Winter 2011

Lower Division Courses

COM 1: GREAT BOOKS OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION: THE ANCIENT WORLD (4 Units)

STAFF (Sec. 1, MW 10:00-11:50, 211 Wellman) CRN 17468
STAFF (Sec. 2, TR 12:10-2:00, 244 Olson) CRN 17469
STAFF (Sec. 3, TR 2:10-4:00, 244 Olson) CRN 17470

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 frequent short papers and take a final examination.

Prerequisite: Completion of Entry-Level Writing (formerly Subject A) Requirement. GE Credit: ArtHum, Div, and Wrt (cannot be used to satisfy a college or university composition requirement and GE writing experience simultaneously). Course Format: Lecture/Discussion - 4 hours.

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: GREAT BOOKS OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION: From THE MIDDLES AGES to THE ENLIGHTENMENT (4 Units)

STAFF (Sec. 1, TR 8:00-9:50, 107 Wellman) CRN 17471
STAFF (Sec. 2, TR 10:00-11:50, 107 Wellman) CRN 17472
STAFF (Sec. 3, TR 12:10-2:00, 105 Wellman) CRN 17473

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 frequent short papers and take a final examination.

Prerequisite: Completion of Entry-Level Writing (formerly Subject A) Requirement. GE Credit: ArtHum, Div, and Wrt (cannot be used to satisfy a college or university composition requirement and GE writing experience simultaneously). Course Format: Lecture/Discussion - 4 hours.

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: GREAT BOOKS OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION: THE MODERN CRISIS (4 Units)

STAFF (Sec. 1, MW 2:10:-4:00, 244 Olson) CRN 17474
STAFF (Sec. 2, MW 4:10-6:00, 244 Olson) CRN 17475
STAFF (Sec. 3, TR 12:10-2:00, 105 Wellman) CRN 17476
STAFF (Sec. 4, TR 10:00-11:50, 293 Kerr) CRN 43752

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.

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.

Prerequisite: Completion of Entry-Level Writing (formerly Subject A) Requirement. GE Credit: ArtHum, Div, and Wrt (cannot be used to satisfy a college or university composition requirement and GE writing experience simultaneously). Course Format: Lecture/Discussion - 4 hours.

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)

STAFF (Sec. 1, TR 10:00-10:50, 113 Hoagland) CRN 17477
STAFF (Sec. 2, MW 4:10-6:00, 267 Olson) CRN 17478
STAFF (Sec. 3, MW 2:10-4:00, 267 Olson) CRN 17479

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.

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.

Prerequisite: Completion of Entry-Level Writing (formerly Subject A) Requirement. GE Credit: ArtHum, Div, and Wrt (cannot be used to satisfy a college or university composition requirement and GE writing experience simultaneously). Course Format: Lecture/Discussion - 4 hours.

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)
Jocelyn Sharlet, Assistant Professor


Lecture: MWF 11:00-11:50, 100 Hunt

Discussion Sections:
Sec. 1 (M 9:00-9:50, 105 Wellman) CRN 17480
Sec. 2 (T 12:10-1:00, 1007 Giedt) CRN 17481
Sec. 3 (W 6:10-7:00, 159 Olson) CRN 17482
Sec. 4 (M 10:00-10:50, 1128 Hart) CRN 17483
Sec. 5 (T 5:10-6:00, 1342 Storer) CRN 17484
Sec. 6 (W 5:10-6:00, 251 Olson) CRN 17485

Course Description: This course investigates the genres of fables, fairy tales, and parables from the ancient to the modern world. We begin with tales from a range of world cultures and explore how fairy tales depict coexistence and conflict in the family, fables articulate social hierarchy and resistance to it, and parables convey spiritual transformation. The course continues with major works of pre-modern literature that rework and combine our three types of tales. Finally, we conclude with modern literature that reinterprets our three genres in new ways to explore modern problems of identity.

Readings will include: fairy tales from Europe, East Asia, and Southeast Asia; parables from the Buddhist, Taoist, Christian, and Jewish traditions; fables from North America, Africa, and Europe; selections from the Pancatantra, the Thousand and One Nights, the DecameronThe Lais of Marie de France, and the MasnaviMidsummer Night's Dream and poetry by Fuzuli, Ghalib, and Mir; and stories by Jorge Luis Borges and Flannery O'Connor.

GE Credit: ArtHum, Div, and Wrt.

Readings:

  • William Shakespeare, A Midsummer's Night Dream (Signet Classics, 1998)
  • Patrick Olivelle (trans.), The Pancatantra: The Book of India's Folk Wisdom (Oxford, 2009)
  • A Course Reader

COM 7: LITERATURE OF FANTASY, AND THE SUPERNATURAL (4 Units)
Gail Finney, Professor


Lecture: TR 1:40-3:00, 176 Everson

Discussion Sections:
Sec. 1 (F 11:00-11:50, 1038 Wickson) CRN 17486
Sec. 2 (T 6:10-7:00, 167 Olson) CRN 17487
Sec. 3 (T 5:10-6:00, 167 Olson) CRN 17488
Sec. 4 (F 12:10-1:00, 151 Olson) CRN 17489
Sec. 5 (M 4:10-5:00, 105 Olson) CRN 17490
Sec. 6 (W 5:10-6:00, 217 Olson) CRN 17491

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, otherworldliness, 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.

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 García Márquez. Readings and films will include texts such as the following:

  • William Shakespeare, The Tempest (1610-11)
  • E.T.A. Hoffmann, “The Sandman” (1816) in conjunction with
  • Sigmund Freud, “The Uncanny” (1919)
  • Edgar Allan Poe, “Berenice,” “The Fall of the House of Usher,” “The Black Cat, “The Tell-Tale Heart” (1835-1843)
  • Guy de Maupassant, “La Chevelure” (1884), “Le Horla” (1887)
  • Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland (1865)
  • Henry James, The Turn of the Screw (1898)
  • Franz Kafka, “The Metamorphosis” (1915), “A Country Doctor” (1917) The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari (film) (1920)
  • Jorge Luis Borges, “The Library of Babel” (1941), “The Garden of Forking Paths” (1941)
  • Yasunari Kawabata, “One Arm” (1964)
  • Gabriel García Márquez, “The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World” (1968), “A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings” (1968)

GE Credit: ArtHum, Div, and Wrt. Format: Lecture 3 - hours; Discussion - 1 hour; Term Paper.

Readings:

  • Shakespeare and Barbara Mowat (ed.), The Tempest
  • Henry James, The Turn of the Screw
  • Edgar Allan Poe, Great Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe
  • Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis, In the Penal Colony, and Other Stories
  • Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

COM 10M: MASTER AUTHORS IN WORLD LITERATURE (2 Units)
STAFF


Lecture/Discussion Sections:
Sec. 1 (M 12:10-2:00, 261 Olson) CRN 43754
Sec. 2 (T 10:00-11:50, 1128 Bainer) CRN 43755

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.

Readings:

  • (TBA)

COM 25: ETHNIC MINORITY WRITERS IN WORLD LITERATURE (4 Units)
Noha Radwan, Assistant Professor


Lecture: TR 12:10-1:30, 194 Young

Discussion Sections:
Sec. 1 (T 2:10-3:00, 116 Veihmeyer) CRN 17494 NEW DISCUSSION SECTION
Sec. 2 (R 11:00-11:50, 146 Robbins) CRN 44311 NEW DISCUSSION SECTION

Course Description: What is ethnic writing? Who is an ethnic writer? Is there an ethnic reader? Ethnic reading? What is the other of "ethnic writing?" White writing? What does an ethnic reading of white writing look like? How about a white reading of ethnic writing? Why is the term "ethnic" relevant at all? These issues and more are what we will explore through the reading of a diverse selection of writings: fiction, poetry and memoirs by authors from the United States and other parts of the world including Albert Camus, Franz Kafka, Samuel Selvon, Richard Wright, Leslie Marmon Silko and Julia Alvarez.

GE Credit: ArtHum, Div, and Wrt. Format: Lecture - 3 hours; Term Paper.

Readings:

  • A Course Reader (Available on SmartSite)


 


Upper Division Courses

COM 100: WORLD CINEMA (4 Units)
Sheldon Lu, Professor
CRN 43764


Lecture/Discussion: TR 12:10-1:30, 119 Wellman NEW ROOM
Film Viewing: T 7:10-10:00PM, 158 Olson NEW ROOM

Course Description: This course offers a brief survey of important developments in world cinema from the silent era to the contemporary period. We examine film classics from countries and regions such as China, Germany, Russia, France, and Africa. Students will look at the international evolution of film aesthetics and the emergence of new film styles. The class also discusses the ways in which films engage with issues of modernity, capitalism, socialism, the nation-sate, decolonization, and multiculturalism in various countries at different historical moments. All foreign language films will be subtitled in English.

Prerequisite: Upper-Division Standing or Consent of Instructor. GE credit: ArtHum, Div, Wrt.

Reading:

  • A Course Reader (available from Davis Copy Shop)

COM 120: WRITING IN NATURE - 1750 TO PRESENT (4 Units)
Scott McLean, Lecturer
(TR 12:10-1:30, 141 Olson) CRN 43765


Course Description: (Expanded description is not available at the moment. Contact the instructor, &#119smclean@ucdavis.edu, directly for more information).

Prerequisite: Completion of Entry Level Writing Requirement (ELWR) and at least one course in literature. GE credit: ArtHum and Wrt.

Readings:

  • Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness (Norton Critical Editions) (Norton, 2006)
  • Jacquetta Hopkins Hawkes, A Land (The Concord Library) (Beacon, 1991)
  • Norman Maclean, Young Men and Fire (Univ. of Chicago, 1993)
  • Charles Darwin, The Voyage of the Beagle: Charles Darwin's Journal of Researches (Penguin Classics) (Penguin, 1989)

COM 138: GENDER AND INTERPRETATION IN THE RENAISSANCE (4 Units)
Juliana Schiesari, Professor
(TR 3:10-4:30, 233 Wellman) CRN 43766


Course Description: This course touches on critical analysis of Renaissance texts with primary focus on issues such as human dignity, education, and gender politics; "high" and "low" culture and its relation to literary practices. It focuses on the culture of the Renaissance and the question of what it means to be human. Considering the importance of the human being as a focus of Renaissance thought, we will study both theoretical and literary texts that deal specifically with education of boys and girls, the "Querelle des femmes" (A question of women), thus gender and its reception and interpretation. We will also draw upon literary texts that actively engage in the question of male and female sexuality.

This course is cross-listed with Italian 141. Prerequisite: Completion of Entry Level Writing Requirement (ELWR) and at least one course in literature, or Consent of Instructor. GE credit: ArtHum, Div, Wrt.

Readings:

  • Laura Anna Stortoni (ed.) and Mary Prentice Lillie (trans.), Women Poets of the Italian Renaissance: Courtly Ladies & Courtesans (Italica Press, 2007)
  • Danielle Clarke (ed.), Isabella Whitney, Mary Sidney and Amelia Lanyer: Renaissance Women Poets (Penguin, 2001)
  • Louise Labe, Complete Poetry and Prose: A Bilingual Edition (The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe) (Univ. of Chicago, 2006)
  • Leon Battista Alberti and Renee Neu Watkins (transl.), The Family in Renaissance Florence: Book Three (I Libri Della Famiglia) (Waveland, 1994)

COM 146: MYTH IN LITERATURE (4 Units)
Scott McLean, Lecturer
(TR 3:10-4:30, 163 Olson) CRN 17498


Course Description: (Expanded description is not available at the moment. Contact the instructor, &#119smclean@ucdavis.edu, directly for more information).

Prerequisite. Course 6 recommended. GE credit: ArtHum and Wrt. Format: Lecture - 3 hours; Term Paper.

Readings:

  • Three Theban Plays (Penguin, 1982)
  • Hyperion and Selected Poems (1990)
  • Goethe, Volume 2: Faust I & II (Princeton, 1984)
  • Homer and Fagles (trans.), Iliad (Penguin 1990)
  • Myths and Texts (Norton, 1978)

COM 154: AFRICAN LITERATURE (4 Units)
Moradewun Adejunmobi, Professor of African and African Studies (&#109adejunmobi@ucdavis.edu)
(TR 1:40-3:00, 1020 Wickson) CRN 43792


Course Description: This course focuses on texts by famous African authors responding to questions about colonialism, independence, gender, development, war, and genocide among others. Works by the following authors will be studied: Chinua Achebe, Chimamanda Adichie, Tsitsi Dangarembga, Boubacar Boris Diop, and Sembene Ousmane.

Prerequisite: Completion of Entry Level Writing Requirement (ELWR) and at least one course in literature. GE credit: ArtHum, Div, and Wrt.

Readings:

  • Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart
  • Chinua Achebe, A Man of the People
  • Sembene Ousmane, God's Bits of Wood
  • Tsitsi Dangarembga, Nervous Conditions
  • Boubacar Boris Diop, Murambi, The Book of Bones
  • Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Half of a Yellow Sun

 


Graduate Courses

COM 210: TOPIC - BAKHTIN AND HIS DIALOGIC WORLD (4 Units)
Olga Stuchebrukhov, Associate Professor of Russian (&#111astuch@ucdavis.edu)
(T 3:10-6:00, 822 Sproul) CRN 17538


Course Description: This seminar will focus on the Bakhtinian notions of polyphony, carnival, and chronotope that incorporate the binary dialectical matrix, but also destabilize and render it inadequate because they integrate the opposites into each other (I into the Other; language into culture; official culture into popular culture; time into space). With this in mind, Bakhtin's seminal texts, Problems of Dostoevsky;'s Poetics and Rabelais and His World, and such authors as Dostoevsky, Rabelais, Tolstoy, Goethe, Gogol, Racine, and others will be examined complimentarily in order to reveal how language and culture connect as one undivided Macrocosm, with the novel as its literary microcosm.

Prerequisite: Graduate Standing.

Readings:

  • Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics (Minnesota, 2009)
  • Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and Hist World (Indiana, 1984)
  • Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays (Texas, 1984)
  • Fyodor Dostoevsky and Peaver and Volokhonsky (trans.), Crime and Punishment (Vintage, 1993)
  • Fyodor Dostoevsky, Great Short Works by Fyodor Dostoevsky (Perennial Classics, 2004)
  • Rabelais, Gargantua and Pantagruel (Penguin, 2006)

COM 396: TEACHING INTERNSHIP IN COMPARATIVE LITERATURE IN COLLEGE

Olga Stuchebrukhov, Associate Professor of Russian (Sec. 1, CRN TBA)
Jocelyn Sharlet, Assistant Professor (Sec. 2, CRN TBA)
Gail Finney, Professor (Sec. 3, CRN TBA)