Spring Quarter 2025

Spring Quarter 2025

Undergraduate Courses

Lower-Division

COM 001—Major Works of the Ancient World

COM 002—Major Works of the Medieval & Early Modern World

COM 003—Major Works of the Modern World

COM 004—Major Works of the Contemporary World

COM 006—Myths and Legends
Archana Venkatesan

COM 007—Literature of Fantasy & the Supernatural
Michiko Suzuki
Humans have told stories of fantastic other worlds and creatures from the earliest tales to the present. Narratives of fantasy and the supernatural have long been a way for us to explore our desires, fears, and what it means to be human. This course examines a range of literary texts and films that feature supernatural “monsters”—both as a contrast to normative personhood, as well as a confounding reflection of our imperfect humanity. We will study Japanese, American, British, German, and French works. Through a broad exploration of fantasy and the supernatural across time, cultures, genres, and media, we will study the significance of monsters, other worlds, and magical transformations to understand key issues associated with gender, sexuality, modernity, science, ethics, identity, and social systems.

GE: AH, WC, WE

Upper-Division

COM 100—World Cinema (Chinese Cinema)
Sheldon Lu

In this quarter, we focus on the rich cinematic traditions of China. We begin with early Chinese cinema and move all the way to the twenty-first century. Students will explore the themes, styles, aesthetics, stars, and socio-political contexts of individual films as well as the evolution of entire film industries. We discuss representative directors and internationally renowned filmmakers such as Wu Yonggang, Xie Jin, Zhang Yimou, Chen Kaige, Ang Lee, Feng Xiaogang, Jia Zhangke, and Jiang Wen. We examine Chinese cinema as an outgrowth of indigenous, national roots as well as a necessary response to international film culture. We look at how films engage in social critique and cultural reflection, and how film artists react to the conditions and forces of socialist politics, capitalist economy, tradition, modernization, and globalization in Chinese-speaking regions.
  • Prerequisite: Upper division standing or consent of instructor
    GE credit: Arts & Humanities, Visual Literacy, World Cultures and Writing Experience.
    Format: Lecture/Discussion - 3 hours; Film Viewing - 3 hours.
  • Textbooks:
    No need to purchase textbooks.  Students will read relevant book chapters and journal articles via the online resources of the UC Davis library. Reading materials include chapters from the anthology Transnational Chinese Cinemas: Identity, Nationhood, Gender edited by Sheldon Lu; Contemporary Chinese Cinema and Visual Culture: Envisioning the Nation (2021) written by Sheldon Lu; and more.
COM 156—The Ramayana
Archana Venkatesan

COM 170—The Contemporary Novel
Noha Radwan
 
COM 195—Senior Seminar Comp Lit: Reception History: A Case Study
Ralph Hexter

Senior Seminar in Comparative Literature Topic: Reception History: A Case Study Within Comparative Literature, indeed literary studies in general, “reception” is the term applied broadly to approaches that, when interpreting a literary work or other artefact, focus not on the creator of the work as the primary determinant of the work’s meaning or value but on the work’s readers. Evolving beyond theories of reader-response, reception is a deeply historical approach. First, one considers the historical context of the first readers of the work, its first audience or audiences. One can move on to trace subsequent readings or receptions along with the ways the work itself was transformed for later audiences. These transformations can be as simple as the way readers in later periods reinterpreted the work; it can involve commentaries on the work as well as translations and adaptations of the work. In all cases understanding the particulars of the moment in which these acts of reception occurred is key. This is reception history. 

One could readily imagine a seminar in which one only read theoretical essays that address the methodological issues involved in reception studies and reception history. In our seminar we will take a “case study” approach, exploring a range of modes of reception by considering moments in the reception of a particular work, one with singular importance and a manifold reception: Homer’s Iliad. An ancient Greek text, the Iliad permits us to make soundings in a more-than-2500-year-long reception history. It offers us the opportunity to consider how readers have approached a work describing and arising in a radically different society and in a different language. Indeed, the text itself seems to emerge from an oral tradition not directly recoverable by us, so that the Iliad itself may be considered “always already” an instance of reception. 

Clearly, a focus on the Iliad, arguably the single most canonical work of “western” literature, and its reception does not readily provide opportunities to include works from traditions that don’t look back to ancient Greece. Far from ignoring this problematic issue, we include it as a feature of reception to be investigated through recent and current debates about empire and exploitation, colonialism and decolonization, identity and othering. Not all Comparative Literature courses include reading from so many radically different times, places, and perspectives. 

COM 195 also offers students the opportunity to produce a 10-12-page paper about a topic that grows out of the theme(s) of the course. You will select your own topic for deeper investigation, make a brief presentation to the entire class as you are working towards completion of your final essay, and craft a polished final paper. For their project, students could delve more deeply into one of the works on our list or, for example, a translation or adaptation of one of the works we read (e.g., Seamus Heaney’s The Cure at Troy: A Version of Sophocles’ Philoctetes [1991] or Marcelo Sánchez' Filoctetes, la herida y el arco [2004], the latter in either Spanish or English; indeed, students who are comfortable working on material in languages other than English are welcome to do so). Students might also choose to investigate a work or set of works entirely outset the orbit of the Homeric tradition just so long as the mode(s) of analysis are in dialogue with the material we are studying. In all cases I advise students to discuss their proposed topics with me well in advance.

Graduate

COM 210 — Special Topic: World Cinema
Sheldon Lu

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,” “global cinema,” “third cinema,” “third-world cinema,” and postcolonial cinema.  Depending on student interests and enrollment, comparative case studies will be drawn from countries and regions from around the world, such as Asia, Europe, Africa, and America.  Special attention will be given to East-West cross-cultural interflows in the traveling of images, discourses, and ideas.  As we look at some pivotal moments in world film history, we also raise broad issues in current film studies such as globalization, diaspora, cinematic style, national identity, visual culture, and film industry.  Students will examine the ideas, practices, and styles of a variety of filmmakers such as Sergei Eisenstein, Dziga Vertov, R. W. Fassbinder, Jean-Luc Godard, Yasujiro Ozu, Gillo Pontecorvo, Wong Kar-wai, Jia Zhangke, Zhang Yimou, Ousmane Sembene, Claire Denis, and others.