Human Values in Literature
Prerequisites: UCLR 100, UCLR 100C, UCLR 100E, UCLR 100M, or equivalent; please check requirements for declared majors/minors for exceptions.
This variable topics course focuses on a perennial psychological or philosophical problem facing the individual as exemplified in literary works, e.g., the passage from innocence to experience, the problem of death, and the idea of liberty.
Outcomes: Students will be able to demonstrate understanding of the ability of literature to express the deepest and most abiding concerns of human beings, and how literary works come to be.
Prerequisites: UCLR 100, UCLR 100C, UCLR 100E, UCLR 100M, or equivalent; please check requirements for declared majors/minors for exceptions.
This variable topics course focuses on a perennial psychological or philosophical problem facing the individual as exemplified in literary works, e.g., the passage from innocence to experience, the problem of death, and the idea of liberty.
Outcomes: Students will be able to demonstrate understanding of the ability of literature to express the deepest and most abiding concerns of human beings, and how literary works come to be.
Pre-requisites: UCWR 110, C- or higher
Writing Intensive and Multicultural
Tier 2 Literary Knowledge
This is a multicultural class.
This is a writing intensive class. A grade of C- or better in UCWR 110 is required to enroll.
Literature and Hustle Culture
What¿s your relationship to hustle culture? Is it a necessary evil in our profit-driven capitalistic society? Is it an enviable aesthetic on the socials? Or is it a system that we might re-examine and critically interrogate? If you are burnt out, exhausted, or otherwise fed up with the relentless grind of the workaday world, this course may be for you. We¿ve come to value labor and production over rest and self-care, even in (especially in) moments of social, political, and global crisis. But what if care and rest were forms of capital? Or even used as a means of resistance? What if we turn to the power of rest not only as a respite from hustle culture but as a lens through which to access stories that imagine other ways of being? This course will revolve around care and rest as a means of liberation and ¿living otherwise,¿ both historically and today. We will interrogate contemporary ¿grind culture¿ and examine how labor, self-care, communes, and social movements operated from the nineteenth century to today and within a global context. In doing so, we will identify and question the values we ascribe to work, play, and rest. Literature will explore themes of labor, healing, trauma, capitalism, liberation, justice, resistance, and mindfulness. We will read novels, poetry, short stories, and essays by authors such as Jenny Odell, Sayaka Murata, Herman Melville, Ross Gay, Henry David Thoreau, Ling Ma, Louisa May Alcott, and Octavia Butler.
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