HC 12: Sacred Form: Literature and Poetry in India from the Bronze Age to Pre-Modern Times
(4 units)

Director: Hartmut Scharfe, East Asian Languages and Cultures

This course examines the literature of Indian culture and civilization through the development of the early religious poetry (prior to 1,000 BC) to a broad range of literary styles and diverse religious and philosophical movements through the classical, medieval, and pre-modern period (the time before the arrival of the British).

Through translations, we shall examine some important hymns of the Veda and crucial sections of the Upanishads to trace the intellectual development, the heights of Vedic mythology, and the subsequent transformations of it as it develops into what is commonly called Hinduism. The material studied will include poetry of the Rigveda, a documentary film of Vedic ritual, and lyrics of the bhakti movement. The various forms of Hinduism are profiled with sections from the great epics, the popular sectarian writings called Puranas, and selections from tantric works that accent the polarity of the female powers. In a parallel development, the Buddhist and Jain reform movements attained prominence for a while. Buddhism has virtually disappeared from India but it had a major impact on the rest of Asia and maybe the world. Modern Hinduism has a very complex texture that incorporates many of the past ideas and tendencies and tries to define its positions versus other religions that have impacted India in the last centuries.

Application on General Education Requirements: four units of Social Science credit (Historical Analysis). Not applicable on GE for students entering in Fall 2002.

Harmut Scharfe, Professor of East Asian Languages and Cultures, was born and educated in Germany. After teaching and studying in India, he came to UCLA in 1965. He is the author of several books, three on the Indian grammarians and two on the Indian state. He has also published dozens of articles dealing with linguistic development in India, Ãurveda, and Indian philosophy. He is currently completing work on a book on education in ancient India.

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HC 15: Acting Myth
(4 units)

Directors: Sandra Caruso, Theater
Miriam Robbins Dexter, Women’s Studies

This is a course in both the study of mythology and in improvisational acting. The course introduces students to a range of mythology and texts from a variety of Indo-European and Near Eastern sources, using the best available translations of original texts. This multi-cultural approach includes presentation of background material which contextualizes the myth both culturally and historically and allows students to explore linguistic analysis and related archeological and historical data.

To understand the living aspect of myth, students will embody these stories by acting them out in directed scenes, to see and feel how these figures represent powerful human responses to the challenges of life we still face: sexual attraction, marriage, love, power, inheritance, and war. The acting exercises offer a chance for students to reinterpret and process the mythic material emotionally and sensorially and provide a rare opportunity for Letters and Science students to learn acting and directing techniques.

Sandra Caruso, Adjunct Professor of Theater, teaches acting in the School of Theater, Film, and Television at UCLA as well as a course for screen writers and actors. She has worked as a professional actor and has trained with distinguished acting teachers, including Sanford Meisner, Lee Strasberg, and Uta Hagen. She is presently a member of Milton Katselas’s master acting class. She has a Bachelor of Arts degree from New York University, a Master's degree from the UCLA Theater Department, and a Teaching Credential from California State University, Northridge. She has directed many plays in the Los Angeles area. She is author of The Actor's Book of Improvisation: Dramatic Situations for the Teacher and the Actor (Penguin, 1992) and The Young Actor’s Book of Improvisation: Dramatic Situations from Shakespeare to Spielberg, Vol. I and II (Heinemann, 1998).

Miriam Robbins Dexter holds a BA in Classics and a Ph.D. in Indo-European Studies, both from UCLA. Her doctoral dissertation on Indo-European female figures, along with courses she taught at UCLA and USC in ancient goddesses and heroines, evolved into her book, Whence Goddesses: A Source Book. She is the author of several journal and encyclopedia articles on ancient female figures. She has written the new introduction to O.G.S. Crawford’s seminal work, The Eye Goddess (Delphi Press, 1991) and co-edited an anthology of articles entitled Varia on the Indo-European Past: Papers in Memory of Marija Gimbutas (1997), as well as a monograph of Dr. Gimbutas’ own collected articles and an edition of her book, The Living Goddesses, published posthumously. Dr. Dexter has taught courses in Latin, Greek, and Sanskrit and currently teaches in Women’s Studies.

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HC 21W: The Rise and Fall of Modernism
(6 units)

Director: Richard Creese, Writing Programs

This course studies the early and middle 20th century's attempt to find, construct, or reconstruct "deep significance." Modernism was the revolt against industrialization, rationality, science, urbanization, industrialization, materialism--in a word, against the modern. The Modernists sought ways to counter their disillusionment with 20th century history with the hope that significance might be found somewhere beneath the grim, modern surface. To complicate the Modernists' program was a rejection of conventional notions of religion. If they were not materialists, neither were they usually spiritualists. It is this search for significance somewhere between materialism and religion which defines Modernism.

First, we shall establish the modern world view, which Modernists were reacting against. We shall then examine the Modernism of D. H. Lawrence, W. B. Yeats, and Virginia Woolf and artists and architects discussed by Robert Hughes in The Shock of the New.

The course will conclude with a look at Postmodernist writers such as Karen Tei Yamashita, and Nabokov, to see how they critique, attack, and parody the Modernist project in their novels. We shall also look at Modernist and Post-Modernist art and plays by Pinter and Frank Chin.

Application on General Education Requirements: six units of Humanities credit (Literature). For students entering in Fall 2002, application on GE is pending (still in committee).

Satisfactory completion of this course with a grade of "C" or better will satisfy the Writing II requirement.

Richard Creese received his BS and MA degrees from the University of Colorado and a Ph.D. in English Literature from UCLA. His major field is Twentieth Century British Literature, more specifically the Novel. He has published articles on Alain Robbe-Grillet, Graham Greene, Ford Madox Ford, and Jane Austen, as well as poetry and fiction. He is the co-author of Currents of Power, a college writing text in publication.

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HC 37A: Ethnicity, Gender, and Social Class in the United States and Other Societies
(4 units)

Director: William Mason, Sociology

In this course, students learn about the population of the U.S. and many of the contemporary challenges facing the nation by juxtaposing readings form the social science literature on social class, social mobility, ethnicity, and the absorption of immigrants with analysis of data dealing with these issues. Moreover, by contrasting the U.S. with other nations, we shall discover how social scientists go about determining what is unique to particular times and places (e.g. the U.S. at the end of the twentieth century) and what are instances of more general phenomena. Instructional software provides hands-on access to census and sample survey data with a minimum of technical knowledge. Through these data bases and our readings, we shall examine inequality based on class, race, and ethnicity, and trends in patterns of inequality; changes in the level and pattern of immigration over time; and the relation between social class and attitudes regarding major social issues such as immigration and poverty. Course activities will include in-class discussions of students’ tabulations and interpretations prepared from one of several data sets and course readings.

The course is run as a seminar and there are no prerequisites. Preparation for each class will involve a mix of reading and computer work. Effective participation depends upon our willingness to subject our own--and each other's--beliefs to the possibility of empirical refutation.

Application on General Education Requirements: four units of Social Science credit (Social Analysis). Not applicable on General Education for students entering in the Fall of 2002.

William Mason, Professor of Sociology and Social Statistics, is a sociologist, demographer, and statistician. His past research has included studies of voting behavior, political alienation, cohort analysis, human fertility, and inbreeding in human populations. His current research is on infant mortality in China and the statistics of multilevel analysis. He received his B.A. from Reed College and his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago; he has been a fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences and of the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation; and he taught for nearly twenty years at the University of Michigan before coming to UCLA in 1990.

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HC 42: Negotiating Conflict in Diverse Cultures
(5 units)

Director: Don Hartsock, Ombudsman Emeritus

The Seminar will explore the art and science of negotiations in addressing campus and community conflicts, focusing on the positions and interests of the disputants, understanding the political and cultural context of the dispute, and developing tactics and skills to address and learn from the conflict effectively, realistically and cooperatively and to assist the disputants to attempt a problem solving accommodation.

Our campus community mirrors our society. While we all negotiate every day, we all see and experience the consequences of people being consumed by escalating conflict in which issues and concerns are ignored or forgotten in the rush to win rather than solve the issue between them. To get behind the positions to the interests embedded in the dispute we need to hear and understand the other party and to be heard and understood. This involves actively listening and withholding judgments based on assumptions and stereotypes. To achieve these goals the seminar will explore, through readings, discussions, interviews and research analysis, the dynamics of conflict and the art and science of transforming destructive conflict into creative problem solving through negotiation and mediation.

My expectations are that the students will grow in knowledge and skill beyond what is presented and practiced in the seminar. The university is a learning community and we learn from and with each other as colleagues, not as students in competition. There is a minimum expectation of four hours in preparation for each hour we meet as a seminar. This will involve reading, reflecting, conversing and questioning.

Application on General Education Requirements: four units of Social Science credit (Social Analysis). Not applicable on General Education for students entering in the Fall of 2002.

Don Hartsock has degrees in English and History with Spanish and Greek minors and holds a Bachelor of Divinity from McCormick Theological Seminary. He served as UCLA’s Ombudsman from 1969 – 1991, practicing mediation and training mediators across campus. He has also served as UCLA’s University Pastor. He continues to be a significant presence on campus and teaches courses in cross-cultural mediation.

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HC 69: Artificial Life and Evolutionary Design
(5 units)

Director: Nicholas Gessler, Geography

This is a course about simulation. Artificial intelligence, artificial life, virtual environments, and evolutionary computation—all four essential elements of simulation—shape both the infrastructure of our culture and its ideology. In so doing, they take on a double life. They live one existence as forces motivating change quite independent of our consciousness. They live another as interpretations of these processes in the minds of our creative scientists and artists as well as in the popular media. Films such as War Games, the Matrix, the Thirteenth Floor, and Dark City both fuel our fantasies and alert us to the actualities of our future. We will address the issues that they raise through first-hand engagement with the literature on simulations and the simulations themselves.

We shall learn that the essential elements from which artificial worlds are built consist of objects (things) and processes (relationships) in a spatial and temporal representation of their world. Objects and processes are assembled into agents: entities that sense and think and act. Agents interact with other agents in the world around them and, as these worlds unfold, they write their own narrative histories, quite often with unexpected results. These simulated artificial worlds can do what our minds alone, our written and our spoken languages, and our mathematics cannot do. We shall learn that their applications range from art and entertainment to simulated theaters of war.

Please note that no special mathematical or computer skills are required beyond a nodding acquaintance with the Windows operating system. You will be taught a manageable special subset of C++.

Application on General Education Requirements: Pre-fall 2002: five units of Social Science (Social Analysis) or five units of Life Science credit.

Nicholas Gessler is writing a book for the MIT Press entitled Artificial Culture - Experiments in Synthetic Anthropology while completing his Ph.D. at UCLA. His research extends the "new sciences" of complexity along the trajectory leading from Distributed Artificial Intelligence, through Artificial Life and Artificial Societies to culture, evaluating the advantages of dynamic computational simulations over discursive and mathematical descriptions and explanations of the evolutionary processes of our cultural adaptation to intellectual, social and physical environments. He is founding Co-Director of the UCLA Centers for Computational Social Science (CCSS) and Social Interfaces & Networks / Advanced Programmable Simulations & Environments (SINAPSE). He is currently developing a suite of three hands-on programming courses in the methods, practice, theory and epistemology of social simulation for the Departments of Geography and Design | Media Arts.

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HC 73: Elementary Particles and the Universe
(4 units)

Director: David B. Cline, Astronomy and Physics

The interplay of cosmology and elementary particle physics is one of the most interesting scientific phenomena and is also extremely beautiful. The early universe consisted of elementary particles such as quarks, electrons, neutrinos, and intermediate vector bosons. These particles, the building blocks of nature, left an imprint on the universe as we know it today.

The course will concentrate on the present aspects of the universe that provide information about the big bang and the early evolution of the universe. It will show how the large-scale properties of the universe were determined by its early evolution and how elementary particles controlled that evolution. Recent observations of the relics of the Big Bang by the COBE satellite and by other techniques will be described, as will the existence of dark matter in the universe and the efforts to detect this matter in laboratories around the world. Einstein’s vacuum energy seems to have been detected, implying that the universe may expand forever. The search for the Dark Matter Elementary Particles that make up at least 90% of the matter of the universe is an exciting project now. Some of this Dark Matter could be in the form of the mass of the relic neutrinos. Finally in 1998, a new component of “dark energy” was discovered. This energy seems to be part of the vacuum of the universe and is perhaps the greatest mystery of all. Where did it come from and why? All we know is that the combined energy and mass seems to give rise to geometry of the universe that is Euclidean or “Flat.” We shall discuss the paradoxes of black holes and the anthropic principle that possibly connects the universe and life. We shall also discuss the role of symmetry and asymmetry in the laws of nature and examine how this relates to the universe.

The course will serve as an introduction to elementary particles as they are studied in various laboratories around the world, such as the laboratory at Fermilab or the CERN laboratory in Geneva, Switzerland, and to some aspects of astronomy. Students will be introduced to the detectors that are used to observe these particles and to examine real particle events. Course material is presented in a fairly non-mathematical way and no special prior mathematical knowledge is required.

Application on General Education Requirements: four units of Physical Science credit. Not applicable on GE for students entering in Fall 2002.

David B. Cline received his Ph.D. in experimental elementary particle physics from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1965. He became Professor of Physics in 1968 and, in 1973, participated in the discovery of Weak Neutral Currents at Fermilab. In 1974, he was one of the first observers of Charm particles. He initiated, along with C. Rubbia, the search for the Intermediate Vector Boson; and he helped start the current search for proton decay. He is Associate Editor of the Nuclear Physics B Journal. Dr. Cline joined the faculty at UCLA in 1986, holding a professorship in the Astronomy and Physics Departments. His programs of research include B Physics studies, ICARUS, Accelerator R&D, Astroparticle Physics, development of a Massive Supernova Observatory, and the construction of a Phi Factory at UCLA. He is Director of the UCLA Center for Advanced Accelerators.

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HC 84: Conflicts Between Languages
(5 units)

Director: Robert Kirsner, Germanic Languages

This course [i] introduces students to the potentially conflict-ridden language situation in three foreign countries and then [ii] discusses various aspects of minority languages in the United States.

The course begins by exposing the student to basic concepts of language, dialect, pidgins, Creoles, and to the social and political problems which can arise when a country contains populations speaking different languages.

We then present three case studies, the first two of which concern countries not well known in the U.S. – South Africa and Belgium – which each have a rich history of language conflict. The last case study concerns Israel and examines the re-development of Modern Hebrew from a literary and liturgical language to a spoken language.

Attention will then turn to the language situation in the United States, including the role of earlier waves of immigrants, speaking Italian and Yiddish as well as the role of Spanish, Korean, and Tagalog in the development of California and the West; and the role of Black English as language or social dialect.

Among the goals of the course are [i] increasing the students’ awareness of language, languages and language issues, [ii] increasing the students’ knowledge of how languages differ, and [iii] appreciating the politics involved in each language conflict, including those in the United States.

Robert Kirsner says that he wears two hats. He is both a general linguist and a neerlandicus (= Netherlandicist, or scholar of Dutch, including in his case its sister language, Afrikaans). He believes that those who have tasted the richness of Dutch literature (from Belgium and the Caribbean as well as the Netherlands) or the richness of Afrikaans literature (by both Afrikaners and "Cape Coloureds") will appreciate the value of studying modern languages related to German as well as German itself. His courses Dutch 120 and 131 provide a streamlined introduction to reading knowledge of Dutch and to Modern Dutch literature. It is not for nothing that both Dutch literature and Afrikaans literature have been fertile testing grounds for the most sophisticated of recent literary theories. The conflicts among languages in South Africa have led to his interest in similar linguistic conflicts around the globe.

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HC 103: Scientific Knowledge, Industrial Growth, and Social Policy
(5 units)

Director: Lynne Zucker, Sociology and Policy Studies

How is scientific knowledge generated and shared? What is the role of institutions such as universities, the law, and private corporations in the exploitation of scientific knowledge? How do national and regional policies affect the generation and sharing of knowledge? What are the benefits and risks of the development and application of new knowledge and how do we assess them?

This course uses the principles of economics, sociology, and policy studies to examine the effects of new scientific knowledge and technological innovations upon the economy and the society. Our topics will range from developments in biotechnology and semiconductors to computer software and communications, including the web. Using nanotechnology, we shall explore the problems of prediction of both benefits and risks to the economy and the society when such new technologies are in the process of development.

Lynne Zucker is Professor of Sociology and Policy Studies, and Director of the Center for International Science, Technology, and Cultural Policy at the School of Public Policy & Social Research at UCLA. She is also Research Associate, National Bureau of Economic Research and Fellow, California Council on Science and Technology. Zucker's current research is on basic science and industry in nano-systems, biotechnology, and the web, joint with Michael Darby, Cordner Professor in the Anderson School, UCLA. One central research and policy question is the optimal amount of knowledge capture-how much knowledge does a scientist or a company need to be able to keep private in order to provide sufficient incentives to generate new knowledge. Her teaching reflects these interests: active learning through analysis and small-scale research.

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