Intro Comp Lit/Transfer Foundations

“Transfer Foundations” is a course designed especially for first-semester transfer students intending to study in the Arts and Humanities. Many transfer students report that the transition from community college to UC Berkeley is one of the most challenging moments in their educational careers. This course is designed to support that transition by introducing students to key methods in the humanities. We'll explore these methods in detail and in explicit, transparent, and demystifying ways. Students will work to develop strategies for approaching the main activities involved in upper-division humanities coursework: critical reading, active listening, literary and cultural analysis, participation, research, writing, and revision.

Our core text will be Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe. We will undertake a close, critical reading of the novel, and we'll then consider its international and interdisciplinary reception. How does Defoe's novel travel, and what kinds of responses does it generate? How does it influence later literary history and give rise to various interpretations and adaptations? How does it find its way into fields ranging from economics to education to international human rights law? Finally, how do Marxist, feminist, anticolonial, and Indigenous critics respond to Defoe's novel? Our intensive study of a single text and its afterlives will let us ask how humanistic study "works," step by critical step, even while we also ask about literature's place in the world. At the end of the semester, students will have had an intellectual experience that is at once broad and deep, and they will be prepared for the expectations that they will face in advanced coursework at UC Berkeley.
 

Note to students seeking to enroll in this class in order to declare the Comp Lit major:  Please enroll in the Hum 100 half which has the necessary section (while Comp Lit 100 does not).  The 5 digit course number for Hum 100 is 25646 and section is 25647.  Thanks!