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.
Lecture, two hours; discussion, two hours. Enforced requisite: English Composition 3. Not open for credit to students with credit for course 1D or 4DW. Study 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. 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.
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.
Reading of several Kafka short stories to see their common elements. Investigation of what Kafkaesque means, and how it relates to modern world. Stories read and discussed include An Old Manuscript, Hunger Artist, In the Penal Colony, Report to an Academy, The Imperial Messenger, The Judgement, and The Metamorphosis. Students write their own final Kafkaesque story to be shared in class.
Representations of desire in poetry take many forms; objects of desire range from individuals to the ideal that haunts Stéphane Mallarmé, Wallace Stevens, and William Butler Yeats. Additional poets read include Charles Baudelaire, Catullus, C.P. Cavafy, Gunnar Ekelöf, T.S. Eliot, Sappho, and Paul Valéry. More contemporary poets include Alice Fulton, Louise Glück, Adrienne Rich, and Muriel Rukeyser. Some of these poets write subtle but explicit sexual poems. Students complete three short papers.
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. Exploration of poetics of hip-hop within tradition of comparative literature. Examination of rhythm, rhymes, flow, wordplay, traditions of signifying, beats, samples, production, and hermeneutics of music videos within historical framework. Historical and current hip-hop criticism and scholarship from comparative perspective, with goal of developing methods, approaches, and strategies for interpreting and writing about hip-hop. 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.