UCLA
The Department of Comparative Literature
A modern play upon Dante, “Devil May Cry” (2015). Faculty Dante expert: Massimo Ciavolella.
Lecture, two hours; discussion, two hours. Enforced requisite: English Composition 3. Not open for credit to students with credit for course 1C or 4CW. Study of selected texts from Age of Enlightenment to 20th century, with emphasis on literary analysis and expository writing. Diderot, Dostoevsky, Flaubert, Goethe, Ibsen, James Joyce, Kafka, Jamaica Kincaid, Garcia Marquez, Rousseau, M. Shelley, Strindberg, Swift, Voltaire. Analysis of texts includes focus on structures, processes, and practices that generate inter-group inequities or conflicts as well as those that support fairness and inclusiveness. Satisfies Writing II requirement. Letter grading.
Discussion, four hours. Enforced requisite: English Composition 3 or 3H or English as a Second Language 36. Not open for credit to students with credit for course 1C or 2CW. Study and discussion of selected texts from Age of Enlightenment to 20th century, with emphasis on literary analysis and expository writing. Texts may include works by authors such as Swift, Voltaire, Diderot, Rousseau, Goethe, M. Shelley, Flaubert, Ibsen, Strindberg, Dostoevsky, Gogol, Kafka, Joyce, Beckett, L. Hughes, and Garcia Marquez. Satisfies Writing II requirement. Letter grading.
Seminar, four hours. Enforced requisite: English Composition 3. Not open for credit to students with credit for course 1D or 2DW. Study and discussion of major literary texts usually overlooked in courses that focus only on canon of Western literature, with emphasis on literary analysis and expository writing. Texts from at least three of following areas read in any given term: African, Caribbean, East Asian, Latin American, and Middle Eastern literature. Texts may include works by authors such as Achebe, Can Xue, Desai, Emecheta, Kincaid, Neruda, Ngugi, Pak, Rushdie, and El Saadawi. Analysis of texts includes focus on structures, processes, and practices that generate inter-group inequities or conflicts as well as those that support fairness and inclusiveness. Satisfies Writing II requirement. Letter grading.
Lecture, four hours. Preparation: satisfaction of Entry-Level Writing and College Writing requirements. Requisites: two courses from Comparative Literature 1 or 2 series or English 10 series or Spanish 60 series, etc. Seminar-style introduction to discipline of comparative literature presented through series of texts illustrative of its formation and practice. Letter grading.
Seminar, three hours. Engagement with current debates and key theoretical texts about film adaptation. Exploration of art of film adaptation in broad sense, including transformation of short stories, plays, novels, historical accounts, biographies, paintings, musical compositions, or philosophical concepts into multilayered medium of cinema. Adaptations addressed include selection of films from range of cultural and linguistic traditions by directors such as Kiarostami, Varda, Kurosawa, Babenco, Rossellini, Hitchcock, Antonioni, Kieslowski, and Taymor. Specific directors, films, and cinematic traditions vary year to year. P/NP or letter grading.
Seminar, four hours. Designed for upper-division literature majors. Study of specific poets and poetics related to them during first half of 20th century. Texts may include poets such as W.B. Yeats, Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, Paul Valéry, R.M. Rilke, Gunnar Ekelöf, and Wallace Stevens. May be concurrently scheduled with course C253. Undergraduate students may read all works in translation. P/NP or letter grading.
Seminar, three hours. Designed for students interested in health professions or theories of wellness. Study presents a triangulated exploration of Ayurveda, Native healing practices, and Western medicine using humanistic methods of analyses and comparison. Consideration of how different and evolving notions of balance in each tradition structure medical practice and affect care. A final project draws upon these comparative analyses to explore contemporary medical practice in one of the three traditions. Students are expected to balance their findings within the triangulated comparison and acknowledge the recent proliferation of integrative and complementary approaches in Western medicine. P/NP or letter grading.
Seminar, three hours. What separates rationality from madness? Who determines who is sane and who is mad? How does literary representation impact our understanding of sanity and insanity, and how does literature interact with medical approaches to mental health? Exploration of these questions with a transcultural approach to literary texts that addresses madness as an ancient phenomenon, and with contemporary approaches to psychology, disability, and mental health. Examination of questions on the medical categorizing of mental illnesses across time; the ethics of representing madness in literature; the relationship between madness, creativity, and resistance; and the interplay between institutionalized and noninstitutionalized forms of care. Primary sources range from Senecan tragedy; to the One Thousand and One Nights and holy fools in medieval Islam; to women's complex relationship with the diagnosis of hysteria; to romance heroes and Romanticism; to anticolonial responses to psychoa