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Catalog Descriptions
Lower Division
COM 001 - Major Works of the Ancient World
001 Wendy Feng
002 Nicholas Talbott
003 Nicholas Talbott- COM 002 - Major Works of the Medieval & Early Modern World
- 001 Marmar Zakher
002 Ruinong Yin - COM 003 - Major Works of the Modern World
- 001 Jeremy Konick-Seese
002 Alicia Manno - COM 004 - Major Works of the Contemporary World
- 001 Laura Catterson
002 Benjamin Fong
003 Sean Sell
004 Sean Sell - COM 006 - Myths & Legends | Amy Motlagh
How can we cope with and explain human experiences and natural phenomena such as growing up, growing old, experiencing the deaths of loved ones, and negotiating relationships with family, community, and outsiders? Myths and legends have helped humans explain the world through narrative for millennia. This quarter, we will examine myths and legends from the ancient, medieval, and modern worlds, including the role of urban myths in the present.
- COM 007 Literature of Fantasy and the Supernatural | Stefan Uhlig
- This course explores how literary texts (not least compared with other artworks) deal with subjects and experiences that are too strange to fit conventional storylines. If fiction is made up of statements that are neither true nor simply false, the realm of fantasy provides a test case for what literature can do. In other words: how can texts represent improbable, even impossible, events and still not lose our interest – let alone persuade us that they know things that we don’t, and that they’re hence worth reading carefully? We focus on a few exceptionally imaginative texts alongside works in other media they have inspired (movies, opera, or dance). These works do not reassure us with their sense of what is real, or even plausible – instead, they ask us to rethink our ways of mapping and experiencing the world.
The texts we will discuss are:
Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, ed. Peter Hunt (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009); note that we will only be reading Alice in Wonderland
E. T. A. Hoffmann, The Golden Pot and Other Tales, trans. Ritchie Robertson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009)
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust: Part One, trans. David Luke (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008)
Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis, trans. Stanley Corngold (Modern Library Classics, 2013)
William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, ed. Peter Holland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008)
Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (Dover Publications, 1993)
Excerpts from works in other media will include: Max Reinhardt, A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1935) / John Neumeier, A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1977) / Dieter Dorn, Faust (1988) / Jacques Offenbach, The Tales of Hoffmann (1881) / Alfred Hitchcock, Vertigo (1958) / Walt Disney, Alice in Wonderland (1951) / Peter Capaldi, Franz Kafka’s “It’s A Wonderful Life” (1993).
Upper Division
- COM 139 Shakespeare and the Classical World | Zachary Scovel & Cheri Ross
- Shakespeare’s fascination with the classical world is evident throughout his career. In this course we will study selected plays through this lens, learning how Shakespeare responds to and reworks both ancient texts and renaissance conceptions of antiquity, and how his work matures within this conceptual framework. Through this lens we will practice our own interpretive and argumentative skills on these compelling poetic works.
- COM 148 Mystical Literatures of South Asia & the Middle East | Jocelyn Sharlet
This course investigates how writers and poets in Persian, Arabic, Sanskrit, Pali, Hebrew, Ottoman Turkish, Punjabi, Hindi, and Urdu create and explore ideas about human experience through mystical approaches to philosophy, devotion, myth, science, and fantasy. Texts include stories, frame tales, narrative verse romance, lyric poetry, and epistles. We will investigate how writers and poets express ideas about themes such as friendship, family, love, marriage, illness, death, devotion, education, travel, the self, the market, governance, and the environment. Students will analyze how texts engage with mystical ideas in their use of language in composition, poetics, and narration.
Kalidasa, Cloud Messenger, Brethren of Purity, The Case of the Animals Before the King of the Jinn, Ibn ‘Arabi, Majnun Layla, Jataka Tales, Jayadeva, Song of the Cowherd, Rumi, Masnavi, Nizami, Haft Paykar, Shmuel HaNagid, Mirabai, Bullhe Shah, Mir, Şeyh Galip, Beauty and Love, and Lakhnavi and Bilgrami, The Adventures of Amir Hamza.
- COM 159 Women in Literature | Michiko Suzuki
The topic for Spring 26 is “Feminist literature.” This lecture/discussion course examines representations of women in literature that may be considered feminist. We focus particularly on East Asian novels and short stories (from Japan, Korea, China) from the 1910s to the 2010s. We also study some important Western texts for comparative purposes. What constitutes “feminist literature” and how do authors depict women in this genre? What are the major concerns/issues in these works and how do they change over time, geographical location, etc.? In addition to learning about various authors and representations of women, we will also examine key issues in feminism, especially in the East Asian context, and develop skills in comparative literary analysis. GE credit: AH, WC, WE. Prerequisite(s): COM 001, COM 002, COM 003, or COM 004 or the equivalent recommended. Lectures, readings and discussions are in English.
- COM 166B The Novel | Stefan Uhlig
- The Western Novel was invented, so we are told, to represent the world through texts in something like the way that modern science structures information. Poetry or drama seemed uninterested in ordinary life, and to supply instead the most exceptional, sublime, or tragic versions of experience. Prose fiction gained its currency, in contrast, by narrating shared, accessible perspectives on the lives led by a set of characters that were unknown (by implication) outside their specific text. This course provides an introduction to the modern novel by selecting five examples of how narratives explore these possibilities in different ways. The questions we address include how novels can be structured to explore interiority, romantic love, imagination, ideology, discrimination, and the contradictions of realist fiction. Set texts include Jane Austen, Emma (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2003); Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2011); Charles Dickens, Hard Times (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2003); Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye (New York: Vintage, 2011); Gabriel Garcia Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude (New York: Harper, 2006).
- COM 195 Senior Seminar: Otherworlds and Underworlds | Jocelyn Sharlet
- This course investigates the way writers create and explore ideas about otherworlds and underworlds in narrative texts in order to understand how characters navigate their experience of the self in the disorienting conditions of social change and conflict. Students will analyze how characters engage with otherworlds and underworlds by way of the imagination, the supernatural, fear, and desire. We will interrogate how writers use comparison, contrast, and approaches to narration to suggest a range of perspectives on the experience of their characters. Students will have access to brief selections from works on critical theory and they are welcome to use these or others in their analysis of a course text for the term paper. Evaluation: one 2-page response paper, one 2-3 minute presentation, one 10-page term paper, and participation in discussion.
Sindbad and Other Stories from the Arabian Nights tr. Husain Haddawy, “The Story of Qamar al-Zaman and his two sons, Amjad and Asʿad”
Abolqasem Ferdowsi, Shahnameh: The Persian Book of Kings tr. Dick Davis, “Kavus’s war against the demons of Mazanderan,” “The Seven Trials of Rostam,” “The King of Hamaveran and his Daughter Sudabeh,” and “The Tale of Sohrab”
Şeyh Galip, Beauty and Love tr. Victoria Holbrook, selections
Shahrnush Parsipur, Women without Men tr. Talattof and Sharlet or Faridoun Farrokh
Ahmed Saadawi, Frankenstein in Baghdad tr. Jonathan Wright
Ibtisam Azem, The Book of Disappearance tr. Sinan Antoon
Ahmed Naji, Using Life tr. Benjamin Koerber
Yehudit Katzir, Closing the Sea tr. Barbara Harshav, “Schlaffstunde,” “Disneyel,” “Fellini’s Shoes,” and “Closing the Sea”
Graduate Seminars
- COM 210 Religion and Translation; Religion in Translation | Archana Venkatesan
Thursdays, 2:10pm-5:00pm in Sproul 922
This course explores the intersection of religion and translation with a focus on the Indian subcontinent. Some topics we will explore--the particularities of translating Indic religious texts, translation as a metaphor for cultural and religious exchange, and colonial legacies and receptions of translated religious texts. We might also discuss how to teach religious texts in translation in the classroom.
The reading list for this course has not been finalized, but will include the following:
Ronit Ricci. Islam Translated: Literature, Conversion, and the Arabic Cosmopolis of South and Southeast Asia
Sankar Nair. Translating Wisdom: Hindu-Muslim Intellectual Interactions in Early Modern South Asia
Elaine Fisher. Meeting of Rivers (Forthcoming)
Anna Schultz. , Echoes of Translation: Audibility and Relationality in Bene Israel Women’s Song (Forthcoming)
