| HC 4 | Immigrants & The American Dream |
| HC 12 | Sacred Form: Literature & Poetry in India from the Bronze Age to Pre-Modern Times |
| HC 15 | Acting Myth |
| HC 21W | The Rise & Fall of Modernism |
| HC 54 | Improvisation and Acting Techniques |
| HC 71 | Cross-Cultural Approaches to Media History & Culture |
| HC 73 | Elementary Particles in the Universe |
| HC 111 | Stress and Coping |
| HC M118 | Roots of Patriarchy: Ancient Goddesses and Heroines |
| HC 121 | Psychoanalysis before Freud, and A Little after |
| HC 130 | How the Cold War Was Played |
| HC M143 | From Latin America to the U.S.: Immigration and Latino Identity |
| HC M150 | Formal Modeling and Simulations in Social Science |
HC
4: Immigrants and the American Dream
Director: William A.V. Clark, Geography
This course is about the process of attaining the "American Dream". Even though the notion of the American Dream may be intangible to many Americans, it is almost palpable to those who struggle to make the passage across the Rio Grande or on a cargo ship from China. These immigrants are drawn by the allure of upward mobility and the belief in its possibility. It is a translation of a "seeking their fortunes" psychology into migration and a new beginning.
Two competing perspectives characterize the many studies of immigration to the United States. One celebrates the contributions of immigrants to their new societies; the other anguishes over the trying circumstances with which immigrants grapple every day. The positive accounts regard Latinos as the next Italians, certain to succeed through hard work and determination. The more negative would close the door to poor and unskilled immigrants from Mexico and Central America. Clearly, strongly competing agendas inform these differing perspectives on immigration, among them the desire for cheap labor, or the need for skilled technicians, or even the humanitarian concern to afford opportunities for as many as possible. Who is right? What is the evidence for achieving the American Dream?
Application on General
Education Requirements: None
HC
12: Sacred Form: Literature and Poetry in India from the Bronze Age to Pre-Modern Times
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.
HC 15: Acting Myth
Directors: Sandra Caruso, Theater
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. HC
21W: The Rise and Fall of Modernism
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.
HC
54: Improvisation and Acting Techniques
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).
HC
73: Elementary Particles and the Universe
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.
HC
111:
Stress and Coping
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. HC
M118: Roots of Patriarchy: Ancient Goddesses and Heroines
Director: Miriam Robbins Dexter, Women’s Studies
This course examines the functions and characteristics of ancient goddesses. Beginning with the European Neolithic, we study ancient archaeological evidence: figurines and pottery from burial and settlement sites. Moving to the earliest historical cultures, we examine Near-Eastern myth: the goddesses of Egypt, Mesopotamia, and Syria. We then discuss patriarchal Indo-European (Indo-Iranian, Celtic, Germanic, Baltic, Slavic, Italic, Greek) goddesses, with reference to these European Neolithic and Near-Eastern roots. We thus trace the sources, back through time, and synchronically through texts, of the goddesses of Indo-European myth. In discussing their functions, we find that they generally played passive roles in their pantheons, echoing the roles which their human female counterparts played in society. Using comparative linguistic and feminist sociological methodology, we uncover the roots of modern patriarchy and the sources of Classical-Age Indo-European goddesses and heroines as manifested through comparative archeological, mythological, and literary reflections of the societies as a whole and of the female members of these societies in particular.
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.
HC
121: Psychoanalysis before Freud -- and A Little After
Director: Irwin Savodnik, Clinical Psychiatry
What is self-knowledge? How do we conceive of what it means to be human? This course examines the different ways human beings have developed conceptions of themselves throughout history. The course is organized historically, beginning with biblical sources through the Greeks and Romans, the early Christian world, the Middle Ages, Renaissance, Reformation, scientific revolution, Enlightenment, the origins of the modern world, Freud’s fin de siècle Vienna and post-Freudian visions. In addition to garnering a deep appreciation of the understanding of self in history, students will also investigate the various iterations of these different conceptions in the present day and be encouraged to develop a critical sense of what is “right” and “wrong” about each perspective studied. The course will require considerable reading, engaged participation and high motivation on the part of students, but students will reap the reward of the course’s basic goal, which is tracing the historical development of conceptions of self. While the focus of the reading is on Western thought, this does not suggest in any way that the only approach to the problem of self-knowledge is a Western one. Should the students desire to pursue other areas, they will be strongly urged to do so.
Irwin Savodnik is an Associate Professor of Psychiatry at UCLA. He received his doctorate at New York University and his MD at SUNY, Syracuse. He has a second doctorate from the Southern California Psychoanalytic Institute. He is both a professor in the College of Medicine and a psychiatrist in private practice. He has written numerous scholarly articles and three books. He loves to teach undergraduates.
HC 130: How the Cold War was Played
Director: Andrzej Korbonski, Political Science
The so-called “Cold War” dominated world politics for most of the post-World War II period. What triggered it and which of the two super powers—the United States or the Soviet Union—actually started it? While most agree that the Cold War came to an end in the late 1980s, does it in fact continue, albeit in a different form?
This course tries to provide answers to these questions. We shall examine why the Cold War lasted as long as it did and why the various attempts to end it sooner failed. We shall also look at the impact of the Cold War on the political and socio-economic systems of the two main protagonists; and at the potential of a “Cold War Legacy” and its influence today.
The literature of the Cold War is voluminous. The last decade witnessed the opening of hitherto secret Soviet archives, which provide an interesting insight into the decision-making process in the Kremlin. Several American and Western European leaders have also published their memoirs. We should thus be able to learn much about how the Cold War was played not only in Washington but also in Moscow and elsewhere.
Application on General Education Requirements: four units of Social Science credit (Historical Analysis); or four units of Social Science credit (Social Analysis). For students entering as freshmen in the Fall of 2002, application on General Education is pending.
Andrzej Korbonski, Professor Emeritus of Political Science at UCLA, was born in Poland resistance movement and spent the last seven months of the war in a German prisoner-of-war camp. When the war ended he remained in the West. He received his B.Sc. degree in Economics from the University of London. He came to the United States in 1950 and served in the U.S. Army during the Korean War. He then returned to school and received his MA in Economics and Ph.D. in Political Science from Columbia University. He was hired by UCLA in 1963 and he has remained there ever since. He has chaired the Department of Political Science, headed the Center for Russian and East European Studies, and co-directed the RAND-UCLA Center for Soviet Studies. In the early 1970s he was Officer in Charge of Soviet and East European Programs at the Ford Foundation. He is currently Editor of the quarterly Communist and Post-Communist Studies.
HC
M150: Models and Modeling in Anthropology
Director:
Ask two anthropologists for a definition of culture and you will get two different answers. Culture, like conscience, is one of those elusive concepts that we know is there, but we cannot easily define. Generally, culture has to do with the ideas, concepts, ideologies and beliefs that we acquire as part of growing up. It is what makes us “us” as opposed to “them” or “the other.” Sometimes the term “constructed reality” is used to underlie the fact that culture is more than a mental representation of the social world in which we live as it also constructs for us the dimensions of the social world– and even our perception of the physical world -- in which we operate.
While we have had over a hundred years of ethnographic research and numerous theories (and even anti-theories) – functionalism, materialism, structuralism, and the excesses of post-modernism—we have not yet developed a good way to represent what we mean by culture or to deconstruct culture into its basic elements to show how they combine and interact to make that whole we refer to as culture.
This course examines some of the basic questions that are addressed in our study of what we mean by culture with new modeling methods that allow us to begin to do quasi-experimental research into the nature of culture. We will make extensive use of multi-agent simulation as a way to examine how culture can be both supra-organic yet be embedded imperfectly in the minds of culture bearers. In this course we will attempt to arrive at a better understanding of what we mean by the “us/them” dichotomy that underlies much of the racism and other forms of discrimination that exist in the world, and better understand the way in which the individual and institutional levels we use as a framework to understand human behavior are dependent upon the cultural world within which we exist and act.
Dwight W. Read, Professor of Anthropology and of Statistics, received his Ph.D at UCLA in Mathematics. His current research focuses on the interrelationship between the material and the ideational domains in human societies. He has edited two special issues of the Journal of Quantitative Anthropology (Computer-Based Solutions to Anthropological Problems (1990) and Formal Methods in Anthropology: Past Successes and New Directions (1993)); and a special issue of the Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation (Computer Simulation in Anthropology). He has developed a major computer program (Kinship Algebraic Expert System, or KAES) that constructs a formal (algebraic) model of the logic underlying the structure of a kinship terminology. He has received several large National Science Foundation grants and is currently a co-Principal Investigator on an NSF Biocomplexity Grant, focusing on the cultural dimension underlying cooperative behavior among Balinese rice farmers.
(5 units)
(4 units)
(4 units)
Miriam Robbins Dexter, Women’s Studies
(6 units)
(5 units)
(4 units)
(5 units)
(4 units)
(4 units)
(4 units)
(5 units)