The acts of reading and writing are both examples of Self-discovery. It is common to think of writing as an act of self-expression just as all art forms are self-expressive. But writers also express even more than they realize, and much of what is written consciously or unconsciously conveys something deeper, including the unmanifest, unbounded, unwritten, absolute Self. What is often overlooked, however, is that reading is also a creative act. When we read, we are absorbing much of the consciousness of the author, but we are also altering it in many ways as well. We cannot help but do so. Each reading is subjective. It conforms to our own individual ways of seeing the world. In this sense, the act of reading is the act of finding one’s self in everything we read. Therefore, this course also functions as Self Discovery because it is our design to locate the absolute, unchanging Self in the midst of the ever-changing diversity of the literary text. In this course we will sample all of the literary genres: the novel (excerpts), the short story, the literary essay, the lyric poem, the film, and a Shakespearean play. We will learn some literary terms, do some creative writing, and discover some strategies for reading and writing. (2 units) (Distribution Area: Arts)

In this course students study the structure of the narrative by examining a number of short stories and a novel. Students learn literary terminology, the fundamental elements of fiction, and the art of critical analysis. This course is essential for helping students develop the literary essay, the backbone of writing in the major. (4 units)

This course focuses on the various genres of literature and the role of consciousness in interpreting literature. Students build on their knowledge of literary analysis from LIT 205 and add explication to their writing skills. The Elements of Literature presents the department’s specialty: the unification of various literary approaches and trends. Students read about contemporary insights into the study of literature that support this direction. (4 units) Prerequisite: LIT 205

This course will look at the Bhagavad-Gita not only for its insight and inspiration but also for the beauty of its form and language. The primary text of this course will be Maharishi Mahesh Yogi on the Bhagavad-Gita: A New Translation and Commentary Chapters 1-6. We will also read the Gita’s last 12 chapters in another translation, a condensed Mahabharata, and The Legend of Bagger Vance, a novel based on the Bhagavad-Gita. We will also look briefly at works by other writers such as Emerson, Thoreau, and T.S. Eliot who have been inspired by the Gita. (4 units)

An epic is a long narrative in elevated style about characters of high position who perform extraordinary actions. From the great world epics, students study principles of Maharishi Vedic Science to illuminate the subtleties of language and thought. The primary text of this course is the Ramayana. Other selections may include parts of the Bible and other scriptures, Homer’s Odyssey, Dante’s Divine Comedy, and Goethe’s Faust. (4 units)

The literature of ancient Greece and Rome is the source of the Western literary tradition. The Greeks in particular recognized the value of literature as an expression of society’s shared ideals and as a means of developing social unity and harmony. Works studied may include Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, and Virgil’s Aeneid, Greek lyric poetry, plus selections from Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Marcus Aurelius, Plotinus, and Heraclitus. (4 units)

This course opens with the heroic ideals of the Anglo-Saxons, runs through the birth and popularization of courtly love, and ends at the doorstep of the European Renaissance. Intrinsically involved with the quest motif, this course charts the pilgrimages in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, the adventures of Beowulf, Sir Gawain, and the Arthurian knights (especially those concerned with the quest for the Holy Grail), and Dante’s emergence from the inferno into paradise in the Divine Comedy. (4 units)

Comedy is a discovery of perfection, of harmony, of one’s Self, of an underlying spiritual existence. It is the triumph over adversity, fear, and suffering. It is the celebration of life eternal. In this course we will examine the nature of comedy and many of Shakespeare’s favorite themes such as love, order, immortality, and right action. Among the plays we will read are Taming of the Shrew, Merchant of Venice, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, As You Like It, Much Ado About Nothing, Twelfth Night, and The Tempest. (4 units)

The Renaissance was the re-emergence of dynamic social and intellectual activity in the Western world. It marked one of the most vibrant literary, dramatic, and poetic periods in history. Its writers searched for fundamental principles and orderly poetic structures in accord with Natural Law to assist in the full development of human life. Beginning with Petrarch, this course examines some of the greatest Renaissance writers of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries: Wyatt, Spenser, Sidney, Donne, Traherne, Herbert, Vaughn, Marvell, and Milton. Also included are readings from some of the major Renaissance philosophers, courtiers, and scientists. (4 units)

This course covers the literature of the Augustan Age, the Restoration, and the Age of Johnson, and considers the period’s emphasis on feelings and rational thought seen in the novel and in the intellectual tenor of the time. Writers include Dryden, Pope, Swift, Defoe, Richardson, Fielding, Burney, Samuel Johnson, and Jane Austen. (4 units)

Like the Renaissance writers before them, eighteenth century sages saw the spiritual power of nature residing in an orderly universe. They sought to tap that power through their attempts to write about it. The novel, the ultimate fictional statement about universal order, emerged from the diverse social, economic, and political forces of the eighteenth century. This course examines the rise of the novel through three different activities: (1) reading novels from Defoe to Austen, (2) studying the cultural milieu of the eighteenth century, and (3) formulating a theory of the novel and its applications. (4 units)

This course examines the nineteenth-century Romantic movement and its escape from the limitations of eighteenth-century rationalism through an emphasis on the divine creative power of the imagination, an exalted perception of poetry and the poet, a sympathy for social renewal, a distrust of industrialization and urbanization, and a rediscovery of the transcendent. Writers include Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, Percy and Mary Shelley, and Byron. (4 units)

Victorian literary style reflects a period of transition from the Romantic to the Modern through a blending of profound subjective experience with an awakened consciousness of rapid social change. We will read works by Charlotte Bronte, Carlyle, Tennyson, Arnold, Dickens, George Eliot, the Brownings, Hopkins, and others. (4 units)

Exploring the previously uncharted dimensions of inner life, modern European writers in all genres developed new literary techniques to express the deeper realities of consciousness at the basis of thought and human behavior. Combating the forces of urbanization, isolation, industrialization, and the decline of religion, such modern novelists as Forster, Woolf, Lawrence, and Joyce, and such poets as the French Symbolists, Yeats, Eliot, Thomas, and Auden, took refuge in a transcendental vision of life. (4 units)

Heeding the call of Ralph Waldo Emerson to create a truly American literature, American writers explored literary and cultural themes that have originated since Columbus first set foot on this continent: the American Eden, the ideal society, the perfectibility of humanity, Self-reliance, and the individual search for Self. Writers we will consider include Poe, Hawthorne, Melville, Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, and Dickinson. (4 units)

Reacting to the prosaic objectivism of the realist movement, the decline of Western spirituality, and the moral excess of the industrial revolution and European imperialism, a new movement in the arts called Modernism attempted to take the individual back to the spiritual source of the Transcendentalists and its Oriental transcendental roots. Leaders in this movement included Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Faulkner, Steinbeck, and Cather (in fiction), and Frost, Eliot, Williams, Stevens, Moore, and Hughes (in poetry). (4 Units)

In this course, students widen their understanding of the streams of creative expression beyond what has been produced in Western cultures. Emphasis will be on those writers and those texts that possess a good understanding of the work of spirituality. Works to be explored may include Lao Tsu’s Tao de Ching, the writings of Chuang Tze, the Confucian Odes, T’ang poetry, the poetry of Kabir and Tagore, Rumi, and Hafiz and the fiction of Mishima, Kawabata, and Narayan. (4 units)

This course focuses on contemporary poetry with the aim of awakening students’ awareness to the stylistic techniques that express different visions of wholeness. Poets to be read may include Theodore Roethke, Denise Levertov, James Wright, Gary Snyder, Robert Bly, Richard Wilbur, Elizabeth Bishop, A.R. Ammons, Galway Kinnell, W.S. Merwin, and Jory Graham. (4 units)

The novel in the last two centuries has become the literary form of choice. It reigns supreme in conveying the depth, experience, and great complexity of character. Born in the 18th century when long narratives — including epics, fables, romances, and picaresque tales — were losing their vitality, the novel became literature’s torch bearer: the primary literary mode for depicting life. This course examines the history, techniques, and forms of the novel, from social realism to meta-fiction, and may include novels from any given period from the 18th century onward. (4 units)

This course emphasizes film technique, including the use of lighting, camera angles, and mise en scene. It takes the student out of the realm of the Saturday night “movie” and into the world of film as a major art form. Our primary texts in this course will be the films themselves, including the masterworks of some of the world’s finest directors. Course requirements include the writing of film reviews and the analysis of a key scene from a film we will have viewed. ($15 lab fee) [Same as FA 226] (4 units)

This film survey traces the evolution of primarily American and European cinema from the early days of Griffith and Eisenstein through the twentieth and into the twenty-first century. It includes examples of history-shaping movements such as Soviet formalism, German expressionism, French realism, Italian neo-realism, film noir, surrealism, and nouvelle vague. As in LIT 363, we will watch a selection of some of the finest “world masterpieces on film.” ($15 lab fee) [Same as FA 227] (4 units)

The Peace Film course explores the many forms of peace contemplated throughout history and depicted in the modern film. Its foundation and inspiration is Maharishi’s vision of world peace that has led to the Peace Government and the establishment of Peace Palaces. In this course we will watch 11 films, including such classics as Yellow Submarine, Grand Illusion, and The Magic Flute as well as more recent efforts. Students will analyze films to see how peace is perceived and visualized in the international cinema community. Besides the films themselves, the primary text for the course is Robert Oates’s Permanent Peace, which examines how peace can be achieved individually and globally. (4 units)

Led by such dramatic innovators as Ibsen, Strindberg, Chekhov, Shaw, Pirandello, and Brecht, drama began to emerge from a century of mediocrity. In the late nineteenth century these dramatists pioneered a dramatic revolution that expressed itself in such forms as realism, naturalism, impressionism, expressionism, surrealism, and the theater of the absurd. All of these figures and the movements they spawned will be examined in this course along with the work of other influential dramatists such as Eliot, Yeats, and Shaffer. (4 units)

Beginning with the Provincetown Players and the Little Theater movement of the twenties, this course explores the drama from Eugene O’Neill — America’s foremost dramatist — through postmodernism and contemporary drama. Among the playwrights we will read are Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, Glaspell, Hellman, Henley, Kopit, Mamet, and Albee. (4 units)

All Western drama begins with the Greeks, specifically the four titans of Athens’ Golden Age: Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, and Aristophanes. In the festivals to Dionysus these four dramatists developed the theatrical concepts of Tragedy and Comedy and helped shape our present view of humanity. In America, some 24 centuries later, Eugene O’Neill gave shape to the modern theater. Much of what O’Neill created was strongly influenced by the Greeks. The American drama that followed O’Neill, Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, Beth Henley and others, labored directly under O’Neill’s influence and indirectly under that of the Greek masters. (4 units)

Nature and the environment has become the most celebrated cause of the last few decades, giving rise to a literature of its own. In this course we will begin first with Maharishi’s vision of Nature and Natural Law, then read some traditional naturalists such as Emerson and Thoreau, and finally move to a variety of modern environmentalists. Our primary text will be the Norton Book of Nature Writing. In our reading we will study the philosophical, historical, and cultural approaches to the environment that America has inherited. Students will also read an extra text on nature to present to the class and keep a nature journal to discover what Mitchell Thomashow calls our “ecological identity.” (4 units)

In the age we live in, the media constructs and reconstructs the world we know. It is so pervasive, that virtually no one on this planet is free from its influence, be it good or bad. At the basis of media is language, the first level of communication. Language forms itself into texts — written, visual, and audio texts — and texts are the interests of literature. In this course we will read a variety of texts that deal directly and indirectly with media as we explore its severe limitations as well as its possibilities to help bring about a world-wide transforma-tion. One literary figure commenting on the relationship between literature and the media said this: Literature is news that stays news. — Ezra Pound

Periodically, seminars on special topics are offered by visiting professors or by resident faculty. (2–4 units — may be repeated)

This course is designed for the practical application of the literary skills — writing, speaking, research, analysis, and synthesis — you have been acquiring in the major. Advanced students find a work situation with community professionals to acquire greater applied knowledge in their field of interest. A defined project is set up and evaluated by both a workplace supervisor and a faculty advisor. (4–12 units) Prerequisite: consent of the department faculty

NOTE: The purpose of this course is as an addition to the requirements of the major; therefore, the units from this course cannot be included as part of the course work required for the major.

(variable units) Prerequisite: consent of department faculty