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Course Criteria
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1.00 Credits
Bibliotherapy uses literature as a means for better understanding our own personal lives and experiences. This workshop explores our bodies as cultural constructs, investigating how social and political forces shape our anatomy and biology. Using the novella, The Ballad of the Sad Cafe by Carson McCullers, students focus on how our bodies learn and experience the appropriate behaviors of our race, class and gender. No grade equivalents allowed. HUMANITIES & SOCIAL SCIENCE DOMAINS
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3.00 Credits
This class explores sadomasochism, isolation, obsession, the divided self, and freedom and responsibility, as revealed through the struggles of Dostoevsky's characters as they endeavor to give meaning to their lives in the social context of 19th century Russia. HUMANITIES & SOCIAL SCIENCE DOMAINS
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3.00 Credits
Italian literature is a tight-knit braid in which the founders of the tradition deeply influence future authors. Steeped in Mediterranean culture (Pagan, Jewish, Christian and Islamic), medieval Italian literature reinvented the past to fit new social and political conditions. Petty wars, trans-national crusades, the Bubonic plague, foreign occupation -- these and other catastrophes spurred writers to protest. Francis of Assisi founded an order based on peace and love for all creatures -- and wrote the first real poem in Italian. Dante's ethical hike through Hell exposed the vices that bring suffering to individuals, communities and the world as a whole. Boccaccio, directly in contact with Muslims and Jews in Naples, reacted to religious intolerance and fear of sexuality by writing entertaining and transgressive stories that send up the folly of people from all walks of life, but also celebrated heroic human ingenuity and diversity. Machiavelli focused new insights on the natural drives to power and pleasure in his comedy The Mandragola. Manzoni's colossal historical novel, The Betrothed, set in the 17th century, has the moral seriousness of Dante, the shrewdness of Machiavelli, the story-telling magic of the Decameron. This tradition continues in Primo Levi. His Survival at Auschwitz owes much to Dante and Manzoni's works, which helped him write his account of the hell of a Nazi concentration camp and scrutinize the choices people make in lethal situations of unimaginable brutality. Students become familiar with essential aspects of Italian culture and discuss how literature can delight, enlighten and empower us to understand abuses of power, the aspiration to justice and happiness, and other aspects of the human condition. This course includes a field trip to the Norton Simon Museum. HUMANITIES DOMAIN
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3.00 Credits
Our sense of cultural identity is in flux and under construction, subject to the play of history and difference. Through documentaries, videos and readings of American Indian myths, stories from the Latin American Boom, and vernacular African-American tales, students uncover layered histories of American destinies and their possible role in defining a more inclusive sense of "American" culture. Students analyze how stories and counter-stories teach and delight; how gender is constructed through cautionary or celebratory tales and how diverse spiritual and erotic values are encoded. Students locate, in stories, the struggle against inhuman (but all too human) violence motivated by greed and fear. Students explore the American Indian presence in Los Angeles, in a powwow, museum visit and guest interview. HUMANITIES DOMAIN
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3.00 Credits
In this course, students read contemporary memoirs (and portions of memoirs) that capture early childhood experience, particularly childhood trauma, often at the hands of family and society. Each work depicts a self defined in the context of trauma, and fortified by the turning of a traumatic experience into literature. The course also includes readings in literary criticism and psychological theory that illuminate the workings of memoir, and illustrate how memoirs may serve both artistic and psychological missions. The course considers how these missions correspond, and conflict, and how various works reconcile them. Students have the option to explore their own memories, and write their own pieces of memoir. HUMANITIES DOMAIN
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3.00 Credits
Using the novel as our catalyst students critically consider the question of a purposeful life. The novel's unique relation to modernity offers an opportunity to investigate provocative examples of the individual's relation to structures of power, the possibilities of resistance, and the potential for love. HUMANITIES DOMAIN
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3.00 Credits
The aim of this course is for students to analyze a variety of classical and contemporary short fiction. The course engages all the elements that give a fiction a chance at success -- obsession, seduction, evoking of the senses, the removal of filters, scene and summary, theatre of the mind, et cetera. This course examinse the elements of fiction - plot, character, setting, point of view, theme, effective dialogue, meaningful description and telling detail, narrative voice, pacing, symbol, etc. - in an effort to determine the part each element plays in creating the overall effect of the short story. Students learn to recognize and use the terminology of fiction and, by reading, discussing, and analyzing several dozen stories by a diverse selection of writers, achieve a thorough understanding of the process and value of writing short fiction, as well as develop skills with which to analyze the form. HUMANITIES DOMAIN
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3.00 Credits
This course considers writing as a radical, subversive act of cultural resistance against authority and oppression in its innumerable forms and guises. Through reading, lecture, dialogue and creative writing investigations, students become familiar with both literary and conceptual models of resistance offered by a diverse selection of writers and thinkers, including Kathy Acker, Reinaldo Arenas, Helene Cixous and Nawal El Saadawi. Particular attention is given to the connection between radical politics and radical aesthetics, the literature of sexual and social transgression, and not just the writer's text, but the writer's body as the tool of rebellion. Using Gloria Anzaldua's concept of auto-teoria-historia, students reflect on their own lives to create their own models and stories of resistance. HUMANITIES DOMAIN
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3.00 Credits
This course provides students with an introduction to the novel as a literary form, through reading, discussing and writing about several modern/postmodern novels. Topics may include: what distinguishes the novel as a distinct literary form, the history of the novel, particular historic or stylistic movements in the novel, comparative studies of the novel, the development of the novel, experimental forms of the novel, realism vs. nonrealism in the novel, narrative strategies employed within the novel, etc. HUMANITIES DOMAIN
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3.00 Credits
This course focuses on exploring the genre of creative non-fiction and examining many of its forms including literary reportage, memoir, biography, travel writing, magazine writing, and the essay. Students read short and longer works by varied authors including Truman Capote (his classic, In Cold Blood, is considered to be a pioneering work of creative non-fiction), Joan Didion, David Sedaris, James Ellroy, Greil Marcus, Norman Mailer, and Art Spiegelman. The class explores patterns and trends in the development of the form as a literary genre, and the vanishing distinction between fiction and non-fiction. The class also examines how the elements of fiction - narrative, character development, scene setting, dialogue, poetic language, point of view, structure, etc. - are utilized in creative nonfiction. HUMANITIES DOMAIN
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