/ethnicity, and national identity. Case studies will include productions from Japan, Korea, Hong Kong, Vietnam, Thailand, and the Philippines. Students will learn foundational skills in formal film analysis.

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.

Techno-Orientalism: From Frankenstein to K-pop. Using Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978) as a theoretical basis, this course will explore how literature and media represent and raise questions about racialized bodies, gender, and technological advancement. We will take a transhistorical approach, analyzing case studies that range from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) to sci-fi films and K-pop. How are robots racialized, and how are racialized bodies depicted as robots? Why? And how do we challenge these depictions?

LTCS 108

It may be the 2020s, but the 1980s are alive and well. From the resurgence of neon colors and oversized blazers to the nostalgic settings and images present in current media production, the ‘80s are everywhere you turn. The decade is one that has an immediately recognizable aesthetic, and Hollywood continues to revisit it today in belated sequels like Cobra Kai or Top Gun: Maverick and in retro-styled serials like Stranger Things. So what defined the cinematic style and content of the 1980s? The course will investigate this question through an introductory overview of Hollywood cinema during that decade, an era in which a surge of “high-concept” blockbuster films hit the big screens (and the newer shopping mall multiplexes) of the USA. Students will watch, discuss, and analyze films in various genre, including Martha Coolidge’s Real Genius (1985), Adrian Lyne’s Fatal Attraction (1987), Paul Verhoeven’s Robocop (1987), and John Carpenter’s They Live (1988). We will consider how these films affirmed and/or questioned the new values of the neoliberalizing USA and how they deployed the new technologies of the time.

This course explores queerness—or sexual dissidence—in Latin American film. While the term can be generalizing and even foreign to Latin America, in this course, queer and queerness are points of departure to seeing and approaching minority sexual cultures on screen: what do they have to say about the nation-state, gendered structures, racial subjugation, colonialism, capitalism, and the environment? And how do they generate acts survival and strategies of worldmaking possibility? The course moves across three constellations: how queer and queerness are made visible by the cinematographic lens to critique and reflect on power structures (2) how they meet and collide with other minority subcultures on screen, like trans, travesti, and lesbian subjects (3) and how queer approaches can serve as a method of inquiry. We will read short critical texts on queer studies, trans and travesti theory, and Latin American studies as they relate to film and cinema while also discuss cinematic works from Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Mexico, Peru, and parts of the Caribbean.

The course is on Tang Poetry, with focus on high Tang period. We will trace the development of Classical Chinese poetry, and then read selected works of major poets in bilingual format. Students can take the course to fulfill advanced Chinese requirements.

LTEA 100A Asia

This course surveys literatures written in Japanese from the late 19th into the 21st centuries. The category of “Japanese literature” is complex. It comprises, often, of contestations, movements, and reflections that resist broad categorizations and give voice to complicated historical and political networks. Hence our use of the term “Japanophone” helps us explore the roles of colonialism, imperialism, and nationalism in Japanese language literary productions.

LTEA 132 Asia

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 how British literature worked through the impact of economic change, urbanization, mass-war, imperialism and globalization, and the many movements for democracy and equality that characterized the past two centuries. We will examine how the optimism of industrial development was tempered by both a nostalgia for a rural, aristocratic order and working-class upheaval how women fought for visibility in politics and culture (including literature) an how Britain both fortified its position as a global power and was confronted by anti-imperial rebellion and the voices of postcolonial authors. Throughout the course, we will pay close attention to changes in literary form and the complex interaction between cultural production and historical conditions.

Narrating Our Americas. In this survey of literatures written in the U.S. since the Civil War, we’ll reconsider the concept of “America” as a way of posing a number of questions about the relationship between U.S. literature and American national identity. We will trace the development of national consciousness across 150+ years, considering how literary texts, from late nineteenth-century populism to early twenty-first century popular culture, have constructed competing and often contradictory understandings of U.S. culture. We’ll pay particular attention to the evolution of national identity in relation to major social and economic transformations such as industrialization, migration, and urbanization to explosive cultural developments like the introduction of mass consumer technologies of film and television and to radical political reorientations through broad-scale movements like anti-racist struggles, feminist movements, and workers’ rights.

This course will engage various forms of Black cultural production ranging from the nineteenth century through the present. In doing so we will pay particular attention to the way in which incarceration, state violence, and Jim Crow apartheid have been rendered—often in an oppositional and/or transgressive way—within the written, sonic, visual, and political practices of Black people in the US. Some artistic/historical moments that will be covered will include slave narratives and songs, anti-lynching discourse, the “Harlem Renaissance,” the Black Arts Movement, Black Feminism, and the narratives and music of the Black Liberation movement through the prison industrial complex. Questions to be considered throughout the term will include: What aesthetic/political strategies have Africans in the US deployed in the face of hundreds of years of enslavement, imprisonment, and state violence? What does a wide-ranging glance at Black cultural production in the US from slavery to our current era of mass incarceration allow for in terms of a genealogy of our current moment of structural anti-blackness? In what ways do our texts, songs, and films underline the structural roles of white supremacy and patriarchy under US capitalism? How does this branch of arts, letters, and politics challenge prevailing conceptions of history, temporality, geography, and legality?

The course will explore the big questions that Shakespeare posed to his audiences, on topics that still matter very much to us today—including love, war, power, race, sex, mortality, good and evil. Readings will encompass a variety of plays from the first half of his career. We will pay close attention to Shakespeare’s masterful way with words and images, with complex plots and compelling characters but at the same time, we will connect our close readings of Shakespeare’s dazzling language to broader interpretive investigations of these texts and their patterns of meaning. As much as possible, the class will view and discuss film versions and adaptations of the plays in order to understand these texts as scripts intended for live performance.

LTEN 112

1790-1830 is an era known for political upheaval and, at the same time, the genre of romance, Gothic and otherwise. This course will take a transhistorical approach to the time period, and will ask questions such as: What defines the Regency novel? How do the genre of romance and the political context of the Regency connect, if at all? What are the afterlives of the Regency novel? Why are we as a culture so transfixed by this period? We will read texts from the period as well as examine more contemporary filmic and literary reimaginings of the era, such as Bridgerton.

From Emily Brontë’s withering critique of ecocidal masculinity to Bram Stoker’s vampiric vision of extraction ecologies, the Victorian novel is entwined with the historical emergence of what we now call climate collapse. This is because the long nineteenth century marks a key moment in environmental history: it witnessed the formative shift from water to steam power, the emergence of species extinction as perpetrated by “nature” and human beings alike, the decimation of global ecologies at the hands of European empires, and the coming to consciousness of humankind—white colonial man, in particular—as a terraforming agent. Turning back to the seemingly distant world of the mid- to late nineteenth century, this course considers how “old” thinkers like H. G. Wells anticipate the pressing problems of our time: among others, hothouse superstorms, species death, energy exhaustion, and environmental racism. Together, we’ll answer the following questions: How do Victorian novelists and thinkers imagine climate collapse and / or its origins? In what ways do they put pressure on our ideas about human and nonhuman, culture and nature, weather and planet? How do they envision empire, race, sex/uality, and ecology as intertwined—and how is our planet’s present and future at stake in this history? Last but not least: how might the Victorians help us think beyond the nihilism of a posthuman world, a world without “us”?

Chicanx Mobilities & Travel Narratives. This course examines Chicanx travel narratives. It explores how Mexican American travel and mobility reveals the function of space, place, national borders, and social practices. Through a survey of Chicanx travel literature, we will critically engage how Chicanx mobility charts terrains of struggle and new strategies for change. Moreover, we will address some of the following questions: What is the travel genre? How does Chicanx mobility align with this tradition? How is mobility tied to ideas of race, class, gender, and sexuality? And what does it mean to be a good mobile citizen?

LTEN 180 The Americas

Please contact instructor for course description.

LTEN 181 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? How do so-called "Slave Narratives" represent America's original prison narratives? 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? 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, 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, sexualized, and classed state terror.

LTEN 185 The Americas

This course will consider the history and historical legacy of the British empire. We will read anglophone fiction and poetry from Britain, South Asia, South Africa, Ireland, Palestine, and elsewhere to uncover how the effects of British imperialism have been represented in literature, as well as the way those legacies are still active today.

In this course we will follow Dante Alighieri's otherworldly journey through Hell, in search of an understanding of human and divine justice through his interaction with the spirits who have molded the world we live in, its values, its art, and the connections that bind those still living to their past. We will also focus on the concepts of love for people, country and God, and we'll see how love can easily be distorted.
Students will contribute to the course with an oral presentation and a final paper.

LTEU 105

LTEU 105 The Mediterranean

LTEU 105 Europe

A selection of important french films, especially some of the french “New Wave” of the 1960s, will be studied in this course, in their resonance with the New Hollywood cinema —from the 1970s to the present. Legendary films of Alain Resnais (Hiroshima mon amour), Jean-Luc Godard (Breathless), François Truffaut (Jules & Jim), Louis Malle (Elevators to the Gallows), Agnès Varda (Vagabond), et al., wherein “auteur” filmmakers played with the rules of cinematic narratives and techniques, will be analyzed in granular detail, and then juxtaposed to clips from Stanley Kubrick’s, Martin Scorsese’s, F. F. Coppola’s and others. Their conjunction may integrated into the PostModern vision which dominated the cultural and philosophical Zeitgeist of the end of the 20th and beginning of the 21st centuries, before our current “digital” age.
In a few cases, the shift from remarkable (and now supposedly “conventional” french films —e.g. Renoir’s The Rules of the Game, et al.) will be enlightening. In other cases, the transposition from these films’ literary springboard will be underscored, e.g. Alain Robbe-Grillet’s Jealousy, so as to assess the synergy and intermediality of literature, creative writing and cinema. Equally interesting will be an investigation into major literary antecedents (Proust, Woolf, Joyce) in the interweave of psychoanalytic free association, stream-of-consciousness, jump-cut editing, etc)

LTEU 141 Europe

Cultural Life Before, In & After the USSR - The aftershocks of the twentieth century in Russia and Eastern Europe are still felt today. This course begins with the artistic and ideological ferment of the early 20th-century, leading into the Russian revolution(s) and the controversially violent project of building a brave new Soviet world. We examine difficult artistic responses to the traumas of Stalinism and WWII, the tripartite system of official, emigre and underground Soviet culture, and Soviet colonialism. All readings in English.

LTEU 150C 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.
The discussion class on Thursday is not required and is used for extra support or practice.
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 films 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 115 French

LTFR 115 The Mediterranean

LTFR 115 Europe

Please contact instructor for course description.

Please contact instructor for course description.

LTGK 104

LTGK 104 Greek

LTGK 104 The Mediterranean

LTGK 104 Europe

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 emphasises 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 culture and food continues this quarter with more grammar points, food-centric readings, conversation, and film.
More Italian cities will share their art and history through their food culture. The course meets in person 3 days a week, and online once a week.

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 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 130W Korean

LTKO 130W Asia

Please contact instructor for course description.

Ovid's work ranged across love poetry, epic, a mythological calendar, satire, fictional letters, a hook-up handbook, and exile poetry. That's a lot! Throughout, he displayed a playfulness, irreverence, and ambition that speaks volumes about the times in which he lived. This class will range across this work, both in Latin and translation.

LTLA 105

LTLA 105 Latin

LTLA 105 The Mediterranean

LTLA 105 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 110C Russian

LTRU 110C 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.

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

Este curso aborda el colonialismo ibérico desde la Conquista hasta el periodo independentista (siglos XVI-XIX) en América Latina. Se discuten tanto procesos históricos como culturales desde los debates actuales sobre “lo colonial” y sus continuidades en la región (colonialismo interno, colonialidad, neocolonialismos, etc.). Por lo tanto, la perspectiva del curso se hace cargo de poner en discusión andamiajes teóricos diversos con la intención de comprender la colonial modernidad en sus complejidades, contradicciones y continuidades. Asimismo, se atiende al devenir de las subjetividades en una sociedad fuertemente estamental, razón por la que es fundamental revisar las agencias emancipatorias indianistas-indigenistas, feministas, disidentes y antirracistas de la región.
Se estudian las prácticas textuales coloniales, las que son acompañadas por producciones cinematográficas que desde el cine silente en adelante han tramado heterogéneas perspectivas acerca de “lo colonial” en América Latina.

LTSP 116

LTSP 116 Spanish

LTSP 116 The Americas

This course explores foundational texts of Mexican literature from the 20th century to the 21st. Students will be introduced to poetry, manifestoes, critical essays, novels, chronicles, and experimental narratives that shaped Mexican nationalism but also which interrogated its dynamics of nation-state formation. From the Mexican revolution, the agrarian reforms, the turbulent 60s, sexual and racial interruptions, to the recent wave of narratives that contest a neoliberal state, the course is designed to provide both dominant narratives and minority perspectives to the idea of Mexico at home and beyond. Texts include Campobello’s Cartucho, Vasconcelo’s La raza cósmica, Rulfo’s Pedro Páramo, Zapata’s El vampiro de la Colonia Roma, and declarations by the Ejercito Zapatista de Liberación Nacional, among others.

LTSP 135B Spanish

LTSP 135B The Americas

Esta clase es un curso de introducción a la problemática de la memoria y los derechos humanos en América Latina. Desde finales de los años sesenta, la mayoría de los países de la región tuvieron regímenes dictatoriales que incurrieron en graves violaciones de derechos humanos, crímenes contra la humanidad e incluso genocidio. A partir de la década del noventa, el cine se transforma en uno de los vehículos principales para darle sentido al trauma social e histórico de la dictadura. En esta clase estudiaremos acontecido durante los años de las dictaduras o los regímenes autoritarios –la tortura, la desaparición forzada, el secuestro de niñas y niños y su reasignación clandestina a familias afines a la dictadura— y la posibilidad o imposibilidad de representar el horror a través del cine.

La clase combinara lecturas históricas, teoría fílmica, textos culturales y películas tales como Machuca, El edicicio de los chilenos (Chile), Garage Olympo, Los Rubios (Argentina), Amanecer Rojo (México), Voces inocentes (El Salvador), La Llorona (Guatemala), Paisito (Uruguay), entre otras.

LTSP 145 Spanish

La cuestion del "Oriente" y el orientalismo en America Latina. Desde la época medieval, la palabra “Oriente” se refería no sólo al punto cardinal donde nace el sol, sino también a las tierras que se colocan al este de Europa. Más aún, la división geográfica entre el Occidente y el Oriente siempre se ha acompañado de una cuestión política y cultural respeto a la diferencia entre los pueblos y estados que habitan estas tierras, y que van enmarcando las diferencias entre un “ellos” y un “nosotros.” América Latina y Filipinas heredaban los legados conflictivos de la división occidental / oriental de una manera peculiar: ambas regiones representan las fronteras de Europa y Asia, donde la imaginación del sí (Self) y del Otro (Other) no quedaban en conforme con el imaginario europeo.

En este curso examinaremos los significados asociados con la identificación del “Oriente” en la literatura y cultura latinoamericana, filipina, y diasporita asiática. Las lecturas incluyen selecciones de Cristóbal Colón, Catharina de San Juan, Vicente Alemany (SJ), Domingo Sarmiento, Francisco de Paula Entrala, José Enrique Rodó, José Laurel, Jorge Luis Borges, Siu Kam Wen, y Wong Kar Wai.  Los requisitos incluyen asistencia y participación en los talleres, un informe oral, 3 composiciones breves y un proyecto crítica o creativa final. 

LTSP 155 Spanish

Esta clase está dedicada a la exploración y creación de textos “creativos” en español. Leeremos y produciremos varios géneros de textos: entre ellos poesía, ficción y no ficción. Llevaremos a cabo talleres en clase para proveer comentarios a nuestrxs compañerxs. Lxs estudiantes completarán un portafolio como proyecto final, dependiendo de sus intereses particulares. (Aunque la gran mayoría de los textos que leeremos estarán en español, lxs estudiantes tendrán la opción de producir textos multilingües).

This class is dedicated to the exploration and creation of “creative writing” in Spanish. We will read and produce texts in various genres, poetry, fiction, and non-fiction among them. We will conduct workshops to provide feedback on our classmates’s work. In consultation with the instructor, students will complete a portfolio as a final project, depending on their individual interests. (Although the majority of the texts assigned will be in Spanish, students have the option of producing multilingual texts).

LTSP 166 Spanish

LTSP 166 The Americas

Please contact instructor for course description.

LTSP 172 Spanish

LTSP 172 The Americas

Health and Literature - In this class, we will study representations of health, medicine, and the body across a historically and culturally diverse range of texts. What are the social and personal dimensions of health, illness, disability, and well-being? How do our bodies determine our selves, and our selves our bodies? And how do we, as bodies and selves, fit in the worlds we inhabit? Authors considered in this course include literary writers, physicians, poets, activists, and artists--the likes of John Milton, Virginia Woolf, Audre Lorde, Riva Lehrer, Maggie Nelson, Atul Gawande, and Ada Limón.

This course offers a series of discussions around representations of gender in popular media, literature, and scholarship related to Japan. Our readings will cover topics such as feminist and queer politics and their representation, popular girls' cultures, and the mutual implications of sexism and racism in the broader contexts of imperialism, colonialism, nationalism, and contemporary geopolitics.

This course takes an ecofeminist and generically eclectic approach to the broad category of “science fiction.” Together, we’ll explore the long-contested categories of “woman” and “nature.” Along the way, we’ll encounter a galaxy of ecofeminisms (emphasis, here, on the plural “isms”) that share a common interest in building better worlds organized around interspecies humanisms. And yet, as we will see, these ecofeminisms diverge from one another in key ways. With help from Mary Shelley, Begum Rokeya, Ursula K. Le Guin, Franny Choi, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, and others, we will consider the following questions: What is this thing called “ecofeminism”? How do ecofeminist writers theorize concepts like human and nonhuman, culture and nature, man and woman, male and female, sex and gender—and to what ends? How does so-called nature productively bite back against some of the foundational theses we tend to associate with feminism at its most mainstream? How does this archive of thought help us envision the imperatives of environmental justice and collective flourishing?

How do literary studies shape our understandings about the politics of climate crises? This course invites students to think critically about the politics of climate change in literary studies through a range of texts, which include speculative literature and environmental studies scholarship. In particular, in what ways do the politics of climate change and speculative literature intersect with race, gender, sexuality, class, and immigration? We study this question through topics including environmental justice as decolonial project, imagining Indigenous futurisms, and critical dystopias. Course texts share a particular topical emphasis on the interplays among scientific underpinnings, environmental justice, and speculative environmental futures in literature.

What is “queer”? What is a queer film? How are same-sex desires pathologized, contested, and affirmed 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, the avant-garde, independent film, AIDS activist video, trans politics, queer of color critique, and art cinema.

LTWL 180

As the world’s largest producer of films, Bollywood’s existence as a model combining song and dance sequences with a melodramatic plot structure, a model that could not be destroyed by the onslaught of affordable digital platforms and global content has become something of a legend. This course will tell you the story of how the Hindi film industry of the city of Bombay (now Mumbai) became “Bollywood”: a globally recognized and circulating brand of filmmaking from India, which is often posited by the international media as the only serious contender to Hollywood in terms of global popularity and influence. A particular corpus of Bollywood films emerged around the twenty first century, that signified a certain form of bigness, with their star lifestyles, bloated economies of scale, world market share, and opulent mise-en-scène. This kind of fecundity in a postcolonial country’s culture industry was unprecedented. The neoliberal restructuring of the Indian state and economy— intensified from 1991, followed by the Hindi cinema receiving official industry status from the state in 1998—resulted in Hindi film industry’s metamorphosis into Bollywood—a dramatically altered mediascape, armed with satellite television, dotcom boom, and multiplex theaters. In this course we will study this corpus of big Bollywood films. Each week we will acquaint ourselves with concepts and methods that will help us study Bollywood as the producer of a distinct aesthetic, a unique language of cinema. Weekly readings are curated as per a specific configuration related to the cultural and social status of cinema—as well as the political economy of filmmaking—and locate them in Bollywood’s own efforts to accrue symbolic capital, social respectability, and professional distinction.

LTWL 184

Please contact instructor for course description.

Please contact instructor for course description.

Reading as Writers. This course will explore what happens when we critically read together and learn ways of conceptualizing and manifesting literary texts. We will study the fundamentals of genre analysis while reading selected works of fiction and non-fiction. In addition to learning mainstream narratives' principles and key concepts, we will explore literary forms inhabiting new dimensions of time, space, language, and structures whose lack of boundaries, definitions, or limitations defy centered literary traditions. The reading list is intentionally diverse and spans from well-known Latin American authors to lesser-known literary trajectories, representing various geographies, styles, and ideological perspectives, offering students a rich tapestry of literary voices to explore. Departing from Roland Barthes' premise, which challenges the notion that the author's intention is the sole valid consideration for interpreting texts, students will use critical essays (to be defined) as tools to think with or through the primary materials.
Primary materials include texts by Clarice Lispector, Maria Luisa Bombal, Ricardo Piglia, Marosa DiGiorgio, Carolina María de Jesús, Juan Rulfo, Sara Gallardo, Armonía Somers, Elena Garro, Manuel Ramos Otero, Cristina Rivera Garza, Yuri Herrera, Mayra Santos Febres, Yolanda Arroyo Pizarro, Rita Indiana, Camila Sosa Villada, Lina Meruane, among others. By developing critical ways to read fiction, students will be encouraged to (re) formulate techniques for their future creative writing endeavors, enabling them to explore the vital shape-shifting energy needed to discover the plurality of voice, vision, and methods for their future selves as writers. Conducted in Spanish, assessments include class participation, reading reports, and a final literary writing project.

A workshop in writing young adult (YA) stories for children ages 14-18, with the additional focus of exploring successful approaches to publication of YA stories. There will be regular weekly reading and writing assignments.

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.

In this course, we will consider literature, art, and film from and about the Mexico-US border, focusing on post-1984 cultural production. Mindful of UCSD’s location, we will also actively factor into our own work the significance of living and writing in the Californias. Assigned texts may include work by BAW/TAF, Guillermo Gómez-Peña, Gloria Anzaldúa, Sayak Valencia, Dolores Dorantes, Cog•nate Collective, Alex Rivera and Cristina Ibarra, Marcos Ramírez ERRE, and Omar Pimienta, among others. We will also spend time in UCSD’s inSITE archives and in the Mandeville Art Gallery’s concurrent exhibition entitled, Border Craft.

Visual Literature: Large-Scale 2D & Book Format

LTWR 114W

Please contact instructor for course description.

Please contact instructor for course description.

Workshop focusing on the review, the op-ed piece, the column, the blurb, the profile, the interview, and “content-providing” for websites. We’ll examine current examples of media writing students will produce a body of work and critique one another’s productions.

Please contact instructor for course description.

Please contact instructor for course description.

Please contact instructor for course description.