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SPRING 2004 COURSE GUIDE
Category V: Arts and Letters
ARLT 100gThese courses aim at depth of knowledge and development of students' interpretive skills through intellectual engagement with major works of philosophy, literature, art, film, or music. Classes are writing-intensive and limited to thirty students to promote direct interaction between students and faculty. For additional enrollment information, see the Spring 2004 Schedule of Classes. You may also download the course descriptions in pdf version.
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Classics in Modern Philosophy
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On Beauty
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The African American Literary Legacy
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ARTS AND LETTERS 100g
Art and Text in Imperial Rome
Professor Boyle
TTh, 11:00 - 12:20
A detailed critical and analytic study of selected works of literature and of visual art (architecture, sculpture, painting) from early imperial Rome. The focus will be on intense reading and intellectual analysis of the works themselves, of their relationship to each other and to the culture(s) which produced them. The course will focus on two periods: the Rome of Augustus (27 BCE-14 CE) and that of Nero (54-68 CE). The art for the course includes the following: Augustan Period: Augustan monuments, esp. the Forum Augusti; official sculpture, esp. the Altar of Peace and the Prima Porta; and Roman imperial painting, esp. the “ornamental style” and sacro-idyllic; and Neronian Period: Architecture, esp. the Palaces; Sperlonga sculptures and the Laocoon; Roman imperial painting, esp. the “theatrical style.” The texts for the course will include: Augustus, Res Gestae (“Achievementi”) Virgil, Aeneid; Ovid, Fasti; Petronius, Satyricon; Seneca, Troades (“Trojan Women”); and Tacitus, Annals.
Top of PageARTS AND LETTERS 100g
Beckett, Theatre and Visual Arts
Professor Lloyd
MWF, 12:00 - 12:50
In this course we will read and watch Samuel Beckett's plays, read some of his art criticism and view work by artists he admired--where possible, we will seek out paintings by these artists in the L.A. area. As a dramatist, Beckett makes extensive use of painterly effects, both in stage design and in direction. We will be able to watch both TV productions of plays like Krapp's Last Tape, Not I and Eh Joe that Beckett himself closely supervised, and the newly completed film versions of his plays (including Waiting for Godot and Endgame) by directors that range from Neil Jordan and Atom.
Egoyan to Damien Hirst and David Mamet. Artists we will look at will include the Irish painter Jack B. Yeats (brother of W.B. Yeats), Bram Van Velde, the Dutch abstract painter, and Avigdor Arikha, the Israeli figurative painter and close friend of the writer from the late 1950s. We will, accordingly, read Beckett as dramatist in the context of the visual arts and their influence on his work, and learn to read visual material--painting, film, plays. We will try to understand Beckett both in the context of Irish drama and art (reading a little of the drama of Synge and W.B. Yeats) and in the context of the international avant-garde of which he was part. The dramas and visual material will be supplemented by a small number of critical works that will aid students in understanding Beckett's works. Students will be expected to participate regularly in discussion, to write three short response papers and produce one longer essay on a production of a play by Beckett.
ARTS AND LETTERS 100g
Body, Poetry, Self
Professor Smith
TTh, 12:30 - 1:50
The convergence of three entities--body, poetry, and self--will form the focus for this course. We shall begin where poetry does in all cultures, with the human body, and explore how all aspects of poetry are grounded in bodily experience. A range of poems from the fourteenth century to the present will give us test cases for discovering how poems serve as mediations between body and self. For historical guidance we shall look to Charles Taylor’s book, Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity. Students who choose this course should not be timid about movement and voice exercises or joining in group performances of poems. In addition to these performances, projects for the course will include one paper devoted exclusively to a single word, one paper using historical conceptions of self to read an individual poem, one paper objectively describing rhythm and sound effects, and one original poem written in imitation of an historical exemplar. The course will conclude with discussion of a volume of poetry by a poet reading in LA during the fall. Attendance at that poetry reading will be a course requirement.
The course will require four writing assignments: (1) a research project on a single word, (2) an objective analysis of sound in a particular poem, (3) an analytical essay on self-identity in a particular poem, and (4) an imitation of a poem, carried through at least three drafts. Readings for the course will include Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (a four-section book-length narrative poem), selected poems of varying lengths from The Norton Anthology of Poetry (typically five poems assigned per class meeting), and a recent book of poems by a poet reading on campus during the fall semester, in addition to approximately 200 pages of readings from Charles Taylor's Sources of the Self and the entirety of Robert Pinsky's The Sound of Poetry.
ARTS AND LETTERS 100g
Border and Spirit, Land and Nation: The "Heart" Land in Literature and Film
Professor McKenna
TTh, 12:30 - 1:50
This course is designed to draw the student’s attention to the underlying structures of signification that both structure texts and produce them. By using the metaphor of the border to indicate the encounter between cultures, races and genders, the student will come to understand the complexities of representation and production of cultural forms. The Border, as Gloria Anzaldua has famously indicated, is not a comfortable place, it is “a dividing line, a narrow strip along a steep edge. A borderland is a vague and undetermined place created by the emotional residue of an unnatural boundary. It is in a constant state of transition.” (Borderlands/la frontera, p.3) The United States has been created out of struggles between nations and peoples, for land and for control over self-determination. The connections between real and metaphoric borders and identity, between land and spirit are central to uncovering the impulse to establish place and nation, as well as to produce lasting reminders of these struggles in art. Students will read a selection of literary texts and will view several films in which these issues are key. They will also read supporting critical essays to guide them in their critical reading and viewing. The course bibliography includes Jane Smiley, A Thousand Acres; Helen Marie Viramontes, Under the Feet of Jesus; Willa Cather, O Pioneers; Katerine Anne Porter, Flowering Judas; Rudolfo Anaya, Bless Me, Ultima; Tomas Rivera, Y no se lo trago la tierra, And the Earth did not Devour Him; N. Scott Momaday, House Made of Dawn; Ana Castillo, So Far From God; Carlos Bulosan, America is in the Heart; Ernest Hemingway, In Our Time; Maria Amparo Ruiz de Burton, The Squatter and the Don; Louise Erdrich, Tracks; and Toni Morrison, Sula. The films include Lone Star (John Sayles), The Ballad of Gregorio Cortez (Montezuma Esparaza) and Tierra (Paul Espinosa).
ARTS AND LETTERS 100g
Chinese Imagination: Culture in Fiction
Professor Hayden
TTh, 12:30 - 1:50
This course will introduce examples and problems of Chinese moral culture through sixty-one short stories and one novel. These works of traditional fiction are the original versions as translated into English, with the exception of the novel Three Kingdoms, the translation of which is abridged. No prior knowledge of Chinese culture or language is assumed. The course will examine the actions of fictional characters in the context of the three ethical systems of Confucianism, Taoism, and Buddhism. What are the norms and how are they followed or violated? Topics include human and celestial justice and the role of individual ambition in the cycle of history. The texts will include Traditional Chinese Stories, Themes and Variations and Three Kingdoms, China’s Epic Drama.
ARTS AND LETTERS 100g
Classics of Greek Philosophy and Literature
Professor Robb
TTh, 2:00 - 3:20
This course introduces the student to a selection of the best of Greek literature and philosophy with an emphasis on reading a text as very much a product of a place, time and society, but also one with enduring interest for thoughtful persons for the present time. The intent is to keep to acknowledged “classics,” the best works of a literature already selected in antiquity as a canon and the best philosophical writing, but which also have proven interest for modern readers. Readings from such authors as Homer, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes, Plato, Aristotle, Epicurus, and Cleanthes.
ARTS AND LETTERS 100g
Classics in Modern Philosophy
Professor Damnjanovic
TTh, 8:00 - 9:20
TTh, 9:30 - 10:50
A close reading of several important works in seventeenth and eighteenth century philosophy. Emphasis on the cultural context of these works as well as on their philosophical content. The reading include Decartes, Meditations on First Philosophy; Locke, Essay concerning Human Understanding (selections); Leibniz, Discourse on Metaphysics, Principles of Nature and Grace; Berkeley, Principles on Human Knowledge; Hume, An Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding; Kant, Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics.
ARTS AND LETTERS 100g
Cross-Cultural Rhetoric
Professor Green
TTh, 9:30 - 10:50
Rhetoric is a seemingly universal phenomenon, both as a set of communicative practices and as a self-conscious effort to regularize a society's modes of effective expression. We will look first at the prevalence of rhetoric in our own western tradition, and then expand our inquiry into the pervasiveness of rhetoric in ancient literate societies (Near Eastern, Chinese, and Indian), in non-literate traditional societies, in the psychology of animal societies, and in the dynamics of human language development. The texts include: Conley, Rhetoric in the European Tradition; Kennedy, Comparative Rhetoric; and Bizzell and Hertzberg, Rhetoric Reader.
ARTS AND LETTERS 100g
Feminist Diasporas: Women and Urban Exile in Lietrature, Performance and Film
Professor Zubiaurre
TTh, 9:30 - 10:50
This intercultural and interdisciplinary course traces the history of female urban exile during the twentieth century. Through the analysis of specific filmic, performative and literary texts, students will reflect upon the many challenges diaspora and migration impose on women, and the multiple ways in which female displacement differs from male exile. Furthermore, students will become aware of the ever-changing and fluid nature of female identity, as it is continuously shaped and reshaped by diaspora and cultural difference, and by the added experience of urban reality: female immigrants, by exiting their homeland, usually leave behind a rural environment they will learn to miss in the midst of an alien metropolis. The main objective of the course, thus, is to expose students to the various strategies used by the female writer/performer/director to turn the traditionally male dominated landscape of urban diaspora into a new feminist arena. The primary texts for the course include fictional works, such as Gertrude Stein’s The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club, Achy Obejas’ Memory Mambo, Farida Karodia’s Other Secrets, Isabel Allende’s Daughter of Fortune, and Jamaica Kincaid’s Lucy; and performative and filmic testimonies, such as Dolores Prida’s Beautiful Señoritas, Christine Chang’s Be Good My Children, Coco Fusco’s Pochonovela, Maureen Blackwood’s Home Away From Home, Cherríe Moraga’s Giving Up the Ghost, Icíar Bollaín’s Flowers from Another World, Louise Glover’s Black Sheep, and Marilú Mallet’s Unfinished Diary.
ARTS AND LETTERS 100g
How El Norte Became the Southwest
Professor Lint Sagarena
TTh, 12:30 - 1:50
This Arts and Letters course offers a survey of literary and visual representations of the transformation of region in the U.S./Mexico borderlands. Themes and issues covered will include: Mexican conceptions of frontier, constructions of identity by Tejanos, Californios, and Hispanos, depictions of the Mexican American War, ethnicity and the western Gold Rushes, the literature of dispossession, boosterism, cultural and religious changes. The course will center on close readings of texts such as: Ruiz Burton's The Squatter and the Don, Willa Cather's Death Comes for the Archbishop, Helen Hunt Jackson's Ramona, versions of The Life and Times of Juaquin Murrieta, and the screenplay of the movie Lone Star.
ARTS AND LETTERS 100g
Lenses on Society: Literature and Sociology
Professor Phillips
TTh, 2:00 - 3:20
Literature is art, and yet there are novels that have changed the way we understand our society. Sociology sees itself as a science, but there have been sociological works so compelling argued that they had a readership well beyond the discipline. This course pairs novels of social commentary with excerpts from contemporary works of sociology on the same or similar theme. For each novel, students will consider three questions: (1) How do literature and sociology approach the same topic? (2) What insights are unique to each and to what extent to the two genres compliment or contradict each other? (3) Are these works dated by their social criticism, or do they manage to transcend their social context? The works include: Lynd and Lynch, Middletown; Thornstein Veblin, The Theory of the Leisure Class; Sinclair Lewis, Babbit; David Reisman, The Lonely Crowd; Howard Becker, The Outsiders; Jack Kerouac, On the Road; Robert Bellah, Habits of the Heart; Brett Easton Ellis, Less Than Zero; Gunnar Myrdal, An American Dilemma; Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man; Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique; Kate Milet, Sexual Politics; and Janice Galloway, The Trick to Keep Breathing.
ARTS AND LETTERS 100g
Literature of Resistance
Professor Weisman
TTh, 11:00 - 12:20
How does a culture react to oppression? What literary and artistic products are created in the process? Can literature be an act of resistance? What modes of overcoming oppression are suggested in such literature? The course will explore these issues in a variety of societies and groups that experience(d) oppression deriving from their cultural, religious, gender, and national affiliations. Students will analyze and discuss diverse genres of spiritual, political, military and cultural resistance to subjugation and oppressions, from antiquity to modernity. The various genres will include, but will not be limited to, texts such as biblical narratives, fiction, poetry, sermons, diaries, historical documents and political manifestos, films, and other modes of artistic expression created by authors such as Atwood, Bradbury, Camus, the Dalai Lama, Dylan, Ginsberg, M.L. King Jr., Marx, Orwell, Wolf, and many others. While some lectures will provide the theoretical context for class discussions, most of the critical and analytical work will happen in class as a product of the students’ contributions and participation.
ARTS AND LETTERS 100g
Literature, Science and Science Fiction
Professor Dilligan
TTh, 12:30 - 1:50
This is a multidisciplinary class that explores the interactions between literature and science. Course material will deal with some of the major developments in Physics and Biology during this century. The primary texts for the course include scientist’s accounts of scientific discovery, such as James Watson’s The Double Helix; biographies of scientists such as William Poundstone’s biography of John von Neumann, Prisoner’s Dilemma; works that address the ethical and cultural dimensions of scientific discovery, such as Jonathan Schell’s The Fate of the Earth; novels by and about science, such as Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49; and science fiction novels, such as Benford’s Timescape; Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?; LeGuin, The Lathe of Heaven; LeGuin, The Left Hand of Darkness; Shelley, Frankenstein; Snow, The Two Cultures; Stoker, Dracula; Stirling, The Stone Dogs; Turner, Brain Child; and Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse Five. The course will make extensive use of the World Wide Web, e-mail and computer multimedia.
ARTS AND LETTERS 100g
Literature, Songs and Opera
Professor Schnauber
TTh, 3:30 - 4:50
Many of the world’s most famous operas, song cycles, oratorios and symphonic works are based on works of known literature. This course gives an introduction into literary works of German and other European authors which have been used most often for music or have inspired some of the most well- known musical masterpieces. It will include Goethe’s Werther, Egmont and Faust, Schiller’s Don Carlos and William Tell, Shakespeare’s Othello, Wild’s Salome, tales of E.T.A. Hoffmann, plays and stories by French authors and poems by Goethe, Heine and other Romantic German poets which have been used for some of the greatest songs and song cycles. In this course students will also learn how to analyze the content and style of the chosen literary works and will be introduced into how these works were put to music in different styles by different composers from different countries, such as German composers Beethoven, Schumann, Mendelssohn, Wagner, Brahms, Humperdinck, Strauss, Austrian composers Mozart (Salzburg), Schubert, Wolf, Mahler, French composers Berlioz, Bizet, Gounod, Massenet, Italian composers Rossini, Verdi, Busoni, Russian composers Mussorsky, Tschaikovsky, German-French composer Offenbach, Hungarian-Austrian-German composer Liszt, and British composer Britten. In the case of opera and songs, students will also analyze how musical phrasing and intonation relate to spoken intonation and prosodics of written text. While the focus of the course will remain on the literary text, the introduction into musical style will be equally important.
ARTS AND LETTERS 100g
Los Angeles: The Fiction
Professor Gustafson
TTh, 2:00 - 3:20
Los Angeles has always been a place full of hype. Let me add some to it. No city in the United States has a more significant fiction and popular culture associated with it since the 1930s than Hollywood and Los Angeles. As much of the political posturing in the 1990s about sex and violence in films reminds us, throughout the twentieth century Los Angeles/Hollywood has been a primary staging ground--or projection screen--for our political and cultural conflicts, particularly for our debate about the place and influence of popular culture and for our concerns arising from confronting one of America's fundamental contradictions. Opposed to the stories (or songs) of California and the West as a free and open space for escape, renewal and an easy attainment of the good life is the fact of the West as a territory of conquest and oppression. Indeed, the West in general and Los Angeles in particular is not the place where we have escaped from each other. It is where we--Native Americans, Latinos, Blacks, Anglos, Asians, Easterners, Midwesterners, Southerners, immigrants from all over the globe, Catholics, Muslims, Mormons, Jews, Protestants, etc.--all met, and will continue to meet. This course offers an opportunity to study Los Angeles and Southern California as a political and cultural borderland: a space of collaboration, friction, conflict and fusion among peoples of various cultures and regions.
Any study of Los Angeles must include Hollywood, and this course will give attention to the Hollywood novel, a genre of literature that was, in the words of one critic, "the great literary invention of the Thirties." But along with using fiction to draw aside the curtain for an inside look at Hollywood, the course hopes to provide students, whether they be natives or newcomers to L.A., with a deeper, richer sense of place. Authors to be read include Joan Didion, Budd Schulberg, Nathanael West, James Cain, Yxta Maya Murray, Luis Valdez, Anna Deavere Smith, Sandra Loh, Karen Yamashita, and Chester Himes.
ARTS AND LETTERS 100g
Love and Desire in Ancient Greece
Professor Burns
MW, 3:30 - 4:50
Eros, the god of love, was a powerful character in the minds of the ancient Greeks, one whom they often struggled to understand, and sometimes to escape. This course examines the Greek understandings of love and desire, through texts which present philosophical discussions, personifications of Eros, and people under his influence. Also central to the course will be the representations of desiring and desired persons found in Greek art. Combining these visual and written texts, we will explore the workings of desire in various social contexts, from private parties to religious festivals, and as experienced by such different "characters" as teen-agers, married women, and the gods. We will also discuss why certain types of desire might have been seen as dangerous and examine the efforts of society to control them. Primary texts will include: Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, Plato’s Symposium and Phaedrus, Aristophanes’ Lysistrata, Euripides’ Medea, and selections from Sappho, among other poets.
ARTS AND LETTERS 100g
Love and Sex in the Ancient World
Professor Swartz Dodd
TTh, 11:00 - 12:20
The sexual revolution didn't happen only during the Sixties. Sixty centuries ago its first stirrings were recorded in tales of love, passion, desire, infidelity, divine union, marriage, adultery, divorce and women scorned. This course is a chance to delve into humanity's first recorded attempts to harness, control, and enhance sexuality and love; inside and outside marriage; in both the human and divine realms. Centuries before Alexander the Great built his empire ancient authors and artists depicted normal and deviant behavior in love poems, literary texts, myths, letters, laws, paintings and sculpture. This course explores views of sex, love, marriage, pleasure, same sex relationships, the status of women, and the fate of children in the periods pre-dating the biblical traditions through the cultural perspectives of the Ancient Near East including Egypt, Babylonia, Canaan, and the Hittite and Assyrian empires. We'll explore the times and lives of people whose experience is captured in texts such as Egyptian Love Poems, Hittite Birth Rituals; Gilgamesh; Wisdom and Witchcraft Literature from ancient Babylon; Law Codes, and Potency Incantations. And from the perspective of our time -- when America has ambivalent "class" distinctions and Disney animators are airbrushing women's breasts out of their classic cartoons before video release -- we'll evaluate the roles class and gender played in ancient personal life and see how differently men, women, and their varied relationships were imagined and portrayed - both seriously and humorously.
ARTS AND LETTERS 100g
Many Faiths: Many Truths?
Professor Crossley
TTh, 11:00 - 12:20
This is a course on religious diversity which looks first at the phenomenon of religious diversity itself, and then explores various proposals for dealing with it, ranging from "true belief" in one's own religious tradition and dismissal of others, on the one extreme, to a universal "identity under the surface," on the other, with various forms of the "pluralist project" in between. The course explores the meaning of "religion" itself, and how it relates to personal faith, on the one hand, and the cumulative, ever-changing traditions we associate with the great religious traditions of the world, both Western and Eastern, on the other hand. Religious traditions are a part of the cultures they serve. To ask the question, which is the true religion is comparable to asking the question, which is the true culture? In this course, the question is rather, How do we relate the religious tradition or traditions of one culture to those of another? What are the significant differences? Are there major commonalities? Can they live together in tolerance and peace? Can they go beyond tolerance to cooperation? The required texts include The Hebrew Bible, The New Testament, and The Qur'an (selected passages expressing the "absoluteness" of each tradition); W.C. Smith, The Meaning and End of Religion; J. Hick, An Interpretation of Religion; A. Sharma and K.M. Dugan (eds.), A Dome of Many Colors; K. Armstrong, A History of God; and J. Hick and P. Knitter (eds.), The Myth of Christian Uniqueness.
ARTS AND LETTERS 100g
Masterpieces of the Short Story
Professor Zholkovsky
TTh, 8:00 - 9:20
TTh, 9:30 - 10:50
This course is intended to be an introduction to Russian literature by way of its best short fiction, during which students will also be introduced to the basic principles of textual interpretation. Students will read, mostly in chronological order, and analyze some of the best short stories written by Russian authors over the two-hundred year existence of modern Russian prose, from Karamzin to the present day. Key emphases will fall on historical background (the reading list provides a cross-section of an entire culture and the changes it has undergone in the modern era); narrative structure (of which students are usually ignorant, but a critical awareness of which will prepare them for more advanced literary, and other kinds of, analysis); and intertextuality (the lively dialog that turns out to be taking place among these texts and often enough between them and non-Russian works). Among other topics that will be addressed are, on the historical side, the civic tenor of Russian literature and its role as surrogate opposition in Russian society, including the peculiar pressures of the Soviet era; and on the literary side, the ways in which these texts often simultaneously adopt and subvert the exemplars that precede them. The reading list includes the following: Karamzin, “Poor Liza”; Pushkin, “Station Master”, “The Shot”; Gogol, “The Overcoat”, “The Nose”; Lermontov, “Taman”; Dostoevsky, “The Dream of a Ridiculous Man”, “The Gentle Spirit”; Leskov, “The Sentry”; Tolstoy, “After the Ball”; Chekhov, “The Darling”, “Anna on the Neck”; Bunin, “Light Breathing”; Kuprin, “The Garnet Bracelet”; Gorky, “Twenty Six and a Girl”; Babel, “Guy de Maupassant”, “Answer to Inquiry”; Romanov, “Without Cherry Blossom”; Zoshchenko, “Aristocrat”, “Receipt”, “An Evening of Culture”; Nabokov, “Spring in Fialta”; Platonov, “Fro”; Iskander, “On a Summer Day”; Aksenov, “Victory”; Solzhenitsyn, “An Incident at Krechetovka”; and Siniavsky, “Pkhentz.”
ARTS AND LETTERS 100g
Medieval Art and Christian Liturgy
Professor Malone
TTh, 9:30 - 10:50
This introductory course examines the Christian liturgical year in relation to medieval art and architecture of Western Europe. Beginning with Advent and Christmas, the successive feast days of the year and the important role that visual culture played in their celebration will be examined. Primary readings from the Bible, sermons, and monastic customs as well as secondary sources concerning particular feasts and their depiction from the fourth to the thirteenth centuries will be assigned for discussion. Comparisons of artistic imagery and sermons will help to define the devotional significance of each feast. In particular, visual imagery (posted in advance on the web) will be decoded to show how these signs of spiritual life emphasized theological ideas. Liturgical practice and innovations will also be correlated with imagery (manuscripts, mosaics, sculpture) and with architectural function to help reveal changes in devotion.
ARTS AND LETTERS 100g
Modernity and the City
Professor Norindr
TTh, 11:00 - 12:20
The city occupies a privileged place in the imaginary of writers, poets, philosophers, architects, filmmakers, and urban planners. It is an archetype of the imaginary which manifests itself in different guises (the ancient city, the forbidden city, the city of man/woman, the modern city, and so on). If the city is a test, as many writers and critics have claimed, how are we to read it, to interpret it, to make sense of it? What are the poetic, political and ideological stakes? The city will be seen as the focal point not only for a comparative analysis of the dynamics of technological society and its effects on artistic production, but also as the emblematic site for the production of a modern, postmodern, or postcolonial spatial imaginary from which new metropolitan forms have emerged. Primary readings will include texts by Roland Barthes, Jean Baudrillard, Andr Breton, Albert Camus, Italo Calvino, Louis-Ferdinand Cline, Marguerite Duras, Thomas Mann, and Toni Morrison.
ARTS AND LETTERS 100g
Music and the Modern Imagination
Professor Demers
MW, 2:00 - 3:20
This class will be devoted to a close study of music from the 20th century that expresses important characteristics of the modern imagination--including social and scientific phenomena, political and racial ideologies, and ideas from the other fine arts and letters of the century. To learn how music intersects the modern world, we will read critical essays, scientific writings, polemics, and works of literature and assess in detail their influence upon selected musical compositions and the outlook of major composers. No reading knowledge of music is necessary, although repeated listening to the assigned music is required. The class sessions will contain lectures, student presentations, and guided discussions. All of the assigned listening is found on cassette tapes on reserve for this class in the Music Library, and the assigned reading is collected in an anthology that may be purchased at the bookstore.
ARTS AND LETTERS 100g
No-Place? No-Time? Society and Utopian Fiction
Professor Barnouw
MW, 12:00 - 1:50
Utopia means “no place,” but utopian fictions projecting alternate cultures have always been comments on their own. We will read them in their historical contexts, spanning two and a half millennia. The topics to be discussed are the books; lectures will provide the historical contexts; the discussion depends, in part, on the students, guided in each class by a leader who has prepared a short list of questions and suggestions (e.g., imagination and moral power in the Republic; social power and economic structure in Utopia; the power of science in New Atlantis; the perception of the other in Gulliver’s Travels; curiosity in Rasselas; nature vs. culture in the Discourse and the Supplement; anti-industrialism in News from Nowhere; scientific optimism in A Modern Utopia; critique of technocracy, rather than science, in We and Brave New World, and of totalitarianism in 1984; better or different worlds in The Dispossessed; imagination and amoral power in Solaris.)
ARTS AND LETTERS 100g
On Beauty
Professor Tiffany
MW, 2:00 - 3:20
MW 3:30 - 4:50
Beauty is a touchy subject these days--in part, some would say, because beauty has disappeared, or been pushed, from the horizon of serious discussion. Just to talk about beauty as an idea today, we usually have to historicize it (relegate it to the past), or approach it ironically (to speak as if something were beautiful). What would it mean, however, to take seriously the pleasures, the anxieties, and the power we associate with beauty? Would it be necessary to recover a sense of the relation between philosophy and beauty, or between art and beauty? To begin to answer these many questions about beauty, we will read widely in the history of aesthetics (the philosophy of art), but also analyze essays of art and literary criticism, by authors ranging from Edmund Burke to Arthur Danto to Roland Barthes. We will consider the enormous impact of popular culture on contemporary notions of beauty, moving from Vogue magazine to fractal diagrams to hip hop. In addition, to complicate our sense of beauty--and to discover its partial nature--we will read back and forth between poetry and philosophy, as if we might fashion, through dialogue, a kaleidoscopic sense of beauty. These imaginary conversations between (for example) Plato and Baudelaire, Lessing and Emily Dickinson, or Plotinus and John Ashbery, will form the backbone of our analytic project, and they will also supply us with a conceptual and imaginative vocabulary adequate to probing the mystery of beauty.
ARTS AND LETTERS 100g
Performing Identities, Performing Cultures
Professor Kondo
MW, 2:00 - 3:20
This course explores “performativity” and “performance” as concepts with profound implications for the ways we think about, and create, gender, racial, sexual, and cultural identities. In addition to conventional arenas of performance—theatre, music, dance--he use of “performance” as a theoretical concept has come to include the practice of everyday life, and we will examine the ways we “perform” our genders and other modes of identity. We focus primarily on performances that transgress our contemporary, culturally specific notions of fixed categories of race, gender, sexuality, and genre. In anthropological fashion, these transgressions debstabilize our deeply held cultural assumptions. The main section of the course highlights specific performances “border trangression” in the contemporary U.S. These will include works that thematically highlight the performance of gender, race, and sexuality (David Henry Hwang’s M. Butterfly), and racial masquerade (Top Dog/ Underdog, the Pulitzer Prize-winning play by Suzan Lori Parks). The course moves to pioneering works in “documentary theatre:” actress and playwright Anna Deavere Smith’s Twilight: Los Angeles 1992, the Chicano-Latino trio Culture Clash and their site-specific documentary theater, and the School of Theater’s production of The Laramie Project. These complicate our notions of genre—a play based on the testimony of “real people” and involve performances across the lines of race, gender, and age. Such performances raise foundational questions: what counts as a play? How fluid is identity?
The question of cross-racial performance and its political implications arises urgently in music, from minstrelsy to hip hop theatre. What are the politics of particular gendered, raced bodies playing across the lines of difference? Here, we will read critical material on the subject and read plays and see films that squarely address the issue. Finally, the live body of the performer, the presence of the audience, and the ephemerality of performance are key features in understanding performance and the ways it has been engaged in contemporary scholarship. Consequently, we will attend at least two local performances: The Laramie Project, on campus, and Top Dog/Underdog, at the Mark Taper Forum. Other readings and films may also be assigned.
ARTS AND LETTERS 100g
Portraiture in Asian Art
Professor Cho
TTh, 3:30 - 4:50
Portraiture occupies an important position in the visual culture of the East and the West. Portraits visualize how a culture constructs the relationship between individuals and their world: they are capable of exhibiting the perceived divinity, political authority, and social status of the sitter. In spite of indifference to this subject in past studies of Asian art, portraiture as a genre has thrived in Asia, and it has developed significantly different traditions from European portraiture in terms of its ritual functions and cultural meaning. Focusing on the portrait paintings of East Asia (China, Korea, and Japan), this course introduces major issues in portraiture and examines various types of Asian portraits. We will discuss a wide range of portrait practices, history and usage in order to broaden our understanding of portraiture as a cultural and political phenomenon in Asia. Regarding commemorative portraiture--among the most numerous forms of portraiture in Asia--we will investigate its linkage with rituals of death and ancestor worship. We will also compare this work with portraiture from other parts of the world. The text books include Jan Stuart & Evelyn Rawski, Worshiping the Ancestor: Chinese Commemorative Portraits and a course reader.
ARTS AND LETTERS 100g
Reading and Opera
Professor Diaz
TTh, 2:00 - 3:20
If opera is the marriage of music and words, what happens when we decide to read rather than simply listen to opera? What can the discourse about literature, which focuses on the verbal, say about a genre that is essentially musical? And what can opera, whose words are often not understood by listeners, say about literature, where words are of the essence? And what happens when we actually read these words? Should we read anything into the fact that opera plots often end with the death of female protagonists, or that some operas appear to distort non-European cultures--or should we just disregard libretti and heed the glorious music? These are some of the questions that we will consider as we read and listen to such operas as Monteverdi's L'Orfeo, Vivaldi's Motezuma, Mozart's Le Nozze di Figaro, Rossini's Il barbiere di Siviglia, Donizetti's Lucia di Lammermoor, Verdi's Otello, Wagner's Der Fliegende Holländer, Puccini's Madama Butterfly, and Britten's Billy Budd. To sharpen our listening, we will also read a series of literary works that variously function as sources of operatic plots, deal with opera within their narratives, or seem to reply to opera's excesses. These include Ovid's Metamorphoses, Shakespeare's Othello, Beaumarchais's The Barber of Seville and The Marriage of Figaro, Flaubert's Madame Bovary, Melville's Billy Budd, Carpentier's Baroque Concert, and Hwang's M. Butterfly. The class will attend one or two performances at the Los Angeles Opera.
ARTS AND LETTERS 100g
Reading Scripture as Skeptic and Believer: The Hebrew Bible, The New Testament, and the Qu'ran
Professor Firestone
TTh, 12:30 - 1:50
This course will examine some of the ways through which the scriptures of Judaism, Christianity and Islam establish paradigms of interpretation. We will read sections of each scriptural tradition from the “inside”--that is, as if we are believers in the religious system that the Scripture represents, and also from the “outside”--as critical observers of a religious system through its classic literature. This methodology will enable the student to gain a deep appreciation for different approaches to reading Scripture at the same time that she will learn how Scriptures “read” the world. One unique aspect of this class is that we will study how the three great monotheistic scriptures read some of the “same” topics. One sample topic, for example, might be Abraham as religious founder. Is the Abraham of Islamic Scripture the same person as the Abraham of Christian Scripture, or of Jewish Scripture? Other possible common topics include the meaning of prophecy, God’s relationship with humans, and the destiny of humankind. The texts will include Wayne A. Meeks, ed., Harper Collins Study Bible; Mohammad Marmaduke Pickthall, transl., The Meaning of the Glorious Koran; F.E. Peters, Children of Abraham: Judaism, Christianity, Islam.
ARTS AND LETTERS 100g
Relgious Experience and the Making of Western Culture
Professor Briggs
MW, 3:00 - 4:50
This course looks at how the cultural identity and attitudes of modern Westerners have been shaped by a distinctive religious past. We will concentrate on those texts that modern Westerners have designated as religious classics. We will also be looking at religious music and art, especially at the ways in which these have interacted with written traditions. The reading list includes The Epic of Gilgamesh; Euripides, Bacchae; Apuleius, The Golden Ass; Augustine, Confessions; The Rule of Benedict; Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love; John Bunyan, Pilgrim’s Progress; Friedrich Schleiermacher, Speeches on Religion; William James, Varieties of Religious Experience; selections which look at the construction of "minority" religious experiences in modernity (Jewish writers such as Martin Buber, African-American spirituals); and "Fall and Redemption Narratives" (selections from Genesis, Milton’s Paradise Lost, J.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, the TV series Babylon 5). Music sources will include selections from Gregorian Chant, J.S. Bach and other composers/compositions which illustrate the broader socio-cultural context of musical production. Visual material will include published sources (e.g., the architecture and sculpture of Chartes Cathedral) as well as visits to the Getty and Norton Simon museums.
ARTS AND LETTERS 100g
Renaissance Drama
Professor Berryman
MWF, 11:00 - 11:50
An introduction to Renaissance Drama with special attention to the methods of interpretation--language, history, character and imagination--ways to understand and enjoy dramatic literature created for the Renaissance stage. We shall consider plays by Shakespeare and at least two of his contemporaries (Marlowe and Webster) to see how social, political, and religious concerns are defined and challenged by the action and poetry on the Renaissance stage. The class will read six or seven plays, consider historical information, discuss interpretations, possibly direct and/or act a few scenes, and explore ways to respond with short essays and exams. The reading list includes: Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, Henry V, Hamlet, and The Tempest; Marlowe, Dr. Faustus; and Webster, The White Devil.
ARTS AND LETTERS 100g
The African American Literary Legacy
Professor James
MWF, 1:00 - 1:50
MW, 2:00 - 3:20
This course will analyze the nature and history of Black American “writerly” strategies, from slavery (Douglass, Jacobs, Washington), through turn-of-the-century and Harlem Renaissance eras (Chesnutt, Dunsbar, DuBois, Hughes, Hurston), to mid-century and contemporary periods (Ellison, Baldwin, Hansberry, Morrison). The course will have a firm “aesthetics” base as well as a politico-cultural orientation.
ARTS AND LETTERS 100g
The Comedy of Difference: Jewish Humor in 20th Century America
Professor Kaufman
MW, 2:00 - 3:20
In the melting pot of these United States, the experience of “difference” might be said to be the hallmark of modern American life. As an art form, comedy reveals the fault lines of American society as nothing else can; and no group has contributed to American comedic art more than the Jews. Traversing the borders between foreign and native-born, upper and lower class, high and low culture, and insider and outsider status, the American Jew has developed an acute eye for the distinctions and contradictions of American life. Not surprisingly, therefore, Jewish humor takes up many of the central themes of the American experience such as identity, war, love, religion, and politics. Through close readings of several classic works and assorted writings, we will explore such major cultural themes—all premised upon the divisions and diversity so characteristic of America—and all described so incisively and subversively by Jewish humor. Readings include: novels and memoirs by Groucho Marx, Joseph Heller, Philip Roth, and Lenny Bruce; and short pieces by Jewish comedians and humorists such as Woody Allen, and Sandra Bernhard. In addition, assigned readings will be supplemented by excerpts from film and television, presented and discussed in class.
ARTS AND LETTERS 100g
The Language and Lietreature of Love in Islam
Professor Reid
MWF, 11:00 - 11:50
This course offers an introduction to the literary traditions of Islamic mysticism. Through extensive readings in poetry and prose, it provides a survey of classical and medieval Sufism (the main form of Islamic mysticism). Sufi literature remains very much alive today: the poetry of Rumi, a thirteenth-century Sufi, is sung by pop stars in Tajikistan and stocked on the shelves of New Age bookstores in Los Angeles. What is unique about the mystical path in Islam? What are its main themes and metaphors? Do you have to be a Muslim to be a Sufi?
The course will address these questions by reading Sufi texts along with others written by Muslim authors outside the Sufi tradition in order to develop an appreciation of classical Islamic sensibilities about the human relationship to the divine. Readings will include selections from non-literary genres as well: biographies of the female mystics and ascetics of early Islam, letters of advice written by spiritual masters and classic formulations of the principles of Sufism. Special emphasis will be placed on developing the ability to read and write about these texts critically. How did tenth-century Muslim men describe contemporary women? What does a hermit’s rejection of society tell us about social problems in the fourteenth century? Why do poets employ daring or even erotic language to describe mystical experiences? The course will discuss the issue of what makes Sufi literature Islamic and why some Muslims have seen it as antithetical to Islam. Classical Sufi literature continues to leave its imprint upon modern writers, and we will also be reading some selections from the modern Islamic world in order to gain a wider perspective on what the path to God means in Islam. Readings may include: poetry from Rumi and Ibn al-Arabi to Khomeini; Attar’s The Conference of the Birds; al-Ghazzali’s Revival of the Religious Sciences; and al-Sulami’s Book of Sufi Women.
ARTS AND LETTERS 100g
The Outsider in Modern German Literature and Film
Professor Clausing
MW, 12:00 - 1:50
This course will analyze the predicament of the outsider, the individual who challenges or ignores social norms, the individual who may be excluded from the mainstream, as presented in twentieth-century German literature and film. Beginning with the aftermath of World War I, this thematic approach will examine the impact on the individual of the economic, social, and political conditions that gave rise to Nazi Germany and the holocaust, the subdivision of the country, and the democratic and reunited multicultural modern state, the Federal Republic of Germany. Emphasis will be on the development of analytical skills applied to depictions of the individual’s coping with ever-changing conditions. Literary works to be studied include The Trial (Kafka), The Threepenny Opera (Brecht), The Visit: A Tragi-Comedy (Duerrenmatt), The Tin Drum (Grass), The White Rose (Scholl), The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum (Boell), How German Is It? (Abish). Films to be analyzed will include Kuhle Wampe, The Blue Angel, The Threepenny Opera, M, The Trial, Jud Suess, Triumph of the Will, The White Rose, The Visit, The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum, Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, Christiane F., Sugarbaby, The Promise, Maybe … Maybe Not, Beyond Silence, and others.
ARTS AND LETTERS 100g
The Use of Love
Professor Kaplan
TTh, 2:00 - 3:20
This course will seek to understand the "cultural work" performed by love stories. By looking at love stories from the middle ages to the present, we will seek to investigate why love stories seem always to have been so extraordinarily popular. How does telling love stories help us to narrate ourselves, both collectively and individually? How does the love plot fashion a "self"? How does it help us imagine ourselves as a people or as a nation? How do romances do the cultural work of creating and maintaining boundaries of race, class, sexuality and gender? How much difference is there between the cultural work done by traditional love stories and that done by non-traditional ones? What, finally, counts as a "love story"? We will test the limits of the genre by reading a wide variety of texts, from medieval to Harlequin to gay romances, from novels which take for granted that the proper and likely outcome of a human life is marriage and family to novels that seem very skeptical about the romance plot, perhaps about any connection between two people. Our reading of the romance will take place in a context of both films and non-literary texts that will help us explore some of the different social, psychological, historical, allegorical, and national "uses" of love. Our texts are likely to include: Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet; Bronte, Jane Eyre; Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby; Malory, Morte de Arthur; Gone With the Wind; Walker, The Color Purple; Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God; Casablanca; West Side Story; Dale Peck, Martin and John; Titanic; It Could Happen to You.
ARTS AND LETTERS 100g
Utopia and Anti-Utopia
Professor Alkon
TTh, 12:30 - 1:50
This course will consider the development, imaginative appeal, and significance of utopian fiction from its origins during the Renaissance to its uses in the twentieth century. The starting point will be Saint Thomas More's Utopia. Close analysis of it will serve to define the genre while also introducing methods of interpreting and judging this and related modes of literature. Other readings will include landmark works that illustrate how the classical utopian model inaugurated by More has been varied and applied: Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe; Jonathan Swift, Gulliver's Travels; H.G. Wells, The Time Machine; Mark Twain, A Connecticut Yankee in King Aruthur’s Court; Aldous Huxley, Brave New World; George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four; Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451; Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed; and William Gibson, Neuromancer.
ARTS AND LETTERS 100g
War and Memory in Korean Literature
Professor Kim
MW, 2:00 - 3:20
This course will examine autobiographical and fictional accounts depicting wars in the twentieth century, with special reference to Korea. We will examine works written during and after the Second World War and the Korean War. We will explore the special links between collective and individual experiences, and the centrality of memories as a means to construct the past. Students will also investigate the historical and political realities at the root of imperialism and aggression. Works by Korean authors (Ahn, Cho, and Pak) will be closely examined along with recent publications by Korean-American writers (Nora Keller, Richard Kim, and Therese Park). Students will be encouraged to think about the complex interactions between human lives and the social, political, and economic conditions in which they emerge, especially during times of conflict and war. The required texts include: Ahn, Silver Stallion; Cho, Playing With Fire; Pak, “Winter Outing”; Nora Keller, Comfort Woman; and Kim, Lost Names. All readings are in English. No knowledge of Korean language, literature, or culture is required.
ARTS AND LETTERS 100g
War and the Literature of Trauma
Professor McCabe
MWF, 12:00 - 12:50
Can the horrors of war be represented? What is lost, distorted or revived through acts of representation? This course will examine attempts to portray physical, psychological and cultural effects of war shock and trauma upon soldiers, medics and civilians through a variety of twentieth century novels, poems, films and essays, particularly those focused upon World War I. We examine an array of psychological and physical results of war—including dissociation, hysteria, hallucination as well as dismemberment; at the same time, we will consider medical treatments and interpretations of these conditions. Along with considering the impact of war upon direct participants in the war, we will address the effects of war upon the domestic sphere, “survivor/spectators” and civilians. In this context, we necessarily examine the relationship between war and gender identity as well as the rendering of women in literary and film representations. And finally, the class will explore how writing and films construct patriotism, national identity and myths of postwar “adjustment.” Texts include Pat Barker’s Regeneration; Pat Duras, Hiroshima Mon Amour; Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises; Toni Morrison, Sula; Wilfred Owen, The Poems; Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front; Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse Five; Rebecca West, Return of the Soldier; and Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway.
ARTS AND LETTERS 100g
Women in Ancient Literature
Professor Eskenazi
TTh, 12:30 - 1:50
As heroes or helpmates, prophets or sages, victims or warriors, women make striking appearances in the Bible and other ancient Jewish literature. This course will examine these female representations, as well as their interpretations in later traditions. In addition to discovering the wide variety of women in the Bible and other ancient writings, our purpose will be to cultivate critical skills in assessing meanings derived from such texts. We will ask: What can we learn about beliefs concerning women? What do these reveal about the lives of actual women? What influence did these stories have on subsequent perceptions of gender issues? How do these stories find expression in today's world? We will concentrate on several critical approaches, including literary and historical. The books for the course include The Oxford Study Bible; Bellis, Helpmates; Harlots, Heroes: Women's Stories in the Hebrew Bible; Darr, Far More Precious than Jewels: Perspectives on Biblical Women; Meyer, Discovering Eve: Ancient Israelite Woman in Context; Trible, God and the Rhetoric of Sexuality; and Texts of Terror: Literary-Feminist Readings of Biblical Narratives.
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