Spring Quarter 2024
- For day, time, room, and TA information, see our PDF Schedule or the class search tool https://registrar-apps.ucdavis.edu/courses/search/index.cfm.
- For all courses not described here, please refer to the General Catalog course descriptions: https://catalog.ucdavis.edu/courses-subject-code/hum/
HUM 002A Global Humanities - Section 2
Carlee Arnett
International crime fiction depicts murders, sex trafficking, drug smuggling, government and police corruption, dysfunctional families and international spies. These crimes are solved by protagonists who are flawed as well as outside of the mainstream culture. The crimes depicted in the novels are used as a vehicle to provide a social critique of the country where they are set.
The search for truth, rather than justice or social harmony, pits the detective against his peers and the political structure. In this course, we will read the Scandinavian novel that brought the genre to the international stage, The Girl with the Dragon Tatoo. An early adopter of the Noir genre outside of Scandinavia was Qiu Xialong with Inspector Chen with the break-out novel Death of a Red Heroine. The last novel, A Beautiful Place to Die, is set in 1950’s South Africa and features a detective traumatized by fighting in Europe in the Second World War contending with the onset of Apartheid. In this course, we will use humanistic methods of inquiry, such as close reading and discussion, to analyze identities within cultures, deviance from social norms, and issues in translation and cross-cultural interpretation.
HUM 004 Animals & Human Culture
Michael Ziser