Comparative Literature Graduate Course Descriptions
Winter Quarter
| Dept | Course No and Title | Instructor |
|---|---|---|
| COM LIT (W26) | 210 THINKING WITH WATER | JOHNSON, A. |
| No detailed description available. | ||
| COM LIT (W26) | 210 REPRESNTATN MATTERS | CARROLL, A. |
| Representation Matters This graduate seminar explores representation as a political and cultural issue and examines depictions of race, gender, sex/uality, and class in literature, film, and other media to engage with theoretical discourses of identity and power in settler-colonial contexts. Course materials will center on representations of Native/American Indian/First Nations Indigenous Peoples in the Americas, including colonial descriptions of 13th-16th century exploration and settlement (the Icelandic Vinland sagas, Christopher Columbus’ journal, Bartolomé de las Casas’ chronicle of Caribbean colonization, Juan Pardo’s account of early Spanish expeditions in the Carolinas and Tennessee); depictions of Native people in dramatic, animated, and documentary films with Native and non-Native writers, directors, producers, and actors; and works of poetry, fiction, and autobiography by Native authors. The course will be organized around critical considerations of multiple relationships among legal, social, and pseudoscientific constructions of race; intersections among ethnicity, gender, sex/uality, and class in multiracial contexts; global racialized capitalism and the performance/consumption of American Indian identity as ethnographic objects, mascots, logos, and costumes; impacts of colonial occupation, land theft, and displacement on Indigenous identities, communities, kinship, worldviews, beliefs, and practices; Indigenous assertions of sovereignty, self-determination, and self-representation; and distinctions between representation and allyship. | ||
| COM LIT (W26) | 210 TOPICS VARY | HARRIES, M. |
Assemblage/Art/Theater What if an assemblage assembles pieces that do not relate to each other, do not belong together, remain separate? * Between them, the terms montage, collage, and assemblage designate a group of practices in visual and other arts. Collectively, these terms are crucial to the interpretation of experimental and avant-garde art since 1900. Historically, montage has privileged the production of surprising relationships established through strong, even violent, juxtaposition. With its origin in film editing, montage emphasizes new meanings produced through the editing of images. By analogy, the technique migrates to striking juxtapositions in other arts. Collage and assemblage, too, bring together unrelated scraps of the world, but how do they belong together? Do they belong together at all? (Is “belonging” a metaphor here?) Where did these pieces come from? Does the origin of this or another fragment matter? These questions emphasize a difference between montage and collage/assemblage. As sketched here, collage and assemblage resemble montage in bringing together pieces of the world into striking, even shocking, combinations, but the aim of these combinations is unclear. Jean-Jacques Thomas, reflecting something like a critical consensus, wrote: “At the level of principles, collage is characterized by the explicit and deliberate presentation of the heterogeneous nature of diverse components, while montage aims at the integration of the diverse combinatory constituents and, as such, provides unity.” What languages are there for the interpretation of works of art that are not oriented toward unity? Working between visual art, literature, and theater, this course will focus on problems in the reading or interpretation of collage and assemblage. We will begin by tracing attempts to establish the basic terms, considering, for instance, the theorizations of montage by Sergei Eisenstein, whose emphasis on the political force of montage will reverberate throughout the term. Once we have established basic terms, we will focus on a series of assemblages across art forms and across media that accentuate the heterogeneous and insist on the separateness of the elements combined. Southern California has a rich history of assemblage practices, and we will, if possible, visit two sites together: Watts Towers and Noah Purifoy’s Outdoor Museum in Joshua Tree. These visits may allow us to think in more concrete terms about problems and practices in the interpretation of assemblage. Other examples will include the performance collaboration between John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Robert Rauschenberg, Mary Caroline Richards, and Charles Olson at Black Mountain College in 1952; Einstein on the Beach, by Robert Wilson, Philip Glass, and Lucinda Childs; and Heiner Goebbels’ music theater piece Stifters Dinge. | ||
| COM LIT (W26) | 290 READING&CONFERENCE | AMIRAN, E. |
| No detailed description available. | ||
| COM LIT (W26) | 290 READING&CONFERENCE | CARROLL, A. |
| No detailed description available. | ||
| COM LIT (W26) | 290 READING&CONFERENCE | JOHNSON, A. |
| No detailed description available. | ||
| COM LIT (W26) | 290 READING&CONFERENCE | MOR, L. |
| No detailed description available. | ||
| COM LIT (W26) | 290 READING&CONFERENCE | NEWMAN, J. |
| No detailed description available. | ||
| COM LIT (W26) | 290 READING&CONFERENCE | RAHIMIEH, N. |
| No detailed description available. | ||
| COM LIT (W26) | 290 READING&CONFERENCE | SCHWAB, G. |
| No detailed description available. | ||
| COM LIT (W26) | 290 READING&CONFERENCE | TERADA, R. |
| No detailed description available. | ||
| COM LIT (W26) | 290 READING&CONFERENCE | THIONG'O, N. |
| No detailed description available. | ||
| COM LIT (W26) | 290 READING&CONFERENCE | RADHAKRISHNAN, R. |
| No detailed description available. | ||
| COM LIT (W26) | 291 GUIDED READING | ABBAS, A. |
| No detailed description available. | ||
| COM LIT (W26) | 291 GUIDED READING | AMIRAN, E. |
| No detailed description available. | ||
| COM LIT (W26) | 291 GUIDED READING | CARROLL, A. |
| No detailed description available. | ||
| COM LIT (W26) | 291 GUIDED READING | FARBMAN, H. |
| No detailed description available. | ||
| COM LIT (W26) | 291 GUIDED READING | GOLDBERG, D. |
| No detailed description available. | ||
| COM LIT (W26) | 291 GUIDED READING | HARRIES, M. |
| No detailed description available. | ||
| COM LIT (W26) | 291 GUIDED READING | JOHNSON, A. |
| No detailed description available. | ||
| COM LIT (W26) | 291 GUIDED READING | MOR, L. |
| No detailed description available. | ||
| COM LIT (W26) | 291 GUIDED READING | NEWMAN, J. |
| No detailed description available. | ||
| COM LIT (W26) | 291 GUIDED READING | RAHIMIEH, N. |
| No detailed description available. | ||
| COM LIT (W26) | 291 GUIDED READING | SCHWAB, G. |
| No detailed description available. | ||
| COM LIT (W26) | 291 GUIDED READING | TERADA, R. |
| No detailed description available. | ||
| COM LIT (W26) | 298 PRE-DISS RESEARCH | ABBAS, A. |
| No detailed description available. | ||
| COM LIT (W26) | 298 PRE-DISS RESEARCH | AMIRAN, E. |
| No detailed description available. | ||
| COM LIT (W26) | 298 PRE-DISS RESEARCH | CARROLL, A. |
| No detailed description available. | ||
| COM LIT (W26) | 298 PRE-DISS RESEARCH | FARBMAN, H. |
| No detailed description available. | ||
| COM LIT (W26) | 298 PRE-DISS RESEARCH | GOLDBERG, D. |
| No detailed description available. | ||
| COM LIT (W26) | 298 PRE-DISS RESEARCH | MALABOU, C. |
| No detailed description available. | ||
| COM LIT (W26) | 298 PRE-DISS RESEARCH | JOHNSON, A. |
| No detailed description available. | ||
| COM LIT (W26) | 298 PRE-DISS RESEARCH | MOR, L. |
| No detailed description available. | ||
| COM LIT (W26) | 298 PRE-DISS RESEARCH | NEWMAN, J. |
| No detailed description available. | ||
| COM LIT (W26) | 298 PRE-DISS RESEARCH | RAHIMIEH, N. |
| No detailed description available. | ||
| COM LIT (W26) | 298 PRE-DISS RESEARCH | SCHWAB, G. |
| No detailed description available. | ||
| COM LIT (W26) | 298 PRE-DISS RESEARCH | TERADA, R. |
| No detailed description available. | ||
| COM LIT (W26) | 298 PRE-DISS RESEARCH | TERRY, J. |
| No detailed description available. | ||
| COM LIT (W26) | 298 PRE-DISS RESEARCH | THIONG'O, N. |
| No detailed description available. | ||
| COM LIT (W26) | 298 PRE-DISS RESEARCH | COLMENARES GON, D. |
| No detailed description available. | ||
| COM LIT (W26) | 299 DISSERTATN RESEARCH | ABBAS, A. |
| No detailed description available. | ||
| COM LIT (W26) | 299 DISSERTATN RESEARCH | AMIRAN, E. |
| No detailed description available. | ||
| COM LIT (W26) | 299 DISSERTATN RESEARCH | CARROLL, A. |
| No detailed description available. | ||
| COM LIT (W26) | 299 DISSERTATN RESEARCH | FARBMAN, H. |
| No detailed description available. | ||
| COM LIT (W26) | 299 DISSERTATN RESEARCH | JOHNSON, A. |
| No detailed description available. | ||
| COM LIT (W26) | 299 DISSERTATN RESEARCH | MOR, L. |
| No detailed description available. | ||
| COM LIT (W26) | 299 DISSERTATN RESEARCH | NEWMAN, J. |
| No detailed description available. | ||
| COM LIT (W26) | 299 DISSERTATN RESEARCH | RAHIMIEH, N. |
| No detailed description available. | ||
| COM LIT (W26) | 299 DISSERTATN RESEARCH | SCHWAB, G. |
| No detailed description available. | ||
| COM LIT (W26) | 299 DISSERTATN RESEARCH | TERADA, R. |
| No detailed description available. | ||
| COM LIT (W26) | 299 DISSERTATN RESEARCH | LONG, M. |
| No detailed description available. | ||
| COM LIT (W26) | 299 DISSERTATN RESEARCH | STAFF |
| No detailed description available. | ||
| COM LIT (W26) | 299 DISSERTATN RESEARCH | RADHAKRISHNAN, R. |
| No detailed description available. | ||
| COM LIT (W26) | 399 UNIVERSITY TEACHING | JOHNSON, A. |
| No detailed description available. | ||