This course offers an introduction to the history of the Mexican Revolution (1910-1920) through film, photography, and works of fiction. The Mexican Revolution was one of the first military conflicts to be extensively photographed and many newsreels exist of the war itself. We will analyze some of these images as well as classic cinematographic recreations from the 1930s and 1940s. This material will be studied in conjunction with key narratives from the pre and post-Revolutionary period (1890-1950). We will examine the role of image-making and nation-building and explore questions of class, gender, and race.

LTAM 110 The Americas

Throughout most of China’s long history, women were at the bottom of Confucian hierarchy and did not enjoy the social or political status afforded to men. This reality began to change during the late Qing dynasty (ca. 1895-1911), and in the modern period the liberation of women became linked to modernization and national salvation. In this course, we will first seek to understand the situation of women in traditional China, and then trace the dramatic changes that occurred in Chinese society as well as women’s lives throughout the turbulent 20^th century.

To achieve this goal, we will analyze literature, film and other media by both male and female authors who are concerned with the lives and realities of Chinese women. What do women wish to liberate themselves from, how do they enact this and to what end? How do some of the most influential men of modern Chinese letters understand and portray the situation of women? In what ways does the problem of gender complicate the ideological advent of modernity in China? And how do the paradigms of traditional Chinese culture and the contemporary situation of globalization impact Chinese women and their writings today? The texts we will read include a variety of different genres, ranging from short stories and novellas to essays and autobiography, poetry, literary reportage, and film not only from mainland China but also from Taiwan, Hong Kong, and the diaspora of writers who feel culturally connected to China but write from abroad. At the same time, we will study relevant works of critical-theoretical scholarship and relate our textual readings to the body of literary and visual culture of which they are integral parts. We will read all primary texts in Chinese but English translations will also be available. All films will have English subtitles.

LTCH 101 Chinese

LTCH 101 Asia

Please contact instructor for course description.

In this course we will read, analyze, and write about speculative modes of thinking and imagining the sociopolitical and intellectual conditions of our contemporary worlds through Japanophone fiction (fiction written in Japanese) in translation. Our readings help us explore the genres of science fiction, fantasy, magical realism, horror and other representations of alternative futures and realities in literary texts, films, and graphic novels. Students will be introduced to diverse approaches in literary theory and cultural studies to understand the socio-cultural, philosophical, and critical dimensions of speculative fiction. Readings include the work of established creators in Japanophone media and literature such as Mamoru Oshii (Akira), Yōko Ogawa (The Memory Police), and Kinji Fukusaku (Battle Royale). No knowledge of Japanese is required to take this class.

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

Can literature build or topple empires? Is literature a business like any other, or does it transcend the logic of the market? Can anyone write literature, or is literary fame only accessible to those with the right family, gender, race, education, innate genius, emotional experience, or marketing savvy? Should literature represent entire nations, or reveal one individual's inner world?

These were pressing questions for British authors and readers between 1660 and 1832, a time period that included massive expansion in both literacy and the print industry, the birth of new genres like the newspaper and the novel, and the Industrial Revolution. Literature, as we will discuss, was intimately connected to politics, battles over the meaning and boundaries of the nation, colonization and anticolonial resistance, and attempts to both forge and suppress revolution. We will delve into the history of this particular time and place while considering how its afterlives shape our present: climate change, global capitalism, the US legal system, the ongoing colonial occupation of Indigenous lands in what is currently called North America, and contemporary forms of racial inequality both here and globally all have deep historical roots in this period, and we will read authors who observed, actively shaped, and sometimes resisted the formations of these powerful structures.

This survey course gives a broad overview and introduction to some of the major works, themes, and concepts central to the study of Asian American literature. This course will outline some of the artistic movements, debates, and critical concerns that have formulated the production and reception of Asian American literature in the twentieth and twenty-first century. Some of the questions this course will explore include: How do we define Asian American literature? Is Asian American literature ultimately a national or transnational project? And given the diversity of cultures, traditions, and gender roles included within the rubric of “Asian America,” is there a way of speaking about or representing a unified Asian American experience?

Over the course of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the United Kingdom has become home to immigrants from all over the world, particularly in the aftermath of decolonization.  In this course we will read literature that explores the experience of migration and its challenges to a sense of identity and belonging.  We will consider how immigrant authors have positioned themselves in relation to British national identity and how the shared experience of migration creates new communities.  In addressing these and other questions, we will also read contemporary literature that tracks the experience of second and third-generation immigrants and the ways that "brexit" has affected the current political and cultural discourse. 

From our morning coffee or tea to our chocolate desserts, the food we consume every day is imported from all over the world, and bears centuries of global history. In the early modern period, global empires rose and fell over beverages, seasonings, drugs, and sweeteners. The production of goods like pepper, nutmeg, tobacco, coffee, tea, and sugar made fortunes, sparked wars, radically transformed global economies and ecologies, fueled the expansion of colonialism and the slave trade, and changed the way people all over the world ate, drank, tasted, and perceived global geographies.

LTEN 149

This course focuses on early American cultural production, engaging “American” in the hemispheric sense of the word’s original meaning. We begin with a focus on Native communities and early European settlement and then turn to the period that has come to be known as the Age of Revolution. This period, functioning alongside a global interest in Enlightenment thought, was a tumultuous epoch marked by ideological shifts in Europe and her overseas colonies. Fundamental questions included: what did it mean to free an area from colonial control? what narratives developed to justify independence to a heterogeneous population? how would a new nation be organized and who would be a citizen? how could revolutionaries fighting in the name of liberty and equality justify the institution of chattel slavery and its mandate that men/women constitute the property of another?

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

This class addresses a range of speculative fictions—broadly defined—by Asian American and Asian diasporic writers. From ancient monsters to sentient software, the texts we will explore in this class reflect on the ways that Asian American literary production uses the process of speculation to both reflect upon the turbulent twentieth- and twenty-first century dynamics around race, gender, technology, and war that have shaped contemporary Asian America.

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

Please contact instructor for course description.

LTEN 185 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?

Please contact instructor for course description.

They're in Florence, but also in Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise. They are angel-like or sinners, temptresses or/and victims. In a male dominated society, and in a man-centric literary space, they manage to stand out, burst out of the pages, and dialogue with the reader.

Dante's female characters, often considered secondary, are powerful in many ways.

In this course we will read Vita Nova and relevant Canti of the Divine Comedy (in translation) and analyze the female characters and the historical and literary worlds they belong to.

Any questions? Please contact me at demarchi@ucsd.edu

LTEU 105

LTEU 105 The Mediterranean

LTEU 105 Europe

This survey course traces the development of Russian and Soviet cinema from the silent era to the present. Close attention will be paid to theoretical and technical innovations, the connections between Russia and Hollywood, screenwriting, questions of authorship in film, and the rise of new experimental formats. Students will have the opportunity to create a zine for their class project. Knowledge of Russian is not required. 

LTEU 154 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. 

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. 

Souvent méconnue, la fiction spéculative française est pourtant riche d’auteurs importants et de textes influents. Dans ce cours, nous en examinerons certains, depuis les précurseurs jusqu’à l’Afrofuturisme, et nous lirons des auteurs francophones de différents pays. Nous analyserons comment ces romans reflètent les courants sociaux et esthétiques de leur temps, comme le progrès scientifique, l’imaginaire de l’extinction, le changement climatique, et les rapports politiques, de race et de genre.

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. 

This online course is the first part of a two-quarter sequence introducing students to the practice of speaking, reading, and writing Italian with an emphasis on linguistic bridges between Italian and Spanish and cultural bridges between Italian and Spanish/Latin American cultures. We examine such topics as popular music (cantatauri italiani and nueva cançión), folklore, intercultural solidarity between Italy and Latin American political movements, and the migration of indigenous traditions from Mexico to Italy. The bridge-building method enables heritage and second-language speakers of Spanish to accelerate the acquisition of competence in Italian while consolidating and strengthening competence in Spanish. Students may complete first-year Italian in two quarters and move to more advanced language study in Italian or Spanish.

Il nostro viaggio gastronomico-culturale continua, con fermate a Genova (pesto), Napoli (pizza), Milano (risotto), Bologna (ragú) e Puglia.
Studieremo avverbi, pronomi, verbi, comparativi, nuove ricette, e tanto lessico "culinario."
3-4 quiz, presentazioni orali, un esame finale, e mini quiz in relazione a film.

Per informazioni, per favore contattare Adriana De Marchi Gherini a demarchi@ucsd.edu

They're in Florence, but also in Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise. They are angel-like or sinners, temptresses or/and victims. In a male dominated society, and in a man-centric literary space, they manage to stand out, burst out of the pages, and dialogue with the reader.

Dante's female characters, often considered secondary, are powerful in many ways.

In this course we will read Vita Nova and relevant Canti of the Divine Comedy (in translation) and analyze the female characters and the historical and literary worlds they belong to.

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 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.

Same as above.

Same as above.

Same as above.

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.

Third Year Korean 130A (5 units) is the first part of the advanced Korean. Students in this course are assumed to have previous knowledge of Korean, which was taught in the Korean 2A, 2B, and 2C courses. Students in this course will learn low-advanced level skills in the areas of listening, speaking, reading, and writing in Korean, as well as expand their cultural understanding. Upon completion of this course, students are expected to acquire and use more vocabularies, expressions and sentence structures and to have a good command of Korean in formal situations. Students are expected to read and understand daily newspapers and daily news broadcasts. Upon completion of this course, students will be able to do the following in Korean:

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

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

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

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

LTKO 130 Korean

LTKO 130 Asia

Please contact instructor for course description.

What’s the good of making fun of people? The social utility of satire—whether to mock the powerful, reinforce ethical norms, or forge communal cohesion—is visible across Late Night monologues and social media posts. When one turns to the ancient world, satire was unique: a literary tradition “totally” Roman. This course will trace the rise of Roman satire by reading selections from Horace, Persius, and Juvenal. Across these authors, we will see how the social history of Rome changes when filtered through this uniquely Roman genre. Throughout, we’ll connect the practice of Roman satire with contemporary discussions about the social good that satire claims for itself. 

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.

This survey course traces the development of Russian and Soviet cinema from the silent era to the present. Close attention will be paid to theoretical and technical innovations, the connections between Russia and Hollywood, screenwriting, questions of authorship in film, and the rise of new experimental formats. Students will have the opportunity to create a zine for their class project. While the class will be conducted in English, all readings and coursework must be completed in Russian for students enrolled in LTRU 150.  If you do not have adequate proficiency to do the work in Russian, enroll in the LTEU 150 side of the course.

LTRU 150 Russian

LTRU 150 Europe

Please contact instructor for course description.

Please contact instructor for course description.

Please contact instructor for course description.

El curso se enfoca en textos escritos y visuales cuyo referente directo o indirecto es la Revolución mexicana de 1910-1920, suceso histórico en el que chocan violentamente las contradicciones sociales y políticas generadas por el desarrollo económico capitalista del país. En este curso examinaremos el modo en que se debate este conflicto armado en el terreno de la cultura, poniendo énfasis en las cuestiones de clase y cultura, raza y género. Leeremos novelas, relatos, narraciones históricas, y examinaremos la tradición fotográfica de la época, asi como algunas películas.

Requisitos:
Una presentación oral (en grupo), dos exámenes parciales (en clase), un trabajo de investigación de fin de curso.

LTSP 135B Spanish

LTSP 135B The Americas

Please contact instructor for course description.

LTSP 140 Spanish

LTSP 140 The Americas

Please contact instructor for course description.

LTSP 174 Spanish

El curso aborda textualidades y performatividades feministas y disidentes contemporáneas en el Cono Sur, a partir del concepto de herida materna. Con una orientación psicoanalítica, se analizan los modos en que opera una cierta “ley de la madre” (Geneviève Morel) en una diversa constelación de visualidades insurgentes (fotografía y cine), performances anticoloniales (desde marchas callejeras hasta el teatro y la música), y escrituras siniestras (novela y poesía) en la postdictadura de Chile y Argentina. La textualización de los contagios, las enfermedades, la transmisión transgeneracional del trauma, la psicosis, los hospitales y manicomios, la antropofagia, la espectralidad de la muerte y los desechos humanos, hacen de lo materno —en los umbrales de lo monstruoso— una escena de simbolización privilegiada y novedosa que vemos aparecer en la producción cultural conosureña reciente y que la diferencia de las articulaciones anteriores.

Se espera que lxs estudiantes tengan una actitud activa en la construcción de sus aprendizajes y elaboren lecturas críticas sobre una constelación diversa de textos y corpo-prácticas, en base a un acercamiento teórico.

LTSP 175 Spanish

Gods, goddesses, heroes and queens, Amazons and monsters---the fabulous creatures of the classical world, many once divine, persist as myth into our present. The course will explore the pleasures of stories told of these characters from ancient Greece and Rome, in poetry and tragedy, and their survival into the Renaissance and the present. Readings include Homer's Odyssey, the Theogony, The Homeric Hymns, two Athenian tragedies, Ovid's Metamorphoses, Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream, and a contemporary novel, Gods Behaving Badly.

LTWL 100

LTWL 100 The Mediterranean

LTWL 100 Europe

This course examines the power of fantastic texts to illuminate, interrogate and subvert reality by analyzing modern Chinese, Japanese, and Korean short stories, novels and films. How can fantastic texts teach us to perceive problems in the cultural psyche from a more critical, insightful perspective? What is the cognitive function of fantastic fiction and film at the threshold of the modern and postmodern moments? How have modern Chinese, Japanese, and Korean intellectuals and artists shaped the literary genre of the fantastic to fit their particular experiences?  And how do these fantastic texts fit into the practice of modernism? So as to find answers to these questions, we will read key examples of the modern fantastic genre in conjunction with theoretical articles and other secondary materials. We will define each literary / cinematic text’s relationship to its particular historical-intellectual context and also consider the aesthetic bonds that tie the modern literary or visual text to its roots in classical East Asian tradition. Throughout the course, we will also place the works in a comparative literary and theoretical framework that relates them to the Western tradition of fantastic writing and filmmaking, which influenced East Asian authors in important ways. This comparative, cross-cultural and interdisciplinary approach crosses genres and cultural boundaries and allows us to gain a deeper understanding of the meaning contained within each individual work of literary or cinematic art. The course is arranged chronologically in that it presents material from late Qing China (ca. 1860-1911) and Meiji Japan (1868-1912), traces the modernist high points of the 20^th century, and then culminates in a study of contemporary fiction and film. All literary texts will be available in English translation and the films will have subtitles. By experiencing these examples of the modern fantastic in East Asia, students will understand interrelationships that exist between texts and authors from different periods and cultures, and thus trace some of the cultural flows that occurred – and continue to occur – between China, Japan, Korea, and the rest of the world. 

Witches, Poison Women, Revolutionary Girls: Feminist and Queer Violence in Japanophone Media explores a survey of media representations of rebellious, maligned, or otherwise notorious figures across the histories of Japanophone media and literatures. 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. Our readings range from 11^th century women’s fiction (The Tale of Genji) to 20^th and 21^st century animation. 

Women in the twentieth- and twenty-first centuries have been rewriting, writing back at Homer, alleged author of the Iliad and Odyssey. We will read and discuss novels and poems that give voice to slave women, to the male lovers Patroklos and Achilles, to Helen of Troy, to the war dead, to Penelope wife of Odysseus, to the sorceress Circe. Authors include Margaret Atwood, of the Handmaid's Tale, Anne Carson, Pat Barker, and Madeline Miller.

LTWL 160

LTWL 160

Martin Scorsese (b. 1942, NYC) is a renowned if not legendary US filmmaker, part of the Hollywood 1970s “New Wave,” whose films command encyclopaedic reference to the history of cinema.

A few of his films, or film clips, selected from his long career, will be studied in depth to underscore his cinematic virtuosity and to elaborate on his possible philosophical vision: Taxi Driver (1976, Cannes Palme d’or), Raging Bull (1980),  Last Temptation of Christ (1988), Goodfellas (1990, Silver Lion Venice Film Festival & Baftas), The Age of Innocence (1993), Casino (1995), The Departed (2006. Oscar Best Film & Director), Shutter Island (2010), Hugo (2011, Golden Globe), The Wolf of Wall Street (2013.)

Precise methods of film analysis (e.g. frame composition, shot-by-shot analysis, narrative programs, film breakdowns, filmic poetics, film genres, integration of specific films as they relate to the history of cinema) will be presented to lead into the interweave between style, history and the history of cinema as they relate to the minute details of every single shot or sequence – from film technique to the deep structure of music, sex, gender, ethics and politics in relation to Scorsese’s visual philosophy.

Note: Veterans from previous courses and advanced students may choose to work on special projects in sync with Scorsese’s films.

LTWL 183 is also part of UCSD Film Studies minor.

LTWL 183

LTWL 183

Please contact instructor for course description.

Please contact instructor for course description.

Please contact instructor for course description.

The genre of horror literature is composed of many different modes—terror, the uncanny, gore and dark fantasy—and features myriad common tropes—haunted houses, ghosts, monsters and zombies. Horror fiction’s primary aim is to unsettle readers and provide a moody, atmospheric reading experience. In this class, we will explore all of these aspects of horror—from the supernatural to the psychological to the allegorical—in our own writing. We’ll read examples of horror devices as they’re used in literary fiction and allow these examples to inform stories that are workshopped in small groups.

Please contact instructor for course description.

Please contact instructor for course description.

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 borderlands. Assigned texts may include work by BAW/TAF, Guillermo Gómez-Peña, Gloria Anzaldúa, Luis Alberto Urrea, Sayak Valencia, Susan Briante, Postcommodity, Natalie Díaz, Alex Rivera and Cristina Ibarra, Valeria Luiselli, Andrew Strum, Marcos Ramírez ERRE, and Omar Pimienta. 

LTWR 113

LTWR 113 The Americas

Writing is both visual mark and cognitive prompt.  What kinds of meaning ­do we conjure when we combine graphic and literary reading cues and when we blur distinctions between the ‘read’ and the ‘seen’?  In this class we will study and create texts in which visual design and illustration do as much work to inform the reading of our literary art as the words do. 

There will be three sections to this course, and these sections will emphasize the creation and reading of analogue visual literatures that appear off-screen. The sections are: 1. Signs, glyphs, and alphabets 2. Prints, poetry, and public writing and 3. Books and book-formatted literature. You will leave this course having a deeper understanding of some ways literary arts visual arts can activate each other and create reader-response in ways neither form can do alone. You will learn of graphic text makers and movements, and you will make at least three well-developed visual literary projects, including a collaborative fold-out book. You may create environmental literature in 2D or 3D, as well as printed posters, books, and other literary artworks that provide a complex reading experience via multiple routes of perception and recognition. This is an upper division written arts course, so even though the class focuses on graphic elements of visible writing, the literary aspects should represent your highest-quality writing - thoughtfully developed and revised.

Please note:    

1. This version of LTWR 114 is not a course in making comics or graphic novels.

2. You will need to get art supplies, and a supplies list will be provided prior to the start of the course the cost of basic required supplies should be less than $50. Please account for the cost of these supplies in making your decision about taking this course. 

In this course, students will study both mechanics and effects of very recent literature across genres written by authors featured in this Winter’s New Writing Series, many of whom are UCSD alum! While learning literary terms and ideas that allow for deep analysis of these convention-stretching works, course participants will write both analytic and artistic responses to excerpts of the NWS authors’ recently published work by exploring the authors’ tools, topics, concerns, and experiments. At the end of the quarter, writers in the course will help one another fully develop one of these exercises in order to send it to the author that inspired the writing.

Each of the course texts will provoke questions about what literature is, as well as what it can be and what it might do in the world. In so doing, these works galvanize critical/creative agility while allowing for fresh possibilities in course participants’ own writing practices.

Course participants will attend Winter New Writing Series readings, preferably in person, to discuss course texts with authors in real time, however the readings will also be recorded for those who can’t attend live events.

The course will NOT include weekly small group editorial round-table discussions of work-in-progress, but it will instead feature in-class writing exercises, sharing of newly-drafted writing experiments, craft & theory lectures, and student teaching presentations.

The readings are at 5PM on the following Wednesdays:

Please contact instructor for course description.

In this course students will explore the form and function of the comedic essay by deconstructing examples of the style and attempting to write their own. Class times will be spent on brief lectures, large and small group discussions, writing time, and workshopping of student material. Authors covered will include Samantha Irby, David Sedaris, Scaachi Koul, David Foster Wallace, Nora Ephron, Kamau Bell, and Ali Wong among others. 

Please contact instructor for course description.

Please contact instructor for course description.

Please contact instructor for course description.