Close reading and analysis of literary texts, including representative examples of several different genres and periods. An introduction to practical criticism required of all literature majors; should be completed prior to upper-division work in literature.
Instructor
Jennifer Tseng, Abigail Heald
General Education Code
TA
Familiarizes students with key topics in socioeconomic and societal critique of capitalism through a variety of readings. By the end of the course, students will engage with important concepts through a variety of literature and media in order to provide a multifaceted introduction to literary modes of social criticism and analysis.
A story within a story, the frame tale is a playful and enduring literary genre. Focuses on frame tales of the global middle ages, tracing their movement from the Indian subcontinent to the British Isles. Readings include selections from Fables of Bidpai, The Arabian Nights, Libro de Buen Amor, and The Canterbury Tales. (Formerly The Frame Tale.)
General Education Code
CC
Close reading of short stories and some novels with the aim of developing critical methods for the analysis and interpretation of prose fiction. Topics include character, plot, narrative structure, and the poetics of prose. The course topic changes; please see the Class Search for the current topic.
Instructor
Jorge Aladro Font
General Education Code
TA
Introduces techniques for the close reading of film (shot-by-shot analysis, etc.), with particular attention to what makes film different from other media. Films studied will cohere around a specific theme, geography, or genre, like film noir. (Formerly Introduction to Film Analysis.)
General Education Code
IM
Surveys 3,000 years of Jewish literature and culture. Themes include origins of the Jews in the ancient world; formation and persistence of the Jewish diaspora; coherence and diversity of Jewish experience; Jewish narrative and textual traditions; interaction between Jews and other cultures; tensions between tradition and modernity.
Instructor
Bruce Thompson
General Education Code
ER
Introduces the fairy tale as a genre, including historical, cultural, and political contexts; relation to identity, performance, transnationalism; contemporary transformations of tales and their expression in other media (e.g., film, art, theater); and current scholarship.
General Education Code
TA
Historical overview of the genre from Augustine to contemporary experiments in memoir. Student write weekly creative-critical responses and a final creative-critical paper.
General Education Code
PR-C
Introduction to Greek myths, including selected ancient texts and visual artifacts, historical and cultural context of their creation and reception, modern theoretical approaches such as structuralism and psychoanalysis, and interpretations in various media.
Instructor
Martin Devecka
General Education Code
TA
Introduction to children's literature as a literary genre, including historical, cultural, and political considerations of the genre's relationship to gender, race, sexuality, nationalism, colonialism, and popular culture through primary texts, secondary criticism, and other media (e.g., film, illustration, comics).
General Education Code
TA
An introduction to selected modes and forms of poetry with an emphasis on close textual analysis. Examples will be taken from different historical periods and poetic traditions. Course topic changes; please see the Class Search for the current topic.
General Education Code
TA
An investigation into the various uses and abuses of race in literature. Course topic changes; see the Class Search for current topic.
Instructor
Christine Hong
General Education Code
ER
Studies religious texts held sacred by different cultures and communities around the world, concentrating primarily on their literary dimensions. Course topic changes; please see the Class Search for current topic.
General Education Code
CC
Travel narratives may be of many types: odysseys of self-discovery, adventures in nature, or journeys to exotic lands off the beaten track. This course examines travelers' accounts drawn from periods ranging from the Middle Ages to the contemporary.
Instructor
Sharon Kinoshita
General Education Code
CC
Examines speculative and science fiction (SF) texts to develop critical methods for the analysis and interpretation of SF as a critique of science, technology, and culture. Themes include encounters across species; novelty and change; expanded concepts of life; and the role of technology in human development.
Instructor
Zachary Zimmer
General Education Code
PE-T
Intensive training in the practice of literary analysis and the writing of polished research papers. Topics include manuscript sources, variant editions, reading techniques, publication technologies, web research. Workshop format. Strongly recommended for majors and/or transfer students who have completed
LIT 1 or its equivalent.
General Education Code
TA
Reading representative Greek tragedies with attention to history, form, and content. Course examines how Greek tragedy responds to the fact of human mortality, i.e., to the myriad and culturally specific ways in which characters in tragedy accept, evade, or deny death.
General Education Code
TA
Reading of selected Arthurian romances in verse and prose from the French, Welsh, and English traditions.
Instructor
Sharon Kinoshita
General Education Code
TA
Speaking, reading, and writing proficiency in Spanish required. The study of poetry, drama, and prose in Spain and Latin America.
Instructor
Jorge Aladro Font
General Education Code
TA
Every age has the monsters it needs. From medieval marvels to GMO chimeras, monsters serve as figures of a culture's deepest fears, anxieties, and hidden desires. This course takes a multidisciplinary, transhistorical approach to the problems and promises of monsters, and introduces monster theory.
General Education Code
TA
Introduces the fundamental questions of interpretation and cultural analysis through engagement with varying literary and cultural traditions of the Indian subcontinent since antiquity. Emphasis is on language, communicative media, literary form, memory, transmission, interpretive approaches, and translation. The course topics change; please see the Class Search for the current topic.
General Education Code
CC
Examines the copresence in literary works (fiction and non-fiction prose and poetry) of nonhuman and human animals from antiquity to the present across a variety of cultures.
Instructor
Carla Freccero
General Education Code
TA
Surveys the politics of fashion, focusing on how style has shaped ideology, culture, power, revolution, resistance, and a variety of identities, including nation, race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and class.
Instructor
Vilashini Cooppan
General Education Code
ER
A history of one or more cultural genres in written, visual, and/or musical forms. Course topic changes; please see the Class Search for the current topic.
General Education Code
ER
Medical Humanities designate an interdisciplinary field of humanities (literature, philosophy, ethics, history, and religion) concerned with application to medical education and practice. The humanities provide insight into the human condition, suffering, personhood, and our responsibility to each other; and offer a historical perspective on medical practice.
General Education Code
PE-T
Focus is on the destruction of the Jews of Europe by Nazi Germany. Issues are historically grounded, and include works of literature, social sciences, philosophy, and film.
General Education Code
ER
Speaking, reading, and writing proficiency in Mandarin Chinese required. Lectures, discussions, writing assignments, and all readings in Chinese. An investigation of Chinese culture, society, and politics in the post-1978 period through literature, film, critical essays, and internet media. Topics include labor, gender, generational divisions, family, urban life, social media, nationalism.
Instructor
Christopher Connery
General Education Code
TA
An introduction to Latino literature and culture in the U.S. A study of the creative expressions of Chicanos/as, Nuyoricans, Cuban Americans, and other Latin Americans in the U.S.
Instructor
Kirsten Silva Gruesz
General Education Code
ER
Considers love, anarchy, and revolution as three modes of liberation. Concentrating on the contemporary period, with explorations of philosophy, literature, film, popular culture, political movements and manifestos, and personal or collective experience, this course considers these variant, but overlapping, scenes of the dialectics of liberation.
Instructor
Christopher Connery
General Education Code
PR-E
What does a telenovela spoof about a virgin Latinx mother and aspiring romance novelist have to do with literature? Course explores Jane the Virgin as a commentary on the tastes, identities, and politics of 21st-century Latinx readers and writers.
General Education Code
CC
Explores the history of magic in relation to the written word. Concerns include the gendering of magic; interconnections among Judaic, Arabic, and Christian worlds; magic in the age of rationalism; and the recent popular fascination with magic.
General Education Code
CC
Combines contemplative practice, including meditative practice, with close reading of literary works to provide students with a more precise ability to interpret and respond to texts, both literary and non-literary. Works include poetry, imaginative prose, and essays.
General Education Code
PR-C
Examines literature's relationship to the past and to the experience of history. Course topic changes; please see the Class Search for current topic.
General Education Code
TA
Examines the literary production of slave societies by looking at the literatures of several pre-modern slave societies; also develops a cultural-historical narrative that explains the origins of genocidal forms of plantation slavery in the Americas by tracing their origins back to Greece and Rome.
Instructor
Martin Devecka
General Education Code
CC
A survey of global narratives, with a focus on the novel over several centuries, traditions, languages, and cultures.
Instructor
Vilashini Cooppan
General Education Code
TA
From The Sorcerer's Stone to The Deathly Hallows, this course approaches the Harry Potter books and films from a variety of critical angles, using the analytical tools of literary and cultural studies to shed new light on this dizzying phenomenon.
General Education Code
TA
Study of representative plays. No previous experience with Shakespeare is assumed.
General Education Code
TA
Introduction to Homer's Odyssey, its hero, and its world. An epic tale of a man who abandons his family to fight in the Trojan War, then returns two decades later, the Odyssey was a profound influence on the culture of ancient Greece and Rome, and continues to shape our self-understanding today.
Instructor
Martin Devecka
General Education Code
TA
Explores the close relationship between photography and literature, from the origins of photography to 19th-century realism and the contemporary photographic novel, interpreting photographs and literature to study how these fields influence each other and how their forms of representation relate.
General Education Code
IM
Examines novels by Toni Morrison, including The Bluest Eye, Song of Solomon, Sula, and Jazz, as sites of discontent and transformation, while also considering literary techniques such as form, voice, metaphor, and narrative structure. Includes discussion of Morrison's ideas about the intersection of race and sexuality, blackness as a shifting signifier, the role of the artist in society, and uses of literature for re-imagining the relationships between history, culture, and individuality.
General Education Code
ER
Introduction to the life of the Prophet Muhammad as a literary text and as a primary hermeneutic framework for understanding the Qur'an, including its relationship to a deep narrative prophetic tradition shared with other Abrahamic traditions.
Instructor
Camilo Rivas-Gomez
General Education Code
CC
Introduction to social media's evolving impact on society. How are social media changing communication, politics, identity, privacy, and what we believe? Materials include critical texts and real-world case studies, as well as films and short fiction.
General Education Code
PE-T
Why does the history of slavery reappear at certain moments in literary and popular culture? Course focuses on the 1960s and the 2000s, when slavery was frequently featured in popular and academic history, fiction, film, and television, in both imaginative and documentary forms.
General Education Code
IM
Do current social, political, and psychological conditions make it more difficult to live a good life? Drawing on the broad tradition of critical theory and utopian imaginings, the course aims to give practical and theoretical guidance toward achieving a good life.
Instructor
Christopher Connery
General Education Code
TA
Surveys some of the most famous accounts and representations of historical and fictional pandemics in the history of literature, mostly from the Western tradition. Students read excerpts from works by Thucydides, Lucretius, Boccaccio, Manzoni, Poe, Camus, London, and Elkhadem. Conversation centers on the question of how Western literature have attempted to both document and investigate the destruction of human society, but also to recreate it.
Instructor
Filippo Gianferrari
General Education Code
TA
Online course using literary and artistic texts to investigate the history and engineering of California, and to imagine a virtual, material, and cultural infrastructure for California's future. Course begins and ends with the Internet, and includes topics such as cyberspace, the Gold Rush, Spanish/Mexican missions, wartime development, and early cybernetics.
Instructor
Zachary Zimmer
General Education Code
TA
An exploration of the great story tradition of the Arabian Nights, or, closer to its Arabic title, The 1001 Nights. Course traces the tales' origins and diffusion through world literature, focusing on its cultural contexts and powerful exploration of folk, mythical, and psychological themes of fate, gender, jealousy, and the act of telling stories.
General Education Code
CC
Quarter offered
Fall, Winter, Spring
Introduces topics in literature. The course topic changes; please see the Class Search for the current topic.
Introduction to the crafts and techniques of poetry, fiction, and creative non-fiction, identifying and exploring traditional and non-traditional literary forms and genres while working on individual creative writing projects. An author reading and two workshop sections per week.
General Education Code
PR-C
Quarter offered
Fall, Winter, Spring
Speaking, reading, and writing proficiency in Spanish is required. Explores creative writing from a bilingual (Spanish-English) perspective, and considers bilingualism in the literary arts (como el ejercicio de una identidad), as a way of thinking and a way of being, as a creative lens (el pensamiento de frontera), as a framework, as a border (que quiere ser cruzada).
General Education Code
PR-C
An intermediate-level course in fiction designed for prospective applicants to the creative writing concentration.
General Education Code
PR-C
Quarter offered
Fall, Winter, Spring
An intermediate-level course in poetry designed for prospective applicants to the creative writing concentration.
Instructor
Gary Young, The Staff
General Education Code
PR-C
Quarter offered
Fall, Winter, Spring
Study of literature in English or English translation. Students submit petition to sponsoring agency.
Quarter offered
Fall, Winter, Spring
Speaking, reading, and writing proficiency in French, German, Greek, Italian, Latin, Spanish or other non-English language required. Students submit petition to sponsoring agency.
Quarter offered
Fall, Winter, Spring
Study of creative writing. Students submit petition to sponsoring agency.
Quarter offered
Fall, Winter, Spring
Students submit petition to sponsoring agency.
Quarter offered
Fall, Winter, Spring
Cross-listed Courses
Critically examines how digital processes are changing scholarly practice and pedagogy in the humanities. Students experiment with how digital media can impact research and communication for textual scholars, museum professionals, archivists, librarians, public historians and educators.
Cross Listed Courses
LIT 232D
Instructor
Elaine Sullivan
Small, discussion-based seminar held in conjunction with The Humanities Institute's community reading initiative, The Deep Read. The Deep Read aims to bring together UCSC undergraduates, faculty, and alumni to discuss and think deeply about a text and its key themes and issues. Course is a comprehensive study of The Deep Read book, the author's work, and its relevant contexts. While the textual analysis framework remains consistent every year, the topic, author, and key text changes each year.
Cross Listed Courses
LIT 112Q
General Education Code
TA