With his radical intervention, Martin Luther changed the understanding of the Bible, the way Christians read the Bible, and the way people understand the church and salvation. In this course, we will discuss some of the key writings of Luther, their historic significance, and their impact in early modern times and on the formation of modern cultures since the 16th century.

“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.

Whereas the influence of Italian-Neorealism on world cinema is undeniable, the literary origins of Neo-Realism are less well-known. The notion of Neo-Realism was in fact first used in Italy to describe trends world literature, and the development of a specifically Italian Ne0-Realist style emerged from a close collaboration between the writers and filmmakers of this period.  Just as Italian Neo-Realist cinema became a cultural phenomenon in China in the 1950s, the Italian literature that Chinese readers were consuming was also dominated by Neo-Realist writers.

How does poetry address the problem of surviving unprecedented loss in the modern period while also dealing with the unacknowledged losses suffered by lives on the sexual margins, for whom the challenge of survival takes shape under the punitive social forces of law and medicine? In this seminar we will take up the case of C.P. Cavafy, an Alexandrian writing in Modern Greek during the first third of the twentieth century, and investigate how Cavafy’s innovative poetic form grapples with historical loss and gay male sexuality from the periphery of empire.

In this course, we will examine found documents as a literary device, i.e., stories that are told through an accumulation of texts, often “found” and assembled by the author or narrator.  Our readings will include examples of epistolary literature as well as experimental tales told through pieces of poetry, critical reviews, footnotes, and gallery labels.  We will also consider horror writers’ particular fondness for found documents, and cases when the mysterious sources of certain materials — and the gaps between texts — represent encounters with the unknown.  Many of our texts will feel r

What is realism? How have ideas of realism changed over time and across media, from photography and documentary—where the idea of the “document” takes multiple forms—to avant-garde/modernist poetry, novels and experimental films? This course explores the fraught nexus of questions of realism and media, with special attention to how these inflect problems of  gender and sexuality, race and ethnicity.

[Note: This seminar emphasizes the importance of 19th and, especially, 20th-century poetry and poetics in the development of Frankfurt School aesthetics, criticism, and theory; it likewise considers more recent dialogues between later 20th and  21st-century poetry/poetics and Frankfurt-oriented criticism.  The seminar is, in addition, co-listed as a Critical Theory 205 core-course offering for students in the Program in Critical Theory's "Designated Emphasis" course of study.  Whether enrolled through Comparative Literature, or through the Critical Theory Program, students are w