Literature
Literature
Part of the Media, Culture & Communication cluster.
Literature invites you to explore how stories shape our understanding of the world and ourselves. Whether you’re reading ancient myths or graphic novels, analyzing poetry or film, you’ll learn to ask big questions about identity, power, and meaning. You will study texts from across time and cultures, and discover how literature reflects and challenges the values of the societies that produce it. Along the way, you’ll develop the tools to read closely, think critically, and write with clarity and insight.
Opening up Literature courses
Do you want to explore the world of Literature? Take any of the 100 and 200-levels without completing a gateway course. Access the 300-level courses by completing Researching Humanities first.
Courses in Literature
Courses in Literature
Gateway
Researching Humanities
Researching Humanities
Explores the role of the humanities in fostering critical thinking, empathy and cultural awareness. Introduces methodologies and research skills across Film and Media, Communication, Literature, and Heritage, Art and Museums, helping students make sense of the world through stories, images and technology. Prepares students for upper-level courses and emphasizes asking better questions rather than memorizing facts.
100-level
Great Literary Works
Great Literary Works
This course is a chronological overview of literature ranging from the earliest monuments (the epic of Gilgamesh) to post-modernity (Marquez). Within this framework we read literary and critical texts revealing what it means to be human, mortal, female, male, or child, or what it means to be responsible, free, a member of family or other community, to be civilized or barbarian. What makes literature different from anecdote or a propaganda text? We learn to approach literature’s ambiguities and ironies and trace circulation of literary topes and themes across ages.
100-level
Introduction to Literary Studies
Introduction to Literary Studies
What is literature, why do we read it, and how do we interpret it? The course familiarizes students with formal properties of a literary work, makes them aware of a constructed character of literary text, and opens discussion of literary value. It is based on a classic division into fiction, poetry and drama supplemented by contemporary non-fiction and rudiments of film narration. In this course we read both well-familiar and off-center literary forms and genres such as graphic narrative, children’s texts, Harlequin romance or microfiction.
200-level
World Myth & Literature
World Myth & Literature
Myths form the foundations of literature all over the world. From the oldest surviving epic, Gilgamesh, to the Ramayana; from the Greek Theogony to the Norse Edda, myths explain why the world is as it is, and who its flawed heroines and likeable villains are. This course investigates the tricks and treats of mythical storytelling in classic literary texts from all over the world, and connects them to the stories of global cultures nowadays.
200-level
Life and Travel Writing
Life and Travel Writing
How do we write about our sense of self? What tropes and models do we apply to build and represent our identity? And what techniques do we apply to empty our self for therapeutic or ideological reasons? How does our bodily experience prompt us a sense of being male, female or other? What brings memory and imagination together when it comes to representing human experience? In this course we read various texts which reveal the culturally diverse and fluid concepts of the self and which represent experience, memory, identity, agency or autobiographical truth in literary nonfiction.
300-level
Film & Text
Film & Text
Most literary texts and films tell stories. In this course we study complex links between literary and film narratives, departing from a formal analysis of both media. Our further discussions of film adaptation revolve around intertextuality, interpretive strategies, viewer participation and immersion, and other complex dynamics between literary source, screenplay and film. Students complete this course having done research into a topic of their choice such as children’s literature on screen, city in text and film, literary and film Gothic, women’s text and film, Bollywood recycling of Western plots, and many other…
300-level
Perspectives on Literary Meaning
Perspectives on Literary Meaning
What difference does it make to participate in culture and read literature as a humanist, feminist, Marxist, or representative of a cultural minority? Hoes does psychoanalysis help us make sense of inner conflicts represented in literature? Students complete this course with a research project into a topic of their choice manifesting their ability to apply selected perspectives by e.g., ‘queering Peter Pan’, tracing intersectional feminism in Annie Ernaux’ autobiographical oeuvre, or classism in Édouard Louis’ autofiction…
Also consider these options:
Also consider these options:
Cluster
Media, Culture & Communication
Media, Culture & Communication
The other fields within the Media, Culture & Communication cluster.
Media, Culture & Communication
Field of Study
Explore Biomedical Science!
Explore Biomedical Science!
To discover the human stories behind medical advances and healthcare.
Biomedical Science
Field of Study
Explore Sustainability!
Explore Sustainability!
To uncover how stories shape our understanding of the environment and inspire change.
Sustainability
The UCR Program Builder is designed to help you easily plan your academic program. Step by step, the tool guides you through selecting courses, building a balanced curriculum, and meeting UCR’s academic requirements.
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The UCR Program Builder is designed to help you easily plan your academic program. Step by step, the tool guides you through selecting courses, building a balanced curriculum, and meeting UCR’s academic requirements.