Fall 2008 Undergraduate Course Descriptions

AFRICAN LITERATURE

No Course Offerings Fall 2008

LITERATURE OF THE AMERICAS

LTAM 87 - FRESHMAN SEMINAR
SALSA MUSIC – STYLE AND SUBSTANCE
Instructor: Sara Johnson

From its inception as a Caribbean popular music, salsa has emerged as a global phenomenon. This class introduces the art, focusing on its musical dimensions and socio-cultural contexts. Readings are accompanied by musical selections, films and an in-class dance workshop.

LTAM 87 - FRESHMAN SEMINAR
A PEOPLE’S HISTORY OF UC SAN DIEGO
Instructor: Jorge Mariscal

An introduction to the unofficial history of UCSD. We will study the establishment of institutional features that allowed UCSD to become a privileged enclave. We will also explore campus social movements that worked to democratize the university and hold it accountable to non-elite communities.

LTAM 110 - LATIN AMERICAN LITERATURE IN TRANSLATION
Proposed Instructor: Carlos Martell

For this course we will be reading a series of canonical and non-canonical texts in 20th century Mexican literature. We will place special emphasis on the importance of the urban and rural landscape, space and spatial representations in cultural works (literary and visual); we will begin the course with look at how space and its construction has been theorized, in geography, philosophy, and literature. Literary, film and music will be some of the cultural products that we will focus on.

LTAM 140 - TOPICS IN CULTURE AND POLITICS:
DEMOCRACY & CULTURE IN MEXICO: THE 1968 STUDENT MOVEMENT

This course has been canceled for Fall 2008

CHINESE LITERATURE

No Course Offerings Fall 2007

CLASSICS LITERATURE 

No Course Offerings Fall 2008

LTEA 100B - MODERN CHINESE POETRY IN TRANSLATION
Instructor: Wai-Lim Yip

Modern Chinese poetry is weighted with anxieties and solitudes, hesitations and doubts, nostalgia and expectancy, exile and dreams, but these stirrings rarely come from a solipsist of the western type who, in the midst of the fragmentation and dissolution of the human subject occasioned by accelerated industrialization and commodification, has often turned his/her back both on society and on his/her audience to embark upon a voyage into an insulated inner space. The intensities in these Chinese poems represent a profound sense of desperation of a different sort. At once intensely inward- personal and outward-historical, these poems are transfigurations from tensions and agonies of acculturation under the military, economic and cultural colonizing activities of the West. The love-hate complex toward both traditional Chinese culture and intruding Western ideologies has engendered some of the most intriguing dialogues and dialectics of modern times.

LTEA 120A - CHINESE FILMS: MAKING SENSE OF POSTSOCIALISM
Instructor: Yingjin Zhang

This class deals with postsocialist filmmaking in China after 1990, a period marked by profound ideological, socioeconomic, and cultural changes. Different modes of filmmaking have competed with each other and have generated a wide spectrum of representations and practices, and a new generation has emerged to claim critical attention at home and abroad. After a brief survey of competing modes and agencies, we will move from the “fifth generation” to the “sixth generation” and beyond (e.g., the “new urban generation”). Directors to be studied in depth include Chen Kaige, Zhang Yuan, Guan Hu, Jiang Wen, Feng Xiaogang, Lou Ye, Dai Sijie, Li Yang, Jia Zhangke, and Zhang Yimou. Students are required to view all listed films (primary and secondary), complete required readings, write four commentaries and one term paper, offer one presentation in class, as well as take a midterm and a final exam.

All films carry English subtitles unless otherwise indicated; all readings are in English. No knowledge of Chinese is required, but good English writing skills are highly recommended.

LTEN 21 - INTRODUCTION TO LITERATURE OF THE BRITISH ISLES: PRE-1660
Proposed Instructor: Michael Grattan

In this course we will examine major literary works written in English before 1660, paying particular attention to how historical, social, and political circumstances shape and are shaped by literary production. This method of reading is the starting point for our exploration of writings that range in genre from verse myth to early drama to lyric poetry, as we develop our understanding of the aesthetic and thematic issues that pervade works from the early middle ages through the restoration. We will also consider the place of such issues as gender, class, and race in early English culture. Readings include Beowulf, selections from The Canterbury Tales, selections from Margery Kempe’s autobiography, Shakespeare, excerpts from Spenser’s Faerie Queene and Milton’s Paradise Lost, and several others.

LTEN 25 - INTRODUCTION TO LITERATURE OF THE UNITED STATES: WRITING NATIONHOOD
Instructor: Michael Davidson

This course provides an introduction to the Literatures of the United States, from the period of early settlement by Europeans in the seventeenth-century to the Civil War period. In order to focus our readings, we will look at American literature through short works (stories, poems, essays) and through the optic of our subtitle. “Writing Nationhood” suggests that an emerging nation depends on various forms of cultural production in order to solidify its identity and create ideals of citizenship and civic participation. Given the size, geographical range, and cultural diversity of the U.S. such imaginations of what the nation could be have contributed in no little part to what it has become. But the emergence of a unified national culture has never been easy. Hence, as a corollary, we will look at three interrelated terms, “contact, culture, and conflict,” that refer to the multiple ways in which U.S. literature has been created through contact between various constituencies (European and indigenous populations, African slaves and Southern slaveowners, Irish immigrants and Spanish populations in the Southwest, etc.) and through negotiations of (or conflicts over) cultural traditions and national origins. In place of an ideal of “American exceptionalism” that has dominated American literary history, we will posit a literary tradition based on American diversity and multiculturalism.

Evaluation for this course will be based on weekly prompts, two short papers, a midterm and a final.

LTEN 29 - INTRODUCTION TO CHICANO LITERATURE
Instructor: George Mariscal

This course will focus on the history and cultural production of the Mexican-origin population in the United States from the nineteenth century to the present. We will begin with writings by Mexicans in the Southwest before and after the U.S. invasion of 1848 and then move through the twentieth century and into the twenty-first century. Topics to be covered include Anglo-Mexican relations, the migrant experience, the Chicano/a and Mexicano/a working class, the Chicano Movement of the Viet Nam War period, the construction of a militant collective identity (i.e., the Chicana/o), and the transition in the 1980s to Hispanic identities and markets. In addition to interpreting literary texts we will analyze film, music, performance art, and other cultural forms.

LTEN 87 - FRESHMAN SEMINAR: THE HIDDEN HISTORY OF TITANIC
Instructor: Margaret Loose

When Titanic sank in 1912, more questions were left floating than deck chairs. What was responsible - capitalist greed, human arrogance, and/or structural flaws? Expeditions in 2007 generated new evidence & theories, which we'll discuss along with those posited by writers since 1912. This is a media-rich seminar.

LTEN 120A  - THE 18TH CENTURY: SEX, SATIRE, AND SENTIMENT:  RESTORATION AND 18TH CENTURY COMIC DRAMA (b)
Instructor: Kathryn Shevelow

This is a class about British comic drama from 1660 to the late 1700s, ranging from the satiric sex comedies of the later seventeenth century to the sentimental and "laughing" comedies of the eighteenth century. We will read a selection of comic plays from this period, and discuss related topics such as theater practices and audience expectations. We will be charting changes in the nature of comic drama itself, such as representations of sexual relations and gender, and shifting conceptions of the nature of comedy and the purpose of the stage. We will concern ourselves with such topics as: depictions of courtship and marriage; the effects of the introduction of actresses; the struggles of female playwrights; representations of the libertine, both male and female, as well as feminized men and masculine women; the backlash against the perceived "immorality" of Restoration comedy; sentimental comedy's re-writing of gender relations and the nature of comedy itself; and “laughing” comedy’s ostensible rewriting of sentimental comedy.

Though the emphasis will necessarily be placed upon the plays as written texts, we will also be viewing taped productions of several of them. In addition to the plays, we will be reading some scholarly material on various aspects of the theater of this period. Playwrights will include William Wycherley, Aphra Behn, William Congreve, Oliver Goldsmith, and Richard Brinsley Sheridan, among others.

The class will be conducted through a mixture of lecture, discussion, student readings of scenes from the plays, and possibly group presentations. Writing assignments will consist of a midterm, a final, and a research paper. Each student will be required to read one additional play for your paper; you may also be working with a small group to give a presentation on it.

LTEN 125B - FIRST GENERATION ROMANTIC POETS: WORDSWORTH, COLERIDGE, & REVOLUTION (b)
Instructor: Fred Randel

William Wordsworth is widely considered the greatest English poet since Milton, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, his friend, collaborator, and rival, is generally regarded as perhaps the most eminent example in English of a major poet who was also a great literary and philosophical critic. They came of age just as the French Revolution erupted, and both of them were early supporters, and eventual critics, of it. Their major writing often wrestles with the meaning of that revolution, of the ideals of liberty and equality which it sought to put into practice, and of the terror which became one of its most discussed features. “Revolution” is also an apt name for the striking innovations--still influential today-- that they introduced into poetry and for the new kinds of ecological thinking which have made Wordsworth a seminal figure of modern environmentalism. Both men likewise experimented with new ways to reconcile some form of deeply experienced religion with the skepticism, distrust of traditional institutions, and immersion in materiality widespread in Europe after the Enlightenment. Both produced some of the English language’s most haunting and meaningful poetry.

This course will aim to assist students to become more discerning and appreciative readers of poetry in general and of these two poets in particular. It will seek to show, through close analysis and attention to relevant historical contexts, why Wordsworth and Coleridge matter.

LTEN 140 - EARLY NINETEENTH CENTURY BRITISH NOVEL: JANE AUSTEN (b)
Instructor: Ronald Berman

This course will cover the following novels of Jane Austen: Northanger Abbey, Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park, Emma, Persuasion.

These novels were published in the early 19th century in the period of The Regency. Jane Austen was in her thirties, but she had been taking notes and doing sketches since she was a girl. Her family understood her talent. However, they could not educate her at Oxford as they did their sons, nor could they put aside enough money for her to lead an independent life. Those were not options around 1800. They did manage to get her books and magazines to read, to travel locally, to visit her extended family in southern England, to build a circle of friends – even to read the course materials of her brothers who were at Oxford.

Jane Austen’s novels reflect her circumstances. They also reflect the history of her time. She brings into her stories a lot “news” about the biggest even of all, the war that England undertook against Napoleon Bonaparte. She shows in her work that she understands the culture of new novels, new drama – and new standards of social life. She is familiar to us because her central narrative concerns the coming-of-age of a young woman, but she has considerably more on her mind. Her novels are about the army and navy of that very military period. And, of course, they are about the great symbols of her good life, the English Country House at the time of its greatest prosperity. She knows a lot about romantic poetry, and her characters can give a very credible account of Sir Walter Scott, Lord Byron, and William Wordsworth. Her central narrative is set squarely within the historical world around her.

LTEN 156 - AMERICAN LITERATURE FROM THE CIVIL WAR TO WORLD WAR I (d)
Instructor: Shelley Streeby

This course is an upper-division survey of US literature from the Civil War through World War I, with a special emphasis on how war and other violent conflicts of this period are remembered in literature and other cultural forms, We will examine many different types of literature, including poetry, oral and mediated literature, speeches, journalism, pamphlets, essays, short stories, and novels. We will analyze this literature in relation to other cultural forms, such as music, photography, and cinema. We will also study literary movements and modes such as melodrama, realism, regionalism, naturalism, and modernism, as well as the important mass cultural genres of the era, such as science fiction and the Western. We will place US literature and culture in the context of the important events of this period, including the Civil War, the Haymarket riots and executions, late 19th-century Indian Wars, struggles over lynching, the “New Empire” of the 1890s, the Mexican Revolution, the San Diego free speech fights, and World War I. Authors may include Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, José Martí, William Dean Howells, Ida B. Wells, Mark Twain, Emma Goldman, Stephen Crane, W.E.B. Du Bois, Geronimo, Jack London, Ricardo Flores Magón, Zane Grey, and others

LTEN 176 - MAJOR AMERICAN WRITERS: FITZGERALD AND HEMINGWAY AND THE TWENTIES (d)
Instructor: Ronald Berman

This course will cover the following:

F. Scott Fitzgerald: selected short stories The Great Gatsby
Ernest Hemingway: selected short stories The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell to Arms

Fitzgerald and Hemingway were part of a great migration of American writers who left the provinces to go to points eats. Like T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, they did their best American work in Europe. The Great Gatsby is a meditation on America by a writer living on the Riviera who wanted to recover his own and the nation’s past. The Sun Also Rises (it is written, literally, by an American in Paris) tells the story of a writer who is no longer interested in that complex subject – and who sees that other subjects may be as compelling. The narrative of these novels is what we know, but along with The Waste Land, these writers invented American modernism. They formulated new kinds of language, and connected their work to the art, style and design of the twenties. Often they made that style in their own image.

Too often, Fitzgerald is praised for telling the story of heroic success, and for telling us what America was like. But he is important also for telling us what it looks like. Hemingway and Fitzgerald were unremittingly visual, and their work (as the great philosophers of the twenties like Dewey, Whitehead, and Wittgenstein advised) is as much about the values of perception as the perception of values. So, this course will be less about the expatriates in Paris or The Lost Generation than about the great, absorbing problems of putting what you see into what you write.

LTEN 177 - CALIFORNIA LITERATURE: CALIFORNIA, THE MOVIE
Instructor: Michael Davidson

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 railroad monopolies in The Octopus, the urban underworld of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, the heroic landscapes of Robinson Jeffers and the phantasmagoric San Francisco of Alfred Hitchcock'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 testimonials by Victor Hernandez Cruz, Cherrie Moraga and Gloria Anzaldua. Although this will be an introduction to the literature of California, it will equally be the study of a concept that, like the shifting plate tectonics 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.

LTEN 181 - ASIAN AMERICAN LITERATURE: THE “YELLOW PERIL” AND THE ASIAN/AMERICAN CULTURAL RESPONSE
Instructor: Lisa Yoneyama

Since the Chinese Exclusion Act of the turn of the late nineteenth century, the Asian presence in the U.S. has long been understood as posing major social and cultural threats. Moreover, the American relationship to Asia has been dominated by war and militarism, whether in the form of armed conflicts, ideological battles, or economic rivalry. Alongside their “model minority” image, casting Asians simultaneously as inscrutable "enemies" – past, imminent, reformed, potential, or ungrateful – has been central to dominant representations and understandings of Asians and Asian Americans. The "Yellow Peril" as a gendered, sexualized, classed, racialized and global epistemological and affective structure of knowledge has been mediated to us through various forms of representation. It is inscribed in official histories, disseminated through Hollywood films and other popular media, and objectified as academic knowledge. Yet, this "Peril," imagined and real, is constantly contested at various local sites, at the in-between places of Asian/American cultural activities. There we can find various alternative representations and counter-memories. The course will examine the still persistent “Yellow Peril” complex as well as the Asian/American response manifested in diverse cultural forms.

LTEN 183 - AFRO-AMERICAN PROSE: AFRICAN AMERICAN POST-MIGRATION NARRATIVES (d)
Instructor: Dennis Childs

In this class we will examine narratives of the African American experience after what historians refer to as the “Great Migration”—i.e. the early to mid-twentieth century mass exodus of black refugees from the Jim Crow South to the northern/western “Promised Land.” These narratives of northern and western urban life all point to paradoxical aspects of internal migration—that escape from the South did not represent an attainment of full-fledged citizenship, political power, social/occupational mobility, adequate food or shelter, or protection from outright white supremacist violence. We will analyze how various writers have created unique and related visions of the manner in which the “Promised Land” became a dubious “re-mix” of southern apartheid. Of particular interest will be issues of space (the places in which southern refugees dwelled, worked, and congregated), time (how each of these narratives continue to look backward toward pre-migratory moments), and gender (the politics of how black women and men experienced urban life). You will be asked to use analysis of these texts as a jumping-off point for you own written compositions. In preparation for this, we will pay particular attention to the ways in which the artistic form of our texts relates to their social, historical, and political content.

LTEN 185 - THEMES IN AFRICAN AMERICAN LITERATURE:  ANTI-SLAVERY AND ANTI-PRISON NARRATIVES (c)
Instructor: Dennis Childs

In this class we will examine narratives of the formerly enslaved (i.e. of the antebellum period) and those of the incarcerated and formerly incarcerated written in the postbellum era, and the way captive narration interrogates liberal tenets such as “progress,” “freedom,” and “democracy.” Some questions of concern will be: What are the connecting links between the “slave narrative” and the “prison narrative”? What do the aesthetic, political, and legal connections between both narrative forms reveal about the nation state and the position of racial others in the body politic? Why do prison narratives repeatedly invoke the antebellum period (slavery) in reference to supposedly post-slavery moments? What is “crime” in the US context and how has its meaning changed and/or resisted change over time? How do the forms of expression produced by the enslaved and the incarcerated challenge prevailing conceptions of American history? What institutional, social, and cultural apparatuses inform America’s current status as the most incarcerating nation in the history of humankind, and how does this status belie notions liberal notions of moral, political and social progress? Our readings of captive narratives will be supplemented by analysis of alternative cultural forms—e.g. “spirituals,” field hollers, chain gang songs—that have been used by the enslaved and the incarcerated to give expression to (and protest against) the experience of racial and class terror.

LTCS 111 (TOPICS IN CULTURAL STUDIES)
LTCS 100 (THEORIES AND METHODS OF CULTURAL STUDIES: KEYWORDS, SPACES, AND MOVEMENTS)
LTTH 115 (INTRODUCTION TO CRITICAL THEORY: LEARNING TO THEORIZE)
LTWL 114 (CHILDREN’S LITERATURE: THE GOLDEN AGE)
LTWL 124 (SCIENCE FICTION: IN LITERATURE AND FILM)
LTWL 149 (THE LAST TURN OF THE 20TH CENTURY IN THE WEST)

LTEN Upper Division Codes:

(a) = British Literature before 1660
(b) = British Literature after 1660
(c) = U.S. Literature before 1860
(d) = U.S. Literature after 1860

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No Course Offerings Fall 2008
 

LTKO 1A - BEGINNING KOREAN: FIRST YEAR I
Instructors: TAs supervised by Jeyseon Lee

Please visit our Korean Literature website at: http://korean.ucsd.edu/  for a course description for this course.

LTKO 1B - BEGINNING KOREAN: FIRST YEAR II
Instructors: TAs supervised by Jeyseon Lee

Please visit our Korean Literature website at: http://korean.ucsd.edu/  for a course description for this course.

LTKO 2A - INTERMEDIATE KOREAN: SECOND YEAR I
Instructors: TAs supervised by Jeyseon Lee

Please visit our Korean Literature website at: http://korean.ucsd.edu/  for a course description for this course.

LTKO 2B - INTERMEDIATE KOREAN: SECOND YEAR II
Instructors: TAs supervised by Jeyseon Lee

Please visit our Korean Literature website at: http://korean.ucsd.edu/  for a course description for this course.

LTKO 3 - ADVANCED KOREAN: THIRD YEAR I
Instructors: TAs supervised by Jeyseon Lee

Please visit our Korean Literature website at: http://korean.ucsd.edu/  for a course description for this course.

• The introductory Spanish sequence (1ABCD) is offered through the Linguistics Language Program
• Intermediate language and upper-level language and literature courses are offered through the Literature Department
• Contact bpita@ucsd.edu or miprivas@gmail.com for further information and with questions regarding placement in the Intermediate Spanish program. Heritage speakers of Spanish are encouraged to contact the instructor to insure proper placement.
• Students in LTSP 2A and 2B must attend both the lecture and discussion sections of the course.
• Note: The final examinations for LTSP 2ABCDE & 50ABC will be held in common; see below for dates.

This course will survey Mexican film starting with the Silent Era and continuing with the Golden Age, the 60s generation and its present-day boom. Students will screen representative films in the  Film and Video Reserves.  Readings and in-class discussions will pay close attention to on-screen content and aesthetics that reflect Mexican history, society, culture and politics while exploring issues of class, race, ethnicity, gender and language. This course will also analyze the relationship between Mexican cinema and the government as it relates to freedom of expression and economics. Prerequisites: LTSP 50A, 50B or 50C

LTWL 19A - INTRODUCTION TO THE ANCIENT GREEKS AND ROMANS
Instructor: Leslie Edwards

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 87 - FRESHMAN SEMINAR: CONTEMPORARY FRENCH AND FRANCOPHONE FILM
Instructor: Winifred Woodhull

Recent films made in France and other parts of the French-speaking world (Mali, Belgium, Quebec), considered in terms of both the social issues they evoke and formal elements such as narrative structure, setting, lighting, camera work, editing, and sound.

LTWL 114 - CHILDREN’S LITERATURE: THE GOLDEN AGE
Instructor: Stephen Potts

As a genre, children’s literature is little more than 200 years old. Rooted in the folk and fairy tale, the genre developed with the spreading availability of print media and public education, and it came into its own—at least in Europe and North America—in the mid-nineteenth century. From then until World War I, it enjoyed what many now call its Golden Age, the period when most of the familiar classics were written. This quarter we will follow the rise of reading for the young from the fairy tales of Perrault, Grimm, and Andersen to the fantasies of Baum and Barrie and the realism of Twain and Montgomery. In the process, we will approach individual works from the standpoints of literary history, sociological context, and child development. Just follow the Yellow Brick Road. This course will also count as a LTEN course.

LTWL 124 - SCIENCE FICTION: IN LITERATURE AND FILM
Instructor: Stephen Potts

Although with precedents in the fantastic speculations of earlier centuries, “science fiction” came of age—and earned its name—in the 20th century. As a new technology at the beginning of that century, cinema quickly discovered the unique possibilities of the genre. We will begin our readings in the post-World War II Golden Age of Science Fiction, moving through the New Wave of the 60s and 70s into cyberpunk and the modern era. At the same time, we will be following the parallel, if not quite identical, evolution of the genre through film, using lectures, discussions, and range of examples. In addition, there is a good chance of a guest lecture by a popular science fiction author. This course will also count as a LTEN course.

LTWL 129 - WISDOM: LITERATURE OF AUTHORITY
Instructor: Richard Cohen

What is wisdom? Is it a type of intellectual insight that penetrates ultimate reality? And thus is there one single wisdom, as wise in ancient India as it is in modern America? Is wisdom a more moderate form of insight? Might there be many wisdoms, each wise within its local (sub)culture? Is wisdom not a cognitive matter at all, but a mode of living? A special way of acting? Or is wisdom a literary genre? A discourse? Is wisdom inborn? Or is it learned? Can wisdom be taught? Who is wise? How do we recognize the wise? And what should we do, once we do recognize them?

To address these questions, the course is divided into two parts. During the quarter's first half — styled "Wisdom Unbound" — the class will read a number of texts out of context. Of course, such de-contextual reading is usually discouraged in literature classes. But this de-contextualization is necessary for our purposes, since we will try to identify trans-temporal, trans-local, trans-cultural indices of true wisdom. Among the texts to be read are: Plato's "Meno," Alan Ginsberg's "Howl," selections from the writings of Chuang Tzu, and William Blake's The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, as well as fortune cookies and bumper stickers. The second half of the course is styled "Wisdom Bound." Here, we will pay close attention to the discursive context within which claims to wisdom are asserted and accepted by an audience as authoritative. In particular, the class considers wisdom as represented in Buddhist writings: from the buddha himself, through the Indian philosopher Nagarjuna, to the Zen Buddhism of Japan, to Jack Kerouac's Dharma Bums. Prerequisite: upper-division standing

LTWL 147 - READINGS IN MAHAYANA BUDDHISM
Instructor: Richard Cohen

This course offers students a chance to read and discuss important sutras belonging to Mahayana Buddhism. Readings include the Heart Sutra, the Lotus Sutra, the Land of Bliss Sutras, as well as several less-known works. Class discussions will focus on the imagination of the bodhisattva, considering this figure in its social, ethical, ritual, doctrinal, polemical, and "mystical" dimensions. Prior knowledge of Buddhism, especially Indian Buddhism, is desirable, though not required. Students who have taken LTWL 129 or LTWL 135 are encouraged to take this course.

LTWL 149 - THE LAST TURN OF THE 20TH CENTURY IN THE WEST
Instructor: Steven Cassedy

The period from 1880 to 1930 was a time of tumultuous change in Europe and the United States. In this highly interdisciplinary course, we will look at the changes that occurred in everyday life, family life, social attitudes, politics, science, philosophy, and the arts. We will examine how technology changed domestic life and how changes in domestic life led to changes in attitudes toward women and sexuality. We will examine the rise of racial thinking in connection with European and American imperialism and in connection with the modern concept of human rights. We will look at philosophies of mind and new developments in religious thinking. This is the era that brings revolutions in biological sciences and physics. We will look at the rise of modern neurology and relativity theory. Finally we will look at the enormous changes that occurred in the arts, for example, the rise of abstraction in the visual arts, “emancipation of dissonance” in music, the abandonment of conventional forms in literature, and the emergence of cinema as an art form. This course will also count as an LTEN course.

LTWL 158C - TOPICS IN EARLY CHRISTIAN LITERATURE: PORTRAIT OF JESUS
Instructor: Dayna Kalleres

This course considers the diverse conceptualizations of Jesus from the early Christian era through to the modern day--some examples include Jesus the apocalyptic prophet, Jesus the rabbi, Jesus the magican, Jesus the savior, Jesus the revolutionary, as well as Jesus the social critic. In a selective survey of the literature, art, and film projecting these various portraits, we shall explore the symbiotic relationship between the construction of Jesus and the wider cultural, political, and socio-historical context. May be repeated once for credit. Final exam or final paper.

STUDENTS MUST HAVE COMPLETED THEIR COLLEGE WRITING REQUIREMENTS
PRIOR TO ENROLLMENT IN LTWR 8 A-B-C
LTWR 8A, B, AND C ARE PREREQUISITE TO DECLARING A MAJOR IN WRITING.
STUDENTS ENROLLED IN LTWR 8B AND LTWR 8C ARE REQUIRED TO ATTEND THREE READINGS IN THE NEW WRITING SERIES (INDICATED BY “LAB” BELOW). SEE LITERATURE DEPARTMENT FOR TIMES AND DATES

DEPARTMENT APPROVAL FOR UPPER-DIVISION WRITING COURSES IS AVAILABLE IN THE LITERATURE UNDERGRADUATE OFFICE FROM 9:00-3:30, MONDAY-FRIDAY.
PRIORITY ENROLLMENT BEGINS 5/7 FOR SENIOR WRITING MAJORS,
5/8 FOR JUNIOR WRITING MAJORS, 5/9 FOR SENIOR WRITING MINORS,
5/12 FOR JUNIOR WRITING MINORS, 5/13 FOR PRE-WRITING MAJORS,
5/14 FOR ALL OTHERS (UPPER-DIVISION STANDING WITH APPROPRIATE PREREQUISITE).