Courses

Spring 2009 Courses


Lower Division Courses

COM 1: Great Books of Western Civilization - The Ancient World (4 Units)

Patricia MacKinnon, Lecturer (Sec. 1, TR 4:10-6:00)
STAFF (Sec. 2, MW 12:10-2:00)
STAFF (Sec. 3, TR 2:10-4:00)

Course Description: An introduction, through class discussion and frequent written assignments, to some of the great books of western civilization from The Epic of Gilgamesh to St. Augustine's The Confessions. This course may be counted toward satisfaction of the English Composition Requirement in all three undergraduate colleges.

Prerequisite: Completion of Entry-Level Writing (formerly Subject A) Requirement.

Course Format: Lecture/Discussion - 4 hours. Limited to 25 students per section; pre-enrollment is strongly advised. Emphasis is on classroom discussion of the readings, supplemented by occasional lectures. Students write frequent short papers and take a final examination.

Textbooks (vary from section to section):
The New Oxford Annotated Bible; Homer, The Odyssey; Virgil, The Aeneid; Plato, The Symposium; The Epic of Gilgamesh;
St. Augustine of Hippo, The Confessions; Sophocles, Antigone; Salvatore Alloso, A Short Handbook for Writing Essays about Literature.

COM 2: Great Books of Western Civilization - From the Middle Ages to the Enlightenment (4 Units)

STAFF (Sec. 1, TR 12:10-2:00)
STAFF (Sec. 2, MW 2:10-4:00)
STAFF (Sec. 3, TR 2:10-4:00)

Course Description: An introduction to some major works from the medieval period to the "Enlightenment"; close readings and discussion, supplemented with short lectures to provide cultural and generic contexts. May be counted toward satisfaction of the English Composition requirement in all three undergraduate colleges.

Prerequisite: Completion of Entry-Level Writing (formerly Subject A) Requirement.

Course Format: Lecture/Discussion - 4 hours. Limited to 25 students per section; pre-enrollment is strongly advised. Emphasis is on classroom discussion of the readings, supplemented by occasional lectures. Students write frequent short papers and take a final examination.

Textbooks (vary from section to section):
Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote; Rene Descartes, Discourse on Method; William Shakespeare, Othello; Dante, The Inferno of Dante;
Beowulf; Salvatore Alloso, A Short Handbook for Writing Essays about Literature.

COM 3: Great Books of Western Civilization - The Modern Crisis (4 Units)

STAFF (Sec. 1, TR 10:00-11:50)
STAFF (Sec. 2, TR 2:10-4:00)
STAFF (Sec. 3, TR 4:10-6:00)

Course Description: An introduction, through class discussion and the writing of short papers, to some of the great books of the modern age, from Goethe's Faust to Beckett's Waiting for Godot. This course may be counted toward satisfaction of the English Composition Requirement in all three undergraduate colleges. GE credit: (ArtHum, Wrt).

Prerequisite: Completion of Entry-Level Writing (formerly Subject A) Requirement.

Course Format: Lecture/Discussion - 4 hours. Limited to 25 students per section; pre-enrollment is strongly advised. Emphasis is on classroom discussion of the readings, supplemented by occasional lectures. Students write frequent short papers and take a final examination.

Textbooks (vary from section to section):
J.W. von Goethe, Faust (Part 1); Sigmund Freud, Civilization and its Discontents; Franz Kafka, The Trial; Mary Shelley, Frankenstein;
Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground; Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own; Salvatore Alloso, A Short Handbook for Writing Essays about Literature.

COM 4: Major Books of the Contemporary World (4 Units)

STAFF (Sec. 1, MW 10:00-11:50)
STAFF (Sec. 2, MW 2:10-4:00)
STAFF (Sec. 3, MW 12:10-2:00)

Course Description: Comparative study of selected major Western and non-Western texts composed in the period from 1945 to the present. May be counted towards satisfaction of the English Composition requirement in all three undergraduate colleges.

Prerequisite: Completion of Entry-Level Writing (formerly Subject A) Requirement.

Course Format: Lecture/Discussion - 4 hours. Limited to 25 students per section; pre-enrollment is strongly advised. Emphasis is on classroom discussion of the readings, supplemented by occasional lectures. Students write frequent short papers and take a final examination.

Textbooks (vary from section to section):
Junot Diaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao; Jhumpa Lahari, The Namesake; J.M. Coetzee, Foe: A Novel;
Elfriede Jelinek, Women As Lovers; Tayeb Salih, Season of Migration to the North.

COM 5: Fairy Tales, Fables, and Parables (4 Units)
Jocelyn Sharlet, Assistant Professor

Lecture: TR, 10:30-11:50

Discussion Sections:
Sec. 1, W 6:10-7:00 (TA: Hilary Bryant)
Sec. 2, R 5:10-6:00 (TA: Ted Geier)
Sec. 3, W 5:10-6:00 (TA: Hilary Bryant)
Sec. 4, R 6:10-7:00 (TA: David Dayton)
Sec. 5, F 12:10-1:00 (TA: Ted Geier)
Sec. 6, T 6:10-7:00 (TA: David Dayton)

Course Description: Exploring the genres of fables, fairy tales, and parables, this course traces the development of the art of telling tales from the ancient to the modern world. We begin with fables, fairy tales, and parables from a range of world cultures and explore the way each type of story communicates ideas about coexistence and conflict in the family and community, political authority and resistance to it, and/or spiritual transformation. The course continues with major works of literature that develop new approaches to our three types of tales, especially the frame tale. Finally, the course focuses on the way modern literature reinterprets fairy tales, fables, and parables in novels and short stories to investigate topics such as the modern state, colonialism, gender, and globalization.

Readings will include (but not limited to): Fairy tales (Brothers Grimm, Perrault, East and Southeast Asian animal bridegroom tales, and Basile); Parables (Jataka tales, The Bible, Rabbi Nahmanm, Rumi, and Chuang-tzu); Fables (Coyote tales, Anansi the Spider tales, Aesop, and Marie de France); Building on fairy tales, fables, and parables : The Panchatantra, The Thousand and One Nights, Brethren of Purity, Island of Animals, Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream, Rushdie's Haroun and the Sea of Stories, Martel's Life of Pi, Parsipur's Women without Men, and selections by Borges, Calvino, and Kafka).

Textbooks:
Yann Martel, Life of Pi; Shahnush Parsipur, Women Without Men: A Novel of Modern Iran; Salman Rushdie, Haroun and the Sea of Stories, Husain Haddaw, Sindbad and Other Stories from the Arabian Nights; William Shakespeare, A Midsummer's Night Dream.

COM 7: Literature of Fantasy (4 Units)
Kari Lokke, Professor

Lecture: TR, 9:00-10:20

Discussion Sections:
Sec. 1, F 12:10-1:00
Sec. 2, W 3:10-4:00
Sec. 3, T 5:10-6:00
Sec. 4, R 6:10-7:00
Sec. 5, W 5:10-6:00
Sec. 6, R 5:10-6:00

Course Description: GE credit: ArtHum, Div, Wrt.

Course Format: Lecture - 3 hours; Discussion - 1 hour.

Textbooks:
William Shakespeare, The Tempest; James Winny (trans.), Sir Gawain and the Green Knight; Garcia Marquez, Of Love and Other Demons; Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis.

COM 10M: Master Authors in World Literature (2 Units)
STAFF

Lecture/Discussion Sections:
Sec. 1, M 2:10-4:00
Sec. 2, W 10:00-11:50

Course Description: This course is designed primarily to acquaint the non-literature major with a cross-section of writings by the world’s most important authors; readings in English translation. Authors that will be studied, but not limited to: Rilke/Yeats, Joyce/Woolf, Mann/Céline, Bulgakov/Tanizaki, O’Neill/Brecht, Lorca/Pirandello.

Textbooks: Rainer Maria Rilke, The Essential Rilke; James Joyce, Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man; William Butler Yeats, Yeats' Poetry, Drama, and Prose; Louis-Ferdinand Celine, Journey to the End of the Night; Frederico Garcia Lorca, The Collected Poems: A Bilingual; Mikhail Bulgakov, Heart of a Dog Binding; Djuna Barnes, Nightwood: The Original Version and Related; Junichiro Tanizaki, The Key and Diary of a Mad Old Man.

COM 20: Humans and the Natural World (4 Units)
Scott McLean, Lecturer (TR 10:30-11:50)

Course Description: You will read some of the foundational books in the Environmental movement - including Henry David Thoreau's Walden, in its entirety. But we will also read books that often are not seen as part of this history, including Colin Turnbull's Forest People and the Cuban novel, The Lost Steps, as well as, a range of poetry, from Virgil to Whitman. GE credit: ArtHum, Div, Wrt.

Course Format: Lecture/Discussion - 3 hours; Term Paper.

Textbooks:
Torrance, Encompassing Nature; Thoreau, Week on the Concord & Merrimack Rivers; John Muir, Writings of John Muir; Turnbull, Forest People; Kroeber, Ishi in Two Worlds; Carpentier, Lost Steps.

COM 53B: Literature of India and Southeast Asia (3 Units)
Archana Venkatesan, Assistant Professor (MWF 9:00-9:50)

Course Description: Introduction to representative masterpieces of South Asia with readings from such works as the Mahabharata and Ramayana, The Cloud Messenger, Shakuntala, The Little Clay Cart, and the stories and poems of both ancient and modern India and Southeast Asia. GE Credit: ArtHum, Div, Wrt.

Course Format: Lecture - 2 hours; Discussion - 1 hour.

Textbooks: Martha Ann Selby, Grow Long, Blessed Night Binding; Mirza Mohammad Hadi Ruswa, Umrao Jan Ada; Amitav Ghosh, The Shadow Lines; Kalidasa, Recognition of Sakuntala; Narayan, Ramayana.

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Upper Division Courses

COM 141: Introduction to Critical Theoretical Approaches to Literature and Culture (4 Units)
NEW INSTRUCTOR Sheldon Lu, Professor (TR 12:10-1:30) CRN 93246

Course Description: GE credit: ArtHum, Wrt.

Prerequisite: One upper-division literature course or consent of instructor.

Course Format: Lecture/Discussion - 3 hours; Term Paper.

Textbooks: Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction; N.K. Newton, Twentieyth-Century Literary Theory: A Reader; William Shakespeare, King Lear.

COM 160A: The Modern Novel (4 Units)
Gail Finney, Professor (MWF 11:00-11:50) CRN 93248

Course Description: Reading and discussion of three major 20th-Century novels as modernist texts: Marcel Proust's Swann's Way, Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain, and James Joyce's Ulysses. GE credit: ArtHum, Wrt.

Course Format: Lecture/Discussion - 3 hours; Term Paper.

Textbooks: Marcel Proust, Swann’s Way: In Search of Lost Time, Vol. 1; Harry Blamires, The New Bloomsday Book: A Guide Through Ulysses; Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain; James Joyce, Ulysses.

COM 168A: European Romanticism (4 Units)
Scott McLean, Lecturer (TR 1:40-3:00) CRN 93250

Course Description: Few words are as charged as is the word romantic. It is, together with freedom, one of the two words from the 18th century that most defines our own time. Or, rather, our understandings of romantic misdefine our own time. This course will include readings from primary Romantic texts, including Coleridge's poems, Keats' letters, and we will use as an anthology Jerome Rothenberg's and Jeffrey C. Robinson's Poems For The Millennium, The UC Book of Romantic and Post Romantic Poetry.

Course work will constitute a lot of reading; the writing of two papers; and a final exam. GE credit: ArtHum, Wrt.

Prerequisite: Any introductory course in literature.

Course Format: Discussion - 3 hours; Term Paper.

Textbooks:
Keats, Essential Keats; Mary Shelley, Shelley's Poetry & Prose; Wordsworth, Essen Wordsworth; Rousseau, Reveries of the Solitary Walker; Coleridge and Holmes (ed.), Selected Poetry; Mary Shelley, Franskenstein; Wordsworth, Grasmere & Alfoxden Journals; Blake, Marriage of Heaven and Hell; Holderin, Hyperion.

COM 195: The Grotesque (4 Units)
Kari Lokke, Professor (W 2:10-5:00) CRN 67470

Course Description: This seminar will examine the mode of the grotesque in selected works from the Renaissance to the twentieth century. We will pay particular attention to the grotesque as a means of social, cultural, and political critique as well as a vehicle for aesthetic innovation. Reference will be made to the major theories of the grotesque, and to the visual arts when appropriate.

The course will be conducted primarily by discussion. In this seminar, student presentations and discussions led by students will play a key role. Requirements include a short midterm paper (3-5 pages), a longer final paper (10-15 pages) and an oral presentation. Class participation will also be an important factor in determining the final grade.

Prerequisite: Junior-standing and major in Comparative Literature, or consent of instructor.

Course Format: Seminar - 3 hours; Term Paper; Oral Presentations.

Textbooks (may include): Shakespeare, The Tempest; Coleridge, Christabel; Hoffman, Tales of Hoffmann; Hawthorne, Rappaccini’s Daughter, My Kinsman Major Molineux; Gogol, The Overcoat and Other Tales Good and Evil; Mann, Death in Venice and Mario and the Magician; Kafka, A Hunger Artist, In the Penal Colony, Josephine the Singer, or the Mousefolk; Dinesen, “The Monkey” from Seven Gothic Tales; Marquez, Of Love and Other Demons; O’ Connor, Revelation, Everything that Rises Must Converge, Parker’s Back; Theories of the grotesque by Hugo, Kayser, Bakhtin, Harpham, and among others.


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Graduate Courses

COURSE CHANGE: The COM 210, scheduled to be taught by Professor Sheldon Lu this spring quarter, is canceled and will be replaced by the listed course below. For any questions, please contact the instructors directly. Please note the CRN will remain the same for the new graduate course.

COM 210: The Grotesque (4 Units)
Kari Lokke, Professor (W 2:10-5:00) CRN 67494 SAME CRN

Course Description: This seminar will examine the mode of the grotesque in selected works from the Renaissance to the twentieth century. We will pay particular attention to the grotesque as a means of social, cultural, and political critique as well as a vehicle for aesthetic innovation. Reference will be made to the major theories of the grotesque, and to the visual arts when appropriate.
The course will be conducted primarily by discussion. In this seminar, student presentations and discussions led by students will play a key role. Requirements include a short midterm paper (3-5 pages), a longer final paper (10-15 pages) and an oral presentation. Class participation will also be an important factor in determining the final grade.

Prerequisite: Junior-standing and major in Comparative Literature, or consent of instructor.

Course Format: Seminar - 3 hours; Term Paper; Oral Presentations.

Textbooks (may include): Shakespeare, The Tempest; Coleridge, Christabel; Hoffman, Tales of Hoffmann; Hawthorne, Rappaccini’s Daughter, My Kinsman Major Molineux; Gogol, The Overcoat and Other Tales Good and Evil; Mann, Death in Venice and Mario and the Magician; Kafka, A Hunger Artist, In the Penal Colony, Josephine the Singer, or the Mousefolk; Dinesen, “The Monkey” from Seven Gothic Tales; Marquez, Of Love and Other Demons; O’ Connor, Revelation, Everything that Rises Must Converge, Parker’s Back; Theories of the grotesque by Hugo, Kayser, Bakhtin, Harpham, and among others.