2020 Literature Summer Courses

LIT 80B

Session 2

Every age has the monsters it needs. From medieval marvels to GMO chimeras, monsters serve as figures of a culture's deepest fears, anxieties, and hidden desires. This course takes a multidisciplinary, transhistorical approach to the problems and promises of monsters, and introduces monster theory. (General Education Codes: TA)

Proposed Instructor - Maggie Edge

LIT 81C

Session 1

Examines novels by Toni Morrison, including The Bluest Eye, Song of Solomon, Sula, and Jazz, as sites of discontent and transformation, while also considering literary techniques such as form, voice, metaphor, and narrative structure. Includes discussion of Morrison’s ideas about the intersection of race and sexuality, blackness as a shifting signifier, the role of the artist in society, and uses of literature for re-imagining the relationships between history, culture, and individuality. (General Education Codes: ER)

Proposed Instructor - Connor Bassett

LIT 102

Session 1

Promotes the understanding of translation and its role in redefining meanings across epochs and cultures, in establishing common norms, and in advancing mutual intelligibility; but also providing encounters with absolute alterity. Actual translations are used as case studies. (General Education Code(s): TA.)

Prerequisite(s): one year of college-level, non-English language study or the equivalent reading ability in a non-English language.

All students - if you satisfied the language prerequisite at another college or via the UCSC Literature Department proficiency exam, email litdept@ucsc.edu to request a permission code. To schedule a language proficiency exam, call the Literature Department at 831-459-4778.

Proposed Instructor - Camilo Gomez-Rivas

LIT 111D

Session 2

Study of representative works by William Shakespeare. Course topic changes; please see the Class Search for the current topic. Critical approach designations: Canons, Media. Distribution requirements: Poetry, Pre-1750.

In summer 2020, we will read Twelfth Night (a comedy), Antony and Cleopatra (a tragedy), and The Tempest (a romance). We will also attend performances of Twelfth Night and The Tempest at Shakespeare Santa Cruz. Tickets will be provided by a grant from Summer Sessions and Shakespeare Workshop, a research center of The Humanities Institute. (General Education Code(s): TA.) 

Proposed Instructor - Sean Keilen

LIT 112C

Special Session: July 26 - August 1

Study of representative work by Charles Dickens. Critical approach designations: Canons, Histories. Visit https://dickens.ucsc.edu/universe/index.html (General Education Code(s): TA.)

Proposed Instructors - John O. Jordan

LIT 114E

Session 1

One Way Ticket to Hell… and Back: Exploring Dante’s Inferno

Focuses on the Inferno, the first cantica of Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy. Examines different uses of metamorphosis in Dante’s representation of Hell, including the relationship between the ancient idea of human metamorphosis and Dante’s representation of the Christian contrappasso (retribution), and the medieval concept of imago Dei (in God’s likeness). Critical approach designations: Canons, Power and Subjectivities. Distribution requirements: Poetry, Pre-1750. (General Education Code(s): TA)

Proposed Instructor - Filippo Gianferrari

LIT 135H

Session 2

Course explores expressions of African futurism in a range of creative media--novels, short stories, and films--and analyzes them in conversation with theoretical texts. Recognizes African cultural producers and theorists as central to conversations about anti-colonialism, revolution, futurity, and the nonhuman and beyond human. Critical approach designations: Geographies, Power and Subjectivities. Distribution requirement: Global. (General Education Code(s):ER)

Proposed Instructor - Kelsey McFaul

LIT 155L

Session 1

Examines development and central themes of vampire film from the silent era to the present. Critical approach designations: Genres, Media. (General Education Code(s): IM.)

Proposed Instructor - H. Marshall Leicester, Jr.

LIT 160M

Session 1

Course examines theory and practice of (gender)queer- and trans-ness in the present historical moment. Drawing primarily on critical theory from trans and queer studies, alongside literary texts and popular culture, the course introduces intellectual and affective resources for navigating questions about gender non-normativity. Critical approach designations: Histories, Power and Subjectivities. (General Education Code(s): TA)

Proposed Instructor - Joshua Jones

LIT 160N

Session 2

John Brown was a 19th-century advocate of the use of armed insurrection to overthrow the institution of U.S. slavery. Why has a man dismissed as a fanatic been taken up as the subject of novels, biographies, popular songs, films, and even internet memes for the past 160 years? Course explores this question through readings in literature, history, and theory. Critical approach designations: Histories, Power and Subjectivities. (General Education Code(s): ER)

Proposed Instructor - Alexander Davis

LIT 179C

Special Session - June 22 - July 3

This course asks students to experiment and play in some radical ways to create and encounter poetry through a distinct set of performance practices: improvisation and spoken word, movement, sound, and visual practices as a way to encounter, create, and animate their own writing. (General Education Code(s): PR-C)

Proposed Instructor - Ronaldo V. Wilson