| Course | Title | Instructor | Description |
|---|
| COM LIT 40A | DEVELOPMNT OF DRAMA | REYNOLDS, B. | |
| COM LIT 50A | WRITING CARIBBEAN | CULBERT, J. | |
| COM LIT 101 | EMPIRE AND AFTER | CULBERT, J.B. | |
| COM LIT 101 | POPULAR CULTURE | JOHNSON, A. | In this course we’ll be looking at texts and practices that are associated with popular culture (comics, films, music, oral narratives in the third world) as well as theories of what it means to analyze popular culture. |
| COM LIT 102W | IDENTITY GERMAN TXT | SCHLICHTER, A. | The class will analyze discourses of "identity" and "otherness" in recent German literature and film with a particular focus on the question how concepts of gender, sexuality, ethnicity and race have been inscribed into the notion of a specific German identity. We will look at different figures of racial and/or sexual "others" (such as "women", "foreigners" etc.) – as they are described from the point of view of hegemonic culture, and as they speak against the notion of a circumscribed and totalized national identity. The materials – a variety of German novels and short stories as well as films – will be available from the UCI book store and from e-reserves at the beginning of the fall quarter.
The texts will be IN ENGLISH TRANSLATION. |
| COM LIT 103 | GLOBL WOMEN WRITING | JARRATT, S. | This course uses feminist, postcolonial, and rhetorical theories as frameworks for analyzing 20th- and 21st-century writings by women from non-Western countries including Lebanon, Egypt, India, and Iran. Gender, nation, and writing are the key terms organizing our readings, writings, and discussion. Using these terms, we will explore issues of sexuality, violence, class/caste, family structure, religion, the geopolitics of feminist movements, and adaptations of "Western" literary forms in non-Western contexts. Readings include novels from American Indian Louise Erdrich (The Antelope Wife), Etal Adnan's Sitt Marie Rose, Nawal El Saadawi's Woman at Point Zero, and Arundhati Roy's God of Small Things, as well as Marjane Satrapi's two-volume graphic novel Persepolis. Some time will be spent discussing historical backgrounds, geographical orientations, and political contexts. The writing requirements will include several short response papers, a literary critical analysis, and a final exam. |
| COM LIT 104 | LATIN AMERICAN FILM | JOHNSON, A. | This course has three interrelated objectives: to teach something about film analysis, to teach something about the history of cinema in Latin America and to teach something about Latin American history through film. We’ll be concentrating on three of the four major national cinemas in Latin America (Cuba, Brazil and Argentina) from the 60s to the present day. Our starting point will be a movement which began in the early 60s called the New Latin American Cinema movement which produced what are still considered the great classics of Latin American film and whose legacy is still felt in even the most recent films. New Latin American Cinema (which includes Cinema Novo in Brazil, revolutionary cinema in Cuba and Third Cinema in Argentina) linked aesthetics and politics in conditions of scarcity and underdevelopment (hence the subtitle of this course and hence the need to know something about Latin American history) and called for a new revolutionary practice of making films which would produce an “imperfect cinema” or an “aesthetics of hunger”. We’ll be screening 1-2 movies a week and reading essays on history and film; grades will be based on participation in class, short weekly writing assignments, a midterm and a final. |
| COM LIT 105 | ASIANAM/AFAM NOVELS | RADHAKRISHNAN, R. | This course will be an attempt to understand and appreciate the common and the different ways in which concepts such as “race,” “ethnicity,” “hyphenation,” “assimilation,” “minority,” “citizenship,” “color,” “gender,” “sexuality,” “visibility,” “nationality,” “citizenship,” “language and silence,” “America,” “history,” “remembering,” “forgetting,” and “double-consciousness” play themselves out in the context of the African-American novel and the Asian-American novel. With an even balance on fictional and theoretical texts, I hope to focus, with your help of course, on issues such as narrative and subject formation, subjectivity as both aesthetic and political, identity as both individual and collective, the relationship between literature and politics, theory and practice, and the politics of representation and signification. Against the backdrop of history and theoretical thought about these themes, we will analyze a few selected novels and examine how they construct themselves both as literary and as political texts. Some of the questions that we will be exploring are: What is the relationship between literary movements and political movements? What is the role of the intellectual and the artist in political struggle? How do “minority” artists and writers create their own traditions? As “double-conscious” works, how do the novels of African-America and Asian-America intervene between Africa and America, between Asia and America? How is “America” signified into existence in these works? What articulations are possible between nationalisms and diasporas? What is the relationship of these novels to movements such as Realism, Modernism, Postmodernism, Multiculturalism, Postcoloniality, and theories of Gender and Sexuality?
Here are some of the texts and the authors we will be conversing with: The Souls of Black Folk (Du Bois), Against Race and The Black Atlantic (Paul Gilroy), Invisible Man (Ralph Ellison), The Woman Warrior (Maxine Hong Kingston), No-No Boy (Frank Chin), Beloved (Toni Morrison), Dictee (Theresa Hak Kyung Cha), Native Son (Richard Wright), and essays by David Palumbo-Liu, Lisa Lowe, bell hooks, Anthony Appiah, Lindon Barrett, Hortense Spillers, Abdul JanMohamed, and Frantz Fanon.
EXPECTATIONS AND REQUIREMENTS: Be there with your heartmindandsoul. Be prepared with the assigned readings. 1 take home (and bring back) exam, 1 short paper and 1 long paper. |
| COM LIT 106W | GENEAOLGIES OF SEX IN MODERN JAPAN | HALL, J. | Contact instructor directly for information regarding this course: jmhall@uci.edu. |
| COM LIT 200A | THEORY AND METHODS OF COMPARATIVE LITERATURE | GELLEY, A. | There is no unified theory of comparative literature nor is there a standard way of practicing it. But the field has a proven institutional standing. It pioneered the kinds of combinatory approach and methodological reflection that are now widespread in the humanities. This seminar will focus on issues and practices that reflect its evolution in the past half century, including the reception of key theoretical approaches involving literary history, formalism, phenomenology, deconstruction, and globalism. Critic-scholars to be considered include Auerbach, Bakhtin, Barthes, Benjamin, de Man, Foucault, Hartman, Kristeva, Lachmann, and Prendergast. |
| COM LIT 210 | SUBJECTIVITY AND SUBJECTION | SCHWAB, G. | This course is designed to discuss readings about subjectivity in different theoretical and political contexts and from trans- and interdisciplinary perspectives. What different modes of attentiveness are called into account in reading about this ambiguous concept? The double perspective on subjectivity and subjection emphasizes the intertwinement of the psychological and the political in any constitution of the subject. We therefore ask what notions of subjectivity might have to do with politics and political representation and interrogate what we mean (and what the theories we discuss mean) by subjectivity, subjection and “the political.” We will also explore how the philosophical question of the subject relates to cultural anthropology, literary and cultural studies and more concretely to ethnographic projects, to literary practices and the critical reading of literature, art and other cultural objects. Finally we ask what notions of subjectivity might have to do with an analysis of the contemporary and its diverse cultural, political and aesthetic/literary manifestations.
We have not finalized our reading list but will select from the following readings and also include a selection of literary texts:
· Amartya Sen, Development as Freedom
· G.W.F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit
· Sigmund Freud, Ego and the Id; Mourning and Melancholia
· Luce Irigaray, This Sex Which is Not One
· Slavoj Zizek, The Ticklish Subject
· Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition
· Joao Biehl, Vita
· Michel Foucault, Abnormal
· Judith Butler, Gender Trouble; The Psychic Life of Power
· Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture
· Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic
· Mahashweta Devi, Imaginary Maps
· Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks
· Ngugi Wa Thiong’o, Decolonizing the Mind |
| COM LIT 210 | PASSION FOR THE APPARATUS | HALL, J. | This seminar in film and visual theory examines the rise, dominance, and fall of "apparatus theory" through close readings of such theorists as Christian Metz, Laura Mulvey, Jean Louis Baudry, Jean Louis Comolli, Roland Barthes, Stephen Heath, Teresa de Lauretis, Kaja Silverman, and such important film journals as Cahiers du cinéma, Screen, Screen Education, Velvet Light Trap, and Wide Angle. By considering both visual and theoretical texts that range in date from the late 1960s through the mid-1990s, we see how apparatus theory shifted the focus of film studies away from its phenomenological and formalist concerns to an ostensibly more politicized understanding of cinema as system and of the "politics of representation." The relevance of psychoanalytic theories (Lacanian, Freudian, and other) of fantasy, subjectivity, and desire is traced as is the "internal" critique of apparatus theory effected by film scholars working on issues of gender, race, and sexuality. Finally, we consider the mounting critiques made of the theory and the renewed force of a liberal historicism within film studies today. Weekly seminar discussions are supplemented by screenings of feminist, queer, and experimental film and videowork relevant to the seminar project. |
| COM LIT 210 | MODERN ECONOMIES OF LOSS | AMIRAN, E. | For modernism, psychology is economic, language is money, and loss is gain--if only a gain of loss. Accumulation is bad stuff, a collection of ills, and the art of losing isn't any good either because, as Elizabeth Bishop says, it isn't hard to master, and it's mastery one has to be rid of. Charles Bernstein dismisses the question in "Soapy Water":
It's not as if an economy of loss is not in--
you can't say circulation because it is kind
of anticirculation: all this nervous
energy dissipates production & erodes accumulation--
so you don't have to get so dramatic, talk
about death & sex, or so moral, talk about idled
hours--all that you ever need to lose is wasting away in
anxiety's natural spring geysers.
But Modernism does get dramatic, drama being a symptom of its own winner-loses logic, and its own performative symptoms are where the fun is in losing like a modern. We will consider ways in which moderns like Yeats, Conrad, Stein, Toklas, Kafka, and Beckett rethink the economic and the systemic, and will read them alongside Marx, Simmel, and Irigaray as an introduction to the economic logics of modernism. |