| AFRICAN LITERATURE -- No Course Offerings Fall 2004 LTAM 108 -- INTELLECTUAL AND POLITICAL TRADITIONS: THE CHICANO
MOVEMENT 1965-1975 LTAM 111 -- LATIN AMERICAN LITERATURE IN TRANSLATION: COMPARATIVE
CARIBBEAN DISCOURSE CHINESE LITERATURE -- No Course Offerings Fall 2004 CLASSICS LTGK 1 (BEGINNING GREEK) COMPARATIVE LITERATURE -- No Course Offerings Fall 2004 LTCS 130 -- GENDER,
RACE AND ETHNICITY, CLASS AND CULTURE: RACE, RACISM, AND JAPAN In contrast to the pervasive "myth of homogeneity," many textual accounts attest to the differences, diversities and heterogeneity in Japanese culture and society. In this course, we will consider films, 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" national culture been produced historically in relationship to its "others"?; What are the interplays 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 multiethnic empire?; How has "whiteness" been constructed as both object of consumption and site of privilege?; How do the differences of race and ethnicity intersect with other important differences?; And what kinds of literary and other cultural-political practices have those minoritized in Japan exercised in resisting the dominant racial ideology and arrangements? Rather than positing “race” as pre-established socio-cultural category, the course examines the relational formations of race/ethnicity, citizenship and nationality in the global processes of capitalism, colonialism, imperialism, and migration. The course, moreover, explores what are the possible forms of anti-racist alliances across the national and other borders between Japan (there) and the U.S. (here). LTCS 150 -- TOPICS
IN CULTURAL STUDIES: VISUAL CULTURES This course will deal with aspects of visual representation, its production, dissemination, reception and use through a variety of media including photography and film. Our readings will take us into the world of advertising, museum exhibitions, art photography, mainstream and independent film and forms of vernacular visual vocabularies such as the family photo album. Assignments will include a weekly 1 page write-up on a visual artifact/item that will be distributed in class. LTEA 120A - CHINESE
FILMS: VISIONS OF THE CITY This course investigates visions of the city constructed in Chinese cinema over 80 years. We will watch films produced as early as 1922 and as recently as 2002. Weekly topics include urban entertainment and teahouse culture (1920s), urban corruption and cosmopolitanism (1930s), urban reconfiguration and idealism (1940s), urban reconstruction and socialist virtues (1950s), urban history and revolutionary aesthetics (1960s-1970s), urban transformation and ideological critique (1980s), urban migration and female sexuality (1980s-1990s), urban enigma and male subjectivity (1990s-2000s), urban fantasy and postsocialist nostalgia (1990s-2000s), as well as urban theater and global commercialism (2000s). No knowledge of the Chinese language is required, but upper-division standing is recommended. All primary films carry English subtitles, and all reading is done in English. LTEN 21 -- INTRODUCTION
TO LITERATURE OF THE BRITISH ISLES: PRE 1660
This course surveys English literature from Old English to the middle of the
seventeenth century. Among the texts we will consider will be Beowulf, Chaucer’s Canterbury
Tales, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Spenser’s Fairie
Queene, Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus, and Milton’s Paradise Lost.
We will also examine selections from medieval lyric and drama, Kempe, Donne,
Jonson, Herbert, Herrick, and Marvell. Lectures will discuss these texts and
their cultural, social, political, and religious contexts, with special attention
to issues of gender and sexuality. The course is designed to familiarize students
with the traditional “canon” of early English literature, but also to facilitate
an understanding of how that canon came to be formed and to encourage questioning
of the idea of the “canon” itself. Writing America: Literatures of the United States before 1865 This is a survey course whose aim is to provide students with an overview of literature produced before 1865 in the geographical space we now understand to be the United States. Supporting goals of the course include:
Texts will include the Heath Anthology of American Literature, Vol. 1, and at least one paperback novel. Students will be expected to attend class and discussion section regularly, participate in class discussion, and complete a range of writing projects that may include journals, essays, exams, and at least one paper of literary analysis. LTEN 28 -- INTRODUCTION
TO ASIAN/AMERICAN LITERATURE In this class we analyze selected Asian American writers with diverse literary forms and writing styles. We study issues such as history and memory, gender and sexuality, generational conflict and home and belonging. From the writings of the early immigrants carved on the walls of Angel Island to the works of later immigrants from Southeast Asia, Asian American writing speaks of many histories and identities. We include poems, plays, short stories and extracts from novels and memoirs. Works of Wakako Yamauchi, Mitsuye Yamada, Bienvenido Santos, Lan Cao and Kim Ronyoung among others are included. LTEN 107-- CHAUCER: THE
CANTERBURY TALES (a) In this course we will attempt to situate Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales within historical, cultural, and literary contexts. We’ll pay special attention to issues of gender and sexuality and how they inflect Chaucer’s poetics and politics and also consider how Chaucer’s work engages with contemporary events, such as the Black Death and the Peasant’s Revolt of 1381. All readings will be in Middle English, but no prior experience reading Middle English is required. LTEN 112 -- SHAKESPEARE
I: ELIZABETHAN PERIOD (a) Please see the Literature Undergraduate Office, room 110 for a copy of the course description for this course. LTEN 127B -- VICTORIAN
POETRY (c) Using a good new anthology, supplemented by single volumes for certain hard-to-find items, we will make a survey of all the expected poets from the Victorian period---male and female, with mostly short but sometimes long ambitious poems. We will also read other writers among those not usually taught---writers out of favor now, writers of humorous verse, lesbian writers, working class writers, dialect writers. Among those on the list: Tennyson, Browning, Arnold, Robert Browning, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, G.M. Hopkins, Charlotte Mew, William Barnes, Thomas Hardy, Lionel Johnson, and Arthur Hugh Clough. At intervals in the quarter, we will take some time in class meetings to discuss, and to relate to the assigned readings in Victorian poetry, the figure of Victoria herself; several social themes in Victorian culture such as industrialism, role of women, education; the Great Exhibition of 1851; and visual arts in the period. Assignments: a prosody exercise; a short and a long paper; and an essay-based final examination with considerable choice of topics that will be known from the first day of the quarter. LTEN 140 -- EARLY
NINETEENTH CENTURY BRITISH NOVEL: JANE AUSTEN (b) This is a course about the novels of Jane Austen and their social and historical context in the early nineteenth century. We will be reading Austen's major completed novels in order of their estimated dates of composition and completion: Northanger Abbey, Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park, Emma and Persuasion. We will be exploring issues that arise from a historically-informed reading of the novels: for example, her position as a woman writer, her political views and the references (or absence of them) in her texts to the great historical events of her own day. We will focus especially upon her representations of gender and social class. We also will discuss her writing style and her satire. The class will have a lecture component, but it will also emphasize class discussion, and it will involve small-group discussions on each novel. There will be a midterm, a paper, and a final examination. (NOTE: The following quarter, Winter, 2005, I will be offering a follow-up course to this one, in which we read the less-known work of Austen, such as her juvenilia, her letters and her unfinished fiction, look at this history of Austen criticism, discuss the formation of the image of “Jane Austen,” and explore contemporary appropriations of Jane Austen in film and writing. *Familiarity with Austen’s major novels—gained, for instance, by taking this course in the Fall or having read Austen elsewhere—will be a prerequisite for the second course in the Winter.) LTEN 142 -- END
OF VICTORIANISM: FROM STEVENSON TO KIPLING (b) Towards the end of the Victorian period, literature went into a new phase, and the old names of Charles Dickens, Anthony Trollope, and George Eliot became replaced by those of Joseph Conrad, Thomas Hardy, and Rudyard Kipling. “High” literature--the serious social novel of up to a thousand pages which went inexhaustibly into our daily lives was replaced; the new fiction being shorter, more action-oriented, tilted towards a new marketplace. The forms of fiction changed--from Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde to Arthur Conan Doyle’s stories of Sherlock Holmes, there was a new kind of look at life at the end of the nineteenth century. LTEN 149 -- THEMES
IN ENGLISH AND AMERICAN LITERATURE: LITERATURE
AND THE CITY: 20th CENTURY URBAN LIFE From early twentieth-century essays about the threatening decadence of urban life, to early twenty-first century narratives about the emergence of the global city, this course will trace the development of “the city” as an imaginative site where a broad array of cultural anxieties converge. Drawing from historical as well as fictional texts, we will inquire into the economic and social transformations that lead to the city’s emergence as a primary material and conceptual site through which our lived experiences of gender, race, class, and nation are produced. Readings will include Ann Petry’s The Street, Fae Ng’s Bone, Nathanael West’s The Day of the Locust, Anna Deveare Smith’s Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992, Loida Pérez’s Geographies of Home, and essays by Mike Davis, Fredric Jameson, George Lipsitz, Georg Simmel, Anthony Vidler, Edward Soja, Joan Didion, Jane Jacobs, Guy Debord, Kay Anderson. LTEN 159 -- CONTEMPORARY
AMERICAN LITERATURE: LITERATURES
OF THE 1950s (d) This class will study the literature and culture of the 1950s, an era usually regarded as placid, conservative and conformist--the "tranquilized fifties," as Robert Lowell said. This same decade saw the emergence of significant artistic and literary innovation , a powerful Civil Rights movement, alternative lifestyle options and bohemian counter-culture whose social impact continues to be felt. It was the era of the early Cold War standoff between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R., and much of the literature of this period could be seen as a response to the pervasive attitude of intellectual consensus to the policy of containment that dominated foreign policy of the period. In order to explore these issues, we will study key cultural documents of the Cold War--J.D. Salinger's Catcher in the Rye, Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, William Burroughs' Naked Lunch, Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar, Alfred Hitchcock's Rear Window, John Frankenheimer's The Manchurian Candidate, the essays of James Baldwin and Dwight MacDonald, the writings of Muriel Rukeyser and Gwendolyn Brooks, the Beat and Confessional poets, the painting of Jackson Pollock and Willem deKooning. We will set such works within intellectual debates of the period concerning mass society and consumerism, consensus and individualism, subversion and surveillance, racial prejudice and racial equality. Many of these debates are underwritten by the normalization of gender roles as embodied in the new corporate organization man and the suburban domestic female worker. Yet these stereotypes of the "other-directed" individual were contested by new versions of masculinity and femininity being presented in literary works such as those listed above as well as in mass culture icons like James Dean, Marilyn Monroe and Elvis Presley. Hence in reading the culture of the national security state, we will also be looking at a state of national gendered insecurity. Students in the seminar will be asked to develop a research proposal on some aspect of 1950s literary culture, culminating in a final research paper. Along the way, students will also write two shorter papers on specific aspects of the reading. LTEN 175A --NEW
AMERICAN FICTION: WWII-PRESENT This course focuses on twentieth-century literatures of migration, immigration, and dislocation to consider how movement across national borders challenges the purportedly fixed categories of gender, race, and sexuality. We will consider a broad spectrum of contemporary novels and critical essays to address the ways in which migration and travel are gendered and racialized experiences, and to explore the material, political, and economic conditions that demand the body’s mobility or stasis, immigration or exile. Readings will include Helena Viramontes’s Under the Feet of Jesus, Bharati Mukherjee’s Jasmine, Jamaica Kincaid’s A Small Place, Lan Cao’s Monkey Bridge, Achy Obejas’s Memory Mambo, and Paule Marshall’s The Chosen Place, The Timeless People. LTEN 176 -- MAJOR
AMERICAN WRITERS: FITZGERALD,
HEMINGWAY, AND THE TWENTIES (d) F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway did their best work in the decade of the twenties, and they came to characterize that period of American life. We will study their major novels: The Great Gatsby, The Sun Also Rises, and A Farewell to Arms; and in addition a good chunk of their short stories. Among the stories will be Fitzgerald’s “The Diamond as Big as the Ritz” and “Bernice Bobs Her Hair,” and Hemingway’s “The Killers” and “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place.” LTEN 184 -- AFRICAN
AMERICAN POETRY: BLACK
POWER TO A POST-BLACK (?) PRESENT(d) Proceeding from the question “what makes a poem black?” this class will engage poetry in its historical, political, and social contexts from the 1960s --the Black Arts Movement and beyond-- to the present, post-black, post-millennial moment. Definitions of both poetry and blackness are multiple, even if they lodge in our consciousness as specific things, therefore much of our energy in this class will be devoted to understanding what imperatives have been placed upon the “black” poet and how individual poets have chosen to pursue their art. In this last respect, the notion of marginality will be important and will direct our attention to writers who have found the margins of the mainstream to be a useful place to produce their work from. We will do a lot of work in this class, learning how to read, listen to, and write about poetry. This is not a lecture course. Requirements for the course include but are not limited to regular class participation, attendance at two mandatory poetry readings, a midterm, and two papers. Writers we will read include among others Amiri Baraka, Elizabeth Alexander, Harryette Mullen, Etheridge Knight, Audre Lorde, Quincy Troupe, Sherley Anne Williams, Sonia Sánchez, Ai, and Yusef Komunyakaa. LTEN Upper Division Codes:
Return to top of LTEN section EUROPEAN AND EURASIAN LITERATURE LTEU 150A -- RUSSIAN
AND SOVIET LITERATURE: 1800-1860 Classic Russian literature from 1800 to 1860. The syllabus will include works by Pushkin, Lermontov, Gogol, Dostoevsky, and Tolstoy.
LTFR 2A -- INTERMEDIATE
FRENCH I Second-year course designed to be taken after 1C/CX. 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 -- INTERMEDIATE
FRENCH II We continue the review of grammar begun in LTFR 2A. To strengthen language skill, 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 -- INTERMEDIATE
FRENCH III: COMPOSITION AND CULTURAL ISSUES Designed for students who wish to further improve writing and conversational skills. Most advanced course in the program that offers a formal review of grammar. Oral skills are practiced through discussions of cultural issues presented in a contemporary novel and a film. May be applied towards a minor in French literature or towards fulfilling the secondary literature requirement. Students having completed 2C can register in upper-level courses (115 or 116). Prerequisite: LTFR 2B or equivalent or a score of 5 on the AP French language exam. LTFR 21 -- CONVERSATION
WORKSHOP I One-unit, 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: LIFR 1C/CX or consent of instructor. LTFR 31 -- CONVERSATION
WORKSHOP II A one-unit, 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. LTFR 50 -- INTERMEDIATE
FRENCH III: TEXTUAL ANALYSIS This course emphasizes the development of language skills and the practice of textual analysis. Discussions are based on analysis of poems as well as on a novel and films. May be applied towards a minor in French literature or towards fulfilling the secondary literature requirement. Students having completed 50 can register in upper-level courses (115 or 116). Prerequisite: LTFR 2B or equivalent or a score of 5 on the AP French language exam. LTFR 115 -- THEMES
IN INTELLECTUAL AND LITERARY HISTORY Lecture et présentation de textes du Moyen-Age au 18e siècle. LTFR 123 -- EIGHTEENTH
CENTURY La littérature française du 18e siècle ne nous a pas laissé de bonne tragédie. La raison en est sans doute que le genre avait besoin d'être renouvelé pour correspondre à une nouvelle situation. En revanche la comédie, plus proche de la vie, réussit très bien. Le théâtre doit donc s'interroger à nouveau sur sa fonction. C'est ce que font les auteurs dramatiques plus ou moins directement dans leur effort pour capter un nouveau langage et de nouvelles formes de relations psychologiques et sociales. Le meilleur exemple en est Marivaux ( nous le verrons savec Les fausses confidences). Mais il arrive que ce soit le théâtre comme tel qui est mis en question et attaqué, comme le fait Rousseau dans sa Lettre sur les spectacles où il dénonce l'effet d'illusion du théâtre et le présente comme une école du mensonge. A cette perspective puritaine réplique la conception baroque et subtile de Diderot (in Le paradoxe sur le comédien) qui conçoit le théâtre comme un dispositif de simulation qui est le meilleur moyen de faire éclater la vérité. LTFR 124 -- NINETEENTH
CENTURY: ROMANS DU 19E SIECLE Nous étudierons trois textes dans lesquels les thèmes du voyage et de l'étranger jouent un rôle essentiel. Textes choisis:Carmen de Prosper Mérimée, Indiana de George Sand et Le mariage de Loti de Pierre Loti. LTGM 2A -- INTERMEDIATE
GERMAN I LTGM 2A is the first course in the Intermediate German sequence. While offered by the Literature Department, it does not focus exclusively on literary texts. We do read works of short fiction, but also work with non-fiction texts (Sachtexte) dealing with aspects of German culture, history and society. Last but not least, LTGM 2A begins a thorough review of German grammar. The course uses a four-skills approach, i.e. we work on reading and writing as well as speaking and listening comprehension. Language of instruction: (na klar!) German. Prerequisite: LIGM 1C/1CX or equivalent (AP score of 3, transfer credit). Please contact instructor before the quarter begins with any placement questions. LTGM 101 -- GERMAN
STUDIES II: NATIONAL IDENTITY Taking its cue from a 1993 Berlin poster campaign promoting social tolerance, the course asks a deceptively simple question: "Was ist deutsch?" The question has received many different answers, depending on who posed it, who answered, and in what context. This seminar explores some of those contexts (cultural, social, political) in an effort to better understand what it means to be German today. Issues we will consider include: notions of 'Heimat,' youth culture, post-unification attitudes, and Germany's place in the European Union. Taught in German. Prerequisite: LTGM 2C or equivalent, or instructor's permission. LTGK 1 -- BEGINNING
GREEK: INTRODUCTION TO HOMERIC GREEK Introduction to the grammar of ancient Greek, with readings appropriate to this level, including some from Plato, Euripides, Homer, the New Testament, and others. This is the first of a three-quarter sequence, by the spring quarter of which we'll be reading Homer's Odyssey in the original Greek. Following successful completion of this sequence (LTGK 1-2-3), students will be eligible to enroll in upper-division Greek Literature courses. Quizzes, midterm, final, and daily homework. LTGK 135 -- GREEK LYRIC POETRY Readings, in ancient Greek, of the superb lyric poets of the archaic period, including Sappho, Archilochus, Alcaeus, and others. Elementary Greek a prerequisite. HEBREW LITERATURE -- No Course Offerings Fall 2004 LTIT 2A -- INTERMEDIATE
ITALIAN I A second-year course in Italian language and literature. Conversation, composition, grammar review, and an introduction to literary and nonliterary texts. Preequisite: LIIT 1C, LIIT 1C/1CX, or equivalent or consent of the instructor. LTIT 100 -- INTRODUCTION
TO LITERATURES IN ITALIAN Dino Buzzati e Alberto Moravia scrivono di mondi diversi. Il mondo di Buzzati è surreale e metafisico, popolato da fantasmi e allegorie. La Roma del Dopoguerra, vista e raccontata da Moravia pullula di storie interessanti, comiche, patetiche e tipiche di un mondo in transformazione Leggeremo due raccolte di racconti: La boutique del mistero di Buzzati, e Racconti romani di Moravia. Un esame finale da completare a casa, una presentazione orale. La partecipazione attiva è essenziale. LTKO 1A is designed to help students develop beginning-level skills in the Korean language. Section C is recommended for students who have no Korean language background, and Section A and B are recommended for students who have Korean language background. The concentration is on the development of reading and writing skills (Sec. A, B), listening and speaking skills (Sec. C), and cultural understanding. LTKO 1A -- BEGINNING
KOREAN: FIRST YEAR I First year Korean 1A (5 units) is the first part of the Beginning Korean series. This course is designed to assist students to develop low-beginning level skills in the Korean language. These skills are speaking, listening, reading, and writing, as well as cultural understanding. This course will begin by introducing the writing and sound system of the Korean language. The remainder of the course will focus on grammatical patterns such as basic sentence structures, some grammatical points, and expressions. Upon completion of this course, students will be able to do the following in Korean: Speaking: Able to communicate minimally with learned material. Oral production is limited to several isolated words or expressions. Listening: Able to occasionally understand familiar words in limited social contexts. Reading: Able to identify a few words and/or phrases in context. Writing: Able to copy some Korean script in a recognizable fashion and perhaps write a few words. LTKO 1B -- BEGINNING
KOREAN: FIRST YEAR II LTKO 1B is designed to help students develop beginning-level skills in the Korean language. LTKO 1B is recommended for students who have Korean language background, and concentrates on reading and writing skills, and cultural understanding. 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. 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: Able to communicate minimally with learned material. Oral production is often limited to repetition of input as well as some courtesy expressions. Content of speech may consist of common lexical items related to people, objects, and basic numbers. Listening: Able to understand some short learned utterances in familiar contexts although misunderstandings and pauses for assimilation are frequent. Reading: Able to identify a number of highly contextualized words and/or phrases, including some borrowed words, in very predictable texts, such as public announcements. Writing: Able to copy most Korean script accurately and write a limited number of familiar words with some inaccuracy. Can produce with inaccuracies a few very simple formulaic sentences consisting of learned material. LTKO 2A -- INTERMEDIATE
KOREAN: SECOND YEAR I LTKO 2A is designed to help students develop intermediate-level skills in the Korean language. Upon completion of this course, students are expected to have a good command of Korean in various daily conversational situations. Second Year Korean 2C (5 units) is the third 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, 2A and 2B courses. Students in this course will learn high-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 be able to do the following in Korean: Speaking: Able to handle, successfully, most uncomplicated communicative tasks and social situations, partially distinguishing appropriate polite and formal speech styles within these social situations. Able to narrate and partially describe simple activities and situations in connected speech using a variety of the more frequent conjunctions. Listening: Able to partially understand segments of connected discourse related to a variety of contexts, i.e., a narrative about leisure or recreation. Comprehension may depend somewhat on contextual and subject matter knowledge, and understanding may be inconsistent due to failure to grasp cohesive cues (comparison, cause-effect, time sequence), pragmatic cues (speech styles and/or honorific expressions), and details. Reading: Able to partially understand texts of several paragraphs in length, such as news items featuring narration and/or description, when those texts feature a clear underlying structure and if expectations cued by the text are fulfilled. Understanding may depend somewhat on contextual and subject matter knowledge, and rereading several times may be necessary. Writing: Able to write some descriptions and narratives on familiar topics by using rudimentary connected discourse which features both simple and complex sentence structures. LTKO 3A - ADVANCED
KOREAN: THIRD YEAR This course is designed to help students develop advanced-level skills in the Korean language. Upon completion of this course students are expected to have a good command of Korean in various formal settings and to understand/read daily news broadcasts/newspapers. Third Year Korean 3A (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: Able to satisfy routine social demands and school or work requirements and handle a wide variety of communicative tasks using appropriate speech styles. Can narrate and describe in paragraphs linking sentences together smoothly with cohesive devices. Can state an opinion, but not yet fully support it, on topics of general interest, such as current events, politics, and social issues. Can handle situations with a complication or an unforeseen turn of events, such as being stranded at an airport, losing documents, and being late for work. Errors rarely cause misunderstandings, even in communication with native speakers unaccustomed to interacting with foreigners. Listening: Able to understand main ideas and most details of connected discourse on a variety of factual topics beyond the immediacy of the situation. Texts include most face-to-face speech and factual radio and television reports involving description and narration and featuring interviews or short talks on familiar subjects. Reading: Able to understand main ideas and many details of texts of several paragraphs in length, such as news items featuring narration and/or description and a modest number of Chinese characters. Comprehension derives not only from contextual and subject matter knowledge but from control of the language. Writing: Able to write texts of several paragraphs in length, narrating, describing, and providing information on familiar, factual topics such as current events, social life, work, and leisure. Can perform additional tasks of expressing emotions and making thoughts adequately with some circumlocution. Native readers have no difficulty understanding writing at this level. LTLA I -- BEGINNING
LATIN We will cover chapters 1-16 of Wheelock's Latin by Frederic M. Wheelock (6th edition). Expect to have a quiz almost every week, plus a midterm and final. Quizzes are worth 30%, the midterm 30%, the final 30%, class participation and other factors 10%. However, when figuring your final grade, I will take improvement (or the lack thereof) into account. I also reserve the right to institute written homework assignments and more frequent quizzes if necessary. Latin is not taught as a spoken language, so the emphasis will not be on conversing so much as pronouncing correctly through oral drills. There are, however, many grammatical principles to be learned. In some ways, Latin is more like math or science than it is like a modern foreign language; you will soon find it impossible to "get the gist" of the readings unless you know the grammatical rules thoroughly. Therefore, I urge you not to fall behind -- it is very difficult to catch up. LTLA I -- BEGINNING
LATIN Due to Rome's (accidental) role as disseminator of Greek culture in antiquity, its creation of an interesting civilization in its own right, and the fortuitous domination of English vocabulary by Latin words, the study of the Romans' language was long thought to be the key to important areas of knowledge. It remains so even now, though today it is more saluted with cluckings of the tongue ("I wish I'd gotten around to studying Latin!") than actual, committed investigation. The study of this language must not be undertaken casually by the mildly curious. It entails an uncommon dedication to laborious homework assignments and the thinking-through of vexing grammatical problems every day. The reward, long in coming, is an improved ability to express one's thoughts in English and a dawning awareness of issues in literature, political theory, philosophy, and history first articulated in antiquity. LTLA 100 -- INTRODUCTION:
LATIN LITERATURE I Readings in Latin prose, with intensive review of Latin vocabulary, morphology and syntax. This course entails a substantial investment of time and energy, but will measurably improve students' abilities in reading Latin. Prerequisite is satisfactory completion of Latin 3 or equivalent. LTLA 100 -- INTRODUCTION
LATIN LITERATURE I A transitional course which looks back to the days of grammar (not so distant and, truth be told, not so well remembered [i.e. the grammar isn't well remembered; the suffering is]) and forward to further Latin glories (even though most students are content to say goodbye to the grandeur of ancient Rome in Latin 100). In This version of the course, we'll read various authors on various subjects, the goal being practice with different types of Latin (prose, poetry, fable, biography, history, oratory) in order to improve students' reading ability. As before, the format is recitation, with a little more opportunity for discussion of topics such as the Roman ethos and outlook. In addition, a much-cherished composition component will help students review grammatical points before they slip utterly from grasp. Mid-term, paper, final. LTLA 132 -- LYRIC
AND ELEGIAC POETRY: THE POETRY OF HORACE NEAR EASTERN LITERATURE -- No Course Offerings Fall 2004
LTRU 1A -- FIRST
YEAR RUSSIAN Embark on a grand voyage into the mechanics and mystery of Russian language, culture, and people. We will journey forth into all forms of communication--reading, writing, speaking, and listening. We will begin acquiring basic vocabulary and grammar skills and attempt to apply them both mechanically and creatively. Original Russian materials will supplement the basic text and language lab tapes. This course meets TuTh for grammar lectures and MW for conversation. Every effort will be made to integrate material on Russian culture into the language curriculum. LTRU 2A -- SECOND
YEAR RUSSIAN We will recollect and expand on the language acquisitions of our previous voyages and set out into new, unexplored territories. While systematically reviewing grammar, we will begin focusing on the language for more creative purposes in reading, writing, listening, and speaking. Language lab videos and readings texts will supplement the basic text. This course meets TuTh for grammar lectures and MW for conversation. Every effort will be made to integrate material on Russian culture into the language curriculum. LTRU 104A -- ADVANCED
PRACTICUM IN RUSSIAN Development of advanced skills in reading, writing, and conversation. Course based on written and oral texts of various genres and styles. Individualized program to meet specific student needs. May be substituted for LTRU 101 A-B-C as requirement for major. Prerequisite for 104A: LTRU 2C or equivalent. LTRU 110A -- RUSSIAN
AND SOVIET LITERATURE: 1800-1860 Classic Russian literature from 1800 to 1860. The syllabus will include works by Pushkin, Lermontov, Gogol, Dostoevsky, and Tolstoy.
LTSP 2A -- INTERMEDIATE
SPANISH I: FOUNDATIONS This 5 unit intermediate course meets 4 days per week and is taught entirely in Spanish. LTSP 2A emphasizes the development of communicative skills, reading ability, listening comprehension and writing skills. It includes grammar review, short readings, class discussions and working with Spanish-language video and Internet materials. This course is designed to prepare students for LTSP 2B and 2C. A diagnostic test will be administered on the first day. Prerequisites: Completion of Li/Sp 1C/CX, its equivalent, or a score of 3 on the AP Spanish language exam. Note: The final exam for LTSP 2A is scheduled for Monday, December 6th, 2004. LTSP 2B -- INTERMEDIATE
SPANISH II: READINGS AND COMPOSITION This intermediate course is designed for students who wish to improve their grammatical competence, ability to speak, read and write Spanish. It is a continuation of LTSP 2A with special emphasis on problems in writing and interpretation. Students meet with the instructor 4 days per week. Work for this 5 unit course includes oral presentations, grammar review, writing assignments, class discussions on the readings and work with Spanish-language video and Internet materials. A diagnostic test will be administered on the first day. Prerequisites: Completion of LTSP 2A, its equivalent, or a score of 4 on the AP Spanish language exam. Note: The final exam for LTSP 2B is scheduled for Monday, December 6th, 2004. LTSP 2C -- INTERMEDIATE
SPANISH III: CULTURAL TOPICS The goal of this intermediate language course is twofold: to further develop all skill areas in Spanish and to increase Spanish language-based cultural literacy. LTSP 2C is a continuation of the LTSP second-year sequence with special emphasis on problems in grammar, writing and translation. It includes class discussions of cultural topics as well as grammar review and composition assignments. The course will further develop the ability to read articles, essays and longer pieces of fictional and non-fictional texts as well as the understanding of Spanish-language materials on the Internet. A diagnostic test will be administered on the first day. Prerequisite: Completion of LTSP 2B, its equivalent, or a score of 5 on the AP Spanish language exam. This course satisfies the third course requirement of the college-required language sequence as well as the language requirement for participation in UC-EAP. Note: The final exam for LTSP 2C is scheduled is scheduled for December 6th, 2004.
LTSP 2D -- INTERMEDIATE/ADVANCED
READINGS AND COMPOSITION: SPANISH
FOR HERITAGE SPEAKERS Note: The Final Exam for LTSP 2D is scheduled for Monday, December 6th, 2004. Enrollment for LTSP 2D requires department stamp. Contact instructor (bpita@ucsd.edu) with any questions regarding placement. LTSP 2E -- ADVANCED
READINGS AND COMPOSITION: SPANISH
FOR HERITAGE SPEAKERS Note: The Final Exam for Lt/Sp 2E is scheduled for Monday, December 6th, 2004. Enrollment for Lt/Sp 2E requires department stamp. Contact instructor (bpita@ucsd.edu) with any questions regarding placement. LTSP 21 -- CONVERSATION
WORKSHOP I Designed to allow students with a basic grounding in Spanish to discuss a variety of topics related to literary and current cultural issues. Focus will be on vocabulary development, use of idiomatic expressions and advancing oral proficiency in Spanish. Pre-requisites: LTSP 1C/CX or consent of the instructor. Note: This conversation/discussion class meets once a week. May be taken as an adjunct to lower division LTSP courses, alone, or in combination with any other LTSP course. Recommended for students planning to study abroad. May be taken 3 times for credit as topics vary. May be taken P/NP or for a letter grade. LTSP 50A -- Readings
in PENINSULAR LITERATURE This course introduces students to Peninsular literature and literary analysis through the close textual reading of a selection of texts including novels, plays, short fiction and poetry. Coursework includes reading of several texts by Spanish authors, participation in class discussions, oral presentations and written assignments. LTSP 50A prepares Literature majors and minors for upper-division work. LTSP 50A and either 50B or 50C are required for Spanish Literature majors. May be applied towards a minor in Spanish Literature or towards fulfilling the second literature requirement for Literature majors. Prerequisites: Completion of LTSP 2C, 2D, 2E or 2 years of college level Spanish. Note: The final exam for LTSP 50A is scheduled is scheduled for Monday, December 6th. LTSP 123 -- TOPICS
IN MODERN SPANISH CULTURE: MODERNITY
AND DON JUAN This course examines the transformation of the figure of Don Juan from the Romantic period to the present, a historical trajectory marked by enduring social division and recurring political crisis. It considers how different authors have used Don Juan as either a vehicle of satire and social criticism, or as a pretext for promoting an orthodox view of history and national identity. How authors have interpreted and adapted the figure of Don Juan sheds light on the progressive, and regressive, tendencies that underscore Spain’s protracted transition from absolutism to constitutionalism. Genres include: novel, poetry, theater, essay, and film. Socio-historic focus. Two exams, one paper. LTSP 129 -- SPANISH
WRITING AFTER 1839: Spanish
Literature During and After the Franco Dictatorship While censorship had an immediate and lasting impact on the literary production of the post-Civil war era, it also had the effect of impelling writers to experiment with clandestine manners of confronting social and political issues. This class examines 1) the extent to which certain texts succeeded in transmitting messages that indirectly transgressed the regime’s traditionalist preconceptions of culture and society, and 2) how such techniques prefigured the postmodern aesthetic that continues to dominate the artistic climate of the new democratic Spain. Questions to be considered: In what sense does the free-market replace the function of censorship? Is it possible that the traditionalist viewpoint has become the new voice of subversion? Genres include: novel, poetry, theater, essay. Two exams, one paper. LTSP 133 -- CONTEMPORARY
LATIN AMERICAN LITERATURE Dos calificaciones: examen intermedio ( 50 p.c.) y un examen final o paper, a eleccion ( 50 p.c). LTSP 135B -- MODERN
MEXICAN LITERATURE In this course we will approach the 1910 Mexican Revolution, its antecedents, development, and outcome, from the perspective of the literature written about that historical period. We will discuss the contribution of specific literary works to our understanding or misunderstanding- of the revolutionary war-as well as examine the relation between literary and historical discourses. Tentative readings:
LTSP 170 -- LITERARY
CRITICISM This course will focus on the work of several Latin American critical literary scholars, like Prieto, Viñas, Concha, Sarlo, García Canclini, Cornejo-Polar, Rama, Martí, Mariátegui, and others, to be seen in dialogue with dominant European literary frameworks. LTSP 174 -- TOPICS
IN CULTURE AND POLITICS: THE
1968 MEXICAN STUDENT MOVEMENT El movimiento estudiantil de 1968 ha sido considerado un momento culminante, transformador, en la larga lucha social por desmantelar la estructura autoritaria del Estado mexicano. Su brutal represión tuvo un impacto definitivo en la conciencia colectiva y engendró nuevas formas de participación en la vida pública, ya pacíficas y legales, ya violentas y proscritas (la guerrilla urbana). El propósito de este curso es estudiar el movimiento como fenómeno político (pugna por la democracia, la juventud como fuerza política) y cultural (la crisis del nacionalismo, la contracultura, la liberación sexual), y examinar de qué forma abrió espacios para el desarrollo de luchas populares subsecuentes, a la vez que alimentó líneas de creación intelectual en México. Los textos del curso incluyen novelas, crónicas, documentales, canciones, etc. Lecturas tentativas:
Material visual:
LTSP 175 -- GENDER,
SEXUALITY AND CULTURE This course will focus on the fiction of several 20th century Latin American women writers. Issues of feminism, gender, sexuality, patriarchy, social movements, and cultural trends will be explored in both short stories and novels. LITERATURE/THEORY -- No Course Offerings Fall 2004 LTWL 4D -- FICTION
AND FILM IN TWENTIETH CENTURY: ITALIAN
FILM The overwhelming popular success of the 1990 film Cinema Paradiso represented both a nostalgic look at what Italian film and society had been in a supposedly more “innocent” era, the promising period of neo-realism and post World War II reconstruction, and a hint that Italian cinema was finally coming out of a slump with a new generation of directors who looked to the past with an eye on the future. In this course we will attempt to follow the course of Italian film since neo-realism through the optic of nostalgia and regeneration that Cinema Paradiso proposes. Our analysis will concentrate on the double-edged subtitle of the course by which the term “children” refers both to the subjects central to many of the films, as well as to the positioning of some young directors as the off-spring of neo-realism. And, since neo-realist influence seems to re-emerge every five to ten years, and appears to be closely tied to social and political movements in the country, we will also follow developments at that level to provide a contextualized reading of each filmic representation. Films will include: Cinema Paradiso, Bicycle Thieves, and La Scorta. LTWL 19A -- INTRODUCTION
TO ANCIENT GREEKS AND ROMANS: ARCHAIC
GREEK LITERATURE This interdisciplinary sequence (LTWL 19A, B, C) includes the literature, mythology, history, philosophy, and art of ancient Greece and Rome, complex civilizations which had a determining influence on all later Western culture. In 19A we'll focus on Greece from the time of the Homeric poems to Aeschylus in the early fifth century. We shall read texts of the period as expressions of an aristocratic culture which placed emphasis on war and athletics and whose economies, educational systems, sexual politics, ethics and theology were shaped by this emphasis. This sequence partially fulfills lower division requirements for the Literature/Writing major, the Literatures of the World major/minor, the Classical Studies major/minor and the Warren College program in Classical Studies. There will be a midterm, final, and paper. LTWL 114 -- CHILDREN’S
LITURATURE: FANTASY AND REALISM Beginning with the fairy tales of Charles Perrault and the Brothers Grimm, this course will follow the development of children’s literature from its roots through the genre’s so-called Golden Age to its present sophistication and mass market appeal. In the process we will fly with Peter Pan, follow the Yellow Brick Road, and examine various topics--e.g., the interweaving trends of fantasy and realism, the balance of entertainment and education in the literature, and historical and developmental assumptions about the intended readership. LTWL 131C -- EARLY
CHRISTIANITY: REINVENTING JESUS Who was Jesus of Nazareth? This is one of the most resonant questions in the whole of Western religious history. Scholars of the "Third Quest" claim to have a much clearer picture now than they have ever had before of the world in which Jesus lived, the formation of the Gospels, and the link between the two. Even so, Jesus remains an enigma. No consensus has been reached about who he was, where he fit in the Judaisms of his day, and whether Christian claims about him are supported by reliable historical evidence. The course explores these issues through a careful reading of the earliest "Lives" of Jesus. The evaluation of these texts is set within the general context of religious biography in Western antiquity and in relation to ancient discussions of history, fiction, and myth. LTWL 150 -- MODERNITY
AND LITERATURE At the end of the nineteenth century, the modern European novel was characterized by the progressive development in time of a perspectival consciousness against the background of a layered, structured world. In this understanding of the genre, we find privileged metaphors of the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century metropolitan world: the city, the home, the museum, the map, the machine, the photograph, and the ruin — figurations of an industrializing society distinguished from the premodern “past” by the bourgeois family “at home” and the colonial administration “abroad.” The modern sensibility narrated in the novel seeks to order and to master its world, yet that world is teeming with the very antithesis of order and reason: the colonial "jungle," the monstrous "undead," the barbarian working masses, and the increasing mechanization of human society. An important modern theme, then, in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness or Stoker’s Dracula, is the struggle between the “human” desire for mastery and the “nonhuman nature” that will not be mastered, a struggle whose incompletion and irresolution is the “modern” condition. In this course, we will ask what other representations of the "modern" would we find if we turned to Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean? Ondaatje’s English Patient, in part, thematizes this question. If the novel, as one moment of literary modernism, narrates a form of metropolitan subjectivity that depends upon represented struggles between reason and the unconscious, enlightenment and faith, home and the 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 turn to consider novels from or about Nigeria, India, Jamaica, and the Philippines: Emecheta’s Joys of Motherhood, Rushdie’s Midnight Children, Cliff’s Abeng, Hagedorn’s Dogeaters. LTWL 172 -- SPECIAL
TOPICS IN LITERATURE: LITERATURE
AND THE EVIRONMENT After some considerations on nature as an issue in the history of ideas, the course will work through several phases: early natural history, English Romantic prose of observation, mid-19th century American figures who are inaugural conservationists, late-19th century pioneer women writers about the natural world, main nature writers in the USA from mid- 20th century to 2004; with a final topic on the ethics and politics and literary expressions of eco-terrorism. This course was run last year in that form, but this time there will be certain new dimensions: an attempt to bring in more poets like William Wordsworth, John Clare, and Gary Snyder, within a course that is largely from the recent past. The writers we shall read and consider are (partial list): Gilbert White, Dorothy Wordsworth, H.D. Thoreau, John Muir, Mary Austin, Annie Dillard, Barry Lopez, Edward Abbey both as essayist and as eco-novelist. Assignments: short oral presentation as member of a topic-panel; very short exercise on the rhetoric of non-fictional prose; paper of some length (8 pages) due in week 10; essay exam on a choice of topics given in advance, derived from course readings. This course welcomes athletic philosophers, science majors, ornithologists, surfers, climbers, persons from Muir College who are admirers of John Muir or fulfilling College requirements, members of campus ecology groups, and literature majors who are also walkers and observers. LTWL 172 -- SPECIAL
TOPICS IN LITERATURE: QUEER LITERATURE What makes a literature queer? To what extent and in what way does sexuality govern the distinction we are making when we call what we think of as literature queer? Does ‘queer’ mean the same thing as ‘lesbian-gay’? How are sexual identities constructed in the first place? Do sexual communities exist? What makes certain sexual identity constructions queer? What non-sexual identities are constructed in similar ways? What constitutes sexual dissidence? In what sense did queer theory evolve from AIDS activism? We shall try to determine what makes texts ostensibly queer by reading, discussing and writing on literature dating as far back as Sappho. We shall also read short extracts by Michel Foucault (from The History of Sexuality), Judith Butler (from Gender Trouble), and other queer theorists. Required work includes an 8-page analytical paper addressing queer-relevant questions, and shorter, informal responses to readings. Classes start with reading quizzes. There will be a final exam. LTWL 176 -- LITERATURES
AND IDEAS The landscape of Jewish cultural life changed drastically in the mid-twentieth century as a result of the Holocaust, exile from Nazi occupation, and the foundation of Israel. This fact has led to the perceived invisibility of Jews in Europe since World War II and the inaccurate equation of Jewish literature with Holocaust literature. In this course, we will explore the vital diversity of Jewish experience in Europe since the war through autobiography, poetry, fiction and film, from Elie Wiesel’s Holocaust account Night to Wladimir Kaminer’s Russian Disco. We will question assumptions about a monolithic Jewish identity by considering the complexity of Jewish remembering of the Holocaust, the possibilities of dialogue between Germans and Jews, Muslims and Jews, and Ashkenazic and Sephardic Jews, and the choice of Europe as a homeland rather than Israel. We will analyze how the texts use language, politics, memory, ethnicity and gender to construct European-Jewish identity as multiple. Texts will be available in English translation.
LTWR 8A -- WRITING
FICTION This course is a rigorous introduction to the basic elements of fiction: Characterization, dialogue, setting, point-of-view, and narrative structure. Students will practice working with these elements in many individual writing exercises; they will critique these exercises in small peer groups in class, with assistance of an undergraduate tutor. These are preparatory to completing a ten-page short story, also written in drafts, which will be critiqued by instructors and peer group members. There will be an in-class, essay midterm on the readings, which include short fiction by Kafka, Chekhov, Zora Neale Hurston, Grace Paley, William Faulkner, Virginia Woolf, Gabriel Marquez, Yukio Mishima, Sandra Cisneros, and others. The lab session refers to the New Writing Series poetry readings. Students in 8A are required to attend three of these readings during the quarter. Prerequisite: Fulfillment of college writing requirements. LTWR 8C -- WRITING
NON-FICTION Like all writers, nonfiction writers build characters, craft descriptions, and create symbols. Unlike poets and novelists, however, they cannot “make something up.” The class will examine multiple types of nonfiction writing, including memoir, journalism and personal essay. We will examine how facts are woven into narrative forms to portray real, rather than imagined, people, places and events. At issue will be the nature of nonfiction writing and how practitioners can write with style while sticking to the facts. Reading assignments will include a broad array of nonfiction models. Students will apply what they learn from the readings to their own nonfiction writing.
LTWR 100 -- SHORT
FICTION The purpose of this course is to inspire you to write and explore the craft and different styles of writing, focusing on short fiction. Students will workshop short stories, or pieces of short prose writing; chapters or sections of novels are also acceptable although our reading list will be solely comprised of short stories. We will make a workshop schedule in the first class, which will allow each student to workshop their writing at least twice to the group, hopefully a lot more depending on the size of the class. This means reading your writing out loud to the class as often as possible. We will discuss and critique the work as a group each week. Each student is responsible for making and handing out copies of their work to the class the week before. You are responsible for 6-10 pages when it is your week to workshop. You are responsible for writing detailed comments on your fellow student’s stories each week. In addition, there will be several writing assignments based on issues that arise during the course of our discussion as a group. Each assignment will be 2-3 pages long. The purpose of this to get you writing-- to help your work as a writer be a part of your daily and weekly life. Some assignments will be done in class. Each week we will discuss stories from our reading list, depending on length we will discuss between 1 and 4 short pieces a week. The literature component is a very important part of the class. We will start off each class discussing the assigned reading from that week, to get our minds thinking critically. Discussion will focus on issues of craft, style and voice. These discussions and readings will infiltrate our work and the way we think about writing and generate creativity. Be ready to partake in class discussion every week and to be serious about your writing. The final will be a 15 page story. Readings may include Sharon Doubiago, Adam Haslett, Raymond Carver, Frances
Stark, Joan Didion, Jayne Ann Phillips, Eileen Myles, Haruki Murakami, Junot
Diaz, Alice Munro, Amy Hempel, Jhumpa Lahiri and possibly others. What is “psychological realism?” What does it mean to receive and then record everyday ordinary impressions? In other words, how do we understand the idea of “realistic fiction,” and how shall we attempt to write it? In this class, we will begin by positioning ourselves as fiction writers within the larger frame of a tradition outlined and defended in essays by Henry James, Guy de Maupassant, Gertrude Stein, and Ernest Hemingway. Then we will practice fiction writing in a series of exercises focusing on different “fictional” elements, including dialogue, action, and description; landscape; transitions; and the dull but necessary work of getting people in and out of rooms. Students will produce a number of 1-page assignments, and then focus on two or three 5-page “scenes” in which they show characters in action trying hard to get what they want. All writing will be subject to “workshop” style review. Students will be expected to critique one another’s work, and to respond to the writing of authors such as Charles Baxter, Raymond Carver, Anton Chekhov, Lydia Davis, Junot Diaz, Ernest Hemingway, Ha Jin, Denis Johnson, Edward P. Jones, James Joyce, Jack Kerouac, Jhumpa Lahiri, Lorrie Moore, Alice Munro, Eileen Myles, Antonya Nelson, Flannery O’Connor, and Z.Z. Packer. LTWR 102 -- POETRY In this class we will spend a tiny amount of the time workshopping student poems and the rest of the time reading, discussing, and participating in in-class writing assignments based on assigned readings. Probably most of the readings will revolve around poems that came out of the following under-represented communities: sex worker, queer, poor, working class, punk rock and hip hop. Students will turn in a chapbook at the end of the quarter that they made themselves and includes 10-15 pages of poems that came out of the weekly writing assignments. When we’re not feeling utterly depressed as a result of the intensely disturbing poems we’re reading, we’ll probably laugh a lot. LTWR 104 -- THE
NOVELLA Katherine Anne Porter says “novella” is a “slack, boneless, affected word that we do not need to describe anything.” She prefers “long stories” or “short novels.” Do we need to defend the notion of “novella?” Perhaps. In any case, we will focus, in this class, on reading and writing fiction that approaches the perilous boundary between whatever is too long for a story and too short for a novel. We will also discuss shorter works that feel novelistic – let’s call them “compressed novels.” Emphasis will be on technical writerly strategies rather than on “self-expression.” Students will produce 30-50 pages of prose over the course of the semester. All writing will be subject to “workshop” style review, and students are expected to be actively engaged in reading and critiquing each other’s work, and in learning how to read and creatively “steal from” established authors, including, possibly, James Baldwin, Caroline Blackwood, Jane Bowles, Sandra Cisneros, Dennis Cooper, Carlos Fuentes, Yasunari Kawabata, Guy de Maupassant, Alice Munro, V.S. Naipaul, Cesare Pavese, and Katherine Anne Porter. LTWR 108 -- WRITING
FOR YOUNG ADULTS In this course students will be writing for young adults---students in junior high and high school. We will consider the particular problems and pleasures of writing for this group and will work on the first draft of a novel. Students will be expected to plot out the novel, develop characters, and write and revise two or three chapters of the book. Students will also be expected to participate in class discussions of each other’s work and to read and analyse some YA novels. LTWR 110 -- SCREEN
WRITING: WRITING
THE FEATURE SCRIPT Learn the nuts and bolts of writing for the screen as you write a feature-length screenplay. In seminar fashion, the class will read and critique your scripts-in-progress. Learn to create engaging characters, dynamic dialogue, visual description and tight structure in the succinct screenplay format. Some experience in scriptwriting is helpful but not required. LTWR 115 -- EXPERIMENTAL
WRITING Multi-genre Narrative(s) - Drawing a variety of aesthetic forms (including romantic poetry, scientifict taxonomies, abstract sculpture, how-to manuals, drama, political speeches, installation art, comics, journal entries, songs, emails, freewrites, games, dictionaries, travelogues, coupons, etc.) and cultural genres (spy, self-help, infomercial, ghost, romance, melodrama, critical theory, satire, fantasy, westerns, coming-out, children's, confessional, fable, etc.) course participants will create hybrid multi-genre writings. These works may use the page as stage or proscenium, but students may also experiment with making text-based three-dimensional, aural, performance, or site-specific works. Each week we will do writing exercises and consider relevant concepts and methodologies, in addition to reading and discussing each other's ongoing writing projects. Students will also read, critically engage, puzzle-over, and creatively present findings upon the following books: Tales of Neveryon by Samuel Delaney, Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth by Chris Ware, House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski, and Blood and Guts in High School by Kathy Acker. LTWR 120 -- PERSONAL
NARRATIVE This course will engage in the writing of personal narratives that address the topic of identity as influenced, formed, or constructed by such entities as society, peers, families, class, ethnicity, and gender. We will read short essays as well as one or two longer texts. These texts will serve as a starting point for discussions about the personal narrative and for your own personal narratives. Assignments will include several weekly assignments, a short paper, and one final longer paper. Parts of the course will be conducted as a workshop, so be prepared to share drafts of your writing and to comment on your colleague’s drafts. LTWR 121 -- MEDIA
WRITING Your major paper will be an investigation into any social/(pop or sub-) cultural/media trend that interests you. It will involve both research and interviewing, and will be aimed at a serious magazine, written in a variety of possible modes-e.g. reportage; autobiography; literary essay; creative non-fiction. The whole class will read and critique first drafts of these projects. A shorter paper involves formulaic feature writing for a mainstream magazine: this exercise in mastering techniques of the banal counts for a smaller portion of your grade. There will be a number of analytic writing exercises on the readings, which include James Baldwin’s The Evidence of Things Not Seen; chapters from Susan Faludi’ STIFFED: The Betrayal of the American Male and Jonathan Kozol’s SAVAGE INEQUALITIES on public education; New Yorker reportage pieces on the fertility industry, pop music etc. (Susan Orlean and others), sections from COMMODIFY YOUR DISSENT: Salvos from the Baffler. Other writing exercises will focus on alternative publication styles, such as the onion, Bust, and tabloids. LTWR 129 -- DISTRIBUTING
LITERATURE: Nuts,
Bolts, and Next Steps This course will cover practical aspects of advancing yourself as a writer: How to apply to graduate school (applications are due in Winter), how to approach literary agents, where to find out about writing contests, how to self-publish, how to submit work for journal publication, how to start a writing group or reading series and when and how to enter them, teaching writing, and other issues relevant to your development as a writer in the world. Each student will prepare a manuscript for submission to an agent or small press or a chapbook for distribution in addition to weekly research and writing assignments. LTWR 148 -- THEORY
FOR WRITERS: NON-FICTIONAL PROSE What shapes literary writing? How do literary theories situate themselves in western philosophical traditions? How is theory written? What does it accomplish? What does it contest? Addressing these large, open questions, this course will survey late-phase literary theory in a way that prompts creative writing projects. Readings (from The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism) will include Derrida, from Of Grammatology; Althusser, from Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses; Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”; Foucault, “What is an Author?”; Barthes, “The Death of the Author”; Deleuze & Guattari, from A Thousand Plateaus (“Introduction: Rhizome”); and Kristeva, from Revolution in Poetic Language (“The Semiotic and the Symbolic”). We will also read Badiou, Infinite Thought: Truth and the Return of Philosophy (selected chapters); Robbe-Grillet’s “Scene”; Poe, “The Imp of the Perverse”; and Lispector, The Hour of the Star. Participants will workshop weekly writing exercises written in response to theoretical positions, leading to a ten-page final project representing, with a greater critical awareness, what creative writers do. Required work & grade breakdown: reading quizzes, worksheets, weekly exercises (40%); final project (40%); participation & attendance (20%). There will not be a final exam. |