L&S First-Year Pathways

This course introduces students to the Ancient Middle Eastern world through its languages, texts, art, and material culture. Emphasis is placed on Ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia as well as their neighbors in Iran, Turkey, Arabia, and Africa. Students are introduced to techniques scholars use to study this evidence, including philology, archaeology, visual analysis, and digital humanities. Topics include urbanism, kingship, science, religion, and death. Students interact with original materials in campus and Bay Area museums. No prior coursework is required.

From cutting-edge medical research to the promises of social media influencers, the cure is everywhere. The desire to be relieved of suffering seems as endless as there are remedies. What is it about the potential of the cure that captures our attention? What is it about the possibility of perfect health that captivates us? What are we seeking when we ask to be cured? This class invites students who are ready to think critically about an idea that seems so ordinary that we rarely pause to consider it deeply, and who are willing to think imaginatively about the cure beyond the absence of symptoms. We will delve deeply into various case studies of the cure, including ancient Greek tragedy and ritual practices, ethnographic accounts of shamanistic cures, the “talking cure” of psychoanalysis, experimental cinema and dreams, and the striving for immortality in literature and beyond. To disentangle frameworks of the cure, we must understand how they emerge. Turning to philosophical, psychological, and theological theories, we will grapple with what the cure consists of. If the cure has been defined as a treatment of a disease and the restoration of health, what does healing look like when there is no proven remedy? When mental pain and physical symptoms resist medical intervention, can aesthetic experiences and artistic practice offer relief? In this class we will try to understand what the search for a cure reveals about the struggle to live life fully.

This course is a small, faculty-led seminar on the practice and discipline of literary analysis. It is meant for all students who seek an introductory literature course and would like to improve their ability to read and write critically, including those who may wish to major in English. Focusing on the close study of a few works, rather than a survey of many, the seminar will help students develop college-level skills for interpreting literature, while gaining awareness of different strategies and approaches for making sense of literary language, genres, forms, and contexts. The seminar also will develop students’ ability to write about literature and to communicate meaningfully the stakes of their analysis to an audience.