Archive
Fall Course Descriptions
| Course | Title | Instructor | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
| COM LIT 40A | DEVELOPMNT OF DRAMA | MUNRO, I. | Please contact the instructor for more information: barker@uci.edu |
| COM LIT 60A | READG ACR BORDERS | RAHIMIEH, N. | In this course we will read works of literature that grapple with question of love during times of conflict. We will examine literature from across the globe representing the effects of war on human relations. Included in our readings will be Corneille’s Le Cid, Honoré de Balzac’s Colonel Chabert, Kurban Said’s Ali and Nino, Etel Adnan’s Sitt Marie Rose, Bertolt Brecht’s Mother Courage and Her Children, Sébastian Japrisot’s A Very Long Engagement, and Kazuo Ishiguro’s A Pale View of Hills. |
| COM LIT 100A | AFRICAN LIT | NGUGI, W. | COLONIALISM AND THE RISE OF MODERN AFRICAN LITERATURE Colonialism and the colonial experience have profoundly affected intellectual production in the world. With the theme of colonialism as the unifying principle, the course explores and compares the work of a number of African writers. Though based on the African literary production, the issues raised are relevant to all post-colonial societies. |
| COM LIT 105 | ASAM WRITERS:ETHNIC | KATRAK, K. | This course explores the work of selected Asian American writers in the English language. Our study analyzes the politics of location and how locations impact ethnicities. Writer’s identities are negotiated along issues of race, gender, language, nationality, and crucially in our contemporary time, geography. Our study, which uses a historical perspective, includes recent South Asian American writers, as well as second and third generation U.S. citizens of Japanese, Vietnamese, Chinese, and other ethnicities. We will study writers such as Joy Kogawa, Jhumpa Lahiri, and Maxine Hong Kingston among others. Requirements include class presentation, in-class writing, midterm, and a take-home final essay. |
| COM LIT 120 | MODERNIST TRAVEL: PLACE, SPACE & IDENTITY | AMIRAN, E. |  This course will study modernist travel literature and philosophy of space to understand how ideas of place and space define the modern self. Modernist literature sees travel as tourism of the self—for modernism we travel not to discover others so much as ourselves. Modernism finds that the self is not at home, but is uncanny, strange to itself. Modern literature that attempts to find the uncanny or unhomely self abroad challenges ideas of identity as something that has a place or a home. Instead modernism develops ideas of space, which implicitly reject nationalism and sociality for aesthetic identity. Along with this displacement of place into space, modernist literature experiences a correlative displacement of physical travel by mental travel. We’ll connect modern travel literature to modern philosophy, psychology, and art about the uncanny self discovered through travel. We’ll discuss work by Gaston Bachelard, Jane Bowles, Paul Bowles (the film adaptation of Sheltering Sky), Dora Carrington, Sigmund Freud, Ernest Hemingway, T.E. Lawrence (including the film, Lawrence of Arabia), Edward Lear, Friedrich Nietzsche, Pablo Picasso, Arthur Rimbaud, Gertrude Stein, and Rebecca West. |
| COM LIT 130 | ASAM WMN WRITERS | KATRAK, K. | This course explores the multi-dimensional facets of autobiography as literary form, and the literary expressions of this form by Asian American writers. We analyze the interstices between telling the truth of one’s life as conveyed in memoir, and in autobiographical novels. Personal stories are contextualized within their author’s cultural and political histories. Just as there is no one way of representing and recreating history, so there are many ways, points of views, and perspectives in recounting a life. We discuss the interplay of autobiography with memory, and how new diasporic locations for immigrants influence looking back on the past. Such memories inspire the literary production of autobiographical stories along with the assertion/erasure of ethnic identities. Selection of literary texts includes a memoir by Meena Alexander, and Maxine Hong Kingston, as well as innovative recreations of autobiographical fictions in Joy Kogawa’s novel, Obasan, and multi-genre autobiographies in Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s, Dictee, and Denise Uyehara’s Maps of City and Body. Our study also includes representations of family and personal history on videos about the Japanese-American internment, and about the struggles of recent immigrants in making a home in the U.S. Course Requirements: Attendance and participation, Class presentation, in-class Midterm, and a take-home final essay. |
| COM LIT 144 | POLITICS OF CRIME | TERADA, R. | This course explores representations of the sociopolitical content of criminal acts, including historical criminal acts, in literature and film. Rather than using sociology and politics to explain crime, we'll try to see how it's possible for crime to incorporate sociology and politics, even as entertainment industries mediate its relations. The most important subtopics for discussion will be youth "delinquency" as social criticism and the role of organized crime in U.S.' cities' economies. Possible texts and films include Walsh, *White Heat*; Hammett, *The Glass Key*; Ray, *Rebel Without a Cause*; Malcolm X, *The Autobiography of Malcolm X*; Burroughs, *The Last Words of Dutch Schulz*; Scott, *American Gangster.* Requirements include discussion participation, electronic comments on a course blog, 2 5-pp. papers, and a final. |
| COM LIT 200A | HIST OF COMP LIT & INTRO TO METHODS & THEORIES OF COMP LIT | JOHNSON, A. | Course Code 22800, Seminar A W-F, 9:30-10:50AM, HIB 311 This course is intended as an introduction to a locally grounded version to comparative literature which will emphasize the diversity of practices and positions within the department. Each week (except for the first and last week), different faculty will be coming to the class to present a set of pre-assigned texts and discuss how these texts either model a certain way of doing comparative literature, a certain way of reading or writing, or raise the kinds of theoretical concerns that seem most pressing. Visiting faculty include: David Theo Goldberg, Eyal Amiran, Rei Terada, Jonathan Hall, Alex Gelley, Nasrin Rahimieh, Jane Newman, Ackbar Abbas. Readings (so far) include texts by Gayatri Spivak, Paul de Man, Eric Auerbach, Walter Benjamin, Gilles Deleuze, Giorgio Agamben and others. This class is pro-seminar only. Assignments will be determined at the beginning of the quarter |
| COM LIT 210 | INTELLECTUALS AND THE IRANIAN REVOLUTION | RAHIMIEH, N. | Course Code 22820, Seminar A TU, 10:00AM-12:50PM, HIB 341 The 1979 revolution in Iran has been the subject of much critical analysis and has received a great deal of attention by intellectuals both within and outside Iran. This course will explore both intellectuals’ views of the revolution and the history of the intellectual and philosophical discourses underpinning the revolutionary movement dating back to the Iranian Constitutional Revolution of 1906-1911. The Iranian literati and political activists of the Constitutional era penned treatises on the role of the intellectual which drew on European models. The concepts developed in the first decades of the twentieth century were revisited and challenged by the next generation of revolutionary thinkers who found new sources of inspiration in the decolonization movements of the 1960s and in elements of Shi’ism. Readings will include works by Akhundof, Taqizadeh, Jamalzadeh, Kasravi, Al-e Ahmad, Shariati, Sartre, Fanon, Khomeini, Foucault, and Shayegan. Through them we will trace the history of Iranian revolutionary discourses and their dynamic interplay with European and the Iranian and Muslim philosophical traditions. Course requirement: Oral presentation and seminar paper (10 pages) for pro-seminar students, 20-page research paper for seminar students. |
| COM LIT 210 | SPATIAL HISTORIES | ABBAS, A. | Course Code 22821, Seminar B TH, 12:00-2:50PM, HIB 411 The key insight of the “spatial problematic” is that space is neither inert nor universal, but socially produced through practice. Hence space has a history, which moves sometimes in tandem with, sometimes against, our understanding of temporal history: an other history. This seminar on “spatial histories” will map not so much a history of space as this “other history”, by focusing on the historical and political implications of spatial mutations seen in literature, cinema, architecture, and urbanism. Spatial histories address both the sense of disconnection felt in the visual and affective fields (e.g., why is it that the more images of the city proliferate, the less they tell us about the city? why do characters in novels and films so often behave in such bizarre ways?); as well as the most everyday of events like the appearance of arcades in the nineteenth century, or the urban phenomenon of “sprawl” today. The question the seminar asks throughout is: what is the history that space both hides and reveals? Syllabus 1/ Introduction Calvino—Invisible Cities (novel) Lefebvre—The Production of Space, pp. 38-46 Soja—Postmodern Geographies, ch. 1-3 2/Arcades—Space and History Aragon—Paris Peasant (extract) Benjamin—The Arcades Project(extract) 3/Phantasmagorias of the Interior Ibsen—The Wild Duck(play) Rilke on Ibsen—Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge (extract) Poe—“The Philosophy of Furniture” 4/Folds and the Spatial Event Borges—“The Garden of Forking Paths”(short story) Deleuze—The Fold(extracts) 5/ Spaces of Potentiality Melville—“Bartleby”(short story) Deleuze—“Bartleby; or, The Formula” Agamben—“Bartleby, or On Contingency” 6/Sprawl and the X-Urban Lynch—“Blue Velvet” (film) Gandelsonas—X-Urbanism (extract) Hayden—A Field Guide to Sprawl 7/Shanghai, the Remake Lou Ye—“Suzhou River” (film) Abbas—“Play it again Shanghai” 8/Psychogeography Pynchon—The Crying of Lot 49 (novel) Debord et al—Theory of the Dérive 9/Histories of the Future Wong Kar-wai—“2046” (film) Dick—a letter about science fiction 10/Concluding seminar EVALUATION Class participation and one term paper |
| COM LIT 210 | THE DIGITAL UNCONSCIOUS | AMIRAN, E. | Course Code 22822, Seminar C M, 4:00-6:50PM, HIB 411 This course will consider important trends in new media theory, and will attempt to articulate psychoanalytic approaches to the digital. We'll discuss the ontological imaginary of the digital, itself based on historical and traditional ideas of the self and of being that persist in discussions of new media, and will consider whether homologies between that ontology and psychoanalytic constructs of mental activity produce a digital unconscious. This digital unconscious is an imaginative structure that subtends both digital art and its reception (i.e. much theory of new media). Digital theory resists psychological and other differential models of interpretation that are said to be tied to old-media paradigms of meaning, a resistance that may itself be a product of the digital unconscious. The effect of the shadow of the digital object that falls on the postmodern subject is to produce or reproduce structures of government and control precisely where and when digital media encourage us to feel liberated from them. We'll study analytic concepts like resistance, repetition, projection, and paranoia, both in digital art and in digital theory, from Freudian and post-Freudian perspectives, including object-relations psychoanalysis, alongside digital media theory and contemporary digital art. Readings will include digital theory by Katherine Hayles, Friedrich Kittler, Eugene Thacker, and Greg Ulmer, psychological theory by Christopher Bollas, Jacques Derrida, Sigmund Freud, Melanie Klein, and Donald Winnicott, and digital art by David Blair, John Cayle, Casey Reas, and Stelarc, among others. |
| COM LIT 299 | DISSERTATION RESEARCH | ABBAS, A. | Course Code 22998, Tutorial A, Variable Units 4-12 For students who have completed coursework, are preparing for their qualifying exams, or who are ABD. |