| Course | Title | Instructor | Description |
|---|
| COM LIT 9 | MULTICULTURAL MYSTERIES | JARRATT, S. | Why do masses of contemporary readers get such delicious pleasure from mysteries? This course offers a comparative investigation into a popular category of prose fiction with a history that exposes literary and cultural enterprises of great variety. Mystery comes to prominence in 19th-century Europe and the U.S. in connection with the rise of sciences, especially psychology, archeology, and criminology. Mysteries used short fiction to explore the secrets of the human mind and behavior—particularly aberrant or criminal behavior—and ancient civilizations. Reading mysteries raises questions about the relation between popular and elite literary production, the stance of the "knower" in Western culture during the rise of new human sciences, and the appropriation of a popular genre by differently positioned subjects.
We will begin by reading classic 19th- and 20th-century examples of the genre by Edgar Allan Poe, Arthur Conan Doyle, Gaston Leroux, and Dashiell Hammett, along side excerpts from scientific giants of the era, Freud and Darwin, to discover who and what counted as appropriate objects for detection and who was considered capable of cracking mysteries. Next we'll track the genre into a later phase, reading works that turn the tables on those classic stances. These works may include Wide Sargasso Sea, Jean Rhys's postcolonial prequel to Bronte's Jane Eyre; Chang Rae Lee's Native Speaker; African American Barbara Neely's Blanche on the Lam.; Louise Erdrich's Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse; and other popular examples. |
| COM LIT 40A | DEVELOPMNT OF DRAMA | REYNOLDS, B. | Please contact instructor for information on this course: breynold@uci.edu |
| COM LIT 60A | READG ACR BORDERS | RAHIMIEH, N. | We will read plays, short stories, and novels written over the course of the past three centuries. Our readings will take us across boundaries of language, culture, and time and give us insights into the complex and specific concerns of the writers and their times.
Suggested Reading List
Jean Baptiste Poquelin Molière, Tartuffe
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust I
Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary
Franz Kafka, “The Metamorphosis”
Sadegh Hedayat, The Blind Owl
Emile Habiby, The Secret Life of Saeed the Pessoptimist
Kazuo Ishiguro, An Artist of the Floating World
Alifa Rifaat, Distant View of A Minaret
Vikram Seth, The Golden Gate |
| COM LIT 100A | AFRICAN LIT | NGUGI, W. | The course, both introductory and an in-depth look at the issues animating the African imagination, examines themes in African Writing in English or English translation: drama, poetry and fiction. A running theme in the course is the politics of language, literature and aesthetics. The course also looks at post-apartheid fiction. |
| COM LIT 102W | CANNIBALISM | JOHNSON, A. | The well-publicized case of the German software specialist who mutilated and ate a microchip engineer in 2002 and the comments of incredulity and horror it elicited are just some of the latest examples of the taboo nature of cannibalism. Cannibalism seems to literally trace a no-man’s land, somewhere one goes only at the peril of losing one’s humanity and turning into a monster. In this course we will be looking not so much at actual acts of cannibalism but at how it functioned as the signpost of a frontier between the properly human and the non-human during the expansion of European colonialism and at how twentieth century thinkers, writers and filmmakers have reworked or responded to that legacy. We’ll be reading fragments of Columbus’s diaries and other colonial travellers, a novel by the Argentine writer Juan José Saer, essays by Montaigne, Levi-Strauss,Michel de Certeau and Jacques Derrida and watching movies like How Tasty was my Little Frenchman, Delicatessen and Hannibal Lecter. |
| COM LIT 105 | DEMOCRACY & MIN DIS | RADHAKRISHNAN, R. | Is democracy the best game in town? Why and why not? Is it both the symptom and cure of our times? What is the relationship between popular sovereignty and democracy; between citizen rights and democracy? How are liberalism, the rule of the law, and democracy triangulated? Is democracy thinkable without the normativity of the nation state? What can we say about the linkages between democracy and identity politics, between democracy and the politics of representation, between democracy and multiculturalism, between democracy and the politics of recognition? How does democracy mediate between the need for distributive justice and the clamor for difference and heterogeneity? What are the different traditions of democracy and how do they mark and define “the political?” How is democratic hegemony different from other forms of control and organization? How do modernity and the democratic form of government constitute each other? How does democracy govern the relationship between East and West, between the so-called “First and Third” worlds; and how does it bear the symptomatic burden of a world that is structured in dominance? How does democracy name the human being as citizen and unpack her in terms of race, class, gender, and sexuality? Is democracy an ideology or is it a pure and neutral procedure? How do capitalism and democracy constitute each other? Most significantly, is democracy possible without an Us-Them divide, or a majority-minority divide? What is the tacit relationship among democracy, violence, and terror? These are a few of the questions that we will be raising in this course by way of readings in political theory, philosophy, literature, sociology, critical theory, feminist theories and theories of gender and sexuality. |
| COM LIT 120 | ALTERITY&HOSPITALTY | CULBERT, J. | "Alterity" and "hospitality" have emerged as key terms in contemporary theory. This course will examine various theoretical models for thinking about the relation of self to others, including psychoanalysis, ethics, feminism, postcolonialism and deconstruction. A selection of short stories by such authors as Conrad, Camus and O'Connor will serve as the basis for class discussion and essay writing on the politics of identity and the ethics of hospitality. |
| COM LIT 121 | GHOST STORIES | CULBERT, J. | What do ghosts want from us? Why are ghosts such a persistent theme in literature, myth and folklore? What connection is there between storytelling and haunting? Our selection of readings for this quarter will include 19th century literature of the fantastic, decadent and Victorian fiction, as well as more recent examples of haunted writing. The question of the ghost will guide class discussion on narratives of memory, fantasy, guilt and "the return of the repressed." Course requirements: one midterm paper and one final paper. |
| COM LIT 130 | MODERN YOUTH | AL-KASSIM, D. | Modern Youth approaches the volatile figure of the male youth in the Modernism of Wilde, W. Lewis, Freud, Genet, Rimbaud and Wojnarowicz. Beginning with late 19th century British anxieties surrounding the homosexuality and civic status of urban boys, we examine the Aestheticist and Decadent response to the emerging legal subject, the youth. In the final weeks of the class we will turn to the contemporary American context via Wojnarowicz's creative memoire touching on street life, AIDS and politics. Moving from the claim that the masculine youth becomes a category of social discipline in the mid and late 19th century to continental modernist preoccupations with early childhood, historical regression and states of primitivedevelopment (in psychoanalysis, social commentary and literature) the course develops the notion that temporal figures of regression and decline offer ambivalent support for normative narratives while simultaneously these figures become crucial modes of resistance to the dominant forms of sexual subjection. We will examine modernist understandings of the social panic aroused by the specter of youth by studying several works of literary criticism and cultural studies.One oral report, one written version of that report, short writing assignments and one longer paper to be revised. |
| COM LIT 131 | PSYCHOANLYSIS&CLTR | GEARHART, S. | This course will address the question of how modern thought has been shaped by the interpretation of individual literary works and in particular of two ancient tragic masterpieces, Oedipus Rex and Antigone. Beginning with a reading of these two plays, we will next consider how one of the most influential subsequent readers of Oedipus, Freud, used the Oedipal drama as a framework for his interrelated theories of sexual difference and of human culture. Finally, we will consider alternative visions of sexual difference and of culture that have been elaborated by thinkers and writers who have sought to give a more central place and role to Antigone in their theory and their fiction. In addition to Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex and Antigone, we will read theoretical texts by Freud and Hegel, as well as plays by French playwright Jean Anouilh and South African playwrights Athol Fugard, John Kani, and Winston Ntshona. Course requirements: 1) two five-page papers; 2) a final, take-home exam; 3) a brief, oral presentation. |
| COM LIT 132 | INTRO TO EURO STDS | NEWMAN, J. | What is Eurocentrism? Where is “the West”? Is the ‘New World’, including the US, automatically implicated in political and cultural conditions inherited from a strictly (Western) European past? What about Islam, Asia and “the East”? Why do we think geographically about identity anyway? Is identity a matter of a fixed geography, indeed, is identity fixed according to ethnic, religious, and political coordinates at all? -- These are some of the questions we will examine in this course, which is the first course of the two-course Core Sequence in the Major in European Studies in the School of Humanities. (European Studies majors need to take both quarters at some point, but both courses are also open to non-majors on a first come, first served basis; all other students may sign up under the CL104 number.) This quarter, we will focus on the period of the Renaissance as one of the key periods during which the very concept of Europe began to be defined. Our special interest will be the question of Europe and Islam; we will study ‘Europe’ as it intersects—commercially, politically, culturally, and in terms of religion—with Africa, the Ottoman Empire and the ‘New World’. Using historical maps, literary texts (including Shakespeare’s Othello, Torquato Tasso’s Jerusalem Liberated, Cervantes’ Don Quixote, and Corneille’s The Cid, among others), and historical and art historical materials, we will begin to trace the influence of politics, religious ideology, military engagement, and mercantilism on the creation of the ‘European’ subject—whoever she or he may have been. Along the way, we will think about how the construction of Europe and religious identity in the past may bear on how we understand our always complex, often confusing, and at times pretty scary political and cultural present. Reading logs and a research paper. |
| COM LIT 190W | X-COLONIALISMS | ABBAS, M. | Has colonialism become a thing of the past, an ex-colonialism, or has it mutated under the pressure of the new global paradigms into something else, an x-colonialism whose relation to older forms is almost unrecognisable? The X in the x-colonial can suggest a number of issues. It can mark the scene of a crime; it can suggest that colonialism can still develop by changing; it can raise questions like: Can colonialism be democratic? Can some versions of democracy be a kind of colonialism? The course will trace these issues raised by the x-colonial in cultural and political theory, in literary texts, and in contemporary cinema and urbanism. |
| COM LIT 200A | HIST OF COMP LIT & INTRO TO METHODS & THEORIES OF COMP LIT | ABBAS, M. | History is always history of the future, one notable thesis on history being that even the
Past will be changed if our enemies win. Hence this introduction to the history and methodologies of Comparative Literature will focus on what is most urgent and relevant to the study of Comparative Literature today. The discipline has undergone many changes and mutations over the years. It is no longer primarily concerned with comparing different literatures, or pursuing “influence” studies, or constructing a “grammar” of literariness, or even studying literature across national boundaries. Comparative Literature today tends to be more engaged with theoretical and political issues, cross-cultural analyses, and interdisciplinary perspectives. Accordingly, the course will be organized around seminars that raise issues of language, subjectivity, power/ideology, space, visuality, gender/sexuality, coloniality, and so on. What a “comparative methodology” foregrounds above all is the potential as well as the limits of any discipline, including the discipline called “literature”. As for theory, it is usually less important what theory is used than what use is made of theory.
|
| COM LIT 210 | EMERGENT SUBJECTIVITIES | SCHWAB, G. | This course looks at the formation of new types and boundaries of subjectivity under the forces of global cultures. It is divided into three sections, each of which chooses a different emphasis. The first section focuses on the mass displacements of peoples across the globe and on the formation of new trans- or bi-cultural subjectivities and forms of subjection. The second section focuses on legacies of colonialism and new modes of colonization, including the colonization of psychic space. The third section explores the recasting of the boundaries of the human in discourses of biogenetics and the new reproductive technologies, exploring the powerful effects such a recasting has on the cultural imaginary. This section also looks at new forms of biocolonialism and ecological destruction as well as new modes of ecopolitics.
While the course has a strong emphasis on critical and cultural theories, we will anchor our discussions in materials from literature, film, ethnography and photography. Note that the theoretical texts listed below are meant to provide a basic bibliography from which we will select relevant selections for discussion in class.
I. Global Wars, Zones of Abandonment and Emergent Forms of Life
Theory: Michael Fischer, Emergent Forms of Life (selections); Veena Das, Life and Words (Selections); Etienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein, Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities; Chalmers Johnson, Blowback; Michael Wessels, Child Soldiers: From Violence to Protection;
Literature/Film/Ethnographic Narrative: Greg Bear, Blood Music; Joao Biehl, Vita; Film: Estamira
II. Colonial Legacies and Indigenous Alliances
Theory: Robert Young, Colonial Desire (selections); Das/Kleinman, Remaking a World (selections); Ronald Niezen, The Origins of Indigenism
Literature: Silko, Almanac of the Dead (selections); Zainab Amadahy, The Moons of Palmares (science fiction)
III. Biotechnologies, Biocolonialism and Ecopolitics
Theory: Donna Haraway, Modest Witness (selections); Kaushik Sunder Rajan, Biocapital: The Constitution of Postgenomic Life (selections); Marilyn Strathern, Reproducing the Future: Essays on Anthropology, Kinship and the New Reproductive Technologies (selections);
Donald More, Suffering for Territory (selections)
Literature/Film/Photography: Zainab Amadahy, The Moons of Palmares; Octavia Butler, Dawn (Vol. One of Xenogenesis-Trilogy); Peter Menzel and Faith D’Aluisio, Robo Sapiens: Evolution of a New Species; The Indigenous Peoples Council on Biocolonialism (DVD)
|
| COM LIT 210 | WE THE PEOPLE | GELLEY, A. | (same as Humanities 270, course code 29826, Seminar B)
General Will, proletariat, masses, Volk, peuple – the terms used to designate the social collective in its generality have in every case a marked ideological cast. Each of the terms lays claim to agency and sovereignty "in the name of" a collective posited by the very name. "Every interpretation of the political meaning of the term 'people' must begin with the singular fact that in modern European languages, 'people' also always indicates the poor, the disinherited, and the excluded. One term thus names both the constitutive political subject and the class that is, de facto if not de jure, excluded from politics. . . . Such a diffuse and constant semantic ambiguity cannot be accidental: it must reflect an amphiboly inherent in the nature and function of the concept 'people'." (Giorgio Agamben) It is revealing that recent treatments of this issue have foregrounded exclusionary formulations, e.g., Spivak’s “subaltern” or Rancière’s “the part of those who have no-part” (le compte des incomptés). This seminar will examine versions of the collective from Rousseau to the present and try in each instance to understand the rhetoric underlying the claim to agency.
Selected Readings:
Giorgio Agamben, “What is a People?” in Means Without End, Univ. of Minnesota Press, 2000
Etienne Balibar, “In Search of the Proletariat. The Notion of Class Politics in Marx,” in Masses, Classes, Ideas, Routledge, 1994
Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, Harvard Univ. Press, 1999
Pierre Bourdieu, et al, The Weight of the World: Social Suffering in Contemporary Society, translated by Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson ... [et al.], Cambridge: Polity Press, 1999
Crowds and Power / Elias Canetti ; translated from the German by Carol Stewart. London: Phoenix, 2000
Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx, Routledge, 1994, 2006
Sigmund Freud, Mass Psychology, Jacqueline Rose (Editor), Jim Underwood (Translator), Penguin Modern Classics Translated Texts (Paperback)
S. Jonsson, “Society Degree Zero: Christ, Communism, and the Madness of Crowds in the Art of James Ensor,” Representations 75 (Sum. 2001)
Stefan Jonsson, “Masses Mind Matter” in Representing the Passions: Histories, Bodies, Visions, ed. Richard Meyer, Los Angeles, Calif. : Getty Research Institute, 2003.
Jacques Rancière, Dis-agreement: Politics and Philosophy, 1999
Jacques Rancière, “Ten Theses on Politics,” tr. Rachel Bowlby and David Panagia, Theory & Event, 5:3
Jacques Rancière, The Philosopher and His Poor, Duke Univ. Press, 2004
K. Ross, The Emergence of Social Space, Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1988
Jeffrey T. Schnapp, "The Mass Panorama," Modernism/Modernity 9,2 (2002): 243-281
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, "Can the Subaltern Speak?" in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg, Urbana & Chicago: Univ. of Ill. Pr., 1988
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, "Subaltern Studies: Deconstructing Historiography" in In Other Worlds, New York: Routledge, 1988
|
| COM LIT 210 | LITERATURE OF PARTITION | O'CONNOR, L. | (same as English 210, course code 24302, Seminar B)
Partition along sectarian lines has been a recurrent feature of British withdrawal from the colonies. This seminar explores the literary treatment of the partition of Ireland (1922); the Indian sub-continent (1947); and the British mandate of Palestine (1948) in the comparative framework of postcolonial theory and with due regard to local historical context. Regarded at the time as a political solution to intractable internal difference and/or as the price of independence, more than fifty years later one might contend, with Urvashi Butalia, that the “’solution’ [partition] actually became the beginning of the problem.” The partition of countries ramifies into other “partitions”--of ethnic groups, local communities, cities, families, psyches, etc. We’ll examine various literary plots and tropes (e.g. the romance-across-the-divide) that elaborate such ramifying partitions. Despite the violent upheaval and repercussions produced by it, partition is paradoxically often surrounded by silence, disavowal, and discursive invisibility. How do writers at a generational (and perhaps geographical) remove from the event of partition come to terms with a history that has shaped them but that they did not experience themselves? How is “the religious divide” rationale for partition informed by a divide-and-rule colonial legacy and/or entrenched sectarian conflict? Is the experience and narration of partition gendered? What effect(s) has partition on the regulation of sexuality? How do post-partition maps and related political symbols alter the political, geographical, and spatial imaginary of the newly reconstituted peoples? What do euphemisms like “the iron curtain” reveal about the (im)permeability of partition? (Cold-War partitions will feature in passing in our discussion.) The reading list isn’t finalized but will probably include works by Urvashi Butalia, Seamus Deane, Amitav Ghosh, David Grossman, Ghassan Kanafani, Saadat Hasan Manto, Khushwant Singh, A.B. Yehoshua and a selection of contemporary Irish poetry.
Seminar requirements: weekly response papers; presentation of research topic; 20-25p research paper.
Pro-seminar requirements: weekly response papers; short class presentations; and take-home final.
|
| COM LIT 210 | AFTER REVOLUTIONARY TIME | HALL, J. | This seminar examines the frequently unacknowledged spatial coordinates of experimental, independent, and avant-garde film to trace radical notions of experience that refuse not only bourgeois logics of reproduction and development but also revolutionary logics of time. Drawing especially from East Asian critiques of modernization and from European and American filmic avant-gardes, we consider the spatial negotiations that inhere within international, global, and transnational avant-gardes, within public and private spaces of fantasy, and within responses that emerge from increasingly uniform landscapes. Considering filmmakers, writers, and critics such as Terayama Shuji, Pamela Lee, Raoul Vaneigem, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Tsai Ming-liang, and Adachi Masao, we look especially at materials written in the late 1960s and early 1970s in their attempt to use spatialized notions of radicalism to expand upon the increasingly moribund politics of revolutionary times. We remember, of course, that studies of the avant-garde, from Burger to Huyssen and from Krauss and to Jameson, have focused upon its temporal qualities. While it might be valorized or detracted as singular and finite or as limitless and reproducible, the avant-garde has first and foremost been conceived through the structure and metaphor of time. But the vanguard is as much a spatial referent born from the geography of the battlefield as it is a suggestion of a prior arrival in time. What are the spatial qualities, especially when viewed from a transnational perspective, of the radical, the experimental, and the avant-garde? Our engagement of space will also involve its psychoanalytic components: does the temporality of the avant-garde require a spatial imaginary? What are the spatial politics of resistance? In what ways does the avant-garde rely on an uncritical notion of uneven development? How has this relation emerged from postcolonial conditions in East Asia? Or from Europe and the US's relations to their own fantastic and actual outposts?
|
| COM LIT 299 | DISSERTATION RESEARCH | SCHWAB, G. | For students who have completed coursework, are preparing for their qualifying exams, or who are ABD.
|