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: Not applicable on General Education for students entering in the Fall of 2002.

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 23: Political Dissidence Today and in Ancient Greece: The Trial and Death of Socrates in Its Classical and Legal Context
(5 units)

Director: Frances Olsen, Law

This course makes the trial and death of Socrates relevant to today by (1) showing its significance to the public response to and legal treatment of dissent and civil disobedience in contemporary America and (2) relating the trial and death to a variety of contemporary theories and strategies of dissent. The course also offers a compelling introduction to the Greek legal system and the values that animated that system. It introduces new ways to think about the roles of law, and places law into a social context.

Finally, the course teaches critical analysis through a careful examination of multiple conflicting approaches scholars have taken to resolving what most commentators consider to be a sharp contrast between the Socrates presented in The Apology and the Socrates presented in The Crito.

Application on General Education Requirements: New L&S GE (Fall 2002) - Arts & Humanities - Philosophical Analysis OR Society & Culture - Historical Analysis

Frances Olsen, Professor of Law at UCLA, received her J.D. from the University of Colorado Law School and her S.J.D. from Harvard Law School. A renowned scholar, she has held visiting professorships in universities around the globe, including universities in Israel, Ethiopia, France, Japan, Germany, Italy, and England. She has also held visiting professorships at Harvard, Cornell, and Ann Arbor-Michigan. She is the author of many articles and books and a specialist in feminist legal theory. When she practiced law, she represented Native Americans at Wounded Knee.

Note: This course has an enrollment restriction.

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HC 51: Music and Society
(5 units)

Director: Rogers Brubaker, Sociology

This course will involve both social analysis -- addressing the ways in which the creation, performance, and consumption of music are social activities -- and musical analysis. The musical analysis will focus primarily on Western art music (i.e. “classical” music) of the late eighteenth through the early twentieth century; the social analysis will deal more broadly with different forms of music, not simply with classical music.

Social issues we will consider include the social functions of music; the changing economic and technological foundations for the production, performance, distribution, and consumption of music; the social processes through which genre differences are established or eroded; the multiple uses of music in everyday life; and the ways in which music expresses social identities.

The class will also emphasize close listening and the development of basic skills in reading musical scores and in musical analysis. About half of class time will be devoted to musical analysis; there will also be listening assignments (requiring intensive listening along with the score) each week.

Students should be able to read music. A 10-15 page research paper will be required.

Application on General Education Requirements: five units of Humanities credit (Visual and Performing Arts Analysis and Practice) OR Society and Culture (Historical Analysis) OR Society and Culture (Social Analysis).

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

Rogers Brubaker is Professor of Sociology at UCLA. He received his B.A. from Harvard College and his Ph.D. from Columbia University. He has written widely on social theory, immigration, citizenship, nationalism, and ethnicity. His books include Citizenship and Nationhood in France and Germany, Nationalism Reframed, Ethnicity without Groups, and Nationalist Politics and Everyday Ethnicity in a Transylvanian Town. He has a strong amateur interest in music.

Note: This course has an enrollment restriction.

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HC 54: Improvisation and Acting Techniques
(5 units)

Director: Sandra Caruso, Theater

Application on General Education Requirements: Not applicable on General Education for students entering in the Fall of 2002.

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).

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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 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 111: Stress and Coping
(5 units)

Director: Christine Dunkel-Schetter, Psychology

This course examines theory and research on stress and coping with an emphasis on the physical and mental health consequences of stress. Stress is an everyday experience in contemporary urban life. It has been defined as demands that tax or exceed the individual's resources. These can be in the form of acute stressful events, such as final exams or relationship breakups. Or they can be in the form of longer-term chronic stress, for instance, that resulting from divorce, chronic disability, or illness. When prolonged and intense, stress is a clear-cut risk factor for physical and mental health problems. Our capacity to cope with taxing demands is important because it can reduce the adverse effects of stress on our health and well being.

Through readings, short papers, and class discussion, we shall explore the various forms of stress in contemporary life; examine evidence for its health-damaging effects; consider the different forms that coping can take and the effects of coping on physical and mental health; learn about social support--a psychosocial resource that has positive effects on health and well being; and briefly consider some dimensions of personality that may interact with stress, coping, and social support in influences on health and well being. A primary goal of the course is to provide valuable, scientifically-based information about stress and coping and their health implications.

This course is designed for seniors.

Christine Dunkel-Schetter received her B.A. from Connecticut College and her Ph.D. in Social Psychology form Northwestern University. She then held a National Science Foundation postdoctoral fellowship at the University of California, Berkeley, where she worked with distinguished experts on stress and coping. She joined the UCLA faculty in 1983 and is currently Director of the Health Psychology Program. She has published papers on stress and coping in cancer patients, on stress among students at UCLA, on social support in many groups including people with AIDS and diabetes and on psychosocial processes in pregnancy. She also co-authored the book, Infertility: A Stress and Coping Perspective. She is currently engaged in federally funded projects on the biochemical and psychosocial processes associated with stress in pregnancy.

Note: This course has an enrollment restriction.

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