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 or 3H or English as a Second Language 36. Not open for credit to students with credit for course 1B or 4BW. Study of selected texts from Middle Ages to 17th century, with emphasis on literary analysis and expository writing. Texts may include works by authors such as Chaucer, Dante, Cervantes, Marguerite de Navarre, Shakespeare, Calderón, Molière, and Racine. 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.
(Same as Jewish Studies M150A.) Lecture, three hours. Study of literary culture of ancient Israel through examination of principal compositional strategies of Hebrew Bible and Apocrypha (read in translation). P/NP or letter grading.
Seminar, three hours. Designed for upper-division literature majors. Study of modern European and American works that are concerned both in subject matter and artistic methods with growing self-consciousness of human beings and their society, with focus on works of Kafka, Rilke, Woolf, Sartre, and Stevens. May be concurrently scheduled with course C263. Undergraduate students may read all works in translation. P/NP or letter grading.
(Same as Gender Studies CM170.) Seminar, three hours. Designed for upper-division literature majors. Investigation of narrative texts by contemporary French, German, English, American, Spanish American, African, and Asian women writers from cross-cultural perspective. Common themes, problems, and techniques. Concurrently scheduled with course CM270. P/NP or letter grading.
What separates love from lust? How are erotic desires and sexual practices informed by language and culture? Interdisciplinary exploration of these questions in conversation with foundational authors from Middle Eastern literature, alongside insights from feminist and queer theory. Study delves into questions on relationship between romantic, familial, and divine love; gender, sexuality, and body; and Orientalism and politics of reading desire cross-culturally. Students encounter various ways of understanding love in primary sources that range from Qur'an and pre-Islamic poetry to mystics and philosophers such as Ibn 'Arabi and Ibn Sina (Avicenna), to Rumi's Masnavi and Nezami's Layli and Majnun, to tales of A Thousand and One Nights and framing of Islamic narratives in Bollywood cinema and American pop culture. Examination of not only how literary representations reflect different historical norms, but also how and to what extent texts and images can impact norms of their contexts.
What if time were seen as malleable? Examination of how different ethnic and racial groups across the Americas manipulate experiences of time through music, visual art, and storytelling to reclaim their worlds. Understandings of time have been used to control populations of Abiayala (the Americas) since beginning of colonial period. But through different cultural understandings of time, experimental bookmaking, and other modes of creative expression, time can be experienced anew. Attention paid to how different formats for storytelling and art alter one's experience of present. Study also identifies how different ways of arranging events, visuals, and words reconfigure relationships between past, present, and future. Includes fictional and theoretical works by Kency Cornejo (Salvadoran American), Dylan W. Robinson (Xwélmexw First Nation), and Manuel Gabriel Tzoc Bucup (Guatemalan K'iche'), among others.