| Course | Title | Instructor | Description |
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| COM LIT 40A | DEVELOPMNT OF DRAMA | REYNOLDS, B. | |
| COM LIT 50A | LIT IN DIALOGUE | NEWMAN, J.O. | This quarter of Comparative Literature 50 focuses on the principles of literary imitation, intertextuality, and canon formation to understand how a variety of world literatures can be read in dialogue with one another. The ancient western classical tradition (Homer, the Greek tragedians,Roman epic and poetry) is studied in dialogue with its afterlives in the late medieval and Renaissance (Dante and Christine de Pisan); students will be given the opportunity to write an optional extra-credit final paper on either modern and post-modern European, African, and American receptions of the classical texts, or on a contemporary film, video, or literary text that dialogues with materials covered in class. The basic principles of comparatism are introduced; techniques of close textual
analysis are combined with theoretical reflection on the nature of
literary form. A series of short papers is required; optional attendance at discussion sections. |
| COM LIT 101 | EMPIRE AND AFTER | CULBERT, J.B. | |
| COM LIT 102 | NARRATIVE THEORY | GELLEY, A. | |
| COM LIT 104 | VAMPIRE STORIES | KUJUNDZIC, D. | |
| COM LIT 106 | ADV SEM COMP LIT | SCHLICHTER, A.M. | |
| COM LIT 200A | HISTORY AND THEORY OF COMPARATIVE LITERATURE | AL-KASSIM, D.L. | CL 200A The Politics of Address: Seduction and Subjection
It has been argued by psychoanalytic and Marxist thinkers that subjectivity is forged through seduction via the adult unconscious message (Laplanche) or through recruitment to social norms (Althusser). Feminist, queer and postcolonial theorists have questioned the model of social interpellation to suggest that subjectivity can never be uniformly minted for it is generated out of a complex negotiation of incitement and refusal, complicity and resistance. In this course we will examine the claim that literature is a site of socially instituted seduction (Felman) by focusing our attention on the writing of abjection (Kristeva). Specifically, we will consider a genre of abject speech in which the fantasy of an address to the Law operates to make audible the resistant potentiality inscribed within a normative order. This fantasmatic address materializes the racial and sexual margins conditioning the norms in play and breaks open the condensation of social fantasy that underwrites subjection to proliferate its subject in new ways.
Our course of reading will provide us with a grounding in literary, feminist, queer, psychoanalytic and postcolonial approaches to problems of aesthetic representation and political critique valuable in any comparative project. The literary works comprise a short selection of the modernist avant-garde in French and English. No familiarity with psychoanalysis is assumed though students who have not read Laplanche and Pontalis' "Fantasy and the Origins of Sexuality" p. 5-28 in Formations of Fantasy, ed. Victor Burgin et. al. may wish to do so. Students are encouraged to read the texts in the original French where possible. At each class session two or more students will be responsible for leading a segment of the discussion with their oral reports. Strongly recommended for first- and second-year students before the M.A. examination and review. Requirements: One seminar paper, 20 pages, one oral report.
Week I 9/27 Introductions: Genet's "Solicitation" and Solanas, "SCUM Manifesto"
Week II 10/4 Foucault, History of Sexuality, Vol. I
"The Subject and Power", "What is Enlightenment?"
Butler, "Subjection, Resistance, Resignification: Between Freud and Foucault" in Psychic Life of Power
Week III 10/11 Felman, The Scandal of the Speaking Body
Butler, "Giving an Account of Oneself" in Diacritics, Vol. 31, #4, Winter 2001 available online
Week IV 10/18 Fanon, "Concerning Violence" in Wretched of the Earth
Lacan, "Aggressivity in Psychoanalysis" and "The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis" in Ecrits
Spillers, "all the things you could be…"
Week V RESCHEDULED
Week VI 11/1 Butler, Antigone's Claim
Week VII 11/8 Kristeva, Powers of Horror
Bowles, Two Serious Ladies
Week VIII 11/15 Kristeva, Powers of Horror
Genet, Theif's Journal
Week IX 11/22 Césaire, Notebook of a Return to the Native Land
Artaud, Theatre and its Double
Week X Laplanche, "Time and the Other"
Lefort, "Dialogue with Pierre Clastres"
De Certeau, The Capture of Speech, Chs. 1-4
Week XI TBA Butler, "Indefinate Detention" in Precarious Life
C. L. R. James, "Postscript" to Mariners, Renegades and Castaways
Pease, "Introduction" to Mariners ,Renegades and Castaways
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| COM LIT 210 | CRITICAL HUMANISM: A GENEALOGY OF THE WORK OF EDWARD W. SAID | NEWMAN, J. O. | "[W]hat I am talking about here [is] humanism and critical practice; humanism as it informs what one does as an intellectual and scholar-teacher of the humanities in today's turbulent world." So wrote Edward Said in the essay, "Humanism's Sphere," published posthumously in 2004. This seminar will investigate the terms that Said brings together here--humanism and criticism, scholarship and teaching, and the place and role of the intellectual in a turbulent world--in a series of texts by Giambattista Vico and Erich Auerbach, to whose work Said returned over and over again during his too short career as well as, of course, in the writings of Said himself. Of particular interest will be the theoretical models that their work provided both one another (Auerbach translated Vico) and Said (who translated Auerbach) in terms of critical practice, and his and their understandings of how the critic's encounter with texts comments upon the politics of what Said referred to as the "usable scope of humanism as an ongoing practice." Along the way we will learn something about Dante, Biblical hermeneutics, and Renaissance Civic Humanism (and other Humanisms too, such as Christian, Secular, Third, New, Marxist, and Trans-), as well as about what Vico calls "Gentile" history, the early career of the German-Jewish refugee scholar, Auerbach (one of the "grandfathers" of U.S. Comp. Lit.), and the life of the U.S. academy during the Cold War. An equally important question will be about the relationship of Said's interest in what some would call these more "traditional" theorists to his work in Orientalism and beyond. NB: 2007 is the fiftieth anniversary of Auerbach's death, and there are a number of national and international conferences being planned. Seminar participants will be encouraged to think about their work for this seminar in that context. Seminar and pro-seminar option. Please contact me (jonewman@uci.edu) for a reading list in a timely fashion, as many of the
assigned texts can be purchased on-line (via abebooks.com, for example) at considerable savings. -- This seminar will meet for the first time on Friday, 23 September, 2005!
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| COM LIT 210 | THE NOVEL AND NARRATIVE THEORY | GELLEY, A. | (same as German 200, Course Code 27201)
There are two issues here, though they are closely related: the novel as a modern (that is, post-Romantic) genre; and narrative form, which of course has wider applicability than the novel but is at the same time a major component in any study of the genre. We will be drawing on a series of 20th-century critics, e.g., Fr. Schlegel, Lukács, Benjamin, Bakhtin, Auerbach, Lotman, Genette, Barthes, Prendergast, D. Cohn, E. Lämmert, P. Brooks, N. Armstrong, F. Moretti. Concurrently we will use two 19th-century novels as models for the theories: Goethe's Die Wahlverwandtschaften (The Elective Affinities) and Charles Dickens's Bleak House. All students will be asked to present short class reports on one of the theoretical selections and on a short section from one of the two novels. Students may want to read the two novels before start of the course.
Texts:
Goethe, Elective Affinities, Regnery-Gateway
Goethe, Die Wahlverwandtshcaften, ed., H.-J. Weitz, Insel Taschenbuch
Dickens, Bleak House, Penguin
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| COM LIT 210 | MOTIVATED FILM | HALL, J. | This course uses East Asian, Southeast Asian, and Asian-American film texts (Cantonese, Taiwanese, Tagalog, Canadian, Japanese, Vietnamese, Thai and Korean, to name some) and the critical writing that motivates, surrounds, and follows those texts to complete two tasks: a) to delineate the states of Asian film criticism today and b) to suggest new geo-temporal approaches to filmic movement and area. Beginning from the now standard critique of the Cold War's legacy within area-studies and its influence on postwar national film studies traditions, we trace the rise of competing models of space to the national film critical system, especially Jameson's political economy, Chow's critical close reading practice, as well as other, politicized attempts at anti-national reading modes--feminist, queer, diasporic, and transnational approaches. Weekly examinations of film texts might include work by Tsai Ming-liang, Ann Hui, Park Chan Wook, Wong Kar-wai, Oshima Nagisa, Kurosawa Akira, Kidlat Tahimik, Yau Ching, and David Cronenberg, while critical texts not only restage the competition between Fredric
Jameson and Rey Chow but also gesture to newer, equally generative models of motivated Asian cinemas.
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| COM LIT 299 | DISSERTATION RESEARCH | TERADA, R. | For students who have completed coursework, are preparing for their qualifying exams, or who are ABD. |