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2025 Literature Summer Courses

    Introduction to the Fairy Tale (5 credits)

  • LIT 61K [Online]

    Session 1

    See the Registrar Course Catalog for Details

    GE Code: TA

    Proposed Instructor: Kim Lau

    • Topics in Latin American Culture: Narratives of Environmental Crisis (5 credits)

  • LIT 80P [Online]*

    Session 2

    Through films, literary texts, historical, sociological, and anthropological writings, explores topics pertaining to Latin American culture and society. Course topic changes; please see the Schedule of Classes for current topic. This course explores the environmental challenges facing Latin America, focusing on how natural resources, climate change, and Indigenous ecological knowledge shape cultural and social dynamics. Through literature and film, students will examine the impact of deforestation, water crises, extractive industries, and environmental activism in countries including Mexico, Bolivia, Ecuador, Colombia, and Argentina. We will delve into how these environmental issues intersect with identity, resistance, and cultural practices, investigating questions of land rights, climate resistance, and community-driven ecological protection across diverse landscapes.

    GE Code: CC

    Proposed Instructor: Brian Edwin Rivera Hernandez

    *Pending CCI Approval

    • The Afterlife (2 credits)

  • LIT 87-01 [In Person]

    Session 2

    See the Registrar Course Catalog for Details (more topic details TBA)

    GE Code: N/A

    Proposed Instructor: Filippo Gianferrari

    • Translation Theory (5 credits)

  • LIT 102 [In Person]

    Session 2

    See the Registrar Course Catalog for Details

    GE Code: TA

    Proposed Instructor: Filippo Gianferrari

    • William Shakespeare (5 credits)

  • LIT 111D-01 [In Person]

    Session 2

    See the Registrar Course Catalog for Details

    GE Code: TA

    Proposed Instructor: Sean Keilen

    • William Shakespeare (5 credits)

  • LIT 111D-02 [Online]*

    Session 2

    See the Registrar Course Catalog for Details

    GE Code: TA

    Proposed Instructor: Sean Keilen

    *Pending CCI Approval

    • Charles Dickens (5 credits)

  • LIT 112C [In Person]

    Special Session: July 20-26, all day.

    From the Instructor: The class is taught as part of the Dickens Universe (2025 - The Old Curiosity Shop) https://dickens.ucsc.edu/universe/information/undergrad-info.html. (this is the 2024 info) You will be taking part in a unique course that is just one facet of the annual Dickens Universe, which is the premier gathering for Dickens scholars from around the world. In addition to faculty and graduate students from UC campuses and 35 other universities, participants include members of the general public and a few high school students. The schedule for the week is very intense, and you're expected to attend the following lectures and activities.

    GE Code: TA

    Proposed Instructor: John Jordan

    • Topics in Modern Poetry: Modern and Contemporary Latine Poetry: Legacies of Movimiento Poetics (5 credits)

  • LIT 120F [Online]

    Session 1

    While discussing poetry in Keywords for Latina/o Studies, Puerto Rican poet and critic Urayoán Noel noted a tension between, on the one hand, the “embodied histories” and “movimiento legacies” of Latine poetry and, on the other, the “institutionalizing imperative” behind the rise of Latina/o Studies in the 1980s and 1990s. This course surveys the written, oral/aural, and visual works of Latine poets from the 1950s to present day, tracing the connections and disconnections between movimiento poetics—which begins with the Chicano and Puerto Rican literary movements of the 1960s—and contemporary Latine poetry. This course proposes that what remains “consistent” in Latine poetry and poetics is the process and practice of movement itself—a propulsion with or against—that frequently lands us between or even outside of manufactured borders between languages, nations, cultures, genders, institutions, and media. (Distribution requirement: Poetry)

    GE Code: N/A

    Proposed Instructor: Joe Alicea

    • The Contemporary Short Story (5 credits)

  • LIT 124C [In Person]*

    Session 2

    This class introduces students to a wide range of contemporary short fiction written in English and in translation. By reading short stories of the last twenty-five years alongside literary criticism about the genre, we will examine how contemporary short fiction both draws on and upends conventions, from its attention to moments of truth to narrative structures. Our main question will be, What does the short story look like today? We will also consider how the short story form has been historically devalued within the global literary arena, particularly in relation to the novel, and how its marginalized status has made the genre a compelling form for documenting stigmatized or sidelined subject matters as well as bringing out new voices. Our readings will focus in particular on exciting horizons within the short story form, including short shorts, animal fables, fairy-tales, and speculative fiction.

    GE Code: TA

    Proposed Instructor: Matt Polzin

    *Pending CCI Approval

    • Time Travel Narratives (5 credits)

  • LIT 126T [Online]*

    Session 2

    This course will study time travel narratives in literature and film as a way to introduce speculative and science fiction (SF). This is an intensive synchronous online summer course. Each week we will analyze and interpret one novel, supplemented with short stories and/or films. Students will need to attend mandatory online discussion sections. Authors may include Octavia Butler, Ted Chiang, Samuel Delany, Robert Heinlein, Joanna Russ, Gerald Vizenor, and Charles Yu. Films may include Branco sai perto fica (Brazil, 2014) and Primer (USA, 2004).

    GE Code: MF

    Proposed Instructor: Zac Zimmer

    *Pending CCI Approval

    • Contemporary Asian Literature: Contemporary East Asian Surrealist Fiction (5 credits)

  • LIT 133K [In Person]*

    Session 2

    Contemporary Asian Literature: Contemporary East Asian Surrealist Novels Surrealism, originating as a modernist movement in Europe, is now a global force in all forms of art in the contemporary world. In this class we will explore how surrealism in East Asian novels takes on a unique sociocultural and philosophical dimension as it intersects in themes of tradition, identity, politics, trauma, and modernity. We will engage with novels written by Japanese, Korean, and Taiwanese writers ranging from the late 20th century to present day and learn how authors use techniques such as dream sequences, distortion of realities, and magic to question the particular societal norms and perceptions of contemporary East Asia while exploring psychological and existential concerns. We will also consider how surrealism may operate differently in East Asian novels compared to its Western counterparts. (Distribution requirement: Global)

    GE Code: CC

    Proposed Instructor: Jihoon Park

    *Pending CCI Approval

    • English Renaissance Literature: Unruly Minds - Mental Illness in English Renaissance Literature (5 credits)

  • LIT 144G [Online]

    Session 1

    Mental Illness in Renaissance Literature examines how Renaissance writers portrayed mental illness and cognitive difference, revealing an intricate web of social, political, and theological attitudes toward the “unruly” mind. Drawing on a disability studies framework, this course explores how portrayals of madness, melancholy, and cognitive nonconformity both limit and expand literary expression. We will examine how mental illness might function as a source of insight or even empowerment, while simultaneously acting as a tool of marginalization. Through close analysis, students will consider how mental illness either enables or disables literary voices in these texts, paying particular attention to how early modern attitudes influenced ideas of agency, autonomy, and personhood. (Distribution requirement: Pre-1750)

    GE Code: TA

    Proposed Instructor: Monica Multer

    *Pending CCI Approval

    • Narratives of Resistance: Anti-Zionist Jewish Literature (5 credits)

  • LIT 160H [In Person]

    Session 1

    This course is a survey in Jewish literature from around the world with one common theme: resistance to Zionism and a vision of Jewishness beyond the Israeli nation state. We will look at the history of anti-Zionism within the Jewish diaspora, beginning with texts from the mid-19th century and ending with our contemporary moment. (Distribution requirement: Global)

    GE Code: ER

    Proposed Instructor: Rebecca Gross

    • Summer 2025 Methods & Materials Topic- Kicking up Dust: Interventions in Archives (5 credits)

  • LIT 179C [In Person]

    Session 1

    This course explores physical archives—those rooms filled with boxes and paper files—as fraught and contested sites of memory, violence, power, and creative possibility. As a class, we’ll think through the history and future of archives, considering both what they were built to contain, as well as what they erase. We’ll explore how contemporary writers, artists, filmmakers, and historians are working in and through archival absences, finding innovative and collective ways to challenge their preexisting limits. This course will embrace the interdisciplinary overlap of Literature and Archival Studies; in other words, we will get dusty rolling up our sleeves for hands-on archival research, learning to draw upon primary source materials while becoming versed in practical archival processing techniques and making our own creative interventions as we go. We will also think broadly about how forces “beyond” the archives—climate change, geopolitical conflicts, and advancements in technology—are directly affecting the present and future of these sites.

    GE Code: PR-C

    Proposed Instructor: Annika Berry