While making no claim to proportional representation or thoroughness, this class tries to survey some of California’s literary and artistic output that directly addresses the intense hybridity of California’s history.  Looking at writing in various genres and media, this class will try to make the concept of California as unstable as those of race, ethnicity, and community. Without snubbing the particularity of each text, we will look at what these contesting and at times even revisionist gestures have in common across genres, communities, personas and identities.

A comparative course exploring the intersections between psychoanalysis, literature and environmental studies.

(Graduate Students interested in enrolling in this course should enroll in Comp Lit 265:1, CCN 17379)

Although we will be focusing primarily on James Joyce’s Ulysses, the archetypal modernist prose masterpiece, our real subject could be named more aptly, Modernism’s Epic Ambitions.  By reading Ulysses together as our proof-text, we will be able to explore a set of issues, both historical and theoretical, that are constituitive of high modernism, but whose specific family resemblance will only emerge as our discussion itself unfolds.

Greek materials are available in the original as well as in English translation.

In this course, we will read some of the most experimental and adventurous literature of the 20th century. Instead of understanding texts as mirrors of social reality, we will consider them as laboratories—spaces for testing out, working through, or mixing up new ideas, categories, and ways of seeing and feeling. We will pay special attention to 20th-century international avant-garde movements, including Futurism, Dadaism, and Surrealism, and we will explore the relation of the literary avant-garde to the avant-garde in painting, cinema, and music.

The course will present a survey of major works of medieval literature from some of the principal literary traditions of the Middle Ages, with an emphasis on epic and on Arthurian romance.  The epics that will be examined are the assonanced Oxford version of the Song of Roland (with an extract from the rhymed Châteauroux/Venice 7 version) and Beowulf, as well as the Old Irish saga of the Táin; the romances are those of Chrétien de Troyes, along with Gottfied von Strassburg’s Tristan, Ulrich von Zatzikhoven’s Lanzelet, and the Middle English S

Modern Greek is unique among languages in that it is the only modern language directly descended from Ancient Greek. In this course, the student studies reading, writing, pronunciation and use of contemporary spoken idiom, all within the historical and cultural context of the language. By the end of the course, the student should have a strong grammatical and linguistic foundation in Greek as it is spoken today. (No Prerequisite).

Comp. Lit. 100 is designed to present students with texts from various genres and historicial periods, to introduce them to the methods of comparative study. Students are expected to have some competence in at least one foreign language and to be acquainted with the rudiments of literary analysis.

[PLEASE NOTE: This “introduction or gateway to the advanced study at the core of the comparative literature major” is expressly designed for students in, entering, or intending to enter the Comparative Literature Department’s major and/or students majoring in other literature departments, or in closely related areas within the humanities. This seminar is UNSUITABLE FOR STUDENTS OUTSIDE THE COMPARATIVE LITERATURE MAJOR AND/OR CLOSELY RELATED LITERARY/HUMANITIES MAJORS, due to the seminar’s intense literary and literary-critical specificity; it is NOT de

This class examines the particularity of literature at the margins of the American culture, globalization and governance.  Through a reading of novels, poems, films, short stories and music, we will attempt to unravel a specific condition of disenchantment with the world emerging from the space of the periphery both within and external to the territorial United States.  The class will grapple with the scales of sorrow, sites of mourning, industrial catastrophes, damage, scarcity, loss and transnational dislocation characterizing the relation of psychic and social life to cultural production