Course Descriptions
Fall Quarter
| Dept | Course No and Title | Instructor |
|---|---|---|
| HUMAN (F25) | 260A CRIT THRY WORKSHOP: RACE, RELIGIONS, AND PSYCHOANALYSIS | CARTER, J. |
| This yearlong Critical Theory Workshop explores psychoanalysis as a means of interrogating issues of race and religion. We will establish a foundation in psychoanalytic theory through readings from Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan. Specifically, we will analyze Freud and Lacan to uncover how themes of religion and race are repressed within psychoanalytic theory. We will then consider recent work that explicitly addresses race and religion as significant dimensions of psychoanalysis. Finally, we will conclude the workshop with a reading of Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, which provides a literary site for examining the intersections of race, religion, and psychoanalysis in the context of settler colonialism, political theology, and environmental catastrophe. Meeting Dates: Fall • October 14, 2025 • November 18, 2025 Winter • January 6, 2026 • January 20, 2026 • February 3, 2026 • February 17, 2026 Spring • April 14, 2026 • April 28, 2026 • May 12, 2026 • May 26, 2026 | ||
| HUMAN (F25) | 270 TRANSCULTURATION, ENTANGLEMENT AND ASSEMBLAGES | CANEPA, M. |
| Transculturation, Entanglement and Assemblages (VS 295) This seminar will provide a platform for participants to evaluate critical perspectives drawn from a wide variety of interdisciplinary conversations on the problem of what constitutes, maintains and transforms (practical, intellectual, expressive, material, visual) cultures on the micro and macros scale. Moreover, it offers a framework for studying cross-cultural interaction that integrates practical, cognitive, art historical and new-material approaches as well as perspectives from both the contemporary and premodern world. Starting from a post-structuralist standpoint and moving to new perspectives as diverse as assemblage theory and the new materialisms, it will introduce key theorists who provide traction in defining and analyzing culture and potential ways forward. We will consider the problem not only from discursive and economic standpoints, as has been common in the humanities, but from environmental, material, urban, visual and somatic perspectives. Thus, while we address some of the most commonly considered problems, such as colonial and post-colonial situations, this seminar attempts to deepen, nuance and broaden these perspectives and provide participants with a wider theoretical and analytical toolkit. Problems include the role of the visual, material and spatial in the extended mind/cognition, inculcation of- or resistances to- ideological formulations in human experience, and the creation, maintenance and manipulation of memory (personal and collective); cognitive artifacts, hybrid minds and human (practical, visual and material) cultural evolutions; art, ritual, religious experience and embodied simulations; the visuality of violence; social cognition and collective memory; phenomenologies of natural, urban and architectonic space and place; and cross-cultural ecological, social, material and visual entanglements. | ||
| HUMAN (F25) | 270 KARATANI & FRIENDS | LONG, M. |
| In 2022 Karatani KÅjin won the “Nobel Prize in Philosophy,” the Berggruen Prize. He is the most important philosopher in modern Japan. He is also one of the most insightful readers of modern Japanese literature. This seminar examines his essays on literature in tandem with the works they discuss, by “friends” ranging from Soseki, Akutagawa, Oe and Tsushima to Freud, Marx, and Foucault. We ask three core questions. First, how did Karatani convince the Japanese public, in a series of essays for a monthly literary journal in 1974, that the key to understanding Capital Volume I is reading Saussure? Students who do not have a background in post-structuralism will learn the basics from Karatani’s lucid prose. Second, how did Karatani turn a year as a visiting professor with Frederic Jameson and Paul de Man at Yale in 1975 into Origins of Modern Japanese Literature (1980), the most insightful book ever written on “interiority” “landscape” and “creativity” in the modern canon? Third, how should we understand Karatani’s insistence, in books like History and Repetition (2004) that a semiotic “aporia” or “gap” is our only reliable deterrent to fascism? Throughout, we consider Karatani’s expressed disinterest in feminism and the environment, and what it says in broad strokes about the compatibility of post-structuralism and environmental humanities. | ||
| HUMAN (F25) | 270 POETICS OF SLAVERY | JACKSON, V |
| ENG 210/HUM 270 The course will explore the ways in which the expansion of Atlantic enslavement informed what we have come to call Romantic poetics in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Most of the examples will be Anglo-American, and will include Clarkson, Hegel, Wheatley, Horton, Blake, Shelley, Bryant, Mill, Douglass, Harper, Whitfield, and Du Bois. There is also a chance that this will just become a seminar on Wheatley (Peters). Theoretical readings will include Hartman, Moten, Sharpe, Berlant, Wynter, Terada, Hanson, Abrams, Brady, Nersessian, and others. | ||
| HUMAN (F25) | 270 THEORIZING PERIODS | EVERS, K |
| ETC 200B/HUM 270 Catastrophic Imagination Revisited The capacity to imagine the future as catastrophe is a central trait of modernity and a vital task of world risk society. Rather than considering the future as the telos of an eschatological history or the space in which history moves progressively forward, the future as catastrophe became with the European enlightenment a medium of self-reflection to continually illuminate the limits, flaws, and risks of its unfolding present. From Kant to Adorno, Arendt, and Derrida as well as from Voltaire to Sebald and current discourses on genocide and extinction, catastrophic imagination in literature and art is tasked to give shape to catastrophes that transform contemporary societies before they (fully) disrupt if not end the modern world itself. What does this task teach us about the capacities and limits of catastrophic imagination in cultural theory and in fiction? European literature and theory, with its transformations and metamorphoses of apocalyptic imagination, dialectic of enlightenment, and risk theory will provide our course with the necessary materials for a reassessment of the function and the limits of a catastrophic imagination. | ||
| HUMAN (F25) | 270 THE GRAPHIC NOVEL | PICHON-RIVIERE, R |
| This graduate seminar introduces students to critical phenomenology through discussions in comics studies. The aesthetic and critical theories in comics studies that are most innovative and experimental are often written in the idiom of comics, and this seminar will also discuss how to read such graphic critical theory. Each week, students will read one graphic novel paired with one or two theoretical texts to examine and interrogate how the experience of reading comics is constructed on the pages of a graphic novel. Theoretical texts will include authors in the fields of aesthetics and phenomenology, such as Artistotles, Edgar Allan Poe, John Dewey, Edmund Husserl, Maurice Mearleau-Ponty, Jacques Derrida, Fred Moten, and Gayle Salamon as well as comics studies scholars and creators, such as Elizabeth El Refaie, Jennifer Howell, Kelcey Ervick, Tom Hart, Scott McCloud, and Lynda Barry. | ||
| HUMAN (F25) | 270 SOCIAL ANALYSIS OF COMPUTING | CROOKS, R |
| For over twenty years, UC Irvine’s Department of Informatics has been associated with research that has something to do with the social, including foundational work such as Rob Kling’s articulation of social informatics. In venues as disparate as the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI); scholarly journals in science and technology studies, sociology, history, communication, and anthropology; and academic and popular books, a general interest in the social has come to mark many forms of research on computing, computational media, and computer-related phenomena. In this class, we are going to try to re-create some of the reasoning that sought to insert (or perhaps re-insert) consideration of the social into research on computing technology. If we accept that the study of computing requires an interest in people, what kinds of theories and tools for the study of humans must we consider? Put another way, how might the study of other social phenomena such as social history, social theory, or social epistemology shape the study of technology? | ||
| HUMAN (F25) | 398B FOR LANG TEACH METH | JONES, L. |
| No detailed description available. | ||
| HUMAN (F25) | 399 UNIVERSITY TEACHING | BEAUCHAMP, T. |
| No detailed description available. | ||
| HUMAN (F25) | 399 UNIVERSITY TEACHING | TORRES, J. |
| No detailed description available. | ||