This course is designed for new transfer students, and will provide the tools and supports necessary to succeed in upper-division coursework in the Arts and Humanities at Berkeley. Working together in collaborative hands-on workshops in the Active Learning Classroom, students will master the major skills of humanistic study: critical reading, active listening, literary and cultural analysis, examination, participation, research, writing, and revision. Learning from panels of senior transfer students and visiting professors, this class will build a large and supportive cohort of new students, a community that is astoundingly diverse in its make up but united in its aim to make Berkeley an intellectual home.

In the 2022 film Saint Omer, Alice Diop imagines an immigrant Medea facing an infanticide conviction in a French courtroom, the symbol of a surveillance system where law and justice participate in racialized or racist oppression. This contemporary Medea seems to embody the fugitivity of a chromatic and affective blueness that stretches the marine environment and aquatic maternal care into the corpus of the movie, the filmic texture, suffusing docu-images with liquid lyricism, which voids the judicial apparatus, reducing it to desolation, an empty signifier. In this course, we will explore this interplay of imprisonment and fugitivity, which, in all its various theoretical implications, shapes the multiple figurations of Medea from antiquity to our day. Euripides’ and Seneca’s plays, the African late-antique Medeas of Hosidius and Dracontius, Toni Morrison’s Beloved, but also Rachel Cusk’s and James Ijames’ versions as well as the filmic renditions of Pasolini, von Trier, and Diop will be the primary objects of analysis, the textual and visual sites for experimenting with the imaginative possibilities of close reading and theoretical argumentation.

In Fall 2024, this course is equivalent to COMLIT 100 and will count towards major requirements for Comparative Literature.

Repeat Rules

Course is not repeatable for credit.