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Literature Undergraduate Course Descriptions
Summer Session 2 2023 (S223)

LTCS 108 - Gender, Race, and Artificial Intelligence
Instructor: Max Schaffer

Contact instructor for course description.

  • LTCS 108 will count towards the Media concentration for the World Literature and Culture major.

LTCS 119 - Asian American Film and Media
Instructor: Steven Beardsley

Contact instructor for course description.

  • LTCS 119 will count towards the Media concentration for the World Literature and Culture major.

LTCS 130 - Gender, Race/Ethnicity, Class, and Culture
Sex, Gender, and Media
Instructor: Meg Wesling

This course examines representations and conceptualizations of the body, sex, sexuality in in contemporary American popular culture. We will discuss how our understandings of sexuality are inextricably linked to our cultural ideas about race and class, and examine the histories that converge to give gender, race, and sex their current meanings. While we will focus primarily on visual representations, including TV, film, video, advertising, we will supplement our visual learning with essays and short fiction. 

LTEA 138 - Japanese Films
Postwar Japan and Kaiju Cinema
Instructor: Erik Homenick

At the conclusion of the Second World War, Japan experienced profoundly consequential cultural and societal shifts that still resonate to this day. One of the most fascinating ways to deconstruct the impacts of these cultural shifts is through popular kaiju (giant monster films) such as Godzilla, Rodan, and Mothra. This course will examine how these films deal with war memory, national/ethnic identity and environmental issues in the Japanese postwar period, from the early 1950s until today.

  • LTEA 138 will count towards the Media concentration for the World Literature and Culture major.
  • LTEA 138 will count towards the Region (Asia) concentration for the World Literature and Culture major.

LTEN 124 - Topics: The Nineteenth Century (b)
Themes of Gothic Horror in Victorian Literature
Instructor: Kellie Miller

The gothic genre has become known for featuring horror, ghosts, and elements of the past haunting the living. To better understand how the gothic genre came to be, why there is such a fascination with gothic horror, and what these representations mean for intrigued readers, we will be analyzing a variety Victorian texts. Sources will include a variety of novels, short stories, and poems by authors such as Emily Bronte, Henry James, George Eliot, Oscar Wilde, and Charlotte Riddell.

  • LTEN 124 will count towards the British Lit Post-1660 ("B") requirement for the Literatures in English major.

LTEN 178 - Comparative Ethnic Literature (d)
Labor and Love: Women, Race, and Class in Multiethnic U.S. Literature
Instructor: Joanmarie Bañez

The tentative course title is Labor and Love: Women, Race, and Class in Multiethnic U.S. Literature. This 4-credit upper division course considers how race, ethnicity, labor, and gender impact notions of home, family, and social justice in texts by contemporary Asian American, Indigenous, Chicanx, and Black women writers. Reading a number of late 20th- and early 21st-century fiction, poems, and critical essays, this course will explore kinship, intergenerational relationships, desire and the erotic, and how different forms of labor impact the domestic sphere—a space that is simultaneously private and personal but also public and political. Students will conduct close-reading analysis of the texts, write short reading responses reflecting on the material, and gain proficiency in academic writing that engages with the intersectionality of contemporary multiethnic US literatures.

This course satisfies credit toward students’ DEI requirements; major/minor requirements for Literature and Ethnic Studies; ERC Upper-Division Writing; Sixth College Narrative, Aesthetic, and Historical Reasoning; Sixth College Social Analysis; Revelle social science; and Warren Program of Concentration requirements.

  • LTEN 178 will count towards the U.S Lit Post-1860 ("D") requirement for the Literatures in English major.

LTEN 181 - Asian American Literature (d)
Instructor: Erin Suzuki

Over the past few years, the genre of “dark academia” has emerged as a popular literary and aesthetic trope emphasizing the legacies of violence that haunt the hallowed halls of elite educational institutions. In this class, we will explore recent work by Asian Anglophone writers in this genre to explore the ways they engage these dark academic tropes alongside considerations of race, class, gender, and colonial histories. This class has a lot of ground to cover so will be reading intensive.

  • LTEN 181 will count towards the U.S Lit Post-1860 ("D") requirement for the Literatures in English major.
  • LTEN 181 will count towards the Region (The Americas) concentration for the World Literature and Culture major.

LTWL 165 - Literature and the Environment (d)
Literature in the Time of Climate Change
Instructor: Maya Richards

This literature course focuses on the challenges and possibilities of narrativizing climate change. We will explore how writers communicate new ways of thinking about climate change and how they imagine different worlds and ways of living that promote a more sustainable and just future. The class employs a climate justice lens to consider how the intersectionality of race, indigeneity, gender, poverty, and environmental injustice is crucial in understanding and addressing climate change. In our exploration, we will read a range of literary styles and analyze the formal and stylistic conventions writers employ to illustrate a planetary disaster that operates on multi-temporal and multi-scalar levels. Reading selections will include works from Indigenous American, Pacific Islander, Asian American, Latinx, and Black American writers.

  • LTWL 165 will count as an LTEN-equivalent course.
  • LTWL 165 will count towards the U.S Lit Post-1860 ("D") requirement for the Literatures in English major.
  • LTWL 165 will count towards the Region (The Americas) concentration for the World Literature and Culture major.

LTWR 100 - Short Fiction Workshop
Short-Form Fiction 
Instructor: Julia Moncur

Far from being ephemeral, short fictions can be gem-like and stunning examples of linguistic and narrative compression, mysterious as well as devastating in their emotional suggestion. These effects bloom out of prose’s most basic elements: the word and the sentence, from choice and structure, and also location and timing. In that sense, focusing on this form will allow us to develop new strengths in these basic elements to the benefit of our prose as a whole.

LTWR 102 - Poetry Workshop
Form and Content 
Instructor: Ben Doller

In this workshop course we will read a wide-ranging selection of historical and contemporary poetry, write poems in myriad forms and styles, and develop a writing community of support and conscious critique.

RELI 149 -  Islam in America 
Instructor: Babak Rahimi

Contact instructor for course description.