Fall 2012

Lower Division Courses

COM 1. MAJOR BOOKS OF WESTERN CULTURE: THE ANCIENT WORLD (4 Units)

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. 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 papers and take a final examination.

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

GE Credits (Old): ArtHum and Wrt
GE Credits (New): ArtHum, Wrt, and World Cultures
(Note: This course cannot be used to satisfy a college or university composition requirement and GE writing experience simultaneously).

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


COM 2. MAJOR BOOKS OF WESTERN CULTURE: From THE MIDDLES AGES to THE ENLIGHTENMENT (4 Units)

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. 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 short papers and take a final examination.

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

GE Credits (Old): ArtHum and Wrt
GE Credits (New): ArtHum, Wrt, and World Cultures
(Note: This course cannot be used to satisfy a college or university composition requirement and GE writing experience simultaneously).

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


COM 3. MAJOR BOOKS OF WESTERN CULTURE: THE MODERN CRISIS (4 Units)

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. 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 short papers and take a final examination.

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

GE Credits (Old): ArtHum and Wrt
GE Credits (New): ArtHum, Wrt, and World Cultures
(Note: This course cannot be used to satisfy a college or university composition requirement and GE writing experience simultaneously).

Readings (vary from section to section):
J.W. von Goethe, Faust (Part One); Sigmund Freud, Civilization and its Discontents; Franz Kafka, The Trial; Beckett, Waiting for Godot;
Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment ; 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)

Course Description: Comparative study of selected major Western and non-Western texts composed in the period from 1945 to the present. 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 short papers and take a final examination.

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

GE Credits (Old): ArtHum, Div, and Wrt
GE Credits (New): ArtHum, Wrt, Visual Literacy, and World Cultures
(Note: This course cannot be used to satisfy a college or university composition requirement and GE writing experience simultaneously).

Readings (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)
Prof. Brenda Deen Schildgen, bdschildgen

@ucdavis.edu

Lecture: TR 12:10-1:30, 1322 Storer

Discussion Sections:
Sec. 1 (T 5:10-6:00, 129 Wellman) CRN 17275
Sec. 2 (T 6:10-7:00, 129 Wellman) CRN 17276
Sec. 3 (W 5:10-6:00, 217 Olson) CRN 17277
Sec. 4 (W 6:10-7:00, 217 Olson) CRN 17278
Sec. 5 (F 11:00-11:50, 207 Olson) CRN 17279
Sec. 6 (F 12:10-1:00, 207 Olson) CRN 17280

Course Description: Traversing the globe, this course is a "genre" course that discusses the origin and development of the popular (or folk) genres of fables, fairy tales, and parables, and follows their development and evolution into their modern forms. The class surveys the social, political, anthropological, psychological, and literary elements of these genres in their various incarnations throughout time and space.

Classes will be conducted partly by lecture and partly by discussion. Students must attend discussion sections regularly and participate in discussions. Your grade will be divided according to the following percentages: 15% first exam, 20% first paper (which is a revision of the essay on the first exam), 30% second paper, 25% final, and 10% class participation. More than three absences in discussion will result in an automatic F for that portion of your grade. Comparative Literature 5 is an Introductory General Education course that satisfies World Cultures, Writing, and Arts & Humanities.

GE Credits (Old): ArtHum, Div, and Wrt.
GE Credits (New): ArtHum, Wrt, and World Cultures.

Readings:

  • Haddawy, The Arabian Nights: Sinbad and Other Popular Stories (Norton)
  • G. Basile, Pentamerone
  • J.M. Barrie, Peter Pan
  • L. Frank Baum, The Wizard of Oz (HarperCollins)
  • Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales of Geoffrey Chaucer (Bantam Classics)
  • Carlo Collodi, The Adventures of Pinocchio (New York Review of Books)
  • S. Rushdie, Haroun and the Sea of Stories (Penguin)
  • A Course Reader on SmartSite

COM 7. LITERATURE OF FANTASY AND THE SUPERNATURAL (4 Units)
Prof. Gail Finney, gefinney

@ucdavis.edu

Lecture: TR 1:40-3:00, 100 Hunt

Discussion Sections:
Sec. 1 (M 4:10-5:00, 217 Olson) CRN 17287
Sec. 2 (M 5:10-6:00, 217 Olson) CRN 17288
Sec. 3 (T 4:10-5:00, 207 Wellman) CRN 17289
Sec. 4 (T 5:10-6:00, 207 Wellman) CRN 17290
Sec. 5 (W 4:10-5:00, 101 Wellman CRN 17291
Sec. 6 (W 5:10-6:00, 101 Wellman) CRN 17292

Course Description: Although the fantastic tale flourishes in the nineteenth century, fantasy and the supernatural are found throughout literature. Flights of fancy, free-floating psyches, horror and morbidity, other-worldliness, fragmented bodies (disembodied hearts, teeth, or hair, possessing a life of their own)-- all these phenomena have been associated with the fantastic and the supernatural. Yet the fantastic has no meaning without reference to realism, and the fantastic shares with realism a fascination with settings and objects, with the material realm. Indeed, the fantastic mode has been viewed as the "left hand" of realism. Similarly, the ambiguity involved in perceiving the fantastic, the supernatural, and the real and in distinguishing these modes from each other often produces a concomitant blurring between sanity and insanity; fantastic literature abounds in depictions of madness or suspected madness.

This course will investigate these and other features of fantasy and the supernatural, as well as their relationship to realism, in literature and film from Shakespeare to Gabriel Garcia Marquez. We will treat readings and films from Germany, the United States, England, France, Argentina, Japan, and Colombia. All texts except The Tempest are included in the anthology entitled Literature of Fantasy and the Supernatural, ed. Gail Finney.

Works studied will include the following:

  • William Shakespeare, The Tempest (1610-11) (To be purchased separately)

Included in the anthology, Literature of Fantasy and the Supernatural:

  • E.T.A. Hoffmann, "The Sand-man" (1816)
  • Sigmund Freud, "The Uncanny" (1919)
  • Edgar Allan Poe, "Berenice," "The Fall of the House of Usher," "The Pit and the Pendulum," "The Black Cat," "The Tell-Tale Heart" (1835-1843)
  • Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865)
  • Guy de Maupassant, "The Head of Hair" (1884), "Who Knows?" (1890)
  • Henry James, The Turn of the Screw (1898)
  • Franz Kafka, "The Metamorphosis" (1915), "A Country Doctor" (1917)
  • Jorge Luis Borges, "The Library of Babel" (1941), "The Garden of Forking Paths" (1941)
  • Yasunari Kawabata, "One Arm" (1964)
  • Gabriel García Márquez, "A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings" (1968), "The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World" (1968)

GE Credits (Old): ArtHum, Div, and Wrt.
GE Credits (New): ArtHum, Wrt, and World Cultures.

Readings:

  • William Shakespeare, The Tempest, ed. Barbara A. Mowat and Paul Werstine (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994).
  • Literature of Fantasy and the Supernatural, ed. Gail Finney (San Diego: Cognella Academic Publishers, 2011) (https://students.universityreaders.com/store/).

COM 10K. MASTER AUTHORS IN WORLD LITERATURE (2 Units)
Zoya Stanchits Popova, Instructor

Lecture/Discussion Sections:
Sec. 1 (T 4:10-6:00, 205 Wellman) CRN 43505
Sec. 2 (R 2:10-4:00, 148 Physics) CRN 43506

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.

Grading: Pass/No Pass (P/NP) only.

Readings:

  • (TBA)

COM 20. HUMANS AND NATURAL WORLD (4 Units)
Prof. Scott McLean, wsmclean

@ucdavis.edu
(TR 3:10-4:30, 129 Wellman) CRN 43260

Course Description: This course acquaints students with changing concepts of the human relationship to the natural environment -- whether cultivated nature or wild nature -- as reflected in literary works from around the world. Reading, discussion, and writing about these works, probing questions about what "nature" is and how humans have historically related to land, animals, and other living phenomena. Emphasis placed on differences between cultures, religions, and historical periods.

GE Credits (Old): ArtHum and Wrt.
GE Credit (New): ArtHum, Wrt, and World Cultures.

Readings:

  • (TBA)

Upper Division Courses

COM 110. HONG KONG CINEMA (4 Units)
Prof. Sheldun Lu, shlu

@ucdavis.edu

(Lecture: TR 1:40-3:00, 119 Wellman)
(Film Viewing: R 6:10-9:00, 206 Olson)
CRN 17209

Course Description: This course is a study of the cinema of Hong Kong, a cultural crossroads between East and West. Students examine the history, genres, styles, stars, and major directors of Hong Kong cinema in reference to the city's multi-linguistic, colonial, and postcolonial environment. The course pays special attention to Hong Kong cinema's interactions with and influences on other filmic traditions such as Hollywood and Asian cinema. Topics will include: characteristics of Hong Kong cinema as a local, regional, and global cinema; historical evolution of film genres and styles; major directors and stars; film adaption of literary works about Hong Kong; Hong Kong cinema's international influence.

Prerequisite: Upper division standing.

GE Credits (Old): ArtHum, Div, and Wrt.
GE Credit (New): ArtHum, Wrt, Visual Literacy, and World Cultures.

Readings:

  • Poshek Fu and David Desser, The Cinema of Hong Kong: History, Arts, Identity
  • A Course Reader (available at Davis Copy Shop)

COM 120. WRITING NATURE: 1750 to the Present (4 Units)
Prof. Scott McLean, wsmclean

@ucdavis.edu
(TR 12:10-1:30, 105 Olson) CRN 43255

Course Description: This course is a study of representations, descriptions, and discussions of humankind's problematical relationship with the non-human world in texts written in a variety of European and American traditions between 1750 and the present.

Prerequisite: Completion of Entry Level Writing (formerly Subject A) Requirement and at least one course in literature.

GE Credits (Old): ArtHum and Wrt.
GE Credit (New): ArtHum, Wrt, and World Cultures.

Readings:

  • (TBA)

COM 153. THE FORMS OF ASIAN LITERATURE (4 Units)
Prof. Sheldon Lu, shlu

@ucdavis.edu
(TR 10:30-11:50, 108 Hoagland) CRN 43257

Course Description: This course is a comparative study of modern Chinese and Japanese literature from the turn of the twentieth century to the present. Students will read short stories, poems, and excerpts from novels written by leading East Asian writers. The class will analyze recurrent themes and topics in modern East Asian literature such as love, death, revolution, war, tradition, modernity, westernization, and globalization. Literary developments in modern Asia will be examined in broad international contexts.

Prerequisite: Upper division standing.

GE Credits (Old): ArtHum, Div, and Wrt.
GE Credit (New): ArtHum, Wrt, and World Cultures.

Readings:

  • (TBA)

COM 167. COMPARATIVE STUDY OF MAJOR AUTHORS: "Homer, Sophocles, Euripides, and Shakespeare" (4 Units) UPDATED
Prof. Seth Schein, slschein

@ucdavis.edu
(TR 10:30-11:50, 129 Wellman) CRN 43258

Course Description: In this version of "COM 167: Major Authors," we shall read and discuss representations of the Trojan War by Homer, Sophocles, Euripides, and Shakespeare. We shall pay particular attention to depictions of heroism (and non- or anti-heroism), of gender roles and gender hierarchy, and of "history," as well as to the tensions between tradition and innovation.in the texts we study.

Prerequisite: Consent of instructor.

GE Credits (Old): ArtHum and Wrt.
GE Credit (New): ArtHum, Wrt, and World Cultures.

Readings:

  • Homer, Iliad
  • Sophocles, Ajax and Philoctetes
  • Euripides, Hecuba and Iphigeneia in Aulis
  • Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida

COM 168A. ROMANTICISM (4 Units)
Prof. Kari Lokke, kelokke

@ucdavis.edu
(TR 9:00-10:20, 217 Olson) CRN 17302

Course Description: This is an introduction to the Romantic movement with emphasis upon Romantic concepts of the self, irony, love, the imagination and artistic creativity, and the relationship of the individual to nature and society. Romanticism as a historical movement began in Germany and England and then spread to France, Italy, Spain, Russia and the USA. Romanticism is a quintessentially international movement that came into being as an almost worldwide response to such cultural and sociopolitical events as the French Revolution, the abolitionist movement, the stirrings of first wave feminism and the colonialist enterprises of the major European powers. This course will expose students to works that portray the price paid by Europeans for the rise of urbanization and industrialization at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth centuries.

Prerequisite: Upper division standing

GE Credits (Old): ArtHum and Wrt.
GE Credit (New): ArtHum, Wrt, and World Cultures.

Readings:

  • Goethe, The Sorrows of Young Werther (Penguin)
  • Claire de Duras, Ourika (Modern Language Press)
  • ETA Hoffmann, Tales of ETA Hoffmann (Univ. of Chicago Press)
  • Broadview Anthology of British Literature, Vol. 4: The Age of Romanticism (Broadview Press)
  • Mary Wollstonecraft, Maria, or The Wrongs of Woman (Norton)
  • Chateaubriand, Atala and Rene (Univ. of California Press Edition)

 


Graduate Courses

COM 210. TOPIC: "The Reception of Virgil's Aeneid" (4 Units)
Prof. Brenda Deen Schildgen, bdschildgen

@ucdavis.edu
Provost Ralph Hexter, hexter

@ucdavis.edu
(M 4:10-7:00, 104 Sproul) CRN 43259

Course Description: This seminar examines the place of Virgil's Aeneid in world literature and the fundamental role of Virgil's work in the growth of Western literary, cultural and philosophical tradition. In this seminar we accomplish three things. First, we begin by reading the epic in the context of first-century Rome. Second, we read selected works and excerpts of works in the European tradition directly inspired by the reading of Virgil: Augustine's City of God, Dante's Divine Comedy, Hermann Broch's The Death of Virgil, and Coetzee's Age of Iron. Third, we examine the contribution of the Aeneid to the various mythologies of the hero, the nation, the state, and the Empire in Western civilization, as well as its use by counter-traditions (Marlowe's Dido, Queen of Carthage, for example). Latin and Greek useful, but not required. Students with an interest in the Western literary tradition, the formation of canon, and counter-canon, as well as the dynamics of empire, nation, and transnationalism and the role of literary works in this trajectory will benefit from this course. Co-taught. Seminar format.

Course Requirement: Seminar paper presented to the class in the last two weeks of the seminar. Written version due by the end of the quarter.

Readings:

  • Vergil and A. Mandelbaum (trans.), Aeneid (Bantam)
  • Dante and Anthony Esolen (trans.), Inferno and Purgatorio (Modern Library)
  • Marlowe, Dido, Queen of Carthage in Complete Plays (Penguin)
  • H. Broch and Untermeyer (trans.), The Death of Vergil (Farrar, Straus, & Giraux, 1982)
  • H. Purcell and Curtis Prize (ed.), Dido and Aeneas: An Opera (Norton, 1986)
  • J.M. Coetzee, Age of Iron (Penguin)
  • Charles Martindale (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Virgil
  • A Course Reader (includes selections from Ovid; late antique versions/receptions of Virgil; Augustine's ConfessionsCity of God; Geoffrey of Monmouth; Roman d'Éneas; Boccaccio; Chaucer, "Legend of Dido," "House of Fame"; Christine de Pizan, "Dido"; selected essays)

COM 390. TEACHING COMPARATIVE LITERATURE IN COLLEGE (3 Units)
Prof. Noha Radwan, nmradwan

@ucdavis.edu
CRN 17508

Fridays, 1:10-4:00pm

822 Sproul


COM 392. TEACHING INTERNSHIP IN COMPARATIVE LITERATURE (1 Units)
STAFF
CRN 57497


COM 396. TEACHING ASSISTANT TRAINING PRACTICUM (Variable Units)

Noha Radwan (Sec. 1, CRN ***)
Brenda Schildgen, Professor (Sec. 2, CRN ***)
Gail Finney, Professor (Sec. 3, CRN ***)

(Note: Contact Falicia Savala, fsavala

@ucdavis.edu, for the CRNs.)