Literature MFA Course Descriptions FA25
Pre-authorization is required for students not enrolled in the Literature Department's MFA Program in Creative Writing. Please submit any pre-authorization request through the Enrollment Authorization System.
LTTH 210A - PROSEMINAR ON LITERARY SCHOLARSHIP
Instructor: Géraldine Fiss
Thinking Across Borders -This is the first in the three-course series of introductory graduate seminars for first-year PhD students in the Literature department. The Proseminar has three main goals: to introduce new PhD students to a wide range of foundational and contemporary conversations in comparative literature to introduce students to the department’s faculty and their fields of study and to train students in the foundational skills of graduate study. The course’s theme, “Thinking Across Borders,” reflects the uniquely multilingual, interdisciplinary structure of the UCSD Literature department, and across our conversations this quarter, we will keep reflecting on what it means to think across national, linguistic, disciplinary, and temporal borders in our work as scholars and teachers. It also reflects the situatedness of UCSD itself on unceded land of the Kumeyaay nation, which is currently occupied by the heavily militarized US/Mexico border, and in a city that has long been instrumental to US empire-building in the Pacific and beyond. We will continue to return to the question of situatedness in both its spatial and metaphorical registers. What does it mean to be situated in a field, or across multiple fields? How are we situated in relation to our archives and our scholarly communities? Where do we know from, and what does it mean to begin to know from here? The first half of the quarter will be devoted to tracing important critical conversations in comparative, transnational, and world literary/cultural studies. We will consider the stakes of terms such as “comparative,” “world,” “planetary,” and “transnational” as critical categories, and we will explore multiple methodologies for working across languages, borders, and disciplines. The second half of the quarter will be devoted to a departmental colloquium of works in progress and recently-published work by UCSD Literature faculty members across multiple languages and fields. These discussions will be open to the entire department, and will be guided, moderated, and facilitated by LTTH210A students.
LTWR 215 - CROSS-GENRE WORKSHOP
Instructor: Lily Hoàng
Contact instructor for course description.