Spring 2000 Undergraduate Course Descriptions |
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LTAF 110 LTAM 120 In this course students will engage in a close reading of novels, short stories, and essays by leading 20th century Mexican authors. Works will be discussed in the context of the political and cultural changes taking place in Mexico after the 1910 Revolution. Tentative reading list: Mariano Azuela, The Underdogs, Nellie Campobello, Cartucho, Octavio Paz, The Labyrinth of Solitude, Carlos Fuentes, The Death of Artemio Cruz, a selection of short stories and essays by José Revueltas, Juan Rulfo, Elena Garro, Carlos Monsiváis, et. al. Requirements: Midterm and final exams, one research paper. CHINESE LITERATURE - NO COURSES OFFERED SPRING 2000 The following courses in Classical Literature can be found under their respective Literature sub-headings: Greek, Latin, and World. Greek Literature 3 COMPARATIVE LITERATURE - NO COURSES OFFERED SPRING 2000 LTCS 130 In contrast to the pervasive "myth of homogeneity",many accounts attest to the differences, diversities, and heterogeneity in Japanese culture and society. In this course, we will read novels, short stories, ethnographies, historical narratives, and other writings to explore questions concerning racial and ethnic differences in modern and contemporary Japan. Some of the questions we shall address include the following: How has Japan's "mainstream/majority" national culture been produced in relationship to its "others"? What is the interplay between the normalizing force of the dominant national culture and the racially and ethnically minoritized cultures? What kinds of positions have the Okinawans, the Ainu, and Koreans occupied in Japan's history of colonialism and multi-ethnic empire? What are the literary and other cultural forms of resistance they have exercised? How has "whiteness" been constructed as both object of consumption and site of privilege? What are the lives of Africans and African Americans in Japan? And how do the differences of race and ethnicity intersect with other important differences? LTCS 140 "Pacific Rim Discourse" and the notion of an American "Pacific Century" are not recent inventions. Whitelaw Reid, a U.S. Treaty of Paris Commission negotiator, dreamed of annexing the Philippines after the 1898 Spanish-American War "for American energy to build up such a commercial marine on the Pacific Coast as should ultimately convert the Pacific Ocean into an American lake, making it far more our own than the Atlantic Ocean is now Great Britain's". For Reid and many 19th-century American imperial ideologues, the Pacific was a vast space that kept the U.S. from the dream of a "China Emporium of American Commerce" and an envisioned relationship with Japan as the "spearhead for the commercial penetration of Northeast Asia". Amidst the immense oceanic expanse were insignificant-looking island groups that could be used as strategic outposts and "coaling stations," including the Philippine archipelago and Hawaii (and all of which were to be annexed at various times throughout the twentieth century on various pretexts). Now, the United States controls several "200-Mile Economic Zones" and naval-military facilities constellated throughout Guam and the American Samoa as "unincorporated territories," the Northern Marianas as a "Commonwealth", Hawaii as the only non-continental state, and the Republic of Belau as the last remaining American "trust Territory". What might be the connections between the previous visions or twentieth-century spread of U.S. military-imperial power and the various migrations, settlement/cultural formations, or neocolonial/transnational arrangements across the many island groups between the American "mainland" and (North) East Asia? In this course, we will trace this Asia-Pacific World-System "dominated" by the United States and triangulated by China and Japan to a cultural history of American imperial desire and modern power geostrategic politics. LTEA 120D We will watch film works produced in the People's Republic of China (1949-
). The emphasis is on the post-Mao era in which filmmakers re-examine
the Communist Revolution of the early twentieth century, the Cultural
Revolution, and broad impacts of post-Mao reforms. Some of these films
are familiar to the Western audience (such as Raising Red Lanterns,
Farewell My Concubine, Blue Kite, etc.). The course also
address the social and political context of artistic production. No language
requirement. Japanese fiction in translation is bound to be centered around the "major" writers, because translators choose writers who are likely to be read and talked about. This preselection is not always advantageous. But that's all we have. In fact, till a decade or two ago, there were few women writers translated into English--as a result of the collective choice of (mainly) male American translators and teachers of Japanese literature. We will do our best to make use of the preselected materials. We will read canonic fiction not to praise it, but to examine it, to find fractures and contradictions as well as intentions and projects. In other words, we will read through literary works to locate strategic issues such as "Westernization/globalism," "nationalism/racism," "gender politics," etc. LTEN 17 This introductory survey of African-American literature will explore multiple forms of black literary production from the late 18th century through the present day. The course will pose several critical questions as points of departure in the study of black literary and cultural production: What are the ways in which African-American literature participates in the production of "nationhood" and national identity? What is the role of migration in the making of black literature? How do the culture of performance, the social phenomenon of "passing", and the performativity of "blackness" inform African-American literary narratives? What are the ways in which black literature sustains a dialogue with other forms of material production such as art, film, photography, print media, and popular music? How do gender, class, sexuality, and other multicultural identity politics shape and influence the production of African-American literature? Authors: Phillis Wheatley, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, Pauline Hopkins, Frances Harper, Charles Chestnutt, Paul Laurence Dunbar, W.E.B. DuBois, Countee Cullen, Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes, Georgia Douglass Johnson, Jessie Fauset, Ann Petry, James Baldwin, Leroi Jones, Quincy Troupe, Nikki Giovanni, Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, Danzy Senna, Saul Williams, and Ruth Forman. LTEN 23 This course will serve as an introduction to the dominant literary trends
in Britain from around 1832 to the present. Issues that will be examined
across genre will include: the construction of the literary canon, literature
and culture, popular fiction, British literature and the British empire,
Black British literature. Authors read will include Charlotte Bronte,
Browning, Tennyson, Mathew Arnold, Wilkie Collins, George Gissing, Oscar
Wilde, D.H. Lawrence, Samuel Beckett, Virginia Woolf, T.S. Eliot, Beryl
Gilroy, Samuel Selvon, Salman Rushdie, Kazuo Ishiguru, Meiling Jin, and
Merle Collins. Students will be evaluated on a midterm paper, final exam,
in-class quizzes, and on class and section participation. Please see the Literature Undergraduate Office for a copy of the course
description for this course. LTEN 107 The first of Chaucer's works we shall address is The Parliament of Fowls. We shall begin at a slow pace, with emphasis upon the literal understanding of each and every word, and with a good deal of reading aloud. The pace will accelerate gradually, sensitively attuned (I promise) to students' growing ability to cope with the apparent strangeness of late Fourteenth-Century Middle English, so that by the end of the second week of the quarter (that is, in six class sessions), we shall have read to the end of this 6999-line poem. Then, beginning on the Monday of the third week (or thereabouts), we shall commence reading Troilus and Criseyde. This long poem will occupy us for five weeks. The last three weeks of the quarter will be devoted to reading as much of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales as we can conveniently manage. At a bare minimum, we shall work our way through Fragment I ("General Prologue", "Knight's Tale","Miller's Tale", "Reeve's Tale", and the truncated "Cook's Tale"). It would, of course, be edifying to do more, but we shall see what's possible. The main focus of this course is upon discovering interpretive strategies
for appropriate understanding of texts that are remote in time, distant
in cultural orientation, and somewhat unfamiliar in language. That focus
can best be realized through the transactions that take place between
me (the instructor) and the class of students. Hence, I should like to
emphasize that regular and reasonably alert attendance is essential if
the course is to be for students the success that I keenly hope it will
be. One five-page paper, one ten-page paper, and a final examination will
be required. Text: Larry D. Benson, ed. The Riverside Chaucer,
3rd edn. (Houghton-Mifflen: Boston, 1987). The course will be an extensive reading of the major forms of literary production (exclusive of drama and epic) developed in England from the age of Elizabeth I to the early years of James I. It will examine the sonnet sequences of Sidney and Shakespeare; the Ovidian erotic narratives of Marlowe ("Hero and Leander") and Shakespeare ("Venus and Adonis"); love poetry from Marlowe to Donne; the development of English satire; and Shakespeare's "Rape of Lucrece". Lecture/discussion format. Two papers, essay final. LTEN 120A With Samuel Johnson, the larger-than-life figure of English Neo-Classicism, a whole era rises to a magnificent (if contradictory) conclusion. We'll spend five weeks on Johnson, who was at the center of the most brilliant circle of thinkers and writers in the period after 1750: we'll consider Johnson as a poet and a novelist, as biographer, editor of Shakespeare, critic, lexicographer; but even more central to this course will be Johnson's moral essays in the The Rambler and The Idler. In the second half of the course we'll consider selections from Boswell's Life of Johnson, perhaps the best biography in any language; from Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire; from a novel by Fanny Burney, unless you read that last quarter in another course, in which case there will be replacement readings from contemporary women writers; from mid-century poets like Thomas Gray, who tend to get neglected in survey courses; and from Edmund Burke, the author of a treatise on the Sublime and of conservative political essays. With no reproach to any other reading lists, this course will show that even if you resist Johnson and these others, you don't know the English Enlightenment unless you know Johnson and these others. The main assignments will be: an oral report, a short paper, and a longer paper. LTEN 130A This course will consider a range of literary representation emerging from the experience of the first World War: poems, novels, and memoirs. The texts will be viewed against the background of the war itself, made visible in historical writings, contemporary (and rare) film footage, photographs, and the like. Special topics singled out for emphasis will include the impact of the 1914-18 generation upon the Modernist movement, consideration of the Great War as a cultural watershed dividing the twentieth century from the nineteenth, and the inevitably slippery relations between artistic expression and lived experience. The course will be conducted principally through discussion, with occasional lectures. One five page paper, one ten-page paper, and a final examination will be required. Texts: Ford Madox Ford, Parade's End (Knopf) e.e.cummings, The Enormous Room (Liverright) Siegfried Sassoon, Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man (Faber)
Your family need not have come from Scotland, and you need not have visited (you'll visit next summer!), to be a friend of chip-size Scotland, Europe's anomaly. Five million people, speaking three distinct languages, distributed across three distinct geographical zones: now finally with a Parliament of their own; yet contentiously still tied to the United Kingdom, a Nation without their own State (like Québec, like Catalonia ). Now as a member of the European Union, Scotland looks over the head of London to all of Europe, more at home within a larger geopolitical entity. Twentieth century Scottish literature is often the record of unhappy struggles against national and personal limitation: be prepared for the dour as well as the joyous. This course covers works by George Douglas Brown, Hugh MacDiarmid, Gun's Highland River, Grassic Gibbon's lyric novel Sunset Song, McGrath the leftist playwright, A.L. Kennedy and other women novelists, Irvine Welsh the author of Trainspotting the book, various recent poets including Kathleen Jamie, Liz Lochhead and some poets in Scots dialect, Alasdair Gray's Janine 1982, and other figures: from 1900 to 1999, women and men, writers in English and a few in Scots, in fiction, poetry, and one play. Two short analytical papers and one longer speculative paper, making a total of 16 pages minimum of writing for the course. A few class members will give oral reports in lieu of one of the short papers. LTEN 142 There were three stages of Victorianism: the early part which was unforgettably
described by Charlotte Bronte and Charles Dickens; the middle or "high"
part which gave us sober and very self-conscious novels like those of
Anthony Trollope; and then the last part, which became the fin-de-siecle.
The literature of the end of Victorianism is sceptical, psychological,
and deeply critical of the social order it portrays. In this course we
will read Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness and Thomas Hardy's
Tess of the d'Urbervilles, which represent the highest of
high culture. But we will also read works like H. Rider Haggard's Allan
Quatermain, one of the great adventure stories and probably even better--and
more influential--than his King Solomon's Mines. In addition, we
will read the sceptics and revolutionaries like Oscar Wilde and George
Bernard Shaw--and also the defenders of Victorian order like Rudyard Kipling.
Please Contact Department for Course Description Information. LTEN 154 This course examines the origin of the concept of an American Renaissance and will ask whether the designation is still viable. In the process we will discuss and broaden traditional notions of American Romanticism and Transcendentalism. Since the years 1836-65 mark an era in which writing became professionalized in America, most of the texts we will read--essays, journalism, history, autobiography, as well as poetry and fiction--address the question of what it means to be an American author. We will give continual attention to the political ramifications of authorship. We will read several and shorter works written by canonical authors from
the period; by the "damned mob of scribbling women"; by newly-literate
writers whose racial status threatened to upset traditional notions that
authoring could and should be distinguished from scribbling; and transcribed
texts from non-literate Native Americans who eloquently protested the
U.S.'s incursions on their lands and sovereignties. The major reading
will include Hawthorne's The Blithedale Romance,Frederick Douglass's
Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave,
Black Hawk's Autobiography or Fanny Fern's Ruth Hall,
Harriet Jacob's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl,
And Maria Amparo Ruiz de Burton's Who Would Have Thought It.
A study of U.S. literature and culture in the period after World War II. The course will focus on urban centers of the East and West coasts, but will also concern the beginnings of demographic mobility between the two coastal cultures. We will read fiction and poetry by a variety of authors including Salinger, Kerouac, Ginsberg, Baldwin, Ellison, Brooks, Plath, Malamud, O'Hara, Baraka, and others. Literary topics will include post-war modernism and formalism; the"beat" movement; literature and civil rights; and women in literature. We will study examples of avant-garde music (especially jazz) and art (especially abstract expressionism) in the period; and we will look at a variety of forms of popular culture (including movies, TV, magazines, advertising). Texts and media culture will be examined in relation to the historical context with topics including: the Cold War and the threat of nuclear destruction; the McCarthy hearings; the cult of domesticity and the redomestication of women after the war years; labor unions and the changing structure of U.S. industry; the early stages of the civil rights movement; post-war patterns of immigration; the growth of the suburbs; the emergence of teen culture; the rise of consumerism; middle-class conformity and the roots of the 1960's counterculture. The course will combine lecture and discussion; two papers will be required. LTEN 175B This course will provide an overview of poetry written since World War II. Our focus will be on the ways that poetry is produced, distributed, and read within literary communities and the ways that communal interests beyond the poem may help in shaping a new poetics. We will begin by reviewing the poetry at mid-century (Lowell, Plath, Wilbur, Bishop) and then the ways that emergent groups such as the Beats or the Black Mountain poets argued for a new poetry based on a fusion of the body and the body politic. We will then discuss the important roles of cultural nationalist movements (Black Arts movement, Chicano/a, Asian-American) and feminism in the late 1960s and early 1970s that built upon the personalist models of the Beats, now applied specifically to issues of nationhood and identity formation. Then we will look at several books of the recent period (Lois Anne Yamanaka, Saturday Night at the Pahala Theater, Harryette Mullen, Muse and Drudge, Ron Silliman, Tjanting, the ASL sign-language performance group, Flying Words), in which experiments with gesture, idiolect and dialect become the focus for arguments with speech-based poetries of the 1960s. In each case, readings will be supplemented by tapes and videos of the poets under consideration. Evaluation for the course will include a review of a local poetry reading or slam, one short research paper and one long research paper on a theoretical problem concerning poetry and community. LTEN 177 As our subtitle implies, California is often regarded more as a representation than as a geo-political entity. Disneyland, Hollywood movies, Silicon Valley, shopping malls, fastfood, suburban sprawl and endless freeways conspire to create what Jean Baudrillard has called a "culture of simulacra", a world of copies and imitations that become "more real" than the original. This phenomenon is not entirely new to the Golden State, and this course will explore some of its earlier manifestations in the West--from Helen Hunt Jackson's romantic view of Hispanic Mission culture in Ramona to the retro noir world of Roman Polanski's Chinatown. Along the way we will look at Frank Norris's dystopic view of greed in McTeague, the urban underworld of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, the heroic landscapes of Robinson Jeffers, and the phantasmagoric San Francisco of Alfred Hitchcok's Vertigo. We will study the emergence of California's artistic bohemia through Beat writers such as Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, and Jack Kerouac, and we will view the renaissance of Asian-American writing via Fae Myenne Ng's Bone and Wayne Wang's movie, Chan is Missing. Latino culture will be represented by Testimonios by early Hispanic settlers as well as latter day testamonials by Victor Hernandez Cruz, Cherrie Moraga, and Gloria Anzaldua. Although this will be an introduction to "California literature", it will equally be the study of a concept that, like the shifting plate techtonics of the state's geography, has refused to stand still. Evaluation for this course will be based on active participation in class
discussion, the completion of two short papers, and a longer research
paper. The "Vietnam Analogy" of the late 1960s and early 1970s was
made by critical American writers and scholars as well as by anti-war
and yellow power movement activists to establish striking parallelisms
and connections between the Philippine-American War of 1899-1903 ('the
first Vietnam') and the then raging war in Vietnam. A whole slew of critical
and neoconservative cultural production and scholarship ensued in short
order, seeking either to establish or dispute the explanatory power of
this analogy in terms of the kinds of understandings of twentieth-century
U.S. national identity and global power that it obscured or enabled. Apart
from attempting a pointed comparison of the intertwined histories of two
Asian American groups (Filipino and Vietnamese), this course will explore
the larger meanings and centrality of U.S. imperialism and war experience
for postcolonial and postwar refugee displacements. In addition, we explore
how it is that the neoconservative argument, which sought to isolate the
two wars and neo-imperial experiences as disparate events having little
to do with one another, may have won out (the Philippine-American War
gets historiographically buried again after the late 1970s while, contrarily,
'cultural wars' are fought on the terrain of U.S. culture over what would
now be called 'the Vietnam Syndrome'). This pre-1900 early black literature survey will focus on broadening and complicating the historical legacy of black nationalist ideology by tracing its evolution in early African-American literature. The course will attempt to extend the parameters of African-American nationalist discourse to consider texts which prefigure, anticipate, and/or disrupt twentieth-century notions of black nation-building movements. To this end, we will explore a number of literary works which pre-date the pan-Africanist movements of the post-Reconstruction era in order to interrogate how "national" identities and notions of a nation-state are constructed through and as a result of literary production. In addition, we will consider postbellum texts which tend to complicate conventional definitions of pan-Africanism. We will also explore the ways in which various texts represent black subjects "in exile" and/or abroad who remake and reinvent national identity as a response to dominant nationalist regimes. Particular attention will be paid to the intersection of religion and national identity, (dis)association with diasporic consciousness, performance as a vessel for nationalist sentiment, Maritime culture as a site of (inter)national consciousness, and the place of gender in early African-American nation-building. Authors: Phillis Wheatley, Olaudah Equiano, David Walker, Henry Highland Garnet, Maria Stewart, Frederick Douglass, Frances Watkins Harper, Anna Julia Cooper, Booker T. Washington, Sutton Griggs, Ida B. Wells, Charles Chesnutt, W.E.B. DuBois, Pauline Hopkins, Paul Laurence Dunbar. EUROPEAN AND EURASIAN LITERATURE LTEU 100 The Athenian democracy produced among other things some of the funniest, most obscene, and intensely political comedy in history. Aristophanes concocts in his comedies a precarious mixture of the high and the low, the silly and the serious. We will discuss the plays in light of their historical moment, but also as exemplary of comic laughter. If you enjoy political satire, physical comedy, or just like the Greeks, sign up for this course. We will read eleven of the plays; papers and a final. LTEU 130 LTEU 130XL This course examines contemporary film and short fiction from the former Soviet Union that reflect the vast political, social, and cultural changes that have taken place there since 1985. We will focus on works notable for their stylistic innovations as well as for the new openness with which they address previously forbidden themes, whether historical (i.e., the Stalinist past), social (i.e., sex), or aesthetic (i.e. the emergence of previously silenced narrative voices or subversive takes on Soviet-era cultural monuments). Class discussions will also address issues of national identity, gender roles and sexuality, ethnic conflicts, and the role of resurrected or repressed memory in constructing a post-Soviet present. We will read short works by Tatiana Tolstaia, Liudmila Petruhevskaia, Nina Sadur, Vladamir Makanin, Dmitri Prigov, Viktor Pelevin and others. Films will include Tengiz Abuladze's Repentence, Nikita Mikhalkov's Burnt by the Sun, Sergei Livnev's Hammer and Sickle, Natalia P'iankova's Strange Time, Rashid Nugmanov's Wild East, and others. All readings will be available in both English and Russian. All films will be subtitled in English. Papers may be written in English or in Russian. Class discussions will be conducted in English. Students who wish to do the course work in Russian should enroll in LTRU 129. DEPARTMENT APPROVAL FOR LTFR 2A, LTFR 2B AND LTFR 50 IS AVAILABLE IN THE LITERATURE UNDERGRADUATE OFFICE FROM 9:00-3:30, MONDAY THROUGH FRIDAY BEGINNING 2/16/00, WEDNESDAY. LTFR 2A Second-year course designed to be taken after LIFR 1C/1CX. We undertake a thorough review of grammar while continuing to develop language skills (oral and written) by studying short stories, cartoons and movies from various French-speaking countries. May be applied towards a minor in French literature. Prerequisite: LIFR 1C/CX or equivalent or a score of 3 on the AP French language exam. LTFR 2B We continue the review of grammar begun in LTFR 2A. To strengthen language skills, plays from the 19th and 20th centuries as well as the movie interpretation of Cyrano de Bergerac are studied. 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. LTFR 2C LTFR 31 A one-credit, one-meeting-a-week course, designed to develop and maintain
oral skills by discussing current cultural issues of the francophone world.
This course may be taken more than once, alone or in combination with
any other literature course. Prerequisite: LTFR 2B or consent of instructor.
Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth century French writers produced a stream of novels, short stories, journals, and articles on actual or fictive travels outside of Europe. This quarter we will look at some of them published over the last hundred years or so starting with Pierre Loti's short fictive account of his first trip to Japan, Madame Crysanthème and André Gide's short novel on North Africa, L'Immoraliste to selections from Simone de Beauvoir's travel diary of her trip to the U.S. after World War II, Amérique au jour de jour, Claude Lévi-Strauss's essay on living in exile in New York, selections from Jean Baudrillard's long meditation on postmodern America, L'Amérique. Readings, discussions, and papers will be in French. LTGM 2B LTGM 2C LTGM 125 LTGK 3 Having mastered (most of) the morphology of Ancient Greek, we'll turn
this quarter to the reading of Homer's Odyssey. Besides translating passages
from the poem, we'll discuss and review forms and constructions as they
appear in our reading. Midterm, final, and some quizzes. Prerequisite:
Greek 2 or the equivalent, or permission of the instructor. In this course will focus on reading selections from Herodotus in the original. Those familiar with Homer will find that Herodotus's Ionic dialect brings back fond memories. For the sake of continuity and an overview, we'll also read the whole history in English translation. There will be some secondary readings, discussions, midterm, final, and paper. HEBREW LITERATURE - NO COURSES OFFERED SPRING 2000 LTIT 12C LTIT 122 In this course we will study a variety of cultural artifacts--fotoromanzi, comics magazine and newspaper articles, advertisements, etc.---produced by and for the mass media in contemporary Italy. The class will be conducted entirely in Italian, and all written exercises and exams will be in Italian. LTKO 1C LTLA 3 LTLA 134 NEAR EASTERN LITERATURES - NO COURSES OFFERED SPRING 2000 PORTUGUESE LITERATURE - NO COURSES OFFERED SPRING 2000 LTRU 1C LTRU 129 This course examines contemporary film and short fiction from the former Soviet Union that reflect the vast political, social, and cultural changes that have taken place there since 1985. We will focus on works notable for their stylistic innovations as well as for the new openness with which they address previously forbidden themes, whether historical (i.e. the Stalinist past), social (i.e., sex), or aesthetic (i.e., the emergence of previously silenced narrative voices or subversive takes on Soviet-era cultural monuments). Class discussions will also address issues of national identity, gender roles and sexuality, ethnic conflicts, and the role of resurrected or repressed memory in constructing a post-Soviet present. We will read short works by Tatiana Tolstaia, Liudmila Petruhevskaia, Nina Sadur, Vladamir Makanin, Dmitri Prigov, Viktor Pelevin and others. Films will include Tengiz Abuladze's Repentence, Nikita Mikhalkov's Burnt by the Sun, Sergei Livnev's Hammer and Sickle, Natalia P'iankova's Strange Time, Rashid Nugmanov's Wild East and others. Readings will be done in Russian, if taken for LTRU credit. All films will be subtitled in English. Students who enroll under this Russian section of the class must write their papers in Russian. Class discussions will be conducted in English. LTSP 2A This 5-unit intermediate course meets four days per week and is taught
entirely in Spanish. LTSP 2A emphasizes the development of reading ability,
listening comprehension, and writing skills. It includes grammar review,
short readings, lab work, class discussions, and working with Spanish-
language materials available on the Internet. This course is designed
to prepare students for LTSP 2B and 2C. A diagnostic test will be administered
on the first day. Prerequisite: Completion of LlSP 1C/CX or its equivalent.
DEPARTMENT APPROVAL FOR LTSP 2D IS AVAILABLE IN
THE LITERATURE UNDERGRADUATE OFFICE FROM 9:00-3:30, MONDAY THROUGH FRIDAY,
BEGINNING 2/16/00, WEDNESDAY. LTSP 2D IS INTENDED FOR STUDENTS WITH A
SPANISH-SPEAKING BACKGROUND. PLEASE SEE INSTRUCTOR PRIOR TO ENROLLMENT.
Prerequisite: Native speaking ability and/or recommendation of instructor.
LTSP 41 LTSP 50C Notes: The Final Exam for LTSP 50C is scheduled for Monday, June 12th. Enrollment for LTSP 50C requires department approval. The aim of this course is not to teach poetry but to provide an opportunity
to enjoy it, to acquire the appropriate critical tools, and to discuss
it seriously. A selection of Spanish and Spanish American poems will be
studied, ranging from the late nineteenth century until today. The course
is intended for students who want to know more about how Spanish Poems
work and what makes them effective. Although background information will
be given on the poets and their social and cultural contexts, emphasis
will be given on the poets and their social and cultural contexts, emphasis
will be on the close reading of individual poems and the reader's response.
Poetry is as much a spoken as a written form and the poems will be read
aloud in class, with particular attention being paid to sound patterns.
Students will be encouraged to bring to class and talk about the poems
they have found themselves and enjoyed. The following texts will be used as a framework, though other poems will be distributed during the course:
Other poets studied will be: Alfonsina Storni and Jorge Luis Borges (Argentina), Miguel Hernández (Spain), Nicolás Guillén, Fina García Marruz and Dulce María loynaz (Cuba), as well as contemporary Cuban women poets. In addition to these founding poets/texts, attention will be paid to
popular poetry, for example Flamenco 'coplas,' tango lyrics and the lyrics
of contemporary songwriters such as Juan Manuel Serrat (Spain) and Pablo
Milaneés (Cuba).
LTSP 130B We shall deal with representative works by periods: the Brevisima relación... by B. de Las Casas (1552) for the Conquest, Sor Juana and Juan Ruíz de Alarcon for the Colonial times, and so forth. The center of the course will be the cultural developments after the Independence (1810-25). Two examinations, one intermediate and one final, and perhaps---according
to the number of students---a brief oral examination. LTSP 142 Two exams, one intermediate and one final, plus an oral presentation
of 15 or 20 minutes (this will depend on the number of registered students).
Este curso consta de dos partes fundamentales. En la primera, analizamos algunos escritos teóricos sobre la relación literatura-siciedad. En la segunda, buscaremos ejemplificar las reflexiones sociológicas a través del estudio de varias textos claves de la literatura puertorriqueña. Al enfrentar las interrogantes ontológicas "¿qué somos?" y "¿cómo somos?", abordaremos una gama de temas importantes: el debate racial, la emigración, el feminismo y el militarismo norteamericano, ejemplificado en la situació actual de la Isla de Vieques. LTTH 100 An introduction to a number of major twentieth-century intellectual movements
in which literature and culture are studied from various theoretical perspectives.
The aim of the course is to give the student a foothold in some of the
basic categories and terminologies of contemporary theoretical discourse,
and to examine critically some of the points of contention among different
theoretical models. This is intended as a foundation for further work,
especially for undergraduates with plans for graduate work in literature
and cultural studies. Critical movements studied will include the (now
old) "new criticism", structuralism and poststructuralism, feminist
criticism, new historicism, and postcolonial criticism. Selected readings
from various sources (to be announced). LTWL 19C We will read works written in Latin from about 200 B.C. to 100 A.D. I will try to fill in the historical, social, and philosophical background. There will be two papers, a midterm, and a final. LTWL 101 Socrates denied that he knew or taught anything, yet few in the Western
philosophical tradition have contributed more to ethics, epistemology,
and metaphysics than he. Through a careful reading of the writings of
his admirers and adversaries we shall try to determine just what Socrates
knew (about, for example, life, death, virtue, happiness, love, and the
gods) and how he knew it. While the evolution of classical and normative Islam will be described and analysed, attention will be given to the varieties of Islamic institutions, beliefs and practices in different social, regional and political contexts, from the sectarian traditions that developed out of the civil wars following the death of the Prophet Muhammed to the eclecticism of the modern Nation of Islam in America. The final section of the course will address ways in which Islamic traditions
are modernising and examine contemporary conflicts and debates in the
aftermath of the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran, the civil war in Algeria,
and other conflicts where governments perceived as undemocratic or too
pro-Western are challenged in the name of revitalised Islamic (or Islamist)
movements. The aim of the course is to examine 'fundamentalisms' by exploring the
common areas in the revivalist movements affecting different religious
traditions, including Hinduism, Sikhism, Judaism, Christianity and Islam
with reference to their political, social, and cultural dimensions. The
problematic term 'fundamentalism' will be subjected to critical scrutiny,
while emphasis will be placed on distinguishing the specifically religious
features of these movements from their wider socio-political dimensions.
The first half of the course will chart the 'F-word" through different
religious traditions, starting with its original application in Southern
California in the early 1900s. The second half will explore common themes
and applications across the religious boundaries. Are there features common
to "fundamentalist' movements that can be applied to all these traditions?
For example, is there a common 'patriarchal' thread, a reaction to the
increasing presence of women in the workplace? After the collapse of the
Soviet Union and the emergence of a market economy in China, are religious
fundamentalisms manifestations of opposition to economic globalisation?
If the turn-of-the-century novel, as one moment in literary history of
"modernism," narrates a form of metropolitan subjectivity that
depends upon represented struggles between reason and the unconscious,
enlightenment and faith, home and empire, private domesticity and the
public sphere, interiority and exteriority, masculine civilization and
feminine nature, and so forth - how do we "read" the transportation
of the novel to the colonies themselves? To answer this, we must turn
to consider novels that necessarily narrate another side of modernity:
novels from Nigeria, Jamaica, the Philippines, Korea, and India. LTWL 172 STUDENTS MUST HAVE COMPLETED THEIR COLLEGE WRITING REQUIREMENTS PRIOR TO ENROLLMENT IN LTWR 8A-B-C. LTWR 8 A, B, AND C ARE PREREQUISITES TO DECLAIRING A MAJOR IN WRITING. STUDENTS ENROLLED IN LTWR 8A AND 8B ARE REQUIRED TO ATTEND 3 READINGS IN THE NEW WRITING SERIES. See Literature Department for times and dates. LTWR 8A This course welcomes you to the backstage area of nonfiction writing, broadly defined. Classes will alternate from workshop, on Thursdays, to lectures and discussions of readings (and anything else that arises), on Tuesdays. The workshop format places emphasis on student writing. The reading load is light to moderate. Required work includes eight writing or revision assignments, each two pages long, and several grammar exercises. The course grade is based on a ten-page final project (50%), on workshop performance (30%), and on class participation and attendance (20%0. Our project is to master the grammatical patterns that constitute the literature of fact. DEPARTMENT APPROVAL FOR UPPER-DIVISION WRITING
COURSES IS AVAILABLE IN THE LITERATURE UNDERGRADUATE OFFICE FROM 9:00-3:30,
MONDAY THROUGH FRIDAY. LTWR 100 The class will also focus on the process of publishing, giving students
an introductory understanding of what they will need to do to see their
work in print. Prerequisite: LTWR 8A. By introducing to the students modernist writings in China, which is
one of the most complex forms of antagonistic symbiosis brought about
by the battles and negotiations between native sensibility and alien ideologies
forced upon her writers by the aggressive acts of Western colonizing activities,
we hope to help the students leap out of their still enclosed elitist
positions and understand that anxieties, solitudes, hesitations, doubts,
nostalgia, expectancy, exile and dreams need not come from an insulated
private space. Like the modern Chinese poets or like most Third World
and Latin American writers (including American writers of inner cities
and internal colonies), they can be, and perhaps should be dialectical
transfigurations from tensions and agonies of acculturation in the process
of crosshatching and fertilization. LTWR 120 LTWR 121 Please Contact Department for Course Description Information. |