Fall 2014

Lower Division Courses

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

Section

Instructor

Day / Time

Room

CRN

01

Linda Matheson

MW 10:00-11:50A

1342 Storer

37271

02

Cloe Le Gall-Scoville

MW 2:10-4:00P

159 Olson

37272

03

Nicholas Sanchez

TR 10:00-11:50A

217 Olson

37273

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): Arts & Humanities and Writing Experience.
GE Credits (New): Arts & Humanities, World Cultures and Writing Experience.
(Note: This course cannot be used to satisfy a college or university composition requirement and GE writing experience simultaneously).

Format: Lecture/Discussion - 4 hours.

Sample 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)

Section

Instructor

Day / Time

Room

CRN

01

Kristen Waha

MW 12:10-2:00P

229 Wellman

37274

02

D Dayton

TR 2:10-4:00P

261 Olson

37275

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): Arts & Humanities and Writing Experience.
GE Credits (New): Arts & Humanities, World Cultures and Writing Experience.

(Note: This course cannot be used to satisfy a college or university composition requirement and GE writing experience simultaneously).

Format: Lecture/Discussion - 4 hours.

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


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

Section

Instructor

Day / Time

Room

CRN

01

Kevin Smith

MW 8:00-9:50A    

118 Olson

37277

02

Deb Young

MW 10:00-11:50A

110 Hunt

37278

03

Pat Cabell

TR 12:10-2:00P

244 Olson

37279

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): Arts & Humanities and Writing Experience.
GE Credits (New): Arts & Humanities, World Cultures and Writing Experience.

(Note: This course cannot be used to satisfy a college or university composition requirement and GE writing experience simultaneously).

Format: Lecture/Discussion - 4 hours.

Sample Readings (vary from section to section):
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust (Part One); Sigmund Freud, Civilization and its Discontents; Franz Kafka, The Trial; Samuel 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)

Section

Instructor

Day / Time

Room

CRN

01

Tori White

MW 2:10-4:00P

205 Wellman

37281

02

Linda Matheson

MW 4:10-6:00P

227 Olson

37282

03

Megan Ammirati

TR 8:00-9:50A

101 Olson

37283

04

Ted Geier

TR 10:00-11:50A

101 Olson

37284

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): Arts & Humanities, Domestic Diversity and Writing Experience.
GE Credits (New): Arts & Humanities, Visual Literacy, World Cultures and Writing Experience.

(Note: This course cannot be used to satisfy a college or university composition requirement and GE writing experience simultaneously).

Format: Lecture/Discussion - 4 hours.

Sample 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; Jose Saramago, The Cave; Alice Notley, Descent of Alette.


COM 5. FAIRY TALES, FABLES, AND PARABLES (4 units)
Kari Lokke


Lecture: MW 12:10-1:30P, 176 Everson

Discussion Sections:

Section

Instructor

Day / Time

Room

CRN

01

Amanda Batarseh

M 4:10-5:00P      

151 Olson

63897

02

Amanda Batarseh

M 5:10-6:00P

105 Olson

63898

03

Zhen Zhang

R  4:10-5:00P

141 Olson

63900

04

Zhen Zhang

R 5:10-6:00P

207 Olson

63902

05

Young Hui

F 10:00-10:50A

101 Olson

63903

06

Young Hui

F 11:00-11:50A

101 Olson

63904

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

Course Requirements: Two four-page papers (20 and 30 % of the final grade respectively), a final exam (25%), participation in discussion sections and completion of four short response papers (25%). 

Classes will be conducted partly by lecture and partly by discussion. Students must attend discussion sections regularly and participate in discussions.

Comparative Literature 5 is an Introductory General Education course that satisfies World Cultures, Writing, and Arts & Humanities requirements.

Prerequisite: None.

GE Credits (Old): Arts & Humanities, Diversity, and Writing Experience.
GE Credits (New): Arts & Humanities, World Cultures, and Writing Experience.

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

Textbooks:

  • Maria Tatar, The Classic Fairy Tales (W.W. Norton & Company, 1999)
  • Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre, edited by Richard J. Dunn (Newton, 2001)
  • William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night's Dream, edited by Gail Kern Paster and Skiles Howard (Bedford and St. Martin's, 1999)
  • A Course Reader
     

COM 7. LITERATURE OF FANTASY AND THE SUPERNATURAL (4 units)
Neil Larsen


Lecture: TR 10:30-11:50A, 1322 Storer

Discussion Sections:

Section 

Instructor

Day / Time

Room

CRN

01

Thomas Hintze

W 4:10-5:00P 

217 Olson

63703

02

Thomas Hintze

W 5:10-6:00P

217 Olson

63704

03

Michelle Westbrook

R 4:10-5:00P

163 Olson

63705

04

Michelle Westbrook

R 5:10-6:00P

163 Olson

63706

05

Nicholas Malone

F 10:00-10:50A

207 Olson

63708

06

Nicholas Malone

F 11:00-11:50A

207 Olson

63709

Course Description: The literature of fantasy and the supernatural, although often transporting the reader into another world or a distant past, is a product of modern, urban society.  In its Western variations, it dates from not much earlier than the 19th century. The appeal of fantasy assumes the cultural and narrative dominance of realism, and the taste for the supernatural rests on the broad, secular disbelief in its existence.  This course will explore this historical and cultural dynamic by focusing on the historical development of one of the most significant formal, technical and popular vehicles for narratives of fantasy and the supernatural: the horror film. A series of ten to twelve of the most widely studied and influential full-length horror films--to be watched by students at their own convenience outside of class via downloadable video files--will form the core content of the course, to be accompanied by in-class viewing of excerpts from many other films and television shows as well as a small and select number of literary works that have furnished the horror film with its basic script templates. Films to be viewed and made the subject of lectures and discussion, stretching from the silent era to the contemporary, to include:

  • "The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari" (Robert Wiene, Germany, 1920)
  • "Nosferatu" (F.W. Murnau, Germany, 1922)
  • "Phantom of the Opera" (Rupert Julian; Lon Chaney, USA, 1925)
  • "Vampyr" (Carl Theodor Dreyer, Denmark, 1932)
  • "Frankenstein" (James Whale, USA, 1931)
  • "Freaks" (Tod Browning, USA, 1932)
  • "Ugetsu" (Kenji Mizoguchi, Japan, 1953)
  • "The Birds" (Alfred Hitchcock, USA, 1963)
  • "Rosemary's Baby" (Roman Polanski, USA, 1968)
  • "Ringu" (Hideo Nakata, Japan, 1998)
  • "Pan's Labyrinth" (Guillermo del Toro, Mexico, 2006)
  • "Let the Right One In" (Thomas Alfredson, Sweden, 2008)
  • "Uncle Boonmee Who Can Remember his Past Lives" (Apichatchong Weerasethakul, Thailand, 2010)

Prerequisite: None.

GE credit (Old): Arts & Humanities, Diversity, and Writing Experience.
GE credit (New): Arts & Humanities, World Cultures, and Writing Experience.

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

Textbooks:

  • TBA


COM 10B. METAMORPHOSES, DECAMERON, ARABIAN NIGHTS, CANTERBURY TALES (2 units)
Leonardo Giorgetti

Section 01.
W 2:10-4:00P
209 Wellman
CRN 64458

Section 02.    
R 2:10-4:00P
151 Olson
CRN 64459

Course Description:  In this course, we will read selections from ancient and medieval texts, focusing our attention on the tradition of tale-telling. We will examine how these texts represent topics such as gender, culture, sexuality, love and social relationships, political and moral laws, supernatural, mythology, and religion. Since this is a Comparative Literature course, we will compare and contrast the transmission of stories into different cultural and temporal contexts, and consider how their narratives may have impacted the consciousness of ancient and medieval audiences. All the readings will be in modern English translation, occasionally accompanied by film screenings.

Prerequisite: None.

GE credit (Old): None.
GE credit (New): None.

Format: Lecture/Discussion - 2 hours.

Textbooks:

  • Ovid, Metamorphoses, translated by Stanley Lombardo (Hackett Publishing Company, 2010)
  • Giovanni Boccaccio, The Decameron, translated by Wayne A. Rebhorn (W.W. Norton & Company, 2013)
  • Anonymous, Sindbad: And Other Stories from the Arabian Nights, translated by Husain Haddawy (W.W. Norton & Company, 2008)
  • Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales, translated by Peter G. Beidler, A. Kent Hieatt and Constance Hieatt (Bantam Classics, 1982)
  • Additional readings on SmartSite
     

Upper Division Courses

COM 110. HONG KONG CINEMA (4 units)
Sheldon Lu


Lecture: TR 12:10-1:30P, 202 Wellman
Film Viewing: T 6:10-9:00P, 119 Wellman
CRN 63585

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 or consent of instructor.

GE Credits (Old): Arts & Humanities, Diversity, and Writing Experience.
GE Credits (New): Arts & Humanities, Visual Literacy, World Culture, and Writing Experience.

Format: Lecture/Discussion - 3 hours; Film Viewing - 3 hours.

Textbooks:

  • Course book is available as a PDF
     

COM 157. WAR AND PEACE (4 units)
Noha Radwan


MWF 1:10-2:00P
217 Olson
CRN 63710

Course Description: The focus of the course will be on the poetics of anti-war literature: poetry, fiction and memoirs.  In the first five weeks of the course students will be reading a selection of European and American literary works written in the context of WWI, WWII, the Spanish Civil War and the American war in Vietnam. The latter five weeks will be focused on Middle Eastern and South Asian literature produced in the contexts of the India-Pakistan Partition War, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the Iraq-Iran war and the American wars in Iraq.

Prerequisite: Comparative Literature 1, 2, 3, or consent of instructor.

GE Credits (Old): Arts & Humanities, Writing Experience.
GE Credit (New): Arts & Humanities, World Cultures, and Writing Experience.

Format: Lecture - 3 hours; Term Paper.

Textbooks:

  • Sinan Antoon, The Corpse Washer (Yale University Press, 2013)
  • S. Yizhar, Khirbet Khizeh, translated by Nicholas de Lange and Yaacob Dweck (Ibis Editions, 2008)
  • Mahmoud Darwish, Memory for Forgetfulness: August, Beirut, 1982, translated by Ibrahim Muhawi (University of California Press, 2013)
  • Additional readings on SmartSite
     

COM 164D. ENLIGHTENMENT (4 units)
Stefan Uhlig

TR 10:30-11:50A
108 Hoagland
CRN 63711

Course Description: Eighteenth-Century thinkers widely credited their period with having set them free from the conventional orthodoxies of the church and state. In natural sciences, religion, moral thought, history, politics, or anthropology, the champions of Enlightenment developed new, and powerfully self-critical procedures of analysis and understanding. This course presents some key examples of these contributions to a range of modern disciplines. However, we will also ask specifically what role the literary, or forms of argument and presentation, played in these developments. The major European and American texts we will study range in their perspectives from a near-utopian confidence in human rationality to deeply skeptical critiques of our ability to answer pressing questions, or resolve enduring conflicts. We will find, in each case, that the forms in which these texts present their argument, tell stories, or imagine their solution makes a difference to the legacy of this decisive period in Western literature and thought.

Prerequisite: None.

GE Credits (Old): Arts & Humanities and Writing Experience.
GE Credit (New): Arts & Humanities, World Cultures, and Writing Experience.

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

Textbooks:

  • Isaac Kramnick, ed., The Portable Enlightenment Reader (Penguin Books, 1995)
  • Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe, edited by Thomas Keymer (Oxford University Press, 2009)
  • Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract and The First and Second Discourses, translated and edited by Susan Dunn (Yale University Press, 2002)
  • Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile, or: On Education, translated by Allan Bloom (Basic Books, 1979)
  • Voltaire, Candide and Other Stories, translated by Roger Pearson (Oxford University Press, 2008)
     


COM 180S. TOPIC: PARIS IN LITERATURE (4 units)
Brenda Deen Schildgen

Taught in Paris

Course Description: The course focuses on the City of Paris and its representation in literary works. We will begin in the seventeenth century when the city of Paris first appears in French literature as a setting for the works. Why the seventeenth century? Because it is a period of radical change to the built environment of the city, which is why it appears in the literary works. It is the period when city planning led to redesigning major features of the city that contributed to making it the city we know today. The social, economic, and cultural forces that contributed to the redesign made Paris the first modern European city. For this portion of the course, we will read Molière, Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme and Le Tartuffe, Selected letters of Madame de Sévigné, and selections from Descartes, Discourse on Method. The second part of the course begins with some basic background information that concerns the making of the modern French nation in the wake of the French Revolution. It then examines how and to what purposes the French medieval period is represented in the early nineteenth century in Chateaubriand’s The Genius of Christianity and in Victor Hugo’s Notre Dame de Paris, the first major historical novel written in French and set in the late Middle Ages. We will examine how the medieval period is fictionalized, how the novel meditates on the nature and meaning of history, and how historical fiction functions as political and ideological analysis.

Students taking this course for upper-division French credit will be required to read all French works in French and to write their papers in French.

Textbooks:

  • Victor Hugo, Notre Dame of Paris - English version, translated by John Sturrock (Penguin Classics, 1978)
  • Joan DeJean, How Paris Became Paris: The Invention of the Modern City (Bloomsbury, 2014)*  *also available on Kindle
  • Moliere, Le Tartuffe and Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme: A Dual-Language Edition, translated by Stanley Appelbaum (Dover Publications, 1998)
  • Madame de Sevigne, Selected Lettres (on SmartSite)
  • Descartes, selections from Discourse on Method (on SmartSite)

[Can be purchased in Paris]

  • Victor Hugo, Notre Dame de Paris - French version (Classiques de Poche)
     

COM 198S. TOPIC: TRACING THE MEDIEVAL AND 16TH-17TH CENTURY STRATA OF PARIS (4 units)
Brenda Deen Schildgen

Taught in Paris

Course Description and Requirements: You will write a journal that I will collect bi-weekly on a Thursday beginning September 11 and ending December 4. Entries should be up to four hand-written pages per week.

Objective: To trace the medieval strata of the city and then to investigate the history of the sites up to the French Revolution; To identify and understand the radical changes to the built environment of Paris that occurred during the seventeenth-eighteenth centuries; To understand the cultural and architectural development of the city of Paris; To analyze the various forces that contributed to the development of the city of Paris up through the French Revolution; To identify the “greening” efforts in Paris of the seventeenth-eighteenth centuries and to analyze the forces and consequences of these development; To know, analyze, and understand the role of city planning in the development of modern Paris, the first modern European city; To express these various objectives in writing.

Medieval Sites to be Investigated:

  1. Notre Dame de Paris
  2. Sainte-Chapelle (will be a class-sponsored visit; reservation required)
  3. La Conciergerie (combined with Saint-Chapelle; reservation required)
  4. Palais de Louvre (reservation required; closed Tuesdays; free on first Sunday of the month from October-March)
  5. Les Halles
  6. Bastille
  7. Basilica St. Denis
  8. Cluny Museum
  9. Sorbonne
  10. St. Germain des Prés
  11. Bois de Boulogne

Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Sites to be Investigated:

  1. Pont Neuf
  2. Place Royale (Place des Vosges)
  3. Marais
  4. Île Saint-Louis
  5. Tuileries
  6. Champs-Élysees

Reading:

  • Joan DeJean, How Paris Became Paris: The Invention of the Modern City (Bloomsbury, 2014)*  *also available on Kindle  (also required for COM 180S)
     

Graduate Courses

COM 210, Sec. 01. WORLD CINEMA (4 units) 
Sheldon Lu

R 2:10-5:00P
201 Wellman
CRN 37339

Course Description: This course examines "world cinema" as a concept, as a critical discourse, and above all as the practices of diverse cinematic traditions of the world. We will also tackle related categories of contemporary film studies such as "national cinema," "transnational cinema," "third cinema," and "third-world cinema." Comparative case studies will be drawn from countries and regions from around the world: Africa, Russia, Germany, China, Hong Kong, as well as the postcolonial Francophone world. As we look at some pivotal moments in world film history, we will also raise broad issues in current film studies such as globalization, diaspora, cinematic style, national identity, visual culture, and film industry.

Prerequisite:  Graduate standing in Comparative Literature, English, or a foreign-language literature, or consent of instructor.

Format: Discussion - 3 hours; Term Paper.

Textbooks:

  • A Course Reader
     

COM 210, Sec. 02. THE IMMANENT CRITIQUE OF NARRATIVE FICTION: AN INTRODUCTION (4 units)
Neil Larsen

T 2:10-5:00P
5 Wellman
CRN 63713

Course Description: “…[A]n immanent critique,” writes Moishe Postone with admirable concision, “does not judge critically what ‘is’ from a conceptual position outside of its object - for example, a transcendent ‘ought.’ Instead, it must be able to locate that ‘ought’ as a dimension of its own context, a possibility immanent to the existent society.” (Postone, Time, Labor and Social Domination) Moreover, here also is summed up the methodology of the one work that has remained the indisputable standard and model for what Postone is generally careful to designate as “immanent social critique,” Karl Marx’s Capital: A Critique of Political Economy.

But how are we to understand — indeed, can we understand? — the method of immanent critique when its object, without ceasing to be social, shifts to something both more narrowly constituted and at the same time possessing historical origins long pre-dating those of “existent [i.e., capitalist] society”: the ‘work of art,’ and even more specifically ‘works’ of narrative fiction classified as novels? Here, by and large, ‘immanent critique’ describes a practice with something like a tradition behind it but without any indisputable exemplar or model and thus far recalcitrant to concise theoretical definition. It is the surveying of that practical tradition and the objective of making a modest contribution to its conscious theorization that will be the point of departure for this seminar.

Readings will fall into two basic categories: a carefully limited selection of critical-theoretical works that, with varying degrees of intentionality, make up the still relatively miniscule literary tradition of ‘immanent critique’; and a somewhat more generous group of novels drafted into service as objects with no other essential purpose than to furnish us with their own immanent contradictions and problems of interpretation. Below is a still partial sampling of readings from (as yet) the first (critical theoretical) category only. A list of the primary, literary (novelistic) works to be read - to be drawn primarily from the Americas, both Latin and North - will be forthcoming. In the meantime, prospective students should email the instructor, Neil Larsen, at nalarsen@ucdavis.edu for updates on what will eventually (but shortly) be the definitive curriculum for this seminar. Critical-theoretical readings will include (but NOT exceed):

  • Moishe Postone, Time, Labor and Social Domination (selections)
  • Georg Lukács, a selection of critical essays including (tentatively): “Narrate or Describe?; “Reportage or Portrayal?”; “Balzac and Stendhal”; “Tolstoy and the Development of Realism”
  • Theodor W. Adorno, “The Essay as Form” and multiple other selections from Notes to Literature, volumes I and II; Aesthetic Theory (selections)
  • Roberto Schwarz, A Master on the Periphery of CapitalismTwo Girls (selection; and a selection of essays, including “Misplaced Ideas”; “National by Elimination”; “Critical Originality and National Adequation”; and “The Importation of the Novel into Nineteenth-Century Brazil.”

Prerequisite:  Graduate standing in Comparative Literature, English, or a foreign-language literature, or consent of instructor.

Format: Discussion - 3 hours; Term Paper.

Textbooks:

  • Not yet finalized - please see description and/or contact the instructor at nalarsen@ucdavis.edu.
     

COM 390. TEACHING COMPARATIVE LITERATURE IN COLLEGE (3 units)
Noha Radwan

Day/Time TBA


COM 392. TEACHING INTERNSHIP IN COMPARATIVE LITERATURE (1 unit)
Instructor TBA

Day/Time TBA


COM 396. TEACHING ASSISTANT TRAINING PRACTICUM (Variable units)

Noha Radwan (CRN ***)
Karri Lokke (CRN ***)
Neil Larsen (CRN ***)

(Note: Contact Falicia Savala, fsavala@ucdavis.edu, for the CRNs for COM 396.)